Issue 6: Fall 2018
Poetry
Small-town Gossip
Marianne Worthington
The best place to hear it? Not in the beauty shop, that warren
of backcombing and flaming hearsay; nor the church house
where prayer requests stand in for scandal. Do not listen
for it in the garages where men gather by twos and threes
gripping their coffee cups and old grudges; or in the Dollar
Store where old couples block the aisles comparing
ailments and dog-tired young women run in for cheap diapers
while their men wait for them, smoking, in idling cars.
You won’t hear it the grocery store either, as aggravated
shoppers fume into their phones while stalking the aisles.
The best place—just listen—the best place is before good
daylight when the mockingbird practices his scales,
when the redbirds wake and cheer each other to the day’s work:
chipping seed, ignoring the propaganda of jaybirds and crows.
Marianne Worthington is a poet, editor, and co-founder of Still: The Journal, an online magazine publishing literary, visual, and musical artists with ties to the Appalachian region since 2009. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Appalachian Book of the Year Award for her poetry collection, Larger Bodies Than Mine. She has edited four literary anthologies, most recently, Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, co-edited with Silas House. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, Shenandoah, The Louisville Review, Southern Poetry Anthology, and Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance, among other places. She lives, writes, and teaches in southeast Kentucky.
Pirouette
For M
Renée Nicholson
The depth of starlight is your heartbeat
squared, that series of entrechat-quatres
and passés. The arrow to the moon a leggy
line of penché, pointe shoe cleaving
harvest glow. Not quite clair de lune.
The high inner lines, perfectly refracting
shadows cast by écarté. The un-light until
you move again. Crescent moon:
over the smatter of fresh snowfall,
each tiny, crystalline glitter-orb.
One day you will witness
the vast, dark sky, wonder
at the twirling pinpoint of light,
that spinning self I’ve seen.
Renée K. Nicholson is assistant professor in Multi- and Interdisciplinary Studies at WVU, the author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center and is co-editor of the anthology Bodies of Truth: Personal Stories on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. She was awarded the Susan S. Landis award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2018. She is the 2019 Director of the West Virginia Writers Workshop at WVU.
ii. Peaceable First Light haiku [2]
Gerard Sarnat
Approaching eclipse
totality, white horses
stand still in shadows.
Our body parts are
intact enough that we can
be here in pieces.
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards, and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Blue Mountain Review,Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Burningwood Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Tiferet, Foliate Oak, Parhelion, Bonsai plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast, Walt Whitman Tribute Anthology and Tipton Review. “Amber of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids/ four grandkids so far.
The Cup Feeds Itself
Simon Perchik
This cup feeds itself
clinging to your lips
as if each star once unearthed
already has an aroma
though it’s a small claim
and you have to fill it twice
with dirt, pour so the arch
circles back barefoot, smells
from stones no longer too heavy
let go or fingers, jaws, winds
that keep nothing for later
not this wooden table
not the wooden chair
not a word and overhead
another morning all its own.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by boxofchalk, 2017. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews please follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8
Time Frames
Marie-Andree Auclair
Featureless flight over meridians
date line, more time zones
too boring to allow sleep.
At last, home.
My own bed, my feverish body
napping. Abruptly sleep decamps.
No use checking the time: The hands
on my analog clock overlap at 6:30
don’t say which.
I stumble to the window
maybe the city will tell.
But the pearl-colored sky
is dressed for either dawn or for dusk
and the scant traffic
shushed by snow, yields no clues.
Even the neighbours’ windows
are secretive, opaque
protecting sleep or seasonal vacancy.
Relief — at knowing where I am
one half of being oriented —
almost balances out my distress
at wondering when I am.
I want to know
which way the earth is turning
jump into day, or night.
Do I phone a friend and ask
what time is it? Do I go back to sleep
wait for the world to righten itself?
I feel ill-timed, almost queasy
a gnaw of hunger for orienting evidence.
I don’t want to choose, I want to
join the flock, breakfast or dinner
Marie-Andree Auclair’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications in the United States, Canada and elsewhere. Some of these magazines comprise Apeiron, Gravel, Understorey Magazine, Eunoia, a and Spadina Literary Review. Her chapbook Contrails was released by In/Words Magazine and Press/Ottawa. She lives in Canada.,and is working on her next chapbook.
In a Montgomery Bar Room
Cole Depuy
Now here’s the plan,
ya dumb shit. I heard them
stock rates from Chicago
to Manhattan take 8.5 fuckin’
millerseconds now-a-days
just to zip through the air.
Shooooo and its done.
Bada-bing-bada-boom, ya hear?
So I got to thinkin’.
When oil prices rise in Chi Town...
Them fuckin’ Exxon stocks rise
in New York just 8.5 millerseconds later!
You see what I’m sayin’,
ya thick bastard? Now, listen here.
We gotta build a tower,
tallest sum bitch ya ever saw.
A fuckin’ giant, barbed wire, copters,
the whole nine.
That way — now hear me out—
our signal’ll take just 8.4
and like a bitch it’ll ‘cross Lake Eire
0.1 before the others arrive,
givin’ us a good millersecond ‘er some shit
to sit pretty ‘n hold our peckers!
Ya see? — Oh boy! — when our signal
gets there nice ’n early we
can buy ‘n sell shit ‘fore the prices
drop ‘n what not. We’ll even get computers
to do the math, I reckon. We’re talkin’
time travel here, brother. Time travel.
Sellin’ the goddamn future
to the goddamn past. Wuddya say?
Cole Depuy is a second-year MFA candidate at Southern CT State University in New Haven. He grew up in Newtown, CT and enjoys being a teacher assistant in undergraduate poetry courses and working on research with the SCSU Social Work department.
Two Suns
Martha Owens
The sleek crows have gathered again,
strutting, and proclaiming loudly to me
Odin hanging in a tree,
the suffering god of poetry.
Today I am busy rocking on a rotting
porch in my red-flowered sundress
and eating an oatmeal pie, but I
only taste the thickness of my steady glare
because I am angry about
the two suns; therefore, I can’t listen
to any talk of Norse gods and poetry today.
The crows squawk sacred runes incessantly at me,
as if Odin were hanging in the woods
right behind the house,
and I finally break down and ask them to
lay their mind-darkening wings
over my eyes, to cover the sight of the
two fire-orbs overhead and the flashing
sparkler-lights around my ankles.
I would choose to have two, moist oatmeal pies
in place of my eyes, which try hard not to see
what isn’t there. Then, if I gave up one eye,
as Odin did, the other one would cry
thick, white tears of cream filling.
I will keep rocking and try not to worry
about which sun is made of hydrogen,
and which one is the product of
a dysfunctional limbic system,
and I will keep eating Nordic runes that taste like desire
spread evenly between two grainy cakes of chewy confusion.
A native of Kanawha County West Virginia, Martha Owens lives in western North Carolina and teaches British literature at Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy. Her poems have appeared in Wisconsin Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Gray's Sporting Journal, Lyricist, and NatureWriting. When she is not working or writing, she is trying to train her little dog, Petee.
Conductor of the Immune Orchestra
Taylor Deuley
Soft, smooth vibrations of music
Filling the hollow compartment
Quiet, yet demanding – unknowingly forceful
The white noise slowly growing
It’s no longer avoidable
Symptoms of its presence – well known
Swaying and fading
The whole cavity turning its attention
To the count that is taking over
The count that is growing
Overpowering the space
The noises get stronger
And as the conductor scrambles
The body is left is in shambles.
Taylor Deuley is a 20-year-old from Elizabeth, WV. Currently, she is studying Occupational Therapy at West Virginia University where she will graduate in 2021 with her Master of Occupational Therapy. She began to write poetry while enrolled in a course titled “Medicine in the Arts” with Renee Nicholson. The inspiration for this piece came from reading a book by Abraham Verghese, My Own Country.
I am Related by Blood to the Sea
In Memory of John B. McLemore
Stuart Gunter
Two weeks after
Christmas, skeletons and flashing
pumpkins hanging
on a mailbox down
the street:
a sandwich of elbow-teeth.
Tell me I am not a ghost.
Let my flesh grow
old and crumble like
a clusterfuck of sorrow.
I stay away from humans.
Hallucination is real. What
are the benefits of escape?
I seek refuge
at the ocean’s shore.
The ocean greets the beach
with waves: impossible
to pay our debts. Panic flowers
like a kiss: tedious and brief.
There will be nights
when I will be lonely.
I am related by blood to the sea.
Stuart Gunter lives in Schuyler, Virginia, where he reads, writes, paddles the Rockfish River, and plays drums in obscure rock bands. His work has appeared in Broad Street, Whurk, Waxing & Waning, and The Artemis Journal, among others.
A Shortage of Fishermen
Nicholas Boever
she straddled shoulders
to stir weir woven hearts:
sun cinnabar rolled indigo or
old bull bones drowned:
thunder where fingerlings pulled,
she swam fingertips down
where whippoorwill reeds
whistled she swam, eyes
eggs spawning trout to swallow
stars each night.
Nicholas Boever lives on a lake in Hopkinton, MA, split between being a poet who writes novels or a novelist who writes poems, and though the lake isn't always there, the writing never stops. He completed his graduate studies with the New Hampshire Institute of Art's MFA program for creative writing and enjoys biking, kayaking, and hiking when he isn't staring off into space in his office.
The Lost Dialect of Southeast Kentucky
Sharon Ackerman
With each syllable,
a pan bangs on the stove,
iron skillet words
muttered by old Scots.
Nary and haint, blinked,
kyarn. Highland tongues
clang in hollows, faintly now,
but I have known smokehouses
haunted by their metal,
shattered mountain coves
where patchwork Gaelic
skipped rivers as a pebble
before it was schooled out,
blasted out. What remains
is water; its rough, ancestral rhythm
ferries me to sleep, speaks again
the white capped fury of old
English cadences, rushing creeks
where a forsaken alphabet
still rages through stone
Sharon Ackerman resides in Charlottesville, Virginia and earned an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in StreetLight Magazine and she was one of the winners in the 2017 Virginia Poetry Society's national contest.
A Swarming
Paul Ilechko
The last encounter,
a sorry babble of voices
cutting like static
through the echoes
of intelligence. Cutting
like a knife through
my implacable skin.
We flew kites in memory
of radio days, taunting
the weather. A faint hum
permeated the garden,
but the shapeless shadow
twisted in the wind
as the elements failed
to maintain their posture,
as the whole was less
than any sum of parts.
After the sun went down
and background radiation
declined to normal
levels, it seemed
that the bees were able
to re-integrate their swarm
into an acceptable shape.
Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks “Bartok in Winter” (Flutter Press, 2018) and Graph of Life (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Stickman Review, Mocking Heart Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Dime Show Review. He lives in Lambertville, NJ.