One Poem by Dan Lau

Stupid Fucking Beauty

Add a few lines

against the shawl’s knitting.

Safer to attend to details.

Safer to comprehend loss.

Analyze your risks

when you open

your mouth. See

that deviled line flair

when the tongue does

what it does. Even in the night

your shadow finds the luxury

of a caesura – the weight

of attending to yet absent from

The experience. So, I kiss you

and tell you all the things that

assault me when

I want,             when

I consult possibility.

That fucking blender,

your fucking hand,

electric cars, permaculture,

each green fig

plumping on the branch

owning the potential

of sweetness,

daring the proliferation

of an idea. Fucking fruit.

Shitty little promises

concentric in their red bed.

Stupid books that tell me about

the many ways sadness

can permeate a core.

Even in the metaphor

when I imagine those

precious little radicles

struggle from casing

to root,            I hate it

because of the margins

where I see them fail.

Stupid little life.

Stupid fucking beauty.

Now, what can I imagine

for tomorrow, but you.

Dan Lau is a Chinese American poet. A Kundiman fellow, he is the recipient of scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Queer Cultural Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in Colorado Review, Bellingham Review, The Margins, Poem-a-Day, The Baffler and others. He resides on the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, also known as San Francisco. (Photo by Bethanie Hines)

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

Advertisement

Three Poems by Cameron Morse

Hellraiser

 Scrawny infant squawking daughter
unswaddled for the car seat
in a more winter than spring rain,
welcome to the world, hellraiser.
March is bipolar in Missouri. Welcome
to this corner of the world. Here is
my thumb. You cannot seem to locate
your own. Let’s do something about those
maniacally flapping hands, those 
dagger-length fingernails. What a nuisance
it is to be born. Regurgitated on dry land.
Exposed to the elements. Let’s adjust
the thermostat. Sandwich the breast.
Get some meat on those bones.  

I Live in the Woods

It's the woods. These streets strung above I-70 are no neighborhood: They have no name. The trees out here in the dark are older than toothpick houses. Denser in their darkness than any porch light. Early morning resounds with cricket orchestration, the long intermittent hiss of a cicada. Backtrack to the blubbery soon-to-be extinct spectral motors of the interstate. This is the age of insects, Gould says, so I start a bug collection. I scoop the iridescent dead from our kiddie pool with a Walmart pill bottle: a Japanese beetle. I have to explain to Theo the exoskeleton of the cicada latched onto the A-frame of his swing set is just a shell, it's not alive, and pick it off myself. I find a dead cicada for display and seal it in the orange tube. Peel the label that says Keppra that says Bactrim that says Methylprednisolone that leaves a sticky little residue. 

Tree, House

The reach for love is the branch 
in my apple tree that is barely touching the eaves. 
There is a thin and fragile part 
of my heart that is always barely touching.
 
An apple tree opening endlessly 
unto the house brings its chimneys 
into the shady auspice of leaves
but let the roots rub up against a cracked 
foundation and they chafe. Mostly 

I just settle into the earth and sprout more
cracks, more spider veins for the rain 
to bleed through, I seep into the soil 
the sound sleep of the soil packed around my cracks. 

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His collection of unrhymed sonnets, Sonnetizer, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

Two Poems by Jaclyn Youhana Garver

Maybe She's Born with It

Have you heard of that girl who
graffitis in Kabul? They say she’s
Afghanistan’s only female graffiti artist.
 
She’s not there? he asks. You mean she lives
here, where the paint in her can is no
threat, where the pigments can’t
 
haunt bearded men who peer between the cells
of pork, paintings, and pigeons as pets
and shout It Is Forbidden. Here, where girls
 
can fly kites, take orders at drive-
thru windows, or prosecute ex-
football players. They can study
 
the musculature of a hand, which can cup
the tender nub of the clitoris or strike
the cheek, can set a broken finger or sketch
 
its knuckle lines and nail beds,
embedded veins that give life to picture
and person. And anyway, yes, this girl, this
 
woman, Shamsia Hassani, (say it
right), still lives there, where they kill
the pet pigeons. She still gifts
 
her faceless models with thick lines
of eyelash, that feminine flutter. She still risks
makeup, music, and the hope
 
of the snowy,
 
winged
 
pappus.

This Was My Alarm This Morning
                song lyric from “Bowl of Oranges,” Bright Eyes
 
I had to hold hands
with a stranger
on a flight cause they
were too scared
 
to land, the radioman
crows from his pink
and snarling mouth
of loam. Like he’s so great
 
for deigning to hold a stranger’s
hand with all its wrinkles, germs,
hangnails, hidden pins of poison
in the fold. I’d rather be like Conor
 
and his bowl of oranges
and his doctor. Just hold my
hand. I think that that would help.
Handholding can’t cure
 
ugliness or illness, but
my heart might sigh at the press
of palm to palm, the income
 
of your skin
to the surface of my
exhalation
        	or kingdom.

Jaclyn Youhana Garver is a freelance writer and editor from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the communications specialist for a national marketing organization. She won a trio of honorable mentions in the Writer’s Digest’s Annual Writing Competition in non-rhyming poetry in 2021 and 2022. Her poetry chapbook, The Men I Never:, is scheduled to be published by dancing girl press in 2023, and her contemporary fiction is represented by Savannah Brooks of KT Literary. Her story “The Butterfly Catcher” will appear in This World Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Horror Stories About Bugs, out this May.

Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.

Dear _____ by Jennifer Martelli

I can’t say I love this country,

but where would I go? Me, without another language

or a compass. I don’t even own an illuminated faux leather red Bible!

This far down lower Manhattan, I can feel the Brooklyn Bridge loom.

To say I don’t love this country means very little, is neither noble nor brave.

There is very little I do love. I once owned a fine pen named for a snowy Alp,

traded it for something I thought I needed more. Now, my handwriting morphs into glyphs:

birds—or really, just the shape of what I think some birds look like flying away over the beach—

If I were to leave, I would have to text so you would know it was from me, that I hadn’t

forgotten you, that perhaps I wasn’t built big enough to love your expanse. 

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative’s Editor, Laura Lee Washburn, has selected July’s poems around the site’s current theme “We’re Speaking” to capture voices pushing back against the current attacks in the U.S. on human rights and on democracy. Citizens of Kansas have an attack on their state constitution on the ballot August 2nd on which we hope they will vote no in order to preserve the Kansas legacy of being a free state in which all citizens have bodily autonomy. We stand in solidarity with all people affected by current rulings from the radicalized Supreme Court.

What I Know Today by William Sheldon

The opposite of life is…
Well, death’s opposite is hunger
“Love and death,” the poet
says, “love and death.” Horsetail
clouds framed by a window tease
dying leaves, red in setting sun.
 Bah.
All preamble to my saying again,
how much I love this graveyard
we tread daily. Let me walk thigh-
deep in the river, sit under winter’s
red skies.  We can be friends, but dirt
is my only lover.  We will lie together,
rise in each other’s clothes.

William Sheldon lives with his family in Hutchinson, Kansas. Books of poetry include Retrieving Old Bones (Woodley), Into Distant Grass (Oil Hill) and Rain Comes Riding (Mammoth).  A new full-length collection, Deadman, is forthcoming from Spartan Press. He plays bass for the band The Excuses. sheldonb52@icloud.com

Guest editor, Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, is winner of a Red Mountain Press’s Editor’s Choice Award for Shadow Light. A new book of poetry from Red Mountain is Wing. Other recent books areThe Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (a memoir, U. of Nebraska Press); A Casino Bestiary (Spartan Press); and Jackalope, fiction (Red Mountain). She founded the Creative Writing Program at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she taught and was an administrator. Low is past board president of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She has won 3 Kansas Notable Book Awards and recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Sequoyah National Research Center, Poetry Society of America, The Circle -Best Native American Books, Roberts Foundation, Lichtor Awards, and the Kansas Arts Commission. Low has an MFA from Wichita St. U. and Ph.D. from Kansas U. Her literary blog is http://deniselow.blogspot.com.

Backyard by Melissa Fite Johnson

This scooped-out hole was once
the Bradford pear a friend and I sat under
last May when she lifted her shirt
to let me feel the life inside. Through
the dark soil, the tree’s roots still stretch
like lines etching a cracked egg.

She became a mother. I didn’t.
She secures the stroller’s strap, follows
her son to the park. She sits with other
mothers
in the shade. The older children
pile acorns in their mothers’ laps
until they spill to the ground.

At home, my husband and I read,
opposite ends of the couch, my feet tucked
under his side. Our tea steeps
in the kitchen. I’m not holding on
to nothing anymore. In the neighbors’ yard,
branches quilt patterns into the sky.

(Originally published in Broadsided Press, May 2017)

Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Broadsided Press, Sidereal, Stirring, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband and dogs in Lawrence, Kansas.

Guest editor Julie Ramon is an English instructor at NEO A&M in Miami, Oklahoma.  She graduated with an M.F.A from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Among writing, her interests include baking, sewing, traveling, and garage sales. She is also a co-organizer of a Joplin, Missouri poetry series, Downtown Poetry. She lives in Joplin with her husband, sons, and daughter.

By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg I Love This Body That’s Not the Way I Thought

like I love lightning, and especially its aftermath:
a horizon balancing blue sky, dying thunderheads,
faint stars, open space—the whole world stretching
its arms two directions at once, just as I do, shaking
myself steady, remembering how this body loves
miles of sidewalk diminishing into a faint path
made by deer with genius for merging the visible.
I love the walk out of what I thought even if
my feet hurt, I’m scared by the blank stare of the sun,
or I’ve surrendered to how the subway sways its chant
along my spine as it cups this body in its seat.
I love the flash of yearning that turns this body
toward the dark or bright branches of sex or dreams,
all this weather informs these limbs and muscles
in the seasons that come and go, or that came and went:
the mechanisms of cell-building, the three children
from that flint-on-flint spark, the years before
walking sunsets out of housing developments,
and earlier, the fast slim legs that galloped me
down long apartment hallways as the girl
who knew how to tell herself to stay curious,
just as the woman who woke from the old pain,
and put on her walking shoes to head out into billions
of atoms shifting into fire or flower at every turn.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 23 books, including Miriam’s Well, a novel; Everyday Magic: A Field Guide to the Mundane and Miraculous, and Following the Curve, poetry. Her previous work includes The Divorce Girl, a novel; Needle in the Bone, a non-fiction book on the Holocaust; The Sky Begins At Your Feet, a bioregional memoir on cancer and community; and six poetry collections, including the award-winning Chasing Weather with photographer Stephen Locke. Founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, Mirriam-Goldberg also leads writing workshops widely. www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.com

 

Guest Editor Julie Ramon is an English instructor at NEO A&M in Miami, Oklahoma.  She graduated with an M.F.A from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Among writing, her interests include baking, sewing, traveling, and garage sales. She is also a co-organizer of a Joplin, Missouri poetry series, Downtown Poetry. She lives in Joplin with her husband, sons, and daughter.

Visiting my Grandson during the Pandemic by Debbie Theiss

My grandson plays on his driveway
chalk in hand as he draws
large yellow daffodils and red tulips
sidewalk paths
trees with orange and cherry blossoms
me under the branches with
picnic basket full of cake and
cookies in blue-checkered napkins
a robin’s nest above my head
with four tiny egg blue gems

I watch him from my car, window down
sun fading in the pink-streaked sky
I beep twice, he looks my way
I throw him kisses; he catches each one
I pull away still watching him and
wish that someone would have HIT PAUSE
before—
before now.

 

Debbie Theiss (Lee’s Summit, MO) grew up in in the Midwest and finds inspiration in the unfolding art of daily life and nature. She is a member of the Kansas City Writer’s Group and has poems published in I-70 Review, Helen Literary Journal, River & South Review, and others.

 

Julie Ramon is an English instructor at NEO A&M in Miami, Oklahoma.  She graduated with an M.F.A from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Among writing, her interests include baking, sewing, traveling, and garage sales. She is also a co-organizer of a Joplin, Missouri poetry series, Downtown Poetry. She lives in Joplin with her husband, sons, and daughter.

 

Listening to Annie Wash Dishes . by Matthew David Manning

Just behind me, my wife, Annie,

is washing dishes. For two days,

she made chicken soup

and now she cleans the pots,

places servings into the fridge

sniffling all the while.

Each pot pops and booms

behind the wall. There is so much

that sound hides from my eyes, though,

while she cleans them an image,

floating and invisible, teases me

this thought of her tapping

each cabinet in the kitchen

as a ritual for good luck. For New Years,

we had tang yuan because it’s round,

but my father complained

about our lack of black-eyed peas.

 

Matthew David Manning has worked as an English instructor at Pittsburg State University in the Intensive English Program. Matthew holds degrees in creative writing from Arizona State University and Pittsburg State University. His poetry has appeared various publications including I-70 Review, Red Paint Hill, Rust + Moth, Kansas Time + Place, and Chiron Review.

Guest Editor Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky and is one of the founders and the Co-President of the Board of SEK Women Helping Women.

 

 

Morning News – by Maril Crabtree

Ten times ten thousand

terrible things in this world

and still

I don’t want to leave it

~ Maril Crabtree

Maril Crabtree lives in the Midwest and writes poetry, creative nonfiction, reviews, and occasional short fiction. Her work has appeared in Canyon Voices, Main Street Rag, Coal City Review, and others. She is a former poetry editor for Kansas City Voices.

Guest Editor Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as The New Verse News, Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.  Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri.  She is married to the writer Roland Sodowsky and is one of the founders and the Co-President of the Board of SEK Women Helping Women.