FROM THE HIDEOUSLY SMOKY MIDWEST

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I love my Canadian neighbors but…

 

At least during Covid we could step outside.

I resurrect my masks and wear them now

to water the puzzled garden, get the mail,

drag in the dumpster. Ash on squash leaves

ages them as surely as gray hair. My throat hurts.

Eyes sting and I’m breathing filtered air.

Exhausted squirrels lay in bird baths.

Deer stagger through the yard.

We keep water out for them,

not to breed mosquitos, nosy neighbor!

Sun a muffled peach pit in both skies.

Moon, overcome with particulate matter,

hides her face, throws scarves of stars

over her mouth to filter pernicious smoke.

Just guessing, since we no longer see her.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

BARK, BITE, BEG, FIGHT, ROLL OVER

by Gabriella Brand

It’s a good day to be a dog

just a dog, with a dog brain

blissfully unaware of red and blue tallies,

unburdened by disappointment,

indifferent to triggers or loud words,

unless someone is reaching for a leash.

It’s a good day to be a dog,

fearless, undaunted, exuberant,

ready for any future, any at all

confident that tomorrow will be 

pretty much the same as today and

the hydrants will be in the same place

It’s a good day to be a dog

keeping dignity when the pit bull passes,

keeping calm when the cats tease,

looking neither left nor right but straight ahead,

putting one paw in front of the other,

tormented by nothing except maybe squirrels.

Gabriella Brand’s short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail,  Grand Little Things, Gyroscope Review, Red Wolf Journal, and more. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Gabriella teaches in the OLLI program at the University of Connecticut. 

ABDUCTED GOLDFISH

by Kenton K. Yee

Dean Young, 1955-2022

In The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf, 2010), the poet Dean Young's exhilarating book-length essay on writing poetry, he repeatedly questions and rejects the idea that the most important thing in writing poetry is an acquired mastery of craft, suggesting that it comes at the expense of intuition, risk-taking, wildness, and negative capability. He writes, exasperatedly and in all caps, "WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES!" —Michael Dumanis, Editor of Bennington Review

I ping. I ping love.

 

I ping love and I love pings.

Here’s one from the library:

Due in two.

 

Love me my deadlines.

Ping me butter melting,

cantaloupe ripening,

gasps quickening.

 

Dean Young.

 

Ducks.

 

Abduct.

 

I’m waiting for the gulls to return my goldfish.

I’m waiting for squirrels to sing like nightingales,

daisies to bear me raspberries,

and bonsai trunks or cornflakes.

I’m waiting for bugles to herald the dying of salmon.

 

All this sun and all that sun.

The melting hours. Starlight. Dew.

The lackadaisical one

who settles for steam turned to rice.

Author’s Note: This poem is in memory of Dean Young, who passed away a few days ago. When I first took up poetry, I didn't know what to make of Dean Young and his rich language and ranging movements. Now, he's become one of my poetry role models.

Kenton K. Yee recently placed poetry in Constellations, Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Indianapolis Review, Matter, Lily Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. An Iowa Summer Poetry Workshop alumnus, he writes from northern California.

SPRING (IS THE SEASON)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

A row of flowers with tags of the victims’ names are tied to a fence at the site of a shooting at King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., on March 24. (Alyson McClaran/Reuters via The Washington Post) "Over the past three weeks, 22 people have died in three major mass shootings in the United States, according to a Washington Post database that tracks those events." —The Washington Post, April 4, 2021

Again, 

spring comes around 

and people talk of hope 

The coming of columbines 

daffodils and hyacinths

the way the greening willows

weep 

 

Squirrels, 

working in the dark

moved many bulbs 

so no one knows where 

they will sprout this year

But who is speaking 

about spring as the season 

of mass shootings 

The ammo crop that is ever ripe  

When young men emerge 

from the long, dim winter 

and find themselves 

deathly pale 

in the too brilliant sun

Who is watching out for them?

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. Recent work appears in Dissident Voice, Jewish Literary Journal, Bewildering Stories, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Chiron Review.

SPACE AVAILABLE

by Sharon Olson

They call it the landscape of fear,
the sense that humans are near,
ears pricked to catch the menace
of car engines, commerce unabated.

So the deer were always nearby,
watching for safe spaces, as if
they might be able to read
the stickers on library doors.

The map has now been redrawn,
if the foxes can come out of hiding,
say the deer, then so can we,
nobody seems to be stopping us.

We are now hosting a family of deer,
our yard a new venue for outdoor dining,
our menu of specials features straight-up
hostas, day lilies, rosehips for dessert.

In dark of night, though, a new creature
has joined the neighborhood menagerie,
squirrels and mice beware, the fisher cat
pierces the silence with its strangling call.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

RELICS

by Anne Harding Woodworth

“We have found a holy thing in a chest,”

said lead archaeologist Professor Gülgün Köroğlu.

“It is a piece of a cross.” UPI.com, August 2, 2013

Photos, undated and curled,
4x6s, 5x7s, lie out in the garage
in a metal chest, some framed, some loose,
some stained with wine and oil,
places miles away with names forgotten,
forgotten eyes and smiles,
pieces of you and me that have lain buried
decades, centuries, millennia,
to be remembered in swabs of saliva
from the inside of a cheek someday.
They will ask: who were our mothers?
when did we live? how did we die?
From the photos nothing will be known
of cracked ribs, nothing of teeth
(though they’ll say we ate grains, of course).
And what about the nutshells
at the bottom of the chest?
Carbon 14 will determine that squirrels
entered it a half-life ago. And surely
it’s the squirrels that gnawed
that rough slat of wood among the photos
with its ancient glyphs of black ink along the edge,
a stick that measured, or so they will say,
the height and width of a holy thing.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her work is widely published in literary journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the poetry board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

THE FRAGONARDS PLAY A HOME GAME

by M. A. Schaffner

Image source: Pébéo

Through all my life I’ve grown up just enough
to step back through the looking glass and sing
nonsense songs while shaving.  You know the tunes.
Context has everything to do with death,
and that changes constantly, so today
I’ll settle for a six pack and a game
of football or Scrabble.  Let small dogs watch
as we wrestle with ambition and win
one more time, because we know its weak points.
Last night there was a moon.  There will be again
long after we uncork our last bottle.
We solved the world’s problems.  It will have more,
but I don’t need to work them any more
than will finches nesting over the grill,
or their neighbors, the squirrels, or the cats
hunting stupidly, garden to garden.


M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and Skirmish Magazine.  Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys.  Schaffner used to work as a civil servant, but now serves civil pugs.