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Under a pale sun, a dark-haired woman sweeps glass
smashed in last night’s brawl. Scattered
shards are edged in blood. Across
the street a boy dribbles a ball—a steady beat
like fired shots. The woman brushes silt and sings:
mi amor volverá (my love will come back).

Around the corner, Pacho leans back
and lights another smoke. His thick glasses
make him look startled. A song
crackles under a needle as he arranges scattered
photographs. A solitaire hand that beats
him every time. He wears his son’s crucifix.

His only boy, first caught in crossfire
and then a crowded E.R. Shouts for back-up,
a gurney, a god had filled ellipses beating
from monitors. Finally, his son’s eyes had glassed
over. Pacho gathers the pictures, scattering
his ashes on the floor… Down the block a song

rises from St. Michael’s church. A song
about a shepherd who bled from a cross
and promised salvation to his scattered
flock. Two boys lounge in a back
pew. Figures plead in panes of glass.
Candle shadows shimmy like girls. Qué ritmo,

they crack, craving the bass beats
that boom from cars. It’s always the same song.
The priest pours wine into the chalice studded with glass
as voices climb the steeple’s cross
and pierce the sky. On stone ledges, birds back
away as a gust scatters

dust and leaves. Then they burst—scattering
up like cards after drunk fists beat
down… Pacho sticks the needle back
into its track. From idling cars, songs
unfurl like skulls and cross-bones.
The dark-haired woman slides her glass up.

Cross now, she beats the sill, scattering curses. (It’s always
the same song.) The boys saunter off, caps on backward,
the grooves of their soles glistening with stained glass.

Angela Canales is a high school educator, freelance editor, translator and writer. She earned her master’s in Writing Studies from St. Joseph’s University, and her story "Out of Nowhere" was included in the 2009 anthology The Best of Philadelphia Stories: Volume 2. Most recently, she was included in the 2012 cast of Listen to Your Mother, a national 10-city reading series exploring the bond between mothers and children.

On New Years Day in Philadelphia
when I was ten and you were seventy,
the Mummers waved their plumes and stamped.
Ice fell in feathers from their capes.
Three boys would bear the Captain’s train
down to the judge’s stand on Broad,
a flask of whisky at their lips.
My father lifted me above
the crowd, the helium balloons.
His shoulders then seemed high enough.
I said that he should lift you too,
and laughed; with smoke-black braid, thick
shoes, you’d dangle almost to the ground.
But from your deckchair on the curb,
the view was blocked. You worked your foot
and said you’d seen it all before.
Robbi Nester is the author of a chapbook, Balance (White Violet Press, 2012). She has published poetry in Qarrtsiluni, Northern Liberties Review, Inlandia, Victorian Violet Press, Floyd County Moonshine, and Caesura, with poems forthcoming in Jenny and Poemeleon. Her reviews have appeared in The Hollins Critic and Switchback, and her essays have been anthologized in Easy to Love but Hard to Raise (DRT Press, 2011) and Flashlight Memories (Silver Boomer Press, 2011).

There’s paint slapped onto
my sky, thick like an impression
on my aching-scratch ink into
leather bound sketch journal
one long poem out of love, want to
take road poem and turn that into
novella that’s effortlessly sad but beautiful and bring
back those days roaring through
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois-breakfast,
sausage gravy-bat factory-beer-
Dave and Joe up front and me studying maps
in the back, shouting directions-no GPS
bullshit, horseshit-doing it ourselves,
it’s been three months-three million years,
the crops are shriveled junk melted down
and shot into our arms, the city is torn down
about my knees-I’ve nothing left but
survival and words
Tom Pescatore grew up outside Philadelphia, is an active member of the growing underground arts scene within the city and hopes to spread the word on Philadelphia’s new poets. He maintains a poetry blog: amagicalmistake.blogspot.com. His work has been published in literary magazines both nationally and internationally but he’d rather have them carved on the Walt Whitman bridge or on the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s old Skid Row.

after “Walk” by Cornelius Eady

I want to buy a forest that will speak

in calm sentences about the aftermath.

 

What it’s like standing deep in hard

black soil, and Springtime, after,

 

cold quiet frozen months snowed in, a tiny room, the window

is all—

 

It’s late I think, for recovery; these frostbitten

hands and toes start tingling with stranded blood

 

each Spring, they unfreeze and unfold,

their secret micro movements,

 

and the narrow shoot,

 

the leaves, the leaves, I say to myself,

 

hard to believe

and then—

they open.

 

Clear cut, then chemicals, clever

heavy water rushes downhill, floods any

second to kill root,

fool the fragile,

 

but a crisis line, a voice,

takes her time with me, waiting,

her emails, counselors, call backs,

 

a forest hut, something shining—

the fire, always a fire,

where all the downed wood rings,

sing

hold your head high,

darlin’

they chant in circular meditation,

live, live, live, they live

me alive, again,

for now,

the cascade of long branches,

of arms feeling a feathery new world

in daily treacherous conditions

in hills of frozen

 

white.

Laurie Arnold-McMillan is a therapeutic writing facilitator in Pittsburgh who uses the magic of poetry to inspire people to get in touch with meaningful material that can alter the course of their life story. She is also a nurse and gardener and enjoys a vital literary community in Pittsburgh.

It’s hard to say what we’ve missed
in these years, you not even
solid enough to be a memory
or maybe not even a brother,
but simply an absence,
like a promise broken
or an approaching front
that builds but doesn’t fall
so its cold can’t kiss
your waiting face,
yet you were there
just in time to point a finger
at our mother’s cancer,
to run into the burning building
for her, selfless lamb.
Still you’re always here,
a cloud above the roof
you move and shift your shape
like horizons in a changing sky
sometimes threatening storms
that rattle windows
and other times only leaving
shadows where sunlight
should have settled.

 

I kept my father’s ashes in a drawer
where I kept scarves, belts and Xanax.
When it was time
the last tangible weight of proof
was carried
on to his high school football field
he had never returned to
until now.
His white ash spilled
across the green
glinting like bone diamonds.

Caren Lee Brenman writes poetry and short stories. Her work has recently appeared in Contemporary American Voices and Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream. She moved from New York City to Philadelphia 23 years ago and hasn’t looked back.

Before me lies a whole crow
so deeply black, the sun accentuates
the green blue sheen of feathered head,
the dulled shine of once darting eyes.
It is not cooked. No spice hides
the raw, dank taste.
I shall eat it all,
eyes averted
from the pooled dark blood.

Born October, 1941 in Philadelphia, Pa., Elizabeth Quigley is a member of Center City Poets. Her poems have appeared in The Fox Chase Review. As a member of Center City Poets, she has read at Three Sisters Café in Fox Chase and at Blue Moon in Center City.

Inside the New Vegetarian restaurant there are New Vegetarians
congregating to sing the praises of five different kinds of pumpkin
or cherry pinot noir that tastes – mmmmm yes -while out by the alley

a banjo troupe from Baton Rouge makes the blues, one girl on a washboard
fingers like jaguars. Another squats, firm hands on the bowstring, plays
the water trough upturned like a lover. Her legs encircle that galvanized metal,

leaning hard against the brick of the New Vegetarian. She twangs and whoops
and mmmmm yes mixes with the winebreath from the crowd as The Jaguars play
faster now as spiced faces loiter, sway and sour under the platinum sky and

one woman, stringy grey hair, gathers up her fringed skirt, she skitters a jig,
with halter top slipping revealing gleaming that cascade of white, flesh
(and her hips like your mother’s). Some call her a cat. The band keeps playing.

You watch as the street, with its dingy look, gnaws on itself in the darkness.
And still, the woman, muttering "jaguar," and meaning the sensation
of a mouth cracking marrow or that near-suffocation.

Sierra Eckert is studying English literature and creative writing at Swarthmore College. Her poems have appeared in The Night Café and Small Craft Warnings. She has had three plays produced, and her original play, Dust of Babylon, was performed in the Washington DC Capital Fringe Festival July 2009.

Postcard unto a glint of lightspeed

Little pinprick, little leaklight: so much dissipates in the wake; so much accumulates in a delay. A wink become a nova become just another patch of darkness. The wind was up a little today and I was watching a flake of mica vibrate, a loose tooth-filling aching to free from igneous pebble, and its little dance was brighter than the sun – if reflected, if minuscule – and I was watching a single iridescent insect wing flashing rainbows, veined and brittle, a little plastic smudge of oil – the greedy vestiges of little black bulges that spin webs and crystals and leave them.

Jacob A. Bennett
lives and works in Philadelphia, where he teaches rhetoric, poetry, and
literature. Links to CV, other poems, and various well-intentioned screeds
published at: antigloss.wordpress.com

This morning she was a meadow in frost.
I came from woods to find the field overwritten.
The small, faceless berries were fringed in white hair,
The honeysuckle spiked with cold pickers.
I walked across quickly, the sun balanced on my shoulder.
I slipped into the far woods.
On my return just thirty minutes later,
The frost line had receded,
The field restored to goldenrod and asters.
I wonder:
Were they true,
The words the field said to me
After the dawn,
But before the high sun
Rolled back the frost?
Scott Thomas has a B.A. in Literature from Bard College, a M.S. in
Library Science from Columbia University, and a M.A. in English from the
University of Scranton and is currently employed as a librarian;
specifically, Head of Information Technologies & Technical Services
at the Scranton Public Library in Scranton, PA. He lives in Dunmore, PA
with his wife Christina and his son Ethan. His poems have appeared in
Mankato Poetry Review, The Kentucky Poetry Review, Sulphur River
Literary Review, and other journals.