Thursday 30 April 2020


Eurydice

by Chella Courington


Women have cried over my confinement
in hell by a husband who loved me so
he could not turn away
could not abide the caveat.
These long dark days
underground
breathless
I have not lived yearning for him.
I’m fine.

Did you really believe he wanted me
on earth with him?
Orpheus?
The beloved singer?
What would he sing if I were there?
For his song he needed me
buried beneath the crushing ground
star-crossed love that could never vanish
because it never was.
He didn’t desire a woman
bloody with menstrual rituals
whose body once luminous would be taken by time.
Orpheus could not accept such a betrayal.
He wanted me as nymph, not crone.

Even more than age
he feared my voice.
Afraid it would rise above his.
What did he know of suffering and forgiveness?
I was the one severed from the sun
shut in subterranean darkness
barely enough oxygen.

He could have joined me the day I descended.
A knife to his throat, a serpent to his breast.
But he did none of these.
Came to me later by other hands.
I have no use for him.


* * * * *

Chella Courington is a writer and teacher whose poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, The Collagist, and The Los Angeles Review. Her novella, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage, is available at Breaking Rules Publishing. (chellacourington.net)

Wednesday 29 April 2020


ANA

by Juanita Rey


I’d sit on the ledge with my Aunt Ana,
dipping our toes in sea water,
letting the minnows nibble our toes
and laughing.

I was seven years old
and she seemed not much older
though she was my mother’s youngest sister –
the wild one so they said
with her slinky dresses,
high heeled shoes,
and underthings drying on the outside line
that, folks whispered,
no respectable woman
would ever think of wearing.

She loved that Caribbean wind
blowing her hair loose
and the tang of fish and salt.
She’d lead me barefoot
along the sand,
into the cascading waves
that rolled up to her deep brown thighs.

She loved to pick up stones and shells,
rub them for good luck.
And she’d investigate the rotted planks
that drifted shoreward.
To her, there was something of pride’s folly
in the wreckage of old ships.
though she didn’t miss a chance to sway her hips
should some local hunk stride by.

I have just returned briefly for her burial.
I heard the men talk
when they didn’t know I could hear.
And the women too
when they invited me into their circle.
Lascivious or sententious – just different shades of lies.
  
I preferred the ocean’s epilogo –
unknowable but cool.


* * * * *

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

Tuesday 28 April 2020


THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

by Juanita Rey


The dead raccoon makes me sad.
To you, it is merely disgusting.
No, the flies, the crows,
or anything else that wants at the corpse
do not bother me.
That’s how the natural world works.
Sure, there’s sorrow in those stiff bandit eyes
but nothing grotesque.
Unless, of course, you factor in
the speeding car that knocked this poor creature
into the gutter.

But, then again,
you shudder at the sight of a tampon,
at the thought of the cycles
a woman’s body goes through.
And there was that film
of a mother giving birth.
Nothing was really shown
but even that nothing was too much for you.

We’re all flesh and blood.
There’s no getting away from it.
And flesh is not always pristine.
And there are times when blood
doesn’t stick to its veins and its arteries.

No, the dead raccoon is not beautiful.
But it fills me with awe.
Here’s four years or more
of foraging, scurrying,
defending, fleeing, mating.
And here’s the machinery
that accomplished that.

No reason for me to ever turn away.
Not while life is such a messy but powerful instinct.
And death says more than it bargained for.


* * * * *

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

Monday 27 April 2020


If I Brought A Man

by Kennita Ballard


If I brought a man
Into this world
Whose life
Would end
Sooner?

How much can I love
A man that looks like me
When there is a world
That would take that very thing
Away

If, as a baby, I wrapped him up tight
Would that keep the world away

If, as a baby, I scrub his skin raw
Would that keep this target off his flesh

If, I could keep him as a baby
Would he ever become a man
That someday...

How much longer
Can this heart
Not yet the mother
Break?

I’ve wonder about the futility
Of mourning now
For a child not yet
Mine
Who doesn’t come home

Sunday 26 April 2020


How Does it End?

by Tova Hinda Siegel


Ants lay dead on the floor 
in my friend’s bedroom.
Her skirt is grey, or maybe black.  
She can’t tell.

No zipper can make the fit
though it moves 
back and forth
and the cows cross the road
bellowing 
in the attempt.

Moths settle on the inviting wool.
Metamorphize 
beyond youth and rainbow.
Time and sound invite me 
to review the moon’s red halo,
settling into the night 
of swirling wind.

Before their death
they marched around and back
and I think of friends
up and down, in and out
of my life, moving in concentric circles, 
diaphanous, though a glass of wine
would keep them,
would hold them still, 
keep them from sliding,
keep them from drifting into the circle
before the drift of drifting pulls
like the gravity of a black hole
and fills till empty, 
with a speed rivaling light
or death 
or breakfast eggs.

The cry of the mother dove deprived
of her fledgling, echoes in the hollow.  
Feathers, beak and dead still open eye,
I bury it in the garden.

The nest stays empty but for an occasional
visit from the father
who never settles but stands vigilant on the edge.
Then he too leaves.

The ants become dust
only to be swept
into the same dirt 
that holds the days dead dove
safe from hungry flies wanting
food for their maggot offspring.

* * * * *

Tova Hinda Siegel’s work has appeared in Salon.comI’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, and several anthologies.  She holds a BA from Antioch University and an MS from USC. A midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Saturday 25 April 2020


That Moment I Knew          

by Tova Hinda Siegel
                                                                                               

Why did I want to walk 
to the Chuppah alone?  
Why didn’t I want my father’s
strength to lean on?
We could have turned and run
the other way. A quick retreat
from what became years of sadness.
Instead, I held 
my flowers, lilacs and
lilies of the valley,
still my favorites, 
in my shaking hands.  
When I looked up –
and I didn’t want to look up –
I could see him
and my mother smiling,
under the Chuppah, waiting.
I stood, so far away, 
solitary as a leaf, 
fallen on the winter ground.


* * * * *

Tova Hinda Siegel’s work has appeared in Salon.comI’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, and several anthologies.  She holds a BA from Antioch University and an MS from USC. A midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Friday 24 April 2020


Keeping Watch

by Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin


Winter’s silence, winter’s darkness,
refuge against the streets.
Walls she can keep dim or make glow,
space she can imagine a French garden
with cornets and hautboys,
or a blue-sizzle club with sax and piano,
or nothing,
just the dripping of the shower,
the creaking of the floorboards,
her own breathing.
Safety, discreetness, discreteness
from the merchants gazing out
through shop windows from sale
to meager sale, the brawny young studs
mustached and tattooed breakfasting at the bar,
the middle-aged men
grouped in early evening before the deli,
standing and looking, standing and talking
the way they say women do, their eyes
following her determined walk
as they follow anyone new
or not male or not white. She could
so easily pass
for one of theirs but
for her wary gait.
On the streets she feels like
the white fly among the black,
the black bear in the Arctic,
the one plant above the snowline. Inside
she can listen to her bourees and blues
and peer out the windows at voices
to catch the speakers at their most disarmed
and candid
and measure if one day they might be
friend or foe.


* * * * *

"Keeping Watch" was originally published in Shadow Road Quarterly (September 2013)

Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin’s poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Grasslimb Journal, Poppy Road Review, Connecticut River Review, Poetry Quarterly, and other places. Carrie is author of the novel Snare (The Waiting Dark) and has stories in journals like Bards and Sages Quarterly, Supernatural Tales, and Luna Station Quarterly.

Thursday 23 April 2020


Playing the Wounded Bird
        a cautionary tale

by Nancy Harris McLelland


Before you play the wounded bird
consider the charadrius vociferus
commonly known as the killdeer.
Because she builds her nest in shortgrass fields 
and sometimes parking lots, nature compensates
with a behavior called injury feigning.

She attempts to protect her fledglings
by making a strident and piping sound
as she hops on the ground,
and flaps a fake broken wing
hoping to fool the cunning coyote
with her plaintive over here, over here.

As I walk down a country road
and harken to her cry,
I reply, “I am not your enemy.”  
Driven by fear and destined by nature 
ever to be the wounded bird,
she’s incapable of making that distinction.

And you? Must you persist in acting the one with a broken wing
hoping to lure the one who needs most to mend a broken thing?


* * * * *

For Nancy Harris McLelland, home means Nevada. She divides her time between Carson City, the capitol, and Tuscarora, an almost ghost town in the ranching country fifty miles north of Elko. She publishes on her blog, Writing from Space—Memoir, Essays, and Poetry from the Wide, Open Spaces of Northeastern Nevada, www.writingfromspace.com, and is also accessible through her Facebook page Tuscarora Writers Retreats.


Wednesday 22 April 2020


Light Over a Broken Day

by Jennie Linthorst


I drop my son off before dawn
for a school canoeing trip.

Driving away in a distracted fog
of trivial maternal anxieties,

I reach for the radio to hear
news of the Las Vegas shooting.

A call comes that a mother from our school
has been shot down next to the concert stage.

I want to reach out to my son,
the distance suddenly untenable.

I turn at a stoplight,
and feel my mother come to me.

Over thirty years gone,
she must know how to comfort the newly passed,

how to hold a light over a broken day,
and cross over to me–

Tell me mom, something sage,
so I can breathe again.

But, she’s not here,
none of them are here now.

My God, their shirts still hang in a closet,
shoes by the door.

When my son comes home,
I will listen to his stories told from under the stars.

I will ask him how the moon spoke
to the river after that bloody night.



* * * * *

Jennie Linthorst is published in Foliate Oak, Forge, Kaleidoscope, Literary Mama, Mothers Always Write, Sanskrit, and The Art of Autism. Her two books of poems, Silver Girl (2013), and Autism Disrupted: A Mother's Journey of Hope (2011), were published by Cardinal House. Jennie is certified in poetry therapy from the National Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy. www.lifespeakspoetrytherapy.com.


Tuesday 21 April 2020


Waiting at a Stoplight on Saturday Morning

by Jennie Linthorst


I know I’m not supposed to stare,
the shame of it burns like a heat rash yet,
I’m drawn to the shine of his red pick-up truck,
surfboards in back, the way his hand

strokes her hair, a girl nuzzled next to him.
I imagine their spontaneity of morning–
how he must wake her with his hands,
his mouth, making love as dawn

creeps through each slat in the blinds,
and what must be a slow drive to the beach.
Like a tigress in heat, pulled to the strongest male,
I am lured to the mountain of his masculinity,

the meat on his bones. Remembering my first kiss
pressed against wet bark, the almosts and could
have beens over pitchers of beer and Camel Lights,
all those mornings after I said yes instead of no.


* * * * *

Jennie Linthorst is published in Foliate Oak, Forge, Kaleidoscope, Literary Mama, Mothers Always Write, Sanskrit, and The Art of Autism. Her two books of poems, Silver Girl (2013), and Autism Disrupted: A Mother's Journey of Hope (2011), were published by Cardinal House. Jennie is certified in poetry therapy from the National Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy. www.lifespeakspoetrytherapy.com.