Capsized

I always thought of dad as an ocean
Spume frothing from his mouth

Mom would say tilt his head to one side
I pretended I controlled the sea

Somewhere waves were created when I did that,
so I looked at him and drew tiny boats on

his lips and cheeks, he moaned and groaned and I
pretended the sea was mad, so I drew

pirates on his chin, sometimes the sea would
gargle and toss back at me all the plastics and

garbage, pieces of sailors and forgotten
ships would emerge, one time he opened his eyes

and his green orbs flashed a mermaid
playing a violin, playing a song of longing

Edward Vidaurre is the 2018-2019 McAllen, Texas, Poet Laureate and author of six collections of poetry: JAZzHOUSE (Prickly Pear Publishing 2019) is his latest, with WHEN A CITY ENDS, forthcoming from King Shot Press. He writes from the front lines of the Mexican-American borderlands of El Valle in south Tejas and is Publisher/Editor of FlowerSong Books.

Confidential Memo

The raid
Since data and deponents were going missing,
I dispatched my agents on a pre-dawn raid
through the brain’s neuronal mega-metropolis,
to seize clues and re-depose witnesses
so I could reconstruct a narrative
and reach a verdict in this years-old case.
Armed with warrants, the agents went in, and returned
not with a flock of biddable witnesses
but with a scattering of laconic exhibits.

The evidence
One yellow crayon, wielded in kindergarten
and possibly still colluding with a hand
to color a cardboard crown so well that no
gap would mar the glowing waxy surface
_____Who ordered this job and for what unspoken purpose
_____outside the lawful borders of the blackboard?

One bowlegged yellow plastic cowboy, lost
beneath a car seat, having survived so many
shoot-outs, brought back from the totaled car by father,
tight-lipped and ghost-white after his passenger died
_____What can we read into this stoic one’s silence
_____regarding the darkness, the rain-slicked road, and the skid?

One yellow rain slicker with hood and chemical
odor, synthetic that outshone the sun,
encased a child like a turtle or deep-sea diver,
and seemed to exude, as if sweating, beaded droplets
_____Will the slicker, still dripping, devoid of a body but subject
_____to forensic probing, yield up the truth about shame?

The dream
Arguing in the Supreme Court of the Cranium
housed behind a giant brow’s facade,
I was multiple, unruly: accuser, defender
dueling the gavel with motions and counter-motions;
guard whose synaptic epaulets sparked mayhem;
and judge whose wig was a maze of convolutions.

In the spring of 2020, Salmon Poetry, Ireland, will publish Philip Fried‘s eighth book of poetry. Thomas Lux said about his work, “I love Philip Fried’s elegant quarrels with the cruelty and ignorance of the world or, more precisely, its inhabitants.”

Coffeehouse Poem # 339

Mourning doves coo
As the rain falls silent
As dreams
A girl types on her laptop
She wears her homeland
On her face
She shows me home
Through her eyes
They never lie
They tell me

Everything

Erren Kelly is a two-time Pushcart-nominated poet from Boston who has been writing for 28 years and has over 300 publications in print and online in such publications as Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine(online), Ceremony, Cacti Fur, Bitterzoet, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg and other publications. He is also the author of the book Disturbing The Peace from Night Ballet Press.

Fifty Eight Thousand, Two Hundred and Nine

Standing in front of the classroom
talking about the Vietnam War
preparing them for the novel they
were about to read, I was drifting
inside myself, barely noticing my
surroundings, thinking about my
son.

When I came to the slide labeled
“casualties” I froze. Fifty-eight
thousand, two hundred and nine it
reads in stark white, 32 point font.
Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred
and nine knocks at the door. Military
servicemen saying the now-famous
words: We regret to inform you…
The same words that were spoken
to me at my door.

I imagine the responses varied:
anger and wailing and violence
and crying and dropping to their
knees and crying and screaming
NO! Did any other parent hug
the Petty Officer trying to get
the words out and whisper It’s
ok, I already know about my
son.

Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred
and nine funerals, most of which
included rifles shooting blanks
in the air–the sound of taps playing
in the background, the color guard
slowly, carefully folding the flag
that covered their child.
Presenting the flag to their loved ones,
like they did for my son.

How did they manage the anger,
the crying, the denial, the feeling
of isolation, of being broken? How
do we manage when overwhelmed
by a car, a rainy night, the horrible
knock on the door.

A student says, But I don’t get it, why
did we fight in this war? and I think,
back in the moment, fifty-eight
thousand, two hundred and nine families
asking the same question, why?
Just as I do, every moment, about my
son.

Sam Norman has been teaching high school for 16 years at Bacon Academy in Colchester, CT. His works have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Amethyst, Down in the Dirt, Red Eft, and Praxis. Most of Sam’s recent poetry focuses on a terrible tragedy. Sam’s son, Ben, just 20 years old, lost his life in a weather-related traffic accident on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2018. Sam lives in Coventry, CT, with his wife Teri, their children, Becca and Daniel, a bunch of chickens, and their beloved dogs, Cloudy and Ripple.

The King of Montana 

1.
After a chance grass fire
burned house, barn, privy to cinders
she hurled curse upon curse at lightning,
the wide sky it leapt from,
their sorry farm that took it dead-center.

She swore to him this time she meant it.
Would wire her father for the money,
buy a one-way train ticket back to Dayton.

He told her he’d be lost
without her hand on his,
their hearts both beating
to the promise of these fields.

She laughed.
“Oh you’ll do dandy without me,
camping in this blamed tent.
Soon enough you’ll trick some other sheep-eyed gal
into thinking this three hundred twenty acres
is the Front Porch of Paradise
and you’re the King of Montana!”

2.
Two weeks later he drove her to the depot in Billings.
He guessed she’d earned
one summer with her kin
while he rebuilt.
“Okay then Sophie. Say howdy to the folks for me.
Have a good summer, and I’ll look for you–
say in Autumn, before the snow hits?

Silent, she turned back, looked at him.
Just once.

3.
Decades later, he sat with his brother
in the farm house he’d built that summer
when she went home.
Chores done, sky darkening,
their dinner dishes cleared away,
one bottle of Four Roses between them.

“Did you never hear from that Ohio lady?” the brother asked.
“I always kind of wondered about her.”

Nels glanced then at his pinewood desk,
the drawer with his dozen letters,
all from her first year away.
Sent back unopened, marked “Return to Sender.”

He had known for decades
it was never the land,
which he still worked and
which fed him well enough.
His true folly? Thinking
to haul a coal merchant’s daughter
away from privilege
out to this barren stretch of nowhere.
To live on whim and luck
and mistake these for love.

“No Olaf,” he said.
“Not hardly for a long time.”

Robert Hasselblad has been writing poetry since college days, half a century ago. Recently retired from forty-three years in the lumber industry, he devotes time to writing, walking, reading, and speculative napping. His poems have appeared in OntheBus:The Final Issue, Avalon Literary Review, riverbabble, and WA 129: Poets of Washington.

Ferret in a Brothel

I was a gift from Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
after he was elected President of the United States.
The piano player with a glass eye took charge of me

and a Colt pistol that once belonged to Wyatt Earp,
the lawman-friend of Mr. Roosevelt who frequented
Madam Satterfield’s. My first home was a hatbox.

The whores passed me around until I bit one—
she’d fallen asleep in my nest of sheets. Rolled
over, and so it was wake the sleeper or suffocate.

A tolerance for being gently handled went the way
of dying, dark-skinned men: out the door. Gone.
A war and then my house of women scattered

by fire, fingers of flame creeping up the skirts
of the drapes like the hands of johns. The shrieks
of trick babies trapped upstairs—desiccated bodies

black and smooth as fur in the keeping of the men
who carried them down into the street. I escaped
that and the thud of engines, the crying woman

swaddled in a sheet on a bright avenue. I was
off into the grasses then into light again. It’s hard
being a ferret, but not as hard as being a whore

or the President of the United States.

Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams prize for his book Walking with Eve in the Loved City, is the author of seven books of poetry, including, most recently, American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press. He has published poetry in Shenandoah, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, and Rattle, among others.

Last First Night

I pose we smoke
(the pleasure we can
still partake in)
but
7 becomes 8
8 becomes 9
and you are still
on the other side
of the locked door,
ursus in hibernation.

So I mark time
mull red wine
with cardamom
and lemon peel
pour the spirit
into porcelain
teacups and pass
to my teenage children
late popsicles
on a summer night.

At 11:55 you appear
your once strong body
fading with the year
you hobble a few steps
in striped pajamas
that Jew from Treblinka
watching Anderson Cooper.

I graze your shoulder,
strands of
your silver hair-
too weak to inhale
you peck me instead
with chapped lips as
your last year begins.

Stacey Z Lawrence teaches Poetry and Creative Writing in a public high school in Northern, NJ. She is working on her first book of confessional poems which explores the untimely death of her husband shortly followed by her bout with Breast Cancer.

Ars Historica

Ramses II had hieroglyphs of his father Seti I
Chiseled off the giant columns at ancient Karnak
And replaced with his own in an effort to swindle
History, and fool future generations into believing
The entire temple had been built during his reign.

But you can’t hide from history, nor alter it.
Once something is done it’s done forever.
Quasars billions of light years from Earth
May never be discovered by humans despite
Amazing technology, yet this won’t alter facts.

Facts support the quasars, Hittites, World Wars.
Ignorance of them can’t erase their efficacy.
The words wasted attempting to alter reality
Fall on cosmic ears deaf to insubstantial claims.
Humans can be mistaken, not so the universe.

You may have seen it with your own baby blues,
Heard it from a media source you always believe,
Experienced it in a frenzy of religious revelation,
Touched its fuzzy tentacles with fingers aflame,
Dreamed it repeatedly thinking yourself certain,

Yet it still could be contrary to history’s physics.
I think perhaps there are infinite dimensions
To time and space, but in this fragile life we lead
Will only know three or four, and many will plod
Along the path of ignorance while only observing

Two or three, essentially trapped in fleshy shells,
Chirping in the trees of free will, observed by gods
Manufactured by clouded minds of righteous clerics.
But this is no reason to cry or commit suicide since
History whispers sotto voce in our malleable minds.

We have the arts diverting our attention from death,
Houses and countries and cars and plants to occupy
Our fallible senses. We’ve neighbors between which
To build temporary fences, governments that preside,
And history laughing gaily at man’s misinformation.

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly and Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry and interviews have appeared in literary journals internationally, including Nimrod, Florida English Journal, Cream City Review, Mandala Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Poetry Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Boston Poetry Magazine. He has published a travel book, Best Choices In Northern California, and his epic adventure Ballad of Billy the Kid is available on Amazon in both Kindle and print versions.

Irreversible

I always write on my desk.
There is a big clock
on the wall against it.
The lower end of the clock’s pendulum
is attached to a shovel;
with every swing
it digs a hole in the floor
which gets bigger and bigger–
soon the hole will be my size.

And I write faster and faster.

Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and many others. His new chapbook titled Under Half-Empty Heaven was published in 2018 by Grey Book Press.

Loosestrife

I think that’s what it’s called.
August is suddenly full of this wildflower, this weed.

It spills from marsh to field to roadside
Splashing everywhere I go.

Green stems and purple flowers
Remind me that you are with me
Everywhere in August, even as you
Prepare to leave.

The blue sky, too.
The colors that you swim in,
That swirl around us both, now
Grow wild, unbidden, everywhere this August.

Heart-shaped rocks show up, too,
Warm from August sun and my fingers rubbing their smooth surfaces.
Since you mentioned them, I see them more easily,
I feel warm and slightly comforted that you will see them too, and,
Perhaps, think of me missing you,

Of open hearts and hope and love,
Of someone else who healed your heart,
Whom you, perhaps, still miss, this August,
While glimpsing fields of purple loosestrife everywhere.

Sara Epstein is a clinical psychologist from Winchester, Massachusetts, who writes poetry and songs, especially about light and dark places. Her poems are forthcoming or appeared in Silkworm, Paradise in Limbo, Mom Egg Review, Chest Journal, Literary Mama, and two anthologies: Sacred Waters, and Coming of Age.