Poetry
Where Panthers Climb Up Pink Ice Walls by Katharyn Howd Machan
Salt by Angelo Letizia
An Astronaut in Retirement by John Grey
Bees Send Me to Jupiter by Ki Russell
Catalogue of Dragons by Deborah H. Doolittle
Distant Tomorrows by Mike Turner
Omission by Paul Hostovsky
Non-Billable Hours by Dale Cottingham
Ohthere the Astronaut by Eric Fisher Stone
Love by Alinda Dickinson Wasner
Blue Coffin by Andre Le Mont Wilson Winner of the Featured Work Contest!
Where Panthers Climb Up Pink Ice Walls by Katharyn Howd Machan
No one follows. No one tries
to hatchet off their shivering tails,
the frost on their growling tongues.
These walls once were regal buildings
in a city where safe people lived.
Ice now, thick and glowing, covers doors
and window ledges, corners where pigeons
cooed and mated, dropped soft shit
through slow breeze. The panthers pant
and reach long legs for grip and ballast,
thick rough pads of wide black paws
torn, bleeding, scarring. Wildly
they believe in the moon as it calls
their jungle names. Instinctively
they are sure the sky will
let them rise through stars:
Earth has cracked upon itself
and all that’s left is cold.
The panthers climb and climb and climb
with eyes like molten gold.
For three and a half decades Katharyn Howd Machan, picking up where Rod Serling left off, has taught creative writing at Ithaca College in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Her specialty courses, besides in poetry, are Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Women and Fairy Tales, and first-year seminars called Fairy Tales: The Hero’s Journey. Her poems have appeared in 39 published collections and many magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, most recently A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and What the Piper Promised (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2018), both winners in national competitions.
Salt by Angelo Letizia
When your atoms have disassembled
and re-formed into a rock
millions of years in the future
they will still carry the memory
of what happened
My disassembled atoms, even with no sentience
reassembled
into star or drop of sweat
will somehow remember it too
And billions of my former atoms
will cry in a dying universe
Death is no respite for me
Angelo Letizia lives in Maryland. His work has previously been featured in Bewildering Stories, Tales from the Moonlit Path and other venues. He is currently a professor of education.
My Reading Tour of the Galaxy
I have vivid memories of one particular night.
Some green, four-armed monster
suddenly sprang from its seat,
and onto the makeshift stage,
grabbed me by the throat,
the arms, the waist and ankles,
while exclaiming in a high-pitched
squeaky voice, “That poem
is about me! You’ve been
reading my mind, you…you…
you…Earthling!”
There are sectors of the galaxy
where poetry is as dangerous
as wrestling quaddas.
I hang my rawest emotions
out on the quivering line of my voice
and who knows what kind of creature
can take it to heart,
mistake my confessions
for what they’ve been holding back.
So many times,
I’ve been beaten up,
left for dead after a reading.
That’s why insurance companies
don’t write policies for poets.
Some aliens can’t take
the rawness of the emotion.
Even a harmless metaphor
sets so many on edge.
I miss those days
when people ignored me
and chattered among themselves.
But that was back on Earth…
a planet of Philistines
I recited to blessed indifference
and my best lines went unpunished.
On The Space Station
You leave one life at home,
create another
for this lighthouse in the sky.
Otherwise, the boredom would crush you.
You’re a lantern
blazing between stars.
No home-cooking.
No zoo trips with the kids.
For a guy
cased like a pupal,
keeping a flame burning
has to be enough.
Besides, you volunteered
to have your cheeks go un-kissed,
your shorts and t-shirts
tucked neatly in a drawer,
that martini in Joey’s Tavern
to be your last for twelve months.
This is space.
You’re a pioneer,
at the forefront of technology.
For tomorrow’s man,
the past is now.
An Astronaut in Retirement by John Grey
Old age
is a fleet
of shiny rockets
taking off
like quills from a porcupine’s back,
one after another
after another,
shuddering the earth for miles,
almost toppling the plaque
from your wall.
Ah, yes, the plaque,
signed by a president
long dead.
You even
shake his dead hand
in that photo
on the mantel.
You stand so proud
in that blue and gray uniform.
Of course, astronauts
all wear green these days.
Your helmet
hangs from your other hand.
It’s five generations
of headgear old.
Old age
is a porch
from where you watch
that silver armada
through thick glasses
and macular degeneration.
It’s wishing
you were strapped into one of them,
on route to the stars.
Ah yes, the stars.
Light long dead
but not as dead
as that pen-wielding president.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Soundings East, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.
Bees Send Me to Jupiter by Ki Russell
Bees thrum pear petals &
wings create a current
across my skin that slips
along the fine hairs of my arms,
neck, & into the pores. Wind
channels into me
until I inflate & my liquid
retreats, bones disintegrate
& dust sifts away from the edges
of my cyclone self. The bees angle
their wings & fan my essence past
the branches, between leaves
around the edges of blooms.
A final harmonic shove shoots
me through the atmosphere,
drifts me onto a solar
tide that floats my squall
all the way out to blend
into the red swirl of cloud
that could swallow the world
where I began as a breath
exhaled into dust. Here my
storms are embraced.
Ki Russell is author of the hybrid genre novel The Wolf at the Door (Ars Omnia Publishing, 2014), the poetry collection Antler Woman Responds (Paladin Contemporaries, 2014) and the chapbook How to Become Baba Yaga (Medulla Publishing, 2011). She is a peer reviewer for the online literary journal Whale Road Review. She teaches writing and literature at Blue Mountain Community College.
Catalogue of Dragons by Deborah H. Doolittle
The Chinese dragon undulating
along the palace wall is a wyrm,
not to be mistaken for a snake.
Its emerald scales, lapis lazuli
fins bring good fortune, excessive luck
to those who live within the confines
of its jaws and claws. A law onto its own,
like the Great Wall draped along the peaks
and valleys a taxi-ride from Beijing,
resting, they say, so do not wake it.
The Danes, the Swedes, the old folk lament
Where have all the wyverns gone? Long time
since one had lurked behind the fog of
war. Others miss the diminutive
cockatrice that pranced on the window
ledge ignored by the inhabitants who snored
as it roared and roared and roared. St. George
and his descendants still look out for
the tell-tale drift of sulfurous smoke
and itch that long accompanied
his arch-nemesis, dragon. Not to
be taken for a drake, which wandered
the earth on four legs like a bristling
wolf, sometimes with three heads, or disguised
as my ex-boyfriend. Kirin are cute,
like ponies. Faes, what can I say, flit
away before you can really get to
see them. Lind wurms look like gigantic
salamanders, but could change colors
in their own reptilian kind of way.
As for the legless, great-winged monstrous
amphithere, I’d rather see than be one.
Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places, including six years in Virginia, but now calls North Carolina home. She has an MA in Women’s Studies and an MFA in Creative Writing and teaches at Coastal Carolina Community College. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda (Main Street Rag) and three chapbooks, No Crazy Notions (Birch Brook Press), That Echo (Longleaf Press), and Bogbound (forthcoming from Orchard Street Press) Some of her poems have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Comstock Review, Evening Street Review, Pinyon Review, Rattle, Ravensperch, Slant, The Stand, and in audio format on The Writer’s Almanac. She shares a home with her husband, four housecats, and a backyard full of birds.
Distant Tomorrows by Mike Turner
We have taken our first tentative steps
Out from here
Into the trackless regions
Of the unknown
Set foot briefly
On a cold, barren rock
Planting flags, not of conquest
But marking our exploration
Now, the heavens open before us
And we dream of new reaches
Stars and systems and planets
Containing fellow inhabitants of this existence
We plan our future travels
Mars, Venus, Saturn and beyond
Searching to expand the library
Comprised of our combined knowledge and experience
And thus we will go
Not today, but soon
Continuing onward
Traveling into distant tomorrows
Mike Turner is a songwriter and poet living on the U.S. Gulf Coast. He was a featured presenter at the 2020 Monroeville (AL) Literary Festival. Mike’s poems have been published in numerous print and on-line journals including Spillwords Press, GreyThoughts, Sci-Fi Lampoon and Red Planet magazine.
Object Lesson
And what if everything,
everything
I have ever wanted
or will ever want
is exactly like
this little wooden toy
that I’d forgotten all about
until now, finding it in a box
of my childhood things
that I’m getting rid of because
I don’t want them anymore--
this little puppet made of
wires, wood and cloth
with its round head
and innocent, kissable face
that I wanted so badly, needed
so terribly that I threw a fit
outside the store
and my mother couldn’t
console me, and my father
turned and walked away
from all that foolishness,
all that carrying on,
this little wooden thing
that has found its way back
into my hands now,
so that I hold it up to the light
as if only dimly recognizing
the object of my desire,
smiling to remember it
and shaking my head
the way my father did
when he turned away
from all that foolishness,
all that heartbreak.
Omission by Paul Hostovsky
What I didn’t tell you about
was the forgotten
long-expired bag of lettuce
all the way in the back
looking bloodshot,
asphyxiated,
tragic as a traffic
accident under plastic,
that I came across
in search of the Lombardy
olives and goat cheese--
how, making a face,
I gingerly extracted
the sodden, severed,
sealed heads of Romaine
from behind the chilling
horizontal bottle of Chardonnay,
tossed them into the bin
with a dead-sounding thud,
then washed my hands of them
and returned for the wine
and cheese and olives,
and served them up to you without
a word of what I’d seen.
Paul Hostovsky's latest book is DEAF & BLIND (Main Street Rag, 2020). His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net awards, and the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Non-Billable Hours by Dale Cottingham
I’ve been too much like Macbeth, my
private turmoil not so private.
Weary surprise with her sister thorny rue
raise their hair suite balloons. From the furthest reaches
the stream gathers itself, hesitates in the sluices,
then just goes.
Hence,
I ask: why can’t my helix let up on me
and let me take the easy way, the one that’s given, that
runs with, not against, the wind?
But that’s not what I’ve known. Even now,
4 A.M. I’m parsing words others throw
like rotted fruit in the variety show.
It seems I always have a debt to pay
just like in the hotel: I’m not passed over,
the concierge slides my bill under the door.
And with a gust front expected tonight, tell me
what blank journal page will it take to ride this out
so I can attain a new manner of speaking,
add to the canon a line or two?
Later, in the dusk, it’s the phone.
She wants me to come over.
My evening’s looking up.
There’ll be soup and negotiations,
some dead air that’s waded in, even smiles.
With no transcript in our non-billable hours,
it will make history even so. During the night
leaves will bunch along fences, trees
will endure to reckon with another day.
We say we like it here but we’re not sure why.
Ohthere the Astronaut by Eric Fisher Stone
Walrus in Old English is horshwæl.
Ohthere journeyed to Norway’s north coast
in King Alfred’s time and found horsey whales
pulsing on beaches like blubbery grubs
tusked with moonlight, chonky balloons
chomping fish-heads. Ohthere
did not discover walruses, the Sami
named them, and before people,
laughing gannets and polar bears
found these tender boats of fat
loafing seaward. One day space aliens
may “discover” us, a tentacled Ohthere
from the glittering celestial vacuum,
a purple squid in helmed in a spacesuit.
Is he a god, devil, or envoy?
Will Ohthere’s kind colonize the world
or offer friendship? Earth’s blueberry
is ripe for picking and plunder.
Beaches bright with seawood beckon
intimate as flesh, stranger than angels,
shimmering curlews calling home.
Eric Fisher Stone is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas where he now lives. He received his MFA in creative writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His first full length poetry collection, “The Providence of Grass” was published by Chatter House Press in 2018. His second book of poems, Animal Joy is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2021.
Love by Alinda Dickinson Wasner
That summer you were two
We sat on the bluff
Watching the comets
Fall from the sky
Onto the blanket of field and lake
That stretched out before us;
And while the other children
Walked on water
Following the moon’s path
To the far horizon
And back,
We filled our pockets to bursting
With stars upon stars
Enough for a thousand years of dreaming;
And while I told you little stories
About the faeries and constellations,
You fell asleep in my arms
So that I knew then that even when
You outgrew me—
Which of course you did all too soon—
I could still every so often
Always slip a star under your pillow
When you least expected
So that when the day
We both secretly dreaded
Finally arrived
You might find a remaining few
Embers
Hidden among my prized possessions—
Enough that you might always awake
Still smiling
Up at the sky.
Blue Coffin by Andre Le Mont Wilson
You first notice the absence
of the scent of pine needles
in the forest—
no minty memories of Christmases
spent searching the woods for a tree.
You next notice the absence
of the songs of birds
in the forest—
just the crackle and crunch of needles
and branches beneath your feet.
You then notice the presence
of dead pines
as far as the eye can see,
along ridges and slopes and valleys,
every evergreen now everbrown.
Sweat trickles down your neck
on this winter day,
and you wonder what wood tastes like
for the bark beetles,
which felled the forests from Canada to Mexico.
Your arms and body vibrate
as your saw cuts an infected tree.
Back at your shop,
you sand, you polish, you run your fingers
over surfaces stained blue by the beetles’ fungus,
And you think of the dead trees
to be recycled this way;
and of the customers on this planet;
and you wonder if anyone will be left
to build you a blue coffin.
Andre Le Mont Wilson (he/him) was born the son of African American poets in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Rattle, and
sPARKLE & bLINK. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He teaches storytelling to adults with disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area.