Just past the new development’s array, beyond the parking lot, the flowers, the fence, the land becomes uneven, falls away into an area of no pretence, abandoned cars, some rocks, some weeds, a bog. Here are drawn children and eccentrics both, searching for wild flowers, or a snake, a frog, to nature lurking in the undergrowth, beyond the ordered asphalt, lineal law; drawn by our lower brain of hunter, ape, where food is found or killed and eaten raw, life is survival, and sex may mean rape. Bricks, debris, rubble, condoms, empty beer… yet, strangely, life-long loves have started here.
*****
I subscribe to the Nietzschean view of humans as a rope stretched over an abyss, animal on the one side, posthuman on the other. I think the ape is very alive within us, as is the drive to reach beyond ourselves to something vastly greater.
This sonnet was originally published in Rat’s Ass Review (thanks, Roderick Bates) but I’ve modified one line here to match the photo I found for illustration.
His weaving adds up to a hapless cloth on both sides of the street: just short of falling, he staggers, with a stop to vomit froth. He’d go far safer if he took to crawling. A brace of cans, though, and a paper sack are taking up the hands his legs could use, as gales inside his head tell him to tack and sway but hold his cargo fast, to choose the service of his thirst above all pride or fear that he might offer easy prey. The spirits he has taken as his guide make him loop back to take another way.
Ten minutes pass. He’s near where he began, reminding me of when I’ve been that man.
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “Between typical youthful indiscretions and self-medicating for untreated depression in earlier life, I have had some tipsy times. The obvious negatives aside, recalling those experiences has made me more sympathetic than I would naturally be in contemplating others’ frailty. The rhetoric of the Elizabethan sonnet structure, moreover, compelled me to bring precision to the experience of seeing oneself in another.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. X: @Smitroverse
She was the one who went off on her own. She was the one who filed for the divorce. You gave her what she wanted in due course. Still she will never leave your life alone.
Available through email more than phone, You have remained a favorite resource. She contacts you supposedly perforce, Less for herself than for a son long grown.
She seeks a certain something left behind, A sterling ladle or an antique chest, A recipe or record you must find. Your common past has yet to enter rest Since fire so often burns within her mind. For smoke fly’s sake, you try to do your best.
A native Virginian, Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia. Her collections with Kelsay Books include Metes and Bounds (2023) and Furthermore (forthcoming, 2025).
He looked at me as if I ought to know just who he was but I did not. I looked away, then so did he. Alas I didn’t recognize the Great God Pan in human form. I simply thought he was another man. I felt a warm gaze inviting me once more. I turned to see him changed. A God again, hooves and furry legs, horns grew. He gestured “Hey?” I was too dumbstruck to do more than stare. He shook his curls and sprinted off somewhere.
*****
Juleigh Howard-Hobson writes: “I wrote this when I lived off-grid on ten acres up in rural Washington State.The forest that made up half my property was dark and creepy. The Great God Pan was no more out of place than BigFoot or werewolves. All of which I imagined I saw/heard from time to time (I use italics as I am not absolutely convinced it was all imagination). Nothing out there ever hurt me, so all’s well that ends well–I’ve since moved back to civilization, which is far more frightening in many ways. As for the form–well, that just was how the poem decided to be.”
Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Able Muse, New Verse Review (including this poem), The Deadlands, Autumn Sky Poetry and other venues. She has been nominated for “The Best of the Net”, Pushcart, Elgin & Rhysling Awards. Her latest book is Curses, Black Spells & Hexes (Alien Buddha). A member of the HWA and the SFPA, she lives on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. In a poetically haunted house. X: poetforest
What, you haven’t heard of me, despite my art and stormy life? There’s much to tell of pride and bitterness, of bliss and hell— but not regret. I’ll fill my pen and write.
I was born a bastard. Maman worked, a laundress, while I’d roam Montmartre, spying through café and whorehouse doorways, trying to snitch some fruit or francs. I laughed and lurked. With lumps of coal I loved to draw on streets. Ditching convent school at puberty, I learned to earn my way. I felt free in circus work, curvaceous and petite and daring on the high trapeze, strong until I hurt my back—I fell headlong.
That set me back, but new work came along— also daring, deemed risqué—being painted, a model for men. Few were sainted . . . nor was I. I didn’t think it wrong to give a man some pleasure and to claim my own. For one artiste I posed unclad and soon became his favorite lover. I had his child, and kept my word: I didn’t name that man on papers with a ‘Father’ line and kept on working. Maman tended him, my son, Maurice Utrillo—a pseudonym so he would not be stigmatized by mine, that of the saucy urchin shedding clothes— and budding painter, watching men compose.
I watched the colors bloom as men composed. Toulouse-Lautrec’s hues, both somber and bright, would join or jar to make a mood just right. He’d talk of wealthy clients and gallery shows while I could study his techniques with paint. He studied me and loved my breasts, my hair, my thighs, my openness to him. I dared to love that rich midget with no restraint. When he refused to marry me, my feigned suicide didn’t change his mind. But what I learned while posing, I combined with my good eye, instinctive and untrained. I’d use my wits (and likely my libido) to paint in oils, with honesty my credo.
I painted nude women by my credo. When I showed Degas my work, he praised me with, “Madame, you’re one of us!” That raised my nerve; like those Montmartre men, I’d show my art—although I’d wish my name need not be printed next to ‘woman artist,’ a tag suggesting Other like a warning flag. I’m already Other in my lot as Bastard-with-a-Bastard history. Will I be known for art or just my life of scandal? I never stayed a bougeois wife, as two would always tangle into three; our pacts permitting infidelity could not prevent one partner’s jealousy.
His cryptic music vented jealousy; Eric Satie was moody, odd, hysteric— and amusing, in and out of bed. Eric and Paul Mousis loved me zealously and it was bound to chafe, our double link. Mousis was rich; Satie holed up in one squalid room. He slowly came undone without me to himself—he took to drink till drink took him. Maurice, by then eighteen, also drank. Since he was prone to rage and smashing things since an early age, Maman would feed him wine to calm such scenes. When briefly sober, it was to me he came— I treasured hearing Maman as my name.
Of course Maurice Utrillo made his name with me his mother-teacher and his Papa (I tell you now) Pierre-Auguste Renoir! Maurice was barely sane, but all the same, prolific and successful in his art. His painter colleague André, with brains and flair, had tireless desire in our affair; our turbulent trio could not live apart. With André as our agent, income flowed— I once took fifty children to the circus . . . Montmartre beggars crowded round to work us . . . we’d help out any artist friend who owed. The stream of money later dried to drought, but while it flowed I bloomed by giving out.
Too soon I knew my bloom was giving out— I missed men’s wide-eyed stares, their swiveled heads. André, still youthful, strayed to other beds; Maurice would drink or sit around and pout. We three unraveled into separate ways. Instead of painting nudes I painted flowers; they didn’t sell but brightened up the hours of living alone, inviting in malaise, till I found Gazi. This young, exotic man takes care of me and listens to my stories, roughly true—my slights, successes, glories. I’m seventy-two. I’ll end where I began, a bastard bitch whose art was bold and right. My pride and grit leave little room for spite.
*****
Here is what the judge for the 2024 Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest wrote: Praise for the winning sonnet crown: Among a strong group of finalists, “Roughly True” distinguished itself across the board—in form, in voice, in message, in grace. After reading these seven sonnets in the voice of French painter Suzanne Valadon, I felt as if I had just taken short courses in poetic form, meter, rhyme, and art history, all expertly and candidly delivered by the fully realized persona of an accomplished, but overshadowed figure, one exquisitely resurrected here in verse. ~Dan Albergotti, Judge
Barbara Lydecker Crane writes: “I was surprised and thrilled to win this contest, and further pleased that the judge seemed to recognize the same strength of character in Suzanne Valadon that I did. The more I researched her life and work, the more I felt I actually knew this gritty woman a bit, despite our wildly different lives. As I get older I find I am more interested in writing about others than myself. My latest book, You Will Remember Me (Able Muse), is a collection of persona poems about portrait artists and their works. I am currently writing a new series of persona poems, this time about landscape artists and their works. This time, rather than writing all sonnets, each poem takes a different form; but all (so far) are in rhyme and meter. That seems fitting both for older times and for the craft and musicality I strive for, to befit the art that I hope to see with these poems one day, perhaps in a new book. And there is something about writing in form that, to me, is exactly like framing a picture. What a difference that makes; it says “completed,” and adds its own panache to the art.”
A billboard seen in Toronto read Sonnet Insurance.
Dear Sonnet staff: I’m eager for your plan! I’ll want an underwriter old-school-based, Petrarchan or like Larkin in his taste: he’ll speak my terms. I’ll benefit from your man adjusting rhymes, making meter strict, assuming the risk of an errant anapest. Does your firm ensure I’ll stand time’s test? Do you pull strings to have each effort picked by a premier publication? One quick draft in the condition of a pre-existing sonnet, and the English-speaking world might dote upon it. But truth be told, my first attempts aren’t craft. Sonnet Insurance, kindly file this letter; insure me later, when it’s written better.
*****
Barbara Lydecker Crane write: “I am a shameless pun lover; seeing this billboard, though, certainly begged for some. “My Letter to Sonnet Insurance” was published a few years back in Light.“
In 2024 Barbara Lydecker Crane won the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Crown Contest and First Prize in the Helen Schaible Contest, modern sonnet category. She has twice been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Able Muse recently published her fourth collection, You Will Remember Me. She enjoys making and looking at art, travel, and her family, which includes four fast-growing grandchildren and one near-perfect husband: he does not read poetry.
Without black tea, his mornings never start. The newspaper should be upon his bed; Not finding it will make his eyes all red. As if examining a piece of art, He reads each page. Loud oohs such as ‘My heart!’, ‘Another swindle!’, or ‘So many dead!’, Are heard as if the earth’s weight’s on his head. Harrumphing, he jumps to the Cultures part. A pensioner today, back in those days, He was a banker. Now, he saunters, plays Carom with me, or spends the noontimes planting Camellias —- a work he finds enchanting. At times, he sits before some dusty files, Puts on the glasses, thumbs through them, and smiles.
Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India. Some of his recent publications include Spelt, Ink Sweat & Tears, Modern Reformation, San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Third Wednesday, and Amethyst Review among others.
It starts with lightning, tinder, and a gust. Smoke-jumper teams, at this stage, may contain it— clad in Nomex, ‘chuting down to dust they rip along the fireline like a bayonet, swinging pulaskis, cleaving to clearings and creeks, drip-torching back-fires, containing each hot spot with counter-tides of flame. They know physiques honed to sprint with gear may still be caught by racing fronts and panic, so they pack a thin aluminum drape, a fire-shelter. A flare-up—now they cannot reach the black by racing through the flame-wall, helter-skelter, so they deploy before the terra torch and bake like foiled potatoes in its scorch.
The fire expands. Its roaring conflagration finds ladder fuels and candles standing trees. The incident commander starts to station resources round the burn’s peripheries— machinery and hotshot crews assemble in camps and helibases. Like mirages, infernos rise to ridgelines, flare, and tremble. As faller teams and swampers check barrages of lowland flame, a bucket-swinging Bell lathers long control-lines with retardant. The Super Huey heli-crews rappel; Sikorsky sky-cranes suck and buzz like ardent mosquitoes, but combustion’s alchemies still plate the skies with gold. A rising breeze…
The crowning flames become a firestorm as fires’ heads combine. Convection columns shoot limbs and embers upwards where they form flak for tanker-crews. Smoke overwhelms visibility. They drop a Mars and lift great lumps of lake, on every mission seven thousand gallons salving scars from summer’s branding-iron. Sudden fission caused by sap expanding inside trunks sends frissons of crackling sparks across the blaze as fire-cracker trees explode. The thunks of falling tops spook ground-crews. Flames find ways to lope the overstorey under cover of smoke while dozers doze and choppers hover.
Although we fight it, such spontaneous heat kindles inner duff. Like Icarus we’re drawn to flame as if it could complete combustion of some smoldering in us, a splendor in the trees. With rolls and dips, like waxwings, flying wax wings to the sun, we soar. .. And then, as if a flash eclipse confronts us with the dark side of the moon, the aftermath appears: black devastation, burnt poles which yesterday were foliaged. Cracked pods already seed reforestation and years will heal what fire so quickly aged but now, devoid of even twigs and slash, this moonscape marks where sunlight fell as ash.
*****
John Beaton writes: “I wrote this one around 2009 not long after Joyce and I had run the gauntlet on a west-east highway through the coast mountains of Northern California. A major fire complex was burning and the road was opened for only a few hours, but we got through. Burning embers lined the roadside and there was smoke and flame on both sides. Each stanza is in Shakespearean sonnet form.”
John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. https://www.john-beaton.com/
One month from when you met me, when you brought the first of many gifts, a 45 of plaintive praise and longing, who’d have thought that forty-five years later we’d survive on weekends, holidays, and summer breaks, a foretaste of the end in every start, anticipation ballasted with aches as we put love on hold and live apart?
You are a holiday. The working week unspools like toilet paper from a roll. My attitude goes airborne when we speak, and when we meet, my heart swoops like a shoal of fish. Would we have lost this giddy glow, living together? Better not to know.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “It makes me feel ancient to realize that for younger readers I will have to explain that a 45 was a record with one song on each side, which played on a record player at 45 revolutions per minute. Love poems themselves tend to feel old-fashioned these days, though this one is about a relatively modern problem, the long-term, long-distance relationship in which both people are employed full time at jobs far apart from one another. The form, a Shakespearean sonnet, mirrors the content, in that the rhymes are separated from one another until the end, when they are reunited. The poem was originally published in the online journal of female formalist poets Mezzo Cammin, and it later appeared in my second book of poetry, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.
Your hours of tears won’t let you follow Those who’ve left you alone. Tonight your head lies on a pillow, Not beneath earth and stone.
The dead won’t be returning, Not for all of your pleas, Not for all your candles burning. Get up off your knees.
The deceased, removed from their rest Can take up all your hours Until your mind, denied a fair rest, Is deprived of its powers.
The road set before you is rocky and steep, So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals. X: @Smitroverse
Form in Formless Times 