Sarah Sarai | A Thousand Deaths

A Thousand Deaths

 

Jack’s in Wisconsin with a girlfriend

whose father is down one cow,

which I become in its death,

the wandering-off cow Jack finds

“out in the woods with its legs sticking /

straight up to the stars.”

Its unborn calf is by its side.

Eight dead cow-legs point out

two escaped cow-souls.

And so I become animal mother

sorrow, my eyes aching and red,

searching night skies.

My legs pointing to the endless.

I am galled by the up and

down of love, a boulder

hard-shouldered every day.

 

Quote from “Thinning the Herd,” I Have No Clue by Jack Wiler (Longshot Press, 1996)

 

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Photo by Amy Holman

Sarah Sarai has published two to three poetry collections, depending on how you reckon, and a bunch of short stories. A native New Yorker, she lives in the big city, where she is an independent editor of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Bruce Whitacre | The Ecru Shirt

The Ecru Shirt

 

I never knew anyone else who claimed it,

But Dad insisted it was his favorite color.

When our young family moved into our $25,000

Custom-bilt split-level, the kitchen was yellow-warm.

 

Our motorboat had a goldenrod dual hull.

He could not mount his skis himself,

But he spent entire weekends towing

His sons tandem in his sparkling wake.

 

Having a favorite color is convenient to others,

An easy default for ties, appliances, even for cars,

But it captured as well his warmth and his wit,

His mellowing with age into a crusty outlier.

 

Flipping through his closet the day after,

We chose the parti-colored sport coat;

It matched the well-worn ecru shirt.

And so he went loudly to the grave.

 

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared in Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is an activist and advocate for the arts and social justice. He lives in Forest Hills, Queens.

Thomas Fucaloro | Two Poems

The Meaning of Corn

Little cartoon yellow bullets
pulled from cobbed gums
glisten with spit and
delicious. Filled to the ear.

No one comes close
to our consumption. Filled
to the beer, we are a nation
defined by what we grow.

8 interesting facts about corn
and none of them are this
poem.


First published in Eratio.


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600 Ways To Give People The Shaft

we wore yellow
to each other’s farewell
although the band played
while the dead danced
we morphed
into an unknown
knowing we would


The titles of these poems come from the George Carlin’s list poem “Join the Book Club,” the ninth track of his album A Place for My Stuff, recorded and released in 1981, from Atlantic Records.


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The winner of a performance grant from the Staten Island Council of the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Thomas Fucaloro has been on six national slam teams. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a co-founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is an adjunct professor at Wagner College and BMCC, where he teaches world lit and advanced creative writing.

Roxanne Hoffman | For Sean

For Sean

I wait for my love to return to me
under the cool shade of the sycamores
bouncing our three-year old upon my knee
I wait for my love to return to me

We tie a yellow ribbon ’round each tree
He plays soldier while I tend to my chores
Veiled in Stars and Stripes you return to me
under the cool shade of the sycamores.


Capt. Sean E. Lyerly, 31, of Pflugerville, Texas, was assigned to the Texas Army National Guard’s 36th Combat Aviation Brigade, 36th Infantry Division. He was piloting the Black Hawk when it went down, on January 24th, 2007, killing a dozen service members. Lyerly entered the Guard as a private in 1996 and was deployed to Iraq in August after being called to active duty. He is survived by his parents, his wife and their 3-year-old son. In a Guard statement, Lyerly’s wife said, “He exceeded even my dreams. He was loving, compassionate and full of integrity — a beautiful man inside and out.”

— Stars and Stripes, January 26, 2007 

Originally published in The Brownstone Poets, 2008.


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Roxanne Hoffman runs the small literary press Poets Wear Prada with Jack Cooper. Her words can be found in cyberspace (IndieFeed: Performance Poetry, Pedestal Magazine, New Verse News); set to music (David Morneau’s Love Songs; on the silver screen (2005 indie flick Love and the Vampire); in print (The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates, Soft Skull Press; It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure, Harper Perennial). Her elegiac poem “In Loving Memory” was released as a chapbook, with illustrations by Edward Odwitt, in 2011. Their second collaboration, The Little Entomologist, appeared in 2018. 

Thomas Fucaloro | One More Left

One More Left

The garlic-stuffed olive

sighs hellfire

as the jar holds

the ocean

marinating.

The garlicky-green ocean

reminds me of old fish-

tanks I never took care of.   

To float

without

a care

to become

skeleton

in a body

of ocean.

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The winner of a performance grant from the Staten Island Council of the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Thomas Fucaloro has been on six national slam teams. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School and is a co-founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is an adjunct professor at Wagner College and BMCC, where he teaches world lit and advanced creative writing.