New Poetry (and introductory note) by Holly Day

After a full summer of not being able to sit comfortably at my desk and work, there’s nothing so wonderful as having the kids back in school and the house and time to myself. Perhaps in cooperation with my determined vision of staying glued to my computer for the day, the weather has turned nasty overnight, and I’m already wearing a sweater around the house and wondering how long I can put off turning on the heater for the season. Outside, sparrows and chickadees cover the lawn as thick as snow, a shifting, twitching carpet of brown and gray reminder that my beautiful summer is coming to a close.

The Anniversary

Years later, they will speak of this anniversary

as though it had happened to other people, neighbors, perhaps.

They will speak lightly of her hospitalization

gloss over the details, mention her minor head trauma

the problems he had had with his temper

back then, in the past.

Their children will glare pointedly at each other

over the heads of the assembled party guests

because one of them should have intervened

someone was supposed to have been here.

- Holly Day 2015

Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Oyez Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle, while her recently published books include Music Theory for Dummies (3^rd edition), Piano All-in-One for Dummies, The Book Of, and Nordeast Minneapolis: A History.  

New Words and Images by Wayne H. W Wolfson

I had to let her go on up the stairs ahead of me because of how she took them. Always, a jaunty dance of rapidly, three steps up then two back down.

The polished wooden floors amplified the sunlight, a golden glow of peace that I would always mistrust. I worried too that the angel was not real as I did not see how the vast expanse of wings could fit through the little slits in the back of the robe.

Her concern was enough to make the stairs gently creak. I do not speak. What was the point with only a few minutes to burn in heaven before falling back through.

Op 9, No 2

The sky is gray but in this drabness it makes the light from our place shine like a distant star or the blush of your cheeks during warmer months.

Inside the air is slightly smoky from wild boar sausage. It is not acrid but a heaviness which is a comfort.

The cool mineral notes of our drinks. Waiting for our meal, I start to tattoo the back of the card which announces the house drink specials. My pen bleeds from the neck and my hands echo in kind.

- Wayne H. W Wolfson 2015

www.waynewolfson.com

New Poetry by Peter C. Venable

Angel-Dusted

and bath-salted,

he aimed a corkscrew into his palm

and twisted and twisted

until it screwed through

the dorsal skin nearly an inch—

like a badly botched titanium screw surgery—

and he reached for a bottle of wine

and I waited for the next twist.

- Peter C. Venable 2015

The Rational

“The Rational is Real and the Real is Rational,”

A buttress of Hegel's Mind

and my mallet-and-chiseled Absolutes.

How my Easter Island idols are adorned

with gull droppings and scales!

Come, tourists, and meander

in our taxidermist's museum of stuffed Beliefs—

are they winking at us with their glassy eyes?

Come, and ponder

as we go spelunking in Plato's Cave,

and meet our flickering shadows.

Let’s ascend our ancestral stairs

to Reason's Tower and marvel

at Syllogism's sculptures.

What, then, are these Monuments

which assemble our Real minds?

- Peter C. Venable 2015

The writer has written both free and metric verse for over fifty years and been published in such humorous poetry journals as Parody, Word Riot, Laughing Dog, and Hobo Pancakes. He is a semi-retired clinician, volunteers at a prison camp and food pantry, leads vespers services for senior citizens, and is graced with a happy marriage, daughter and son-in-law, and Yeshua. Hagar the Horrible is a role model

New Poetry by James Diaz

The underside of river run

From now on

this word and light

will be

all that you have

a tiny stone

carried since September

on the inside of your sleeve

a stack of unpaid bills

next to an unread book

on Anarchy

the yellow moth

and the strange pond 

past Oswego

a house built

on shadow

moss 

and childhood echolalia 

life deferred 

random

but more true

than anything else you can remember.

- James Diaz 2015

James Diaz lives in Upstate New York. His poems and stories have appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Pismire, Ditch, Collective Exile and My Favorite Bullet.

New Poetry by Michele Seminara

Mourning Morning 

My mother's house surrounds 
me in a shroud: the tinkling 
of the teaspoon as my father stirs 
his tea, his tea; the chug of the washing machine 
that never dies. The tubular wind chimes casting
their cool auric spell around us; the complaint 
of the floorboards bearing up our lives.
And the busyness, of the birds in bush nearby... I

lie with eyes shucked open, not turning
to what waits to be let in. 
I hear the phone shriek—and again— 
then footsteps up the hall; the sound
of hesitation at the door—
as I elongate this moment,
try to dwell inside before. 


- Michele Seminara 2015


Michele Seminara is a Sydney poet and Managing Editor of Verity La.

New Poetry by Rodney Nelson

Harder Times

a gray-and-white photograph

of woods that were gray and white

in an olden November

dark gray of tree shadow and

two men in dark not smiling

not having to squint too hard

one with a rifle in hand

a wried dead buck on the ground

the other with a mustache

a gray-and-white November

in the quiet of drought time

dark-gray November of want

- Rodney Nelson 2015

Rodney Nelson worked as a copy editor in the Southwest and now lives in the northern Great Plains. He recently published a chapbook.