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Two Poems by Anna Idelevich

Early in the morning

Early in the morning jelly smokes over the water,

put semolina and millet in the boiler

and make a dream in the ocean of love.

Your love.

Disheveled my braids,

braids, not just disgrace,

curls of curly house.

Will fall like a beam into a ditch,

will whisper to me, will embrace,

and the line will run.

He will press, he will kiss,

and I’m already a river….

We went out into the night, the jackets were buttoned

We went out into the night, the jackets were buttoned,

lanterns – honey of audience.

And the graffiti was emphasized in black

we don’t need about love conventions.

The stars breathe in fumes, gas

they understand tenacious, different.

And our cars are on the highway

foreshadow the two o’clock.

Lips strewed with grains

and the words are baked sleeplessly.

I don’t need you and the other,

even in the morning, sweet swearing.

Passing high arches

the lanterns above them pour in flames.

Moths on the bumper and in the lamp

so many of our verses will die.

They swallowed from resentment

and watches – trends.

I’m in a beautiful nightmare with you

let them go drunk …

There is no competition when together.

And the bass player of the night is a black song

skeletons people.

You caress my feet in a taxi

in the twilight our madness.

Who will move those lines from you

if I love?

Drunk, drunk month also flogs,

which is not for the weather.

Anna Idelevich is a scientist by profession, Ph.D., MBA, trained in the neuroscience field at Harvard University. She writes poetry for pleasure. Her books and poetry collections include DNA of the Reversed River and Cryptopathos published by the Liberty Publishing House, NY. Anna’s poems were published by Louisville Review and Fleur-de-Lis Press, Weasel Press, In Parenthesis, displayed at The McNay Art Museum, O:J&A, Lucky Jefferson, Hash, Gyroscope review, among others. We hope you will enjoy their melody, new linguistic tone, and a slight tint of an accent.

Image by Pudelek, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Autumn Fading-Director’s Cut by William T. Blackburn

Green*
Fleshy limbs fingerpaint the sky
That wondrous joy of life bedecked in emerald sheaves
Parasols twirling, swirling overhead
Shade from a beaming sun
Meal for all things living

Red
Cavorting flame upon the canopy
Fiery spriggan leaping upon chilled winds
Pamphlets scattered over cobbles
Story of the forest
Within these leaves

Orange
Ember glow at sunset
Drawing down of growing season
Harvest bounty: blessed apples, squash, and beans
Citrine post-it clings to heel
Worm-worn one-sheet from the bower

Yellow
Golden halo reflecting in the lake
Final blush of high summer sun low upon the sky
Damp, rainy days along muddy paths
Aging newsprint pages gust
Announcement of winter snow

Brown
Battered by rain, knocked from lofty heights
Infusion of tannin, little tea puddles
Moldering and curled with age
Crumpled, torn kraft paper wrappers
Littering our sidewalks in autumn

Black*
Sepulcher of bacterial dance
Nodules of decay in snow piled slush, boot treads
Windblown and waterborne to sewer grates
Mingled there with detritus
The leavings of the day

Currently based in Ohio (USA), William T. Blackburn struggles still to find his car keys. He holds a BA in English:Writing/Teaching and Music Composition from Westminster College. His work appears in SCRAWL: 94, Emerald Press, Route 7 Review: 6 & 7, Edify Fiction: Teen, Thirty West-Weekly Degree 6/19, The Blue Mountain Review 16, fws:journal of literature & art: 2 & 3, Paragon Press: Tales of Reverie, The Anti-Languorous Project: Soundbite 4, AbstractMagazineTV-Contemporary Expressions, Soliloquies Anthology: 24.1, and Poet’s Choice: Birth, Please See Me, The Rainbow Poems(UK), AIPF, TAEM: Abstract Elephant. His work has been selected by Castabout Anthology, and Ricochet Review: 8. He contributed to Adirondack Center for Writing: PoemVillage-2019 and 2020 and Response II, as well as Riza Press/Pen and & Pendulum: Giving.

Image by Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Dülmen, Börnste, Weide — 2015 — 9921” / CC BY-SA 4.0

Two Poems by Gregory McGreevey

cicada’s hymn

Untitled

Untitled

Your name has become muscle memory for me. The atavistic tendencies of time travel. Sweet billowing hills laying rampant like a red carpet. A fiefdom of marginalized tumors, swollen rivers, and cauliflower ears. Gently spoken vertigo, an ally of sensory vistas.

Black tar is redundant, white guilt is redundant, pharaohs only speak of architectural intestines, of facetious apologies nestled among the emerald sarcophagi. Bow to splendid tones, stop fantasy, remit pleasantry.

Heart rests in fragile atmospheres, builds fatal reckonings from the sting of being born.

Gregory McGreevey lives and write poetry in Baltimore, Maryland. His work has previously been featured in West Trade Review, The Finger Literary Journal, and Straylight Literary Magazine.

Image by Rushen – {unidentified} cicada (emerging) – Khao Yai National Park, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79233028

Sorrow by Christine M. Du Bois

I walked today in Wilmington. No Biden sightings,

but I had a most perfect look at a Cooper’s hawk

–the best of all my years of birding.

I love birds. 

The Cooper’s Hawk is a bird.

Cooper’s Hawks eat birds. 

It has surely happened somewhere

—somewheres, many times—

that a mother bluebird 

with tiny babies in her nest has met her end 

in the cruel claws and beak of a Cooper’s.

And her babies have starved, wailing in their nest.

But, blameless,

the Cooper’s Hawk has not starved,

nor her plump babies.

I love the mother bluebird, 

and I love her frantic infant birds, 

and I love the stately Cooper’s Hawk,

and I love her sated babies. 

Hawks are not humans. 

But it is the sedimentary sadness of our story

that I carry such tenderness for them all.

I cannot stop,

just as the birds cannot stop

being birds.  

Christine M. Du Bois is an anthropologist of immigration, race relations, and food cultures.  She has published three non-fiction books, Images of West Indian Immigrants in Mass Media (LFB Scholarly, 2004), The World of Soy (University of IL Press,2008), and The Story of Soy (Reaktion Press, 2018). She lives in a hotbed of election happenings, near Philadelphia, where apparently bad things happen.  This is her first foray into poetry. 


Photo by Pete Nuij on Unsplash

I Garden Weeds by Ethan Goffman

I wouldn’t say I have a brown thumb.
Fresh green weeds spring up where I garden,
infiltrating
the flowering natives.

I cultivate a wild look,
but when does the cultivation end
and weedy wildness begin?
What is art?
what is dishevelment?

All gardening means
tending living things
with tiny minds of their own,
selecting them, herding them,
eliminating undesirables,
bringing order to
wild, green beating hearts.

Writing poems
is a kind of gardening,
from the soil of the spirit.
What does one control?
Are weeds gifts from the wild?
from the oversoul?

To garden, one must get down in the dirt.
Never be afraid to prune,
as an old girlfriend, of sorts, told me.
She pulled out men as abruptly
as I yank dandelions the instant I spot
their lovely, golden heads.

In the main garden bed,
I scrape out, dig out, wrench out
weeds, weeds, weeds, weeds.
Gnarly little interlopers
with fluffy white flowering balls,
viny running weeds, encircling,
boisterous, broad-leafed things,
puny patches of innocent clovers.

As one wise gardener said,
a weed is just a plant that has not found a champion.

No matter how I prune and pull
the soil of my soul
I’ve lost control
of my garden,
my unruly thoughts,
dreams, wild words.

Ungrateful little weeds
peek out,
smile,
say, “don’t hurt us,
we are
gifts of nature
who made us all.”

Ethan Goffman’s first volume of poetry, Words for Things Left Unsaid, is just out from Kelsay Books.  His poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, BlazeVox, Bradlaugh’s Finger, Burgeon, The Loch Raven Review, Mad Swirl, MadnessMuse, Ramingo’s Blog, Setu, and elsewhere. Ethan is 
co-founder of It Takes a Community, a Montgomery College initiative bringing poetry to students and local residents.  He is also founder and producer of the Poetry & Planet podcast on EarthTalk.org.


Image by mieoli – uitstaande melde (Atriplex patula), CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3020781