Pushcart Prize 2022 Nominations from the California Quarterly vol. 48, No. 1-4

A Question Mark in Flight by Maja Trochimczyk

California State Poetry Society is pleased to announce the following nominations to Pushcart Prize from the California Quarterly, vol. 48, issues no. 1 (edited by Maja Trochimczyk), 2 (guest-edited by Margaret Saine), 3 (edited by Bory Thach) and 4 (guest-edited by Deborah P Kolodji), published by the California State Poetry Society in 2022. Copies of honored poems are posted below.

1. Vol. 48 No. 1. “Waterfall Symphony” by Dana Stamps II

2. Vol. 48 No. 1.  “Light” by Frederick Livingston

3. Vol. 48 No. 2. “The Land I Long For” by Michael Fraley

4. Vol. 48 No. 3. “The Calling” by Ella Czajkowska 

5. Vol. 48 No. 3.  “Tule Elk Preserve in March” by Vivian Underhill

6. Vol. 48. No. 4. “Morning at Moore's Lake, Again” by Kimberly Nunes

Winner of High Honors from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart Prize XLVII includes over 60 stories, poems and essays from dozens of small literary presses published in the calendar year 2022. The Pushcart Prize won the NBCC Sandroff Lifetime Achievement award, The Poets & Writers/ Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers citation and was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the seminal publications in American publishing history.

In last year’s Pushcart Prize, editor Bill Henderson noted that the Pushcart Prize, “the small good thing, has evolved into an international prize drawing nominations from small presses around the globe.” As always, the selections are made by a distinguished panel of Guest Editors and hundreds of Contributing Editors. The list of authors selected and encouraged over the decades, is immense. (An index to previous volumes is included in each edition.)

While I do not believe in poetry prizes, as comparing apples to oranges to mountains to seas is a futile operation, our nominations are fantastic, so enjoy reading them

California Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, edited by Maja Trochimczyk

Cover Art by Diane Lee Moomey

        WATERFALL SYMPHONY

  

                                           Droplets drum against

             rocks, a blue dragonfly’s 

                                   enchantment dances,

                              lilies perfume the amphitheater sky, 

                                          coconut sun —

                      screen slathered on,

                                   and nude sunbathers splash

               as they surface,

                                 then dive

 

                                        underneath. Echoes  

                   from a chorus of jumpers, 

                                  the jagged cliff’s ledge a stage

                      as summer mist—an ovation 

                                           as happening wetness hits— 

           croons its steamy scores.

 

            Dana Stamps II

  Riverside, California

 

Going Somewhere... by Maja Trochimczyk

LIGHT

Mendocino, California

sunbeam alone

               is a poem

but on this fallen log

              with you

everything is

              tongue tip

fingertip

              heartbeat

who was I?

              sweating brick 

by brick

             in gilded cities

as if 

     to impress 

the heavens

     with my cleverness

as if

     to invent 

anything 

             as alive

as this urgent

             syrup

melting into

             our veins

warming 

             pine-steeped air

Earth was made 

             for breathing

suddenly

     I become

blue

             and cloudless

 

Frederick Livingston

Mendocino, California

California Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2, edited by Margaret Saine

Cover Art by Michael Kostiuk

 THE LAND I LONG FOR

 

The world I want lies under the waves,

Under many chilling leagues of water,

Beyond the reach of common daylight.

 

Pale stars illuminate its deep blue sky

And trees of giant girth cover the ground

They’ve occupied for countless years.

 

The land I long for is wakened at dawn

By the clear notes of flowing birdsong

From the leafy crowns of the trees.

 

The story was never told to me in school,

I only know it to be true because...

My blood and bones have taught me so.

 

         Somehow I will find a way

              To reach the forest floor

         Through a door I cannot say

              Is made of gravestone or of wood,

         But which is no less real to me

              Than any ordinary day. 

  

Michael Fraley

San Francisco, California

 

California Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, Edited by Bory Thach

Cover Art by Ambika Talwar

THE CALLING

  

Take my hand, we shall drink golden starlight

from the brass chalice of curiosity,

adorn our hair with stars' glittering light.

We shall clothe ourselves in silver moonlight

and blush our faces with sunlight’s kiss,

and dance through the dust of time unmeasured,

whirl till we are dizzy with awe

and drunk on the songs of the universe.

 

I have not truly known freedom until

I have shaken off the chains of attachments

to this world, this low-land

—of biological, mechanical, electric—

of static, of moving,

till I felt the seductive

beckoning of the ephemeral,

the limitless melody of cosmos.

 

I measure myself in dawns and twilights,

in inhales and exhales, breathless moments,

in dreams and daydreams and nightmares

as I unravel into blooming.

I am a flower eternal, floating,

drifting soundless in space on the waves

of the darkly enchanting oceans

of nebulae in purples and pinks.

 

And I dare you to not heed my calling,

and I dare you to resist the pulling,

the fire, the resonance in the bones

which leaves the traitorous flesh a-trembling.

And I hail to you: Come! We shall walk down,

down to the center, down to the core,

down to the end of all, down till it’s up,

until it becomes the beginning.

  

                                                                      Ella Czajkowska  

                                                                      Beverly Hills, California

The Spiral by Maja Trochimczyk

TULE ELK PRESERVE IN MARCH

 

Here it is midmorning and the valley is singing to itself.

Listen to the bees

thrumming to the trees in bloom like a hum in the chest

for comfort. The hawk unfolds from the cottonwood

a mosaic of pottery shards and the ravens

croak like stones dropped in water, down the back

of the throat. Feel the earth pulling you close.

 

It is not nostalgia, to cling to the marshy ghosts

of a parched lake, the water snakes who swarmed

through the rattling reeds.

 

The breeze picks up and the hawk returns.

The heat rises and the plains begin to wave.

One shell-white egret sits in the shush

of leaves still translating wind into sound.

 

Someday all this will have silted away, the halo of song

arcing above this small pond, the calf chasing the birds.

The birds translucent below the sun.

Once this was underwater

And is

And will be again.

 

                                                             Vivian Underhill                                                                                                                                            Allston, Massachusetts

Gold Waves by Maja Trochimczyk

California Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 4, edited by Deborah P Kolodji

In Production - Artwork not selected yet

MORNING AT MOORE’S LAKE, AGAIN

 

By eight a.m., the mist, like ghosts exiting, bustles and fades

in every direction, spheres barely there,

until they aren’t.

            Quickly, slowly, the sun casts in.

 

The lake turns dark mirror, speckled with night dust

and featherings—the occasional dragonfly

stringing along morning’s heat. Reflections of trees—

and clumps of trees, borders

            onto other realms, all the same as this one.

 

Sudden sounds—a cormorant propels

the surface like an engine. At the floating dock, hops

to join another, then settles, observes the air, the sky,

            all the nothingness of the world before them.

 

Black from beak to tail, to webbed toe, yellowish dob

on the other one’s head, he has not moved, but to nibble a wing.

The wet one holds her wings aloft, waggles tight,

steady beats in eastern sun, diaphanous, melting to brown,

            she continues, thus—I know so little—

 

have gendered them to my own pleasure.

With pen and notebook, sun hat, and poncho

over my pajamas, shoes

            I slide on and off in cool sand.

 

The birds contemplate—an avian thought matrix, untouched.

            One steps a quarter turn, intent, drying her body.

So much patience here. And time.

 

And yet—I can see the watermark on the shore reeds, the lake

            is lower than last year, that much dangerously

lower. There’s a flash of red

 

on one cormorant’s bill, somewhere, the same bullfrog sounds

at a depth that matters, somewhere out of sight.

Kimberly Nunes

Ross, CA

Autumn Lakeshore by Maja Trochimczyk

 

 

 

 

CSPS Poetry Letter No. 3, 2022 - Part 2. Review of Books by Buckley, Takacs, and Trochimczyk

The third issue of the Poetry Letter in 2022 features monthly Contest winners for March-June, Jeff Graham as Featured Poet and three book reviews. The poetry have been posted earlier: https://www.californiastatepoetrysociety.com/2022/09/csps-poetry-letter-no-3-2022-winners-of.html. The illustrations, as above, were anonymous paintings of fruit on delicate Bavarian china fruit plates I found in a California thrift store and use daily, for these are so pretty and such a pleasure to look at while eating my pomegranates fresh off the tree... In the past, artisans adorned many items of daily use, somehow since Bauhaus these are replaced by straight, geometric, white, and hospital-sterile plates that are completely unappealing visually and make one think of illnesses and the sterility of a lab. So enjoy the explorations of thrift stores, following your hunter-gatherer instinct, and bring home the most delightful discoveries that graced someone else's home before coming to yours. 

 MICHAEL ESCOUBAS  REVIEWS IN JANUARY, THE GEESE BY B.J. BUCKLEY

26 poems, 48 pages, published by The Comstock Review, Inc. ISBN 978-1-7337051-3-4

It was in the summer of 1994 that my family and I were driving through Montana enroute from Illinois to Seattle. We got an early start out of Bozeman. As we approached an outcropping of boulders surrounded by a stand of pines, we beheld a partial arc of rainbow presenting just above the rocks, slicing through the spruces. This scene, a kind of spiritual awakening, planted seeds of desire to return.

        B.J. Buckley’s latest collection, In January, the Geese, centers me in the environs of Montana. (Without having to go there!) Winner of the prestigious Comstock Poetry Review’s 35th Anniversary Poetry Chapbook Contest, this thin volume reads as big as Montana’s azure-cyan sky.

        While we live in the seemingly technologically advanced 21st century, there is little hint of this in Buckley’s treatment of life in Montana. This is a poet who loves the life she lives. She doesn’t depend on cell phones with all the attendant gadgetry. She is close to the land. I can think of no better trait for a poet. Absent such closeness, poets are bereft to write with insight and truth.

        As I read these poems Buckley’s “big-shouldered,” earth-bound brogue lassoed me. Her diction is precise and burley. She has lived her poems.  She opens with “Upthrust;” which describes a coulee (gully or ravine) belching out what lies beneath. Note her vivid terms in this excerpt:

Frost heaves itself from the ground: everything

buried begins its slow swim to the surface.

Fields sprout stones, small hills of barbed wire

and baling twine lift overnight from plowed

furrows.

Not a word is wasted as the poet paints a word-picture better than any artist. Readers need this lead-poem for context. The coulee provides a snapshot of life and sets the collection’s tone: “Deep in coulees / where the dead have long buried the dead—/ mare with her colt caught breech half born, / gutshot deer, lost lamb—the soft earth/ that swallowed them opens its mouth, / spits back their bones like pearls.”

Winter

The title poem, “In January, the Geese,” inaugurates Buckley’s telescoping of seasons. Like the Big Sky region itself, transitions are subtle and signaled by familiar things:

in their long strings every morning

in the pastel sky twining

south and west and east,

towards the fields of stubbled barley

and dry grasses and withering

winter wheat, every evening returning 

all degrees of north

to the shallowing stock ponds

As the poem continues for a total of 49 lines, the line breaks suggest the familiar shape of fowl in flight. In gorgeously descriptive language Buckley treats her readers to scenes observed from on high: the shallowing stock ponds, the little flows in the coulees, crowds of playground children, the quiet of Montana sunsets. I have never encountered a richer depiction of landscape, of wildlife . . . the way things are to a poet who soars within the long string of geese.

Spring

Late afternoon is the setting for “At Sun River,” where we find “two old men cleaning their catch . . . their knives quick and sure / as they slit shining bellies from anus to jaw.” Buckley places me at the scene. I inhale the cold spring air, smell the fishermen’s bodies in need of a bath and deodorant. I’m with them on muddy slopes and in the shadows of pine trees . . . I feel their contentment . . . their inner peace. I wish the same for myself.

        In “Seed” Buckley explores the “fragile boat of time: death, rebirth, / each infant kernel coded by its mother / plant with the hour of life’s return.” Continuing, the poem takes on a unique religious flavor that surprised me at the end.

        In Illinois, we see “Boxelder Bugs” every spring. Believe me, you’ve never seen them in the way Buckley describes these unique creatures.

Summer

Transitioning into summer, I would be remiss if I failed to call attention to Buckley’s world of birds, animals (wild and domestic), trees, flowers, and insects. I quit counting after about three dozen mentions! B.J. Buckley cares about the environment. Her poems are filled with pathos for the land and the life it breathes. That said, she is no one’s political pawn. She tells the truth as she sees it. 

         “Pronghorn Elegy” describes these lovely creatures who, by nature, need “the openness of space.” They often find themselves hopelessly entangled in man-made obstacles of barbed wire. Their antlers become their prisons. In response:

“ . . . some of us break locks

on head gates. Some of us cut wire in the dark.”

Autumn

“Infinite Haze, September” describes the natural phenomenon of a forest burn. Through the device of personification, Buckley has me choking in smoke rolling in “like fog, restless [italics mine] across the fields of shorn hay.” The haze disrupts the life of pheasants in courtship. A fox is caught by hot embers when the wind suddenly shifts. Buckley’s language is palpable in describing grasshoppers leaping frantically “from the stiff shards of iris and peony. There is so much more.

        For B.J. Buckley, In January, the Geese, comes full circle from “Upthrust,” to the last line of the last poem, “Last Rites.” In this poem, a widower, weathered by the misfortunes of life, finds strength and value listening for the voices he once knew, life spreads out before him, the wild geese flying home.

~ Michael Escoubas

first published in Quill and Parchment

WILLIAM SCOTT GALASSO  REVIEWS BRIGHT SKIES BY MAJA TROCHIMCZYK

85 Poems, 184 pp, Moonrise, 2022,  ISBN 978-49-8, color paperback,  978-1-945938-52-8, e-book

In these uncertain times when the world wobbles on its axis between pandemics, climate change and war, taxing our ability to cope; Maja Trochimczyk (editor of the California Quarterly), presents us with her antidote, Bright Skies, Selected Poems. The book is divided in to five sections: Spring, Summer, Babie Lato (Indian Summer in Polish), Autumn and Winter. She created this generous volume (her ninth) as a gift to her children, grandchildren and for those of readers fortunate to read it. Every poem celebrates the incomparable beauty, diversity and healing power of nature--giving us reason for hope. In her first poem, A Spring Revelation, she declares

 “I love my mountains

blue and spring green, still

under clear azure expanse.

Their velvet pleats pile up

in layers above the valley rocks, 

pathways in empty riverbed.”

In the second poem, Only in California, “the desert is rich with the noise of our ghost river.” In Spring Cleaning, our avid gardener reveals:

This morning, I declawed the cactus […]

I cleaned out the pantry, sorted out 

one bookshelf and my past

carefully discarding useless fears

and fading disappointments […]

I arranged my thoughts 

into a singular clarity of purpose.[…]

Now, I only have to breathe in 

hot noon light, to set old pain, 

anger and resentment on fire,

expel the ashes in a shower of sparks

with diamond rays so brilliant, 

they make me into a supernova

a revelation, cosmic, bright—"

That’s healing.  In addition, she compliments her literary art with a visual artist’s eye for light, color, shape in the exquisite detail of her photography. The photographs on glossy paper present in minute detail every subject she turns her attention to. Further, her knowledge of local flora and fauna verges on the encyclopaedic, presenting us with an abundance of riches, which inform her life and work, writing poetry is like growing artichokes from a seed of invention. 

       Whether one perceives dewdrops on a rose, the wind swirl of a kite in cerulean skies or, an incoming wave bursting from a turquoise sea, one is moved and that’s the point. She presents all five senses and dares you to fully engage—and to be moved. “Look ahead—Look up— Look / inside—we are alive” for these are Diamond Days in Crystal Gardens. 

In addition, Ms. Trochimczyk makes clear that all we treasure is in danger. She admonishes us to recognize that in man’s pursuit of short-term profit, we may likely lose the Eden we cherish.  Not by the will of God but by our own reckless behavior towards the mother that bore us. In the Tale of the Hare…, “his presence tames my heart—a gift from Gaia / for theses hard times of the plague of hatred and distress,” and from Drink of Water, “I don’t want my resident raccoon to be shot /with the black, dead-looking gun.“   

No, what Maja clearly wants is the taste of honey from bees, the song of birds and the inspiration of their flight, the colors of fall in full regalia and the quiet of winter in its dreaming sleep. What she depicts in every poem is a desire for harmony and light, unity of purpose. 

Yet, Maja’s celebration of life is not confined to nature alone, but to the love of one human being for another whether that person is one’s spouse, son, daughter or grandchild, or simply a dear friend—a member of her chosen family. She celebrates with equal joy the gifts of body and spirit, rejoicing in the holidays that bring people together. One of my favorite poems is Your Rainbow, which I see is both a collection of images and a metaphor for gratitude. Here are a few lines addressing that rainbow, 

         “You are a rainbow of endless Light

                 You are a fountain of boundless Love

                       You are a red ruby of life

                           You are a pure amber of creation

                               You are a new gold of strength

                               You are a green emerald of affection

                           You are a blue sapphire of truth

                      You are a clear amethyst of perception”

Finally, and I won’t give it away, there is a coda…don’t miss a page. This work is a feast for mind and spirit as close as your garden, eternal as stars. Recommended!

~ William Scott Galasso

MICHAEL ESCOUBAS REVIEWS DEAREST WATER BY NANCY TAKACS

44 poems, 79 pages, Mayapple Press

In one of Wallace Stevens’ lesser known and underappreciated poems, “Poetry is a Destructive Force,” we find these lines:

That’s what misery is

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast,

To feel it breathing there.

After reading Nancy Takacs’ latest collection, Dearest Water, I’m struck by the force and wisdom in her work. Poetry is a lion, an ox in her breast.      Dearest Water is structured in four divisions: 1) Poems for Women Only, 2) Wildness, 3) Invisible Jewels, and 4) Notes to God from County Road H. 

A Word About Style. Nancy Takacs writes in free verse. Her poems are structured in couplets, tercets, quatrains, and logical paragraph breaks. A nice variety of presentation. She does not force-rhyme. When rhymes or half-rhymes occur, they are occasional enhancements applied to what she is doing.

Takacs is a student of the natural world. Flora and fauna inhabit her work. Within this broad category, I found animals, birds, bees, trees, canyons, colors, fishes, and ghosts. Her poems are replete with emotional resonance born from an abundant storehouse of memories and experiences.

Poems for Women Only. Dare I say that the poems in this section are vitamins and minerals for men? Take for example her short poem, “Making Up”:

is like the first pickle from a mason jar,

raspberry jam in the tapioca. My husband

speaks to me for the first time after our

argument that shimmered with hooves.

Now his voice is all hallowed and velour.

Now my voice is hazy and mango. We halt

our sorrows for now. We go out to the tulips

and have a cookie. I put on my magenta

sweatshirt. Her dusky sky has one tamp of bitter.

Holding a hand can be like a hornet in a balloon.

It takes two hours for our toes to get drowsy.

Wildness. This section illumines the poet’s concern for animals, the environment and social justice. Love is pervasive within her environmental concerns.  “Wolverine” is a case in point:

I’m kind of a loner like you, skunk-bear,

but way too soft, lounging

on my futon with a paperback

on my breast, digesting tasty

memories of Proust.

. . . . . . 

Wolverine, I’ve leaned

into creeks for watercress,

picked the raspberries

bears have been in, 

looked into the eyes

of great horned owls,

glimpsed the bear, the fox.

. . . . . .

Humans call you terrible,

caribou-hound, bone-crusher,

tooth-eater. Trappers wait for you,

snowmobilers spin across your space.

I hope you’re still running and running,

hunting and hunting somewhere

wide and cold enough for you.

In the same poem she avers, I should have let the wild be wild. This after making friends with and even feeding several wild creatures. Indeed, “wild” is pervasive in Takacs’ work. Her advocacy is multiplied through poetic craftsmanship. She is able to take a step back, harness her emotions weaving high art into environmental concerns.

Invisible Jewels. Upon encountering this section, I asked myself: What is the meaning of this section title? How can a jewel (something palpable) be invisible?       As I pondered this, I noticed a tonal change within the poems themselves; a loosening of the poet’s diction. The poems took on an aura of simplicity. They became like well-seasoned entrées. “What My Dog Knows,” begins to pull the curtain back on how “ordinary things” become “invisible jewels”:

is how the smell of shampoo

means I’m going out,

and the blow dryer

means without her. 

She still asks

with her butterfly ears

wide open.

She is pine-scented

from yesterday’s bath,

brushed, ready

to go if I want her,

trot to the lake and roll

in something rotten

as soon as I turn my back.

She’s small but loves to bark

at all the big dogs in the park,

slip her collar

and lunge for their throats.

If I would only

take her,

And let her.

Notes to God from County Road H. The lead poem, “Drought” is akin to prayer. In 16 poems of varying length, Takacs lifts her voice to God about the way things are in life. I’ve done the same thing myself. This poet raises her voice much better than I, however!

She invites her readers to walk with her “where oceans of stars / once fell into orbit, / and rolled up on the shore / of the skies, . . .” This wide-ranging series serves as catharsis for Takacs. The outer visible world speaks to that which is invisible within her heart . . . hope within the reality of drought. Look for signs that drought may be multi-dimensional in the poet’s mind.

I led with a reference to a poem by Wallace Stevens. These lines from the same poem, seem a fitting closure to this excellent collection:

He [poetry] is like a man

In the body of a violent beast.

Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

~ Michael Escoubas, 

first published in Quill & Parchment

CSPS Poetry Letter No. 3, 2022 - Winners of Monthly Contests April-June 2022 and Jeff Graham, Featured Poet

 

Plums and Currants, image from a fruit plate.

Do you see how luscious the Italian plums, red and white currents are in this picture?  The author of this delightful painting remains anonymous and the painting itself is from my fruit plate with gold trim that I found in a California Goodwill. Too many “modern” sets are plain, white, thick, clumsy, and plain boring. These bunches of fruit envisioned by an Anonymous (the most prolific author of works of art in human history!) for placement on delicate porcelain, and then on dining room table, come from the still-life tradition in European painting that extends back to the Renaissance. Maybe it is time for it to be reborn? 

      Is everything new better? Is “modern” more praiseworthy for its Bauhaus-inspired simplicity than the overly ornamental Baroque? These currants remind me of a currant bush in my childhood garden and the joy of picking the ripest, golden drops of tart juice, still more sour than sweet. My Mom made the red and white currants into jelly, preserving them without cooking, to keep the Vitamin C and nutrients alive. In the Poetry Letter we preserve once-published poems and share the sweet and tart taste of words. After all, being fruitful means being creative. Enjoy the fruit of poets’ labor!

            ~ Maja Trochimczyk, CSPS President

 

FEATURED POET – JEFF GRAHAM

Jeff Graham studied English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the chapbook The Eye of Morning (Zeugma Impress Inc.) and one of 12 poets featured in Crystal Fire. Poems of Joy and Wisdom (Moonrise Press, 2022). His publications include appearances in journals such as Blue Unicorn, Indefinite Space, California Quarterly, Asheville Poetry Review and Grasslimb. Jeff is also a contributor to various haiku journals.

ANGELS MUNDANE

1

Slight breeze on a slight day.                            

The moth is on the bough.

The bough falls to the ground.

The moth falls with the bough.

Remnants of impact flutter upward.        

The sky remains the sky remaining.                                        

2

Nightfall’s fallen. First star lit in lanternglass.                    

The moth equatorially maps out the fiery.

Nightly happenings – happening happens. 

     Lantern-lined sky. First match’s last. 

Flicker of wings, of glint within glass fractures.

The moth equatorially crawls the skyline.                        

     No, it is the lantern that staggers 

     as on the horizon it passes past.                      

3

Between knowing what to do                              

without doing, and doing

without knowing what it does,

the moth falls not from,          

but within its capacity for grace,          

after singeing wing to star.

4

Night’s nix, dimlit wicktrim.                                     

The moth trudges the waxing moon

while traipsing through the wax:

     bothity of both.                                           

An unheld candle draws near the ever-

encompassing, all-                        

assimilating 

     nil,                                                                                               

is snuffed by a clasping of patterned wings –        

is snuffed by claspings of patterns.                               

5

Stray wasp by night –                                                                               

     irregular flicker                                   

on and off the porchlight bulb’s 

     irregular flicker,                                

together with the usual moths’ usual.                     

     Morning: 

motionlessness, though less                           

     than motion.

Swift kick of the leg of the collective 

     deckboard remainder.            

Small crawls 

     of a cenotaph of sunrise.                                                                       

6

The moth is born by end of day.                    

The moth is old by end of night.              

Fallings and Falls amid leaves 

     as (and as) leaves fall –                                        

hesitancy not of will but of lightness –                  

upon and in-with an indifferent stream                                    

that leads to a nondiscriminatory sea.                       

Of stars and of moons clung to by moths.              

Of the suns of stars and the star of the sun.          

The night is old with the moth’s decline.   

     The sea is young by morning 

                           

NOTE: Section 3 is the edited version of a piece published in Common Ground Review, Fall/Winter 2018

 

SKETCHBOOK: ARTIST: REAL AND IMAGINARY 119 

Journey home.                                                                             

Canopy of bare branch above,                                                   

leaf over leaf over what unrevealed underfoot:

          arrival without leaving.  

                                                   NOTE: Published in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal 2021                                                

THE BANTAM HOURS 32 

Between each stride lie random patches                                            

of winter grass, too green to be green          

beneath and between the sway of brown

of summer, made grey by summer’s end,          

grey-swayed by autumn-ending’s wind.

Between each grass blade waits the void.                                   

Between each void stands a patch of grass. 

                                                              NOTE: Edited. Published in Grasslimb Spring 2020                  

NOCTURNE 1

The shadow shared by the pine and me 

becomes the whole of night.

The shadow shared by the pine and me, 

who lean into each other’s shoulders,

dances as we dance like trees, 

lets fall its leaves as humans do.      

                                                

                                                          NOTE: Published in Blue Unicorn Fall 2021

THIRST                                                                                                                                              

 Kind thief, please take from my coffee cup                        

          the rippling moon. 

I have grown tired of sipping my gaze’s reflection,                                                                 

of eclipsing my reflection’s reciprocation

with the swish of a plastic spoon.

Dearest Macrocosm, pardon my gross negligence.                                                                     

I ended up swallowing night                                                         

and am drunk on the distant lights of stars,                            

          on light, 

          on distances.

                                                         NOTE: Published in Asheville Poetry Review 2021

NOCTURNE 62

Haloed moon and I – gratefully,                                   

none but the moon and I;                                                    

none but the moon and I to notice.

                                                 NOTE: Published in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal 2022

THE BANTAM HOURS 89                     

In the inch between autumn and the hour – 

miles of which ahead and behind,                     

miles of which wide.                                                            

My striding-through’s mutual interlude –                         

mutual, thus with                                               

(thus in, thus of)                                                                      

                               and 

subsequently                                                                         

                               as.                                                                  

And as such, the inching of my steps –                                                    

mileage made up of autumn’s momentarilies.                                     

And as such, a momentary I.                                                     

                                                 The inching by

of Autumn’s catalogue of autumns.

                ~  Jeff Graham  

WINNERS OF MONTHLY CONTEST IN APRIL, MAY, JUNE 2022

Alice Pero, Monthly Contests Judge, selected the following winners. For April,  the 1st Prize was awarded to “Awaken” by Debra Darby. For May (Personifications, Characters, Portraits) the 1st Prize went to Carol L. Hatfield  "Cloud on the Ground" and the 2nd Prize to Joan Gerstein "White on White."  For June (the Supernatural), the 1st Priz wineer was, "Buffaloes Escape" by Pamela Stone Singer.  

BUFFALOES ESCAPE

 

Wrapped in cloaks of snow, buffaloes

live in Moon’s lightning-green eye.

Embedded in their bones

palimpsests reveal eternal life.

Etched with star drawings, stick figures and shapes

from outer space, their horns speak stories of worlds 

where they travel calm plains.

Water songs and ceremonies, their messages.

Wander hills and valleys: cone flowers, golden rod, milkweed.

Speak the holiness of earth.

 

                                                    ~ Pamela Stone Singer, 1st Prize, June 2022

 CLOUD ON THE GROUND   

 (for my mule, Andromeda)

Never one to be

lost

in fog - 

she calls

it

to her. 

She shines

white    as any opal -

     with a quiet

     fire

     in the belly.

The fog holds

the four-beat

    drum

of her pearl

hooves

and keeps it all

to itself.

The sky recognizes

her -

molds and

forms

soft cotton

sculptures 

in her honor.

Cloud

on the ground

she is - 

with one flick

of her tail

the rain

obeys

and we ride

the afternoon

on a veil

of grey….

iridescent 

at the core….

                                           ~ Carol L. Hatfield, First Prize, May 2022

AWAKEN

Find the strings

Ride the gleaming scales of the fish

blazing melon, gold, scarlet

nocturnal sapphire

before vanishing into the ocean at dawn.

Mooring the dreamless

dream remembering in tow

listen to the tides of morning.

The fishtail reveals its secret.

Awake to awaken

In waves of shimmering water,

The mystical call of the whale 

beckons.

Awaken

Find the strings.

~ Debra Darby, First Prize, April 2022