NarrativeNortheast

THREE POEMS – Marge Piercy

on December 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

COUNTING EVERY PETAL

The ground is finally bare, the snow
vanished into it as if it had not
smothered the world for months.
It might wrap its shroud around us

again. We celebrated the first snow,
counted ourselves lucky to cower
under blizzards but by the 14th
storm we are simply bored.

Now I search flower beds for green
steeples rising, even for weeds,
anything that grows. Starving
deer nibble rhododendron leaves.

Mother with two fawns at dawn’s
breaking. I stay quiet, watching.
Every day I count birds at feeders.
A pair of robins is an omen.

When I lived a year in San Francisco,
I missed spring, as if without pain
there could be no pleasure. Winter
makes the first crocus a celebration.

THE MONOTONOUS BIRD

High in the green rooms
of the sugar maple a strange
bird calls, calls, calls. Does
he/she seek a mate? Lost,
maybe from the South, since
it’s new to me who all spring
and summer know the words
spoken by bayberry warbler,
tohee, robin, brown thrasher,
catbird, oriole, wren.

What does it want, crying
insistent as a leaky faucet
hidden by the tiers of wide
flat leaves? What good
would identifying do could
I spy it, Peterson in hand?
It would still passionately
want what it’s not getting.
I hear my younger self
in its fierce cry of hunger.

How many years and grey
rooms I haunted seeking
a return of love, affairs
tearing flimsy in my avid
hands. Give me, give
was my cry repetitive
and dismal. How tedious.
How forlorn. I should have
more patience with this
lonely traveler.

HAND-ME-DOWNS

Mother told me when I was little
that the small depression under
my nose and above my lips
was the fingerprint of an angel.

She said when a baby’s curled
in the womb, it knows every
thing before and after, which
is why babies don’t want

to be born. But the angel makes
us forget. Otherwise we’d never
willingly enter this chaos, this
maelstrom of trouble and pain.

Of course we cried to exit that warm
safe place where all we need
was given us while we rocked,
richer than we’d ever be again.

I wonder what it was I knew
then – I wonder.

Copyright 2019 Marge Piercy
Box 1473, Wellfleet MA 02667
hagolem@c4.net

Marge Piercy has written 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and most recently Sex Wars. Among her 19 volumes of poetry the most recently published include The Hunger Moon: New & Selected Poems 1980-2010, and Made in Detroit. Her critically acclaimed memoir is Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.
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THREE POEMS – M. L. Brown

on December 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM

A woman is housing,
is keeping the darks
from the lights, is splitting

wings from breasts, dividing
one into knives and spoons,
answering: What’s for dinner?
Have you seen my? Why
is the gas bill so high?

A woman
is fragmenting, tectonic plating. A shoe
left on the stair again.

She is stealing to a quiet shade,
trying to save some paradise.

*
No, she answers, there is no more ice cream—
no lick, no trace.

ONLY MEAN BONES

I’m becoming an open honey comb of bone,
a canted weave, a clutch of shells
eroded by the sea. I’m becoming bone

friable as a fender rusted by salt winters.
A pelvis translucent—china cup, too brittle for tea.
Holy relic. My body, its own catacomb.

O sieve of hips, may you sing
like Sappho’s broken poems, while I write
in swirls and curves, wear away my wrist bones.

REQUISITES OF A GOOD LETTER

from Manners for Millions

Try until you
find the stroke you like
They vary

Sit
with plenty of elbow room

Say “ceremony”
you will get more pleasure

The first thing is your

body

(Very truly yours, Yours sincerely, Affectionately yours)

M. L. Brown is the author of Call It Mist, winner of the 2018 Three Mile Harbor Press Book Prize, and Drought, winner of the Claudia Emerson Chapbook award. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blackbird, among other journals and anthologies. When not writing, she devotes her time to raising funds for a nonprofit health care organization. She lives in California.
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3 POEMS – Chelsea Dingman

on December 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

A MEMORY OF WATER

It rains because another body has fled
its wounds. It rains because morning is sick
with drought. It rains because only water
has memory. It rains & someone’s husband
or mother or brother has become the past
participle of love. It rains because we must be present
when the world disappears behind cloud. It rains
because we look for our mothers under clotheslines & beds,
nestled inside the throats of birds, as we mother the rain
that wants to bury itself below ground, as we mother
thought & not deed, our gods pulsing like a murder
of crows at a firing squad ceremony. It rains again,
now, because the trees want to feel anything
new. It rains because blood stirs under the surface
of ash. It rains because sadness wants to be
repealed, as the fires we burn become the future.
It rains because silence is the circus we give our children,
while we pray to sorrow to take away the rain
splitting our throats. It rains because everything
fallen once knew joy. It rains because water wants
to originate anywhere but sky as sky breaks
open inside us. It rains because we can’t stop
becoming this world when we are lonely.

AFTER YOU ALMOST DIED THE FIRST TIME

I called your name to hear
a voice like yours echo
in the rime. I called myself back

from the lure of a man’s hands, the beggar
moon caught in my throat.
I called you mother. Not Mama.

Not Mom. I created distance
in that one word. The hull
& husk of your lung, spooned out.

Lobe by lobe, I called breath
an enemy. I was called orphan
by agencies. My father, already dead,

as you raised us alone. I called you hero
for awhile, then whore. Then leaf
that can’t return to the tree. Or maybe

that was me. I called the days grey
horses. I called it love
when moss overran the pines.

I called you through this animal
loneliness. I called you someone
I didn’t want to be. I called you, yesterday,

to wish you a good day. The sparrows,
forgetting themselves in the glare
of the windows. I called the day

forward to fold over our voices.
I called to say love is evidence
of all that you’ve kept alive.

INDUCTION

Today, a daughter will come,
pale & unprotected,

to make me possible.

I will be ruled by no other god
but time.

Chelsea Dingman is the author of Thaw (University of Georgia Press, 2017),

What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018) and a forthcoming book of poems, Through a Small Ghost (University of Georgia Press, 2020)
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TWO POEMS – Paul LaTorre

on December 22 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE PRESTIGE

Boys desire to be
desired, too.
Boys move
out of single
parent homes &
into double occupant
condos of unwilling to fix
foundations so they never fill              the vacant rooms.

Men make tombs offill              their defects,
erecting
monuments
to conquest &
mislabel it company.

Boys can also be whores, you know.

Boys ignore knocks on doors
& keep pleading.

Boys use fingers as
tongue depressors when
depressed & hit eject.

Boys look into mirrors
at shapes that aren’t there
& also want not to be there.

Boys become assistants
to magicians willing
to help them
learn
to disappear
& then reappear
each evening withfill            the flick
of an ‘Abra-cadaver’fill              wrist.

Boys become men            who vanish altogether.

ONE SIZE FITS

All of us have a type:
Schindler’s list thin,
starvation Ghandi thin,
ungodly thin like Paris Hilton
after purging six big macs,
Tom Hanks Philadelphia,
Jared Leto in Dallas gaunt
ribs could play xylophone
like my withhold of protein
led to Ethiopian days of near
fainting on stair masters
after chugging a sugar-free
Red Bull with taurine
(which is actually bile)
scorching eyes as chlorine
crotch touches during first
summer swim, Angelina Jolie
cheekbone thin, won’t even eat
a wafer thin, paper doll thin,
Kate moss thin, chemo treatment
patient thin as pre-Easter Jesus
apocryphal thin
& all these                          idols               fit
on the altar
which we kneel to              nightly
& make our sacrifice.

Paul LaTorre is a poet, activist and educator who teaches at Bloomfield College in NJ. Blending pop culture with advocacy for various forms of trauma including abuse, disorder, and mental health issues, his aim is to create dark poems with a sense of levity. Paul’s work has been published in Zeitgeist, Drunk Monkeys, Narrative Northeast, BLINK and has been featured on the DREAM Act’s ‘voices’ portal. His chapbook of poetry, Disappearing Boy, was recently published by the 3 Mile Harbor Press.
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TWO POEMS – Lauren Sartor

on December 11 | in Haiku, Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

1. Using This Booklet

“This booklet does not offer a plan for recovery from alcoholism” (Living Sober, Intro)

There is no chronology in addiction.
It is always where it is. Love too
can be like that; young love, especially.
This booklet is not a plan, it is more
like a body with bruises; the poems
connect the contusions in an attempt
to remember what was erased by force.
This booklet is full of accidents
with pages like carrier pigeons –
in hopes to reach out to the dead,
to coerce the grave to grow roots.

Fending Off Loneliness

“When we have only ourselves to talk to, the conversation gets kind of circular” (Living Sober, Section 14)

There’s always
a cliché to cling to.
Hair of dog and keep scratching.
Tie one on and get loose.
Off the wagon and hit your head.
I put a record on the player;
the grooves deepen.
I crack one open.
The singing comes first –
that I understand.
The reading aloud
is reasonable enough.
But this talking to walls?
I don’t know when it happened,
but it’s happened.
Each night my feet paces the distance
from Binghamton to Syracuse.
The floor’s wood is testimony
of this delirium, of this trek, of my tongue
moving like a train full of philosophers.
I’ve answered questions put forth by phantoms,
reminisced at length about my childhood to the face in the window,
drank until I became incoherent.
I’ve sat on the rocking chair to make it nod,
strained my voice at the curtains to make them clap.
Each night is a compulsion for company,
an argument to be put to sleep.

Lauren Sartor has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in publications, such as Black Fox Literary Review, Broad! Magazine, Calyx Journal, Literary Juice, Easy Street, The Former People’s Journal and others. Her work takes an earnest look at the conflicted, and often misrepresented, facets of ordinary livelihood. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at SUNY Binghamton.
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TWO POEMS – Irene Mitchell

on December 3 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

NIGHT

Autumn to Winter hastens
like a goat that will eat anything
from a can to kidney pie.

My inscrutable design
for a good night’s sleep
is not to dwell on such images
but to leave the compass behind.

I rely on the sanity of the day
for my night’s rest,
the blue quilt
a citadel of comfort.
I do not bring papers to bed
or identification
as they are obvious interference
and may yield contradictory interpretation
at a later date.

The night is better than the day,
more eloquent, intangible.
Night has me in its maw.

VISIT FROM A RAPTOR OF INTEREST

Let me not waste myself on impossible flights….
William Everson

A hawk presents nearby,
the elm’s limb so close
to the window I think
it has come to visit me in camaraderie.

I left the city for the night air here,
the hawks and hilarious jumping rabbits,
the cricket concerts,
the black of the berry.
Here, there isn’t much to be distressed about.
One day there is algae in the pond,
gone the next day and the water lively again.

I have named the hawk Ted
for its poetic input, the language
of its muscles, the holding at the back
of a few grey feathers,
the wingspan huge
even, I suppose, in the rain.
Goodbye, Ted.

Heeding cautions and riptides,
where this bird goes, there go I
into the wind
and overwhelming sky.

Irene Mitchell’s fifth poetry collection, Fever, has been published (2019) by Dos Madres Press. Equal Parts Sun and Shade: An Almanac of Precarious Days, was published in 2017 by Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press. Mitchell is the author of three other collections: Minding the Spectrum’s Business (FutureCycle Press, 2015), A Study of Extremes in Six Suites (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012), and Sea Wind on the White Pillow (Axes Mundi Press, 2009). A long-time teacher of writing in New York, and former poetry editor of Hudson River Art Journal, she conducts an ad hoc series of workshops on how to write better poetry. Mitchell has been featured reader of her work at Poets’ Walk, Bard College’s Institute of Writing and Thinking, William and Mary College, Marianne Courville Gallery,The Albany Institute of History and Art, Melville’s Arrowhead, Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, Woodstock Colony Cafe, Hudson Opera House,as well as regional libraries and bookstores. Mitchell is known for her collaborations with visual artists and composers. She is a 2019 Associate Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
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Two Poems – Kika Dorsey

on November 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

THE GENETIAN

She told the three Russian soldiers
she would gather snails that day,
and she picks their brown and white shells
from the dew-drenched land,
and in her satchel she had three,
and Mutti said to try to find a dozen,
to feed her and her sister and the three soldiers
who track mud in their home, setting Mutti’s face
into grim lines.

The gentian is in bloom,
deep blue petals curling, surrounding yellow stamen
like a fallen sun,
like the hole inside of her
where her older brother and father disappeared,
hole like the caves where the ibex live
high near tundra, young ones with velvet horns
soft like her before the war,
the hunger and the blood that came now
every month and the soldiers with their laundry
and tobacco and vodka and thirsty eyes.

She comes to a meadow with a snow gum
surviving from a fire,
its new sprouts reaching from the blackened old trunk
like a womb, bulbous.
She thinks how out of every death sprouts an insistence
to live, despite the ashes, despite the eaten valley,
and she thinks of a day when maybe she will stretch herself
like Alpine tundra’s five petals—
her brother with his mucous breath,
her Vati of yellow nicotine hands,
her Mutti of yellow yarn for socks
her breasts aching like sunset when the moon bulges,
her sister the petal that finishes the cross with the hungry body,
and all the petals
will drink in the sun as if never losing it,
never burying itself in the winter frost.

LULLABY

She lived in a makeshift camp
in front of Vienna’s ruined Bahnhof.
Her feet were bare, and the filth on her skin
itched as she wiped the lice descending into her eyes
from her dirty, dark bows.
Her brother hopped around the American canteen clapping,
and the soldier threw him half of his sandwich,
but the older boy Hans wrestled with him
and took it way.

Yesterday was a better day.
A soldier threw her two cigarettes,
and she bartered them for two apples,
one for her and one for her brother.

At night she sometimes dreamed of her mother,
dead from an air raid in Essen,
her mother kneading the potato dough to make Knoedel,
her mother polishing their black shoes,
darning their socks.
Of Vati she remembered little.
He disappeared in Russia and never came back.
She remembered his shoulders were broad and strong
like a castle’s stone.

In one dream her mother was a small bird
perched on the rubble.
Her hair was crow-black,
she had no wings, just a coat of feathers,
and she sang to her daughter the lullaby
about the moon emerging blurred from the clouds
and the stars coming out,
and when the daughter awoke,
it was the middle of the night
and the soldiers were drinking
on the broken steps of the station,
speaking in a language she couldn’t understand,
and she could see the moon.

It was a sickle,
like a scythe threshing the sky for a song.

Kika Dorsey is a poet, educator, writing coach and tutor in Boulder, Colorado. While finishing her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in Seattle, Washington, she performed her poetry with musicians and artists and wrote about German and Italian modern and postmodern writers. Her poems have been published in The Denver Quarterly, KYSO Flash, The Comstock Review, Narrative Northeast, The Columbia Review, among numerous other journals and books. Her chapbook, Beside Herself , was published by Flutter Press in 2010. Her full-length collection, Rust, came out with Word Tech Editions in 2016. Her forthcoming book, Coming Up For Air, comes out in 2018. She is an adjunct instructor of English at Front Range Community College and has tutored in their writing center since 2008. She is also the poetry editor of Plains Paradox.

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SURVIVORS – Amy Barone

on November 26 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

The piping plover, hailed one day each summer
for its resurgence in the Rockaways, Queens,
lives protected in camouflaged nests on the beach.

Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay,
the world’s prime supplier of soft-shell crab.
Home to four-hundred-sixty residents, where

water defines life, where home and religion matter.
The cahow re-emerged on Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island
after a three-hundred-year absence. It thrives amid

native flora, wildlife and limited access to man.
Shadowboxing Arctic hares, clinging jellyfish, bonebeds
and badlands on Fossil Freeway in South Dakota.

Me—I’m the woman with medicine in her voice,
a forest bather mating like a corpse plant, melting into time,
floating toward a twelfth life like a trumpeter swan.

Amy Barone’s poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in early 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone’s poetry appears in Café Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK.) She lives in NYC.
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De Halve Moon – Pamela Kallimanis

on November 25 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Henry Hudson’s boat. September 2, 1609

The actual founding of New York City occurred in 1615 when the New Netherland Company, a subsidiary of the Dutch East India Company chartered to make four voyages within a three-year limit, built a stone house on the lower tip of Manhattan Island. Around this stone house, the huts of traders sprang up. This was the inconspicuous beginning of the city and for some years there was no change in the scene. There was just the storehouse and the rude huts of a few hardy men who bartered with the Indians for furs. (Kieran 3)

One.
Everything about New York is a barter.
Every single moment that one stands on the lower tip of Manhattan,
the traders begin to spring into their rudeness, small claims on the biggest places
and all the while, someone is pushed out of the way –
the beautiful creatures that fly in the air,
the creeping critters on the sands below the ice in March.
And, at some point, in May or June, when the grasses are about to spring
from their seeds, stones are place over them by the companies.

Nobody thought much about progress in the beginning.
None were able to conserve the birds, and for some years –
the harbor was still prolific and engorged with the natural.
It was only when the grease from the skins began to slink into the mud
that the locals began to question the new habitants’ storehouses.
At first, they simply looked into the buildings – to see the skins,
and the fat, but the blood would streak into the streets and hasn’t stopped.

THE PEOPLE

“By 1500, Lenapes have lived in the area of Greater New York City for 1,500 years. They call their homeland Lenapehoking.” (Mushabac and Wigan)
“Land is the gift of the creator.”

Which creator makes the land in New York?
Which party is responsible for the area the people called Lenapehoking –
because there is a new land being made in ways that don’t resemble the first waves,
sandy marsh, soils and glacial deposits.
The newest construction is more angular and less ruddy.

The buildings going up are blue in color, more like steel than copper.
The brick and mortar are a darkness, a blacker brick
than the local soils reddish and golden points.

1626. Construction of Fort Amsterdam begins
at the southern tip of Manhattan. (Mushabac and Wigan 7)

The lightness begins to shift, shadows fall in places where there had been sun streaks.
The birds lift off the tops of the workhouse.
1626. Eleven African men, probably captured from Spanish or Portuguese ships, are brought to New Amsterdam to labor as slaves for the Dutch West India Company. (Mushabac and Wigan 7)
And the labor force arrives
at the same time the rookeries are emptied out.
Birds seeking life somewhere beyond the shore
and the feathered inhabitants leave the coast of the islands
moving across the Hudson to New Jersey
so many species of shorebirds and crows vacated
to greener shores leaving the gulls to their trash.

Imagine the walls of Fort Amsterdam which rose
from the rocks and sewage
and all the while – in some new formed rule –
the strong backs of slave labor began in the galleries
and moved into the corners of the streets
as the sand became hard and dense from footprints
and the water blackening and slick with human bondage
and waste and wear, headbands tied up the hair
and metal clanking chains remanded and maintain order.

Whose bright idea was it to push some of us down?
Who gave the orders to cast stones against the tree?

Their eyes were fixed on the blue sky, the lushness of the waters,
open air and whole vistas of movement in the clouds
while the narrowness of their oppressors began to skim off
the humanness, eyes no longer met with respect,
bodies no longer equitable – who determined the price to be paid?

Whose best thinking put a price tag on another?

Pamela Kallimanis, M.F.A. in English Writing and Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She is an Instructor in the English Department at Hunter College and a student of International Migration Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. Her work explores questions of identity, ethnicity, migration, loss and trauma. She teaches a wide range of courses from Literature, Creative Writing and Poetry. She is the author of “The Zero Elegies” published by Three Mile Harbor Press. http://cuny.is/professorwrite2
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THE SPRINGSTEEN SENTENCES – Barbara Berman

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments
For Debra Alessandra

1.
I was in Mimi’s garage apartment, three blocks from our high school and packed floor to ceiling with her kinetic collages and black and white photos, with Deb who said we had to hear this record, the first album by this guy up in Freehold who didn’t smoke pot, maybe had a beer once a week and was always getting rid of band members for not working hard enough, and that made sense to me because Stanley said drugs interfered with the creative process, which is how some teens within 50 miles of Manhattan talked when trying to sound profound.

2.
We sat in silence on a pile of colorful pillows and got blasted to another planet, except it was a few miles north of where we lived but didn’t want to.

3.
After Stanley killed himself I came home from work in D.C. and played “The Price You Pay, “ over and over every night for a year and then it took me two decades to hear it again without weeping.

4.
When I discovered that Springsteen read Flannery O’Connor before I did I worried too long that I was losing my edge.

5.
When I learned he was helping veterans I thought of my hometown neighbor Don Seigwarth, always fixing things, who enlisted in the Air Force, was shot down, never found, declared dead, was as nice as his parents, and is every soldier who won’t be remembered by enough people.

6.
When LIVE 75-85 was released , an acquaintance with a better stereo let me play it for the first time at his place, and he was as lonely as I was and he talked a little during each cut, and as I got up to leave I thanked him when I really wanted to scream HOW COULD YOU?

7.
I was never much of a screamer but I didn’t take it well when a bunch of men got up to get more beer at the Oakland Arena during “This Hard Land.”

8.
How can you be from Jersey and not need THE RISING? I said to a friend from Hackensack.

9.
When I heard the CD of Springsteen on Broadway I understood why a friend from LA spoke with force about the BORN TO RUN audio book, as opposed to the print version I’d devoured, because it was him reading, which is like he’s right next to you, and of course what we were talking about was Communion.

10.
The night I met my husband, who was born in Stockton , California and helped pay for his Berkeley degree by working in a cannery, we talked for three hours, and about fifty minutes in I learned that he didn’t believe in God so I quickly steered the conversation to the deal breaker.

11.
WESTERN STARS doesn’t do as much for me as I’d wanted it to, but I will be wrecked when Springsteen stops stretching.

POST-SANDY SHORE

There was a time when storm was storm,
not cause for great alarm. It isn’t so now.
Each storm brings a fear that can’t be erased.

Waves pound blame into places where blame
never settled before. There was a time
when storm meant adventure and sailing
was gentle , and homes stood their ground.

It isn’t the same at the shore anymore.

Barbara Berman’s first full-length collection of poems, Currents, was published by 3 Mile Harbor Press in 2018. Her poetry has appeared over the years such literary magazines as: Coracle, Gargoyle; Lilith; 99 Poems for the 99 Per Cent; Poetica; OffCourse;100 Poets Against the War and other publications. Her chapbook, The Generosity of Stars, was published by Finishing Line Press. She has been active in the literary and publishing community since 1979, when she organized the first independent press book festivals in the country. Her poem “SAY NO” was published in the Village Voice Special Issue on Nuclear Disarmament. It was then set to music by Australian composer Vincent Plush who was in residence at Yale that year. The piece was performed in the United States and in Australia and elsewhere. Barbara’s essays and book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, and other journals. She has served on the jury of the California Book Awards and lives in San Francisco with her husband, Clifford Lee, an environmental lawyer. Her book reviews appear regularly in The Rumpus.
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THREE POEMS – Toni Mergentime Levi

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

MILK

Milk arrives like a blessing in my dreams—
blue-white as a glacial waterfall from a far-off thaw.
In my most joyous dream, a precious rare appearance,
I am old—old as I am now. But suddenly, my breasts
are filled with milk again and waking I remember

the neonatal ward, where my full-term bilirubin baby
looked like some blue-ribboned, beefy best-in-show.
In reality, of normal size, my jaundiced giantess
dwarfed the pink wrinkled heartbreaking preemies
riddled with tubes and sensors in their Isolettes.

They sent me home in tears, bereft, without my baby—
blindfolded in her fish tank under therapeutic light,
without me (impossible!)—her only known universe.
For two unrelenting days at home, my milk dripped,
useless as my love. For two years after, she drank her fill.

Milk courses through my dappled world of dream.
My breasts are swollen, tender, nipples tipped in red.
My milk is a river flowing to the land of tiny babies.
All—now all can emerge from their boxes, alive.
Those who said I wouldn’t have enough were wrong.

ROUNDUP

I walked through a field just sprayed with herbicide.
Found out later, didn’t know at the time.
A pregnant neighbor, alerted early, got out of town.
But I didn’t sense the stealthy carcinogens
suffusing my system, still don’t know their insidious plans.

I’ve tried so hard to suss out where the mugger lurks,
the track of the careening truck, the cracks
in concrete. How I’ve wished for a well-trained rat
to sniff out all potential minefields in my life.
I scrub melons, wear subway gloves.

Who could imagine that three days after 9/11,
when shifting winds blew the awful ashes
of the fallen towers and the dust of the dead
northwards to the aerie I call home, that I would
(and did) throw open my windows to let my brethren in.

Note: Roundup ™ is a Monsanto herbicide.

_______________________________________________________________________

TIME STRETCHED OUT…

that August when my father died −
like the summer I turned twelve
and my knee started to go soft,
to pull apart, until the doctor
braced it straight for seven weeks,
while pulp knit into bone.

When my father’s legs gave way,
as he trudged to buy the paper,
the pavement cracked his jaw and watch.
In the cancer ward, I wound the stem each day,
as mornings and evenings fused in pain,
and he hid his hands beneath the sheets.

As Father’s life thinned and dimmed,
Mother screamed at the cicadas
whirring and ticking in the endless heat,
like invisible clocks from another planet
with multiple suns and
years of a thousand days.

Time unwound that summer −
returned me to the weeks of nightmares
that my knee had turned to flour and water.
And Father came to soothe me into calmer sleep.
When I kissed him hours before he died,
he whispered he was not afraid.

As old age courteously extends
its clichéd bony hand to me,
I’ve replayed this farewell
like fingers fraying and fraying
the silky edging of a baby blanket
when the lights go out.

Toni Mergentime Levi is a poet and librettist. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections: White Food (2016) and Watching Mother Disappear (2009), both from Mayapple Press, and For A Dancing Bear (1995) from Three Mile Harbor. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Prairie Schooner, Crosscurrents, Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, California Quarterly and Apalachee Quarterly, as well as online, on radio (WBAI-FM) and in anthologies. Toni has been awarded residencies at VCCA, Schloss Wiepersdorf (Germany), Konstepidemin (Sweden), MacDowell, Djerassi, Ucross, Millay and Saltonstall. Thanksgiving, one of two operas and several other collaborations with composer Paul Alan Levi, won a Grand Prize for New Opera from the National Music Theater Network. A collaboration with composer Charles Fussell premiered at the Tanglewood Music Center and will be released on a recording by the Boston Modern Opera Project. A native New Yorker, Toni lives in Manhattan. Her website is www.tonilevi.com. The poem “Milk” has been previously published in her collection, White Food.
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TWO POEMS – Patricia Carragon

on November 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

SPIRITUAL

Real estate
plants another tombstone—
“For Sale” signs
on every block

Like the rest of the city,
a lifestyle is under siege
by an urban plague.

The Village is dying,
taking the slow,
cancerous exit.

Below my feet,
apparition vibes
from artists, writers, singers,
musicians, and dancers.

John Coltrane’s “Spiritual”
says prayers
for the living
and the dead.

Jazz
celebrates death,
New Orleans style.

It’s raining
cool Lenten drops
on my umbrella.

SPEAK LOW

The breeze “speaks low,
speaks loud”
of the ocean’s love
for the bay—
cools the summer heat
on my head.

On the bay—
a diamond galaxy,
a sun’s reflection.

Nature in love
with herself.

A ship sails
under the bridge—
my mind wanders
in the opposite direction,
thinks of what was
and what should have been.

Love picks her favorites,
“plays hard to get.”

Time is old,
hides her age,
but young enough
to steal my happiness.

The sun will shine
on the moon tonight,
but her mood
swings in cycles.

I’m not like the moon—
my cycles bleed,
eggs lost in darkness.

What I thought was love,
blew out at dusk.

The tide rises—
clockwise jazz
beats on the terrain.

In my head,
I hear Lady Day sing:

Love is a spark,
lost in the dark too soon,
too soon . . .

Patricia Carragon’s recent publications include Bear Creek Haiku, First Literary Review-East, A Gathering of the Tribes, Jerry Jazz Musician, The Café Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Krytyka Literacka, Panoplyzine, Poetrybay, and Sensitive Skin. Her latest books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles, and Innocence from Finishing Line Press. Her first novel, “Angel Fire,” is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press. Patricia hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.
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MY FATHER AS POLITICAL THEATER – Paul Genega

on November 22 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

My father is on the phone screaming for me not to hang up. He says he is in a Hollywood, Florida hospital where he’s been taken against his will. The reason, I come to understand: He was sitting on a bench in front of his church when some well-meaning Samaritan spotted him looking old and lost, fragile and small, and called 911. When the local Fire Department arrived, despite protestations and sputtered explanations, he was strapped to a gurney, wheeled into a van, and whisked off to the ER.
I was waiting for mass, he tells me, voice rising somewhere between panic and rage. I forgot to change the clock, to spring forward… That’s why I was sitting there… But nobody will listen… Now they want to do a CAT-scan… They won’t let me go home… I was just waiting for the next mass… I forgot Daylight Savings Time… This is shit.

My father is 98 years old. He is stooped over like half a horseshoe, his skin so thin it seems to rip in the wind, skeletal arms splotched with purple and wrapped in gauze bandages which look as if they date to the Crimean War. Sometimes he reminds me of friends who died in the plague of the 80’s covered with KS, what they might be like today if they’d lived to be ancient, un-lapsed their Catholicism, and took up competitive Bridge. Sometimes he reminds me of a leopard poised to leap for the jugular. But that, I remind myself, is the father of my childhood, not the shrunken nanogenarian on the phone.
A nurse gets on an extension, briskly introduces herself as Audrey, then tells my father she wants to talk with me privately for a moment. We’ll get right back to you, I assure him. Scout’s honor, Dad. Scout’s honor?
It’s an old joke between us, the Boy Scouts being one of a long list of failed attempts to win his approval when I was a kid.
Scout’s honor. He’s leery but he complies.
Now what seems to be the problem, I ask the nurse after he’s clicked off. As far as I can tell, this all seems to be an unfortunate mistake. So what’s he still doing in the hospital? Why hasn’t he been sent home?
Because his blood levels aren’t normal, she replies.

Normal? I just can’t help wondering what constitutes “normal” for a 98 year old. Nonetheless, from recent examinations, I know that my father is fading and his kidneys are starting to give out. I also know that he has said many, many times that he does not want to die in Florida. Dying in general doesn’t seem to bother him, just dying in Florida. He’s scheduled to return to Long Island in a week and a half and unless there is a critical issue at this very moment I swear on a stack of Baltimore Catechisms that I’ll be sure he sees his primary care physician the minute he’s back in New York. Frankly, I tell her, keeping him in the hospital would kill him.
This does not sit well. Not at all. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, she counters, but there are issues besides the blood work. Namely, dementia. We’re almost certain he is suffering from dementia.
Dementia?

Yes, dementia, she says firmly. A chronic or persistent disorder of the mental processes…
Hold on, I manage to interject. Just hold on.

Slowly (I think) and politely (I hope), I explain that I have just returned to New York from Florida and when I saw him a few days earlier he seemed fine – as fine as one can expect of anyone at his age, as fine as he ever was, for that matter. Terrible flirt with waitresses. Lousy tipper. Congenitally suspicious of new foods and people. But at the same time, a man who devours The Times every morning, cooks and cleans for himself, tools around in a sixteen year old Buick without mishap, and plays serious Bridge with a “favorite partner” twice a week. We’re just friends, he assured me over osso bucco last week, nothing romantic. Having outlived two wives, he isn’t quite ready for a third.
But he can’t answer our questions correctly, Audrey retorts. They’re very basic questions and if he can’t answer them correctly, we have no choice but to admit him for further observation.
He’s very hard of hearing, I explain. Practically deaf. And he’s a real Depression baby, insists on buying cheap knock-off batteries for his hearing aids…
That may be the case but…

Try again. Please try again.

Okay. Mr. Gee-niger. Mr. Gee-niger! Get back on the phone.

Genega! I scream. Guh-negg-uh!

There’s scraping and static as my father hurries back on the line. You there? He asks warily.
Yes, I’m here, Dad.

They took my cell, you know. That’s why I’m on this God damn hospital phone. Someone stole my cell.
We’ll find your cellphone later. Don’t worry about it. Listen to the nurse now.
I’m trying to sound calm and nonchalant but truth is rage and panic are beginning to bubble up in me also.
Okay, Mr. Gee-knee-guh. I want to ask you a few basic questions.
This is shit, my father replies. Shit… shit… shit… shit… shit…
First off, where do you live?

Long pause.

Where do I live? You want to know where I live? I can hear the frustration and disdain in his voice.
Yes, where… do… you… live? Tell… me… where… you… live.

I live in Massapequa Park. On Long Island. Next door to Barbara and Martin.
See, what I mean, he doesn’t even know he lives in Florida.

But for most of the year, he does live on Long Island. Barbara and Martin are his step-daughter and her husband. They live next door. Surely she has heard of snowbirds…
Let’s continue. Okay, Mr. Gen-eager. Where are you?

Another long pause.

Huh?

Simple question. Tell us where you are.

A low moan escapes his lips.

Where are you? Tell us where you are.
In the place to which I have been abducted, he finally growls.
See, Audrey booms, triumphantly.

But…

Did you hear him say hospital? I didn’t.

But…

Okay, one more. Who is the President of the United Sates, Mr. Gen-gah? Who is the President?
Shit, he replies, worn down to a whisper. This is shit.

I know he’s not doing himself any favors stonewalling Audrey’s interrogation but at the same time, I am kind of proud of him for resisting.
I repeat. Who is the President?

Now my father has been a loyal supporter of the Republican Party in suburban Nassau County for his entire life. He is not a ticket splitter and has never voted for a Democrat for President – never, including 2016, when he decided his best option was to sit out the election.

Who is the current President of the United States of America?

That man from New York everyone hates, he finally replies.

I didn’t ask your opinion, Mr. Gen-guh. Audrey seems genuinely miffed now. Just tell me the name.
But my father refuses to utter the name of a man he finds loathsome and detestable. A thug and a thief. A braggart and a bully. Not a real Republican.
If he can’t answer the questions correctly, he can’t be released. It’s simple as that.
This is shit, he says again. Get me the hell out of here. Get me home.
Don’t worry, Dad, I assure him. Just give me a little time.

And then the line goes dead.

Two and a half hours and six phone calls later, I finally get through to a supervising physician who spends considerable time listening to my take on the situation and finally agrees that although he’d like to run a series of further tests there is no justifiable reason to hold my father against his wishes. Someone from the hospital eventually drives him back to the Church of the Little Flower where his car is parked and he drives himself home.
We talk that evening and although frazzled, he seems genuinely relieved to be in the safety of his tiny condo, stretched out on his La-Z-Boy with a stack of library DVDs.
I am finally ready to exhale as well, so I pour myself a scotch, kick back wondering if there is anything to glean from the day’s frazzled theatrics. Well, yeah, I conclude, the first being that it’s obvious that almost no one – including me – has figured out how to deal with people living well into their nineties, many pushing to the one hundred mark and beyond. How much supervision do they need? How do we respect and preserve their independence while making sure they aren’t a danger to themselves or others? What medical interventions are appropriate at their age? In essence, what do you do with a 98 year old who is not confined to a nursing home or assisted living facility and won’t give up his Buick? How does he get the world to see him for who he really is, not some profile concocted from a series of research studies? That’s one line of thought.
The second is darker, my father’s story underscoring – again – how little it takes to be suddenly enmeshed in a vast, impersonal bureaucracy with a rigid set of rights and wrongs and little interest in who you are or what you have to say. One minute you are waiting for mass in front of your church, the next you are in a large urban hospital being declared mentally incompetent. One minute you are cooking breakfast for your kids, the next you’re in federal custody awaiting deportation. One minute you are someone, the next just another one of “them.”
I’m sure there’s more to be learned from this Florida fiasco but I conclude that my ultimate takeaway is basic and frighteningly familiar: a reminder that in this fissured age of Red state / Blue state, everything has become political. Daylight Savings Time. Good Samaritans. Emergency Rooms. Everything.
Even an old man sitting on a park bench.

His curses and his prayers.

God help us, even that.

Paul Genega’s poems appeared most recently in This Broken Shore, Off the Coast, and Tifert Magazine’s “border” issue. A chapbook of recent poems, Moordener Kill, is scheduled for early 2020 by Finishing Line Press. Among his many awards are the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Read More »
ARTEMIS LOST – Jennifer Juneau

on November 18 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Anyone—or I—
couldn’t tolerate

what was late in arriving.
I squinted to figure out

where you might have been,
but darkness disconnected me

from the circumspection
of mankind.

Purblind, I couldn’t see the wall
or its grief.

Everyone was asking for you.
I won’t forget

the sheen their waiting held
or your absent silhouette.

I would have readily bent
to your celestial frame

had I lent myself to your peerage,
the wolfskin, the beam.

Where was last summer?
The inquisitive eyes of trees?

Where the new moon? The map?
How the attired dream

attracted you like lodestone.
And so you go.

(The headstrong will
won’t ground what has wings.)

The cloud drip. The isochromatic shield.
Life is tired. It’s true. And triple

triple you
how the arrow cushions reflex.

Where did I put last summer? Under glass?
What dropped

from the slotted sky other than contempt?
A promise maybe.

Who can misprize the indelible gift of light
my discoid rival hides?

Jennifer Juneau has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, The Million Writers Award and a Sundress Best of the Net award. Her work has appeared in many journals including American Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Evergreen Review, Seattle Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.
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CRUISE – Paul Genega

on November 18 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments
After cancer
mandible
replacement
I wear
the concave
skull of
Munch’s scream
a far cry from
the witless pretty
Caravaggio
I flaunted
in my pretty
witless youth –
the quick look
look away
cruise I got
back then
I get again –
death the
only magnet
sexier than sex
```
 
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Paul Genega’s poems appeared most recently in This Broken Shore, Off the Coast, and Tifert Magazine’s “border” issue. A chapbook of recent poems, Moordener Kill, is scheduled for early 2020 by Finishing Line Press. Among his many awards are the Charles Angoff Award from The Literary Review and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Read More »