Red Wolf Editions Spring 2022: A Change of World

Red Wolf Editions Spring 2022
Theme: A Change of World

Since 2020 the world has changed radically. Who could have imagined this, a pandemic world? Should I say, post-pandemic, going forward? To be honest I’m not so sure how that will be, but hopefully it will, as they say, morph into an endemic flu situation, where fatalities are relatively low even though new variants continue to spread like wildfire. Our new issue here is not meant to be about the pandemic as such; it definitely takes it on board though, and you, like me, may wish to do so in our writing. But change is meant to be taken in a generalised, more internalised sense. But of course what is internal is reflected in the external world. One mirrors the other. Isn’t that true?

Before things changed, before anything changes, there is a sense of a lack of change, of deadwood, and of the desire for change. Since the time for change hasn’t come, one has to wait it out. The state of waiting for change is one of apparent passivity, but it need not be. What one does to fill the time while waiting is one question. The other question is one of dissatisfaction and longing, and with that comes an internalised clock where one prepares for change. This is an intricate process, perhaps like how a spider constructs its web, or how a bee flies from flower to flower to gather pollen. It is a process of long patience and internal work coupled with actual steps of doing. Change takes time. Time changes things.

Which brings me to the next point, and that is that loss is change. Even if things are in a state of equilibrium, it cannot remain still. Change happens whether you will it or not. When you look back at the stages of your life, you will realize this. It’s as if the curtain falls, the stage that opens in the next scene is different, has progressed. Sometimes the scenery changes, or the people are new, or if the same, they are altered by events. The social dynamics also change with time. Do things change for the better, or for the worse? How does one deal with loss, with change? Does it lead one to cynicism, bleakness, depression? How does one deal with such shifts?

How do you feel about the world’s environmental issues of change, which appear to be at tipping point? What changes have come over us? Yet it’s never one thing, is it, but losses and gains. The body deteriorates, the spirit comes into abundance? And isn’t the ultimate change death? A change of world that we’ll have to die to find out. Though it may be your death you’re thinking about, the world doesn’t end. Like a wheel, it spins, as seen in Chagall’s The Creation of Man, and a new human and other new creatures shall spring forth. Nature works in cycles, in seasons of change.

Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,
Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing
From all the restless ways we must be going
And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,
Whether around a clockface or a world.
—Adrienne Rich, “A Clock in the Square”

Finally, I’d like you to think about poetry and change. Do you, like Rich, believe that poetry, as it is imaginative, is also transformative? That it is not mere self-indulgence, a marginal activity, that its voice, alongside other human endeavors, grounds us, reminds us, prods us, that it is “not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what might otherwise be” (Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics), toward change? Perhaps not ‘change’ in capital letters yet but changes within the self, toward a new reflection of self and world? A rebirth of your world begins with the self. I believe that imagination leads to a change of self and a change of world, however you interpret it. A person, after all, is a world. To quote Alan Walowitz, in his poem, “Revision”:

I assure you, from vast experience,
to change a life requires more than one’s full portion.
But to revise, to see yourself again,
that can be an everyday miracle, if only we’d try.
Some of our fathers tell us we’re not quite chosen,
but just to be certain, we had better be better
and a light unto the nations.
This is hard work, the toughest there is,
but, didn’t I hear God say, in some unrecorded verse,
Hey pal, isn’t this what you signed up for?

The world as you imagine it, day by day by day, is a powerful one, can determine your mood, stance, everything. With poetry, we can perhaps practice the zen that Jane Hirschfield speaks of: “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.” Then, for us poets, we write it down as if our souls depend on it.

Read our submission guidelines here. Please check back on our site to see if your poem has been selected. We will not be sending out any rejection letters.

Submissions period: September 2021 to February 2022. Selected poems will be posted here on this site as well as on this site and compiled into a PDF release in Spring 2022.

Good writing.

Irene Toh
Editor
Spring 2022

PDF Release of My Dream of You Issue 19

I am pleased to announce the release of the Fall 2021 Issue.

The poets with work in the My Dream Of You edition are:

Virginia Aronson
Rose Mary Boehm
Jeff Burt
Joe Cottonwood
Holly Day
Edilson Ferreira
Charles Halsted
John Huey
Kathleen Latham
Ron. Lavalette
John Maurer
Michael J. Leach
Joan Mazza
Karla Linn Merrifield
Kate Meyer-Currey
Michael Minassian
John Muro
Heather Sager
Tricia Sankey
Emil Sinclair
Debi Swim
Ivor Steven
Alan Toltzis
Mark Tulin
Alan Walowitz
Robert Walton

You may download a copy of the PDF release here.

My Dream of You Fall 2021 Issue 19

You’re invited to submit to our new issue, titled A Change of World. Read submission guidelines here. You may also find us over at the other site at Red Wolf Editions. Happy writing!

Irene Toh
Editor
Fall 2021

The Coronavirus Poetry Issue Final Edition

The Pandemic Issue

The poets in this collection gave witness to a pandemic that had taken over the world since March 2020. Italy was the first European country to go into lockdown, and it was a matter of time before Covid-19 became a global pandemic. Over 4 million people have died after contracting Covid-19. At the time of writing, the Delta variant is causing third or fourth waves all over the world.

The pandemic has forced the shutdown of economies and of borders. It was like an apocalypse movie of death and privation. We are so familiar by now with its new lexicon of lockdowns, social distancing, remote working and learning, zoom meetings, swab tests, contact tracing, self-isolation, face masks, vaccinated travel lanes, etc.

The pandemic foregrounded the economic divide, between those with the resources and those without. In particular richer countries have high vaccine rollouts and poorer ones are floundering. People’s livelihoods are under threat or have gone under. So although the world is mired in the same threat, it has not handled the crisis on the same level or footing in terms of resources and governance.

Things will not return to pre-coronavirus ways for a while yet. While we’re preparing to be Covid resilient, to open borders, we cannot rule out repeated lockdowns and its collateral damage to economies, livelihoods and mental wellness. So it is that our mindsets have been forced to change. What is the state of our psychological well-being? What about lives that have fallen apart and have to be rebuilt? What does a new normal look like? Our poetry must continue to tell these stories.

Note:

This is the third reiteration of the title. The first was released in Fall 2020, the second in Spring 2021 before this final edition. A couple new poems were added but most of the poems were written about a year ago, before or after. Just so you know the different time stamps as you read the poems. The earlier issues may be found under the red wolf issues tab on https://redwolfjournal.wordpress.com/red-wolf-issues/

The poets with work in this issue are as follows:

Misky Braendeholm
Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Mike Dillon
Preeth Ganapathy
Marion Leeper
Jack e Lorts
Jane Newberry
Emalisa Rose
Sally Sandler
Emil Sinclair
Julia C. Spring
Ivor Steven
Adrienne Stevenson
Debi Swim
Alan Walowitz
Robert Walton
Jon Wesick
Elise Woods
Fred Zirm

You may download the issue here.

The Coronavirus Poetry Issue Final edition

Census of Dreams, by Alan Walowitz

Census of Dreams
by Alan Walowitz

The dream is a lie, but the dreaming is true.
Robert Penn Warren

Where are you calling from tonight?
Another place I haven’t been awake,
but play the perfect host
adrift in a world I claim I never made:
I nod, tip my hat, and soon I’m gone.

Sure, the dream feels real–
enough to wash me from the first of dawn,
through day’s uneasy peace,
till creak of porch in stale night air
stills an unrequited yawn.

But end of another endless day,
brings no rest I dreamed
and fills my head like a waiting room
where lost friends are counted
for the long journey home.

Instead, all peace I sought gets dashed
on a jagged thought, skipped breath,
late night call and no one there.
And you, last dream to the door,
ask nothing but to leave alone.

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press. The full-length, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems, is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written both trans-continentally, and mostly remotely, with poet Betsy Mars.

Somewhere, Anywhere, by Jeff Burt

Somewhere, Anywhere
by Jeff Burt

It’s natural to think the thread of a spider that wafts
from a dying oak branch toward a blueberry bush
is cast like an anchor from one ship to a floor,

but the filament is spun as it drifts, the spider is not in safety
on deck but riding the forefront whiffed by the breeze
eyes set on nowhere in particular or a vague set of greenery

where chances of prey are plentiful, being prey are few.
They are the perpetual first astronauts launched
in a cone on the top of a rocket screaming into space,

Not a void as in nothing in it, but void as in empty of experience.
My ancestors from Sweden took trips in the dark night
and ill holds of transports with all the other poor farmers

for a vague territory on a map of the western Great Lakes,
not attached to a tow line that could snap them back to Sweden,
but riding the deck, splashed with spray, to an unseen port,

like yearling whales on ancient and epic excursions
ribbing sea’s mountains and shoals following the same
genetic geographic destiny without a clue of a resting place.

Even today at the 7th Avenue stoplight
I think of being taught detachment from desire
will enable us, but to what when we do not desire?

We feed on want and wish like fire eats oxygen
and bound carbon until the flame poofs out.
Bound carbon—that is what we are anyway,

waiting to be unleashed, our DNA demanding
the chains be sparked into explosion,
to do, to act, to have something other than.

Other than—to be other than what we are.
Some of us are not meant to stay on the dying oak
or strung on a taut string in comfort.

Some of us are not meant to farm the old land.
Some of us are meant to launch into the air
screaming as we head to who knows where.

The red light changes. I walk. I dream
I have somewhere, anywhere, to go.

Source: A street corner moment

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California with his wife. He has contributed previously to Red Wolf Journal, Williwaw Journal, Heartwood, and many other journals.

Dreaming of a Northern Spring in the Subtropics, by Rose Mary Boehm

Dreaming of a Northern Spring in the Subtropics
by Rose Mary Boehm

A month or so before winter stencils the almost bare
branches of the ash in anticipation of silver-green turning
to black and brown, when the muddy earth waits patiently for its
feed of ash mulch, when the worms retire from the surface
to prepare their survival deep in the warm earth, everything
is ready, expecting death and rebirth. The centipedes huddle
under the mountain of firewood just delivered, the river rats
dig into the Styrofoam-covered ceiling, the last of the autumn
apples are rotting between brown tufts of grass, while the fox
barely remembers his friendship with the wolf dog. They’d danced
only one summer. The sun hangs low, the moon a faint Cheshire cat
rising behind the mountain, the poppy seeds rattling in their pods.
The ravens croak overhead, steering with their diamond tails.
The bird-scare guns are silent—no longer protecting harvests.
There is a sharp scent of snow in the air, for now a warning,
and the swifts dip their wings in yet another goodbye.

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fourth poetry collection, The Rain Girl, was published in 2020. Her fifth, Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders, has just been snapped up by Kelsay Books for publication May/June 2022. Her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

Winter 2020, a Sonnet, by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Winter 2020, a Sonnet
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This is the time of year for fever, the time
for downed timber, for masks in the grocery
and for seeing through the trees, how many

trailer houses sprouted up this summer.
Out in the chill, we find Indian currant
on the trail, shocking pink berries chilled to purple,

bird-fodder to the end of winter. We pass
a low-scarred elder, where baby bucks have
sharpened new antlers, count wild cherry logs,

pumpkin orange. There are galls on the Oak,
eggshell thin, caterpillars gone. This is the cold time,
time for sickness and loss, the rain crow vanished,

whose stutter and croak called out storms. We urge the one
last persimmon from its tree, find it gone rotten.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic. Her website is http://www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.

The True Nature of Imaginary Things, by Alan Toltzis

The True Nature of Imaginary Things
by Alan Toltzis

Imaginary rats lurk in my kitchen.
These rats lack something:
Guile. Purpose. Intent.
I worry I’ll tread on one in the dark.
I flick the lights and bristle,
sensing a rat, slick with sickness,
in the corner.
A ridge of fur stiffens and glistens
along the curve of its spine.
Early one morning, I startle another one.
Tiny feet click-click-click, like gravel
strewn across tile, when it tries to dart
under a table.
There is no table in my kitchen.
The rat freezes midway across the Saltillo tile floor.
It means no harm. Imaginary evil never does.
Rats are too busy with rat business;
with being a rat.
Once, a friend caught one in a trap,
drove to the lake, submerged it for 10 minutes,
and left it there.
The rat beat him home.

Alan Toltzis is the author of two poetry collections—49 Aspects of Human Emotion and The Last Commandment—and two chapbooks, Nature Lessons and Mercy (forthcoming). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online publications including, Plainsong, Grey Sparrow, The Wax Paper, Black Bough Poetry, and Anthropocene Poetry. Alan is an editor of The Mizmor Anthology. After a lifetime in Philadelphia, he now lives in Los Angeles. Find him online at alantoltzis.com; follow him @ToltzisAlan.

Song Without Moonlight, by Alan Toltzis

Song Without Moonlight
by Alan Toltzis

I try to overcome
my natural reticence
but words stick in my throat.

For two months
the moon hasn’t found me.
I’ve stopped looking for her.
Is it low clouds,
the angle of the eaves,
a skewed viewpoint?

The ocean rocks uneasy tonight,
uncertain when to rush the shore,
when to cower and hide.
Drizzle settles on shriveled wild plums,
dotting the dunes. It’s six months
until fresh ones take their place,
a mixture of ripe and rot
abuzz with flies.

A trickle of salty, silvery mist
beads up on resinous clusters
of poisonous bayberries,
redolent with temptation.

Tonight, I will become a warbler
and choke gray-green berries
down my throat whole.

Alan Toltzis is the author of two poetry collections—49 Aspects of Human Emotion and The Last Commandment—and two chapbooks, Nature Lessons and Mercy (forthcoming). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online publications including, Plainsong, Grey Sparrow, The Wax Paper, Black Bough Poetry, and Anthropocene Poetry. Alan is an editor of The Mizmor Anthology. After a lifetime in Philadelphia, he now lives in Los Angeles. Find him online at alantoltzis.com; follow him @ToltzisAlan.

Earth Bound, by Alan Toltzis

Earth Bound
by Alan Toltzis

One night, I will swap pillows
for rocks and dream
of angels, God, and heaven.
For now, the sky is heavy
with fret. The weight of earth
falls from invisible cracks
feathering my ceiling. Plaster dust
rims my eyes most mornings.

Alan Toltzis is the author of two poetry collections—49 Aspects of Human Emotion and The Last Commandment—and two chapbooks, Nature Lessons and Mercy (forthcoming). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online publications including, Plainsong, Grey Sparrow, The Wax Paper, Black Bough Poetry, and Anthropocene Poetry. Alan is an editor of The Mizmor Anthology. After a lifetime in Philadelphia, he now lives in Los Angeles. Find him online at alantoltzis.com; follow him @ToltzisAlan.