by Dee Allen
There have been times-- Musical, foot-stomping, joyous times-- At strobe-lit spaces Goths and Rivetheads Were known to congregate When I was welcomed And felt accepted As one of their own. And at other times At such spaces-- Times I wish Were erased from my memory-- When I passed through The dancing, undulating, spiked & pierced Lot unnoticed, Double-black-- Black garments moving, Covering Black skin, Except for the face-- And a superpower I never counted on having Kicked in around the decorative, mostly Pale elitist ones Uniformed in the shade of midnight: Invisibility. African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California U.S.A. Active on creative writing & Spoken Word since the early 1990s. Author of 7 books--Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater, Skeletal Black, Elohi Unitsi and his 2 newest, Rusty Gallows and Plans--and 66 anthology appearances. Currently seeking a new publisher.
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by Maree Reedman
My backyard is blanketed in lavender flowers, little trumpets, heralding memories of university days, exam time, the year ending, and my mother, who liked purple and blue, how she cut down the majestic jacaranda on her footpath because it was close to the power lines. There’s a family of frogmouths in the paperbarks at work. My niece and nephew are getting their licences, Dad’s going on another cruise. My mother died in the dead of winter, she wouldn’t wait for the frangipani to sprout green leaves at the end of its old fingers. Maree Reedman lives in Brisbane with one husband, two cockatiels, and five ukuleles. Her poetry has been published in the United States and Australia in Chiron Review, Naugatuck River Review, Unbroken, Stickman Review, Grieve, Hecate, StylusLit, and has won Ipswich Poetry Feast awards, including a mentorship with Carmen Leigh Keates. by Emily MacGriff
I saw water music whomping women women wearing leaves and their hair breathing in baritone stretches of precipitate I shook the waves – rubber and rudder pointed in from the surf wanting to call back in stomp, brush, slap scoop, smack gulp, spray, gasp wanting an answer swish, smash, sing sway, say something, just arms leaf head leaves breast bottom belly leaves the strings of music in the empty bits of me, my history and feet be silent, it’s all the engine drop, rain, my own chest’s cascade it’s all the chimes I cry, and cloud. Emily’s work pulls largely from her experience working aboard expedition ships as a marine biologist/wilderness guide in the polar regions, South Pacific and British Isles. She is mostly retired from shipbound work and focused on navigating life as a woman, artist and mother. She’s based in Detroit and received an MFAW from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. by B. J. Buckley
Moon splintered bone, each cloud a torn and dirty winding sheet, a shroud for stars. This is what the world is: killing to stay alive: wasp and caterpillar, fox and vole, the aging lynx in one last leap to the back of a panicked deer, clawing for its neck, for red, for warm, the beautiful simplicity of blood beyond which nothing has any meaning, bear chewing through flesh and sinew to free itself from a trap. There’s always a knife at the throat of love, some desperate hunger, wolf devouring its heart to save its heart. B. J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her recent work appears in Grub Street, Hole in the Head Review, About Place Journal, Dogwood, and Calyx. by Willow Kang
for Ishita Pandey On Coney Island listen, to the unquiet of the night rabbits turning nocturnal & wintery, China dolls hopping off their prairies Yet the carnival rides never stop rolling, nor the restless tides, pulled by a moonlit chariot Tonight is fit for space station escapades, stay watchful. May caffeinated owls concoct for you an insomniac’s poison in the silk worm’s nest What shenanigans loom around the alleyways, giggles atop the street lamps, skyscrapers like monuments to fireflies Scurry between midnight parties on High Street & peek into the shimmering rooflights, on this night filled with cratered, puzzling belongings Willow is a writer from Singapore. After school, you can find her reading thick history textbooks, aimlessly writing poems, and solving frustrating math problems, in a futile attempt to conquer boredom. Just make sure that her coffee bowl stays full. by Jas Saunders
Sometimes when I’m anxious I’ll write poems on the plateaus of my palms, blue waves of ink flowing within their gradients and ridges When I want to hide those feelings from the rest of the world like a hermit crab tucked inside itself, I’ll share an empty fist, displaying new and delicate fingernails like bleached white seashells washed ashore learning to grow in real time with the rest of me. Published in UWA’s Pelican and Peafowl magazines, as well as Perth’s youth magazine Pulch, Jas Saunders is an Honours (Creative Writing) student at UWA, with an undergrad in English Lit and Public Health. Her writing focuses on liminal spaces, nostalgia, or memory, with representation her younger self would have desired. by Yuan Changming
for Qi Hong Taking a walk around the neighborhood at sunset Leaves rustle as if they are crows flapping by In the twilight sky, the moon looms- What if it vanished into an unknown space as the clouds exchange their feelings in a hurry? Seeing a passer-by come my way, I derail my body & thoughts alike What if the planet really comes to a pause during the pandemic? What if social distancing becomes the order of the day forever? What if the season, in other words, lasts between rain and snow? Seeing two teenagers approach, I jump aside and hop on the curb like a lousy dancer as they run along What if the doors of my homeland remain closed until I am too old or too weak to move, to see and kiss my first and last love? What if my family cannot afford to immigrate to Mars from this burning or frozen planet? What if another huge meteorite hits earth hard enough? What if what I know is neither true nor false? Yuan Changming hails with Allen Yuan from poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations & chapbooks (most recently LIMERENCE) besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), Poetry Daily & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1929 others. Yuan both served on the jury and was nominated for Canada's National Magazine (poetry category). by Sienna Taggart
paperbag bush, prickly poppies, creosote ironwood blue phacelia bitter root —the desert’s offspring sewn together, rustling whispering their brisk secrets up the mountain. I taste them on my tongue when rain beckons and calls feel them on my palm, their gummy milky sap drying on my fingertips I walk climbing higher to the Yucca with her sugary waxed cream flowers sheathed in sharp points, roots swelling with sudsy pulp; I stand before her threadlike neck concealed behind a bladed fan cup my hands as wind pulls velvet tears from her cheeks. Sienna Taggart (she/her) is a Creative Writing and English student. Her work has appeared in Dundee University Review of the Arts and The Ekphrastic Review. Sienna lives in El Paso, Texas, with her family and spirited pup, Ronin. She can be found on Instagram @siennaraine_ by Tom Brami
When in poverty, your altitude becomes familiar, and you realize the difference between being short and being short of thrift. You fly and think of falling into the spiral of earth without obligation of forming belief, like a peach prone to bruising. We are all air bound, arranged in failure and moving. Observe her husband below. Right now, he’s changing by walking the feet to an invisible line. He is a kind of glass she held to the sun, an emergent quality present in ways or degrees. In the future, you will recognize your face as a groper probing a fisherman’s hand. You’re a boy crawling into a crevice to sleep. Anemones stain the sea; birds are lost in migrating sand. You use them as half buried pillows. Outside you, a ship is casting a frost that freezes the ocean. The snow is calm and reddish, prone to bruising. Wreathing clouds are suspended on a sphere. Tom Brami is an Australian writer and filmmaker working on a PhD in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry can be found in Of/with, otoliths, Futures Trading, Southerly, and Foam:e. by Emily Bartlett
We navigate familiar rocks as if scattered by a hatted chef with careless, exquisite precision. Driftwood charred and bloated, washed up, and our silence is sliced open by the cries of seabirds. And other pieces of whole float stiff; crab shell, cicada wing, twig, cast adrift, sucked into cavernous spaces, spat into currents laced with torpid, yellowing foam. How long to roam before our final resting place? You really have to wonder. Never before has this ocean made me afraid, except on such days, when churning water blurs; seclusion hoped for but not promised beyond the waves. Emily ‘Emmy’ Bartlett (nee Walsh) is an Australian writer, artist and Pleiadian starseed living between Sydney and Coffs Harbour, NSW. She runs a creative agency and is writing her debut novel, Ozora. Emily is the assistant editor of Plumwood Mountain Journal and loves etymology, singing and the feeling of being underwater. |
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April 2024
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