kingsoftrain

Ohio born and raised, Kerry Trautman is a founder of ToledoPoet.com and the “Toledo Poetry Museum” page on Facebook. She is a poetry editor for Red Fez, and she participates poetry readings and events such as Artomatic 4-1-9, Back to Jack (Toledo’s annual Jack Kerouac reader’s theater,) and the Columbus Arts Festival. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Midwestern Gothic, Alimentum, The Coe Review, Slippery Elm, and Mock Turtle Zine; as well as in several anthologies such as, Mourning Sickness (Omniarts, 2008), Resurrection of a Sunflower (Pski’s Porch Press, 2017,) and Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince (NightBallet Press, 2016.) Her poetry chapbooks are Things That Come in Boxes (King Craft Press, 2012,) To Have Hoped (Finishing Line Press, 2015,) and Artifacts (NightBallet Press, 2017.)

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~Dysmorphia~

This junk-drawer carting my delicious
brain around, my heart, my working hands,
other used-to-be-useful bits.
Conveying things I don’t…

Rax King is a dog-loving, hedgehog-mothering, beer-swilling, gay and disabled sumbitch who occasionally writes poetry. She authored the collection The People’s Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling (Ursus Americanus, 2018). Her work can also be found in Yes Poetry, Dream Pop Journal, and Five:2:One.

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The Lord will keep you free of every disease

Boys were faith healing
in every furry chest, priestly
in every dimpled chin—yes,

I believed! I spoke in tongues
for boys, made hymns
of love songs, believed in the firm

of knobby fingers tapping my sap,
in tongues plumbing
the sick of my throat. I tithed

everything to boys. But boys
have no place at bedsides
like gods do, but those arms

live to pin me down, but those hands
claim they can’t lay on me
full of something so dull as healing.

To be sick is to learn the falseness
of your priests. I…

What Is Not Beautiful
poems, Adeeba Shahid Talukder
Glass Poetry Press, 2018

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I wish for idols, bits of God
To worship, stare at, to keep. – {from} Disorder

In a recent piece for The Adroit Journal, poet Leila Chatti talks of how one can see and pass over a word thousands of times and then, suddenly, see the word as if it’s been given permission, by shape, to form. In reading Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s What Is Not Beautiful, I was reminded that all art is new. That some clues come from the same mirror. That somewhere between pearl and thorn, the question mark has begun its blank scoring of lost films made to alert creation we exist. Whether versed inside the sleeplessness of identity or outside the numbness to settled beauty, Talukder speaks as if to understand the language of the one written into the story late, who’s…

I .

thru June 21st, Lulu is offering 20% off all print books with coupon code of TWENTY18

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

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private publications are available via paypal (bartsmock@gmail.com) or https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock, as such:

chapbook, [BASILISK], 64 pages $5.00
(Feb 2017)
chapbook, [the accepted field], 84 pages $5.00
(May 2017)
chapbook, [in this life another is you], 64 pages $3.00
(Oct 2017)

I I .

also:

I have privately published a work of mine consisting of 60 poems that I am calling {mood piece for baby blur}, and am making it available to anyone donating 5.00 or more to my poetry journal {isacoustic*}

donation can be made, here:
https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)

be sure to provide a physical address, to include your name, for the send.

You can check out {isacoustic*}, here:

site: https://isacoustic.com/

How to describe Heather Minette’s Half Light? Half-asleep, “half-awake,” half-empty, “half-asking,” half-full, “half-note,” half-life, “half-moon,” half-dark, “half-light.” Each poem is a sparse vignette (in both meanings of the word), mostly colloquial in tone and expertly half-finished in a way that allows for a cosmos of unremembrances to enclose every stanza, navigated by a vague meditation.

Across these pages, Minette is mourning memory and remembering mourning. For example, in “Christmas ’88,” while the narrator watches a VHS of Christmas past with her brother, noting that the family members in the video are changed or deceased or both, she is struck with a spasm that causes her to knock her brother’s wine glass onto the rug and “I watch the kidney-shaped stain fade from purple to gray/ and I will it to settle,/ so that if I lose him like the others,/ there will be tangible history/ of this night/—a memory…

Triin Paja is an Estonian, living in rural Estonia. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Portland Review, The Adroit Journal, and Entropy, among others. She also writes and publishes poetry in Estonian, and is the author of a poetry collection in Estonian, “Nõges” (Värske Raamat, 2018).

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October Snow

the women stand for hours and do not
complain. it is the sternness
of a plastic rose, of muted wives
and servants once entombed, alive,
beside husbands and masters, laid down
like silk, gold, a weapon, a language.
it is the way lampposts are valued
as winter fruit that does not rot,
a light that blurs enough
to say shadow, memory, girl.
speech moves in them
like a starling murmuration
before filling a river with
the apple petals of their
photographs. it is a rotting
window-frame barely holding.
it is to believe one’s heart, like a hand,
has furrowed…