Category: Poetry

Sometime before dawn

an hour before midnight

a brash chord sounds

Bold dissonance

Pause

and another follows

You have heard

nothing of that

cat’s musical stalkings

and I am awake for good

lie still 

on the pull-out bed

and await the next

charge of the keys

that does not come

The cat jumps to a shelf

and is utterly still

Me too

Roberta Gould lives in the Hudson Valley and study birds.  Her work has appeared widely in poetry journals, blogs, and anthologies, She is the author of   11 poetry books, including Pacing the Wind, Shivsitan, Louder Than Seeds, Foothills Publishing and The Art and Craft of Poetry.  Her website is robertagould.net.

I am jealous of the syrinx, the ability
to sing two notes at once, to harmonize
with the self. In my harnessed larynx,
so many caught songs, edges cracked
and fading, muffled as if from behind
rows of coats in a deep cedar closet,
mothballs blotting out sense.
Then there’s mimicry, the way the lyrebird
can copy the chainsaw gutting its forest,
the car alarm piercing its canopy.
But birds should never sing those notes.
And it’s not like everything is a lark.
The calls they make to each other,
warning and mating, staking their claims,
it’s posturing in every kind of way.
Still, I wish to slip from my body, to be
a mockingbird, to inhabit new skin,
reedy bones, a different sort of plumage.
What a relief to stop being
for an interlude, to call out in new
language that elicits fresh response.

Rebecca Hart Olander holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has
appeared recently in Ilanot Review, Mom Egg Review, Plath Poetry Project, Radar Poetry, Virga
Magazine, and Yemassee Journal, among others, and her critical work has been published in Rain Taxi
Review of Books, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Collaborative work made
with Elizabeth Paul is forthcoming in Duende and They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary
Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). She was the winner of the Women’s National Book
Association poetry contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Rebecca lives in Western
Massachusetts where she teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of
Perugia Press. You can find her at rebeccahartolander.com.

O Michael tonight

I am dreaming of you.

We trace night with

our fingers climbing

ladders of darkness

past the full moon.

Over silver light into

star light we dance

through air redolent

with lilacs.  Your eyes

glow like burning comets

as we waltz over clouds.

O Michael tonight

I dreamed of you and

woke to find you

sleeping at my side.

Joan McNerney’s poetry has been included in numerous literary zines such as Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze, Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Blueline, Halcyon Days and included in Bright Hills Press, Kind of A Hurricane Press and Poppy Road Review anthologies. She has been nominated four times for Best of the Net. 

It’s too easy to call me
floor-level cocaine,
nagging whine
of an ambulance
trapped on the freeway.

I’m the makeup worn
by straight guys pretending
to make fun of gays but really
liking the look, a costume
that never finds a closet.

I’m the cowbell played
because it’s there.
I’m the menace
of power chords
read from a manual,

close enough not
to need another take.
Don’t mistake me
for the sports car.
I’m just a guy

who shouldn’t
be behind the wheel,
a personal driver away
from aging gracefully,
from natural causes.

Daniel M. Shapiro is the author of several poetry books and chapbooks, including How the
Potato Chip Was Invented, Heavy Metal Fairy Tales, and The Orange Menace. He is a special
education teacher who lives in Pittsburgh.

Pull a slip of paper

from the fishbowl, sidle up

to your assigned instrument—sit

at the traps, fondle frets, moisten

the reed.

The act of drawing

your assignment does not convey

competence, any more than the act

of drawing a different set of keys

from the punchbowl mandates

someone else playing second fiddle

for a while.

The most eager participant

always begins the riff, sets the tone,

the pace, chooses the key. The decision

before you: whether to harmonize.

Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances include The Literary Yard, Big Windows, and Locust, among others.

C-Sharp!
my mother shouts
kitchen to living room
over the jiggling dance
of the regulator
on her pressure cooker.
C-Sharp!
Try it again.
Occasionally she walks out
wipes her hands on her apron
bends over, inspects the music
points out the error on the page
since I lack her perfect pitch.
She knows her notes —
better than cousin Evelyn,
who went to conservatory
and can hardly play a thing.
All that education wasted on Evelyn
who never practiced in the first place.
Evelyn’s folks could afford the tuition.
It’s all for the best, she says.
My reliable dad —
high school valedictorian, no college —
would never have fallen
for someone so educated.
And then, of course, there would never
have been me, so she is grateful
Really
for that surprising turn of events
that seemed so sad and is yet
so perfect.
Except occasionally on those lazy afternoons
making pot roast
when I fumble careless with Haydn
and stab her in the heart with Middle C
Plain
not elevated.

Pat Snyder Hurley is a Columbus, Ohio poet whose work has been published in the literary journals Pudding Magazine and Still Crazy, Common Threads, a journal of the Ohio Poetry Association, and OPA’s ekphrastic poetry anthology A Rustling and Waking Within, as well as online journals The MOON Magazine and Snapdragon.  Her work also appears in a collection of poems that she and her late husband Bill Hurley wrote during his battle with esophageal cancer (Hard to Swallow, NightBallet Press, 2018).

No corncob pipe
or timothy hay sprig
stuck in his kisser,
but the lead singer is wearing
a chambray shirt, felt hat,
and a crying, slung
twelve string. Insert
a weathered clawhammer
banjo in the background,
and frayed jeans cut-off just
above the high water line
and you get the idea.
Add two fiddlers, both
with beat-closed eyes,
and a barefoot tambourinist
with an on-the- rocks
in his striking hand
and you’ve got the band
on the stage’s left side.
On the right is
a Bourbon barrel,
two metal trash cans,
a couple wooden crates
and a menagerie of empty
cookie tins that comprise
the percussion section.
You can’t forget a show
like this: a no-name
dive off a dirt road:
intimate, visceral—
allowed in to see or hear
the magic of a local secret—
moments you feel you’re
a note within a larger song,
part of the river’s flow,
when the experience flitters
your stomach like free fall.
You feel that backwoods
accelerando? Affrettando?
That’s this unknown Kentuckian
backing band building
tension like the current
quickening before a waterfall,
crescendo approaching
the cliff’s edge, mist rising
from below it like the vocalist’s
hands, clapping faster
than hummingbirds’ wings,
alongside the button accordionist,
leading the stomping boot-
beat further downriver
to where they in unison
plunge into the coda,
keel us all over the brink.

Jeffrey Warzecha earned an MFA from Lesley University, is the recipient of The Connecticut Review’s
Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and has new publications both in print and online.