Journal

Dear editor:

Sir/ Ma’am: (I’m never sure)

Today, you said, I’ll dole out bits of words,
snippets of ideas. And you’ll be grateful.
And I am grateful, dragging my fingers
over the keyboard, twitching here or there
in vain hope that some metaphor
will drape herself seductively on the mattress page,
pouting her carmine lips, daring me to clothe her,
daring me to slide into the poem beside her.

Not, you said, good enough.
What you’re giving me grates on my nerves
like lemon rind, or maybe parmesan.
It stings; it smells. I’m listening, really I am,
dispensing with whole harems of image
in favour of the hunter, the camouflaged watcher,
stealthy and blind, waiting for the imitative
gabble of flocks of words alighting
on the white expanse.

Why not just retire? you shouted, You
have no artistry, no talent for the new.
You stood there, shredding what little symmetry
had settled on the page. I fumbled with the fragments:
my lovely metaphor reclining, my fleeting words.
I can hear you laughing at my numb fingers
assembling this poor mosaic, mocking my efforts,
But understand that this not a resignation, just a reminder
that I’ve worked here more than 30 years
and you haven’t won yet.

Hugh Anderson lives on Vancouver Island which seems a pretty solid place in a world no longer certain of reality. Recent publications include The Willawaw Journal, Panoplyzine, Vallum, 3Elements Literary Review and forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review. He has one Pushcart Prize nomination and a Best of the Web nomination.

Vermin Hotel

To the two brown rats
that frequent our new birdhouse,
the one atop the oak stump
outside our window:

I suppose you have to eat
and seeds make a fine meal.
I’m okay with you feeding there.
But let me say I don’t want you
playing house in our wood pile.
We are not a vermin hotel.

I understand the importance of diversity,
the value each creature brings,
whether I like it or not.
I’ll share with you
as long as you stay outside.
You’re on your own with the cats.

 

Frank Babcock lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is a retired Albany middle school teacher and owner of a bamboo nursery. He writes poetry to share the strange thoughts that rattle around in his head and to get them off his mind. He started with an interest in the beatnik poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg.  He has a long way to go and much to write before he sleeps.

To My Great-Grandmother:
In case the post office is still delivering where you are

Granny, I sit in the garden reading the letter you wrote
your sister when you were the same age I am now.

Lena, I guess I’ll never get to see the orange trees in Florida. I’m too old
to travel and my eyes don’t work as well as they used to. 

Now I know how you felt. But unlike you, I made it — lots of times, in fact. If I could
I’d send you pictures of the groves, verdant branches hung with glowing fruit,

and pictures of my mother, your granddaughter, living there. After she died,
I found a postcard you sent me, its one-cent stamp postmarked

at the Memphis train station on your way home. Your familiar cramped cursive
has faded with age: Cry loud if they aren’t treating you all right. I’ll come get you.

Here in my backyard, ruddy penstemons crowd purple salvia spikes
and flannel milkweed. Bees hum a song of autumn coming soon among the asters

and the daisies’ last summer snow. My dahlias explode red as your strawberry jam,
those jars you filled with sweetness and lined up on pantry shelves in pre-dawn light

before your daughter woke and fussed about you messing up her kitchen once again.
That morning you led me out the back door at sunrise. There was something

I should see. We walked together past Grandmother’s neat beds of hybrid roses
to the far back lot, to where a wire fence embraced your tangle of stems, leaves,

flowers whose names I no longer know. Granny, once when someone asked me
the time and place I felt the safest and most loved, I remembered

holding your hand beside your garden crowded as this one I sit beside today.
You pointed to a web where day’s first light split gold through hanging dew,

and at the center a fragile ladder spun by the great black-and-yellow spider
suspended there. You said Look. Look how beautiful it is. 

 

Louise Barden is a transplanted Easterner who has recently and happily re-settled in Corvallis, Oregon. She has been a university English instructor and a marketing-advertising executive. Barden’s poetry has won awards from Calyx , the North Carolina Writers’ Network (Harperprints chapbook contest for Tea Leaves), and the Southwest Review (2017 Marr Prize finalist). Her poems have been published in Chattahoochee Review, Timberline, and others.

Finding Freedom

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing,
whispering, clamoring, murmuring…
-Kate Chopin, The Awakening

See me disrobe & wade into the water,
feet sinking into the white sand, skin
horripilating from the sea breeze as I submerge.
Because what lies beyond this shore
is something better, maybe. Because
there is nothing left for me here, nothing
I can bear. Because all I see are birds
with broken wings, shackled
to the shore. I swim out, treading
toward the waves breaking further
than the eye can see. The sea is seductive,
the way it can swallow us whole.
So swallow me. Take me somewhere
where I can be free, where I can be
touched without turning whale-like,
without the blood of my body staining
the bedsheets. No hope here. I kick
harder. Scissor my legs, arms pulling
saltwater. Inhale the scent, swish the sea-
water, swallow it. Sea, you speak
to me, speak to my soul. Let me be
free. Swallow me whole.

 

Despy Boutris‘s writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston, works as Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.

To Lori and Vine,

I witness a thundercloud form on the eastern edge of Colorado
‌          in late May near a crowd of heifers grazing,

a slim but athletic twist that seems to gather with a ferocity,
‌          not amassing slowly over hours but suddenly,

not quite like the snap of finger and thumb,
‌          as when you are watching a swimmer going out

into a lake and comes a point when you understand he cannot make it back,
‌          that he’s gone too far and your heart pumps quickly

and you look for a boat—the cloud gone angry, an amassed head
‌          that glowers with darkness, a solidity that seems to defy gravity.

then rains. It rains on the cows and rains on the few trees the cows can find
‌          and rains on me and my spare tire and my blown tire

and the highway and rains so hard I can barely see the semi come
‌          that roars past within a foot of my car and swerves after the fact,

stops, and the driver runs with his head holding his hat that keeps nothing dry
‌          to ask if I am alright, puts his hand on my shoulder and says

we’ll get through this as if the thunderhead is but one piece of a larger problem,
‌          we stand speechless together because I don’t know what he means

but I understand, the tire iron in my hand as light as a hollow reed,
‌          my clothes no longer heavy with rain but thin as gossamer,

and I wondered how he knew your brother, my friend, had died drunk
‌          in our hometown, how Wounded Knee as occupation had ended

but the murders had not ceased, and this is to say I’m returning,
‌          I’m returning as soon as I gather enough money that it precipitates,

that this letter written on small pages of the trucker’s note pad will find you
‌          before I do, that I have a debt to repay, a kindness for a kindness,

that my life has taken on a new meaning looking for a new experience,
‌          that I owe a life to your brother, to this land, rain, and this trucker

as we watch the thunderhead pummel a farm and the grasslands with a front edge
‌          now with lightning hitting earth as it pushes east over Nebraska.

 

Jeff Burt lives in California with his wife amid the redwoods and two-lane roads wide enough for one car. He works in mental health. He has work in Rabid Oak, Eclectica, Tar River Poetry, and Kestrel Journal. He was the featured 2015 summer issue poet of Clerestory, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review narrative poetry prize.