Poetry Summer 2020 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Vecteezy
Rodrigo Dela Peña
If a Wound is an Entrance for Light
& other poems
Shellie Harwood
Early Evening, Late September
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
The Deacon’s Lament
& other poems
J. H. Hall
Immersion
& other poems
Kimberly Sailor
Two Aphids
& other poems
Sugar le Fae
Bagging
& other poems
Lauren Sartor
Shopping Cart Woman
& other poems
Nathaniel Cairney
Mushroom Hunting, Jackson County, Kansas
& other poems
Elisa Carlsen
Cormorant
& other poems
Daniel Gorman
The Boy Achilles
& other poems
Samara Hill
I Look for Her Mostly Everywhere
& other poems
Nicole Justine Reid
Returning to Sensual
& other poems
David Ginsberg
Butterfly Wings
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Café Sant Ambroeus
& other poems
George R. Kramer
Young Odysseus
& other poems
Amy Swain
In Praise of Trees
& other poems
Frederick Shiels
Bad October: 2016
& other poems
Matthew A. Hamilton
Summer of '89
& other poems
Chris Kleinfelter
Getting from There to Here
& other poems
Martin Conte
Ghazal for the Shipwrecked
& other poems
Natalie LaFrance-Slack
I Do Not Owe You My Beauty
& other poems
Susan Marie Powers
Dark Water
& other poems
George R. Kramer
Passover/Easter 2020
Since Eden never such a sanguine night.
After the slaughter in Goshen of all the flocks,
their cries abate in the last limb of light.
Against slave hut doors a blood tide knocks.
Moses chafes for the risen sun god’s eye
then the furious flight to silent Sinai.
Contagions and devils stalk this spring
as willets and warblers ring and rage
over this and that malicious king,
over these just deserts, that minor plague,
over those years of Egypt grown tired and fat
and the hungers haunting Judea after that.
Another prophet offers up feeble explanations
for each lost child and blood-let lamb.
Fear lumbers today through divided nations
and down the snaking streets of tired Jerusalem
stumbles the risen son, a savior, an enemy
falling from this weedy Garden of Gethsemane.
Young Odysseus
You sprang from the old story
Boys lined along a gully
Soldiers belting up a gun
Arguing in a strange tongue
Whether to shoot or not
Each boy half in terror half sailing away
Someone was always nosing to know
Where you were from though long
from fresh off the boat your patois
peppered words like wave
cresting crashing long after
Father feel my skin wrap over your old ribs
Drag your battered oars far from sea
Winnowing fan kindled for heat
Tread your shadow across the Canadian steppe
Horizon is border of the sailor’s knowing
But my mind is shallow against relentless ocean
All I think is borne in light breeze
Carrying this thin vessel to the edge of the world
Dividing ourselves in our dreams
We chart many headings
This sail slooping below a bright horizon
That body not dropping in a red ditch
At Your Birth
These Hopes Ate My Heart
At your birth these hopes ate my heart.
Against a fetal monitor’s anxious beat of passion
your red ear emerged yearning to wander,
sprouting like a mollusk from a glassy shell,
arising from a sea floor, alive to the limpid world.
If ever a toddler swaddled the limping world,
it was you, your lips pursed like a heart
kissing then pinched to a hermit crab’s shell,
and your faith that your tidal passion
will wash out grief to find other seas to wander.
Did I think then that you would one day wander
your way as you choose, spinning the wild world
into your dreams, throwing your passion
beyond the farthest territories of your heart,
kicking out of your cavernous shell?
Then we will mend and refill this shell,
your fading parents, and wander,
two shadows cast by one aging heart.
In a whelk beneath the wobbly world
we bathe in your conch blast’s passion.
I lie awake mulling these days of ill passion,
prelude to tattering seas and artillery shells,
or perhaps a broken fever and a patched up world,
where you can remember me while you wander
across maps marked by the travels of your heart.
I wish your heart a moment’s rest from its passion, a morning
to wander the beach for shells, at peace in this implausible world.
George R. Kramer
hails from Canada, Colorado, Kenya and Alabama, but is a long-time Virginia transplant. The child of European refugees from Nazism and Communism, his parents’ legacy and his peripatetic childhood leave a trace in much of his writing. He makes his living as an attorney. His recent published poems are on his website, https://blueguitar58.wixsite.com/website.