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Springtime in Philly: A Mirror Sonnet

                                                                              

(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.

Exit

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.

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.

 

63rd Street: An Ode to Childhood

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.

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.

ONLINE BONUS: The Hunger of Tides

DaVinci was convinced that the tide was the breath of a beast

he could not see.

You agree.

It swamped your sandy house in the super storm,

washed your grandfather up on the wrack line,

pulled under the heavy mood of the mother

you barely knew as she tried to stay afloat.

Stay afloat.

You wish you were born part tide

and rise above these anxious seas. I will take what you love,

it sings, pressing you

to love

so little, so little, pressing you to rise and fall, rise and fall.

What the tide wants from you, you do not want to give.

 

Galileo felt in its movement the movement of the Earth, moving him

to write

that the Earth is not the center of the Earth, moving him

to live

under house arrest until he died.

When you dove into the Mediterranean, it rocked you against a crag

that rose out of that wild sea

as if it too, needed to breathe. Breathe. It opened your wounds

to brine—

sinew, muscle, nerve, memory, shame—

and bone.

The tide continued to roil Galileo’s imagination.

Imprisoned in his home, he looked at the stars for confirmation

until he went blind.

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a night club, operated heavy equipment and drove a taxi. Author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, his work has appeared in The Common, Diode, Guernica, Hippocampus, The New Welsh Review, Philadelphia Stories, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.

 

ONLINE BONUS: The Trash Truck

After William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

on the

gas-guzzling

monster

 

who collects the shit

we don’t want

anymore

 

steel jaws

snarfing down

castaways

 

snaking through

narrow streets

 

orphan remnants remain

napping next to the

zinnias

Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose publications have appeared in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Curriculum Inquiry, and Rebelle Society. She is in the first year of an MFA Program in Creative Writing at Arcadia University. She is a chocolate snob, a swimmer, and lives in Philadelphia.

 

ONLINE BONUS: When I Try to Let You Speak through Me

I get myself in trouble again

Conjuring you

 

Must be I want to summon

Your response to this moment

 

The bank of language

Stuck back where you left off

 

I want to bring you in

So say what you may

That must have been meant for me

Alone or no one

As in spoken only in fury or despondency

 

Still I struggle to regret

Letting you muscle me to silence

 

Now I take your voice places

You would not want to go

 

I am afraid where else

I can find you

If not when I believe I know your take

When I let your voice resound

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal, and a Regular Contributor for Versification. He is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press). His work has appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest, Cleaver Magazine, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, and elsewhere.

 

ONLINE BONUS: Hard-hitting Bob

If I want to recall my father’s snow-blue eyes

and his father’s before him, and that old man’s

high, cracked, Rhenish accent

 

there may be no more certain way

than to remember how they looked

when I asked them to name their favorite ballplayers

 

Grandfather Harlan – breathless, piping – said

“It vas Chimmie Foxx, the Dopple X.”

and his mind pushed aside a Shibe Park turnstile

 

but I think Daddy heard a broadcast reconstruction,

the mock A’s and the imitation crowd

unspooled on wire recorders in a studio,

 

then, from a Philco long since dust,

a drumstick socked a hollow block

and: “here’s another long, long home run

 

for the pride of Pryor, Oklahoma,

Hard. Hitting. Bob. Johnson.”

The distance in my father’s eyes,

 

looking past us to the clean arc of a ball

through cloudless skies of pure belief,

to watch once more what he had never seen

A native of eastern Pennsylvania, Jack Romig lives with his wife and son in the Berks County village of Huff’s Church. He was a longtime manuscript editor with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City. His poems have appeared in The Fourth River and in the former online journal Common Sense 2, where he was poetry editor for three years.

 

ONLINE BONUS: Weed Gallery

The bull thistle, yes, with fierce spines.

Bright blooms on every stem

aren’t sufficient to make it a flower.

 

But how can a violet be a weed? I know

it’s invasive, but April violets glow

in the grass, shy when spring’s starting.

 

They’re blue, not violet, as is clear

from the rhyme. Wind stirs

last year’s leaves, and under my feet

 

five-petaled blossoms gleam

like dark stars. Hawkweed lifts

yellow blooms on its thin stems.

 

It’s a sign of bad soil. But it shines

at the roadsides, and bindweed climbs

on anything, attaching itself to hedges

 

and fences. Yes, it’s a weed, and trains

moan at all hours. Broken-down

cars rust on small lawns.

 

And when I step out under blue-silk

skies, it will be sweet to walk

among flowering bindweeds.

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

ONLINE BONUS: Looking for Spoonbills

This morning I see robins are back,

the first birds I learned by name. How many

lessons were written on the blackboard,

 

the worksheets, the little red desk? My mother

thought everything good in my life came

down to Miss Chase, my first grade teacher.

 

Not the hesitant Sunday School teachers

up the circle stairs to a rickety room

where I pasted noodles onto blue paper.

 

In school  I never found out what moves

on the soft bed of the Atlantic, what makes

its own light in the dark, its body transparent,

 

its skin flashing. O, Miss Chase, didn’t you

realize huge plates of earth crash into

each other? All I know has been flipped

 

upside down and shaken out like a giant

snow globe. This morning Curtis Adams,

teaching on TV, says I can do it, woo-hooing

 

to show how hard a workout I do

though I’m in a chair fluttering my legs

and lifting 2-pound weights. Sometimes

 

I’m threadbare, but on the TV, Florida gleams

in the heat. My mother met me in Florida

once, too old to fly though I didn’t know it

 

till she came through the gate unsteadily.

She was smiling, ready to find roseate spoonbills,

pelicans, limpkins, eager to learn something new.

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

 

Biopsy

you escape

the coil-spring trap

leave the ripped

 

foot there

pooled in blood

you have been

 

touched by

the hot instrument

of pardon

 

see the lawn lit

by benediction

light at the end

 

of day silver

pond a mirror

towers of clouds

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.