POETRY
selected by Felicia Mitchell, author of Waltzing with Horses
Cris Eli Blak
Followed by Author Bio
A Year in the Life
365 days
8,760 hours
525,600 minutes
31,536,000 seconds
and nothing to show for it.
I’ve run out of windows to
smash,
there’s no more glass to fight,
no more relationships to walk
away from,
no more friends to lose,
no more lungs to bruise.
This is my requiem.
The last moment of the last act
of the show that no one cared to
show up to
because they knew it
wouldn’t last.
The angels named me Christian and
I can only assume that
that means that at one
point they had complete
faith in me,
expected me to be something
special and I do try (a lot)
and I do fail (a lot).
But a man once
told me that it’s not about
if you fail,
it’s about when you fail
and when you fail you will
fall and have scratches on
your feet,
but in some places schools have
been cremated and hospitals have
been bombed.
Your hair is not made of twigs.
Your sweat is not poison.
Your spit is not nuclear.
And for someone who lives in a time
when each year
55.3 million people die,
12.7 million get diagnosed with cancer,
you quite frankly do not have the right
to condemn the year you lived.
Notice that for everyone who dies,
131.4 million are born and that’s not
counting those who are born again,
those like me who
tumble and fumble and try each time
to get back up as someone different.
My middle name is the name
originally meant for the brother
who never made it,
who would have been older than me
but who never got to see the shine
of a day
because he came out a stillborn but
I was still born and I’d be lying if I said
that that shit didn’t bother me.
It is known that I am afraid
of nothing except myself,
that I would rather walk into
a cave of wolves than look
at my own reflection.
Out of 12 months
we may not even wake to
see one day.
365 days
8,760 hours
525,600 minutes
31,536,000 seconds
and I’m
still
standing.
~ ~ ~
Cris Eli Blak is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet. He won the Christopher Hewitt Award in Fiction for his short story "Soul Cowboys," published in A&U (Arts & Understanding) Magazine. As a poet, he has won two poetry slams and has been published by the International Human Rights Arts Festival. He has also performed poetry at the Dramebaazi Children's Theatre Festival, based out of India, and the Youth For Justice and Peace Showcase for Racial Equality. His article, "Born Guilty," was published in I Taught the Law journal. He wrote the script and co-produced The Brother's Survivor, winner of a Bronze Remi Award from the Worldfest Houston International Film Festival. As an award-winning playwright, he has worked with theaters from New York to London. He can be found on Instagram @criseliblak.
Derek Furr
Followed by Author Bio
Poor Jack
April 2020
My son and his mother wept when Jack died
In By the Shores of Silver Lake. It was fall.
I came home from teaching fifth grade.
They were collapsed on the couch,
Sammy was five, red-haired and plump,
Trembling, wedged under Caroline’s wing.
She sobbed and stroked his back, and I
Dropped my bag at the door, I was numb
With fear, “Who had died? Our dog?”
Outside the beeches were bronze, the wood thrush
Had not yet migrated, winesaps were ripe.
It was a dress rehearsal, if an unexpected one,
Like the faulty smoke alarm, angina, the missed curfew
That could be a car wreck. Everyone has them,
Often through a book: prairie fires, scarlet fever,
Or as in Anna Karenina, when she regrets,
Too late, that she has bowed down in darkness.
I saw this coming, knew it the second time,
And I teared up in spite of the foreknowledge,
Or because of it, who knows?
Today,
Two dogs later, we are on the same green couch,
Dilapidated now. We laugh to remember
Boohooing mother and son, flummoxed father,
Poor Jack (such a sad story!) while
Sickness sweeps the country, the Dow
Plummets, hospitals and morgues surge,
Prophets warn, “He’ll steal the election
Again.” Then Caroline recalls, “I was
Pregnant on 9/11—eight months—
So was the bagel shop girl,
What are we doing, she asked me
Through her tears as she made change,
Bringing children into this?”
Out our window
A masked boy pedals his tricycle.
His masked mother stops to admire
Our lawn full of bluebells.
Sammy answers his phone in Japanese,
Smiles (the girlfriend) and dashes upstairs.
Gabby (the dog) grunts.
Czesław Miłosz wrote
That on the day the world ends, an old man
Binding tomatoes repeats, “There will be no other
End of the world.” It was midsummer,
In Warsaw, 1944. People like to point out
It was sunny on 9/11, it’s Passover and Easter
For the pandemic, it may be Happy Thanksgiving
For Armageddon. Poor Jack,
We’re curled up on the couch with the idea
Of you, of how your people loved you
By their fireside, how they huddled
Under a blanket and imagined the worst
And remembered the best.
~ ~ ~
Derek Furr is the author of two mixed-genre collections, Suite for Three Voices and Semitones, and has new work in Raritan, Jacket2, and Forum. He grew up in rural North Carolina, taught public school in Virginia, and lives now with his family in the Hudson Valley, where he teaches literature and directs the MAT Program at Bard College.
Laura Lucas
Followed by Author Bio
evol
in an old photograph i stand next to a woman
feeding the seagulls under a melbourne blue
sky. i don’t know her but i know her name
is love spelt backwards. i know that she let me
secretly eat the banana candies when mum told
me i couldn’t have any. i know that she is still
alive and that she lives somewhere up the coast.
i know that her granddaughter has a face full
of freckles and is the same age as me. what i
don’t know is if she remembers the version
of herself that exists in the photograph or if
she would recognize me in the street. i don’t
know if she spends her days stitching loose
threads together like i do or if she has made
peace with the passage of time. i don’t know
if that day felt fast or slow or under who’s
roof i slept that night. what i want to know is if
she ever imagines what i must look like now and
if my hair is still pale blonde (it’s not). i want
to know if her son loved my mother and if he
would have loved me too. but mostly what i
want to know is if a bluish purple bruise formed
on the knuckle of his hand after slipping it inside
the closing door at the airline gate. the photograph
feels delicate on my fingertips. like if it were to be
destroyed then so too would the memory. the
seagulls and the woman and the girl and her pink
striped hat. gone. like none of it ever happened.
the swimming in the ocean and the crying at the
airport. the cockroach on the payphone during
our layover in hawaii. the magpies and the
banana candies and the twelve apostles. the love
and the hate and the little jean skirt. the rental
house and the night our neighbours’ roof caught
fire. lose the photograph and lose everything. the
entire history of a girl: vanished into thin, blue air.
~ ~ ~
Laura Lucas is a Canadian poet and folk singer-songwriter. Laura is passionate about music, yoga, and traveling with a purpose. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Iris Literary Journal, Burnt Pine Magazine, From Whispers to Roars, and elsewhere. Laura's music can be found on all streaming platforms.
Rebecca Bratten Weiss
Followed by Author Bio
The Prayers of the Faithful
In Assisi, I saw the greenish-white, wax-encased
body of Santa Chiara, unrotted, a stern Italian
woman with a majestic nose. I had heard she was
fresh faced and golden haired, but instead she
just looked tired of it all. Holding beads, grimly.
In Padua, I saw the tongue of St. Anthony, or maybe
his heart. It’s hard to remember, after so many
fingers, so many foreskins. Like recollecting nights
with different bodies, different hands discovering yours.
Ask yourself, if you become a saint, what will
your relic be? Which part of yourself will squabbling,
pious villagers steal from your crypt by night?
Which breast, bone, or tooth will the faithful
bedazzle with rubies, enshrine in tabernacles?
And what part might you nestle in a cedar box, tie
with silk string, send to a lover? What note would
you send to explain? “Please do not be disturbed by
this shriveled tongue, this is my body that
loved your body, this is intended tenderly.”
Or perhaps this desiccation is too abrupt,
you’d prefer your severed hand or ear or breast
get a little time to itself, get its bearings in its new
solitary state, before dispatching it with messages?
Like Gogol’s “Nose,” trotting innocent across bridges,
enjoying a jaunt with no dreary face to hold it down.
This is a lesson in learning to love your body
as you loved theirs. To count each finger as a relic.
Imagine your bones glittering with gems,
imagine your breasts as loaves of feast-day bread.
Imagine your lover kissing the green-hued
rattled bone of your singular unattached foot.
You have learned to carry your body like a mule
carries coal, learn now how to flaunt it like
St Bartholomew flaunts his flayed skin,
raise it like a banner.
Now take it to bed the way you might take the
severed head of a corpse. Place it beneath
the sheets. Let it bleed out. Let the sleeper
wake and find it, hot and dank. Wait outside
and listen for his screams. Know your power.
~ ~ ~
Rebecca Bratten Weiss is the author of Mud Woman, a collaborative chapbook with Joanna Penn Cooper (Dancing Girl Press, 2018) and a chapbook Talking to Snakes (Ethel, Summer 2020). Her creative work has appeared in numerous publications, including Two Hawks Quarterly, Jesus the Imagination, Convivium, Connecticut River Review, New Ohio Review, Slipstream, Shooter, Gyroscope, Ethel Zine, and On the Seawall. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Rebecca's essays have appeared in The Green Room, The Tablet, The Blog of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Human Life Review, Delta Epsilon Sigma, US Catholic, Plough, Image, and at her Patheos column, Suspended in Her Jar. Rebecca recently completed work on The Dirt, an eco-feminist novel exploring the impact of the fracking industry on a dysfunctional Ohio family. She is also in the process of revising The Peacemakers, a speculative literary sci-fi in which women in a near-future matriarchy control men via advanced AI technology.