Shreveport 1982: A downtown church on Christmas eve, well loved, well cared for, Worshippers in fine clothes crowd together In the old walnut pews– it is too warm for furs: Married daughters, handsome nephews In from Houston, people we do not know: Of all the places one could be this night, As lonely as any bus station or manger. But there is this: The particular tears of Christmas, The precise fragrances, the harmonies That make it palpable, That release memory’s stubborn catch Differ for us each And for every home far from home. I hear the sound, thin and sweet, O Holy Night, Scored for the voices of teenaged girls, The white light of candles Dancing on their faces.
Raleigh 2008: There are twelve of us for Christmas, three generations, ours the oldest. A benign weariness: Food and gifts, family jokes and tales, Small stresses let quietly pass. Cousins cavort, careen, compete. Our daughters, friends too, consider vegetables; Their husbands assemble a soccer goal While the gravy cools. As we are leaving, I think I see Traces of a tear on Julie’s cheek; Her smile lingers, quiet, faintly moist.
Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
I cannot make it cohere above the cigar butts, against this blackness. Here error is all in the not done, what follows within & persistently, funda- mentals in critical moments. These stones we built on to put land back under tillage,
not knowing, beyond that, dry spring, a dry summer, locusts & rain, gates all open. Hot wind came from the marshes seeking a word to make change. To this offer I had no answer.
Letter to a young poet
Setting out to visit all those wonderful places that your mother sends
postcards from is no ex- cuse for not working — remember that travel
is often confused with travail. & be aware that pterodactyls will come at
you with the sun at their backs, tout comme ta maman, whom they closely resemble.
alongside an episode
Bushfires in south-east Australia, thick sea ice thinning in the Arctic Ocean, the British economy — your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available. All you can find now are morsels of information about diverse mixing skills in consonance with electronic dance music; & how, due to test-score pressures, the resulting outcomes have been far worse than predicted.
I / tried to / reel her back
After a year of witty banter, the first firemen at the scene said “start the conversation with an open- ended question, otherwise bumps will appear at the injection sites.” It’s really a form of manipulation,
they agreed, but the only other thing that might possibly negate the out- break is the arrival of a new flavour of ice cream, & that’s hard to arrange.
Mark Young’s most recent books are The Toast, from Luna Bisonte Prods, & The Sasquatch Walks Among Us, from Sandy Press. Songs to Come for the Salamander, Poems 2013-2021, selected & introduced by Thomas Fink, will be co-published in October by Meritage Press & Sandy Press. Mark is editor of Otoliths.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Has a purpose, unless it’s only point is being savoured in its perfection— in the service of teeth, bursting its blue blood like some kind of sacrifice, submitting itself to sustain life or enhance it, both emblem and archetype: avowal of Nature’s deathless bounty.
What can be said of the ripe prize, chosen against its incognizant will; at least not forsaken? Its use being useful, its best self inside a beak or blender, transformed, in effect, into something else, like that first apple, only opposite: its meaning derived from grandeur, not grief.
We enjoy it, extol it, we eat it, paint it, photograph it, write about it.
What, then, can be said for the withered one, neglected, stockpiled, sullied by time, consigned to limbo between vined and corrupted? What does its neglect signify, if Fate forsakes its function—consumed or admired? Not unlike sad men, their pruned, sour skin
a fruitless reminder: now it’s too late.
Knight and Squires, Redux
My inbox is empty, which isn’t to say there aren’t any messages in there. But the one (I know better than to hope for two—or more) confirming something, anything, with regards to my genius (Obvi I’ll use a lower-case-g because only dead people and sociopaths can employ capital letters on their own behalves). Okay, maybe not genius but an affirmation, an acceptance, or the opposite of the formulation every rejected writer reads like a lifelong series of not-so-gentle reminders: you’re not the witness this world seeks. I can’t go on, I’ll go on, one of us wrote, but he could go on since he’d already been admitted entrance, earned the tailwind necessary for something we call a career, an annuity, succour from the squall.
Had Melville used email could he have looked in Hawthorne’s draft folder and seen the unsent missive, declaring, at long last, that he got it, he appreciated it, God-Damn it to Hell, he envied it, which is why he’d never send it, same as all the confederates and critics who had bigger fish to fry, industry events to attend, and cocktails to consume with other insiders and those born or bred with the burden of being a Genius? Believe me, Nathaniel might have said, it’s better to do the work without distraction, without ever trusting who your friends are, sensing that reviews and plaudits and money are all dust once you’re done, and who knows how the world will measure you— and your work once it no longer matters? That’s the story of my life.
But poor Herman could not see, and never knew all the things not awaiting him in classrooms and graduate seminars and reprints, even Movies and Biographies: an entire industry, built plank by plank, salt and blood and belief alive in every splinter—a bible of sorts for us, the ones who seek solace and inspiration, The One we might turn to when we wonder about our own unread messages and the fate that awaits us (no hints, it’s too painful to actually peg the future), fellow mates aboard a bigger boat, where attainment and acceptance mean less than solidarity, or sweat, or something. No, that’s a lie: all of us need a sign that signals, ballast for our belief—or lack thereof—that obliged us to take a pen, find some faith, and compose in the first place.
Dog is God Backwards or Vice Versa
Dogs are never not alive until they’re not; And it’s not that they’re gone so much as we aren’t.
It’s not about earning or appreciating each and every nap; It’s the peace of not needing approval. And who owns whom?
Dogs rely on routine, a reminder they’ve already evolved; Perfected in accordance with man defining what he needs.
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2021. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455. Read his published short fiction, poetry, and criticism here and on Twitter.
The nature of poetry has evolved since the innovation of free verse and now should allow vast latitude of expression. Too many self-appointed guardians of the realm of poetry presume to righteously define the boundaries valid for exploration, arbitrarily excluding what may not appeal to their particular sensibilities. When some of the French Symbolist poets, in particular Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollonaire and Valery, shattered the forms used for centuries and created free verse, resistance was automatic from the academics who scorned them. Those poets are venerated today as a vital part of literature.
The last major disturbance in the tranquility of poetry was caused by the Beats, who were dismissed as ill-disciplined, ill-mannered, disreputable advocates of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Now they occupy a respected niche in the cathedral of poetry, having survived alienation from the mainstream despite excursions in autonomous verse, or unrevised stream of consciousness ramblings. Their contribution exploded some of the restrictions on style and content, but their accomplishments have become stratified, while their disruption of incipient ossification has been forgotten. They are now as tame as Byron, Keats and Shelly, other forbearers who lifted the torch of rebellion against arbitrary constrictions on subject matter.
Traditionally, the self-anointed custodians of verse attempt to regulate the form, style and content of poetry and deny the validity of differing efforts. Many of the janissaries of poetry, sheltered by universities, grants, or private support, reject the adventurous spirits who seek other directions. The issues of our times are at least as consequential as effusive celebrations of the seasons, laudatory odes on public occasions, or indulgence in self-absorbed introspection.
The ancient Greeks raised poetry to the acme of public attention, with presentations of poetic drama at annual major festivals that were socio-religious-political-artistic competitions, with a laurel wreath for the winner. Today the most energetic presentations are poetry “slams”, crude performances of diverse material in rapid transit deliveries that contradict the fundamental needs of poetry; careful attention, time to consider the meaning and an atmosphere conducive to understanding, rather than raucous burlesque.
The only way to sustain poetry in the Information Age and maintain its relevance is to make it meaningful to audiences conditioned to the internet, ipod, Blackberry and text messaging. The dictum: “Form follows function” is still pertinent. If the duties of the poet can be conceived to include chronicling our times, protesting the abuses of government, raising a voice against injustice, speaking out about the increasing dangers that threaten human existence, it is critical to allow substance not to be shackled by style, content not to be constricted by form.
Rhyme and meter were once the only practiced format of poetic expression. Now they are increasingly marginalized. Perhaps metaphor and simile are not more sacred. We must aspire to emotionally engage new audiences, involve them in the illumination that poetry can transmit, preserve the existence of a vital form of human expression that is being overwhelmed by a saturation of easily accessible, diverting entertainment. We must also develop new voices that may achieve a dynamic readership by offering an alternative to brilliant wordsmiths. We need poets who will offer meaningful and significant truths to a public saturated by confusing information and nearly jaded by ongoing visual assaults on their sensibilities.
Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theatre director and worked as an art dealer when he couldn’t earn a living in the theatre. He has also been a tennis pro, a ditch digger and a salvage diver. His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and his published books include 21 poetry collections, 7 novels, 3 short story collections and 1 collection of essays. Published poetry books include: Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays, Perceptions, Fault Lines, Tremors, Perturbations, Rude Awakenings, The Remission of Order and Contusions (Winter Goose Publishing, forthcoming is Desperate Seeker); Blossoms of Decay, Expectations, Blunt Force and Transitions (Wordcatcher Publishing, forthcoming are Temporal Dreams and Mortal Coil); and Earth Links will be published by Cyberwit Publishing. His novels include a series Stand to Arms, Marines:Call to Valor and Crumbling Ramparts (Gnome on Pigs Productions, forthcoming is the third in the series, Raise High the Walls); Acts of Defiance and Flare Up (Wordcatcher Publishing), forthcoming is its sequel, Still Defiant); and Extreme Change will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. His short story collections include: Now I Accuse and other stories (Winter Goose Publishing), Dogs Don’t Send Flowers and other stories (Wordcatcher Publishing) and The Republic of Dreams and other essays (Gnome on Pig Productions). The Big Match and other one act plays will be published by Wordcatcher Publishing. Gary lives in New York City.
You can find more of Gary’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Low, the winter sun crosses the sky At highest noon, I greet him eye to eye Almost
Dandelion
Down drifts up light as a dream released by a breath
it floats from sight to set new roots, to bloom again and send out seeds on another wind.
Gravity can’t hold a spirit freed nor roots restrain a hope in bloom. The smallest breath with words said clear sets loose the tether that held me here.
Dale Walker is a poet from North Carolina.
You can find more of Dale’s work here on Ink Pantry.
It starts like nothing else does – with a simple marker: felt-tipped, Harlem black, that liquorice smell that is supposed to warn of something toxic to the human survivals; a simple line drawn down the earlobe so that something has been earmarked for something else, set aside like an antique lamp for resale; that craven Velcro way you run from the schoolyard bully, his brutish uncapped marker on the rampage.
Isaac Newton Reinvents the Charcuterie in His Own Cold Meaty Likeness
Such a cinch to move, all those electricals sent down from the fuse box, Isaac Newton reinvents the charcuterie in his own cold meaty likeness if I didn’t know better, unplanned sit-ups in the dark; the court jester before the castle, it is the laughers reverse engineered by able tear duct sheddings, humanzees in the mezzanine drumming up interest – where you end up is the sum of floppy meanderings, painted streetwalkers lining easy street, vacuums to fill in the dusty ballast-less drooping; this sky bridge of Damocles hammocks on the slow dangle, tiki bar umbrellas chasing off the rains in miniature.
Every Band Needs a Train Song
Every band needs a train song before everything goes off the rails as I stand over this sink that has seen better days, look away for a moment and when my eyes return, the sink is gone. I look away again without a thought and when I look back the sink has returned. I finish brushing, spit and rinse before turning out the light. If such things still phase you, you are groping minnows on someone else’s dirty water. Jack-knifing with gassy trucks on the diesel plan. A hint of darkness and I am gone. Back down into the tumbling catacombs of my vaulted lint-trap mind.
I wonder
if Greta was ever Garbo’s real name
or if she knew the dyslexics would would read it and see her as Great before anyone else
so that word of mouth got around
from all the bigs to the smalls
like the nefarious gum lines of some New York travel agent
who wonders why she never left the streets of New York once she got there
falling in love with a city and never a man.
Kain Crescent Park
A slim meander off Robertson to that pavement-painted blue arrow, then four steps up, count them as you go: one, two, three, four… and now you are in Kain Crescent Park looking across the flats to some picnic table by wood’s edge, on the lean and so well forested that ravenous mosquitoes eat better than you; yes, those buzzing little blood-devils, in front of a large uncut stone like the one Jackson Pollock can’t help but lie under.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Ink Pantry, Impspired Magazine, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
You can find more of Ryan’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Harvey Floyd sat on a bench, feeding kernels of wheat to the pigeons that clustered and cooed around his feet. Car horns blared and buses rumbled down the streets. Vibrations from the constant traffic rattled Harvey Floyd’s bones. He twitched and grimaced from the irritations and exhaust fumes swirling around him.
“I need a quiet and restful place,” he said aloud. “Someplace where there is no noise.”
One of the pigeons near Harvey Floyd’s left foot stopped feeding, cocked its head and stared at him with one shiny eye. “Why don’t you move to Spelsbury?” the pigeon said.
“Where is that?” Harvey Floyd asked, not at all startled by a talking pigeon.
“It’s in England.” The pigeon pecked at some wheat kernels by Harvey Floyd’s left shoe.
“How do you know?” Harvey Floyd scattered another handful of grain.
“I just flew in from there a few moments ago.”
“Ah, that explains your accent.”
“Quite so.”
“What’s special about Spelsbury?”
The pigeon hopped up on the bench and sat next to Harvey Floyd. “It has a twelfth-century Norman church with a beautiful square tower and a lovely cemetery. The village is so small you hardly encounter anyone. You will like it there. It is quiet, very restful. No cars or buses. I am sure it is the perfect place for you.”
The pigeon hopped off the bench and wandered away down the sidewalk.
Harvey Floyd went to Spelsbury and with good luck managed to rent a small stone cottage right next to the churchyard. The pigeon was right, Harvey Floyd concluded several days after moving in. Spelsbury was indeed quiet and restful.
Harvey Floyd became a fixture, wandering around the tiny village and taking his daily tea in the Rose and Thorn pub. In the evenings he treated himself to two pints of ale and an order of fish and chips. The patrons he encountered in the Rose and Thorn soon learned of his desire for solitude and said very little to him, which pleased Harvey Floyd enormously.
The cemetery, grassy and green and shaded by old oak trees, thrilled Harvey Floyd. He spent his afternoons walking among the gravestones. Many of them, tilted at precarious angles and covered with mosses and lichens, were hundreds of years old. Harvey Floyd could still read the names engraved in many of the weathered marble markers.
After many months in Spelsbury, and for amusement, Harvey Floyd began making up stories about the people buried in the cemetery.
He found one stone with the following epitaph engraved on it:
Here Lies John Nately Spakes
1620 – 1644
A damned highwayman was he Hanged by the neck From a stout oak tree Never again to rob Either thee or me.
The engraving struck Harvey Floyd as particularly intriguing. On sunny days he sat on the grass, leaned against the headstone and made up swashbuckling exploits of the handsome young brigand. He imagined beautiful and aristocratic ladies swooning with the vapours, and their male companions trembling with fear and impotence, when the highwayman stopped their coaches on the King’s Highways and robbed them of their jewels and money.
One day as Harvey Floyd lazed against the highwayman’s headstone in the warm summer sun, making up a great tale, John Nately Spakes spoke to him. “I am going to rob the coach of Sir John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester, this afternoon and you will accompany me,” said a voice from deep within the ground.
Harvey Floyd felt something grasp his ankles and pull. He began to disappear under the ground. Soon he found himself astride a snorting stallion by the side of the King’s Highway. Another man astride a similar horse rode out of the surrounding oak trees. “Who are you?” asked Harvey Floyd. His voice cracked and trembled with fear. “Are you John Nately Spakes?”
“Aye, that I am.” John Nately Spakes grinned savagely. “Here,” he said, handing Harvey Floyd a large and clumsy dragoon pistol. “The Earl is a bloody rotter. You may have to shoot him if he refuses to give up his purse.”
“Oh,” Harvey Floyd stammered, “this is not at all what I wanted. I seek peace and quiet. Oh, no, this simply won’t do.”
“It is too late for you,” roared John Nately Spakes. “Your swaggering tale becomes your life. But look! Yon comes the Earl’s coach!”
Harvey Floyd looked down the road. A coach, pulled by four horses with flaring nostrils and hooves hammering the road’s surface, thundered his way. The driver snapped the reins over the backs of the horses, urging them onward.
Before the coach reached them John Nately Spakes spurred his horse into the middle of the road. He brandished a pistol. “Hold! Hold!” he shouted and aimed the pistol at the driver. The driver pulled on the reins and put his weight on the footbrake, bringing the coach to a stop. Clouds of dust boiled around it.
John Nately Spakes swung his horse round to the coach door. “Out, out with you! Be quick about it,” he commanded. Two women and one man tumbled from the coach. “Well, now,” said John Nately Spakes, baring his teeth in a vicious sneer. “If it isn’t the Earl of Rochester and his harlots. Give up your purses!” ordered Spakes, waving his pistol in the air.
“Never!” bellowed the Earl of Rochester over the shrieks of the two women. “Driver!” he shouted. “Shoot this blackguard at once!” The driver stood and aimed a pistol at John Nately Spakes who fired his own pistol first. The driver dropped to the coach’s footwell and lay still.
The loud pistol shot startled Harvey Floyd’s horse. The horse reared violently. Harvey Floyd toppled off and landed on the top of his head. He heard the bones in his neck snap and break then blackness closed over him.
The groundskeeper found Harvey Floyd the next morning lying against John Nately Spakes’s gravestone and called the local constable who called the coroner. After a brief examination the coroner determined Harvey Floyd died of a broken neck.
How, asked the villagers, did Harvey Floyd break his neck in the cemetery? The coroner shrugged. Some things, he said, cannot be explained. The villagers buried Harvey Floyd in a secluded corner of the churchyard and forgot about him.
Several months later a pigeon flew in and perched on Harvey Floyd’s gravestone. The pigeon surveyed the cemetery, noted the oak leaves twinkling like emeralds in the afternoon sun as a soft summer breeze swept over them. “I see you have found a quiet and restful place,” murmured the pigeon. Then he flapped his wings and flew away.
Robert P. Bishop, a former soldier and teacher, lives in Tucson. His short fiction has appeared in The Literary Hatchet, The Umbrella Factory Magazine, CommuterLit, Lunate Fiction, Spelk, Fleas on the Dog, Corner Bar Magazine, Literally Stories, and elsewhere.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
So Long, Marianne, Leonard Cohen had sung when I was a thing of the future and still unborn, intuiting the ways of the world from an unhappy womb.
My father died when I was six months old. My eyes cannot recall his mien, my ears his voice, too preoccupied with the milk that mixed with diluted salt.
“So Long,” she whispered when I became only one, entrusting me to what she deemed trustworthy hands, rescuing me from penury by severing a sacred bond.
And who says food is more important than love! A child gets more sustenance from a maternal hold. Now I feel as starved as when I was an infant bereft of home.
So Long Mariannes, Miriams, Marys and all wretched mums.
Tedium
The drab features of the dullest of days, a frowning sun and a languid moon that’s loath to scintillate, a mast-less ship that has loitered for a hundred years in yonder bay.
The minutes that tick on the mantelpiece the passage of time, deafening my ears, an unnerving similitude of reiterative ills in yonder abyss.
The bland voice that dictates the norm to which homo sapiens has conformed continues to drawl in every soul beyond yonder walls.
The desk that has harassed necks and spines irreverently reclines upon the ground, sluggish with pride, a monument for lives ill-spent in strife in yonder hives.
A Reading of the Film Bee Season
I always associated magic with evil deeds, with hags and cauldrons, with boiling snakes, with sowing discord amid matrimonial seeds, with ruptures, with effigies, with psychic disease, with a trail of misfortunes that never cease.
Kabbalah was one word that filled me with fear, a cultural legacy that ignorance had reared, but it took a movie with Richard Gere to show me how words transcend their spheres to attain a hearing in God’s own ears with a possible response from the Mighty Creator.
What Is? [For my Loulou Spitz]
What is in this white, little paw? A pledge of friendship, A tenacious hold, A grasp of firmness in a very ephemeral world.
What is in this rubber-like, tiny nose that nestles to every item of clothes, that sniffs each fragrance, each odor of socks, and hoard them like bones?
What is in these fluffy, drooping ears that capture the pulse of inward fears, that yearn for footsteps, for the rustle of treats, for fluttering heartbeats?
What is in this proud, arching tail that heralds a storm of greetings, that eloquently commands attention and praise, and orchestrates the art of hailing?
Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.