Three Poems by Elliott batTzedek

Bull

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On the sunny south side of the barn there was a lean-to

and in it was the stall for the resident bull, the minotaur

of my childhood nightmares. Come near the fence

and he would charge and the look

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in his eyes told you he could open the locked gate

anytime he chose and we would run screaming not in the kid way

of then falling to the ground and shrieking in laughter but in solid sweaty fear

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so the whole backyard was off limits except to the barn cat named

fuck I’ve forgotten her name I always knew her name

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the things you think you can afford to forget in the maze of your mind

will do you in, that’s a fact—

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that cat was fearlessly evil. She would stir up the neighborhood dogs

and restless they would pursue faster   nearly snatching her tail and then

she would leap between the fence rails into the pasture

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and the dogs would bay bloodlust and the bull out of nowhere would bear down

upon them while the cat sat on the trough cleaning her paws until

her path was cleared to saunter back to the porch

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to beg cream. She died doing that.

Led a pack of dogs to the their doom, dove over the third rail and

dropped dead of a heart attack. Died doing what she loved most to do, died

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at the pinnacle of her attitude. She taught me blood was the price to pay for trying

to tame her, taught me to find a job and do it well, taught me

the pure joy of standing aside after pitting pursuers one against the other.

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lay me down in the tall grass

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Chores and school took hours aplenty and yet

there were always more hours, and more, and more,

the gate through the pasture a magical door

through which clocks could not follow. A whetted

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pocket knife, Army canteen, a pack

of Archways and a day went on forever.

Wearing a wristwatch, I swear, severs

us from the world. In the woods out back

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I was knight and dragon, jockey and horse, dream-

body, gravity-spurner, wingspanner,

fire-breather, panther, sword-dancer,

always the village saved, the hostage redeemed.

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In the wide meadows, wolves, in the hedgerows, giants,

in the timber, wild boars and bears. Though held

captive at school in the woods I could rebel,

camouflaging through corn fields, sun-striped and defiant.

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a small price for freedom

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Over the snow over the street over the

rocks racing under the runners, ten, twenty,

thirty miles an hour no shame then

in screaming as long as you

call it yelling, pretending

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a push on the cross bar to the right

or left could direct your

fate now. Each corner swinging you

wide, hanging on with your whole

body learning if you can’t stay

on you must roll or risk sled’s runners

slicing over hands or calves or

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face. Three, four, five together,

ropes taut from sled to hitch

of truck driven always by uncles

always by uncles aplenty.

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Pulled uphill the first time

you knew your body’s own

full weight. Rushing down, learning

to dig in with the toes of your

boots for sliding under the truck would

be disaster or so we’d been warned,

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no one had ever seen it done, the only

of our limb-risking stunts with

no medaled-hero of consequence.

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How many boys had taken this ride?

How fewer girls, always the most fearless

of any pack? How those girls who tied

their fate to trucks could the next day

walk the hallway ungroped as any boy,

the rush of fear

proud price to pay.

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Elliott batTzedek lives in Philadelphia. Her poems and translations have been published in: American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Lilith, I-70 Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Humana Obscura,Sakura Review, Apiary, Cahoodaloodaling, Naugatuck River Review, Poemeleon, Poetica, Philadelphia Stories, and a Split This Rock poem of the week. Her chapbook the enkindled coal of my tongue was published in 2017 by Wicked Banshee Press. A chapbook of translations from Shez, A Necklace of White Pearls, is forthcoming from Moonstone Press in 2024.

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Two Poems by Janet Faller Sassi

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Skelton’s Manifest Destiny

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There was a time when I wandered the wide ochre plains of the West.

Montana, the Dakotas, passing through Sioux land and Chippewa villages

as my brushed leather chaps pounded the flank of my horse.

My corset held me upright even as I dozed.

My grey braids grew brittle and wisp. My throat filled with dust.

I rode into the sun for endless days,

not knowing when I’d stop, if ever, on land that stretched to eternity.

When night fell, the stars subsumed me as if I’d never existed

In this vast world.

Where women suffer to be Cowboys.

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I became a snake shedding its skin in the shade of a rock

A brook trout, run aground in the furl of a shallow pool

A cactus drying up at the root, just as a flower bloomed on my crown.

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Life could not and did not hold me.

My flesh time was brief.

But my bones,

polished by the sands into hard alabaster,

and set down in the gully of a trail,

Have become a thing of beauty

for the eyes of the passing traveler.

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Skelton in a Red Dress

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I once was a hot mama.

A warm handful mining for it

On the fire escapes of my youth.

Flesh pressed into wrought-iron rungs where we’d lay

In rapt desire, those summer nights

All sweetness, plumpness and bounty.

Now, I’m a rack on which hangs

this scarlet silk-lined subterfuge, as I

Hobble down those same metal steps

Arm bones clattering against hip bones,

Calling to the boys below in seductive tones

through a casement of grey teeth.

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Wanna hang? I ask. I lock a thighbone.

They freeze, then take off down the street.

I know I’m dead to them,

Still, I raise my carpus and blow a kiss,

Landing it on those

Tender Virgin Haunches.

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Janet Faller Sassi’s  work has appeared recently in the American Writer’s Review, the Last Call, Chinaski Anthology, and VIA(Voices in Italian Americana.), ‘Untapped New York’, ‘Intrepid Times’, ‘Splice Today’ and ‘City Limits’. She earned a Master’s in English-Creative Writing from Fordham University www.everlastingmisfortune.com

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Coal by Jennifer M Phillips

Coal 

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Everyone had a scuttle and a bin

for coal, and a small, mean grate

with a chimney to loft the soot that snowed back down

to blacken the row-house brick, the painted gate,

the plane-tree leaves, our gloves, and everything.

Old railway lines crisscrossed the rattling plate

by the laddered-up signal-box with its dingy flags,

where I’d wander with a thruppenny ice – chocolate

on a stick – reward for posting Nana’s letter

in the pillar-box and watch trains’ steam dissipate

down the track, the rattle mumble into a sea-sound,

then silence of again-expectant steel: the threat

of it, the promise, the draw of foreign parts

that then meant Bath or Crewe or Harrowgate,

back when Leeds seemed as exotic as Singapore,

when boilers, sweat and shovelers and hundredweight

carried armies abroad and prospectors to explore,

and relatives I never knew who’d emigrate

to Australia and Argentina. I’d speculate

how large the world might be that lay beyond

me, when far fel near, and near, far, in the freight

of Hounslow dreams coal carried on the wind.

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Jennifer M Phillips is a  bi-national immigrant, painter, Bonsai-grower. Two chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022, Phillips’ work appeared in over 100 journals.

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Crows of Hyde Park by Bruce Whitacre

Crows of Hyde Park 

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I know by your eye you know more than I.

Sleek as a plume, wise as a child-

guide to the sorcerer’s mysteries, all this rests

on your winged shoulders

as you feed at Speakers Corner,

nodding and bobbing to the joggers and strollers

who vaguely notice your black wedges in the lawns.

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We both remember the groaning carts

of the condemned wending through the hanging day mobs

to here, the Tyburn Tree, even then under your scrutiny.

You and I live in that gaunt gallows tree shadow.

We both saw the criminals dropped to their deaths

for their faith, their poverty, their cruelty and crimes.

Like us they thrust and fussed only to become

one more meal for you and your nest of ugly chicks.

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I shiver as you peck out your breakfast.

Tell me, you alchemist’s raven, you hangman’s rook,

when my feet dangle and my mouth speaks nevermore,

will you peck out my eyes while flapping your wings?

Seeing you waddle in the spring dew I’m convinced

“dust to dust” is merely a euphemist’s phrase

for what you and your murder do in your carrion ways.

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Good Housekeeping, Poets Wear Prada, is a BookLife Reviews Editors Pick. The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks, placed 2nd in Contemporary Poetry at The BookFest Spring 2023. His crown sonnet won the Nebraska Poetry Society’s 2023 Open Poetry Contest. More info at http://www.brucewhitacre.com .

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Ugh by Carl Kaucher

 

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By g emil reutter

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Carl Kaucher continues his evolution as a poet in his latest collection Ugh. The poet sets the tone for this collection in the first stanza of the opening poem, Café Waldorf:

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A flame perfectly formed on the wick/ is the definition of a candle. / Aspects if gray adorn the dying sky/ like wisps of cigarette smoke dissipate into an afterthought. / A pool of soft orange light seeps through the kitchen window/ onto a snow filled yard/ bounded by a chain link fence/ glowing under a crescent moon/ as the tip of Orion/ stabs shimmering towards the south.

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The poet’s use of strong imagery such as like, wisps of cigarette smoke dissipate into an afterthought, Orange light seeps through kitchen window, and the original image of a chain link fence glowing under crescent moon. He completes the stanza with the tip of Orion shimmering towards the south.

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Café Waldorf is a powerful poem on many levels and I am happy to report the rest of Ugh rises to the level of the opening poem. Kaucher as with his previous collections bring the reader along on a journey through towns and cities, back alleys and rough streets, into the bars, parks strolling past the churches.

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The poem. Elnore Avenue, opens with the changing face of churches in America:

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The white pillars/ of the old Lutheran church/ are peeling into Pentecostal/ and those that exit/ are glowing with spirit/ all high on God. / I have a container of spirt/ in my back pocket/

that always gets me down.

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The poet uses a creative image of the old Lutheran church peeling into Pentecostal coupled with those exiting high on God. But for the poet, he carries a pint in his back pocket that always gets him down. It makes the reader wonder if all those folks high on God even noticed the poet standing, taking notes and observing.

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Kaucher brings us into a better understanding of what he observes on his journeys in the poem, For:

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The first Stanza:

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where to go/ to go back within/ to the place before I begin/ to the streets- the heat/ the miles of empty sidewalk/ the people I don’t know/ going to where they go

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The third Stanza:

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even though some have dimmed/to back within/their troubled lives/but I never would have seen had I not been there/ had I not wove in and out/ of traffic on mad highways through cuts in mountains/through potholes in shit towns

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And in the last lines of the poem:

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it is no place but this place/and it all goes down/as it makes sense/ like a bag tumbling/down the street/making the pace of the place/ and the silence of the still/ breathing sweetly beneath/ the surface of my shine.

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So the poet understands his journey of visiting those places disregarded, forgotten and yet here he is going back within, of seeing what he would never have seen. Weaving in and out of places mostly unnoticed yet there is the silence of the still breathing sweetly beneath the surface of his shine. Simply beautiful.

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While reading through the collection one comes to an understanding that the streets are the church of Carl Kaucher and that notion is very clear in the first two stanzas of Sunday, 24^th and Federal:

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Stalactites drip underpass

like blood of architectural alchemy

peeling blue paint off brick walls behind

stickered phone booth etched of petroglyph

to baptismal waters pooling

beneath broken fire escapes

off alternative ghetto.

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Apostolic church playground

pendulum of squeaky swings

by razor wire chain link fence.

Graffiti holes discussing the advent

at the check cashing store

of Western Union shopping cart rap

crumbling elevated lines.

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The flood of images builds until we reach the crumbling elevated lines. I paused taking in the images and then entered the last two stanzas, simply a tsunami of images:

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Meditation of rhythm and blues

to gospel singer vibrato of falsetto

as Jesus sweeps the sidewalk clean.

Scripture-stained concrete pillars

soul punked at Alter street shacks

and smokestacks of monochrome

barrio gelatinous daguerreotype.

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Snapshot of heavy industrial flowers

blooming big machines of progress

ripping apart the put together

one stone highways of ever,

endeavors of go to gone,

gospels of rusted needles

and pink panties plastered to concrete.

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Reading this collection, cover to cover, poem to poem firmly establishes Kaucher as a unique voice in American poetry. There is a temptation to compare this poet to others but it cannot be accomplished as Kaucher is a man who writes what he lives and observes. There is no pretense here, there is no make believe. Full of metaphor and images, realism rings throughout this collection.

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You can get the book here: Ugh

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g emil reutter is a writer of stories and poems. He can be found at: About g emil reutter

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The Heavy Lifting Companion, Bookwork by Felicia Rice, Poems by Theresa Whitehill

By Greg Bem

I was flattened by disaster but upheld by the belief of my community.

From “Rising from the Ashes,” the preface by Felicia Rice (pg. xvii)

The Heavy Lifting Companion is a book of our climate. It is a book of our ecology. It is a book of disasters. It is a book that answers the question: what is next when what was is lost? This remarkable book is a companion to an art book that was born out of the loss of a physical printing press following a wildfire. It addresses what was, what can be, and what is across multiple frames, and does so by combining truth through storytelling with truth through the exploration of poetry. And it is done so riding on the tails of immense work and passion: the work of the individual and work of the community.

This brief review starts with a disclaimer: much of the joy of exploring the resilience and evolution of Moving Parts Press and Felicia Rice’s commitment to her craft is discovered through The Heavy Lifting Companion. To explicitly describe the beginning, middle, and end of this chapter would be to do a disservice to the companion work itself, a companion that serves, as companions do in everyday life, to provide support, assistance, and a conduit of knowing experiences, truths, and reflections.

I could live
in this house
house of
memory
even though
nobody I ever
knew or was
kin to had
such a memory.

From “House of Water, House of Feathers, House of Light” by Theresa Whitehill (pg. 24)

In August 2020, at the heart of much attention in the world, “a devastating megafire destroyed almost 1,000 structures in the Santa Cruz Mountains” (pg. xiv) including Rice’s home and letterpress shop and inventory of artists’ books. The loss seemingly insurmountable, Rice’s perseverance reflects a richer story: there is more than this, more than that, more than loss, more than gain: it is totality, a Zen encompassing. The Heavy Lifting Companion is that which sprouts up from the devastation and reveals this spectrum of experience, survival, emergence.

How do we describe our resilience, our growth, our timeline? How do we describe destruction, loss, and grief? Forays into the fluidity of the adverse vary widely. Honoring the poetic and the exploratory, this book is both compact and utterly descriptive: it shines light on facts and nuances, and centers comradery and conversation. The Heavy Lifting Companion is an incredible introduction to Rice’s press for newcomers, and an incredible and visceral exploration of this harrowing sequence.

This book is a book about a press, but it is also a book about a book: of which it takes its name, Heavy Lifting, a limited-edition art book that was born not only out of ash but out of the crumbling and defiantly awful series of events around 2020: COVID, policy brutality and murder, disorder, disease, collapse.

The reader rides out the waves of crises. In the end, the book gives the reader the power of flight, perspective, community, and the will to persevere.

From “A Different Reading, a New Art,” the foreword by Inge Bruggeman (pg. x)

The Heavy Lifting Companion is a structure, a form through which we meet expression. It is organized and orderly. It responds to chaos and exhaustion. It is emblematic of work. The book is divided into several key sections. It describes intention. The building. The expanding. Pushing forward. It describes the facts. The flames. The fires. It describes the reasons and the movements. It pushes through into the abstract, poetry, the conversations, the friendships. And it moves into transformative, formalization: the project, the community, the collectivism.

It is a book of multiple voices, both within and without. The shared action to restore the lost press, the collaborations between Rice and Whitehill, whose work dances around event and circumstance but finds something new, a landing pad or a home, between the roar of change. From press to artist book to the keystone companion, friendship is the motif peeking out from between the pages. And it pushes forward to the greater whole. The final sections of the book include an exquisite remixing and adapting, an evolved form, a film, which takes the text and reimagines it. While the film is not included in or throughout the book, we are afforded glimpse into its construction is provided, and we are given an enticing opportunity to reflect on future actions.

It’s painful to think that such important work is coming into the world at this moment when it is so hard for the work to be seen as it should be seen, but there is also the new way in which such work will be seen because of the upended paradigms and the emerging changes. It’s a moment of free-fall.

By Theresa Whitehill in “Genesis: Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill / —A selection from emails exchanged between June 2020 & July 2021”

A sense of frailty and risk. A sense of alluring. A sense of invitation: invitation to experience challenge and challenge met with response. Reading The Heavy Lifting Companion offers the experience of responsibility. To support that which suffers. To prevent that which is on the brink. To douse that which burns. Rice and Whitehill provide a call to know this, to walk with it, to understand it. Their explorations are beautiful despite the harrowing conditions.

You can find the book here: https://movingpartspress.com/product/the-heavy-lifting-companion/

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com.

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Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell by Alan Catlin

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By Charles Rammelkamp

As the poet Robert Cooperman has noted, Alan Catlin is the Charles Bukowski of our generation. Like Bukowski, Catlin’s subject is the ordinary lives of the anonymous poor, alcohol and substance addiction, relationships gone wrong and urban sleaze in general. Like Bukowski, too, Catlin is an extremely prolific poet, his work all over the samizdat press. His current work,  Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, is in keeping with these overall themes.
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Catlin had a long career in the restaurant business in Schenectady, New York. For short, call him a bartender though the responsibilities were more complex than pouring drinks. As he writes in the persona poem “on and off the road.” (this may or may not be Alan Catlin himself speaking),

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            After years of hearing people ask me

            what else I did besides work behind the bar,

            of asking me what my other job was as if

            50 hours or so as week wasn’t like real work…

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The poem goes on with the absurdity (or sheer ignorance), until at last the speaker tells us, “I developed

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            a stock response, “I’m independently wealthy

            and I do this for fun.” After a while I added,

            “And I’m gathering material for a book.”

           Most people didn’t want to know what kind of

           book it was going to be. Maybe they thought

            they would be in it and what I had to say wasn’t

           going to reflect well on them. And they’d be right.

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It’s a sly joke but true! Take the poem, “Old Man.” The speaker encounters a vaguely familiar face at a bus stop, cadging cigarettes, propping himself up with a cane; ‘mostly bald head / hidden beneath / old Yankees cap // nearly transparent skin.’ The reason he looks familiar? The speaker suddenly remembers ‘how he used to brag // say how I’d made him / his first legal drink // when he was five years / younger than I was // before he became half dead / and twice my age.’ Burn!

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Or take the young woman in “Andy Warhol Revisited”:

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            Made up with five shades

            of mascara, all of them black,

            she was a pan-angelic pixie

            embarking on a second childhood

            before a self-induced, early

            death.

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We’ve all seen her somewhere, haven’t we? Or her sisters or her friends. Or maybe we’ve seen her brother. You know, the guy in “Skinhead Fury”:

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            His t-shirt said, Organized Anarchy,

            white skulls rampant on a field of

            burning crosses; skinhead fury

            in crooked black lettering about to

            ignite, race wars and random acts of

           wanton violence his modus operandi

            in between long stretches inside,

            courtesy of the state judicial system.

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Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell actually starts in Hell, Catlin the Virgil to the reader’s Dante. “Lady Day Sings the Blues in an Open-All-Night Club” features Billie Holiday stroking the blues with the headless jazzmen and is immediately followed by a couple of poems with the same title, taken from the British writer, David Peace: “many doors to hell; open, all of them open.”

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            a voyage in the dark,

            the ride of a lifetime, a ferryman waiting inside,

            holding a lantern, beckoning for you to follow.

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Sure, I’m mixing my Afterlife metaphors, Charon being the ferryman in Greek myth, but we follow Virgil through the murky rooms of The Inferno, meeting one lost soul after another. There’s ‘the flushed version of a character from / some dead author’s lost novel’ (“Tastee-Freeze”), the former gymnast pulled down now to a place “only Oxys, Demerol and Jack Daniels could cure” (“Fucked by the muse”), the pubescent girls celebrating their thirteenth birthday under the boardwalk, being taken advantage of by older men while their single moms work nine to five, their only goal in life “to live until they were sixteen” (“The Little Darlings”). We encounter them in Las Vegas, Vietnam, the Philippines, Argentina, Malaysia, wherever there’s a bar and somebody who needs to forget. No, nothing reflects well on these people. The title of the poem, “Refugee from Another Planet” could refer to almost any of them.

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Whatever Way Out Machine

            he’d come in on must have

            malfunctioned and left him

            stranded still dressed in

            decades-before-the-millennium

            duds: bright floral surfer pants,

            loud striped t-shirt, leather thongs

            and rose-colored glasses that

            mostly concealed his drug spaced

            eyes. He was trying to hitch

            a ride to the coast to join

            an enclave of pot growers

            and potential cult suicides,

            the name of his destination

            tattooed on his forearm in code,

            a place eight miles past nowhere

            at the bottom of a cliff that

            a Richter Scale 8 had dumped

            into the Pacific, not even memories

            left behind.

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These characters are vivid, lurid, vibrant, flamboyant. Catlin, as Virgil, thrusts them right into our faces, as if they were figures from our own nightmares.

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Catlin quotes Charles Bukowski for the titles and epigraphs of several of the poems in Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell. There’s “alone and insane in tiny rooms” (the protagonist “smoking her own special brand / of acquired-from-the-street, loco weed”). There’s “some babbled and some prayed”: “as if end time was yesterday / and they needed more money / for the meter that had run out.” There’s “Sometimes i just fall into it,” set in 1969, during the time of the “useless war” (Vietnam) raging overseas while the speaker hunkers down in upstate New York. There’s “how grimly we hold onto our misery,” which about sums it all up. Catlin also uses epigraphs from various other poets and writers to start other bleak poems – Philip K. Dick, Roy Batty, Lula Pace, Maurice Dekobra, and Buffalo Bill among others. To which the reader generally responds: There but for the grace of God or Whatever…

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Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell is vintage Alan Catlin, not exactly a “delight” to read, but impressive as hell.

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You can find the book here: Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell

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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House, Presto from Bamboo Dart Press and most recently See What I Mean? from Kelsay Books.

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Late Epistle by Anne Myles

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By John Zheng

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Anne Myles’s Late Epistle opens with a poem titled “Bane,” which functions like a prologue that sets the tone and prepares the reader for what the poet says in this collection. The poem starts with the speaker’s plain statement that a subtle pain which is something unknown since her girlhood has been “pushing against my heart and breath.” Because it’s unknown, it provides a space for the speaker’s imagination: “a rock whose weight” slings against her ribs to cause dense cold, “a sleek canister / of poison gas” which writhes in her body, a fetus turning out to be unreal or dead in dreams, or a familiar one curling against her spine with its cramped limbs. Though the pain hurts, the speaker treats it with lighthearted humor as if it needs extra care:

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I walked slowly, carefully,

so I wouldn’t jostle it

was that my charge upon the earth?

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Her humor continues with an exaggeration in the next stanza:

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I’d start up at times to realize

I’d been soothing it, whispering

The secret name I called it.

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Now the reader realizes that Bane, the word used as the title, suggests respectively the secret name and the unknown pain. Also, this unknown pain is both physical and psychological, but the poet continues her creative thinking by associating the pain with an assiduous creative process:

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Or was it a seed, dark and lustrous,

splitting and rooting into the rock,

unfurling its lone stalk

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to cast out lines on emptiness,

defining the blue of an October sky

with a dragonfly buzzing through it—

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now, perhaps?

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“Bane” is made up of nine tercets, but it concludes with a brief yet emphatic line composed of two words: “now, perhaps?” The question mark seems to suggest a lack of sureness.

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Page after page, pain and grief thread through many poems in the collection. “Four Interiors,” a prose poem in four numbered paragraphs narrated in the first-person voice, presents a Jewish girl’s four encounters or psychological activities at different ages of growing up. Paragraph one compares birth to “the world’s end waiting to be launched.” The irony of this phrase is that the baby who can see the glow in her mother’s belly sees also the dark of the light at birth, and the speaker stresses that’s what she always sees. Paragraph two works like a footnote to the dark of the light in the human world. It’s about an encounter in the malfunctioning elevator of an apartment building. Myles contrasts the elevator and the encounter, saying that although the girl is prepared for the elevator to “smash into the roof” she is never prepared to be called “Kike” by an insulting woman. The sudden intensification of this elevator encounter does hurt like something twisting within. The girl realizes ever since that she must walk carefully and identify with a human being who is “one of us” though she also understands that this way of approaching someone is like “seeking an expanse of darkness that would light me up within.”

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Grief and regret loom in another prose poem, “An Origin Story,” which focuses on the mother’s dementia. Myles builds up the tension by describing a daughter who barely understands her mother’s restless behavior hissing the curse with a b-word when she sees her mother up three times at night, “dressed, brushing her teeth—about to head downstairs” to prepare breakfast. Upon hearing her curse, her mother, whom the daughter had loved, responded by spitting at her and pulling her hair. Years later, the daughter still feels guilty about her curse, saying that “the image of my own ugliness turning and turning behind my eyes.” This reminds us of what Robert Hayden regrets about his misunderstanding of his father in “Those Winter Sundays”: “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”

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However, in “Happiness,” again a prose poem, Myles presents a different scene about the mother-daughter relationship. The daughter remembers a happy moment shared with her mother in the kitchen: “Later she would wash and I would dry with the radio playing. We’d knock our hips together on purpose, then knock then again.”

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Some poems are narratives about secrets of women-loving-women stories. The one titled “Women’s Studies” is a sonnet composed of seven couplets. It reveals a tender and honest feeling about approaching a woman. The female speaker reminisces about the Women’s Studies potluck in a lesbian’s house. The door image is both literal and figurative. It opens and closes when other women leave for home to make dinners for their husbands. But the speaker who has nowhere to go is eager for a talk with the hostess in the kitchen, and this eagerness seems like opening a closed door for her new understanding of Women’s Studies.

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Late Epistle is a heart-touching collection of self-revelation through personal narratives. In a sense, it is a lustrous seed growing in the rich soil of figurative language and imagery. It’s a delight to read.

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You can find the book here: Amazon.com

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John (Jianqing) Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023), A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021), Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019), Delta Sun (Red Moon Press 2018), and The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). His edited books include Conversations with Dana Gioia, African American Haiku, The Other World of Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku. He is a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. Zheng’s newest chapbook Just Looking: Haiku Sequences about the Mississippi Delta is available for download via Open: Journal of Arts and Literature.

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Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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If you want to read a book with love on each page, Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell published by Andrews McMeel Publishing is the one.  The two hundred and fifty-six volume is filled with unsentimental verse expressed in almost statement like single stanza poems that are clear and direct.

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The book is divided into ten sections starting with If you are dreaming of someone from page one to twenty-two. On page seven, Peppernell writes in a one-stanza poem:

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We should kiss.

Not because you passed my way by chance

But because you stopped

And I haven’t been the same since.

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This poem sets the place and situation clearly.  It is full of emotion but not too sweet and not too spicey…almost perfectly seasoned and it sets the tone for the entire volume. In the second section, If you are in love, the untitled one stanza poem presents a clear image of how love works.

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If I were to build a house

I’d have your arms as the walls

Your eyes as the windows

Your smile as the front door

Your heart as the fireplace

And your soul as my light

I’d place my faith

Knowing I’d finally

Found a home.

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This gives the reader a fresh perspective in viewing the place they live where each part is of the loved one and how good it feels. In section four, If you are lonely, on page eighty-four, in a statement-like one line stanza, Peppernell writes:

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How does loneliness exist with all these souls in the world?

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The question is basically unanswerable but the message is clear.  The question as statement is almost paradoxical in that loneliness does exist even in a crowded room. In another one- line stanza poem, Peppernell writes:

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If I had my say and had my life to do again, I’d have moved us closer.

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This poem on page one hundred and thirty in the section If you are missing someone, demonstrates directly and clearly how one might adjust one of the most important things in his or life. In this case, the most important thing Is the us being in a tighter proximity either physically or psychologically she does not say.  Closer is the key word.

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In this same section, she writes of distance again on page one hundred and forty-six.

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And in the end all that matters, is the distance, that we are,

creating all this longing.

The butterflies I feel for you, listening to our song on the radio,

The way I miss you even in the early hours of the morning.

Wondering about the day I will have through the night before.

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It is a love poem but without all the wine and roses and just a person reflecting on distance. On page one hundred and sixty-eight, Peppernell gives the reader another statement poem.

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You just have to surround yourself with people who have the same heart as you.

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It sounds like a survival poem without the details. In the section These are for you on page two hundred and forty, the one stanza poem expresses the bone deep love can have for another.

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This is my life

And I will fall for you every day

Because you are my love

And I see you in everything.

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Although this author is sparse with words, she tackles big issues in relationships and expresses clearly the emotion that comes with them.  She is skillful at setting up place and situation with few words but with strong impact. This is a book that makes the reader feel good.

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Her books are available from www.andrewsmcmeel.com

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.  Her articles have appeared in the national publication, Teaching for Success; regionally in South Jersey Magazine, SJ Magazine. Delaware Valley Magazine, and her essays have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her poetry has appeared in US1, SRN Review, The Fox Chase Review, Bindweed Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, That Literary Review, The Remembered Arts Journal, and other literary magazines. She has critiqued poetry for local and regional writer’s conferences and served as a panelist and speaker at local and national writer’s conferences.  She lives  in Mount Laurel, NJ.

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