October 2018 | poetry
Truncated Lives
Those millions who,
because of
color,
belief,
origin,
differentness,
hated
by imagination,
were chosen,
among all people,
to be example
forever,
of inhumanity
to fellowman,
castigated,
isolated,
in separation,
to die.
Me and Melanin
I’m known
for the slight amount
of melanin
in my skin.
In fact
I’m proud
to have so little!
SO pale!
YOU
are the opposite
of me
and have abundance.
I hate you.
I will enslave you,
hate you,
and kill you
for the melanin
in your skin.
by Duane L Herrmann
Duane L. Herrmann, is a survivor who lived to tell, and loves the pure light of the moon – and trees. He creates from his knowledge and experience. His collections of poetry include: Ichnographical:173, Prairies of Possibilities, and Praise the King of Glory. Individual work is published in Midwest Quarterly, Little Balkans Review, Flint Hills Quarterly, Orison, Inscape and others in print and online in the US and elsewhere, in English and other languages. He received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, the Ferguson Kansas History Book Award and nominated to be Poet Laureate of Kansas.
October 2018 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
The thing about Charlie Mingus Jr.—who clattered
onto the scene like a grand piano in a punch bowl—
is that he also was young once. More than that, fate
made him endure indignities that make a street bum
look like Reagan’s strapping young buck on food stamps,
savoring a T-bone. System so sullied even mobsters did
more than music critics, but you know, that’s entertainment.
I’m black, therefore I’m not: this is what four hundred years
of errors and trials—faith wrung out from unripened rinds—
forced folks with the nerve to be born neither wealthy nor white
to know from the get-go. And for the love of a stained-glass God,
don’t speak off-script or they’ll wash the mutiny from your mouth
with a firehose; that’s why most men lie down mutely in darkness,
safe or at least sheltered, beneath the underdog of hatred & history.
Get them to kill each other, or even better, hoodwink them
into hating themselves: that’s the anti-American Dream too
many citizens sleep through, fed a fixed diet of indifference,
intolerance, and interference. So what can you do if you know
you’re a genius, and all the klan’s men can never convince you
water isn’t wet? Keep rolling that rock up the hill until it grinds
a fresh groove into the earth: improvise your own force majeure.
This is almost my time, he said, and good God wasn’t he
more than half-right. I know one thing, (you can quote him)
I’m not going to let anyone change me. Overflowing with
awareness of himself, fresh out of the furnace, molded in
the image of a bird that flew first and further—mapping out
the contours of this new language: dialogic, indomitable—
his work exploded, a defiant weed cutting through concrete.
1957: five albums in twelve months—righteous waves
quenching a coastline, reconfiguring the world the way
Nature does. And his reward—a brief stretch in Bellevue,
ain’t that a bitch? Listen: when The Duke declared music
his mistress, he was lucky enough to need nobody, aware
that the genetic razor cleaving obsession and insanity is
capricious, like all those calamities Poseidon orchestrated.
Mingus was never not human, the impossible endowment
that drove him, destroyed him and, in death, restored him.
His tenacity was the heat that both healed and hurt, a comet
cursed with consciousness—he went harder, dug deeper,
even as his best work impended, yet-unrealized revelations:
Blues and Roots the brown man’s burden, a thorny crown
worn only by dispossessed prophets willing or able to testify.
His recalcitrant wisdom: earned the way trees acquire
rings: the reality of who he was, even if he too changed
at times, like the country that claimed him, mostly after
the fact. And whether you’re committed, an exiled crusader,
or a respectable suit working to death in squared circles,
the message from that rare bird’s song still resounds today,
an epiphany blown through the slipstream: Now’s the Time.
by Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. His work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, The New York Post, The Good Men Project, and others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of Virginia Center for Literary Arts (www.thevcla.org). To learn more, please visit seanmurphy.net and @bullmurph.
October 2018 | poetry
Bat shit
abusive
now after
upside down
battered twins
fêted
fetid star
mellifluous
obsequious
arch flatterers
melancholy
clump of gay
clay oxymorons
amputated –plug
pulled on bouquets.
by Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, Margie, Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Tiferet plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast and Tipton Review. “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids and four grandkids so far.
October 2018 | poetry
they will not be delayed
stare down the tick
tock clock
or will be extended
graciously
summer’s tufting breath
i opened my hand
where are you?
come here now and kiss sky
cerulean pale cornflower whips
of blackbirds
these clouds only wisdom
years ago
drink with me and dance
jig waltz rondo mazurka polka
adagio or allegro anything
that moves
this place is safe
nothing but goodness
can envelop us
my arms are open
but quickly before they aren’t
by Heidi A. Howell
Working loosely in the range of experimental/ language/Black Mountain/ NY School traditions, Heidi A. Howell has published poems in online and print literary magazines, including s/word, Psychic Meatloaf, The Eastern Iowa Review, Otoliths, la fovea, What Light, So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and the Washington Review, which nominated her work for a Pushcart. She holds an MFA from George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.
October 2018 | nonfiction
All your friends have older brothers–some in jail, some in Vietnam. But Nancy’s brother is a cop. He works nights and sleeps days, so he’s always snoring in the back bedroom when you play at her house.
Nancy is a tomboy. She likes to play Matchbox cars. She always chooses the cop car and makes the scary siren sound–rrrrrrr rrrrrr–as she rushes the black and white car marked POLICE across the worn carpet.
You’re not a tomboy. You want to choose the turquoise Bel Air convertible so you can pretend you’re Miss America being driven down the street in a parade. But you always choose the ambulance and follow the cop car across the carpet, because when there’s a murder, somebody’s got to clean up the mess.
One day Nancy’s mother goes to a wake and leaves you in the house with just the cop brother snoring in the back.
Do you want to see my brother’s gun? Nancy asks.
You don’t really. But you know it’s polite to say yes.
She drags a chair over to the wooden cabinet in the front hallway, climbs up, and takes a pistol out of a leather holster.
She points it at you.
You stare into the dark hole of the barrel.
You better put that back, you say, or else–
Else what, she says.
Else I’ll tell your mother, you say.
She shrugs and puts the gun back in the holster.
You don’t tell her mother. Or your own mother. And you keep playing Matchbox cars just like before. But for weeks afterward when you go to bed and mumble now I lay me down to…, you hear Nancy making the scary siren sound–rrrrrrr rrrrrr–before you fall into the dark barrel of sleep.
by Rita Ciresi
Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and three award-winning story collections, Second Wife, Sometimes I Dream in Italian, and Mother Rocket. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.
