Hunger | Christopher Woods

December 18, 2020December 16, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Reading it for the third time, I am still amazed. Hungry, after midnight, in a hotel room in Galveston, I scan the room service menu in my lap. There, under the “Omelets” heading, it states that all are served with warm biscuits and yes, with mourning potatoes.

I am astounded. But I am also a realist and do not believe that biscuits will climb five floors and arrive still warm at my door. That they arrive at all is sufficient. Still, it distresses me to know that I have, for all this time, through all kinds of culinary weather, never known that some potatoes, by design or scheme or recipe, are meant only for mourning. I have eaten potatoes in all kinds of moods, even outside my homeland, and never, I think, funereally.

But I am also starving. I pick up the phone and call room service, order the potatoes without question, in an almost normal voice. Then, waiting in the dark, I hear waves crash against the seawall. The world is such an eerie place, I think, each day stranger than the one before.

Somewhere in the bowels of this hotel a room service cart is rolling this way, and for an instant I do not care if even death comes riding on it.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. His photographs can be seen in his gallery –http://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/ . His photography prompt book for writers, FROM VISION TO TEXT, is forthcoming from PROPERTIUS PRESS. His novella, HEARTS IN THE DARK, is forthcoming from RUNNING WILD PRESS.

This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.

Ripe Apples – Jessica Rigney

December 16, 2020December 3, 2022 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

You make of me a magician—
a laborer supplicant and servant
as I bring the corners of the cloth

together and know you see—
know of your marveling at my hands and
how they come together. It is I

who fashions a new heart each morning
awake to ripe apples which appear
inside the curve of my arm as though

I’d gathered them in my sleep.
Reveries write themselves upon the day
I say. Prefiguring every kindness falling

at my feet. By night they are siphon
for the sorrow tonguing my boots.
You make of me a witness—

stalwart bearer of deprivations
of sleep as I peel carrots at midnight
and know your eyes follow the line

of my shoulder to elbow to wrist and
how they work together still. It is you
who with your arms unloosening

‘round the waste of me lost beyond
these endless unnamed days—you
who magics the seasons back from before

the stay.
Name not I, but the it which is this.
I say.

Jessica Rigney is a poet, artist, and filmmaker. She is poetjess on Instagram.

This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.

The Kind of Diner – Samantha Steiner

December 11, 2020December 10, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

The kind of diner where the benches are turquoise vinyl, where the tables are edged in steel and there’s a tin full of half-used crayons by the register. Maybe there’s a jukebox. Maybe the jukebox actually works. Maybe it swallows your nickel.

The kind of bagel shop where half the walls are exposed brick and the other half are glass, where all the furniture was bought at an estate sale. Orders are handwritten on a notepad with a ballpoint pen and strung on the laundry line that spans the counter. There is no bathroom. Even the employees have to duck into the office building across the street on their lunch breaks.

The kind of bakery where the ceiling tiles can be poked out of place with a broom handle, where the chairs and tables are white wire. Help yourself to a pair of tongs, a serving tray. A cashier will give you more napkins than you could possibly need, and you will surprise yourself when you use them all.

The kind of cafe where there’s a corkboard. Someone needs a babysitter. Someone teaches guitar. Someone is selling a used croquet set. Each flyer ends in a fringe of phone numbers. You reach for that fringe and your wallet tumbles from your pocket. Someone picks it up and hands it back to you.

The kind of New York where you still live, though you don’t eat out much anymore.

Samantha Steiner is a Fulbright Scholar and two-time Best of the Net nominee. Her 2019 essay “To the Current Tenant” appears in the print anthology Coffin Bell 2.2, and other works are published or forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Apple Valley Review, and The Citron Review. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @Steiner_Reads.

Eve – Amy Wray Irish

December 9, 2020December 9, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ 1 Comment

When I reach to select the fruit
appearing most plump and ripe
my thumb plunges in, straight through
skin, meat, seeds, core
until it meets my fingers
creating a perfect circle.

Its all beautiful pulp in my palm.
No mold or rot here. I hold
a handful of sweet stickiness,
a shock of soft flesh. The surprise
forces a small ha of breath
to escape me, a moment of delight
that I then extend to you.

Not as temptation. More
as proof. Reflexively, instinctively,
I share this sensation
and offer you connection—
thinking that we share a rib,
a mythology. Any knowledge
for or against this is a fruit
I have yet to bite.

Amy Wray Irish grew up immersed in Chicago’s diverse arts scene, then traded Midwest winters for the Rocky Mountains. She has been published both online and in print journals, most recently with Punch Drunk Press and Waving Hands (forthcoming). Irish is a member of Lighthouse Writers, Columbine Poets, and Turkey Buzzard Press; her chapbooks include Creation Stories (2016) and The Nature of the Mother (2019).

This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.

Vested Cognizance, Dealt – Laura Carter

November 18, 2020November 18, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

She was dealt a war. She was dealt a civil war.
She was dealt a rooftop only rain knows.
She was dealt crimson and pronomial sea.
………….There was nothing but brackish there.
Do you want to be held? Do you want to be held apart from
………….a working world, or a willing world?
Were you built by a window?
Were you built by a window where spires were first?
Did you ever find that you needed your neediness there?
………….Did you?
Were you built from a first Palatine knowing?
And how? When you first delighted in yourself, did you think about the others soon there?
………….Did you heat up a tenement of souls?
What did she first find? A new house?
Was a house built of beauty, or was a house cut down?
………….Which one were you? Possible?
Were you built from a window, where there was nothing?
………….Are you she who was dealt a civil war?
Are you she who was dealt a retrieval?

Laura Carter lives in metro Atlanta, GA, where she finished her MFA many moons ago. She has since then published many poems in individual form and also a handful of chapbooks. She continues to teach writing classes to undergraduates.

Bread in the air – Ashley Howell Bunn

September 4, 2020September 4, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

the greatest thing about dishes in the sink is that we have dishes and we have a sink and that I get to wash them when they get crusty and I hate that but there was food enough to be left behind and fungus enough in the air to make the dough rise and that you ate it with butter just like a victorian orphan and we laughed and then all played cards at the table and the greatest thing about the hole in the wall is that it is there and my hand made it and that there was emotion enough to propel it forward and that we are still here in this house and art sometimes covers the hole and sometimes it doesn’t and one time you put your little shoe in the hole never to be seen again and I laughed and I found some old shoes to put on your feet and the greatest thing about that moment is that you have shoes and you have feet

Ashley Howell Bunn is pursuing her MFA in poetry through Regis University where she is also a graduate writing consultant. She reads and helps develop community engagement for the literary journal Inverted Syntax. Her work has previously appeared in The Colorado Sun, the series Head Room Sessions, and others. When she isn’t writing, she teaches and practices yoga and runs a small personal business centered around healing. She lives in Denver, CO with her partner and child.

This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.

HOWL – Charles Dalton Telschow

September 3, 2020August 28, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

“HOWL” by Charles Dalton Telschow

When the echoes of your neighborhood fall silent, and the wind chimes stop ringing,

Breathe.

There is a time for inhalations and exultations.

Do not forget we are living in history, please make your contribution to the textbooks thoughtfully.

Scribble in the margins of love and hangman’s noises and spirals that go all the way past the page, and remember the process of history that has brought that page into your presence. The tree that fell and was peeled layer by layer and chemically repurposed, to hold your thoughts for you. The weight of its death as it holds the heaviest of your breaths.

And your breath is so heavy these days. So heave it towards the moon and howl because it’s 8 PM, and this is Denver. We are the echoes that do not fall silent, the porchlight that does not burn out, the PBR that stays cold, even in direct sunlight.

So carve your truth into the former flesh of your lungs, but do not think it is any truer than the air you would breathe because of these pages.

How generous of the trees to give us air, just so we can cut them down and write about how beautiful they were. How selfish of us to not tell of how disgusting we were to the beauty of this world. How dare we rewrite the history of our horrors until it shines, but can’t see ourselves in it any more. Hoarding the grace under generic gentrified graffiti, and masks that do nothing to hide the fear in our eyes.

Remember the imperfection of tree branches, and how they worry not of straight lines and sterile wounds.

When the echoes of your neighborhood fall silent, and the wind chimes stop ringing,

Breathe in.

And howl.

Charles Dalton Telschowis a 26 year old Colorado native who is set to release his third self-published book of poetry, “a constellation of sparks”. He has been performing poetry for over ten years and also has been in the local music scene for almost as long. He has a solo music project called “The Polite Heretic”

This poem is from the Thought For Food anthology,
a poetry collection benefiting Denver Food Rescue.
You can purchase a copy of the book here.

Dawn as an Act of Survival – Paul Ilechko

August 19, 2020August 20, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

Slurred croak cracked collarbone

head shaved tight to the pinking flesh

a pure invention of street life

synthesized and wired for direct current

breakfast juddering under ultraviolet

charred and caramelized with a blast

of woodsmoke as coffee is guzzled syllables

sputtering from misshapen tongue

the stink of syrup of hot sauce and vinegar

silence hanging heavy between

the throb of another morning and the stale

breath of the previous night

no recollection pervades his damaged mind

of how besotted the leather drool

of survival staggered him homeward

through greased and gut-churning detour

steel-pinned and bone-plated with memory

of smoke and gasoline he lights his flame

in competition with the rising sun

a crimson sky his furnace.

Paul Ilechko is the author of the chapbooks “Bartok in Winter” (Flutter Press) and “Graph of Life” (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Juxtaprose, As It Ought To Be, Cathexis Northwest Press, Inklette and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. FB: pilechko Insta: njscattista

Genesis – Philip Matthews

August 14, 2020August 14, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

*NC048 © D. Johnson, courtesy of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center*

Flutter at no wide open mind.

I did not think like an individual eyelash.

I did not move in the hourglass house,

perpetuating itself of flashes of quicksilver of fish-knives. My parents.

When the sermon was streamed in the old South, it was creamy, a small amount amounting.

Whatever I thought of / against me, little queer hook, I was writing on my centurial skull.

Until something ovarian. A tucked testicle. I felt her tapping, almost at full plank: Petal.

Philip Matthews is the author of “Witch” (Alice James Books, 2020) and “Wig Heavier Than a Boot” (Kris Graves Projects, 2019), a collaboration with David Johnson. A poet from eastern North Carolina, he currently resides in Sauk County, Wisconsin where he is Director of Programs at Wormfarm Institute. Up to this point, his practice has anchored in site-specific meditation and performance: he is curious about what happens next. philipandpetal.com / @philipandpetal

The Colorado Photographic Arts Center has an exhibition Aug 14- Sept 23, 2020. The Space Between explores issues of queer identity, sexuality, and relationships through the works of three contemporary artists, including two photographers and a poet. In “Through the Lens of Desire,” Kris Sanford uses vintage photography from the 1920s – 1950s to explore an imagined queer history. “Wig Heavier Than a Boot,” is a collaboration of poetry and images that reveals Petal, a persona whom Philip Matthews manifests to write about and David Johnson photographs.

81 – Hilary Sideris

August 13, 2020August 5, 2020 ~ South Broadway Press ~ Leave a comment

She flaunts her pomegranate-
purple impulse-purchase mini-push
mower in her duplex backyard,
our mother of contradictions

from Depression-era Texas, women’s
libber, cheapskate even when it comes
to shoes, of which she has hundreds
of pairs. Why pay a man? Plus, here’s
a chance to show the shape she’s in

and get some sun. A younger, maybe
married neighbor suggests swinging
by on his John Deere. Tactical, tactful,

she declines. She knows the road
such favors lead a woman down.

Hilary Sideris has recently published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Free State Review, Gravel, The Lake, Main Street Rag, Rhino, Room, Salamander, and Southern Poetry Review. Her new book Animals in English, poems after Temple Grandin, is forthcoming from Dos Madres Press.