Poetry

#finalpoems / [?]

My Photograph

You are beautiful.
Three words, a simple statement on a common magnet.
Yet, so much kindness with this gesture.

Framed by the fresh feeling of being me, but
with the freedom to be someone else.
My chance for raw expression in the exposure of your lens.

Is it strange that that vintage camera gave me the most comfort?
Its character and quality used to capture
so many previous faces, bodies, and moments.

This camera that has seen so much,
now angled to capture me
in this moment.

Spine resting against
the cool leather chair,
as my head tilts towards you

Legs stretched out in their length,
with slight bend at the knee.
Feet resting on ruby heels.

The outside tree creates a tango of shadows
on the hardwood and across the deerskin rug
as the evening light pours through the window frame.

Cars can be heard passing by three stories below.
But they are in their own separate world,
missing this moment that is mine.

Rachel Michael is a physician based in Toledo, Ohio. Her love for arts and literature have inspired her to begin writing. She writes poetry and fictional short stories, and is looking forward to sharing her words in future publications.

#finalpoems / [?]

thickness

Because the fever hasn’t let up.

And I used to mesmerize myself by the way you walked, the pendulum of feet pattering one after the other, the sway of the hips and your laugh exploding from the crackled timber of your tongue. You used to simmer in the kitchen, lock your fingers together, push your glasses farther up your nose, lift your hips to the counter and dangle your legs like little wind chimes, and I opened my mouth and blew breezes at you just to hear your ankles jingle. Remember the time I watched you in the mirror and mimicked the way you spread your lips apart and tongued the air, and we almost kissed like that, but there was a void between the gums? Remember the smoke and the bread crusts flicked down over the fire? Remember the ineffable heat and how the sweat that poured down our noses formed puddles where our scents welded together? It was the first time we touched.

The last time we walked together, there was a violent presence in the air—in the squeak of your chair wheels, the cold concrete, the grimace on your face where the pain filtered through the fleshy layers of your mask. In wanting to feel closer, I bent down and mimicked your open lips, growled with you, said I, too, knew pain because it was in you.

But you shook your head—

I wish I was your body, so I could once again comfort you, crochet your skin anew, take ruined palms and sand them soft, take breasts and massage the pulp from them, take your pain and squeeze it from your flesh, wring you out and run your fever dry.

I wish I was your body so I too could feel the shatter you felt, so my empathy was not just another churlish phantasm of our love.

You left residue all over my body and it is hot to the touch—

Mira Glasser is an artist, writer, and bookseller living in Portland, Oregon. She is studying at Lewis & Clark College, where she won the 2019 Dorothy Berkson Gender Studies Writing Award. She has been a featured reader at Survival of the Feminist and Grief Rites Readers Series, and has a stack of unpublished chapbooks in her fridge, where they stay good and fresh.

#finalpoems / [?]

Her Zest

Her list of accomplishments was long, long, long.
Her work, her love, her song – – – now gone.

The measure of one life lived,
the purpose of what we give.

Was it fate that gifted her with it all?
Her zest left the rest of us to fall –

ow behind her tremendous lead,
left us planting the seed

of inspiration she gave,
with one small wave

that provided our moral scope
and allowed us some small hope

that life will go on and on and on
even now, that she is so, so, long gone.

Annette Gagliardi has poetry published in Genre: Urban Arts No. 8- Print, Southwest Journal, Summer & fall 2019, Dreamers Creative Writing Online and in their Year 1 Anthology Down in the Dirt Online Magazine, Trouble Among the Stars, Issue#2, Poetry Quarterly, the Poetic Bond VIII & IX. She has work in the League of Minnesota Moccasin, the South Dakota State Poetry society Pasque Petals and in Arizona State Poetry Society’s Sandpiper. Annette is a contributor and one of two editors for the anthology, Upon Waking: 58 Voices Speaking Out From The Shadow of Abuse.

#finalpoems / [?]

Late September 2001 Rorschach Test

in memory of Farhad

The daily morning paper dares,
who do you see here? Newsprint’s
blotches of black and grey form a face

no more terrorist than the turbaned man
who enters this E train at 3rd and Lex,

such assumptions another cause for terror
for the Sikh man who decorated his taxi
like it’s the 4th of July to ward off the ignorance
from skin white like mine. I asked him to deliver us

to Queens Memorial, please. I cradled Philip, fevered
with sickled cells. He’ll recover in a bed next to Farhad,
who’d learn he is dying of cancer, who’d feed us, two weeks later,
when we’d visit, dried white mulberries from Iran and bid us

to take care of each other. I rode home on the E train that once
ended at the World Trade Center through tunnels
linking English to Spanish, Hindi to Yiddish
like the cupped palms of girls make telephones
that carry misconceived messages around a slumber party.

Like Priya’s terror broke through my phone that night:
                         .                     .     A man shouted, ‘I’ll burn you Arab girl.’
Tamil, not Arab, she was walking home
on Avenue A, in New York winter

when it is never truly day or night
and everyone’s skin fades to a washed out
version of the self. In the morning, these faces unite

in their need for coffee as they create a line
of silhouettes, a fresh Rorschach test.
The bagel cart owner knows what each prefers:
black or sweet and light. Saeed saved me

the last poppy seed muffin that morning,
like many mornings, my arrival always near his workday’s end —
he’ll start a round of golf on Long Island while I start
a day of editing and dubbing in windowless rooms.

As he prepped my coffee – scooped the sugar,
flipped the spigot in one move – I searched for
my wallet, missing. “I think I left it …” He handed me
the brown paper bag with my breakfast
and some cash, “here, something to buy lunch.”

Lisa Eve Cheby, a librarian, poet, and daughter of immigrants, holds an MFA from Antioch University and an MLIS from SJSU. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in various journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, Love Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is available from Dancing Girl Press. http://lisacheby.wordpress.com

#finalpoems / [?]

“From a Crumpled Note in the Back Pocket of the World”

Come home.

Clothes off.

Coffee on.

Tip back

Tropic of Cancer.

Commit felony

To memory.

Mug down.

Turn it off.

Bathe half naked

And relinquish soul.

Bring the ghosts

Out and

Drink fireball

In the shower.

Balancing act.

Keep forward.

No refunds.

No end.

No win.

Sit by the ocean

In your mind

In the cheap motel room

And try to save your

Self.

Allison Ursa is a painter and writer residing in northern Alabama and currently makes work that lies somewhere in between. She is unsure of but inspired by the endless possibilities of what color the light at the end of the tunnel is.

#finalpoems / [?]

The Laugh with the Lilt
Dr. Jannette Goddard-Finegold, 1948 – 2019

Fifty years
since we spoke
since we laughed together

We planned to meet again.
I read her poetry
She read mine
She died last Sunday.

My parents are gone,
a sister, a wife

those others
I guarded with my skill
but could not save

and Denise
her brilliance, her quickness
her kindness

and that delighted laugh
at her own work
The Day the Audience Walked Out on Me,
and Why.

1973 Reading — Denise Levertov

Audio Reading

Don Krieger is a biomedical researcher living in Pittsburgh, PA. His poetry has appeared online in Uppagus Magazine, Entropy, Tuck, Vox Populi Sphere, and others, in print in Hanging Loose (1972) and Neurology, and in several print anthologies including in both English and Farsi in Soodabeh Saeidnia’s Persian Sugar in English Tea, Volumes I and III.

#finalpoems / [?]

Solace

Raise them,
Hold them foremost.

Your hands, your wands, your pens.

Be it whatever may.
Show solace.

Shadow the hypocrites.
Show them the least of pity-I plead you.

The sun has vanished long before.
The light we hold now, be not the aura of god.

We are all children of the devil now.
Trapped in a game of reality and fiction.

Fools who do not comply, are fools.

Only to the many, for they are the few.
It is their hands that are raised.
Their tears that matter. Their hearts – for they are still pure.

Unbridled with guilt, greed and blood and power.
Release your prayers for them.
Join them as they mourn the death of humanity, the death of nature and the death of god.

For I too am no longer with the living or the dead.
I remain forever, with the fools.

Saqif Maqsud is an admirer of words that twists and bends the subconscious. Devoted to Tagore from an early age, he is an avid fan of literature that reserves multiple interpretations. Occasionally, Saqif tends to dive into the world beyond, only to dabble in dark literature momentarily. He also prefers vinyl over digital music.

#finalpoems / [?]

Rain’s End

The rain poured
the day you walked away from me.

I was sick and shy.
I wanted to hold you.
I didn’t want to say goodbye.

The rain poured
and the hallway was so tiny,

Paint peeling, wood moldy.
A door on either side
created a box we couldn’t get out of.

The rain poured
and the sound was like a thousand drums

trying to get our attention
beating a divine message –
now now now now now

We closed our ears,
and the water washed you away.

Now 14 years later I sit, pen in hand,
surrounded by family and friends,
yet completely alone

breathing in the sweet essence of
the hundred purple flowers you promised to send,
still

waiting

For your hand on my shoulder
your whisper in my ear, waiting
for you.

LM Neal is a Queer writer working to transcend binaries and borders. She hails from the ocean shores but lives now between city and woods with partner, child, and pets. She has been published in a range of journals and anthologies, and is happy to be participating now with a #Finalpoem as we perch at the edge of ending.

#finalpoems / [?]

Dorian

To prepare for a storm
is to build a longer table and invite the neighbors.
Make your favorite meals, fill up the glasses with wine
and watch it overflow. Capture a child’s face light up in
a quiet explosion while playing on a swing.
Remember their laughter, the innocence of the moment.
To prepare for a storm is to celebrate the calm.
To walk inside a room knowing you’re sheltered,
counting every wall a blessing.
When a howling wind breaks into your home,
you’re naked, or just waking up or lifting up
your child from their crib
You say a prayer, a cry for help
It’s fast, inaudible, a thread of trembling words.
It is surrender at the start of a war you haven’t
fought but know how it ends.
When the ground begins to shake and
things start falling off the walls,
you scream names in an empty house.
Fear will do anything to bite loneliness in the neck.
You’re running around your own home and
suddenly it’s a maze you’ve never seen before.
If only you could get out of the door and into-
the mouth of the wind?
What is a refuge if not anywhere but where you stand?
You run from fire and walk into a door of flames.
No one thinks they’ll burn to death if only they keep going.
There must be water on the other side.
Buildings are already collapsing.
There’s not one house standing.
The trees, they seem to suck themselves
out of the earth
A hurricane feels like drawing stillness into a room
that prefers to dance. The music goes on forever.
You hear a cry and look around-
It’s your baby. Clutched so tightly in your arms it
is almost a part of you, not separated but one with your body.
A mother will do anything for their children.
You don’t see when the pole starts to fall
from behind you
You’re running towards nothing.
Dead bodies line the street.
On this day, fear is a language we all speak.
Your eyes wide open- searching.
It hits you hard, the back of your head
splitting in half.
Your whole body trapped in death,
Eyes wide open- a new shock forming.
Blood trickles down your broken neck
and a last image flashes before your eyes-
the breaking of bread in the church.
They pass it round the table and you don’t take.
Your hands are already too full.

Tryphena Yeboah is a Ghanaian writer with a background in Journalism. She is currently an MFA candidate at Chapman University, studying Creative Writing.

#finalpoems / [?]

It’s Over

Soon the blinds will be shut
and the sun
will complete
burning my skin.

Blackout curtains
and an inhalation
will transform blinking
into a nightlight carousel
of ponies and stars.

Just floating in space
as I have been
after the cord
from the mothership
was severed
& my ship’s captain
was too lazy
uninterested
to pull me back in.

They wanted me to float away
after I repaired their ship.

It’s about time
because I’m about done
trying to repair the damage
from the supramarginal gaps.

There’s only so much pink icing
pink blush
and peach jam
to spread over the craters.

No more making shopping lists
no more shopping
no more patching
or decorating
no more trash.

Thank you
lovelist Apocalypse
for it’s what we all deserve.

I die knowing I tried my best
within this mess
with some regrets
and confess
if my cells
could regress:
I’d whisper to the one
covered in pink
to try harder to link
to those who sewed buttons
on your torn up shirts
to those with sprinkles in their eyes.

Gina Tron is the author of three books, including ‘You’re Fine.’ She has been published in literary journals including Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Press, Junto Magazine and CatheXis Northwest Press and has contributed to publications like the Washington Post, VICE, Daily Beast and Politico. With an MFA in Writing and Publishing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she writes daily crime content for Oxygen.

#finalpoems / [?]

There will be no poets

in the future

the last words will be nouns
that burst into flames

in scorched weedless fields
where there was corn
soy beans

there will be millions
of climate change refuges

no matter how beautiful
and shinny the steel
the fence on the southern border

if there is a fence
will keep no one out
and no one in
the rich believe

money

protects them
and perhaps they’ll be
the last to die

and still banks
will sell you an annuity
and a plan
for your financial future

even my husband believes
we’ll muddle through

if there are 160 active breeders
left at the end
in some small part of the earth
that’s habitable
it may be possible
to restart the human race

and new poets will find words

Bonnie Billet wrote until she was 38 and was published in several journals including POETRY. Bonnie started writing again a few years after retirement and has been published in Yes Poetry, So To Speak and accepted for publication in Rhino and Anatolios Magazine. I spent the intervening years working as a landscape contractor working in NYC.

#finalpoems / [?]

Metro

When this neighborhood is in ruins
And the pools reduced to concrete depressions
Missing their giant pestles
The patios will emerge under
The archaeologists’ brushes
Along with glistening pebbled glass from sliding window doors
That we kept open on summer mornings.
Rat droppings will ossify into fossilized beads
That people will pay great money for
And wear in stud earrings and fine necklaces
There will be ancient cherry forests from the seeds we spit on summer evenings
They kept chickens and grew organic figs in the urban center,
The professor will say.
And we don’t know what they called themselves
When they went home for dinner.

Maureen O’Leary is a poet and author living in Sacramento, and earning her MFA at Ashland University on Ohio.

#finalpoems / [?]

MotherLove

It’s not stylish to love your mother.

I have found this out.

In chat rooms.

On Facebook.

It’s almost obscene.

Joyful parenting experiences

And mothering experiences

Are not welcome.

But when I look back

On our forty years together

I have nothing but love.

Arguments erupt.

Then fade away.

Love is left.

Even if it isn’t

Stylish. 

Ruth Marner lives in St. Louis. She is the author of “The Bike Ride,” which is in Sinister Wisdom’s July edition (#113). She enjoys bicycling and has a BA in Literature from Grinnell College.

#finalpoems / [?]

contours

only words

always sounds like an excuse 

an evasion

the lowering of the bar which gives people worth

the weakening of bonds that make individuals possible

but a closer look reminds us that compassion is a verb

infinitively existential as is to be 

and to be sure 

not emanating from the place where

hate derives

misbegotten 

lonely as indignity

or the end of everything

the time traveler

stopped somewhere

nowhere for miles

cries tears from a distant heartache

feigning as memory

when in fact

it will be as phantom as a lost love

no meaning in accidents

if there are truly accidents

once the axe falls

talking begins

spurting fictions

from sad grotesque baskets

of finite art

made by unfolding fingers

working swiftly nimbly

as if stopping brings notice

and another name for the list

marking locations on a map

turning every which way

no side is up

in the permanence of each location

abandon hope and any plan of return

or alternate realities aside

the joke is on another page

begin as if again

Steve Piazza is a writer and poet living in Athens, GA, where he served as an educator for many years. His writing draws upon the richness of society’s diversity, compassion, and shared optimism, focusing on the inspirations behind how vital it is to cultivate and preserve the best in people.

#finalpoems / [?]

Shadows

When our sun sets
we lose our shadow
and become mere dust,
soon to be scattered.
We become a faint memory that torments a loved one’s soul.

We are a mere chance happening in a certain spherical realm.

Some of us are famous,
some with disabilities,
most regular,
some an abomination–
a government that self-serves.

We wear our mask in the day,
hiding behind a façade of blissfulness and success.
But the moonlight unearths us,
reminding us that we are shipwrecked in a body.

We are an illusion existing for a moment in a certain spherical realm.

Our existence is a mere chance.
When our sun sets
we lose our shadow
and become mere dust,
soon to be scattered.

I am Coleen Everglades Lewis and I reside in Pembroke Pines, Florida. I am a poet, registered nurse and adjunct professor. I have fond memories of growing up in Jamaica and climbing trees, walking for hours, and watching the goats walk home by themselves close to sunset. In the Bahamas, where I also grew up, I have peaceful memories of walking to the beach after school and bathing in the warm beautiful seawater, under balmy blue skies. I also enjoyed climbing different trees, especially the tall coconut trees, sea grape trees and guinep trees.

#finalpoems / [?]

Rules of Engagement

This is how
you get him
to hate you:

speak.

Of welts, of weather
of money and mothers;
guileless, you dribble the barbs
that hook into the soft space
between his ribs
with cavity-ache, bruise-sweet

What he once thought sweet
turns bitter, your sapling
turns kindling
between you.

The more you speak
the more the words chafe
on abraded skin
until even a comment
ground clean of edges
sends him thrashing.

He loved your voice
once but now
you see the grimace
before the words ever vibrate
out of your collapsed throat,
like you’re coughing out
flies instead of asking
how his day went.

You spiderweb your words
between the pillars of your teeth
but when you grow lax
they buzz free and he
can’t help but break the hive
of your mouth.

To calm him
you must be an ornithologist
and study the exact manner
in which he nests his anger,
braiding the bloodwarm memories
of your mistakes around the cold of it,
a wreath of thorn and tinder.

Note the shape and contour
of it, cloistered
in the net of his tendons
brushing his lungs,
embraced by the soft things
he no longer shares with you.

The egg is stone,
like his fists,
crudely formed and
unyielding,
acidic when named.

This is how
you get him
to hit you:

have skin.

Wear it before him,
plain or glazed with pigment,
just wear it
without care.
Pump blood through the fields
of your flesh
carelessly
unadorned and catching like fire
on his magpie eye.

Bouquets of flowers become
bouquets of bone;
caress his gift
of knuckles with
a hemorrhage of your own, cradling
everything he can’t say
in the space between the wind up and
the bruise.

A flinch is
an invitation
to draw the amethyst
from your cheeks.

A scream
a request
to gentle your flesh
with rubies.

In the mirror,
you tilt your face
left and right, noting
all the colors his hands
can wring from you.

This is how
you get him
to kill you:

breathe.

Become unbearably
alive,
an insult of
an existence.

Breathe and watch
his rage crown
from beneath his skin,
a hatchling he calves newborn
everyday.

Breathe his fists,
stroke the snake
of blood from your temple,
let it coil
in your palm.

Smile.
Let the animal
exhaust himself knowing
the nature of
his defeat.

This is how
you he dies:

Sloane Leong is a mixed indigenous islander cartoonist, writer, and artist. She most well known for her indigenous sci-fi comic Prism Stalker and she has a new graphic novel called A Map to the Sun
forthcoming from First Second Books in 2020. She is currently living near Portland, Oregon.

#finalpoems / [?]

Nest

and then
holding each other
as if bird’s eggs

cradling
carrying on
as children

Jennifer Y. Montgomery is a poet, writer, visual artist, storyteller, attorney, and pie baker who lives in Connecticut with her daughter and two cats. She grew up in rural North Dakota but believes she has no discernible accent. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Red Weather, Haiku Journal, Failed Haiku, and several others. She believes that truth is stranger than fiction and authenticity is the highest art form.

#finalpoems / [?]

dracula imagines the potato

leaning on his bicycle’s handles dracula
has his questions                                            such as
                                                                                   who sorted the world into prey and predator

dracula lives
in the threat of a sunrise with his questions
after which he must sleep

a particular vampire routine
that is inefficient but beautiful
                                                 like the rising and setting of the moon

like grass growing through the pavement cracks
and exclamatory graffiti in the men’s room
                                                 turning the bike around dracula wonders

which are predator and which prey
together the two make a vague world of
the small and the larger

the clean scent of mist is
the sign to start heading home
arriving around 5am dracula goes up

to the 3rd floor                                               up
to the door of his apartment                                 lets himself in
his sleep will be peaceful
//

walking through the world dracula has his questions
leaves in the gutter smell rotten
the typewriter is slowly killing him

one word                                            at                                            a time
he knows
you don’t really get to predict your death
but you can read the warning signs

long ago the ants lifted any last remains of food in the apartment

gold twilight glitters outside
making a dusky gloam-light inside
and moons are more beautiful anyway

                                                 the filmmaker and the poet
                                                 know
                                                 there’s something sweet about moonlight

some of his friends are vampires too
a friend said
go so slow when hunting

that the world forgets you                                             he dreams
                                                                                                   of villages and mossy
                                                                                                   mountains and red

apples and the descent of the sun
into the treelike
//
riding a dark bike trail dracula has questions

what i wonder is why death
sometimes comes as a complete surprise
to the living                                               there is no answer

                                                      the bicycle’s left
handle was always sharp
with static

of each human dracula wonders
has its time come
                                                 dracula wonders why
                  in the world
jubilation survives the longest of any emotion
in the stairwell dracula hears his neighbors are talking
one bought a potato for dinner
shows a brown tuber to her partner

//

                                  in the
dark her corpse has a
totemic solidity                                               dracula imagines the potato

Jack Giaour‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, Broken Plate, and the Rio Grande Review, among other journals. He has an MFA from Chapman University in Southern California, and currently lives in Massachusetts.