Boxing at Mar a Lago, by Robert Walton

Boxing at Mar a Lago
by Robert Walton

Morning shaves grown to blue bristles,
Cigarettes in the corners of their mouths,
Hard arms dangling from hard tattoos-
Uncles taught me out back
Where the trashcans squat
And the women don’t look.

You can beat a big guy, Kid,
But you got to take a punch,
And another,
And another.
Keep your elbows together;
Keep your gloves up.

Take the punches,
The ones you block,
The ones that get through,
Take the pain – wait,
Wait until he opens up
Then hit him with all you got.

The uncles took punches for years
Until the last punches came along,
Corona virus came along,
And plugged their lungs with
Covid snot
That even the choking
Respirator
Failed to move.

I still keep my gloves up,
My elbows together,
But the Mar a Lago people –
Louis Vuitton shod,
Helmut Lang scented,
Will never open up.

Robert Walton’s novel, Dawn Drums was awarded first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors Association’s literary contest and also won the 2014 Tony Hillerman Best Fiction Award. With Barry Malzburg, Walton wrote The Man Who Murdered Mozart, published by Fantasy & SF in 2011. His “Do you feel lucky, Punk?” received a prize in the 2018 Bartleby Snopes dialog only contest. Most recently, his story, “Tryst” was published in The Ghost Story. Robert is a retired middle school teacher and a lifelong mountaineer with many ascents in the Sierras and Pinnacles National Park. He lives in King City, California.

Hummingbird, by Robert Walton

Hummingbird
by Robert Walton

You take a break
In first sunshine,
A grass stem
Barely bending
Beneath your weight –
The dried flames
Of Indian paintbrush
Are slim pickings –
Gone.

 

 

Photo by Ed Haskell

Please visit his website for more information about him: http://chaosgatebook.wordpress.com/

Robert Walton’s novel, Dawn Drums was awarded first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors Association’s literary contest and also won the 2014 Tony Hillerman Best Fiction Award. With Barry Malzburg, Walton wrote The Man Who Murdered Mozart, published by Fantasy & SF in 2011. His “Do you feel lucky, Punk?” received a prize in the 2018 Bartleby Snopes dialog only contest. Most recently, his story, “Tryst” was published in The Ghost Story. Robert is a retired middle school teacher and a lifelong mountaineer with many ascents in the Sierras and Pinnacles National Park. He lives in King City, California.

A Plain Grey Life, by Misky Braendeholm

A Plain Grey Life
by Misky Braendeholm

We watched, prayed time’s chants
as damp crimson leaves blew into
his eternal six foot deep.

I was wrapped in mourning clothes,
comforted by a plain grey life,

held my sorrow within my sorrows,
within my creased and carded fleece,
within my heart’s brow.

A palmed rose tumbled on to his coffin,
his memory kept with the skulls of saints.

Misky Braendeholm’s work is regularly published in monthly issues of Waterways in the Mainstream – Ten Penny Players, Visual Verse, and Right Hand Pointing.

This Time, by Misky Braendeholm

This Time
by Misky Braendeholm

The light through the window
is spun in the beech tree.
In the mirror.
Across the floor.
Breathes in curves along white walls.
Cleaves to each cold-ash hour
of my grandmother’s clock.
Its hands stopped.
Ten past five. And it was
never rewound again.
Its brassy age-cured chime
as noisy as clashing colours.

Misky Braendeholm’s work is regularly published in monthly issues of Waterways in the Mainstream – Ten Penny Players, Visual Verse, and Right Hand Pointing.

Release, by Martin Willitts Jr

Release
by Martin Willitts Jr

Every day, she tilled the soil,
the sun would arise, tatters of birds
unsteadied air, bumping against
the invisible horizon,
uneasy flay and release, buckle
wings, sprinting endlessly towards
whatever was out there she couldn’t see.

The birds had overwhelming news,
and she kept her own counsel
on what the news might mean.
Maintaining prayer helped control her urge
to join, to bird-release, wing-whispering,
if only, if only.

The bird thrashed into the sky,
Join us now, molt, shed what is human
that’s holding you back.

The right direction was where the sky
was azure, so she believed harder, stretched out,
sprouted her own magnificent wings.

Martin Willitts Jr has 21 full-length collections including the Blue Light Award 2019, The Temporary World. His forthcoming books include, Harvest Time (Deerbrook Press, 2021) Leaving Nothing Behind (Fernwood Press, 2021), Meditations on Thomas Cole’s Paintings (Aldrich Press, 2021,) Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2021,) All Wars Are the Same War (FutureCycle Press, 2021).

Inwood in October Light, by by Andrea L. Fry

Inwood in October Light
by Andrea L. Fry

They say the trade was made in May—
though it’s against a sky like today’s October light

that I imagine the Lenape in 1626 holding
out their palms to receive twenty-four dollars’

worth of beads and trinkets for what they
thought was to share Manhattan island.

I see the Lenape, studying Peter Minuit’s
moving lips, trying to make sense of the sounds,

wanting to trust his glittery gifts when,
in a second they witness behind

Minuit’s fawning head, the change—as light
does in October—a rectangle of dazzling

red and gold shifts then throws everything
into sheer splendor—like a king

might transform an ordinary room, recast
the moribund into brilliance. And everyone—

Minuit, the Lenape—see the sudden illumination
as a blessing of themselves and what they’ve done.

With it comes another change—as shadow does
in October—a band of grey—runs

underneath and parallel, an alternate world
of silhouette that travels just below the glorified.

Andrea L. Fry’s Poisons & Antidotes is scheduled for publication in spring 2021 (Deerbrook Editions). The Bottle Diggers was published in 2017 (Turning Point Press). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Graham House Review, Plainsongs, Sequoia, Stanford Literary Review, Writers Resist and others. She is a nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii, by Andrea L. Fry

The Archaeological Park of Pompeii
by Andrea L. Fry

I. Horse Unearthed

Unnatural curve of fetlock.
Ear strangely erect.

Neck, shoulders and once warm belly
that stood on four regal legs

lie now on a bed of ash, captured
just moments after all of it—

writhing loin, withers, flank, muzzle and dock—
scratched and mauled at the earth,

screamed in its horse tongue,
kicked with all its weight at the trough,

gnashed its jaw
at the iron bit in its mouth

that held it to hell.
Petrified eyes petrified.

Horse on fire.
Pumice raining.

Animal raging yet against an inferno
from two thousand years ago.

Only its bronze saddle,
as still now as it was before.

II. Fresco of Narcissus

We reflect—

how after
time has sapped
his splendor,

even after
apocalypse,
the lover

gazes still
on the object
of his love.

An echo that—
more so
than any

other love—
self-love
can’t believe

the day
it won’t
exist.

III. Skeleton Under a Rock

Once one early evening in our backyard,
we saw two legs of a vagrant man straddling
a pine tree, knees and ankles turned outward
in defeat. We couldn’t see his body or face,
for the tree obscured his upper half.

We could tell by the way my mom’s initial fear
softened that the man was too wretched to be
a menace to anyone. The ambulance came
and they dragged him out from under the tree
by his waist, his legs staying parted in surrender.

I thought of that man again when I saw a picture
of Pompeii, a skeleton’s legs splayed, attached
to a pelvis and just the root of a spine. The rest
of his torso and head was hidden by a stone beam,
lodged still at the angle that killed him.

His thigh, shin, and feet bones were all that was left,
fossilized like the two white shafts of a half-drawn A,
and the crude rocket pinned forever
half of the man who dared try to escape his death.

Andrea L. Fry’s Poisons & Antidotes is scheduled for publication in spring 2021 (Deerbrook Editions). The Bottle Diggers was published in 2017 (Turning Point Press). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Graham House Review, Plainsongs, Sequoia, Stanford Literary Review, Writers Resist and others. She is a nurse practitioner at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Two Old Men, by Emil Sinclair

Two old men
sit side by side,
in awkward silence;
a familiar tableau.
The night nurse
comes in,
to take his vitals;
she thinks we’re
brothers.
He laughs,
and I cringe inside
(where I always go,
to hide my shame).
But the beard I grew
in my college years
to shade
my callow youth,
is now as grey
as his sparse
unshaven stubble;
my scalp,
as smooth and bare
as his.
I can forgive her
the mistake.

Suddenly, he grabs
my hand
and breaks
the silence:
“Why didn’t you
come to me
for advice,
like I did
with my father?”
he asks me
imploringly—
the disappointment
in his eyes
and voice
so heavy,
I fear
I might sink
right through
the floor.
“I don’t know,
Dad;
I just didn’t,”
I reply—
but do not answer.

It’s five years now,
that he’s been gone.
But the memory
of his anguish,
and my own
befuddled dismay,
lingers still;
a toxic cloud
of regret.
It took so long
for him to ask
for that which
was not given.
Could I be
so far different?
At last, my answer,
then:
All things come
to he who waits—
except what
we desire.
If he were here,
I would ask him now,
how to live a life
less passive.

Emil Sinclair is the pseudonym of a sometime poet and longtime philosophy professor in New York City.

The Myth of the Word, by Emil Sinclair

The Myth of the Word
by Emil Sinclair

Every word I write
is a lie—
even “and” and “the.”
Fiction is my drug,
poetry my
delivery system.
Words are nothing but
two-bit actors;
shabby clowns,
miming for a pence
and a pocketful
of sand,
stolen
from a beach
on a windy day.
You remember.

I live in the Afterlife
(the time after you),
where all judgments
have been made,
all records sealed,
and no appeals
of sentencing
may be heard.
It’s so busy
down here
in liars hell—
or writers paradise—
so many tales
to be spun,
and verses
to be written.
I see, from here,
you’re doing well;
I send you
my kindest regards.

I can’t recall now
how young I was,
when I fell in love
with myth:
the Dream
that dreams us.
The word is not
the thing;
yet all things
are just words,
pregnant
with Gods.
I am Hermes,
their midwife;
son of Zeus,
cheater
of cheats,
guide of souls.

Process notes:
1.) It was novelist Mary McCarthy who once said of playwright Lillian Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”
2.) “The word is not the thing,” is a quote from Science and Sanity (1933) by the Polish-American philosopher-semanticist, Alfred Korzybski.

Emil Sinclair is the pseudonym of a sometime poet and longtime philosophy professor in New York City.

Skeleton Leaf, by Debi Swim

Skeleton Leaf
by Debi Swim

How beautifully leaves grow old.
Tender green buds unfurl, straighten,
strengthen and flutter in the air.
And after the blush of autumn
has drained to parchment brown
the leaf becomes like fine lace,
delicate, fragile, wispy tatting.

And she has become a frail leaf,
beautiful gossamer leaf,
leaving behind
the remnants of a beautiful life.

Process notes: “How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” John Burroughs

Debi Swim lives in beautiful southern West Virginia where she persistently writes to great prompts from around the web.