Category: Poetry

Who was that cute boy,
brother as clean-cut teen,
with a folk guitar,
beardless chin to the mic
in the Franklin gym?
Who was my brother then, senior year,
with Gene in the middle, full-throated,
and Pete, nonchalant on his banjo?
Were they doing Tom Dooley or All My Trials?
Something Kingston Trio, something
earliest Dylan, a PP&M number?
The photograph, 1964 vintage,
a high school Kodak moment,
depicts my brother emerging
from the robin’s egg of innocence:
pre-Vietnam, pre-wine, pre-
long life of broken women.
The composition is such
there’s no telling the truth,
but I like to believe
his audience danced, classmates
sang along that December night
for Jimmy’s sake.

---

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel toGodwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. Forthcoming this fall is Psyche’s Scroll, a full-length poem, published by The Poetry Box Selects. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poe Redux, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. Google her name to learn more; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.

A one-winged dove ooh, ooing as dusk settled
and the car barreled toward home. The plea
of I don’t wanna do your dirty work twisting
around the pipes below a sink full of dishes
piled high. The way every girl named Alison
you met made you think of wedding cake
and licked fingers, made you wonder about
arrows, and whether true love was bound to
come with a quiver of pain. Early mornings
when the sun shone, the sky a knotted skein
of clouds amidst the blue. Raised on radio
and celluloid heroes, it’s hard to calculate
the cost of harm vs. good. The cemetry gates,
how love will tear us apart, how boys don’t cry.

---

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.

The bristly drawl waits inside me,
warms my mahogany neck, courses
through the smoothest rosewood.
If you have tattoos, you know
what it’s like to be told, Careful:
It’s permanent. The ink
that labeled me from hell
isn’t going anywhere. I’ve
been designed for top speed,
Space Ace in a hot DeLorean.
This bridge, these humbuckers,
they built screams out of exhales
mistaken for sighs. You could call me
a hillbilly, mock my V-shaped head,
but I could tremolo from here to where
we used to practice our scales, snake
from groove through rolling hills to a solo
no one can buy without the devil’s loose change.
That solo used to play me, but now it’s gone.

---

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.

Ozzy bit a bat’s head off, headed for rabies shots,

proved checked-in cough was habitual from joints

with Iommi by calling from the hospital phone

a friend who played the intro to “Sweet Leaf”

on repeat for the ER doctor. Coughing was a favored

vocalise and solmization for Ozzy. A frequent chord for Iommi.

One he fake-fingertip licked into mean riffs,

plucked like leaves off the devil’s lettuce then laid on the fretboard.

Just another cross he dangled round his neck.

 

Birmingham phlegm never vacates one’s throat—

it’s like a laryngeal squatter, unignorable, unforgettable:

like riding a bike made of graffiti and sheet metal

factory pollution. Like a bird that builds a Brummie nest

and keeps coming back to roost, or one that flies away from home

and congregation to form a solo career out of pills

and dead guitarists, eponymous music festivals and rocklore,

feels the incessant throat-tickles of home

that resonate like reverb and vibrato.

 

Combustible herbage hacks and chart-toppers were sole

communication forms during their migration-separated years.

Whenever Ozzy flew to rehab, Iommi could feel it

rattle his lungs, tingle from nostrils to sinuses

like disturbed dust. For every hit another hit.

Iommi never looked for needles,

though tried finding psychedelics in dens,

cocaine in snow mounds, eventually health in a haystack.

He apologized to men he street-fought as a thug kid,

tossed away knives, forgave the fiend inside.

 

Finally he reconciled with Ozzy after gnarly years

when Ozzy’s inability to fly high and straight solo

finally ended. They shook hands at the airport,

flew home to revisit places that inspired

Beelzebub-beats: the factory that stole Iommi’s digits,

clubs that shapeshifted Ozzy into part-frontman, part-phenomenon.

And when they deplaned, both inhaled, then coughed.

---

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.

The core of any computer

is the motherboard. Cops,

priests, the Medicis, Lehman

Brothers, all must bow

to circuitry named for the woman

who bore us all. We warm

our hands over resistors,

capacitors, parts none of us

have names for, and expect music.

We feed them: more memory, better

processors (though the days

of the daughterboard are long past)

endless lines of code. And yet

whether they sing seems often guided

by the hands of imps, the whims

of shysters bearing soldered flowers.

---

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.

surrounding cerebellum’s irregular gray folds,

seeding violet lilacs of language

with the yellow pine of pleasure,

red oaks to ward off fear,

blue spruce among an evergreen assortment

to warrant your great attention.

In my mind’s eye some saplings mature

capable of moody indigo blooms, others

in groves of Chinese orange trees able to come

fully to orange fruition in a single day.

---

Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel toGodwit:  Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. Forthcoming this fall is Psyche’s Scroll, a full-length poem, published by The Poetry Box Selects. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poe Redux, at http://karlalinn.blogspot.com. Google her name to learn more; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.

This is the movie
the part in the movie
where the star basketball player gets hurt
and most of the others have fouled out
so the snotty kid
who annoys everyone
but deep down inside
is really an enlightened asshole
he comes out of the stands
borrows a uniform
that’s two sizes too big
and you know what he does
and that’s me here
that’s me on this song
no guitars
just me
and voice
but really
just me

---

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.

You’re on stage

naked

 

singing

Sweet Jane

 

unplugged,

shoulders leaking bad whiteness

 

into a vortex

of mysterious chords.

 

You finish with a subdued flourish

and only one person claps

 

but you’re not in the least bit

chagrinned

 

because that’s

 

everyone.

---

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

A slight taste of bitter

almond beneath the ever-

present pomegranate. You chewed

a seed, eyes far

away, rosined your bow.

 

Once again it was time

to play for the assembled,

the few who understood

and the masses, whom your every word passed

 

over like sea waves,

that shatter, endless,

over and again on the shore.

---

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.