January 2019 | poetry
When the radio blasted
over the art gallery,
and Jim Morrison crashed
my only reading in the Big Apple,
eyes of famous poets in the audience
averted from my broken smile,
I wasn’t there—I went way past the headlights,
out past unrecorded tribal rubric,
airwaves drumming through me,
flew to a hideout on my own back streets:
Schadhouser’s yard, 1953,
one sticky afternoon
we beat each other up
on the same wedge of dirt
my mother, a little girl, played
Hopscotch on in 1929
between Cronin’s barn and a paint peel
on the fence of a three-decker—
who knows who lived there—
Cid Corman maybe
who moped down Annabel
muttering blessings.
That afternoon, my smile might have
made you grimace, too.
It does me, as my fingerprints
corrode this yellowed polaroid
the hostess was so quick to shoot
before she unplugged “Riders on the Storm.”
My father’s gift for the rare
true smile and my grandmother—
cloud hair, morbidly soft skin,
and tyrannical—come back alive again,
come back to me
through this photograph of a shudder
and a trace of alleys and shame
in my disrupted line,
her only recorded history
when, circa nineteen-ten,
she took the hand of the one
who kicked this broken smile
down the staircase of the spine.
by Michael Daley
Michael Daley’s poems have appeared in APR, New England Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, North American Review, Gargoyle, Writer’s Almanac, and elsewhere. Awarded by Seattle Arts Commission, National Endowment of Humanities, Artist Trust, and Fulbright, his fourth collection of poetry, Of a Feather, was recently published. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.
January 2019 | fiction, poetry
Phantom Limbs
When you burn your life down
to nothing
it takes a long time to rise
years of reaching out
With or without feathers, the sifting
through ashes, burnt bone, table legs
is difficult work: a shoe lace, a blue button, scraps of leaf colored silk
you don’t remember wearing
Memories you can’t recover, sing and itch like phantom limbs
you feel but cannot see
The eggs you crack for breakfast
held promise once
Home on Your Back
Every horizon is an invitation to start over
you remember this line as you make coffee
in the French press you unpacked earlier
you can’t remember who told you this
or if at the time it helped.
From the back porch, you look east
to the yet unopened sky
partially blocked with shrill green needles
huge pale gray clouds hover overhead
a hint of pale yellow showing through
you will see morning before light sparkles across the marsh
with its smells of sawgrass, earth, decay
not what your roots know.
Anxiously your toes curl
origins thin and pale under the balls of your feet
crimped inside your soul, not ready to dig down
to connect the familiar
with the unfamiliar
Behind you, boxes sit unopened
full of kitchen things wrapped in newspapers
furniture pushed into empty spaces
you will trip over chairs for weeks
until muscle memory takes over
and you make what you have carried here
home, another home
The only familiar sound is your breathing
orange brushes of words from other mornings
trapped in warm coffee, you hold
your youngest daughter balanced
on your hip, head buried in your neck and shoulder
her sticky sweet drool mixes with new smells
you try to imagine this is the place you live
your baby child oblivious of the world outside
her immediate view
encased in the husk of half sleep
her scent as known as your own
love me how big she mumbles into to your cheek.
A Cooper’s hawk flies over head, named for you
by the long sweep of its wings, the white tips of feathers
a predator you have seen before
you take refuge in its shadow
stretch your left arm wide like a bridge
girded between before and now
“This big,” you tell your daughter, “this big”
by Martha Catherine Brenckle
Martha Brenckle teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Publishing both poetry and fiction, sha has published most recently in Driftwood, The Sea Journal, Broken Bridge Review, Lost Coast Review, and New Guard Literary Review among others. In October 2000, she won the Central Florida United Arts Award for poetry. Her first novel, Street Angel, published in 2006 was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and a Triangle Award and was a Finalist for Fence Magazine’s Best GLBT Novel for 2006. Her short story, “Nesting Dolls” has been nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.
January 2019 | poetry
Outside
lone mockingbird
perches on oak branch
holds his early service
Inside
Requiem—
benevolent din
spreads her arms
around hushed church
Outside
wind whirls
whips crusty leaves at
anxious autumn
Inside
cloaked in mystery
harmonies brush callused fists
rub tear stained cheeks
tongues of light
dance radiant lament
through stained-glass
Outside
sudden quiet—
has earth stopped turning
all trees frozen, seas dried up?
Inside
Dies Irae wafts over
undulating shoulders
stooped in wooden pews
choir incants
endless tangle of Latin
sounds anguish me—numb
Outside
rain begins weeping—
aeternam, aeternam, aeternam
sobbing, bleeding onto fresh-dug grave
*Inspired by Mozart Requiem- Catholic Mass for the Dead
Dies Irae- Day of Wrath, Aeternam- Eternal
by 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.
January 2019 | poetry
What’s here is here, almost none of the time—
no matter what clever slogan your coffee cup says,
no matter which way
the plastic flamingos are facing,
and even if there was a happy ending.
I’m nervous,
to the point of blurred vision. My breathing feels
like a broken train of thought,
the actuality of my fears, derailed and spreading
small fires
all across town.
This realization that somewhere, far enough away,
those cataclysmic flames are just a distant light;
that even a mass extinction
is just a distant light.
Which is to say, somewhere else, half buried in the snow,
a dying coyote is hallucinating warmth
and maybe the Harvest moon,
hung by yellow rope
in a December sky.
Which is also to say,
despite our awareness of absent mercy,
every star is someone’s final illusion,
not a redeal,
but one last ember
of comfort.
by John Leonard
John Leonard is a substitute teacher and professor of composition. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University South Bend. His previous works have appeared in Twyckenham Notes, Poetry Quarterly, The Jawline Review, Fearsome Critters: A Millennial Arts Journal, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. He was the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Wolfson Poetry Award and 2018 recipient of the Josephine K. Piercy Memorial Award. John was recently appointed assistant editor of Twyckenham Notes. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs.
January 2019 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
One night, we don’t know how, he slips the bands
that bind his claws and sets to work. If fast or slow,
it doesn’t matter—whether, in a rage
of thrashing action or, methodical
(the slow precision of a diver bent
on patient reclamation from the sea),
he stalks and disassembles each bound mate
he’s harbored with, and snaps off limbs and pries
between the overlapping plates their shells
can offer only for their weak defense.
He rips them up, thrusts toothed appendages
into the soft connective flesh, and feeds.
All through the night his work transpires until,
in morning’s white fluorescent light, he lies
revealed: an armored, glutted emperor,
a sated cannibal astir within
his muddied lair, his realm acloud with limbs
adrift and picked and gnawed to fringe along
the edges of their shells, and tissue ripped
to pennant threads and litter at his feet.
Consider how we care for him: the creature we’d
have eaten without thought, though he contrived
to feast before us, had he not consumed
the meat we’d meant to satiate ourselves.
And now, the empty tank near tenantless,
do we declare the victim we’d have made
our own a criminal among the just, or call
him reprehensible in spite of us?
by Gregory Loselle
Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others.
January 2019 | poetry
My own words ricochet
back into my face,
splintering flesh,
with the impact
of mindless syllables
muttered under my breath,
barely audible
but heard nonetheless.
Words spewed
into the atmosphere,
involuntary but vile,
words I should have vomited
into any empty vessel
and plugged with
a lead stopper.
Words spilled
onto sacred ground,
scattered in a garden
for the innocent
to find like tantalizing
red berries
on a poisonous bush.
by Gloria Heffernan
Gloria Heffernan’s poetry collection, What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, has been accepted for publication by New York Quarterly Books. Her chapbook, Some of Our Parts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2018. In addition, her work has appeared in over fifty journals including Chautauqua Literary Journal, Stone Canoe, Main Street Rag, Columbia Review, Louisville Review, and The Healing Muse.
