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Mantic author Maureen Alsop and Joshua Gottlieb-Miller, winner of the 2012 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, paired up to create this piece of poetic splendor, “Cloud,” via A-Minor Magazine. Thanks, all!
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D., is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Mantic and Apparition Wren, and several chapbooks. Maureen is an associate poetry editor for the online journal Poemeleon and Inlandia: A Literary Journal. She presently leads a creative writing workshop for the Inlandia Institute/Poets & Writers, and the Rooster Moans. Collaborative poems with poet, Joshua Gottlieb-Miller have recently appeared on Verse Daily, Contrary, Inertia, and Switchback. http://www.maureenalsop.com
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the winner of the 2012 Indiana Review Poetry Prize. He lives in Madison, WI, where he works as a writing center coordinator and grocer, and volunteers with the Writers in Prisons Project at Oakhill Correctional Institution.
M E D I A T I O N S O N P E R S P E C T I V E by Matthew Zingg
Because the sky was wax paper the planes were
flies stuck in their holding patterns.
From a few thousand feet downtown must seem
like something a man
could carve into a walnut shell.
It was just one of those days.
On the rooftop again a couple of dumb Lowells
in our hungover pajamas wagging two dollar
egg salad sandwiches
above our heads like late minute commandments.
You said: the city was wearing its clearest uniform.
I said: the brow of the park looked
scabrous and fresh
in its Sunday best, the air a shade
of yellow easiest to forget.
It was a game we played—to see how far the other
could take all this acreage.
A balloon lifts up a couple blocks away
and it means an explosion, a portent
or it means a slow eye. In other words
there is nowhere else to go up here, stretched
thin as we are
across this autumn afternoon.
Matthew Zingg‘s work can be found in The Paris-American, The Awl, Blackbird, Cider Press Review, HTML Giant, The Madison Review, Birdfeast, The Rumpus, Everyday Genius, and Muzzle, among others. He lives in Baltimore where he hosts the Federal Dust Reading Series.
Friend, they’re on their way to tell you that the poem you’ve been carrying is no longer your love poem. She’s said, “If another boy comes along, I’m going to kiss him,” and they’ve stamped it all official. There’s no time for an ode to the time you touched her hair in a store window, an elegy for the morning she found your necklace splayed softly in the dirt. She’s working on a little something about boxes and boxes and empty tractor trailers, about the widest river on your favorite continent and the shortest song you’ve ever heard. There are lines about several evenings where the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing in America. That poem, like most poems you loved, is useless. I’ve only come to tell you that I know how you are feeling, and it doesn’t matter. You need to take a long swig of something now. You need to get the hell out of here.
Sarah Carson was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and now lives in Chicago with her dog, Amos. She is the author of three chapbooks, “Before Onstar” (Etched Press, 2010), “Twenty-Two” (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and “When You Leave” (H_NGM_N, 2012). Sometimes she blogs at sarahamycarson.wordpress.com.
From “Solitude Must Share My Solitude” by Pia Aliperti
A fixed fire
a quiet, collected aspect.
Now for the hitch in the storm.
Fix your hair
bathe your face,
white-walled life.
I would then be your mistress.
Pia Aliperti holds an MFA from The New School. Her poems and reviews have appeared recently in Rattle, The Best American Poetry blog, H_NGM_N, and Publishers Weekly.
The only way to win
is to rent a bulldozer
file a construction permit
learn how to operate
a bulldozer.
Don’t be a sore loser.
Trace the thought
back to the beginning.
The bus is late, again
but it’s here. It’s just you
and the driver.
His ringtone is that
Ennio Morricone song.
You know the one.
He has to use his hands.
He says, “Who is this?”
Then, “Oh, good morning.”
Andrew James Weatherhead holds a degree in Neuroscience from NYU, an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and is an Eagle Scout. His website is www.andrewweatherhead.org.
How To Keep Clean When The World Around You Is Going To Shit
by Travis Macdonald
Spoiler alert: there’s no secret meaning asleep beneath
every single love story. The human mouth contains
about 20 billion bacterium breeding
endlessly. Generations live and die in the grip
of your indigenous indigestion. Meanwhile we are still
killing the buffalo but with birth control
darts and BBQ sauce instead of bullets. Same dark hunger, different
villains in the seed vault stealing meals. It doesn’t take
Monsanto stock or an advanced degree to see we’re sinking in
iceberg sweat and high-speed propaganda bandwidths. You can get a PhD in pretty
much anything. Adieu
to you, dear country club bar mitzvah season. We miss
your microbe exchange rate slow dance doubling. With every chaperone slap
the effects of your affection hardened
into hidden tissues and hand-me-down zippers. Overstimulated
economic indicators of the apocalypse beware: This is the moment
where we begin to build our intimacy into a big brand name.
Travis Macdonald is a copywriter by day, editor by night and a poet in between. He is the author of two full-length collections (The O Mission Repo [vol. 1] and N7ostradamus) as well as several chapbooks. With his wife, JenMarie Macdonald, he publishes Fact-Simile Editions, a micropress dedicated to the creation of handmade contemporary poetic artifacts from recycled or reclaimed materials.
Last Thursday night, Augury board and friends kicked back over a few pints with the good people of Phoenix Park in New York.
Drink specials, a book sale (thank you all!), and hours of good conversation later, we were already speculating about turning this into a fine, lasting tradition.
Thanks to everyone (esp. David Joel Friedman, Viv for her Shriners fez and Phrenology bust, and Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography for the wonderful pics) for joining the party, lifting a beverage, and building your book collection. Won’t be long until we have two more to add to it ….
Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is originally from Atlanta, GA, and works as an artist and freelance editor in St. Louis, MO, where she co-curates the Observable Readings series. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems have appeared AGNI (forthcoming), Verse, Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Cimarron Review,Fence, and Verse Daily, among others. Stephanie is a compulsive baker and also very handy with a pitchfork. “Childproofing” previously appeared in Delmar.
Today I sat at my desk. Moved
a few books around. Thought of my demise.
Wrote a letter to a friend’s mother
thanking her for the Longfellow;
she’d heard I was a poet and naturally assumed.
I ate when my body said eat.
I drank water – cold and slick
it slipped down my throat.
I waited for the mailman
to walk up the steps. I heard his start
and stop, the lift and lowering
of the lid, the sharp turn of his boots
on dry leaves. I waited and he came.
I listened and he left. He and I
and the crows and the UPS man
and the kid down the street with the basketball
are all figures moved by instinct and need,
obligation, desire, and boredom. But I digress.
I picked the glass up, set the glass down,
stood up, walked the floor, looked out the window,
cursed the grass, and thought, thought, thought.
– never fully dormant, never fully engaged.
And all the while this is what the sign around my neck said: If it rattles like a person than it is a person.
Tina Schumann’s work was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Tupelo Press listed her full manuscript as a “remarkable work,” in their 2012 open submission period. Her chapbook “As If” (Split Oak Press) was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for 2010 and in 2011 her work received a Pushcart nomination.She holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies including The American Poetry Journal, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, Harpur Palate, PALABRA, PARABOLA, Poemeleon, Raven Chronicles, San Pedro River Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.
