Grown Wild

Carla Barger

Row after row mother toiled
pulling bright swollen beans from the vines,
a daughter bent-backed, brow beading,
while Grandma sat on the porch and cried. 

The garden had grown wild in secret
though mother had phoned every day.
Grandma had gasped, always winded,
exasperated at the need to explain.

I’m minding the corn, snapping beans,
boiling down blueberries for jam.
The frost will come early–—so early!—
and I still have so much to can.

But a neighbor explained to mother
how he’d see Grandma at night dirty, afraid,
ghostlike in flashes of heat lightning,
and wandering the rows every day,

whispering like droplets to onions,
laughing with crickets and peas.
While the corn matured and grew heavy
and the peppers grew tangled with weeds

Grandma frantically twirled in the moonlight,
a wild thunderstorm on its way out to sea.

Ghost

Carla Barger

 /ˈgōst/
noun

 1 :  a disembodied soul: Just days before the stroke, Grandma dreams that she is standing at the edge of a field of wildflowers across which a stranger beckons. She hesitates, touches toes to petals, then refuses, unable to crush beauty into dirt.

 2 : a faint shadowy trace: The powdery scales of a marsh moth smacked against the cool glass of the hospital window. From underneath the thin blanket grandma’s hands float free, pinch at the air around her that is swarming with the unseen world. The dream fills the room for those who did not dream it, the stranger’s unuttered voice louder than our own.

 3 : a false image in a photographic negative: Coffee tins full of them in her dresser drawer— here she is with Great Aunt Dovey, here with Uncle Joe. We finger the brittle strips gingerly as if they too might turn to dust, holding each one up to the window until the light reveals her alone— someone’s hand on her shoulder, the puff-sleeve of her blouse crushed, the pattern of petals nothing but a series of dark dots.

Behind her a blanched field of wildflowers in monochromatic bloom.

 

Carla Barger is a poet and lyric essayist who hails from the farmlands of Southern Ohio. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently finishing her PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she also teaches poetry and co-directs the Digital Humanities Initiative. Her work has appeared in decomP magazinE, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Light Ekphrastic, MidAmerica, and elsewhere. She received the 2019 David Diamond Writing Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Malcolm Sedam Writing Award for Poetry from Miami University, and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. Find out more about Carla at CarlaBarger.com.


Barn, Moth

Jeff Burt

The roll of the earth extinguishes
            the last flame of daylight,
                        a pitch, a yaw, then night.

A moth tumbles through
            the incandescent light
                        of the yard lamp

into that indeterminate
            strip of obscurity
                        where radiance diffuses

into absence and reflection,
           thin smooth glass
                        that shines like a jar

holding the glow of harvest
            and beyond the unlit cornfield
                        and darkness of my longing.

I miss your voice,
            at times a bellicose bar
                        beating against the metal of time

at times a filament drawn so thin
            one electric word wired to another
                        brings radiance to all around it.

The Infinitive to Listen

Jeff Burt

Threatened by the sprawl of an oak
and unremitting sun
the timber and truss of the roof age,
crack, dry and rot,
the roofline no longer an erect V,
sides sagging as if the ink
that drew them had become wet
from the winter’s rain.

I spy bumps and swales in the linear run—
squirrels have planted acorns
in the shingles, pushing up a corner
of a square and tamping down,
but the shingles appear more like
Fedoras with the brim curled from overuse
of a gripping tip of acknowledgment.

I have lived here too long, perhaps,
to go on explaining to prospective buyers
about picking holly sprigs
bent over the eaves in the winter
and how one has to dress the outside lights
from the power feed and grounding hub
on the roof or risk a sudden electrical flip,
flop and pitch to the yard below,
the dent in the gutter from a branch
of the cedar across the street that sailed
like a straw in the gusts of a winter storm,
the little pocket in the beam
where a chickadee had her nest
and a crow or jay could not pierce,
the flat area where in spring
one year recovering from a torn calf
I bathed in sunlight and read Chinese poetry
until I saw every bush, shrub
and stripling as an ideogram,
learned how complicated
the pen-stroke graphic 
of the infinitive to listen is,
with speaker, hearer, past
and present, whispers
and blares of vocables
held in a single image,
with not a single vowel,
phoneme or syllable
to explain the entirety of to listen.

We have no heirs to this house,
only to our home, which travels
in the lives of our children.
I have learned this roof is a brushstroke
that cannot be spoken.

Jeff Burt works in mental health. He has contributed to Rabid Oak, Ecotheo Review, Williwaw Journal, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review Poetry Prize.

 

Ode to Reflection

Karen L. George

 

Stunning, the way one object reflects another, contingent
on density, distance, medium between, angle of giver to receiver.

How, closer to earth, a bird's clone crystallizes,
and sun through colored glass casts tinted replicas.

Water my recepor of choice—lake, stream, veneer of ice.
Creek water shimmers trees on mud or sand bed

overtop minnows making squiggly doubles
beneath my silhouette as I lean over the bridge rail.

How shadows travel and lengthen as day unravels,
the juncture when a mountain veils an entire valley. 

Motion layers the allure—a fish breaks the pond skin
while waves intersect the sway of tree twins.

The bathroom light on the vinyl curtain imprints green
bamboo on white tile like dark trunks on new snow.

Everything echoes something else: a grimace on a face,
a yawn. Mirrors and glass yield images in reverse.

Even our eyes. Light travels cornea to retina, converts
to impulses, so our brain interprets what looms before us.

 

Karen L. George is author of five chapbooks, and two poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014) and A Map and One Year (2018). Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Adirondack Review, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Louisville Review, and Still: The Journal. She reviews poetry at Poetry Matters: http://readwritepoetry.blogspot.com/, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the online journal, Waypoints: http://www.waypointsmag.com/. Visit her website at: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

 

It’s More Than 12 Steps Across the Desert

Robert S. King

 

My shadow is quite drunk,
but the desert will dry me out.
In the alcoholic bath of my own sweat,
I empty the bottle,
then stagger into the sunburned land
of footprints walking in circles,
of a clumsy surfer on tsunami dunes.

I seal a message to myself in the bottle,
drop it in the waves of sand
where I am going down for the third time,
still wanting that bottle back, full
of 100 proof whose last drop
tastes like a tear that falls forever,
and staying dry is staying in the desert
among mirages of monsoons,
downpours where the happy hour sign winks
and the bar is set low,
where courage is drained by the ounce
and the next step is backwards.

 

Robert S. King lives in Athens, GA, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press and edits Good Works Review. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Chariton Review, Hollins Critic, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Negative Capability, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Diary of the Last Person on Earth (Sybaritic Press 2014), Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), and Messages from Multiverses (Duck Lake Books, 2020). His personal website is www.robertsking.info.



Prevarication

Lisa J. Parker

 

At the edge of yard
I watched blackberry vines for readiness,
pushed against nascent buds as red to purple to black,
vines inching taller against their cling and twine around
silvery anchor cable on the telephone pole.

Mama warned of electrocution when she caught me
shimmying half its length toward a tangled kite, told me
my hands could be burned clear off, I might end up
in a wheelchair like cousin Jimmy
who worked for Dominion Power and got thrown 50 feet
to the ground where the imprint of his body
burned into the grass.

I wondered what wild thing could make a blackberry
stronger than a man, ran my fingers against vines until
they touched cable, pressed my luck
until I grabbed the whole cable in my fist, held it
tighter with each passing minute until slowly the fallacy
of my mother's warning became clear
and I walked bowl after bowl
of blackberries in to her, never another thing mentioned,
even years later, the countless syrups and preserves
she spooned or spread over bread she pushed
into my mouth when I was too sick to feed myself,
her careful conservation the only thing that could sustain me.

 

Hillbilly Transplant Writes "Where I’m From" Exercise With Imposter Narrative

Lisa J. Parker

City girl, Brooklyn-born, rough raised
by loud women cursing store-bought pickles,
and men who couldn't carry their own weight,
by subway tunnels where I learned to hold my breath
and perfect the hasty walk-not-run when rats
hugged the tile walls of transfers between Prospect Park
and Brighton Beach, or not-quite-men
proved themselves to each other with catalogs
of come-ons as I passed.

I am summer drought brazen-cracking the hydrants,
standing in the sting of its water until
my jeans adhered to me and the waves of heat
finally rolled off.

I am kitchen windows sweating streaks all year long,
neighborhood Babushkas who cooked constantly, sour cherry jams,
pickled garlic, my Ukrainian neighbor whose chewy black breads
I teethed on, her sister whose quick clap under my chin
taught me early to say spasiba to everything no matter how small I was,
no ingrates tolerated in the swarm of warm aprons, these women
who guarded the gates to every doughy, salty treat of my childhood.

I am backseat of the movies at Sheepshead Bay,
learning the indelicate truth of neighborhood boys.
I am feet whose callouses came early, concrete
and hard grass, 5th floor walk-up, my Latvian neighbor
who would only paint my nails if I let her take a razor
to my heels, the pads of my feet, and then soak them
in sudsy warm water while she talked of love.
I am my mother’s Matryoshka, each doll its own lacquered red,
sun-yellows and brilliant greens, flowers of her homeland, peasant
and princess, each piece a story, a variation from that tiniest doll, a baby
fashioned from a single perfect piece of wood.

 

Lisa J. Parker is a poet, musician, and photographer. Her book, This Gone Place, won the 2010 Appalachian Studies Association Weatherford Award, and her work is widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Southern Review, The Louisville Review, Appalachian Heritage, and many Bedford/St Martins college literature anthologies. Her photography has been on exhibit in NYC and published in several arts journals and anthologies.

 

Cold to the Bone

Annette Sisson

 

Boots, two pairs of socks, feet
cold to the bone. White sheers ruffling
at the window, register breathing softly.
Sun lifts the room into light.

I unzip the brogans, peel away
thermals like leaves from cornstalks—
extend bare toes to the pane,
poaching the warmth collected in glass.

My sister calls. And calls. In Indiana
the pack of snow is splotched, gray
with muck. It buries her sidewalk. Her busted
shovel can’t take the weight of wet snow. 

I buy teas, cat treats, pack a photo
of our mother stirring at a hot stove.
I wonder how to quell the chill,
deliver boxes of warm jellied toast,  

pry hope loose like windshield ice,
send her a morning with arms like sunlight.

 

Annette Sisson is Professor of English (Victorian Lit.) at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Recently, she is much taken with one of her earliest loves, writing poetry. Besides teaching and mentoring college students, she loves to travel, hike, bake, play piano, sing alto in choir, watch birds (but not officially “bird watch”), and hang with her family: two sons and a daughter, fully fledged, and her husband, a Communications professor at Belmont. In the last year, she has published 15 poems in 13 journals, including Nashville Review, Typishly, One, and a chapbook, A Casting Off (5/2019, Finishing Line). She was selected nationally to be a BOAAT Writing Fellow (2020), won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize (2019), and received honorable mention in Passager’s national poetry contest (2019). Up ahead (five years?) she sees retirement beckoning; it looks like writing and family, sprinkled with house projects, music, travel, and adequate sleep.

 

Moth

Marcus Whalbring

 

One bigger than my nine-year-old hands.
Its scribbles of legs were stuck, frozen
to the cement of the classroom windowsill.

It looked in through the mist of the harsh March air
at me as if it had flickered from the flowered light
of some dream I hadn’t flown through yet.

Nothing in its stare seemed less than planetary.
The dead engine of its wings stalled with frost.
I was a child still, frozen in the moment until

his teacher’s coat flapped over her shoulders
on her way out to free it with her fingernails
and lay it in a bed of dead daylilies.

Won’t fly, she said, shedding her coat again,
but it’s alive. Frost filigreed on windows dissolved
by afternoon, but my thoughts were stuck

in the morning, how she’d balanced the moth
on her hands with such care,
the way one would the last flame on a cold planet.

 

Marcus Whalbring's most recent poetry collection How to Draw Fire appeared in 2020. His poems have appeared in publications like The Cortland Review, Spry, and others. He's a father, husband, and teacher.