…..

Insomnia

“Let’s take a walk” she suggests

at one in the morning, when I can’t sleep.

We stroll around the block

slippers scuffing the grit at the edge of the asphalt,

lake breezes sneaking under our nightgowns,

quiet voices mingling with the cicadas and frogs.

 

I lay awake now, and wonder:

What did we talk about, on those walks?

And why was my mother always awake

staring out the window

sitting in the dark?

……

This poem is from the chapbook Mothers and Other People by Karen Taylor (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/mothers-and-other-people-by-karen-taylor/

….

Mothers and Other People is a poignant collection delving into themes of death, loss, estrangement, nostalgia, and family. From the ache of unspoken words to the weight of unresolved conflicts, the poems in this collection delve into the emotional terrain of estrangement with raw honesty and vulnerability. Mothers and Other People invites readers on a journey of introspection and reflection, encouraging them to confront their own experiences of loss, estrangement, identity, and the complexities of family relationships.

Karen Taylor has written several short stories for anthologies, but this is her first poetry collection. She lives in Queens, NY and recently celebrated 25 years with her spouse, author/editor Laura Antoniou.

….

Confession #80:

How to be a Man

….

I insist I have no idea 

how to be a man. I insist 

I am one. Maybe 

you are too. 

…..

I know how not to be 

a man. I know what I do 

to another body 

will not make me more 

a man. 

….

I know what I do 

to another body 

could make me less. 

Less man 

by being less 

human, less than human, 

a beast consuming 

blood or tears or unyielded flesh. 

….

I do not know 

how to be a man, but 

I will not stalk with wolves.

….

This poem is from the book
Confessional by Fletch Fletcher (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/confessional-by-fletch-fletcher/

….

CONFESSIONAL is a sequence of poems pulling at the raw emotions, the regrets and mistakes, the parts of ourselves we rather leave buried. Dig them up and question the ties of family, religion, tradition, love, your own mind, and how much of you is your choice or the choice of others. Steer clear of 835, as there must be parts of each of us, some hurts or joys or secrets, that must be kept to ourselves.

Fletch Fletcher is a poet, a science teacher, a brother, and a bunch of other random things that may or may not help you understand him. He was lucky enough to work with and learn from amazing poets while getting an MFA in Poetry at Drew University. Fletcher’s first collection, Existing Science (2021), was published by Assure Press.

……

TREE SURGEON 

 

After my father left, 

I climbed trees. I do not know 

what it means to be safe, 

but I learned how it felt to be held — 

 

woven in limbs, brushed in bark dust,

uncoaxed by the prodding of the wind 

or the lulling certainty of ground 

and it was here, hovering, that I felt closest 

 

to him. He spent hours climbing trees,

maneuvering limbs to cut out damage,

ridding the world of one entrenched 

in telephone wire or lingering near a roof.

 

I ate Handi snacks on branch tops,

pretended the red stick was a saw 

and went at it, thinking I could 

break tree bones.

 

I would move two-handed, driving 

it until skin had broken, until 

something lighter appeared, a dint 

the size of my pinky nail. 

 

Then, I would stop, wipe the matted hair 

from my forehead, examine what living was left

and trace sounds of clapping leaves with my eyes.

I am left wondering at the ways we sprawl

 

and curl — how trees don’t know what solace is

but sustain it anyway. I will never hold 

a contradiction like that. 

What I remember most from those days:

 

hollow never meant empty 

and ants can’t tell the difference 

between skin and bark. 

 …..

This poem first appeared in Bellevue Literary Review. The poem is from the chapbook Tree Surgeon by Alecia Beymer (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/tree-surgeon-by-alecia-beymer-nwvs-181/

Tree Surgeon is a series of captured fragments that conjure and question notions of closeness, distance, home, loss, and grief. It is a rumination on how the mundane envelopes us, how place remakes in us daily. The poems linger in an interstices of the environmental world, the global pandemic, the death of a father from Covid-19, and the leaving and returning to the remnants of a steel town along the Ohio River. The book begins in the impossibility of sound and language and the layered grief of loss. It continues through offered intimations and excavations on how we interpret, and learn to believe in, the complexities of intimacy and attachment to place, people, and ourselves.

Alecia Beymer is an Assistant Professor – Educator in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in SWWIM, Bellevue Literary Review, The Inflectionist Review, Radar Poetry, Sugar House Review, among others. In her research and creative work, she is interested in ecopoetics, forms of attachment and intimacy, and the poetics of teaching.

…..

The Dream of Being Together

….

We have officially forgotten Sunday, when after  

church, we cheeky, American-born children once   

devoured seasoned saltfish with savory johnnycakes 

and drank the red sorrel and goat water our           

Caribbean Grandmothers left for us on islands of 

elbow-greased windowsills uptown in New York City

…..

We have forgotten how frozen palm trees  

garnished our row house rum punch. Sunday 

night metropolis-moonshine. Family jammin’

barefoot to Christian and Un-Christian Calypso 

on the polished, living room dancehall floor

…..

Who knew that one day most of us could only 

dream of being together again, breaking breadfruit 

inside sacred and profane row house sandcastles           

loosely built beneath the Big Sugar Apple Stars    

…..

This poem is from the chapbook City in a Seashell by Tiffany Osedra Miller (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/city-in-a-seashell-by-tiffany-osedra-miller-nwvs-180/

City in a Seashell features a selection of Caribbean-American Carnival poems, literary sketches, fables, elegies and vignettes evoking personal expressions, memories and ancestors of Antigua, Jamaica and the mystical island of Gabinda. These poems come from an urban-tropical soul, a grieving American daughter of Caribbean parents who have gone on to that magnificent Carnival in the sky, leaving her an immigrant to every island she can find replicated in her city streets.

Tiffany Osedra Miller is from New York City where she teaches poetry and drawing workshops. She was a finalist for the 2020 Calvino Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review and Palette Poetry.

…..

The Salt Pond in Autumn

……….for Mira

….

The season’s last butterflies

in near-death delirium

dance like schoolgirls

dotting the shoreline,

dropping radiance 

from silky pinafores,

G-d is granting

the death of pine forests. 

……

Why do you frown 

my dearest pilgrim?

Waves of the Danube,

the waltz of immigrants

briny Slavic lyrics

Jewish notes played too fast,

American imperatives

to obliterate the past.

…..

We’ve forgotten it all,

we couldn’t forget,

howling like a whale

beached at Nantucket.

We pressed the lemon of memories

squeezed it inside out;

the highball of reveries,

the lowball of time.

….

This poem is from the book Kinship by Maxim D. Shrayer (Finishing Line Press) and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/kinship-by-maxim-d-shrayer/ , amazon, and everywhere books are sold.

Kinship, the new collection of poetry by the bilingual author, Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, weaves together some of the principal themes in modern Jewish history: ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism, exile, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel. Shrayer’s richly orchestrated and formally elegant verse captures with poignancy and passion what it feels like to be a Jewish poet with Soviet roots, living in America during Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. Kinship is, ultimately, a pained and inspiring meditation on writing between languages and cultures.

Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author, scholar, and translator, was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family and immigrated to the United States in 1987. A professor at Boston College, Shrayer has authored and edited more than twenty-five books. His recent poetry collections include the Russian-language Stikhi iz aipada (Poems from the iPad, Tel Aviv, 2022) and the English-language Of Politics and Pandemics (Boston, 2020). Among Shrayer’s other books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America, Leaving Russia, and Immigrant Baggage. He is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca, and their silver Jewdle, Stella.

Untitled

…..

My marriage needs mending

I’m sewing it with a needle

With no thread

It is silently ending

 

I try strapping on huge wings

Of possibility

I can do it for moments

 

My secrets have changed

To truth

They never needed to spill

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Stronger Than Salmon by Carol Shamon (Finishing Line Press) and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/stronger-than-salmon-by-carol-shamon/

Stronger Than Salmon is an unflinching collection of poetry that explores life’s strongest tugs and pulls – family, aging, love, loss, and self-discovery. Shamon’s honesty in examining and facing life’s currents invites the reader to join her journey for truth. A journey that eventually leads to wonder and belonging.

Carol Shamon has been writing poetry since the age of nine. This collection stands out in its simplicity of chosen words to convey big emotions related to topics such as death, divorce, mental illness, and life itself. Shamon began having her poetry published when she was attending college at the University of Northern Colorado. While keeping up with journal writing, she took a break from publishing while she created and owned a successful talent agency for 35 years. Now she’s writing and publishing as fast as she can with several poems and two zines recently published as well as a memoir in the works.

………..

The Wrong Place

…….

I don’t think we’re in the right place,

my son said,

looking up at the sign above the desk.

What’s oncology? he asked.

It was my turn to look up at Eli,

(my tall manboy with the baby face),

into those wondering hazel eyes.

My tongue curled around the word, 

reluctant to release its awful power. 

Big breath.

It means cancer, I said. 

 

My husband came in from the parking lot

and we three trooped down a hall,

into a small room,

without enough space to breathe,

sat in hard plastic chairs,

and heard from an unsmiling doctor, 

aggressive, unusual, 

large tumor, sarcoma,

blood in the belly,

more detailed pathology,

bone marrow biopsy,

bone scan, body scan,

port-o-cath, clinical trials,

chemotherapy, radiation,

nausea, vomiting, losing hair,

treatment before Christmas,

no more school this year.

 

No school! Eli exclaimed,

as if that were the worst of the news.

But perhaps it was the only bit he could grasp

in the soup of this surreal conversation.

We sat and stared,

dry-eyed and numb,

nodded, signed, took appointment cards

into helpless hands,

and slowly rose. 

Our legs somehow carried us

from the small room, 

back down the hall

and out of that right and wrong place

into the gray afternoon.

This poem is from the book The Wrong Place by Tawn Parent (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-wrong-place-by-tawn-parent/

The Wrong Place attempts to answer the question: How does a mother cope when her worst nightmare comes true? This collection of poems and essays chronicles the author’s journey alongside her young son as he is diagnosed and treated for a rare cancer. Readers follow the family as they learn the vocabulary of cancer, develop a new way of parenting, and grieve the loss of their son’s innocence. The family navigates endless medical procedures and hospital stays while seeking to maintain a sense of themselves outside of “cancer world.” Throughout, the author relies on humor and hope to pull her through.

A native and resident of Indianapolis, Tawn Parent has been a professional writer and editor for 30 years. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Home Planet News Online, Anti-Heroin Chic, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Nzuri. She has worked for various business publications, and also served as proofreader for two books.

…..

A Still Morning

….

eleven fat geese

bathe in the river’s

shallow water

…..

black and white moths

rise

from the grass

a quiet August morning,

the river less

tempestuous,

almost a sleeping god,

one that supports wild birds

and beasts that come

to drink

…..

a monarch rests on

a tomato plant,

closing and opening

its wings:

…..

a summer day

in the Berkshires

…..

This poem is from the chapbook Natural Wonders by Sarah Sutro (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/natural-wonders-by-sarah-sutro/

These poems are guides to seeing up close, they move throughout a year, tempered by the fundamentals of sun, rain, snow, darkness as the basis of human survival, and the re-creation of beauty thanks to a poet’s eye. Balancing inner feeling with outer circumstance, the poet brings awareness to natural processes, that define her engagement with the world. The poems point out split second changes, interactions within the environment, and capture the upfront miniscule moment and the constancy of rhythms, arcs and gifts from nature. A kind of rallying to care for earth’s house and our ultimate survival, they stress the necessity to repeat these daily excursions and the urgency to keep on cultivating, walking, praising, looking ahead – ultimately conversing with the earth every day to protect and appreciate her.

Sarah Sutro is an American writer and artist who has had poetry published in the US, Europe and Asia. Her chapbook Études was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016, and her book of essays COLORS: Passages through Art, Asia and Nature by Blue Asia Press in 2011. Her work has been included in journals, newspapers and anthologies, and she has been a writer and reviewer for American Arts Quarterly and Berkshire Fine Arts. For many years she taught college courses in art and interdisciplinary studies in the Boston area. She was a finalist for the Robert Frost poetry award in 2005. Her paintings can be seen at www.sarahsutro.com.

This Year

 

Do not be afraid—I will save you.

I have called you by name—you are mine.

                                                —Isaiah 43:1

 

Today I wake dreaming

of sparrows. I’d dreamed them

through the redbud and black

walnut out by Second Bridge,

and they’d each shared

their singular songs: chipping, 

swamp, white-crowned, 

American tree. I lie here

in bed awhile with Memory

and listen, then we walk

back to a June afternoon below

Two-Stair Crossing to watch

a bird with a brown-streaked

belly hop from rock to rock

bobbing its tail and snatching

gnats. Louisiana waterthrush.

Yes, I reach out to Memory

to relive that chance encounter—

one bird, one man, and less than

five grand minutes connected

by the creek. We walk a little

farther downstream where

a rush of July and August

friends fly in to greet us: ducks, 

herons, woodpeckers, wood-

warblers, mimics, and jays. 

Sitting up, but not 

quite out of bed, I’m ready

to pull on my Mucks,

put on my mask, pick up

my walking stick and head 

for the creek hopeful

that, with distance and luck, 

I’ll keep hearing the name

Chuck this year.

[note: An earlier version of this poem first appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Vol 25 (2022), journal of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.]

This poem is from the chapbook By Fowlers Fork by Chuck Stringer (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/by-fowlers-fork-by-chuck-stringer/

By Fowlers Fork, Chuck Stringer’s first poetry collection, chronicles his daily walks by a suburban creek near his home in Northern Kentucky. Beginning in the early days of the pandemic, these poems document one man’s efforts to enter, experience, and name the abundance of flora and fauna, habitat and history found in and along the creek’s flowing. From its Ordovician fossil past, through its Fort Ancient artifacts and presences, to the spray paint graffiti of some local teens, By Fowlers Fork employs a variety of poetic forms as it takes the reader on an intimate journey into one creek’s sacred space and time, and its unexpected wildness.

Chuck Stringer lives with his wife Susan by Fowlers Fork, a creek in the Gunpowder Watershed located in Boone County, Kentucky. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. His poems have been published in Anthropocene: Poems About Environment, For a Better World, Literary Accents, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Riparian, and other journals.

 

Fishing Pier and Hunting Lodge

 

An old man in hip boots stands in shallow water, just before it merges into the Chesapeake Bay, reeling in his fishing line and then casting again, re-baiting as the need arises with chunks of peeler crab he keeps in a pocket. He’s catching rockfish, the Maryland term for striped bass. He looks old, but he will get much older and toward the end of his life will build his own sailboat and sail alone on the bay. He looks at home standing in the water but does not know how to swim. Like other watermen, his skills involve staying afloat, keeping his vessel from capsizing, tonging for oysters and pulling up crab traps. He served for fifty years as commander of the Maryland Oyster Fleet, which means that above all else he’s a politician. He’s wearing a floppy hat because it’s sunny, but wind has started blowing, so he’s tied the hat under his bristly chin.

 

His daughter, the opera singer, has inherited his beautiful curls. Her press releases claim he’s a singer too, but his performances usually take place at night, on a boat or in the yacht club, when he’s drinking and belts out “Old Man River.” She’s given up touring for the time being and is wading in the bay, tentative in her black swimsuit that shows off her buxom figure. She’s learning how to swim. My mother, wearing a bathing cap and a frilly pink swimsuit, is teaching her, encouraging her to relax while she cradles her in her arms.

 

My father, a skinny veteran who wants to be a singer, is fishing on a rickety, zig-zag pier, but unlike Captain Amos he’s not catching anything. He’s singing, but the wind is picking up strength and I can’t hear the words, although it sounds like a straining attempt at an aria.

 

I’m sitting by myself about halfway down the pier, wishing I could swim but prohibited because of the ointment and bandage on the back of my right knee where a spider bit me. At least that’s how the two Carolyns—the singer and my mother—have diagnosed the oozing pustule, which looks like a miniature volcano.

 

The scene has taken on a glow, like a picture in a tiny shrine, lit by a votive candle. My wife would call it a “flashbulb memory.” It reminds me of Proust, how tripping over the uneven paving stones in the Baptistery of San Marco recalls a similar stumble in Combray. Wind invokes Wingate, a spit of uneasy land across from Lower Hooper’s Island, which is uninhabited. I gaze at a group portrait: Captain Amos, my mother, my father, and the “glamorous soprano” who’s come between my parents.

 

The wind accelerates, and clouds that appeared like a mountain range over a long, flat island and the wide bay have nearly reached us, lightning hitting the water and thunder grumbling. We retreat to a hunting lodge by the pier, where a caretaker latches the shutters and locks the door. We’re all afraid, except for Captain Amos, as rain tattoos the tin roof and wind rattles the shutters and whines under the doors and down the chimney into the big fireplace where the caretaker lights tinder for a fire, even though it’s August.

 

The funny thing is, I don’t remember the storm passing, or trotting out to the Chevrolet as the last drops of rain peter out. The windy, sunny day on the edge of the water always ends with a summer squall that traps us in the hunting lodge, like characters in Sartre’s No Exit. It’s the last time we find ourselves together in one room, a temporary refuge from the permanent storm, so I hold on and won’t let the light blow out.

 

Disclosure #3

 

I have never returned to the location of the most intense memory of my childhood. The lodge is probably long gone. But I wrote a poem about the experience over a decade before I began working on this memoir, a pantoum with a title that I knew was inaccurate, “Storm on Fishing Bay.” Composing the previous chapter allowed me to flesh out details, but the song-like qualities inherent in the repeating, circular Malay poetic form do underscore the musical interests of the main characters. Now that the poem is being reprinted, I’m giving it a new title: “Storm Approaching”:

 

What’s hard to explain

darkens the prospect of happiness—

like wind picking up off shore

where four people retreat separately.

 

Darkened, the prospect of happiness

falls back to a hunting lodge

where four people retreat, separately

latching shutters, brewing coffee, gazing.

 

Fall’s back. In a hunting lodge,

who is stirring the dust—

latching shutters, brewing coffee, gazing

at pictures spilled from an album?

 

Who is not stirring the dust?

The mother fussing? The boy who ponders

pictures spilled from an album?

The father quiet? The beautiful stranger singing?

 

The mother fusses at her boy, who ponders

what’s hard to explain:

the father quiet, the beautiful stranger singing

like wind picking up off shore.

 

The excerpts are from the book Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers by John Philip Drury (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/bobby-and-carolyn-a-memoir-of-my-two-mothers-by-john-philip-drury/

Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers focuses on the author’s mother and the “glamorous soprano” who came between his parents when he was eight years old. They both fell in love with her, but Carolyn Long and his mother, whose nickname was Bobby, ended up together, sharing a life and what they secretly considered a marriage, having exchanged vows on a moonlit night in the summer of 1958. This memoir celebrates the do-it-yourself union between two women: a housewife who became a bank teller and a professional singer who became a voice teacher. It endured until one partner’s death in 1991—memorialized by the cemetery plot they share, with their names engraved on opposite sides of the tombstone, just like the names of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their life together was turbulent, partly because of their volatile personalities (and it took volatility to make such a leap of faith into forbidden love in the Fifties), partly because of prejudice against same-sex relationships, so they had to call themselves “cousins” in order to rent an apartment or a house together. Although the author grew up with the two women and considered Carolyn more of a parent than his father, he didn’t discover the true nature of their tumultuous relationship until both women had died and left clues for him to find in their diaries and notes.

John Philip Drury is the author of six collections of poetry: The Stray Ghost (a chapbook-length sequence), The Disappearing Town, Burning the Aspern Papers, The Refugee Camp, Sea Level Rising, and The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies. He has also written Creating Poetry and The Poetry Dictionary. His awards include an Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review. After teaching at the University of Cincinnati for 37 years, he is now an emeritus professor and lives with his wife, fellow poet LaWanda Walters, in a hundred-year-old house on the edge of a wooded ravine.