This issue features
photograph by Jim Cumming,
poetry by Darlene P. Campos,
poetry by Shakira Croce,
poetry by Paula Goldman,
poetry by John RC Potter,
art by Stephen Ledesma,
poetry by Sally Wilder David, and
Jim Cumming
A Total Solar Eclipse Composite – April 8, 2024, Waterville, Quebec, Canada
Copyright © by Jim Cumming.
Darlene P. Campos
My Mother’s Voice
My mother's voice broke all volume rules.
The phrases “speak softly” or “lower your tone”
were never, ever taken seriously.
There were so many times when I could hear her,
especially down the hallways of her workplace
and I would follow the words, the pitch, and the melody
until I found her and then I would remind her to please use
her inside voice because, goodness, Mom,
people in outer space can hear you.
But now my mother's voice is much lower and she tells
me it's only temporary and her doctor echoes the
same message. She needs to exercise those vocal
cords more and more to regain their strength.
One day, she says with hoarse and strained speech,
this too shall pass.
Yet as I walk down empty hallways, I pretend I hear
her signature voice and it's booming and loud, like she’s
an impatient sports coach or a passionate drill sergeant.
“Those people in outer space, Mom,” I whisper to the silence,
“They want to hear you again.”
Copyright © 2024 by Darlene P. Campos.
A Sense of Direction
For five days, I lived in a hospital
as my mother’s caregiver.
I ordered her meals,
buzzed for a nurse whenever she asked,
and elevated her feet upon pillows.
During her afternoon naps, I would walk
around the hospital for two or three
hours without a break and return
right as she was waking up.
You didn’t get lost, she’d ask, in this giant place?
I would answer, of course not,
you have always said I have an excellent
sense of direction.
The day she was discharged, the patient transporter
loaded her onto a wheelchair and constantly made
wrong turns, bumped into walls, and took us in circles.
It’s this way, I finally spoke up, I figured out this
hospital in just one day.
When we reached the parking garage, my mother held
onto my forearm and panted as I led her to the car.
You always know exactly where to go, she said with
a fragile and tired voice. I smiled and didn’t mention
that for the last few months, I have been
completely lost.
Copyright © 2024 by Darlene P. Campos.
About the Author
Darlene P. Campos earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. When she's not writing, she enjoys reading, exercising, and going to museums. She is Ecuadorian-American and lives in Houston, TX with her husband and their eight rescue cats. Visit her website at www.darlenepcampos.com
Shakira Croce
Fire Regime
A womb is
an empty space
for the most part, leaving
possibilities
for rot or new growth.
Scraped into a clearing,
recognize the pattern
when the cycle fractures.
Storms rage and dissipate
now with ever-growing frustration,
unleashing devastation or
simply laying the groundwork
for an alternate habitat or
evolution?
They whip across
flags spewing from the pole
raised for the open house.
Microaggressions hack
like a nasty cough on a crowded train.
Another wildfire
feeds on ancient trunks.
Some adapt to the frequency and intensity,
develop a thicker exterior,
shed limbs to protect.
Others succumb.
But what’s this?
Dormant buds awake
to the hush of smoke-scouring wind.
Acres of ash
lend to multiple sprouts
within the solitary diameter
one once stood.
Copyright © 2024 by Shakira Croce.
Divergence
Silly, no matter
what the subject
and how much we prepared
the talking points
it always ended
in tears.
At first choked back,
a pause
then glistening in infinite
courses across your face, still flesh.
The interviewer, having asked
for a simple response around data
would be forced to take a moment
to breathe, too.
And reconsider the follow-up question,
shift the framing to a dialogue
around your diagnosis.
Voices from the recordings
cascade through the cell’s clouded
speaker as I take notes.
Your acceptance speech at the summit
is hard to make out through cries.
But your endless joy is clear
in the children
who ran with claps and skips like stardust
as you exited, gold in your fist, to applause.
Copyright © 2024 by Shakira Croce.
About the Author
Shakira Croce is a poet living in Lynbrook, New York. Her debut poetry collection, Leave It Raw (Finishing Line Press, 2020), has received critical acclaim by New Books Network, Quill and Parchment, Ovunque Siamo, California State Poetry Society, Highland Park Poetry, Poetry Online Radio, and Mom Egg Review. Croce’s poetry has been published widely in literary magazines and journals, including the New Ohio Review, Pilgrimage Press, Shark Reef, Bards Annual, and Permafrost Magazine. She has been a Great Neck Plaza Poetry Contest Winner, a finalist in the Linda Flowers Poetry Award, and a semi-finalist in TulipTree Publishing's Wild Women Contest. After graduating with a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MPA from Pace University, Shakira currently works as Director of Communications and Public Relations at Amida Care, New York's largest Special Needs Health Plan supporting underserved populations affected by HIV.
Paula Goldman
Camille Claudel’s Yearning
after The Age of Maturity, 1902, Camille Claudel
“Your fingers slip away from mine in time and here in my sculpture I am on my knees begging you, to come to me, and yet, you cling to your old love, Rose Beuret. I clothed her as Clotho, spinner of destiny until life’s threads are cut. I tried to save you from old age and death. To fall in love deeply, to lose oneself so completely, to know ruin and despair, I gave you all, partaking in your work. Yes, I did the hands and feet in The Gates of Hell, and yet, there is no mention of me. Only a girl to your mature years, I stayed seven years your lover, never to live with you. You went home to Rose. I aborted our child. I could take no more, but I stayed for I had no money after my father died. I was as good as you, a fact you could never accept. Yes, I learned from you, but you had someone else cast your work in bronze. Who has not wanted as I have cannot know what I’ve suffered, destroying my own works. Paul, brother, were you envious of my talent that you wanted me committed? Thirty years in an asylum, I chose not to leave. Mother didn’t want me; neither did our sister. Of course, I went mad. Auguste, you tried to help, and I spurned you. Who has not been enthralled only to be disappointed cannot know my yearning.”
Copyright © 2024 by Paula Goldman.
About the Author
Paula Goldman's The Great Canopy won the Gival Press Poetry award. Late Love published by Kelsay Books is her most recent book. Her work appears in many magazines and several anthologies. She holds an MA degree in Journalism from Marquette University and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Former reporter for The Milwaukee Journal, she served as a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Museum for 25 years, living in Milwaukee, WI with her husband of 57 years, biking, hiking, and volunteering. Many of her poems revolve around artists’ lives, wanting people to recognize other dimensions of their selves.
Jim Cumming
A Total Solar Eclipse Composite – April 8, 2024, Waterville, Quebec, Canada
Copyright © by Jim Cumming.
John RC Rotter
Eclipse
All eyes looking upward,
searching the heartless sky,
a darkened day on show;
Moon and sun in a dance,
blinded by the event.
Voices raised yet not heard,
lives lived only to die,
dreams lined up in a row;
People are in a trance,
not knowing what it meant.
Call it an eclipse,
if you so desire.
Staring at the sun:
it’s a world on fire.
This poem is from the unpublished manuscript titled Walking in the Shadow of Someone’s Soul.
Copyright © 2024 by John RC Rotter.
About the Writer
John RC Potter is an international educator from Canada, living in Istanbul. He has experienced a revolution (Indonesia), air strikes (Israel), earthquakes (Turkey), boredom (UAE), and blinding snow blizzards (Canada), the last being the subject of his story, Snowbound in the House of God (Memoirist). Recent prose publications include Letter from Istanbul (The Montreal Review) & A Day in May 1965 (Erato Magazine); recent poetry publications include From Vaisler Brothers to Tel Aviv (New English Review) & Chiaroscuro (Strangers and Karma Magazine). His story Ruth’s World (Fiction on the Web) was a Pushcart Prize nominee. His gay-themed children's picture book, The First Adventures of Walli and Magoo, is scheduled for publication. Visit: https://johnrcpotterauthor.com
Sally Wilder David
For Lady Liberty on Her 138th Birthday
The Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles; dedicated October 28, 1886
Barefoot
in this harbor of pure beginning,
you do not smile, wince, or shiver
but wait
on our abandon and self-abuse,
green and alone.
It has been years
since that sea-colored gown
first fell from your shoulder
then rose, bold as an apple
beneath Bartholdi’s palms.
Genius, your face is not beautiful,
your Roman nose colossal.
What was he thinking of
to raise a woman so tall?
How do you stand with us now, Mother—
our tongues baffled, arms prodigious,
not what arms once meant—
only what the huddled masses fear?
We have spoiled you, scuffed you;
made your souvenirs our stature, our self-reliance;
everywhere possibility, yet everywhere
owned by the few, not the many,
disconnected,
forgotten wires or a family torn apart.
Now we must climb inside you again,
tired and poor, filled
with promises of a fabled land.
Lift us behind your eyes. We are all too short.
Lady, forgive us.
Copyright © 2024 by Sally Wilder David.
Stephen Ledesma
Hibiscus in Periwinkle, 24” x 30” oil on canvas, 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Ledesma.
About the Artist
Stephen Ledesma retired and moved to El Paso in 2016 and began oil painting shortly thereafter. Prior to his retirement he worked for the federal government as a healthcare designer in various locations across the country. He finds oil painting a welcomed creative outlet without the bureaucratic bounds of working within the government. El Paso has proven to be a good fit for him and his furry family.
Sally Wilder David
World Repair (1.)
For my mother, Dr. Alice Elizabeth Drumm, M.D.
I wish I could tell you what it’s like here. 1
Gardens blossoming with magnolia, rowan, narcissus
used as remedies for thousands of years
before physicians discovered their wisdom.
Narcissus was my mother’s favorite flower.
The flower of Airmid, goddess of healing,
who, like Alice, knew by its scent it conveyed
the favor of the gods
and bathed in its oil.
Others soon did so and became well.
Airmid herself became an immortal flower.
That’s what it’s like here.
*
I don’t remember if I told you
how one day I rose again
from my bed no longer crippled
and began to use my hips for balance and motion
just as you do.
I learned how to walk without a cane, without
a staff or guǎizhàng.
You too can do this.
Pity those who laughed when I said I was getting well.
In silence I heard it
as I heard the word for walking stick in Zhuang in my head,
sought its meaning till I found it.
There are many languages besides ours.
*
Speaking to one, then another 2
I hear trees singing
in their roots below, each after each until millions remember
the wisdom of ancient people
known to thousands of Cherokee
who, dying,
spoke
of spirits that lived below the earth
and, like trees,
knew death and rebirth.
In time all remember
the narcissus blossoms, recall their scent
that wafts down from above
forcing us to rise, recall the trees
and every blossom on earth.
*
How fine it is
that finally I have remembered what you said.
(1.) World Repair, Tikkun Olam, the ancient idea that each person is obligated to participate
In changing the world for the better.
Copyright © 2024 by Sally Wilder David.
About the Author
Sally Wilder David (Mrs. Fredric Weinstock) has published in The Worcester Review, Anthology, 3Elements Review, Athena, Voices (international anthology; Israel), Silver Needle Press, Scarlet Leaf Review, Ekphrasis, The Anglican Theological Review, Pensive (Northeastern University), Open Democracy (prose: The Cup of Tears is Overflowing, as Sally David) and other publications. Sally earned Honorable Mention in a Writers’ Digest contest and First Prize in a Worcester County Poetry Association contest judged by Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. She studied with David Wojahn, Madeleine DeFrees, Patiann Rogers, Mark Doty and Paul Smyth and corresponded with many notable thinkers & writers, including Bill Knott and Richard Wilbur. Sally lived and taught in Massachusetts for 33 years, where two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur recommended her to participate in a writers’ retreat at the VCCA in Amherst, Virginia. Her chapbook and a larger volume of poems are ready for publication in 2024.
Review of 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
by Nam Le (Knopf, 2024)
In 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem Le contemplates what it is to be Vietnamese because as he states “Whatever I write is / Vietnamese. I can never not— / You won’t let me not — /” as with any immigrant, the new home / country is always questioning one’s reason for immigrating and loyalty to the new home. In his case, Australia, but with all immigrants, this would be true if it were France, the UK, Italy, or the USA. Yet you, whoever / wherever one might be, “are the living palm, / the wind, the phoenix song,/” For in the blending of the cultures, it’s as if there is always a new birth, perhaps out of the ashes or merely as a result of the blending of the dynamic cultural mixing that has been the case since human descendants left Africa over eons, developed into the plethora of cultures and civilizations that with time developed their own traditions, way of life, and respective values.
In various ways, he lets the reader know that genetic heritage is a real thing and that as much as one might want to ignore or deny it, deep in our molecular structure as humans, in our cells, our DNA will surface or in more common terms our “blood contains it. / What happened to them — / Your parents, theirs, all their kin—” Our present is a result of those who came before us. That their experience be it good or bad as is, is often the case with new in-coming immigrants who are “picked on, picked last, left out,” and called a number of insulting names for being in the new land—wherever that might be, really, just substitute the people with another group—for all humanity repeats itself and raises its awful racist head be it with even others of similar related cultural groups, i.e., think of Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas—when the majority in the new found land choose to reject or spurn the newbies in the land. And what connects all the immigrants? In his case, it’s the Anglo-linguistic “Mitotic, mitogenic, mitochondrial. / Ceaselessly / Dividing, changing, charging./” dynamic of language that reaches out as if by a cultural spider until its web envelopes its societal bait as it molds its audience / catch (as it were) the “Émigrés./ “Exophones./” that they may in the end write in the “tongue” or as in his case English.
Here we have a philosophical and metaphorical dysection of language invoking Pound, the Romans, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians to form/mold/shape the word “Into the lingua franca…/” Yet is what remains safe or is it a coincidence of what remains for us to read and discern?
But we must not overlook the double talk of language which shapes our existence as with:
“collateral damage or spillover they mean rounded-up death.” The cleverness of the language distracts us but its reality hits us as if drenched with freezing water.
As with all languages, people speak in code “everything is code. We know what they are saying / and we know what they are not saying,/” But thankfully as we bury our dead “the earth reseeds.”
And:
Nothing escapes me
I am the escape
the vast secular seep where nothing
need mean more than itself
In this seminal work, Le has graced us with a linguistic cornucopia of historical and genetic traces of our global humanity. This is a work that will make you think and rethink and perhaps it will help you uncover reality, the naked truth.
About the Author
Nam Le’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Granta, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, and The Monthly, among other places. He has received awards in the USA and Australia; these include the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His short story collection The Boat has been republished and widely translated. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
About the Reviewer
Robert L. Giron is the founder of Gival Press and is the Editor-in-Chief of ArLiJo. His latest book Songs for the Spirit / Canciones para el Espíritu was released in 2023.
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