Philadelphia Stories: Publishing Local Writers & Artists
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t talk about them.
Don’t talk about that family at the end of the street, don’t talk about the house with the woods beside it.
Just ignore them, and don’t talk about them.
And they didn’t really talk about the grass that always grew too long. Nor the disarrayed wooden front porch, which rotted away a little more with each season. Nor the tattered screen door, hanging limply on by its rusted hinges.
They didn’t talk about the boy who lived there, nor the two girls, and how they seemed to vanish each time a neighbor came much closer than the sidewalk.
They didn’t talk about the odd clothes those kids wore, like hand-me-downs, both too big and too small and mismatched from shirts to sneakers.
The closest they ever got to saying anything at all was a Sunday morning, where they had stopped by the woods to strip some bark from the loose branches, to play swords in a backyard.
One of the boys nudged another and breathed as quietly as he could, “look.”
They watched as the father and son got into the front seats of the tan-brown station wagon and the mother and teenage daughters into the backseats. The car drove up the gravel path and past them as they watched, gawking awkwardly from the corner.
The car drove away down the street and turned out of sight.
The neighborhood went quiet. It remained quiet for some time. And for that strange amount of time, the boys seemed just to wait, as though the scene had not entirely ended, as though the other shoe would soon drop.
Something sodden seemed to form over them, inarticulate and heavy. They stopped playing.
And after the short time had passed for waiting, they quietly threw down the sticks among the trees’ roots and picked up their bikes where they had left them. Without speaking, they began to walk home.
“Did you see their faces?” one of the boys asked after they had walked past a few houses.
“My mom says not to talk about them.”
“Yeah, that’s probably right.” A pause came, and then went. “But did you see their faces?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Why did that boy sit in the front seat?”
“I don’t know. We shouldn’t talk about it anymore.”
“Yeah, I guess.” They quietly walked on for a bit. “Has your older sister ever let you have the front seat? – And he didn’t look any older than us. And – Why did their mom sit in the back seat?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it.”
The neighborhood fell quiet again.
The tread of the bike tires purred on the street as they walked back home. It felt like the only noise in the entire neighborhood – or the entire world.
A breeze passed, but it was not cool, and they passed under the shadow of one of the cedars.
Soon, very soon, the summer would end, and they would go away again – away from here, away to school, away from childhood – and these strange and quiet moments would fade.
“I mean–did you see their faces?”
Isaac W Sauer is a writer and poet currently working as an investment analyst in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Eastern University, studying literature, politics, and philosophy.
Editors’ Choice: 2021 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
To you, connoisseur of cave mushrooms,
imperious orderer of the underground,
when you finally shuffle out from your hidey-hole
into the clean random dark
and look up in desperation again after a turn of stale seasons;
to you, gruff reactionary; to you, bigot;
the night will read as though
I, devilishly,
will have collected with the left hand
a swath of stars
and shaken them out again from between thumb and forefinger
familiarly, both too brilliant and made too strange.
Judd Hess holds an MFA and an MA from Chapman University. He won the 2014 Fugue Poetry Prize, the 2011 John Fowles Creative Writing Prize for Poetry, the 2009 Ellipsis Prize, has been a finalist for several other awards, and was nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize.
Editors’ Choice: 2021 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
1. You are not a ghost.
2. Welcome the change coming into your life.
3. The world may be your oyster, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get its pearl.
4. You must try, or hate yourself for not trying.
5. Birds are entangled by their feet and men by their tongues.
6. Land is always in the mind of flying birds.
7. Nothing is as good or bad as it appears.
8. Benefit by doing things that others give up on.
9. Alas! The onion you are eating is someone else’s water lily.
10. In case of fire, keep calm, pay bill and run.
11. A man without aim is like a clock without hands, as useless if it turns as if it stands.
12. You are often asked if it is in yet.
13. Try everything once, even the things you don’t think you will like.
14. Bend the rod while it is still hot.
15. You learn from your mistakes, you will learn a lot today.
16. Never cut what you can untie.
17. Remember this: duct tape can fix anything, so don’t worry about messing things up.
18. Finish your work on hand, don’t be greedy.
19. Happiness is often a rebound from hard work.
20. If your desires are not extravagant, they will be rewarded.
21. Your tongue is your ambassador.
22. Hard words break no bones, fine words butter no parsnips.
23. Your mouth may be moving, but nobody is listening.
24. Think of mother’s exhortations more:
25. Don’t worry, half the people you know are below average.
26. “Accept yourself.”
27. If everyone is a worm, you should be a glow worm.
28. It’s tough to be fascinating.
29. Sometimes you just need to lay on the floor.
30. The quotes that you do not understand are not meant for you.
31. Today is an ideal time to water your personal garden.
32. Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
33. The secret of staying young is good health and lying about your age.
34. Take the chance while you still have the choice.
35. Being alone and being lonely are two different things.
36. Some dream of fortunes, others dream of cookies.
37. Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.
38. Next time you have the opportunity, go on a rollercoaster.
39. When all else seems to fail, smile for today, and just love someone.
40. If you eat a box of fortune cookies, anything is possible.
This cento is comprised of lines borrowed from Fortune Cookie Message: http://www.fortunecookiemessage.com/archive*
S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and author of Glory to All Fleeting Things. In 2021 she is the recipient of PERIPLUS, Jack Straw Writers, and the dots between fellowships, and is a Writer in Residence at Prairie Ronde and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Batiste is a reader for The Rumpus and her own Pushcart nominated poems are anthologized and appear internationally in Michigan Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and wildness among other decorated journals.
Editors’ Choice: 2021 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
One day, I’m going to be a star.
Immortalized on a t-shirt at a justice walk,
Momma pray that I make it to the squad car.
Bury me in my hood. I don’t want my soul too far
and save my voicemail for some rapper’s album, real talk.
One day, I’m going to be a star.
Spray paint my face on the hearse’s hood. Clean up the shot scar.
My copper brown skin decayed to a grey cast; they’ll gawk.
Momma pray that I make it to the squad car.
Bathing in blood for wearing a hood. This life is bizarre.
My starring role on CNN, cemented like caulk.
One day, I’m going to be a big star.
My killer will don their white hood. Press my head to the tar
and slather my entrails to serve the best hawk.
Momma, is being a nigga, all we are?
The bullets still go through the cap and hood. Never on par,
they can’t ignore me in death, even after the cleanup of chalk.
One day, I’m going to be a star.
But Momma, if you’re reading this, I didn’t make it to the car.
Jaya Montague is a 2018 graduate of Temple University’s journalism program. She was the first runner-up for the first iteration of the Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and mentored under poet Sonia Sanchez. She has work published in Apiary Magazine and is based in Philadelphia, PA.
Editors’ Choice: 2021 Sandy Crimmins Poetry Contest
When my father remembers my mother has died,
when he realizes he had forgotten, and he cries
— if that’s the word for those great, wracking peals of thunder
I feel against me, holding the hollow tree
he has become as it waits to fall — he shudders
in the sudden storm of memory, and I know
I brought this down upon him,
the lightning bolt loosed from my callous hand.
I decided, then and there, I would never
speak of my mother again. I would lie
if he asked where she was. The dead die
again and again in their remembrance.
It is I who would kill her, the coward with my words.
But there is this: they are also reborn in the forgetting.
I become young again, the little boy he expects
when the nurse tells him I’m here, your son,
here to see you. Maybe he thinks to bounce me
up and down on his knee, a bronco I tried to,
but could never, tame. Up and down
goes time, rushing, fierce in its will to throw me.
But in that moment of his expectation, my mother is alive
and she is young and, oh my, so beautiful.
I never knew how beautiful she had been,
as she is again in his mind
when he hears the words Your son is here.
We are all young, and strong, and not even a little
bit broken. It’s why I lie.
It’s exactly what I wish I could see.
In addition to Philadelphia Stories, Joe’s poems have appeared in journals such as the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Philadelphia Poets, and Apiary. He was the Featured Poet for the Fall 2014 Edition of the SVJ, which has nominated two of Joe’s poems, “Light” and “Forsythia,” for the Pushcart Prize. Philadelphia Stories recently selected his poem, “Hospice,” for their 15th Anniversary Edition. Joe’s first book of poetry, Always in the Wrong Season, is available on Amazon.com.