Reasonable Doubt

I don’t trust Big Pharma, Margaret frets,
but Mexican folk remedies? Mushrooms?

Herbal teas, lime juice, turpentine?
Aren’t curanderos just faith healers?

Tepotzlán’s ancient shaman, Don Pedro,
blended Náhuatl with Spanish—duet 

of reed flute and Flamenco guitar. He patched
my bloody finger with warm belly fat

from a tlacuache—Mexico’s beloved marsupial.
Tore a strip from my yellow silk scarf

to wrap his handiwork, warned me
not to wash my hand. I had nightmares—

infection, amputation—yet my wounded hand
felt cool, no longer throbbed. 

A week later he removed the bandage—
no lump of putrid fat, just a pale ridge

of ropy skin. ¡Perfecto! A perfect graft.
After fifty years, even the scar has disappeared.

Faith healers? Auras? New Age crystals?
¿Quién sabe? But curanderos…

I’d almost forgotten my tlacuache transplant.

Lake By the Ocean 

Step right up to the microphone
Lines written in broken English
Young Shakespeare on the mic
Or maybe a young Dylan Thomas 

Step right up to the microphone
Cakewalking babies on the keys
Ringing the jangle sounds
Maybe find the next Bob Dylan 

Step right up to the microphone
Visit the lake by the ocean
Spit the alternative soul poetry
Spread it with some blues hop

Jakima Davis writes, “I’ve been writing for almost 22 years. I’ve been published in underground publications. I’ve published three chapbooks. One in 2016, and two in early 2021. I’m expecting my full book published soon. This is my third appearance in The Big Windows Review.”

Alternative Energy Wishes for My Brother

“I am ok. Work is kicking my ass.
Sometimes I wish I did something
else like install wind turbines or something.”

I also wish you
installed wind turbines.
Or mini hydroelectrics
on downspouts
of the lonely.
So when it rains
a mechanical arm
hits a gong every 30 seconds.
The gong is tuned
to the frequency of the human heart.
Or solar panels
on people’s eyelids so to
power their phones
they must sit
perfectly still
eyes closed
thus creating an
inner dialogue
rendering a cell phone obsolete.
Or biothermal
exchange generators on
the thumbs
of a polydactoid cat
rigged to a tiny projector that
shows kaleidoscopic lights
on the ceiling
when one strokes its ears and it purrs.
Or a pressure differential converter
built into the floor of
the room
of a disabled child
so when she
rises from her wheelchair
and takes
a single step
messages flash out
all over the world
celebrating the sacred dignity
of small things.

Christopher Hadin is a writer, naturalist, and environmental educator. His work has appeared in Sky Island Journal, The Thieving Magpie, Better Than Starbucks, October Hill Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Headlight Review. and Loud Coffee Press. He lives in Ferndale, Michigan.

Rain at Night

Rain insists all evening. We shelter in place,
not thinking about the homeless. Love may conceive
upstairs, in isolation from the elements.

A boy’s night is long under canvas, him alone.
Rain fingers’ patter cannot reach his face; they seem
feminine, like Sirens tapping Ulysses’ prow.

Or he lies on a bunk in the cottage Dad helped build;
listens to rain on shingles just overhead.
A book of poetry, from the shelf containing all

the Reader’s Digest Condensations, has The Eve
of St. Agnes: “Her rich attire creeps rustling
to her knees.” In the rain he can hear it, as he waits

for parents to go out for the evening. He will drift
asleep afterward, rain on the window like pearls
she removed, warm from her bosom, in Keats’ poem.

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and “Covid Spring, Vol. 2” (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

Abstract Gallery

doorway watchers
he said, she knows
nobody knows
creative oblique
voices on the piano
a jump of junk
barbed wire love
piercing affections
shadows on doors
painted hands
abandoned shoes
canvas footsteps
still framed colors
blocks of people
crashing oceans
windows weeping
wounded clouds
star blessings
mirrors of self
burning candles
heaven without hell

life is a cartoon
between comic books

Dr. Roger Singer is the Poet Laureate of Old Lyme, Connecticut. He has had over 1,150 poems published on the internet, magazines, and in books and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize Award Nominee. He is also the President of the Shoreline Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society. Some of the magazines that have accepted his poems for publication are:  Westward Quarterly, Jerry Jazz, SP Quill, Avocet, Underground Voices, Outlaw Poetry, Literary Fever, Dance of my Hands, Language & Culture, Adelaide Literary Magazine, The Stray Branch, Toasted Cheese, Tipton Poetry Journal, Ambassador Poetry Award Massachusetts State Poetry Society, Louisiana State Poetry Society Award 2019, Arizona State Poetry Society Award 2020, and Mad Swirl Anthology 2018 and 2019.

Flooded

Cotton pressing against cotton
Blue rivers sinking into silk
The materialistic urge for more than
existence, to feel
cotton sheets embodied by
water (detached elemental
motion, raw mass
seamlessly moist). White absorbing
mud, seedless — light brown,
brown, dark — cotton. In
my insides, a dirty mind. What does
that make me? 

Frederico Voroniuk Manica is a young aspiring writer that is fascinated by abstract and symbolic poetry. They have recently participated in the Poetize 2022 contest. 

A Normal Day

is ever poised on a fine-stropped edge
we cross barefoot but never know it
until we teeter.
Yeats saw a metal ball balanced
on a small fountain jet
in a shop window, remembered
it when troops blasted
two ancient bridges near his Tower.
Not knowing what aerialists
we were born to be
until the swaying begins,
we are blithe
in our daily centrifugal dance,
never look down.

Carol Hamilton taught 2^nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana, and Oklahoma, was a medical translator and storyteller. She is a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published and received various awards for 19 books and chapbooks of poetry, children’s novels, and legends and has been nominated ten times for a Pushcart Prize.

The Hard-of-Hearing Priest

The girls of the eighth grade at St. Joe’s cleaned the parsonage every Friday. One of the nuns would line them up at the bottom of the steps. The girls held buckets and brooms and mops. They walked up the steps in single file.
_____They cleaned the parsonage while the priest presided over confessions in the church. While still a relatively young man, the priest became hard of hearing and in the confessional, he had to ask the confessor to speak up.  As a result, anyone kneeling in the pews outside was likely to hear. It didn’t matter; the verdict was always guilty, the penance always light. Say the “Our Father” three times and be on your way.
_____After lunch period on Fridays, the priest would come to the classroom the seventh and eighth graders shared and would sit at the teacher’s desk and ask students questions related to the bible. The students would stand when answering. The nun, whose classroom it was when the priest wasn’t visiting, stood in a corner of the room with a peaceful expression, hands folded at her waist. The students knew to speak clearly and amplify their voices.
_____Though the priest was hard of hearing, he did not speak loudly himself. He delivered his short sermons in a soft-spoken way. Some of the older members of the parish were hard-of-hearing, yet they appreciated his brevity.
_____One night, a Friday night in fact, the parsonage was robbed; the priest happened to be at the house when the thieves arrived. He didn’t hear them wedging open a window. They tied him up. They also decided to give him a beating. The priest had a small safe in his closet and the thieves took it away with them.
_____The priest was discovered the next morning when two altar boys went to his front door because he was late to say mass. The police interviewed the priest in his hospital room, and he said he didn’t get a good look at the thieves. The theory from the police was that the priest knew the identities of the thieves, but they were also members of his parish. A further theory was that the at least one of the thieves had a sister who’d cleaned the priest’s house and knew about the safe.
_____The parishioners, when talking amongst themselves, could list any number of potential suspects. This parish being what it was.
_____Because the priest could not, would not, name his attackers, a case was never developed.
_____A few years later, following a short battle with brain cancer, the priest died. The doctors said the cancer might have been growing in the priest’s brain for quite a while and this might’ve explained his hearing condition.
_____The doctors might’ve wondered, too, why no one in the parish had ever encouraged the priest to have his hearing checked. 

Andy Plattner lives in Atlanta, Georgia. He has taught fiction writing at the University of So. Mississippi, University of Tampa, Emory University and Kennesaw State University. He has published stories with The Southern Review, Paris Review and The Literary Review, as well as other places. He has a forthcoming short story collection, Tower, with Mercer University Press.

Santa Fe in July

I breath sage fragrance rising from bundles of desert flora.
A bare-foot magician wearing a brown derby hat
proudly shows his open palms
to those learning the language of his hands.
First people artisans display handmade jewelry
on plant-dyed woolen rugs, unique offerings for sale
to those walking and embracing the 400-year-old plaza.

Unfenced apricot trees line the walkable narrow streets.
Married to the law of gravity,
ripened orange fruit falls gently from the open sky.

On a goat path trail, we hike through vanilla scented forests,
carrying time and water,
crisscrossing creeks of unfrozen snow.
Butterflies float like house dust between ponderosa pines.
Scurrying sand lizards hide under misplaced rocks.
Late day monsoon showers leave puddles, and conversations,
that evaporate into the desert before sunset.

At night, our warm skin sleeps under a humming ceiling fan.
Moving air, comforts vivid dreams,
multicolored and four dimensional, streaming within our eyes,
darting in the dark like schools of released fish.

We awaken in the morning without clocks,
holding natural light next to adobe walls.
We rise from restful sleep to begin our chosen day,
7,000 feet above the level of an unnamed distant sea.

David Lipsitz‘s poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Chaffin Journal, Cape Rock, From The Depths, and other literary publications. 

Waiting Room

Sitting in the groggy
Saturday morning clinic,
we watch the lucky couples
exclude the solitary woman,
huddle together wearing
black glasses, slight disguises
of bright swallowed laughter,
time slowly circling the room,
one by one stripping masks
from sideways-whispering faces,
exposing forward-facing fear
as the outer door opens
and the solo woman rises
to meet her husband above
averted eyes and hug
her delivered children
for gladly laughing yes
she is pregnant
again.

Matt Dennison is the author of Kind Surgery, from Urtica Press (Fr.) and Waiting for Better, from Main Street Rag Press. His work has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Bayou Magazine, Redivider, Natural Bridge, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Cider Press Review, among others. He has also made short films with Michael Dickes, Swoon, Marie Craven, and Jutta Pryor.