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2024
$10.00
80 pages
"Sharps & Flats" theme issue
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Featured in this Issue:
Poetry by: V.A. Bettencourt, Kim Salinas Silva, Joe Cottonwood, Terry Godbey, Hooks Jordana Halpern, Deig Sullivan, David Chorlton, Cecille Marcato, Christopher Locke, Martin Vest, Jim Daniels, Robert Okaji, Charles Rammelkamp, Jedediah Smith, Alison Stone, Mike Schneider, Sarah Stern, Alan Catlin, Susan Shaw Sailer, Jason Irwin, Robert Harlow, Robert Perchan, Susan Eyre Coppock, Dan Sicoli, Janis Joplin, Ellen Sazzman, Ken Holland, John Schneider, Monique Avakian, John Davis, Donna Davis, Lenny DellaRocca,
Lisa Kamolnick, Andy Roberts, Virginia Watts, Linda Scheller, Marc Alan Di Martino, Tony Magistrale, Josh Mahler, Martina Reisz Newberry, Kate Deimling, Ed Taylor, Wren Tuatha, Richard Matta, John Marvin, Matthew J. Spireng, P.R. Gupta, Kareem Tayyar, Charlotte Covey, Karen Toloui, Joan Bauer, Noah Fischbach, Sierra H. Hixon, Colette Tennant, Rebe Huntman, Kristel Rietesel-Low,
Donna Pucciani, Geo. Staley, Jane North, Livio Farallo, and Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
Front Cover: by Nicolas Raymond
Back Cover: by Raymond Logan
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Sample Poems from Issue 43
Mudd Club by Deig Sullivan
Carpet by Alison Stone
Saint of the Expressway by Noah Fischbach
Lines Written After Reading Mamie Till-Mobley's Autobiography by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
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Mudd Club
by Deig Sullivan
Off Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca
a small, discreet plaque
on the side of a co-op loft building says
Former Home of the Mudd Club.
Danish tourists run their hands
over the raised letters
feeling for a bass line,
nodding solemnly
The Mudd Club
Yes
The Mudd Club—
a period piece in music memory
when Joey Ramone walked this alley,
Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed and maybe Sweet Jane, too;
did they know what it would all mean?
that it would matter
so much?
Hanging out and falling down
and getting picked up
off the cobblestones
when there were no streetlights
no private equity
no private anything
only chord progressions, drums
and lots of drugs,
when drugs were a form of
the most glorious transportation.
They were, right?
Take my earbud,
the tourists say.
Let’s share the
Mudd Club playlist.
Pass the gummies,
come to communion,
flip a penny from 1978.
And maybe the ghosts will sing.
© 2024 Deig Sullivan
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Carpet
by Alison Stone
Instead of vacuuming, I follow
memory's frayed silk ribbon. Old loves
and resentments peer from low-flying helicopters
or behind stalled cars, all the same
light brown Dodge Dart, where
I picked at black putty on the window
during the better boring trips.
During the worse ones, I retched in a bag.
Now I reach the fog-erased river and wonder
what the hidden schools of fish
have to teach about the losses
piling up like leaves.
Do forgiven injuries blur? Disperse as smoke?
There's a sharp pit sprouting in my heart
that proves I won't let go no matter
how I act the part by spreading fingers wide.
Beside the rest stop, plastic horses graze,
not bothering to scare, while the abandoned
cabin of Maine summers goes about its work
of dropping into landscape.
I snap myself back to the dusty carpets,
too late to attend to, and the dog wags
so I walk and wonder how
I would explain myself if called
into the court of wasting time. Your Honor,
I might say, I didn't want the dog
to miss her chance to pee
on these particular weeds. The breeze,
full of fried food and laundry soap,
carries whatever plea
I give into trees' waiting limbs,
and the dispersing clouds offer no alibi.
© 2024 Alison Stone
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Saint of the Expressway
by Noah Fischbach
I went for a walk in the dunes
and realized I was dust.
My ghost: facial extremities
bleached in silk, cocooning
the roaring autobahn of steel; lingering
anxieties clouded in plumes of cherry-filled
exhaust. Now exhausted, I collapse
onto spring-loaded clouds
and pray. Amidst sand-stained dunes and
cloudless skies, the chasm remains
aflush with light—a lonely beacon—
straining and striving towards outstretched
arm of water and clay; perhaps simply
hallucinations from the devilish sun,
a sun that seeks to end us all.
© 2024 Noah Fischbach
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Lines Written After Reading Mamie Till-Mobley's Autobiography, "Death of Innocence"
Mamie taught her boy how to whistle
to slow his stuttering,
words hard to get out like
Moon Pie,
bubble gum.
Maybe a wolf whistle
was just a whistle,
done when her Bo bought two cents of bubble gum from Bryant?
And how dare I
play the Till card?
After all, mine wasn't carved up, hacked, and hammered
(on the outside, at least).
Because Mamie blamed herself.
As every bereaved mother does:
"If only she didn’t wear flounced skirts, then—"
"If only I made him scrambled eggs every morning, then—"
"If only he didn’t go alone, then—"
Maybe then she wouldn't know
the cruelty of the uncontrollable.
Mothers solder to their children.
But when a child comes home
in a crate, locomotive leaden—
unloaded cargo, tagged to a bill of lading
it's no if, then, or maybes.
Just that hardware fact.
© 2024 Sharon Kennedy-Nolle
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