An online journal for small literature
April Sevilla likes photography equally as well as writing poems. She always carries a camera along with her pen and paper wherever she goes. Watching cats, clouds, rain, stars and newborns are what truly makes her happy.
Unprofitable Combinations
You, me, and the other
Are like dust, smoke, and water
…That pretty much sums it up
JBN self-identifies as a label-resistant American native of variegated hues. His children’s musical Chimes: A Christmas Vaudeville premiered in Fairbanks, Alaska, with Santa Claus in attendance, opening night. He is host/facilitator for the Hell’s Kitchen International Writers’ Roundtable, which meets twice monthly at Manhattan’s Columbus Library: walk-ins are welcome.
A Rap: To the Over-Eager
Perhaps you have to do
What you think you have to do.
Perhaps, however, you don’t really have to.
Perhaps it’s only what you think you want.
But take it from me, kid, consequences haunt
And ghosts do linger and cankers grow—
Don’t you think that I should know?
Oh I’m not saying don’t
But that perhaps it’s wise to stall.
It’s their funeral but it’s your Fall.
[A mother]
A mother
cannot be a poet.
There’s too much to do.
A mother cannot see the newborn as
the hope of the future
the glitter in the firmament
the lifeblood con¬summation of all cause
and certainly not as
the onset of intract¬able death.
A mother-poet like that must go mad.
And yet—
A mother cannot help
but be a poet
As she protects the progeny from
non-existent dangers
imagined threats—every bush at night a bear—
and acts as if she herself were
the young thing’s swaddling armor till
a ripe age when the cloth is shred
to rags, the metal rusts and clanks, while
all that remains unsaid below the surface
lies still
and cold as the ice in the ocean, while
hot as all the lava that laces the hells of living earth.
And when the child folds into an adult—
A mother cannot possibly be a mother,
which, in fact, she can only be,
and cannot help,
but cannot help
but help.
I hope these sundry paradoxes
help you understand
your mother.
The Language of Encouragement
When the cat was new the claws and teeth
were trained before they’d become bayonets;
the leaps and junkets to exotic lands,
no reprimand from you but twee caresses
and glee in a soprano register
that passed for kitty talk. Destruction did
not mount to much, yet.
And when he grew
he walked all over every gut and scalp
the same as ledges, as if all were his,
leaving a wake of shattered cachepots’ shards
and desultory scratch marks. See how easy
and natural it is for him, now free
and fully formed, to join the terrorists.
Jessica Sommerfeldt recently completed her degree in history and creative writing at SUNY New Paltz. Her work has previously appeared in Chronogram Magazine and Stonesthrow Review.
Daylight
When daylight first seeps between
The faded white blinds
I rise like a sun
boundless in joy and energy and
for these few moments I revel in
this taste of invincibility
even while deep down I know
that by the time the clock strikes noon
I’ll have fallen back asleep
Reflections
Why must everything hurt,
I asked
She chuckled,
The world is nothing but pain, child
Only then did I realize
I was speaking to a mirror
Jo Longley is an alumna of Kingston University’s Creative Writing MFA Program and past Editor of ‘Ripple Magazine.’ Her poetry has been published by ‘Cattywampus,’ ‘Confingo,’ The Enemies Project, and ‘Anapest’ among others.
Narcissus Bulbs
My brain is a daffodil.
I like the crisp line of your trousers,
pressed divinely; an employable skill that is.
I’m scared most every day,
like all things that happen everyday—meh.
A sustained lightning flash of terror looks just like
a plain white wall. Who’d have known? Besides
the terrified and soldiering on. A daffodil? Yes.
I couldn’t begin to explain why, save the soles
of my feet ache, you seem suitable to employ,
and I press this upon you: for a while you
crave color—a splash, a dot—and
when that does not come,
you swear to every aphid that crawls over you:
some black would be suitable, actually, a wall of black
would really do.
Rose lives with her family in the Appalachian Mountains where she serves her community as a behavioral health professional. By night she enjoys reading, writing, and spoiling her cat.
Skin Memory
Uncanny how the skin remembers
At your mere suggestion it warms
And flits like summer water
How simple it is to
Open memory’s
Window and feel
The night air
Speak of
You
William R. Soldan is a writer from the Ohio Rust Belt and the author of the story collection In Just the Right Light. His work has appeared is such publications as Neologism Poetry Journal, Jelly Bucket, Bending Genres, Gordon Square Review, and many others. You can find him at williamrsoldan.com if you’d like to connect.
Dust and Ash
Had there ever been a time, she wondered, when her shoulders weren’t bowed beneath a great weight, a thing pressing her into the dust that had come and would be coming? What wide spaces we scavenge, she thought, like gulls in the sand. The sky burns and here we are, pecking through shards for something to sustain us. How the dream of rain carries, etches the world, then rips into strips when we reach out our hands. What are trees are not trees, but these upright bones and gashed knees sunk in the ashes.
REID MITCHELL is a New Orleanian teaching in China. More specifically, he is a Scholar in Jiangsu Province’s 100 Foreign Talents Program, and a Professor of English at Yancheng Teachers University. He is also Consulting Editor of CHA: AN ASIAN LITERARY JOURNAL. His poems have been published by CHA, ASIA LITERARY REVIEW, IN POSSE, and elsewhere. His first collection, SELL YOUR BONES, was published by Berlin’s PalmArtPress. Way back in the 20th century, he published the novel A MAN UNDER AUTHORITY. He also had a separate career as an historian of the American Civil War.
Hank Williams
And The Whipperwills
Whisper “Sweet Darlin’,
Go To Sleep,
Good Night”
I know those painted black steel
stairs you ascend, high heels
dangling in your weary hand
I have seen the noir seams
of your laddered stockings
gone crooked
the swelling of your calves
the tilt of your razor-edged skirt
the way your left hand lifts
your bob cut black hair
from where it kisses the nape
of your muscular, tango neck
the naked, screwed-in bulb
flickering yellow messages
into Morse Code for ghosts
trying to try not to give up, at least
not this particular whipperwill night
not with Hank Williams watching
from heaven
For decades, Jim wrote TV commercials for many well known products and brands while working as a creative director at two national ad agencies. But in his early days, he had to come up with features and benefits for chicken goggles. Yes, chicken goggles.
The Chicken Goggle Solution
I can’t think of a better conversation starter than this: “I used to write copy about chicken goggles.”
As a copywriter for the Montgomery Ward Farm and Garden Catalog, I really did write about chicken goggles. While the catalog was brimming with other products like tractors, tillers and hydraulic scoop claws, nothing came close to writing about those goggles. Not a frivolous fashion accessory, these beak-borne devices helped prevent bloodshed in the barnyard. You see, chickens are serious peckers and even engage in cannibalism. Two things I suggest you forget about the next time you walk into KFC.
If there’s any good news here, it’s that chickens usually only attack only the bird that’s directly in front of their faces. So if you ever come back to earth as a chicken, that’s a good thing to know. The goggles hinder the chicken’s view so it won’t go into full attack mode.
I learned all this in Chicago’s Montgomery Ward building, now an architectural landmark. Built before central air conditioning, the building had rotating fans mounted high on concrete columns. Seated before my typewriter, I learned to type with one hand while the other hand held down my papers as the fan rotated past my desk. Then as the fan began its return rotation, my other hand covered my papers while the other hand typed. And so it went for 8 hours a day during the summer.
Working in my open office area, the writers’ desks were arranged side-by-side. Over in a corner, my boss sat in his own cubicle. He was a chain cigar smoker and I rarely saw his face. A cloud of smoke perpetually encircled his head. Only by watching the red end of the cigar could I at least aim my conversation toward his mouth.
Sitting atop one of the file cabinets, we had a bowl of peanuts in the shell. One day, I took an X-acto knife and carefully opened a peanut. I then trimmed a long, narrow strip of paper and wrote a note from “Rabu,” a worker being held prisoner on a peanut farm in Cameroon. He was clearly pleading for rescue. Rolling the note tightly, I squeezed it into the shell, carefully sealed the shell’s edges with rubber cement and placed the special goober deep down in the bowl where it sat for months.
One quiet afternoon, there was a shriek loud enough to crack crystal. A secretary had opened the peanut and became near faint. To this day, she thinks a much older Rabu is still being held hostage on the peanut farm.
So forget about using a life coach to teach you how to get your associates to “Lean in” to what you’re about to say. Forget about going to seminars teaching you how to get your voice heard. All you really need to know are two little words and you’re on your way.
“Chicken goggles” works for me every time.
James Croal Jackson has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in MORIA, off the coast, and Oyster River Pages. He edits The Mantle. Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. jimjakk.com
Red Bricks, Gray Sky
I wear
another hungry
headache from
waking
drool dribbling out
into blue pool
on pillow
having shaken
off another night
of tigers’ teeth
and bent bones
grateful at least
inside a home
to pour
yesterday’s coffee
drank black then
to the bridge
to watch
yachts fade
into mist
oh how the rich
don’t know
what they’re missing
The Last Beer
Made all the better
because it’s the last one,
like the last sweet kiss that
sends a soldier to war.
When gone,
the house will be empty,
the spirits departed.