March & April 2019
Vol IV No II
Not your ordinary poetry magazine!
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Published bi-monthly
Sentimental Poetry with Vera Ignatowitsch
Victimhood
When blizzard, quake, economy
attack and show no lenience,
what does the future want of me?
It’s such an inconvenience.
A Surprise Party
Everyone turns out for it,
everyone but you.
You never know who might attend.
No, you never do.
They may not know each other,
but ah, they all knew you.
Couples Therapy
Mild is the blister’s sting
the day you finally burst it
and disinfect the wound.
As for the shoe, you’ve cursed it,
but memory makes you sad
to see it so encrusted.
For years you put it on, and on—
a punishment you trusted.
Claudia Gary, author of Humor Me, Bikini Buyer’s Remorse, and poems in journals internationally, teaches at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and elsewhere. Follow @claudiagary. pw.org/content/claudia_gary.
Ball Gone Astray
Child, I might tell you
nothing rolls here
crooked upon the earth—
but I’d as surely in the end
hand you a leaf of truth
that could outlive a year.
And I might well tell you
all turns to bliss
of love and faith—
that the leaves beneath
which you run will descend
to a faultless ball;
That your several destinies
will make a roll call
of the utterly blameless—
but I must return to you
this perfect sphere
of yours in lieu of these.
​
​
Daril Bentley has been a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and the New Mexico Book Award for Poetry. He has most recently been published in Journal of the Isles, CircleShow, and The Halcyone Literary Review (Best 64 Poets of 2018.)
Questions
Pull me through the clouds,
let me sit with you.
It’s been four years.
I just want more time.
I have so many questions.
Should I take this time
to find out the answers or
should I just sit quietly?
What made you take
the heroin that stopped your heart
and shattered my life?
Who sold it to you, this thing that
took our breaths, our words?
But if I could sit by you again and
ask, ask . . .
I would hold your hand until
it was time to go and . . .
​
​
Susan J. Mitchell’s poetry has been or is forthcoming in Appalachian Journal, Harbinger Asylum, and Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love Anthology. Her latest book is After the Heroin: A Mother’s Story in Poetry.
Ann
Come to me, Ann,
put on your old brown shoes
button up your coat
close up the house
and come to me, Ann.
Suns can rise and set
Catullus said;
that same old wonderful line
comes back
one way or another,
time after time;
we know it to
be true and don't care,
don’t pay it no mind,
share and share alike
that wretched wisdom.
The weather changes,
the king dies, the tyrant deposed,
revolution, fire, burning,
the comings and goings,
but we don't care,
not for a moment, not nohow,
for now is our only island,
our rock, our well of hope.
Come to me, Ann;
you may as well
leave it all behind,
let it all go and
take your chance;
we can love, can lose,
will lose it all
to the brigand time,
lose it all in the end,
our lives, too,
but for now
take my hand, my heart;
forget the final pitiful loss
of everything and let us
kiss the sacred crown
of flowering May,
make our vows,
and be here now.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle "Sweet Adeline," use a knife and fork, and killed a postman.
On Planting A Tree
All my life I’ve wanted to see a chestnut tree.
The looming giant of the forest
In stories told by old men.
I’ve never seen one.
I want to see elm trees again.
I remember a week when I was ten,
They cut down every tree on Elm Street.
Too sick with the Dutch Elm to live.
And left the street lined with stumps
Two or even three feet across.
Fifty years later
I have planted a horse chestnut.
It’s small.
There isn’t a horse, and it’s not a chestnut tree.
But someday it will loom over the street,
A displaced giant from a distant forest.
Bruce McGuffin’s poetry has appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Parody, and The Asses of Parnassus. His day job involves thinking about radios at a laboratory outside Boston.