Journal

the 5:39 out of Ronkonkoma

the sundown of silvergulls
ushers in our 5:39. Tracks
zip and zoom connecting
commuters with window
slice snippets of golf course
communities, affordable
housing, ads for Ikea and
botox babe billboards. All in
an hourly ride, shaking out
snakes from the lock stepping
9 to 5 grind

***

and i’m poeming
the clouds, clearing
the mind’s chatter
sipping slowly this
river of valium

watching the
dogwood trees
pinking–
early days april
window seat west

Foot Massage

My parents never danced in the kitchen—
no flamboyant dip in a red silk
dress, no rakish tilted fedora. They swayed
to a predictable rhythm of domesticity;
their embraces proper, Presbyterian.
Evenings, with dishes cleared from the table
and children pajamaed, they sat
at opposite ends of the couch.
My mother slipped shoes off
and stretched her legs to nestle
bare feet in my father’s lap.
He would massage the left arch
and then the right of each foot with his strong
thumbs, slowly circle the ankles,
caress the heels. He kneaded the crevices
between each toe to touch that tender hollow
on the underside. She settled into cushions
to arrange her feet as a cat would curl,
and like a cat she purred.
Who knew that the foot, with all its
tiny bones, could soften and surrender
to pleasure like that. The whole house
mellowed under its lid. Then they rose to
the last choreographed tasks
of the day: latch the doors, dim
the lights—two beats slow, quick
quick slow.

Connie Soper’s poems have recently appeared in North Coast Squid, The Ekphrastic Review, Windfall, and Rain Magazine.  She divides her time between Portland and Manzanita, Oregon. Publication of her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming in 2022 from Airlie Press. 

When you moved to Kansas City

I wonder if you miss the Flint Hills
driving west, the way they glowed
on fire in spring, sweep of rose-light
when twilight fell, the land a swell
of small waves coming in, tide of rest,
a bed of coals. Old friend, you sit
inside your house, pray for your son
whose mind’s a ball of fury. I wish
I could roll through Kansas City like
thunder grips the sky there, tendrils
of flame flashing overhead, find you
and fly towards the western fields,
maybe see the prairie that is left
and stand in it until we’re swallowed
by the switchgrass and the bluestem
and we feel braced and insignificant.

Ellen Stone advises the Poetry Club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series where she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poems have appeared most recently on Verse Daily and in the anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion. Poems are forthcoming in Mom Egg Review, and in the anthology, A Tether to This World (Main Street Rag, 2021). Ellen is the author of What Is in the Blood  (Mayapple Press) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net.

The Poet Crosses the Border Between Now and Then

. . . the artist needs time in which the raw material of experience may settle
to an imaginative depth, where it can be transformed into art. –Michael Longley*

It was his poet’s habit to take an evening walk across
the winter-weary landscape looking for any spark
in those ragged fields or low slung, sullen skies
to ignite an image or a thought worthy of a poem.

But the defeated weather slumped, uneasy in its
shabby coat of frost. The bedraggled landscape
feared any beauty might startle the evening
and disturb its last mundane moments of light.

Winter has a way of rubbing the imagination away.
As the cold, gray light collapsed into a scrub of oaks,
that ordinary, dying day was like so many others:
not worth a jot in his notebook or his memory.

But years later, a long-silent synapse arcs and he crosses
the border between now and then. He imagines he hears
that cold, gray light scream out, an angry shriek,
so clear, as if it learned, too late, it is dying fast.

Tangled in the landscape of memory, image and metaphor,
the poet is consumed by the desperate scream raging in
those darkening woods. As the last flicker of light dies,
he imagines the sorrow of that death into a poem.

*From Michael Longley’s 2017 PEN Pinter Award address, October 10, 2017 at the British Library

Doug Stone lives in Western Oregon.  He has written three collections of poetry: The Season of Distress and Clarity, The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water, and Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain.

That Night We Were Ravenous

Driving from Stephenville in the late October
dusk — the road swooping and disappearing ahead
like an owl, the hills no longer playing dead
the way they do in the daytime, but sticking their black
blurry arses up in the drizzle and shaking themselves,
heaving themselves up for another night of
leapfrog and Sumo ballet — some

trees detached themselves from the shaggy
shoulder and stepped in front of the car. I swerved

through a grove of legs startled by pavement, maybe a
hunchbacked horse with goiter, maybe a team of beavers
trying to operate stilts: it was the

landscape doing a moose, a cow
moose,
most improbable forest device. She danced
over the roof of our car in moccasins.

She had burst from the zoo of our dreams and was
there, like a yanked-out tooth the dentist
puts in your hand.

She flickered on and off.
She was strong as the bible and as full of lives.
Her eyes were like Halley’s Comet, like factory whistles,
like bargain hunters, like shy kids.

No man had touched her or given her movements geometry.

She surfaced in front of us like a coelacanth, like a face
in a dark lagoon. She made us feel blessed.

She made us talk like a cage of canaries.

She reminded us. She was the ocean wearing a fur suit.

She had never eaten from a dish.
She knew nothing of corners or doorways.

She was our deaths come briefly forward to say hello.

She was completely undressed.

She was more part of the forest than any tree.
She was made of trees. The beauty of her face was bred
in the kingdom of rocks.

I had seen her long ago in the Dunlop Observatory.

She leapt from peak to peak like events in a ballad.

She was as insubstantial as smoke.

She was a mother wearing a brown sweater opening her arms.

She was a drunk logger on Yonge Street.

She was the Prime Minister. She had granted us a tiny
reserve.

She could remember a glacier where she was standing.

She was a plot of earth shaped like the island of
Newfoundland and able to fly, spring down in the middle of
cities scattering traffic, ride elevators, press pop-eyed
executives to the wall.

She was charged with the power of Churchill Falls.

She was a high explosive bomb loaded with bones and meat.
She broke the sod in our heads like a plow parting the
earth’s black lips.

She pulled our zippers down.

She was a spirit.

She was Newfoundland held in a dam. If we had touched her,
she would’ve burst through our windshield in a wall of
blood.

That night we were ravenous. We talked, gulping, waving
our forks. We entered one another like animals entering
woods.

That night we slept deeper than ever.

Our dreams bounded after her like excited hounds.

John Steffler served as the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada from 2006 to 2008. Though he was born and educated in Ontario, Steffler spent many years in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, as a professor of English at Wilfred Grenfell College.

John Steffler’s books of poems include That Night We Were Ravenous (McClelland and Stewart 1998), The Wreckage of Play (McClelland and Stewart, 1988), and The Grey Islands (McClelland and Stewart, 1985), among others. His novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright was shortlisted for the 1992 Governor General’s Award for fiction and won the Smithbooks/ Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award.

These excerpts were drawn from Waterfront Views, Contemporary Writing of Atlantic Canada (http://waterfrontviews,acadiau.ca/flash/steffler/steffler_bio.htm) and from the University of Toronto Libraries, Canadian Poetry Online (https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/steffler/index.htm) For additional information, see also the Atlantic Canadian Poets’ Archive (stu-acpa.com/john-steffler.html). For a more complete list of his poetry books, see Penny’s Poetry Pages Wiki (https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/John_Steffler).

Grouse Gap

The willows stir with warblers, juncos
Late July, and the mountain is burning
Moving from forest into smoke

In the arc of summer, each warbler, junco
Has moved from egg to naked urgent chick
To ragged youth, stirring the willows

A through-hiker appears, burned brown
Moving fast through the tunnel of flowers
Larkspurs, bent under the weight of bees

He does not speak, he does not stop
His is a business of miles
He has seen flowers already

My life below is submerged in smoke
Hidden, but I remember it
A memory antique as snow

As the workings of a darkroom
My father moving a sheet of white paper
Bringing a world into the light

Pepper Trail‘s poems have appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Ascent, Windfall, and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he works as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.