Poem by Donal Mahoney

My Therapist’s a Lady

It’s all so simple now,

yet it took 30 years

to begin to understand.

It’s as though someone

stole the primer I had

and gave me another

in my own language.

It’s because you are

who you are

that I’ve begun

to become who I am.

That sounds too dramatic.

All you did, really, was scream

when you opened the bathroom door,

saw me wrapped in a towel,

standing at attention on a mat,

waiting in my thirtieth year

for the steam to clear

from the cabinet mirror,

waiting for someone

to shout, “At ease.”

Donal Mahoney, a native of Chicago, lives in St. Louis, MO. He has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Commonweal, Public Republic (Bulgaria), Gloom Cupboard (U.K.), Revival (Ireland), The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), Poetry Friends, Poetry Super Highway, Pirene's Fountain (Australia) and other publications.

My Latest Collection

The Woman: In a Box

Free to all who wish to read it. I hope it is enjoyed.

Poem by Anindita Sengupta

The Wading Women of Marina Beach

They step forward eagerly, clutch

each other’s hands, as if they need solidarity

to confront waves. The first water

bristles up in a head of foam, old lace

unfolded in a rush. They squeal,

and suddenly they’re girls again.

They stride deeper, spin to preen

ravaged hair and clothes.

Their laughter wets the wind,

sarees plump with water, puff

and balloon like sails.

Later, they sprawl on sand

and look to sea, imagine

the big ships, quiver drops

from their hair.

Their bare, brown skin peeks

where the blouses cut downwards

at the back--shy, defiant,

encompassed in a fistful of cloth.

Anindita Sengupta is a poet and writer in Bangalore, India. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies including Eclectica, Nth Position, Pratilipi, Kritya and Not A Muse (Haven Books). In 2008, she received the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing. Her first collection of poetry, City of Water, is in publication with Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters. She is also a Charles Wallace Fellow.

She is a columnist for Comment is Free, The Guardian (UK) and Bangalore Mirror. She is also founder and editor of Ultra Violet, a site for contemporary feminism in India. More at www.aninditasengupta.com.

Poem by Bob Bradshaw

In China

In China in the nineteenth century

a woman wrapped her daughter's

chest tightly with rolls

of cloth.

My daughter is eleven.

She wears a "training" bra.

What is she training for?

We watch TV together

and everywhere dresses

drop like towels in a sauna.

Young women pant in bedrooms

like fires whipped

by high winds.

What is she thinking?

I switch channels but everywhere

young couples wrestle and moan

as if absorbing

hard, quick punches.

Are these the role models

for my daughter?

Soon she could be dating.

I can imagine the young man

standing in our doorway,

his bribe of CDs

waiting in his father's borrowed

car. His polite manner

won't fool me. I know.

I've been there.

Bob lives in California, where he dreams of retiring to a hammock. Forthcoming work of his will appear in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in November 2009. New work will also be published soon at Writers Connect in Singapore. Recent poetry of his can be found at Halfway Down the Stairs, Chantarelle's Notebook, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, The Rose and Thorn and Orange Room Review.

A Fabulous Online Collection by Howard Good

Recently released by Blue Hour Press, My Heart Draws a Rough Map, by Howard Good, is an online collection of prose poems. With a cool layout and artwork, the work is easy to access and enjoy. And, as each piece is written in a way that only Howie can write, accessing it is necessary and enjoying it is a given.

Take a look.

Poem by John Riley

One Story Above the Boy in an Old Car

Near dusk today a car backfired beneath

my office, where the traffic creeps

east to west into a stoplight queue, waking me

from my working slumber. Its engine shuddered

and loped; with each out-of-sync crankshaft turn

new smoke swelled from below

the rust-red car. Behind my locked window

I watched a boy around four, maybe five, kneel

on the car's backseat, press his nose

against his window glass. Entranced

by the blue smoke, his eyes tilted up, rolled down,

as though he alone had the power to pull

into existence the ragged clouds beyond

his grasp. The smoke dispersed out of his sight,

above his head. Lost in his new power

to drag vapor into being and fling it toward the sky,

he could not see that the orange sky

spread across the city roofs was slowly

being squeezed into gray—below

the engine will whine, sputter to life.

The queue will break up, the old car

will catch the light.

previously published in Frame Lines Magazine

John Riley lives in North Carolina, where he works in educational publishing. His fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Falling Star, SmokeLong Quarterly, Willows Wept Review, Loch Raven Review, Hardboiled, The Centrifugal Eye, Frame Lines, The Houston Literary Review, San Pedro River Review and Hobble Creek Review.

Chaperons of a Lost Poet, by John Vick

http://www.blazevox.org/bk-jv.htm

In CHAPERONS OF A LOST POET, John Vick has created an extraordinary long poem, and become part of a great tradition of American writers who have chosen to examine heritage, gender, hunger, desire, intense self-doubt, and history. Early in the poem, Vick sets these words into a list: "get into the deep blue valley void of nothing matters..." As readers, we feel the pull towards that void, as the narrator struggles to discern and honor self and his own choices against the majority culture. But this poet does not get lost, and never gives into the "void of nothing matters". This long poem is evidence of that. With remarkable syntactical strategies that never feel forced, Vick makes a whole world visible, he makes a whole world matter to his readers. There's great sorrow in these pages, hard-won wisdom, laughter, too, and a remarkable self-portrait emerges.
-Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected.

This book by John Vick is fearless.
-Valerie Fox, author of The Rorschach Factory, and Bundles of Letters, Including A., V., and Epsilon, with Arlene Ang.

Review at Press 1.
http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v3n2/terry-review.html