Category: Poetry

“My Mind is Changing Me” by W. Roger Carlisle

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Everyday now I make a list of names
I can’t remember; I believe rehearsing these
words will save my memory. I place notes inside
cupboard doors to remind me of basic tasks.
I fear having a social microscope focused on me.

My memory has no home but right here, right now.
It has always been my help-mate ready to fill
every pause, every moment of panic with some
pithy saying or the name of some ancient philosopher.

Now, it has gotten lost; it is wandering somewhere
in the backyard weeds with the melting clocks,
a lost piece in a giant puzzle.
I still have old memories but that quick retort
has become unreliable. Like King Lear,
I must throw myself on the mercy of the gods.

When I tell all of this to my children they ignore me;
old people always do this they say; “they
talk about things you can’t see to cover up
their memory losses.”

Now, I am standing alone in a room full of angry people;
the faces are very familiar but I don’t recognize
anyone; I think I am in a dream but I may be confused about that.

I see strained confusion on the face of my friends
as I answer their questions with a blank look.
I have developed many strategies to cope with this
social disgrace. I often cough or rub my head like
I’ve got a headache; sometimes, I just stop and adjust
my hearing aids.

Somehow I will go on. I’ll use disdainful looks to
change the conversation into something I can remember.
I’ll dress in an old trench coat and mimic Columbo.
I’ll feign condescending wisdom as I rub my chin.
There is nothing worse than a puzzle missing a part.




W. Roger Carlisle is a 75-year-old, semi-retired physician. He currently volunteers and works in a free medical clinic for patients living in poverty. He is on a journey of returning home to better understand himself through poetry. He hopes he is becoming more humble in the process.

“Viola” by Henry Stimpson

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

1.

“I put my checkbook right there,”
Mom wails. “Am I losing my mind?”
Old bills, notes on scraps and snapshots
breed on the dining-room table,
but no checkbook surfaces.

Mutely, she shuttles from the bedroom
to the living room, piling on the sofa
her hats, sweaters and thin lilac gloves
that were stylish decades ago.

2.

When the movers come,
Mom shrieks at Dad, “It’s all your fault!”
Stripped bare, the dusty rooms
of their little red house echo.

“Let’s go to my house,” I say.
In the passenger seat, she nods out
clutching $36 in her left hand,
a smile on her creased lips.
She thinks she’s moving in with me.

3.

“I could have had a wonderful job
at the bank,” Mom whimpers
when I drive her to their new place.
But she was afraid to leave Linda
and me alone with Dad,
just back from the mental hospital.

4.

The first night in their seniors apartment,
she locks herself out, shrieking
in the hallway in her nightgown.

They send her to the same hospital
Dad went to forty years ago.

5.

In the nursing home,
Mom is lost in a Sunday paper flyer
that’s as gaudy as a macaw.
“That’s not bad!” she says,
pointing to a sneaker on sale.
I plop down, unnoticed.

Her plump pal Mrs. Quinn eyes
the peanut butter crackers
I bought for scrawny Mom.
I crack open the cellophane
and we three have a party.
The crackers are delicious,
bright orange and salty.

She meanders in her slipper-tiny feet
as I walk her slowly down the corridor.
“I love you,” she says with a gappy grin
(they’ve taken away her bridge)
and my heart leaps.

6.

After another bladder infection,
she’s back in the hospital,
not eating or drinking much.
An intravenous line snakes to her hand.
She sits up and stares wide-eyed
at the brown blotches mottling her legs
as if they were a strange map.
“Can’t I get a cup of coffee in here?”
she asks no one in particular.

7.

I put a plastic spoon brimming
with coffee milkshake to her mouth.
Her lips purse tight.
I hand her the spoon.
She plunges the handle in.
I grab it and her mouth pops open
like a baby bird’s
and I shovel the gelid liquid in.
“That’s my son!” Mom tells the nurse,
who purrs, “He’s a nice boy.”
My boyish spirits soar.
I’ll save her life with thickshakes!
She’ll go back to the nursing home,
where I’ll love her again like a baby.

But eating’s too much bother.
She needs a feeding tube to survive.
Linda and I say no. Dad goes along.
They disconnect the IV.

8.

Mom fights for air, fast wheezing breaths,
wrenched-open mouth, dead stale smell,
one eye shut, the other open, glazed as a marble.
She flinches when I kiss her near her shrunken ear.
“You’ve been a great mother,” I say.
“Been” feels like a betrayal.

9.

In a pinkish casket
Mom lies with roses,
looking oddly determined,
almost the mother I knew.
Dad kneels there, crying.
“She’s in heaven now,”
the Catholic priest says.

10.

One of ten fed by the coins
her Italian papa gleaned in his barbershop,
Viola Iervolino married a Yankee
and learned how to crack a lobster.
Viola Elizabeth Stimpson reads
the granite headstone on the family grave.

In this faded color snapshot,
a pretty young woman in shorts
joyously hoists a striped bass
her husband caught. Months later
his seed and her egg will fuse
and time will begin.




Henry Stimpson has been a public relations consultant and writer for decades. His poems, articles, and essays have appeared in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Lighten Up Online, Rolling Stone, Muddy River Poetry Review, Mad River Review, Aethlon, The MacGuffin, The Aurorean, Common Ground Review, Vol1Brooklyn, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe and other publications. Once upon a time, he was a reference librarian, a prison librarian, and a cab driver. He lives in Massachusetts.

Two Poems by Mike Hall

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

A Fork in the Road

Forks in the road come and go,
choices made on which path to take,
life decisions impacted by the choosing.

The pain from insults . . . from unwarranted blame,
heaped upon a fragile spirit,
leads to such a fork . . . but which path to take?

One leads to resentment – a slow burn building into rage –
the flames of wrath – all consuming –
     burns the “f” from fire,
     melts the “d” from danger,
leaving what is left to fuel the coming fury,
cutting a wide swath – out of control –
destruction left in its wake.

One leads to despondency – the avenue to depression –
turning everything inward, creating a shell of isolation,
     interjecting “self-” with doubt,
     rejecting hope by attaching “-less”,
the path spiraling down into unknown depths,
an abyss of no return.

But what of another path as yet unseen,
a path that needs to be cut so others can follow,
a difficult path, blazed with hard work,
a path where the pain is turned into purpose,
overcoming the inner-demons of uncertainty,
inspiring a future full of confirming assurance.

Pause at the fork and consider.
Contemplate . . . Envision . . . Choose.


The Good Side of Odd

They always seem odd, or out of place, like they are
     a five-string guitar,
     a few bricks shy a load,
     a dog that won’t hunt,
     an elevator not going all the way to the top,
     a few cards short of a deck,
     half a bubble off-center,
     stuck in reverse.
A smile lights up their face, an unkind word never uttered –
     their glass is always half-full;
     they search for the silver lining in the darkest of clouds;
     a perpetual spring is in each of their steps;
     failure is not an option (they just found another way that does not work);
     they believe the light at the end of the tunnel is just ahead;
     if one door closes, there must be one open somewhere;
     when lemons appear, they know lemonade is near.
See what I mean . . . odd.




Mike Hall is the author of two collections of poetry, Autumn’s Back Porch and Thinking Out Loud. His work is a call for us all to think of our place in this world and how we can be kinder and more respectful to each other. He and his wife, Cynthia, live in the Dallas, Texas, area.

Two Poems by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Dear Man Who Mugged My Grandmother

a severed sonnet

Her age 78
but she would have told you 75
and gotten away with it, such smooth skin.

You didn’t ask,
grabbed first and shoved her to the concrete,
got away with her Social Security check.

There are 14 bones in the human face.
You broke 6 of them stomping your feet
on her head.

You didn’t ask but their names are
Mandible, Mandible, Maxilla, Maxilla, Vomer,
Zygomatic bone.

I want to know your name as I know your
considerable desperation. Hers was Sarah.

(she used to sing to me)


Forgetting Needs No Forgiveness

When everyone who knows me is gone,
I will be well and truly gone, but for a few
short years after my body’s passing, I’ll be

a stranger’s familiar face on the crowded train
platform, wide forehead and button nose,

my beloved black current cologne wafting in
on storm currents brewing from the east,

the idiosyncratic way a cashier twirls locks of hair
around pointer finger, forward, then back again,

a neighbor girl’s identically off-key rendition
of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” and that wee

tiny itch behind my husband’s ear, he scratches
slowly, forgetting what it was he wanted to recall,
will also be me, but he won’t ever know it.




Lana Hechtman Ayers leads generative writing workshops in the Amherst method, helps poets assemble their own collections, facilitates a Zoom Poetry Book Club, and manages three poetry presses: Concrete Wolf, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. Architect of the “severed sonnet” form, her poems appear in such places as Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, The MacGuffin, and Verse Daily. Author of eight full-length poetry collections, the most recent are: When All Else Fails (May 2023) and Overtures (September 2023). The Autobiography of Rain is forthcoming from Fernwood Press, September 2024. She’s also published Time Flash: Another Me, a romantic time travel novel. A sequel is in the works.

Two Poems by Sue Fliess

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Empty Nest

It isn’t
the very quiet house,
the pause from the hustle
or the lack of last minute paperwork
that get you.
No,
It’s opening the dishwasher and seeing
two plates
two mugs
two spoons
but having to run it anyway
and the missed quick peck
on a cheek
as they leave the house
that get you.

It isn’t the looking down the hallway
at unoccupied rooms
that don’t require tidying
or the not having to nag about homework
that get you.
No,
It’s the laundry that no longer piles up,
the not being the first to ask How did you sleep? How was your day?,
the not noticing we’re out of bread
because there are no more lunches to pack
that get you.

It isn’t the freedom
to now come and go as we wish
or the trash that never seems to accumulate
or the pantry that’s always too full
that get you.
No,
It’s the “table for two, please”
because we are suddenly only half.
It’s the need to fill this newfound time
in an attempt to make our hearts whole
again
so that we’re not always thinking about
how it really is
the very quiet house.


Phones of the Wind

In a garden, by the sea,
through the woods, upon a tree,
on a snowy mountain peak,
there’s a comfort many seek.

Mourners come, both young and old,
traveling through heat and cold,
to use a very special phone
that helps them all feel less alone.

“Phones of the Wind” became a way
to grieve, to talk, to hope, to pray,
to share the details of the day,
to say the things they didn’t say…

“I’ll see you soon.”
“Our love was true.”
“Forgive me, Mom.”
“We’ve all missed you.”
“She’s so grown up. Wish you could see.”
“I think that you’d be proud of me.”

…to send their love, to mend, to heal,
to tell them how they really feel,
to share a dream, or just to cry;
A chance to say a last goodbye,

to hold them close, although they’re gone,
to give them courage to go on,
to keep the bond, renew their strength,
for love will go to any length.

There is no ring, no dial tone.
It’s just a disconnected phone.
A bittersweet long-distance guide;
a bridge to reach the other side.

Beneath the sun and stars and moon
they reach the ones they lost too soon.
Love that has nowhere to go
is sent along the line, and so,

Whispers in the wind will find
a solace for those left behind.
Bringing peace to all who try,
a link to lives beyond the sky.




Sue Fliess is the author of over 50 published children’s books and has had essays published in O the Oprah Magazine, Huffington Post, Writer’s Digest, and more. Her books have been selected by the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, received industry awards and starred reviews, been named to notable lists and published in multiple languages. Learn more at www.suefliess.com.

Two Poems by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

This is for My Grandmother

This is for my grandmother, Carolyn Colby.
“Terminal cancer,” the doctor said. His eyes filled with tears.
“I’ll get you the best hospice care in Boston.” He put his arm around her.
My grandmother’s eyes were cloudy but dry.
She said, “I’m 84, I’ve had a good life, so I don’t want to die.
I want experimental treatment.”
“That would ruin the months you’ve got left,” the doctor said.
My grandmother said, “I’ll risk it,” and she did
And had a fatal stroke
On her ninety-third birthday.

“This is for My Grandmother” first appeared in The Providence Journal.


Opening Lines

“There is no Frigate like a Book”
Will make you take another look.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Has surely done its author proud.
“Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind”
Secures a place within my mind.
The moral is: Do not despair;
A great first line is hardly rare.

“Opening Lines” first appeared as a letter in The New York Times Book Review in response to Elisa Gabbert, who said, “Truly great first lines are rare.”




Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 280 poems published in a wide range of places, including twenty-two in past issues of Sparks of Calliope.

Two Poems by L. Lois

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Summer at the Bay

Dad built the fire
on the beach
while we took our pails
out on the salty flats
searching for sand dollars

we stomped close
to quarter inch holes in packed sand
one foot on each side
watching water shoot up
from the panic deep below

the sun set and we lounged
in miles of tidal pools
heated by washboard rippled ridges
four inches
of hot tubbing bliss

running out further to the waves
rinsing off the crusty scratching
a shock of cold
from the incoming tide at dusk
back to our towels

wrapped around shoulders
hunched on the bleached logs
pushed to land by last winter’s storms
hands stretched towards
the flame

marshmallows roasted
on the end of straightened
coat hangers
perfectly rotated brown for mom
or spectacular balls of fire

peeling away one layer to roast again
a single marshmallow went
three rounds
slipped off skins of charred sweetness
before walking up the hill to bed


I’m Taking a Poll

would you like my poetry
more, or less

if you knew I sometimes
write naked?




L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies, nor time. Her essays have appeared in the Globe and Mail, her recent poetry In Parentheses and Woodland Pattern.

Two Poems by Deborah-Zenha Adams

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The Sacrilege of a Tilted Axis

We wear heat like a rough hair shirt to prove
our faith, swelter inside a zealot’s skin,
each breath a battle against steamy air.
Our days are sanctified by fiery purge.
This is our one true religion. We sing
hymns of praise to mercury, our doctrine
built upon a creed of worn compliance.
Even the innocent seek forgiveness
when summer storms break Heaven with bone-shake
rumble. The passionate prayers we submit
are penitent, exultant, or pleading,
depending upon the thinness of blood.

Conversion always begins in whispers.
Mystics find prophecy in black locust
turning, sycamore samaras spinning,
raining down upon the earth like a plague.
Every truth exhausts itself in time.
Alpha cedes to omega, infidels
turn their gaze to the western horizon
where old gods creep and slide into descent.

“The Sacrilidge of a Tilted Axis” first appeared in Tennessee Voices Anthology 2023-24.


Why I’m Not Appalachian

My people came down from those high mountains
dead set on finding a good enough life
off to the west, a land where horizons
hug the ground and rest easy on the eye,

where men can till fields in straight rows, where wide
flat vistas spread out in all directions,
where night falls so slow it meets morning light.
They brought resources from those high mountains:

backbones strong enough to hold the heavens
up, hands grasping carved-stone rules to live by,
heads wrapped in bread-and-bean expectations,
hearts content to live with good-enough. Life,

they knew, was a rocky slope; you could slide
straight to Hell if you bore fancy notions.
To be safe they pinched their coins and dreams tight,
tamed and leashed. In a land where horizons

bare it all, there’s no place for illusions
to grow, or for superstitious moonshine
to overshadow common sense. Visions
don’t bring the crops in, so they locked their eyes

on the constant earth, not the fickle sky.
Unadorned plains served eight generations,
filled their bellies and kept them satisfied,
but my own hunger craves those high mountains
from which my people came.

“Why I’m not Appalachian” first appeared in Tennessee Voices Anthology 2022-23.




Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry, and served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Roanoke Review, WELL READ Magazine, Dead Mule, Persimmon Tree, and other journals. You’re invited to visit her website: www.Deborah-Adams.com.

Two Poems by Deborah Tobola

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

All In

It’s a way of seeing, a way of being in the world. It’s a leap
into the void, stealing a night from another life,
it’s the hook, the snap of acid, soft clacks of the train,
memory raining its silver stories down. I am the daughter
of the Bohunk side of the family, where the men praise
the Teamsters, curse all pipefitters, pound their fists
on the table, pound their fists until the Berlin Wall comes down
and tanks roll out of Prague. I am the wife who forgot to come home.
I am the mother holding the son who shoots into
van Gogh’s cobalt revolt, the mother who scours the sea
in search of a lost blanket. I am the grandmother who is promised
a pirate ring. I am the daughter with the dropper of morphine,
the cancer patient with the bee tattoo and the blank fortune cookie.
I am the witness in the courthouse who sees the indentation
below the killer’s new crewcut, the woman in the hospice room
with owls, raccoons and fireflies. I am the bride in camouflage;
I ride into the wind, licked by the desert sun’s red tongue,
ride past Eppie’s Blue Spruce Bar, with its bright blue rebar,
ride toward the sea and the sea sighs like history or desire, ride, ride
to my pirate who will kiss the blue bruise that blossoms
beneath his hand—no, I am Alice falling, spinning, down
and down the dark hole of the new world. I am the red road
to Barstow and the widow and the widow’s tears. I am a sea bream.
I am Penelope, wed to beauty. I am a Fury.
I am Circe. I am Marie Curie.
I am a rain of birds. I am Persephone, aflame
with alchemical passion. I am an untamed river of light.
I am burning with the knowing. I am a poet.


Instructions to the Bride in Camouflage

“Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” —Sylvia Plath

You come by horse. You ride into the wind across Rio Arriba, past
Eppie’s Blue Spruce Bar, with its bright blue rebar, and into
the village of Abiquiu. You see little mud houses and bleached
skeletons of automobiles. No white chickens beside a red
wheelbarrow. Not here. You are headed to Georgia’s sacred place
for a writing workshop with women. You want to know if you
should go all in. Your literary ancestors can tell you. But haven’t they
already? Didn’t Emily advise you to tell all the truth but tell it
slant? And didn’t Elizabeth proclaim that the art of losing
isn’t hard to master? Edna reminded you that love is not all
and Alice chided, be nobody’s darling. Normally you avoid
gatherings with people you don’t know. But you are hoping
these women’s poems will unfold like birds of paradise
and sing to you, tell you who you are. You dismount.
As twilight spreads like a deepening lavender bruise, you call
Ghost Ranch. Someone will come to show you the way.

An earlier version of “Instructions to the Bride in Camouflage” appeared in Conspire.




Deborah Tobola has received awards and recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Pushcart Prize, the National Writers Union, the California Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She earned a B.A. in English in 1988 from the University of Montana and an MFA in Creative Writing in 1990 from the University of Arizona. Her memoir, Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison (She Writes Press, 2019) garnered positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as winning awards in creative nonfiction, social justice, and social issues.

Two Poems by Sahand Farivar

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Dreamer

I was sixteen the first time it occurred
to me that things stand open. What I mean
is, ever since I saw that flower gird
itself in purple petals, I have been
convinced that each and every thing I sense
blooms inward. There I was alone beside
the lake but I was also falling in
the petals kind of like when true love rents
you from the world and tips you downward, tied
to those deep eyes in whom you turn and spin.

I didn’t think much of it then; in fact
I thought so little of it that to say
it never crossed my mind. Besides, abstract
ideas always seem to lead astray
our explanations. Still, today, it’s said
I’m like a dreamer, standing by and blank —
I’m always in my head, that’s how my brothers
have learned to view me. So, once up from bed
I like to go against the riverbank
and watch how each wave turns with all the others.

Then sometimes when the winds are blowing strong
a gull will come by riding on the gales,
thrown side to side but coursing hard along
the torquing gusts. He trusts his widened sails
to meet with chance and craft in it direction,
a dance the sky has asked him to. I love
those stymied mornings when I’m lost and flying
and time is gone. It comes as resurrection
when like the oak leaves tossed from high above
I land again and hear a far bird crying.


Basketball

We thought at first now here’s a kid gone crazy.
He’d come out to this hoop and shoot the ball
all day. We said he must be stupid, lazy
or spooked by life so much he had to stall
his youth in games. His whole mind in a loop,
an arc that carried from his hand a shot,
he’d spot up square or on a move regroup
so as to tarry with the tarmac lot.
But soon we’d come to watch. He had become
a citizen to that old court. He played
the sport as though he had gone blind or dumb
and something else were moving him. He’d made
of his own strange instinct a worldly bliss
where rules don’t change and new attempts don’t miss.




Sahand Farivar is a Canadian poet who lives on the north shore of Lake Superior. His work is forthcoming with Blue Unicorn and Cactus Press Poetry.