April 2020 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Green.
Like the Mississippi River where the Rock River cuts the Rock Island Arsenal bridge in three. Like heavy clouds in that evening period when birds huddle in nests to await the next. When a single bat cuts sky too early for the mayfly too late for robin. Like threats of let loose. Like cover, like hands over mouths, like breath. Like heat. In eddies where remains of my best friend were bagged, after bound, after held, after down. Like heavy and shut. Like what I call God, what I call Heaven, what I call Green. Where sand holds ankle, promise, and anklet. Bones trace fern. Memory trace warning sign. I sit on the second truss, halfway suspended, awaiting the storm.
Dizzy.
stumbles to wall
catches with skin
slides to floor
He can feel Her.
He can feel Her.
He can feel Her.
There.
closes window
draws curtains
turns gold
into patina
into green
into oozing
scabs upon canvas
No surprises
He says
Or he doesn’t. Not with hands.
falls into child’s pose
canary knees exhausted
postulates to her to her to her
She watches him
until he falls asleep
Shoshana Tehila Surek
Shoshana Surek received her MA and MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University. Her essays, short stories, flash fiction, and poetry, can be read or are forthcoming in Carve Magazine, december Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Malahat Review, Vestal Review, Cease, Cows, 3Elements Review, and f(r)iction Magazine. In 2017, She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she is a 2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award finalist. More of her work can be found at www.ShoshanaSurek.com.
April 2020 | poetry
I pulled the sheet over the hole again,
laid stones along the edge to stop
the wind from slapping it against the sky.
I didn’t want to see
how far down I’d have to leave him.
He’d showed me what I needed to know,
how to brine the meat in salt and garlic,
how to mix dill in the vinegar,
keep the cucumbers and carrots
crisp through months of snow
when I’d be alone
and no one would come up the mountain.
He taught me to talk to the mirror,
look in my own eyes, say I’m afraid,
the only way to pierce the cloud,
make it bleed your worry.
He’d always say there’s no one
who’ll get in the hole with you;
make your own mind.
For months I tried to shove the ache
back in the hole, wanted the days
to pile like shells into years,
cover it, settle the patched mound
‘til it was a flattened hill of my dead.
Every morning the steel on stone voice
cuts the air when I cook the oats,
raisins and molasses,
stare out the window at the snow,
roll his words in my mind.
Even now I whisper the rules:
throw salt over your shoulder to blind the devil,
be ready to say you’re sorry,
watch a man’s eyes when he talks
if I want to know
whether you can believe him.
Mark Anthony Burke
Mark Burke’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sugar House Review, Nimrod International Journal and others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart prize. See: markanthonyburkesongsandpoems.com
April 2020 | poetry
Albert did you really say
science without religion is lame
Did you repose under constellations
hour-less nights no calculations no formulas
knowing infinity lives in cosmic sparkle hoping
to stir eons of wonderment
When in deep contemplation did a welling-up
ferry you into timeless paradise priests call heaven
I ask you if this sacramental suspension
could be a black hole final grave consuming us
Tonight blackness swallows me
Imbibed by inky abyss turned inside out
reshaped silent
I wonder of my finality earth’s extinction
the fate of pondering
When you reveled under constellations
hour-less nights did you implore God
that this luxury not be something
time forced you leave behind
Did you write a verse incant an intercession
invite tempus fugit back over and over?
Conversation with Albert Einstein
Marianne Lyon
Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.
April 2020 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Dearest Friends,
I wanted to inform you of the cats and my disposition to move from San Francisco to Palm Springs in about three weeks, living out remaining time in an easier quieter environment.
Serving on non-profit boards plus having a half-century’s active social scene has just become more than we can handle.
I’ll try to adapt to a different existence, and hope to stay in touch with everybody — but I do ask that you be patient, not push too hard – there will be a lot to adjust to plus everything takes extra time at this stage of the game.
I plan on maintaining current email address/ mobile number, will advise you of new home address/ local landline number once have settled in hopefully beginning of March.
I’m so very grateful to have wonderful chums who shower me with love along with support.
Much as I would like to see everyone prior to leaving, it’s impossible. Your understanding is appreciated.
Escape the cold, come to visit next winter during the desert’s wildflower blooming as well as January’s Film Festival if not sooner!
Particularly with my life’s partner passed, I’m missing each of you already.
Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals (e.g., University Chicago, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, University of San Francisco) plus national (e.g., Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Clementine, pamplemousse, Deluge, Poetry Quarterly, Hypnopomp, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Poets And War, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Indolent Books, Pandemonium Press, Texas Review, San Antonio Review, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review and The New York Times) and international publications (e.g., Review Berlin and New Ulster). He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with global warming. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters.
April 2020 | poetry
(Pegasus Constellation – Winged Horse)
You ask me the difference between Pegasi
and unicorns as embers of fire complete
burned circles four feet in front of our feet.
Our town hankers for a time
when fire and hunger were rare,
when wings or horns were inconsequential,
when hearts waltzed woozy with pixelated promise.
Now wings and horns are all we have. One fantasy
after another. Men lament their learned helplessness.
Women work to recall the struggle to overcome it.
Unicorns all glitter magic until they impale our throats
with singular horns. Shame shows itself as hemorrhage,
detectible only by internal scan. What the world
sees as magic you see as disgrace. A dearth of grace.
Our blood fertilizes our flowers, blooming toward the cloud
cover of heaven. Pegasus uplifts the dead.
Unicorn=death and death and death.
Pegasus=angel on which the soul floats into whisper.
Amy Strauss Friedman
Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule (Kelsay Books, 2018) and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). Amy’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work has appeared in Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work can be found at amystraussfriedman.com.
April 2020 | poetry
As Much to Speak of Weather
I do not write of my father because he loved me, a truth I have come to believe in for its obviousness—no less obvious that is to say than the way one speaks of rain, its beauty and betrayal. Today’s rain is preemptory, a windless gravitas: what a speaker of political mindset might refer to as bi-partisan, claiming a democracy of garden and glass. How parental! (How paradoxical, both bound and torn asunder!) To speak of my father’s love, then, is as much to speak of weather as if weather is all there is to speak of. My father—who has since taken his words to the grave—has nonetheless left me with rain, another season’s first chill of rain.
Words Frequently Confused: Historicism, Histrionics
If you don’t know the width of the forest when you enter it, how will you know when you’re on the way out? Or do you mean to settle there, to burrow under the dry root of a defeated tree and stay, an abundance of honeybees and berries nearby, a small clear stream? Haven’t you notified the children already, sold every earthly possession, signed up online for Your Majesty’s benefit? Come on, Columbus, isn’t that the way of forests? Aren’t you lost before you know it? Aren’t you penalized half the distance to the goal?
Phillip Sterling
Phillip Sterling’s books include two poetry collections, And Then Snow and Mutual Shores, two collections of short fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told and Amateur Husbandry, and four chapbook-length series of poems (Significant Others, Abeyance, Quatrains, and And For All This: Poems from Isle Royale). A fifth series, Short on Days, will be released in 2020.
