The Elements
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 9 of Allegro which is the first themed edition. Poets have interpreted this in different ways: so you will find poems on weather, the elements of the periodic table, the four elements and the constituent parts of a larger whole. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Sally Long
Poems
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 9 of Allegro which is the first themed edition. Poets have interpreted this in different ways: so you will find poems on weather, the elements of the periodic table, the four elements and the constituent parts of a larger whole. I hope you enjoy reading them.
Sally Long
Poems
Neptune’s Coquette
My toes throb over
hard pebbles. Waters slip
over slim ankles. Should I stand
shivering or go swim?
Lose my footprint?
hard pebbles. Waters slip
over slim ankles. Should I stand
shivering or go swim?
Lose my footprint?
Off I run, falling over myself
a mug of salty cider. This
wave an insecure bed.
Seaweed pillow. Carried by
moon to an abyss.
The floor of my mansion is
not tidy. I shall have sponges
for lunch. Ride with seahorses
perhaps.
On the far shore, my gigantic lover
smiles, kisses of surf. We thread
soft waters while sunshine
dresses us in golden sequins.
Joan McNerney
a mug of salty cider. This
wave an insecure bed.
Seaweed pillow. Carried by
moon to an abyss.
The floor of my mansion is
not tidy. I shall have sponges
for lunch. Ride with seahorses
perhaps.
On the far shore, my gigantic lover
smiles, kisses of surf. We thread
soft waters while sunshine
dresses us in golden sequins.
Joan McNerney
Hail
Chopped icicles from
heaven; somebody's
been whacking at St.
Peter's basement. Hail
like swiss-cheese
ice-blades or transparent teeth:
bicuspids, maybe (it's
a metaphor:
forgive us sinners, Bite
me.)
Through the glass
we gaze out awestruck,
or slip furtive hands
through perforated
shelters, and get smacked
like children
immemorial (don't touch!)
but when we turn our
backs a laugh, a yelp –
And then it's over, and
we all pick out
one dagger for the
freezer.
“Normal”
wins
because it lasts
forever. Still, the man
who says hail never
made him nervous, lies
or lay down stupified.
And I for one
remember when it rained
down glitter-knives,
so may I never be there
when the sky
does more than lightly
slap us.
Kathryn Jacobs
Quality of the Day
To affect
the quality of the day,
that is the
highest of the Arts.
Henry Thoreau
The plaintive call
of mourning doves
awakens you.
Pay attention,
feel the stirring in your loins,
even though it isn’t spring.
Set your senses on fire.
You swim
out of the mindless torpor
of an estuary
into the open sea,
ready to make something
out of nothing.
In the stillness of the moment,
without trying,
just effortless effort,
the day becomes
a work of art.
Milton P. Ehrlich
Beaufort Ten
blowing
through
and kicking up
prismatic dust
it probes and
pushes past.
Sweeping on
its energy
distils and
forms
implacable
gathering
genie-like
brash and
rushing
crash and
crushing.
Tiles are
tugged
trees
t
u
m
b
l
e
fences
fall
whirling scraps
in frenzied flight
are pushed and plucked
blown and sucked until
a quiet breath sighs them down
Jack
Segal
Snow
Frieze
The shapes are barely visible.
Hints at best.
A table here. A bird bath
there.
Car roofs. Gym set slide and
ladder.
Figures with shovels flailing.
Sluggishly.
The whorling winds
Making everything curl and bend
Against form and ligature.
One cannot help wondering,
As the whiteness descends,
If it could tamp down
The world’s great angers
Emitting so much heat
But brightening up so little.
Imagine them all snuffed out,
Not even a thin steam rising.
This palest of tempests
Stopping everything cold
As it falls and drifts shamelessly
Downward and out/up,
Furies vanishing like errant thoughts,
Tempers trapped, Vesuvial, Mid-scream.
Hostilities in bas-relief,
Modern day Elgin Marbles.
Savagery becoming sculptural decoration,
An architectural chill,
A calming within the storm
Turning everything somnolent.
Quietude laying down its laws.
Immaculate pale riders obeying
Without question. The unsoiled
landscape
Glistening. Snowy silence
marching on.
Mary K O'Melveny
Problem Child in the Periodic Table of Elements
They
want
to
know
why
I
all
ways
compound matters
Cathy Warner
On Language
Poet,
Reach down deep inside yourself.
Discover what you need to write.
Unearth it.
Carve out only the essential
(nothing extraneous will do) –
only the rawest, most crucial words
that language has to offer.
Take
what seems to be yours to take.
Let it penetrate the pages.
If blood-stained mineral her content,
then you have tasted well.
Sarah
Rehfeldt
Down South
Waves of heat rise
it’s not even noon
main street is empty
yet an old yellow dog
really weaves its way
menacingly toward us
our first trip down
south
I hope that dog
isn’t rabid
and my friend hopes
we meet someone
like Atticus Finch
Sugar Tobey
A Warning Sign
“What
happened to your leg?”
Standing
in the opposite shower,
I
looked down at my thigh,
the
scabbing red gash
covered
by a clear plastic bandage.
Early
morning at the gym,
the
casual acquaintance – Mike –
making
polite conversation over
the
plash of water, the squeal of pipes.
I
explained about the biopsy,
the
melanoma, the surgery,
the
stitches and the healing.
“This
transparent film dressing
does
it all. Waterproof,
so I
can even swim, shower.
But
if it comes off,
I
just have to keep the wound
moisturized
with –”
The
word was about to tumble
effortless
as an acrobat
out
of my mouth, but
all
at once I drew a blank, stammered.
Embarrassed,
I muttered,
“Senior
moment. It’ll come back.”
But
it didn’t.
Back
at my locker, I remembered,
petroleum jelly,
scuttled
back to find Mike
shaving
at the water basin.
“Oh,
Vaseline,” he nodded,
and
it was as if my whole life depended
on
that word, on Vaseline.
Charles Rammelkamp
The Bite of Conscience
“She kept getting into
little traffic accidents,”
Lenny told Marcia at the funeral.
Lenny told Marcia at the funeral.
“That was my first
clue. Ticky-tack
little fender benders,
cockeyed
parking in the lots at
the malls,
misjudging stoplights.”
“Then came the
headaches,
the nausea, the
vomiting.
Loss of appetite.
So we went to the
doctor.
Tumor big as an egg.
They did radiosurgery
with the gamma knife,
but Hope was never the
same.
Said it was the biggest
mistake
she’d ever made, having
the surgery.”
Lenny looked like a
little boy
who’d misbehaved, a
blank innocence
in his eyes, like a
mask.
“I’m so sorry for your
loss,” Marcia murmured.
“Forty-five years of
marriage. Geez.”
But all Lenny could
remember
was losing his patience
with Hope,
bullying her about the
broken headlamp,
the twisted windshield
wjpers,
sarcasm sharp as
incisors
tearing into her brain.
Charles Rammelkamp
Flint
We still speak the
silicate language of sponges
lining the bottom of
shallow seas.
Now we’re cut into the
cold air, sliced and fractured,
knapped into arrowheads
and knives.
Time and pressure have
made us
hard and sharp.
But when we glowed
under that ancient water,
we had no use for keen
edges.
And when we spoke,
we spoke of things
alien to these woodlands:
of waves and flow, of
light and salt,
of time that never
passed, and never would.
Vivian Wagner
Coal
Swamps became me,
palm trees and ferns
pressing down into
peat,
transforming into
something darker yet:
a piece of bituminous
coal
in a roadcut by the
Cambridge Walmart.
This is the way of
rocks:
first we’re one thing,
then another,
and then a flicker of
flame in a fireplace
on a cold April
morning,
gone in a sleight of
geologic hand,
a puff of carbon, and a
whisper, finally, of water.
Vivian Wagner
Hurricanoes
Fifteen years before I heard of King Lear I walked home from a party
through a storm, daring the wind and sideways rain to stop me, clenching my
jaw, livid to the gills in a stretched-arm soaking.
Turns out I’d also lost a girl, I
kissed her in the disco the previous week, fell immediately to lovesickness,
dry-mouthed, way off the pace during 4th-form games, nights spent
praying to a God I didn’t believe in that her crowd would show and I could get
to know her name in order to get my tongue in her face again.
The late evening sun lit up the
bus across town, but by the time I saw her in the kitchen I’d had three ciders
upstairs and the sky outside was heavy as a set of black eyes.
She was sat on the stovetop
wrapped round a Mod while his Fred Perry friends stared into their vodkas and
orange squash. I remember my throat getting really hot though my body froze.
This was no place for a New Romantic. Inner chatter took over.
Tearing
up in the street I bated the wind, beckoned it over, butted it with my head for
seven miles, drove into the rain with my promontory extra-small chest, a
deposed king wailed his misfortune to the only gods present who ordained a
fever slow to subside and the next fortnight in bed. I don’t talk to the
elements these days though I often hear them whispering in my head.
Daniel Roy Connelly
Arson
Fires burned behind
every window
in my first grade
assignment to draw
a house. Fifteen suns
blazed in the sky,
and strange flowers
bloomed in the yard
where children didn’t
play. Who lives
in your house? the teacher asked me.
Nobody lives there.
Curlicues of smoke
streamed from the
multiple chimneys.
I didn’t include a door.
Someone else
might have made up a
story that included
a dramatic rescue. In
my story the fires
always burned. The why
didn’t matter. I
only knew what I saw
when I closed my eyes.
Michelle Brooks
Burning Paper
You invited our community to a
ritual,
a vespers service to explore
who I need to forgive and
who I hoped might forgive me.
Forty people came, wrongers and
wronged
into a cold chapel with sleet
tapping picture windows.
We settled. You lit a candle.
You must have read to us. Maybe
we sang.
You talked of
good-for-the-soul,
giving and asking.
That muddy confluence.
You handed out paper. We wrote
names
of those whose chains linked
with ours.
We dredged up visuals
in silence.
We folded our slips.
You collected them in a rush
basket.
Your cauldron was bronze. The
match flared. The names
whooshed in orange flames high
up the paneled wall,
we shifted in uneasiness of
seats.
If I was forgiven, I do not
know it,
how I admired that frightening
fire.
Tricia Knoll
Four Dollars’ Worth of Change
ching-changs in my coin purse.
It’s 2016.
What can I possibly buy with sixteen quarters?
Two gallons of gasoline?
One head of cauliflower?
Four Greek yogurts?
A cheap pair of socks?
Dear Lord!
I ain’t got much;
I’m just another punk
who finished grad school and can’t find a job,
but I got my feet in worn boots,
and I got daydreams in my notebook,
an option to enlist or the right to drift
and plenty of anger to protest
injustice
inequality
poverty
racism
fascism
fundamentalism
any -ism I damn well please!
So, I’ll sit cross-legged on this sidewalk
for a few hours more, mohawked and brooding,
contemplating and counting
my four dollars’ worth of change.
ching-changs in my coin purse.
It’s 2016.
What can I possibly buy with sixteen quarters?
Two gallons of gasoline?
One head of cauliflower?
Four Greek yogurts?
A cheap pair of socks?
Dear Lord!
I ain’t got much;
I’m just another punk
who finished grad school and can’t find a job,
but I got my feet in worn boots,
and I got daydreams in my notebook,
an option to enlist or the right to drift
and plenty of anger to protest
injustice
inequality
poverty
racism
fascism
fundamentalism
any -ism I damn well please!
So, I’ll sit cross-legged on this sidewalk
for a few hours more, mohawked and brooding,
contemplating and counting
my four dollars’ worth of change.
Nicole Yurcaba
The Heavy Elements
with mammoth
nuclei
last only
seconds.
Was that a
wisp
of a silvery
metal
gone in a
wink?
Ephemera in
our world,
they must be
stable
beyond our
4D cage.
Their
electron clouds
float in a
midnight vacuum
of higher
dimensions
where the
periodic table
never ends.
Linda Neuer
White Wedding
We all came to Willa’s
white wedding,
just what she’d prayed
for, fresh snow
on the holy ground, the
church bathed
in light as my
white-haired sister
met her balding groom
at the altar.
The Reverend welcomed
me back,
asked all the Trues for
donations,
He did the marrying. I
did the rings,
and placed her
trembling hand
in the hand of her
retired fly-boy.
Their vows were
few. They love one
another and won’t miss
the lonely art
of making do on a
single income,
Tom in his WW2 digs at
the air base.
Willa in her attic room
up two flights.
Tomorrow they will
purchase a cottage
with one step in front
and two steps
down from the deck in
back, then buy
a king-sized bed, a
dining room table,
a stove, groceries, and
a jug of wine.
Norman Klein
Chased In
Eight twenty’s choking
whistle says
“Train’s late, track
needs work.”
Years ago she’d have
forty cars
on time running full
throttle.
Today nine half-empty
cars
clank and rattle on old
track.
Next to the track is
the river,
its geese gone, its banks
gouged,
its upturned tree roots
looking
on as the iron-stained
river
churns up muddy blood
beneath brick-thick
ice.
Here I sit on the edge
of March
chased in by a
ten-below wind,
an old man worrying his
train,
burning wood as he
waits on
a fickle sun to find
its way
to his fields, and his
river.
Norman Klein
March
Morning
A hat on a black spiked
fence.
A bus
blessing waiting passengers
with yesterday’s slush.
A woman shaking her
umbrella
at the ladder truck
inching
back into its fire
house.
A black dog walking its
old man as ship-thick
fog
smothers the horizon.
A taxi waiting for
metal rain
or soot snow.
All of us locked in the
lull
of today awaiting
the drift of tomorrow.
Norman Klein
Letters from Home
Dear V—
How quickly meaning
drains from the mind and with it words.
I reach for
reasons…Maybe life is about water, I tell my heart,
passing the frozen
lake, the mountain, the hairpin turn.
Transformations of
water, I like that. We harden, melt and stream,
we become clouds, and
rain.
Today trees wear long
strands of bead pearls, ice-lace
on the branches. The
lake is dusted with snow over black ice,
a checkerboard from
shore to shore, the swans flown
into wooden frames.
Images in the cold
glass: pipe and shoe polish – my father.
His fragrant smoke
coming upstairs from the den, with its knotty-pine walls,
the one room he
built…around himself.
The other day, G
polished my boots and I felt little again, husband as father…
Our friend always
speaks about being a mother.
But if life is water,
all identities dissolve. Keats said, “I am one
whose name is writ on
water.” Don’t you feel that?
Even our name ripples,
the letters little specks of light
re-combining, floating,
making for the opposite shore.
Or, shoreless, moving out
and back in rings. “Circumference
is my business,” wrote
Emily Dickinson. What would it be like for us
to stay at home – and
flow from that certain center?
Write soon, and tell me
how you’re settling in.
G & I wish you well
in your new home ~
Love,
P
Patrice Pinette
Yelm (In alchemy, substance from which the elements developed)
The fig’s fine seeds.
Bees bluster from tree to tree taking each essence
to make a single unit
of honey. The magazine says that not
wearing
a bra builds muscle, so
I droop. We pick antique mason jars, put
in
white tea lights, screw
them tight, learning how to stay married inside
of lapse. In hiatus. In the
season of white petals that flank the wind,
whist-clusters that
smell like cat-piss, spackle the gravel, tiny hoarders
of beauty. Dazed. Seeded. I stand in the drive, globe petals in
my hair.
Feeling for walls of
glass. Salt in a dip of water. Lit.
Megan Merchant:
Golden Buddha
When I found you in Bangkok,
you were lying on your side
on a marble platform in a Buddhist temple.
Your form covered in solid gold sheets,
and you, solid, golden.
21-carats at least. Maybe more.
I strolled in front of you for an hour
and behind you for another.
You, gargantuan, massive,
two hours long, front and back.
You seemed tranquil.
I wanted to be like you,
just as tranquil.
I want to be like you, still.
Solid. Golden. Tranquil.
I looked for you for twenty years,
but found nothing,
no image, no words,
found you only in my memory.
Sayeeda T Ahmad
Six Things I Can Say about a Lump of Gold
1. I went with my
brother Stephen, a photographer, to a gold mine and mill in Marmato,
Colombia. There we spent two days and saw a pile of rock and mud as
high as a one story building get crushed, sluiced, sifted, heated, cooled,
burned with acid and toasted into a lump of gold, the size of the end of my
thumb. It shone in the miner’s palm as Stephen took its
picture.
2. Element: Gold
Symbol: Au
Atomic Number: 79
Atomic Mass:
196.96655 amu
3.
Gold mask in a
shallow earthen tomb, death mask
It holds the tiny
toenail hammer marks
Of ancient smith,
commissioned in a long-gone
Court. With
grief or rage did they the mask construct,
As we feel grief or
rage at funerals?
The mask still
speaks, but cannot tell
If what it says is
anything the same.
4.
At the restaurant
Côte in New York City, you can order a chocolate cake with shaved gold on
top. You can eat the gold. It’s totally inert, so
it passes right through. How many people died for that lump
of shit?
5.
On the grey wood
porch
A laughing girl points to the
Golden sunset
line.
6.
In safe deposit
1348,
Of the Cambridge
Trust bank, Harvard Square branch
There is a shallow
felt tray, red. In the tray,
There is a gold
coin cast in Ancient Rome,
Patrimony from my
mother’s father,
A profile of a
woman on the coin.
There is a tendril
of hair on the woman’s neck.
The tendril shifts
in the breeze from the ceiling fan.
Elizabeth Ferry
The Earth split open
The Earth split open
and everything disappeared:
The water boiling for tea on the stove,
a man tying his shoelaces,
siblings arguing around a toy,
a cyclist crossing the street,
a mountaineer planting the spike into the icy slope.
Millions of human moments stopped and
devoured.
The beams and debris exposed
like open fractures,
that won’t heal for years, maybe lifetime.
People who can neither count, nor bury
all the lost ones.
Numbers are faceless, boggling statistics,
but they do not hang from the chain
around the ankles of those who still walk.
Mothers and daughters, sons and fathers,
friends and neighbours
- they will keep pulling
from the other end,
and it will be hard to let them go.
The Earth split open like a dragon
burning and tearing powerfully, monstrously .
The cavity of the flesh, still breathing and trembling,
twitching wounded, sensitive to touch.
I don’t care about the numbers,
they don’t mean anything to me,
as one is already too many.
Natasha Boskic
at Dylan’s Shed
for Mab Jones
badgers aplenty
snuffle through cliff-top garden
sniffing out apples
capsized snail sways
on spiral keel atop fencepost
tumbles into brambles — safe
heron’s descendent
still priests Taf’s estuary
stands solitary in sand
but for seagull altar-boy
silent liturgist
shoreline’s sole officiant
while poets prattle
whole families
tear up their passports
buy Syrian fakes
escape through cornfields
shall I say
I would wait my turn
in camps turned jails
among the wretched of the earth?
bad badgers & rats
pilfer sweet apples — foxes
& seagulls watch
across the
Taf: ‘church
the size of a
snail protrudes
its horns’ — not
‘through mist’:
the day is clear
dry bright and
illumines broad ‘sea wet’ sands
Helen May Williams
Alchemy
What roaring gales
yanked us by the roots,
what magnetic fields
pushed us along
latitudinal lines,
what witchcraft
stirred up
this
strange alchemy
of you and me—
a curious confluence
sloshing together
like borscht and
bourbon.
Natasha Garrett
Sun Veneration
I am no match
for my beach neighbors
in camping chair pews.
I don’t know the words
to their gentle hymns,
the taste of bread and
wine
on their table.
All I can offer
to the hazy August sun
is my own slick,
darkened body
prostrate on the warm
sand,
soft palms turned
upwards
as if welcoming a gift
from above.
Natasha Garrett
Ignis Semina
“The world in sunlit
half-sleep is a film of fire.”--Fred Chappell
Sunup. Your arms
around me, lips
against my chest. The
sun
sneaks in around the
edges,
yet does not penetrate.
I kiss your hair,
breathe lilacs
and hundred-six-degree
sweat, yesterday's salt
and flowers. Your hand
shifts,
touches the inside of
my elbow.
You wrap around me
tighter.
Every thought is
hardening fire.
Robert Beveridge
Stone cutter
He reads the veins
of granite like a map
then hefts the rock
onto the stone table’s
sand cutting bed.
His left hand steadies
the block, his eyes
make sure where a blow
should land, and with a deft
strike, the heavy hammer
cleaves off a shard with a spark.
Hands worn and cracked
by abrasion and lime
reposition the stone.
Again his eyes search out
the hidden line,
and the hammer falls
to facet a rock.
Stone after stone,
shaped to interlock,
wear down his fingers
to calloused claws.
As stone chips pile
at his feet, sweat
darkens the rock.
Wall after wall,
sandstone, limestone,
field stone, ledge rock,
each a different look
held by hard hands,
unlocked by eyes
seeking a hidden face.
Eric
Chiles
El Niño,
your warm breath,
fragrant with yarrow and salt -
beguiling these white
apple blossoms
into early bloom - defying
frost - and the uncertainty
of any other spring -
M.S. Rooney
Contributors
Sayeeda T Ahmad is a writer, poet, graduate of the MA in
English – Creative Writing program at the University of Northern Iowa, and a
winner of the Selina Terry Poetry Award and Muse Masters Season 2 Performance
Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in Inner Weather, The Daily Star, ditch, Stone’s Throw Magazine,
monsoonletters, Six Season's Review, Arts and Letters of Dhaka
Tribune, Wasafiri, and by Safina
Radio Project.
Robert Beveridge makes
noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland, OH.
Recent/upcoming appearances in Chiron
Review, Riverrun, and Third Wednesday,
among others.
Michelle Brooks has published a collection of poetry, Make Yourself Small, (Backwaters Press), and a novella, Dead Girl, Live Boy, (Storylandia
Press). A native Texan, she has spent much of her adult life in Detroit, her
favorite city.
Daniel Roy Connelly's poetry is widely published online and in print. He was the
winner of the 2014 Fermoy International Poetry Festival Prize, a finalist in
the 2015 Aesthetica Magazine Creative
Writing Prize and winner of the 2015 Cuirt
New Writing Prize for poetry. His recent work has been published by The North, The Transnational (in
German), Ink, Sweat and Tears and is
forthcoming in Acumen and on Uncle Vanya in Critical Survey. He is a
professor of creative writing, English and theatre at John Cabot University and
The American University of Rome. www.danielroyconnelly.com
Elizabeth Ferry is an anthropologist and teacher. She lives in Brookline, MA with her husband, two sons, father, dog, and snake.
Natasha Garrett writes poetry and personal essays. A native of Macedonia, she lives in Pittsburgh, PA.
Kathryn Jacobs is a poet, a medievalist, a professor at Texas A
& M – C and Editor of The Road Not Taken. Her latest book, Wedged
Elephant, was published last year by Kelsay Press. Previous books (6)
include In Transit (David Roberts Books) and Marriage Contracts from
Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage (University Press of Florida. Along the
way she has published over 200 books and 16 articles.
Norman Klein has
published 50+ poems while teaching in Boston then Chicago, and now braves the
elements in the back woods of NH.
Megan Merchant is a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems have most recently appeared in publications including Red Paint Hill, Rat’s Ass Review, Mothers Always Write, Crack the Spine and First Literary Review East. Her poem, “Filling Station God” won the Las Vegas Poets Prize, judged by Tony Hoagland. Her second full-length collection, The Dark’s Humming was the winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). She is also the author of three chapbooks: Translucent, sealed. (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), In the Rooms of a Tiny House (ELJ Publications, October 2016), and Unspeakable Light (Throwback Books, 2016). Gravel Ghosts is her debut full-length poetry collection through Glass Lyre Press. She also has a children’s book forthcoming through Philomel Books. You can find her work at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.
Linda Neuer is from Miami, Florida. Recently, some of her poems have been published in Jupiter, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Tattoo Highway, Lily, Sangam, Abyss and Apex, and Astropoetica.
Mary K O'Melveny is a retired labor rights attorney. She lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY. Her work has been published or accepted for publication in various journals, including Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, The Write Place at the Write Time and Flagler Review. She is a member of an established women's writing group, "Writing Gals," based in New York's Hudson Valley.
Patrice Pinette is a
teacher and tutor living in New Hampshire, loves writing with teenagers, leads
workshops for adults, and is an adjunct at Antioch University New England. She
received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Inspired by
alchemy between the arts, Patrice dances poems, and creates poetry pastels
exhibited with the Visual Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review; The
Inflectionist Review; Connecticut River Review; Northern New England Review;
Adanna; Poetica; Evening Street Review; Smoky Quartz, and New Hampshire Poets Showcase, among
others.
Sarah Rehfeldt lives with her family in western Washington where she is a writer, artist, and photographer. Her poems have appeared in Appalachia; Weber – The Contemporary West; Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction; and Kaleidoscope. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart prize in poetry. Sarah is the author of Somewhere South of Pegasus, a collection of image poems. It can be purchased through her photography web pages at www.pbase.com/candanceski
Jack Segal is retired from a varied and fulfilling career in electronics, in the course of which he has travelled to more than 25 countries. He has since completed a creative writing degree covering most genres, but poetry is his first love. He is married, has two children and lives on the Isle of Wight.
Sugar Tobey was born and raised in Brooklyn New York. Currently resides in Manhattan's East Village . Enjoys telling stories about growing up, living, and working in New York.
Vivian Wagner is an
associate professor of English at Muskingum University in New Concord, Ohio.
Her work has appeared in McSweeney's
Internet Tendency, Silk Road Review, Creative Nonfiction, Narratively, and The
Ilanot Review, and she's the author of Fiddle:
One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music.
Helen May Williams is
Associate Fellow at The University of Warwick. Her poetry appears in Envoi, Hearing Voices, Horizon, Raw Edge,
Roundyhouse, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Three drops from a
Cauldron, Allegro, Envoi, Haiku Journal, Bluebeard’s Wives (2007), This Body I Live In (2015) and Samhain 2015 (2015). ). Her chapbook, The
Princess of Vix is due for publication by Three Drops Press in January
2017.
https://helenmaywilliams.wordpress.com/
https://helenmaywilliams.wordpress.com/
