NarrativeNortheast

TWO POEMS – Alise Versella

on January 4 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

COFFEE BREAKS AND FAMILIAL ACHES

The day
Is frenetic energy
Neutrons bouncing in a nucleus- the walls of this
Kitchen
I stop to percolate
Filter the day through me like water through coffee beans

Café
Bustelo takes me back
To a particular time of day
The way
My father takes
The Sambuca
To an espresso cup, much too small for his callused and arthritic hand
Places a twirl of lemon curl
Wet around the rim and drops it in

The bitter bite, a harpoon
To drown the days demons down
His nerve damaged spine, slackening
Back relaxing
My father, captain, loud at the helm
Rendered
Quiet
For a few hours in the afternoon

Most days we circumnavigate the globe of his moods
Each coffee cup or shot glass a different port
Heaven Hill after an argument
Two cups of coffee or three
Depending
On the previous night’s sleep

My father does not sleep
Years of shift work
Shifting the meridians
Of his body

Most children
Think themselves polar opposites
Of their parents
But I am finding
The coffee is staining my teeth
It becomes harder and harder for me to fall asleep
Is this predisposition
Hereditary
This need for bitter comfort,
Mercy?

The espresso
And expression
A confession
Because I did not go to catholic school
Cannot recite a Hail Mary
But I am full of grace
In this caffeinated state
Café Bustelo, salvation
As the scent of if fills my nostrils

For a moment I breathe deeply
And relax, like my father, into the warmth of the sun
Streaming in through the
Kitchen window
On a hectic afternoon.

TIME AND AGAIN

One day the armies of little boys who saw no other future

than to sacrifice their bodies for money
Will come home from the foreign countries
Whose languages and cultures they were ordered to burn
One day old men will realize borders are pretend
Gates we erected with spikes because white picket fences could not exist for them

One day maybe in another decade little boys will stop fighting wars with little boys
Reminiscent of days on playgrounds where toy airplanes were built from paper
Could not propel bombs the bombs were crayons

Today I can’t read the paper
Most days I can’t face the news
This does not make me naïve, a poet hippie who believes love will save us
It won’t
She hasn’t been loved back for a while she knows
It takes more than love to save the world

But these days I am afraid and my nerves jangle

like plastic skeletons on Halloween
They don’t look like decoration anymore they look like warning
My dead walk the streets each morning
Slowly dying at jobs we hate
But they pay for our portion of the world
We stand ready to defend our corner
I feel like I am suffocating to protect a corner patch of weeds
Nothing has grown here for awhile

I do not have my father’s green thumb
I do not know which seeds I have inherited but I do not want them
The seeds are on fire
The kids are not alright
I must admit I grow more terrified of walking to my car at night

I do not know what more to write
We’ve been typing out the same old ink
I argue in my own mind each night
Try to reconcile poetry as medicine
When it’s medicine we cannot afford

I do not know anymore the point.

Tomorrow I will get out of bed
I will commit to do the work the only way I can
So tomorrow, while the new decade burns, I will write a poem
Again.

Alise Versella is twice nominated for the Pushcart, and A Best of the Net nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society. She is the author of the full-length When Wolves Become Birds (Golden Dragonfly Press 2021) and the forthcoming chapbook Maenads of the 21st Century (Dancing Girl Press). She has been published widely in such journals as the Opiate, Crack the Spine, Steam Ticket, Penumbra Literary and Arts Journal, Luna Arcana, Soup Can Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Circle Show, White Stag Journal, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Press Pause Press, and Soundings East. Versella has worked with Women’s Spiritual Poetry, whose latest anthology, Goddess: When She Rules, raised money for the Malala Fund. Kirkus has called her “…[A] boundlessly energetic and promising technician [who] crafts a unique blend of the symbolist and the confessional; a talented, promising newcomer.” She performs throughout New Jersey and across Zoom screens and has taught Poetry as Power in local libraries and schools.
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CLOUDS – John J. Trause

on January 2 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of Why Sing? (Sensitive Skin Press, 2017), a book of traditional and experimental poems; Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears (Dos Madres Press, 2016), a book of poems on art, film, and photography; Exercises in High Treason (great weather for MEDIA, 2016), a book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts; Eye Candy for Andy (13 Most Beautiful… Poems for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Finishing Line Press, 2013); Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round (Nirala Publications, 2012); Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007; rev. ed. 2014); and Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review, the artists’ periodical Crossings, the Dada journal Maintenant, the journal Offerta Speciale, the Great Weather for Media anthologies It’s Animal but Merciful (2012), I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (2014), Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (2019), and the forthcoming A Shape Produced by a Curve (2023), and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site, both in April 2016. He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, Andrei Codrescu, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Billy Collins, Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lector, Andrei Chikatilo, and George “The Animal” Steele. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.
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THE EMPTYING & TW0 POEMS – Jan Beatty

on January 2 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Mullions cut the windows
into equal pieces, there were cats
prowling the halls of the asylum.

Nights straight-line rain hit the glass,
the wooden rafters shook.
Oracles in white uniforms scavenged,

lifting us to their rooms under
the heavy crucifix. Searching for prophecy
in our small bodies, they held us

to their flat breasts, drove their fingers
inside us dreaming of jesus:
How he would fuck them, hallelujah!

“Whose seed am I?” the oracles
sang, hovering, as they licked and
sucked in the dark,

emptying everything—
mediums between the dirty town
of the small room and the vast space.

DRAG STRIPS

Four lines of a lyric
(or nothing comes that rises):

Dear figure of mother: I’m staying
with the white page: since

nothing comes that rises—
just the truth that drags & bitters

GREEN COMETS OF THE FUTURE

Down County Road 18 outside of Stow,
my head flying the room of strangers.
I was fifteen & doing peyote in some guy’s trailer
buttons of weed, young enough I was

wearing my scapula around my neck,
burning into my skin with its green string, praising:
IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY,
PRAY FOR US NOW in all scary caps.

On the other side, Mary in long robes holding
this flaming bloody heart—
The green comets of future spinning,
catapulting me in & out of time &

I thought about my pillowcases at home, sewn
into a sleeping bag for safety, the drapes pinned shut
Birds were flying around inside me—
in circles, white. I could feel the

psychopathic swirling of air. Were they
spirits returning to dive-bomb
the monstrous buildings of my past?
In the cloud soup, in the cloud river

of my brain, the hills & factories of Pittsburgh
rose up like the only real things.
What was it that people wanted from me?
What was I trying to hold together?

I hurtled the broken-down steps
of the single-wide—what passed for a country
home on that green night, my head
now the comets, my head now walking away.

Jan Beatty is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard (2021). Her sixth book, The Body Wars (2020), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems (2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress for fifteen years, and as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, and a social worker and teacher in maximum-security prisons.
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CAPRICORN – Issam Zineh

on January 1 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

“Christ did not want to leave the body.” — Linda Gregg

It must have been hard for him to recount
the parable with her there—just shaved,

mons slick with suds, sweat winging
to her armpits, the serenity of a man

between trees—trees, an ability to forget.
Apple yields fig. Fig yields cypress.

It became a kind of therapy session.
She was in bed. Netting

kept the mosquitoes from her
thighs. As she slept, discovery made

its way in like another snake from the landscape.
She woke to a mercy that came in the form of a fish.

And they ate and were made aware of the beauty
of the animals. This, at least, is how I learned it.

Isn’t God a centuries-old sign of wanting,
the swollen remnant of rest?

Isn’t guilt the smallness of our bodies
against open space?

Aren’t you the welcome blackness
that swallows me whole?

Issam Zineh (he/him) is a Los Angeles-born, Palestinian-American poet and scientist. He is author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), which was an Editors’ Selection and finalist for the Trio Award for first or second book, and the chapbook The Moment of Greatest Alienation (Ethel Press, 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tahoma Literary Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Poetry Café (https://thepoetrycafe.online). Find him on twitter @izineh.

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SUITE FOR SMALL GODS – Al Maginnes

on January 1 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

for Jim Harrison

1. The Naming

We don’t know what they call each other
or even how they communicate. Their tongue
might lie in the cycle-sound crickets call
or the rise and fall white noise of tides.
They may say nothing, only exchange
sad glances at our stumblings. Somewhere
trout bend like commas in the silent
mobility of water, bass nibble around
the drowned trunk of trees. In corridors
shaped from marble, behind doors
so thick they took two men to carry,
hidden ritual goes on, syllables
whispered in dead grammars and incense,
each devotee ushered to the center
of the room where they must say a name
and be given one. One name will be
inscribed in a book sealed to mortals
who believe in nothing but change,
the chaos of shifting verb tenses,
of marriages wrenched asunder,
the screaming chaos of a future
screaming toward us, filling our mouths
with words remembered from the days
we carved them into altars once stained
with the blood of what we sacrificed.

2. The Little Gods of Hunger

Some lives are insatiable,
always ready for the next feeding,
the next obstacle to consume,
small motors leaking oil
as they bark through all
before them. Bare limbs,
mud-crusted stones, the richest beef
all ground up and swallowed.
This is the first and last story
we know. The first hunger is
the one the body works to feed
all its lives. And cactus spines,
grapefruit skins, cold pizza all
are fair game. We should learn
from these little deities how
to consume so thoroughly,
but mortal and forever fussy,
we refuse this bean, that brand
of seasoning, but the softening
tissues of food a step beyond
its prime can still feed us,
no matter how imperfect the food.

3. The Small Gods of Poetry

It’s silence most of the time, back here
by the rainbarrels, where the leaves
of last winter drift pile in drifts around
the rainbarrel, thick enough to keep
the ground damp, where a seed small
and hearty, might take hold
and struggle upward. There are places
stillness beckons language,
though words, like fish, rarely come
when summoned. You can soak back here
in shadows, dream your way
inside the house, the kitchen filling
with dusk light, the porch sprawled
in day’s last full glare. Just before

your eyes close, there will be motion
at the treeline where waking
and dreamlife blend. Then words might
pad forth, trackless, low-shouldered
predatory as wolves. They circle
houses whose windows are lit,
looking for the dark ones where
they might slide through the gates
of sleep and find their own way.

Al Maginnes has published four chapbooks and nine full length collections of poetry, most recently The Beasts That Vanish (Blue Horse Press, 2021). Recent poems appear in Lake Effect, MacGuffin, Inflectionist Review, American Journal of Poetry and many others. I live in Raleigh NC and teach at Louisburg College in Louisburg NC.
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TWO POEMS – Taneesh Kaur

on December 30 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments
BEACHED WAIL OF BETRAYAL

“…women will reject womanhood itself, if the condition ‘unable to move around freely’, both physically and psychically, is seen necessarily to accompany it.”
–Léonie Caldecott, “The Dance of the Woman Warrior”

Body. You have absorbed and adorned
rage from so many angles
from so many people of different pitches
bass to soprano
who don’t know
women,
what it’s like
to live most of your life
deprived of a clitoris.
The deep betrayal
down to the breath
of a beached wail in
distress left in the wake
of a wave of your death,

Mom. Where was the womanhood
sisterhood
you so elegantly displayed
to your friends
when you were flesh?
Where was that sacred bond
for my sex, for me, your daughter?

Kali. Shakti. Devi.
Shining One. Great Mother.
Am I a woman,
with pieces taken?
Kali, Feminine Force
Could I carry a child
and not hate my womb?
This force that runs from the earth’s core
to my root up through my vast mother land
can I accept it
without using it against myself?
My body?

These are existential questions.
At the core of society
we are taught to hate ourselves, women,
protecting our cave fertilized, unfertilized
while doused in rage, enraged.

(previously published in Beyond Words Magazine)
________________________________________
RECLAIM LAUGHING

My humor is hard to access.
It must be some kind of
room it hides in
until I have nothing
and then it emerges to say
see? Things are still
worth laughing about
my laugh reveals
life as a finite
gift a mortal joke
and I remember that God
doesn’t want us to suffer
that we’re put here,
all of us, with our own
purpose we learn
our strengths our
weaknesses learn to make
them our strengths
I’m sensitive,
and that’s positive
and I’m careful
with my words and I
love that about myself
and I shouldn’t
hate
what I love about myself
and I realize humor is one
of my strengths, it’s been
used against me, laughing
I’ve experienced
the worst of schadenfreude
from kin
and it’s time to reclaim
laughing time to
laugh time to create
a legacy of laughter
to smile at nothing
the whimsy of the clouds
and not feel stupid that laughing
is a gift and
gratitude lifts
and not trust fall
into that familiar plaster smile
that hides a peculiar kind
of depression

Taneesh Kaur is a teaching artist of East Indian descent, based in the Bay Area. She is a social justice advocate whose first love is poetry, and uses nature to understand and dismantle systems of mental and physical oppression. They have their MA in linguistics from SF State with a year and a half of training in Mexico and Chile. Se habla español.
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TWO POEMS – Yenifer Maria Mezquita

on December 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

TO THE LOVER

Who was never truly a lover
just a rotting corpse

A pile of hollowed-out bones
looking for a place to lay
wounds of war
and unspoken desires

You
made a coffin out of my body
and buried yourself in my hips

You
slipped in through my teeth
not knowing
that I have swallowed men whole
not knowing
that I carved out the depths of myself
to make room for you

I chose you
because only a dead man
would want to sleep
in an empty wet hole

Dear lover
I am sorry if I never told you
that I’ve been a graveyard
longer than I’ve been a woman

So rest easy now
you can lay your death
Inside of me

I promise

that your grave will have a name
that the soil from my body
will absorb the nutrients from your flesh
and sprout wildflowers between my legs

I promise
that I will take the emptiness I birthed
after four years of never making love
and I will carve it into your headstone.

________________________________________

THE OCEAN

feels like the salt crusting on my brow,
like the wind dancing with my hair
on a Sunday afternoon
después de la Misa
for those that don’t pray
but still believe in god.

It tastes like–
espagueti con pan.
And if I was lucky,
un pecao frito de Maimon.

Like the sour grapes
from the trees that lined the beach,

like the saltwater
washing away the sand on my feet.

When I was a kid
I used to look out at the ocean and think–
this is all there is between you and me,

water

As deep as the hole in my chest
that never goes away
and I don’t remember exactly
how it got there,

the ocean

is warm and clear
—tonight

It feels like rays of moonlight
tickling your skin,
like the rattle of cicadas
echoing through the wind
with Oscar de Leon
blasting in the distance,

“Lloraras y lloraras sin nadie que te consuele.
Asi te daras cuenta que si te engañan duele”

[Clap]

For a moment
you are here, now
in the present.

Remember
that you don’t belong
to any one nation.

Remember
that your bloodline
was born of the sea fearing

That your ancestors
have loved across oceans
for centuries.

Remember
that hyphens are made of water
And that you are too

Yenifer Maria Mezquita was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and lived in Altamira, Puerto Plata, until age 8. She moved to the Bronx, New York, in the summer of 2001 and grew up ‘en el ba y ven,’ often spending summers with her grandparents back in the Dominican Republic. She attended Amherst College in Western Massachusetts and now lives in the DC area, where she works for a national non-profit. A life-long self-described “closeted poet” and storyteller, she has been dreaming up words and worlds for as long as she can remember. She loves Miyazaki films, downpours, cats and looking up at the sky.
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TWO POEMS – Gina Antonia

on November 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

MEE MA

By the time my father is eighteen,
my grandmother had been psychiatrically committed five times.
My grandfather would pack her in the car –
the bags under her eyes heavier than those in the backseat.
She never learned how to drive herself, you know –
the bridges would have been too tempting.
Sometimes, she didn’t know whether the voices telling her
she was worthless were coming from her heart or her husband –
we were told you sacrifice one for the other. We were told –
Italians are passionate people, you know –
Someone screaming at you is the ultimate form of flattery.

We were told –
The best mothers are selfless.
The best mothers deny themselves.
The best mothers make sure the fridge is stocked before
they lie down for three days. My grandmother underwent
shock treatment, over and over again,
to try to steady her stomach to return to a home
where she was expected to fill everyone else’s –
despite herself running on empty since she was a teenager.
At the end of her life in the hospital,
the doctors stopped giving her the benzodiazepines
that had allowed her to leave the house for the last 60 years.

She screamed at the top of her lungs: “please just let me die.”
What we didn’t realize was she had been screaming that for 60 years.

We couldn’t save her from the trappings, from the bounds,
of the kind of generational suffering that we thought
would go away once she arrived on the boat.
It didn’t.
The only thing we could do for her was allow her the ecstasy
of a temporary loss of consciousness through repeated shocks
to her brain. While she had to beg and grovel to access that ecstasy,
I honored her memory
by losing consciousness every few days.
I lapped up opiates, drank until my body revolted,
slept with strangers who sent shock waves through my psyche,
ate all the things she never allowed for herself
before ripping open my esophagus to dispose of the pleasure –
you know, the kind that makes my bloodline recoil.
As I laid in a facility at 20 years old,
itching, itching, itching at the imaginary bugs crawling all over me
in the midst of withdrawal –
withdrawal from temporary loss of consciousness –
I screamed at the top of my lungs: “please just let me die.”
Mee Ma -I tried to break the cycle, I really did,

but the bridges nearly got me, too.

NOT ALL MEN

You see – you wouldn’t need to protect me
if you weren’t all trying to kill me.
To the man who boldly exclaimed that rape
statistics were exaggerated and women lied –
we all lie – before gently and tearfully pulling
me aside to talk about his own PTSD –
I’m so sorry you’ve been failed
by the same system I have. I’m so sorry your tears
haven’t been captured in the statistics –
But I can’t be expected to hold you up, to comfort you,
to affirm you, when you’ve pinned me
to the ground while your friends trampled me.
Toxic masculinity is a form of victimhood, I imagine –
But you said you don’t believe victims.
The most insidious thing is you know
you don’t have to kill me to make me dead.

Gina Antonia is a poet, performer, and social worker currently based in Seattle, WA after having lived and accumulated stories in Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. She has previously been published with Read or Green Books, and performed with Inspired Word NYC, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the Barbed Wire Open Mic Series. Her writing largely focuses on trauma, identity, liberation, and shame.
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SEND NUDES by Peggy Robles-Alvarado

on August 12 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Peggy Robles-Alvarado is a tenured New York City educator and award winning poet who inspires triumph and embodies strength. She is a 2021 Jerome Hill Foundation Fellow in Literature, a two time Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2020 Atticus Review Poetry Contest winner. She is also a BRIO award winner with fellowships from CantoMundo,Desert Nights Rising Stars, The Frost Place, VONA, Academy for Teachers and The Home School. Peggy is a three time International Latino Book Award winner who authored Conversations With My Skin (2011), and Homage To The Warrior Women (2012). Continue Reading
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A Coming of Age Movie that Does Not Toil in Darkness OR In This Movie No One Suffers (after Danez Smith) – Andy Markert

on August 11 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Opening scene.

We meet a boy at the grave of a friend
after one too many funerals.
His stubble is sparse,
because 18-year-old facial hair
hasn’t turned to the daggers of a man.
And he remembers,
with other mourners gathered
how the obituaries always call us artists
To be polite about how tortured we are.

As if art is the only polite way to excuse
The trouble we caused.

Cut to –

We are all alive again and screaming lyrics to a song
proclaiming how no one likes us when we are 23
even though none of us are.
Faces beaming
out by a bonfire
and we are young again
in our black v necks
and black jeans
and none of us
Have thought of death.

As a fire roars in front of us.

We pretend we are whole and
Home
In a family that we’ve chosen.

Fade to

A warm spring day
and we each hug one another
all of us alive
and joyful.

Because surrender is easy
when you don’t know what the war is like.

We didn’t know that every moment of suffering
Was just the basic training to a longer battle.

That seems so far away.

And today no addict died.
because today no addict died.
because yesterday no addict died.

And we are all free in ways we
have never felt before.
The sirens are far away.

Because this movie was never about the death,
but the life in this moment

Because each day we see each other again
and for this moment we are breathless in
the possibility
of all the things we can become
have become
have survived.

God lives on the lips of everyone
and He tells you

For the first time –

You are forgiven.

And if no one else
will have you

We will.

Roll credits.

Opening scene.

Andy Markert is an internationally trained poet and performer living in Seattle, Washington. He can be found regularly at the Nuyorican Poets Café, Rain City Slam, and other slam poetry venues. For information on bookings, please contact him on IG at @andymeerkatt.
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JUNE IN FEB – Daniel Metz

on July 16 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I took all the shortcuts—fire
exit, hidden stairs, first car closest
to the escalator—and minutes later there
you were under the chocolate lamp at my
place, practicing French, irregular
verbs, ankles crossed at the
hiking boots. You put down your
book and tilted your head.
In the morning we put our heads together.
The apricots squished. The tears collected.
Then your cellphone hummed and the doorbell
bumbled. The super interrupted with his
mulched mood. So we got the hell out, to
the Greenway Terrace median strip where
everyone in this grow zone crowds into the F and
transfers at Jamaica. Let’s water the lettuce.
Let’s French at a crosswalk. Let’s thwack at each
other’s penises, cattails in a swamp, steeplechase,
gift giver, gift regiver, copycat, flatleaver, fat lover,
sugar shaker, Shangri-la.

Daniel Metz poetry has been published in Best New Poets 2012, American Poetry Review, Salamander, upstreet, Imitation Fruit, Talking Writing, Audio Zine, Temenos, Assisi, Mudfish, CCAR Journal, Verse Wisconsin and other journals. He is a retired technical writer and teacher, and has a BA in English from Columbia and lives in Manhattan. His book of poems It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You will be published in February 2025.

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A Poem for Those Days When You Think It Better if You Were Anything Else But Human by – Luis Pabon

on July 8 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

On our worse days

We think being human is trash

But sometimes the grass wants to be flesh

Is not greener on the other side of the fence

And the heavens want a human experience

Unhappy with being simple spirits

And the constellations aren’t happy with its planets

And yet the earth still spins on its tiny axis

And we find gratitude for the little things

Like kindness and its sister forgiveness

Knowing that even when such siblings fight,

Tomorrow we will be alright

And not compare our size & our sides & our strides

With any other form of life

Because we are all just doing our best

Trying to keep alive

Living moment to moment

One breath at a time.

Luis Pabon is a poet/social worker born and raised in Bronx, NY. Luis has self-published 7 full collections of poetry most recently Earth’s Bad Mouth (Kindle Direct Publishing, 2021). He has secured Honorable Mention for the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize and his work has been published in Up the River Journal as well as Pine Hills Review. Luis currently resides in Albany, NY where he works with individuals living with severe and persistent mental health concerns.
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TWO POEMS by Sharon Mesmer

on June 27 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

HOME / MEMORY / HOME

— for the women of Ukraine

            I called my home “Memory” because before I was born ancestral voices instructed me to lay down my wings, go to sleep in the sea, and rise in the land of my mother.

            Strong underground waters brought me to her. My first step became an anchor.

            Her people were barbarians of distant origin, moved by pursuit through hostile lands. Centuries ago they raised a singing stone against the sky so that hundreds of years later it might beckon them back across the breath-bridge they called “Memory.”

            My mother said I bore the mark of a mysterious incandescence, which meant someday I would gather our people to heaven. She told heaven and home were the same, so I called my heaven “Memory.”

            And when our destroyer appeared, we swept our tears through the gutters to clean the smell of their metals from our streets. It was a sacrament to listen to the rushing flood in the cold muddy dusk. The flood moved our souls smoothly between the billboards and the lakes, the dead and the living. We called the flood “Memory.”

            Like a blood influxion, positioned between my shoulder blades and lungs, it spread through my skin and under my oxygen. My veins became inroads, my lungs telephones, my aorta a radio. More whirlwind than water, it carried me. And what I didn’t know, Memory knew, and where I flowed, Memory had always been.

            The stone my ancestors raised called out through my skin, and across the breath-bridge, and into every kitchen.

            The wings I’d laid down appeared on the shoulders of those who rose above the flood, above encroaching death. Their forms shone bright against the sky, ringed with light.

            I watched from the ground. Ancestral spirits had changed my flood-feet to Earth-feet, for their own reasons.

            When the flood receded all was quiet. Not a soul remained, except for me.

            I am alone. But I know memory will bring me home.

            And so I call my memory “Home.”

Includes phrases from Max Jacob, translator Michael Benedikt; Atilla Joszef and Gyula Illyes, translator John Bakti; Mutsuo Takahashi, translator Hiroaki Sato — From The Prose Poem, An International Anthology, edited by Michael Benedikt, Dell Books, 1976

NEXT LET US PRAISE ILLUSTRIOUS MEN

—after Rose Castellanos, Mexico, 1925-1974

Next let us praise illustrious men,
ancestors of many generations.
Let us visit their gallery on National Picnic Sunday —
see how their statues stare past us,
mysterious as ancient carved stones?

Here is the head of a long-dead governor,
funny little Boswell around the jowls.
Masses of families on long-awaited holiday
squint at his inscription:

            “They brought us parrots, armfuls of fruit . . .
            they willingly traded everything they owned . . .
            taking fifty of them captive I made slaves of the entire island . . .
            in an hour I possessed three hundred men and their families.”

Let us walk past the open-mouthed crowd
And observe what happens when I say,
“Did you know his name means
‘rank old mutton wearing a snail mitten’?”

See how the upstanding grandfathers shake their fists?

Let us continue to praise illustrious men
whose children’s children stand safe today
in the shelter of their accomplishments.

Next is the famous sixteenth century civil servant,
his serene eyes ever heavenward.
See his fashionable pencil mustache?
See the young mother dipping her fingers
into the chiseled letters of his most famous utterance?

            “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity capture as many of these natives
            as can be sold.”

I whisper in her ear:
“It is by following a trail of cheap perfume
that one discovers fresh air.”

See how she looks at me in horror?
She how she looks for a policeman?

Next let us praise the men who own death,

the men who took death from others
and wore it for a crown.
For instance, this famous sailor,
frowning like a sad basset hound in repose.
A wide-eyed child reads his legend aloud:

            “Our work was to exasperate and ravage, mangle, destroy and kill.
            We cut off slices of their bodies to test the sharpness of our swords.”

I tap the child on the shoulder:
“Did you know the natives fed poison to their babies
— to save them? In two years, half the Indians were dead.
In two hundred years,
all were gone.”

His mother spirits him away,
while I smile gently —
I know the blows that truth delivers.

Here, finally, is the still-living jolly philosopher man,
who once opined If not dominion then what?
I once wondered “If not poetry then what?”
I was not so old when he stole the words of my youth
from my mouth and gifted them to his wife,
who then grew an extra set of legs
so she could wear ever more
beautiful shoes.

This whole rotund multitude —
like cheap collectibles in a curio.
Yet I do not want to harm them,
send their bloated corpses floating
to the bottom of a lake.
Right now, outside my kitchen window,
in a crevice between missing bricks,
the wing of a dead fledgling sparrow
is becoming a fan of bones.

So let us praise illustrious men,
their faces inscrutable
as ancient carved stones —
the stones beneath which they buried
our mothers alive.

Sharon Mesmer’s most recent poetry collection, Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books), was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy Magazine. Other poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Half Angel/Half Lunch and Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). She has published the fiction collections The Empty Quarter and In Ordinary Time, from Hanging Loose Press, and Ma Vie à Yonago from Hachette in French translation. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Commonweal, and The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School
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THE COLONY OF ART by David Galef

on April 8 | in Fiction | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

To get to the Howard Oberholter Artist Colony, I took a train to Plunketteville, then a bus to Upper Yarn. I hiked the last mile up a dirt road, humping a knapsack that contained a change of clothing, a battered laptop, and a sheaf of notes beyond dog-eared. I didn’t have money to spare for a cab. I’d been working on my first novel for five years and had quit my job at the Mayfly Diner to finish it. I was insanely grateful for this residency and ready to make the most of my stay.

The address was 310 Mountain Lane, but I almost passed it. #310 was a shack listing to the left, with weathered pine boards and two front windows of unequal size, like a squinting face. A caretaker’s shed, I assumed, and knocked on the door.

A left-leaning old woman in a quilted beige housecoat answered. She had a wandering eye and looked me up and down and up again.

“I’m Arthur Bunt, staying at the colony,” I informed her. I fumbled in my coat for the letter I’d received, pecked out on a typewriter with a faulty i key. I’d carried it everywhere for the past two weeks and fingered it like a talisman. In the left hand margin was a red-eye gravy stain from my last day at the diner.

Her attitude reversed at once. “Oh, a resident! Come in. I’m Louisa Oberholter, the colony director.” She stumped into what she called the anteroom, which led into “the parlor,” an area sectioned off by a folding screen that angled to the left. By the far wall was a jagged hole in the floor where someone had put a foot through the rotten board, which she carefully stepped around. “You’re a bit early. We’re ready at four o’clock.”

“Sorry, but I didn’t know how to contact you. Where should I leave my stuff?”

“Just bring it into the bedroom.” She gestured toward another screened-off quarter.

The bedroom was a rickety cot next to a cardboard box marked “Linens.” A threadbare blanket stretched to the edges of the cot, a duet of damp socks dangling over the rail. A tan knapsack leaned against the far wall, stained underwear spilling out of the front pocket.

I cleared my throat. “About the colony….”

“Howard was my husband, a postal worker. He never had the chance to write, just oversaw everyone else’s letters. He passed away behind the counter. I opened this artist colony in his name.”

I’d seen the ad in The Writer and applied. One of the attractions was the absence of any application fee. Just then I heard the noise of machinery starting up in back, like a giant clearing his throat. “What’s that?”

She gestured toward a tiny window looking out back, where a medium sized crane had started to chug, a wrecking ball hanging motionless like a ponderous exclamation point. “The Upper Yarn town council says the building’s unsafe, and they want to tear it down, but all they’ve done so far is put that machine there.”

I gestured toward the cot. “Is that where I’m supposed to sleep?”

“The colony supports two artists per month. The accommodations include room and board. You’ll have to share with Sam Lowell. He’s a poet, and he’s using the studio. His shift ends at four.” She checked her watch. “Right now. Sam!”

From behind the last screen emerged a huge man in faded jeans and an Emily Dickinson T-shirt. Mrs. Oberholter performed an introduction, and we shook hands. He was ink-stained and damp, though I saw no pen and paper anywhere. Behind him extended the studio, a four-foot alcove with a table lit by a humming fluorescent bulb. A rusted beach chair kept the table company. In front of me, Sam began to bed down for a nap. The cot squealed but held—for now.

“Sam has the towel. The shower and toilet are out back. Howard mistrusted indoor plumbing.”

Recumbent, Sam farted softly in a series of pffts. I nodded at Mrs. Oberholter while fanning the air.

“I’m no cook, but that cupboard has sardine tins. Saltines, too.”

Since she seemed to want me to look over everything, I opened the cabinet and took out a tin with a faded label. The expiration date was ten years ago. I didn’t see any Saltines but took her word for that.

Next came the studio itself. When I entered it, the orange colony cat emerged from the shadow under the table and drew blood when I tried to pet him.

“That’s Howie. He can be nasty if you approach him wrong. I think of him as the ghost of Howard. Your shift ends in twelve hours, unless you work out another arrangement with Sam.” She withdrew as Sam started to snore with a hint of a whistle.

I took a closer look at my workspace. The one concession to decoration, an embroidered sampler hanging in the alcove, read “TYME TO WRYTE.” I placed a hand on the plain deal table, which teetered to the left. When I tried to stabilize it, a splinter ran into my thumb. Cursing softly, so as not to wake Sam, I sat down in the low-slung beach chair, which aligned my head with the tabletop. The floorboards creaked ominously.

I thought about art. My novel wasn’t getting any younger. I looked at the cat, who glared back at me but sheathed his claws. Sam’s snoring wasn’t all that loud. The crane seemed to be edging away from the house.

Just then, the wrecking ball began to swing, slowly at first.

I hauled out my laptop, set it up on the table, and began to type as fast as I could.

David Galef has published extremely short fiction in the collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize), extremely long fiction in the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (Kirkus Best Books of 2006), and a lot in between. His latest is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. Day job: professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University. He’s also the editor in chief at Vestal Review.
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HEARTACHE by Marlene Olin

on April 6 | in Fiction | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I’m flat on my back when he takes out the gel. A gob falls on the floor.

This won’t hurt, he says. Fisting my hands, I stare at the wall, the basin, a neatly framed poster of a cat. Then his hand grazes my breast.

“Don’t be nervous,” he says. “I’ve done this many times before.”

My pulse starts, stops, gallops. Then I remember to take some deep breaths. I try to think of good times, times to savor, times to tuck into my pocket on a rainy day. An unexpected vase of flowers. Earrings for my birthday. A weekend at the spa. But then that final message punctures my thoughts. It’s over, read the words. Don’t keep asking why.

The room is small and getting smaller. Each sound is amplified.”We’re almost finished,” he says. Then he turns me on my side.

If only there were a pill, a transfusion, a magical procedure to mend hearts and heal pain!

One last click on the computer and he’s through. “You did great,” he says. A drawer opens and closes. A light in the ceiling blinks on and blinks off. He’s hovering now, leaning in his crisp white coat, brushing his sleeve against my neck. Then he unpeels the stickers from my chest and gently disconnects the wires. The screen is blank, the machine quiet. All at once I’m uncoupled, as untethered as an astronaut floating into space.

“The test looks fine. Your valves are clear, and the blood flow is normal.”

But something feels broken just the same.

Marlene Olin’s short stories and essays have been published in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Catapult, PANK, Narrative Northeast and the Baltimore Review. She is the recipient of both the 2015 Rick Demarinis Fiction Award and the 2018 So to Speak Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and for inclusion in Best American Short Stories.
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