In The Hollow

Susan Scott

You were born small
screaming large
in a southern town at the brushy fork
of the Appalachians.

Already drawn
you slept for months
before your eyes captured
blue of another galaxy.

Far-flung swirl of stars
a celestial ferris wheel
you would alight
no fear

a fistful of moons
in your left hand
blinking neon

a harbinger
I would swathe you
tight and tense
until your head slumped

content against my chest.
All that remains in that hollow
is impression, jagged
outline of mountains you were born to.

 

Susan Scott taught GED mathematics for several years before returning to life on the road. In search of poetry and home, she has lived in several cities and villages throughout the world. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon and has published in halfwaydownthestairs.net and with Write Denver.

 

Points of View

Sharon Ackerman

 

All that time spent as a child
under the moon,
and I never once looked upward

Preferring to run, a jar held
high for lightning bugs,
the air damp on my arms                                 

Calling look to my father, waving
my jar of lights, as he peered
down the long telescope of years.

Where I waited, steeped in dew
and he searched the silvering air,
its large heavens, as though he knew

We would fail to find each other
in this world, so he gazed into the next.

 

Sharon Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. She is the first place winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international contest, London 2019. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Streetlight Magazine, The Atlanta Review, and Heartwood Literary Magazine. She is the poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

 

The CSX Circles the Carolina Cove At Midnight

Joyce Compton Brown

It rumbles in the dark
like a deep bass note     
pitched beneath coyote’s
tenor yelp, as it has
for a hundred years,
from West Virginia coal mines
through the valley. It snakes
down Linville Mountain
toward factories long dead,
past depots boarded up,
converted to tourist sites.

It passes plants where mysteries
are made, where trucks wait
to carry the load.
Slides on down to
Piedmont towns where
empty buildings loom
rust-red in the night.
Dead cotton mills
and furniture plants squat
near boarded company stores.
It rolls down to the flatlands
to a few coal plants
still churning out some power
before the final shutdown.
Moves on down to port towns
carrying oil in tank cars
for big ships to carry
on to foreign ports.

At journeys end cargo cars sit
in great tracked lots, waiting,
where kids write their songs
of I am here with spray paints
and bold words, indecipherable
to men rambling by, in language
no clearer than the coyote’s yap,
ignored as commonplace,
the jibberings of the young,
irrelevant to the journey.

 

Joyce Compton Brown has published in such journals as 'Main St. Rag', 'Kakalak', 'Still', and 'Flying South'. She studied poetry at Hindman Institute and Wildacres and has won several honors in art and poetry journals. Having taught English at Gardner-Webb University, she now concentrates on poetry, art, and roots music. She plays banjo, explores old music, and was keynote speaker at the American Gravestone Association Conference, 2019. Her chapbooks are 'Bequest' (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and 'Singing with Jarred Edges' (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2018).

 

This Morning, In the Mist

Jane Hicks

A hawk wings                 out over the valley
climbs, seeks                  a curtain of rain
thermals, wheels,         awash in summer
bathes in breeze            no prey below
no hunt                          but hawk hunger

 

Jane Hicks a retired teacher living in Upper East Tennessee. She has published two full length collections of poetry, appeared in numerous anthologies, and many regional publications.

A Weekend is One Thing and a Thing Later

After Robert Gober

Lee Hodge

I saw a lady silhouette on a truck’s mud flap and a
Missing cat notice written from the perspective of the cat
I’m lost before the shape of you in the rearview mirror
My mother was telling the sales woman in Talbots about her court date
While a tree was falling on the lawn
Of the former Home for Confederate Widows
After watching golf on the liquid crystal display
Studded and picturesque with prefallen trees
We read the plaque on the raptor trail for Bill Patrick
Who dedicated his life to birds of prey
Which are majestic creatures
Then the fake diamond earring of the man
Next to me on the greyhound bus
Gleamed in the smell of piss
I took half a pink pill and
The 7 Eleven parking lot
Next to the old 7 Eleven parking lot dissolves jagged
It was raining before
The woman was pulling her dog
Out through the mist of evaporating water
Dissipating in the brightness of the morning
Which is the day coming on timeless
In the space of the storm last night of the morning
I was waking to work and saw the notice again
I’m lost! I was last seen Sunday
I am sure you are cool but I would much rather be home
Help me! Please
Please
I’m lost!

 

Lee Hodge is an MFA candidate in poetry and fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a recipient of a 2019 Carol Weinstein Grant. Her work has appeared in Clinch Mountain Review and Funny Looking Dog Quarterly. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

 

Standing in a Late Season

Mark Senkus

the wind moves in the direction
of the crows over the long field
the sky does not hesitate to press
down with its cold eye

laughter early in the noise
of morning
sounding like a foreign language
the hours running through the light
from their gathered brightness

the sun today can hold no warmth
like a tire being punctured

shadows stiff against the ground
like eyes that will not blink

in the distance the canal rises with
the firm droning of water

the weight of the river
grows heavy as grieving

we do not know what
we have missed.

 

Mark Senkus lives in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and works as a psychotherapist. He writes in the evenings, the mornings and at work while he is on breaks. Senkus was widely published in the small press poetry underground of the late 1990s. He began writing again after a twelve year hiatus from poetry.

 

Words of the Sapient

Grace Curtis

We attach lattice
to our vocabulary. Crows,

gathered in a nearby tree,
speak,
sounding like rain. Each spoonful

 of day deepens
into its own murmur.

Turn off the TV, we say. Sit
in a chair, look out

into the field
that laps up sun
like a thirsty deer at a pond.

We dip our toes into
the stream
of another species’ sentience
until it feels

like our own wings beating. We crush
winter’s left-over slurps

beneath our shoes,
hoping for the best,
forever honed
into the worst, forgetting
to hold the crow’s words
close to our ears.

 

In Consideration of Seasons

Grace Curtis

What’s been written thus far is yammer
yielding to the rain drenched apple blossom
as if droop alone represents spring,

as if swooping swallows generate time
against the quiet unfolding of the Ash.
The river breaks open the earth

at a place few are destined to cross.
Fissures pushed forward
from puny crests, spill out

their hoard. Dirt, as dirt then silt,
marches into the tears, swept
by inevitable design, and piles up

at the base of another day. Hunger,
like a requiem to season, speaks
to drift’s relentlessness, to disappointment,

to forced renewal, to the obedience
of migration, to the nest builder’s diligence,
to the sun’s unstoppable impact

 on earth’s descent. Hunger
blankets the still cold ground
like a battlefield afloat, bucketing

mica and feldspar in deconstructed pails
of an undefinably hued river floating
beneath a shower of pink and magenta.

 

Grace Curtis is the author of three collections of poetry, Everything Gets Old, (Dos Madres, 2019) The Shape of a Box, (Dos Madres, 2014). Her chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage chapbook contest and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her prose and poetry can be found in such journals as Sou’wester, The Baltimore Review, Waccamaw Literary Journal, and others. www.gracecurtispoetry.com

 

Dream, Three Ways

Carol Grametbauer

 

from inside winter’s vise                           crushed in the grip of cold
I dreamed a flowering chaos                  I dreamed a June canvas
of milkweed crowding roadsides          a million blossoms aglow
creamy bindweed flowers                       bobbing in a breeze
humming with bumblebees                   as if they were alive
the rustle and buzz                                     the sonorous summer-sounds
of the season’s fervor                                on a sun-struck afternoon
piping me away                                           like a solstice choir processing
to a green and luminous place             to an ethereal Eden
my soul’s delight                                          built of air and longing

 

Carol Grametbauer is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Homeplace (Main Street Rag, 2018) and Now & Then (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in journals including Appalachian Heritage, Connecticut River Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Artemis Journal, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, as well as in a number of anthologies.

 

 

A Note at the Beginning of Autumn

James Owens

 

The rain has paused here,
but I like the raw wind that tears
at the branches, undressing them,
redressing, calling me

to stand at the door and watch
yellow leaves rush away
as clouds bulk taller
into the sombering afternoon.

The tough old men I knew when I was young
are gone, every one of them
with their tobacco juice and rattlesnake
canes and vast coats worn soft,

 but I've heard of a high bald on Pine Mountain
where they gather in wind like this
and talk about the lights down here.
Someday I'll go, and I'll know them.

Envoy:
There is a spider web in one upper corner
of the door frame.
Three wrapped flies
glued to the wood like seeds.

 

The Last Fling of Winter

James Owens

 

The sleepy mammal,
rimed with a silver frost,

is warm now to the touch,
has come alive in afternoon

sunshine to dart about
the swell of the fields.

Earth hides secrets
in leafless thickets:

already windflowers, adder's
tongue, bloodroot,

the gabble of the grackles.
The bulb and the grub

and the seed will tell
the first dragonflies

– metallic, uncurling –
to shimmer.

(Note: A found poem constructed with phrases from “April 6,” in Donald Culross Peattie's An Almanac for Moderns)

 

James Owens's most recent book is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or forthcoming publications in Appalachian Heritage, The Adirondack Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and Dappled Things. Originally from Virginia, he earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.

 

The Painter

Amy Ellis

A man teaches a woman to mix paint
pigment and oils and liquids in jars
and glass decanters, ground together
and sloughed on a piece of wood.
Knife scraping board, his hands
on hers and they stir yellows
vermilion and paint the sky red.
There is a wicked storm coming.
There is a child crying through
the door. There is a woman nursing
a baby. There is a girl child breaking
tiles by the hearth. There is a cook
sweeping ash from the coals.
There is a woman being painted.
He puts her body into position
and marks her curves with a brush
that knows the way her body can stroke.
Her fingers are coloured blue.

 

Amy Ellis has a BA in Creative Writing from Longwood University and an MA in Digital Publishing from Oxford Brookes University. She is a self-published author and works in publishing in London. Follow her online @amesplaza.

 

“What Can I Give You?”

—Maggie Smith, “Love Poem”

Ace Boggess


The right question. Ask & ask, &
answers debate one another
on how best to remodel a basement
or replace photos lost in the fire.
Perhaps a silver necklace would do,
bracelets, a ring—symbolic or ordinary.
More basic needs interrupt the argument,
suggest groceries,
bedding, underwear, & socks.
What about that perfume you like—
the one scented with lavender & honey?
How about tickets to a show?
Gifts, like cards, can be personal things,
though never gift cards.
I wanted to offer something
that says what I want to say & can’t.
These words form a bundle
of butter-lipped lingo.
Try to get the story right,
but I speak in cubic zirconia
when I mean diamonds
raining through a hole in the roof.

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). His writing appears in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, River Styx, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.