Selected Poetry from Issue #49, 2021

Cover art by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Blood Ring 

I cut a tunnel through my father’s onyx ring,
cut the diamond out & stone-fired a garnet
in the center. My astrologer said that onyx
& diamonds together cool down love.
When I asked the jeweler not to clean
the band & bridge so my father’s DNA
could bleed into my skin, he became stone,
looked at me like I was a baby-eater or pod person.
On my middle finger for a direct line to
the heart & years later I wandered into
Dynamic Energy Crystals in Sausalito, past
the singing bowls & the rose quartz globes.
The psychic walked straight over to me
& said, What is that ring?
I told her it was my father’s &
she said, The energy goes through
that center stone & down into your body—
it’s a channel.
I looked down at the blood red opening.
It’s a very powerful ring, she said,
I was very close to him, I said,
feeling the red spreading, feeling
the blood move, she felt it from
across the room:
I looked into her blue crystalline eyes,
afraid to disappear into them. 
Wear garnet on Saturdays, she said,
within one hour from sunrise during
the period of Saturn.
Okay, I said, rubbing the stone,
her standing so close I was feeling the ghosts
move through me in this crystal house
of meteorites & geodes,
this blood ring,
my father all around me.

Jan Beatty’s sixth book, The Body Wars, was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the winner of the Red Hen Nonfiction Award for her memoir, American Bastard, forthcoming, 2021. She directs creative writing at Carlow University where she runs the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and is Distinguished Writer in Residence of the MFA program.

Garbage Disposal

My mother and father are sitting at Sardi’s
on their honeymoon in New York, smiling
for the camera, my mother in pearls,
doing her best Bacall, my father
doing his amazing impression
of a normal person, and I keep thinking
if I just look hard enough at that
smiling happy couple in 1948 I’ll see
a clue, a fissure, the tiny crack
at the base of the dam that would
slowly widen and spread and finally
lead to my mother, fifteen years
later, flat on her back under

the kitchen sink, my father drowned
in scotch, the money gone
and of all things a new garbage
disposal resting on her chest, her kids
looking on as she tries to figure out
how to lift it with one hand, fit the hex
nuts onto the mounting bolts with another,
and then find another hand for the wrench,
and first she was laughing and now
she’s sobbing, the kids too young
to help, or to figure out how
the pearl necklace in the photo
has somehow been transfigured
into a garbage disposal, it just
doesn’t make sense, and I stare hard
at that photo, looking for the clue,
the tell, the giveaway that just might
save us—me, my wife, the two boys—
from the weight—the tremendous weight!—
of the garbage disposal.

George Bilgere’s seventh collection of poetry is Blood Pages (2018), He has received the Midland Authors Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA grant, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and two fine little boys.

Out of Paterson
                        for Mark

 From the tall windows of your loft we could see
the dark tangles of vines in the ruins of the mills
where men and women toiled not that long ago
to make silk for the rich and guns for Union soldiers
but it might as well have been ancient Rome
for we just lived to numb the past 

there was no will or hope to counteract our birth
and separately we crept over the walls of those worlds
where our lives had cast no shadows and we went to the river
where our fathers had watched the car races and fireworks
from Hinchliffe Stadium and we sent our sad shoes over the falls,
and above us the stars disavowed their malediction ---

 and in this new universe, the boats carried our old beds out of Paterson
and I see it now that something was going on that night and we bore
the terror of our nakedness with a twig of faith that had fallen from a tree
in some good Samaritan’s dream.

Linda Hillringhouse was a first-place winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and a second-place winner of Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Lips; New Ohio Review; Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her new book is The Things I Didn’t Know to Wish For (NYQ Books).

On Sundays we would gather for lunch 

like clockwork, always at my Aunt’s house,
never once at ours. 

I loved Sundays, the meals of roast pork
and fried plantains and rice and beans,
but most of all I loved to be with my grandmother,
who I called Ayiya instead of Abuelita.
I liked to stand to her left in the galley kitchen
while she cooked without a recipe, speaking
little but welcoming me softly into her safe space
in front of the small window, giving me a taste
of the food before it was served.

I remember being enveloped in her bubble of love,
not noticing that the men in the family
always ate first. 

Not until I was far away from those Sunday lunches
and taking my first Women’s Studies class at college
did I realize the inequity of this weekly ritual. 

I made it my life’s work to create camaraderie
and equality around my own dining room table,
surrounded by my own family and friends,
expanding the fragile bubble from Ayiya
that allowed me to survive.

Lisa Coll Nicolaou teaches and writes in New Jersey. For the past four years, Lisa has enjoyed her role as visiting poet in the Paterson Schools. Her poetry and prose have been published in a variety of. In 2016, she shared first prize in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest for her poem, “My True Religion is Kindness.” 

It diminishes 

As we age, the circles around us
shrink.  The generation before us
who ran the town, had us to dinner
told us stories of before we moved 

here, have almost all gone into earth
or air.  Now half of our own pack
have vanished. Too many memorials,
too often the ambulance wails. 

How far I can walk or hobble goes
from six miles to down the hill
to the road and back.  Hi there
I hurt chirps a new joint or muscle. 

What can I see or hear now?
What can I lift, carry, how deep
can I dig?  What do I daily forget?
I batter on these closing in walls. 

Do we now chat with doctors instead
of buddies? Texts, Facebook aren’t
having coffee together, sharing
days that are no longer so full.

Marge Piercy’s 20th poetry book ON THE WAY OUT, TURN OFF THE LIGHT will be out in the fall from Knopf, who published MADE IN DETROIT before that.  PM has republished several novels with new introductions, short stories THE COST OF LUNCH, ETC and essays MY LIFE, MY BODY.

For Me and Clare

How does sorrow wear me?
Am I a gaudy broach, a costume pearl,
a pin, a piece of lace-- torn from
some breathing midnight long ago?

When it sets me down in my rightful place
and touches up its hair, do I make
the ever-slightest whispering sound
like a dress moving against a polished floor?

My face lies buried in my mother's sewing box--
its sequins, cameo profiles of
1920's socialites, a hem, a patch of blue silk
something to be sewn or used or simply to be
put away -- buttons, a hundred, the beautiful
treasure of them against my lips.

There is so much to a box of nothing--
Tonight I broke, seeing her again
in my own eyes-- something pinched
and worried, and infinitely longing
I said don't go. What does it mean
to say don't go to someone who isn't there?
And what do I know of any honest singing?
What does my sorrow wear?

Born and raised in Elizabeth New Jersey, Joe E Weil is a former tool grinder and union shop steward who became an associate professor at Binghamton University. His poetry, stories, notable quotes and reviews have been appeared in many journals and anthologies including Boston review, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, and he has read his poetry at universities and colleges across country. Weil makes his home in Binghamton, NY with the poet Emily Vogel and their two children.