Tag: poetry

Natchez Steamboat Found in 2007, Honey Island | Heather Dobbins

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Image: Justin Wilkens

The remains were raised by the Mississippi—an old song in shards.
Was it burned by accident? Or captured when New Orleans was,

run up to Yazoo River to escape Union hands, ashore in a bend?
Lincoln so wanted to roll unvexed to the sea.

Muted pitches in an old steamboat, its firebox is a gaping mouth
for coal. The river has the last say.

Each Natchez meant more bales, more boilers. There was no music
like the Natchez’s whistle. Heard was the length of the open

valve, vibration in steam—not air but rising steam rarefying in the bell.
But music doesn’t give out any answers.

The steam’s been gone. No one’s bragging on the Race of the Giants
or Captain Leathers anymore. The floating palace, wood rot come up

for air. The river is the last say.

Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fjords, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (Kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more. 

Editor Interviews | Emylee Amber

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Emylee Amber is an observer of the stars and an architect of art built on a foundation of words. She is passionate about music and helps her partner construct poetry to the sky with his band, Saeva. While observing the stars, Emylee runs her own Instagram based on the movements of the planets and other astrology-based information @eclipselunairee. Emylee is wandering about the Centennial State. Searching for things and those that peak her curiosity, while finding comfort in the embrace of the mountains and magic surrounding her. She contributed to Thought For Food (South Broadway Press, 2020) by editing the anthology and publishing her poem, Speak to Me.

Remember this place- we watched the skies turn dark and the leaves start their journey away.

The golden hour lasted forever and I couldn’t imagine calling any other place home.

It feels like we were dreaming the whole time- it was as though that quiet would last forever.

Unknown – Found on the bathroom wall at RitualCravt’s old location

What does this quote mean to you?

This quote found me when I was in the midst of an identity crisis. I had been wandering around for what felt decades in a vessel I hardly knew. It was the spring of 2018, after a brutal breakup that left me without many friends — in a city that I was from, but hadn’t grown up in. So everyone, including myself, was a stranger. Anonymous. I desperately wanted to embrace a feeling that felt like home, where I could recognize and understand myself. I was at an Astrology workshop at RitualCravt attempting to use the stars to lead me to this lingering desire. This quote was hanging above the light switch in the bathroom of RitualCravt’s old location. 

Upon reading it, I immediately felt seen. Heard. Understood. I knew of this place and it had felt like a “home”. I was saying goodbye to it, over and over again. Yet, at the same time, this reminded me that “this place” has yet to come. I will have another moment of quiet within the golden hour, and again, it will feel but only of a dream that was to last forever; and that’s the beauty of it.

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

Outside of my collection of art, occult, and poetry books — the most important impact I’ve had with stories wasn’t in a book at all. When I was a little monster, I had the hardest time falling asleep. My mother would lay with me in order for me to knock out. Most nights I couldn’t wind down, so eventually my mom started telling me bed-time stories. My favorite one, in particular, was about a little grey mouse who lived in a little grey house. She and I created a whole family for Little Grey, including his best friend Byron Brown. I can still picture the town I imagined in my head for him; I can see his favorite ice cream shop and the baseball fields Little Grey and his older brother, Fred, would practice at. The way my mom went into detail and came up with adventures meant the world to me. It helped me foster my imagination and showed me the importance of words. 

At a certain point in my childhood, I had drawn a map of Little Grey’s town. I came up with a story web on how each person in the town was related. I even started to draw pictures of Little Grey and his family. Unfortunately, the drafting of those stories into physical form never came to fruition since I could never fully remember them after a night of sleep. Yet, I will hold those memories dear in my heart. Maybe one day Little Grey’s adventures will be written again but until then I will remember to play in my imagination, use my words to tell stories or open up important conversations and remember sometimes the best stories can’t always be retold.

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

Priceless. Art has and will always be priceless, no matter the media. It tells a story. It’s a piece of history, of not only your life, but the world that once was and will be. It’s an escape, yet it is also a connection. It’s a song. It’s a smile. It’s that weird meme you came across on the internet that hits a little too close to home. Art is in everything that we do, that we speak, feel, touch, see, dream, and heck, even all of us are pieces of art too. 

This moment in history we are living in is the best time to remind society of the recognition art deserves. Let’s put pressure on those that do not recognize the impact of art and remind them that without art, they wouldn’t even be here; yes, corporations and the United States government — I am looking at you. Now is the time to use all of the medians we have at our disposal to break down those barriers, mark our history, and make our voices heard. Make our beliefs seen. Make the world remember that art is in you and me. Art is priceless.

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

To be frank, I wouldn’t still be on this planet without writing and art. As a child, I was constantly living in my imagination. I sang from the time I knew how to make noise, started drawing as soon as my parent’s felt comfortable with me to use a writing utensil, and eventually fell in love with writing and storytelling. In middle school, we did a poetry course and I was enamored by the concept of expressing oneself in word play, exaggerated sentence structures, and without even addressing the topic. Eventually, it was the only way I could cope with my mental health and I found a lot of solace in this space I had cultivated for myself. Writing had been such a private avenue for me. I only shared my pieces to those I felt like would be the most connected to the matter. 

When I moved back to Colorado after graduating high school in Illinois, poetry led me to many friendships and opportunities within the Denver community. A professor-turned-friend, Tara Shea Burke, would seek out poetry readings at Mercury Café and Book Bar while encouraging me to not only tag along for the adventure, but to also share my pieces to a live audience. It was exhilarating. Those moments are what led me to having this opportunity to be an Editor with South Broadway Press, while also having the confidence to work on my own art within my astrology work and musical collaborations with my partner. (P.S. You need to check out Tara’s work — it is phenomenal!)

What is something that matters to you?

I’ll be honest, this is the last question I answered in this interview. There are a plethora of aspects within our society and life that matter to me, yet they all result back to people. So, I would say people matter to me. People’s behaviors, stories, opinions, and truths — what makes them so incredibly human; I can’t get enough of how important all of those little tidbits are. To how they will see the world around them and with those perspectives how it will impact their actions, shape their world and mine. 

I could spend hours observing people and trying to learn their story, while taking several days speaking with them to understand the shape they hold within this universe. I want to know what has taught them to grow and what they are still healing from. I want to know what they believe in and see if their beliefs are something that could hold truth in my world. 

It’s also a pastime of mine to try and figure out people’s planet placements within their natal chart by interacting with them. Since it helps me with understanding one of my passions but it also shows me that people aren’t black and white. As stated before, they are frickin’ art and they matter even if there are obstacles in our world showing them differently.

Anything else you’d like people to know?

You can find me slingin’ cards virtually or in a small gathering of friends almost weekly to play Magic: The Gathering. I almost picked my favorite flavor text, “Your life will set with the sun”, as my quote for this interview. If I’m not casting spells, I can be found listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode while wallowing in my teenage-angst by still being 110% obsessed with My Chemical Romance. Yes, I’m crying because I miss concerts.

The Beach Ritual | Mo Lynn Stoycoff

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Image: Ryan Loughlin

The banks look like a Goodwill store
washed up, clothes everywhere

Our bodies run down to the surf
shells bubble out of the sand

Salt teeth bite at our ankles
then our labia, breasts and eyes

We are fifty-six laughing
little islands of loamy flesh

We wash up onto the sand
pink and glinting in the sun

We find our clothes, soft as homespun,
warm as August dunes of sand

Four fire-lords build a circular blaze
that sways and rises to meet us

We too rise and sway, huddled
like fur weanlings at the breast

our chests rising and falling in sync
our smiles lit up and flickering.

We raise a sunny, rubicund cone
high, high into and through the fog

We shout, laugh and cry
firelit eyes each a salty ocean

We release it with smoke into the chill air
and dissolve into dance and drums

and silent pairs, trudging up the banks
trailing bits of circle as we go.

Mo Lynn Stoycoff is a writer and visual artist whose poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Rise Up Review, The American Journal of Poetry, California Quarterly, Speckled Trout Review and many other journals and anthologies. Mo works in the performing arts and lives in Central California.

Prometheus Felled | Heather Bourbeau

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Image: David Matos

Prometheus Felled

Bristlecone twist upon twist, layer upon layer, like fingers
of the crone or braids of her mother, reaching for the sky.
Cold air, hot sun. High desert survivor

dared erosions and fires, needed only a few small strips
of bark to stay alive, outlive them all.
But 5000 years were undone in one afternoon.

We want to know, to name.
We are Machiavellian in this pursuit.
Prometheus stole fire from the gods, carried it

in giant fennel stalk, gifted it to humans.
For this, he was bound to a rock, his liver to be eagle-eaten
every day, regrow at night and be eaten again.

To understand the brain’s hemispheres, we cut the corpus collosum.
To learn the spread of virus, we cull the herd, open skulls.
To know the oldest, we bored the bark,

failed, then cut and sectioned, hauled and processed.
Counted rings, counted time. Only then did we understand
the ignorance and arrogance.

Still, we kept one slab at Ely casino, then convention center.
Respect reserved for the lab or the field, now national park
in part because scientist-cum-lumberjack pushed

to protect remaining pine, hobble the folly
of men, like him, believing they need to know,
no matter the damnation, no matter the pain.

Update: Bourbeau’s poem “Prometheus Felled” is now part of her 2023 collection of poetry, Monarch, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. You can find a copy of her book here.

Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cleaver, Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Short Édition, The Cardiff Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and Chapman University Flash Fiction winner. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.

This piece is a part of South Broadway Press’ March issue, Language of the Earth.

Suburban Garden Evicts Vegetables | Wendy BooydeGraaff

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Image: Alexander Sergienko
Peas zigzag through weeds, scaling borage instead of trellis. 
Tomatoes stagnate, grass and clover thrive, tender beets

sprout alongside dandelions tubers. Uprooting one hefty weed 
evicts the fledgling vegetables. It all grows, though the weeds 

grow best. My own roots reach back to clean plow lines and blooming 
rows: eighty acres of fruit farm plus a rectangle of Ontario’s Eden 

beside the old garage: all-you-can-eat green beans, snow peas, cherry 
tomatoes, rhubarb for pie and stewed berries over ice cream.

I grew up knowing a weed is a weed and a plant 
is sacred. Behold my upscaled quagmire—Royal Burgundy Beans, 

rainbow chard, heirloom Spanish radishes, yellow pear tomatoes—
mingled with timothy, dandelion, broadleaf plantain. A feast of colours 

descendant of rain-scented soil spread down a long laced 
table, paired with a leggy wine. Inside, I hear the garden 

call. Dillweed whispers and waves, its delicate imitation 
fern summons rusted canning rings while blue morning 

glories drown everything by mid-August.

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s poems, stories, and essays have been included in Critical Read, Not Very Quiet, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Meniscus, and elsewhere. Originally from Ontario, where she grew up on a fruit farm, she now lives in Michigan suburbia.

This piece is a selection from South Broadway Press’ March issue, Language of the Earth.

Alienor | LindaAnn Lo Schiavo

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Image: LindaAnn LoSchiavo

To unobservant eyes they seem like plants.

Long, limber stalks with out-sized bulbous heads
Could be confused with other specimens,
Especially to folks who’ve never seen
Exotics rooted in a foreign pod.

By night they leave protected flowerpots.

Exhaling oxygen, these beings fly,
Determined to reverse what climate change
Eroded by offsetting greenhouse gas
With purifying breaths, restoring trees,
And tackling global warming, ice-shelf melt.

I won’t reveal this methodology.

My job is to provide fresh nutrients ― ―
Ingredients from our rare biosphere.

Then curious balloon contraptions sail
These pods to sites that need repair and care.

Disguised as gladiator allium,
Purple florets compressed inside a round,
Attractive head, the team disperses from
Each stem ― ― a green antenna ― ― gets to work. 

Earthlings don’t know extraterrestrials

Are wise, solution oriented, pained
By man’s destruction, astral gifts blood-stained.


Night winds blow golden over what’s reclaimed
And what’s unfinished. Damaged nature won’t
Regenerate except through tender tips
Renewing fruited plains, life’s green wealth,
’til Earth rejoices in its own undeath.

Native New Yorker LindaAnn LoSchiavo, recently Poetry SuperHighway’s Poet of the Week, is a member of SFPA and The Dramatists Guild. Her poetry collections “Conflicted Excitement” [Red Wolf Editions, 2018], “Concupiscent Consumption” [Red Ferret Press, 2020], and Elgin Award nominee “A Route Obscure and Lonely”‘ [Wapshott Press, 2019] along with a contribution in “Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice”  [Macmillan in the USA, Aracne Editions in Italy]  are her latest titles.

This piece is part of South Broadway Press’ March 2021 issue, The Language of the Earth.

Editor Interviews // Brice Maiurro

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Brice Maiurro (he/him) is a poet from Earth. His work has been compiled into two collections, Stupid Flowers and Hero Victim Villain. He has been featured by The Denver Post, Boulder Weekly, Suspect Press, and Poets Reading the News. www.maiurro.co

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

What does this quote mean to you?

I think about this quote just about every day of my life. It’s so easy to get swept up in any moment into what seems so important, while those little things fly on by. Recently, I took care of a dog, a great dog, Garbanzo, while my friends were in the process of moving. I’ve never had a dog, I grew up with cats, and I was very excited. I felt like a little kid the whole time, taking him on walks, chasing him (or having him chase me) around the house, taking weekend naps curled up beside him, it was amazing. I work from home like a lot of us and analyzing business processes for a solar company felt really important until I’d look over and see Garbanzo, belly up, requesting a few good belly pats. Every day at work I told myself there was no time for me to go on a walk, but when I was watching Garbanzo, I was outside, bundled-up, several times a day and I was so happy about it.

What books have made an important impact on you and why?

Radical Dharma by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jamine Syedullah. Since I was maybe 22, the ideologies of Buddhism have always resonated with. I was raised Catholic and that didn’t stick, but Buddhism has always made sense to me. It’s a religion, or ideology, built around intentionality and compassion. There’s a lot of wiggle room to find your own way within the forests it offers you. Especially something like Zen Buddhism, that often has an attitude of “always do this… unless it doesn’t work for you!” I appreciate the grey space, but found myself plateauing in my Buddhism over the last couple years, as with American Buddhism comes a lot of white people feeling kind sitting on a yoga mat while there’s big revolutions going on outside of its doors. Radical Dharma busted open those doors for me and showed me this new beautiful intersection of anti-racism with queerness with Buddhism. That you have to take your Buddhism practice into dismantling it all.

Lama Rod’s experiences of rejecting his Christian roots really resonated with me. He found he had a lot of anger, but opted to say “this isn’t for me” rather than “let’s burn this to the ground.” Rev. angel reminded me the ideas of existing in a state of not having all the answers, and expanded my ideas of queerness beyond gender and sexuality into a larger realm of seeing how binary thinking is so pervasive in the smallest microcosms of our culture to the very large interlocking systems of oppression that we should collectively disrupt and transition to a better place. Radical Dharma reminded me that our liberation is a collective liberation and we all have to use the tools we’ve been given to work together.

What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?

I see it all as storytelling. In many ways, we all exist in silos. Storytelling is a way to peek into someone else’s silo, maybe inch their silo a little bit closer to our own. Storytelling can be a time capsule, it can be an exercise in compassion and solidarity, and I believe with the right considerations in place, it can be a therapy.

How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?

I discovered poetry almost on accident. I just was bored and found myself messing around with words. The words led to more words, which led to poetry events, which led to a larger, though far from holistic, understanding of Denver’s communities, and through all of that, I’ve been able to teach things with my words, but what I love maybe more is being the student. I’m very blessed, in considering all my privilege, that for years I’ve had the chance to be exposed to the writing and art of so many people unlike myself. That continues to challenge me.

As for my writing now, writing is best for me when it’s fun. When I’m having fun, I feel like I’m doing something well.

What is something that matters to you?

Kindness matters to me. Small gestures that set the tone of the world we deserve to gift each other. Goofiness is a virtue of mine, sincerity. Cooking matters to me. I love that cooking offers me this chance to spend time by myself in the kitchen, and then share the rewards of that time with the people near and dear to my heart. My partner, Shelsea Ochoa, matters to me. She challenges me to do more and be more, and especially to be myself more.

Four Poems | Margarita Serafimova

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Image: Paweł Czerwiński


The Witnesses

We were observing ourselves colliding
with ourselves as if in a dream,
as if on a king’s road,
with horses, with dogs, with spears,
the air tinted in red,
the age-old branches between us and the hidden stars.
We were keeping a record of proceedings.

Underneath the skin, upon which the devastating battle for tenderness
is being played out,
there is a cocoon.
In a cocoon of blood,
I am bathing –
a red egg,
a red butterfly –
in full safety
behind the curtains of the bloodfall.

Yes, I brought my shield down.
My breasts were bared, elongated.
Around my ankles, there was dust.

The roads wept.
I gave them my eyes.

Margarita Serafimova is the winner of the 2020 Tony Quagliano/ Hawai’i Council for the Humanities International Poetry Award, a 2020 Pushcart nominee and a finalist in nine other U.S. and international poetry contests. She has four collections in Bulgarian and a chapbook, “A Surgery of A Star” (Staring Problem Press, CA: https://bit.ly/3jDU793). Her digital chapbook, ‘Еn-tîm’ (Wilderness), is forthcoming by the San Francisco University Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange in 2021. A full-length collection, ‘A White Boat and Foam’, is to be published by Interstellar Flight Press in 2022. Her work appears widely, including at Nashville Review, LIT, Agenda Poetry, Poetry South, Botticelli, London Grip, Steam Ticket, Waxwing, A-Minor, Trafika Europe, Noble/ Gas, Obra/ Artifact, Great Weather for Media, Origins, Nixes Mate. Visit: shorturl.at/dgpzC.

Word Counts | Samantha Steiner

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Image: Simon Pelegrini

Fuck word counts, and fuck regret, and fuck enjoyment, and guess what? Fuck origin. That’s right, fuck origin, and fuck memory. Do you know what fuck means? A girl told me back in middle school: Fornication Under Consent of the King. She said the word was posted on the front door of every reputable home, and that it meant yes, we got the okay from our royal leader to mate, copulate, dance the horizontal polka, put the thing in the other thing. We’re sinners with a lifetime indulgence we bought in advance. We fraternize with the devil, but only according to protocol, baby.

So I say fuck word counts, and fuck regret, and fuck enjoyment, because that’s what fuck is. Fuck is enjoyment. Fuck is regret. The Fuck Word Counts. Fuck is the apology before the infraction, the permission before the play. And who is fuck for? Fuck is for the people who look like Matt Damon and Marilyn Monroe, for bodies concealed just well enough to display. Fuck is for paleness and paler-than-paleness, a certain shape of eye, a certain girth of waist, a certain functionality of limb, a certain history of genitalia. And I say fuck that.

I say fuck origin, and fuck memory, and fuck death, because fuck is a gift, and Fornication Under Consent of the King is Matt Damon in a red velvet hat and a red velvet cape, a walking blood-filled penis with a golden wand, pretending to give out fucks when in reality, he doesn’t give a fuck. I say fuck origin because fuck is origin, because before you and I were you and I, we were twinkles in the eyes of people, maybe lusty, maybe frightened, maybe willing, maybe not. I say fuck memory because fuck is memory, because no one was watching when you or I morphed from a twinkle in those eyes to a glob of cells, as the glob of cells halved and doubled into the tube that formed a mouth and an asshole, two instruments of fucking, consent of the king or not.

Fuck is one person. Fuck is two. Fuck is three. Fuck is more. Fuck is rapid addition. Fuck is no gender. Fuck is all genders. Fuck is silent. Fuck is loud. Fuck is ordinary. Fuck is occasion. Fuck is insult. Fuck is compliment. Fuck is monetized. Fuck is freely given. Fuck is hot. Fuck is cold. Fuck is chafed skin, hidden liquid, violation, ceremony. The Fuck Word counts.

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.

Problem Child | Jesse Lee Pacheco + Lillie Fischer

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Lillie Fischer is a storyteller and director. Her work explores loss, honesty, our relationship with the earth and how to reach out to our inner child. Currently she is prepping for several experimental short films on an artist commune in Northern Colorado with her husband and dog. @lilliefischer

Jesse Lee Pacheco is a Performance Artist from Denver, Colorado. Life is wonderful. Life should be positive. When it’s blown to pieces, that’s when it becomes art. @jesselee_sent_ya