April 2017 | poetry
A black drape flutters
before my face or is it
a heavy veil of smoke
while offering prayer
for a friend
following a cremation.
Let the dark pall shield my eyes
dim my mind from knowing the process
of immolating a beloved soul, flesh, bones.
While Jewish law forbids cremation
I ask further how a family rights this
course after the holocaust,
after human beings delivered
such a means of death.
Nancy Smiler Levinson
Nancy Smiler Levinson is author of MOMENTS OF DAWN: A Poetic Memoir of Love & Family; Affliction & Affirmation, as well as numerous stories, and poetry that have appeared in publications such as Confrontation, Phantasmagoria, Poetica, Touch: The Journal of Healing, Survivor’s Review, Blood and Thunder, and Drunk Monkeys. A CNF piece was a Pushcart nominee in 2015. Nancy lives in Los Angeles.
April 2017 | poetry
Doctor’s words
swam around
her head
like moths,
and for a minute she couldn’t breathe. Leaving the cracker-white medical arts building she drove directly to the fast, cold river and dove in. There, standing in waist deep water she reached down to the stony bottom and began flipping rocks. Within ten minutes she had collected a handful of squirming, segmented hellgrammites. At home, in their Pepsi bottle aquarium, the invertebrates rested on a high shelf in the kitchen. Night after night she fed them from new recipes, as she worked her way through The Joy Of Cooking. In the background music played, never the same song twice. Later, she burned her clothes in a cardboard box alongside pictures of old friends and a once-upon-a-time husband. It surprised sales people when she arrived at a store in an old bathrobe and left in a new one. All the while, inside her, the benign tumor sat silently.
Travis Dolence
Travis Dolence is a librarian at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His work has appeared in The MacGuffin and the chapbook The Lyrical Librarian: Verses from the Stacks, published by Consortium.
April 2017 | poetry
They were
j u m p i n g
rope
double dutch
they called it.
two skinny
black girls
with legs the
size of
toothpicks
and mouths
that could be
heard from one end
of the block
to the other
and I wondered
What it would be
like
to have
a sister.
Karamo Muchuri Sulieman
At age 61, I am a mature African American poet who has written several hundred poems and published at least 100 of them. I received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Mellen Poetry Contest, for a 100+ page poem entitled Black Roses. I have also published in numerous magazines; journals and anthologies; among them San Fernando Poetry Journal; International Society of Poets; American Academy of Poets; Noble House Poetry collections and others. I also have one published work entitled Seasons.
April 2017 | poetry
The night was yellow. A city of light bulbs, ready to blow out. At the top, the Ferris wheel stopped sharply with a rust-covered clank heard across the park, and a woman screamed. Couples held hands a little tighter. A white-bearded man with missing teeth said it was the end of the world.
Meredith Boe
Meredith Boe is a writer and editor residing in Chicago. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Midwestern Gothic and Mud Season Review, among others. Her critique has appeared in World Literature Today, Chicago Book Review, and Chicago Stage Standard. She sometimes writes poems on a typewriter at events around Chicago with the poetry-on-demand group, Poems While You Wait.
April 2017 | poetry
It comes to me in the watch museum.
It’s weights, hammers and gears.
Action, reaction.
The thud of an escapement.
The dominoes of a story.
I stand inside a pocketwatch
and lose myself to inevitable design.
A plan well engineered
leaves nothing to emotion but the joy
of cog after cog, falling in track,
ticking toward the unalarmed achievement
of another hour struck. Zen empty time.
Our story is like a watch,
weights, hammers, gears.
Little gears for instant gratification,
Huge gears that circle in years with minute changes.
And I know that your actions are reactions,
along a path which matters like another hour struck.
Nothing personal.
Wren Tuatha
Wren Tuatha’s poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Loch Raven Review, Clover a Literary Rag, Driftwood Press, Five 2 One Magazine, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Digges’ Choice, and the anthology Grease and Tears. Wren and her partner, author/activist C.T. Lawrence Butler, herd goats on a mountain in California.
April 2017 | poetry
1
Returning to their home town after 25 years
was surreal. They got lost trying to get to
the high school. The ice cream stand they worked in
was now a dry cleaners, while Old Smith’s Farm
was gone altogether.
2
Looking at the photos posted by George
the old swimming hole back home is now a fancy
water park with diving platforms and a wave pool
and roller coaster slides such a blight on that old
small town charm and I think I’m going to cry.
3
Contrasting today’s summer of yardwork
house repairs, car troubles and no money
with his youthful summers of dating, swimming
ice cream stands and summer stock theatre makes him sad
with longing and knowing you can never go home again.
Michael Estabrook
Michael Estabrook is retired. No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms, able instead to focus on making better poems when he’s not, of course, endeavoring to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.
