Arrival CDG – 2014, by Carolyn Clark

Arrival CDG – 2014
by Carolyn Clark
                                     for Sean and Caroline

Our white mare follows me
even across oceans:
transported inadvertently
past la douane
one white horsehair
on my jacket, brand “Avalanche.”

This level crossing of la banlieue
the Blue line at first glance so similar to Rockville’s
Red line: above ground, green and below…

but – Sycamores – here there are more of them,
Isis’ gift,
and ubiquitous graffiti.

Similarities abound,
parallels to Tribeca, trains of NY.

Yet here these trees adapt, hang on.
And graffiti? Why try to erase
that which cannot be (erased).
A deeper history here relives the pain
of centuries as if it were yesterday.

I’m crossing towards Paris, past
crumbled buildings and crumpled litter
that stills swirl in place,
yet today the early light,
and hope, slices of fresh shade,
cool in summer,
put on a fresh face.

Carolyn Clark, Ph.D., is a devoted teacher and a personal trainer. Indebted to teachers at Cornell University, Brown University, and The Johns Hopkins University for degrees in Classics-related fields, she enjoys riding, writing woodlands lyric poetry, and finding mythology everywhere.

Lost Summer, by Jon Wesick

Lost Summer
by Jon Wesick

White walls, beige carpet, popcorn ceiling, three bookshelves, unused Quebec and Nova Scotia guidebooks, wooden sword, window AC unit with blinking change-filter light, indigo loveseat, IKEA coffee table, Kleenex, Kindle, tea mug, fountain pen, seven plastic storage boxes, exercycle, red-and-gold poster from my feature at the Kerouac Café, chicken stock, canned tomatoes, five pounds of brown rice, cherry mead fermenting in a gallon jug, stand mixer, toaster oven, busted microwave, stove with two broken burners I won’t report to the maintenance staff so proud in their refusal to wear face masks, six pair of shoes, disinfectant wipes by the door locked to keep the virus out, two file cabinets, last paycheck, first Social Security check, full-size latex mattress, meditation bench, Thich Nhat Hahn calendar, desk, two office chairs, laptop for Netflix and Zoom meetings

White walls, beige carpet, popcorn ceiling, unused guidebooks, white walls, beige carpet, popcorn ceiling, white walls, beige carpet, popcorn ceiling

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels and most recently the short-story collection The Alchemist’s Grandson Changes His Name. http://jonwesick.com

Ablutions, by Fred Zirm

Ablutions
by Fred Zirm

Now we sing Happy Birthday to ourselves
twice, just in case we don’t make it to
next year, as we wash our hands like surgeons,
like that Scottish lady, like Pilate, like priests
in preparation or repentance or faith or fear
for all the good and ill our touch has brought
all the way from China unless we change
our tune and learn to sing together.

After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English from Michigan State and an M.F.A. from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, Fred Zirm spent nearly 40 years teaching English and drama at an independent school. Since his retirement, he has continued to direct plays but has also focused on writing poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction. His work has been published in about a dozen small literary magazines and anthologies, including Still Crazy, cahoodadoodaling, NEAT, Voices de la Luna, Greek Fire, and Objects in the Rearview Mirror. He lives with his wife and younger daughter in Rockville, MD.

Only Borrowed Light: Poems of the Soul in Reflection, by Emil Sinclair

What happens when everything that passes you have passed? Your life worn like one last garment shrouding you; you’ve become all woozy until you hit “recall”. Emil’s poems trace an intense soul searching, coupled with the remembrance of love and loss, so as to find its own light in the poetic landscapes, in borrowed mythology and imaginative re-enactment.

From the despair of “I can discern no center/within myself” to the realisation that “it is all/inside me,/now”, from forgetting to remembering, such that “the only healing is art”, his collection brings eloquence to the kind of ripening that brings the soul’s trajectory into the river of a remembrance, an ever fluid crossing between times past and present. The poems stir the reader into a tragic empathy, from which one emerges more human than when one first began.

Download the collection here.

Only Borrowed Light Collection

Grocery Run, by Jon Wesick

Grocery Run
by Jon Wesick

White hair, gaunt bodies, toothless mouths
hidden behind sky-blue facemasks, they wander, listless
as George Romero’s zombies, mindless feeding machines
programmed to consume by a cold uncaring universe.
They shuffle inexorably forward, fingering limp broccoli,
flabby Brussels sprouts, and frozen ribs
large as Toyota Camrys.
I imagine them devouring the raw pork,
their dentures, like flesh-eating beetles,
picking the bones clean of pinkish-gray meat.

Glasses fogged, hands covered in contagion
due to the lack of disinfectant wipes at the door,
I push a cart loaded with five-pound bags
of potatoes and onions of dubious provenance.
The shelves, empty as interstellar space.
And although science has proved a vacuum
is more than nothing, I cannot subsist
on quantum fields alone.

Chicken stock, canned tomatoes, still no yeast.
Tough are the soles that tread
the blue, taped arrows on the floor
that knife edge of safety between microscopic assassins
or maybe some giant tentacle that would burst
through the gray linoleum and drag me into the abyss.

A stock boy blocks my path, his barcode reader
threatening as a serial killer’s chainsaw.
“Got any eggs?” I ask.
“No, we don’t have hand sanitizer.
The store without eggs is across the street.”

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels and most recently the short-story collection The Alchemist’s Grandson Changes His Name.
http://jonwesick.com

San Lucas Mission, by Elise Woods

San Lucas Mission
by Elise Woods

I first heard about San Lucas when I studied abroad.
I was told by a middle-aged professor named Gordon that I should
really consider going.

During the week of Semana Santa, it was customary to reflect.
Colorful carpets called alfombras were made out of flowers;
everyone was quiet during a somber parade.

Tuesday was Market day:
All the vendors would gather to sell fruits, vegetables, and crafts.
They would sell whatever they could pass off for a reasonable sum.

The children I worked with at the biblioteca
Would brush their teeth at school and smile through foam.
I stayed five months before yearning for home.

Elise Woods is an assistant tutoring coordinator at Jefferson Community & Technical College. Her work has appeared in The Avenue, The Learning Assistance Review, and SpreeBeez magazine.

In The Hot Sun, By A Deserted Barn, by Paula Bonnell

In The Hot Sun, By A Deserted Barn
by Paula Bonnell

The barn gone grey, silvery grey,
and here in its side, one board of many
and in it, many vertical
lines which thread it from end to end, bending
as they go – leaning this way and that
with the lilt that makes a move
a dance. They are fibers, each
of them; joined, they make wood. Cut,
they are grain, and the knots
they sway past were the arms of
branches, which reached and elongated
as they emerged from the trunk
to stretch, to sieve air through
manifold twigs and unfurling leaves
while these rising paths, these filaments,
lifted and carried water to the cresting
top of the tree.

Paula Bonnell’s writing has appeared in four collections
of poems, including “Airs & Voice”, chosen for a Ciardi Prize
by Mark Jarman, been heard on The Writer’s Almanac, and
a short story selected for a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize
and published in newspapers.

Florida Haiku, by Paula Bonnell

Florida Haiku
by Paula Bonnell

The wind in the trees . . .
a wind chime –
These parts are inhabited!

*

The sound of a motorcycle –
the call of a mourning dove –
the trailer park

*

Evening star, palm tree
Illuminated swimming pool
crescent moon

*

Summer night:
within the hurtling along the tracks,
an invisible train –

Paula Bonnell’s writing has appeared in four collections
of poems, including “Airs & Voice”, chosen for a Ciardi Prize
by Mark Jarman, been heard on The Writer’s Almanac, and
a short story selected for a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize
and published in newspapers.

Finding Home, by Elise Woods

Finding Home
by Elise Woods

What is home anymore?
I no longer know.
I no longer know what is considered normal.
I can’t figure out how to get past the past.
Nor can I accurately plan for the future.

I’m supposed to drive somewhere, right?
Where exactly is it that I should go?
My once clear destination is now unknown.
In my brain, there are glimpses of Maple Trees.
Sounds of laughter and splashing in the neighbor’s pool.

My shopping spree in February was a mistake.
No one can fully appreciate my wardrobe in a Zoom call.
I can only gather that I must navigate anew
To a new destination and new definition of what it means
To live, and of what it means, to be home.

Elise Woods is an assistant tutoring coordinator at Jefferson Community & Technical College. Her work has appeared in The Avenue, The Learning Assistance Review, and SpreeBeez magazine.

Lockdown silver (after ‘Silver’ by Walter de la Mare), by Marion Leeper

Lockdown silver
(after ‘Silver’ by Walter de la Mare)
by Marion Leeper

Last night the moon dropped in to pass the time of night.
She kicked off her silver shoes
and perched in the branches of the sycamore.
My feet, bare as hers, burnt on the frosty ground.

She told me the news: lights glowing
in houses all along the world’s girth.
The beating heartaches in each little box
beneath the silver casements.

I looked into her single eye. She told me
these branches, blocking out the sky
were not bars, but the edges of a lens.
She said, ‘Look closer. Inwards.’

Then she was off, round the church tower, widdershins,
Leaving me in the streetlight’s neon stripes.
Until sleep claimed me, warm
with silver feathers and the ripples of shining fish.

Process notes:

I made this poem one sleepless night early in lockdown: it comes from a revisiting of poetry familiar from childhood, and also while working on a collection of moon legends from around the world.

Marion Leeper is a poet and purveyor of stories and tall tales based in Cambridge, UK. She fell into poetry when she was elected Bard of Cambridge for a year and has been happily drowning ever since. She has written on storytelling in education, and toured storytelling shows around the UK and beyond. Her poems have appeared in The Fenland Reed quarterly, In Other Words anthologies for Allographic Press and Earth, We Are Listening for Slice of the Moon Books.