A River Sings | 02 01 21 | James Diaz

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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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 31 21 | Michael T. Young

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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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 30 21 | Elizabeth J. Coleman

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. 

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A River Sings | 01 29 21 | Cole W. Williams

Cole W. Williams
Flowchart of Binary Fallacies

—Submitted on 01/27/2021

Cole W. Williams is the author of Hear the River Dammed: Poems from the Edge of the Mississippi (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2017) as well as several books for children. Her poems have appeared in Martin Lake Journal, Waxing & Waning, Harpy Hybrid Review, WINK, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Williams is a student in the MFA program at Augsburg University in Minneapolis.

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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 28 21 | Marilyn Chambron

Marilyn Chambron
Two Poems

This Place Called Home

We stand at the precipice of time.

A time which has seen us stumble and falter but not alter our ideals of a nation for the people and by the people.

Let’s bury the hatchet not in flesh but to the root of the tree of backbiting, bitterness, betrayal and bitchery.

A nation able to bear its soul but not lose its solace for one another.

Uplifted by a people, all people, who have a stake in our fertile soil of liberation.

A sacred soil drenched in the tears and blood of those who realized we could not continue as separate but equal.

Come out of the winter of deceit, debauchery and disparity and enter the spring of renewal, rebirth and repair.

Unity has not been reached but we strive toward the prize set before us as we envision: not division or revision, but a decision to press through the noise, through the hate, through the pain to stand as one people united in this place called home.

Recall

Recall another ordinary day
Within another ordinary week
Recall the plague which will not go away
Destroying both the mighty and the weak

Recall flash points of death and of dying
Visual assaults upon the sane mind
Recall families shocked and now crying
Pray to heaven for a little more time

Recall our collective fear unspoken
Masks, testing, placebos and quarantines
Recall all promises made, then broken
Hopes and dreams of an effective vaccine

Extraordinary year now ending
Lessons, scars and revisions still pending

—Submitted on 01/23/2021

Marilyn Chambron‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Colorado Sun and Social Distanzine. She is a retired financial services manger, and lives in Denver.

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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 27 21 | Catherine Gonick

Catherine Gonick
That the Past May Enlighten the Present

Let the words written long ago at last
fulfill their promise, may it become
self-evident that all men, all women,
all people, are created, can live, equal
and equally represented

though they now be divided,
can no longer hear one another speak

That the past may enlighten the present,
let those who can, renew the words
written long ago, so they are heard
and spoken, shared, even among people

who feel as divided as Esau from Jacob,
Ishmael from Isaac, who once were red-headed
children too closely related, their half-sister-mothers
Martha and Sally, wife and slave to their father

Jefferson, stealer of birthrights
who nonetheless wrote a promissory note

to the future, declaring that all
his children were created equal, legitimate
and entitled, to life, liberty, the pursuit
of democracy, the shared burdens of hope.

—Submitted on 01/22/2021

Catherine Gonick‘s poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Lightwood, Forge, Sukoon, and other journals, as well as in anthologies including In Plein Air (Poetic License Press, 2017), Grabbed (Beacon Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Dead of Winter (Milk and Cake Press, 2021). She works in the fields of sustainable technology and alternative energy.

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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 26 21 | Elaine Sexton

Elaine Sexton
Two Poems

Fear, Itself

I dreamt I was killing myself with
heavy cream, whipped
to top a key lime pie.

The pie is killing me because
citrus is bad for my gut,
which I ignore. But my gut

does not. Even here
my gut shows up. And
how could it not? We are

what we eat. My arteries
calcify, signs of closures.
I hope this is not the case

with my heart. Yesterday
I paused on a busy road,
all backed up, to let a skin-head

driver & his very young son
pass. I know, or suspect, he voted
poorly. And wait to find signs

of his proclivities to be
plastered to the rear his truck. But
do not. Why fear

what isn’t there––when
there’s more than enough to fear––
that is.

CENTO, MIXTAPE: BEFORE + AFTER
INAUGURATION DAY, 2021

I am alive — I guess —
how would I know —
if I am still thinking —
I know —

I am I because my little dog
knows me

and no one else
— If he could speak he might

say: I remember you always
at the top of your lungs:

even if you never spoke,
even if you never spoke

lying in a hammock —
in a field of sunlight between
two pines
putting two + two
together in a box.

Sources: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Danez Smith, James Wright

—Submitted on 01/19/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Elaine Sexton is the author of Prospect/Refuge (Sheep Meadow Press, 2015), Causeway (New Issues, 2008), and Sleuth (New Issues, 2003). Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared widely in American Poetry Review, Five Points, Oprah Magazine, Pleiades, Poetry, and other journals. She teaches poetry at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute, and has been guest writing faculty at the City College of New York (CUNY). A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Sexton serves as the visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Online at elainesexton.org

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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. 

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A River Sings | 01 25 21 | Mary Ann Honaker

Mary Ann Honaker
January 6, 2021

I’d settled in with a jigsaw & CNN
to watch the counting of electoral votes;
a dull process, one of which I’d not
been aware of until this year.

The papers were regular in form
& order, & for what reason
does the gentleman from <state>
rise? The puzzle was all wrong:

a tree where there was no tree
on the box, too many flowers.
I couldn’t find the corner pieces.
Nancy flinched only a little

when the odd popping noises
interrupted her steady scripted speech.
It was all wrong: suddenly the feed
from inside the Capitol was gone,

& instead people scaling the building,
fists and flagpoles interrupting windows.
Mom entered with a dining room chair
into my little room & sat, said

“This is not American,” said,
“Where are the police?”
& my heart was hopping
to a dance floor beat, I said,

“I think I’m going to throw up,”
& honestly believed I might.
Then someone in Nancy Pelosi’s
chair, “O God where is she?”

I squealed, palmed my own
mouth as I’d imagined some man
palming hers. Last I heard
the august lady was hiding

in her office. Minutes pass.
No police. At last the word:
somewhere in the secret tunnels
under Washington, armed men

guarded Congress. That day
I forgot to take my medicine:
morning, midday, & night.
I nearly forgot to eat. I stayed

in my seat until the chanting
of the sacred words ended
around 4am. By then I knew
the puzzle was not the one

pictured on the box,
& I’d have to guess my way,
watch as a scene emerged
I could not possibly expect.

—Submitted on 01/17/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Aftermath series

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019) and It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, and other journals. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Beaver, W.Va.

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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 first inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

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A River Sings | 01 24 21 | Dion O’Reilly

Dion O’Reilly
Two Poems

Ode to Dolly P.

Of course, your breasts—
your Motherland. Your Big Sky.

Your greatness pulling you
forward and forward.

We want to live
in your cleavage.

Gaze at your long nails
as they tick the fretboard.

We will always love you—

your native talent. Your hard
core story and bird-call trill.

Your odd combination
of Realness and Display.

I watch you on Jimmy Kimmel,
your gliss lips and chalk-white,

piled-high perfection.

I feel like Frank O’Hara.
Don’t collapse, Dolly Parton.

Don’t Collapse!

If you die, we won’t believe
you’re gone. We’ll keep

sighting you alive
like Jesus or Earhart.

Whatever you do, don’t stop
tottering along our American streets

in your dagger-sharp, blood-red,
open-toed pumps.

Girl, you’re all we’ve got left.

Prince Charles, Your Mother Won’t Die

I imagine that verge feeling
of waking a second before

the alarm and the alarm
never sounds

so you can’t get up.

Is it hard, even for a prince,
to count his blessings?

Aren’t you like a child who can’t sleep
on a kidnapper’s
1000-count sheets?

What a lovely hell—days and days
of perfect drought,

her long life pulling
eternity’s golden bow,

arrow notched and waiting
knuckle pointing

at an unending century
of Corgis and commonwealth.

We watch you wait, wanting
the old world to exfoliate,

reveal the pink skin
of the young. But you’re not

young anymore, bitter prince
who never mounts a throne.

Will we ever know
the green garden of your hopes?

Every morning the sky
must seem like a diamond
of impressive size

on the thin finger
of your perpetually
unpopular wife.

—Submitted on 01/17/2021 to the erstwhile Poems in the Afterglow series

Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has appeared in New Ohio ReviewThe Massachusetts ReviewSugar House ReviewRattleTupelo Quarterly, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, working at various times as a theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher, among other occupations.

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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 first inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. 

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A River Sings | 01 23 21 | Diane Ray

Diane Ray
A flaw in the inauguration, otherwise perfect as its palindromic


date, the rarely formatted 1/20/2021, somehow symbolic of the rarity of this moment in time to save a nation and a planet before the clock runs out. I’m certain my bursting tears found company among the wet-eyed many when our new President Biden began to speak, we who nightmared through Trump’s four long years, culminating in the long slog through election returns and fake news challenges, on through a sitting president giving a violent coup its marching orders. Seared into memory from two weeks past, still haunted by the Confederate flag and Nazi slogans flounced through Congress, a policeman pummeled in the vise of a window, others dragged and beaten by a mob, one killed. The living cartoon of a horned, bare-chested Viking lolling about in the Speaker’s seat accompanied by fellow travelers striking Washington-crossing-the-Delaware selfie poses, whose idiocy unwittingly provided cover for the hard corps militia-trained, narrowly thwarted from carrying out far worse than the five lives sacrifice….

Demagogue-in-chief now flown, today I joined the many in hypnotic trance, reveling in wonder at history’s turned page and at long last able to freely breathe, listening to just-minted President Biden’s eloquent and timely words, proffered with his super power for compassionate reaching out to friend and former foe alike, who let fly the better angel offspring of Lincoln and St. Augustine as we witnessed American Democracy reclaimed, his speech hitting all the high notes of needed pledge to cut through the multiple thorny thickets confronting We, the People, including the spiraling overgrowth of covid virus as we brace ourselves to hack through the worst weeks yet.

Regal young poetic queen, Amanda Gorman, National Youth Poet Laureate, her hands festooning words like dancing butterflies, read rhythmically and flawlessly her deeply informed poetic tribute, and if you did not know it, you would have no idea of her valiant battle for fluent speech, who two years before could not utter the letter “r”—like the new President, a living symbol of humankind’s capacity to heal and overcome in behalf of speaking your truth.

Were you, like me, entranced by all this grace and promise, which at least for a while blinded you to the covid gaffes? When the new administration could have modeled how to easily reach for and grab the gold ring of covid safety free and clear, could have passed out cautions like socks in the mouth of normal spontaneity? Instead, we witnessed close encounters—our brand new President finishing his maskless speech, still bare faced once seated, who hugged his famously impeccable old friend, former President Obama who then held his own hug fest with a gaggle of former cronies while we tuned in from our covid spaceships, each one of us voyaging in the dark as to just what more infectious means regarding the enterprising new covid strains lurking among us while health care crisis in L.A. recently rose to the watermark for rationing of who shall have a crack at care, who shall wait eight hours in ambulance or not even score the ticket of ambulance-worthy. Why any pandemic ball drop with covid cast in the starring role of President Biden’s top priority as wily mutants stalk us from sea to shining sea?

—Submitted on 01/21/2021

Diane Ray’s work appears in Cirque, The Jewish Literary Journal, In Layman’s Terms, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Sisyphus, and other journals, as well as in  anthologies including Sheltering in Place (Staring Problems Press, 2020). Ray, a native New Yorker, lives near Green Lake in Seattle and works as a psychologist.

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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 first inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993. 

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