6 – Poetry

By Howard Kuenning

We’re all Gatsby, always have been, standing lonely on our own pier, 
Looking for the certain future, rich as Croesus, really, in this world, 
Food, rent, man, and printed books online. It’s all on line!
Which line? Not really sure, when just a click in is a false fantasy 
Self-policed by Keanu Reeves algorithmic goggle-eyed, Google-eyed, 
Dr. Octo surge machines running their traps along the frozen tracks of 
Our pitiless dreams—Me. Mine. My thirst. My hunger. 
Feed this Dream, the American Dream, 
Hydrogen clouds of nano-fission uncontrolled accelerants 
Seeded and harvested in simultaneous and decayed extinction 
Beyond the reach of any kind of Archeology on this campus, 
This field, opposing teams faced off in this early moment of
A new Age of Hope, Build Back Better. Back, where? 
To some pre-pandemic Eden that rudely shoves our 
Rotten American Dream of white privilege back in line 
With the failed Utopias of dreamless sleep, where nightmares lurk, 
Ready to devour hope and promise, the staggering beauty of 
Young hearts and minds dropped like unarmed victims into a 
Turf battle for Truth, the flipped coin of Both Sides Now, 
Yes, Joni, now, Both Sides? Neither looks quite right, does it? 
No, it doesn’t. Yet we stand in this relative quiet, the Global Blowhard 
Silenced by a click out, his scuttling parasites panicked by deafening silence, 
Parched tongues thirsty for deception, unslaked. How does it feel? 
The great alibi turned out to have vacuum for a soul, and the deal is a Con, 
A Great Lie the bedrock on which all deals fail. At some level 
We’re all jugglers and clowns, and the tricks we turn don’t matter 
When we discover that he really wasn’t where it’s at, 
After he took all that he could steal. In fact, there is no where, here. 
It’s over there, marked in every domicile of hope and sanctuary by 
The bright green gleam off Gatsby’s dock, the pitiless alien router eye of a 
Vast Matrix monster gazing from a billion feeds into our hopeless spaces, 
Only a click away. Go to him, now, you can’t refuse. You’ve got nothing to lose, 
Now you’ve lost it all. Invisible, no secrets, concealed.

---

After decades living as an expatriate in Europe, Rick Kuenning lives in western North Carolina.

Rick Kuenning translates lifelong writing and teaching experience into poems informed by a quick and innovative sensibility. His work reflects a keen interest in nature, art, culture, and religious studies. It also draws on a long career in international relations and national policy. He writes with depth and variety; cultural criticism and political censure are leavened with whimsical reflection and lyrical meditations on the natural world. He is stirred by rich language; words formed into beautiful phrases allow us to see in new ways and better understand ourselves. His poems seek to provoke and inspire!

His creativity is often sparked by dialogue with other poems. He is awed by nature, angered by injustice, and moved by the stories of those whose voices are not heard. Rick Kuenning is a versatile, caring, domestic man. He reads widely, enjoys cooking, and listens to classical and popular music. His poems are forthcoming in Perceptions Magazine, Slab, and Variant.

Boring Creds: B.S. United States Military Academy, M.A. (English) Duke University, ABD (English) University of Maryland; English and Philosophy Instructor at the United States Military Academy, English Instructor at the United States Naval Academy.

By John McPherson

Nanuk thought it was time,
time to go out on the ice,
to relieve her family of one more useless
mouth to feed during this hungry time
when seals were scarce. They would
soon have to move. She did not want
to move again, her bones were too achy.

She remembered as a young girl when
the missionaries came; how they gasped
when they learned about the old way of
going out on the ice. Her people learned to
not tell them of such things. It did not happen
often anyway, and never against one’s will.
She had laughed inside at their strange ideas
about how to care for their old ones,
keeping them alive well past their usefulness.    

She would ask her youngest granddaughter
to take her before the rest were awake.
One last ride, to hear the dogs once more,
to feel the icy wind on her face. The bears had gone,
looking for seals. It was a good time to go.
She would find a small mound
to lean back upon, close to the water
where the ice would soon break up
sending her frozen shell to the bottom of the
cool green sea.  

Her spirit, though, would soar to a place
the missionaries knew little about.
It would be good to see the old ones again.

---

John McPherson started writing for contests in 2015 when he was in his mid-seventies. In addition to contests, his poems have appeared in The Avocet, a quarterly publication emphasizing poetry about nature; Post Scrip, an anthology of postcard poetry; and various other anthologies. His short stories have appeared in Del Garrett’s Vault of Terror, Volumes one, two, and three. He has served as President of White County Creative Writers, Gin Creek Poets, and Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas. He currently lives in Searcy, Arkansas, just 20 miles from the small town he grew up in, having lived in Little Rock and Russellville.

By Emily Kocurek

Bleeding.

Her mom’s been bleeding for days.
Transfusion after transfusion,
As if her veins were sieves.

Drinking.
Her mom’s been drinking for years.
Bottle after bottle,
As if her only worry were gin.

Dying.
Her mom’s been dying for hours.
Heartache after heartache,
As if there weren’t enough already.

We sit on the floor together
And discuss impossible objects.
She’s kept eternal hope
But also wished her dead.

Now she holds a jaundiced hand,
As she longed for hers to be held,
And fears this wish fulfilled.
I hold her hand too with our hearts

Bleeding. 

Author’s note: Impossible Objects

---

Emily Kocurek, M.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine. She divides her time at UAMS among her research projects, clinical duties in the medical intensive care unit and pulmonary clinic, and being an associate program director for the internal medicine residency. She is a Little Rock native.

Dedication: To Josh, for always giving me perspective.

By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

In a slot of Grandma Ada’s rolltop, 
I found a hand-colored photo 
of Uncle D. in his Marine uniform, smiling, 
eyes bluer than the overbright sky 
of the hand-tinted tropical backdrop. 

I tried to imagine my gentle uncle, 
who taught me how to whistle and to jitterbug, 
peering out of foxholes that could be blown up
at any moment by a tossed grenade, or crawling 
in slippery sand under gunfire, or searching 
for the enemy whose uniform was the color of sand,
my uncle on that volcanic island that stank of sulfur, 
blood, decaying bodies, the flamethrowers’ smoke. I tried 
to imagine him wielding a Ka-Bar knife to slit a throat, 
or swearing to slit his own throat to avoid capture, 
but I could only see him with his shining eyes, soft smile. 

Decades later, after Uncle D. died, my aunt sent me
a Xerox of his war diary that just detailed
in his chicken scrawl what he ate 
and the New York Yankees’ scores. 

How I knew what he’d gone through 
was that I heard after he’d been home 
a month, my mother, his middle sister, irked him, 
and he flew at her, knocked her to the floor, 
began to choke her. 
My grandparents had to pull him off.

---

Rochelle’s novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. I’ve published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as After the Pause, BoomerLitMag, Brief Wilderness, Brushfire, The Courtship of Winds, Figure 1, La Presa, The Midwest Quarterly, Mudfish, Mudlark, Neologism Poetry Journal, Packingtown Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Westview, The Iowa Review, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Stone Path Review, Frontier Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Stand, Carbon Culture Review, Cider Press Review, Cutbank Literary Journal, Doubly Mad, Edison Literary Review, Evening Street Review, Euphony Journal, Inkwell Magazine, Amarillo Bay, Bayou Magazine, Poet Lore, Crack the Spine, Compass Rose, Controlled Burn, Cumberland River Review, Flights,The Furious Gazelle, Glint Literary Journal, The Griffin, Grub Street, Hey, I’m Alive, I-70 Review, Isacoustic, Los Angeles Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, East Jasmine Review, El Portal, Litbreak Magazine, The Virginia Normal, Chantwood Magazine, The MacGuffin, Memoir And, Moment, The Moth, The Nonconformist, Rougarou, Negative Capability, Penumbra, The Louisville Review, Amoskeag, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Entropy Magazine, Rio Grande Review, riverSedge, Rogue Agent, The Seattle Star, Seven Circle Press: A Literary Micropress, Sierra Nevada Review, Steam Ticket, Streetlight Magazine, Swamp Ape Review, Licking River Review, Whistling Shade, Peregrine, Gulf Coast, Existere, Passager, Midway Journal, Moria Literary Magazine, Empty Mirror, Sanskrit Magazine, Typishly, The Literary Nest, Underwood Press, Willow Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Waxing & Waning, and Wrath-Bearing Tree. Rochelle’s poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Spry Magazine nominated her poem for the Best of the Net. Rochelle currently teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

By Candace Armstrong

I remember her clumping tread,
the rubber-tipped cane
striking the floor before
the halt-slide step.

In a hurry, it was a faster
clump-shush, clump-shush.
As a child, I never understood
why she walked that way.

She’d had polio, her childhood
spent in heavy leg braces,
one leg forever shorter,
lucky she could walk at all.

Her feet were tiny, her shoes
built-up, special-ordered, 
bought to match her wardrobe 
and walking sticks. 

Her gait sounded an early
warning system to teenage ears.
Later it was the white noise
of her invisibility.

Now, with belated empathy,
I swipe cobwebs from her cane,
long consigned to an attic corner─
put to use for my shattered knee,

lucky I can walk at all.

---

Candace Armstrong writes poetry and fiction in the beautiful woodlands of Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her book, Evidence of Grace, was published in April 2021. Her poetry and short stories have been published in DASH Literary Journal, Quill and Parchment, The Corona Silver Linings Anthology, The Lyric, Midwest Review, Illinois State Poetry Society, Highland Park Poetry, Muse, and the Journal of Modern Poetry,and other journals and anthologies. Candace also had an essay published in The Mindful Word. She received Special Recognition in the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest from Poets & Patrons in 2018 as well as First Honorable Mention in Category 1 of the Poets & Patrons contest in 2020. Candace has taken fiction workshops and classes at the University of Iowa, the College of Charleston, and others online, including WOW! Women on Writing. She participates in local poetry and writing groups. You can learn more about Candace and her writing at candacearmstrongwriter.com.

Colin Williams

You will care for them when it’s time.
With static eyes, pores firing off sweat,
you’ll milk the globes of blood
dangling like apples under their arms.

You’ll turn the bed into a foam-rubber redoubt,
roll out puppy pads, stroke skin where it’s intact.
You’ll cradle them like grandpa as he withered,
lifting without pulling, patient, strong.

You’ll make broth from whole chicken. You’ll scoop 
the cat shit, you’ll wash shirts stiff with plasma.
You’ll squeeze clots from the lines like jelly. You’ll
turn your house to a stall and muck it out,

Patient farmer, and when they’re whole,
devices back in their boxes, the tape stripped
like old wallpaper, the scars gleaming, your back
aching, you’ll forgive their body, and feel

Your own—whole only as a pound of beef
shining behind glass on plastic and air.

---

Colin Williams (he/they) lives in Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Florida. His writing has appeared in Hobart and the Northern Appalachia Review, and he covers heavy metal for outlets including Bandcamp and Revolver.

Laura Schaeffer

You could fly for an instant
whole body in separate hands
cupped and held hands
you could fly when they let you

but I made a mound beside me.
I kept your shoulder to my shoulder
to lean into wind to feel an updraft
in your paper bone.

---

Laura Schaeffer’s poetry has been published in The Pitkin Review, Tidepools, Ars Poetica, Currents, Poetry Corners, Pif Magazine,Collective Visions Gallery, and The Far Field. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Laura has taught workshops to alumni during the annual winter conferences and led a six-month poetry class for at-risk youths. She attended the Centrum Writers Conference on a full scholarship and recently participated in a six-week writing workshop led by a previous program director at Goddard 

Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop

Alan Swope

The art of sighing isn’t hard to master;
each day greets us with news of fresh disaster.

Yes, it is easy to sigh, too easy.
We sigh every five minutes, says science,
but unnoticed, unwitting, not well earned.
Shakespeare’s young lover “sighs like a furnace,”
unceasing groans from a gloomy suitor.
Sighs come cheaply to these moping youth. 

But the true art of sighing is refined by the old.
Aging tunes the pitch of the sigh, enriches its timbre.
Long years deepen the reach of the sigh, each heave 
conveying a lifetime of struggle endured.

My grandfather’s sighs released the weight of years
like bilgewater from a barge. Grandmother’s sighs,
a musical chord resolving when it reaches 
its home key, all dissonance sweetened.

Sighs comfort the old, 
like the bellows breath of the yogi, 
outpourings to recharge the soul.

---

Alan Swope’s poetry has been published in Fort Da, Front Range Review, Mixed Mag, Perceptions Magazine, Poetic Sun, and Roanoke Rambler. He is a practicing psychotherapist and an emeritus professor with the California School of Professional Psychology. Alan enjoys singing, acting, travel, cinema, and gardening

Suzanne O’Connell

It was a fine Sunday morning
when I felt the first sign.

We were not the pancake-and-funny-papers
type family.
Mom wasn’t doing the crossword.
Dad wasn’t refilling the coffee cups.
No one taking turns reading Krazy Kat out loud.
Instead, there were three kids fighting
over the small boxes of cereal from 
the bargain pack of 12.
Everyone wanted the Frosted Flakes,
no one wanted Raisin Bran.
Sometimes I felt like the Raisin Bran.

Dad was getting dressed for golf.
He would be gone all day.
Mom was still in bed with another headache.

The sound of crunching cereal shook something loose.
I remembered autumn leaves underfoot,
me walking to school,
each leaf seeming so defeated and sad.
Walking, I would’ve been daydreaming about my usual reveries:

quicksand,
whales,
electrocution,
arithmetic,
my tonsils,
the tragedy of apples.

While thinking about the autumn leaves,
a stirring began in my stomach,
magma churning,
red rocks glowing with heat,

a volcano in the making.
A spanking-new thought occurred to me:
I realized I had clarity about nothing,
that my job as a seven-year-old was 
to define who I was and what I wanted.
Breathing stopped. Arguing fell away.
I stumbled with the gravity of this explosion,
and almost fell down on the kitchen linoleum.

---

Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Brushfire, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Good Works Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Opiate, Pine Hills Review, Silver Birch Press,Tulsa Review, Visitant Lit, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. She was awarded second place in the 2019 Poetry Super Highway poetry contest. O’Connell was also nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her poem “The Viewing” was included in the Finishing Line Press anthology Covid, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer For Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.

Carolyn Jabs   

People flicker out. Each of us has an unknown
expiration date. Someone is always left behind.  
If we cannot live forever, 
what bargains should we make?
Can we schedule our tears?
When must we be wrecked by grief?
How long should we allow ourselves 
to linger in the twilit gap, 
between consciousness and dreams,
where cancer does not exist?  

Weeping is not your way. You would rather die
than ruin one day with useless medicine.
Soon, I will begin to think about a future
that does not include you. I will not
confide these thoughts even to myself.
Like people who have built on a fault line,
we will reach across the widening chasm
as long as we can. What are the odds 
of seeing another sunrise as beautiful as this one?

---

Carolyn Jabs has contributed essays and articles to the New York Times, Newsweek, Working Mother, Self and many other publications. She is author of The Heirloom Gardener, one of the first books about heirloom vegetables, and co-author of Cooperative Wisdom, Bringing People Together When Things Fall Apart.