Chad Parenteau

Working Misanthrope Versus Pandemic

They stole my singularity.

Back to being among, not of.

I played. I lost. I want to leave.

No ball back. Home already here.

#meetoos #neveryous both

rejoice, tap on my glass bubble.

No more I-love-you-don't-touch-mes.

Hell is other people calling you back.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus, released in 2013 by FootHills Publishing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tell-Tale Inklings, Queen Mob's Tea House, What Rough Beast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Ibbetson Street, Molecule and Résonance. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. He has hosted the long-running Stone Soup Poetry series in Boston since 2004. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming. 

Susan Tepper

Drip

A drip from the eaves

into the gutter

has kept me awake

most of the night

it's been raining

my pillow is wet.

I dreamt Bobby Darin

came back after

forty years of silence.

What would Sandra Dee

do finding him jigging

to Mack the Knife

in her living room?

I miss you.

Even though we never had

a single intimate moment.

Would you notice

if I slipped away

quiet for

forty years.

Susan Tepper is the author of nine published books of fiction and poetry. Her two most recent titles are CONFESS (poetry from Cervena Barva Press, 2020) and a road novel WHAT DRIVES MEN (Wilderness House Press, 2019) that was shortlisted at American Book Fest. Other honors and awards include eighteen Pushcart Prize Nominations, a Pulitzer Nomination by Cervena Barva Press for the novel ‘What May Have Been’ (re-written for adaptation as a stage play to open in NY next year), shortlisted in Zoetrope Contest for the Novel (2003), NPR’s Selected Shorts for ‘Deer’ published in American Letters & Commentary (ed. Anna Rabinowitz), Second Place Winner in StorySouth Million Writers Award, Best of 17 Years of Vestal Review and more. Tepper is a native New Yorker. www.susantepper.com

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

To Ann’s Typewriter

for Anne Menebroker

Will you tell me HERE,

typewriter, what you miss most

about Anne since she’s been away?

She’s with you still, you say.

Are you SERIOUS?
The words remain.

Someone still reads them

and finds joy.

Will you tell me more?

My ears have perked up.

Let it all out in typewriter

speak. I am down.

Tell me more. I am right here.

Drink in hand,

I feel so peaceful

like if the ocean was outside

my door and the mountains

on the other side.

Will you go on typewriter?

The sky is crying.

Rain is falling down.

Can I come back again someday?

You’re a lovely LECHEROUS MACHINE.

Like Ann said, with a slow and greedy excitement,
you find a way to end one’s days.

Luis has lived in California for 45 years. He works in the mental health field in Los Angles. His poetry has appeared in Ariel Chart, Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, The Rye Whiskey Review, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Mama Magazine. 

Simon Perchik

A single page, barely room
tries, almost fits its envelope
the way splinters already there

know exactly where your hand
was trying to reach - at the end
her name, all else is doubt

though once face down even you
will stare at the wood, half table
half crate leaving a place

- the letter will get used to you, stay
festering between your fingers
through no fault on their own.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8

David Cranmer

The Inconsiderate

On a dirt road threading out of Port-au-Prince

A man discarded alongside the ditch

By thugs, former Tonton Macoute,

Laid flat with machete hacks

Bits of bone and brain fan out from the wound  

Blood seeping into the dry, dusty ground.

Our squad arrives securing the scene,

Interviewing witnesses and recording the crime

Two MPs stoop by the corpse, and strike a pose

A souvenir picture is snapped while nearby

Cordoned off with onlookers, a woman cries.

Étienne, our assigned interpreter, tells the GIs

The weeping woman is mother to the deceased

But they do not flinch—it is lost on them

How they are treating her son’s remains

Like the trophy hunters of some big game.

Years on, these soldiers would be dead too,

But that day in Haiti, it was going well for them.

David Cranmer is the editor of the BEAT to a PULP webzine and whose own body of work has appeared in such diverse publications as The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, LitReactor, Macmillan’s Criminal Element, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. He's a dedicated Whovian who enjoys jazz and backgammon. He can be found physically in scenic upstate New York where he lives with his wife and daughter, and he can be found virtually on Twitter @BEATtoaPULP.

Richard Fox

Rudy Dog and me

Blood in Rudy’s diarrhea. Again.

Standing, he rocks. Tail glued to anus.

Fifteen years threaten to topple him.

I stroke his back, trace each spiny ridge.

My hand nestles his rib cage, 

supports legs that crumble from caress.

I lift him into my arms,  palm cups his bottom.

He jerks his head away. My chin, a hazard?

His nose searches. He nuzzles my beard.

Rudy and me, we’re mates crawling the same arc.

After my chemo, he curls next to my chest,

a sentry for a decade. We share his purple blanket.

Aging, disease disrupt the fulcrum.

Must help him up, down from the couch.

Cuddle him when confusion mars his face. 

We sense our debility, the erosion of awareness.

Gastric attacks leave him more brittle.

Infusions wither me irreversibly.

I wonder, should we pose beneath the purple blanket?

Me, holding his rear paws? He, snout balanced 

on my shoulder? Let sleep bless our arrival. 

When not writing about rock ’n roll or youthful transgressions, Richard Fox focuses on cancer from the patient’s point of view drawing on hope, humor, and unforeseen gifts. He is the author of four poetry collections and the winner of the 2017 Frank O’Hara Prize.  - smallpoetatlarge.com

Susan Tepper's Confess, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Susan Tepper

Confess

$8.00

 ISBN:978-1-950063-38-3

 21 pages

Cervena Barva Press

Susan Tepper's Confess is a small intimate gathering of reflective poems from Cervena Barva Press published in 2020. One of the many problems with collecting a group of poems is that you have to decide if you want a book with some unity, not a miscellany. Miscellanies are all right, certainly, and they comprise most books of poetry printed today, but you want another unifying factor. The title CONFESS  lends itself to the illusion of forward momentum. What is the narrator confessing, and to what end?

"I come to you broken/have been trying to say/all that is not the way/it shows on the surface," the narrator says opening the first poem. They follow this statement up with a nostalgic description of an old photo as an illustration of exactly how broken they are, with the placid surfaces of the photo's subjects--Victorian women--undermined by the fact that the narrator has baldly told us they're broken to begin with. And the questions begin: broken by what? An interesting enigmatic opening move.

Many of these poems move by quickly--they're generally short--yet that consistency of mood prevails as show in this masterful short piece midway through:

Part & Parcel

Close the shutters

Allow darkness to rip

Your eyes in tide pools.

Two suitcases, side by sided,

Have yet to be unpacked.

Excuses, elaborations

Does this mean we won't stay long?

You're flattened by so many roads

I am stung and run over.

Two suitcases: it's been written

Part & Parcel by your own hand.

The minimal punctuation allows the poem to be read at a sort of angry breakneck speed, which fits it well.. While in most cases, I'd like the poet to direct my attention more, the deft use of impactful  verbs throughout rip and flatten a reader as well as speed up the poem. The art of the short line in evidence here is commendable as well.

Finally I'd like to talk about the larger question of the poem, what the narrator is confessing, and to what end. We often think of confession as something with a religious sense, with the end result being forgiveness for our sins. Or the more broadly confessional scene of the dark night wherein we confess our deepest secrets to the ones we love in the hope of gaining mutual understanding.  Or, the professional  confines of the purely therapeutic confession, where the box of antiseptic tissues is always available for emotional leavings, or even, in these Covid-19 times, the group therapy confessional of the, God help us, Zoom conference. What is Tepper's narrator confessing? My guess is a combination of these things. The poems don't strive for meaning but rather gather round and create an overarching theme: mortality. Which is what all poems come down to anyway.