Journal

Interlude

A morning gone resplendent in autumn lavish,
when a strange still-scape appears in the parted
grass: the long, oil-slick of snake, carnation-
pink mouth agape, clasping the bloated,
brown body of a toad who’s made no effort
to escape having lost or given up on itself,
the only motion an amber, amphibian eye
wanting to look past this grim anguish and
close in silence as if it could dream away this
hideous communion in which the predator’s
unable to swallow the prey and the hapless prey’s
unable to flee, and, seeing how neither asked
for mercy nor forgiveness, the morning, now in
ascendant blue, wore on, and the world offered none.

Twice nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize and, more recently, for Best of the Net in 2022, John Muro is a resident of Connecticut and a lover of all things chocolate. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published in 2020 by Antrim House,. Since that time, John’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Grey Sparrow, River Heron, Sky Island and Willawaw. Pastoral Suite, his second volume of poems, was published by Antrim House in June of 2022. Instagram: @johntmuro.

The Lookout

I look up, in the black and white picture—my
hair still cropped short, my mug floating atop a
checkered apron as I sit in Grandfather’s lap.
He looks far and away.

Though I can’t see his face (we are turned in the
same direction), my smile mirrors his and my body
posture exudes comfort and joy. There’s fatigue
mixed with a shy happiness in his gaze.

In the back, a not quite readable date. If I am
four, he’s sixty. And a note: he drove a long way
for the first time. About sixty, he’s teaching
himself how to drive.

Says the note, we’re on a cousin’s terrace in a
small sea resort. Was I on the passenger seat, as
we tumbled uphill on the winding road? Now
we have safely arrived.

My dark eyes, like night birds, drink in the horizon.
His are pale, full of oceans. A slim railing draws the
ethereal border of the beyond that he, that we
braved. The rest dissolves in white.

Toti O’Brien is the Italian Accordionist with the Irish Last Name. Born in Rome, living in Los Angeles, she is an artist, musician and dancer. She is the author of Other Maidens (BlazeVOX, 2020), An Alphabet of Birds (Moonrise Press, 2020), In Her Terms (Cholla Needles Press, 2021), Pages of a Broken Diary (Psky’s Porch, 2022) and Alter Alter (Elyssar Press, 2022).

Time and Stillness

‌     –Seated Woman
‌     Pablo Picasso, 1920
‌     Musée Picasso, Paris

I knew someone just like her,
a copy editor on a daily
where I worked in the ‘60s.
She wore shifts, a woman
of size and almost spooky
calm, and she wrote headlines
better than anyone I knew.
She was fast, didn’t need
to count characters, just wrote
the head, and it always fit,
no small thing in the hot-type era.
When I struggled, she’d quip,
“The first thousand are the worst,”
and write it for me, always
accurate, on point, unforced,
straight or witty as needed.

Still, she would hit a hard one
from time to time and
plant a bare foot on the floor
(she often kicked off her shoes),
cross the other leg on a knee,
cradle her cheek on thick fingers
and look off into the distance
as if in a trance. While it lasted
it seemed that the process of time itself,
the present ceaselessly
becoming the past,
streamed through her stillness.

But she was working,
and once the head came to her,
she would stir, glance around,
type it out on a half-sheet
and stick it on the spike.

 

Small Pieces Refusing

‌     –Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
‌     Pablo Picasso, 1910
‌     Art Institute of Chicago
after an interpretation by Elizabeth Cowling

I wake before dawn in pieces, light and dark
smokey facets tinged with rose; my feet,
blind moles, search the gloom for slippers.
I feel my way like a poorly organized front
of hesitant gray clouds — tweak the dour
resting face in the mirror, comb the inherited
cowlick into a part, select from limited
options a shirt and a narrative for the day.
So I gain an assembled self. But at what risk
of losing these fragments? Each a view
from a different moment, a different angle,
the way cocking one’s head reveals
a strawberry hiding in the patch, the way
memories come from nowhere when nowhere
is given room: Smell of dry grass, a phrase of Ravel,
the auditory hallucination of my father
calling me to supper across the garden at dusk.
Time flaking away. The richness of small pieces
refusing “to lock together to produce
a clear, fixed, unitary image of the man.”

 

Moments Alone

‌     –Family of Saltimbanques
‌     Pablo Picasso, 1905
‌     National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

If they seem lost in the dusky rose and blue
middle of nowhere it’s because they’re not
working: Fat Clown’s not honking his rude
horn or miming slap-stick indecencies;
shape-shifter Harlequin’s up to no pranks;

even the child acrobats and the slender youth
with a drum on his back are poised and still.
No one trades a glance with anyone.
And the woman, who sits apart
in her non-performance skirt and shawl,

a tall sun-hat circled with flowers
precarious on her head — how hard it is
to know what to say about the woman.
She and they have reached a moment
when the tent is struck, the gear loaded,

and the hard-earned skills, shtiks, roles
and routines that hold them together
seem grubby, shopworn. They are not
unhappy to be free of them, to have
a little time to be their lonely selves.

John Palen‘s latest book, Riding With the Diaspora, won the Sheila-Na-Gig 2021 chapbook competition and was published in April, 2022. He has recent work in Sleet, Cider Press Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, and lives, writes and gardens on the Grand Prairie of Illinois.

A Place of No Substance

Come with me
past the old barn
‌                               that’s no longer there
and descend the sloped corral
‌                               now a field of weeds
into the gully dredged deep by time.

Gaze up the opposite slope:
there we scrabble past badger holes and
cat-steps fixed in dirt by broomsedge,
foxtail, and bluebell roots
not even time’s deluge can dislodge

to a ledge that tops the slope, and pause:
glance backward past the phantom barn,
the faded farmyard ghosts of granary,
chicken coop and weary clapboard house
‌                               all no longer there
to see what time can take away
and—in this ledge you stand before—
‌                               what it cannot.

Stoop low, leveling your eye to this
earthen peephole
‌                               still there
opening to an improbable,
sun-drenched cavern extending
endlessly on a palette of multi-hued,
jeweled pebbles
‌                               still there
and wonder,
simply wonder that a place possessing
‌                               no substance
‌                               no terra firma
through an old man’s lifetime can persist,
insisting on itself and its brilliance
which the devilish twins time and death
envy from their fruitless domains.

Darrell Petska is a retired university editor. His poetry and fiction can be found in 3rd Wednesday Magazine, First Literary Review–East, Nixes Mate Review, Verse Virtual and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.

Lost Song

–after Carolyn Forché’s “Lost Poem”

I’m searching for a song I heard years ago.
I can’t recall the title, but there’s a wagon
in the song, and a market, and a white dove
or maybe a swallow. We sang the song
sitting shoulder to shoulder on the school bus
to summer camp, or to tour a Coca-Cola
factory, or to sports events where we mostly lost
the game or the race, or to matinées downtown
to see “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” We would
harmonize our voices to drown out the shouts
and laughter of the boys throwing dice and taking
nips from mini-bar bottles and ducking behind
seat backs to puff on cigarette butts. In the song
the wind laughed, there was an ox, and a farmer,
and our voices swelled full throated, a frisson
of danger down our spines as we imagined
how, if we were threatened, we would fight back
or at least fly away.

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.