Howard F. Stein
A Dot’s Journey

First a thought,
Then a dot
With a circle
Faintly in mind.

The slightest line
Emerges from the dot,
Hesitates, its pseudopod
Ventures a tiny step,
Stops, extends but a hint more,

Begins to shape
Into a curve that
Turns slightly inward,
Halts once more before advancing—

Recognizes where
It is headed only
Upon arrival, followed
By the next amoebic
Dare of advance and curve—
Direction revealed
Only retrospectively—

Until the dot
Meets and reunites
With itself,
Quest and destiny
A circle, the first thought
At last complete.

—Submitted on 02/03/2021

Howard F. Stein is the author of Presence: Poems from Ghost Ranch (Golden Word Books, 2020), Centre and Circumference (MindMend Publishing Co., 2018), and other poetry collections. A professor emeritus at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Stein lives in Oklahoma City.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Francis Fernandes
Fire

You came in
out of the crisp morning,
still aglow from your run,
dressed in your stretch pants
and a cap that hid your hair.
Your gravity and brisk air,
à la Joan of Arc, infected me
with that special longing
for an overarching truth.
I grasped at your garments,
tore them from your acquiescent
frame, while you whispered
something in your own agnostic
tongue which I barely understood
and which, frankly, could have come
from anywhere. You sank deeper
into my arms. The walls shook
and the sheets crackled like sparks,
the bed blossomed orange,
wild blue spears leapt from your soul.
But things took a turn when I saw
shiny-domed monks setting themselves aflame,
beheld race car drivers maimed and scarred
for life, witnessed doomed airliners
leaving nothing but charred remains
for the families of the deceased.
Having gone that way, I knew right
then and there that we are all afflicted
with visions, or words, not just you
my nubile pyro saint. In fact,
we are visions and words – some of us
burning brighter and louder than others –
and it came to me that, in the end,
after the days have shortened
and the sun has disappeared,
with the plain bones of winter
exposing that other singed and haggard
world, then our ashes will rise
through the low-hanging mist
and fly off in the wind, carbon seeds
unknowingly dispersed over the porous skin
of the Earth, with no purpose whatsoever
except maybe to call forth
some sleeping Lazarus from silent darkness
into the splendors of a new morning.

—Submitted on 02/02/2021

Francis Fernandes grew up in the US and Canada. His work has appeared in The Zodiac Review, Amethyst Review, Third Wednesday, Montréal Writes, Underwood, and other journals. Fernandes lives in Frankfurt, where he works as a teacher.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Debra Shigley
Dream Machine

American Dream:
Work hard. Buy a house. Raise a family.
Okay, but isn’t that
for suckers?
Here’s another quintessential
American Dream:
Get rich quick. Gold rush. Dot-com boom.
High-growth startup.
Game Stop rallying.
Insta-famous.
We invented these things.

Is it the American Dream
To own a dry cleaner
or a taxicab
or a Dunkin’ Donuts?

Is it the American Dream
to squeak in on a “plus factor”
or an actual quota?
She thinks so.
Is it the American Dream
to walk through
your neighborhood at night
and not get shot?
He thinks so.

Whose American Dream is it
to touch the soil
and feel
free?

Rough passages
But here, today,
you can marry whom you like
in whatever church you like.
That’s not nothing.

You can also buy crap
on infomercials
or scrolling
late into the night.

Do you have bootstraps?
Hard work (that fiction) elevates
only some.

American Prism:
refracted rainbows
gleaming, cascading
City on a Hill?
That depends
on who’s
looking.

—Submitted on 02/01/2021

Debra Shigley is the author of The Go-Getter Girl’s Guide (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). She holds a BA from Harvard and a JD from Georgia State. She worked as an editor at Atlanta Magazine and briefly practiced law before appearing regularly as a lifestyle expert on the likes of The Today Show and CNN. Moving to Mexico City, Shigley, who is biracial and Jewish, launched a hairstyling service for women of color. She is an on-air host for Local Now, a news app at The Weather Channel. Shigley lives on a farm in Milton, Ga., with her husband, five children, a barn, a garden, pecan trees, and pigs.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Patrice Boyer Claeys
Two Poems

The Sum of Destructions

Thank you, Jesus,
that is over—
wisdom too long neglected
chasing the dreams of men
protected by walls
with their mouths full.

They sang as they rounded up each interloper.
We all heard it—
music
of the lost world
citizenship
hidden
in the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

The words they spoke
slithering down
layer upon layer of dark deceit.
And yet, their voices sweetened the snaking air
and reduced everything else to blur and shade.

Many in the darkness
millions of us
teemed with an illness
dreaming of heroes—
the men
still promising
more than greatness
supremacy—
a way of living in America.

A drop of honey        or of venom
we drank and waited for something to drop
out of a hat
those human faces
rapacious, moldering
selling door to door
an overdose of America.
*
And then it came to pass
all this was gone.

Lady Liberty
once more
bounced back           but not completely.

This heavy, heavy head
sad
under its own misgiving
bent to the earth
spent
on the thick satin quilt      of America.

Cento Sources: Theodore Weiss, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, W. D. Snodgrass, James Clerk Maxwell, Edward Thomas, Claribel Alegria, Liz Rosenberg, John Beer, Paisley Rekdal, Sophocles, Randall Jarrell, Javier Zamora, Keith Waldrop, Giannina Braschi, Connie Deanovich, Eileen Myles, Judith Askew, Patricia Spears Jones, Raymond McDaniel, Thomas McGrath, Alice Notley, Emily Carney, James Wright, B. H. Fairchild, Alexander Laing, Wanda Coleman, Edward Arlington Robinson, Philip Whalen, Elizabeth Alexander, Mark Conway, Cathy Song, Susan Stewart, William Archila, Tom Chandler, Arden Lavine, Jenny Bornholdt, Richard Aldington, Tato Laviera, Mason A. Freeman, Jr., Tina Cane, Christian Wiman, Allen Ginsberg, Blas Manuel de Luna, Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland.

The Little Deaths We Lived

1
After voting from sea to oil-slicked sea
this country
was a distracted vigil.

The evidence was everywhere—
President Emeritus
assailed the public with lies
plundered
America
just for aggravation.

As he grasped with bloody clutches—
Come on. Nothing. Can. Stop me. Now. Ohhh ahhh—
anger sublimated into a mask
the grim mask
of the protesting vacuum.

2
We have a heartache,
America.
We thought we were
a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
whispers
Come, Pioneer.

But this is ambiguous
now—
no one answers, no one comes.

Cento Sources: W. S. Di Piero, Fred D’Aguiar, Julia Mishkin, Paul Killebrew, Juan Delgado, Josephine Ollitt, Thomas Merton, Fabio Pusterla, Walt Whitman, Charles Reznikoff, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Patti Smith, Mark Rudman, Sean O Coileain, David Lunde, Joy Harjo, Allen Ginsberg, Lenelle Moise, Emma Lazarus, Fay Dillof, Leah Umansky, Sandy Florian, Harriet Monroe, Gjertrud Schnackenberg.

—Submitted on 02/01/2021

Patrice Boyer Claeys is the author of The Machinery of Grace (Kelsay Books, 2020), Lovely Daughter of the Shattering (Kelsay Books, 2019), and in collaboration with photographer Gail Goepfert, Honey from the Sun, (Blurb, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, little somethings press, *82 Review, Burningword, Inflectionist Review, and other journals. Online at patriceboyerclaeys.com.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Cal Freeman
Three Poems

After Reading of Mark Truan’s Death

A great confectioner is gone.
His little factory in west Detroit
will be sold off or abandoned.
I spent hours in the store on Ford Road
while my grandmother
scooped ice cream and weighed
bags of chocolate hearts
and bird-shaped toffees
for the doomed marriages
of Dearborn Heights.
There are no graves for confectioners,
and our grandmothers
will be dead for an incalculable
number of years before the rapture.
Only the immortal
can understand the bitter
syrup in the bulla, the coloratura
of the cantor, the sick flesh grey
as gauze on a day-old dressing.
Father, grandfather,
beloved employer,
is it sweet-toothed from where you
sit to want to stave it off,
to fear both sleep and nothing?

The Carp

It isn’t enough to plead.
A novena utilized for personal ends

is merely nine days’ jaundice.
The reconstructed eye might peer

like a marble appears to when it
stills but stillness is not attention.

They wend a dye into the water
that articulates the carp’s DNA

with the color blue once
it’s swum past the barrier,

a flicker in the eye
of God, a catspaw wave

on the river—it isn’t enough
to say, What runs ripples;

what looks sometimes
makes the innocent run.

Everything Sounds Like the Clop of Water

Except the saw whet owl and the swallows.
Those balloons above the bay might’ve meant something an hour ago.

It surprised me to learn that you can stand on the shore
and not dissipate, that anyone might want this.

There’s banality and profundity in every phrase.
You just need to talk enough to get the sound right.

—Submitted on 01/31/2021

Cal Freeman is the author of Fight Songs (Eyewear Publishing, 2017). His writing has appeared in RHINO, PANK, Rattle, The Cortland Review, Southwest Review, and other journals.

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Susan Kay Anderson
Always Eugene

The air runs off the river. All spaces
have given in to dreaming
shadows between here and the cedar
lengthening my love for Eugene. This is how
it always begins with me and Eugene.
When I begin observing the trees again.
Always Eugene running around.
Expecting every moment a change.

My sentences are incomplete. What else
This early. Eugene in another heyday.
Same daffodils and hyacinths scratching
The air river willow even far from it.
At home in the library. Others also
Resting their eyes. That’s why the carpet
All so quiet. Not even phones ringing.
This way it is the day of the memorial
Every day cycle. Heads bowed. Then
I say no to the salmon dinner. It is
Already too dark for driving but that
Is what we do leaving them behind.

The story should have been more about the landscape.
If I could criticize just for a moment I would say ugly chairs
Yet I would have them in a minute in a second and recover
The material

A fine swirl, a madcap idea, something exotic burlap
Velvety horsehair
Recycled later as a shirt.

Once a hurricane has landed, there is really no going back
To before and how before was different
Everything

In place in that place. Even the water

Extra potent
Extra watery.

I was walking to and from my life.
The rain pitter patter all that space
Between the drops onion soup.
Thought it was another corner
To go around and instead went right through
Saw a different angle saw you as an angel
Talking me down from the edge
But I never knew I was quite on it
To begin with. I’ll tell you my dream.
It is of my house. A house of trees
Fantastic leaves. They could be needles.
Actually I would prefer pine or cedar.
Cozy. Something branchy. Moving.
I am lucky. True as weather. Say it.
See how they were waiting and waiting
for something to show up in the mail
a turn at the big wheel so to speak
out of their league mostly true
but it was fun while it lasted.

If this poem could be anything
It would be spirit attempts
With feathers and time crossing
Ocean grabbing all light
Mixing it a little and so forth.

At least they weren’t endlessly
Sitting in cars and doing just
About the same although leaving
The motor running is what trucks
Do when busy with deliveries.

—Submitted on 01/31/2021

Susan Kay Anderson is the author of Mezzanine (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (forthcoming, Finishing Line Press), a biographical memoir of Virginia Brautigan Aste. Her poems, essays, stories, and interviews have appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Guernica, Mudfish, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. Anderson holds in MFA from Eastern Oregon University. She lives in Eugene, Ore. 

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

James Diaz
Three Poems

I’ll Take It With Me

What took the most from us
gave us back the most
in the end
added on like a wisdom tooth

I remember almost dying
there but for the grace of somethin’
and being here, now, I’ll admit,
is bittersweet
considering all those that I come from
are scattered now on the wind

grief too, I want it all now
the hurt so huge
you come out small
some nights
and goddamn if the lake in you
isn’t on fire
again

I’ll take it with me
while I wait my darker turn
across this narrowing divide

how beautiful it was to be here
despite everything
and everyone
you had to give up
along the way.

It Is Time

There is in me
This thing
I have for so long
Refused to name
That I am my life
Right now
And not tomorrow
Or all of the many things (count them,
There isn’t enough time)
That went wrong
Way back when
No, I am right here and now
Which, let me tell you
Is a scary place to be
For someone who was once a child
Whose parents hated their own lives
and each other, fiercely
What you do then is you go inward
But a little too far, child,
And it no longer does you much good
To try and keep the world out like that
Look up, for just a moment,
Because, while it is true
That above us all is a sky
So temporarily holding
And fastly slipping away
You would not be blamed for feeling it’s all a little useless
Is it not also true
That you will have been here
Regardless what proof of you time will consume
And time will end, my child, time has to end
Yours and everyone else’s
The lack of it, like the lack of you so small (I remember)
You were but a plant making due with blood water
This lack that brought you to your knees a thousand times
(I remember)
It is only when you fill a thing to the brim
That it becomes significant to you
We are not long in this place
I dare you to not to let it go to waste.

Breakage

I am tired
but not in the way you think
I am swaying
branch like
barnacle eroding beautifully
intertidal faith carried like so
I’ll dip it all
into the wind
west faced train
gooseneck navigator
I’ve carried things
all my life
handed off
to me
receptacle that I was
the strongest littlest shaker
shackled to the floor
some nights
oh, you should have heard me wail
and laugh it off
it was all just so unforgivably beautiful to me
I tended to my bend
like so many false flares
shot into nowhere
you needn’t come for me
I swim upstream
against the light
the sky bear pounces
I am like a fever lifting tonight
basking in the get-well-soon
of the midnight room
we have waited so long for you
this is the world
and I have wanted
every pain in it
to teach me what I need to know
like so
and on my knees.

—Submitted on 01/31/2021

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry; Gone Lawn; The Collidescope; Thimble Literary Magazine; Horror Sleaze Trash; and  many other journals. 

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Michael T. Young
Three Poems

The Day the World Stayed Inside

Crouching around tables
or stretched over sofas and floor rugs,
people tell stories of famous storms
that shut down cities and left people in the dark.

This sparks tales of late nights in the kitchen
or leaning over a pool table in the basement
passing family gossip around like the last cigarette.

Fresh tea and coffee fill the rooms
with various aromas of clarity.
Then someone uncorks a bottle of wine
for measure against the long day ahead,
and predictions of the even longer night.

Although the heat clicks on,
a few still wrap themselves in blankets,
feeling a chill they can’t account for.
Others roll up their sleeves
sharing scars and memories of what it was like
to get in a bar fight over a lost bet,
or finding out that the blonde at the end of the bar
was still married.

Some learn for the first time where they’re ticklish,
others, that they have an affinity for Greek history
or tapioca pudding.

The family’s youngest, a girl in a green dress,
sits by the window toward the end of the day.
Through the afternoon, she watched a beetle
crawl up the glass. Now she watches darkness
press to the panes like a tide rising.
She counts stars floating into view
like distant crystal jellyfish, and imagines
the weight of all that water pressing down
and how one day the whole house
will rise on the buoyancy of its own light,
a blue whale surfacing to draw in one long breath.

The Game of Statues

Our eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark
that cloaks our monuments. Their granites,
marbles, and coppers flash with dappled stories:
a burning insistence in the lie of pure light.

It’s why visitors slow before them,
to catch themselves in a fall they mistake
for taking time to reflect, even as it all
washes through them as though they were glass.

Nothing catches. They leave unchanged.
Neither have our ears tuned
to the voices echoing in the chambers
where we celebrate what has been made

out of the lives of others, out
of the muscle and age of people
who have no name in the books
we cling to and hand on to our children.

We’ve played the game of statues so long
we’ve forgotten to take the next step,
or notice the night is a deep hard granite,
and the chisel is in our hands.

Forbidden Rocks

They weren’t in any of the usual places—
quarry or beach cliff or cavern,
but somewhere on the other side
of what everyone believed possible,
around the bend of a ribcage,
suspended under a skullcap.

Suspecting them to be lined
with crystal, geologists tried
every kind of hammer and chisel.
But their points all broke
or shattered, because nothing
is harder than their dead center.

Over their course surfaces
and through their hairline fissures
wind warped into an enchantment.
Not a song anyone called beautiful
but a spell that lured people
from the deep caves of the country.

They trekked to the capital
and erected a temple there,
a house to celebrate their new
monuments, icons of force,
idols of a will that never opens
to light or exposes itself to warmth.

—Submitted on 01/31/2021

Michael T. Young is the author of The Infinite Doctrine of Water (Terrapin Books, 2018), The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada, 2014), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax, 2000), and Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press, 2012), winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Main Street Rag, Off the Coast, Cimarron Review, Rattle, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. 

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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

Elizabeth J. Coleman
A Long Line in Manhattan on a Glorious Autumn Day

I ask the man behind us if he’s a doctor.
I wish I were, he laughs.

He has a degree in psychology, but a musician now,
has been transcribing Bach cello

suites for bass guitar during quarantine.
He loves the low resonant tones

of both instruments.
I picture him in blue scrubs

with his salt and pepper hair,
and an earring in each ear,

striding, mellow
through the E.R.,

stopping by my bed,
taking time to comfort me.

Soon he’ll move to Roosevelt Island,
with his wife and baby,

from one room to two.
My father did his residency

in its hospital torn down years ago,
I tell him.
They’re moving into the old lunatic asylum.

Four hours later,
he hands me his phone

so I can listen to him play, forget
in that moment

not to touch a stranger’s things
in a pandemic.

Anyway, it feels like he’s a doctor,
my doctor,

and by now I have
complete trust in the man

with the salt and pepper hair,
and an earring in each ear,

listen to him play guitar,
his vibrato so like song,

so like a human voice,
Purell my hands,
stride into the booth.

—Submitted on 01/29/2021

Elizabeth J. Coleman is the author of The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), Let My Ears Be Open (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and The Saint of Lost Things (Word Temple Press, 2009). She is the translator of Pythagore, Amoureux, a translation into French in a bilingual edition of Pythagoras in Love by Lee Slonimsky (Folded Word Press, 2015). Coleman is the editor of the anthology Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Her poems appear in Colorado Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Rattle, and other journals. Coleman’s poems appear in Together in a Sudden Strangeness: American Poets Respond to the Pandemic (Knopf, 2020), Know Me Here: An Anthology of Poetry by Women (Word Temple Press, 2017), Poetry in Medicine Anthology (Persea Books, 2014), and other anthologies.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.