Late Night
 
Sometimes I miss the mystery of the late night phone call from a random stranger
the ridiculous panting of a chronic masturbator, the lonely man or woman
randomly punching numbers into their telephone, trying to make some connection
reaching out into the dark over and over again until they find someone
with the time or curiosity to respond.
 
When I was a teenager, I used to jump to answer those late night calls
before they woke my parents up, would whisper into the phone to these strangers
patiently quiet as they said dirty things to me, try to guide them into proper conversations
because I was lonely, too. Eventually, I could steer a conversation away
from promises of butthole-licking and finger-fucking
to conversations about what I liked to do, what I thought of my parents
what I thought of school. I’d read poems over the phone to them
if they stayed on the line long enough, ask their opinion, tell them I was trying real hard
I didn’t have a lot of people in my life who liked poetry.
 
Sometimes, when the phone rings, and I don’t recognize the number
I pick it up anyway because I’m curious. But now, it’s never anyone making fuck-noises
into their end of the line, or someone wondering what I’m doing, what I’m wearing,
what I like to do, it’s always someone trying to sell me something
or alert me to hail damage in my neighborhood, or ask for a donation
it’s never anyone particularly fun.
 

_________________________________________________________________________

Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).

 
 Book Report
  
 I’m such a slow reader   
 that I began The Iliad shortly after 
 the Trojan War, and today—
  
 bloodshot and squinting 
 in the thin light of my desk lamp—
 I finally turned its six hundred, sixtieth 
  
 dauntingly thin page, and read, with exhaustion, 
 that gorgeous last line, Thus they buried Hektor, 
 tamer of horses. Christ, I can’t wait 
  
 to plow through the sequel!  
 As if the names weren’t hard enough—
 Iphegenia, Clymenestra, Agamemnon,
  
 Astyanax—all ideas of love and law 
 seemed to count for nothing.  
 Almost everyone died for the sake
  
 of the gods’ desires and a foolish dispute
 among men—two armies whaling on each other,
 while Achilles played blanket burrito 
  
 in his tent, then carved a murder canyon 
 through the Trojans. Finishing Homer’s epic
 was an odyssey in itself. 
  
 I’ll never get back the years 
 spent slogging through its plot,
 a page or two at a time, tacking forward,
  
 then circling back on a dactylic tide, 
 a ship lost in the fog. How good it felt 
 to finally glimpse the ending’s rocky cliffs, 
  
 a coastline vaguely familiar, family and friends 
 standing at the edge of the last page,
 waving me home. 

_________________________________________________________________________

Michael Steffen‘s fourth poetry collection, Blood Narrative, has just been accepted for publication by Main Street Rag Press. His work has recently appeared in Chiron Review, The Chestnut Review, and The Comstock Review. Michael is a graduate of the MFA writing program at Vermont College and currently lives in Buffalo, NY.

The C paper

It was her best work by far.
Covered like a casserole she’d cradled it to class,

handing it like a tribute into his soft white hands
tendered well before deadline

she’d used a thesaurus and words like solipsism
disenfranchised and hubris

run it through with a Grammarly
free trial version, Chicago style

formatted and cited.
Hardly touched, a couple of red crosses

and slashes where he’d nibbled at the
edges of the first and final paragraphs,

a couple of checkmarks like crumbs
along the middle margins.

It looked like a face- a round little head,
the mouth gaping open in surprise:

another perfect C.

_________________________________________________________________________

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean, as well as writing and comparative literature programs at LSU and Tulane University (PhD). An erstwhile academic, he now writes, translates, edits, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain.

On Being Done

Last night my mother told me she missed me.
Something in her voice reached into my heart
and woke the young boy in me, the one sleeping
for sixty some years--
the one she had labored out of her body, held him
in her arms, fed him warm milk, bathed and changed
him, taught him to walk and talk, watered the garden
of his growth with her tears--that one,
that one heard her say, “I miss you.”
And it became clear to the man in me how impossible
it is to be done.
At ninety, my mother, her life behind her, all but the last
thin chapter read, now only echoes down the long
hall of time in her head, cannot let go of who she was.
How could who she is ever fill the empty rooms of her
present heart, longing for all the memories, all the love
all the purpose of the past?
Dances with ghosts, no matter how beautiful they are,
can never last.
Memories, no matter how hard we cling to them can never
hug back.
All our lives are stories we want to be never-ending.
But every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
And the denouement will never let us pretend ours is different
as we lie alone in our aged beds, waiting for the kiss goodnight,
waiting for the one who will turn off the light, then take us by
the hand and aching heart and lead us into our dreams.

________________________________________________________________________

P.C. Scheponik is a lifelong poet who lives by the sea with his wife, Shirley, and their shizon, Bella. His writing celebrates nature, the human condition, and the metaphysical mysteries of life. He has published four collections of poems: Psalms to Padre Pio (National Centre for Padre Pio, INC), A Storm by Any Other Name and Songs the Sea has Sung in Me (PS Books, a division of Philadelphia Stories), and And the Sun Still Dared to Shine (Mazo Publishers). His work has also appeared in numerous literary journals, among them, Adelaide, Visitant, Red Eft Review, Boned, Time of Singing, WINK, Poetry Pacific, Streetlight Press, and others. He was a finalist in Adelaide Anthology Contest 2017, 2018, and 2019. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee.

Stranger
 
Her seat was diagonally opposite mine
the whole of the journey to Paddington.
Village people, city people, families,
came and went. She and I were constants.
 
I’d fetch my coffees from the buffet. She
had her own wholegrain, had beetroot juice.
I read my various papers, magazines,
and she her Germaine Greer in paperback.
 
She had the habit, an unsettling one,
of flickering her hand across her face.
A long brown strand of hair would fall,
regularly, across her forehead.
 
From Paddington, we were quickly swallowed
by London and the Underground, although
I did, for just one moment, wonder
if that was her down-carriage. 
 
It was her though certainly, waiting
in reception, in the news and media office.
Still that hand shadowing its uncertainty
across the tense white face.
 
Next day, I bought the paper, naturally,
to see my piece. There were also photos
of two different women, named. Either
might well have been my stranger.
 
One was a woman due to donate a kidney
to a very sick sister. Another an emerging
political recruit, favoured in the hierarchy,
but now accused of office bullying.
 
Haunted sometimes by that shimmering hand,
the manifest unease, I’ve often hoped
my stranger was the donor woman.
But I honestly cannot be sure.

______________________________________________________________________

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has been published widely in Britain and in the USA, where he was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2020.

Thereafter

My heart in a bucket
in the barn black with ice
and warm lambs lantern-lit
to tease it apart with greedy tongues.
The world revolves
taking with it wolves and pipers
green hills stacked like pears
and me, departing your expanse
in a glass-bottomed boat
doomed to precariousness
my eyes weighed with candlesticks
too white to light.

________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Collidescope, Bluepepper, and Chronogram, among others, and are forthcoming in Muddy River Poetry Review and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.