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.  

Go South
 
Your flashback
is akin to a planigraph.
Others in the album
forfeit their focus.
By and by
is it tyranny
or the thrill of transition?
All of you is a blur
like the fine print before me
without reading glasses.

________________________________________________________________________

Sanjeev Sethi is published in over 30 countries. He has more than 1350 poems printed or posted in literary venues. He is joint-winner of Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux organized by the Hedgehog Poetry Press. Recent credits: Lummox Poetry Anthology # 9, Pomona Valley Review, Ephemeral Elegies, The Cannon’s Mouth, Rochford Street Review, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Canteen 


Out here with my father     Sun

light   day           Star  bald 

out            Side   any   siding 

with           Out    any   wall


with my father        my water     out

Here           is this      quiet  

corner         my father’s 

house is       heaven       where he lives 

without any siding outside any wall 

                      where he heaves is

the wild       the raw      scalp of silence. 

_________________________________________________________________________

Cameron Morse was diagnosed with a glioblastoma in 2014. With a 14.6 month life expectancy, he entered the Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri—Kansas City and, in 2018, graduated with an M.F.A. His poems have been published in numerous magazines, including New Letters, Bridge Eight, Portland Review, and South Dakota Review. His first poetry collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Baldy (Spartan Press, 2020). He lives with his wife Lili and two children in Blue Springs, Missouri, where he serves as poetry editor for Harbor Review. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.  

Plucked glances

These cord tote bags were my everything when I was living in Long Island.
My aunt in Rochester had dozens of them from Lancôme to Victoria’s Secret
and kept them piled up in her impeccably ordered basement, twice larger
than my rented room in Mineola. She treated me to lavish meals and shopping
trips and I never mentioned my eat-once-fast-twice days in NY, her gifts were
no match for poor grad students who saved for used books and practicum Friday
trips to Varick St. She gave me my first designer dress which I still keep all foiled
up in my Romanian closet, for the book signing tour I will never take, except none
of the totes matches the wannabe black lace and the bruised poems, the way their
bodies leap, node to node, spiked with anticipation. The tongues of longing speak
louder than thunder, heart walls upon heart walls, cast their lengthy shadow.

To the god on watch

This corner of the afternoon is mine and the eyes that won’t leave me alone.
I am robbing you of the sweet pleasure of washing the world. In blood, tears
or brine from the Black Sea. I know a Romanian song about love that tears
the flesh open, a mouth that chars every syllable, every milky daybreak tumbles
down choking these October skies bearing the weight of your smile, a knot of hunger
in every breathing throat and the drizzle that follows me everywhere. Go blind, now.

A day spent curled around your face
 
This achy October, heavy fruit thundering
down. In the grass, brown apples, warm scent
 
of spoil. Clouds smeared half-way across
the treetops. Among rotting sweetness,
 
in the tall grass, your chest that rises
and sinks unnoticed, my fingers floating
 
across familiar flesh, getting lost under
the brittle foliage. The way days oxidize,
 
tiny summer flakes coming off everything.
Who can trust the hours? The ticking two-timing
 
hands that push us farther away. Hard to imagine
what lies ahead this dangling numbness, light
 
growing softer, then deafening dark. In between,
bodies plastered to one another, awaiting winter.

________________________________________________________________________

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, she got her MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the International Poetry and Translation Editor of The Blue Nib.