Journal

Paper

Anne Frank said, “Paper has more patience
than people.” Her voice, so alive
in her diary, was one the Nazis couldn’t silence.
This morning I wrote on white notebook paper
with lines like unimpeded roads—my scribbles
thin guy wires connecting me to myself.
Before computers, carbon made ghosts
of my poems and essays, my thoughts pressed
into gossamer onion skin. When I gaze
at the flimsy sheets now, it’s as though
they come from another self.
Paper, my long-suffering friend, I love
your placid face. Where else
could I ask questions no one can answer:
Why does my adult son, locked
in autism, not know how old he is? Why
does he stride away, talking to himself
without saying goodbye?

A former high school English teacher, Phyllis Mannan lives with her husband and daughter in
Manzanita, on the North Oregon Coast. She has received a Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry
and has published a poetry chapbook, Bitterbrush (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have
appeared in Cloudbank, The Oregonian, Rain Magazine, Verseweavers: The Oregon
Poetry Association Anthology of Prize-winning Poems, and elsewhere.

Through the morning

an espresso over ice
topped with bitter
tonic water. a drop of fresh
lemon juice. a garnish –
fresh rind. over our balcony
light climbs like a squirrel
down gutters on saturday
mornings. I walk
from the kitchen
to the sitting room section
in a t-shirt and underpants
and socks. move
through the morning
like a horse on a hilltop,
casual and confident, quiet.

DS Maolalai has been described by one editor as “a cosmopolitan poet” and another as “prolific, bordering on incontinent”. His work has nominated twelve times for Best of the Net, ten for the Pushcart Prize and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections; Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016), Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019) and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022)

Return to the Chattooga River

I’ve measured the years in shades of grey.
Tonight’s sky is full of lamps. Up the river
bank, in scaffolds of apathy, rafters drift
into dreams of raging rapids. I sense
the smell of late spring prowling through
the night, skittering across random
peaks of river chop. The river’s muscle
flexes, builds as the stars sweep the sky.
Hope bids me to the water’s edge—for
a voice far downstream, in the ocean
perhaps—who said the river will test us,
strengthen us. A voice who knows I left
for land. In an eddy, the milky way swirls,
wet pincers lurch near my feet as I listen.

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, attended Notre Dame, practiced forensic science, and now lives in San Diego with his golden-doodle dog. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, New Verse News, San Pedro River Review, and Healing Muse.

The dazzle of fireflies in the sticky Jersey night

the sour tang of mold tickling my nose
in cramped summer beach rentals.
Holding my breath as warm salty waves crash
and knock me over. Sand worming into my suit.

These memories like seeds inside.
Some, I plant and nurture. Some lost
until upturned by mental rummaging.

All of us with seeds, tucked tight—
dark and bitter, or luminous—
secreted inside; too many to share.
And when we’re planted, do they die too?
The prickly new sweaters, the rust-iron of a bitten lip—

where do all these fragments end up?
Seems as wasteful as a field of dandelions
whose seeds loft and float, catch
and land, random to all appearances.
Is there a pattern? Where do memories go?

Catherine McGuire is a Sweet Home, OR writer/artist with a deep concern for our planet’s future, with five decades of published poetry, six poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book, Elegy for the 21st Century, a SF novel, Lifeline, and book of short stories, The Dream Hunt and Other Tales. Find her at www.cathymcguire.com

Beau Soir

–after Claude Debussy

The sun is long settled and the sky
has been assembled then reassembled
by an artisan wind, hastily extracting,
polishing and reappointing stars across
the delicate drape and ruffled hem
of heaven when, exhausted, it falls
back upon lamp-lit porches while
woodsmoke rises like flak, dark and
directionless, and long streams of ice –
translucent strands of shagbark –
overflow wooden soffits destined
for foundations of slender stone and
I’m certain such moments of random
and broken beauty merit more than
a prayerful pause and a deep-seated
need to hold onto them then remembering
that soft-focused hour some days before
when, approaching dusk, a few starlings
had descended upon tiny branches
overlaid with snow, wanting to re-leaf
a late-turning elm as if all things in need
of mending in this life can easily be
repaired or made whole again as I
continued on, strangely elated and alone,
towards a shoreline I can smell but
cannot hear and a tideless strait that’s
as still and dark as a ledge of black ice.

John Muro, who is a resident of Connecticut and lover of all things chocolate, has authored two books of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite — in 2020 and 2022, respectively. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee, a Best of the Net nominee and a recipient of a 2023 Grantchester Award. John’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Grey Sparrow, Sky Island, Valparaiso and Willawaw.