Journal

Dreaming of Eucalyptus

‌          Send me a postcard when you get there
‌          Give me a ring when you get back.

Come spring we’ll get away from all this
and find some old island of sun and rock
in the loose weave of a hammock breeze
until we feel summer embalming us
‌          and dream of eucalyptus.

You’ll be fragrant as a peach split by the sun
I’ll be pale shade for black island sand.
Stripped of our secrets and calm pretenses
we’ll dive deep and startle the Cycladean sea
‌          and dream of eucalyptus.

Because you love the full moon God would
screw in a new lightbulb every night,
learn to speak Greek again, give up
modern ethics for ancient aesthetics
‌          and dream of eucalyptus.

Promise never to forget yourself again
or the days when you were my next of sin.
I’ll remind myself you can never be mine,
and rebody myself from time to time
‌          and dream only of you.

Richard Collins is a Zen monk who lives in Sewanee, Tennessee. Born in Eugene, he graduated in English from the University of Oregon. He has taught at universities in the US, Wales, Romania, and Bulgaria. His recent poetry appears in MockingHeart Review, Northridge Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Think, and Urthona. His books include No Fear Zen (Hohm Press, 2015) and a translation of Taisen Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk (Hohm Press, 2022).

Baby Demerol Gets Set Adrift

As I kicked, punched, and swam in amniotic fluid
The nurse asked my mother, do you need Demerol?
First child, extra-long labor, pain—yes, YES! All this shit?
It’d better be a boy. She calmed; her brain broke for lunch
But delusions confused and muddled her name quest

At Big G, Boyle Heights, 1951.
Rayon reminded her of fabric; Kingsford sounded
Like charcoal. It’d better be a boy. Girls are
So, so—Nameless for months, she summoned Ronnie
From the depths of a movie memory.
‌                                                                   Ronnie

Is leaf blade-shaped, leafstalk, stipules, photosynthesis,
Maybe a Hebrew joy or future Scottish king.
Dowell is Irish for son of the dark stranger,
Perhaps a slave master’s nanny and concubine.

There’s no Congo, Bantu, or Cameroon Ronnies,
Some Kofis.
‌                                       Dowells populate Tennessee.

My name is to die for, bless my soul. Mother’s joy.
My name is Watts, like Towers. My name is Compton,
Like troubled. My name is Palm Lane Public Housing
Fused to explode on the border between the two.|

Lee, my middle name, asked the first and last
How in hell did I get stuck between two fuck ups?
People always mispronounce Dowell—Do well—Dial
Doughwell——never Ronald, once Ronnie, I’m now Ron,
which sounds sexy when murmured or whispered naked.

Lil Black, RD, Red Devil, and Ron-Ron; better
Nicknames than Pootchie, Hickey, Spot, Skillet, or boy.
Ron renamed—reinvented, and evolutionary.

Ron L. Dowell floats like a verse in cyberspace.

Ron L. Dowell wrote Watts UpRise, a poetry collection released by World Stage Press in 2022. A very public love letter to Watts, Los Angeles, the collection honors its most notable artistic landmark, the Watts Towers, and its creator, Sabato Rodia. Watts UpRise is a finalist for the 2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and a featured poem, “Compton, An Energy-Fueled Dark Star,” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Ron’s poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, North Dakota Quarterly, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review-Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon.

Woods Walking

My friends and I discuss the names of trees.
Though none of us are arborists, each one
knows a species here and there, so by degrees
we call out the woods entire. Our walk began,

though none of us are arborists, with each one
saying, “Look at that tree! What is it?” Until another
called out the wood, the leaves, and thus began
our game of claiming knowledge, but soon enough our

saying failed us. Each tree resembled another,
so we started inventing names none would believe,
our game of claiming knowledge soon enough
descending to wild insistences meant to deceive

no scientist. Inventing names none would believe
is story-making, an act the woods enable.
Meant to delight and inspire, not to deceive,
is the job not of the lie but of the fable,

the story, the poem, the play. Soon we were able
to label fishmaw, fat-step, monkey shell
every shrub we saw, no lies but only fable,
and we laughed at the names we conjured from our warm well

of ignorance, maw-deep, fat-lipped, an empty shell
of absent knowledge we filled, by degrees,
with conjured joy. How warm, how wild, how well
go the days when friends discuss the names of trees.

Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies and is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. Her collection A Dangerous Heaven was published in 2023, and her chapbook Play was published in 2016. She lives in Florence, SC, where she teaches at Francis Marion University and serves as poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.

Shared Bounty

ripening apples
at twilight
gleam dusky red

in the tree
by a wall
that holds back a hill

young fox appears
leaps lithely up the wall
walks a tree branch

nosing each fruit for ripeness
daintily picks one with its teeth
sits on the wall to eat

a sibling strolls down the hill
finds a windfall
sits nearby

having eaten together
they flow down the wall
tails high

graceful
as a pastel line
swirled over a page

Maureen Eppstein’s most recent poetry collection is Horizon Line (Main Street Rag 2020). Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Earthward in 2014, and will publish a new chapbook, Daughter in 2024. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Willawaw Journal and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Crossing the boundary between the arts and the sciences, her poems have been included in a textbook on geometric modeling, a university geology course and a National Audubon Society report.

She Watches

The barn owl perches on our bookshelf
in the upper left corner between Richard Adams,
Maya Angelou and Jane Austen, spines bent
or broken, pages dog-eared and worn soft–
perfect nesting material should our owl desire.
In spite of her heart-shaped face,

she is no romantic. She hears every movement,
sees in the dark, the moles tunneling under rugs,
the hurts and silent accusations tucked
behind books, secrets shoved into corners–
wisps of dog hair and dust won’t hide them.
She surveys our coming and going, sleeps

through stuttering conversations
and long stretches of quiet, wakes
to punctuations of laughter and chatter,
moments of tenderness. She does not hoot,
she’s not the hooting sort, but neither
does she chortle or shriek. If she has words

of wisdom, she keeps them to herself.
We don’t feed her, but sometimes we forget
a roasted chicken carcass on the counter,
a pot of pasta carbonara on the stove,
slightly over-steamed broccoli in a bowl
by the sink. But she never samples,

as if she lives on air alone.
There is a great deal we don’t understand.
Now and then she wings about, lands
on the back of a dining room chair,
the upstairs banister, curtain rods.
She goes unnoticed, like the blue jar of marbles,

the ceramic tray of shells and rocks. Visitors
never get a glimpse, never suspect our owl.
The dog gets a little nervous, retreats
to her crate, sweeps her tail over her nose,
sleeps with one eye partially open.
Maybe we should be wary, too,

but her presence is a comfort.
We are more kind when she watches.

Ann Farley, poet and caregiver, is happiest outdoors, preferably at the beach. Her poems have
appeared in Timberline Review, Third Wednesday, Willawaw Journal, Verseweavers,
KOSMOS, and others. Her chapbook, Tell Her Yes, was published by The Poetry Box in
April, 2022. She lives in Beaverton, OR. Visit www.annfarleypoetry.com