Journal

Setting Things Right on a Friday Night

I was going for a walk in the almost dark when headlights from behind lit up a porcupine a few feet ahead and I didn’t mind shooting the breeze with her but not before we left the macadam for the short grass and the porcupine told me right off she was attracted to my dark gray suede shoes, same color and texture she said as the hide beneath all her quills and no, she nor any other porcupine she knew could catapult them into my skin and she instructed me how to stroke her, she so liked being stroked and how almost impossible it was to find anyone who’d do it and when I did it, the quills tickled us both and she asked if she could run her paws over my shoes and I said, sure, why not, what could it hurt and I thought she might be falling in love, then she told me her twin boys had been struck by a pickup and succumbed in the tangle of witch hazel beyond the U-curve so what else could I do but give them to her, leaving me to make it home barefoot in the sharp light of a new moon.

 

Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is published in over seventy journals including The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Windsor Review, Packingtown Review, and Tar River Poetry. His first collection of poems entitled JUICE has been published by Regal House Publishing. He writes from Pennsylvania.

Playing Basketball with Vietnam Veterans
in the Village Right Before Independence Day

Lord, our joints do creak, but our 12 to 15 foot jump shots remain deadly accurate.
Ballers—it’s in the blood and if our moves can no longer be characterized as
French pastry, there’s enough jellyroll left to raise a few eyebrows. We play until
it’s too dark to continue and tramp to the nearest Irish bar, rough looking on
the inside yet occupied by gentle men. I enjoy hearing my compatriots spin their
adventures, particularly as it pertains to the Mekong, maybe because my 349 draft
number—the only lottery I’ve ever won—assured there would be no rice paddies
for me back then. “I forgive you,” one of the guys says, “for setting that screen that
put me on my ass.” “Yeah,” I say, “I’m usually a lover, not a fighter.” Another says
“We should drink to that” and we lift our beer glasses and toast love, love,love,
our gray, our white hair glowing a light blond in the cheap yellow of the strobe
lights.

 

Tim Suermondt is the author of five full-length collections of poems, the latest JOSEPHINE BAKER SWIMMING POOL from MadHat Press, 2019. He has published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine, december magazine, and Plume, among many others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Philosophies

But the name does not matter,
this is a spoon The spoon and
table are just things. I know that,
Alec replies to my mom.

Several of us are eating at DQ with
my youngest nephew. My nephew,
thirteen year old Alec just finished
his middle school choir concert.

We try to understand Mom, sometimes I tell him.
The object is still useful.

Alec turns to his mom and says
Mom, you’re a spoon.

His mother replies, Thank you.

 

Nicole Taylor lives in Eugene, Oregon. She has been an artist, a dancer, a hiker, a poetry note taker, a sketcher, a volunteer and a dancer. Her poems have been published in  Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, Cirque Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, Just Another Art Movement Journal – dance poems to New Zealand, West Wind Review, and others. You can read her poetry at Oregon Poetic Voices.

Dandy

As girl, you hid behind a hood of hair
Took up residence inside overalls
Deflected eyes every way you could

As young man, you now reveal yourself
A dandy, startling in your pegged green pants
Thrift-store shoes, sleek as greyhounds
Paired with Armani shirt and blazer by Zara
Its texture echoed exactly in the S24 tie
Sunning itself on your broad chest

You weave through the midday streets
Among the folk living their lives
In flip-flops and unfortunate shorts
And every head turns as you pass
It is in the nature of the sun to shine

 

Pepper Trail‘s  poems have appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Borderlands, Ascent 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 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he works as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

Field Guide to Your Life in Middle Age

That high, clear wall you see in
the distance is really the sky,
etched with clouds.
Sometimes it feels like
you live in a bubble,
but you don’t.
Everything extends
outward, to infinity.
You aren’t trapped.
The horizon only seems fixed.
Try this: go for a long walk
and listen for the shatter
of glass that isn’t there.

 

Vivian Wagner lives in New Concord, Ohio, where she’s an associate professor of English at Muskingum University. Her work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many others. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and three poetry chapbooks. See Vivian Wagner Books for more information.

Surveillance

I am being followed by raccoons.
The first one crossed slow
through neighborhood traffic,
stopping first the southbound
and then the northbound car
which swerved and went around.
She stopped in front of our passenger tire
and looked at me.  Drive on, I said,
drive. I was watchful
all night and wore tall boots when I walked.

If she’d been an old woman under a cloak
of stripe and ringed eyes, I’d have known her
sooner for the specter that she was,
a warden, a watcher, that old white opossum
that showed its teeth against the sliding glass.

I am walking on the shore when the next
raccoon comes, small, gray, cute even
until he looks right at me and comes a step closer.
Go away; go the other way.
Everyone realizes it’s just me he wants,
so I put the three books of poetry I carry
spines down in the sand,
a barrier wall to confuse him. I flee,
losing the library copy of Glück’s Ararat
to the wild.
‌                   They keep doing this,
I shriek to whoever will listen,
third one this week: Raccoons
are trying to get me. In the hunched back
of the largest one, she carried age
like a contagion. Soon, claw fingers will wave
come here, come here. You, with your baby
high cholesterol, with your blood
pressure just up enough.  You’re slow,
you’re one of us.  Put on the cloak, slow down,
grub though the corn cobs
and the leftover breads.  Take this white
pill, this pink.  Swallow, swallow
with your morning juice, come hump
along the shore and the street with us.

 

Laura Lee Washburn, author of This Good Warm Place (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize), has published poems in such journals as Poet Lore, Carolina Quarterly, 9th Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review.  Harbor Review’s annual micro-chap prize is named in her honor.