poetry

The Last Day of January by Paul Ilechko

The Last Day of January

Ice is floating on the surface of the river the water

appears to be motionless looking like the skin

of ice is locking it into place triangles of slush slowly

form in front of the great stone footings that anchor

the bridge it’s as if the river is quietly creating

its own glaciers and all we have to do is watch

downstream there are rapids it won’t be

long now until the shad are fighting their way

upriver some of them will travel over three hundred

miles some of them will be tangled in the great

sweeping nets where the Lewis Island fishermen

trawl the river bottom just above the bridge

for almost two years now we have been frozen

in place we no longer seem able to create new

memories most of us will reappear on the other

side of this endless winter that we are traveling through

many of us will not caught in the nets that were

randomly cast fins thrashing gills bursting for air.

Poet and songwriter Paul Ilechko lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. He is the author of several chapbooks. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Night Heron Barks, Feral Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and Book of Matches. His first album, “Meeting Points”, was released in 2021.

Two Poems by Leonard Kress

Orpheus Autopsied

When cops and doctors finally found the crime

scene, and retrieved the soggy, mangled, headless

corpse, they could now officially buttress

what they’d previously only been able to presume

with the singular fact that his heart had a hole.

They could not determine, though, if he was born

with it (which might explain his early turn

to poetry and ascendency) or if it was his role

as lover-losing-beloved that burned through

or whittled out that hole. Or his descent

to the underworld, where some monster meant

to wound him on his way. Or losing her through

foolishness again—that gaze that can pierce

a heart. Or maybe, his final lonely life

hunting down poetry, and the ultimate strife

that life entails. They couldn’t even deduce

how common it was among poets—this affliction.

After all, they’d have to kill them first to find

out, or disinter too many tombs with no funds.

There were limits, of course, to their speculation.

Serial Killer

The most famous serial killer-rapist ever

lived for a while in my old neighborhood

50 years ago, only now public

and those who still live there

and those who ventured far

revel that they almost intersected

with infamy.

He stayed with his grandfather for the year

though no one remembers him

(the boyishly hunkish miscreant)

but grandpa’s

a different story.

Screamed at kids who ventured near

his flower beds

stiffed workers

sold blighted shrubs

at the nursery he owned

and the kid who replaced his pads

at the local Chevron swore

he rode his brakes relentlessly

It was mostly the girls

(girls back then)

recalling two of his early victims

at the Jersey shore

(downa shore, they would have said)

Praise God

it wasn’t one of us

hitch-hiking alone the Black Horse Pike

to weekend in Ocean City

all family and dry

then sneaking cross

the causeway to Somer’s Point

to drink with college guys.

Was it him, one wonders

who picked me up

tossed my backpack in his trunk

complained the whole way

about his broken wrist

his cast decorated with hearts

Thank God

I didn’t accept the pill

he offered after popping

one himself.

Those poor girls

they all chimed

could have been us

under the boardwalk

at dusk, beach patrol busy

with fires and their own pickup lines.

They still haven’t admitted

to boyfriends (some who became husbands)

who they let pick them up

wriggle off the two-piece strap

from peeling sun-burnt freckled shoulders

and the soothing beery lick

impossible to stave off

even if they wanted to—

Crystal Blue Persuasion

on the transistor by now

half-buried in the sand.

Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex and Walk Like Bo Diddley. Living in the Candy Store and Other Poems and his new verse translation of the Polish Romantic epic, Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. Craniotomy Sestinas appeared in 2021. He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio.

Two Poems by Laura Johanna Braverman

My Husband On A Ladder Picking Olives

Late afternoon

and I sit at the marble garden table. The moist heat

of summer dried up, a tarp is piled wide

with olives ripe

for brining.

When we lived seven floors up

olives were things in glass jars. And what

was brining—

or October—?

His head is somewhere among the silver-sided leaves.

Twigs shift

as his hands rummage and reach.

He drops each stone fruit

into a bag hanging from a branch,

handles strain against the weight.

But it’s the light I want to talk about—

the way it slants through tree twists and gaps,

lands on coastal soil in amber splatters

and sets the yellow grocery bag aglow.

How, in a few hours

this late-year day will have gone.

He’ll board a plane.

But for now:

the unburdened tree, the fruit-bearing light—

all between.

Of Weeds and Broken Things

Left undisturbed

the soil nests those seeds abandoned to the wind—

traveling cast-offs come to rest

between the rows of olive trees.

I wish I knew the name

of every bloom and stem. A patch there

looks like coriander lace.

Another, a clustering of rocket leaves—

amid the green

are modest flares of white and gold and lilac,

tiny sisters of bud and aster.

But when the ground is cleared—

red earth turned and tilled, remnants

of a different ordinary

come unburied :

a rounded chip of glass, a sliver

of painted porcelain.

I bend for a jagged corner

of white ceramic tile, its mortar ridges

caked in coastal soil.

Little artefact

of someone’s kitchen, bath.

Of a life.

Laura Johanna Braverman is a writer and artist. Salt Water, her first collection of poetry was published in 2019 by Cosmographia Books. Her poems have appeared in Plume, Levure Litteraire, Sky Island Journal, New Plains Review and Pratik, among other journals, and in the anthology Awake in the World, II. She recently earned her MA in poetry and will begin PhD studies this fall, both at Lancaster University. She lives in Lebanon with her family.

Two Poems by Layla Lenhardt

Tomato Flakes

“Oh you’ve got green eyes, oh you’ve got blue eyes, oh you’ve got grey eyes” – New Order

I keep you hidden

in my bedside table,

or buried between my legs.

And at times, we don’t speak.

On the day we saw the moss

covered pond next to the house

that knelt on the hillside, I swore

I could say your name forever.

Your hand was entwined in mine,

like bodies in Pompeii.

You feed me artichoke

hearts from the jar. And loving

you is always eating from the

same bowl, stained bedsheets,

never-have-i-ever in Adirondacks.

It started with your skin, peeling

like a birch tree, the sun spilling

through the door jamb. You

carried with you the salty

air of the Atlantic.

It ended with a hurricane

bridges washed away,

roads buckled, I no longer

lick your wounds, paint

your nails. Send you photos.

And missing you is like

trying to tame a wildfire.

Cece & Silvino

I wish I could take every path. I wish

I could let such carnivorous aliens

bloom between my hip bones. I wish

I could hold little fingers in my hand,

give you your first palm readings, make

dandelion wine to take to Nona’s.

There’s no easy answer. I’d adore you

for a thousand years, and a thousand

years after that. I’d spend an eternity

memorizing your freckles, speaking your

names, but the gold around my

finger is heavy and unnatural, motherhood

is complicated. I’m not cut for this

cloth.

I’d be a bird, feeding you what I’ve already

digested, straining out the bad parts. I’d

Let you fill the moon. But I’d never be

ready. I can’t re-write my mercurial DNA,

I can’t make my bones need something they don’t.

Each month I will bleed and each month

he’ll travel further and further away. He’ll burry my jewels

in the dirt, throw my heirlooms in the ocean.

The decision is my zeitgeist

so I’ll keep my mirrors sheeted,

and I’ll let him tell them I didn’t

want you. It’s his way of healing.

But know, if I could take every path, that you would be my

Full Moon in Taurus, an earth shaking,

thundering, explosion of love.

Layla Lenhardt is a queer poet who splits her time between Indianapolis and Philadelphia. She is Editor in Chief of 1932 Quarterly. She has been most recently published in Rust + Moth, Sad Girls Club, Poetry Quarterly, and Pennsylvania Literary Journal. www.laylalenhardt.com

Two Poems by Alan Catlin

The Photographer

Near death

she reclaims

her long

abandoned

Art: taking

pictures of her

fellow travelers

along the ward;

barely able to

stand herself,

she holds a camera,

focuses a lens,

she sees all

that has been

missing in her

life, all those

years past,

the ones that

will never come.

Death and the Maiden

Listening to Schubert

as the candle

burns out

the bent wick

in a puddle

of drying wax

the junk littered

room, torn curtains,

broken bed frame

we know exactly

how this ends but

not when

Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books including, most recently, Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh (Dos Madres) Memories Too (Dos Madres), Sunshine Superman (Cyberwit) and a fictional memoir about his bar jobs , Chaos Management (Alien Buddha).

Two Poems by Rustin Larson

Lawn Ornament

Buddha, seated with four disciples, looks like my grandmother, same squarish face and long earlobes, same hairdo, topknot she’d put under a net before she went to work at the egg plant, the disassembly line, so to speak, white ovals conveyed for candling and then powdering for armed forces overseas. After work she’d slip on Buddha’s housecoat– a few ocher stripes, some emblems of orchids– she would drink her tea, silently, ceremoniously, the center of a circle of ghosts.

Carroll Street

in Brooklyn is probably still there, as familiar to millions as Ingersoll is to me. The fall turns to parchment. Every leaf is blank. Every leaf has something written on it, held under a slanted evening light. In a slanted evening light in Brooklyn someone sips Irish Creme from a snifter and lays down a pair of hearts. Someone shoots the moon; another person is sure she has enough for the ride, and yet another

waits for her shift in the department store to end so she can make her photography class. Meanwhile, a man in a dirty coat is followed by six genuine devils who want to eat him. A priest is doing laps in the pool at the Downtown Athletic Club, his mind a transcendental blank as he touches the wall and curves back. In the afterlife, three people sit around a kitchen table. They’ve just finished turkey and all the

trimmings and now they are settling into cigarettes and coffee and beer and better conversation than they ever had in life. The big, bear- like man with the glass eye says he is “Mighty Hunter” and pounds his smoke-filled chest. A fourth person, the grandmother, walks into the kitchen now with a jar of sour pickles. The light is a cloud-covered yellow. There is a sandy soil garden full of zucchini and cucumbers outside. They talk and talk about the Catholic Church and Christmas and Easter and how their funerals were all a bit disappointing, aggravating and yet balming when someone spoke a kind word or offered an earnest prayer. The houses they live in are their favorites from life. They, each, are not quite ready to choose a new identity– rebirth seems like a cold bath. So here they sit, taking turns in each other’s kitchen and home, an endless supply of cigarettes and coffee and beer cleared unnoticed from the table every endless hour.

Rustin Larson’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry East, The Atlanta Review and other magazines. Crazy Star was selected for the Loess Hills Book’s Poetry Series in 2005. Larson won 1st Editor’s Prize from Rhino magazine in 2000 and has won prizes for his poetry from The National Poet Hunt and The Chester H. Jones Foundation among others. A five-time Pushcart nominee, and graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing, Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry Festival in 2002 and 2004, a featured writer in the DMACC Celebration of the Literary Arts in 2007, 2008, and has been highlighted on the public radio programs Live from Prairie Lights and Voices from the Prairie. He lives in Fairfield, Iowa.

North of Oxford Presents – National Poetry Month @ Chase’s Hop Shop – 4-30-22

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North of Oxford Presents

Live

National Poetry Month @ Chase’s Hop Shop

7235 Rising Sun Ave

Philadelphia, PA 19111

April 30^th – 2pm to 5pm

Poets Reading

Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, Charles Rammelkamp, Sawyer Lovett, Ezra Solway, Jane Rebecca Cannarella, Paul Ilechko, Cleveland Wall, Carl Kaucher, Dave Worrell, Michael Griffith,

Host – g emil reutter

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/

Chase’s Hop Shop

https://www.facebook.com/Chases-Hop-Shop-319982001828515/

Pandemic of Violence Anthology

Topsy Turvy

Featuring poets Howie Good, Rustin Larson, Susana H. Case, Dee Allen, Alex Carrigan, Naila Francis, MaryAnn L. Miller, Megha Sood, Steven Croft, TS Hawkins, Lauren Camp, Chad Parenteau, Henry Crawford, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Michael T. Young, M.J. Arcangelini, J.C. Todd, Antoni Ooto, Byron Beynon, Jane ‘SpokenWord’ Grenier, Linda Nemec Foster, Sean Howard, Brian Donnell James and Greg Bem

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/pandemic-of-violence-anthology/