Ashes

Harried by the orange digits

on the dashboard,

I leaned in around

the steering wheel,

up too close

to cars in front, ripped

past gnarled clearcut

patches. My

ferry reservation

crumpled in my hand

five miles before

I waived it at

the ticket clerk–

‘I’ve got to get to a funeral!’

 

The ferry rolled forward

in the sun, chased

looping seagulls

across the straight.

By the window,

I stared into the water

until bald stumps

surfaced

in the green-grey foam.

Then the PA brought my head up–

‘Passengers, today is the Sea Carnival–

look starboard,

the clown craft race is underway!’

And there, a yellow submarine,

an orca whale, an ambulance

nudged through the waves,

while on the shore

the whole town

filled the piers to watch.

 

The mourners fought

for footing in

deep sand. Someone

offered

an inoffensive little prayer

but was cut short

by a shrieking chaos out

 

on the Straight.

Gulls fell frantic,

ravenous

on the herring bloom.

And as we trudged off,

some birds heaved

their heavy stomachs and

floated drunkenly away,

while the cloud of ashes

billowed wider

just under

the waves.

 

by Jonathan Cooper

 

Jonathan’s poems and essays have appeared in various publications including The New Plains Review, Cirque Journal, The Statesman Journal, Houseboat Literary Magazine, and Poetry Pacific. He lives with his family in Vancouver, Canada.

 

Baker City, Oregon

Young girls make me smile

And cry at the same time

They are a bundle of dynamite

And a hurricane rolled into

One

But she just sits with a

Book as we’re passing

By a river

She reads while I look at that

Redhead of hair she owns

I think about her perfect tits

Hiding under her t-shirt

I want to take her hand

And whisk her off somehere

Make the time roll back

I watch her right resting

Still as a prayer

 

by Erren Kelly

 

Erren Kelly is a Pushcart nominated poet from Los Angeles. Erren has been writing for 25 years and have over 150 publications in print and online in such publications as Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine(online), Ceremony, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg and other publications.

 

 

Barbara Tramonte, Featured Author

The Students Write Poems for Their Teacher

 

The students write poems

like they are painting

in the filtered dust of a late-night studio.

They fling glorious globs

of paint on a canvas

they imagine.

 

It is abstract.

It is realistic.

It is impressionistic.

 

They don’t need to find language;

the paint will do it for them.

Yellow will scream metaphors;

brown, onomatopoeia.

Thick black lines are symbols;

red, the gash of simile.

 

On parent’s night

I hang them up,

(their poem-things)

and their parents respond viscerally

 

In the gallery of words theirs say

“This is what I mean”

inferred by the yellow stroke that leaps

from thought to word,

invoked by the word

that lolls on the black line of comprehension.

Incised by the red connection

linking me to you.

 

 

Seem Bright

 

Between

Thigh-light ellipses

To and for America

Eat mac ’n’ cheese

Or grilled cheese on

Pleather

Young mother

Makes living

Seem bright

 

Okay here in USA

Clownish gyrations

Young girl with urges

Slinks toward

Mayhem with child

Tell her, stop, and

Check with

Lauren Bacall

 

Later, breast

Nipple

Hard and drifting

Through years of

Soft dancing

 

Snake beads under

Skin that hungers toward a mouth

Slink back, sling out

 

When feet slide into scripted shoes

They yell for free farm love

 

 

To Le-Ann, Who Had a Heart Attack

 

On New Year’s Eve

My student

Legally blind

 

Had a heart attack

But that was after her eviction

Now she’s in rehab

Submitting her Master’s Thesis

To me for

Our sixteenth iteration

 

To Le-Ann, who had a heart attack

On New Year’s Eve

Who has more fight in her

Than a drill to the earth

 

Whom I carry like a wounded sack

Of mashed-up innards

Who will finish

Or finish me

 

To Le-Ann, berating me

Commanding that I read

Reread, re-tread, explain

Why I can’t make the world right

Why she is blind

Why her daughter’s on the spectrum

Why her veteran status

Can’t save her from the streets

Why Schlossberg’s theory of transition

Means shit in real life.

 

 

Should I Care

 

If an ambulance just

Cruised up my neighbor’s driveway

With flashing red lights

And no noise?

 

Yes,

But still

My night goes on

 

Maybe my neighbor

Will die like my husband did

Right there in the home

Right there on the couch

Slumped over

In the midst of eating some pineapple

 

We are all stopped short yet

Think the tune will carry us

 

by Barbara Tramonte

 

 

Barbara is currently a professor at SUNY Empire State College, where she teaches in the school for graduate studies. She worked as a poet-in-the-schools in New York City for ten years, and formerly owned a children’s bookstore in Brooklyn Heights. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Alembic, The Binnacle, Black Buzzard Review, The Chaffin Journal, Confluence, Crack the Spine, Dos Passos Review, Drunk Monkeys, Edison Literary Review, Eleven Eleven, ellipsis…, Folly, Forge, FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry, The Griffin, Hiram Poetry Review, Home Planet News, Illya’s Honey, Juked, Kaleidoscope, Monarch Review, New Letters, The Old Red Kimono, Pearl, Phantasmagoria, The Pinch, riverSedge, Sanskrit, Serving House Journal, Slipstream, Spillway, The Tower Journal, Tulane Review, Westview, and other literary and academic journals.

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