Promise I Make Myself

When I turn 70, I am embracing vices

like a newly-discovered, long-lost twin,

like an adolescent puppy love,

vices I avoided all my life out of fear,

abundant caution and good common sense.

I will smoke cigarettes like Bogart and Garbo—

seriously, mysteriously, sexily,

and casually.  I will smoke cigars

and pipes.  I will dare cancer to catch me.

I will dabble in recreational drugs,

will sample ecstasy, hallucinogens,

and, of course, marijuana.  I will eat

the whole brownie, maybe two, and will sleep

the deep and blissful sleep of the stoned

and will laugh myself silly

at ordinary wonders of the world.

I will mix myself boozy drinks with names

like Moscow Mule or White Russian or Sex

on the Beach or Mai Tai.  I will go nude

at nude beaches and stare unabashedly

at naked splendors there displayed.  I will.

I will hire expensive companions

and have unwise, illicit, unsafe sex.

I will gamble.  I will ride in helicopters

and bi-planes, on backs of motorcycles,

my arms around the supple, sinuous waists

of younger daredevils.  I will be

a daredevil.  I will eat like Anthony Bourdain.

When I turn 70, I will explore

all the vices, including the one

my parents thought the worst of all

the others, the biggest sin: indolence.

 

Cecil Morris

Cecil Morris has been nominated for a Pushcart in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He and his indulgent partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the central valley of California and the Oregon coast. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Hole in the Head Review; Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.

Horizontal Snow

Mesmerizing horizontal snow

on Halloween, a weather record

for Chicago accumulation–

 

Chicagoans are unpredictable, too,

when they observe Halloween,

putting on masks

when they sit in bars

dressed in orange and black,

sip Betteljuice Cocktails,

tout toy lasar guns like children

dressed as action heroes,

Hasbro Avenger Marvel Titans

with lightning bolts

across their chests,

strut in the costume competition

that doesn’t win the prize

in the school parade.

 

By Jan Ball

Jan has published 396 poems in U.S. and international journals like Nimrod and Slipstream, U.S. and Orbis, England, and Cordite, Australia. Finishing Line Press published her four chapbooks and first full-length poetry collection. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart as well as twice for Best of the Net.

The Copenhagen Interpretation

(for the cashier at Brookline Booksmith who told me Carlo Rovelli was the best author in the whole bookstore, which felt like a stretch although I liked the book.)

 

I believe

 

Before Anaximander the world was flat

and ringed by a river called Ocean,

 

That Copernicus moved the sun literally

pushing earth to its tertiary orbit.

 

I believe

 

We were born of four substances, just earth,

fire, air, and water, later to be atomized,

 

That we could never have wrapped ourselves

in the blanket of space and time before Einstein.

 

We invent the world,

 

Rounding its edges when we need the room

to sail our ships, space the stars to grow

 

the universe.

 

Steven Goldman

Steven Goldman is a writer and teacher who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books: the YA novel Two Parties, One Tux, and a Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath and the essay collection Four Square and the Politics of Sixth Grade Lunch. His work has appeared in a number of literary and professional magazines, including The Jewish Literary Journal, Edutopia, and Nimrod.

Gula, Gluttony

In response to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.

 

If William Tell’s arrow missed

and the child was struck almost clear through the head,

his hat would look like the one on this wall,

crown pierced instead of the apple.

Take that most primal of fruits.

Wedge it into a slaughtered pig’s open mouth.

The cauldron is laughingly small, but somehow a full feast

is laid out—plump chickens, chowder bowls to the brim,

the largest drumstick you can imagine,

and a cavernous jug of wine upturned for one long gulp.

Drink it all down. How could you be blamed

for wanting it now, apt as this world

is to launch arrows at your head,

a mere blink between the quick and dead.

 

Jennifer LeBlanc

Jennifer LeBlanc earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her first full-length book, Descent, was published by Finishing Line Press (2020) and was named a Distinguished Favorite in Poetry (2021) by the Independent Press Award. Individual poems have been published or are forthcoming in Consequence, Solstice, Nixes Mate Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and J Journal. Jennifer is a poetry reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. She was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and works at Harvard University.

Ukraine

Bombed apartments lie open,

windows shattered, spears of

jagged glass, broken teeth

biting into vacancy.

Torn net curtains flap,

wave, signalling into emptiness.

No neighbours to spy on

No secrets to conceal.

In flattened playgrounds

twisted slides, slaughtered serpents,

still emblazoned in blue and yellow.

Swings sway in the freezing wind;

the haunting cry is heard

of dead children’s voices.

In ruined shopping malls

corpses clutch in frozen fingers,

plastic bags of untouched bread.

 

Cratered roads leave villages

names on maps, virtual destinations,

no more reachable than

Shangri-La or Camelot.

Stray dogs ravage the dead

Loose horses graze

in someone’s garden.

In a bombed-out cottage

an old woman cooks potatoes.

Behind her, two flower-papered walls,

half a cupboard, a china elephant,

the remnants of her bedroom, shown

on the evening news in Paris, New York, Delhi.

The village classroom,

a tangled mess of broken desks,

a single shoe, an open book,

a child’s sketch of a burning tank.

 

A boy crossing a pock-marked road,

automatically looks for traffic.

A ghostly line of phantom waggons

passes the unburied dead.

Stuck in muddy ditches, tank guns

point skywards at the rising moon.

A bomb explodes, a flash of red,

the dreadful beauty of instant flames.

In London, Washington, Moscow, Beijing,

they roll the dice, again.

 

Sarah Das Gupta

Sarah Das Gupta is an 82-year-old writer from Cambridge, UK, who has been writing since last year when an accident left her with very limited mobility. Her work has been published in many magazines and anthologies in over 25 countries, from New Zealand to Kazakhstan. This year, she has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Dwarf Star Award.

Featured Author: John L. Stanizzi

FRAMED

…for my father

 

To love a person with Alzheimer’s is to learn the song

in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.

– Arne Garborg

 

He spent years in the basement

at war against forgetting.

Scissors and tape were his weapons,

the conflict relentless,

his ability to recall

anything was vanishing.

 

He cut up hundreds of old photos,

following the lead of his demolished brain.

Anything he believed excess

he cut from the photo-

trees, cars, houses, the sky.

It was the people he was holding on to.

 

Like the cat pushing his whiskers into

the corners of walls,

my father rubbed against

the corners of his longing,

leaving a vague imprint of his losses,

the stain of the past he was trying to marshal.

Memories he was

not even aware were lost,

had been swept away.

 

The chosen were taped

somewhere into a cheap frame

he’d buy at the drug store across the street,

until he could no longer remember where it was.

 

If someone struck a match

in the trashed warehouse of his brain,

that person was cut from a photo

and taped into his new dwelling-

The Frame of the Familiar.

 

Everyone overlapped-

the newborn, the aged, the dead,

the teens, the young adults…

it made no difference

whether they had known one another or not,

as long as he thought

he might have known them from somewhere,

from some time now omitted.

 

To finish, he’d find a photo of himself,

the one person he was still sure he knew.

He’d hunt for a place

to tape himself

in this new world, part color,

part black and white, part sepia.

 

There were giant people, tiny people,

torn people, faded and stained people,

in this multi-colored person-scape

comprising only those folks

he “sort of” “seemed” to recognize,

even MLK, RFK, JFK, Anita Bryant

made it into a frame.

 

When a frame was completed

he would take it out to his knotty pine porch,

its walls covered with frames,

grab his Black &. Decker

and drill straight through the frame

and into the wall.

 

Done.

Onto the next.

 

He had discovered a way to resurrect

some inner joy,

but the imperative was

to tape securely

lest someone get separated

and forget their way back.

 

He tamed the rough, curled edges

of the old photos with Scotch-tape,

and brought generations together,

a congregation of the living

alongside their ghost kin,

a population of his own design

of faces remembered,

or faces

he thought he remembered.

 

John L. Stanizzi

John L. Stanizzi is the author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, Chants, Sundowning, POND, The Tree That Lights The Way Home, Feathers and Bones. Viper Brain, and SEE. John’s work has been widely published. Johnnie’s poems can be found in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Plainsong, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Review, PoetLore, Potomac Review, and many others. His creative nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, East Coast, After the Pause, Adelaide, Impspired, and many others. His poems have appeared widely in Italy with profound gratitude to his translator, and dear friend, Angela D’ambra. John has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He also coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. A “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud, John spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud. He is a former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, a New England Poet of the Year, and Poet-in-Residence at Manchester Community College and in the Middletown Connecticut School District. In 2021, John was the recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing – Non-Fiction, granted to him by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Culture, and Diversity for work on his new memoir, Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned. His short CNF piece Pants was named by its publisher, Potato Soup Journal, “Best of 2022.” John taught literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, for 26 years. He taught high school English and directed the theater program at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. for 24 years; Johnnie put up 42 plays in 24 years. Johnnie lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT.