Sam Barbee

Eclipse

A lone rooster, his swollen comb flops
as he scratches and struts. Ruling
only himself during the eclipse.
Does he close his eyes . . .

consoled by a silent roost,
fear the fox skull’s yowl?
He flails and tucks appetites
in a retrievable place.

In the false morn, you nap again
beneath crimson sheets. I cool on top
remembering days no sheath
could separate us. This shredded place

where we sleep, its bruised linens
will never again invite yearning.
Dawn slips past the moon.
From the fencepost, the rooster sounds.

Sam Barbee's poems have appeared Poetry South, The NC Literary Review, Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology VII: North Carolina, Georgia Journal, Kakalak, and Pembroke Magazine, among others; plus on-line journals Vox Poetica, The Voices Project, Courtland Review, and The New Verse News.  His second poetry collection, That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), was a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016.  He was awarded an "Emerging Artist's Grant" from the Winston-Salem Arts Council to publish his first collection Changes of Venue (Mount Olive Press); has been a featured poet on the North Carolina Public Radio Station WFDD; received the 59th Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for his poem "The Blood Watch"; and is a Pushcart nominee.  

Howie Good

Another Word for Dystopia

They kicked in the door. Your wife screamed. A few of them were wearing white lab coats as if they were doctors. The world was behaving in ways you wouldn’t have believed possible just a short while ago. With a “doctor” on each side, and the people in neighboring apartments covertly watching, you were hustled down the stairs and across the street and into an ambulance. To this day, no one will talk about what might have become of you. Everything is either too hot or too cold; nothing is soft. Prepubescent girls have dreams eight feet high and made of steel.



Mad Love

You’re the equivalent in French to “a crime gorgeously lit by big arched windows” and why street level drug dealers are now conniving to work their way up to roof level. Soon towns and even mid-sized cities are going to be petitioning to be renamed for you. A headline says Johnny Depp Is Radioactive, but how many people besides you know an isotope when they see one or that puddles are the autographs of rain? If you were a month, you’d be a torrential August. There are rose-choked paths winding through you where day feels like night and the rain that shakes the petals loose shakes me.



Myths of the Near Future

Black-winged angels circle overhead like birds of prey. The last surviving shul is being converted to use as a tool shed. Out front a noose has been looped around the neck of a statue of Anne Frank. We’re approaching the hour when torturers report in for the night shift. Meanwhile, some two thousand women and girls rally in the park against menstruation despite the ashes of burning rivers whirling down in gusts. Young soldiers accompanied by snarling German shepherds patrol the perimeter of the crowd. The soldiers are forbidden on pain of death to make friends with the dogs.



Broken Highway

Forget God and religion, what the skinny Buddha is called. Follow the broken highway, and when you do, the only witness against you will be the flamboyant bird of the desert. You’ll pass through red nights and long white days and have a guarantee of a chance to win one of 1,000 prizes – everything from a string of fairy lights to an ear in a folded piece of paper on which someone has printed, “Take it, it will be useful.” Even so, your identity will remain a secret, as there’s no word yet in English for a parent who’s lost a child.

Howie Good's latest full-length poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, is due in early 2021 from Thirty West.

Todd Mercer

Bassett Park, 1983

Sure, we fought among ourselves. Sometimes tempers
flared due to friction and over-familiarity, close walls.
But let an outsider mess with any one of us? Every quarrel
went on hold. The persecutor faced a big problem
with the entire neighborhood. United in mutual defense.
Tommy Ridenour cut another boy with a knife,
there at Bassett Park. Damn near bled out. That delinquent
would mess with anyone, without apparent rationale.
Months later police came for him on an unrelated matter,
appearing in force at his door. The kid Tommy cut
improvised proactively, made a distraction, cover enough
that his attacker got away and over the river.
Neighborhood to the Nth degree. Old School style.

Todd Mercer (who writes because it’s cheaper than drugs) was nominated for Fiction and Poetry Pushcarts last year. His collection Ingenue was published in 2020 by Celery City Press. Recent work appears in Praxis, The Lake and Star 82 Review.

Tony Brown

How To Speak Of Death To Your Fellow Americans

To begin with, take off your funeral suit
but do not put it completely away
in the back of the spare room closet.
Do not forget how it looks on you
and how often you’ve had to wear it.

When you begin to speak, remember
that some folks have never been to
the number of funerals you’ve attended.
Some have never been to any
and will not understand a word you say
but talk anyway. Some don’t believe
people die as often or as unfairly
as you know they do

and you will not make them feel grief
easily or quickly. Talk anyway; you might need
visual aids. Some only see death
when it’s as close as the next room
so when you speak of death to them,
you will have to simulate the sound
of death knocking on the adjoining wall
to make them understand.

Some of them will smirk and speak
of Darwin and some will speak of Jesus.
All of these people will speak of what is right
and what is deserved; most will stare you down
and shout the word “justice.” Talk anyway, seeking
those among them who, even as they sneer,
will avert their eyes. Talk to them; ignore the rest.

Many of them will be the kind of people who say,
“If I die…” Show them your funeral suit; tell them
how often you’ve worn it; show them the shiny cuffs,
the worn tie tucked in the pocket after the church hall
reception; say the names of the dead and how often
they died saying, “if I die…tell them how
I was killed. If I die, make it mean something. If I die,
remember my name.”

Maybe you will say something to someone that will work
but don’t put away your funeral suit after that.
Don’t bury it deep. Don’t assume you’ll get to wear it again
only when they put you at last into the ground.



This My Body

This, my body:

nondescript and hard-regretted tattoos,
pedestrian piercings, a belly hung
over the belt line, badly crusted feet,
wounds long healed in the skin if not
in the tissues below. I claim the title of
man covered in evidence of mistakes
that led to this being, this now.

Some would say do not fall into the trap of comparison
but here I am staring into my own eyes, seeing
coal mountain strip mine, railroad cut
in New England granite, shoreline wasted
under washed up oil and the garbage of decades.
I claim the title of warning shot, alarm
long ringing and long ignored.

Old friends stand aside,
watch me self-inspect; they do not interfere.
Who knows me, knows I will go hard upon
this dark body, down this long tunnel called old man,
will mine it until I can draw out gold from poison.
I claim the title: I am temple of hard road.

Tony Brown has been writing for over 50 years, and publishing and performing his work for over 40. A seven-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best Of The Net nominee, he has traveled the country, slammed for the Worcester Poets’ Asylum, and organized and hosted many readings and reading series. His most recent eBooks and publications can be found through his Patreon site (https://www.patreon.com/TonyBrown). His daily poetry blog is available at http://radioactiveart.blog . He resides in Worcester, MA. Tony most commonly performs his poetry with The Duende Project in collaboration with Steven Lanning-Cafaro on electric bass and classical guitar, Christopher Lawton on guitar, and Chris O’Donnell on drums;  They have released six collections of their work, available on all the usual online streaming and download outlets. More information can be found at their Website: http://theduendeproject.com

Max Heinegg

Religion in the COVID Wing

Waking, we see her glove the door, adjusting
her cloak, light capped in the shadows
of the morning ward, her bearing the proof
of faith I have mocked my entire life

bowing to us, frightened father & child
whose fever is breaking up. What fortune
she would leave the realm of light to find us here
pinned to the bed, startled from a blanketed chair.



Godsend

The baby in the COVID wing is crying
during quiet hours. Through the glass,
I see the source, just sitting up,
the parents on both sides attending.
Knowing to be here meant it was in danger,
as my child was, in our room, because a strain
of the virus forces the heart to stop its own
& all the insurance & human eyes on micro-
scopes, & every money-driven ingenuity
cannot guard, only monitor. The child’s cries
did not pierce, because I believed it would live.
Not for innocence, or virtue, or mercy, but
for youth, a divine shield she was given
that this day guarded her life.

Max Heinegg is an English teacher and singer-songwriter who lives in Medford, MA. His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Thrush, Nimrod, and Kestrel. His music can be found at

https://maxheinegg.bandcamp.com/

Mr. Rogers Kills Fruit Flies, by Scott Ferry, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Mr Rogers Kills Fruit Flies

Scott Ferry

Main Street Rag 2020

53 pages

$13

978-1-59948-825-7

Scott Ferry is a poet of lengthy breath and a surreal logic, used to reveal the intricacies of a mind gently turned on itself. The book is divided into three sections: Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies; how to cross eyelid bridge; Divination by; each with its own character and concerns. Early in the first section, narrated by historical figures in unusual situations, Ferry stopped my poetry-musing--that pleasant state wherein one thumbs the book lovingly, looking for the good word--with the beginning lines of 'Joseph Campbell dreams of war.'

It started in the bathroom, mirror etched in ice,   

the razor's rhetoric on jawline tearing up

trees and children, and here in my home!

But I cannot leave Jean unbeknown

on the lanai. I look to the East, there

is a mountain of bodies skinned bare

like antelope. In the crater their identities

cave in, obtund. The lava waves fragrant

like hibiscus and rot. . .

The odd and surreal juxtaposition of ice in stanza one and lanai in st. two can't prepare us for the 'mountain of bodies' and the lava fragrant with hibiscus and rot. The poem continues, referencing spirits as disparate as Wonder Woman, Krishna, Hanuman, Sita, and finally Charon the ferryman, whom we find does not accept credit. I appreciate the willingness of the poet to direct the reader outside the poem and pleasantly down the rabbit hole of research via these casual mentions of Gods and beings. 

In the second section subtitled 'titles of children's books that will never be written' the reader finds a number of astonishing poems of genetic engineering (Gilly and the tiger wings) and fish cleaning an octopus (clockwise the sleeping octopus) and my favorite of these, "a bee in the maze of springs and wasps."

If my Queen wishes, I will go again,

past the poppies and the dripping ferns,

past the wasp Queen and the yellow-toothed den,

over the coils of high wires that crack and burn

to find the low moist strawberry beds

white and gold, and the blackberry stamens

between the taut thorns of rust and red

and the backlit lavender bulbs illumined.

I suppose there have been poems from bee POV before but I can't recall them, and if I could recall them I doubt they'd be this good. The easy inobtrusive off-rhymes and near-iambic lines guide us through the bee's journey out to serve its Queen and back to serve again. I don't think I'm such a romantic until I read poems like this one. It's a great poem.

Section three falters only a bit for me, as poems of divination force me to figure out the form of the divination rather than enjoying the form of the poem, but that doesn't mean there aren't great poems here as well. "Cleidomancy: by keys," is one such example, what appears to be a simple list poem is complicated when the narrator leaves the list-making and concentrates on the metaphorical key to the present, a list of what his spouse and child are doing, and the surprises embedded in their day.

As the poem begins, "Nothing to open. I cast them in order," it finishes with "I don't need any other keys. I don't want to know." The poet has come full circle to the present, and finding no divinatory keys to the present, he decides he doesn't want them anyway.

I don't know if I've done justice to the full round of complexity in these poems; they're not difficult to read, but they're intellectually heady, exciting. Especially in the first two sections, I find a poet and writer ready to take us out of our comfortable norms and try to show us something new. That's really as much as I can hope for in a poem or a book of poems. I'll look forward to whatever Ferry does next.

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal

Star Gazing

Softly gazing at the stars;
If I could name one, it would
be a lucky guess. To be versed
in astronomy, to know just a
little bit more; I only know
that stars are small from
where I stand. What do you
want me to do? I want to
decorate my room with them.
I would take a point, small as
a needlepoint. These are my
musings tonight. It is not all
I think about in this empty
house, in this empty room.
Often, I think about you and
how I love your laughter. I am
on my own tonight. There are
no barricades in front of my
door. But I digress, I do not
take the stars for granted.
Just between us, I am going
to learn their names, or just
one or two once each year.

Luis lives in Southern California, works in Los Angeles, and has a new poetry book coming out from Rogue Wolf Press in 2021. The book is entitled Make the Water Laugh. His prior books and chapbooks over the past two decades were published by Deadbeat Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, New Polish Beat, Poet's Democracy, Propaganda Press, and Pygmy Forest Press. New poems will appear at Otolith, Piker Press, and Yellow Mama Webzine in 2021.