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The basement furnace died at 3AM.

The chilly weather of early spring

Arrives by degrees inside the house,

Like seawater leaking into a hull.

 

We bundle up, treasuring our warmth.

By afternoon, the halls have chilled, as wind

Whines tunelessly and rattles at the glass.

“In Paradisum” from Fauré’s Requiem

 

Chimes down the crooked stairs like lazy stars

Revolving overhead, pining away

For me, yearning to have me home again,

Out there shining in solar Sargassos

 

Or ocean swirls of discarded plastic

Gathering in Pacific emptiness.

Fresh dust snows on furniture and floor. I breathe

The busy air, teeming with life, split by shafts

 

Of sunlight. My voice is dry from all the dust.

It’s taken over everything. It coats

The meniscus of my glass of water.

It’s made of us, our cats and candles—

 

Rumors of how our lives will be consumed—

Particles of meteor and pollen,

The powder that puddles on the floorboards

As nails are hammered into old walls—

 

Iridescent archipelagos of pearl

Trailing lagoons of chalk dust in their wakes.

Our self-incineration, which hardly hurts,

Starts lightning racing into nothingness.

 

I know we’re dust, and stardust too, but more—

Phosphorescent dust in oceans of sunlight,

Like breaths exhaled, diffusions, traces of song,

Engines firing in the voiceless dark.

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Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. His fifth book, Storm Swimmer, was selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize and will appear in 2023. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.

Man is the only creature that is not always killed when struck — all others are killed on the spot; nature doubtless bestows this honour on man because so many animals surpass him in strength. — Pliny the Elder

 

The talk-radio host is provoking listeners to weigh in on what language we believe acts as the official discourse in hell. The host thinks it must be Latin, too many sins, he says, tented under Papal vestments, meaning too many thighs grazed behind the doors of countless sacristies for perdition to be voiced in any tongue other than that of its most zealous arbiters. The callers, on the other hand, are sure it’s English, or Hebrew, or that demons speak all languages, or none, because suffering existed before language, which to me seems the strongest argument, as I shift my car into park up the block from the warehouse you let slip was your last work delivery, last obligation, when you called to say goodbye (a contraction of “God be with ye”). I keep the engine running like Kojak or Columbo, watch you over my trash-strewn dashboard as you load boxes onto a hand truck. I will follow you, stop whatever crime you’re planning against yourself, because I know you’re asking for a savior. On the radio, another long-time listener shares that the word “suffering” comes from Vulgar Latin, a variant of “sufferer,” meaning to “endure,” or to “carry,” and for a moment I resent you. But then I see your truck bumping down the rutted warehouse drive, and I swing into traffic behind you. I keep at least two car-lengths between us. As we twist through rush-hour, the topic has turned from Hell to Heaven. The host believes we have no need for language in the afterlife because God is complete understanding. And while I agree that there’s comfort to be found hiding under the blanket of omniscience, it still makes me want to call in and remind everyone that awareness, God’s or our own, is essential to our suffering. Without it we wouldn’t know we’ve been abandoned. God couldn’t get angry. There’d be no Hell, no reason for it, or for any of our actions, and as the great TV detectives teach us: motive is everything. You jam a quick right, screech your van into a supermarket plaza, and I’m thinking, good, if you want groceries, it means you don’t want to die. Still, I shadow you into the store and calculate our surprise meeting among the vegetables, perform my shock at running into you like this, while you act as if you don’t know I’ve been tailing you since before we both ran that red light.

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Keith Kopka is the recipient of the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for his collection of poems, Count Four (University of Tampa Press, 2020). He is also the author of the critical text, Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry. He is the recipient of the International Award for Excellence from the Books, Publishing & Libraries Research Network, a Senior Editor at Narrative Magazine, and an Assistant Professor at Holy Family University.

San Girolamo, Caravaggio, 1605

 

In a dark room, San Girolamo writes with a quill pen.

He’s partially draped in a rich, red cloth, maybe a cloak,

maybe the covers from his bed as if he rushed naked

to the table straight from a dream, fevered with ideas.

A thick book on his lap. A thin halo’s edge,

barely visible in the dark, hints above his balding pate

at hallowedness. For all the years I’ve dusted this framed

postcard on our bedroom dresser, that little light remained hidden.

The blessedness I’ve always seen, what gets me

every time —the firm arm of a man reaching for — what?

a word? some truth? Muscled, alive, tendoned. Only the holy

of a bare-shouldered body.

 

Here’s the tableau: the ancient saint stretches without looking

toward an inkwell in shadows — books, cloth, oaken table,

and a blank-faced memento mori.

The man reads. The skull stares.

That hollow head a warning that the world’s fleeting,

the dark and light of afterlife eternal. But, oh, Master,

this is a game. The skull is half hidden, a dull

paperweight, unheeded.  Your model — bright, vital,

glowing with thought.

 

I conjure you whispering

as you paint, a voice escaping time from that museum

postcard on the bureau as my love and I loll in bed —

Listen, before it’s too late. Allow yourselves scarlet

bedclothes, and strong bodies in a glowing room,

and work you want to dive into, and books,

books are good, piles of them to retreat to,

partly naked, after rolling around

half the night with your love, alive, hungry,

eating up this life and one another while you can.

---

Mary Jo LoBello Jerome, a Bucks County PA Poet Laureate, edited the creative writing prompt book Fire Up the Poems. Recently named poetry co-editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Mary Jo has published poems and stories in many journals. Her chapbook, Torch the Empty Fields, is coming out in 2022.

Even now, is it possible to consider the self-original: the source

from which something arises?

 

Nothing solid after your death, one hour in that loss-space equaled

seven years of earthy life. Grief unoriginal and shocking.

 

Learning that Mars is quiet and seismically stable,

oddly reassuring. The silence inside of me

after you died. My thin, rigid outer layer, my lighter

volatile elements. Maybe,

I was not alone.

 

What trust is required to stay behind,

to hear good luck close by?

 

Like me, my new lover returns from near-empty space where sound

could not be heard, where atoms and molecules could not carry

our voices through air or water.

 

Now faith follows the sound

of our original music, wounded and delighted.

---

Amy Small-McKinney’s chapbook, One Day I Am A Field, written during Covid after her husband’s death, is forthcoming with Glass Lyre Press. Her second full-length book, Walking Towards Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize 2016. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, judged by Chris Bursk. October 2021, she co-taught a workshop with poet Nicole Greaves, Poetry & Aging: Does What We Have to Say Matter? at the virtual Caesura Poetry Festival. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia where she was born and raised.

She bent slowly, grabbin the damp

bedsheet from the laundry basket.

then stood, arms stretched

so nothin touched the ground.

Mama snapped the sheet in the

wind to scare the wrinkles out,

took the splinterin clothespin and

stuck it on the thin line runnin

cross the parkin lot. all our stuff

danced on display but the drawers.

 

We headed back to the basement to

wash the next load and she watched

me run behind her, her brown eyes

soft and laughin. this time, Mama

let me hold the quarters and the

whole buildin could hear me.

skippin and jinglin.

---

Edythe Rodriguez is a Philly-based poet who studied Africology and creative writing at Temple University. She loves neo-soul, battle rap, and long walks through old poetry journals. She has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Brooklyn Poets, and Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her work is a call for aggressive healing and is published in Obsidian, Sonku, Call and Response Journal and Bayou Magazine.

                                                                              

(Demeter)

Wake crocuses—push through crumbling asphalt;

purr and croon, slumbering cats curled like snails—

let feral dreams rumble through the sewers.

Snowdrops: root through the frost, unlatch her vault

and show her the way out; read the rock-braille

with fingers deft as mice feet, lithe as worms,

and tunnel to the Market-Frankford line.

She’ll board that train. Wake up, weeping cherries

and forsythias, down rows of brownstones

till the thaw gives way to fluttering vines—

my trademark welcome back sign. Wind: carry

my love notes by sea—fragrant balm of storms,

lilac, and exhaust. If only she would

eat that scent like seeds, undo sleep for good.

 

(Cora)

Eat that scent like seeds, undo sleep for good—

lilac and exhaust—if only I could.

Love notes come by sea in a balm of storms—

my soon-I’ll-be-back signs. They carry me

till the thaw gives way to fluttering vines

and forsythias. Down rows of brownstones,

I’ll board that train, wake up buds of cherries.

I’ll tunnel to the Market-Frankford line—

my fingers deft as mice feet, lithe as worms—

and I’ll feel my way out, read the rock-braille.

Snowdrops root through frost, help unlatch my vault.

My feral dreams rumble through the sewers—

cats uncurling from slumber to croon, wail.

But first, I must push through this crumbling asphalt.

---

Dawn Manning creates art with words, metal, photography, and other media, in Delco, PA. She is the author of Postcards from the Dead Letter Office (Burlesque Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in CALYX, Ecotone, Smartish Pace, and other literary publications. She also herds cats for local rescue efforts.

George Segal, 1975, 2020. Plaster, wood, plastic, metal and electric light.         

Lot of good it did me. Rising before dark.

There was a bench in the woods. I sat on it and waited for Autumn. It came too.

Light (tangelo bruise) brushed the leaves.

The wolf’s head in my satchel. Smells of fresh laundry and evil. Now the

 

Building across the way is burning. And not just that one, but all of them.

The floor feels good under me, cool. Sunlight hacked into fragments.

Shaved, paper-thin layers. I think I used to know the word

 

 

 

 

In Spanish. I’ll wait right

Here, dammit. One day they will

Deliver milk again. I’ll learn the Spanish for thank-you and betray.

 

 

 

 

I’ll step out the door to The End of The World to admire

Eros and the roses I spend so much

 

Time on. The yard, at night,

Illumined with strange light.

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Leonard Gontarek is the author of eight books of poems, including The Long Way Home (2021). His poems have appeared in Field, Verse Daily, Fence, American Poetry Review, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and The Best American Poetry (edited by Paul Muldoon). He coordinates Peace/Works, Poetry In Common, Philly Poetry Day, and was Poetry Consultant for Whitman at 200: Art and Democracy. He conducts the poetry workshop: Making Poems That Last.

 

We wore slap bracelets and pants that swished. Housed somewhere between paradise and Cobbs Creek where the drill teams pounded percussion into our bloodstreams. We’d beg our parents for water ice in the summertime, itching to dangle from monkey bars or play freeze tag. The very mention of water balloon fights threatened the glory of our fresh braids and high-top fades. Yesterday’s blood-dried scrapes were forgotten. We were too preoccupied to notice the wood chips tickling the bottoms of our feet until the walk home. Cricket chirps, lightning bugs and moths prophet us with knowing that the day was well spent. Our teeth became stars of jubilee rivaling the streetlights. These were the days before it mattered that I couldn’t jump double-dutch. My heart hop-scotched to private ideas about rainbows and happy meals. Back then, I harnessed the boon of the present moment. Back then, I could reach for a cloud and give it a name.

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Courtney C. Gambrell was born in Philadelphia, PA, where she currently resides. She is a Fellow of The Watering Hole whose poems have appeared in APIARY Magazine, As/Us Journal, For Harriet, Philadelphia Stories, the Healing Verse Philly Poetry Line and elsewhere.