Tag Archives: literary journal

Poetry: Kingston, Jamaica. 3am. Passa Passa Dance Party

books poetry lit November 2, 2014 Leave a comment

One good thing about music / when it hits / you feel no pain
—Bob Marley, Trenchtown Rock

When her body is a compass
bearing South, and she is crouched
bare-toed and feckless above steaming pavement
poised to give birth to drum or bass,
Red Bull triggered at the wrist,
hips a bouquet of cackling fingers,
lips two hummingbirds aimed for flight,
the Glock-Nined baby brother
she nursed from croup
with lavender oil and Cat’s Claw bark,
for whom she turned a fist of nothing
into school fees and uniform,
and whom she will bury
in St. Andrew Parish Church Cemetery
once the sun fully rises,
feels more like a brilliant toothache
her tongue worries,
than a tumid and wild devastation.

-Idrissa Simmonds, Crab Creek Review

Poetry: Ithaka

books poetry lit October 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Dear Penelope, do you now sleep among the catacombs?

Scarves of white drift over the Aegean – an altar of bottomless blue.

I have gone to the edge of the world and still cannot find you.

Even the olive trees raise their spangled limbs skyward in longing.

Mother Earth slides her abacus beads, conjures storms quick as curses.

When lightning struck, did the boat protect or beckon the bolt?

Island flowers shut their eyes only when the stars disrobe – hope and sorrow held
within the same root.

She imagines him bright-toothed & swarthy, but her husband is just sunburned & homesick.

So many suitors holding her skeins – she’s woven a trail for her waylaid mariner, long
as his beard and her undoing.

In twenty years she has never asked, What shall I wish for myself?

Odysseus wonders, Do I have the right to return?

Maids cast offerings to the sea: red rose petals and grape leaves, love and wine all that remain.


** The line What shall I wish for myself? is a reworking Mary Oliver’s line What shall I wish for, for myself ?

-Kelly Cressio-Moeller, just published in Thrush Poetry Journal

Poetry: Dear Mucha

books poetry lit October 25, 2014 Leave a comment

It is raining in Manhattan. I am sitting in a chair overlooking 14th street and I realize you were right. I told you that people are taller than buildings. I told you that there are many green places in the city. Look at Central Park, for instance.

In the morning pink light falls across hardwood floor, spreading out like a thousand peonies, and I imagine that it is a greeting from you. But it is nighttime now, and raining so it makes no difference if I tell you a few real things. Today I saw a billboard advertising cigarettes and in a fit of frenzy went home and burned dinner.

And could you love me if I was pretty enough to be painted on your billboards? I would let my hair down long enough to collect pools of curls at my waist. I would pose naked in front of your tall landscapes and reach out with both arms pulling this city into my body.

And Mucha, the weather is all over this house.

I thought of such things while walking to a shop to buy cigarettes. In Manhattan, the streets smell like a wet cement and baked bread. It feels like the whole city is yawning. I, too, am tired of this body.

Yours, Catherine

-Catherine Bresner in Burnt District

Separate Beds: Short Fiction

books poetry lit October 20, 2014 Leave a comment

If all short stories had the fierce, ferocious immediacy of Jahla Seppanen’s, I’d read a lot more short stories.

“I don’t miss her as I thought I would. Sure, at night, but what’s night without some loneliness. Even when we were married I would wake up, her on the far side of the bed and me on the other, and I would feel lonely although she was close. My parents slept in separate beds. They said it helped parry feelings of being unwanted. When they kissed in the morning over coffee and eggs, it was a real kiss. Not an afterthought to the seven o’clock alarm. Not a simple recognition of the other’s being. A real kiss.

The separation began when I suggested spending a month in Morocco.”

Read more at Turk’s Head Review

Poetry: Mornings

books poetry lit October 17, 2014 Leave a comment

She would have cooked
his breakfast, eggs sunny-side up,
runny the way he liked them,
strong boiled coffee poured
and waiting, better than the diner.
But before the train screaming
through tunnels, his windowless office,
the idiots he had to “sir,”
he needed a space without her
or his children, so he dressed
in a crack of light from the bathroom,
held his shoes by two fingers,
and left them sleeping. That walk

to the diner was his time

Read more at Burnt District

-Susan Aizenberg

Thank you to Linebreak for publishing one of my poems!

books poetry lit October 15, 2014 Comments: 2

linebreak poem claire hellar

Lovely followers, I’m so excited to say that Linebreak, one of my very favorite poetry publications, picked up one of my poems, “Kitchen Ode”! Please read below and share on Facebook/Twitter if so inclined! (There are handy links at the bottom of the page)

Read or listen to “Kitchen Ode”  on Linebreak

Poetry: Boat

books poetry lit October 14, 2014 Leave a comment

My son sleeps
the way a boat
comes free—

ropes thrown back
on deck, and the soft hands
of the water all around.

-Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Star 82 Review

Poetry: Orderly Dispersal

books poetry lit October 13, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m asking you now in my calmest voice, my voice of patience and maintenance and strength, to rise slowly from your seats and turn to face the nearest aisle. The person in front of you is moving deliberately and efficiently. Put your trust in that person’s control of his or her impulses to rush or push or trample the persons between him or her and the ultimate goal of the exit just as you exercise your power over your own impulses to act in the same way.

Listen to the tone of calm in my voice. Do not worry. Relax the muscles in your shoulders. Lift your feet one at a time, move each a few inches forward and put it back down with plenty of clearance for the shoes and feet of the person in front of you who is proceeding in the same measured way out of the row of seats to the aisle and on toward the ultimate goal of the exit.

Read more

-Jesse Minkert, Paper Nautilus

 

Reading Kierkegaard at the Bar

books poetry lit October 9, 2014 Leave a comment

I am practicing exercises in futility.
I call it hope.

At the bottom of this beer,
drunk becomes Enlightenment.
It will this time.
The stool will stop quivering
rippling tsunamis to my thighs.

The ice cubes invited themselves
to this party, but they can’t tell
a good lie. They look like a priest
I once knew.

The corners of the bar look like God
right angle perfection. My fingers,
bell curve or parabola
depending on the glass. Mismatched.

There is an infinite qualitative difference
between the desire to sit on a bar stool
and the feeling of your ass two hours later.

I am as lucid as the waitress’s open pockets.
I have exact change. I know grace
when it catches me by the throat
and refuses to kill me. This is why
I come to the bar. Alone.

I have all the fear and trembling
and drowning has never been
so difficult. The floor, the only
leap of faith I cannot make.

I found God in apron pockets. Not hers.
Never looked, just felt. Just fought the urge
to hide behind the potted palm
beside the ladies’ room all night,

sipping the glass half-full
tucked between the corner
and the plant.

-Hilary Kobernick, Paper Nautilus

 

The Late Summer

books poetry lit September 8, 2014 Comments: 2
Though this

powerful season isn’t over
and she’
s still snuggling up to me,
she brings
a cryptic bulletin
with ragged ice.
To experience aspect of
“that time” and “that sense” enough,
quiet tables bearing fugitives
shall spend time under sunshine.
The more sunshine,
the more shadow covers
this burned heart.
-Natsuko Hirata, Blazevox