~ highlights and recommendations from recent issues of literary journals ~
by Mark Danowsky, Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal
*
Lunch Ticket (Winter/Spring 2019)
You Li – In Champaign, Illinois
https://lunchticket.org/in-champaign-illinois/
[excerpt]
Tomorrow he tells me he is on 9 p.m.
curfew for his first special-approved trip
from home, six weeks out from being
locked up, and when he first ate
strawberries after twenty years he cried.
*
Subprimal Poetry Art/Music (Issue 13)*
Ion Corcos – Bus Stop
https://subprimal.com/issues/issue13/bus-stop-by-ion-corcos
[excerpt]
You tell me you saw a boy on a cart
hit his horse with a plank of wood
*Subprimal has gone on hiatus
*
Valparaiso Poetry Review (Fall/Winter 2018-2019: Volume XX, Number 1)
David Kirby – Negative Reviews of Famous Italian Cultural Sites
[excerpt]
The ultimate museum critic is Benito Mussolini, though
he was also ultimate in other ways.
*
Kettle Blue Review (Issue 5.2)
Peter Grandbois – I thought I would still my body
https://www.kettlebluereview.com/peter-grandbois
[excerpt]
I remember running through school
To throw up in the bathroom
So no one could see
I mean I found my dog beneath the wheelbarrow
*
Birdfeast (Issue 14, Winter 2019)
Anna Mebel – Variable
http://www.birdfeastmagazine.com/fourteen/mebel/
[excerpt]
Plants have no memory, they say, because forgetting allows them to store energy.
*
The Poetry Review (UK) (Vol. 108, No. 4, Winter 2018)
Pascale Petit – Her Flowers
http://poems.poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/her-flowers/
[excerpt]
Muzzy from sleeping pills, my grandmother
got out of bed and started to go downstairs,
*
The Cincinnati Review (11.19.18)
Amit Majmudar – I Carceri
https://www.cincinnatireview.com/samples/i-carceri-by-amit-majmudar/
[excerpt]
then God is a cricket somewhere in that oppressively expansive complexity
*
Columbia Poetry Review (sample work)
Denise Duhamel – Swedish Death Cleaning
https://www.colum.edu/columbiapoetryreview/current-issue/swedish-death-cleaning.pdf
[excerpt]
I liked reading better than playing outside
and that reading led me to the big questions early—
what will happen after we die
Aaron Smith – Blanket
https://www.colum.edu/columbiapoetryreview/current-issue/blanket.pdf
[excerpt]
Does it matter to you that it’s snowing
in West Virginia and people keep saying the word blanket?
Ethel Rackin – Say it with Flowers
https://www.colum.edu/columbiapoetryreview/current-issue/say-it-with-flowers.pdf
[excerpt]
someone was reading
the fine print
*
The Café Review (Winter 2019)
Ellen Sander – The Bar at Saturday Zoo
http://www.thecafereview.com/winter-2019-poetry-the-bar-at-saturday-zoo/
[excerpt]
singer trying
a stage
hikes his voice
a twitched octave
against the
tic-clicks of billiards
*
The Account Magazine (11, Fall 2018)
Chad Sweeney – [from] Little Million Doors: an elegy
http://theaccountmagazine.com/article/sweeney-18
[excerpt]
All delicate
In the body held
In the coarse
Rope netting
Of the body time keeps
*
Southern Indiana Review (Fall 2018)
Leila Chatti – Aubade in the Old Apartment
https://www.usi.edu/sir/current-issue/aubade-in-the-old-apartment/
[excerpt]
just down the block, the donut shop and the wig shop
and the pizza place no one goes into
*
Crazyhorse (No. 94, Fall 2018)
Joanna Klink – On Mercy
until one day it was so close it shook you,
for a moment, like candlelight on a wall
Lisa Russ Spaar – Persimmon Midnight
so ripe the black calyx leaves
*
Prelude (Issue 4)
Robert Archambeau – Notes on the Avant-Garde
“I found a sonnet,” said my professor,
“I put it in a museum”
Aaron Kent – Morning in Retrograde
Night
Has burnt us once again
Peter Giebel – Together, It’s Nothing
The horse is only a theory