TAKE AWAY THE ACCOUTREMENTS, GET TO THE ESSENCE

by Barbara Simmons

Photo source: Flash Art

for Anna Halprin, dancer/choreographer

born July 13, 1920, died, May 24, 2021

In this picture you’re barefoot on your deck,

a wooden acre wrapped around your home,

your natural dance studio, where cloud and sky and sun and blue

help bodies became dancers, where singular experiences

beyond the body find their way inside,

becoming gesture, movement, giving answers

to why we move this way, not that, into, around,

under the others on the deck, the patterns of their limbs,

and feet, and hands, letting story enter body, exit dance.

You teach by showing that you move for love, to share

what lives inside your heart, so others find what lives in theirs.

You write that when you eat a carrot

you eat the sun, that we are but the human dance

of life, recycling everything we see and touch and feel 

into the you and you and you we brush past 

on this deck, beyond this deck, into the trees, into

the ecstasy of branches reaching.  I watch you move

others to move themselves to be more, feel more, 

uncover ways we can connect, to treat

the very ground we stand upon as holy, the feet that

touch it then and now and hence as sacred, the hands 

that reach above our heads potential wings that soar,

that share, that speak the only message that will matter,

that we all have mattered here.

Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, resides in California—finding the coasts inform her writing. She graduated from Wellesley College, received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. A retired educator, she continues to explore the communion of words as food for memories. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent, OASIS, Common Ground, Soul-Lit, Hamline Literary Review, Writing it Real, NewVerse News, and CAPSULE STORIES.

DILEMMA

by Joe Amaral

The large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains." The design was originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s, and appeared on several medallions for the society made by Josiah Wedgwood as early as 1787. —Library of Congress

Six minutes until game time
and the anthem is about to begin.

I’m afraid to kneel for inequality
in front of 11,000 drunk people

holding their hands half-heartedly
over hearts awaiting the start of

a collegiate soccer game where voice
rather than tangible action counts.

I want to avoid the hostile sneers of fans
awake in fake patriotism, ignorant to

police brutality. My kids follow the lead
of the crowd and stand. I ditch my family,

climbing concrete steps into the breeze-
way, my back to the flag, ducking into

a bathroom. The blood and soil floor is
piss-stained. I sort of kneel, listening as

the reverberation of a bad singer gravels
something antiquated and fragilely austere.

I feel for those going through the motions
dead-eyed. They know dutiful conformity

is an empty gesture unspoken. But a fist
in the air, a knee on the ground, now that

is no small token.

Joe Amaral works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the central coast of California. He has two young daughters, Zelia and Rui, and his wife Marina is a surgical nurse. They love spelunking outdoors, camping, traveling and hosting foreign exchange students. His writing has appeared worldwide in awesome places like 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, The Good Men Project, The Rise Up Review and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. 

SWAGGER

by Herb Kauderer

not understanding
that presentation
is all about posture

the presidential hopeful
offends the interstellar alien
with a proffered hand

his campaign ends painfully,
his promise of war fulfilled


Herb Kauderer is an associate professor of English at Hilbert College, and the author of over a thousand published poems, including ten books.