Journal

Sprang!

Tassel-head weeds toss in a fresh wind.
Stretch up over rye neighbors, hang out
Tap-dancing till they snatch the first drops
of April’s christening.

Through Amtrak’s window
two dark-eyed, little girls
gape at the onrush—
mottled homes, apartments,
fenced off lots containing semi-trailers
parked in rows like soldiers on parade.

Soon big rumble-mo flees the city, shoots out.
They wonder at boundless parks
with crowds of trees and yellow flowers.
Exclaiming, they spy floppy-eared cattle
wearing cinnamon skins, sporting big humps—

shouting, asking for chocolate milk
they bug their mother from her serenity.
She doesn’t get it
tells them to keep still,
and they can’t.

Someone’s taken the lid off.
Under clean blue skies
goose pimples crop up anytime.
Cool wind runs its finger along autos
driving people to speed, young couples to kiss.

There’s a hustle in this spring.

Neal Ostman’s poetry has appeared in various journals, anthologies and e-zines. Recent publications include: Book of Matches, Panoplyzine, Willawaw Journal, and WordFest Anthology 2022. His poetry readings have been well received at many venues in Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, and other cities in his travels. In addition to poetry, his published credits include humor and business articles. Neal is a member of The Poetry Society of Texas. He lives in Colleyville, Texas.

Just One More

It’s an old crabapple,
not pruned for years,
more thicket than tree.
I cut dead and diseased
limbs and branches,
little shoots on the trunk.
After an hour I’m
tired, but see just
one more limb
that beckons —
healthy
but crowded, going
the wrong direction.
I stand directly
under it, sawing,
wanting to be done.
When it breaks free
and falls I have one
second before it
hits me to consider,
this is how soup
is ruined, relation-
ships sunder,
wars start.

John Palen is the author of Distant Music and Open Communion: New and Selected Poems, both from Mayapple Press. His latest book, Riding With the Diaspora, won the 2021 Sheila-Na-Gig chapbook competition. He lives, writes, and gardens on the Illinois Grand Prairie.

The Cinderblock Duplex in the Sixties

Newly wed with rented furniture.
We’d roll to the middle
of the lumpy bed where I
became pregnant right away,
The smell of coffee
which I loved made me sick.
When I wasn’t nauseated,
I was starving.
We were invited to Rabbit’s trailer
where he served us Chef Boyardee
which I thought delicious.

Did he make it back from Vietnam?

I’d never lived alone and lit a candle at night
until I started feeling sleepy.
I can’t remember what I did all week,
waiting for your weekend pass—
there was no money and I didn’t drive.
You were halfway through OCS
and destined for Vietnam.

Holding you seemed more secure
than I’d ever been, there among
the useless silver flatware—
why did I ever choose a pattern?
On the end table, a candy dish
we received as a wedding present,
which I kept full.

Gail Peck holds an M.F.A. from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is the author of nine books of poetry. Her first full-length book, Drop Zone, won the Texas Review Breakthrough Contest; Poems and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Cimarron, Comstock Review, Consequence and elsewhere. Her full-length In the Shadow of Beauty will be out in 2025. She lives in Charlotte, NC.

Daughter

I write about her in poems,
thinking she can be
brought back by songs.

In dreams, she floats around me.
Dreaming, I write poems,
knowing where my child belongs.

Awake, I make coffee, It seems
humming is all around me as if
she can be brought back by song.

During the day, I wander
around, lost, not
knowing where my child belongs.

At night, I hum in my sleep,
searching for my daughter, hoping
to find her in song.

Dreaming or awake, I try to find where
I belong. Maybe in her laughter, a music
to bring her back in song.
I know where my child belongs.

The Minnows and The Woman

We slip across the sand, in and out of the sea.
The waves wash us back with other minnows,

all of us swirling our bodies, swimming
back and forth. We never tire. We do not wish

to be caught in a bucket and used as bait
to catch our sisters and brothers, the bigger

fish. The woman who comes here is filled
with longing. She comes to be with the sea.

We know she will not harm anyone.
Not woman, man, child or fish. She comes

to put her feet in the the surf’s edge, to be
with us, to feel the push, the pull of the ocean

 

Diana Pinckney, Charlotte, NC, has six collections of poetry, including Hummingbirds & Wine. She is the Winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize, Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Prize and Press 53 Prime Number’s 2018 Award. Her work has appeared in Cave Wall, Arroyo, RHINO, Emrys Journal, The Pedestal Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Willawaw Journal and other magazines and anthologies. Pinckney admits to being very interested in writing persona, and ekphrastic poems, and has led workshops on both forms for the Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts. She is now working again on poems about her daughter.

I Told the Rain

‌                                        -after Tarfia Faizullah’s I Told the Water

I told the rain ‌               you’re wise
‌            to fall upon ‌                     rich and poor
‌                         alike.
Told it ‌                            your sleek silvery lines
‌            streak the sky ‌                caress
‌                        our faces ‌            ‌if only we’d look up.
You only exist ‌               because of our thirst
‌            we think. But ‌                beneath your touch
‌                        we are all ‌                          one.
The first time ‌                I was soaked to the skin
‌            I peeled off ‌        my clothes and stood
‌                        under your sheath, ‌        your sluice,
‌                                     your flow. ‌                        My flesh
became fish, ‌                         holding its shape
‌            in your cool ‌                          embrace. ‌     I knew then
‌                         how love ‌                            was possible:

The urge to be ‌                      subsumed within
‌             the steady pulse ‌                    of the beloved.
‌                            I knew then‌                         we’d search
all our lives to find ‌                            your likeness
‌             you ‌      silver-haired ensign ‌           you ‌     flag of pearl
‌                           of gray ‌              of argent.

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.