Journal

Alluvial

1.
What I have is a map of yellow, blue and red squares
on streets named Lafayette, Rivard, Hastings.

What I know is that my father’s grandmother lived here,
not far from the Eastern Market, not far from her cousins.
If you missed the vendor’s cart, you could walk from west
to east for your cabbage. Her house, her father’s house,
her sister’s house, her cousin’s house—these houses
are a map now. A square of red or yellow or blue.
2.
Her home is a freeway now, my father’s grandmother’s
house. Her sister’s house, her cousin’s house—
all freeway now too.

Black Bottom it’s called, this neighborhood of rich
marsh soil buried under pavement and freeway.
3.
My father’s grandmother made and sold hats
in the front parlor of the house that is now a freeway,
but it’s her father’s name in the business directory.
4.
Alluvial:
The Detroit River bed holds old wooden ships, cars,
firearms. Hattie’s feathered hats with velvet trim
are down there, too, fossilized in the murky clay.

Suzy Harris was born and raised in Indiana and has lived her adult life in Portland, Oregon. This year she published a chapbook called Listening in the Dark (The Poetry Box) about her journey through hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants.

Fallen Fruit

Osage oranges fall thump in bright green circles
deer at dusk will come to forage.

Beside the house, a barrage of walnut husks
onto the gravel: ping ping ping.

Jeanette said she quickly learned rat-tat
rebel guns from eh-eh government ones.

Holed up in her home, huddled against
her bedroom wall, she knew which side

shot into the air, signaling.
‌                                                  Later, hiding
up-country near the final rebel checkpoint

rat-tat there meant someone taken
into the rubber trees and killed.

During her year of Red Cross rice,
groveling for G-2 passes,

her pallet on the hut’s dirt floor,
she said the rat-tat she never got used to.

Nor could she eat the little river fish,
no matter how delicious, for the thought

of the bodies they themselves had eaten.
ping   thump thump.

Wendell Hawken (she/her), a Washington DC native,  earned her MFA in Poetry at the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Publications include three chapbooks and five full collections: The Luck of Being (2008), White Bird (2017) a sequence about her husband’s battle with cancer, Stride for Stride: A Country Life (2020), After Ward (2022), and All About (January 2023). Hawken lives on a grass farm in the northern Shenandoah Valley where the first meaning of AI is Artificial Insemination. Two dogs keep her company. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Millwood, VA, a quirky unincorporated village in Clarke County.

The Gate

Grandma was a gruff old bird.
When she went to a schoolboard meeting,
which wasn’t often, they’d be eating crow
and say it tasted like chicken.
Us kids would hang around
when there was nothing to do
just to see if there would be fireworks.
When Cramer’s cows broke into her garden
he was fixing that fence before sunset.
Her reputation pushed before her like a wave.

But I’ll tell you something else:
during the Depression there was a mark
on her gate and hobos would knock
on Grandma’s back door,
she would hand out a sandwich
to the ragged soul standing there.
I don’t think many people know that.

Gary Lark’s most recent collections are Easter Creek, Main Street Rag, Daybreak on the Water, Flowstone Press and Ordinary Gravity, Airlie Press . His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, Rattle, Sky Island and others. For more information, you may go to his website.

The Bell Song

between the gaps of living, a bell rings clear—a pulse flows
from dirt to acknowledge that things are not as they once were.

what am I? space stretched upon skin and a mouth wild
in protest, in love—kneeling, am I devoted or a martyr?

if you tend to me, am I a garden or a wound? not an indecisive
shoreline, not folk songs of mild victories, not downcast gazes

or the sun drenched in shadow—old shadow—but strips
of nascent sparks. forgotten yet revered, sunrise made to

sprout in contrast to windswept branches, to bodily extremes—
not dust collecting in adhesives, not the chained or the unhappy.

the bell tolls, fluctuation of ropes along shimmery heights,
this is a good world—a land that prophesies and promises,

a smearing oil portrait that runs and runs and runs but never dries.
this is a fresh person—creature of sharpened throat but soft palm,

beneath the singing bell, I am a garden with earthy wounds.
there is a place for me here—I am unlearning the sentiment

of the misfit so I can bury myself into belonging. ear turns to sky,
the bell tolls no longer—I am so consumed by love, I am so alive.

 

Stefanie Lee is an ambitious 18-year-old writer from Montréal, Canada. Living with a physical disability called Nemaline Myopathy, she is currently pursuing a STEM-related collegiate degree in computer science. She was recently featured on Medmic.com for an interview regarding her poem about overcoming scoliosis. She hopes to share her unique worldview as a young disabled woman who continually seeks the beauty in every difficult situation.

Duffy Tries to Find a Way to Open Ocean
Through the Longest Ice-in in Ten Years

–Twillingate, Newfoundland

The moans came from his own throat. No,
the boat spoke. Floes nip and grind its wide
arc to slivers, a narrowing vee, and he,
eye wild as the wind across the queasy
unrest of the ice-in, steps away like some lost
Jesus walking this was-water, this hard bay.
My god my god. And as a child again
testing the teeter of brash ice, treads the wreckage
toward what little he can see: gauze
of brown shore through fog, the uneasy
breath of land and the bound sea
under which his cod are on the move,
a crab dies in an unchecked trap,
and what might as well be family sinks berg-deep.

Upstate New York writer Marilyn McCabe‘s poetry has won contests through AROHO, Word Works, Grayson Books, and NYS Council on the Arts. Collections of poems include Perpetual Motion and Glass Factory, and chapbooks Rugged Means of Grace and Being Many Seeds. Videopoems have appeared in festivals and galleries. She blogs about writing at Owrite:marilynonaroll.wordpress.com.