Poetry Winter 2020 fiction all issues
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Paula Reed Nancarrow
Morning Coffee
& other poems
Jill Burkey
Mala
& other poems
Oak Morse
Boys Born out of Blues
& other poems
Beatrix Bondor
Engine Ode
& other poems
Monique Jonath
a mi sheberach
& other poems
Lisa Rachel Apple
Bounty
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Human Condition
& other poems
Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik
and we are echoes
& other poems
Devon Bohm
Forgiveness
& other poems
Jeddie Sophronius
I Rest My Mother Tongue
& other poems
John Delaney
Poem as Map
& other poems
Elizabeth Bayou-Grace
Fire in Paradise
& other poems
Monaye
In Utero
& other poems
Michelle Lerner
Ode to Exhaustion
& other poems
William French
I Have Never Been
& other poems
Josiah Patterson Wheatley
Coeur de Fleurs
& other poems
Karo Ska
womb song
& other poems
Robyn Joy
Sisyphus
& other poems
Han Raschka
Love Language
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
The Memory in My Pinky
& other poems
Gilaine Fiezmont
Europe, too, Came from Somewhere Else
& other poems
Scott Ruescher
At the Childhood Home of Ozzy Osbourne
& other poems
Emily R. Daniel
Visitation Dreams
& other poems
Lindsay Gioffre
Toxicodendron Radicans [Sonnet 1]
& other poems
John Delaney
Poem as Map
For Connie Brown
Some make a maze in a cornfield
that you mosey through, past dead ends
and detours, to the finish line.
Others carve a circle round an apple,
so you return where you started,
but having peeled the rich rind off.
I see it as a map you’ve been given—
with thematic key and compass bearings,
bold and shaded colors—arrows pointing
to a destination, with background music.
I want you to feel the topography
of my thinking, its scale and gradients.
Just follow directions and don’t get lost.
I hope your questions will be answered there.
Let Me Tell You What I Think
We’ll never live up to our potential.
It always comes down to greed.
And jealousy. Even lazy yoga.
What life lets you get away with.
Our actions peddle pet philosophies
around the pedestals of statued principles.
Your modus operandi
becomes your raison d’être.
We’ll never be more than apprentices
in Nature’s beauty salons or fabrication shops.
Oglers. Idlers. Hourly help.
You’ll be lucky to get a foot in the door
or out of your mouth. We’ll never learn.
Now, your turn.
Continental Divide
When we divvied up our lifetime
together, you got the furniture;
I took some rare books and vintage maps.
You kept your family’s Indonesian trunk;
I, my mother’s Yankee mantel clock.
All in all, we split it down the middle,
after discarding all the junk
we had collected to outfit the years.
There were plenty of good memories,
handfuls, in fact, to cushion the boxes.
Yesterday, in the Subaru burro,
I crossed the Continental Divide,
where, as you know, water is pulled
either east or west. Even tears.
To the End
It’s good to get to the end of things—
the spit of land that brings
you to the shore.
The rounded cul-de-sac
that turns you back.
To close the book on the last page,
and reach that age
when everything has gone before,
when present tense accents the past.
In the days’ roll call, to listen last
for your name. To have the last word.
No regrets, wondering if there’s more,
when you’ve seen and heard
it all.
Elwha
Olympic National Park, Washington
It begins where I can’t see
and ends where I don’t know:
I witness its esprit
de corps between beach sand and mountain snow.
I watch the water flee
over rocks in the riverbed,
dragging logs and debris,
flushed from its system like bones of the dead,
and then, once it’s free
to revive both in rage and repose
its former identity
and purpose for the rest of time, it shows
how to bring, in magnificent motion,
the blue of the sky to the ocean.
The river was the subject of the greatest dam-removal project in U.S. history.
John Delaney
In 2016, I moved out to Port Townsend, WA, after retiring as curator of historic maps at Princeton University. I’ve traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and am addicted to kayaking and hiking. In 2017, I published Waypoints (Pleasure Boat Studio, Seattle), a collection of place poems. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, appeared in 2019 from Finishing Line Press.