Eli Whittington is a mediocre farmer and an okay parent. They enjoy long walks on rhe forest floor because the ocean is really far from here, and kind of scary. They are the author of ‘Treat me Like you Treat me like you Earth’ published by the late Suspect Press. They also have two tracks of spoken word on Black Marlet Translation’s Punketry album. They are really bad at playing banjo, but will always be, more punk than Brice.
Elizathebeth.com has poems on it that are nearly impossible to read on a phone.
—I kill indiscriminately // I breathe the same //
& yet I can plant these copper-colored seeds saying // this is
for you // mariposa // para tu Día de los Muertos you leave
so many behind I think I am part of that parade poking
dying earth // neck bones’ sweet ridges offered to sun //
skull breaking through the sheen of work’s liqueur //
el jefe Cruz observing // then shouting // oye // too deep //
or too close // already the acres // in spring // a sea of milkweed //
& so I jump like the young boy I am no longer una Danza
de los Viejitos & continue working down the line // seed &
seed // a campesino finally // once this skin is flensed to laddered
bone // grin—all teeth // black sockets alive & laughing //
—O mountain hectares covered in orange // the sheer volume
of you now // the sheeted square footage // sound of the wings
un grito de vida I keep hearing in this nightmare world // hiss—
I cannot bear to say it—as if from a herbicide
w/a half-life & a means of migration
Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent book is This Is Where I Live Now I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the 2020 Grid Poetry Prize, and [q / lear], a chapbook from Green Linden Press. He has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Canary, The Night Heron Barks, Map Literary, Otoliths, and Under A Warm Green Linden. He lives in Lansing, Michigan where from May 2017 – April 2019 he was the area’s first Poet Laureate.
We had language and we had water, they wouldn’t let us have both. We knew what the water was capable of. We said yes to it and our reflections. They closed the park at midnight. We spit at the sky and talked it into the ground with masks on we spoke from our heart. Those with the least to empty talked loudly with mouths wide open. The hate was too infectious to be prevented. They hated that which did not concern them. They were unconcerned with the hatred. They said that’s what it is as if it had always been because they said it because they said it that’s what it is. I didn’t say anything when nobody asked. I just walked into the water on a mission. It held me as water does. I became to become again. I floated away for dry land.
How little time the relatives have and how stuck they are in it. The ones who are determined to make love happen live as though it’s about to. At all times their hearts are breaking and while the city spins so fast that they are used to it each one is a quake in heaven. There are ghosts who would bleed to stop it, angels who mourn eternally for all the hurt that has already been absorbed and can’t ever be reversed. They have so much compassion and nowhere to go with it. The things they understand wouldn’t make sense in a vision. You can’t just be told it as ecstatic divine revelation. It has to be discovered by sitting in the dirt longer and writing every word down and walking the letter across town. I waited until I learned how to recognize the instruction and then followed it with a diligence fit for bricks that want to bring out the best from behind the sun. I only tried to tell you about it. When I couldn’t it was enough to kill. That was when I returned to the water. There were so many people walking out of it. I couldn’t look them in the eyes. They didn’t stop me.
The Matt Clifford (right) did so see his shadow thus marking four more weeks of Tax Season. (www.blackmarkettranslation.com)
When you leave the desert, your mind forgets the heat, but your body remembers. When you leave the desert, the smell of wet dust right after rain lingers in your nose, hopeful, electric, forever refreshing. When you leave the desert, the desert keeps a piece of you.
Mārta Ziemelis is a Toronto-based emerging poet and established literary translator. Her poetry has appeared in The Ice Colony and CRUSH Zine. It is also forthcoming in the Sapphic Writers zine “Out Of The Wardrobe”. Her Latvian-English translations include “Do you exist, or did my mind invent you?”, a poem by Gunta Micāne (TransLit Volume 11: An Anthology of Literary Translations, 2017), two short stories in the anthology The Book of Riga (Comma Press, 2018), and Narcoses, a poetry collection by Madara Gruntmane, co-translated with Richard O’Brien (Parthian, 2018).” Instagram.
Across the park, an old clock tower
surrendered itself to moss and vines.
Tendrils coil along the clock hands,
twine the gears and down the shafts.
Finches knit knobby twigs, grass, and leaves,
nesting in vents and through the hollows
where the eaves have rotted, remaking
what we leave behind into the life that follows.
Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, Gargoyle Magazine, One, Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Facebook. Twitter
Gwantigok, Penawahpskek,
Passamaquoddy, Pashipakokee,
long rivers, long through the land you flow
long through us will you flow,
flowing from where the rocks widen,
from where pollack feed us.
Piscataqua, Androscoggin, Cobbosseecontee,
Olamantegok, Quahog,
where water lies between the hills
through the sheltering place,
to where sturgeon gather together
to red ochre river, color of our children.
Shellfish place, treaty-making place.
Sebastcook, Seninebik,
Skowhegan, Baskahegan,
our stories flow
through little channels,
bearing rocks and memories
from where salmon leap the falls
to broad open waters,
turning back to where wild onions grow,
With birch and ash along their backs,
long rivers of first light
through our families flowing:
Wazwtegok, Winoztegok,
Zawakwtegw, Gwantigok.
Ndakinna.
Carol Willette Bachofner is an indigenous poet (Abenaki), watercolorist, and photographer. She is the author of 7 books, most recently Native Moons, Native Days (Bowman Books) and Test Pattern, a fantod of prose poems (Finishing Line Press) Her poetry has appeared in various journals, such as Prairie Schooner, The Connecticut Review, The Comstock Review, Cream City Review, Crab Orchard Journal and others. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies such as Take Heart: Poems From Maine (DownEast Books) as well as Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). She has won several poetry prizes, including the Maine Postmark Contest (2017). She served as Poet Laureate of Rockland from 2012-2016. Her photographs have appeared in various journals, such as Harbor Review (2021) and Spirit of Place where her photograph, ”Rigged” was an honorable mention given by Maine Media Workshop in 2013.
My grandmother is the ocean now
roaring always somewhere
even when quiet here and now
her smooth surface breaks into waves
She resists and yields at once
in magnitudinal power tides
pulled heavy from the moon
in consort with the sun and
of service to the earth
I know her without seeing her
hear legends of her raging depth
feeling her live in each coastal drop
She swells around my ankles
to let me feel my roots
when instinct crashes over me
It is her—urging moments into eternity
Sarah (she/her) is a health advocate, activist, and poet who loves sunshine, storms, and quiet nights. She is a queer Jewish reiki-practicing witch, and poetry is how she understands and misunderstands Life . Sarah has been published in Stain’d Arts and South Broadway Ghost Society publications, and her work has been featured by the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center. Her two self-published books, I’ll just hide until it’s perfect and Tend, are available now by contacting sarahdlarue@gmail.com.
the worst place to store medicine is in a medicine cabinet
the worst place to store secrets is under the tongue as they diffuse through the membranes, the capillaries, bypassing the stomach, the intestines, the liver, anything that could filter them, dull their potency, tumbling directly into the bloodstream filling up everywhere the secrets that hurt, that bite, that claw, are less painful than the one that could change everything, could heal and mend and dissipate all the terrors we live alongside the secret of loving those whom we do not tell
during WWII my german-born great-grandmother painted a WWI helmet red white and blue
stuffed it with dirt and flowers to match hung it in her front window next to the biggest american flag the neighborhood had ever seen and dared anybody to doubt her I think about her as I watch men and women straighten their arms, stretch their hands flat fingers that never held anything heavier than a cigarette accusing people who live on the same street of jobs stolen, livelihoods vanished the country my great-grandmother held her heart up to, dripping blood as red as anybody born on its soil, is not the country I live in, is not, even, the country she lived in all the things we caught by their tails, hate, injustice, a constant confusing of equality with oppression, only seem new to eyes socketed in white skin a flag as big as the world can’t cover a hate as deep as an ever-expanding universe all the galaxies moving away from ours so quickly no signal we fire, even at the speed of light, will ever reach them it’s just you and me, alone together, and when we die, nobody will know but us
Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.
failed, feral at best,
stuck between phases of moon,
my body out of sync with time
I was promised bliss
with one bite, but still I lie
abed in honey phlox, sleepless,
joints aching to be shredded,
skin to burst as March ides
march on to May’s full flower
moon and past. I passed
for human, despite my howl,
the blood curse,
even growling, lacking only
fur, claws, sharp teeth. Reserved
in every form except of judgment
for what I thought a werewolf
ought to be: a wound at best.
But the worst feature was
my abject desire to preserve
human remains. Until I met
my werewolf’s ghost carrying scent
fresh human flesh on spring breezes,
in gradual degrees shifting my
dimensions under all moons,
full, dark.
Jericho Hockett‘s roots are in the farm in Kansas, and she is blooming in Topeka with Eddy and Evelynn. She earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at Kansas State University, but is a forever student. She is also a poet, teacher, and especially a seeker who is most whole in the green–whether in garden, field, forest, or heart. Her poems appear in Burning House Press, Snakeroot: A Midwest Resistance ‘Zine, Ichabods Speak Out: Poems in the Age of Me, Too, SageWoman, Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity, and Touchstone, with more works always brewing.
This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology, a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue. You can purchase a copy of the book here.
To hear the close distance,
your howl, when unable to find
one cold sliver of moon.
I opened warm window.
This frozen stuck body of me
shifting over to what it must be
in a house made of worry
and flammable things.
When survival is one hungry beast
lighting fires fast as
bear claws unleashed
in this box of a house, any house,
to find food, any food, feed
that soul hungry beast
eating sliver of moon
cooling fire on face of a moment
of hard-assed especially sweet stuff, any life.
I listen for line to connection.
Hear hot pulse of warm blood,
surprisingly bright, bursting
through like great wolf
shedding cloak of sheep's clothing
is this, yawping call I can't see, only feel
coming back like a boomerang self
to wild safety, close distance,
raw sound of one howl howling now.
Roseanna Frechette is a longtime member of Denver’s thriving bohemian underground. Spoken word performer and host as well as multi-genre writer, her work has featured at art galleries, rock stages, and festivals including Poetry Rodeo, Boulder Fringe, and Arise as well as indie publications including Stain’d, Lummox, Semicolon, and Suspect Press. Former publisher of Rosebud Forum magazine, and one of Westword’s Colorado Creatives, Roseanna holds great passion for the power of small press and the beauty of literary originality.
This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology, a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue. You can purchase a copy of the book here.
South Broadway Ghost Society 