~ highlights and recommendations from recent issues of literary journals ~
by Mark Danowsky, Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal
*
Alaska Quarterly Review (AQR)
Vol. 35, No. 3 & 4, Winter Spring 2019
W.J. Herbert – Hybrid
[excerpt]
If you’re a red wolf
you know what I’m talking about.
xxxxx
Ted Kooser – Car in the Driveway
[excerpt]
I was almost eighty years old, and everywhere I’d
been and everything I’d learned was gone
*
Bennington Review
Issue 6 – “Kissing in the future” – Winter 2018/2019
http://www.benningtonreview.org/
Maggie Millner – A Partial History of My Desire
[excerpt]
When, in college, I learned my advisor
had edited a widely praised anthology
of “world’s worst verse,” I found it
very difficult to write.
xxxxx
Niina Pollari – I spend the Day Not Speaking
[excerpt]
Something you must know
Is that I am hesitating
*
Ploughshares
Spring 2019, Vol. 45, No. 1
Jennifer L. Knox – The Gift
[excerpt]
When I was little, she’d bring me to restaurants
and read while I, no doubt, talked and talked. Things
children said weren’t interesting to her, she told me,
and family never had to say, “I’m sorry.”
*
The Massachusetts Review
Vol. LX, No. 1, 2019
Casey Patrick – Recollection
[excerpt]
Or. A maiden stands
between a man and what he wants. And.
Each version leads here: She walks
into the world with her hands
Strapped to her back.
*
Copper Nickel
Number 28 / Spring 2019
Elizabeth Spesia – Cyclops
[excerpt]
Her body sprang from
incomprehensible void, a dark chaos. Whatever
happened to being a goddess?
*
The Georgia Review
Summer 2019
https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/product/summer-2019/
Alberto Ríos – The Scorpion of Loud
[excerpt]
we live our lives.
If we’re lucky, no one will notice us.
of course, we think we want it not
to be like that:
we think we want to be noticed.
xxxxx
Jeff Gundy – Notes Toward Intuitive Geography
[excerpt]
The parking lots lie bare as the hearts of old men.
*
Ecotone
Spring / Summer 2019, Issue 27
https://ecotonemagazine.org/shop/issue-27/
Christine Gosnay – New State
[excerpt]
It feels ethical to imagine you here,
a mandate from the poplar
*
Appalachia
Summer / Fall 2019
https://www.outdoors.org/trip-ideas-tips-resources/appalachia
Wall Swist – Hawk Feathers
[excerpt]
At the southern edge, a porcupine
barks and bristles, edges away
*
ZYZZYVA
No. 116
Hanae Jonas – Good
[excerpt]
Repression’s good for some things:
The long-closed door days, possession
turning my knives.
*
Post Road
No. 35
http://www.postroadmag.com/35/poetry/wright.phtml
Carolyne Wright – Not on My Résumé
[excerpt]
I was almost ashamed to show up, I was such
a lousy waitress—mixing up orders, begging
smoker co-workers to empty the ashtrays
*
The Adroit Journal
Issue 29
https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-nine/emilia-phillips-poetry/
Emilia Phillips – Poem About Death Beginning With A Humblebrag And Ending With A Shower Beer
[excerpt]
Today, for once, I did not think of Death. I avoided him like all men
in public by pretending to read, by putting in
my earbuds to drown out his I still need you, babys with Patsy Cline’s
I go out walkin’.
*
Birdfeast
Issue 14, Winter 2019
http://www.birdfeastmagazine.com/fourteen/mebel/
Anna Mabel – Variable
[excerpt]
Plants have no memory, they say, because forgetting allows them to store energy.
*
Valparaiso Poetry Review
Volume XI, Number 2
https://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v11n2.html
Catherine Staples – Hacking Out
[excerpt]
It was wheel and feint while we trotted along
in long grass, in the loose swing of work
and pleasure on a twenty degree day, horses
steaming breaths, fingers loosening from knots—
when another unfixed bit of blue shot forth.
xxxx
James Harms – Keep My Word
[excerpt]
At dawn, night
and day nearly blend, nearly
erase all differences, a way of
celebrating gray and
the end of gray, of saying
here and now are enough.
*
Tupelo Quarterly
Winner of the TQ14 Open Poetry Contest
http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/my-mother-describes-chemo-for-andy-warhol-by-d-gilson/
D. Gilson – My Mother Describes Chemo for Andy Warhol
[excerpt]
Popsicle lick & radiation drip
& ugly shoes nobody
should be wearing. I’m tired
some days. On Wednesdays
we watch reruns of Judge
Judy. I like Fridays. Clorox
smells & Montel’s on TV
from nine to ten.
*
Birmingham Poetry Review
Issue 46, 2019
https://www.uab.edu/cas/englishpublications/bpr/latest/pantoum-for-the-broken
Toi Dericotte – Pantoum for the Broken
[excerpt]
If we escaped, will we escape again?
I leapt from my body like a burning thing.