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Poetry Feature: Lonely Asteroid’s Ode to a Rover by Chloe Ziegler

Follows: Curiosity Rover Sings Happy Birthday to Itself

 

I’ll kiss you like the autumn
sun to a horizon, just
at seven. 
And I’ll miss you like lost
stars in smog, just  
past heaven. 

Curiosity does best me when
I hear you sing alone oh

My Dear, I won’t be long. Just   
hold your galactic gates till
dawn, and remember how 
I love you.

 

Chloe Ziegler is a senior attending Towson University who has had works published in Towson High School’s Colophon. She has gained several years of editing experience while working on both schools’ literary magazines. This is in pursuit of a lifelong passion for literary journals and writing that began in a second-grade after-school poetry workshop. As shown in her poem, she is an outspoken feminist and activist via her literary works and also on social media.  Chloe is also featured in Volume 72. 

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Poetry Feature: #buryyourgays

She sees my neck
choker wrapped
dares to graze
the skin beneath
the disbelief 
my head is not yet
rolling

In every dream
I hold her hand
and feel her gaze 
as the sun
the earth cracks
my lover must fall
to the flaming tomb
the fate of every sinner’s 
choices

I open up
on date night
the series finale 
we cannot wait to see
the tension build
before the kiss
we start to believe
in happy endings 

The lover is shot
thrown off the cliff
sacrificed 
the moral of the story
set

She has to go
she doesn’t text
I crawl back in 
my sleeping bag
my closet closed
and cozy

 

Ashley Robles is a queer, Hispanic artist currently residing in San Antonio. She studied English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin and is working to normalize chronic illness in her corporate and creative life. Her work has been published in The South Carolina Review, Messy Misfits Club, Grim & Gilded, and Unstamatic, among others. She is a recipient of The Bermuda Triangle Prize and is part of Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s 2022-2023 Poetry Collective cohort, where she is currently working on her first poetry collection. Robles can be found online everywhere @mzashleypie

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Poetry Feature: Down at the Club by Barry Peters

mid-winter
my annual descent
into the dark place

dirty immersion
in the muck & mud
& funk-smelling

junk of soul jazz
a gaslit basement
pink-jacketed quintet

rotund bass
walking the dog
saxes & drums

the gummy organ
a rumbling subway
beneath my feet

undersea
melodies adrift
in overcoat pockets

filthy & killer
sugar & spice
in plush booths

& at the heavy bar
another brown drink
in thick glass

a line of draft taps
steeples pointing
up & outta here.

 

Barry Peters and his wife, the writer Maureen Sherbondy, live in Durham, N.C. He has been published in Best New Poets, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry East, and The Southern Review, among others.

 

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Poetry Feature: BETTY CROCKER HAS LEFT THE KITCHEN by Jane Costain

She’s had it! Enough! She is done
with all that mixing, stirring,
measuring, those dirty pans
to scrub! Away with the apron,
the glued-on smile!
Leave all those books for others
who know no better.

She takes her meals now
in style at restaurants.
A bottle of fine wine 
served in a crystal goblet.
No more sipping the cooking sherry.

In her little black dress with its
slightly scandalous neckline,
her fingers bejeweled (no need
anymore to knead the dough),
her hair now blond, cascading
(no net) about her deliciously
made-up face, she clicks around 
in dangerously high heels.

In fact, she is no longer “Betty”
but “Liz”—and for her,
the words “house” and “wife”
can never be spoken as one.

 

Jane Costain is the author of the chapbook Small Windows (Main Street Rag, 2018) and has privately published A Dozen Centos. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Plainsongs, The MacGuffin, Pinyon Review, and Iris Literary Journal. She has a master’s degree in the creative arts in learning from Lesley College and has taught in public schools for over thirty years. She lives with her husband, Gary Moore, in Denver.

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Poetry Highlight: “Summer Night” and “August Wind” by Marcin Oświęcimka

By: Michael Downs

As I try to write these words, a little more than a month has passed since Marcin Oświęcimka drowned while swimming off one of the Canary Islands. Marcin, a writer and graduate student at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, had begun a semester abroad at Universidad de La Laguna in Tenerife, working to complete his degree in English philology with an emphasis on American language and culture.

Though I am a writer and professor in the United States, for a brief time in Spring 2022 I taught in Kraków, which is how I met Marcin. Quickly, I came to admire his writing and to feel grateful for his spirit. Smart and witty, Marcin connected to others through tenderness and empathy. He organized events for the campus’s English language and literature club. He could talk about skateboard wheels as well as he could discuss poems by Charles Bukowski.

For an assignment in my class, he wrote a poem based on a painting by Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Some 75 years after Hopper finished his “Summer Evening,” Marcin looked closely at the image of a man and woman standing in garish porch light, and he called them “a couple like any other.” Such a bold statement! Literature usually explores what differentiates the individual from others. So, Marcin’s description challenged my expectations and raised questions. What would the poem reveal about couples that make them all alike? At the end of his “Summer Night,” published here for the first time, Marcin offers a paradoxical answer that leaves the reader to wonder about the distances between people in love.

As seen in “Summer Night” and a second poem, “August Wind,” Marcin was a writer and poet of great potential. In an email before he was to leave for Tenerife, we talked about the possibility of him studying in the United States. I knew of a scholarship, and he hoped to conduct research into attitudes toward different foreign accents in English. “No other country can provide so many opportunities to research that field,” he wrote.

As for his creative writing, Marcin told me that he’d been traveling back and forth between composing in Polish and in English. It turns out, he wrote, “that I’m a completely different poet in my mother tongue, and I’m currently having adventures exploring this side.”

Summer Night
after Edward Hopper’s Summer Evening

the guests returned to their homes
it was an enjoyable evening
(for them)
or at least it looked as if it was
firewood and charcoals are crackling still
in the barbecue

they are a couple like any other

the night has come and
moths are headed to the lamp
sizzling on the bulb
and grasshoppers and
an occasional owl
are looming
from the meadows
and from the woods

this corner of the world
is where time flows how
it was meant to
with the idle wind strolling along
and perhaps too many chances
to think about what we all
think we think about, but we don’t

a neighbourhood like this is too small
for having secrets
so that’s how I know
they are a couple like any other

I see their undraped curtains
and the door blind undrawn
And it doesn’t mean much
nor does it bare a soul

I see them in the spotlight
sitting on the ledge of the veranda
quite close to one another
but they are a couple like any other
here
infinity spans between them

august wind

august wind
sometimes carries
notes of autumn
to itself
although it’s still
summer around

and silver moon
shows up
now and then
in the middle of a golden day

so I find a single dry straw
among lush blades of grass
and a lonely white cloud
in a patch of clear blue sky

old age reminds us that
it not only reads our memoirs
but also
writes us back

– Marcin Oświęcimka

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Poetry Feature: “On Being Mean” by Olivia Sokolowski

On Being Mean

 

A man walks up to me at the gas station air pump

and tries to explain how to use the machine. I understand

how to use the machine. When he won’t take the hint

I get back in my car and he shouts, I don’t want to hurt

you! I’m just trying to help! And that’s when I get the urge

to lean out the window and smile I’m just a mean

person! Right, don’t I remember your voice from last year

calling to tell me the same? Or was it my mother’s

laughter, saying zippy, zingy, feisty—little tap-

dancey words, maraschinos? Oh man, by now I know

the artistry of Mean, its well-lit pastry case

haloing flavors: blistering pineapple, thoughtless

plum… Rich beyond measure were the egg yolks

plashing the windshield of that new Subaru. I once

stole back a birthday gift, a mounted painting, and stayed

thirsty for that urge days later. Were you not

in the car when A. read us his poem about the body

in his backseat, dying, white hair loosing

from that figure which must have been his grandfather

but turned out to be the treasured family dog? O,

how the rest of us laughed! Like shards of hard candy

shooting out of the sunroof and into the mouth

of the moon. The moon is kind because she eats this

kind of laughter, fashions it into an ambergris

waxed with sleek window cats and tulle-purple dusks, an average

she used to perfume the crags of the quiet stadium

we parked beside. But now, I only want to cross

the highway of that memory to touch the dark

noses of the cows that grazed there—sweet and sad

beneath the moon’s blue spit. Why can I only

see them now with their faces to the earth, how the pulses

of their breath ask a question the grass still refuses?

 

 

 

 

 

Olivia Sokolowski

On Being Mean

Olivia M. Sokolowski is a poet currently pursuing her PhD at Florida State University. She earned her MFA at University of North Carolina Wilmington and her undergraduate degree at Berry College. Her work is recently featured or forthcoming in Lake Effect, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Nelle. You can also find Olivia streaming at twitch.tv/clockwork_olive.

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Exclusive Poetry Feature: “My Lover and I” by Christopher Kuhl

 

October blows dust, summer
long gone into a dark barn

like a hiding lover. Autumn
buries my life as the heavy,
fallen leaves and first hard frost
choke the grass.

My lover loves me
and grants me my loneliness

beneath a sky of steel-tipped
stars. The huge sun, yellowed
like an old bruise,

slips behind the hedgerows.

Who among us is holy?
One with myself, I kissed
the skin of a stone, and

heard the sea, the sea
rolling out, whispering
as dark as wine in a skin

or in its cold jar—the nightmare
silence is broken; I go to my lover

and am lonely no longer. At dusk
our slow breath thickens in
the air: begin with the rock;
end with the water.

Shut the kitchen door slowly
behind me

with a click.

 

Christopher Kuhl has published poetry, essays and short fiction extensively in on-line and print
journals. He has also written eleven free-ranging books of poetry and prose, exploring the
interactive human, natural and spiritual worlds. You can follow him and his fidgety brain on his
Facebook author’s page, Christopher Kuhl Writer.

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Exclusive Poetry Feature: “Christmas Comet” by karla k. morton

 

Dec 27th, and it’s already light so much later.


It’s then I realized I missed winter solstice —

no chance to celebrate

the longest night of the year;


still consumed in the everything-grief

of my Deerhound, dead at 13 –

so old for a big breed; so young for a human.

The sweet suffering of a grateful life;


my mother trying to wrap Christmas biscuits

in a trash bag,

asking for the fifteenth time:

where all this food came from,

and whose new jacket is this,

and why didn’t I bring the dog like always;


that hot bandage ripped quick and again

off the wound that had almost healed

twelve minutes ago.


So much to think about – holidays, family, death,

as if the Christmas Comet stirred such things –

like full moons calling forth newborns and floods.


And if the moon stirs the waters,

what would a comet stir

but the very breath from an old furry body,


and the mind of a woman

as sweet as a box of peppermint creams,

the lid left open,

 

swept up and pulled

glowing

into the long darkness of the woods.

 

2010 Texas Poet Laureate karla k. morton has fourteen collections,  with “The National Parks: A Century of Grace” her most recent and historic: visiting and writing about all 62 national parks in situ. She’s a National Heritage Wrangler Award winner, songwriter, and nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame.

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Exclusive Poetry Feature: “The Dascomb Aerie” by Donna L. Emerson

 

(family homestead, Bath New York)

I lift the old wooden fold-out chair from the shed. Its canvas cover is faded.
I can still make out stripes of orange, yellow, red, with a thin line of royal blue
every now and then.

We walk, the chair and I, to the mound of soft grass where the house used to be.
The grass under my feet, long and shiny. It feels as it did in the 1950’s
when we sat under these same maple trees, now as then fluttering in the breeze.

I can still see aunts and uncles strewn about on cotton quilts here,
near the old house. They talk about fishing, going gliding later today,
about Eisenhower and that oddball Nixon. They laugh, telling the story
of splashing in Camel’s Creek below the farm when they were kids.
They had one bathing suit among the four of them and had to give it
to the minister’s son, who came along.

They take in summer sun, rolling leg on leg, rubbing on suntan lotion,
grooming each other. My Dad and Uncle Cecil, shirtless, boxer shorts
showing above Bermudas, lying on their stomachs. Mom and Aunt Jane,
hair pulled back with combs and rubber bands, slide their oiled hands
up and down their husbands’ backs. Other than here
I don’t see men lying down like this, close as all four in bed together.
Other than here my father never lies down, except at night.
Uncle John sits in his yellow polo shirt and shorts, sucking on his pipe,
while Aunt Betty slaps a fly on her soft knee.
Uncle Harry’s at the pond with the boys, fishing.
Aunt Helen’s gone shopping in Hornell.

Waves of heat, flush with red raspberry smell, move over us.
Grandpa’s leaning down in the berry patch in his sleeveless, ribbed undershirt
and gray post office pants, a two-gallon metal pail on his belt, picking berries.
We’ll have them for dinner and breakfast, then lunch too.
We girls will help our moms can them in jellies tomorrow.

I follow the thick, drunk flight of bumblebees on the cluster of thistle flowers
next to Grandma’s lawn chair. She says, “When we were kids
we used to make hot pads out of these. See how the thorns hold them together

They were real pretty.”
She and I put thistle flowers together to make pads for the family dinner table.
There, Grandpa will pray for five minutes while we fidget,
asking God to “…make these stories to our uses…”
that we kids never understood until last year.

 

Donna L. Emerson lives in Petaluma, California, and western New York. Recently retired from Santa Rosa Jr. College. Donna’s award-winning publications include the New Ohio Review, CALYX, the London Magazine, and Paterson Literary Review. She has published four chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections. Her most recent awards: nominations for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and two Allen Ginsberg awards. Visit her website: Donna Emerson.com

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Exclusive Poetry Feature: “I Have Been Yearning For a Safe Space in the Desert” by Alise Versella

Just me

…………..The Joshua trees

And the Milky Way (no light pollution)

No noise polluting the tramways of my brain

It all runs through me

Sets my nerves to cackling like crows atop birch trees

………………(I loved the birch trees in Maine

………………And the top of Cadillac Mountain

…………………………….. Just me

……………………………………………….The rock

…………………………………………………………………And the wind

………………………………………………………………………………………………….All the Atlantic around me

                                                                                                                               

Cold and brutal and sparkling in the sun speckled between the clouds—a toad hiccupping for a sky)

 

My heel struggling over cobblestone in Dublin, musicians on Grafton Street

St. Stephen’s Green holds me still

Holds me like you never did

 

I yearn for the ways in which a place loves me

Understanding what I mean in my silence

 

I am craving the retreating of the desert

Everything strands of time suspended

………………You have to look harder for the blooming

—really listen for the gurgle and the ripple

………………Like how lately I really have to listen hard to hear my heartbeat

 

My shoulders two boulders red in the sun

I need the truth of a desert being the last place you’d look for life

And yet here we are existing

 

…………….(I am a desert now)

…………………………….But you didn’t know the flowers bloom in the spring here too

—pollination happens amongst dust

 

I am learning how to shed the husk

Of the world and let nature do its

Living—I will live better to see the stars in all their light-absorbing glory

Perhaps the belt of Orion will cinch tight the waist of my worry

 

I will become one with a memory

Between the laundered sheets of time

Spaces free of concrete suffocating

…………….Plastic bag over the mouth of breathing

 

Sometimes I feel like I am suffocating within my own body

 

Oh for the empty

……………The archeological sand ready to petrify my bones

A fossil of my vertebrae

Oh for the desert to empty my lungs—fill the night of me with a moon for its stars

 

 

Alise Versella is a pushcart nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society whose work has been published widely. She is forthcoming in Crack The Spine and The Poeming Pigeon. Her latest poetry collection, When Wolves Become Birds,  is out now through Golden Dragonfly Press.  You can find her at www.aliseversella.com.