This is the season when small children write cryptic notes to a white bearded stranger in the North Pole, and dream of lighted Christmas trees with bundles of colourful packages underneath: When the elderly dream of past Christmas dinners packed with relatives and children, and those long past times when the air was pure, and masks were only worn during Halloween.

This is the season when a mystical atmosphere seems to form out of a sense of wonder and want, and a tiny baby in a stable becomes real again: It is a special time when we attend church in the late night to celebrate the coming of a baby who will become a beacon of hope and light.

This is the season when a magical atmosphere develops bringing a sense of peace, and wonder to our hectic lives: When we actually wonder if enemies are really enemies, and if there may be a Saint Nick, that brings happiness into the lives of children.

This is the season when tree leaves fly about like young lads and lassies in their bloom: A time when we welcome the blue moisture of rain, and the whiteness of snow upon the earth to tell us all things can change.

This is the season when husbands and wives fall in love all over again, and the future appears brighter: When families get together in gratitude and love, sharing hugs and smiles.

This is the season we yearn for all year long to do all those wonderful things we should be doing all year long: It is a time when we see each other in a different light, and candles in windows reflect the wisdom of our dreams.

(First published in California Quarterly).

James Piatt is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS, and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO. He has had four collections of poetry; ‘Solace Between the Lines’, ‘Light’, ‘Ancient Rhythms’, and ‘The Silent Pond’, over 1,550 poems. 35 short stories and five novels, ‘The Ideal Society,’ ‘The Monk,’ ‘The Nostradamus Conspiracy’, ‘Archibald McDougle PI’, and ‘The Carmel Mystery’, published worldwide in over 225 different publications.  He writes poetry to maintain his sanity with hopes to succeed someday.

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.

From the Pound Cantos: CENTO XXX

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.

Even the Ugly Blueberry

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.

Hubris, with caveat

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.

Earmarked

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.

So Long

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.

So what
are you now?
Not
what you were:

tumbled,
re-shaped by waves
and sand,
diminished.

cast by storm’s surge
beyond
highest tide.

Only your inmost spiral remains–
a core of strength
resisting.

Dale Walker is a poet from North Carolina.

TO EXIST BETWEEN ETERNITIES WILD NOTHING LIKE THE EYES OF
THE SKY AXIS INFINITY DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE BLISS /COME
FORWARD WITH YOUR VISCERA AND VIOLENCE AND SHARE MY
WINGS/UNLEASH YOUR SPIRIT BENEATH THE RAMJET ALLEGRO
TEMPLE OF THE NIGHT SKY A NEED FOR MIRRORS AND
COUNTLESS SKIES/SHAKE YOUR INFINESSENCE SLOT CANYON
HIGHBREATH NARCOTIC ERUPTIONS CLOUD NOTHINGS EXOTIC
PULSE A NAME BEYOND DESIRE SEMAPHORE SIN PLAY AT YOUR
OWN RISK TALKING TWILIGHT/ INTO A SPHERE OF YOUTHFUL
SYMPATHY RIDES THE THIEF OF YOUTH THIN AIR ADDICTIONS
MELANCHOLY BODY SACRILEGE TATTOO HIGHWAY INSOMNIA
PUNK/ TEENAGE BLOOD REPETITION OF A THOUSAND HUNGRY
EYES/SOMETIMES WE ARE ALL ETERNAL IN THE CONSTELLATION
OF MIDNIGHT MOSAIC FACTION/ MY GREEN UNQUEEN GALLERY
CRUSH HYPERRITUAL AUTUMN CRY OPULENCE LIKE A TRIANGLE
AND A DUEL/SOME TALK TO MEN WHILE OTHERS TALK TO GODS
DANCE IT VISCIOUS RIDDLE OF THE SANDS CHAMELEON
CHARADE STAR CODE CHALICE/ASK THE DESERT ORACLE THESE
POISON DECLARATIONS THE REAL UNREAL CONVERSATIONS
WITH A NEW REALITY/DISSOLVE THE ILLUSION IN A
SPIRITDANCE/NATURE’S SYMPHONY DRAFT INTOXICATION

You can find more of Rus’ work here on Ink Pantry.

1.

To our cottage on the pond,
I ascribe human attributes,
And why not:
Four generations of
Idiosyncratic postures,
Favourite chairs,
The smiles of grandsons
Around each corner,
In every splash off the dock,
Scent of decades of pine rooms,
My father’s shaving brush,
Memories in other artifacts
We did not buy.

So when we leave,
Packing up board games
Along with Beth’s shy grin,
We ease out onto the lane,
Regret visceral
Until about the Massachusetts line.
The cottage, at first forlorn,
Has figured out what’s going on,
Recognizes the red kayak,
An intruder in the guest room,
But, relaxing under its cover of
Newspaper, moth balls,
Frayed bedspreads,
Like an old bear we know,
Dozes off for the winter.

2.

Cold October rain
Scatters unwilling leaves,
Crimson, orange-gold,
Before the holiday,
Slick paste on asphalt.
I pack my painting tools
Under the house:
The can of grey stain
Will not survive the winter.
In the tight wood
On a hill back from the pond
Green clings to green,
A few leaves fall unturned.

3.

Late October: SUV’s headed out, mostly
Pickup trucks on the lane.
They are the surrogate residents
On the pond in the off season,
The people who shut off the water,
Drain the pipes,
Winch up docks up onto land,
Check in winter for snow on the roof.
We have a common concern
For a tight seal around the chimney,
The grey birch by the Turtle Rock
That needs to come down.
We discuss
The judgment of the selectmen,
The Red Sox’ chances for next year,
The merits of metal roofing.
We entrust them with precious things,
Sacred ground, these folk
With whom we share a love of place
Until we come back again
In June.

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.