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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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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.