Monthly Archives: January 2024

Barbara Loots, ‘Small Things’

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Things have a tendency to lose themselves:
hammer, needle, the necessary spring,
a button, the keys–they disappear like elves,
like roses, wishes, the words for everything.

Dive in. Ransack a drawerful of debris.
Wrestle with irritation, grief, self-doubt.
One earring, that pen, eyesight, dignity:
small things we learn, in time, to do without.

*****
Barbara Loots writes: “The small losses and lapses of memory that happen to everyone seem more vivid and alarming as I grow older. I realize that it isn’t things but myself I must gradually, inevitably let go of. Even so, the vast, abundant universe brings perspective to the human situation, including mine.”

Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com

Photo: “Things you might lose on the subway” by Hippolyte is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Marcus Bales, ‘Down-sizing’

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I will retire and go to buy a ranch-house home,
And a fenced yard build there, for the dogs to roam around,
And raised beds, full of easier-weeding loam,
And cultivate my garden’s ground.

And I shall have my wife there, who knows the signs of stroke.
Morning and night, we’ll take the pills our doctors gave us,
And cook our meals of beans and rice because we’re broke —
And hope the kids vote blue, and save us.

I will retire, and maybe write and, when I’ve napped,
Cruise the internet, perhaps, and lament the loss
Of civility, and watch the fascists arrive, wrapped
In the flag, and holding a Bible and cross.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “Yeats‘s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree‘ irritates me. Its narrator, left to live on an isle, would be dead in a week. Yeats’s mode of life was a series of retreats from country-home to country-home, sponging off the wealthy. Retreat is his vade mecum, and ‘The Lake Isle’ is only his most famous one. So I thought, well what the hell am I doing differently? And the answer is, not much. I made a career out of selling expensive things to rich people, too. And my retirement will be a retreat as well. Where’s my Lake Isle? In the suburbs, funded by Social Security instead of Lady Gregory, perhaps, but no less a throwing up of the hands and leaving it to the next generation to try to straighten out what mine has done.

“So Yeats’s narrator retreats to the high-fantasy farming of an isle in a lake, as if farming weren’t hard enough but it needed the difficulties of getting supplies across water. My narrator retreats to the suburbs without enough money to sustain his prior lifestyle. Two silly poets writing silly stuff.”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rosie poising with the garden Buddha, plants, raised bed, bamboo fence, Garden for the Buddha in progress, front yard, Seattle, Washington, USA” by Wonderlane is marked with CC0 1.0.

Barbara Lydecker Crane, ‘Justin Case’

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Justin Case is a very cautious man.
He keeps a cache of bottled water, food
and a pair of spares in the trunk of his sedan.
Others think that he’s aloof or rude
when he inspects each fork and spoon for germs.
His sisters know he swivels out of kisses.
He navigates the office on his terms;
Justin shuns each outstretched hand–and misses
clinching business deals. He cannot fathom
why colleagues eye him strangely when he hits
an elevator button by lifting past them
his wing-tipped toe. With snakebite kit
and mosquito netting, he’s ready to embark 
upon his lunchtime stroll in Central Park.

*****

Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “This poem, first published in the Atlanta Review, was one of the first persona poems I wrote: I’ve written several dozen over the years, and I find I love trying to speak for another person, real or imaginary. Maybe the process develops empathy, as well–who knows?”

Barbara Lydecker Crane was a finalist for two recent Rattle Poetry Prizes. She has received two Pushcart nominations and various awards from the Maria W. Faust and the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contests. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Ekphrastic Review, First Things, Light, THINK, Valparaiso Literary Review, Writer’s Almanac, many others, and in several anthologies. Her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me (ekphrastic, persona sonnets) was recently published by Able Muse Press, and is available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Remember-Me-Ekphrastic/dp/1773491261. Barb lives with her husband near Boston.

Photo: “i’m so scared you know” by timsnell is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Richard Fleming, ‘Time 2’

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A hamster racing on a wheel,
a movie spinning on a reel,
the clock-hands march inexorably.
What they record, we cannot see
or touch, or hear, or smell, or taste,
yet it diminishes. Make haste.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “When young, I thought about time in terms of how quickly I could run 200 metres and, later, whether I could dip under 35 minutes in a 10k road race. Yes, I was shallow then but youth and shallowness often go hand in hand: they did in my case. Grown older (let’s be honest, old) , Time has acquired a capital T and seems to have morphed into a rather unnerving companion who demands more and more of my attention every day.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/