Of Thee I Sing

They sing the traditional notes 
if it is, if it is, if it is,
it is if, is it if, if if if 

	and I (d’oh) get stuck way behind, 
so               (lalala    re     ti)                fa,
	me  (mi)  me.

I slobber notes as if my uvula
were throwing off bitter tonic.
But they, if it is,
		        spit them out
as cleanly as discarded teeth,
so porcelain white because
they sucked off our blood first.

· · ·

Hope Fill

Hope gathers in my mouth
but I don’t know how much
it will take to fill it. Molars
grind as if sanding anxiety.  

My tongue feels swollen as 
if allergic to such emotion.
Taste buds also are confused
by sweetness bitter-tinged.

I mistakenly bite my inside	
cheek. The blood dries up
to let hope fill my mouth.
I gulp air, more than air. 

I can’t hold my breath long,
but hope, o hope, I can hold. 

· · ·

The Red Cap and the Pussy Hat

                               (with apologies to Edward Lear)

I
The Red Cap and the Pussy Hat oft disagree
   while ignoring their sinking boat, 
as they proclaim to be sailing sea to shining sea
   yet common ground they don’t note.
The Red Cap pondered riches high above,
   And said to the Pussy Hat under the stars:
“O enemy Pussy! O Pussy, my enemy,
   What an ignorant Pussy you are,
         You are,
         You are!
What an ignorant Pussy you are!”

II
Pussy Hat said with a scowl, “Cap, you’re so foul. 
   I know you want to rule everything!
But you seem harried of a world so varied
   and so you won’t have me under your wing!”
They went on their way, four years to the day,
   In the land where every swamp thing grows,
And just as it should the Stylish Fascinator stood
   To proudly sing, “The Pussy, she knows.
         She knows,
         She knows!”
To proudly sing, “The Pussy, she knows.”

III
“O’ Fass,” said Cap, “Unwilling to stop your shrilling?”
   “I will indeed sing,” said the Fascinator, “I will.”
So what could they say, but kept on their way
    and glimpsed fat turkeys on Capitol Hill. 
Were they so blinded, everyone strong-minded?
   Red Cap and Pussy Hat thought each a buffoon.
Yet hand in hand, all across the fabled land, 
   We chanced on the learned and the loon, 
         The loon, 
         The loon, 
We chanced on the learned and the loon.

—Submitted on 09/19/2022

Ronnie Sirmans is a metro Atlanta newspaper digital editor whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Plainsongs, The American Journal of Poetry, What Rough Beast, and elsewhere.

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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. 

Looking for Answers

          I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
          I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
          into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
          how to be idle and blessed 
                                                                     —Mary Oliver

Yesterday’s walk—fish scale clouds.
Three woodpeckers calling loud,
flying tree to tree following one another. 
What do you call a trio of good-omen birds in flight?
What do we name these clouds scaling through sky 
in scalloped arcs like the shimmery 
flat side of an ocean dwelling fish?

What do you call the feeling 
when everything seems akimbo and in limbo;
really neither here nor there.
Almost to spring, yet temperatures still plummet
turning snowmelt to ice.
Almost at war; the world on edge.
Pandemic ravishes in places; is calming down in others. 
Folks don’t know what to do—mask and distance, 
or step back to “normal.”

I’ve fallen out of practice how to gather; 
have settled back into hermitic ways,
finding comfort in aloneness; 
unease at the thought of “in-person.”
What do we call it, to feel lost
in the midst of every day; in the midst of your life;
your precious life.

—Submitted on 09-17-22

Marjorie Moorhead is the author of the chapbooks Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2 Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Verse-Virtual, Sheila-Na-Gig, Amethyst Review, Moist Poetry, Tiny Seed Journal, Bloodroot Literary, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Support Ukraine (Moonstone Arts, 2022) and Covid Spring II (Hobblebush Books, 2021). Her full-length debut, Every Small Breeze, is forthcoming from Indolent Books.

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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. 

Nobody Noticed

Jesus came back on TikTok since
two hundred forty characters  
couldn’t raise the dead.  
He was hoping three minutes
would be enough to regroup 
all the MIA Christians
who’d stopped believing
in anything—especially themselves.

If only their ears had been eyes
the first time—they could’ve seen
what I really meant.
Even though they’re
glued- together stardust,
humans just weren’t
built that way.

They made him the first bloody
telegraph pole—
sending a message
that endured two millennia—
until the digital age.

Then hucksters with toothy smiles
and slicked back hair played
fast and loose with all
his humble truths
to keep the cash cow mooing—
they preached heaven
could be here on earth—
as long as the price was right.

His video was a simple one
no gangsta rap or dancers
writhing to primal beats
just a sad-eyed bearded soul
preaching worldwide brotherly love—
he didn’t stand a chance.

This time there were no angry mobs—
neither crowds nor riots appeared—
not even a single thumbs-up. 

· · ·

Ambivalence

The future is
never present
while looking 
at the past 
only ghosts
of lost chances
that restlessly
haunt the
temporary now 
as they dispatch
the immediate
to misty realms  
of unnoticed
and forsaken
opportunities
where the light
of day is
forever cloaked
by shadows
of promises
waiting to 
be born

—Submitted on 09/04/2022

N.T. Chambers‘s poems have appeared in Grassroots Literary Magazine, In Parentheses, You Might Need to Hear This, Nine Cloud Journal, The Elevation Review, Wingless Dreamer, Months to Years, New Note Poetry, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Quibble Magazine.

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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. 

Diaspora
Eight bars for Greg Pardlo						

Accepted to your master class while ignorant of what 
besides a Pulitzer you were, I stopped to get your book, 
and after being charmed by that first poem on being born, 
was daunted by the density of learned allusion in your work;

so, locked out of the Promised Land of meaning for the sin 
of being shallow, I started leafing forwards from the back, 
trying, like the hotel thief who jiggles every doorknob, 
to find just one unlocked, to burgle for its billfold sense, 
the keys and coins left on the desk, the lacy bra inside 
the dresser drawer, the belted pants across the chair, 
the cell phone plugged and glowing on the bathroom sink; 
and there, I found your poem about the Quaker Parrots 
living in the ballfields wide and graveyards deep of Brooklyn, 
and that began a recognition hometown comfort groove.

I recognized those parrots and my Brooklyn in the one 
where you had walked.  Your voice became a ticket to a reading 
where Whitman, Moore and Auden, Hart and Lourde 
were sipping wine and pocketing the pretzel snacks for later; 
and the only thing that poems have ever done, 
to make a way for someone I could tumble talk to native tongue 
to tongue, came fresh as a baguette in a bicycle basket.

So, when I heard your call that I should raise my eyes to see 
those parrots in the trees, I shouted like a congregation
that I have raised my eyes to a Midwood, Brooklyn sycamore 
on the walk we’d take around my parents’ block to smoke some pot 
before Thanksgiving dinner, and I have seen the stick nest 
of the Quaker Parrots jutting like a beaver lodge 
above the leaf-strewn lawn of the Orthodox Jews 
who invaded our assimilated neighborhood 
in the decades since we siblings moved to Jersey 
and Connecticut, unaware that Kings would rise again.

And I have heard their noisy chattered ruckus, though to me 
they sounded less like Dizz and Bird at Minton’s Playhouse 
popping peanuts than like housewives calling deli orders out 
to countermen in lab coats and smudged white paper side caps 
on a Friday at Blue Ribbon while their cars were double parked 
on Avenue J.

So, when my sister touched my sleeve to pass the roach to me,
I pointed, as first one and then another, green as Kool Aid
showed up at the dark mouth of the nest and pulsed their wings, 
then flew away, and asked her are those parrots, or a figment of the weed?
And, when we got back to the house from our pre-Thanksgiving walk, 
my Uncle Fred and Cindy’s boyfriend Robert watching Dallas
play the Giants in the kitchen, dipping crackers in the baked brie 
before the guests arrived, I told my mother, peeling carrots for the crudité, 
there were parrots in the tree outside the Berson’s house, and she said, 
Arthur, darling, Berson moved out years ago; the yahmmies live there now.

So, I was riffing on diaspora, on everything that smacked at me, 
even on your epigraph, which said that love is as a hundred thousand, 
which put me distantly in mind of Lear, whose heart 
would break into a hundred thousand flaws or ere he’d weep 
for loss of child’s fealty as a kingdom he was banished from, 
but only as a quote that you might know, 
and not because it really fit, since sometimes, 
when you solo, you wind up into a cul-de-sac and lose a measure backing out.

Those winter, still-dark mornings leading to your master class
I labored by the yellow lamp beside my desk, to trade these eights with you, 
to raise the sort of ruckus that a Pardlo parrot might, 
to lay my song on top of yours, to see your parrot avatars of love 
to answer back with something from my nesting past 
that sang a siphoned song, then finish with a bit about the cognoscenti 
who nowadays give Quaker-Parrot tours to day-trip hipsters, 
who are made to sign agreements to keep nesting sites a secret, 
lest the poachers catch and turn the parrots into pets, the very pets 
they were meant to be when they were shipped from Argentina,
as the legend goes, some sixty years ago, and their crate broke open 
on the tarmac at Idlewild, whence they came like all of us, to Brooklyn.

—Submitted on 03/05/2022

Arthur Russell won Brooklyn Poet’s Poem of the Year for 2015 and was runner up for the same award in 2021. He placed second in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award from The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in 2021. He is co-editor of The Red Wheelbarrow, an annual journal published in William Carlos Williams’s hometown of Rutherford, NJ.

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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. 

What Keeps Me Up 

The wounded toes of ballerinas, 
the violet shell of a grandson’s ear, 
three small olives at rest 
in their own green blood.
Twelve useless elixirs 
I bought to heal my tension,
my tension deep, 
so quivering deep, 
my muscles wear me out, 
but won’t let me sleep. 
A pneumatic drill down the valley 
echoes like a brakeless train. 
Malarial clouds from western fires
drift across the fruited plains.
In the country of the homeless, 
we’re wide awake, eyes bright 
as nighttime cats. 
There’s nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to sleep. 
Lord, there’s nowhere to sleep 
in the home of the brave. 

· · · 

Sugar Habit

When Andrada visits, we drive downtown,
stroll Pacific Avenue, listen to untuned guitars 
like we did when we were fifteen 
before her mother killed herself, 
and she moved away
with a new mom she hated.

I watch her pour tablespoons of Xylitol into Lipton tea, 
swallow THC gummies, forage my fridge 
for family-size chocolate bars. 
I understand she needs to argue with me 
that her Four-Square scripture could save 
the gays and Catholics, 

that her Twelve Steps and Paleo diet— 
which she can’t follow— 
are good for her, 
like slitting the pale skin of a thigh 
is better than slitting a carotid.

Besides, who am I to talk? 
Even as I write this, I want to click away, 
look at an old lover on Instagram, 
Google the sister I don’t talk to, 
revel in the the weird achievement 
of peeling my cuticles till they bleed. 

But next time she wants to visit, I’ll say No.
God knows, she drives me crazy,
but I hate to lose her. She’s the only one 
who knew me when I was alone 
on a tire swing, fingers scooping from a jar 
of Empress jam, summer sleeping 
like a parent who wouldn’t get up.

· · · 


Worm Moon						
                                                             9 March 2020

Named for the blind one, her body of sticky pearl, 
eater of the dead, eaten by the blood-breasted birds.

The Earth tugs at thunderheads, a hand of sky
fingers the soil, sun cuts the clouds, 
and touches our winter-whitened skin.

Then they rise—the earth-loosed, 
and slack-stranded, helpless, pink, like intestine writhing 
under the black-bead eye of Crow.

Their rising reminds me to make plans— even before 
she dies, for how to live without my mother— 
the one I turned to God before I learned words,

who brought me to first light as Disappointment— 
My sex wrong, my Hebrew hair,
my thickened waist, like unbaked bread.

Now is the night of the Worm Moon, Lenten Moon, 
Sugar Moon, and Sap. Last full moon of winter, Chaste 
Moon of the virgin spring. 

Its persistent turn, night shadows and silver discs—  
the closest we get to hope. We, the soft and shapeless,
the badly-made.

—Submitted on 01/14/2022

Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books 2020). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, and New Letters. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts, radio shows, and events, and she leads ongoing workshops with small groups of poets from all over the United States and Canada.

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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. 

Pathway to Epiphany  

Towards the summer sky
I make a shape of heart
With my clumsy hands
This is the feel of life
I tell the season

This is to illuminate the dark
Dreamland like a search light	
I tell the crow stalking behind
Like the spirit of my late 
Father. This is to gather all

The positive energy in the world &
Send it to the future. I tell my
Unborn grandson. This is the cycle 
Of life & the philosopher’s stone

I tell the greening copse. This is 
The circle to fill in with cries
& laughs. 
      I tell my other self
Beyond the cosmic wall, as if 
To balance yin and yang
    In the whole universe 

· · ·
 
Soulmating: for Qi Hong

He lives on the yang side of the planet
& she on the yin; through Platonic love
They maintain the balance in (human) nature

His is hard & straight like ‘1’ while hers
As soft & circular as ‘0’; coupled together
They make up the whole cyberspace

Time renders him immortal, when space
Expands her indefinitely. Entangled, they form
The coordinate, where history sucks all black holes
 
· · ·
 
Self-Semantics: a Bilinguacultural Poem 
 
1/ I vs 我: Denotations
 
The first person singular pronoun, or this very
Writing subject in English is I , an only-letter
Word, standing straight like a pole, always
Capitalized, but in Chinese, it is written with
Lucky seven strokes as 我 , with at least 108
Variations, all of which can be the object case
At the same time.
     Originally, it’s formed from
The character 找, meaning ‘pursuing’, with one
Stroke added on the top, which may well stand for
Anything you would like to have, such as money
Power, fame, sex, food, or nothing if you prove
Yourself to be a Buddhist practitioner inside out
 
2/ Human & 人: Connotations 
 
Since I am a direct descendant of Homo Erectus, let me
Stand straight as a human/人, rather than kneel down
 
When two humans walk side by side, why to coerce one
Into obeying the other like a slave fated to follow/从?
 
Since three humans can live together, do we really need
A leader or ruler on top of us all as a group/众?
 
Given all the freedom I was born with, why
Just why cage me within walls like a prisoner/囚？

—Submitted on 05/08/2021

Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include Pushcart nominations and publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry and Best New Poems Online, among others. Recently Yuan served on the Jury for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards (poetry category).

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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. 

The Word

like two priests, grazing

like silk floss trees		
the thorny uncle’s rose

slip into my boxers 
forget my body

give me a smog check
i am clean coal

a chimney						defeated fossils

a bark collar						the new pope

· · ·

Frame Everything

you cannot imagine how hard it is 
each lady slipper you drew 
is a dear i killed 

								they call it blood burning
								do you know what haunts you? 
								i am twelve 

a shower boils 
the young men inside 

								i come as often is possible 
								the LA water and power company 
								could be my family business 

the last castle is 
an old woman 
who hasn’t seen you 
since the nineties 
and says you did alright 
also your mother would be proud 

								i made her casket
								three cedar logs 
								i cannot believe they buried her 
								without underwear

—Submitted on 03/13/2021

Marshall Woodward is the author of Clown Star (Gutslut Press, 2022). He edits the journal Cultural Fan Fiction. Recent poems have appeared in American Writers Review, Brickplight, Aji, and The Indianapolis Review.

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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. 

And Then After You Got the Vaccine

you didn’t want to limp, even though your old lady
knee makes that happen sometimes and the hall
to the door outside felt long.  Your knee didn’t
hurt before you spent a year inside—exercising, yes, 

but with bands and balls and a prescription.  You’d
actually feared the men hiking past you at the lake,
their unmasked nostrils suddenly obscene. The hall 
felt long and it was still daylight but barely when you 

pushed the door at the end of it open, your fingers 
cold with alcohol and reeking of New York State Clean
from the gallon jug with its plunger applicator, a
scent like a cheap head shop. Then the many white

Art Deco steps of the Westchester County Center.
A harmless man in a wheelchair on the sidewalk:
masked, your age. The chipped paint on the iron
railing. You were a little girl in this place once. At

last, turning the corner as if it were all nothing, your 
husband, eyes brightening as he finds you. His long 
stride you’ll have to hurry to match—but his eyes. This
thing won’t kill you, now. Rush hour. The ride home.

· · ·

Five Hundred Thousand People

I keep thinking about cotton candy: a Marie Antoinette 
bouffant, toy lipstick colored, on a paper cone. How it

seemed impossibly huge, how it dissolved into nothing
when I tried to eat it. Wet grass under our plaid blanket

in the mosquito-bite twilight of a brass band concert. I
was six maybe, standing on my father’s sneakers so he

could teach me how to jitterbug. My mother said he always
stepped on her toes when they danced, but wasn’t I stepping

on his? On purpose? I didn’t understand. My mouth lost
in a cloud of sugar, my face sticky. Other kids with balloons,

balloons let go into stars and darkness. One hand in my
father’s, trying to keep my balance. My mother laughed but

seemed sad about something. Suppose everything I’ve 
written until today had dissolved into nothing. Everything.

Five hundred thousand people. I’m dancing on all of their
shoes, trying to keep my balance. I still don’t understand:

all that sweet twilight gone, all that lost music. Mothers,
fathers. Other kids. Balloons let go into stars and darkness.

· · ·

But No One Did

Afternoon rests fitfully over us, tossing off the clouds’
thick blankets, marking the dormant grass with sudden
shadows—our chimney, a tangle of empty branches—

then drowsing into near-twilight. Dull, dull, a
comfort, this pause, this slumping into what? Peace,
maybe? Nothing pending. No one breaking glass, 

no one cursing. The creek’s still energetic with last
night’s rain. The whistle of a freight a mile off, traffic
on the road outside just now flicking on headlights. All

week watching interviews on TV, I worried about people
who spoke in their living rooms in front of bright windows. 
Because anyone could…but no one did. As if my worry

could save all of us. Maybe tomorrow will be normal—
coffee and a buttered roll. Normal like a hot shower,
a blue sky free of razor wire, memory’s easy breath. 

—Submitted on 03/13/2021

Christine Potter is the author of the poetry collection Unforgetting (Kelsay Books, 2018) and the time-traveling young adult series, The Bean Books (Evernight Teen). Her poetry has appeared in the anthology Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), and in the journals Rattle, Eclectica, Mobius, Sweet, and been featured on ABC Radio News. Potter lives in the lower Hudson River Valley.

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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. 

Signs of Life

I know we have just landed a craft
on Mars, a planet 140 million miles away, again.
budget 2.9 billion dollars.

I know the Perseverance Rover currently monitors the atmosphere
so we might predict Martian weather, useful, maybe, 
in some imagined future.

I know how it feels to lift a boy-child up into my arms, 
resting his head on my shoulder, my whole body 
blooming from the scent of his scalp.

I know how it feels to have the hand 
of a man on my throat
chair tipping against a wall.

even now, we do not know how we become
a hard hand or a pressing knee,
have yet to travel a country mile to document these formations.

how the soft, suckling mouth of a baby grows to turn and twist,
fueled by a pit of sorrow,
how we can become a foreign land to our people.

I want to travel, here; see if our human curiosity
our humble perseverance
can reveal how to make this world more habitable.

I know that a murmur soft and low,
a tender hand, is what we need 
to sustain signs of life, on earth.

—Submitted on 03/11/2021

Rachael Philipps-Shapiro is a writer and journalist. Currently a student in the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence, she was a poet in residence at Bethany Arts Center and received an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship. Here journalism spans titles from The New York Times to Edible Westchester to Time Out London and Elle.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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.