A friend sends A picture of three chickens Standing in a kind of Formation On a road where The snow has begun To retreat
Funny I tell her I was singing the theme from Green Acres Last evening,
And thinking About people Who move to rural places In search of serenity- While also thinking “This village could use a Trader Joe’s “
As for myself I am smitten With mountains –
Majestic but Unpretentious
And the way The silence calms me Like Miles Davis Playing a muted, tender ballad – which my friend says he mastered after two years singing the evening sky
Sunday in East Glover
Two lane roads twist Like an awkward boy At a house party.
Chamber of Commerce Autumnal breezes whisper
“It’s ok to be an October smitten brother in a corny plaid jacket which screams I too fell in love With travel agency fairy tales About this place!
I am a concrete-weary man En route to a tryst With trees and silence
I wave to blushing hills – Check the rear view mirror For police suffering from a drought Of quotas
But now The day is as calm as my blackness was unsettling for the woman in the General Store
Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of The District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. His poems have been included in over 50 anthologies, and in two volumes—fingering the keys (Gut Punch Press, 1990), and Scattered Clouds (2019, Alan Squire Publishing) He also co-hosts The Sound Of Surprise on WPFW-FM in Washington, D.C.
I know you are cold, motionless under covers holding the warmth so that freeze won’t seep into your skin. I know you are cold, on the sofa under a blanket, trying to do a crossword puzzle by candle light. I know you are cold, standing with your back to the gas stove, hoping the flame will lift the chill from your body. I know you are cold, warming yourself by the fire, wearing ear-phones plugged into a laptop listening to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies.
I know you are alone, trapped in your house by the charged power line lying like a snake slithering in your driveway. I know you are alone, waiting for your son or daughter to take you to their house where you can lay down in ease. I know you are alone walking through neighborhoods, eyeing empty houses, black filling the windows as if in mourning. I know you are alone, in a crowded restaurant after you finished lunch, wearing old clothes, a grimy self you want to wash.
I know you are in the dark, defiantly holding a candle, watching snow fall on the lawn sheeted by ice under crystallized trees. I know you are in the dark, silence alerting your body to danger as freezing rain pelts the roof and glass. I know you are in the dark, wondering if the distant train’s horn is one carrying lost hours under a midnight moon or bringing back time before sunrise. I know you are in the dark, gripping the comforter so you don’t lose yourself in the night or melt into the liquid black of God.
FOR SHARON: A SONG OF US
Obsidian colored hair and skin, dark as the soil of Illinois, smooth curves of fertile earth forever young, her smile the sunrise, her eyes the gentle night.
Sitting with friends at breakfast, she waves when she sees me. We exchange slight conversations; these bits providing nourishment for the week.
Her voice is a smooth velvet sound rippling through words, streaming through our laughter, music written by the infinite composer is measured to the beat in my chest.
I wish my hand could contour her cheek, our eyes closed, lips upon lips.
Song of Africa, I am song of Ireland. Let us stand on the same land and lift songs from of our united hearts in the morning, one soul rising from the altar.
SUNSHINE DIDN’T COME TODAY
The week has been under drizzling gray. So I bought some yellow roses, chrysanthemums, daisies, and lemon drops for you.
As you roll the drop on your tongue, you put the flowers in a vase and deeply inhale the smell.
I remember when we met. You wore a white blouse and yellow skirt, colors of spring days and young hope,
your hair dark as woods unexplored, eyes of earth nurturing virgin forest
that now look at me as you are smiling.
Sunshine has come today.
MARYLAND HEIGHTS
She stands at the precipice overlooking the bridges into Harpers Ferry, the armory and the houses. Then she looks to her right, upriver of the Potomac, at buildings along the river and trees descending from cliffs to the river banks, in the direction where the river came from, when clear waters passed over shallow stream beds, gathering itself from tributaries, in a hurry to find direction and flow, sometimes recklessly flooding riversides when it was born of a blizzard.
She extends her arms, as if she is going to embrace all the trees and lifts her head to give thanks to the clear sky.
I stand several steps back from the ledge, stare at people rowing boats and paddling kayaks at the union of the Shenandoah and the Potomac. I look southward at the river flowing through the gorge, notice the muddy and deep water progress slowly to the bay, then to the ocean.
I am aware of the disguise covering swift currents and turbulence cascading over boulders at Great Falls. I’m old enough to remember when the river was not full. Water ebbed from the banks during droughts, revealing sandy scars.
She turns around and look sat me, smiling at my quizzical expression. “You know, you are a very beautiful man.”
I am terrified of heights.
John Monagle writes: I reside in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Retired from working at The Library of Congress, I’m a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts with a MFA in creative Writing, specializing in poetry. I’ve had numerous poems published in a wide variety of journals including Minimus, Wordwrights, Bourgeon, and District Lines.
Image: Pub. by Nichols & Stuck, Pharmacists, Charles Town, W. VA. “Tichnor Quality Views,” Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
On the night before the resurrection, four little girls are seated around the dining room table a rainbow of chocolates and twice as sweet.
Sisters, they gather to perform a family sacrament– turning eggs into the colors of tomorrow’s dresses careful careful the girls whisper reverently, turning eggs from side to side
Pink violet yellow blue fragile hearts shining through Sunday school curls.
In the kitchen elders gather around the radio listening for the Saturday night news. Already the year has been bloody down in Birmingham and injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Sit ins marchings beatings bombings– the jailing on Good Friday was anything but good.
The little girls know nothing of oppression just the murmurs from grownups in the kitchen. On Easter morning, they will rise to sing hosana in the children’s choir unaware of how innocence can run red as blood.
Prior to taking a serious interest in poetry, Bernardine (Dine) Watson worked as a social policy writer for major foundations, nonprofits, and media organizations. She has written for The Washington Post, The Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation and Stoneleigh Foundation. Dine’s poetry has been published in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Indian River Review, by Darkhouse Books, and by the Painted Bride Art Center. She was a member of 2015-16 class of The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ the Poet in Progress Program, and the 2017 and 2018 classes of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s Summer Writers Week. Dine serves on DC’s Ward 4 Arts and Humanities Committee and on the selection committee for the Takoma Park Third Thursday poetry reading series. She’s read her poetry in venues throughout the DC metropolitan area with More Than A Drum Percussion Ensemble. Dine is a current member of DC Women Writers of Color.
Image by Rowland Scherman, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In the darkness of an early morning, In the chill of a tropical winter, My car trails the work bus Along narrow, sandy roads.
The bus hauls its cargo of workers To the orange groves, To climb ladders, To pick bushels of fruit.
I am a worker, too, Driving to school To teach the children Of migrant pickers, To teach the children Of the owners of the groves. I am worrying about the children, And about me, As I follow the bus.
The bus pulls to the side of the road. A dark figure appears from the palmettos, As dawn begins to play in the sky.
I see light falling On the fullest, round belly. She must give birth this day! She pulls herself Onto the steps of the bus. She is gone.
Oh, sister, What will happen to you this day? What has happened to our world To leave us both So out of joint, As I teach; As you pick and give birth?
My Orange Bathing Suit
Me, in my orange bathing suit, A boyfriend, the quarterback, Cute and sweet, coal miner’s son; Kay, tall and lithe, forget her boyfriend’s name, Only that he occupied a piece of her mind, On the rocks at the edge of New River, oldest river in North America. The ancient New River winding its way Through endless crevices to the Gauley, to the Kanawha, To the Ohio, and to the Mississippi.
We lay about on boulders, hot from the noon sun Making its way across the sky Dragonflies skimmed the eddies. The sun finding us long enough to burn our fair, young skin. Free from school, free from parents, free from small town eyes.
Rocks, standing since the ice age, heated our bodies From beneath, warming us from cold mountain winters. All around us mountains hovered, covered with huge trees, The Appalachians, one after endless one. We thought they would always fill the sky. Strip mining was just beginning; Mountain top removal, a horror we could not imagine.
Kay could give her guy her devotion; he preened in it. I, in my orange bathing suit, only suspected It was an art, this devotion. I was in love with the sun, The sky, and my orange bathing suit. We thrived in that history And did not think to ask that it last forever.
Dreama Frisk has published in Wild Sweet Notes, Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, Inside Out (Quaker Journal), The Charleston Gazette (WV), and Journal of Virginia Writers, juried for placement at Tamarack (WV arts and crafts center). She graduated from West Virginia University and University of Virginia.
Dreama taught in Florida schools where she also worked with the American Federation of Teachers. In Arlington, Virginia she taught World History to young adults in a special program. She has studied with Marc Harshman, WV poet laureate, and Barbara Kingsolver, and led a writers’ group, Ice Mountain Writers, at Romney, WV where she lived with her husband in a nearby cabin. She lives in Arlington, VA.
Image: Aerial View of Parkersburg, WV, Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
so hushed, his steps that crunch, his heart in such
sync with mine. I rise draped in river mist
and slip my hand in his, entwining our
fingers. We dance as grass grows long beneath
our feet, and he dies in my arms as I
lead him on, all his music mine to eat.
Elizabeth Stevens was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland. She uses her poetry to explore the ways evangelicalism has affected her relationship to her gender and sexuality. Her work has been previously published in Spilled Milk Magazine and Prometheus Dreaming, and she was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. If she was a cryptid, she would be the Loch Ness Monster, because she too would like to hide at the bottom of a lake where no one can bother her.
Image: Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
