STREAK-BACKED ORIOLE

by David Chorlton

A cloudy desert day. The city smiles.

Slow rain falling. Circles of light on the pond.
The same sad news
                             drop by drop
and no umbrella for protection
against reports from far away. 
It’s numbers day
by smoking day with innocence
as no defence, a conflict over who belongs
and who doesn’t. It’s different
with birds,
              the ones who stray
out of their range are most sought after
like the Streak-backed Orioles
come north to the water reclamation park.
They don’t need papers.
No visas. Just an orange
cut in half
              for easy feeding. Welcome
bright birds. No borders in the air.
The newscast doesn’t reach
to where they are. They leave a question
hanging:
           are there orioles
in the Middle East? Has beauty ever been
a broker between the sides
of an old argument? One side does this, the other
does that.
             They keep doing what they know
to do. Every answer comes
in kind. There must be a field guide
for cruelty. It must be disguised
as a holy book.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix and takes note of the local wildlife. He had a book out early this year called The Flying Desert in which many of the birds he sees even within the city limits are represented in poems and his watercolor paintings.

WINNER OF INTERNATIONAL BAT WEEK, 2023

by Cecil Morris

Bureau of Land Management wildlife technician photographed William ShakespEAR, a female Townsend's big-eared bat, in Jackson County. William ShakespEAR won BLM's 2023 Bat Beauty Contest. Photo courtesy Emma Busk / Bureau of Land Management via Oregon Public Broadcasting.

William ShakespEAR—right, not the poet-actor-
playwright who, maybe, made your high school English
class a drag, but a Townsend’s big-eared bat—won
the National Bat Beauty Contest this Halloween
and brought his bouquet of mosquitoes and moths
home to Ashland in southern Oregon, home
of a pretty famous Shakespeare Festival
where, I must admit, I was not bothered by
any flying insects during an evening
performance of Romeo and Juliet
in the outdoor theater. So good on you,
William ShakepEAR. Perhaps you can bring back
glamour to big ears, which would benefit
me, a man almost 70, with thinning hair
and elongating ears (think King Charles III
or the pendulous lobes of Nicole Kidman).
I do not want to be Dumbo with a flat
tire, Dumbo depressed, or Alfred E. Neuman
deflated. Of course, you, Mr. ShakespEAR
have perky, pricked up, Doberman-like ears,
and I am sure no one makes fun of you.
Too bad Bat Week has not had the success
of Shark Week. We need a Spielberg thriller
with blood and menace: EARS. Who’s listening now?

 

Cecil Morris taught high school English for 37 years. Now retired, he spends his time writing poems and shaking his head at the news. He has poems in or forthcoming from Cimarron Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

TO EMILY DICKINSON, ON THE DEATH OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR

by Anne Myles

I’m thinking of you, centaur sister,

and of this other, lost now—

stripped words beating meters

against God’s battlements

Young I discovered both of you,

needing the keen of it—

hymns of love ingathered

only in separation

Two queens I can’t approach,

though I too felt the rising

to stitch the rage with beauty,

to feel my throat open

in despised prophecy–

flames of our temperament leaping

in stony rooms of limitation,

clawed by what we cannot name—

Both of you dead in your fifties

while I scan a new horizon—

still looking for that vanishing green

pasture to lie down in

Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.

MEDUSA

by Akua Lezli Hope

AI-assisted images by the poet.

First lady Michelle Obama considered wearing her hair in braids while living in the White House. But then she thought of the American people. —The Washington Post, November 17, 2022

U.K. Tells Schools They Can’t Ban Afro Hairstyles. School rules about what styles are allowed that mostly affect Black and mixed-race children are likely to be illegal, a government rights commission said. —The New York Times, October 27, 2022

Almost half of Black and mixed-race women have experienced race-based hair discrimination at school, according to a new study. Of these, more than half (57 per cent) say they continue to deal with hair-related trauma today. —Independent (UK), October 7, 2022

Medusa was the serpent-goddess of the Libyan Amazons, representing "female wisdom". (Sanskrit medhas, Greek metis, Egyptian met or Maat ).  She was the Destroyer aspect of the Triple Goddess. Called Neith in Egypt, Ath-enna or Athene in North Africa.  Her inscription at Sais called her "mother of all the gods, whom she bore before childbirth existed." —Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

You think god cursed me, 
that this morphing nimbus petrifies beholders
when it is only your eyes seeing snakes 
and being struck by a beauty you cannot decipher 
 
These S&Z curved electric antennae 
are defense against the gray arts, 
channeling, channeling ancestral energies 
an armor of creation’s forcefield and being 
 
Remove your transgressive hands 
or feel the casual, stinging shrapnel
from misbelief shattering against truth

 
Author's Note: I ache for the children who have been abused for their hair styles. I had a corporate career and wore my hair in what is now called protective natural styles, along with my suit, pumps and—a tie from 1979, until I retired in the 21st century. Here it is another century and the same old stupidity.
 

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, and peace.  A paraplegic, third-generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, NYSCA, SFPA, Elgin, & Best of the Net, Rhysling & Pushcart Prize nominations. 

THE QUEEN IS DEAD

by Debbie Peters

Destitute Dead Mother holding her sleeping Child in Winter, 1850 (Oil on Canvas), by Octave Tassaert

In a housecoat she slept

till breath came no more

        with no one beside her
        lest roaches and mice

her beauty obscured
by toilets she cleaned

        her wisdom unheard
        by those whom she served

my mother, your drudge—
Long live the Queen.

Debbie Peters lives in New York City and dedicates all her writing to her beloved Gerson Lesser. She encourages the world to open its eyes to the millions of queens who quietly die every day, everywhere.

SPRING AND FALL

by Fran Schumer

An empty FDR Drive in New York City was photographed on March 25, 2020. Credit: Phil Penman via The U.S. Sun

It was a beautiful fall, and we all remembered that it was because it was
such a terrible time. From the reservation near my house, you could see
where the towers stood. For days afterward, someone posted a sign:
Dear Jesus, Please bring Mr. Spinelli home.

This spring is beautiful, too; piles of pink on the streets of my deserted
suburb, the magnolia trees past their prime. I walk every day with my
husband, our new routine, and notice what I might have missed before, like
the hawks flying overhead, above the skyline where the buildings burned.

I see hyacinths and daffodils and creeping phlox, pale and soothing like the
blue the doctors wear or the coverlets on patients in the ventilators. We’ll
remember those patients, and how good it was not be one of them, to eat a
banana after weeks of canned pears, not to be the only person living in fear.

It’s not so bad when everyone is afraid of the same thing, though some
days you’re afraid of those other things too. On those days, especially,
it’s good to be distracted by the work it takes just to eat, to go out, and,
heaven forbid, risk it at the bike shop because one of your tires is flat
and you need to ride to see all this beauty, the expressway beneath you, so eerie
and empty of cars. In more normal times, the traffic could kill you.

Fran Schumer is the author of Powerplay (Simon and Schuster; NYT bestseller) and Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her work has appeared in various sections of The New York Times including Op Ed, Book Review and Sunday Magazine; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the winner of a Goodman Loan Grant Award for Fiction from the City University of New York. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

TRUTHS AND LEPIDOPTERA

by David Chorlton

Andrus Nichols in The Saintliness of Margery Kempe directed by Austin Pendleton at The Duke on 42nd Street. Photo by Carol Rosegg.

A hawk against the dawning clouds
moves high and dark
as the city underneath him
awakens. On this day the news
breaks with a louder
crack than usual, and even
the quail who spill out
from the neighbor’s bougainvillea
walk a nervous line.
The television screen lights up
with happiness and Earthly delights
before names
start to be named
and analysts dissect the crimes
they are suspected of. But it’s early
and the shadows of the palm trees
lie wet across the ground. It’s hard to believe
in such joy as advertisements show
while subterfuge and scheming are the order
of the day: also a day
in which lizards flash
across the back yard wall, hummingbirds
fly constantly
from bush to bush, and a Funereal Duskywing
trembles at  the Coral Bells
that silently ring the hours
rolling along the wash and up
the mountain to the ridge
where they rub their cheeks against
the timeless moon.

—

Another day: another cog
clicks in the universe. The sun rolls
into place. It’s hard to tell so early
whether that’s a Cabbage White or Southern
Dogface, but the nascent flowers on the milkweed
are a marker on the winged way
to truth.

—

The jasmine draws its power from the rain
recently fallen
and the air feels as though
it were smiling as we breathe it,
even in this tainted world
where sin remains popular
centuries past the age when heretics
were burned, although
defining it depends on which
side you’re on, and being accused
just generates more mystics
like Margery Kempe, who the more she was mocked
the more she believed she was right.
Some people believe
the sulfur floating on the scents just now
is someone’s soul; a proposition
kind enough to merit acceptance.
When in doubt
take beauty’s side, even
when the hawk marks its path
with a talon drawn across the midday sky.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. A recent collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press. The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant. A new book Reading T. S. Eliot to a Bird is due from Hoot ‘n Waddle, based in Phoenix.

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

THE PEDICURE CUSTOMER'S DILEMMA

by Catherine Wald

Across the country, countless workers in the nail salon industry, mainly immigrant women, toil in misery and ill health for meager pay, usually with no overtime, abused by employers who show little or no consideration for their safety and well-being. It is a world of long days and toxic chemicals, where the usual protections of government have failed, at all levels. —NY Times, May 11, 2015; Photo: A pedicure at a salon on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times. 

Time to choose: should I deprive you of your
livelihood or your unborn children?

Do your lungs need air as badly as my toes need to be
decked out in glorious colors that never existed in nature?

Is it frivolous to pay another human being to caress the
arches and balls of my feet in a way no lover ever will?

In your hands, oh modest Korean or Chinese or Thai woman,
shy, unsightly appendages, emboldened, grab the spotlight.

For two dollars apiece, you give me ten hand-crafted
oriental miniatures, perfect and miniscule as gemstones,

sparkling harbingers of summer, delightful butterflies
birthed in a cloud of formaldehyde, ethanol and XX.

Pedicurists, like most winged creatures, enjoy a short
lifespan: but we all know beauty demands sacrifice.

In this world where gainful employment is hard to come by,
where aesthetic pleasure is so desperately needed, is it

time to turn off the tap?


Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.

ONLY IN MY ROOM, NOT IN GAZA

by Catherine Wald

“Everything is beautiful in my room, but only in my room, not in Gaza.” --Nidaa Badwan quoted by Jodi Rudoren in The New York Times February 28, 2015

Call me radical, you who uphold
hegemony of the hothead; call me
artist when I find beauty on the
inside, where it’s supposed to
have been stamped out; call
me traditionalist, locked away in
my own self-inflicted zenana.

Here, no one will beat me or throw
stones after me.  Here, I can forget about
which missile coming from which side
may explode my face. Here, I have
rediscovered what safety feels like.
Look carefully: let me remind you, too.

This is the only way I know to honor
perfection of nests and eggs and those
fledglings straining at the windows who
will have to learn to fly inside their heads
like I have, like we all have, in this ageless
conga line of barefoot women on hot sands.

Here, when I am punched in the gut, it’s by sunlight
or soul; colors or ideas. Freedom, I call this freedom.
No need to send for a doctor. This is how I heal.

Some day I would like to fit the whole world into this room.

Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.