GEORGIANS ON MY MIND

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

George Balanchine with, Mourka, his cat. Photo by Martha Swope (1964). NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 5120841

Police behind riot shields beat protesters facing Europe,

robed in Georgian flags, calling for new elections.

 

     Sometimes Russia moves with planes and tanks.    

     Sometimes it strangles slowly, so no one notices.

 

Cat floats around my home like a ballet dancer

waving her curved plume tail, padding on velvet paws.perfume, 

 

     Sinking on velvet paws, she pliés

     before jumping, leaping.

 

Choreographer Balanchine used to throw his cat

in the air and photograph her on the way down.

 

     Threw his cat in the air to watch her gymnastic grace.

     Taught his dancers to move like that.

 

Taught them, too, the perfume of Russian ballet.

Though his real name, Balanchivadze, was Georgian.

 

 

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet who lives in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Nixes Mate Review, Streelight Magazine, Witcraft, and The Orchard Poetry Journal.

ENDORSEMENT

by Judy Rowe Michaels

The end for US President Joe Biden's election hopes was quick and unfolded in almost total secrecy—but Vice President Kamala Harris was ready… Harris "took time to arrange both lunch and dinner for the assembled aides," the source said… "The menu was salad and sandwiches for lunch, and pizza and salad for dinner. The Vice President's pizza came with anchovies, her go-to topping." —AFP, July 23, 2024

My late husband loved

anchovies. I do not.

But Kamala orders anchovies on her

pizza. Good enough for me,

though their salty, abominably

fishy slime does war with my

basic food groups—oatmeal,

Caesar wrap, lox with

schmeer. I have not tried

anchovy as finger food

for my Maine Coon cat,

but Larkin, long-time Democat,

will doubtless rise to

the occasion on his long hind legs

and prance. The smell alone

should do it. No need

to tell him they're endorsed

by the President-Elect.

Judy Rowe Michaels is, clearly, an optimist. A six-time cancer survivor, she speaks about ovarian cancer to medical school classes as part of the national organization Survivors Teaching Students. A retired English teacher and poet in residence, and a poet for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, she has published four poetry collections, most recently This Morning the Mountain, and three books on teaching poetry and creative writing. She has received residencies from Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Banff Centre for the Arts. For over twenty years, Michaels has been a member of Cool Women, a monthly critique group that gives readings and publishes group anthologies.

THE INNER LIFE OF A HENCHMAN

by Michael Brockley

Photo by Amy Volovski at Birds&Blooms.

The cardinals nesting in the barberry bush beneath my bedroom window work together as if they have fledged many chicks during their brief lives. The mother, dusty brown and patient, approaches her chicks through aerial feints. And by hopping from lower branches to the upper fork where the hatchlings await the spiders and crickets she delivers. The scarlet male darts and barrel rolls toward its forage with what I pretend is pride. 

Soldiers were once children in such a hurry to fly. I was such a boy aiming toy bazookas and sniper rifles at Lincoln Log forts under siege. Now I celebrate the appetites of five hungry gullets, hoping the chicks survive the neighbor cat’s overnight prowls. If I can’t protect the spring’s latest brood, how can I save the children of Jerusalem and Rafah.

Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Parliament Literary Journal, Stormwash: Environmental Poems, and Barstow and Grand. Poems are forthcoming in Of Rust and Glass, Ryder Magazine, Otherwise Elsewhere Literature and Arts Journal, and The Prose Poem. 

MARCH

by Juditha Dowd

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock

Once again we’ve let ourselves be taken in by spring. 
Words we haven’t spoken for months come tumbling 
from our mouths. Tulip, soil, survival. 
Fools that we are to trust a tease so early in the season, 
we need it like we need the cat to see ourselves 
in a rosier light—young and more attentive—aspiring 
to the better selves we seem to have forgotten. 
We need it like we need the moon to make the universe 
believable. I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to write 
a poem without any mention of spring or moon or hope
so maybe that’s worth a try. But night still comes too early. 
I see you’ve already poured the wine, set a glass 
beside my chair where a cat sits watching the fire. 
If I don’t close these blinds right now, the rising moon 
might keep me here, wandering the galaxies. 
In case it’s true that hope cannot eternally renew itself
or spring last longer than today, let me let me stay with 
what I know tonight, release the cord and step away.
 

Juditha Dowd’s fifth book of poetry, Audubon’s Sparrow, is a lyric biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon (Rose Metal Press). She has contributed poems to Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Kestrel, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Presence and elsewhere.

TO A CHORUS OF TEARS

by tom bauer

It seems inevitable his eyes would look like that
singing that song, effulgent with yearning
for things lost, as the river weaves towards
the past. Reminds me of cartoon eyebrows,
pointed in an inverted ‘V’, like a tent,
anguished peaks over wounded disks, singing
what might be the saddest song ever made.

An invisible step leads to this next question,
on foot, an actual physical object
moving in space, in the moment of space,
not merely that moment witnessed onscreen,
a moment now in the past, outside this one,
this moment here with the keyboard, the echo,
the cat on the radiator nesting his head.

Are we free? As time waves out, are we free?
Free of the pain, the breath, the trees and light?
For it seems we are not free on earth, to choose
to run or fight, to give or take, we are
in moments welded to our choices,
fixed outside freedom, choosing what we must.

So are we free, then, when we die? Is that it?

tom bauer lives in montreal with his sons and plays boardgames.

HOW TO ERASE

by Ron Riekki

Sacheen Littlefeather

“Indigenous identity is complicated. 

What I do know is that the impact that Sacheen had on myself was very real” 

—Devery Jacobs 

  

—“The Sacheen Littlefeather controversy highlights a 

debate over what it means to be Native American,” CNN, November 5, 2022

 

“I like you the way you are” 

—Avril Lavigne, 

“Complicated” 

Sacheen Littlefeather’s sister says that Sacheen 

talked about being native in order to get fame. Yet 

her sister is having no trouble denying being native 

in order to get fame. Why wait until someone is dead 

to have the conversation about their identity?… I know 

someone who’s native. Her brother denies being 

native. & in his denial, it furthers his belief that 

 

he’s not native. Whereas, his sister—who is native— 

goes to native events, is deep friends with native 

people, & so she learns more & more about her

native heritage, but when she tries to explain 

those connections to her brother, he has no 

interest… If Sacheen Littlefeather’s sister 

wanted to understand her sister, then she 

 

would have needed to talk to her sister 

to find out what her sister knew, knows, 

will know. Native is narrative. It is 

the stories we unearth, how we grow 

by unravelling what is unknown. 

A CBS News article I read on 

Sacheen Littlefeather said it 

 

reveals the reality of her her- 

itage, but it misspelled her 

name twice in the article, 

listing her as: Sacheen 

Littlefather & Sacheen 

Littlefield (since 

corrected), but it 

 

made me think 

how the cloud 

outside my 

window 

right 

now 

is a 

 

dog, 

no, 

it’s 

a 

c 

a 

t 

. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

BLESSING THE ANIMALS

by David Chorlton

On and around The Feast of St. Francis, October 4 this year, many churches organize a Blessing of the Animals to which dogs, cats, bird, bunnies, ponies, chickens, and all creatures great and small are welcome.

Here’s a cat who’d take

the dinner from a china plate but bless

her anyway; she doesn’t know

the rules of etiquette. Consider the coyote

blessed when he stops in the middle of the street

and looks back at a pedestrian

his wildness has touched. Bless the starlings

who were fruitful and

multiplied from coast to coast, and bless

the common pigeon for

turning waste lots into food. Bless

the rattlesnake who curls up at a trail’s edge

by stepping carefully around him,

and save

for the jaguar who returns to

ancient hunting grounds

a special blessing that will follow him through

darkness. Shall we dare

to shower favor on the rats who climb the final

daylight and cavort

in yards and vegetable beds? Or spare

an extra prayer for the Great horned owl

when he is done with ferrying souls

to comfort and a resting place?

When the Cooper’s hawk is waiting

for a mourning dove, be generous as this world

in which an ocean is the predator

and a river is the prey.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and has shared home with many cats, birds, and occasionally dogs. The creatures who visit his yard appear frequently in his new book Poetry Mountain from Cholla Needles in Joshua Tree, CA., who also published the poems his white cat Raissa wrote in the late Clinton years (of a very concrete nature) in a little book called Gilded Snow along with her owner's commentary.

WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

BEHOLD

by Geoffrey Aitken

 

the cat

our predatory

suburban

household favourite

cannot change

its spots

the cuttlefish

the octopus

and the squid

like the chameleon

can change colour

now

the automobile

A minimalist industrial signature drives Geoffrey Aitken away from the scene of mental unwellness for the eyes and ears of those without voices. Widely published locally (AUS), and internationally (the UK, US, CAN, CN & FR), he chases ongoing congeniality.

MORGAN

by Ann Neuser Lederer

When William Morgan was executed outside a Havana prison on March 11, 1961, his strange story seemed to vanish from the popular imagination as quickly as it had appeared; it was lost in the classified archives of the Cold War; and it was edited out of Cuban history by Fidel Castro’s retelling of the revolution as an epic tale of a handful of men fighting under his direct command at the exclusion of all others. —PBS American Experience

Under the low thorn bush it lurked, planning to pounce.
The white and black cat, named Morgan, for the lady
who gave us his mama as a kit, vowing it was male.
But now I know better: all calicos are girls.

The secret buzz was: Mrs. Morgan’s son was killed in Cuba.
His little daughter was sent to her grandma.
This could happen to any of us: a father runs off
to join the revolution, the "Yankee Comandante"*
falls out of favor, faces a firing squad.

Morgan the cat’s needle teeth poked out
from its cavernous, soundless mouth.
It was born mute, we soon figured out. Maybe deaf, too.

One time too many times it wandered near
the neighbor's fence,waving its feathery tail
at the pacing black-gummed Chow Chow
whose orange mane flared and fangs spit drool.
Morgan didn’t hear those loud barks of warning.

I didn't witness the feline neck fur wet with red,
when the big beast shook and bit.
I never heard yowls, but still can hear them.

I never saw the lineup, blindfolds, smoke or slump.
Often enough I saw the little girl, a quiet waif.
By and by, Castro, frail in his papery shell,
lay on his stark white bed.

Every little instance holds a tidbit to pass on.  
When driving on a winding road,
always point straight toward the curves.

Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up hearing whispers there about the legendary "American Comandante." She also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky as a Registered Nurse. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in journals, anthologies, and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, and Weaning the Babies.

DEPARTURE

by Gail White

They have paid all they have
to enter this cramped space.
They no more know
when they will sleep again
or where, than the blind
mole knows if it will escape
the cat outside its hole.
Universe, be kind.


Gail White's new book Asperity Street is available on Amazon or from Able Muse Press.

LIVING FOSSIL

by Mark Danowsky

“Normally, we wouldn't call something a living fossil. But the name seems tailor-made for the frilled shark, whose roots are traced to 80 million years ago.” --Bill Chappell, NPR, January 21, 2015. Phot source: Reddit.

Your cat and dog
communicate well-
enough to earn
a place inside
and remind us
domestication is
a two-way street

We speak
to our pets
and they respond
in their own way
which often means:

not speaking

turning to stare
at anything but you

walking away

I sometimes say
"you're a fake wolf"
to my dog
and I mean it
because it's true;
though I'm a wolf fan
when I wake
to find him standing over me
it's creepy enough

I would never say
you look primitive
to the dog
since who am I
to judge—
any creature
here today
has earned the right
to live among us

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.