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ONE WAY
There’s not much to this
poem, really: an ice blue
streetlight above a
lonely corner at
the intersection of x
and y, anywhere
in the Anyhow
Town, America of your
choice: the snow flowing
around it like a
flurry of a million white
moths who’ve mistaken
it for their god, or
just the moon, maybe, the whole
moment floating there,
suspended, it seems,
in time and space, above a
sign that reads ONE WAY.
Jason Ryberg
Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Kicking Up the Dust, Calling Down the Lightning (Grindstone Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
One leap and I was over the hill,
my skates and my arms shooting like pistons,
on a lake that ran into a river
and a river that ran beside trees.
I knew then I was not going back.
Not for the airplane. Not for the phone calls.
Not for the hands that waved, nor the voices
that called in the deepening distance.
The snow pointing to a cleft before me,
my scarf whipping and my body bent double,
my soul jetting out like blood for the tracks,
I was heading for the highway, hurtling
like a globe toward something hard, the best
bet, something cold as New England rock,
to slam my boxed-in body into.
Lisa Low
Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.
Would You Believe Me If I Said: I Still Love You?
I
If I told you the left shoe
you wore had no sole,
would you think I was
lying?
If you told me the burns on your fingers
were from lighting candles on my first birthday
I’d believe you.
II
On Columbia Boulevard your mobile home
is a tombstone. Whiskey waves lap against
empty-bottle graves.
Ghosts bubble around your ankles.
They’re too deep, you said, the holes.
You started digging before I was born.
III
One December I saw you
crawling out of scars, turning
a million tiny door knobs. Had you
swallowed the keys in handfuls?
You were opening hundreds
of caskets across your body.
IV
I never stopped searching for the face
of you holding my brother
over the pond in Laurelhurst,
black hair reaching like outstretched
hands begging for a shovel.
That photo was the only time
I really saw you.
V
You stand at the window
but you’re not home.
The Other Side of The Mirror
plays on vinyl and ghosts
scratch on the disc like rain.
If I told you I
liked the way spit formed
on the corner of your mouth
like a dozen white roses
would you believe me?
Clara Howell
Clara Howell is an emerging poet born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Clara finds poetry as an opportunity to connect the ordinary with the extraordinary by putting her most honest and raw experiences on the page. Clara's work has been previously published in the Pacific Review and Cathexis Northwest Press.
