New Poetry by Helga Kidder

Recipe for Confession

Kneeling behind a latticed screen, Saturdays you used to confess a teenage fire beginning to flame your belly, tonguing the tips of your fingers and toes. You didn’t know yourself anymore as the fire took over your neighborhood, street by street, you couldn’t extinguish. Each house was threatened as you kindled the fire with twigs and branches you found behind sheds and in dark corners, ate an apple a day to keep temptation away.  You looked in your mother’s cookbook for help.  All the recipes required ingredients you didn’t have or want. The priest had no other solution for your affliction but to tell you, Say ten Hail Mary’s and hope for the best.  Of course, as each house burned, the town shrank.  You left it one morning when you saw on the horizon the sun’s bliss, glittering your needs, the last notes of your song yet unsung.

- © Helga Kidder 2022

Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills where poems find her early mornings where the red bird waits for special seeds, where flowers beg to be watered, where she listens and watches critters slip in and out of liriope.  She has five collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020, and Learning Curve – poems about immigration and assimilation.

 

 

New Poetry by Caroline Reid

After Normanville

in baking January

our skin sweats

maraschino cherries

traces of last year drip

from creases

of tired vocal folds

a squawking flock

of sulphur-crested

cockatoos sail in

batter the air, land

on salmon gums

mollusc tongues carving

syllables out of blue

blue sky

time draws light long

and peachy-blush as if

time is having an affair

with the soft slumbering hills

of the headland and

the world is not turning

a darker axis

little blue wren

in the crackling garden

red-breasted robin

in the knocking pines, why

is coming back from a place

so like never having gone

- © Caroline Reid 2022

Caroline Reid is a plural poet who has twice represented South Australia in the Australian Poetry Slam. She recorded her debut collection SIARAD (ES-press 2020) as an audiobook, adapted it for stage and performs it as a spoken word show, most recently at the Red Dirt Poetry Festival in Alice Springs. Caroline collaborates with film-makers to make video poems which have screened in international festivals. She won the 2021 Mslexia International Poetry Prize for Women.

New Poetry by Vern Fein

Lincoln Laughed First

Particularly memorable were his words to a young woman whose deep interest in a hospitalised soldier led her to press the question: 

“Where were you wounded?” 

The infantryman, who had been shot through the testicles, repeatedly deflected her inquiry with the answer: “At Antietam.”

 After she asked the president to assist her, Lincoln talked privately with the soldier and then took the young woman’s hands in his own, explaining:

 “My dear girl, the ball that hit him, would have missed you.”

An august occasion—

the Cabinet tense 

like Civil War soldiers 

hidden behind trees

waiting for a life or death volley.

But Lincoln did not 

spread out the scroll

of the Emancipation Proclamation

as the room expected.

Instead, that oak-tree, strong man

took a news article from his pocket

and began to read Artemus Ward,

a humor writer from Cleveland 

who made Lincoln laugh

though slavery was not funny at all.

He knew it and steely-eyed 

stared down the grimaces and grunts

in that room and this bumpkin president

read an article he found funny

about a hayseed performer bashing

in the head of a Judas figurine

at a carnival show. 

Lincoln, notorious for telling jokes,

laughed first and told

the disapproving eyes 

if he did not laugh 

before he pronounced,

he would die

and that they needed

the same medicine 

as much as he did.

Then he ended slavery

in the rebel states,

which was no laughing matter. 

- © Vern Fein 2022

A retired special education teacher, Vern Fein has published over two hundred poems on over ninety different sites, a few being: *82 Review, Bindweed Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Courtship of Winds, Young Raven's Review, Blue Pepper,  Monterey Poetry Review, and Green Silk Review. His first poetry book—I WAS YOUNG AND THOUGHT IT WOULD CHANGE—was published by Cyberwit Press. 

New Poetry by David Dumouriez

I saw this bloke at the bus stop who 

I saw this bloke at the bus stop

who looked like Warren Oates.

Collar-heavy shirt in powder blue,

hair slight and crossing east-to-west,

and not the closest kinship with his razor.

But it was the shades -

retro, brown, too big -

that magicked up the era.

Didn’t hear him laugh - that would

have been the clincher - but he’d not

have been disgraced beside a Fonda,

Jack, or Hopper. Quite what the value is 

to be a Warren Number Two, don’t know.

For it’s not the look that makes the man,

but the man that makes the look.

Warren.

     In the graveyard.

                With a head.

A battered Prince of Seediness, undead.

- © David Dumouriez 2022

David Dumouriez once won a poetry competition by accident and the memory of it still haunts him. His hobbies include cricket, horology, and finding new ways to avoid talking about himself.

New Poetry by KB Ballentine

Winter Triptych

I.

Wind rushes the house,

   growls around corners,

doesn’t rest though night

   has tumbled in. Lights

blinking, we wait

   for the blizzard, hoping

the logs, the candles will last.

II.

   Snow and light sculpt

the yard. A background,

   a page fresh and new.

No fussing gusts, only the chimes

   furred and frozen, oak and cedar

accepting the ephemeral. Ice

   crystals rising inside our breaths.

III.

Slipping on re-frozen tire tracks,

   slush shifting gritty and gray,

I watch blue skies, meager sun

   re-form the layers: top crust cracking

into dirt or gravel, asphalt slick –

   stiff fingers, runny noses tricking

our memories. Forgetting wonder.

- © KB Ballentine 2022

KB Ballentine’s seventh collection, Edge of the Echo, launched in 2021 with Iris Press. Her earlier books can be found with Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), The Strategic Poet (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

New Poetry by Benjamin Fox

So Cliché 

Our earth circled sun appeared 

in the west this morning.

Everything under it was old.

- © Benjamin Fox 2022

Benjamin Fox is fifty. He’s had by a compromising wife and three tall children. Ben struggles while smiling in Salt Lake City, Utah. He does not buy into the predominant church or their politics, but strives daily to be a gentle and good force in the world. Ben is full of wonder and seeks after kindness.

New Poetry by DS Maolalai

How to be funny 

- for Michelle 

I can't help it – I say things 

that are needlessly, 

thoughtlessly cruel. I'm sometimes 

a snob, and I sometimes think how  

to be funny is by telling people  

they aren't clever  

in ways they won't notice, 

or not right away. in work  

there's this girl – we get on 

but I talk her down often, 

as if we weren't exactly  

the same sort of fool – both  

answering emails and phones 

to be snarled at by strangers eight 

hours each day. but she gets in a bother  

(she cares about people) 

and I can't help then  

but laugh, because I do  

less often than she. a poem like this 

will end generally  

with a pat little metaphor.  

I need more of an instinct 

for how to be kind.

- © DS Maolalai 2022

DS Maolalai has received eleven nominations for Best of the Net and seven for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections, "Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden" (Encircle Press, 2016), "Sad Havoc Among the Birds" (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022) 

New Poetry by A.J. Huffman

The Propriety of Balance 

I am noble bird with self- 

made wings, stitched to a consciousness 

I cannot describe.  Together we are 

godly, ghost and galvanized grace 

erupting in moments of majestically 

released breath. 

- © A.J. Huffman

A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She has published 27 collections and chapbooks of poetry.  In addition, she has published her work in numerous national and international literary journals.  She is currently the editor for Kind of a Hurricane Press literary journals ( www.kindofahurricanepress.com ).  

New Poetry by Michael Lee Johnson

Witchy Halloween (2)

Inside this late October 31st night,

this poem turns into a pumpkin.

Animation, something has gone

devilishly wrong with my imagery.

I take the lid off the pumpkin’s headlight

and the pink candles inside.

Demons cry, crawl, split, fly outsides —

escape through the pumpkin’s eyes.

I’m mixed in fear with this scary, strange creation.

Outside, quietly tapping Hazel the witch,

her broomstick against my windowpane rattles.

She says, “nothing seems to rhyme anymore,

nothing seems to make any sense,

but the night is young.

Give me back my magical bag of tricks.

As Robert Frost said:

  “But I have promises to keep,  

  And miles to go before I sleep.”

-  © Michael Lee Johnson 2022

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada, during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet in the greater Chicagoland area, IL.  He has 264 YouTube poetry videos. Michael Lee Johnson is an internationally published poet in 44 countries, several published poetry books, nominated for 4 Pushcart Prize awards, and 6 Best of the Net nominations. He is editor-in-chief of 3 poetry anthologies, all available on Amazon, and has several poetry books and chapbooks. He has over 443 published poems. Michael is the administrator of 6 Facebook Poetry groups. Member Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/. Do not forget to consider me for Best of the Net or Pushcart nomination!

New Poetry by Doug Holder

Sciatica

Suddenly at 67

an alternating current

swept my leg with pain

perhaps a prelude

to a walking stick

a twisted cane.

Am I in a new

'walk' of life?

Maybe

a limping

gimp

in a dirty black overcoat

that dogs bark at

or children break from play

and run away...

A grim totem of shooting pain

on the winding road

that leads, perhaps

to a performance

of taps.

- © Doug Holder 2022

Doug Holder is the co-president of the New England Poetry Club. He resides in Somerville, MA.