Bart Solarczyk

Shaking Sticks

Today a happy dog
bouncing in the yard
won’t allow me
to consider
suicide or murder

the sky’s a cliché blue
& it’s warm for November
shaking sticks
she wants to play
why not?

Even Light

Sunbeams warm the room
but skunk my bottled beer

everything, even light
has a downside.

Bart Solarczyk is a lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, PA. Over the past forty years his poems have been published in print & online in a variety of magazines, journals, anthologies, broadsides & chapbooks. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including his most recent book, Carried Where We Go, available from Redhawk Publications & on Amazon.

  

Rusty Reviews: Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, by Amber Decker

Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief

Amber Decker

• $8.99
• 62 pages

Folkways Press

2022

I've followed Amber Decker and her poetry for some time now with respect and admiration. Instructions for the Proper Cremation of Your Grief, is a smartly produced 4-by-6 perfect-bound chapbook from Folkways Press, which  reads as well as it looks.

Take as an example the poem "Coal Miner's Daughter," a dangerous title with all of its cultural associations. Decker uses them to full advantage, the details of mystery beginning to coalesce and eventually blossom from the initial lines excerpted below to the in the final two lines of the poem: "the crooked gravestones/of every small-town churchyard."

I am a lover of all the dark places

the headlights of my car can never touch.

My empty womb is jealous

of the warm orchards

where the black-eyed children

of Appalachia gather at night

to pick apples

with their skeletal fingers

by the light of the moon.

These lines, fecund with possibility, highlight a collection rich in detail and a lyrical expression for which many poets would extract their eyeteeth. Toward the end of the book, in "Elegy,"  the narrative opens with "grief knocking/at the doorways of my eyes," and whose "bones [are] busy trying to climb out of my skin." There's a texture of felt-life detail here that both impress and express, shock and awe,  in demotic lyrics that go forthrightly from a female persona and assail with words an imagined world, resolving it in twice earned–at least– emotion. This is a fine chapbook, in short.

Jason Ryberg

Evening Birds

With the sunset comes
the first of the evening
birds, with their glassy

eyes and piercing blue
notes, bragging about all their
women in the dark

places of our quaint
little neighborhood, the sun
now nothing but a

residue of pink
and gold on the horizon,
and the stars just now

focusing all their
distant gazes upon us
from places that some

scientists say are
now just giant holes in space,
that lead somewhere else.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. 

Gloria Mindock

Bucha

A tragedy
The sky turned red
Blood
The Russian soldiers fed

With force, with guns
A village now hostage
They rounded up who they could
Pulling them out of their houses
Hands tied behind backs

Screams, shots, rape, brutality
Families watched their loved ones
Murdered

HORROR

The world cries with hearts broken
But does not help
Sends weapons only
Making victims of all of us

Souls of the deceased will never rest
Until freedom is achieved
The broken land rejoined

Standing with Ukraine
The colors of your flag raised
Blend in with the sky
Sunflowers wilted
But soon will bloom
As evil is defeated

Bucha, we love you

Gloria Mindock is editor of Červená Barva Press. She is the author of 6 poetry collections, and 3 chapbooks. Her poems have been published and translated into eleven languages. Her recent book is ASH (Glass Lyre Press, 2021) won 7 book awards and was translated into Serbian by Milutin Durickovic and published by Alma Press. Her new book, “Grief Touched the Sky at Night” is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Gloria was the Poet Laureate in Somerville, MA in 2017 & 2018. www.gloriamindock.com

Jason Baldinger

a bed of dead lizards

hear that gravel bellied song
that gravel bellied reply
these birds foreign to me flash
flickers of color unrecognized

shelled by a walnut tree
I sit on match sticks, splinters
cows low at that side of the road
sun hasn’t broke the ridgeline
soon heat will reach dangerous

I’ve memorized this same sky
deep in the wings of night
when the only sounds
are cricket’s legs
and the slow burn of stars

as night stretches
time is once again
valueless

it's past time to shelter
crawl into a bed of dead lizards
let the swamp cooler
take the sting
out of that thermometer

or see if the tire patch
will handle this sticky tarmac
through one armadillo towns
complete with headless bears
and collapsed eaves

in a roadhouse
I order a gallon of sweet tea
a platter of catfish
let the air conditioner be my spine

if luck holds
beyond mark twain
or the mississippi
then it's keokuk
the sixty-one highway
disappears
the ghosts of iowa
eccentric as howard hughes

Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA.  He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, as well as two ekphrastic collaborations (with Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) are forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster. His etsy shop can be found under the tag la belle riviere.