PLACING SEASHELLS ON GRAVES, BY PHOTOS

by Joan Leotta

 
 

The poet by the beach at Les Braves Monument, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer

Living far now, from where
the veterans among my
beloved dead are interred,
I will place by my
father’s photo
a seashell, one that is also
a veteran of sorts, a shell
from Omaha Beach, Normandy.
 
Walking with our guide
where our soldiers landed,
my fingers, on that cool
May morning plucked,
two slim jack-knife clam shells, 
from the wet sands before the
tide could steal them back.
 
That same guide had recounted how

scientists found that

even after seventy years
sand of this place
still carried traces
of the landing party’s blood.
 
That same day, we were given roses
to lay on graves in the American cemetery.
I also laid down one of these shells,
with a few grains of sand still
clinging to its curves like
hands clasping a lifeboat
thinking that perhaps
the grains carried
DNA from a comrade of the
unknown man I visited.
 
The other of this precious pair
found its way home with me.
I did not wash it or place it in a
generic box: “Shell, France.”
Instead, I kept it aside, wrapped.
Each Memorial Day, I carefully place
that small remaining
Omaha Beach shell
with its few grains of sand
by my father’s picture.
Although he was on
Pacific Coast sands beating
back assaults from a different
Axis Power foe, he and the
Omaha Beach men
were also comrades.
I imagine the soul or souls
on the sand in my shell
communicating with my father,
trading tales of their fight for justice.
 
On Memorial Day, especially,
I think of them and
all who sacrificed their
lives for our country as does
everyone who loves
and remembers those soldiers,
everyone who loves freedom.

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She’s been published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, and a two-time nominee for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her poetry and stories have appeared in Spillwords,  One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, The Lake, and many others. She performs folktale programs most often highlighting  food, family, and strong women; she performs a one-woman show, “Meet Louisa May Alcott, Nurse and a Force in Healing America post Civil War.” Contact joanleotta[at]gmail[dot]com for her Main Street Rag poetry chapbook Feathers on Stone.

LIFE AT LAND’S END

by Mary Eileen Knoff

In January, for thirty years, I have left behind
grey Seattle skies to sit beside the Pacific shore
at Land’s End, on the Baja’s southern tip,
seeking respite from the northern chill.

Each year, thunderous surf lashes the land,
crashing against its standing stone, La Roca,
filling the sky with mist and foam.
This year the scene turns my thoughts toward home:

there an explosion of presidential orders
overwhelms like a deluge, threatening
to reshape truth as surf reshapes the sand.
Can our country withstand the onslaught thrust upon us?

Many of us now cast about for a course
to follow through these treacherous times.

Life at Land’s End calls out to me through the fog:

Stand firm like this rock, persist like the tide
shine like lighthouses for those who ride on stormy seas.
Your words and deeds of truth and mercy will be guides,
like bright, shining stars in a blackening sky,
like rafts of life on fear and greed’s wicked seas.

Mary Eileen Knoff spent the first two decades of her professional life as an English teacher, editor, and freelance writer. In the mid-1990s she studied for pastoral ministry and then served as a spiritual companion and small group facilitator since the early 2000s. She has lived in Redmond, Washington near the foothills of the Cascades for the last thirty years. For the last decade I have been crafting a collection of poems about life on the pond that I call Ponderings. I am in search for a publisher of that collection these days. In 2012, as part of a doctoral program in ministry, she collected, edited, and published writings by myself and others, now in a second edition, called Seasoning the Soul: Meditations for the Celtic Year.

NO SEATS AND ONE TOILET

by Susan Cossette

Challenger Deep, Hades Zone—

There are better maps of the moon and Mars.

 

Humans like superlatives—

Highest, lowest, longest.

Hubris.

 

We sit cross legged, barefoot—

watching for golden pocketwatches,

chipped china and worn shoes, 

footprints sunk in silent ocean sand.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

SO FAR

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

                                                            for sister colette

                                    

this year 

84 died 

brooks county 

nicknamed 

the real death valley  

flesh 

dropping away 

under the texas sun 

each face  

each name 

disappearing 

like a drop of water 

in the sand 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and new verse newsas well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at Y92 in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.” 

SPRING BREAK

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Spring Break ramps up on Fort Lauderdale beach and bars nearby. (Mike Stocker / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

They amass like mosquitoes

seasonal, thirsty

buzzing full throated

drinking from the trough

dancing bikini bar to bar

singing across hot sand

under bright sun freedom

in the Ponzi State

Where cities are whitewashed

spiritually unclaimed, soulless

coyotes nosing full garbage cans

their woods stripped bare for 

asphalt streets, pink plastic

body parts and towers 

on Styrofoam foundations

eroding narrowed beaches

while out in the rurals

abandoned washers, rusty 

cars, no jobs, lots of guns

red banners to the past

This is the place 

to party-hardy

for frontier values

fierce individualism

reduced taxes, no rules

endless cycles of consumption

just build, build and burn 

When the invaders conquered

the Natives warned them

of the inevitable loss:

the nose of the deer

will fall off... 

and that's Florida

the Underwater State

Where everyone is welcome

to the final season 

the grand finale

the greatest sunset

in American history.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, UK, 2019). In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released the poetry micro-chapbook Florida Man. The Physics of Grief puts the fun back in funerals while taking a serious look at the process of mourning (QuoScript, UK, April 2021). 

TIME'S UP

by Richard Meyer

Follow the online bot that tweets the elapsed amount of the T***p presidency in 0.1% increments .

Deranged, incompetent, irate,

the loser won’t admit he lost.

Refusing to accept his fate,

he’ll lie and cheat at any cost

and even wreck the ship of state

while claiming he’s been double-crossed.

But he’s defeated, shamed, undone.

The unrelenting countdown clock

keeps dropping digits one by one.

He cannot stop the tick and tock.

He’s out of time. His end has come,

a failure there’s no hiding from.

He’s squeezed inside an hourglass,                 

dissipating grain by grain.

The dwindling moments come and pass,                    

and nothing of him will remain.

His legacy and final brand

will be a little mound of sand.

Richard Meyer’s poems have appeared in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Think, Measure, Light, TheNewVerse.News, Alabama Literary Review, and The Evansville Review. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems, Orbital Paths, was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.

LOSING TIME: MY LAST JOG ON A CARIBBEAN BEACH

by Bill Meissner




via GIPHY

The watch slipped from my wrist and dropped
to the sand, burying itself. Retracing
my footprints, I couldn’t find it, though I searched
and searched, my palm skimming the beach
like a metal detector.

Home from vacation, I wonder who might
find that watch, wonder
what lonely, homeless beachcomber—years from now—
might idly sift a handful of sand and

discover it. Would the watch be
silent, its cracked face filled with grains that seeped in,
little by little, smothering the two luminous hands?
Or would it still be ticking away in some other time zone,
each sweep of the second hand like a wave
smoothing a distant shore?
If he held it to his ear, like a spiral seashell,
could he hear the azure roar of the ocean inside it?

If I could replace something, it wouldn’t be
the watch I lost. Instead, I’d retrieve
a minute, an hour, a day or two, a month,
even a whole year. I’d retrieve
a few friendships, the blurred mistakes I’ve made,
the faces that faded from the family photo,
an afternoon of tender touching. I’d recover

those moments that passed
while the grains
in the hourglass fell
and fell
in a line so thin and steady I could hardly tell it was moving.

Bill Meissner is a teacher/writer and the author of four books of poems, two short story collections, and a novel Spirits in the Grass which won the Midwest Book Award.  He lives in Minnesota.  Visit his Facebook author page.

SLEEP AFTER A T***P SPEECH

by Ben Kline 

What are facts if they lack
truth in telling? He was the bad lover I left

five weeks and sixty two months before
the March hail behaved like July and everyone

succumbed to citrus words and coral colored lip gloss
that shined like a silver watch in waters shallow

with guppies looking for a bite, barracudas
for purple blood so thick it shoved the sand

aside before his foot could find your throat.
What is the warning

shared by mothers on the beach
when their daughters spot men with cameras

walking too slowly by? He was brutal
but unskilled, a successful punch

lacking cause or defense like a tree
the wind sends onto a sleeping home

busy with inconsequential dreams, vivid truths
we only tell ourselves.

Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he writes about the modern digital existence and his dark Appalachian past. His work has appeared in KNACK Magazine, Headmaster Magazine, Birds Piled Loosely, and apt.

OPTIONS TO CONSIDER AFTER A TRUMP VICTORY

by David James

CREDIT: MATT / THE TELEGRAPH 

You can stumble
into your cave of despair and blame

half the electorate for their blind
ignorance; you can stick your head
in the sand and try to hide the shame

you feel for your country; you can live behind
four walls of silence and let the world implode

on itself.  Or you can gather your belongings
and move to Croatia or Singapore.
But it won’t change a thing. On the long road

to heaven, you’ll find lepers and hypocrites, almost anything
floating between paradise and hell.

The fact is, no election could ever save us.
No truth can be hidden for long.
No amount of rain can fill the old well

if the well’s dry as a bone. To live with disgust
is to admit defeat. To admit defeat is to lose

all hope. And to lose all hope it to give in
to darkness. Sorry, I can’t let that happen. I’ll stand here
in the light, work hard, and wait for the good news.

David James' third book My Torn Dance Card was a finalist in the 2016 Next Generation Indie book award. More than thirty of his one-act plays have been produced. He teaches at Oakland Community College.

REMEMBERED WHEN I COULDN'T WRITE THE POEM WHEN I COULDN'T

by Sarah Sadie

“The current slump in frac sand mining has brought about new problems for residents who live near inactive mines because companies have abandoned the sites and are no longer watering huge sand piles to control silica dust. Wright noted two-thirds of the sand that is used in the hydraulic fracturing method of extracting oil and gas in the United States comes from western Wisconsin -- which has led some in the industry to call the region the ‘Saudi Arabia of Sand’.”  —WisBusiness.com, April 21, 2016. Photo: Frac sand mining operation in Wisconsin via Grassroots North Shore.

Remember before Barriques moved—
the one on Monroe, with the warped wood floors, the tables
too big or too small for our laptops, notebooks, notes and soups.
We’d go over submissions, catch up on festivals, phone calls,
calendars, email, whatever came next,
and one table over, the hummus plate overheard,
interrupted, “You’re looking  for someone speaks Spanish?
I know someone, matter of fact,
she’s native, bilingual, looking for work—”

But we were poets with no money to pay,
so no help to her. He shrugged then, “Poets?

You know, you ought to write—” he backed up. “I’m in sustainable ag. You ought to write—this fracking—nobody wants it. Out in Western Wisconsin? None of ‘em want it. But last night they had a meeting, here at the Capitol, vote taken. And no one allowed to speak. No one. What kind of a—You should write about that. About fracking. About what’s happening. And up North, with the mine. You know, people in Madison ought to get out and see, see the devastation out there—then they wouldn’t—”

We muttered something, nodding, We’re trying. Yes. We know. We know.

“You know why, right?” he asked.
“Because. They don’t want to hear it.
Whatever we’ve got to say, they just don’t want to hear it.”

Sarah Sadie’s chapbook Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015 and a full-length collection We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds is now out from Lit Fest Press. She teaches here and there and hosts occasional retreats for writers and other creative types.

WHITHER WEATHER #1: CA RAIN PRAYER

by Frances P. Davis

Lake Cachuma photo by Paul Wellman, Santa Barbara Independent, January 23, 2014

We listen with such longing
its little liquid voice
metallic tap on heater vent
click against cement, hiss on leaves

Our thirsty memories stretching
far back to parched times in caves
sand and dry wadis, long treks
to miracle holes gushing springs

Enough of this listlessness
dehydration’s wilting lassitude
withering fruit and vines
the farmer’s boot on powdered ground

May the sky anoint the land with rain again
let’s hear it pounding shingles
gutter runnels gushing
the splash and gurgle of surfeit

Dance or pray or seed the clouds
catch cumulous in a net and twist, bring
back birds in puddles, boats on brimming lakes
canals bearing gifts to penstocks south

Let’s smell the earth drinking
the air electric with recharged ions
let’s catch rainwater in a goblet, lift it
like the finest wine and swallow


Frances P. Davis lives in Summerland, California, a button of a village stitched to hills overlooking the Santa Barbara Channel. The village looks at water all day long, but its reservoir is dry, its lawns browning, its vineyards, raisins on the vine.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, Frances writes a column about the town for the local newspaper and publishes poems in print and online journals.

SHUTDOWN

by Sara Berkeley

Image source: nationalparks.org

The day the government shut down
the ocean showed up for work.
They put some barricades up
but waves kept coming in, unfazed.
The toilets were locked
and the barricades went up
to stop the people coming in to the park
but we went early, before they closed
the National Seashore, and I can attest
that the seals and the pelicans
and the small fish and the birds that eat them
kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,
rending the heart of the beach in two,
throwing their violent weight around
while Congress ran aground;
the rush of foam and fuming toil
of the wind blowing spume back
from the crests as loud as the silence
along the corridors of power,
the sand hot beneath our feet,
the water silvery gold, the gulls
laughing and crying as we were
laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared
we reckoned they hadn't heard
that the government was hung -
hoist by its own petard -
that they'd put some wooden barriers up
to stop the tourist cars
from visiting the National Seashore
while well beneath the roar of the breakers
tearing up the shale
and the keening wail of the gulls
the day was a good day, ungoverned,
lovely, full of miracles.


Sara Berkeley was born and raised in Ireland. She has had five collections of poetry published, one of short stories, and a novel. She has been widely anthologized, including in the Harvard University Press An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, guinea pig, and varying numbers of fish. When she is not writing poetry, she is a nurse for traumatic brain injured patients. She is well ready for the shutdown to end.

CYRUS VS. SYRIA

by Greg Scott Brown

Khan al-Assal Massacre

I imagine the young man kneeling in a ditch
in Syria would rather hold forth on Miley
and twerking, to wit: simply awkward,

morally bereft, or downright un-American?
The young man kneeling in a ditch
in Syria is not American, of course.

No matter.
Given a choice to debate the reprobate
Miley, or taking a bullet to the brain,

I imagine which choice (which is no choice)
he might make while waiting
to add his blood and brains to the ditch.

Might he imagine something more
than Miley in a Syrian ditch
where his voice is blood and sand and void?


Greg Scott Brown lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he teaches Composition, Critical Thinking and Literature at Los Medanos Community College.

EGYPT NOW

by David Radavich

Photo copyright by Tom Prokop.
 Used with permission from 123RF.

Is this
a worse desert
than the one
we knew?

Sharp, with no
relief of sun
or sand

and the faces
down like

ghosts

a violence
so pure

even the angels

cry out
in their belfries.


Every body
is ultimate

alone
in its blood

night
crawling

nowhere
safer than a morgue.


The palm trees
don’t know

their own water,

air aches
bent overhead.


Don’t tell time
to return

until

the sand

falls through.

                      
David Radavich’s recent collections include America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011). His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe . His new collection is The Countries We Live In. 

SOILED CANVAS

by Jerome Betts


Oil in seabirds death identified --Press Association, Feb 6, 2013

Birds found on Chesil beach have been taken to the RSPCA's West Hatch centre near Taunton. Photograph: Geoff Moore/Rex Features. Image source: The Guardian

A painter's boast, one long past day,
Beside his Guillemots and Spray:
‘Such are the touches I can give
That when they’re caught in oil, they live.’

This week, his grandsons found the sands
Left grease and feathers on their hands
And told small children asking why
That when they’re caught in oil, they die.


Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and has contributed verse to LightenUp OnLine, New Verse News, Per Contra, Snakeskin and Tilt-A-Whirl, as well as numerous print publications.

THE RAIN OF MERCY

by Laura Rodley

Image source: Dipity.

Now your waves drink the sky,
an everflowing cup,
that soothes your skin
constantly scorched by daily sun.
See how my raindrops
speckle you with sweet relief
so your tides can surge
upon the sand, keeping
the promise of everlasting life
a promise in danger of being broken
but here, the falling drops
wet and seal the cracks
so your waves tumble, tumble,
the ground sure beneath your reach.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.