2021 Pushcart Prize Nominee
2020 Best of the Net Nominee

You seek roots belonging to separate limbs.
There will be no ocean mist on the windshield,
fir needles on the doormat. Undetectable will be the bounce
of curls over hopscotch squares, of a basketball on the driveway,
of words off patent leather shoes.
No early risings, no spitting out the wind, no made up songs
while spinning on the tire swing beside the lemon tree.
Kneeling in pews, walking through grassy hills towards zebra,
puckering at the taste of kumquats, pressing flowers in a dictionary…
none of that will be found.
Nor will it show the girl-turned-lover-turned-woman
who still can’t look at her own body in the mirror,
who startles when the earth vibrates,
who has many friends but no place to sit.
There will be no trace of how I lost my laugh on a savanna,
grew calluses under my hair, found stars drowned in a tea kettle.

I know what I will tell you when the results come back:
I’m part garden-fairy, part combustion, part chalk and incense.
I’m swallowed bone, borrowed pitchfork, water-logged paper.
And then I’ll hold your hand in mine, watch your eyes crease,
tell you that I’m mostly four-leaf clover with a splash of earl gray.
And that is what we both already knew.

Karen Shepherd lives in Portland, Oregon, where she enjoys walking in forests and listening to the rain. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in various online and print journals including most recently Elephants Never, Neologism Poetry Journal, Cirque Journal, and Mojave Heart Review. Follow her at https://twitter.com/karkarneenee.

In the days of door to door salesmen,
my grandmother would say,
“Here comes another charlatan.”

My fourth grade nun stressed,
“There will be no tomfoolery.”

I made the baseball team
because the coach said
I had spunk and moxie.

My father constantly referred to our neighbor
as a blithering idiot.

My mother cautioned me almost daily
to come right home from school and not
to gallivant around.

I wasn’t allowed to wear dungarees
to school under any circumstances.

In high school, I had the chutzpah
to take Mary Ann behind the gym bleachers
where we would buss
in between class changes.

something about autumn
feels early —
late afternoon
seems like dawn,
a starting
instead of an ending,
a starting — at the end,

something is starting.
I step out my back door
into the ravishing transfiguration
of maples, oaks, birches,

arm into my jacket —

the late sun builds new power
into my old shoulders
until I could carry anything,
and I begin to walk —

through autumn’s dawn-seeming,
golden, late afternoon,
into the frosted, fog-white night
toward a shimmering morning
I will never see —

I’ll be home long before then.

John Wiley started out as a ballet dancer and turned to poetry (poetry being much easier on the body) when his knees gave out for good. His work has appeared in Terror House Magazine, Detritus, Outsider Poetry, and Montreal Writes among other journals.  He lives in a California beach town and works in his wife’s audiology practice.

I’d like to be dead for a few minutes
and then alive again and report what
I saw or if I’m not allowed that then
keep to myself the truth of the life to
come although I’m not sure what to do with
that information, maybe I’ll write poems
about it or, even better, books or
even even better screenplays because
there’s a lot of money in those and when

I die I might as well die rich, was it
Jack Benny who said that if he couldn’t
take it with him then he wasn’t going?
Father liked that one a lot, on his death-
bed repeated it over and over
until he fell asleep for the final
time, the sleep of death I think it’s called though
if sleep’s death then waking in the morning’s

resurrection – but I take it back, there
was Father’s death-rattle in the throat and
to me by his beside and sleepy as
Hell that’s exactly what it sounded like,
a rattle but a baby rattle, my
baby rattle, I guess it was a sign
or a signal, by the time I figure
it out I’ll be rattling off my own, then
greeting Father again in the After-

life, which will be like life but an echo
like the son to the father and death to
life and day to night and Benny funny.

Gale Acuff has had poetry published in Ascent, Chiron Review, McNeese Review, Adirondack Review, Weber, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, Poem, South Dakota Review, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008). Gale has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.

when it is quiet like this
I wander around down here
just walk and do not touch anything
look at each object as if it is an exhibit
in a gallery or a museum

I start from the lift –
pause and sit in my usual chair
examine the other green and yellow chairs – two each
take in the curve-sided coffee table
that always has the same magazines
that could rapidly become museum pieces
the cracks in the paintwork of the sliding door
a form of instant art – Pollock or Dada
I call this The Basement School
that includes the artificial pot plant –
when I turn a corner
there is a picture on a wall of boats on a shoreline
placed so the people who sit underneath cannot see it –
this I instantly name The Unseen School

the futuristic scanner in its own room
becomes a sculpture called the white donut –
satisfied I sit down again in my usual chair
name it yellow chair one and the others
yellow chair two and yellow chair three
and go on like this with the two green chairs

James Bell is Scottish and now lives in France where he contributes non-fiction to an English language journal. He has published two poetry collections the just vanished place (2008) and fishing for beginners (2010) and continues to publish widely and regularly with ekphrastic journals such as Nine Muses Poetry and Visual Verse. His short fiction, like his poetry, appears in print and online.

Thanks for sharing my canoe.
Yes, I drift around the pond
all day, reading and trusting
what I read, tasting the onset
of colder weather, aching for
the affection of migrating birds.

I’m glad to have you examine
notes I’ve taken on the poems
of Wallace Stevens. So many
secrets to set me blinking and wise,
so much texture to smooth me.

You with your decided flesh
offer coffee custom brewed
to seduce me into a lower case
version of myself. Why bother
with the niceties of literature
when the pond exhumes itself
in stink of leaf decay and fish?

Here comes rain to impress
its wax seal on everything sweet.
Refreshing with fragrance of stone,
revising the last unfallen leaves.
You fold my pages into yourself
and look homeward or shoreward
with the slightest tinge of fear.

We should always be this subtle,
leaving only the faintest ripples
as the canoe I refuse to paddle
sketches a simple hieroglyph
only the pond itself can read.

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.

Twice past the Naval estate, past the Racecourse,
past Palmerston Farm, the cricket club, the Lane.
Close to four miles, while the family sank to evening.

The Olympics had done it, Grand Prix, gold,
the family rapt by the flickering fulfillment.
Inspiration, aspiration, puff and blow.

The first half-mile was the purest, always,
the calves’ vibrancy, the sweet straight breath.
The gasping, rasping later he attuned to.

The family meanwhile slobbed on TV news,
domestic Masterminds overseeing all,
earnest and dazzled and enraged by turns.

Winter, he kept laps going, maverick man,
ever more excluded, lonely, as the streetlights
flickered thinly in November murk.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who lives about 30 miles down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s boathouse. His poems have been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, where he is a regular in SanPedro River Review, Jerry Jazz Musician and Panoply. Robert is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee for his poem “Cultivation.”