You're the Apple of My Eyes
Does here and there observing pink cause little girls to stop and think as angels that what they must do, though daughters, is be mommies too? How precious worn upon their clothes are hugs and kisses we impose they see as gifts that they receive of love entrusted they believe... ...that they in turn must also share with every doll and teddy bear that they embrace -- not simply hold -- to offer wisdom they unfold... ...in role so often they'll reprise with "You're the apple of my eyes". Portly Bard Portly Bard: Old man. Ekphrastic fan. Prefers to craft with sole intent of verse becoming complement... ...and by such homage being lent... ideally also compliment.
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Summer Interior
Why didn’t he paint a scene sun-kindled and warm as the title, not this room where she sits, posed like a conundrum, her body forced into incongruent angles of shame and desire: the awkward cant of her back as it stretches from the floor to the bed, her face forced downward, hidden by a cap of pelt-black hair she ties each day in a tight-fisted knot on top of her head? Her blouse a palette of icy milk and mauve shadow, shown against a pulled-off sheet that’s somehow glaciated down to the floor, where she poses as if divided into hemispheres: one where the neck of her blouse casts a shady vee inside the cleft of her breasts; the other where a dark delta meets the bare landscape of her thighs. Though she aches in all the places where this posturing pulls her body awry, she knows it’s a gesture of love. Her skin glowing with the same ghostly light as all his inconsolable houses. Jeanne Wagner This poem was first published in In the Body of Our Lives, by Sixteen Rivers Press. Jeanne Wagner is the winner of several national awards: most recently the Arts & Letters Award, The Sow’s Ear Chapbook Prize and the Sow’s Ear prize for an individual poem. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review and Hayden’s Ferry. She has four chapbooks and two full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover winner of the Stevens Manuscript Prize, and In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers in 2011. Space Between Breaths
The grandfather of my grandfather of my grandfather hides in the space between breaths, folds his shadow, shelters it inside his heart. He slides himself among the birches, sweeps footprints beneath fallen leaves. Darkness arrives early, wind warns of ice and snow. The armies of the Czar search for Jewish men, unwilling conscripts fated to die. The grandfather of my grandfather of my grandfather plants his toes into damp earth, roots himself, stretches his arms starward, turns them into branches. His hair becomes leaf, his body grows bark. He is tree, is ghost, is memory. Valerie Bacharach Valerie Bacharach’s poetry has appeared in several publications including Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Quarterly, US 1 Worksheets, The Tishman Review, Topology Magazine, Poetica, The Ekphrastic Review, and Voices from the Attic. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops and conducts weekly poetry workshops for the women at CeCe’s Place, a halfway house for women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Her first chapbook, Fireweed, was published in August 2018 by Main Street Rag. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Iphigenia A tease, a breeze, plasters my shroud to my face as they ladle Iphigenia A sacrifice to be, but a breathing woman still, and yet, Hauled with the same grace as a slaughtered bull, Her eyes wide circular silent blue white grey like the motionless sea, open As the bull’s guts would be, entrails replaced here by soundless tears. Iphigenia opens her mouth to protest but never says the words Kneads those lips together, knows she is of strength-born Absorbs the scenery she is carried past, the lunacy, the chaos, dizzying Slices of colour, of sea and seaside, abandoned ships, skeletal trees, And maybe me, hiding in the colour of the lightest pink roses Persephone gathered. A woman who breathed air, who bled blood, Oh, look how it careens down each crag of the ledge into the water now. Iphigenia, emptied now. Strength-born, and pure of heart, fine to suffer for the betterment of others, she will never see, and never learn it was never true. And as the ships set their way to Troy, Peter Blegvad’s voice pops from the frothy lather against the sliding: And that's my daughter in the water I lost every time I fought her… Every time she blinks, she'd strike somebody blind. M. Eileen M. Eileen writes, teaches, edits, and breathes beside the water. Her poetry and prose have been published in Hanging Loose, MonkeyBicycle, and Rogue Agent, among others. She can be found @m_e_g_writes. Summer Evening
His mouth tasted of bourbon and cigarettes, his hands were warm around her waist. His voice, when he spoke into her ear, was low and rumbly. These were the tools—his taste, his touch, his smell—he used to ensnare her. Sheet lightning lit the clouds upriver, a high-wattage summer light show that pulsed in sync with her blood. The river was high, but not over the tracks stitched along the banks and bordered with scrub brush. Tomorrow, the trains would wend their way north—orange engines labouring in opposition to clouds drifting south in concert with the rhythms of the Missouri. She would sit in the mornings as the sun rose and in the evenings as it set, with her feet on the narrow railing that hemmed the porch. Watching. The clouds were ever-changing. He nuzzled, his breath as hot and moist as the summer air, a trail of entreaty across her neck and shoulders. The invitation was insistent. But she knew that path and her mind wandered. To the river. To the barges, three abreast and six deep, going who knows where, slowly, driven by improbably small pilot boats, engines throbbing. Her yard was edged with common lilacs, a border lush with heavy clusters of lavender and white. The river breeze carried a whiff of their fragrance, pungent and sweet. She let it settle like a scarf around her and shrugged away his kisses. In the morning, she would leave him. Susan Caba Susan Caba is a former newspaper journalist, now turning her writing skills to fiction and non-fiction narratives. She lives in Lexington, VA, but house-sits frequently around the country. Hopper's painting reminded her of a month taking care of a house with a porch overlooking the Mississippi River, where she watched the clouds and the water drift along to unknown destinations. Little Victory l the quarry the marble the sweat the chisel the belly the feather Nike’s wings livened in the cold stone and her breasts thrust forward and her right hand cupped her lips and her cry swelled triumph over Samothrace and her shadow cheered the gods II the pilgrims the winds the battles the cracks the falls the dirt the shards the shovels the waves the Louvre Up Yves Klein floated, up quite neatly from the beach, up through the azure haze, up above his Nice, where he, prince of the void, signed the sunlit far side of the sky, only begrudging the soaring gulls the holes they punched in his masterpiece the pigment the resin the foil the gold the rose the flame the ashes the sponge the bruise the Giottos the gut the katas the saints the leaps the pills the rocket the heart -- III Greatest painter in the world, Monsieur Le Monochrome, it is he who stuck me on this spike! That crétin, with his babble of infinity and space, with his naked swaying models, his “living brushes” – oh, vive la liberté for them! – he left me here, headless, armless, footless, crusted in his eyeball-sucking color while my steadfast mother, so far away, longs ever for her severed limbs, shedding her sacred dust into gawping mouths. He would have spiked her if he could! the bits the screens the power Doesn’t this beat watching SpongeBob, girls? Ooh, look at that little purple angel! Isn’t she exquisite? * She’s blue, Mom. And she’s not an angel. See? She’s Victory. On a stick. Which makes no sense. Or, wait, it does. It makes the same sense as me saving for Coachella and you not letting me go. * You never give up, do you, Pol? Someday I’ll be dead and then you can go wherever you want. For now, you’ll just have to suffer. Oh, my God, Thalia! Don’t touch! * But Mama the angel wants me to pick her up. * Ma’am! Keep the child behind the rope. * She doesn’t want you to pick her up, honey, she’s plastic. * Plastique! Voilá le sublime. Gods, I want off this…this stick! * Mama, you need to look with your listening ears! * Ha, right on, Thals. I bet I can print her for you. * You can? With her head on? And arms? And feet? And rainbow fingernails? * Yeah. Totally. * Oh là là, to have fingers! And rainbows! Je t’en prie. IV the viewers the love the blue the blue the blue Elizabeth Kuelbs
Elizabeth Kuelbs writes and mothers at the edge of a Los Angeles canyon. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can find more of her work in The Timberline Review, Minerva Rising, Every Day Fiction, Cricket, Poets Reading the News, and elsewhere. do not speak to me of pain
after my father died, i saw him everywhere. driving the bus. in the hardware store discussing the unique benefits of one lawn mower over another. waving at me from coffin shaped clouds. when i was trying to fall pregnant, all i saw were pregnant women. some with one already in the pram. a second toddling alongside the wheels. a third selfishly baking in wombs fertilised with blood & bone. now everywhere i look i see exhausted women. this one in a yellowing field. a white knight-less horse in the distance. fat red book on her head. red is her colour. knowledge becomes her. she looks on at the man banging on about his pain. she listens. wilting like a garden of artichokes planted too close to the frost. the drum of her heart, heavy as a load of un-spun bath towels hauled from the washing machine & hung on the line never to dry. the surgeon with the funnel on his head (that no-one seems concerned about) makes his first incision. ‘I see this all the time,’ he says, hacking into the man’s head foraging for the stone of madness, ‘particularly in men your age. A very serious condition–– far more painful than that of the inferior woman-stone. I mean the average man-stone could easily render a man unable to take out the bins, cook a meal––even feed the oxen! Indeed, the best he could perhaps manage might be to lift a tankard of ale to his very lips!’ the woman slumps forward onto the table that might topple if she leans too hard. she is not used to leaning. & it is not that she has no sympathy for the man. just she’s had her own lonely years of period pain, then the ovarian cancer, the ovariectomy, the appendectomy, the hysterectomy & now the diverticulitis that has appeared out of nowhere & there is talk of a man with a funnel on his head removing the diseased part of her colon. but she will cross that moss covered bridge when she comes to it. for now there are bins to take out, oxen to feed rabbits to stew––with or without artichokes, it will depend on the crop. & she knows her own stone of madness is growing now too. taking up space in her head like her dead mother’s sideboard she did not want & now sits in her garage gathering dust & guilt. but she will not have it removed. she will learn to live with it. it is what exhausted women do. Ali Whitelock Ali Whitelock is a Scottish poet who lives by the sea in a suburb she can ill afford. Her debut poetry collection, ‘and my heart crumples like a coke can’ is published by Wakefield Press and her memoir, ‘Poking seaweed with a stick and running away from the smell’ was launched to critical acclaim in Australia and the UK in 2010. Her poems have appeared in The Moth Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, The Pittsburgh Quarterly Magazine, The Tahoma Literary Review, Bareknuckle Poet, The Bangor Literary Journal, The Glasgow Review of Books, Poets Republic, NorthWords Now, Gutter Magazine, The Burning House and many others. For further info see: www.aliwhitelock.com ‘Soon the Fine Days Will Come’: January in Arles, 1889 “Soon the fine days will come and I’ll start on the orchards in blossom again,” Vincent wrote Theo, as if tight buds opening into bright flowers could solve everything, as if he could live on that gorgeous wedding of colour and light, the frothy beauty filling the fields enough to rouse the heart just one more time, the snows of winter again left behind as in his first year there, when he hungered not for the fruit but the glorious blooms of peaches and pears, apricots and almonds, painting the delicate petals as they fell and he fell so hard for them all, over and over again. Caroline Collins Caroline Collins, formerly known as the hula hoop champion of Scotty’s roller rink, lives in Georgia, where she teaches writing. Her book of poetry, Presences, was published by Parallel Press in 2014. Recent poems on blues music appear in Arkansas Review and Big Muddy. Her poem “Van Gogh’s Night Horse” (based on his “Terrace of a Café at Night”), is forthcoming in Blue Heron Review. Notable Pre-Raphaelite Muses
Rossetti’s Lizzie Siddal is the most famous one (see Millais’s Ophelia), but there were others: Effie Gray—John Ruskin’s ex-, who married Millais after divorcing Ruskin, had eight children (Ruskin wouldn’t touch her because of pubic hair); Jane Morris—progressive in everything—carried on with Rossetti right under the nose of William (British Arts & Crafts Movement, social reformer); and Fanny Cornforth, held séances to contact Lizzie (Rossetti’s with her the night Lizzie takes laudanum, OD’s). Stephen Gibson Stephen Gibson’s most recent poetry collection, Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror, was selected by Billy Collins as winner of the 2017 Miller Williams Prize from the University of Arkansas Press. He has also published six prior collections: The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press, West Chester University), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press). His poetry has appeared in countless publications from The American Journal of Poetry to The Yale Review. Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival
I swallow your dreadful imagination of what it must be like, relaxing into the steel’s cold descent, the tip searching for my heart, my gut, your guts writhing in their own chill. It’s sex, food, everything you desire and love and fear disappearing into me only to reappear bloodless as Excalibur slipping from stone’s gullet, shimmering in the spotlight of relieved applause, your faces whiter than mine. The pose I strike imitates what balances above the ecstatic tilt of my head, a jeweled sign of redemption, simple marker over a grave in a faraway place where a new crowd pales, anticipating the worst. Steve Abbott Steve Abbott is a former alternative press editor/writer, criminal defendant, delivery truck driver, courtroom bailiff, private investigator, information director for a social service agency, and college professor. He is founder and remains a co-host of The Poetry Forum, a weekly reading series now in its 34th year in Columbus, Ohio. He has edited two anthologies and published five chapbooks and a live CD. His full-length collection A Green Line Between Green Fields (Kattywompus Press) was released in 2018. He has never danced the macarena. |
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