Issue 214

Robert L. Giron
1 day ago
14 min read

Updated: 1 hour ago

This issue features

photograph by Judy Lewis,
poetry by Philipp Ammon,
photograph by Judy Lewis,
poetry by Sandra Dreis,
poetry by CJ Giroux,
photograph by Abd Muid,
poetry by Peycho Kanev,
photograph by Gabor Gonz,
poetry by Katharyn Howd Machan,
photography by Jason Yoder,
poetry by Andrew Shattuck McBride,
poetry by Jon Petruschke,
poetry by Charles Rammelkamp,
poetry by Claudette Mork Sigg, and
fiction by Yurii Tokar

Judy Lewis

Glacial Majesty (Columbia Icefields, Canada)

About the Artist

Judy Lewis is a long-time resident of Arlington Forest (Arlington, VA) who finally took her bucket-list trip to the Canadian Rockies with her husband Mike. They drove up the Icefields Parkway to Jasper and can confirm that it’s truly one of the top drives in the world! Judy is also a singer with Ken Schellenberg and Friends, who sing cabarets for the Arlington 55+ program.

Philipp Ammon

Enterprise of England

Great and most fortunate

By George!

What an Armada!

Three lions

Better than Brexit

Never surrender

Roar

We fought them on the field

What a fine hour!

Nothing is lost

Almost victorious, happy and glorious

We sing with heart and voice:

Three lions

By George!

The Nude

Politics as it really is,

The naked truth:

That’s Donald Trump

About the Author

Philipp Ammon is a historian and philologist. He studied at Kazan and Moscow State University and the Tbilissi Institute of Classical Philology and received his M.A. from Free University and Humboldt University of Berlin. He has published a book on Russo-Georgian history: Georgia between statehood and Russian occupation. The roots of the conflict (Kitab, 2nd edition Vittorio Klostermann,

https://www.klostermann.de/Philipp-Ammon-Georgien-zwischen-Eigenstaatlichkeit-und-russischer-Okkupation). His fields of interest are the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He is fluent in English, German, Russian, Georgian, French and Italian. He is a fellow researcher at the Centre for Military, Intelligence and Security Studies (CMISS) in Victoria (Canada). Essays, stories and poems in German, English, Yiddish, Russian, French and Italian have appeared and are appearing in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland), Cicero, Berliner Zeitung, The European, Kosmopolis, Jüdische Rundschau, Matrix - Journal for Literature and Art, tabula rasa, Rhein!, karenina, Das Blättchen, Ossietzky (Germany), Die Presse, David, erostepost, perspektive. hefte für Gegenwartsliteratur (Austria), Revue Verso (France), Nuove Lettere, Osservatorio Letterario, Calabria Letteraria (Italy), Quadrant (Australia), Turning Points - Faces & Names with Essays from The New York Times, აფრა, სჯანი (Georgia), Qutub Minar Review (India), Tales of Reverie, WestWard Quarterly, Juste Milieu Literature & Art Zine (USA), Grine Medine (Netherlands), יידישלאנד (Sweden), Зеркало (Israel). They have been translated into Ukrainian (Petro Rychlo) and Dutch (Hilde Pach). Russian, French and Yiddish poems have been and are being set to music in Russia (Leonid Sergeyev, Vjacheslav Akopov, Andrej Moltschanow, Elizaveta Panchenko), France (Olivier Milhaud, Jean-Philippe Dartois, Jacques Arnould) and Ukraine (Taras Kompanitschenko). In 2020 he won the XXXVI Literature Prize (2020) for poetry, short story, essay writing in the I. section (unpublished single poem) with the poem Città eterna from the Italian Cultural Institute of Naples and the international poetry and literary magazine Nuove Lettere.

Judy Lewis

First View at Athabasca Falls

About the Artist

Sandra Dreis

Mourning Dove

Light drizzle. The cardinal arrows

home, hides in dense red azaleas.

Chickadees flutter in black

and white, scatter like pages.

The mourning dove coos, waddles

for fallen seeds below bird feeder,

waits till the others fully depart

for sweet remains that lie--

silent gifts on the ground.

She survives the wary eyes

of wilder things, drinks her

sacred allowance from puddles,

then—like Ruth in the field,

extends her faith and gleans.

About the Author

Sandra Dreis’ recent chapbooks are Cultured Pearls and Dry-docked in New Jersey (Kelsay Books) other poems have been published Main Street Rag, Kakalak, North Carolina Literary Review, among others.

CJ Giroux

Every Day Is a Bad Movie

Dreading the next showing, but unable to turn away,

I navigate the nursing home’s hall,

like a child taught to never stare at an eclipse, but only its shadow

on pieces of pinholed cardboard.

In time for the coming attractions, come and gone, decades ago,

I dread the final credits.

Aides shush the chirping microwave; buttered popcorn and bleach usher me

toward the empty chair beside you.

My hand over yours, I close my eyes, knowing somewhere, as if in a Sugimoto photo,

a film ends, but always remains:

the projection beam is a cliché, the white of snowy fields

under a full moon on a Christmas card.

Shadows spill off margins like water over a county dam,

don’t end.

About the Author

CJ Giroux teaches at Saginaw Valley State University. A reader for Dunes Review, his most recent chapbook is Sheltered in Place. He completed his graduate studies at Wayne State University.

Abd Muid

A fierce woman with intense eyes

Peycho Kanev

Crime and Punishment

She said

something to me

without opening

her mouth,

only with her

eyes -

then she made me

repeat it.

About the Author

Peycho Kanev is the author of 12 poetry collections and three chapbooks, published in the USA and Europe. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Rattle, Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review, and many others.

Gabor Gonz

Beautiful Misty View from Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland

Katharyn Howd Machan

Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland

Faces in the Chapel

for John S. Gentile

You’ll find them grinning, vines and leaves and buds

emerging to the world from generous mouths

as if to boast There may be angels here

but we’re the ones who touch and bless the earth

and call it forth to flourish in sun’s reach.

You’ll hear them laughing, silent pale gray stone

part of the trickery they cunningly

embrace to say we can be good fools, too,

if we’ll dare open our small human ways

to welcome in the wicked wilder dance

of wit’s fertility, their laughing eyes

an open invitation to believe

in truth beyond grim roods and crossed sharp swords.

Please let them tell you without spoken words

that they embody winter’s silver bells

to save for summer’s golden jubilance

in music of roots’ eager rise from dark

to offer stems and blossoms bright for bees.

Green Men, three hundred of them welcoming

the prayers of all of us who dare to see:

trust who and what they are and how they share

their sacred light in every living tree.

About the Author

Katharyn Howd Machan’s most widely published poem is about a frog trying to climb up out of a toilet. Her first paid job was as a live-in-domestic at the Swiss Home for the Aged in Mount Kisco, New York in 1969 when she was 16. Since age 22 she has taught college undergraduates. With her beloved spouse Eric Machan, Howd she has raised two children, in Ithaca, New York. Oh—and for body and spirit, she belly dances.

Jason Yoder

Pele braids are easily seen in

this image of flowing lava

Andrew Shattuck McBride

Pele, the Volcano Goddess, Contacts Defense Contractors

A nuclear reactor the size of a shipping container,

that will fit on a truck? An entire system, in four

shipping containers? What could possibly go wrong?

I’m not against power for the people, even in my name.

Of course, military applications receive funding,

get fast-tracked. Excuse my eye-roll. This all-too-human

hubris and ambition is tiresome. Earth, crucible

of war, climate change and other man-made disasters.

Why do you think my attendants are priestesses?

A condition: If you must use my name in Project Pele,

don’t use my name in vain. Don’t mess this up. Beware

incurring my wrath. Don’t think you’re beyond my reach.

Another condition: Pay royalties for use of my name

to my people the Kanaka Maoli—Native Hawaiians

in Hawai‘i Nei, along the west coast, on the Ninth Island

of Las Vegas, around the world. Don’t think of royalties

as sacrifice. Think offerings, think tribute. My people,

wherever they are, even in their home islands, are weary.

Don’t underestimate their strength, their power.

Remember whose side I’m on.

Nāhuku Lava Tube

One afternoon I missed the school bus home

from Mountain View Intermediate, started walking

toward Volcano. Luckily, a classmate saw me

and asked her mom to give me a ride. Lorna’s mom

was unfazed, didn’t chide me for not thinking

through a fifteen-mile hike home.

If I had known where an opening to Nāhuku was

in Mountain View, I could have taken the tube home,

to avoid being seen in my humiliation over missing

the bus. Hours later, exhausted and hungry,

could have emerged into the starstruck night

and fiery glare of Dad’s worry and wrath.

About the AuthorAndrew Shattuck McBride grew up in Volcano, Hawaiʻi, six miles from the summit of Kīlauea volcano. Based now in Washington state, he is co-editor of For Love of Orcas (Wandering Aengus, 2019). His work appears in literary journals including Rattle, San Diego Poetry Annual, Clockhouse, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Crab Creek Review, Black Horse Review, and Pontoon Poetry.

Jon Petruschke

[Haiku]

vineyard sunset

his same touch

improved with age

in the museum

I reach for

your ivory

About the Author

Jon Petruschke is a writer and psychotherapist who resides in Portland, Maine with his wife and two sister cats. He has two books available - Dream Haiku: Poems from Nights and Naps and the recently released Cherry Blossom: Erotic Haiku

Charles Rammelkamp

Fortinbras Rhymes with FDR

As far as sons go,

I think I am more Fortinbras than Hamlet –

more decisive and confident.

I spent my life making business decisions,

establishing the Coolidge Foundation,

the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site.

The Calvin Coolidge House on Massasoit Street

in Northampton, where I grew up, added

to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

It occurs to me that “Fortinbras” sounds

a little like “FDR.”

Fortinbras – “strength in arms” –

the savior of Norway in the end.

And FDR? A lifelong Republican,

I never voted for the man once.

But I grudgingly admired his efforts

to bring us out of the Great Depression.

Father never much liked Herbert Hoover.

He thought he boasted too much,

mockingly called him “Wonder Boy.”

“That man,” he once said, “has offered me

unsolicited advice every day for six years,

most of it bad.”

Still, he endorsed his Commerce secretary

when Hoover ran in 1928.

“Let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier

to the stage,” Fortinbras says. “For he was likely,

had he been put upon, to have proved most royally.”

Easy to say when your rival is dead.

About the Author

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. A collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was recently published by BlazeVOX Books. Rammelkamp once arm-wrestled Sonny Liston in a bar in East Saint Louis.

Cansonic 760

Silhouette of a flock of crows flying over

the trees in the forest at night with a full moon

Claudette Mork Sigg

The Warning

A little while after sunset, while there is still light in the sky

and the river runs slow and sluggish in the increasing darkness,

if I step outside on the porch, just in that moment,

the crows rise up from the tree tops, one, two, three of them,

squawking and screaming in the stillness, circling,

calling out their warnings to all the stealthy creatures

just beginning their nightly survey of the shadows

waiting for us, even me, this person who stands

silently and admires their sudden noisy flight

of warning, a warning I needn’t heed, because I’m

here on the porch, not there in the tangle of brush

and weeds under the gently swaying cottonwoods,

and the warning is all about me, the woman on the porch.

A Dark Night with No Romance

Not long ago, a million people died of pestilence while

an old man went golfing in Florida. The sun seemed bright overhead,

but he was muttering under his breath in short angry gasps

about how life was rigged against him, and he was hungry,

so hungry he could eat everything on the table.

On the sixth day of the new year, when the old man’s greed

for winning grew vaster than sense and swallowed any rationality left,

when his desire for revenge and chaos grew so strong

it devoured him and eradicated any possibility of peace,

he let the dogs loose. and today they are howling as they run,

hungry to feed upon the carrion he is creating on the battlefield.

About the Author

Claudette Mork Sigg received an M.A. in English Language Arts with an emphasis on Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. After teaching high school English for nearly thirty years, she retired and subsequently became an art, history, and natural sciences docent at the Oakland Museum of California. Her work has appeared in publications such as Natural Bridge, the Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, Common Ground Review, Sierra Songs & Descants, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Cradle Song, and 75 Poems on Retirement.

Yurii Tokar

The wristwatch.

This story happened in Dnipro (formerly Dnepropetrovsk) in 1981. On my 14th birthday, my father gave me a watch. The first serious dream of my life came true. My mother raised me alone, but my father sometimes came to visit. He had another family. In the Soviet Union, children were not allowed to work, and my mother could not give me such a gift. She did not earn very much money. Every morning, I carefully put the watch on my wrist, and every evening, I carefully took it off. The mechanical clock ticked all night on the nightstand next to my bed.

But one morning, when I was walking to school, the metal bracelet came undone. It needed repair. The screwdrivers and small pliers were at home. So, I carefully put the watch in the pocket of my spring jacket, which I hung in the cloakroom at school. After finishing school lessons, I put on my jacket. There wasn't a watch in my pocket.

I've never had anything stolen from me before. The very word "theft" sounded wild to me. I found it hard to believe that someone could take a watch from someone else's jacket pocket. Later, I encountered thieves more than once, but I did not want to believe what had happened. However, you can’t run away from the truth. At home, my mother felt sorry for me but said that I should learn not to trust everyone.

When I went to university after finishing school, I started receiving a scholarship and was therefore able to buy a watch for myself. However, that sad incident began to change my naive idea of people for the first time. Encounters with decency and meanness, nobility and betrayal lay ahead. My mother died a long time ago. She worked as a primary school teacher all her life.

When I was a schoolboy, my father visited me once a month and left my mother thirty rubles, always under the phone book. I knew little about his childhood and youth. He did not like to talk about himself.

However, it was revealed to me that my paternal grandfather was German, and my grandmother was Russian. But my mother's parents were Ukrainian. So, nationality is a very relative concept. It is much more important who a person feels like, and not who he was born as.

Time passed. Every night, my watch ticks near my bed.

After graduating from university, I became a mathematics teacher and left Dnepropetrovsk.

In 2014, after many years of separation, life unexpectedly threw me back to my hometown, and I began teaching at a school in Dnepropetrovsk. After three weeks of teaching, I decided to find out more about the history of the school where I got a job. Where to find out? On the Internet, of course. What happened next might have reminded me of a cheap soap opera if what I discovered had not been the truth—a surprising and sad truth.

Sitting at the computer and getting acquainted with the history of the school, I suddenly saw a black-and-white photograph of one of the directors of this educational institution on the monitor screen. My father was looking at me from it. My father. It seemed so incredible that it evoked associations with the time machine from the science fiction films I had been fond of as a child. For a moment, looking at my familiar face, I wanted to feel like a boy, not a forty-seven-year-old teacher with more than twenty years of teaching experience, who had lost his mother, friends, and even his students in life. For a few seconds, it really seemed that the twenty years that had escaped had never happened. However, the real world cannot be dissolved in illusion; it is like Vladimir Vysotsky said: "...Only in dreams can you not escape forever, a brief moment of fun, so much pain around..."

It is clear that, having left the computer, I began asking the teachers about my father. He had been the director back in the early sixties of the last century, and therefore none of my new colleagues had met him personally. However, it turned out that his daughter (my older sister on my father’s side, as it turns out), whom I had never seen before, had been the director of this same school many years ago and then transferred to the district education department. I met her a few days later, and she recognized me as her brother.

My sister invited me to her small teacher’s apartment, introduced me to her husband, treated me to a delicious dinner and aromatic tea, and only then began to tell me about my father. He died in 1996. I did not know this and did not know much more about his life. After all, my father and I had not seen each other since my mother died in 1992. I was already working far from Dnepropetrovsk at that time. Of course, my sister Svetlana showed me my father's grave, and we saw each other after Victory Day, on May 10. That's when she told me the story of my father's youth, which was an amazingly moving one. No! It was a tragic story.

In 1941, before the war, my father turned eighteen. I first saw his photographs at that age in the album of my newly found sister. Stubbornness, maximalism, confidence, and the will to resist life's adversities radiated from the gaze of young Evgeny. That was my father's name. He married a Jewish girl; they had a daughter, Alla, and six months after the wedding, the war began to break people's destinies, like an icebreaker breaks ice floes—confidently and stubbornly. My father was drafted into the army and sent to a military school in Kazakhstan. There, he received the rank of junior lieutenant, but he was not allowed to go to the front because Evgeny's surname was German. His young wife and child remained in Dnepropetrovsk. When the Nazis captured the city, in mid-October, they and several thousand other Jews were driven into a vacant lot, and all were shot. Everyone: men, women, old people, and children.

As soon as I learned about all this, I felt ashamed. Ashamed that until I was forty-seven, every night I heard the clock ticking on the nightstand, but I never heard about the mass execution of Jews in Dnepropetrovsk, despite the fact that I grew up in this city. I knew about the Kyiv tragedy of Babi Yar, but not about the one in Dnepropetrovsk.

My sister also showed me an old photograph of my father's first wife. It turned out that a beautiful Jewish woman with kind and, in my opinion, wise eyes was captured in it several months before her death.

About the Author

Yurii Tokar teaches mathematics in Ukraine. His poems, stories, and essays in Russian and Ukrainian have been published in Ukraine and the USA. For example, in publications such as "День" (Ukraine), "Сімейна газета" (Ukraine), "Література та життя" (Ukraine), and "Освіта України" (Ukraine).