Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Susan Wilkinson
Selena Spier
Red From The West
& other poems
Pamela Wax
Talk Therapy
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey Water
& other poems
Mark Yakich
Necessary Hope
& other poems
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
& other poems
Keegan Shepherd
Silver Queen
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
Sacred Conflagration
& other poems
George Longenecker
Those Who Hunger
& other poems
Hailey Young
Ball Room
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Ever Since (v.2)
& other poems
grace (logan)
Dynamic
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Limerence
& other poems
Kayla Heinze
Stop checking the score
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Chasing Through to Dawn
& other poems
Alex Eve
A moment
& other poems
Robert Michael Oliver
Prison Hounds
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Poems Without Birds
I dare you to find one that doesn’t
just take off on the wings of words,
a poem
that doesn’t just twitter at the sky.
Poems without birds travel much slower,
step much lower. Their earthbound
aspirations forge a path through
a pathless woods.
Poems without birds
often need us to carry them
and when they find their way into our pockets
we tend to forget about them
until much later
when we find them crumpled
and shrunken in the laundry
deformed after the fact
—newly furrowed and maybe a mystery,
paper roadkill in the lint trap
like the remains of old sales receipts
for things we no longer possess.
Limerence
Part I
I caught her like the Covid virus
unexpectedly
unfamiliarly
with no remedy
Then I almost died
of her
It started with a stabbing pain inside my chest
from carrying her around in my heart when she
wanted out
Pounding blood
like thunder
Muscles tightening
Heart beating
and
unbeating.
Then a flood of silence like the end
but not the end
No end came.
No end comes,
only empty stillness
in long miles of
loneliness
like sunlight hiding in the high grass
anticipating the sunset
blinded by the golden bands
of outstretched arms
reaching but never holding
Then darkness
and some things you can
not touch
not even when they get closer
Maybe in death
but then the choice is not yours entirely.
Part II
Thinking of her now, still
gives me
ideas. I remember all things she said
things I thought but never heard before
Her words whispering into my soul
blowing softly and building strength
like a hurricane
in her name
Her syntax sexes me up
I want to get naked with her voice
let her crawl inside me like I am a cave
her voice echoing through me
melting my mineral darkness
Her sweet breath a soothing warmth
dissolving into my cooling skin
She never knows when to stop
Patiently
she tries to find the truth
She knows what to do
and she takes all that I give
but I don’t know why
Now, she likes to re-tell the story of me
reminding me we are done
she tells me I can go
but I don’t ever leave
and only she knows why.
Abscission
Look it up, search, find abscission.
There is a name for everything:
Platitude, petiole,
Pythagorean Theorem.
So many things and so many names.
Not long after we are born we learn
everything has a name
and we begin to say them,
call things by their names to
bring them magically to us.
The stem that holds the leafy part to the tree
owns the name of petiole.
Maybe it doesn’t matter so much the name,
until you feel the inexhaustible pull of the world
and realize the impossible strength
it takes to hold on, and stay connected
through the changing seasons and all the changes
in the weather: wind and rain, and hurricanes.
A petiole subsists.
Things that make such a difference
have names you want to pronounce correctly
to teach your children, whom you have named.
And when the fall arrives and the petioles
take their part in the leaf abscission,
we stand in wonder at the changing colors
admiring the emptying trees as they
accept their loss almost as if they had a choice.
Fledgling
I will
follow your
lead:
Flapping
Fluttering
Falling,
Failing!
Flying.
Until
I do not
need to
follow you flying
any longer.
Corinne Walsh
earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for short fiction in 2006. Then paused writing to raise her family. The devastating isolation and loss brought on by Covid19 brought poetry back into her life as a magical muse. Her poems have appeared in Abandoned Mine, The Bluebird Word, Acropolis Journal, and Tiny Frights. She is currently working on a full length book of poems.