The Last Remaining Deity Speaks

Having ousted all rivals, I take possession

of suburban hostas and road-running squirrels,

and strike rare birds from recorded histories

 

of ponds. It is time to decommission causeways

now that the marshes have flaked. I design

the cities higher and higher on softening

 

foundations. I stack the insecurities of wealth,

and endorse both its guardians and armed

intruders. Whenever I like, I lift the streets

 

to patch the gas lines. I manage a land of millet

ground under a thumb into flour deflowered

by wind, and reroute buckets of effluvia

 

to a shrinking lake. I pilot the riverboats

that navigate waters between snipered cliffs,

and transport every iteration of spoiled fruit.

 

I standardize dejection marooned on a rugged

portage, and refit the ships that lost the Pacific

to microscopic plastic. I host a ceremonial dance

 

of cleats and hatchets that blends ecstatic worship

with the infant mortality rate. I beset the ancient

temples with mudslides. I put minor holidays

 

up for auction, and unclasp obligations so they fall

like fistfuls of worry beads. I am default, the very

last god who speaks the vernacular language.

 

Alan Elyshevitz

Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a full-length poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and four poetry chapbooks, most recently “Mortal Hours” (SurVision). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Do You Have an Accent?

This town has a rusted roof gas station,
a store shelf where you would find
charm and shame sitting side-by-side,
as inseparable as lovebugs,
buy-one-get-one for the last 50 years.

You can still buy a scratcher ticket – or twelve,
and sit, welcomed, on the sidewalk
with your dreams of a less-debted life,
or watch as barefoot beauties walk west to work,
carrying babies bulging with
Dollar General budget-nutrition.

Don’t forget your manners if you’re just visitin’,
one proper and polite nod to say,
“just like my daddy did,”
to all those with their collars blue
just like the sky-paint on the gulf.

“Poor, rural, and southern”,
is meant by most
to sound scary and scabbed
just like the shallow intimidation
of pitbull pups scratching and slobbering
against their chain-link boundary lines.
But to me it sure looks a lot like
lovin’ and learnin’ that the things
worth having take the most time,
saturating slowly like sun tea
brewin’ in the porch-pitcher.

I spent a decade patting makeup
onto the warm red tones of my neck
to conceal a crime of culture,
instead of questioning
why moving up
had to mean moving away.

These memories had a lesson for me,
like a neighbor pulling my ear
back to my mother for new wisdom,
chastising me for talking to strangers,
forgetting my manners,
and not listening to my father.

These memories are like mangrove mud,
hugging my ankles until I am stalled,
anchoring me to mindfulness of a moment
tinged with something sour,
like that sulfuric smell across the marshes,
that is hard to romanticize – yet still cues a smile,
when its rotten earthiness tells me that I am home.

It is only in this pause,
the stillness before a shifting tide,
when I can clearly recall and recite
the scripture –
the allegory of me,
and where it was written.

It was composed here;

In the nimble thank you wave,
at a neighbor kind or neglectful enough
to turn an eye as I swiped citrus slices
from yard overhangs,
to rub into my vulgar mouth,
with dirty hands.

On the sweet-wind steeped from
magnolia blooms and orange blossoms,
the perfect perfume to compliment
a blushing heat-sick face.

It was spoken over the rumble of thunder,
during the can’t-miss primetime storm watch,
hurricane season 2004,
sung with the intoxicating breaths
of the gulf stream,
scented with pheromonic petrichor.

They say that one man’s white trash
is another’s treasured upbringing,
and through the catharsis of return,
a lowbrow renaissance,
I know both to be true.

My only infallible faith is in the
beauty visible from the gutter,
and I will celebrate each day
in the midst of a perennial
impoverished holiday,
like the Christmas lights draped
on fences, roofs, and trailer tops,
hanging on with staple-gun hugs,
all year ‘round.

Elizabeth Curley

Elizabeth Curley lives a dual life as both a poet and a social work researcher. Elizabeth received a Silver Medal from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in 2012 and is still writing a decade later. Elizabeth’s time is spent consuming, collecting, carrying, crafting, and quantifying the human experience.

The Gristle of Love

Months after I had cleared her clothes from our apartment

and delivered them to a homeless shelter as was her wish,

I drove to our cabin in the mountains to gather her last shirts

and sweaters, socks and tights, sneakers and slippers. I was

weary of all the searching, finding, sorting, folding. Weary even

of the touching. I could not stomach one more trip for charity.

Death, you see, had made me a coward. I just jammed everything

in three thirty-gallon black plastic bags, which I tied off tightly,

left for next morning pick-up at the end of the driveway,

flanked by six-foot banks of ice-skinned snow. An hour’s nap later

I saw through the window that crows had come, torn open the bags,

dragged their contents all over, confused perhaps by wisps

of sweat and perfume, thinking who in his right mind would put

anything but chicken bones and pizza crust in such beguiling sacks.

One had her lace panties in its beak, shaking it like a battle flag.

Another was chewing the sleeve of her pineapple tee shirt.

A third was back at the bags, manically scrounging for more.

I walked out calmly with a shovel. The birds flew away.

I had visions of leaving it all for a next storm to bury,

re-collecting the debris after spring thaw and burning it into

a biblical pillar of smoke, soaking the ashes in the stream out back.

Instead, I climbed the crusted banks, roamed the neighbors’ yards

and snowbound streets, picked up the pieces, placed and cinched them

in new bags, left them as before. The birds came again and again.

Again and again I gathered, each time working more slowly, each time

the pieces smaller. Until the sun was gone and I stood by the last bags

I owned, slightly less full. I stood there all night, the crows laughing

and I laughing back, their amber eyes flashing in the new moon dark,

neither stupid nor cruel, though I had thought them both.

At first light, men with boots and gloves came in a green truck.

One said Good Morning. Another took the bags away.

 

Ken Haas

Ken Haas lives in San Francisco where he works in healthcare and sponsors a poetry writing program at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. His first book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. Ken has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies. Please visit him online at http://kenhaas.org.

Max Capacity

My mind is

a cluttered cupboard

a hoarder’s den

skyscraper-stacked

bits and chits

shiny scraps strident notes

on skin when there is

no room at the inn

no vacancy

for one more guest

nor even space

for oxygen

 

 

thirst is the strongman of needs

with many ways to drink

morning news with morning joe

the Times they are a-changing

podcasts preachers PSAs

Sirius no longer lit

but air-waved and ever-on

any cracks in the stacks

I fill with pages beloved

books poems of my own

and others (who I’d like to be)

 

 

all this mess

magpie-made

I’ll use it someday

but the cows stray

I’m too busy to fence

my mind is at capacity

I fear the thoughts

will overflow like the gentle man

I saw yesterday

at 4th and Main

deep in conversation

with the gentle man

in the glass of the bookstore window

Ann Weil

Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in Crab Creek Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Whale Road Review, Shooter Literary Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Life Cycle of a Beautiful Woman, will be published in 2023 by Yellow Arrow Publishing. Read more of Ann’s poetry at www.annweilpoetry.com.

John Perrault

Emilio’s

—Sorry, We’re Open!

 

The young lady is served ribollita

with a fresh chunk of bread and a question:

What is it you prefer about a man—

his propensity to cheat—or to kill?

 

The young lady is perplexed—first time here—

stares at her soup, steps on her boyfriend’s boot,

knocks a can off the counter.  Young lady,

please don’t be upset.  We are all friends here.

 

Whatever you say, please—say it in Greek.

Or Italian.  Or even English.  Think:

here we are on the brink of disaster

and only you— your answer—can save us.

                                               

She thinks.  She says, “I don’t care for either.”

Her boyfriend smiles.  She smiles.  Emilio

smiles—like Socrates in the Agora:

Ah, good!  So then:  ta chrimata paidi mou.

 

 

In this Dark World and Wide

 

He lived inside his head; his lust

lay with books.  He read, he wrote.

(Some of his works are mind-numbing.)

He’ll go blind, they said, you watch.

 

And they were right.  One poor eye patched,

one weeping, there was no doubt—

(though he didn’t see it coming)—

that paradise was lost.

 

And going blind he made a list

of every angel God let

out of heaven—his mind combing

Lucifer’s by feel, by touch.

 

The dark night of the soul.  The match.

The smoldering intellect

smoking out free will.  That humming

in the wings?  His wife.  The last.

 

 

John Perrault

John Perrault is author of Jefferson’s Dream (Hobblebush Books), Here Comes the Old Man Now (Oyster River), and Ballad of Louis Wagner (Peter Randall). A Pushcart Nominee, John has published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Christian Science Monitor, Comstock Review, Poet Lore and elsewhere. John is a former Portsmouth, NH poet laureate. His chapbook, Season of Shagginess, has just been published by Finishing Line Press. www.johnperrault.com

My Father’s Body

I wasn’t prepared for the body

the stillness of it, a life muted,

how the gray sets in

how small a man can be.

The stillness of him, a life muted

in a hospital room, thin blankets

against his rails of bone

how the gray sets in,

the breath still in him,

I learned

how small a father can be

when I’m too afraid

to touch him.

to touch him

when I’m too afraid,

how hollow a father can be

I learned

to still breathe,

as the gray sets in

rails of bone, against

thin blankets, and his hospital room

in stillness, a life muted,

how gone a father can be

when the gray begins

stillness, our lives muted.

I wasn’t prepared for my father’s body.

Lisa Rua-Ware

Lisa Rua-Ware is a poet in central Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Lily Poetry Review. When she’s not chasing her two rambunctious kids, she works as a technical writer, loves drawing, journaling, list making, and all things paper crafts.

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