It is Written

Yes. I have an ego like a Brontosaurus. It is thirty stories tall and leathery. It won’t eat anything with a soul, but you’d best watch out for that swaying neck.

Yes. I want the tiaras, stacked like heretic halos. I want enough Pushcart nominations to cause a traffic incident. I want pizza delivery to be delayed because my words split the sidewalks.

Yes. I want the yes on the tall shelf. I want you to drench me in rose petals. I want a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on my ankle so I will never forget that I am “oui.”

Yes. I have been here before. I have spliced particle physics with pyrotechnic poetry in the greasy gymnastics of online dating. I have checked my inbox every eleven minutes for the ones I like to like me so I can still have light when my power fails.

Yes. All of this is the hunt for the hit. I wanted acceptance from husband holograms, and I wrote myself into their expectations. I want acceptance from story sergeants, but the stakes are higher because this time I am telling the truth.

Yes. This oozes with addiction, and the returns diminish. What once felt like atomic assurance is now a drowsy game of badminton. This morning’s “congratulations” is charred by dusk. Yeses add up to little. I like my words when I forget to be “likable,” but they congeal on the stove of submissions.

Yes. This is all grand. Writing is worth it. My life is a comedy. There are cat hairs in my microwave and limbo poles at the corners of my eyes. I cannot describe my divorce without bringing in Weird Al, or walruses, or the wind-sock people at the car dealership. I cannot grease myself in grief without a mouthful of honey-butter.

Yes. I want my words to count, and I am incompetent at math. I want to feed the starving. I want to heal the sick. I want to run through the cave pulling candles from my crown, until the people in darkness circle up with light. I want to write people free.

Yes. I have a savior complex, an inferiority complex, and an infatuation with affirmation. If we are capable of being damned, I am doomed. My hands are red and sticky from the caramel apple. It is good, and it is evil. I am incapable of telling the difference.

Yes. It is written. Whether we are speaking of my brown hair, my punk pancreas, or my dervish drive, my mother claims, “it’s in your book.” I don’t know where faith becomes fatalism. My book will not go unread. I live not by bread, but by every word from the mouth with no ego.

Yes. I am still hungry. I bite my own neck, then read the Beatitudes. I am poor in spirit. I contemplate pawning my pride. I buy a plastic Eiffel Tower for my desk instead.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar. Her work appears in Cagibi, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Razor, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has had Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and laughs with her mother daily.

Heaven and Hell

Silence fills the air,
as I sit, alone,
among endless rows of graves.

I wish for heartbeats,
for laughter,
for tears.

I miss the noise.

But I know that I can’t have it.

I can hear the footsteps of the living,
but there’s no sound for me.

Silence surrounds me,
as I lay in my own void,
a void of life,
eternal and silent.

I will never know happiness again.

But I accept it,
lying here, alone,
among endless rows of graves.

It was fun being dead for a while,
to feel the quiet
and the peace.
I thought hell would have fire and brimstone,
but I guess that’s only what they tell us.

I’m moving on now,
accepting my reality.
And I know that one day,
I’ll find my meaning,
in the cold abyss.

But for now, all I have is silence,
a silence that never ends.

And I bet there’s fire in heaven.

Claudia Wysocky, a Polish poet based now in New York, is known for her ability to capture the beauty of life through rich descriptions in her writing. She firmly believes that art has the potential to inspire positive change. With over five years of experience in fiction writing, Claudia has had her poems published in local newspapers and magazines. For her, writing is an endless journey and a powerful source of motivation.

A Poem about Time

I’m endlessly waiting,
perhaps for the right words
to express the arrival
of spring’s birds. Perhaps
for something not yet
come into being, something
which will amaze me.
The moon climbs the sky,
then suddenly it dies,
and my thoughts are paralyzed.
I look for the moon
in your unhappy eyes.
Your life is a mystery to me,
so I wait, and as I wait
a million leaves slowly grow
on a thousand trees.
And I grow older,
and the stars which were once
young and full of desire,
die, and sink to their knees.

George Freek’s poetry appears in numerous Journals and Reviews. His poem “Written At Blue Lake” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His collection Melancholia is published by Red Wolf Editions.

Everyone Was Nice

It should be annoying but isn’t,
that even here we’re collected
in comfortable rooms and sorted,
then carry documents
along sometimes the wrong but always
pleasant corridors to smaller rooms
and groups. We’re reminded
of the welfare states we were born in
and which at least a number of us hoped
would return. An idealized version –
for the ubiquitous officials
who help us to the right place are all young
and never seem annoyed or condescend.

A loose circle, couches;
decent coffee and pastries. We tell,
as expected, our stories.
It takes a while to grasp the common thread,
and not everyone does, because
it isn’t a thread but the whole cloth.
For this group life isn’t one thing after
another – which is easier to deal with, or
not – but one thing. Which
the incidents we crowdedly
recount (mine, I’ll admit,
the pettiest and most diffuse)
reveal … So that when

we’ve finished, and the pastries
and coffee are all gone, we
stare at each other with no idea
what to do; the room, as it were,
is full of monuments or philosophical
systems … We should admire, I think –
critique, polish – but all we manage
is silence. At which the officials,
who somehow receded, seem more visible.
They had better (the consensus is)
not ask us to relinquish those
statues; it would be
worse than what they’ve done with our bodies.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, September 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Windows Review (2020, ‘21), etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

Repair

All you whose lives I have crashed into–
or who’ve crashed into mine–
and then staggered away into the stream of the passing time,
this is to let you know that I have not given up
trying to fix everything.
Though we are of such obscure and dark machinery,
so easily broken, countless times and in countless ways,
I can’t help but insist:
all the pieces must still be present somewhere,
even if dispersed as far as the stars.
To persist in being:
to take up with daily care a consciousness
capable of filling space, of finding and holding
present the farthest fragments of our scattered
selves—we could not be made more perfect.

Wishing
unfinished

When a white crow
can just escape death
and scramble up to fly,
is that a kind of sign –
good or bad for who?

Let’s say: never mind,
or may we live together
on our brave best behavior?

On a bramble branch
a buzzard chick is listening
as if life is not clutched in a fist.

Life is reciprocal; we can perceive
a glimpse of the complete picture.
We’re dancing on toes or firm feet,
our nimble fingers will reach the distance.
For eternity we can participate in bits of that and this.

Poet and novelist Arno Bohlmeijer writes in English and Dutch, is the winner of a PEN America Grant 2021 and has been published in renowned journals in five countries, including Universal Oneness: An Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World, 2019.

Footfall

I keep waking to these lost days
of late dawns and early dusks

of blue light
and black
mountains

of your coffee
cold on the
counter

and the absence
of your
footfall

on the hardwood
floors all
around me.

Ryan Brennan lives in the Catskill Mountains where he writes poetry that just barely exists. He has recent or forthcoming work in Cider Press Review, Frost Meadow Review, Pacific Poetry, Brazos River Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Mantle, One Sentence Poems, amongst others. 

At my age

those who were married
are now divorced
and maybe
remarried
and maybe
divorced again
and those
of us
who
were never married
long
for anything
other
than the life
we lived
and I
have to catch
myself
from falling
into
the gaps,
imagining
what it would be like
to be held
by a person
who will be
snoring
in minutes
instead of
all of this
humming
and everything
in my apartment
exactly where I put it
when I wish
someone
had misplaced
at least
something.

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize.  Right now, Riekki’s listening to The xx’s “Islands.”

Pour me an epiphany on the rocks sunny side up with a twist

_____Ah! tout est bu, tout est mangé!
__________–Verlaine

Of the totally abstract
______hopelessly inscrutable
____________powder of the cosmiverse
______to fuck up everything I sing I sing.

Into the valley of death they ride,
“Half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward,”
they chant and I quote with all of my hurt
prominently displayed upon mirrors of infinity
apposed obliquely under duress.

Perhaps a bit of exposition channeled through diversion
even inversion and a series of “You don’t say” type blurts
would be the odor of the placental creatures’ wool.

Cries of “nonsense will avail you nothing” won’t suffice
to berate the lack of meter and asolnonce
for now is a time as adequate as any for the total exclipse
formerly shadowed in doubt. For egsample::

Logic is the last refuge of scoundrels peddling the sins of the fathers.
Nothing proceeds without big lies since the decay of verse into prose fiction.
That one is the only one and no one is only sly nomen or Noman though not a pipe.

And all these yestodays blighted pools the fey to musty breath.
To borrow and to borrow and to borrow craps in shits sweaty place
from say to say til the last shibboleth of imported grime.

Play it again in Café Americain for old times’ sake. If she can stand it, I can.
But Dooley was a drummer and he couldn’t do it. Try Ella.
Why did she have to go? Why does anybody?
“It’s the beast of boredom,” calms the Joyfreud,
“come to fertilize us all.” Ah shit.

____

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, including 6 Pushcart nominations, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worcester Review. He has a chapter in Hypermedia Joyce, and his book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher. He seeks to marry the experimental, non-narrative with the lyric and traditional in the manner of Nietzsche’s marriage of Apollo and Dionysos. He generally avoids accessibility for its own sake, and the prosaic personal story with superimposed line breaks that is ubiquitous these days.