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.
