Little walt
by Anne Michael
When Mother sends me with a bucket to the pump
and it is a rainy day, droplets landing on my face, I open my eyes
trying to see where the rain starts but cannot
because I blink—and why is it that I blink without ever
meaning to?
My Baby Brother wails so loud
I hear him out of doors although the rain is also noisy
splashing the leaves. I can tell the wagons’ wheels are spewing mud
as they clobber past hitched to wet horses who snort at the weather.
The pump handle feels slick and water spurts into my
bucket so that I think of a waterfall in a gully or tumblers
at the sea’s shore where the little fishes get caught in the seining nets.
When the bucket’s full I set it down beside me
and watch water’s surface going plip plip and my own face
under the rain and how it is that I can keep my eyes open looking
into the bucket: behind me in the reflection is the cloud
that is raining all upon the Town.
Mother calls me to the house, You have been loafing.
The bucket, full now and heavy, becomes my chief burden
although a hen scurries beside me, and the ice man hollers
at his little brown donkey and the world around me
is so full of everything!
Anne Michael is the author of several poetry collections, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals in print and online. Salmon Poetry plans to publish her next full-length collection, The Red Queen Hypothesis, in 2021. Meanwhile, she writes and blogs from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley region. Find her at www.annemichael.wordpress.com.
fantasy on Emily and walt
by Marylou Streznewski
As far as we know, they never met,
But she had heard his poems were –
“immoral.”
What would she make of this ruffian?
He of her tiny whiteness?
Where could we have them meet?
Wasn’t there a boat trip –
a journey to Philadelphia
where she met that minister?
We could put them on deck together,
let them lean – no, she wouldn’t lean.
She would stand straight and proper.
He would lean, with open shirt,
a slouch hat – such language!
The prim tight woman’s gaze
would fix on him.
Her mind would speak.
He would be amazed.
Such fruit from such compression –
like the last drops of the brandy
they said was the color of her eyes.
Marylou Kelly Streznewski is a writer of prose, poetry, fiction and non-fiction who has taught writing at high school, college and community venues. She holds a Masters’ Degree from The College of New Jersey, and is the author of three chapbooks, Rag Time, Women Words and Dying with Robert Mitchum, as well as two non-fiction titles, Gifted Grownups and Heart Rending- Heart Mending. Her poetry has appeared in Sow’s Ear, New Millennium Writing, Bucks County Writer, English Journal, Snake Nation Review, Veterans for Peace Newsletter, and Schuylkill Valley Journal.
wild wandering man
by Ray Greenblatt
A wave of words washed over the world,
he broke the shackles of rhyme,
but his
rhythm rhythm rhythm
never ceased,
his long lines wild and reaching
spoke to each new generation.
He loved men
he loved women
he loved his country
he loved the earth.
We see men on corners
who resemble him,
we go deep into urban basements
to hear young poets intone him.
In Camden, New Jersey
in a little rickety house
a little black woman sits
channeling him
knowing his hundreds of biographies
quoting his many unique phrases
indeed, we see her shape-shift into him.
We walk to the Camden waterfront
on a gray windy day
and peer across the Delaware
as Whitman did so many times
dreaming how America would grow
in so many unfathomable ways.
Ray Greenblatt’s most recent book of poetry is Nocturnes & Aubades (Parnilis Pub, 2018). His experimental novel, Twenty Years on Graysheep Bay, is published by Sunstone Press, 2017. He has written book reviews for Joseph Conrad Today, Graham Greene Newsletter, Dylan Thomas Society, and John Updike Society.
Furrowed Brows
—Stephen Alcorn, linocut of Whitman
by George Drew
Great God in Heaven! This gaunt camerado
running around and around inside his house—
six circles a minute, if I count correctly—
must have the constitution of an ox. Fifteen minutes,
and he's still at it, a blur of flesh passing under me
every circuit. Furrowed in disapproval is,
I'll wager, what he's thinking when he eyes
my wrinkled brow; or at best, in amazement. Or,
just that I'm in deep speculation. But not so,
not this woodcut cousin pressed on paper,
this framed Victorian-rigid vagabond poet
glassed-in and hung on a hallway wall.
And why should I cast scorn like stones
into a lake's blue body? Does not this planet
on which we keep our tenuous balance circle
the sun? Does not the moon circle this Earth?
And I have seen men circling men for much less.
With my full-bearded stern demeanor,
my twisted head and swiveled eyes, my features
inked in jagged geometric shadows, though
at first glance I might look like an oracle
more hated than loved, more feared than hated,
I am in fact my own lampoon, a mock sobriety
staggered by this camerado's sweaty enterprise,
the exactitude of which is equal to the exactitude
of black ink etched on linoleum by a knife.
George Drew's eighth book, Fancy's Orphan, appeared in 2017, Tiger Bark Press, and his ninth, Drumming Armageddon, will appear in Fall 2020, Madville Publishing. Drew won the Knightville Poetry Contest, The New Guard, his poem appearing in the 2017 edition, and two other poems as Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Contest, appeared in the 2018 and 2019 San Diego Poetry Anthology. Recently, one of his poems from Fancy's Orphan appeared in Verse Daily.
Long after drum-taps
by Kathleen Mulholland
You said Whitman served at the hospitals and camps
only to whet sexual cravings.
Yes, maybe that sent him, but how could he stay,
if desire was all that led him?
Piles of limbs smoldered every hundred feet,
and legs now stumps, cut below the knee, infested with maggots.
And men, drenched in diarrhea, crowded makeshift hospital rooms.
And yet he stayed. Wrote letters for boys with no arms to hug him.
He prayed with those whose lips quivered so much in fear,
they were unable to kiss.
He read to illiterate soldiers,
North and South,
who had rotting teeth and hacking coughs.
If he loved them, does it matter how?
Kathleen Mulholland writes to understand her place in this world. Under the guidance of Dr. Christopher Bursk, she placed runner-up four times in the Bucks County Poet Laureate search. She won the 2016 Bucks County Muse Award, and won an honorable mention in the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize (2008), and is founder and a host of the Newtown Library Poetry Series. She’s been published in The Bucks County Writer, MadPoets Review, and US1 Worksheets. She considers herself blessed to have so many talented writers in the community who inspire and shape her poetry.