SUMMER 2022 | Dayton, OH
Prairie View at Yorktown by Erica Keener
Prelude to Spring
Beth Sjostrom
January opens
like a darkened theatre
hours before the show
quiet, empty, cold
February follows
ushering in heat and
dispensing programs
packed with promises:
there will be light—
the hint of an
early morning sunrise
glowing like stage lamps
at the edge of the horizon
there will be music—
a bird orchestra
tuning their instruments with
rusty screeches, squeaks
taps and trills
there will be drama—
the spotlight from a full moon
dancing with the earth’s shadow
while a green comet
leaps across the sky
there will be a love story—
not the Valentine’s Day version
with its sugary Hallmark tropes—
but love appearing in many roles
family, friends
artists, writers
strangers helping strangers
and there will be a happy ending—
after the climax, an epiphany
the soothing realization
that love is all there is
and it is enough
it is why we are here
so get ready
quiet your voices
watch closely
March is behind the curtain
ready to enter stage left
let the play begin...
Breaking Spring
Carol Pohly
Tightly reined by angry
sleet-bearded wind,
this dapple-gray day
struggles
to free herself
from winter’s heavy harness,
her frosted hooves
plodding through
the murky mire of March,
with a restless snort
and a whinny.
February 28, 2022
Betsy Hughes
Is this the end of month or end of time?
I wonder as the empty hammock strung
between two trees starts swinging and the chime
of mobiles on my porch which had been hung
last summer stirs itself to sound. It's dusk,
with shifting shadows everywhere I look,
a mood of dimness pregnant with the musk
of anxious air. Each sharpened tenterhook
makes piercing points across the TV screen
depicting the invasion of Ukraine,
grim images of bombs and bodies, scene
of refugees upon a road of pain.
The winter there and here is very cold;
the world of war relentless, sad, and old.
Field Notes
Judy Johnson
John Deere’s green behemoths—their tires almost
as tall as my car—are crawling,
clawing across fields,
turning over rich, dark soil before
crossing a two-lane state highway,
lumbering toward another field.
Sometimes they block traffic
headed south for a quarter mile, the drivers
sitting easy, kings on their thrones
looking down on us little people.
In the line of stopped cars, we wait patiently,
thinking of fresh sweet corn in August.
Heading into the Forested Glen
Anne Randolph
down a long flight of stone stairs,
I walk to a bridge, look for the new
arrivals, beavers, but they are off
playing hide and seek or gnawing
on trees. Thick with brown branches,
the long, sturdy woven basket
of their dam strings around a pond
they've created.
Tinkling like bells, rivulets stream
around the dam's edge. The water level
has risen, starts to seep between boardwalk
slats, caressing my feet.
It's been two hundred years since
beavers lived here. They are welcome
creators of habitat for fish, turtles and
frogs, breathing new life onto this sunken
earthen floor. Some visitors on the bridge
shake their heads in dismay at the change.
What are they missing? I smile at the new
creation, its promise of hope and
transformation rippling through me like
a song.
Focusing on the Planets
Anne Randolph
Our friend's night telescope is wheeled
onto blacktop. Like a small cannon,
its barrel points up, as if ready to blast the stars.
We take turns peering through the eyepiece—
first at Jupiter, its bands of grey gaseous clouds
shrouding mystery. Two of its moons
close together, like white marbles.
We switch to nearby Saturn, cast in a hard light,
rings merged in a thick bright circle,
like a lifesaver mint.
The planets shift behind trees as we spin
with the earth. When the telescope is turned
to the crescent moon, I exclaim over
its closeness and clarity, as if I could
touch its brown crusty surface pocked
with craters. Where its curving edge meets darkness,
stark silhouettes of hills and mountains rise,
ready to flake off into the depths.
Only one side of the moon's face is ever seen,
its hidden obscurity like a shadow
we might carry.
Alone
Barry Yeoman
My television is a psychoanalyst
who does all the talking,
hypnotizing me nightly.
She sits on top of packed
bookshelves that cover the wall.
Each stuffed volume a professor
staring at me, brows lifted
over eyeglasses down on the nose
disgusted by my failing memory.
The vacant chair in the corner
is my deceased grandfather
patiently working on a crossword.
A floor pillow with arms
is a long-lost lover
waiting to embrace once again.
The table lamp next to
the tilting globe, an expatriate
traveler in her 20’s style hat.
The wall clock a stranger
nagging me to do something
better with my life.
Sunlight Winds
Abigail Burtrum
The water shines,
As the sunlight winds.
The water is crystal clear,
As it all started with one tear.
Today, Tomorrow
Emma Gramza
Every night I lie in bed
thinking about what I said.
Was I kind enough to my friends
up until the school day’s end?
Will my day tomorrow be great
or will it be a worser fate?
I hope that I make the right choice
and speak kind words with my voice.
The World Is Cruel and Mean
Lindsey McDermott
A little girl sits on the steps of a little house on Newham
Street.
Her shoes are pink.
But the lights on the cop car are blue and red.
And they flash, leaving dots in her vision.
The world is cruel and mean.
A little girl sits on her bed in another little house.
A statue of Santa on her nightstand.
As she wishes for her mommy to come home.
The world is cruel and mean.
A little girl picks walnut after walnut off the ground of the
woods.
One by one they go in the bucket.
Until the woman comes out and dumps them all out.
The world is cruel and mean.
A little girl smiles at two parents.
They are not her own.
But they tell her pretty things.
“We love you.”
“We want you.”
The world is cruel and mean.
A not so little girl smiles at a new set of parents.
They tell her pretty things too.
But this time is different.
They say those pretty things,
But this time, they feel true.
Maybe the world is not so cruel and mean.
A girl walks with her sisters into a cold hospital.
The tiles are white, speckled with glittering stones here and
there.
She squeezes her dad’s hand.
And sobs when he doesn’t squeeze back.
The world is cruel and mean.
A girl struggles to hold her family together.
Struggles to hold herself together.
She cries.
She smiles.
She cries again.
The world is cruel and mean.
Incoming by Erica Keener
that’s good because if
Ken Haponek
is the latest text
my father has sent.
I probably do not
need to state this
but he is 78.
Fingers labor
over a flip phone
approaching puberty
in human years.
He texts me again
to start over
and finish his thought.
Is this the message
I will receive
from him someday?
Half-finished
as his heart thud-thuds
or his brain
decides it had better SEND
before he takes a long nap?
Will I, like him,
hold this phone
for years
when its functions fade
and it is slow to charge
so I can read his last missives
20
the way he kept
his phone
so he could read
the final words
of his grandson
or listen
to a voicemail
from his mother
one more time?
After the Vietnam War: A Postcard
Herbert Woodward Martin
The largest card in the pharmacy for sale.
I purchase and send it home with this message.
This card forces me to write down
the fire of my memory.
I say only what is necessary.
My dear Sir:
The Government has said the war is complete.
Officially I am on my way to the place that loved me.
The good memories are held solidly there:
The warm days of love-making,
The pick-nicking in the woods.
The country you sent me to crush was lovely.
Everything I saw had a tinge of sorrow attached
And we torched it all to ash.
I remember a young girl weeping over her burned flesh.
She may have been a woman I might have recognized at
home.
The fore-bombs had eaten away her clothes and she was
naked.
I turned my eyes away.
I gave her the privacy she deserved.
She is still walking on that road.
She is a photograph. It is filed away in my memory.
All the temples are demolished.
There is no place to ask for or request forgiveness.
This memory is placed in a sacred place in my mind.
And every letter from home my mother ended with
Come on Home Boy, My Lord Come On Home!
What is Not the Most Beautiful but Endures Nonetheless
Grace Curtis
No one could mistake the ember-hot
of us, as the most beautiful; ragged edges, frayed
seams; our mangled, and becoming
more mangled, bodies together bearing proof
that while meaning is helpful, it’s not
crucial; that sometimes the most fragile
taproot produces the most durable bloom;
that not because of effort, but in spite of it,
a river, while slowing to a trickle
in sun-heat, will continue on, sea-bound. At
what point does more than this, matter?
This morning you placed
a fresh wound into my palm and asked
only that I see it, not heal it. That is all.
Not that I swoon over a freshly harvested field,
nor over the fallowed. Not that I engage, nor
—and this is important—that I act, but rather
that I stay.
On Not Being Able to Forgive
Grace Curtis
Surely. One can live with the vacancy,
an ever-present space,
not exactly onyx and empty,
but rather, warm—and by warm, I mean taupe-ish—
sun-filtered gray, like a small fog. You can see
the tops of some hills, hued below the sky, colors on a scale:
ash, nickel, stone, battleship. You can drink
from a cup, then set it down. You
can kiss a child, hoe between rows
of unbounded routine. You can even smile, laugh, live
from day to day, converse, go
to a store, wash your face. How intertwined,
the twin limbs, unforgiveness and its concomitant grief,
one a tree, one a sucker. Though, who can say
which is which? On the ground,
below the feeder this morning, two cardinals—
life-mates, I want to imagine—going about their business,
pecking and eating the fallen
bounty, one bird brilliantly
scarleted, the other, mostly fog
with only bits of brightness, here and there
breaking through.
Love and Sex in the Library
David Lee Garrison
Whenever I went to the public library,
I pulled out a little wooden drawer
with cards in it to find the call number
for Teenage Guide to Love and Sex.
Actually, pretty soon I did not have to
look it up because I knew it by heart,
but the book was never on the shelf.
And, no, I was not going to ask
a gray-haired lady librarian where it was.
A shudder of sympathetic humiliation
swept through me years later
when I saw a movie character
try to sneak a porn magazine
in with Time, Newsweek, and a couple
of newspapers, only to have the cashier
yell out to the manager
at the back of the quickie mart,
“Hey, how much is the Orgasm?”
The question as to why I could never find
the Guide, though, was not answered
until the headmaster of the school for boys
where I started my teaching career
announced after lunch one day
that the school’s library had books on
the facts of life. “You can check them out
without fear of embarrassment,” he said.
“You do not have to steal them.”
Juliet at Seventy
Judy Johnson
Will got the story wrong,
pandering to the audiences
of 1597 who were all about tragedy,
about the death of youth and beauty.
Friar Lawrence had no potion,
but smuggled me, dressed as a monk,
to Mantua, where Romeo waited.
There we married.
We returned to Verona
after the twins—Mercutio and Tybalt—
were born, named to honor
fallen friends and pleasing our parents.
Beauty faded as the years passed.
I minded at first—the crow’s feet, gray hair,
thickening waist, my steps slowing—
though Romeo never seemed to notice.
Time has been gentle with him
his thick, wavy hair now white.
Watching him with the bambinos,
I think how well I chose.
John Cale as a Pisces-Punk Icon
Journee Lutz
Dreamy, drony, and relaxed, a twenty-one-year-old
John Cale stepped into the New York City music scene armed
with his viola and a mind set on making art. Nearly sixty years
later, his musical career is still prevalent and, at eighty years
old, he is still an iconic figure of proto-Punk.
When I found John Cale, it was veering into the
summer months of the 2020 lockdown and I was going
through my quadrennial musical renaissance. I came across
Paris 1919, his 1973 studio album, and I loved it so much
because of the luscious melodies, romantic lyrics, and
innovative combinations of classical music and 70’s rock. From
there I decided I had to know more about him. Who was he?
What was his history? And, of course, as a child under
generation Z, I had to know his zodiac sign. Seeing that he
was born on March 9th, 1942, I was suddenly very enthralled.
As a Pisces myself, I often get overjoyed when I see
another musician or artist under the same star sign–it was as if
we were meant to find each other. Emotional, intuitive, and
notorious escapists, Pisces make such ruminating and visceral
artworks which is exactly what I had noted in Paris 1919 and
John Cale’s subsequent releases thereafter. Through the ages,
Cale has warped in and out of musical significance, but his
sixty-plus year career has proved him to be an incredible
influence on punk music which, I believe, stems, in part, from
his Piscean framework.
Pisces is a sign that is always teeming with creation,
innovation, dreams, emotions, and fantasy, which, by escaping
his homeland of Welsh suburbia, Cale sought after as he
began his musical trek in the U.S. Before long he found his first
music group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as The
Dream Syndicate (which already held a very Piscean essence
from their title alone) and, immediately, evidence of Cale’s
Pisces influence bloomed in his work, moving him to further
progress the genre of classical music of which he was trained.
The compositions of The Dream Syndicate’s songs (i.e. “17 XII
63 NYC The Fire Is A Mirror”), which consisted of sustained,
sharp, and squealing violist performances over droning
background sound (drawing heavy influence from American
minimalist composer La Monte Young), gave a dark and
dreamlike underbelly which expresses the idealistic mindset
that Pisces often coin.
The musical prowess that Cale brought to The
Theatre of Eternal Music was striking. Brian Bridges mentioned
their “drone-based expositions...” which did much to
“challenge the more traditional boundaries of what can be
considered composition” became addictive and sought after
in Cale’s later groupings. This mixture of a shrill yet dreamy
atmosphere remained consistent throughout
Cale’s experimental career, especially when he moved into
The Velvet Underground which he co-founded with
fellow March Pisces, Lou Reed. Together, Cale and Reed
wrote songs like “Sunday Morning,” “Winter Song” (written
by Cale for Nico), and “Venus In Furs,” which both used the
droning/amplified compositional techniques and dark
idealistic/escapist lyrics and vocals. (“Venus in Furs” has been
described by New York Rocker writer Alan Betrock as “the
sexual-drugged-S&M-fantasy trip”, another example of a
heightened, dreamlike vibe that is seen under a Pisces
influence.)
Brian Coley notes, Cale from the very beginning was
“very constructive about using [his] viola” which had been an
emotionally gripping staple in his previous repertoire, so his
influential music style carried into his further work in the avant-
garde proto-punk NYC scene. By sticking with his gut feeling,
something Pisces doesn't shy away from, it made for an
excellent display of inventive songwriting.
In his Post-Velvet Underground landscape, Cale
continued to influence and nurture the musicians of the late
60’s and early 70’s. Yes, he continued to make music, but,
most importantly for punk itself, he also began to produce
records. These records include classics like Patti Smith’s anti-
establishment poetry-rager Horses, a young Iggy Pop’s The
Stooges, and The Modern Lovers’ titular debut album, all
reproducing his visionary sound and gnawing emotion while
still creating what we now know as the beginning of American
punk rock.
Without John Cale’s intuitive vision and ability to
create dreamscapes with his musical talents, we would not
have many of the artists we deem as punk today. Looking back
on his career as a musician and producing body, his Piscean
intuition to nurture and sustain others in his field, as well as his
ability to stay in tune with the evolution of music, it isn’t
surprising that he has been deemed the “Midwife of Punk.”
Some Poets
Rita Coleman
Some poets cannot bear a day of solitude,
need a teaching from an old tree, need
to witness a donkey’s bray, want
a glad hand from a neighbor.
Some listen to a scarlet bird
rhapsodize, notes that tumble one
by one into a collecting pool where poets
dive to the underside and surface
over and over with words that undulate,
vibrate, quiver into meaning.
Some poets follow bloody bootprints
that lead to empty shells of grief,
overturned mountains, fire streams
of lava, whirls of wind that wreck
people and homes and nests,
to possibilities that need a turn
of soil, a night’s rest to find
vines holding fast to branches
that sway in the wind from
a mother tree that quakes.
Ars Poetica
Rita Coleman
Bushing with the dogs
over twitchable fields,
words thawing into
globes of genius, a surprise
to the skies.
No need to button up
in a gray flannel suit,
sensible shoes. No one
is interested in rules
that can’t be broken
anymore.
This lump of flesh
with the squirrel
mind and its heavy
robe of doing is
moving to Sundance,
Wyoming where the broad
street invites a walk down
the middle at midnight,
the mind surrounded
by sapphire mountains.
Yellow Here, Yellow There
Helen Yue Chen
i cannot look outside my window
as you may see crackly skin between the thin slit between
those windows taped—misaligned—with coarse A4 paper
there is no more
eruption of giggles ascending from the overgrown
weeds in the backyard
you may find me
then lounge forward to peel skin open; oxygenize flesh inside
puncture holes in the softness of stomach
and see if i spit out undigested dog meat
disappointed you find just scrambled eggs and jasmine rice
give
give my burning tongue a pause
you will find saliva in flames
burning
burning to keep silence
head bloating from the smoke, liquified thoughts take space
heating my flesh inside out
away from the limelight that turned away from assault
i pray
don’t pry through my bones already sore
that man looked like my grandfather—could have been
on the verge of despair
on the skirt of collapse
the yellowish hue stays nearby
the streets are yellow everyone knows
8th avenue guts me there in paralysis of not knowing
when danger may come
i don’t cry for the days that i may never run in the dark, under
quivering branches
ethereal glow of August dipping into frenzy breeze
skin waiting to be kissed by sun at dusking day
i just wonder when i can face the winds without fear
32
i accept that i may never hide my color
it is not me who needs to hide
Issue 24 Sponsor
Light in the River
By David Lee Garrison
In accessible poems that are much like stories, David Lee Garrison finds ambiguity and mystery beneath the surface of everyday experience. He rewrites the Biblical creation myth, positing Dog before Man; he imagines John Keats as a baseball player; he watches children play Hide and Seek and rejoice in finding and being found; he ponders the epitaphs in an old graveyard; and, he remembers a singer who came in one measure too early on the Hallelujah Chorus. The poet envisions life as a meandering journey through a summer afternoon by the river–humid and intense, with revelation everywhere, like leaves and shadows on the water.
“In the honorable tradition of poetic memento mori, the poetry of David Lee Garrison explores the nature of reflection and memory, probing the boundaries that separate the living and the dead.”
—Corey Andrews, author of The Genius of Scotland
“These poems have the warmth, the wealth of detail, and the essential humanity of someone who has surely lived an authentic life in this world.”
—Jared Carter, author of Darkened Rooms of Summer
Available at Dos Madres Press.