….

Solitude

….

Still waters meet

sun-soaked sand, curve

with grace, like the neck

of an egret, whose elegant

wings spread as it lights

with the slightest

splash of

imagined

sound, content

to wade in shared

reflection with a

silent world.

….

This poem is from the chapbook Mississippi Meanderings (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/mississippi-meanderings-by-barb-geiger/

The poems in Barb Geiger’s collection, Mississippi Meanderings, invite you to witness America’s iconic waterway through lyrical snapshots of the river’s many moods, moments in its rich history, and the inhabitants and travelers of its waters and shores. You’ll be awed by river wildlife and sand island sunsets, fascinated by mammoth barges and pearl button factories, and entertained with poems of mishap and moonshine. Photos accompanying the poems in the collection are available under the Photo Gallery tab at http://www.barbgeiger.com.

Barb Geiger lives in Waukesha, Wisconsin, with her husband, Gene, and their sweet chinchilla, Raji. She is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Authors Guild. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and in several Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Calendars. Her award-winning memoir, Paddle for a Purpose, was published in 2018. Mississippi Meanderings is her first poetry chapbook. You can find out more about her writing at http://www.barbgeiger.com.

….

The Pumpkin Field

….

Being just a poor British boy grown

where London’s roots defile Saxon towns,

common woods and meadows, I know little

about agriculture beyond the shelves

and tin cans of childhood. So when I see

…..

the field of pumpkins on the edge of I-5 North

the bulbous fruit strung out like orange pearls

in finely tuned rows, small hard heads lolled

on the dry soil, I am amazed. That so much 

can be gained from these ignorant seeds.

…

This poem is from the chapbook The Residents (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-residents-by-matthew-j-friday/

….

The Residents begins with the author’s arrival at the height of the COVID pandemic and explores his new life as a US resident. The poems reflect on this new journey and study what being a resident means for other people, flora and fauna. While Oregon’s inhabitants and landscape form the basis of many poems, others explore residency in a wider sense, crossing borders near and far away.

Matthew James Friday is a British born writer and teacher. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmith College, University of London. He has had many poems published in US and international journals from all corners of the world. He has published numerous micro-chapbooks with the Origami Poems Project (US). Matthew is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet.  The Residents is his first chapbook. More of his writing can be found at: http://matthewfriday.weebly.com

Matthew James Friday

…..

Lock and Key

….

Through the tall hay, high as a pony’s chest, I spotted him ducking. He scrutinized me, watched me silently. From my partial view, I could see his coffee-colored skin glinting in the sun.

Not knowing what to do, I kept to my chore, hacking away at the dead tree Papa cursed at all last week. Said he didn’t have time to be hauling off some dead oak that fell in a lightning storm near a month ago. He told me it was a boy’s job. My ax arm was hurting and sore; still I hacked. Every few seconds, though, I’d spy a sideways glance to see if that man was still there, hiding in the hayfield to my left. Not hiding too good, I might add. He must have known I’d see him.

What to do.

Only 13, I don’t know what’s right. Some say the rich folks should be able to keep as many slaves as they can afford. Papa says he ain’t so sure.  Don’t really matter much to us, I suppose, since we don’t have enough money for new shoes or leather gloves, much less slaves. Must be awful being somebody else’s possession, even worse, a runaway.He is gonna get hisself killed, I thought to myself as I chopped at the limbs. Another sideways glance. And he don’t look all that much older than me. Maybe 20. Maybe younger.

What to do.

My arm was dreadful tired, so I decided to chance it and take a break. Papa was off in town; Ma was making lunch. No one would catch me wasting a moment to relax my muscle. I’m not big like Papa, barely Ma’s size, really, but I’m growing. Soon I’ll be a real man.

Man. That black man. I caught his eye and lifted my chin his way. In that moment, everything stopped but the summer breeze. It brought some relief as it blew through my damp shirt. Then he lifted his chin too. Not that much older than me, but bigger. Darker, for sure.

What to do.

The man, he began to stand from the crouch where he hid. He was a head taller than that hay when he stood up full. Geez, he really could get hisself killed if somebody saw him. Who knows what a person might do. Even Mama. I thought of the rifle that stands ready near our kitchen stove. Here I was, and I had seen him. Who would see him next?

He lifted his hands through the golden-green hay stalks. Cuffs. Iron ones held his wrists inches apart. The man was locked tight by those manacles.

I paused, then looked at the heavy ax in my hands. I’ve never even been near a black man before. With a silent prayer we’d both be free of each other safely, I held the ax up and approached him slowly, crouching into the hay myself. No movement from the house; Mama had not seen me. Up close, the black man’s breath was fast and loud. I could see whiskers on his jaws. His eyes, full of fear and pleading.

It took only a moment and not one word.

He put his hands near the ground, and I lifted the ax over my shoulder. The hay prickled at my arms and face. In one swing, it was all over. Using all my 13-year old might, the blade crashed down. That iron chain weren’t so hefty and strong after all.

Free in one blow, the cuffs separated. His dark head nodded, he lifted his chin at me once again, and then he ran like a wild animal through the hayfield toward old man Carter’s farm.

He had been locked. My ax was the key.

Free.

With a dirty, shaking hand, I rubbed sweat from my cheek, sensing one tiny hair poking from my skin. I’d never noticed that whisker on my chin before. Maybe, I thought as I headed back to the dead oak and my boy’s job, I’m gettin’ closer to bein’ a real man.

…..

This flash-fiction story is from the chapbook It’s Time (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/its-time-by-katie-sullivan-hughbanks/

It’s Time is a fresh collection of flash fiction that focuses on the immediacy of the moment. The most valuable commodity we have is time – time to notice, to feel, to reflect, to learn, to love. The characters in It’s Time bring this truth to life while revealing how connections to each other and the natural world are complicated and problematic, but ultimately beautiful. Each story reminds the reader that to be fully human, we must grasp the only moment we have is now.

Katie Sullivan Hughbanks is a Kentucky poet, fiction writer, and photographer whose work celebrates the beauty of nature, the power of connection, and the value of every voice. She teaches literature and writing at Assumption High School in Louisville and spends every moment she can writing, hiking, taking photos, singing, dancing, birdwatching, and admiring dogs of all types. Her first poetry collection, Blackbird Songs, was published in 2019 (Prolific Press).

Headshot photo: Jenny Cobb

….

Whale Fall

…..

I thought I was done with you

until I heard the story of Tahlequah,

the orca whale whose silky calf

…..

lived only a few hours after its birth.

Tahlequah balanced the corpse

on her forehead and her back,

…..

kept it from sinking, and pushed it

for seventeen days and one thousand miles

through Puget Sound and the open sea.

…..

She lifted the body as it sank—

hundreds of times—hoisting it

out of the water to take a breath.

…..

When at last she released her calf, the carcass

sank to the sea floor—whale fall—

fare for scavengers in the dark.

…..

I have carried my grief as Tahlequah

carried her dead calf, determined

not to let go. Pushing it to the surface

….

when it drops down. When

will I let it fall? Where might it settle?

My sea floor is a blanket of sand,

…..

smooth and abiding.

What creatures in my darkness

might flourish with the gift of release? 
                   

…………. –published in the Taos Journal, Fall 2023

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Eclipse (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/eclipse-by-sarah-wolbach/

The poems in Eclipse illuminate the complicated history of a married couple over more than two decades. Reflecting both ambivalence and affection, the poems explore their early adventures and revelations and the eventual transformation of the relationship during the course of the husband’s decline and death. The final poems in the collection describe the wife’s journey through the aftermath of his passing.

Sarah Wolbach was a Michener fellow and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. She lived in Mexico for several years, and later in New York City. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Comstock Review, Dos Gatos Press, Taos Journal of Poetry, and Yalobusha Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

….

The Iowan Speaks of Lakes

 

I’ve known water:

the color of mud, the texture of jello

            cow baths

            duck mucks

            pig puddles

shallow creeks meandering

mulishly toward a home in the farmland.

 

On hot, muggy days, soybean fields shimmered

like boxed oceans under the sun.

On windy days, the cornstalks did a grandstand wave

like the tide was pulling them in.

On stormy days, rain settled in the lowlands for a rest.

 

I learned that immensity and breadth

are for the sky

not for the water

at my feet.

…..

…..

This poem is from the book Beyond Cornfields (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/beyond-cornfields-by-elaine-m-seaman/

…

Traveling Beyond Cornfields is the heart of this collection of poems by Elaine M. Seaman. Starting from her miniature town in Iowa to various states, especially Colorado and Michigan, and countries, especially Mexico and New Zealand, she notices intricacies in landscape, flora, fauna, and humanity. She recognizes life lived and life lost. But she always remembers that “Home is just ahead. Warm rooms in our clover meadow, oaks and pine. Home. Ahead.”

Elaine M. (Koren) Seaman grew up near the cornfields of Iowa but has lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for over forty years. Her sons draw her to Colorado and New Zealand each year and wanderlust takes her to other parts of the planet. Finishing Line Press published her first book of poetry, Rocks in the Wheatfield, in 2004. Her self-published book (2019), My Mother Sewed Dresses for Five, contains quilts she made and poems she wrote that share titles. The American Quilter’s Museum in Paducah, Kentucky, has one of her quilts in their collection, as do many private collectors.

Elaine M. Seaman

You Can’t Fly into a Mouth Filled with Past Fears of Burning

 

Let dust rise thirteen feet high behind our car wheels;

Let withered lupine give their seeds to dry soil;

Let red worms spin down to find moisture near the fig’s roots;

Let fires that rage to our north and south burn all remnants of hope;

Let hope’s attachment release and float pine trees’ incinerated bodies forward;

Let what we tried to mold with our calloused hands crumble against our tongues.

What we tried to erect out of ashes, out of a spring’s trickle, 

couldn’t sing with two hands, couldn’t fly 

into a mouth filled with past fears of burning, 

with a mind clogged with memories of loss. 

Watercress builds and gathers near a spring’s outlet;

blackberry vines grow unimpeded near a lake’s lips.

Let our promise move from a joining to a centering,

thrusting out from our powered center. 

Let our mind set on becoming more than one 

turn inward to clip any division, 

reform and align what we envision 

with what will grow from our fields 

that pop with lilting grasshoppers, 

splitting seed heads, bursting pinecones. 

……

This poem is from the book Break Self: Feed (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/break-self-feed-by-gabrielle-myers/

…..

Break Self: Feed meditates on eroticism and relationships with searing language play. The poems sing of our ecosystems, their human threats, and possible cures based on nourishment and barrier fracture. In eco-poetic lyrics, borderlands and boundaries evolve in reference to a deep connection with the natural world that surrounds us with its seasonal shifts and the impacts of climate change. We never know when abundance and satiation will come. We spend so much time preparing for devastation and desiccation, so much energy we waste planning our ruin. Beak Self: Feed repurposes that drive, energy, and time towards preparing for our proliferation, our unfurling, our living into our potential. Dig into the soil, feel loam and fine-webbed roots working out their networks of nutrient pull and harvest. Let’s mimic the roots motion to gather, see what it can get out of the perfect soil, set ourselves on expansion, lengthening, growth. 

Gabrielle is a writer, professor, and chef. Her memoir, Hive-Mind, published in 2015, details her time of love, awakening, and tragic loss on an organic farm. Her first poetry book, Too Many Seeds, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Her third poetry book, Points in the Network, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been published in the Atlanta Review, The Evergreen Review, The Adirondack Review, San Francisco Public Press, Fourteen Hills, pacificREVIEW, Connecticut River Review, Catamaran, MacQueen’s, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and is forthcoming from The American Poetry Review. Gabrielle is the Farm-to-Fork columnist for Inside Sacramento magazine. Access links to her work through her website at www.gabriellemyers.com

….

Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate

                                                 for my mother

 

 

Were you that outline in the boat falling 

into the horizon—an unspecified figure

 

blown loose by wind and wave, open 

to interpretation or storm? Churning color, 

 

lit from inside like regret, the way you 

gave up painting and everything you loved. 

 

The horizon dissolves in the thickened 

layers of strokes, a streak of black 

 

working its way across the middle 

of the canvas. Storms, as if 

 

one could become unassailable. Or

were you one of the figures of breeze 

 

and light, walking the piers and beaches? 

Here, but going somewhere else.

….

….

This poem is from the chapbook Not My First Walk on the Moon (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/not-my-first-walk-on-the-moon-by-linda-hillman-chayes/ .

Not My First Walk on the Moon takes the reader on a journey through time and geographies. It moves through seasons and generations, through cityscapes, seashore, barrier islands, and backyards. The poems reflect on loss and how it reverberates throughout a lifetime including the tiny but continual losses of aging. They also celebrate moments of joy and awe inspired by breeze, light and love. Many of the poems use a framework of visual art and imagery—including a mother’s love of Turner’s Paintings of the Sea at Margate, a crime scene photo in which the facts fail to tell the story, and a portrait of a family leaving Rockaway beach in late afternoon. The moon slips in and out these poems but takes center stage in one as the author recalls watching the 1969 moon landing and imagines her very own walk on the “moon’s luminescent dustscape”.

Linda Hillman Chayes is a poet and psychoanalyst. Her work explores the ongoing process of knowing who we are in the context of our family’s stories (past and present) as well as our social and cultural environment. Her previous chapbook, The Lapse was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kestrel, The American Poetry Journal, Quartet, The Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, The RavensPerch, The Wild Roof, Beyond Words, and other publications. She practices as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in New York City and Westchester County. She co-wrote and co-edited a book The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity published by Routledge Press in 2018.

 

…..

Olivia and I learn about the nature of time and space

 

 

Not the shortest day, Olivia corrects, 

time is all the same, the days,

I mean.  She’s reaching for words

 

to encapsulate what yogis and physicists,

even visionaries can’t articulate, 

but she doesn’t know that yet,

 

seven years old, maybe eight, a so-large block

of her school life to date spent in a square box

trying to learn science via Zoom 

 

in this season of plague.   What must she feel, Olivia, 

ten months away from playmates, such dark times,

everything askew?  Cold solstice and I learn 

 

Jupiter and Saturn align as light wanes, one great 

conjunction of the two largest planets in our known system

combining their brightness over a tired city.  

 

Just look south and west, Corina instructs 

as I sit on my yoga mat what we call hours later.

There will be such brightness, and is this

 

irony or blessing on a day when most of the hours 

all days contain will be spent in darkness 

before the world tilts back.    In second grade,

 

I learned only of time’s forward motion, learned

never to hold still in the now as now, nearing seventy, 

I hold still, this Great Conjunction glimmering.

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Because Time (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/because-time-by-liz-abrams-morley/ .

The poems in Because Time invite the reader into the imagined future of the poet’s youngest students, and grandchildren, as this fragile generation negotiates the “unprecedented” times of pandemic, school shootings, abridgement of bodily autonomy and a climate gone bizarre;  simultaneously the poems interrogate and redefine experiences and traumas of generations gone.  A rumination on disruptions, on “life after so much death,”  an homage at times to resilience, and a prayer for the future, the poet seeks words to keep this youngest generation, despite logic and the odds, “crazy for hope.”

Liz Abrams-Morley’s previously poetry collections include, Beholder, Inventory, Necessary Turns and Learning to Calculate the Half Life.  Her poems and short stories have been published in a variety of nationally distributed anthologies, journals and ezines and have been read on National Public Radio.  She has collaborated with visual artists, both as a collage artist and incorporating her poetry into visual art pieces.

…..

Baptism at Jordan Lake

I made my way barefoot down a rocky path and did not stop walking when I reached the shore. The rising sun reflected scarlet off the water. It could have been a lake of fire. Nothing looked different when I came up–No charred earth, no paradise. The lake was amoebic and still. The empty two-lane caressed its curves. If she would come I’d bring her down to the banks. I would show her what it feels like to break through the surface not caring if it is water or flame. I would ask, do I seem different to you

now?

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Look: Love Letters (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/look-love-letters-by-maxx-dempsey/

Look: Love Letters asks us to imagine the interception of the past and present, and how they fit together to create an internal portrait of a person.  The poems open a window to the mind of the author who is grappling with their own personal history and the echoes of their lineage. They are the culmination of the confusion of a curious child, and a penchant for obsession. The poems fit together like puzzle pieces, creating a landscape of the author’s internal journey through loss. Each short poem is a letter to someone or something that doesn’t exist anymore except in memory. They allow for meditation, both by author and reader. They are each a self-contained rumination nostalgic for a past fire that still somehow burns.

Nine Lives: A Question

 

To consider everyone’s attendance

during my incident, the whereabouts

of my two feline housemates

comes into question.

 

Perhaps,

pushed to the basement

by my shrieks and pleas, they quietly braced

their quivering frames against 

one another.

 

Perhaps,

drawn by the smell 

of fresh blood, they paced hungrily

along the edge 

of the dog-chewed rug.

 

Perhaps,

sitting patiently

by the kitchen, they conjured

a spell, like the mystic familiars

of their ancestry. Whiskers touching,

eyes midnight with dark magic, they forged

a new life, a cat-life, one of their nine

lives, and they blessed it onto

my broken body.

 

Perhaps,

I have the spirited grace

and luck of feline fortitude,

by which Death 

is so easily eluded.

 

Perhaps,

I shouldn’t question it

because curiosity killed

the cat,

you know.

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Post-Traumatic Poetry (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/post-traumatic-poetry-by-mackenzie-rose/

Post-Traumatic Poetry is at once deeply personal and frighteningly universal. Mackenzie Rose‘s collection of poems shares her story from being a young woman in an abusive relationship  to becoming a domestic violence survivor. Her poems take the reader through her first glimpses of her partner’s narcissism and gas-lighting to the moment he tried to kill her. They untangle her medical trauma and find her traversing the world with a new identity while learning to understand her physical and emotional scars.

Mackenzie Rose is a survivor. On August 26, 2017, only two days after her 28th birthday, the man with whom she shared a home plunged a chef’s knife into her throat, past her tongue, and through the roof of her mouth. After eight days of recovery in the hospital, Mackenzie re-entered the world with a limited ability to speak, a PEG feeding tube, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). After relentless therapies, she began to reclaim some semblance of normality and retrained her voice to carry her new narrative. Mackenzie is a professor of Communications and English at Shenandoah University and a PhD student of trauma studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She can be found speaking at public functions about destigmatizing trauma.

With her dog, Bertie, Mackenzie Rose frequently escapes to the beautiful wilderness of the Shenandoah National Park to recharge and find peace in Nature’s healing qualities.

For more information, please visit rosestorytelling.com.