Jacob Budenz
1/20/2017–1/20/2021

& we rise swamp-green & giggling
fingers dripping w/citrus juices
reclaiming your coal fires
for our sabbats

& you will watch one day
orange-stained skin
darkening

& the orange reddens
yellows
leaps up to lick you
leaps around you
becomes you

& we know you hardly need help
self-immolating
but we help you
in our wide-hearted grace

& we leap
we witch bitches
over heaps of flame
coal-fires sparked from dumpster fires
impregnating us with devils

& the planet sings with us
though gutted already

—Submitted on 02/14/2021

Jacob Budenz is the author of Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018). His poems have appeared in Slipstream, Entropy Magazine, Assaracus, Pussy Magic, The Avenue, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, educator, and witch with an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

Kenneth Canatsey
Diogenes, on How Democracies Die

There is no honest face in Athens. Many
a day and night I’ve walked its streets until
my feet blistered—and when the blisters burst,
and sandals became unbearable, I wrapped my feet
in rags and kept on searching. I met smirking
hucksters on every corner. I stuffed my ears
with beeswax to escape their lies; they ran
like raw sewage through the streets.

The Demos has become polluted. Every man
looks only to his own advantage, his own
party, and each strives to outdo the other
in goading the fawning, fickle mob.
They love their games and festivals, their bacchanals;
they excel in hot rhetoric, and neglect
the duties of state.

They say Phillip of Macedon and his army
are marching toward the city. An army of our own
has gone out to meet them, somewhere on the plains
to the north. But those I talk to are tired of the endless
palaver of politicians who have forgotten
how to pass good laws. They say
they are weary of this thing called Democracy.
They crave a Tyrant: It is power they worship.

No, there are no longer any honest men,
not one, in this city that I love.

—Submitted on 02/09/2021

Kenneth Canatsey is the author of Silk Road: The Journey (XlibrisUS, 2015), Blessed Be the Anawim (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), and The Daimon Call: A Travel Journal in Verse and Other Poems (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), as well as the translator of A Bilingual Edition of Poems by St. John of the Cross: Spiritual Songs and Ballads (Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies. He retired from a career as an registered nurse and case manager at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

Michael Lauchlan
To Freedom

Nobody cut the word from our heart walls
—Paul Celan (Trans. David Young)

Breath by breath between children
between sisters parting, between
lovers in the rage of love, a word hummed.

Wordkin of lover and friend,
it’s walked from deserts and steppes

with a straggling line of families
and been slurred, translated, refracted
and often proved counterfeit.

One day I’ve lugged my bag
from office to car and a knot in my back
creaks when I try to back out.

But something releases in the last breaths
before sleep, as I recall my brother,
without a sound, handing me a new

ball glove. I oiled it until it turned
black, until it was rag-loose
and ready to snap around a grounder.

Tomorrow, without thought, I’ll shift
to make space when we meet for coffee
and you won’t say anything and won’t

even look but sit down and push
a book toward me, or no book at all,
just your hands, opening before us.

—Submitted on 02/06/2021

Michael Lauchlan is the author of Trumbull Ave (Wayne State University Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, and other journals.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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.

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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. 

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. 

SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

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.