MAYBE IT STARTED WITH A HAMSTER

by Judith Terzi

and maybe the two albino rats
came next. And the rock collection.
Smooth oblong rocks he'd paint
faces on. And maybe shells came
next, and then stamps, though
he hardly knew where the countries
were on his globe. He liked
the biggest stamps the best, ones
with faces on them, faces of men
he could become. And maybe
the aquarium came next––red-tailed
sharks lurking behind rocks in his
bedroom with Jack Dempsey
cichlids and sucker fish. And maybe
the model building came next:
ocean liners with tiny people he'd
wave at, fighter planes with grounded
toy pilots. And tanks with soldiers
he would salute, but who never
saluted back. The tanks––stuck
between his childhood bed, with its
beige striped bedspread, and a shiny
maple highboy where he shoved
all of his desires, all of his heartache.
For later.

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Books, 2018) as well as of five chapbooks including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus Press). Her poetry appears widely in literary journals and anthologies, has received nominations for Best of the Net and Web, and has been read on the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and is a former educator who taught high school French for many years as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

ME TOO WHO

by Rebecca Street

How can it be a little lass of nine

Should feel such guilt and fear the threat of hell?

Too young to name his cruelty a crime

Too damaged and coerced to ever tell.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

Rosy cheeked girl who works to find a way

For her sweet child to have a better life

Could not afford to lose her job that day

Besides her mother’s cousin is his wife.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

The bashful boy with pimples on his face

Could run like lightening so his coach did say

This dear one’s "yes sir" followed every race

With sleepless nights and silent tears by day.

Me too

Time’s up

So what

Shut up

Will justice for the few forever reign

While numerous nameless suffer such pain?

Rebecca Street is the author of You Can Help: A Guide for Family & Friends of Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Assault and the online program for survivors You Are Not Alone. She is also an actor and a poet. She has addressed both lay people and professionals at a wide variety of venues including the NY Office of Mental Health, the Fordham Graduate School of Social Work, and the University of CA., Santa Barbara. On April 4, she will be the keynote speaker for "Take Back The Night" at The Juilliard School.

ON THE RECENT DEATH OF CHUCK BERRY

by Gil Fagiani 

To Chuck Berry, 1926-2017

I was a chronic bed wetter. My teachers mangled
my name, called me Fag-ee-annie, no matter how
many times I corrected them. I wore orthopedic
shoes and had stomach cramps in class. I couldn’t
sit still and Miss Harrison tied me to my seat with
jump rope. When I couldn’t recite my homework,
Miss Wilson shook me, leaving nail prints in my arms.

Then I learned how to turn on Chuck Berry
in my head. His voice jolted me out of my stupor,
his guitar chords, like a tommy gun, riddled
the blackboard, the bookshelves, the display
cases with prize-winning science projects,
the Stars and Stripes, the Pledge of Allegiance,
the portrait of the President of the United States.


Gil Fagiani is a translator, essayist, short story writer, and poet. His latest book is Logos (Guernica Editions, 2015). Gil co-hosts the Italian American Writers’ Association’s monthly readings in Manhattan. In 2014, he was the subject of a New York Times article by David Gonzalez, “A Poet Mines Memories of Drug Addiction.”

RELAXING INTO BLACKNESS

by Orel Protopopescu

 “He [Obama] was not always free to relax into his blackness, out of fear that it would frighten white America." —Michael Eric Dyson,  The New York Times, June 24, 2016

Although my winter skin is sallow,
a pale olive the world calls white,
my eyes and ears and pores
absorbed many shades of blackness
in New York in the sixties
in the middle of Long Island.

When I relax into my blackness,
I’m back in the music of the streets,
homes and churches of my childhood,
back with the old folks who called me baby
like they’d given birth to me,
their pupils widened in welcome,
back where doo wop groups sang
in the halls of Hempstead High
and we spilled out of choir to join them.

Where are you now, besides alive in me,
sweet-time brothers Andriamaharu,
who taught me to speak French,
a few words of Malgache,
and how to make a dance of laughter?

Fast and deep run the dark waters
that take me everywhere, bathed
in the fine and mellow vibrations
that forever slip like syrup
from the throat where Billie Holiday
birthed her blues, a fierce beauty,
a deep ease like a pair of taps
laying down paths I never want to leave,
sounds I never want to stop hearing,
like the voice of my then best friend,
abused for “talking like a white”
who said, in her Jamaican lilt,
“I don’t know what color a voice has.”

Oh, to relax again in the hammock
of our blackness, sharing secrets,
dividing the gold of the world between us.

Orel Protopopescu, children’s author, translator and poet, has been published by major houses (Simon&Schuster, FSG, Scholastic) and her book of translations, A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China (with Siyu Liu) was honored by the New York Public Library. Orel won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010. What Remains, a chapbook (2011) followed. Thelonious Mouse, her fourth picture book, won a Crystal Kite, 2012, from SCBWI.  A Word’s a Bird, her animated, bilingual (English/French) poetry book for iPad, was on SLJ’s list of ten best children’s apps, 2013. Her poetry has appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, Light, Lighten Up Online, and other reviews and anthologies.

FOR PAT SUMMITT: NEVER FORGOTTEN

by Jill Crainshaw

Pat Summitt, who was at the forefront of a broad ascendance of women’s sports, winning eight national basketball championships at the University of Tennessee and more games than any other Division I college coach, male or female, died on Tuesday. She was 64. Her death was confirmed on the website of the Pat Summitt Foundation. Summitt stepped down after 38 seasons and 1,098 victories at Tennessee in April 2012, at 59, less than a year after she learned she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. —The New York Times, June 28, 2016

she sits on the edge of her bed
and laces a pair of red converse
hi-tops the toe edge on the left one
scuffed for greatness she is certain of it
and proud of that work-worn abrasion
but no one else knows or even cares
about her dream or that she spends
two hours after sixth grade math class
every day in the backyard where her
springboard to stardom has been
hanging for the last year since she begged
and begged and her daddy gave in and
nailed it to an aging pine tree
not quite regulation height
above ground now made bald from
thousands of toe dancing dribbles
behind her back between her legs
ball leaping up from red southern clay
to stain her hands forever with a passion
no one else gave a second thought to
for a too-tall scrawny girl with a ponytail
who always sat alone at the very back
of bus 81 she tugs the laces tight
the way she likes them then grabs
her rawlings from the closet and heads
out the door for the old pine stopping
as she does every time she leaves her room
to rub her shooting hand over the lady vols
program she got that one time
her cousin took her to a game and
the coach even signed it for her

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. Her poems have appeared in *82 Review and Five Magazine and in an anthology by Wicwas Press. She is also the author of a number of books on worship and theology.