January 2022 | poetry
In the desert men
left their red hand prints
in high caves
We climbed to see them
In the arid map-drawn panhandle
men found shadowed crevices
to scratch out figures
of their prey
then self symbols
some magic to catch them?
We trudge and climb
to find them
Our thirsty days lead us
to dry lands
and hidden places searching
for the reasons that flicker
in the dark recesses of our minds
whisper welcome
to what we seek
even in the heavy silences
of these humid-breathed
and drowsy afternoons.
Carol Hamilton
Carol Hamilton has retired from teaching 2nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana, and Oklahoma, from storytelling and volunteer medical translating. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published 17 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry and has been nominated nine times for a Pushcart Prize. She has won a Southwest Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, David Ray Poetry Prize, Byline Magazine literary awards in both short story and poetry, Warren Keith Poetry Award, Pegasus Award and a Chiron Review Chapbook Award.
January 2022 | poetry
The old era smelled rotten
like rancid motor oil. On the horizon,
machinations of gods
rumbled like impending darkness,
releasing missing letters
and links upon the world
to spell the message:
The world is collapsing.
What are you looking for?
In response we extracted
warped notes from musicals
like Hedwig and the Angry Inch,
injecting them into mirrors
so we could watch them transform
into red, malignant storms.
We were always singing ballads
of stolen adulthood
and curtailed childhood
until we learned how to make
enchantments from broken strands
and release songs of judgment
and decay, wearing necklaces
the wind did not finish. Underground,
skeletons of horses and dogs
pulsed like phosphorescent ghosts.
We danced with them in the basement,
tuning in to radio static that crackled
under a dangling bulb, mercury everywhere.
Strings of little lights burned all night,
coating our tongues bright gold.
Susan Michele Coronel
Susan Michele Coronel is a New York City-based poet and educator. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including Spillway 29,The Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, The Night Heron Barks, Prometheus Dreaming, One Art, Funicular, TAB Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Passengers Journal. In 2020, she received a Parent Poet Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. This year, she received a Pushcart nomination and was a first runner-up for the Beacon Street Prize. She recently completed a manuscript of her first book.
October 2021 | poetry
When I think of heaven, I see trash:
Broken bottles, leaking Freon, used notebooks,
Thanksgiving scraps, industrial dross, ash
Of lives that rot and leach into the brooks
And streams that feed the river, then the sea.
Yet, when I conceive a perfect hell, it looks
Unpeopled, manicured, fresh, foolproof, each tree
Equal, sidewalks flat, no black oil stain
On any gray driveway. Loveless and pure.
Why, then, am I so ashamed of my pain?
I haul my grief in my sinful junk cart,
As if I could secure peace from this vain,
Broken, human life. No, I live, not apart
From death, my pardon pawned, deep of my heart.
Richard Stimac
Richard Stimac writes poetry about growing up in the Rustbelt. Richard published poetry in Faultline, Havik (2021 Best in Show for Poetry), Michigan Quarterly Review, Penumbra, Salmon Creek Journal, Wraparound South, and others, and an article on Willa Cather in The Midwest Quarterly.
October 2021 | poetry
Just ten years ago, I felt young,
before that, not old enough.
Before now, geologists say,
there was a before, a before before
when ice, white cedar trees, and dark
brown salt deposits lined the coast.
When the waves pound the shore,
I hear the churning, churning
of saltwater like the buckled inner-
workings of the mind.
The surging of desires that wash
ashore, recede, and reemerge
like a hand extending
and then retracting itself mid-air.
On the boardwalk, a couple shares
a scone. Ahead, a child carves
a moat around a sandcastle. Above,
the seagulls seem lost—
they throw their bodies into the air
any which way, skim the water’s
surface, then take flight, as if to say:
Never mind or not today. I close
my eyes: salt turns to sugar in my mouth.
The January sun stings
my eyelids amber. Beneath this layer
is another layer: of cedar, peat,
marsh. Two teenagers giggle
with lattes. One young, the other
even younger. How many mornings,
like this one, have I already forgotten?
A Labrador chases a tennis ball
into the water and flashes its teeth.
I grin back. Day, too, froths at the mouth.
Shannon K. Winston
Shannon K. Winston’s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, The Night Heron Barks, RHINO, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. Her poetry collection, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2021. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Find her at shannonkwinston.com.
October 2021 | poetry
Plug Nickel and Red Cent
met on museum steps and, inside,
mysticked with blue innocent Della Robbia,
rhythmed the light-shine white
of beyond, above, bright,
orisoned warm-milk fired clay, like flesh,
god-child in supple mother embrace.
Sigh of centuries.
Out straight west, they drove
their wood-paneled station wagon,
out past the 30-hundreds, the 40-hundreds,
nearly to the 52-hundreds
on the table-top Chicago grid,
out to Leamington to meet the gray-pants boy,
sitting on front porch steps, in full view — a
white-red-striped t-shirt buzz-cut good-boy,
out from inside, away, at large,
watching ant-gang heft cornbread crumbles
except this one alone, down sidewalk square
to an insect Promised Land.
He looked up at the two men,
vaguely priestly, vaguely outlawed,
said: “I’m looking to flee captivity
for the sin I don’t recall committing.”
“We’re guilty, too,” they said, and
the three walked to afternoon church,
for Stations of the Cross,
flaming altar candles, up, reaching always up,
echoes, shuffling, Latin abracadabras,
plainsong up, incense up from censor,
from burning coal, straining up,
cloud of unknowing, cloud of Mount Sinai,
cloud of breathing and not breathing.
After Amen, the three split up
and went home by a different path.
Patrick T. Reardon
Patrick T. Reardon, a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of ten books, including the poetry collections Darkness on the Face of the Deep (Kelsay) and Requiem for David (Silver Birch Press) as well as Faith Stripped to Its Essence, a literary-religious analysis of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence. His poetry has appeared in America, Rhino, Main Street Rag, The Write Launch, Meat for Tea, Under a Warm Green Linden and many others. His book Puddin: The Autobiography of a Baby, a Memoir in Prose-poems is forthcoming from Third World Press.
October 2021 | poetry
The Autumn leaves of the maple tree
died. Standing at the tired roots, the basement pottery wheel still spinning,
I vulnerably vowed that the red finger with a long nail growing out of your eardrum
sliced the “I” in half and stuck the pieces back together sideways
into an “H,” that you heard something about hell
when I said something about us.
What always changes
doesn’t. Faithful, I parted my lips to release
the substance of things, “You (mis)heard me.”
and you heard everything
but one wor(l)d.
Words are creative fingers that slither
in throats, striving for vomit
or to make all things new,
trustworthy and
( ).
They are in skulls, nyctinastic,
ready to flick a new Gaia
back into the light, out of three tunnels,
where the power of life and death can rest in peace
as sound.
You didn’t hear (“It’s not over”)
again. Angry, you were not obligated to listen,
and it was Christian for me to apologize
for your deafness, for lacking a miracle—
out of love.
You thought the fingers were mine, for they were made
in my image. I should have spoken
outside the house we shaped children in
as a stranger, for everyone hears correctly
what matters not. Central,
I should have said that I hated you.
After promises of affection, wondrously,
you would have finally heard
what wasn’t hard to believe
and been free to live
with a sliced extremity floating within.
Now, far apart, I hope that bits don’t grow like maple seeds
or letters that could float in dark, deep, and cerebrospinal waters
and bump-merge in(to) inner speech,
but rather that fragments miraculously become
that which never existed—nothing—
metaphoric parentheses which do not suggest “fill in,”
a hope which can only be desired if
the hope is lost. At the very least,
is it wrong to think (and think and think)
wor(l)ds could be noise?
O.G. Rose
A finalist for the 2020 UNO Press Lab Prize and 46th Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Allegory Ridge, Streetlight Magazine, Ponder Review, Iowa Review online, The William and Mary Review, Assure Press, Toho Journal online, West Trade Review, ellipsis, Poydras Review, O:JA&L, and Broken Pencil.
