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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.

Sympathetic Magic

Old brauchers knew the making of good beer from pumpkins,

the preparation of ripe poultices to fix sore eyes and hearts,

the scribbling of mystic letters that, tacked to the lintel in a grid,

would drive the worst of malefactors from the door.

 

The learning of these arts, they knew, embodied one fixed rule:

A man can teach them only to a woman; a woman only to a man.

 

And so with us. This of you, that of me, in rites of bed and table,

exchanges older than the spoken word, new incantations purely ours,

and secret spells invoking skies and seasons, wind, soil, water, light.

 

We may bury a potato under the eaves and repel all wickedness.

I will show you.

 

*A braucher was a healer in the Pennsylvania German tradition of folk medicine.

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.

 

Under Quarantine

I watch her watch her mother wave

goodbye through the window

of her room in assisted living,

 

each pressing a single hand

against the glass pane,

palm to palm, as if in prayer,

 

a gesture lasting but a moment

before daughter, a masked

store clerk, departs for work—

 

their loneliness an orchid

dropping its last leaf.

John Sweeder’s poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Shantih, Better Than Starbucks, and Haiku Journal, among other venues. His first book of poetry, Untethered Balloons, was published in March of 2021 by Adelaide Books, New York/Lisbon. Now a retired professor, John was born and raised in Northeast Philly and taught at La Salle University for 30 years.

 

Busy Night

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.

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

The Elements

 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.

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

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.

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

What Our Fathers Didn’t Tell Us About the War

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

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.

Dear Renee

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?

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.