Cheryl Wilder’s collection Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection (Press 53), received Second Finalist in the Poetry Society of Virginia North American Book Award and Honorable Mention in the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. She is the author of the chapbook, What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press), and her work appears in Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath (Press 53), Barely South Review, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. She served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE, held residency at SAFTA, and received a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant for her forthcoming poetry collection. Co-founder of Waterwheel Review and president of the Burlington Writers Club, Cheryl earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her home is near the Haw River in North Carolina.
Steve Cushman
“What You Don’t Know”
What You Don’t Know
Is that I once left you on a Tuesday in 2007,
called in to work and drove four hours north,
toward Massachusetts, the state of my birth.
I had planned to stay with family for a week
tell them it was only a vacation, but stay there
long enough to figure out my next steps. The
plan, if you can call it that, was coming together
until I stopped at that Exxon in Richmond and
while filling up I looked over and in the Buick
at the next pump was an older couple, and she was
feeding him a Honeybun, which on any other
day may not have mattered, the way she held the
sweet treat, bit off her own piece and then offered
it to him and he took a bite, closed his eyes and
then they looked at each other and smiled. It broke,
and opened, my heart in ways nothing had in years.
Sure, they must have had rough stretches, but they’d
somehow made it through. When I arrived home,
around seven, you asked if I’d worked late and I said
I had. You took a bite of the Honeybun I offered,
even let me kiss your sugar-sweetened lips.
~ ~ ~
Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. He has published two poetry chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award. A new collection, Eating Paradise Without You, is forthcoming from Unicorn Press in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and works in the IT department at Cone Health.
Patricia L. Hamilton
“Counterpoint”
Counterpoint
Mr. Stoa taught us Bartók, notes clustered in discordant patterns
like words with too many consonants.
One Saturday when we rehearsed at his apartment
he disappeared into the bedroom to tend to his wife’s needs.
Like words with too many consonants
her disease, scleroderma, was hard to pronounce.
He disappeared into the bedroom to tend to his wife’s needs,
hoping she'd be cheered by our junior-high exuberance.
Her disease, scleroderma, was hard to pronounce.
We were young, inexperienced with mortality,
hoping she'd be cheered by our junior-high exuberance.
“That monkey!” a father sniped behind Mr. Stoa's back.
We were young, inexperienced with mortality,
with prejudice against the unfamiliar.
“That monkey!” a father sniped behind Mr. Stoa's back,
frowning at our teacher's beard and Birkenstocks.
With prejudice against the unfamiliar,
our parents kept a watchful eye on us,
frowning at our teacher's beard and Birkenstocks.
How Mr. Stoa loved Bach—motets, partitas, fugues.
Our parents kept a watchful eye on us
although Top Hits radio taught us all about Woodstock.
How Mr. Stoa loved Bach—motets, partitas, fugues—
weaving Baroque music into our lives as a labor of love.
Although Top Hits radio taught us all about Woodstock,
we practiced stately sarabandes on our recorders,
weaving Baroque music into our lives as a labor of love
at that gangly age when interests careen in all directions.
We practiced stately sarabandes on our recorders
while the nightly news focused on draft dodgers and riots.
At that gangly age when interests careen in all directions,
we held a pancake breakfast to raise money for a harpsichord.
While the nightly news focused on draft dodgers and riots,
the wife's fingers grew slack from the effort to hold on.
We held a pancake breakfast to raise money for a harpsichord,
only dimly guessing at the heartbreak that lay ahead.
The wife's fingers grew slack from the effort to hold on.
One Saturday when we rehearsed at his apartment,
only dimly guessing at the heartbreak that lay ahead,
Mr. Stoa taught us Bartók, notes clustered in discordant patterns.
~ ~ ~
Patricia L. Hamilton, a professor of English in Jackson, TN, is the author of The Distance to Nightfall (Main Street Rag). She won the Rash Award in Poetry in 2015 and 2017 and has received three Pushcart nominations. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Broad River Review, The Windhover, Slant, and Bindweed.
Justin Hunt
“Today We Hauled Your Toys from the Attic”
Today We Hauled Your Toys from the Attic
A crate full of Legos. The wooden train set
you and I laid out a hundred times. Mickey
and Tigger—bedraggled, misshapen. The rusty
Esso station the older boy next door, Michi,
handed down before we left Germany.
And all those books we read, trying our best
to calm you: Pu der Bär, Swimmy der Fisch,
Three Billy Goats Gruff, the Touch-Me
series with their furry pages—the cottontail
you patted as your mother held you in her lap.
We brushed away thirty years of dust,
packed it all up, put your very first toy on top:
the roly-poly penguin you played with
in your crib. I’m sure you’d remember it—
its egg shape, soothing chimes and blue,
weighted bottom. How it would wobble,
pitch and roll but always come gently to rest,
always find a way back to its feet.
~ ~ ~
Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has won several awards and appears in a wide range of publications in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including, among others, Barrow Street, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Journal, Solstice, Arts & Letters, The Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Terrain.org, Southword, Live Canon and The Bridport Prize Anthology. He is currently assembling a debut poetry collection.
Katherine Tunning
“True Things”
True Things
Sometimes true things are too good to leave out.
Like how you never finished reading Anna Karenina
after your borrowed copy fell overboard
on the boat crossing Lake Titicaca.
Or how in the midst of the months of chemo,
every day the same day stretched in one long
loop from grocery to doctor to pharmacy
and back, ticket home crumpled in the trash,
I took up as a hobby cracking
the combinations of the locks
I found around my parents’ house.
It isn’t hard. You just need a calculator
and nothing better to do than tune
your whole self to the slow ticking
of metal, listening for the moment
when something even slightly different happens.
Like how one morning I stared into the open pantry
then turned to my father, bald and stooped
and seeming very small,
and told him gravely:
If you take the letter E out of Cream of Wheat,
it spells CRAM OF WHAT.
Or even how one night after turning out the lamp,
we knocked our heads so hard together
that insight blazed up white as lightning and I shouted
Pug dogs and Fig Newtons are the same color!
which is absolutely true, and just goes to show
that truth is value-neutral. Carries no more weight
than those weightless swollen pages
fanned out at the bottom of the lake,
some endemic fish still waiting for a Latin name
nibbling with interest at the edges, trying an E
and discarding it, trying another and then
with sudden flick and shiver swimming off, pursued by
nothing. No gleam of coming train, no
midnight phone call, no terrible crack of light.
~ ~ ~
Katherine Tunning lives in Boston with her partner and a highly variable number of cats. Some of her recent poetry and fiction has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Waxwing, The Penn Review, and Washington Square Review. You can find her online at www.katherinetunning.com