because this is what friends do: they leave messages without subject or context, assured their meaning will be derived despite time and distance. They anticipate recognition, approval, and agreement.
But she writes, I’m sorry, what?
It’s nothing, really – a reference to a show we watched as friends, delighted by the boy’s every hapless stammer, the grandfather’s every belch, their madcap adventures attended by a charming cast of aliens and mutants.
What has changed: We’re older. I don’t know who Michael is. She doesn’t know Harry was put down. I don’t know if she went home to Arkansas this summer. She doesn’t know I applied there today.
But we both remember – I’m sure, I’m certain – the mutant we loved most: the wise, inexpressive friend whose brow lifted only as he reached for her, as her weapon carved through and pushed him over the woven wicker sides of his nest to the ground where
he lay cawing, twitching. I mourn him.
About the Author:
William Bonfiglio’s poetry has been awarded a Pearl Hogrefe Grant in Creative Writing Recognition Award, the Julia Fonville Smithson Memorial Prize, and has appeared in Gulf Coast, New Letters, PRISM international, and elsewhere.
That our bodies are cities on the verge of riot, that the blackout eclipsing
our overburdened power grid approaches with each hum and click
we utter. Under the ash gray and black lily tattoo, a constellation of red
beauty marks like taillights punctuates my left side. I’ve tried to forget
that coffee grounds are placed on hospital radiators
to mask the scent of bowl movement. To forget that it doesn’t always
work. That I hid in the bathroom until the nurses had changed
my father. As a child in Miami, he was taught to hide
beneath his desk with a textbook covering his head. His mother
fled Europe as the reich advanced. Towards the end
my father’s tongue remembered its German. Unsere Körper
revoltieren. Where is there to hide when we can’t escape?
About the Author:
Jamie L. Smith
Jamie L. Smith is the author of “The Flightless Years”, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (November 2024). Her chapbook “Mythology Lessons” was winner of Tusculum Review’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, and anthologies by Indi(e) Blue, Allegory Ridge, and Beyond Queer Words. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com for more information.
Today the air waves, and no I don’t mean a breathy metaphor raise of a hand or fist or a live long and prosper Mr. Spock salute hello- goodbye but the Morning Session jazz radio host is laying down, segueing, spinning and pouring out some liquid light—Afro-pop, Texas saxes, a hypnotic brass band named well, Hypnotic, with a tuba (are you kidding me), and a grab bag burger bar full of blues, with Mingus shakes—and for just a moment or a couple starship dayshine hours or three, the uglies known as autocrats, republic-bought- fatcats, genocide, slavery denied, sexicide, planetary homicide/cruelicide be momentarily confined to back back background backbeat, tossed out the backdoor to the dusty dirt floor.
Oh mamas of the world, (who rule? you rule!)
this is some sweet sweet jam on top of toast and one way to get through the brain-cracking soul-sucking fires and flames of a fall-apart world frayed at seams, each step forward a simultaneity of present/future madness, cash-flush mcmansioneers, charioteers, side by side the homeless, the helpless, lands and lands of rubble-buried kids. How to get through a day that involves step step stepping the fray? Let those jazz messengers and the jazz hosts play, channel language universal, bathe and baptize me, you, all in the bop diddy boom fresh air waves, wish upon a toe-tapped head-nod red native star, there’s get-it-done activism still to be made, and now, yes now, these tunes will kick free, happen it up higher, staying strong today.
Tomorrow will show its cheat cards soon enough. For Now: Marvin Gaye, end of show, take it away.
Electric Eclectic Strong by Randy Bynum was selected as the winner of the 2024 HoneyBee Prize in Poetry by Nebraska State Poet, Matt Mason. Here’s what Mr. Mason had to say about the piece:
This poem is a beautiful celebration of music and radio. With great use of sound and language (musically put together!), it deals with frustrations that music can’t eliminate but can give a respite from so that we can gather ourselves back together and be able to deal with the madnesses of the world. With a conversational style, it draws you in like a friend’s voice and holds you to the last, gorgeous lines.
About the Author:
Randy Bynum’s work appears in Cirque (contest winner), Arboreal Literary Magazine, Metonym Journal, Atticus Review, New Plains Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and others. He explores people, places, social inequity (his mother was ½ Native American/Cherokee). He’s seeking publication for his collections Tulips Talking Behind My Back and Dragons Who Type: Poems of Whimsy and Wishes. He’s a former speech/theatre teacher, an award-winning playwright, (“The Convert”, Kennedy Center/ACTF, Region IX), and believes KMHD Jazz Radio can help save the world. He lives in Portland, OR with wife Dani and rescue dog Cooper.
A spoon scrapes a plate in my house, the oak in the floor a hundred years old a thousand planks and penny nails. Is this man made of rock who forgets to kiss on a bus I made a list of how my house sounds. Quiet – that’s the sound of his glass being emptied. Hiss – the expressway slithers. Silver – streetlamps slice my kitchen when I cannot sleep. I fascinate on the faucet – a long diamond. Ghost – it knows about the attic, the carpenter’s marks for apparent stairs, a doorknob lodged in the basement’s mortar. Summer is a flood, it takes out the washer, the water softener, it creeps at the cabinets and shelves. Normal is a sump pump and stink of mold. Debt is how we got here. A knife clinks the sink or am I too warm to sleep. Is high ground a place I can crawl to. How the night looks – vast.
About the Author:
Molly Sturdevant’s prose and poetry have appeared in Orion Magazine, The Dark Mountain Project, Crab Creek Review, Poetry Northwest, About Place Journal, and many other places. She is recognized as a WFM Union Scholar, and taught early modern philosophy for a decade before becoming a full-time writer and editor. She recently completed her first novel, which focuses on women in labor history, and is seeking representation.
Trauma stays tucked in ribcage and hip, jolts you out of dreams you can almost see. When you wake too quickly, the image slips
with the ancestral shadow in your pulse’s grip. You repeat, Nothing happened, at least to me. It’s your parents’ trauma staying tucked in ribcage and hip,
and then you’re bent and crying on the lip of your yoga mat, and you don’t know why. The key to all this, you think, is lost when the image slips
and you wake too quickly. Flip off the sweaty blanket, make some tea. Trauma stays tucked in ribcage and hip.
Stretch it out of you, let your sweat drip, release whatever dams your sea. You wake too quickly, and the image slips
but you are stronger than whatever trips through your dreams. Breathe… even as trauma stays tucked in ribcage and hip, even if you wake too quickly, and the image slips.
About the Author:
Genevieve N. Williams holds an MFA from University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she received two Academy of American Poets Prizes. She is a queer poet whose poetry won an Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, The American Journal of Poetry, Mid-American Review, and Verse Daily, among other journals and anthologies.
A small cat curled in my friend’s bathroom sink. Half a glass of lemonade left to drink.
The urge to touch the rosewood floorboards when the light slants just right. Waves
against breakwaters. What saves us?
Everyone wants to know if I’m suicidal,
my father had said, from his nursing home bed,
As if that would be such a bad thing.
Stacks of books I’ve yet to read, the needlepoint I’ll finish and need to redo. Unplanted seeds
in tiny jars on my windowsill. The meteor showers I keep missing. Squirrels scrambling on powerlines.
Curiosity—that’s what keeps me here,
he said.
I’d still like to know what will happen
with this next election and with you,
what we’ll do when the water runs out
or the border walls cage us in.
The woman I love who I haven’t told. My friends’ not-yet-written poems.
Brass rabbit bookends whose noses I dust with my thumb
on my way out the door most mornings. The tree that sways
by my friend’s Brooklyn balcony. The lanternflies:
whether they’ll be back. The track that skips on my father’s worn record:
what a wonderfulwonderfulwonderful world.
About the Author:
Jamie L. Smith is the author of “The Flightless Years”, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press (November 2024). Her chapbook “Mythology Lessons” was winner of Tusculum Review’s 2020 Nonfiction Prize and is listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. Her poetry, nonfiction, and hybrid works appear in publications including Southern Humanities Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Red Noise Collective, and anthologies by Indi(e) Blue, Allegory Ridge, and Beyond Queer Words. Please visit jlsmithwriter.com for more information.
Each spring they burst forth a supernova of pollen and perfume
The white dogwoods are starlight hydrangeas prickle in the twilight sky changing color based on iron and copper in the ground
The pillars of creation are rhododendron Crepe myrtle waves like faint comet tails Heavenly bodies here on earth
Black holes absorbing everything around them Galactic soil to compress, and start anew.
Perhaps the BIG BANG was just the seed erupting forth, after all, we are still covered in dirt and water
If I am a flower, let me be the moonflower out at night and soft, the morning glory half life, bioluminescent in the water like seaweed
glow for the stars already in the soil I walk on And bloom for those to see
About the Author:
Murryn Payne
Murryn Payne is an amateur artist, enthusiastic thespian and part time scarecrow. Her work has previously been featured with Button Poetry’s Short Form contest, Headwaters, and 300 Days of Sun. She once heard the phrase ‘the work you do when you procrastinate is the work you should do for the rest of your life’ and has been writing ever since.
When I turn on the faucet, he cannot escape this torrent, his wings vibrate, an eyelid dreaming flight which can lift him only in the direction of the water’s exit. How quiet is the panic of this moth. He begs nothing from me, no mercy even as the liquid pools around him, which shows him the life of a dead leaf in autumn. A brown thing all wet and weighed down.
I want to be more than this bed I made.
About the Author:
Annalee Fairley
Annalee is a queer poet that currently lives in Roanoke, VA. Over her writing career, her poetry has been published in Ink & Nebula, Apricity Magazine, The Black Fork Review, Hellbender Mag, and Chapter House Journal. She has been awarded the Gager Fellowship, Neill James Creative Writing Scholarship, and the Betty Killebrew Literary Award for her poetry and fiction. She currently works as a librarian.
She shows me where they’ve repainted the blue and black lines on her face and neck, adding a new target just above her collarbone. Her wig frets her in this weather; the sore place in her throat is back. She gets so many visitors I don’t even glance over there when car doors slam.
Out my window that faces her house, bright cannas simmer in a line where the wall of my old garage once tottered, the whole dilapidation leaning more and more until it had to be torn down. Long gone, but today I imagine the canna blossoms gold and scarlet against dark scales of the vanished garage roof, the ancient shingles shedding grit daily and the rotted rafters sagging, caved-in like the hollow above a collarbone.
About the Author:
Lynn Gilbert’s poems have appeared in Arboreal, Blue Unicorn, The Lakeshore Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Sheepshead Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable, Off the Grid Press, and Fjords Review book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in a suburb of Austin and reads poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.
