John-Michael Albert

The New Croesus

Just like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

Astride the golfers’ well-groomed eighteen holes,

Here, in a once disease-infested swamp,

An orange hubrid with a coif whose flame

Is Just for Men (under-timed), and his name,

Make Us Great Again. Here, his tiny hands

Waive the world’s contempt; his rheumy eyes lase

The Beltway’s lair of red-tied suits and wealth.

“To hell with treaties, powers, rights,” tweets he

From his sleepless den. “Come—you comfy rich,

You one-percenters Dow-Jonesing for more,

You brash elitist kleptos of the world,

Come, you entitled oligarchs—to me.

I’ll quench this country’s lamp to glut your store.”

The Woman Who Read This Book Before Me

printed in hard lead, No. 1 pencil, tiny letters

next to phoenix, “mythological bird that lived in Arabia”

our improbable meeting was in The Pages of Day

and Night; she arrived like a new character in Act III

when Adonis compares the earth to a pear or a breast,

she hesitated, wondering especially about the pear

she circled damp asphalt and New York

is Harlem, later New York is Wall Street

halfway through the odes, she started to underline

the names of trees—palm, date, cedar—but not plants

some of her comments were enigmatic: one line was decorated

with a five-pointed star, two were fenced-in with braces

in the ode to love, she put a checkmark

each time the poet wrote let there be weddings

            let there be weddings . . .

            let there be weddings . . .

            let there be weddings . . .

in an image / with breasts and thighs and all the rest:

she could not see Mohammad hurling goddesses from the Kaaba

somewhere between the poems and the essay at the back,

she lost her pencil; from there her comments were in ink

when she finally underlined poetry does not become poetry

unless it frees itself from the easiness and obviousness

that is demanded of it, all her marginalia

should have trembled in their chains, eager

to disappear like scorpions and jerboas

frantically seeking shade before the rising desert sun

And So Each Lover Is Both Greek and Trojan

            responding to Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Pattern for Future Dirges, No. 20”

And so each lover is both Greek and Trojan,

Both deceiver and deceived. It’s love’s contract,

The price we pay when we tie abstract

Pleasure to reality’s heartless, daily motion.

And in exchange for what? Meeting in the rain,

A common destination, conversation

Over a meal and drinks, a certain reservation:

How much dare we share, now, of our joy and pain?

And then we feign a scuffle over the tab:

Who will get to show he loves this moment most?

The last of the wine, one final, lingering toast . . .

(Do we part at the doorway, or share a cab?)

Yes, there’s a dream world that we can only feel,

And through love alone can make it almost real.

John-Michael Albert has been active in the Portsmouth, NH, poetry community for the last 25 years. He has served on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and hosted many open mics in Portsmouth, Dover, Durham, and Rochester. Mike edited The Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire (2 vv., 2008 and 2010). His latest published collection is Collected Animal Poems (Portsmouth, NH: Marble Kite Press, 2024).

toc

next

Elizabeth McCarthy

The Compaynys of Beestys and Fowleys

after “The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms” written by Juliana Barnes (Berners), 1486, originally credited to a male author

Men didn’t know it was she

            a fifteenth century nun

                        cloistered in an English convent

who scribed with a feather in bastarda blackletter script

            the collective names for beasts and fowls.

How did she, this bride of Christ, know of the

            murthre of crowes and unkyndenes of ravenes

                        What kind of company did she keep?

As a young girl did she listen to the

            wache of nyghtingalis and charm of goldfinch

                        learning to sing in God’s choir?

Did she stand on the banks of her country estate

            and join the sege of heronnys and gagle of gees

                        as they took to the sky like angels on wings?

Was her soul bruised by the glorious walk

            of the ostentation of peacocks

and the diving romance in a fall of woodcockis?

Did this unusual girl of nature and letters befriend

            nest of rabettis and scoff of fysh

before she grew and hid her true self from the

            pride of lionys and sculke of foxis?

What company did she keep in that sheltered house

            where man does not recognize a woman’s hand?

Atlas

condemned by war

he held up the sky

carrying things

to the end of eternity

in a shopping cart

filled with the world’s belongings,

its squeaky wheels rolled onward

along train tracks and highways

he moved from place to place

seeking home for the unwanted

mumbling on street corners

whispered warnings never heard

until the weight he carried

fell and crushed the earth

and with it, the myth of humanity

Elizabeth McCarthy lives in an old farmhouse in northern Vermont. Retired from teaching, she began writing poetry when the world closed down in 2020. She is a member of the Poetry Society of Vermont and an online poetry group, The Lockdown Poets of Aberdeen, Scotland. Elizabeth has four collections of poetry, The Old House (self-published), Winter Vole (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Hard Feelings (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and Wild Silence (Kelsay Books, 2024).

toc

next

Michael Montlack

It’s Not the Job of the Clairvoyant

To lead us through the catacomb,

to be a sliver of light in the hollow.

It’s no one’s job to show us what

we have made in life. Our crops

speak for themselves. The culprits

who poisoned the soil disguised

in costumes of our own making.

Doesn’t the Clairvoyant remind us

we are more than the sprockets,

we are the machine. We are able

to count but choose blowflies

over blessings. You are naked,

the Clairvoyant says. Not my job

to dress you. We ask if the others

are just as scared and scarred.

We ask for a thicker sliver of light.

Not my job! We reach for a hand

in the dark, so sure the blowflies

can smell our expiration dates—

feeling entitled to understand

our purpose. Dreading there’s none.

Can You Spare a Dime

I miss phone booths, the irony of seeking

privacy in public in a transparent box.

A conversation seemed more dramatic

there. A dire performance for passersby.

Who even talks on the phone anymore?

When I call, rather than text, friends,

some can’t hide their annoyance: Um—

why are you calling me? I want to say

my voice offers more nuance than emojis.

I miss the graffiti in phone booths too.

The FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL . . . etchings.

Those declarations that [INSERT NAME]

WUZ HERE. It was so existential. Simple.

Animal. How we marked our territory.

But smart phones leave a live loud trail,

erasing any chance for a secret getaway.

And forget about pranking so-and-so

about that good time. Caller ID’s sure

to rat on you. I miss making prank calls—

junior high exercises in method acting.

Adopting personas, doing improv really.

How it taught us to keep a straight face.

Maybe emojis will make faces obsolete

like phone booths. Replace words even.

Is this the evolution of communication?

It feels dire, and I keep thinking about

well . . . phone booths. Wondering if

without them, it’s harder for Clark Kent

to transform into Superman. How do you

say Who will save us now in emoji?

My Friend Stephanie Asked When I Knew I Was a Writer

And I was as surprised as she was when I said,

Before I learned to write. I was four maybe.

On the backyard swing set in a rush of euphoria

as I competed with my twin sister to see who

could go higher, our bare feet kicking at the sky,

the rusty swings creaking in unison. I knew

somehow I would remember this, this moment

she likely would not. Why? And if she did,

it would be different, framed differently,

or unframed. Even then I was in the habit

of seeing a moment like a diorama or

movie still, pausing to collect a smell, words

a stranger uttered, how a shadow crawled

along a cinderblock wall—a sort of click

in my head and there it was: a blur of joy,

my sister in the bleachy glare, a glimpse

of my mother in the kitchen window, head

down as she sliced onions, the crab apples

rotting in the grass below us, our Irish Setter

a spill of orange on the gray concrete patio.

All loaded with meaning I could not grasp

but managed to carry in an invisible backpack

where I kept the fear that I would never learn

to read, terrified whenever I dared to lift

the open book or magazine my mother left

on a couch or nightstand—all those letters

a secret code, probably making fun of me:

the strange boy who saw stories everywhere

but may never learn to write. Yet even that

I knew would one day be a story worth telling.

“The Inside Scoop on Apollo 10’s Infamous Floating Turd”

            —Popular Science

None of those astronauts ever fessed up to it.

I can neither claim it nor disclaim it, one said.

As if afraid to admit Shit Happens even in space.

As if claiming a bowel movement might tarnish

their new halo, stealing some of its silvery grace—

that shard of shit a blatant symptom of humanity.

NASA transcripts preserved all the repudiations,

but what, if I may, has become of the rogue turd?

Was it plastic-bagged and namelessly tagged?

I prefer to picture it on a parachute, still orbiting,

rather than being filed away in an earthly archive.

The bridal bouquet no one ever dared to catch.

If we weren’t so tone deaf—or unwilling to listen—

what might be gleaned from the wordless sermon

of that turd? A modern but less elegant version of

The Tower of Babel: boisterous kids barging into

our parents’ room, invariably creating a mess.

Reminding us we still have yet to be potty-trained.

Potential Obituarists for Humanity

The Orangutan? Sharing over 97% of our DNA—

can we trust them? Even if they’re willing to sign

our history, will there be gestures complex enough

to express a psychology so bent on self-destruction?

We could ask the cooperative Bottlenose Dolphin,

but the cheerfulness of their squeaks could never

fully convey the sense of emergency we unleashed.

Surely, African Grey Parrots would be fine reporters.

If we were more concerned with being candid than

cinematic, laundering our worst scenes with filters.

Elephants would make much more reliable sources

with their infamous memories. But there are limits

to their altruism if they can’t forget our lust for ivory.

Mother pigs sing to their young. If we weren’t busy

eating them, they might be convinced to compose

a dirge for us, some ballad to recount the fabulous

tale of an animal that once dared to rule the Earth.

Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His work recently appeared in Poetry Daily, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Barrelhouse, december, Cincinnati Review, and phoebe. He lives in NYC, where he teaches Poetry at CUNY City College.

toc

next