Albert Katz has been a professor of cognitive psychology for over 40 years and is now on the cusp of retiring. In his undergraduate days he had aspirations to be a poet, gave readings in coffee houses and published some poems in long defunct small literary journals. He found it increasingly more difficult to write poetry once he started graduate work and through most of his academic, career, publishing extensively instead in scientific journals. He has been married (and divorced) twice, has three children, two of whom have published themselves. As retirement started to loom, he found that his poetic voice started to reappear, after almost 50 years dormant. Over the last two years he has had one or more poems published (or have poems accepted for publication) in Poetry Quarterly, Three Line Poetry, Inman Indiana, Ariel March, Soft Cartel and Pangolin Review.
After My Talk in Jerusalem ~ Albert Katz
my presentation completed
I walk the Via Dolorosa
on the route He walked
buried now some feet below me
by the debris of time
all around me I feel
larval creatures that should have been extinct
cloned and oozing
in the whirlpool of current events
I see a newspaper
and though I can’t read the Arabic
I interpret quite well the pictures
of mangled bodies
and so it cycles
I have dinner with another presenter at the conference
“I think what happens when you are young never leaves you”
she tells me
distraught by the news of her best friends suicide
when I think about her friend
I wonder whether she conjured up horrors from her past
a film she was forced to watch again and again
until it was too painful to bear any longer
or did she pick and choose which horrors to re-visit
or perhaps re-shape
making the ugly even uglier
the black even blacker
and why did she not choose to make the ugly a bit less ugly
the black a bit less dark ?
In Jerusalem you know for sure that Jung was correct
that we play out cultural histories
in the stories we construct of our lives and of those around us
in the morning after breakfast
I walk towards the Wall
there is a commotion in the crowd
looking past the young soldiers with uzi’s
slung across their shoulder
I see two women trying to reach the Western wall
in the line reserved for the orthodox male
bearded men shouting obscenities
waving thin white arms
the soldiers are shouting also
though it is not clear at whom
I take a picture surreptitiously
and by so doing
break the second commandment
when I reach the wall
remembering none of the Hebrew
I was force fed for my bar mitzvah
nor knowing any prayers
I recite Leonard Cohen in English
there’s a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in/
that’s how the light gets in
I am not a believer
nonetheless I write a note
leave it in the crack between the brickwork
I ask that He look after my three children
as an afterthought I add
“and all the other children”
Charles A. Swanson
Charles A. Swanson teaches dual enrollment English in a new Academy for Engineering and Technology, serving the Southside region of Virginia. Frequently published in the Appalachian region, his poetry and short fiction have appeared in such magazines as Virginia Writing, Wildlife in North Carolina, ALCAlines, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Confluence, Pegasus, The English Journal, and Now & Then. He has worked with writers such as Cathy Smith Bowers, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Robert J. Higgs, Jim Minick, Ron Rash, Donald Secreast, and Frank X. Walker. He also pastors a small church, Melville Avenue Baptist in Danville. He has two books of poems: After the Garden, published by MotesBooks, and Farm Life and Legend, from Finishing Line Press.
The Stick Figure Poem ~ Charles A. Swanson
–“and the Word became Flesh,” —John 1:14 (RSV)
–“and someday, I’m gonna be a real boy!” —Pinocchio
The stick figure man tries to figure
how his frail matchsticks
can gain some flesh. He walks along,
stick sun overhead, thin sticks
for rays, and he wants yellow
to warm him. He wants
some cheeks to blush and grow rosy.
The thin stick tulips
need to purple up. The little stick
dog needs to wag his tail.
The stick figure man most of all
needs his God to save him.
Poor stick figure man is at the end
of the Hangman’s noose,
knowing that one more consonant
is needed to make the word,
“salvation.” Poor stick figure man,
pale stick bones in the valley
of dry bones, he wants to connect,
find the word for ligament,
find the word for expression,
find among the dry bones
of words, all the letters for
consciousness and conscience.
Bruce Ducker
Bruce Ducker’s work appears in The New Republic; the Yale, Southern, Sewanee, Literary, Missouri, American Literary, and Hudson Reviews; Shenandoah; the New York Quarterly; Commonweal; the Quarterly; PEN/America Journal; Poetry Magazine; and indeed Ascent. The author of eight novels and a book of short fictions, he lives in Colorado.
Leath Tonino
Leath Tonino is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, The Animal One Thousand Miles Long, about explorations in Vermont, where he was born and raised.
Peach ~ Leath Tonino
We think of walks as lines, sometimes crooked,
zigzaggy, maybe even loopy, but always A to B.
So I was surprised, delighted, a little disconcerted
when yesterday’s eight-hour walk through the city
turned out to be a peach with a military cemetery—
thousands of white markers on a green hill—for a pit.
The morning’s steps were so many bites and swallows
of juicy flesh—strangers, dogs, buildings, birds,
thoughts that went nowhere but somehow brought me
to a standstill, my hand on a sun-warmed gravestone.
And then, can’t say I understand how it happened,
the afternoon’s steps remade the peach in my belly,
each stranger, dog, building, bird, and random thought
packing the flesh together, adding back the sweet juice.
Roy Bentley
Roy Bentley is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama Press), Any One Man (Bottom Dog), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press); as well as Walking with Eve in the Loved City, a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and published by the University of Arkansas Press.
The Heretical Free Fall of a Child Held Aloft then Released ~ Roy Bentley
Time is one pirate, gravity another. Still, my swashbuckler-
grandson wishes to be set free from a part of his limitations:
he wants to fly above a man’s shoulders and I’m that man.
Besides, what is there to say while a scalloped-edged cloud
scuds by the street-facing windows? The first time I toss him,
the act and result is more a gift to me than he may ever know—
while the DNA strains to replicate and breezes rustle leaves,
I am the man more than half the way to being nothing again.
Meaning someone who has heard a glad child more than once
and might want, instead, as an alternative, to spend a day alone
or with someone who loves Elmore James as much as he does.
However, just now, my place is in the room where I toss him,
the open book of a face canceling election-year blather about
graciousness and fair play in a country which respects neither.
A dog with one brown eye and one blue is circling, wanting
to be loved at least this much for an hour or so in the light.
Robert Claps
An empty nester, Robert Claps lives in eastern Connecticut with his wife, not far from the point where the CT river meets Long Island Sound. Recent work has appeared in Marge: An American Journal of Poetry, Crab Creek Review, and Tar River Poetry, among others.