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.

I pulled up my collar.
Discreet dark-blue scarf
wrapped around my mouth.
Dark glasses.

Right at the front.
Conspicuous
but for the camera.
Just another groupie.

Hundreds of years
after leaving this town
I had nothing better
to do than freeze
on this winter day in London,
outside my famous
ex’s town house.
And there he was.
A common sound rose,
a sonorous sigh.

His new blonde trophy
tried to make herself visible.
He remained firm.
there could only be one
point of interest.

For a moment I thought
he had seen through my disguise.
For a moment I wanted
my camera to be a gun.

 

 

 

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels, one full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks, her work has been widely published in mostly US poetry journals. Her latest full-length poetry manuscript, “The Rain Girl,” has been accepted for publication in June 2020 by Blue Nib. Her poem, “Old Love’s Sonnet,” has been nominated for a Pushcart by Shark Reef Journal where it was published in the Summer of 2019.

When electric power fails, a sneer
drifts from the haunted forest
and nibbles our extremities.

The night wind rackets in shades
of dolor we otherwise dodge,
being creatures of sprightly mood.

Tonight I lie in a dreamless stupor
and dream anyway, rehearsing
my love of a tiny woman

represented by two broken sticks
dropped on a street in Cambridge
west of the MIT campus.

I don’t remember that woman
seeming so brittle, but the sticks
are undeniable. I drop a tear

in the gutter as the howling
of our deaf old cat wakes me
into dark too thick to stir with

those broken little sticks of pine.
No use explaining this dream
to you, busy feeding the pets.

No use bracing myself against
the windy dawn just brimming
with the last tatter of rain dispersed.

You wouldn’t believe how distant
the streets of Cambridge became
since I last crossed the rainbow

of Longfellow’s cut-stone bridge.
I should have left the two sticks crossed
at an intersection. Too late

to recover them. Just believe,
as I do, that electric power
will restore itself in time

to link us to the Anthropocene,
where dark fades into fresh colors
even the dirt-poor can wear.

 

 

William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent book is Train to Providence, a collaboration with photographer Rodger Kingston.

I watch you tremble.  The cracked, dry pieces
of your hands a winter mosaic—flakes
and webs of blood where fissures grow deep.
Will you lay your palm on my cheek of chiseled stone?
Sculpt my emotions one last time to mimic regret!
Icicles clink together like champagne flutes
in my hair—a toast to an extinguished flame.
Breathe steam against my lips and pretend you left
your soul within me.  Skate away on our black-glass
pond of a past, breaking through.

 

 

Jennifer Ruth Jackson is an award-winning poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Red Earth Review, Banshee, and more.  She runs a blog for disabled and/or neurodivergent writers called The Handy, Uncapped Pen from an apartment she shares with her husband. Follow her on Twitter @jenruthjackson.

(Robert Gordy, Untitled Face)

She appears to be Neanderthal, her face
is flat, her nose quite broad, her forehead high.
Her jaw is square, her mouth a gaping space;
a pupil seems to pop out of each eye.
It may just be the way her ancient skull
is structured, but she looks so terrified,
as if her very essence has been dulled,
and she can neither scream for help nor cry.

I see her every day, framed on my wall,
and my sadness for her cannot be contained.
I feel for her, her grief, but most of all—
I feel for my own loss, my constant pain.
I look at her and relive my own trauma;
she looks back at me, intimating karma.

 

 

Diane Elayne Dees’s chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House; also forthcoming, from Kelsay Books, is her chapbook, Coronary Truth. Diane’s microchap, Beach Days, is available for download and folding from the Origami Poems Project site. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

There was this show on the massive amount of food
prepared everyday on a luxury ship, thousands
of pounds of shrimp and chicken and unspeakable
numbers of workers trapped on that boat,
racing against the clock to make every meal perfect.
I don’t even know if we have words to judge this.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong here, like I’m
different in the way a shrimp is different
from a chicken, the way they look at
the world with either feathers or from
underneath the ocean and in the end sharing
space on someone’s plate is all they have in common.

Sometimes I feel like I’m from another planet,
you know, like I’m lying there on someone else’s plate.
Then I walk down the street watching everyone watch
themselves in store windows believing the same thing,
how different they are. And I start thinking, well, maybe
we are all from Mars, or maybe we’re already on Mars,
and we’ve been here all along.

And if that’s true, then maybe we’re not so different after all.

 

 

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.

 

I’m throwing out a pair of old jeans
but not my efforts to be a good person,
I’m trying to answer all of your questions,
truthfully, not like a cloud of vapor,
who I am, where I come from,
feel like they’re standing before you for the first time –
yes, I’m feeling a little storm-tossed,
because I’m not sure my life can measure up to yours –
I’m also tossing the black t-shirt with a band on it
because I’m not twenty-one anymore
and hoping I can cast some light
on everything everybody ever did to me –
whatever I say, it’s as much to educate me
as you – at least, it’s my effort
to make sense of this moment in time
by stepping out of it –
so I remember the first person who broke my heart,
the first person who discouraged me;
but they’re fleeting, serve little purpose,
shadows of shadows –
high school crush? what is that?
girl in the coffee shop? who is she?
girl who asked me to grow my hair out
who was half way to being you –
I still have these teenage poems,
would have been better off burning them,
wherever these women are now,
I hope they’ve done well,
and their kids are healthy –
of course, in the din of a crowd
ignoring them would be better,
for remembering can be a little bit like dying:
compartmentalizing the brain
like cleaning and packing my clothes neatly
so some shelter will take them – it’s raining,
or maybe I’m imagining it,
can’t recall most people,
not even the damage we might have done to each other,
but know that somewhere in my brain,
lingering in a corner,
is every word I ever heard,
every face I ever saw,
not even the universe is as big as this –
then there’s my father who died.
who must feel the same,
my mother who thinks that
I should have been something other
than what I became,
and there’s the names I changed
to protect the nerds –
you’re saying something,
I’m not sure I hear you,
I don’t know how much you know,
like the days on Block Island
when I finally discovered
what manhood is all about,
and those walks in the woods
where my spirit got a good going over,
caught in a powerful storm,
stuck in some church youth group –
those were other days, other people,
Daggie and Luke, tender Marie,
and lectures on God and the Devil,
times of silence I could actually feel,
like the spaces between notes in a song –
the thing is, you never run out of room in your head –
you tell me it must be
some kind of therapeutic exercise
but a few of those people were pretty okay –
at least they must have been –
sometimes I can smell the past,
sometimes I can taste it,
it doesn’t always gel neatly,
and the ones I miss and those I don’t
confuse me, confuse each other,
or appear so clear, so precise,
more than I could ever hope for
and I even thank my brain for showing them to me –
did you know I had a best friend in kindergarten,
I suffered the indignity of a first kiss,
I never did move to my dream city,
my fourth-grade teacher encouraged me –
now look at me,
I have a wife, a house, a garden,
I know what it’s like to change,
I’ve drifted alone,
I’ve made plans together.
I’ve been present when the truth came out,
and I’ve sometimes wondered
where will we all end up,
and am I the man you think I am,
and who’s that driving away in the distance –
well it isn’t me
and you shouldn’t be surprised by that.

 

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. He was recently published in Transcend, Dalhousie Review, and Qwerty, with work upcoming in Blueline, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Clade Song.

2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee
2020 Best of the Net Nominee

Your neighborhood grew hilly
in my absence, the houses
clinging to unruly slopes.

You redecorated to suggest
an Art Deco version
of the Panama Canal but

that drippy neighbor squatting
at your dining room table quotes
Coleridge and George Herbert to prove

how culturally advantaged she is.
I should have stayed home but
wanted to watch the workers

resurrecting the old railroad
that before the latest earthquake
trundled through your back yard

with container-loads from China.
Piecing together their language
of grunts and groans I learn that

a coppery autumn discontent
has settled over this city,
wrenching men from needed sleep

and drying up the mother’s milk
that fuels your future leaders.
After resetting and polishing

miles of rail, the workers burn
their favorite tools with ritual
prayers to invoke the moon.

In response it rises, a full moon
veiled by pumpkin-colored mist.
You’ve said nothing about the cries

of blackbirds parsing funerals,
of delinquents breaking into
storage sheds where militias

store their nuclear weapons.
You neighbor quotes her last quotation
and gusts through the back door

with a gesture of sweeping disdain.
I claim the chair she warmed,
and pretend to admire the carpet

you laid, Panama gray
with a fringe of jungle. Your smile
is ravenous. The day declines

toward a stainless climax no one
who hasn’t savored your small talk
can fully perceive or admire.

William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent book is Train to Providence, a collaboration with photographer Rodger Kingston.