A part of my heart
I never knew existed – if
it existed at all before
that moment – began
to beat the day
you were born.
That first new movement,
a chamber opening, filling
with bright blood,
stilled my breath
and whitened my vision
as you emerged into the world,
all eager lungs and flailing limbs.

Later, your fresh skin wrapped
in layers of blue towels,
I held you and lost myself
in your closed eyes, the cries
which announced your arrival
echoing through the new and tender chamber
of my suddenly meaningful heart.

 

 

Edward Lee‘s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll.  His debut poetry collection Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge was published in 2010. He is currently working towards a second collection. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Lewis Milne, Orson Carroll, Blinded Architect, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com

We call it our Chagall Room because of
the six stained glass Chagall reproductions,
Christmas presents from Judy over the years,
embedded in the large windows of our porch.

The couch, too, is covered with a blanket
replete with circles, obelisks, rectangles,
floating cows, chickens, kissing couples, and
menorahs this Russian Jewish master encased

in the blues and crimsons of his dancing heart.
The room glows at dawn with besprent splendor—
spectral hues filtered through these joyous windows.
But when Judy is in the hospital, forced to obey

the tyranny of Crohn’s disease, absent from
this room she designed, windows and couch
lose their lively mottles, dissolve into
duns of longing, desire, despair.

That’s the way with rooms, isn’t it?
The nexus of life we breathe into them
lasts only so long as those inside their
vibrant glory breathe, last, abide.

 

 

 

Charlie Brice is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Sunlight Press, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, I-70 Review, Mudfish 12, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.

the city looks best
in the orange
blue moonlight. night
comes, and evening also; twilight
falling salt
with the crispness and layering
of freshly washed bed sheets.

and lights rise, burning
steadily above you
and flashing below
in the unbroken
movement of slow rivers,
which are calm
though slightly rippled,
like flattened out
sandwich foil.

you step outside
to fewer cars than usual
and no pedestrians.
feel that last of winter
as it reaches out
past February,
puts its fingers
in your collar and pulls back.

 

 

 

D.S. Maolalaí has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

1

Cruising past St Maria Goretti High School
at 9th and Moore,
9th Street,
where you can still buy fresh ravioli,
where Rocky Balboa characters
sport earrings and tattoos
over slick hair…

Down Moyamensing,
past Southwark,
where the kids of the projects
grew in the shadow
of monolithic high rises,
kids like Pinky and D-Head,
who escaped their concrete hell
each summer for two weeks
at Camp Linden,
met college kids
who staffed the bucolic
Chester County hideaway
on the Brandywine Creek,
where the pastoral
peace of the wood
was canoeing from Lenape Park
down miles of the creek
to land at Linden again.

A flash of memory,
of Moyamensing,
and Ronnie Ricci,
who lived
a stone’s throw
from the throngs of ebony faces
in the towering prisons
of Southwark,
who grew up
on Italian streets,
loved nature,
and taught the kids
to love animals,
who adopted the baby hawk
I found one day,
alone and destined to die
were it not for Ron,
and protected him,
nurtured him,
named him.

Remembering the daily joy
witnessing the wondrous
survival of the delicate
little predator,
who eventually
took majestic wing,
but perched each morning
at the peak of our cabin’s shingled roof,
to call out to his beloved rescuers
a raucous hawk billed ‘good morning!’ and
‘rise and shine!’
each dawn until late August,
when he flew off
to merge with the wood,
to live the destiny
of the wild and free.

Now I wonder how far
from Moyamensing has Ron flown,
have we all flown,
from that one idyllic
and desperate summer,
when so many abandoned birds met
to heal and grow,
then take flight back
into the wilds
of our concrete woods?

2

Then it’s Passyunk Avenue to Mara’s,
the best in Philly for generations,
the vibe of the old neighborhood,
real Italian food
in the same booths
where the poets,
lovers and friends
huddled together
to celebrate each
historic night’s reading,
or birth poets’ plots
to undermine normalcy,
to dig away at the banal,
words for shovels,
digging the very thing
they sought to subvert,
the timeless, changeless America
of Passyunk,
of Mara’s,
of pizza
and chianti,
where Mario Lanza never died
and Sinatra lives forever.

 

 

Phillip Henry Christopher is a poet, novelist, and singer/songwriter who spent his early years in France, Germany, and Greece.  His nomadic family then took him to Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, and Vermont, before settling in the steel mill town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in the smokestack shadows of blue collar America. While wandering America he has placed poems and stories in publications across the country and in Europe and Asia, including in such noteworthy journals as The Caribbean Writer, Gargoyle, Lullwater Review, Blue Collar Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blind Man’s Rainbow, and New York Quarterly.

The balloon men wander through their new-formed cave.
It is made of tent flaps and old sails—I do not think it will fly;
these are the same men who work the soil all day…
what do they know of leaving the earth?
I’ll be a courser, in a reconstructed army jeep,
and the driver will trace their path mazelike
through the vineyard backroads he knows like his pocket
which contain a battered flip phone and a thin black wallet.
But it’s more than that, he tells me: it’s the stitching
and the lint. It is the telling wear at a certain seam
and the discolored fading on the exterior of a pair of jeans
where the wallet rests inside.
It is simple physics: hot air rises.
That is why the storms come and batter the crops
and pull the riggings and strain the fabric
but the tension pulls evenly if the seams are sewn right;
the seams are what would break first, air slipping out
like grain from a hopper. The way they talk,
you’d think it isn’t possible.
                      It isn’t possible,

the driver says;
my wife—she sewed it herself. They’ll be okay.

 

 

Andy Keys is a writer from Sandpoint, Idaho, the child of a weaver and a winemaker, and an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Their poetry has appeared in Queen Mob’s Teahouse and ST.ART Magazine. You can find them on Instagram at @_andykeys.

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.