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Robert L. Giron

Issue 201

This issue features

photograph by Jakub Gojda,

Winner of the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award and Finalists,

photograph by Bing Bing Zhu,

photograph by Daniel Sanders,

poetry by John Grey,

poetry by Thomas Piekarski,

poetry by Gerard Sarnat, and

poetry by Cary B. Ziter

 

 

Jakub Gojda

 

Champion Golden Trophy


© Jakub Gojda.

 

 

Jendi Reiter

 

Winner of the 23rd Annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award-2024

 

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award

at the Cummington Fair

 

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

 

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.

Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.

Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?

Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

 

blocks pull through dust

to cheers. Desire anything

 

because it's in front of you,

soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers

sold from white wooden stalls

 

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don't tire,

rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner

that's promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

 

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.

Man and woman is understood

by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently

resting their chins on their wives' tucked curls.

 

Slow, slow. The alto swings

long molasses hair back from her cheeky face

singing that not-like-other-girls song.

 

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits

the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.

His mother sticks her face into a cream puff

the way Vita would have

 

tongued Virginia Woolf's cunt. To be pleasant

memory, to be covered in art,

don't cry at leavings. Blame

 

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.

Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

 

one anniversary short of golden,

she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

 

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets

with tickets for the final carousel,

 

what vows held her up so long?

 

 

Copyright 2024 by Jendi Reiter.

 

 

Finalists for the 23rd Annual Gival Press

Oscar Wilde Award-2024

 

Jendi Reiter

 

Why the Sunrise Is Trans

 

wake up, I say to him,

and hold my hand.

                        this liminal cotton

candy pink threaded through blue

is thin where the day rubs

against last night,

                        one of so many

in our years.

 

his broad

soft back tolerates

                        my leaning

briefly, but I'm unsteadying

the phone he raises

with both hands to capture

the clouds' mouth spilling gold light

                        like a monstrance.

 

what if we forget

                        this, would it matter?

 

people love sunrises and want me dead.

                        not me, I exaggerate

how sorry the sky should feel

for fallen leaves.

                        but consider autumn,

another gorgeous transition

burning. it's so popular.

 

                        he's dissatisfied

with the screen.

colors not true. look at me

forgetting this already

for his sake.

                        he fucks me typically

from behind

since I've changed

to blue like the morning that's starting

to blow

                        the clouds' rosy embers out.

 

he's getting dressed and soon I will

put on my boring pants

in the same size he wears.


                        I used

to powder-pink my cheeks, a fool

who could've blushed quite

                        enough naked.

 

the sky is photographed

as if that means

we understand it.

 

                        by myself

standing longer at the window.

a plane chalking its contrail

implacably straight-angled

lets itself be erased by going higher.

 

 

Copyright © 2024 by Jendi Reiter.

 

 

About the Author

Jendi Reiter is the author of the novels Origin Story (2024) and Two Natures (2016), both from Saddle Road Press; five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022); and the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2016). Origin Story was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize and Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.

 

Vanessa Haley

 

 The Golden Shovel

  

Of course, yes, it is “her age,” and you do not want

to give her a stoke just imagining you burning in hell,

forever slipping on Satan’s slick surfaces, the rave and rant

of TV evangelists full volume in elevators, fallen or fell

the only floor options.  You take her arm, and she leans

heavily as you inch towards the slow-motion conversation

about the tulip bed, the blight that overtook the pole beans

withering on their vines, the seventeen-year resurrection

of cicadas, their varnished shells small sculptures of one life

abandoned for the Rapture, and who can blame

them for wanting to fly, for letting go of all the strife

tunneling through a larval eternity of pale, soft shame

laid bare in summer light until they understood how to harden

themselves, clinging to trees and telephone poles?  I am the she-devil

saving coffee grounds for the compost heap in Bosch’s garden,

half-bird, half-woman, temptation a silver funnel, a golden shovel.

   

Copyright © 2024 by Vanessa Haley.

 

About the Author

Vanessa Haley’s poems have appeared in literary magazines such as The Grove Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, Rhino, Southern Poetry Review and The Gettysburg Review. The Logic of Wings, (Cherry-Grove Collections, 2004) was a finalist in the Lyre Prize.  Her work is reprinted in several anthologies, most recently in Storms of the Inland Sea: Poems of Alzheimer’s and Dementia Caregiving (Shanti Arts Publishing, (2022). She is one of sixteen poets with an essay in POETS ON PROZAC: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Formerly an Associate Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, she has practiced psychotherapy in Delaware for the past 25 years and is now retired.

 

 

 

Brent Schaeffer

 

Quarantine Season: I Still Love You, But

 

We can’t go on meeting like this—

past Pinehurst Dental and the taqueria

where the orange extension cord

lights the marquee sandwich board:

Puposas. I didn’t leave the house Monday

 

or Tuesday. Wednesday I decamped on little errands.

The crows in the parking lot fought,

picking at children’s fingers (or was it shrimp

a woman tossed from a take-out box?).

Our life is smaller than we thought. Now

 

a man in drugstore headscarf and thick eyeliner

sweeps the leaves and spring grass

at the corner of Northgate and Fifteenth.

Citizens catch the empty bus. The police hide

in all of us—even our sweetpeas

and honeybuns. And me,

 

braving people, all their hazards,

can’t remember my own zip code:

the faint, green light on my knuckles

at the service station so near home.

 

 Copyright © 2024 by Brent Schaeffer.

 

 

About the Author

Brent Schaeffer’s poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in Cutbank, Rattle, LIT and Poet Lore, among others. He was the runner-up for the 2024 Patricia Goedicke Poetry Prize, a joint winner of the Letter Review Prize for Poetry 2023, and a finalist for the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books Poetry award. Brent writes in Anchorage, Alaska.


 

 

Elliott Kurta

 

Fear

 

 

            To my mother, who learned to be still and silent.

            To my father, who learned to be loud.

 


It’s funny. They call it boy scouts, but what they don’t tell you about is the girls. That’s all they talk about—when the fire, red as lust, burns itself alive before you, the boys unbuckle their voices and peel away courtesies. They talk of girls: what they want to do to them, how they want to be with them. And they look to you, waiting for you to stain your tongue with dirt, spit up gristle so they can chew the fat. But your voice only lodges in your throat. Because even if you could speak like a boy, what would you say? But girls aren’t what pace the halls of your mind—you see broad-shouldered figures, voices stern and deep, square jaws flecked with shadow. So you make needles of your words. With each sentence, you push metal through pink muscle, wind threads tight against your arms until your fingertips fade to blue. Push the brightest parts of yourself into shadow. You learn that the only thing that hurts more than daring to peel back your skin is stitching yourself into someone else’s.

Even sealed beneath this hard mask, your eyes catch every detail. You fixate on how the wood curls under the gleaming blade of his pocketknife, the feral edge to their laughter. There is a tremble in your step as you walk the tightrope between sleep, for the first time afraid to surrender to the fall, to risk the hours of stillness. When you were little, you wondered why your mother took your hand in hers before you crossed the river of asphalt, flanked by snarling steel beasts; why she saw razorblades underneath shiny candy wrappers; why her voice sank and disappeared as your father’s words exploded. Now, alone in the woods, you can finally name that feeling that makes monsters of men, gnaws at edges of your nerves, pulls you just into paranoia. Alone in the woods, you understand fear.

 

Copyright © 2024 by Elliott Kurta.

 

 

About the Author

Elliott Kurta is a writer, poet, and bibliophile. He currently lives in Charlotte, NC with his dog and a forest of houseplants. When not working on his upcoming debut novel, he enjoys running, cooking, and practicing the piano and guitar. His poetry is forthcoming in Oprelle’s “Matter” anthology. 

 

Bing Bing Zhu

 

Blooming Yellow Flowers on Sassafras Tree

 

© Bing Bing Zhu. 


Deborah H. Doolittle

 

William Carlos Williams on Saxifrage

           

sharp as daggers

to the heart

of the matter.  No wallflower,

 

the earth’s its terra

cotta flower

pot.  Cement, concrete,

highway pavement can

 

not contain.  It

splits them up and spits them

out.  Like sarsaparilla,

 

sassafras, savory

in summer, it launches frugal

blossoms like random

afterthoughts,

 

like jazz notes

played on someone

else’s sax.    

 

Copyright © 2024 by Deborah H. Doolittle.

 

 

Eating the Plum

 

            after William Carlos Williams

 

Eating the plum is an exercise

of restraint.  There seems one less

in the bowl every time I look.

I like the darker ones best, with skin

so bruise-stained, the flesh beneath it

stuns me and makes me think of

broken eggs, rising suns, and the time

you ate the last plum and said so. 

 

 

Copyright © 2024 by Deborah H. Doolittle.

 

 

The Wine Dark Sea

 

Now, that’s something I’d like to see.

The sun, like an enemy ship,

half-sunk behind that horizon

line that divides one endless blue

from another.  All that water

thumping the hull, rocking the ship,

causing the wood to creak, lanyards

to slap the masts.  The sky half black

behind us.  I know such moments

are rare.  I know that one must be

prepared for it, having absorbed

an endless stream of typical,

tropical sunsets with islands

slipping under the distant waves

like desert oases.  The storms,

the scorching heat, and the doldrums,

let’s not forget them.  All must be

endured seemingly without

end, repeated tediously. 

And then it rolls out before our

unsurprised eyes as if someone

had just then uncorked and poured it,

like wine so fine it defies its

being classified.  Suddenly

clarifying the crest of each

wave quavering in our own wake.

   

Copyright © 2024 by Deborah H. Doolittle.

 

 

About the Author

 Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places (including the United Kingdom and Japan), but now calls North Carolina home.  An AWP Intro Award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda and three chapbooks, No Crazy NotionsThat Echo, and Bogbound. When not writing or reading or editing BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, she is training for running road races, or practicing yoga, while sharing a house with her husband, six housecats, and a backyard full of birds.

 

 John Grey

 

Poem for the Brother You Never Had


You' re out there on a rock somewhere, imagining the brother that might have been. There was no abortion, no miscarriage, just the rock with you on it, the water splashing its gray sides. They were too poor for another kid, too poor to do anything but lead you to this river, he to show you how to fish, she with solemn instructions on the stripping of the scales.

But maybe there was a brother and he taught you to walk out into the stream, to ignore the tug on your legs, the dampness of your jeans. He said, sit on the rock and I'll be by for you. And all the time nothing but the water lapping, a constant senseless sound, like the brother you never had speaking to the brother you never were.

 

Copyright © 2024 by John Grey.

 

 About the Author

John Grey is an Australian- born poet, playwright, musician. US resident since late 70's. His latest book is What Else Is There from Main Street Rag. His work appears in Fox Cry Review, The Great American Poetry Show and Spitball.

 

 

 Thomas Piekarski

                                   

 Family Affair

 

I must ask you a question, kind sir, about your parenting.

Wouldn’t it be awful were you to chance upon a fishbowl

in which your only daughter morphs into some mermaid?

How would you go about rescuing her? Would rescue be

worth the pursuit? She would swim there freely in denial

with dragons breathing flames of retribution, punishment

for the sin of non compliance, having failed in the model

scripture set out for her. Oh how dare she swim liberated!

You would counsel the poor dear, blow bubbles and horn,

shake the bowl in order to disrupt those swirling currents

that allow her to discover what wonders exist in quest of 

common kin. Imagine the process in which tides identify

for her traditions inside caverns yet to be explored. She

moans, unable to give birth, and no death on the horizon,

exempt from any earthly authority, but you needn’t weep.

She isn’t lost to you yet. There might be a time and place

you merge, reunite with a formative being that spawned

many centuries before this one. Or perhaps she’ll drown

in the end. Maybe you shake the cataclysm of doubt that

lingers like a stillborn. It’s a testament to her tremendous

health, that stoutest will of hers, disavowing flaccid gods

that at present time only represent a briefest resurgence to

the surface of a virtually voided world. Now then, is your

wife invited to the scene? Your son? No reason for worry

since they too have come to judgements, from their starts

designed to carry out the orders handed down minus any

decrees slipping into a convoluted consciousness. So pray

if you like. Make sacrifices. Slay bulls, revere cows, yank

hearts out of the chests of Aztec warriors and feed them to

those dragons thrashing water in the fishbowl, their flames

opaque like divine wrath pouring out and devouring a self.  


 Copyright © by Thomas Piekarski. 


Daniel Sanders


Foggy Harbor and Sailboats

 

© Daniel Sanders.


 

Zeitgeist

 

For those minus purpose

the world is a circus,

heads down the throats

of hypothetical lions

wherein they watch

harlequins vying

for fame and sailing

from fiery trapezes

through breezes,

gliding on thoughts

that cannot pierce

the firmament

nor manifest in

any blithe spirit or

significant invention.

 

Living in service

of a higher order

flowers take their place

along with those objects

that populate the planet,

animals, people, granite,

endure twang and sting,

laud glistening dawns

while science rules over

what’s certifiable,

doesn’t recognize

the phony leviathan

supposedly trampling 

forest and fawn.

To watch phantom ships

collide in morning fog

spurs great satisfaction

for the mythical satyrs

who slip into dreams

through bloody curtains

where criminals wail

for release from jails

of penury and pain,

whose ire builds

like lions chained

in gilded cages.

 

 Copyright © by Thomas Piekarski.

 

About the Author

Thomas Piekarski is a former editor of the California State Poetry Quarterly. His poetry has appeared in such publications as The Journal, Poetry Salzburg, Modern Literature, The Museum of Americana, South African Literary Journal, and Home Planet News. His books of poetry are Ballad of Billy the Kid, Monterey Bay Adventures, Mercurial World, Aurora California, and Opus Borealis.

 

 

 

Gerard Sarnat

 

Organic Or Too G.M.O. Rancid Mousy Mealy-Mouthed?

 

Slight of hands

On the one digit

Our three kids each

Volunteer or at least

Admit given the choice

Oy that each would keep

Their set of parents rather

Than have traded either/both

In for those seen during sleep

Overs there at friends’ houses.

However now counting another

Finger all of them (plus spouses)

Raise total of six children way diff

With much more discipline/ hovering

From mothers well as fathers: I dunno

Exactly why but assume at least U.S.A.

Has-–unsure if better or worse—changed

Down to granular details crap we feed ‘em…

Does above perhaps jibe with your post hippy experiences?

 

 

Copyright © 2024 by Gerard Sarnat.

 

About the Author

Gerard Sarnat has won prizes and is a multiple Pushcart/Best of Net Award nominee. His work has been widely published, including four collections. Work has appeared in Brooklyn Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, New Delta Review, Buddhist Review, New York Times; Oberlin, Northwestern, Yale, Pomona, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Brown, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, British Columbia/Toronto/Chicago and Virginia university presses. He’s a Harvard College/Medical School-trained physician, Stanford professor, and healthcare CEO. Currently he’s devoting energy/resources to deal with climate justice serving on Climate Action Now’s board. He’s been married since 1969 and has three kids/six grandsons, looking forward to future granddaughters. Visit: gerardsarnat.com

 

Cary B. Ziter

 

Back to Bed

 

 the sun falls out of the sky and across my mattress and I am sure I have slept for three days at least I hope so, since the daffodils have withered and the umbrellas are permanently wet and the chimes wobble and playoff-key and the half-light of twilight hiccups madly and for breakfast there is only limp lettuce, plastic water, a can of flat beer and a piece of stale bread I see in the corner of my dry eye. staring blearily at the clock I know only one thing:

in this spastic moment, it’s time to go back to bed.

 

Copyright © 2024 by Cary B. Ziter.

 

About the Author

Cary B. Ziter is the author of several published books for young readers. Prior to his retirement he worked for the New York State Tax Department, Exxon and IBM, including long-term assignments in Paris and Hong Kong. He earned a degree in journalism from Morrisville Agricultural and Technical College and his master’s in literature from Bennington College. His poetry has appeared in Blueline, the Front Range Review, California Quarterly, Oracle and elsewhere. He and his wife, Jozi, live in New York’s Hudson Valley region. Visit: carybziter@gmail.com

 

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