Archives

Contrary to Popular Belief, or, My Parents Debate Religion Over Coffee

My father doesn’t believe in God the way

he thinks he should. There will always be

barriers between the holy and the tangible,

and today, it’s Big Bang vs Genesis. I think

this world will never have the answers for

bare feet on the water’s surface. But still,

he is suffering, too. My mother believes

the moonlit garden where we were born

is pure. My father sees the other half. God

is not limited to beauty; the world he built

is far from perfection. It is blossoming with

faith thin as the broken breath between

sips of coffee gone cold. Tension tethers to

our living room gilded by dawn. My father

 

 my mother believes, but when he sees her,

stained glass and baptismal waters shifting

between what is known and what is felt,

he feels obligated to choose. Worries that

resurrection, water deepening to wine, and

sin cannot be explained. If God is salvation,

he is Monet’s lily pads, each lotus sunset,

and the earth we are buried in. For her, this

answers everything, creates all. But divinity

encompasses heartbreak, hatred, death,

ignorance and childhood leukemia and

trigger fingers. My father rests, takes

my mother’s hands, and silence swaths

doubts. Much like God asks, though, he

 

believes in being good, no matter what follows death. I’m not sure there’s a difference.

Annabelle Smith is a student at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. She has received national recognition for her work in poetry from Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. More of her work can be found in Spotlong Review, Potomac Review, Black Coffee Review, and other journals.

 

Oxygen Destroyer

As long as I’m alive, who can say I wouldn’t be coerced into using it again? – Dr. Serizawa (Gojira, 1954)

 

Brackish water detonates, stickleback failing

to squirm from the kingfisher’s bill.

 

Swept into the branches, what remains:

smash the spine, suck bladder from bone.

 

Pistol-mouthed sun edging the lips

of the river. Last night, I fired

 

upright in bed, struck by a moonbeam of panic:

Twelve years on, you’ve somehow escaped,

 

survived by a stream of electrons,

mourning notes, your candle’s animation

 

frozen on my laptop’s open window.

I almost titled this Open Window

 

to bear witness to not just your death

but the power of air, the advantage of height,

 

the threshold you once threatened

for my murder. Still your tremors

 

haul me, flailing on my side

in your mouth, from the boiling surface,

 

each eye fixed on its own dimension,

talon and water and sky. Here, the air

 

I can’t respire. The delta shrugs, pulls again

its body to its neck, forgets the waves,

 

the trace scales floating. Sleeps.

Surely you are not the last lizard

 

to crawl from this ocean.

If we keep testing this weapon,

 

you may yet rise again. If our atoms touch,

our bodies will explode.

Dan Schall is a poet and teacher based in Pennsylvania. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Willows Wept Review, Anthropocene Literary Journal, Arboreal Literary Magazine, Merion West, Cartridge Lit, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Shore, The Light Ekphrastic, Right Hand Pointing and many other journals.

 

Tombstones in the Delaware River

Graves warehouse

immortality like a bank

stores bullion. Yet,

if the need arises,

a defunct cemetery

may wish to break

open the marble assets

deposited to its care

by evicting a few

unaccounted bodies

and auctioning off

its surplus headstones,

now repurposed as rip rap

for the Betsy Ross.

At low tide, when

the velvet waters

draw back you

can see the markers

stacked around

the bridge piers like art

displayed in a rich

man’s parlor, names

and dates showing

on their banknote

faces. They have ages

left, standing security

for capital improvement

in perpetual care, though

not as was intended.

Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. Finishing Line Press has accepted his chapbook, Lungs, for publication in 2024. He was nominated this year for the Pushcart Prize.

 

You Suck At Striper Fishing

You suck at striper fishing

declares a bumper sticker on a Toyota Tacoma.

 

I speed up to see the purveyor

of this, in my case,

truthful claim,

expecting a Duck Dynasty

character in camo jacket

and traffic-cone-colored beanie

but, instead,

find a young guy

in a vibrant silk button-up

which I quickly assess

isn’t a Reyn Spooner

or Tommy Bahama.

Maybe a Coogi relic from the 90s.

 

When he notices me,

I smile in a way

that is meant to communicate

but likely does not

that even if this isn’t his truck

and he also sucks

at catching striper, he is good

at catching people.

 

He nods

and releases me back onto the Schuylkill.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery and still lives in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he teaches social work at Rowan College South Jersey. Recent or forthcoming publications include: Rattle, New Ohio Review, Sonora Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He is the author of the chapbook, Roadside Attractions: a Poetic Guide to American Oddities. Find out more at: www.johnwojtowicz.com.

 

Letter to an Old Friend

To read “Letter to an Old Friend” by Sonia Arora, click HERE.

Sonia is trying to find the right balm to cure her diasporic funk. She channels her angst by writing poems and insists on walking every day. Sonia has been published in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket, Elysium Review, RockPaperPoem, Sonic Boom and more. In her free time, she fights fascism and makes pumpkin roti. Sonia raised her son Kabeera in Philadelphia and the city echoes in her heart till today.

 

In the City

We saw a goose in the courthouse yard.

Then more flew in and settled

on the grass. The day was sinking hard

 

to dusk, but the geese paid it no mind,

just croaked and rustled by the pond.

The path encircling them was lined

 

with pithy weeds that spit fronds high.

End-of-workday walkers passed us by,

mothers with strollers, shy

 

tourists, acting awkwardly at home. The water

glistened, increasingly, as the sun slaked

itself on winter-fingered tree limbs. The ache

 

of colors intensified the sky for one moment,

then slid to indigo. And off we went,

wandering towards home, and fell in bed,

as if this were some grand event.

Magda Andrews-Hoke lives in Philadelphia, PA. She has studied literature, religion, and linguistics and was a 2019 recipient of the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship for Poetry. Her poems can be found in Commonweal Magazine, The Friends Journal, and elsewhere.

 

Fevered

She told me her brain was a barn on fire,

horses hammering at the stalls, beams ablaze

and buckling, sparks taking their hot bodies

outward and upward on air drafts, or worse,

her brain a cathedral burning, it was Notre Dame

while Paris gasped, medieval joinery unjoined

in a furnace that melted iron, out of control,

smoke in her lungs, an auto da fe of mind.

What I could tell her was: nothing. That

everything dies? That the fire is beautiful?

Or, here is a river, immerse yourself? No—I held

her feverish body next to mine and let her burn.

Ann E. Michael lives in Emmaus, where for many years she ran the writing center at DeSales University. Her most recent book is The Red Queen Hypothesis; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. Her next collection, Abundance/Diminishment, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in the spring of 2024. She maintains a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog.

 

the body remembers everything it has ever been

Editor’s Choice: 2024 Philadelphia Stories Poetry Contest

 

and by this I don’t mean the eggs in me that grew

inside the fetus that was my mother inside her mother’s womb

 

I mean how when cats flick their talkative tails we sense

precisely the heft of our own, feel the spark and the stretch

of dormant muscles ready to twitch

&

I mean how we are blessed by remnants of

first-worm’s segmentation so yes our guts

have brains and yes our tongues are

smart and lissome as octopus tentacles and yes

our hands can reach from each side of

our bilateral bodies and in the middle

meet and clap and clap again

&

I mean how when I whisper you have wings you open

your chest, you pull your shoulders back, you feel your arms

retract and sprout anew through the exact

places in your back that ache whenever you

have given up hope.

 

Shhh now—a secret: your thyroid gland is in

your neck, for once you needed it to pull that precious

iodine from the water fluttering through your

gills. Now your fingers are flicking, aren’t they,

readying to reach, aching to touch those most familiar

flaps –

 

go on, no one’s looking, and your hand

knows just where on your neck to land.

Elliott batTzedek is a bookseller, poet, and liturgist who lives in Philadelphia. Her poems and translations have been published in: American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Lilith, I-70 Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Humana Obscura,Sakura Review, Apiary, Cahoodaloodaling, Naugatuck River Review, Poemeleon, Poetica, Philadelphia Stories, and a Split This Rock poem of the week. Her chapbook the enkindled coal of my tongue was published in January, 2017 by Wicked Banshee Press. A chapbook of translations from Shez, A Necklace of White Pearls, is forthcoming from Moonstone Press in 2024.

 

Yellow Throat

Editor’s Choice: 2024 Philadelphia Stories Poetry Contest

To read “Yellow Throat” by Alison Lubar, click HERE.

Alison Lubar is a queer, nonbinary, mixed-race femme; they teach high school English and Mindfulness. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net, and they’re the author of four chapbooks and one full collection, METAMOURPHOSIS, forthcoming with fifth wheel press in October 2024. Find out more at alisonlubar.com or on Twitter @theoriginalison.

 

Underground Parking in Tehran, 1984

Editor’s Choice: 2024 Philadelphia Stories Poetry Contest

 

“We must take shelter darling,” my mom

whispered in my ear at 2’oclock in the morning.

Her soft words were preludes to staccatos of sirens.

We had 5 minutes before the bombardment would begin.

An exodus of terrified neighbors ran through

the maze of staircases and dark corridors towards

the underground parking.

 

I saw my friend Shadi running barefoot.

She had to choose between finding her slippers

or grabbing her cat, Pishi,

and she had picked the latter.

Her 3-year-old brother was oblivious

to what was happening.

He walked straight to the back wall

of the parking lot with a box of crayons,

drawing hieroglyphs of zigzags

and squiggly lines.

To him, this was merely a late-night potluck.

 

People gathered around with their survival kits:

food, water, blankets and transistor radios

to follow the news. The parking lot was dark and cold

like a tomb of a forgotten king.

I wondered how long we may be stranded this time,

and what would happen if the bombs hit our building.

 

I sat cross-legged on the cement ground

in a cocoon of blankets and closed my eyes.

I could hear Shadi’s cat meowing in the background,

Mrs. Mirza praying, “Ya Ali, help us,”

and the weak radio frequency dying and resurrecting.

Shakiba Hashemi is an Iranian-American poet, artist and teacher. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Laguna College of Art and Design. She is a winner of 2023 Best of the Net Award and has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. She is the author of the chapbook Murmur (Word Poetry, 2023) and her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Indianapolis Review and elsewhere.