July 2020 | poetry
The cabbage knows
only one thing—to head.
The moon looks like a cabbage
or a head but it isn’t either.
Moonlight veils my window
unwelcome down the walls,
too much and in the wrong place.
Dripping sounds keep me awake.
There is no way to contain
moonlight or mop it up.
It pulls on the near skin of the earth,
stretches and makes waves.
I dream here is a huge baby,
round faced, that I have to care for.
I do, and it gets smaller. The moon
is often a metaphor–breast, eye,
fingernail, communion wafer,
scab–yet it is still just the moon.
Mary Jean Port
Mary Jean Port is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook of poems,“The Truth About Water,” was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. She recently had poems published on Indolent Press’ poem-a-day site, “What Rough Beast,” in “Leaping Clear,” and in “ellipsis….” She has work forthcoming from “The Halcyone.” She lives in Minneapolis, where she taught at The Loft Literary Center for twenty years.
July 2020 | visual art
Hidden Stairway
Robb Shaffer
Robb’s background is diverse, and his fascination with other cultures has exposed him to a wide variety of colors, sounds, tastes, and smells. He seeks the unusual amid the ordinary. Robb frequently writes about his experiences, and at times he documents them with photography. His subjects include people and nature at their finest, but the majority of his work centers around architectural images. Robb and his wife live in Hartford, Wisconsin, a rural community about thirty miles north of a more urban environment, Milwaukee.
July 2020 | poetry
In Iran in the rich, delicious pear region,
there sits the centrifuge for the development
of atomic bombs.
I don’t want to end up like Bukowski,
a bitter career alcoholic, Writing classes?
Classes are for asses. (can’t even look
at people or talk to them), hating other poets
Writing is all about leaving behind
as much stink as possible.
Or George Carlin who went from hippie,
dippy weatherman, The forecast for tonight
is mostly dark, but getting light toward
morning, to a working rageaholic
out of rehab and in denial.
I’ve imagined how the two of them
would have gotten along during
an all-night “drinking fest,” insulting
each other to the point of fist cuffs.
I turn on Carlin’s 3a.m. HBO special,
an endless rant, dropping numerous F-bombs.
Lynn says and I agree, Turn it off.
Bukowski, a life-long pugilist of men
and women, Carlin, a pathetic skeleton
of his former self.
Both mummified
in a dangerous atom smashing,
If you have em, smoke em,
deathly moving, indifferent universe.
John Sierpinski
John Sierpinski has published poetry in many literary magazines such as California Quarterly, North Coast Review and Spectrum Literary Journal. His work is also in eight anthologies. He is a Pushcart nominee. His poetry collection, “Sucker Hole”, was published in 2018 by Cholla Needles Press.
