Bio of Gail Goepfert

Gail Goepfert is an ardent poet, photographer, and teacher. Currently, she’s an associate editor of RHINO Poetry and teaches classes online at National Louis University. Her story spans the Midwest in locations between the Mississippi River and northern Ohio, but her passion for travel is endless. She authored a chapbook, A Mind on Pain, (Finishing Line Press 2015), a book, Tapping Roots (Aldrich Press 2018), a second book, Get Up Said the World, Červená Barva Press, 2020. Collaboratively, she worked with Patrice Boyer Claeys during the COVID months on Honey from the Sun, a book of her centos and Gail’s photographs, and a chapbook, This Hard Business of Living, coming out from Seven Kitchens Press in 2021. Glass Lyre Press will publish her latest book of poetry in 2021–Self-Portrait with Thorns. Recent poem publications appear in After Hours, The Examined Life Journal, Night Heron Barks, Inflectionist Review, and Rogue Agent. She’s had four nominations for a Pushcart Prize and this year was nominated for Best of the Net by Night Heron Barks. Her photographs appear online at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Olentangy Review, Storm Cellar, and 3Elements Review and on the cover of February 2015 Rattle. She lives, writes, and snaps photos in the Chicagoland area.


Desperate Beauty

— I paint flowers so they will not die. Frida Kahlo


We are watchers, Frida.
Aching but obedient to light,

resurrected by shocks of color.
Mornings you pluck

bougainvillea or pearly
gardenias, plait them in your hair

above your brow. I shadow
the fire of spring poppies

and the profusion of lilacs
and pink hydrangea.

With the organ pipe cactus,
you spike a sage-green fence

on the borders of La Casa Azul
tuned to the rhythms of sun

and rain—its lavender-white
flowers tint while you sleep.

Our love-eyes like greedy
tongues lick the rare-red

of wild angel trumpets.
We are aficionados. Pregnant

with joy in the garden’s cosmos.
We pursue hues like lovers’

lips, stalk columns of yellow
calla-lilies, praise the appeal

of honey-petalled sunflowers
and the lobes of violet irises.

We thrive on iridescence—
our eyes attuned to its blessing.

Watchers. We bend near
in reverence to the bloom—

all pain humbled
for a time by beauty.

— first published in SWWIM

Wulf at the breakfast table

eating twelve poached quail eggs, topped with homemade hollandaise sauce and Ossetra caviar before a solitary stroll around the pond. Wulf in the afternoon swatting flies with his tail; walking backwards in the forest; dancing. Wulf at night mixing an aperitif with the name of Rimbaud’s Left Hand: absinthe, Benedictine liqueur, orange liqueur, freshly squeezed lemon juice, pineapple juice, one egg white, and a few drops of rosewater for good measure, followed by a dinner of crown roast pork and seasoned pork sausage stuffing. Wulf at bedtime: wine-colored silk pajamas, white Australian sheepskin throw tucked under his chin, Gaspard de la Nuit on the bedside table, the words “I see it now. My fate is to hang…” going through his head as he falls asleep. Then, those dreams of Little Red all night long.

Jenene Ravesloot

When Men Came West

Time ago, grass reached a man’s boot when
he rode his horse toward the west and a dream.
Jack rabbits and coyotes ran this place, burrowed
in lava caves when cougars and bobcats hunted.

Mountains watched over everything, but they
stayed out of what happened. Sheep men came.
Grasses disappeared where their flocks ate
and ate; cattle ranchers built keep-out fences.

Families suffered over deserts, mountains, defied
dangerous rivers where some drowned. Some floated
their wagons down the Columbia on shaky rafts,
built bridges for those who came after. Then many
staggered into Oregon.

Cattle and wheat grew; wells plunged deep into
hard ground, sometimes hit only more dust;
some hunted gold and silver, lost everything;
while many folk, back east, were urged to come.

Whole families marched toward those mountains,
gathered in small towns with dirt streets, plank
roads; cleared land, cut logs for one-room cabins;

called this place bountiful.

Coyotes still talk about the old days, time ago,
when they were alone in a wide-open land; when
tall trees waved wild and sang in constant winds.


End Zone

Somebody died yesterday.
Then another and another.
I saw their souls sitting on the prairie,
wrapped in blankets and sun.
Should I speak to them now, or wait?

Stay calm. Go from bed to pen and back.
The paper’s there for conversation.
Ink on pages will outlast me,
when persons become ghosts
and a whole world of anima hangs above
like webs on a chandelier.

It is the living who pray to strange gods,
who make laws and break them
in our short, foolish lives,
who worry when the roof leaks, a cellar floods,
who torture each other, cage children,
who keep walking our daily rounds, thinking of youth,
waiting to slide into the dark.
Who will mourn us, someone or no one?

I will wrap myself in wind.
I will pull the needles from my arms,
the tubes from my mouth. My skin, tissue-thin,
will be the memory of veins in a leaf.
My fragility will bloom with wordless affection
for the living and the dead. My bones
will disintegrate, their ashes rise to meet
my ancestors on some mountain or cityscape,
their dust in the skyscrapers they built,
stone on stone.

– Previously published in Poetry Salzburg


Bio of Irving Miller

Born in New York City and educated at New York University, Purdue University, and the University of Michigan, Irving Miller taught and served as a university administrator at New York University, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Akron. He has authored over 80 refereed articles and book chapters in science and engineering, over 200 abstracts and presentations, edited and translated several monographs, and received numerous science and engineering grants and awards. A casual poet for most of my life, he began writing poetry seriously in 1995.  His poetry has appeared in journals, collections and chapbooks, and on several websites.

The Rules

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth – Albert Camus

you cannot play backgammon
if you eat yogurt

you cannot shoot BBs
if you own a watch

you cannot ride a bike
if your name starts with a vowel

you cannot play bridge
if you have red hair

you cannot sing carols
if you can spell quetzalcoatl

you cannot eat corn flakes
if you are an only child

you cannot play the harmonica
if you have an older sister

you cannot feed the pigeons
if you are left-handed

you cannot watch the sunset
if you have freckles on your nose

you cannot read Tolstoy
if you had an appendectomy

do not assume the rules
do not apply to you

they do


Bio of Jocelyn Ajami

Jocelyn Ajami was a painter and filmmaker for over twenty years and founder of Gypsy Heart Productions. As an artist with a global perspective, Jocelyn has been the recipient of numerous awards, including major grants from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, The Leadership Foundation, International Women's Forum, and the Goethe Institute. In 2008 she served as an activist/grantee in Dublin, Ireland during the drafting of the international treaty banning cluster bombs. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 and has been published in several anthologies of prize-winning poems, including Encore (2018) in which her poem, Un Deseo, won the Founders Award/first prize, from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, she lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

Un Deseo, (A Wish)

Find me
In the hollow of your hand, clutching
fallen dreams

In the salt of your tears, burnishing
the wounds of old Seville

In the bristles of your broom
sweeping alleys
on the crescent of the moon

Find me
In the crystal bowl, galloping
through liquid chambers

In the speckled eel, coiling
like a dancer’s lunar train

In a child’s first breath at
the Banquet of Words

Find me
In the smallest worm, crawling
through the brambles

In the fragile caterpillar, propping
temples on common ground

In the burnt weed, floundering
on sacred mounds

Find me
at your feet, a solitary ant,
bewildered
by the commerce of devils

Find me
the desert pebble
on a snowcapped mountain
insignificant and bare

near the midnight border
of somewhere, Anywhere


Bio of Myron Stokes

Myron Stokes is a 9-year Air Force veteran, and a clinical psychotherapist who counsels combat veterans. He has been writing poetry and short stories for 15 years. His poem, “For My Ancestors,” won first prize in the 2012 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse. A member of the Illinois State Poetry Society and Oak Park Writers Group, he has work published in Margie, International Journal of American Poetry 2005, and the Ellen LaForge Poetry Prize 2007.

History Lesson

When grandpa LeAndrew was kicked by the foreman
then called an uppity, no-account, stupid nigger,
he uppercutted the foreman’s chin,  
booted him in the ribs five times
and watched the man writhe and groan
in Mississippi’s red-clay dirt.
My father said, “Poppa didn’t shit off nobody.
Lord help you if you pissed him off.”

That night my father heard cornered prayers,
fierce whisperings between his mother, Elvinia
uncles, Napoleon, Theophilus,
aunts, Cassietta, Johnnie Mae, and Izora.
Grandma Elvinia, passed seven months with Aunt Kalliope,
paced the planked kitchen floor,
sobbed over and over,
“Lord Jesus, they’re gonna kill’im tonight.”

A mob of car lights blasted the windows,
ravenous as snow wolves.
A riot of drunk curses and vile threats
maimed the magnolias and peonies.
An empty gallon jug of bootleg
shattered the window above the sofa.
Bricks and Coca Cola bottles followed,
destroying Grandma Elvinia’s angel figurines.
My father hid under the bed
with Aunt Senovia and Uncle Jefferson.

“Bring your black ass out, LeAndrew,”
the hooded foreman yelled over and over.
“We got something for your nigger ass!”
Slurred double dares took root in night soil,
splattered the clapboard porch,
slammed against the rocking chairs
Grandma Elvinia and my great aunts
sat on when they gossiped, shelled peas,
stitched quilt fragments. 

Minutes before the invasion,
two hulking silhouettes
slipped out of the house,
snaked silently through the oaks and pines
under the blonde moonlight.
An owl’s soliloquy urged them to hurry.

Grandpa LeAndrew’s and Great Uncle Napoleon’s
calloused fingers caressed their shotguns
on their laps in the pickup,
Grandpa LeAndrew unblinking in his stillness,
wearing Grandma Elvinia’s lemon-yellow
Sunday dress and veiled hat.

 
GrandmaElvinia-GrandpaLeAndrew.jpg

Bio of Marilyn Peretti

Marilyn Peretti's poems have appeared in journals including Kyoto Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Talking River, Journal of Modern Poetry, California Quarterly, Snowy Egret and online New Verse News. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, she has self published two books on cranes: Let Wings Take You, and Cranes to Come, once featured at Int’l Crane Foundation; also Lichen-Poems of Nature, Angel's Wings, and To Remember-To Hope, thoughts on tragedies of the Japanese Tsunami. See other poems at http://www.perettipoems.wordpress.com

White Poinsettia

Aztecs surely knew
what glory they might
bring to hopeful eyes,
cultivating the brilliant

flor de Nochebuena,
delicate broad plant
mostly seen in season
of Christ's Celebration,

wide green leaves with
snowy bracts fluttering,
gracefully curving to points,
so like wings of angels.

I got lost there

just like you. And now we’re both lost there and the good
news is we have each other and this vast whiteness except
for a few marks, marks we cannot read because we are too
close to it or too far, or too much to this side of it or that side
of up or down and there is no use reading the landscape for
meaning if you can’t make out what the landscape consists
of so we spend a great deal of time pressing our fingers
against our eyes as if to wipe the tiredness away but clarity
won’t come and there’s some small comfort in that, to be
surprised you know, to let whatever happens happen, and
good news, we’re still here and we are between this and that
and life is like that I being yours and you being mine
meandering in this place we’ve found ourselves in, throwing
the dice since perhaps the colors will be better found that
way, the cloth perhaps better woven that way, by god knows
what means, not by your means or my means, but divinely
made as such things are if they come at all and as I said, we
got lost there long ago. It was the throw of the dice, you
know. They said we could go anywhere. Just pick a place,
any place. That meant so much to me once, that is to say, a
long time ago.

Jenene Ravesloot

First published in After Hours Press, 2019

Skiing

My mother skies like an Olympian,
diving down moguls of locked memories,
navigating knee replacements and broken bones.

When she fears she might hit a tree,
she makes angels in the powder, dodges
chronic arthritis with pain pills and lightning.

In the warming hut of her kitchen, she works
on jigsaw puzzles of kittens and blue sky while
sipping hot chocolate and nibbling donut holes.

Her shirt is red checked like the wallpaper
in her kitchen, and when she zips down each slope,
out of bounds, her hand-knit scarf tied

in an unreadable knot, she becomes a blur,
a French Impressionist dancer with a couple
of pieces missing, a potpourri, a broken mirror.

She stands up from her wheelchair clutching her cane—
a monogrammed rod, a wooden crutch, a tree branch,
an extended piece of willow, a bleached crow—

then plants it like a pole, attempting to descend
the stairs one more time, each icy step a flag of victory,
a fast blue slope, a thrilling dangerous carousel ride.

She carves her boots into the carpet like orthopedic
ornaments, slowly slides her patella, joints and femur,
her titanium knees, her aching shoulders, summoning

her courage, then points her skis towards the bottom
of the mountain—where the powder and ice await,
where we all will be someday—closes her eyes, and lets go.

Published in The Caregiver (Holy Cow! Press, 2018) and Lilipoh (Winter 2020)

Kabul Dead End

A woman stands alone
covered head turned
to a crumbling wall
shoulders hunched
protecting a secret.
She takes something
from a drab cloth bag
maybe a cell phone
for a forbidden call
or a knife
weapon of honor
in defense or revenge
or, even more dangerous,
a book of poetry.

Chaotic Beauty

Two pianos,
haunting brilliance,
wonder on the vine.

In the vineyard,
in the glass,
tasting notes of worth.

Sing the song of chaos
mounting in despair.
Yet a sort of hope prevails,
leading me to the end note.

The binding, crushing madness.
Smashed grapes,
macerated winter fruit, dancing,
like Jack Frost on the pines.

The relentless notes
of cherry, ice and sadness,
a beauty to behold.

On the vine,
in the glass,
fading away.

Trailer Park Incident

Fading daylight
wicks from the sky,
night tar thick and sticky
between trailers where moonlight
ought to be.
A big man walks with a small dog,
footsteps crunching on the gravel road.
Shadows leap from Christmas lights
and some thing happens down in the dark
some big dog tears from his owner’s leash
or a woman feels a fist
or a man’s betrayed.
Some thing unexpected
Something brutal and bloody.
Shouts, accusations and curses ring out.
And a lone voice cries
“How could you?”
The dog whimpers
and the man entreats
“How could you do that?”

Panic and rush,
slapping doors
as the neighbors descend from their decks to the road.
Car doors slam, engines roar,
headlight angels fly across the porchscreens.
Deep into the night they intone through the darkness,
the pissh of a beer can,
glow of a cigarette,
murmur of voices,
all wondering
How?
How could you?