Journal

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.

 

Dear Mother in Your Iced-Tea House

what are you doing now
where did you eat your
lunch and were there
lots of anchovies…
—Frank O’Hara, Morning

Are you enjoying your freedom
goddess of the city, classical pianist
on the threshold of fame, Wonder
Woman of the Metropolitan Martini
in your surrogate sylph summer—
walk-in hair salons, manicured, pedicured,
and pampered, pursing your pouty
lips, swinging your sultry hips,
writing posies of prose and poetry,
queen of Manhattan night life
a frisée of golden beetroot
jasmine scented crimini over-easy
Hollandaise-poached quail eggs
avocados on the side, toast tips
drizzled with extra virgin truffle oil,
salmon roe and thin-sliced ginger,
breaking hearts and pocketbooks,
pocketing portfolios of rising stocks
nymph-like and childless, binging HBO—
Big Little Lies and I May Destroy You?

 

Oregon poet and artist Dale Champlin has published in Willawaw Journal, Cathexis, Pif, The Opiate, and elsewhere. In 2019 she published The Barbie Diaries. Two collections are forthcoming, Isadora and Callie.

Storms and Head Rises

Every year we watch a world blown away by storms.

We see lights shoot saw-teeth in the moving dark, wind dipping into earth whatever it
‌          carried in its manic swings, shed and grain left as lint huddled in a freshly
‌          exposed pocket of what has in a tornado come on unfamiliar.

We are confronted with damage in a fallen tree on a flattened house, another head rise
‌          on Red River wrapping its rust over cotton fields.

We go higher when the wagons tip over in the rushing water, high like animals
‌          into a hill alongside one another, river of gratitude for hands reaching out for us.

To recede is to reveal what we are afraid to lose.

 

Ryan Clark is obsessed with puns and writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), and his poetry has recently appeared in Interim, Barzakh, DIAGRAM, and Fourteen Hills. Though he grew up in the Texoma region of Oklahoma and Texas, he currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Iowa.

Dear Donna

Thought you might want
this photo from
Senior Prom, 1969.

I’m the dork.
You’re the beauty.
Dad’s Polaroid always
impatient with the fixer
streaked like memory.

After prom we walked
in rain, dripping
eyelashes kissing.
Borrowed poncho leaked
brown, ruined the rented
tux but you still have
the pressed corsage,
you told me at reunion.

 

Joe Cottonwood is happy to be called an old hippie. His new book of poetry is Random Saints — poems of kindness for an unkind age. He’s a semi-retired home repair contractor and a lifelong writer sheltering with his high school sweetheart among redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.