Let’s get off at Osceola And grab our coonskin caps, boys. Forgetting the farmer’s fields And head for the wild patch of land In the corner of yon field And flatten our bodies Against the ground Filling our nostrils with The smell of black Iowa dirt Near the Des Moines River.
Let’s shoot an azimuth of 270 degrees Due west and head westward Past the lank, slank Cowboy towns of Durango Or what’s left of Neal’s Larimer Street. Let’s even taste that black Dirt ‘til it feeds The red bones in us and We’re moving like Natty Bumpo As coyotes at the edge of town.
La Otra
BY GUILLERMO LAZO
Tú eres la tranquilidad En mi cerebro ruidoso Y por tú cara Puedo ver el rostro del universo El universo es el cosmos Es lo que hace nuestro mundo posible Qué hace tú posible Hoy es muy intempestivo de integrar nuestra materia en una canción de existencia como la lluvia en la arena qué hace tú posible
Kynthos
BY GUILLERMO LAZO
On a gravelly road in Germany In the early morning light I write the name of my beloved In the dirt With the toe of my combat boot As I pull guard Her perfumed card Calls me From the Rocky Mountains westward Half a world away As I stand guard Over 37 years of topsoil In the early morning light
She is the Greeks to me She is Kynthos – Diana Protectress of the wild young Purveyor of knowledge And she is America With real wilderness And rawboned hands and puritanical ethic And miles and miles of endless onset.
Guillermo Lazo was born and raised in Chicago. Univ of Illinois BA Ed 1974. Univ of Colorado BA Literature 1986. Editor and Publisher of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Arts (Poetry Magazine 1978-1984). Author of Surround Me As Burlap (Pueblo Poetry Project 1980 Pueblo, CO), Ching Poems (March Abrazo Press, Carlos Cumpian ed.), Bathers of the Med Sea (1989 Baculite Publishing – Canadian Printing). Articles: Confessions of a Marrano (Halapid Magazine Anousim Society of Crypto Jews 2001).
i destroy myself with a slow grind pressing my body against the bitter wheel at any sign of sharp success polishing away the burrs of hope and joy until i am pebble forgotten in the crush of boots
Passion
BY JOSEPH WILCOX
at easter brunch as we douse the bulge of egg casserole and sweetbread in our stomachs with fresh hot coffee like a post-coital cigarette my brother extolls the virtues of the stock market how he cheers the ups and downs as he buys low and his millions grow he pauses righteousness rising to rail at the cross of his tax burden the unconstitutional waste of government taking his money and the onus of minimum wage that shrouds his body corporate to my sister who earns $15 an hour retail
Factious
BY JOSEPH WILCOX
don’t you see? if we are fighting each other we are not fighting them if we are fighting each other we won’t go to the shed to find our pitchforks
would you like to borrow one of mine, friend?
Joseph Wilcox studied at the Jack Kerouac School, started a theater company, and raised a family in Colorado. He lives in Aurora where he writes science fiction and fantasy, and poetry in the sleepless hours of the night.
We’re gathered here in this sacred place Darting looks of judgement and envy You still manage to pull a sour face As the imam gives the khutba about how to love thy neighbor I look down at their feet, calloused but not withered It’s as if I can read their lives from their feet
Every untrimmed nail and hard blue vein Running after children No time to thrive, only maintain Resilient, despite the shock of motherhood Dressed in burnt orange Salwar Kameez and glass gold bangles The baby coos and gurgles until the azan comes Then its shrill cries and a burst of tears How dare their mother do something for herself? Religious commitments don’t end Such tribulations only make them more clear
Babies, an extension of their mother until around age four Then one day their need for cuddles suddenly ends And the only remembrance is saggy pillows and stretch marks Designed like directions on a map
Despite the sleepless nights and loss of time Soon the baby discovers their own independence He sits nicely as his mother prays sunnah He fixes his own hat when it falls Like kneading dough, she forms to the chapter of her life Her tests become her triumphs, her loss is what she gained
I make a dua after Jummah, thanking God for His preference The little things I cherish, take the good with the bad How can you appreciate God’s gifts? If it’s honey all the time Sometimes we have to feel the sting
Mimi Khoso is not great at short biographies, and the pressure it causes to make an appealing impression in short summary. She does understand the need for it however; she was born in Georgia in 2002, and has moved all over Georgia and Texas during her childhood. She doesn’t have any professional credentials for writing poetry. She believes that once you discover your passion it gives meaning to your life. Her favorite book is The Beguiled by Thomas P. Cullinan and her favorite song is Saanson Ki Maala, based on the 16th-century poem by Mirabai then popularized by sufi singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. She has realized what makes celebrated films and timeless music profound is in its words. One of the great pleasures in her life is reading and writing and she is not fully able to explain why. When she converted to Islam over four years ago, she read of its deniers claiming the Quran to merely be a great work of poetry. To that, God responded to produce a verse similar to His if you can.
in the center of the bowl, a still life for a still life,
reflecting sweet and sour gem, blinding, squinting at the fruit of it,
glistens a warm memory, juice weeping between the fingers
A pucker, confetti of pulp in the belly. Bloated with remedial fullness.
Lydia Ford is a poet based in Colorado, where she lives with her boyfriend and two cats, Melon and Zuko. Her work has been published in Words Dance Magazine, Ink & Marrow, boats against the current, Beyond Words Magazine and wildscape lit. You can often find her in her local coffee shop, probably telling someone about the music playing overhead or her love of nostalgia. More of her work lives on Instagram @lydfordwrites
Tributaries: A Beautiful Opportunity to Lose Our Way
BY BRICE MAIURRO
The first thing I heard in these poems was a heartbeat. In his opening poem “All Water Has Perfect Memory”, an allusion to a Toni Morrison line, the rhythm for me was that same rhythm at the start of Dark Side of the Moon. The book begins with the sense of a heartbeat growing louder and louder each moment. Everett’s first collection of poetry, Tributaries, continues to carry that heartbeat, and the sorrow between its beats, throughout this literary confluence of moments. Moments among a greater sense of we, the ecological we.
In his poetry, Everett’s time is the earth’s time. These poems are not contained to the one-hundred-ish years of a human life but zoomed out and slowed down. They connect us to a very clear something greater than our singular journey as a human being on this planet. It is hard to tell where he ends and the rest of Mother Earth begins. He reminds us of this truth for all of us. The poems are in conversation with one another, compounding the complex yet approachable mezclado of this book. The Osage dance with the Cottonwoods dancing with the stream below them, all tributaries feeding into the heart of this poet. Everett is spellcasting here; calling in the healing of the earth and sounding the cautionary canary for its woes.
In addition to spellcaster, Everett serves as field guide, death doula, and eternal student in these poems. These poems are “always hungry” to listen more. In these poems, our fellow living beings, the Great Horned Owl, Coyote, the Bison, are much more teacher than metaphor. There is an admirable equanimity in Everett’s work (and play). He explores the distance between here and home, where home is the same home we find in “eco-”. Everett, as are we, is water, in the words of Toni Morrison, “trying to get back to where it once was”.
“Poets, remember to listen”, says Everett in “Populus deltoides”, “to breathe in the vanilla of resin”. Everett has a knack for imagery (see lines like: “blue hunger”; “cloudless teeth”). He sets scenes magically, and then returns to the reader in a very direct and curious way, as if it were a conversation over a cup of shade grown coffee. I find the agrarian salt-of-the-earth wisdom of these poems reminiscent of Wendell Berry, a fellow poet captivated by the rural. Everett himself is from the “windtossed flatlands of southeast Kansas”, which he visits often in this collection. The poems are biography; confessional poetry of the landscapes and experiences that shaped him and his words.
The poem “Geraniums” in particular stood out to me, with visceral lines like “a blackbird flies backwards from tinted window”. In very intentional moments, Everett captures the core of surrealism: not to immerse the reader in a dream, but to attempt to liberate our colonized minds. Everett has a poetic conviction. When he says “it is better to speak in chrysanthemums”, he speaks from experience. He “plants the seeds in the mouths of everyone” he meets.
Shorter poems like “Pine Trees Covered in Snow” show us that Everett can be potent while being concise. These interludes to longer readings act as heartpunches, steering the collection along.
I often have a hard time with questions posed in poetry, finding them to be navel-gazing or overdramatic shenanigans, however I found myself enamoured of the questions Everett poses. Questions like “Do horses hide in my blonde waves?” where the goal seems not to send you into a philosophical spiral but to invite you into the great curiosity and wonder of this poet. Phrases like “amanita dreams” have me asking my own questions with that same curiosity – what is an amanita dream? What colors would I find there? What shamanic doors can be opened by being more curious about the world of our fungi friends?
In the words of our Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson, “it hurts to become”; this collection pushes through the pain of the Anthropocene becoming something more alive, revealing limbs reaching for a better world. The poems in this collection are never so binary to choose to be a meditation on climate grief or to choose to elevate the natural world. They are a both/and, a queering, an honesty. There is a beautiful disobedience that Everett encourages us to join him for, where we too “ignore the no trespassing warnings”, “follow the river” and lose our way.
Brice Maiurro (he/they) is the Editor-in-Chief of South Broadway Press. Hailing from Lakewood, CO., he is the author of four collections of poetry, including Stupid Flowers and The Heart is an Undertaker Bee. His poetry has been published by South Florida Poetry Journal, Denverse, The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and Poets Reading the News. Website: www.maiurro.co
a man opens his mouth & a border spills out. a grandmother unspools her tongue like thread, stitching her children into the fabric of a country that never wanted them.
they say this is progress.
(they mean:) the skin thinned to paper — the hands blistered, still reaching — the lungs filled with air thick enough to swallow. (they mean:) look how well you have learned to survive. how your bones folded neatly into history. but we know. we know what it means to be asked for our papers. to be split between two alphabets & never whole. to carve out our own faces with the sharpest vowels until we are palatable. marketable. safe.
(they say we are lucky to be here.) lucky.
lucky like my mother learning
the price of shame at the grocery store. (the clerk’s mouth curling around her accent another thing she must swallow whole.)
lucky like my father with his hands roughened by the steel of a land he could never own. (the factory hums. the sweat dries. the paycheck arrives. the hunger stays.) (somewhere) they are building monuments from the bones of the silenced.
(somewhere) the land forgets the sound of its own name. concrete buries it whole.
this is history, they say. (they mean:) the textbooks that forget us — the flags stitched with the tongues we lost — the songs we were too tired to sing.
(they say we should be grateful.) (they mean we should be quiet.)
but i remember. i remember the rice fields & the rivers thick with ghosts. the prayers my grandmother whispered to the soil. the stories that split her open & stayed.
they say the rice won’t grow without blood. (and still, we eat.)
Sreeja Naskar is a high school poet based in India. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, The Chakkar, ONE ART, Frigg Magazine, The Little Journal, and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.
You remind me that I am hungry. That I hunger. That I am meant to be fed. That this is a natural state of being. I should not be ashamed to want. You remind me that I need connection. You remind me that it is natural to be tethered—to other people, to a person, to an idea, to a thing. You remind me that I have grown from something small, small, small. You remind me that all of us were once small, small, small. You remind me that I have experienced loss before / a severing and survived.
Liza Sparks (she/her) has work published in The Pinch Journal (online), Allium, Timber, CALYX, Split This Rock, and many others. She was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net in 2022. Her work is informed by her intersecting identities as a brown-multiracial-neurodivergent-pansexual-woman.
Let’s keep dancing like you promised would never be done.
I have awoken, You’re no longer there.
Endless Tomorrows I miss you, I grieve for you so.
You helped me ignore my fears because you said tomorrow will always be near.
I have awoken from the illusion and I grieve for your return, but no, you were never really here.
Endless Tomorrows you let me go.
I see my fears now that you helped me get through, because Endless Tomorrows, you were always true.
Endless Tomorrows, I loved you so.
The pain of today replaces my fears, because Endless Tomorrows you’re all I’ve ever known.
Endless Tomorrows I danced with you, but it was only Ego & Fear wearing your mask in my belief that it was actually you.
I have danced with Ego & Fear I didn’t know they cut in.
Endless Tomorrows you were always there to hide my fears with the illusion of the never-ending dance.
Fear & Ego you cut in to dance, sneaking in. Never did you ask,
then I finally hear you say,
“Masquerade”
as you both finally remove your Endless Tomorrows masks.
Scott Nookester is a kind man relearning how to be in the present. He is a hard worker, who is learning to be soft with his edges. He is a man learning to dance with the new.
Crepuscular, adj., the behavior of animals most active at twilight
For Ash
BY NEAL ALLEN SHIPLEY
It’s cold but the sky is clear, cleaved: bright pink sits on blue and there are no clouds, but a stripe of white would be poetic. This administration will ban the sky if they can, executives ordering it to stop changing color – trying to administer a world where there is only day and night.
Imagine, refusing to believe in twilight while the sun seeps into the gums of the horizon – denying nightfall on a summer evening when you savor sunset, still warm and purple on your tongue. Hunting is restricted between sunset and dusk when these animals are most active – to feed, to court – at the height of their power:
*
Odocoileus hemionus, mule deer feed selectively at dusk, choosing the parts of sagebrush that are most nutritious. Site-faithful, they return only to the safest, most bountiful grounds, pawing the soft loam of your back yard so close we could hand-feed them if we weren’t so loud.
You call me but you’re worried about other things – the dog I pretend to hate is sick and it’s probably just normal shit, but still. I forget to tell you that I know twilight is real, that it’s the most beautiful time of day, the mountains’ silhouette like thick walls of a bowl thrown up by practiced hands to protect us in this conservative city.
*
Vulpes vulpes pick-pocket their predators in the gloaming, stealing yesterday’s prime rib for tomorrow’s supper. The red fox knows to keep away from traffic – has learned to scent the carbon steel of their hunter’s rifle on the wind, stow their stolen goods deep beneath the snow where it will keep until leaner times.
This administration has convinced themselves there is only high noon, masculine sun scorching the earth shadowless, baking them where they stand without reprieve – the delicate frills of dawn too dangerous for them, nighttime dragging her slow fingers down their chests, the cold dew of Spring fresh in the corners of their mouths.
*
Canis latrans call to their young with soft woofs when the sun sinks almost completely, a nightlight deep within the mountains – small howls that make you lower your joint. I tell you about the time a coyote invaded my cul de sac growing up, our neighbors shepherding their dogs inside to avoid a slaughter.
You tell me the coyote is a mean bitch, but you’re meaner. If they’re a threat, we’ll bring the girls inside and I’ll fight this administration tooth and claw with you until it’s just another neighborhood dog, one we’ve seen before, docile; we stay outside with the joint, the soft glow of dusk around us.
Neal Allen Shipley (he/him) is a behavior analyst living in Colorado with a modest collection of pets and an unhinged collection of plants. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Creation Magazine, The Talon Review, and SCAB Magazine, among others. Despite the horrors, he loves a fancy hot dog. You can find him on Instagram @nealio9
To the reggae rhythms on his radio, a man pushes his coconut cart up the street, the juice sloshing in its clear bin, the coconut sweets & his dark skin gleam in this morning’s hesitant sun.
Poet-translator Lorraine Caputo’s works appear internationally in over 500 journals and 24 collections of poetry – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023). She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.
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