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Homage to John Coltrane

Times when it got too tough to tame my toddler daughter,

we drove out to a place she called the indoor playground,

because it was—a gilded age mansion, mansard roof

and all, gutted and filled with toys, dolls, board games, fully

stocked, itty-bitty kitchens, soporific gliders.

The basement was jammed with scooters and trikes and big wheels,

bumper-to-bumper around oval lanes, casualties

off to the side bawling. It had my favorite things,

she said, as we motored through the city neighborhood

called Strawberry Mansion, turning on 33rd Street,

cruising by the onetime brick row home of John Coltrane,

the cynosure of a dilapidated quartet—

marked by a plaque visible only from the porch stoop.

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Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz were both published in 2018. Craniotomy will appear this fall. He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens Community College in Ohio.

After Analysis

What I meant to say was clear /

Corrupted.

Like, look at this comp

arison:

Says, no it’s late.

Eyes betray me, look I gave agency to flesh,

But what I meant to say was I exhausted myself

To pass out, to pass the time,

Twirling a cigarette to hail the darkness.

Always picturing movement,

Because what I’m trying to say is still / silence.

As if motivation is a secret,

Sugar secreting from a pear.

What I mean to say is two things coming together like a glance,

Like a glass of milk.

What I wanted to say was whiskey,

Sound of a crack opening bottles.

What I really mean is a door has multiple parts engaged in function.

What I really mean is I’m apart,

Indivisible sections laid out on a rug.

What I mean is some part of me would see these pieces, another part would just

bang them together to make sparks.

This reminds me of the wild,

& this is me not admitting it,

& this is isolation of myth,

& this is my exit.

---

Jonathon Todd is a poet and musician, living in South Philadelphia. His work deals with observations mainly written between breaks, trying to find humanity outside of and within labor. His work has been featured in Philadelphia Stories, The Lower East Side Review, and Shakefist Magazine among others.

Breaking 200

 “There is no time to think or savor the thrill of speed. And as you go down that strip, you don’t see anything. It is a no-man’s land.” – Don Garlits

 

Did it? Did it? Didn’t it? It did! By God, it did. Don Daddy did it. Big Daddy broke hot rodding’s barrier with a bam and a bale of smoke, barreling down the straightaway. Cheers from the bleachers. The rocket speed shock of the year we’d all been waiting for.

 

Did The Greek do it earlier in Illinois? All’s I can say is today the Chrondek clocks called it. In Great Meadows, at the Island Dragway, Big Daddy Don Garlits did it.

 

But it happened so fast—couldn’t see a damned thing. A shroud of fumes. Let’s pause. Take it back. Slowly now, back up the quarter-mile belt of tarmac. The Swamp Rat back across the starting line. The amber bulbs blaring again.

 

Now our rare hour—clear the area!—Daredevil Don, engine revving, raring to tear track. Slower, now, watch how the slick-wedge car’s back tires stir a whir of smoke, burning rubber. How, like an arrow, this 2000 horsepower nightmare dragster blasts down the blacktop, shatters the barrier, buries its challenger in vapor and exhaust.

 

Watch the parachute burst from the back. Watch the car break to a halt. Watch Don Garlits turn the wheel, drive back, rattling down the strip, his parachute dangling limply behind, his white glove waving from the glittering mist, already clearing it.

---

Sydney Doyle grew up in the Great Meadows mucklands near the Delaware Water Gap. She received her MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a Doctoral Fellow in English/Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Her poems appear in The American Journal of Poetry, Canary, Waccamaw, and elsewhere.

 

Paternoster Lakes

looking down on the Grinnell Valley, Glacier National Park, Montana

 

Five blue pools of water in the mountains

sewn together by strings of icy streams—

half-decade of the rosary, or full

if each bead counts twice.

Dammed by moraines dropped by moving masses

 

of ice, each could be its own mystery.

Above the green and red strips of sediment

lies a lonely frozen tarn that showers

the four beads below.

Snow drifts block its path from unsure footfalls.

 

But glacier lilies finish the prayer,

trail receding ice, lift the spring up slopes

with their golden crowns, delicate heads bowed

until dormancy,

when they’ll store the spark in bulbs.

---

Ryan is a writer living and working in the Philadelphia area.  He holds an MA in Writing Studies from Saint Joseph’s University and writes poetry and creative non-fiction. 

Greased Lightning

It’s like old times

the way we are laughing in

this dive bar, the smell of

stale fry oil soaked into

the wooden tables our

elbows stick to.

 

My friend is telling us about

the day the upper-class boy

popped her cherry—

 

only the details now are hilarious

and not heart-racing like

it was then, but the

way we are laughing, it’s

 

as though the decades hadn’t gone

anywhere and we were

those nubile, smooth-limbed does

burning simultaneously with

embarrassment and promise

 

when the world was at our

feet and we were too unsure of

how to tread—

 

The papers that year marveled at

balloon angioplasty and test tube

babies and the first successful

transatlantic balloon flight

 

and Jim Jones would change the way

we look at Kool-Aid forever—

 

but we were inventing our own vocabulary,

racy admissions whispered behind

hands, our heartbeats and the

ache between our legs matched the

 

hard rock thrums vibrating from the

muscle cars driven by boys with wild

hair and no inhibitions—

 

they’d drive by slowly, trying

out their best Kenickie come-ons,

we’d respond with Rizzo taunts

then turn away and lock arms, laughing

 

just as we are now, drunk on

the reflection we see

every time we close our eyes.

---

Lori Widmer is a full-time freelance writer and editor who writes for businesses and trade publications. She was nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in various publications, including TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Philadelphia Stories.

Our Roof Is the Nose of a Rocket

Our entire building hums,

as a beetle does before it takes to the air.

We break bread and give thanks and make things

with such frequency and repetition

that our awareness of time passing

is telescoping inward.

We’ll demand innocence,

but we know the hum,

this static-white-noise

in the field of our mind

is to remind us that

the ratio of life lived

to life left to live

has shifted

the first of many times.

Climb six flights of pre-war stairs

open the hatch to the roof so we

can drink green wine from flea market crystal.

It takes so little work to unhinge

there is little doubt that we are living doors.

We can calculate how concrete makes

geometric shapes between cities.

There is a cold front,

and coats are thin so we

cast a gaze across the skyline,

a play’s curtain.

Audacious, we cut holes

through and peek at the actors.

From the roof of that building

with it’s wild hum

like buzzing wings

we dopplar out

convinced that, tomorrow

we will lift avenues

and blocks and all

with only our will.

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Christa Pagliei is a writer and media producer from Wyckoff, NJ living in Brooklyn, New York. A published poet and fiction writer, she co-created the podcast Lost Signal Society- a series horror/fantasy/sci-fi plays. Additionally, she’s a Film and TV professional working on shows like Succession, Sneaky Pete, Mr.Robot and many more.