Jihyuk Han
Three Poems

The Peach Tree

Pandemic—my favorite season
The holidays pass and I am
A young woman again. Only one
Trick-or-treater in 34 years
On Gnarled Hollow
Road. And it was my angry
Neighbor Kal, dressed as
The Angel of
Death. Better to
Think of my first
Love, L and write him
A poem or letter
In the shape of a
Peach, only who knows
How the Old Stump
Would respond?
L, who climbed
The roof of his mail
Truck, for the
Highest peaches—he
Fell 3 months
Ago. But I can still
See him on his tippy-toes.
Reaching up…
Only, no more peaches
And his bag stained with
Blood and dried leaves.

Crushed By This Beauty

6 Feet to the left, the grunts and screams of the Russian tennis player
crack the flat screen. I absorb the insatiable gaze
of the masked passengers waiting
to board the train. Everything moans and churns
Even the creepy bearded guy with his thumb twitch.
Happy but waiting. One could
Murder us all: the high school boy
Texting on his cell phone. Furrowed and grimacing
A small girl punching the air while her mother
Reads the news. All the headlines are uncomfortable, naïve or
Misdirected. Nothing pacifies the girl named Judie
The announcer says he doesn’t love us
Not this moment
Or the next. I was wrong to leave you.
I won’t allow myself the pleasure.
The train of Not Thinking of You never arrives
I am never leaving this station.

Neighbors

The masked, pantless father is standing on the front walk
The leaves of the Japanese maple—flaming
And the days like drugged up
Passengers nodding off to sleep
While the children are molested by bees

What good is apology?
When it’s gone too far
And the listener’s ears are filled
Not with remorse

No faith in the endless thrown shade. The trees look as if women are hanging
Themselves between the branches. You could be strangled here
You are strangled
Still early summer. Yet to give up
It’s obscene moons, its rope burns and slow willful
Dismantling.

—Submitted on 10/28/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series. 

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Margo Taft Stever
Immigration Policy

—Submitted on 10/27/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Margo Taft Stever is the author of Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019), Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019), The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015), The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012), Frozen Spring (Mid-List Press, 2002) and Reading the Night Sky (Riverstone Press, 1996). Her work has appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, Plume, and other journals. Stever is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, NY.

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Liz Ahl
Conjunctions, 2020

We had to drive elsewhere,
out past the snowy screen of pines,
to find enough empty horizon

to have a chance at spotting
Saturn and Jupiter in conjunction—
a meeting both etymology and metaphor

might call conjugal—closer together
than we’d ever seen
or would ever see again, joining

their two lights nearly into one
during the dark year’s deepest darkness.
Before sunset sent us seeking,

two blue jays knocked for several minutes
at the front door with their beaks—
we leaned and listened, unseeing, until

you crept out the basement exit
to see what was tapping, because
we couldn’t from inside and didn’t want

to just open the door in case
whatever waited there was braver
than we were and just came inside,

assuming that a door unlocked
in response to knocking
is an open mouth saying come in.

But they beat it for the tree line as you
approached. A pair of jays, skittish
on one side of the door and us,

a skittish pair on the other, imagining
ridiculous possibilities—rabid
squirrel, miniature Jehovah’s witness.

Of course it was overcast later
when we sought out the shortest day’s
third hidden duo, added that conjunction

to the growing list of things unseen
by our naked eyes in 2020 but still
believed in. We knew they were up there

beyond this cloudy night’s closed door
not because of Christmas or wishing it so,
but because of mathematics

and maybe also because in all that dark
we stared at before driving home
from the edge of the snowy rural airstrip,

we could make out one region of clouds
where a faint smudge betrayed
the lurking, flirting half-moon.

No star or planet strong enough to burn
through that blanket, but the lunar
smudge maybe offered consolation—

even in its blue-black bruising—
the dimmest evidence of light
on the other side.

—Submitted on 12/22/2020

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), Home Economics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016), Talking About the Weather (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012), Luck (Pecan Grove, 2010), and A Thirst That’s Partly Mine winner the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook contest. A new chapbook, Song and Scar, is forthcoming in 2021 from No Chair Press. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Measure, Cutthroat, and other journals. Ahl lives in New Hampshire.

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Paul Ruth
Practice Needed

I see my people crying in the sun.
With souls
fraught for fragile justice,
being decided on the broken backs
wanting to find peace,
only seeing the shadow.

Is the division an invention?
Is it a re-imagination?
Or a fate shared in the past of ancestors?
A forever need to be a protestor.

I want to be agreed with and share this common ground,
but I am blinded by where I cannot stand.
I am inspired by aspiration of opportunistic desire,
only to find the invitation thrown away by my own hand.

A creation needing always a little more creating,
a recipe testifying, “salt to taste.”

And yet to see the shadow is to know the sun
and to stare down the sun is not to see the colors.
Look toward the horizon when dusk or dawn
meets shadow to sun. To see the outline.
To see the colors. To see our reflection in an ocean,
a lake, river, stream, muddy puddle of time.

But if the soul cannot bear to bare,
practice at night with the moon, when all is alone
and your world is empty.

—Submitted on 12/22/2020

Paul Ruth is a high school English teacher and adjunct college instructor from the Metro Detroit area. He has written opinion articles on the state of education in Michigan and makes his aphorisms available through his Instagram account @envisionedaphorism. With his human partner, and their Old English Sheepdog Limerick, he produces the Instagram account @limmieslimericks.

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Barbara Quick
Three Poems

A Lesson Taken From the Green World

A sprig of basil from the basketful
I gathered for the pesto went astray.
And so I stuck it in a small glass vase
on the sill, to use on another day.

Inside that milky blue glass jar—inside
the stem, hidden from me—a miracle
of transformation took place. Root cells formed
while the stem marinated in water.

When an early frost ruined my garden—
when I needed a fresh leaf of basil,
cooking in lockdown—I plucked
the sprig out of the jar and found a plant,

Ready for soil, ready to grow again,
after such long days of deprivation.

The Writer’s Life in Lockdown

Determined to try to cut my own hair,
I note a similarity to the Herculean labor
of rewriting, yet again, my newest novel,
which is filled with so many words,
each of which needs to be considered
as I go forth with scissors.

I remind myself, looking for courage,
of what my stylist, Emily, used to say:
Divide and conquer!

I have so much hair that Emily always referred
to the second haircut and sometimes the third
I think of this while I stand outside
in the unforgiving sunlight,
a full-length mirror propped against the wall.
One lock at a time, I wind my hair around a brush,
peer at the ragged ends
and attempt to cut.

It’s tricky, in the mirror, to coordinate the interplay
of scissors, brush, and hand, when everything’s inverted
through an irksome law of physics guaranteed to impair
one’s looking-glass dexterity.

The tresses I bring forward from the back—
the only way to cut them—are by necessity
so close to my eyeballs that they’re difficult to see
with clarity.

Like those scenes I wrote and rewrote, so lovingly,
over the course of the last five years or so,
thinking I’d nailed them with each iteration.
The drudgery of editing is nothing like
the joy of creation.

The left side, which looks like the right side,
is looking not bad at all.
Only two-hundred-odd pages to go now,
to layer, to refine,
one god-damned hair
at a time.

Not a Time To Give Up the Fight

in memoriam Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sometimes, all you can do is make the bread.
When the source of your protection
has flown the coop in panic,
and one of your great heroines is dead,

Look down at your own hands
that have known how to knead and turn
the mixture of flour, water and yeast
for half a century.

Your hands are so much wiser than the part of you
that wants to panic, too.

Think about the migratory birds,
so vulnerable in the vastness of sky.
They don’t give up. Each little body
keeps striving till the goal is reached
or the animating flame of life
goes out—

Even through the darkest night.

—Submitted on 12/21/2020

Barbara Quick is the author of The Light on Sifnos, co-winner of the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of three novels, with another forthcoming in 2022. Her poems have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Panoply, Mezzo Cammin, and Monterey Poetry Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018). She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. Online at BarbaraQuick.com.

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Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Three Poems

After the Fracture

Things break forever, I used to think
before I found Kinsugi, the art of repair,

a mending that exposes the scars
in a map of gilded lines and curves,

a broken bowl becoming somehow more
than what it was before now webbed in gold.

A shattered country looks like debris
on a smooth shore, landing after damage.

There is the finding and puzzling together
with a hope that the quicksand

of pain does not have its way.
Sometimes piece by broken piece,

we seam our lives together, making
something stronger—a new vessel glinting.

Stone Work

I will come back to this world / in a white cotton dress. Kingdom after My Own Heart. / Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves.
—Lucie Brock-Broido

Everyone walks through shadows. Even the Queen of Mirrors
inside Mirrors in her Queendom of Sisters and Daughters.
Queendom of Umbilical Cords. Queendom of Coffee Pots.
I find more—more stones, more bones, more dust and ash
to unpack carefully like the heirloom baptismal dress
wrapped in tissue paper or the last leaf falling, leaving
branch roots against the sky, the ground turned upside down.
I keep unfolding, unmolding what aches to be retold.
The stone stacks I build and unbuild. The Queendom
of Cairns. Queendom of Water Marks.

So much compressed into a stone, the many stones
I’ve stolen, pieces of a place to remember being there.
I’d like to slice them like cake see the carbon of stars,
taste their light, the pumiced remains of eruptions,
the leathery skin of dinosaurs, the moonlight pressed into sea,
that first bite of an apple, that flesh and the stenciled fear
on cave walls, the making and unmaking of ruins
when the world was snow-filled then ice-covered, not even
one window of sadness left. Queendom of Unblemished.

I might find what I wanted all those hidden tears ago—
maybe the unfracture, a return to the ease of beginnings
before the shatter in the Queendom of Adjusting Well.
Queendom of Undressing. When my skin felt like a suit
with nothing underneath but a weightless kitten or the angel weight
of sorrow or nothing, nothing at all in the Queendom of No Corners.
Queendom of Pins Pursed in the Lips. Queendom of Sheets Drying
in Wind peopled by women who rinse rice, hold keys in their fists
in the dark, know about old failures and twisting rivers,
about opening gates and making gardens by lifting rocks.

Look, right there—the silhouette of one crow
in the center of the road plucking at fresh death
as the last dash of sun gives even pebbles spikes of shadows
in the Queendom of Gravity and Orbit. I harness the work
of stones, fossick for evidence and remembrance,
unearth new moons. Queendom of Repair.

Letterpressing in Autumn, 2020

after Ada Limón

I set each sort upside down in the composing stick,
“A Name” emerging like the steady march of ice across our pond,
a dark openness lightening. In the wooden drawer
below I find the italicized letters for Eve’s
whispered words: Name me. Name me.

And now I welcome the unnamed, a billowing
or a deep murmuration as if the steeled depth of me
had been replaced or loosened back into itself.

It was like a single frond of a fern catching wind,
that kind of breathing freely, like what had tightened
released, first tears, then ease.

It was the fullness of a red maple,
the one on Jericho Street that makes an apron
of redness on the grass below when the sun
weaves through its generous leaves,
a world unwobbling and settling,

and from my window
I see a group of people on the crest of the ridge coming toward me.
I hear joy in their voices and in the late afternoon light,
that perfect slant of our star that rescues almost everything.
I see their faces now.

—Submitted on 12/17/2020

Sarah Dickenson Snyder is the author of The Human Contract ( Kelsay Books, 2017), Notes from a Nomad (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and With a Polaroid Camera (Main Street Rag. 2019). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, RHINO, and other journals. Online at sarahdickensonsnyder.com.

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Gillian Ebersole
On Driving Around to Delay the Inevitable

I wake before my alarm. I think about death. perhaps this is because I am a dancer & my knees have begun to ache. my back hurts in the mornings. there is a sense of time ticking when your career is supposed to reach its peak as your body does. perhaps this started when I watched someone go into cardiac arrest after taking adderall or because the last time I saw someone I loved before he died was through a zoom screen or because I was raised in a religion centered on crucifixion. I begged the figure on the cross to wake up. it is 5:59am. I graduated from my childhood bedroom while people died. from a virus, from truncheons, from tainted water. in prison, on the streets, in hospitals, in cages. I am haunted by the way my country was built on death. the person I love is so disturbed by capital punishment & I realize I have never considered it, except for to say it is bad. this is the worst part. it is going to be a dark Christmas. we do not even put up a tree. the snow freezes over & I almost fall every time I leave the house (which is not often). I wonder about cold toes & soft things & if these are compatible. the first time I made love I left my socks on. there is a small dog with a sweater. the snow has never been so white. I longed for this & now all I want is mahogany bookshelves & oak paneling & red wine & a crackling fire. is it death that is inevitable or separation at night? let me sleep.

—Submitted on 12/16/2020

Gillian Ebersole is the author of  The Water Between Us, winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press (forthcoming in 2021). Her poetry has appeared in Attic Salt, Pomona Valley Review, MAYDAY Magazine, and Weasel Press. A dancer, Ebersole currently works for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

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Deborah Wanzer
October 2020

October,
Crawls into town on all
Four years, wondering:
Has this been an interlude?
An interrupting minstrel-show
For the basest of the base?

Some say, an aberration,
An oddity, an albino squirrel,
Spectacle of the neighborhood—
Shocks of white
Amid autumnal leaves.

Exhausting and exhausted,
October
Plays songbirds sinking
From smoky skies,
Swallows from a firehose
Of cock and bull stories.

Out of breath,
October remembers organs
Once pink and supple,
Blaze now with the sickly
Sour of pneumonic bonfires.

October,
Eighth month of the Roman calendar
Older now, timeworn.

—Submitted on 10/25/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Deborah Wanzer is a clinical social worker. 

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Xiaoly Li
Two Poems

The Voice of Air

We are pigeons
flying olive branches
to our mothers—
boxes and boxes—
building a great wall
of tender hearts
to reduce wind’s ravages.

We are bees
seeking flowers
bringing sweetness
where most needed—
the care-givers and
the care-given.

When this frozen wind
sweeps from East to West,
we have to fight two fights.

“Traitors,” some brothers say from afar.
“You, virus,” a few brothers point fingers here.
The double swords split the sky and ocean
rendered by the bleeding sun.

Spring Still Comes in Spite of April 2020

The minutes grow to be ready—
the first cut of chives of spring.
I drop lemon into the chive dumplings—
wow, explosive taste of spring.

Frank and Violet run back and forth
next to one neighbor’s fence—bark no more,
they just come to say hello.

Across the street at a birthday party,
everyone sits 6 feet apart.
Kids cheer and wave from a honking car,
stand in the sky window, and drop a giant
teddy bear beside bright yellow forsythia.

Air is so translucent after days of rain,
influx of magnolia, peach flower and
rhododendron—the universe is breathing me.

A grosbeak on top of the snowy weeping cherry,
picks and drops flowers—throwing stars.
Oh, I want to catch those stars bloomed fresh.

—Submitted on 10/24/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Xiaoly Li‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, and other journals. She holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and a masters in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China. A fiction writer and photographer as well as a poet, Li works as a computer engineer and lives in Massachusetts. 

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Judith Skillman
Three Poems

Great Northern Fur Seal

Flaherty—young astronomer
to whom we come after sea horses,
octopi, anemones, jellyfish,
the hermit crab and Moray eel, otter
preening near its red rubber ball—
you remind me of my father Sid,
staring up after dark at the sky
as if it could free him from his own
sad news of living alone while married
to my mother. She the social butterfly,
he the eccentric physicist. Throat-
clearing, cleaning his glasses on his shirt,
staring with a homemade telescope
at eclipsing binaries. Your pronged tail
folded beneath you on a fake sea rock,
we watch as you polish one flipper
then the other, fur glistening beneath lights
of the Seattle harbor. This a Saturday
like any other, except—how explain
the depths and deckled edges
of the two party system—how make sense
of your pose as we round this corner
to find a monk-like almost-
person-animal-sea creature
in an attitude of beatification
observing, as it were, the last white clouds
cross a sky whose stars,
erased by sky glow, seem more holy
for their disappearance.

Lot’s Wife

~O Pillar of salt
erect prayer of halite
how come to these late years
without the two angels
begged by your husband
to stay

~two daughters
offered to men
who would harm child-virgins

The cities spread
in checkered burns

~O pillar of salt
left behind
by plump girls decked out
in finery

Say we are Sodom
we Gomorrah
we perceive temptation

Where is north
~where not south

~O cairn see our passage
from four years of yester night
changed into today

The Time to Ask Questions Has Passed

Sunset, and the rains are over. Stout birds sing.
There are no children here and none visit.
The body is its own quarry. An eye
turns inward, notes of Bach fly alone.
A contagious spring reigns in the garden.
Crescendo of purple clouds, lime green leaflets,
bawdy weather unsuited to the mood.
Soon, in the dark, the old depression
lifts. Leo Tolstoy’s Nikita
wakes in the sleigh beneath his master
to live twenty more years as laborer.
To measure with his steps how many straws
it takes to warm a horse in winter.
Three toes gone from each foot, still he walks.

—Submitted on 12/13/2020

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections, including Came Home to Winter, (Deerbrook Editions, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, Field, and other journals. Skillman is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Wash. Online at judithskillman.com.

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