My boss asks me to watch 16 hours of camera footage. Instead I watch dandelions lose their heads at the slightest breeze. Nearby weeds shed their mustard petals. The sky dares me to name its every shade of blue. Cotton, Chromium, Seafoam, Tremor. There are more important things to worry about today than work, like breathing the grass-cut air, catching the sun’s bright spears. The swollen clouds are an army of angel wings descending. I watch their feathers fall.
Eric Raanan Fischman is an MFA graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He has taught free writing workshops in Nederland, Boulder, and Longmont, Colorado, and has had work in Bombay Gin, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and many more, as well as in local community fundraising anthologies from Punch Drunk Press and South Broadway Ghost Society. He also curates the Boulder/Denver metro area poetry calendar at boulderpoetryscene.com and is a regular contributor to the BPS blog. His first book, “Mordy Gets Enlightened,” was published through The Little Door in 2017.
This is a found poem from Grant, Mira. Symbiont. New York. Orbit, 2014. Print. Pages 444-472.
Jen MacBain-Stephens (she/her) went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in Iowa where she is landlocked. Her fifth, full length poetry collection, “Pool Parties” is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2023. She is also the author of fifteen chapbooks. Some of her work appears in The Pinch, Kestrel, Cleaver, Dream Pop, Slant, Yalobusha Review, and Grist. She is the director of the monthly reading series Today You are Perfect, sponsored by the non-profit Iowa City Poetry. Find her online at http://jennifermacbainstephens.com/.
As snow does to a fire gods who bit flowers of ink a nest of mad kisses down the long black river the milky way sky’s pale vertebrae archipelagos of stars
framed between small branches
blossoms of small arms , nails us naked to the color of pink hyacinth singing singing in deep red ripples your voice is a pale street lamp on calm black water
just (a word planted by the water
before I am a stone in a stone-swallowing river thrown
into
sleep
————————————————– your eyes
Donnie Hollingsworth has lived in many small Rocky Mountain towns and currently resides in Lamar, Colorado–where he teaches Art and English at the local community college–with his wife, cat, and dog. His art can be found here.
Josh Gaydos (he/him/his) is a self-taught poet that currently resides in Colorado. He has been published in Barren Magazine, Door Is A Jar Magazine, The Lettered Olive and The City Quill. For 2023, he is releasing a poem a week on his free substack at https://joshgaydos.substack.com/InstagramTwitter
Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.
Pablo Neruda
What does this quote mean to you?
Trite but true with some flowers is this Neruda quote to me. It’s stuck around since I read it and though I am finding that finding of self a great deal less static than this quote implies, it keeps me aware that I could wake up in a decade’s time and find what I’d been running for or running from had made me into something I despised. Sorry for rhyming so much.
What books have made an important impact on you and why?
Too many so I’ll pull the first five that come to mind. East of Eden by John Steinbeck, captures human nature and our interconnectedness, the fact he addressed it to his young sons and was saying “here it is, everything” and delivers. frank: sonnets by Diane Suess, for the “isness”, not answering the Sirens call on a happy feeling or ending, the ability to paint a landscape as big as a coast and also write a poem about the grout around a brick (I’m being figurative here). What Work Is by Phillip Levine, for laying out that blue-collar / American working condition with romanticism and disdain, to put himself in it, distance himself from it, and paint individuals like they were in the room with you. Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, the ‘other poems’ in that just drop you somewhere and you’re immersed, it could be India and you feel the dense downpour with a herd of water buffalo walking by or New Orleans, or Compton. Robin puts you there in a way I haven’t been transported before or since. Another big one for me is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. My mom had given me that when I really went headfirst into this writing thing. That book helped me to make a point to find art and make space for art wherever I was. Watch a movie, read a book, spin some vinyl and pull feeling or a scene from everything.
What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?
Sanity. Gelling and coming to terms with the cracks.
How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?
I wouldn’t be here without it, and I don’t just mean serving a guest editing stint for this press. I’d be dead, or fishing with my hands and a line in the Gulf, or possibly I’d be a merchant marine. Most likely dead though.
And here you are standing two feet bare on the floor of your kitchen turning back to the wall behind as though he were standing bare-footed there with you again as he did those years prior. Before the days dissolved into the rising of time immemorial and you who had just kept your head above water now live in the after so far below you have come to know the nocturnal creatures who in quiet habits roam from shore to shore only under all the weight of dark stars. What can you do but let flow through your fingers—the now and him too though he was yours for a time and gave you such happiness. The distances between keep widening and soon it will be that you cannot recall his eyes or the scent amongst his thick curls. Turns out you knew—had known all along this was coming. It was why you held him close for so long why you saved him in dreams so many times you lost count. It was the one sure thing you held in your heart and though you knew it to be true you gave him everything even so—even though you knew in the coming years he would be gone from you. And here you are standing two feet bare on the floor of your kitchen turning back to the wall behind you as though he were standing bare-footed there.
Jessica Rigney is a poet, artist, and filmmaker. She is the author of Follow a Field: a Photographic & Poetic Essay (2016), Entre Nous (2017), Careful Packages (2019), and Something Whole (2021). Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. She lives and wanders in Colorado and northern New Mexico, where she films and collects feathers and stones. www.jessicarigney.com
This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, Dwell: Poems About Home.Purchase here.
There is no such second place in the world where so many noteworthy moments have been saved. How many of your breaths flickered on the walls, how many of your tears soaked the floor, nobody knows. A part of your heart will stay here forever, no matter where the wings of fate take you. It’s a magic point, the mind remembers it as the heart longs for it, one and only—home.
Norbert Góra is a 32-year-old poet and writer from Poland. He is the author of more than 100 poems which have been published in poetry anthologies in USA, UK, India, Nigeria, Kenya and Australia.
This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, Dwell: Poems About Home.Purchase here.
I’m airing out the house of my heart. All the cobwebbed corners, the shelves of knickknacks, are being dusted unmercifully. I’m opening the shutters letting the wind blow out the musty smell of disuse. I’m putting flowers in all the rooms. Even the basement, the attic ignored for so long are getting a going over. All that old junk has got to go. It’s just shelter for spiders that tap away when the lights come on.
I’m trying to put the house of my heart in order. “Smarten up,” I say, adjusting the bowties of my fears. “Stand up straight,” I say, brushing off the jackets of my doubts. “Everyone be on your best behavior,” I say to my wants and needs. “We have a guest coming.”
The nt. is cold & flesh is sold in galleries just down the road
Long spaces of silence are speech & the stars are knives
that stab @ your eyes
You stumble home past churches & brick shit-houses
all the pots & pans hating the buildings they live in
All the houses are heads & the windows are eyes
each house has a different haircut
@ home,
this is goddam
serious business, lazy
electric red lilies asleep in the window, your eyes
playing tennis w/ stars & light
in a glass frying pan
all nt.
Other times it’s a joyride,
exhaust pipes flashing in the sunset—zoom—
You get there. You have dreams. You love someone.
The only certainty infection w/ illusion. Some people are there. You
try to make plans. It breaks down. You keep going. It hurts.
There are books, statues. It breaks down again. You keep going.
You’re the only one there. You’re the only thing real.
A storm of light on the plane of time.
Zack Kopp is a freelance writer, editor, photographer, graphic artist, and literary agent currently living in Denver, Colorado. His informal history of the Beat Generation’s connections with Denver was published by The History Press in 2015. Kopp’s books are available at Amazon, and you can find his blog at the website for his indie hybrid press at www.campelasticity.com featuring interviews and articles and links to other websites. His improvised novel, Public Hair, was described by one critic as “simultaneously the best and worst book ever.” The latest chapter of Kopp’s “fantastic biography” (Cf. Billy Childish), Henry Crank’s History of Wonders is expected in 2022.
This poem is from South Broadway Press’ new anthology, Dwell: Poems About Home.Purchase here.
as in the one who feeds you with her chest, the one who housed you next to her most sacred innards, the one your eyes search for as you cry.
a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth; [3]
the unparalleled truth of motherhood: only one person will ever birth you.
the unbearable truth of motherhood: no world she births you into will as be as safe as the one she made.
(also in extended use) a woman who undertakes the responsibilities of a parent toward a child [4]
every place that has ever felt like a second home to me has had the influence of a woman who houses the strength and presence of a whirlwind framing everything from the door to the walls to my heart.
South Broadway Ghost Society 