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The car alarm jabs the neighbors awake

every fifteen minutes when its bark

sets off the strays in their chorus

of call and response and the supermarket

down the block has an alarm, too; it throbs

like a synthesizer overlay on an old disco track,

but the neighbors don’t dance except for

the young couple across the street who hustle

out on the stoop to the rhythm of their

raised voices, the angry tempo of go ahead

and do it, of big man, of bitch, while

sometime traffic on Broad Street whispers

its wheels on asphalt to hush its roll

through streetlights’ amber cone before the siren

song of the EMT’s carting someone in the truck

to the ER on the other side of town while neighbors

wish, maybe, that they were in one of the planes

overhead, the belly-lights sly wink like

saying, You know this is all bullshit, right?

before it screams down onto the runway

at the airport across the river – or perhaps it’s

the ringing they hear borne in the brief quiet

of their own bedrooms, the brazen scurry

of blood through their ears’ capillaries, the rattle

of breath only they can hear like a dream

they can’t quite rise from, a song almost recalled,

its ancient refrain on a loop they can’t shake,

in the mystery of sleep, awake, a puzzle, impossible,

like how, after all, day breaks without a sound.

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Chris Ritter is a Philadelphia native living and working in a South Jersey suburb.

 for Delaware City Oil Refinery

 

From here I promise you will see it all —

 

those clusters of towers

their various diameters and heights

lifted into cloud-clotted sky

 

bespeckled by summer sun

grounded by a low plinth

composed of wide shallow domes

 

grounded by marshes clotted with nests and lairs

clusters of golden phragmites

rising up there

 

then water, lapping

where eels unscroll, abiding in the dark patches

on their way to the Sargasso Sea

 

not a sea as you’d imagine it, just

the ragged floating place they dream of —

 

a falling sequence of materials

from solid to liquid to gas, a game

of animal vegetable mineral —

 

old cast-iron composed of scraps of dying stars

grounded by a burning fall

torn caterwauling out of the ground

 

casting fire and steam into that floating sky

while within, the compression of life forms —

fern bones and beetle wings from long ago

 

transformed to gasoline and other gases, or lighter fuel

diesel laced with hydrogen, or propane —

gases, liquids, steam, fire — fluid forms

 

in drifted tatters lapped by sky and water

smithereens unfurled, swarming

toward some remembered place.

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Anne Yarbrough’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Delmarva Review, and Gargoyle. She lives along the lower Delaware River.

The color absence is yellow and blood

red, bones of glass shattered on the floor

with no broom or dustpan in line of sight.

 

Did you see me walking the other day?

I was delivering you in the flex of my arms,

sleeves folded back to conceal the rips

 

of laughter. I wonder if you still hold

the last words you spoke to me in your

pocket like a brand new set of car keys.

 

Don’t you worry that I forgot my jacket

in the freezing cold rain? Or maybe the wind

rubs its hands together on the front porch

 

waiting to come back inside. The color

absence glazes its palette in the summer

fallow, knocking sugar skulls against pine

 

doors, brittle to the touch and slapped with

salt water. If endings spring forth like a geyser,

then let me catch the steam on the way down.

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Ezra Solway writes in Philadelphia where he received an MFA in Creative Writing at Temple University this past spring. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured in The Jewish Literary Journal, North of Oxford, and Small Leaf Press, among others. You can follow his writings on twitter at @SolwayEzra

To read What Our Fathers Didn’t Tell Us About the War, click HERE.

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Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

We used to sit together every day, the dusty bus, those long dirt roads.

Your father, old when he was young, hobbling to the barn at milking time.

My sister keeps embroidered pillows in the closet with her holidays, hums

all through the house, long and slow. Are you that kind of woman now?

Renee, my dumb heart cannot remember If I ever played with you in school

or if I left you by the swings for those girls who only let me be the monkey.

 

Did I forget you, your long braids in that wet field of grass? I was the one

who swallowed all the knives, key tied round my neck with a grey ribbon.

Today, I brought out the flour bowl and rolling pin, the salt and baking powder.

Habit you’d do without. Kitchen quiet, emptying, its low deliberate light.

Renee, I didn’t use the wheelbarrow. Nor stripped the chicken from the bone.

Can you understand my lumbering, my rusty hands?  Do you miss our home?

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Ellen Stone grew up in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania.  She advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen’s poetry collections are What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013.)  ellenstone.org.

In a hospital room

I stand next to your son,

watching you drift

in and out of consciousness.

I give you flowers,

their stems clipped.

You drop them in a pan

of shallow water.

 

Outside, I can see the bus station

near the last stop on the subway line.

 

Remember when you moved to Mount Airy,

on the second floor? We talked all night

about politics. Then Watergate broke, and

you foresaw that Nixon would fall.

You always drove me home

pounding your palms on the steering wheel.

 

Kamal takes a napkin and wipes your mouth—

“Are you hungry Mom, do you want a drink?”—

while I keep asking if you know my name.

You raise yourself and say it once,

just before you fall back.

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Since 1990, Robert Coles has published over one hundred poems in various literary journals, anthologies, and magazines. His most recent poems have appeared in Peregrine (Spring 2017), Mudfish (vol. 20, 2018/vol. 21, 2020/vol. 22, 2021), and Cura Magazine (Fordham University, Spring 2019).

Should I just leave you in this frozen night

since you’re no help? Go there and plop that heart

in the gut bucket. We’ve packed the fridge tight

with cabin food already, so for the parts

we’ll keep, we’ll pack some snow on them. Your deer

should make decent venison jerky. Look,

it’s just dead meat. There is nothing to fear

about a dressed deer. Now, down past the brook,

Dad leaves the organs deep in the thickets

and then he wipes the blood off his hands.

Here’s his rag for that. Take that gut bucket

then go dump it in the snow like a man.

But that heart, I always chuck it far back

where it can wait for spring all blue and black.

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Having grown up in Chester County and worked in Philadelphia, Andrew Weller has a deep connection with Eastern Pennsylvania. He just graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with a Masters and Bachelor’s in English. He continues to write in his spare time while starting his career as a technical writer.

To view The Time on Dali’s Watch, click HERE.

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Nick Cialini lives in Lancster, PA where he teaches literature and is a PhD candidate at Temple University. He adheres to Joy Harjo’s principle that “life begins at the kitchen table” by sharing food and games with those who matter most to him. This is his first poetry publication.