M.L. Fenton is an aspiring poet and a full time bus driver. She is a life long resident of the Monongahela river valley of Pennsylvania. The collapse of the steel industry, subsequent deterioration of the of the surrounding neighborhoods as well as the rivers themselves serve as inspiration for her poetry.

Shopping list

She had beautiful penmanship (something
I’ve always lacked)

I thought as I looked at her

Shopping list:
Pudding
Hot dog relish
Bananas (two, ripped from the bunch)
Reader’s digest
Jumbo
Etc.

Me, hurried and slightly annoyed
after work.

Discarding the shopping list in the
buggy, continuing with the minutiae
of my, oh so important life.

later when she’s gone

I’m always looking for those
shopping lists with her lovely handwriting

when my hands touch the cold handle of any shopping cart.

Olivia Rahal is an incoming freshman student at the University of Oklahoma, double majoring in Acting and English: Writing. She has studied Acting at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute for two years, where she was surrounded by many artistic disciplines; creative writing especially sparked her interest.

After 18 Years of Observing Mama

In my 18 years, Mama began as
crinkling brown butcher paper:
the kind used to conceal a quaint christmas gift,
neat and admirable:
temporary qualities.
Soon, the paper takes on
edges, creases, and points.

Mama’s neatness acts temporary.
I watched it fade so quickly, I am
baffled to still find its abundance
preserved in time:
photos taken before my 18 years.
Perhaps that moved me to so highly esteem pictures.
Pictures steal the fleeting from the clock;
the momentary morphs into a higher form:
permanence.

Mama can not endure permanence,
yet her perfect, pressed, platinum hair on
school picture day
survives,
Now, Mama begins to crinkle.
Her pale skin swallows her tired eyes.
God never gave her tired eyes.
Perhaps the fatigue, too, will fade —
temporary.

I wonder what other temporaries My Mama holds.

Raymond Byrnes managed communications for many years for the U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat satellite program. His recent poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Shot Glass Journal, Panoply, Typishly, Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia.

Locust

That locust on the hill
the one nearly wide
as tall, waves a thousand
moss-green feathers
each one a hundred leaves.

Every feather sways in rhythm
with the wind, but not like
frantic pom-poms shaken
at the game; more like how
Aretha’s boa shimmied
when she took her bows.

Eric Roller lives and works in Port Angeles, Washington. He enjoys teaching youth and wandering aimlessly on the Olympic Peninsula.

A Personal Memorandum of Misunderstanding

Today, a Wednesday,
I’m sitting in my office
with its rectangular window set
perpendicular to the world,
writing this poem of resignation
on company letterhead.
There have been other signs
of my surrender for weeks:
I forget to shave on Sunday nights;
I wear Hawaiian shirts on Mondays;
on Tuesdays, I sport hiking boots
with khakis, and
last Friday, a half-day, I wandered
off into the woods adjacent to work
and fed my lunch to the chipmunks.
This particular office job,
like the many in the past
I shouldn’t have accepted,
now tops my list of places
I look forward to leaving behind,
just nudging out that portable toilet
I once visited on a 110-degree day
in a solitary desert campground
in Southern Arizona.

It started off amiably enough
last February.
I admit, I was infatuated with the facilities,
especially the gym with the convenient
personal sanitation wipes—
and I was smitten by
the discussion of benefits,
the 10-personal days and matching
retirement plan.
And as I walked away from the interview,
knowing I had landed the job,
I secretly smiled with
the thought of possibly
making it 20 years
for the pension.

Today, though,
a Wednesday,
this job has worn
through the fabric of the months
to bare the bones of
my starved resolve.
This morning, a mouthpiece
called an emergency
meeting about mission statements
and guiding principles.
A memorandum of understanding
was laid gently on my office chair
like a leaf on a forest floor while
I was away from my desk, and
by mid-morning
there was a heated debate
on the post-traditional re-engagement
of our institutional engagement plan.
After lunch, a time I like
to spend fretting about the future,
I was asked by my boss with a serious face
to conduct a laser-like examination
of the overall
capacity of our tools.

I sit here in my office, now,
just before quitting time,
my door wide open while
I write these words
in jagged columns,
hoping to get caught
with my pen on paper
meant for official
business only.
My stomach and chest
are beginning to tighten
with the anticipation of what
I know I’m about to do:
Walk into my superior’s office,
the one in the corner with the view
and the family photos with frames that read
“Happiness” or “Fun Times,”
slowly remove my keys from
their lanyard, and then slide them
across the newly waxed conference table
and say, feigning sadness,
I am submitting this,
my personal memorandum
of misunderstanding.

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.