Nathan Anderson is a poet from Mongarlowe, Australia. He is the author of Mexico Honey, The Mountain + The Cave and Deconstruction of a Symptom. His work has appeared in Otoliths, BlazeVox, Beir Bua and elsewhere. You can find him at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter.
Racquets she said, even though there was no tennis going on.
Or maybe it was rackets, & she was talking about the noise up the road, or the way that local builders get their plans through council despite breaching nearly every bylaw in the book.
Could have been Reckitts, left up for me to interpret which among their products I’m in dire need of — condoms, antiseptic lotions, mustard, mouthwash, grime or pimple remover.
Then again, perhaps rickets, even though I’m not young — except in name — & any or all of the products listed above would have helped minimize or even remove that condition.
So, rockets. No, not that, her red glare tells me quite clearly.
Leaves only ruckets . . . But there’s no such word in general use, though it is a family name, & a brand of skates, &, if Google’s autocomplete is accurate, it might have something to do with tickets to the Rugby World Cup.
Though, wait. Because of this fuss I’m making over what the word in question is, I’ve just been accused of causing a ruckus. Perhaps that is what was intended all along.
Two poems from 100 Titles from Tom Beckett
27: Default Settings
Start at the end, my sensei told me, & work your way back. Then, once you’ve got there, start again & work your way even further back. Again & again, until there’s nowhere left to go. Then start again. This way or that is immaterial.
28: Spacing Out in Space
The stars have temporarily gone out, & I have drifted in the sub- sequent darkness. Am back in that art-inspired social diner in Bangkok — or was it on Tatooine? — gazing at
the wall, unconsciously memorizing the sign that states the place is avail- able for brunch, lunch, & dinner, as well as open for home deliveries between 8:00 am & 10:00 pm. Such
is life on the final frontier. Nothing to see when you’re going at super- luminal speeds, not even the imposs- ible linear light of stars passing by in the way that old tv series used to
imagine might happen. Nothing to do except tune out, or else turn on Net- flix or Disney+, because, as they say, in Space, when you’ve got your ear- buds in, nobody can hear you stream.
Amazone
Some time later, when the karaoke machines
started calling to one another, she packed up
her respirator & its axled oxygen cylinder &,
with a tetrapak of re- constituted Brazilian
orange juice for guidance, headed for the jungle.
From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXXII
I don’t know what they are up to. It wd/ seem unwarr- anted. Read one book an hour, less a work of the mind than of affects, but enough to keep out of the briars. The people are addicted. Life & death are now equal, no favour to men
over women. Boat fades in silver; slowly. Let no false colour exist here. Behind hill the monk’s bell borne on the wind. The bamboos speak as if weeping. Of this wood are lutes made.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for more than sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
She’s dead, but her Facebook page is still alive, still there, no comments, pictures, likes deleted. Her friends leave her messages today, wish her a Happy Heavenly Birthday.
I stick to the living with my birthday blessings, but pause at the names of the dead on my list of friends, eight of them gone. A few classmates from 50 years ago. An old boyfriend. A poet friend. My father.
I click on their profiles, feel a stab, as if they want something from me. I could post an emoji: a glass of wine to celebrate a loved one. A row of red hearts.
A pang, a longing—but also a lifting, as if I’m being welcomed, taken by the arm, pulled a little closer. There they are, smiling, hugging spouses, grandchildren, pets. My father in his red suspenders, my mother at his side. Happy, healthy. No walker in this picture, no sign of Parkinson’s.
I am not ready—yet—to wish him, my atheist father, a Happy Heavenly Birthday. Still, I’d rather visit him on Facebook than in the cemetery.
Missing You
You missed the war, Da. You died a month before Russia invaded Ukraine— not that the world was at peace when you left it.
I miss the depth of you, Da. It helped, in our moments of joy or sadness, to feel the warmth of you sharing our ups and downs. It helped, in this falling-apart world, to know you were there, thinking about things— able, somehow, with just the right comment, to clear a path for us through the mud, the mess.
We are making a book of your Potpourri essays: your thoughts on everything from truth and gratitude to old clothes, words, politics, aging. I am the proofreader, mostly adding or removing commas, dashes, spaces—the little things you were sometimes careless about.
Who knew your last days would be spent wilting on a bed in the hospital where you worked? Small, thin, shrunken, you lay curled like a comma beneath the blanket. I want to believe you ended your story with a comma, Da, not a period. A comma is a promise, more is coming. Your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will continue the story,
The Language We Speak
I don’t speak her language, but she speaks mine. We bond within seconds, joking that we’re the only two grandmas in Playa Venao, haven for surfers and lovers of nature and music on the beach.
She is Fatima, who grew up in Paraguay, one of ten siblings in her Catholic family. I am American, Jewish, my second home in Israel. She laughs, says we have nothing in common.
Maybe not, but we talk and talk, share the stories, the lessons of our lives until it’s clearer and clearer: we do speak the same language, but it’s not about the English she learned from her years in England. We speak the language of coffee and cake. My son calls it a playdate when I meet her for cappuccino at her daughter-in-law’s Cafe. We agree that coffee without cake is boring, so we share a slice: chocolate, pumpkin, or passion fruit. We speak the language of walks on the beach, flip flops in our hands at the edge of the sea. The language of mothers and grandmothers, the ones who come running to help, who stay for months if we’re needed and wanted. The language of women growing older. We have seen what life has to offer: the joys and heartaches. We take what comes, as long as there’s coffee and cake and a friend at our side when discussing men or kids or the white age spots on our legs as we laugh and console and laugh some more.
I Will Remember Tomatoes
Is this how it begins? A name gone AWOL. Fog. A blank stare. Twice this week I’ve had to ask my daughter what the weird-looking vegetable in our fridge is called. Pale green, round and tough, leafy stems sticking out. Kohlrabi. Kohl-rabi. Will it help next time if I think of a rabbi? I am certain I will always remember tomatoes, lodged firmly in my mind with cucumbers, spinach, cilantro—but endives are slowly slipping away, and it takes me a minute to name an artichoke, my least favourite vegetable, bitter when I scrape each leaf with my teeth.
I remember Mrs. Mosely, my first grade teacher and how she visited me in the hospital when I had my tonsils out, but most of my college professors are hiding with kohlrabi in the place of forgotten things.
I want to remember kohlrabi the way I remember my tenth grade biology teacher— not what he taught us, but how he held his hand out and rubbed his fingernails with his thumb while he lectured. I want to remember my teacher— but not the crash that killed him when his car hit a deer. Not the sleepless nights when I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his long-haired son: my crush, a witness to his father’s death. Will I ever forget how he barely spoke to me after the accident? How he favoured someone else?
Tongue and Throat
For Irene
Sometimes my friend is a bonfire. Her laughter blazes, warms, lights the dark. Sparks mirth all around till I’m glowing too.
Sometimes she’s a wildfire, worry raging up and down the hills of her life, burning all hope—a charred earth left behind as she imagines the worst, always the worst.
I feel the first hint of heat when she fears there’s something in her throat. Hotter when the doctor spots it on an X-ray: a small, globular mass in her neck at the base of her tongue. Mass, she says, choking on terror, as if the word is poison and can’t possibly mean anything but cancer of the throat or vocal cords.
Google doesn’t help. Surgery, disfigurement. Tongues cut out. Vocal cords excised. Succumb to silence? She’d rather die, she tells me, than lose her tongue.
Five days after her birthday, she’s headed to a specialist for a scope—and, most likely, a biopsy.
Flickers! Flares! Orange leaping and dancing when I read her text: no need for a biopsy. Not cancer. Not. Not. I call her to celebrate. Balloons for her being wrong again. Still alive, still talking. A toast to her tongue, to this birthday blessing, her best gift this year: a cyst, benign, harmless. Who could ask for more?
Lori Levy‘s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Mom Egg Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Work has also been published in medical humanities journals and has been read on BBC Radio 4. Lori lives with extended family in Los Angeles, but “home” has also been Vermont, Israel, and, for several months, Panama.
The only place it is a mountain is from our dock. Driving around, I have seen it from other angles, No more than undulations In the New Hampshire landscape. But across the pond it rises Gently, right to left, And runs asymmetrically along a ridge Perhaps a mile, Sloping down at last toward the big lake. It is the remembered view We carry home at the end of summer. In my binoculars I can see New A-frames in the high meadow On the near slope. I do not begrudge them their gated driveway, Their view of the pond, That they have taken up residence In our field of vision, Their binoculars trained, I suppose, on us.
At the Laundry
Summers I worked at the laundry, Money for college. This was in the ’50s, People still got polio then. We washed the dingy garments of the shoe towns (We still had them in New Hampshire then) And the fine percale of folk Down gated roads by the lake. The girls who did the folding (We called them girls then) Would offer coarse jokes About the bed sheets of the rich. And I, caught, then as now, Somewhere in the middle, Passed wrenches to Neil, our boss, As he straddled the ancient boiler, Expert turnings of things we chose to think Kept us from blowing up. He nursed and finally lost a son to polio. For forty years I went by his house And we would recall the ones Who ran the presses, fed the mangle. The laundry is gone, of course, Chiropractors and aromatherapists in its space; Gone, too, is Neil, my gentle friend, Who valued me in a fragile time, On hot July afternoons, Steamy with the innocent fragrance of Starch, fresh linen, decent toil.
By the Meadow: June 2007
Betsy Winbourne, now eighty, Rakes hay in the meadow at midday— You would not do this a month from now; Up from Boston, opening the cottage. No sign of the Woodleys; They say his tumour has come back, His fields thick with timothy and clover, In need of Seth to mow, If one knew where Seth had gone. I walk along the lane Gathering the winter’s news: Someone’s cellar flooded, Someone’s well has failed, Bears in the woods, taking out bird feeders. And yet: The young leaves, the greens, the light, So various, so fresh with innocent hope: It is early June in New Hampshire And the world seems possible.
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 have no clue what Krshna taught Arjuna but I like the name Atman a lot. Atman. Atman. Where a man is at. At all times. No matter what. Gita, get in the action, gorgeous girl, God is the answer, keep the meter.
Wisdom, none. What Krshna tells Arjuna makes no sense. I prefer mathematics. Knowledge of how things are made and done more than meditation on the Self as a manifestation of the One.
I’ll never have to leave this comfortable planet. We have this asset but can we sell it? In Paradise Lost, Satan executes his plan but God already knows all about it. Still, whether it succeeds or fails is up to Man. Same here, when it comes to nuclear armaments, a distraction from the work of making life permanent.
It is all premised on the mystery of invisible but sentient particles— little Krshnas and Kachinas nesting inside one another. Meanwhile life goes on outside all around you— WWII, the Napoleonic wars, the Civil War which we’re still fighting.
Krshna says behead your brothers without prejudice or justice. So it transpires in the nuclear fire. Whatever forever. Teacher, teacher—tiger!
On the Avenue
From marble and granite to steel and glass, we were discussing Rhina Espaillat’s On the Avenue in class, was it 1950s or 1980s NYC and were the fifties the city’s halcyon days or is it now, the 2020s, the boroughs teeming with immigrants from the round earth’s imagined corners, Hasidim and Muslim, Haitian and Russian, as we Italians and Irish in an earlier era were. Everything will be ok or not, the recombinations which make prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong. On the avenue God speaks by spewing toy and clothing stores, breakdancers and ice skaters, the Brooklyn Navy Yard seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, the skyline admired when my car broke down on the Triborough Bridge. The numbers of us overwhelm, there exist powers overwhelming for the human body and mind. I don’t mind but I can’t make sense of it. Gandhi said What you do may not seem important but it is very important that you do it. By that what is meant? Linda said Why does God always have to be a man? I said He could be a She but she’s probably really a Tyrannosaurus rex. I like to be in America!
On Suffering
I waited too long to biopsy my lung yet lived long enough however long is long. Whatever. It’s not wrong to count along while busy living. Sing and stay strong absorb the sun’s photons and store them in your bones.
Those bones outlast slights and wrongs are white as lightning and strong as sticks and stones. Inside is one’s spirit, soul, the nameless one the one that’s never known. It has no cell phone can’t communicate or even moan. Therefore. Why complain? Have some fun.
Soon I’ll be undone underground my garden burned down. So what. John Donne died and so did Milton. Emerson too, and Whitman. Get over it. Vote. Love. When the train comes in the station whistle with it, wish on stars with passion or careful hesitation. Anything’s fine, within reason.
Season by season things get done. Algebra and calculus, Malcolm X, George Washington. No taxation without representation. A gun in every den. People will be governed one way or another, by a king or trusted friend. Corporation. Men are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Evils to which they are accustomed.
I’m too young to die! I cry. My generation cannot outrun the sun but I want to see what happens next, a tsunami or tornado, rain and wind beyond our comprehension hit in the head by speeding debris, irony of ironies! plastic contraptions, rotting computers and yogurt cups, pain in the baby! Moment’s notice. None, I notice, live long enough to see the end. A billion
years hence human sense has so modified and mutated under some other sun we share one mind and everything’s remembered by everyone. Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest. A perfect tan is possible, and work is fun. I’m going there when I pass on because souls will travel at warp speeds, using nuclear fission. About suffering, religion was right (and wrong) all along.
Robert Ronnow‘s most recent poetry collections are New & Selected Poems: 1975-2005 (Barnwood Press, 2007) and Communicating the Bird (Broken Publications, 2012).
My world, a dark blue in its Vastness comes with aches And pains and a cache of Visions that echo in the Ebony void, of its emptiness. My music, filled with secrets And stories couples me to Winter’s wind as it ricochets Off my nighttime memories.
I Enjoy
The sounds of waves continually rushing onto a sandy shore bringing in stories from the deep where man has no power to edit,
The rays of the sun that never end, which carry warm supplications in the ether high above where man has no ability to censor.
The chirping of colourful birds singing feathery arias high in the trees of a verdant forest where man has no capacity to tarnish.
Yesterdays of my Dreams
Like butterflies flitting in the breeze, my mind is floating in the blueness of a sky full of images, visions, prayers, and forgotten truths, that touch the quivering echoes of all the yesterdays of my dreams.
Untitled
As our thoughts rise and fall on seldom trod paths, The warbling of birds will cast new visions into Our evolving memories.
As a rusted gate swings lazily on a copper hinged hasp It solemnly warms us to loosen our emotional grasp On those things that are dark, but ephemeral.
As thoughts swim up the river to a placid pond, They go to a place where contented minds gaze, and muse upon in the lazy hours of the day,
As things plague our mind, and arrive as if designed by demons, we must understand that they are just bits of unreality, and
As each new day leads us to greater happiness, They will vanish into the darkened void where All such gloomy things are quickly destroyed.
Burning Tempo
Another day Like yesterday… Red dust Climbing Into the earth, The oceans, And rivers dry, Birds swaying In the dry wind, Ashes in The hearth, Don’t cry, Don’t cry, it’s not Over yet… Pretend my friend. Each day is a Miracle, Life is magical, It’s a beat, A pulse, An echo. Voices Bounding off the Heated land, by Drum sticks used by withered hands Hidden inside Leather: Pretend my friend, … Don’t cry, Don’t cry.
James, a retired Professor and octogenarian is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee and has had five poetry books “The Silent Pond,” (2012), “Ancient Rhythms,” (2014), “LIGHT,” (2016),“Solace Between the Lines,” (2019), and Serenity (2022), over 1700 poems, five novels, seven essays, and 35 short stories published worldwide in over 255 publications. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
There was a knock on my door. I heard footsteps walking as I opened it. My heart skipped a beat. I saw no one, only heard footsteps walk and walking away. I counted a thousand footsteps at least. I am known to embellish things. I fear the man I am turning into. There was no shadow to those footsteps. In the distance I thought I saw a figure walking. It was just a memory of someone I once knew.
Taking the Name
The skeleton’s skull is suspended in the night sky, taking the name moon; its bleached white tears are dispersed along night’s canvas, taking the name stars. The black ink is spread throughout, which has already been named sky. Its hue will change in the twenty-four hours called day with spheres lingering in the sky with the names of sun and planets to keep our attention and interest.
Cut Down to Size
O, I am not handy with a saw, but I have cut into wood like a woodcutter. I cut until my hands hurt and my blisters made me feel useful. I cut under the shadows of tree leaves. The cutting of limbs was such a release. One day someone might be cutting on me. I am far from healthy. I feel the pain in my knees. I feel the torment of not being able to do what I used to do. I see my life racing by. I am seeing a future where I will need to slow down.
Count the Days
Here I count the days? My time is going slow. Between morning and noon, between noon and five o’clock, I feel a quiver some days. The days are so long. I search my soul so deep. One of these days I will lie under grass.
I am just here surviving. Green pastures await me. I will lie underneath. Time is up for everyone. There is no need to feel sad. I do not always feel down. I look forward to night to watch the stars cluster.
Our Collapse
Our collapse is our own doing. Greed inevitably consumes itself. Man has sold its soul for riches. This negligence will come due. Like a wilted flower, we will perish someday someway at any hour. I will be among the protesters kicking up the dust I will become.
Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Ink Pantry, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories.
You can find more of Luis’ work here on Ink Pantry.
I adorn my mind each morning with a word as a queen for her coronation is adorned with gold, with associations to combat the foul breath that is spewed from establishments, individuals, and the rituals of the modern world.
Though sharing three consonants with its adversary numb, nimble is my armor against stagnation, stupor, and getting outrun by the spurious and the arrogant.
I resort to sedate in times of turmoil when warfare sharpens its fangs and claws, when rockets compete for the bull’s eye that is wrought by profiteers who have been wooing my hometown port.
Sanguine is my anodyne for un-halcyon days when depression is depleting both pockets and spirits and Hope is an effigy that pins impale whose sister Mercy is being burnt at the stake.
A Single Birthday
I imagine what a single birthday would be like spent with her: a home-made cake that her hands deck with nuts, with candles that are not to be blown out. Two glasses of sweet wine brewed by her ancestors in the vicinity of their country vineyard. An apple pie. And some milk chocolate that instantly melts in my mind before it reaches my mouth.
A bottle of perfume with a blue ribbon round its neck. A white hairband for my ponytail. A strapless bikini for my next summer holiday. A puzzle to keep me busy on lonely nights. And a tearless goodbye.
The Essenes
Their mode of existence was marked by numbers – these offsprings of David, the Nazarenes – by sacred geometry.
Even-tempered and compassionate, they kept no servants or slaves and equal men and women were declared.
The hand that was placed on top of the head had learnt the art of healing both the afflicted and the sick.
They consumed their meals in utter silence, the vegetarian meek who drank nom fermented liquids and because purification was uppermost, they lived by rivers and lakes to keep themselves cleansed.
On Mount Carmel they pursued the truth, the illumination of inner lives, so the Book of Enoch was among other texts that their precious library kept and both john the Baptist and Jesus Christ received their blessings and enlightenment.
And sleep, which for modern thinkers contains the residue of the day’s turbulence and joys, is a source of deep knowledge, so the last thoughts before a slumber are to be purified and purged to keep the power of the mind intact.
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 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.
Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.
