2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee
2020 Best of the Net Nominee

I met my friend at the Tate Modern.
He had a school assignment.
He was supposed to go to the Rothko Room
and write about whatever feelings
he experienced there.

“Let’s look at the other stuff first,” I said.
I showed him Max Ernst’s “Forest and Dove.”
I couldn’t help but launch into a monologue
about the significance of birds in Max Ernst’s work.

Then, I said, “Wait, she’s here, too,”
and showed my friend something by Dorothea Tanning.
She was Max Ernst’s wife,
who lived to be a centenarian.
In one of her last interviews
she said that she missed him.

“And you just have to see the Paul Delvaux,”
I told my friend.
Delvaux always painted the same woman –
someone he’d loved in his youth
and couldn’t forget –
a scar upon the memory,
the one that never was.

However, since it turned out
that the Delvaux was out on loan
to another gallery,
we made our way to the Rothko Room.

It was dark.

The large canvases had titles like
“Black on Maroon”
or “Red on Maroon”
and that was exactly what they looked like.
I knew I was missing something.
I stared, hoping it would come to me.
I tried to eavesdrop on the teacher
who was there with his students.
“So, how do you feel?” I asked my friend.
He shook his head and answered,
“I don’t like this.”
I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

It turns out I’m quite okay
with not getting Rothko.

 

 

 

Anca Rotar lives in Bucharest, Romania, and writes poetry and stories. Her work has been published in several online magazines. You can find her on Instagram at @ancarotar5

I knew the dying was coming—
knew her heart struck twelve
because I couldn’t sleep,

could only gaze out at the hallway,
past my door as it creaked
on its hinges, the wind outside

the open window running
its hands over everything in sight.
If I closed my eyes, I could pretend

it was my grandmother, running
her fingers through my hair.
I knew my father would call soon,

stranded at the hospital with her,
not wanting me
or my brother to see death so young.

I knew the lawyer would stop by,
present us with her
will. I didn’t know she’d leave

my brother her rocking chair,
and me: my favorite breakfast—
her recipe for buttered biscuits.

Didn’t know my father’s face
could glisten with tears or how hard
I’d sob, or how my mother’s palm

would smooth back my hair
me as we watched the coffin descend
into the ground, my grandmother

making her way into eternal life,
as the priest promised.
I wish I believed in eternal life.

It’s too much work to try
to imagine a realm without darkness,
no croaking

toads, nothing with claws.
It’s too hard to believe in her
cheering for me up above.

But how tempting it is to have faith
in her floating like pollen above us,
the clouds blurring her angles,

her body all tangled up with God’s.

 

first published in Prairie Schooner

 

Despy Boutris is published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Palette Poetry, Third Coast, Raleigh Review, Diode, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.

Some are pushing up daisies.
Others are stiff
due to ideology or intention.
This march has no music.
The band is over.
One is guarded
to get-together another one.
If you wish others
to walk on air for you
they need to be subsumed
by pecuniary inflows or douceurs.
Self-actualization bids
offer goose eggs to others.
On this path: seclusiveness is sky-written.

 

 

Sanjeev Sethi is published in over 30 countries. He has more than 1250 poems printed or posted in literary venues. He is winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux organized by the Hedgehog Poetry Press. His poem, “A Factory of Feelings“ was voted “Poem of Month – March 2020” at Ink Sweat and Tears. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Having nothing better to do, I kill
Time by looking at a traditional
Chinese painting on my iPad
Much enlarged, it appears like
A plain sheet of rice paper
Smeared with ink. I view it
In the presence of bonsai; I
Drop several thick strokes to the floor
Of history, leaving a few fine lines
Behind the sofa, & failing
To catch a colorless corner
Between black and white
It is a landscape newly relocated
Into my heart’s backyard. Then I sit
On my legs, meditating about
No light in the picture, no
          Shadow of anything, no perspective
As in hell. Isn’t this the art of seeing?

 

 

Yuan Changming perches on Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Credits include Pushcart nominations, chapbooks, and publications in about 1700 literary outlets across 45 countries.

Early, the chosen one
Invested in superiority.
But life demurred
Measurables fell short.
No real enemy
The competition gracious.
Yet wanting, believing
Some throne to be his.
Suffering alone
Confessing to no one
Least of all self.
Thinking he conceals
Yet hurting the other
In unrealized ways.
Smiling outwardly
But inwardly, both
Prisoner and warden.

 

 

Russel G. Winick began writing poetry at nearly age 65, after concluding a long legal career. His poems have appeared or been selected for publication by The Society of Classical Poets, Blue Unicorn, and Lighten Up Online.

Every girl I loved
in high school or
at least every one
I dreamed about
ended up with
a boyfriend
from another school,
and I hated them
for that because all
the chances I never
had anyway died again,
like running over
a dead animal on
your way home.
I know now they
were instinctively
driven to perpetuate,
to seek out their
best prospects,
the shiny athletes or
intellectual student
body presidents so
their own babies would
defend the genome,
you know, date boys
from other schools.
I know now it was
just natural selection
because all of us wished
we carried that favored
gene too.

 

 

 

Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Kimera, Spindrift, Rain, Slightly West, Timberline Review, COG, Common Ground Review, Typehouse,  Bangalore Review, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995. He also has a book on the poetry of Langston Hughes, The Black and Blue Collar Blues (VDM, 2008). Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College.

The far West of Wales, 1965

Rhys and John were Victorians, after all,
born 1892 and ’4,
so in Arnold’s café, in the mornings
(Arnold had laid the papers in),
they’d read of London and the 60s
with mounting shock. The Sun, The Mail, Express.
Permissive horrors showered on their heads.

Then came the girl and boy, in London now.
She was young Mamie’s niece, the girl,
on a history course in King’s.
(And Rhys and John would read of miniskirts,
the King’s Road, Chelsea, Rolling Stones.
Their wives damned blisters off the miniskirts
and all who strutted in them. Hmmm.)

And the boy, a nephew of Butler the coal,
and he was at that Economics place.
Demos, riots, Chairman Mao.
But they started coming to Arnold’s often,
and reading The Guardian, on holiday mornings,
talking to Rhys and John across the room.
(telling them of trad jazz and espresso bars,
of Marx and the ancient Greeks.)

He was a nice lad and, what with that,
and the lovely girl she was,
Rhys and John were radicalized,
late in quotidian lives.

 

 

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, living a little way down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. He has published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020 with “Cultivation” (Sparks of Calliope, 2019).

on those athletic blocks
keenly balanced
expectantly alert
she knew
her training would propel her
down that track
the moment
the starter’s pistol fired
but she also knew
there was a choice
a contested decision
regarding those left behind
and
the obligation
and insistence

others must follow

 

 

Geoffrey Aitken is regarded as an emerging poet in his home state of South Australia and is gaining increasing momentum with publishers like Underground Writers: Issue 27 & 28 (AUS), Glass Journal: Poets Resist (US), Flashes of Brilliance (US x 2), Aesthetica (UK) and Pomme Journal (Fr). He writes pithy poetry (after years of poor mentals) and is concerned about our youth and the problem of mental health along the avenues. He does not dwell. He is older and reads at open mic events in his outer suburbs when timely.