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.

Abigail Chabitnoy Reading Two Poems Appearing in Volume 70 of Grub Street

 

 

 

You can read Abigail’s poems “A FOUR-PART APOLOGY FOR MY CONTINUED BEING”, “A PERSISTENT DREAM OF LARGE BODIES  OF WATER & EVERYTHING THAT MIGHT BE WAITING WITHIN”, and “A PRONG OR SHARP POINT SUCH AS THAT ON A FORK, OR ANTLER” in Volume 70 of Grub Street, out now. You can also view her poetry comic on pages 150-154 of Volume 70. Click here to view Volume 70.

 

Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Poetry and shortlisted in the international category of the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry. She was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, Lit Hub,  Red Ink, and elsewhere. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, and currently she is on faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Denver Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

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.

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.

Chelsea Harlan Reading “The Leopard Slug” Appearing in Volume 70 of Grub Street

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You can read Chelsea’s poem “The Leopard Slug” in Volume 70 of Grub Street, out now. Click here to view Volume 70.

 

Chelsea Harlan holds a B.A. from Bennington College and an M.F.A. in poetry from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Sixth Finch, Hobart, Cold Mountain Review, The Greensboro Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of the chapbook Mummy (Montez Press, 2019), and the recipient of the 2019-2020 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize judged by sam sax. She lives in Brooklyn.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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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

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.

Leah Bushman on “In My Nightmares I am Calling Jeff Bezos ‘Daddy'” in Volume 70 of Grub Street

 

You can read Leah’s poem “In My Nightmares I am Calling Jeff Bezos ‘Daddy'” in Volume 70 of Grub Street, out now. Click here to view Volume 70. You can also read Leah’s poems “Between Sternum and Stomach” and “Our Sockets Won’t Stop Bleeding” on Grub Street‘s website. For the first poem, click here. For the second poem, click here.

 

Leah Bushman is a nature gazer and animal lover who rarely takes life seriously. This is her first publication. A Towson University graduate with a B.S. in English, she can be found on social media at @leahbushman.

Exclusive Poetry Feature: “Aubade” by Jesse Wolfe

 

Her brown curls heaped on the pillow,
the comforter sprawled below her breasts.
She fled into her magazine.

For a minute, motionless, he stood.
Starlings chattered in the walnut tree.

*………. * ……….*

In days they decided on a baby.
It was not the last “decision.”

* ……….* ……….*

As, like coils of hair, they each unraveled
in stories too intricate for pianos or flutes,
he strained to envision that tableau
(the floral bed spread they bought in Berkeley;
her lips almost closing, moving back apart
as she subvocalized; his own feet sunk
into the carpet)
in successive surrogates of that home:
their beach bungalow in Venice,
their box apartment in Japan …

*………..* ………..*

She lingered in the garage, assembling
their grandson’s tricycle.
He’d be out of his wheelchair next month, or not.
They’d live to see the child’s graduation, or not.
Their years living apart
would come to seem natural—an exhalation—
or always hurtful and capricious.

He returned to his music stand.
For a week he’d been practicing
the first movement of this piece by Roussel.
He could be in high school again.
Focus, repetition. No expectations
save one note tilting toward the next.

 

Jesse Wolfe teaches English at California State University Stanislaus. His debut poetry chapbook, En Route, appeared in December 2020. He is the author of the scholarly monograph Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge, 2011) and is completing a second scholarly book about intimacy in contemporary Anglo-American fiction.

Mak Sisson on “The Woman Who Wanted to Plant Turnips” in Volume 70 of Grub Street

 

 

You can read Mak’s poem “The Woman Who Wanted to Plant Turnips” in Volume 70 of Grub Street, out now. Click here to view Volume 70. You can also read Mak’s poem “The Days the Deer Died” on Grub Street‘s website here, and Mak’s nonfiction piece “List of Symptoms of Something I Cannot Name That I Have Taped to my Fridge” here.

 

Mak Sisson is a graduate student at the University of Montana, studying environmental science and natural resource journalism. She aspires to save the planet and write about the environment, however local or global it may be. Her nonfiction, which appears in volume 69 of Grub Street, received first place nationally in alternative story form from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. She currently works as a science writer for Modern Treatise.