A little Poland of Yiddish candlesticks,
bread and honey, apple slice and
omen, Lipton in a clear glass
mug, indisputable as cotton
slippers scratching out
half-erased ceremonies from
a floor that grunts like America
(a Mediterranean drained
of accordion
and starlight)

Caravans of matzoh and salt haul
pads of butter in a rain of fingertip and piano.

I never learned the language
of these things
the language of all
that’s left

________

S. Preston Duncan is a death doula, BBQist, and spiritual mutt (read: half Ashkenazi/half Americana music) in rural orbit around Richmond, Virginia. He is author of the short book and EP, The Sound in This Time of Being (BIG WRK, 2020). His work has been commissioned by The Peace Studio for their 100 Offerings of Peace project, recently appeared in The New Southern Fugitives, Atlas + Alice, Levee Magazine, Circle Show, and been translated into Chinese by Poetry Lab Shanghai.

it’s been a year since he died
since i scalded dishes thanked well-wishers
returned to work a year

and nights still conjure death-mares
spin nooses from tumorous bowel loops
turn doctors to jesters   a year

of their cackling circling my bed
until i soak sheets, compress to a fetal curl
a year a year   but each morning

mercury rises and death-restless
i wash wrap up in patchwork and return
to this vigil, this prayer to solid things:

dear studio he anointed with whiskey and oil
dear bench he soldered of oxidized iron
dear adobe  dear window  dear wall

make me yours: pine resin clay straw
bring him to me—bring him home
or make me wood and stone

________

Amy Karon’s poetry has appeared in Kahini, Cricket, Eastern Iowa Review, Claw & Blossom, Half Mystic, Caesura, Lagan, BALLOONS Lit. Journal, and elsewhere. She is also a medical writer. She lives in rural Washington with her spouse and seven ducks.

Amen as we gather beneath the mantle of delicatessen where
the Marx Brothers held court in kippered herring barrels and I’ll have
what she’s having—a Danny Rose Special with marinara and cream
cheese.   I scratch at the exfoliation of past before artisanal was deemed
artisanal,  when his buckling linoleum and commas of grease tagged
foot-tall mountains of tender pastrami or humps of chopped liver
that bedded down with flirty romaine.  How to surf these orbits
of memory that spin the halo of my vegan constellation.  I am now
a distant galaxy away from splayed portions of smoked and salty flesh—
this fluorescent-bulbous moon where fat was prized and murder thrived—
thick display cases of bulging fish eyes and cow tongues moaning.
His deli was a movie set with perfect portions of schmaltz—dried
scraps of corned beef in ellipses around the slicer blade—dust balls
in the laps of empty front windows—a porcelain cityscape of plates
piled high on a steel counter—formica tables with just the right amount
of fade.  I ain’t kvetching about this concerto of tradition, this immigrant
fusion food I devoured gleefully on Sundays, ignorant of my people’s ruse
of secret no-pork sausages during the Inquisition or the thin and sour
rutabaga soup of Auschwitz.  What sandwich would they name after me now?
A feeble union of smoked carrot lox and pureed cashew shmear
with a Mogen David martini to wash it all down?

________

Rikki Santer’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications both nationally and abroad including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East,  The Journal of American Poetry, Hotel Amerika, Crab Orchard Review, Grimm, Slipstream and The Main Street Rag.  Her work has received many honors including five Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.   Her eighth collection, Drop Jaw, inspired by the art of ventriloquism, was published by NightBallet Press in the spring. Please contact her through her website:   www.rikkisanter.com

Later, in America

In New Hampshire, my grandmother tried to tell a French-Canadian nurse
they’d wait until the circumcision to name him.

So when my father, Nathan, applied for his first passport, he discovered
he officially began as Later. Funny for a man always at the airport early.

His mother’s English never prospered.
Her lips would not surrender to its shapes.

She’d been born Yiddish, syllables coating her tongue like milk,
the way first language bears us—sometimes across an ocean.

Yiddish was her Old-New World, where life muttered, shouted, sang,
and begged and wailed and whispered.

When she quizzed her children about their Boston shul.
When she mourned the sounds or klangen of a shtetl street.

Her sons and daughters refused to speak
their American thoughts to her in Yiddish.

I waited too long to ask. Absence cannot answer.
But finally I have learned the words: far vos? Why?

Yiddish Cento*

It is always about bread and death.
A person can forget everything but eating.
Better an egg today than an ox tomorrow.
Better one friend with a dish of food than a hundred with a sigh.

He who has not tasted the bitter does not understand the sweet.
All is not butter that comes from a cow.
Only in dreams are carrots as big as bears.
If you can’t endure the bad, you will not live to witness the good.

A man should stay alive if only out of curiosity.
He should laugh with the lizards.
Laughter is heard farther than weeping.
If you’re fated to drown, you will drown in a spoonful of water.

Man begins in dust and ends in dust—
meanwhile, it’s good to drink some vodka.
Enjoy life—you can always commit suicide later.
If you’re going to eat pork, get it all over your beard.

*all the lines in this poem are Yiddish sayings

________

Susan Cohen‘s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology, the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, the Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Her second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize. She lives in Berkeley, where she is finally learning Yiddish.

my speech has been dragged through the mud
bashed up a brick wall, and watched itself
tumble into a katrillion pieces
my speech has been scalded and plucked
nip-tucked and given no pardons
my speech has longed for thunder to strike it
it has whimpered in the school bathroom
it has sealed itself up on the bus ride home

my speech has been passed over and picked over
been denied and made a scapegoat
my speech has been demoralized and left to fend for itself
and family ain’t no type of help
auntie on the side hollering
for your age, for your age
you can’t talk worth a damn

my speech has been warned, it has been duck-tapped
scurried under a table, hosed down and asked to be numb
my speech has been posted on a least wanted board
my speech has tried to hide in the trees,
tried to blend in with the air
my speech has played with knives
it has been tossed into the river
it has swam up river,
my speech has disciplined itself
pushed with every cell in its body
my speech almost saw the north star
but it always seems to plummet right back down

my speech has been made into a clown
it has had to fight off jokesters
it has had to fight off bad dreams
my speech has had dreams of hearses
it almost called 911,
it almost strangled itself with an extension cord
my speech has had maggots eat through it
my speech has been destituted and polluted
my speech has seen satan and the kidnapped boy
in the back of his basement

my speech has never found any four-leaf clovers
it has never taken its shoes off
my speech has never been able to come face to face with the mirror
it has never been able to find gold within itself
my speech has never been given any dignity
but all sorts of doubt
my speech knows all the doors to pain
and auntie still on the side hollering
for your age, for your age

__________

Poet and theater instructor Oak Morse was born and raised in Georgia. He was the winner of the 2017 Magpie Award for Poetry in Pulp Literature as well as a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Awarded the 2017 Hambidge Residency, Oak’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Menacing Hedge, Nonconformist Mag, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. Oak has a B.A. in Journalism from Georgia State University and he currently lives in Houston, Texas where he teaches creative writing and performance and leads a youth poetry troop, The Phoenix Fire-Spitters. (@oak.morse)

The day does not end and so the ghosts come out in daylight
nothing supernatural about them, just a part of the landscape
where the herons pick their twig feet up and place them down
where the albino reindeer is perpetually catching up to the herd
and shadows rest in sunsets for hours staging mosquito ballets
the ghosts need a vacation and the mosquitoes don’t bite them
and if someone is awake on the lake at three am so be it then
it is so quiet nobody will be afraid the sun stays in the sky
for weeks and you are telling me ghosts are strange the wind

ascends into the sky and vanishes without exhaling you say
the witching hour of the ox the wee black mass the dark dark
I pass through the trees to the palm of the lake. Tuula weeds.
Later, coffee. My grandmother stands on the shore wearing red
lipstick, corals and amber. She holds hands with her favorite
brother, squints. Two sheep run up to the bank and I trail them
with my eyes. When I look back she’s moved behind a birch or
stone or sunray. I bend down to eat last year’s whortleberries.
My body remembers that somewhere else it may have been grieving.

__________

Mariya (Masha) Deykute is a Russian-American poet and translator. She is a graduate of the UMass: Boston MFA program and currently teaches rhetoric and creative writing in Nur Sultan, Kazakhstan. Mostly, she writes about the wilderness that exists inside and alongside all of us.

Dream Disaster #1

Hunting for moods
Is trending in a dark spectrum
Coal and pesticides
Were the last thing
They had too much
Time to decide
So picked everything
Deliveries Mon-Fri made the streets unbearable
She put on sheer netting over her custom black latex
He picked up his small dog and put it in a bag
To get on the train
Heroin chic had its moment
And here we are
A protest vaguely stirs the conscience
Of a construction site
Hanging homemade flags
The plant rose like a steampunk Oz
Surrounded by shanty towns
It’s been pointed out that crime is expected
In such close quarters
TB the second cause of death
By an infectious disease
But its romanticized qualities have dissipated
Infections during the most superstitious ages
Gave rise to the appealing myth of vampires
And their associated fetishes
Pale skin and drastic vitamin deficiencies
My dream disaster
Involves an accidental poisoning
And its subsequent hallucinations
Wearing my viscera as a shimmering suit
As I lead an army of service industry workers
To an early retirement overseas
In Bhopal for instance on a certain night
Only the poor have paid for
By spiting themselves further
Or through the five mysterious days
Of the Great Smog of London
Which peeled away the veneer
Of miraculous post-war industries
The numbers like the bodies
Don’t add up to anything more
Than just more numbers and bodies
Remember Segways and edible shirts
They seem to be part of it as well
As we move up and around expanding worlds
Burning tires and immolating monks
Mixing metaphors at a cyanide cocktail party
Cutting and re-cutting what was already finished
A cold war of the unverified heating up

Infinite Duration

              Or

Textbook Modernism

It begins with the construction of a set
Nothing is its appropriate color
Anything can happen
A market crash may cause
The production to fold
And things will remain this way indefinitely
A human-sized playground for mice
Undisturbed lounging for flies
A hastily attached light crashes down
Onto a table that has no chance
After a time a new idea might take hold
And is laid over the existing foundation
Everything down to the handles
On the cabinets is painted
In a single camouflage pattern
The players in monotone bodysuits
Fresh from Hamlet’s overbearing speech
Destroy each other emotionally
In crude remarks without basis
The raw head of pig is delivered
By a young man in a rental tuxedo
A refugee from a reception
Who recites the menu of the last supper
Of the lord of a mansion in Surrey
In the middle or late 1800s
Right before he died of an embolism
The pale fellow is given a tip and departs
Next to the brutal reviews of this fiasco
In a national newspaper
There’s an ad for an air freshener
A rosy-skinned person
In a mountain setting inhaling deeply
Puffing out their chest in a plaid shirt
It’s all too much and you wish
None of it felt familiar
We’ve worn out our welcome
But that’s part of the routine
And the test audience agrees
And it all goes from there
Your jowls dragging like someone else’s knuckles
Until the next thing picks you up
Or fondles you into a new excitement

________

Armando Jaramillo Garcia was born in Colombia and currently resides in New York City. His first book of poems is The Portable Man (Prelude Book, 2017). His work has appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, TAGVVERK, Prelude, Pinwheel, TYPO, The Opiate and others. In his spare time he improvises on the piano daily as a way of thinking about art that is non-verbal and he loves breakfast and a bike ride, which he starts thinking about the night before.

There is something so silent
about air slinging through a world, something
so heavy. Like uranium.

Then at 11:02am, the sky turns bright.

There is a silent click, a sudden cry,
the sound of teeth clenching tight.

We see her falling, with teeth bared wide,
lungs shattered into frames.

She begs to wade once more,
but that is too much to ask.

She never sees the earth or soft
lights, and the pines will no longer rest
safely along her spine.

Her gills start melting ice-blue into her skies
and her ribs tremble silver into white.

Nippon falls and seabed rises, and legends
and temples and luminous
bodies fission into dust.

There is nothing left for us anymore.

So we take a bite
of rust.

________

Amy Zhou is a high school writer at The College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. She has been recognized for her writing by The New York Times, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Frontier Poetry, and Hollins University. An alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, she serves as the Editor-in-Chief for her school’s newspaper, The Radar, and literary publication, The Steele. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, Diode Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, among others.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE THOMAS FIRE WITH DISPLACED LAUGH TRACK

I wake with my mother in her bed,
she’s already smoking and watching the news.
The Thomas fire undresses mountains
to the south. California closes its eyes
in a bowl of smoke. I light a cigarette and mom
moves the ashtray between us on the bed.
In the other room, a laugh track—
my brother watching TV. Every 15 seconds hahaha
like a flock of ordinary birds. How
do we account for loss, in vegetation or ash?
The body count: 2. The dog on the news runs away
and comes back to the razed foundation of her home.
Strong winds are forecast again for Wednesday— hahaha…
I’ve laughed into the firewinds of loss too,
made light of my charred parts: whole
lives carved out by the white crack of heat. I hold
my tongue to the ash, here I am
asking for nothing but what flame can give.

__________

Caitlyn Curran holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Her recent work can be found in: The American Journal of Poetry, Basalt, Grist, Hubbub, Miramar, Raleigh Review, SALT, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She was a 2018 Centrum Fellow at the Port Townsend Writers Conference and recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize.

__________

Jack Giaour lives near Boston, Massachusetts, where he makes his money as a freelance ghostwriter. He holds an MFA from Chapman University, and his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Cardinal Sins, Mantis, and Jelly Bucket, among other journals.