Mercedes
(poems 30 words or fewer)
Let's open The Note with "poetry prompts."
Range Anxiety. One source of resistance to electric cars is range anxiety, the worry that the battery charge will run down when the driver is en route somewhere. Write a poem about how anxiety is changed by distance.
Learning a Language in Prison. It's hard to learn a second language. Would it be easier or harder in prison? Write a poem about the language of prison and then write a poem about the prison of language.
Pacing Zeroes. Sat around with some high-school educators recently, and they kept using this phrase.
Milk. It's pretty key to mammals. Defines us, in part. There may not be enough poems about milk. Or dairy products in general.
Burning Things. Could it be that because civilization robs us of regular opportunities to burn things, that could be what's wrong with us? Write a poem about burning things, or about what's wrong with us, or both.
Quantum Theory Implication #28. I've lost your address. Does that mean you are no longer there? Oh, by the way, when you were struggling about whether to rent apartment A or apartment B, it turns out you rented both and you are living in both. If I come visit you, I'll show up at one and that will be the only one you rented. Write an infinite number of slightly different poems about this.
Empty White House. The first stanza could be about a white house that's empty. Second stanza could be about The White House. Empty. Abandoned. But filled with the voices of ghosts.
Since we cranked up RHP in 2004, we've regularly done issues full of poems even shorter than required by our standard guidelines. All poems here are 30 words or fewer. Unless we failed to count and somebody slipped in a 32-word poem (because we didn't count.)
We are so pleased with this issue. We had many, many submissions and we send out our special thanks to all poets who submitted. Congrats and thanks to the poets who are published herein. As always, thanks to the RHP team: Laura M Kaminski, F. John Sharp (fiction), F. J. Bergmann (copy), and Sina Evans, who has been posting pieces from our 13-year archives on our Facebook page.
Enjoy!
The Note
by Dale Wisely
Angelology Issue 112
DWisely
Georgia Armstrong
I wanted to be louder,
And you wanted to matter
The Reason We Drank:
Anuja Ghimire
Where is the milk?
Rivers full of vacuum
empty hands raising
the baby
Shloka Shankar
The Absence of Signs Is a Sign
Say something, it’s too quiet.
They should make pills for this,
to not feel a thing;
sideways rain.
I quit (soft-spoken and obsessive).
It’s one of my favorite words.
Sources:
A remixed/cut-up poem composed of quotes from the movies Mrs. Doubtfire, My Girl, Forrest Gump, and Serendipity.
Tom Fugalli
Fear of Intimacy
It’s a shame waking
you just when the
silence got interesting
but it seems we’re
surrounded by breath-
taking wolverines.
Not that there’s time
but here’s something
else you should know.
Martha Magenta
dead satellites
drifting
space junk
cold and distant
fathers of fathers
Martha Magenta
salutations
to the wild cat moon
through the window
my angry father
shotgun in hand
Lee Nash
white ruffle
tied to the aerial
wrong car
Senryu
Jade Riordan
News Ticker
He turns on the news;
the TV crackles,
then swallows him whole.
His name scrolls across
the bottom of the screen.
Corey Mesler
Here
Here I am: bone.
Here is my eye,
paling.
Here is where I
stopped: sleep.
And, here and
here, where
I put my last words.
Trent Walters
Life on the Moon (v 2.0)
Nights are
long
cold
bleak.
Days are
long
cold
bleak.
Regolith
leaks into
cracks
of the space suit.
DWisely
Michael McInnis
We watched a tanker
whisper into the fog,
riding high,
heading back north
where wild horses run,
where the glaciers stopped,
where fifty-foot tides
eroded the continent.
Canadian Tanker Down Chelsea Creek
Ama Bolton
Dreams in Upper Silesia
first night in a new place
says my Polish friend
whatever you dream
will come true
I salvage scraps of colour
from the night’s flotsam
emotional orange
complicated blue
Penelope Scambly Schott
On the Track
Hey, it’s my turn to be last,
yells the boy in his red t-shirt.
He jogs behind the line of kids,
grinning. I want to recruit him
into the army of my country.
I want to appoint him CEO
of every global corporation.
Really, I want to marry him.
Bradley Samore
On the Camino de Santiago
Out of nothing
I have made a cup of silence
when I hold it out
wonders
like bright coins
come my way
Marc Mannheimer
out front
a rose-lined yard
and a handsome brown puppy
eating a napkin
Einstein Brothers
Chet Corey
Angelology
Twelve angels are jitterbugging
on the head of a pin.
Slow dancing is not allowed
for obvious reasons.
Richard Fox
Europe
Arcing swallows finish the sky;
light waylaid by the windows.
Fishing lines in the water;
heron among the sheep.
The unfinished cathedral;
the river on unfinished business
at your feet.
Richard Fox
Quasar
Someone crossing
in front of a window
will cause it to flicker
& be a quasar;
he does all this for
you & does not speak—
he is spoken for.
Timnit Kefela
I carry with me
a careful kind of sadness
blooming freely under an
empty corridor’s fluorescent
lights, two halves of an
avocado stacked in my
left palm: fleshless.
Avocado Rinds
kjmunro
mistaken
for the owner of the Mercedes
badly parked
Contributors
112
Georgia Armstrong is a 20-year-old anthropology student living in British Columbia, Canada.
Ama Bolton: "At seventy-one, my daughter informs me, I’m at peak vocabulary. So I'm lucky to be a poet and not a pole-vaulter."
Chet Corey was born in Minneapolis and lives in quiet seclusion along the shores of Bush Lake.
Anuja Ghimire loves poetry all the way from Kathmandu, Nepal, to the U.S., from earth to stars.
Richard Fox has contributed work to a semi-plethora of journals, including this one. Swagger & Remorse, his first book of poetry, was published in 2007. He lives in Chicago.
Tom Fugalli’s work has appeared in Forklift Ohio, Prime Number Magazine, Unbroken Journal, Voicemail Poems, and other places. He lives in New Rochelle, New York, and enjoys 5-year aged Gouda.
Timnit Kefela is an Eritrean drawer poet from Nairobi trying to navigate a city life in a very suburban California town.
Martha Magenta lives in Bristol, England, UK. Her poetry, haiku, senryu and tanka have appeared in a number of journals and magazines. She collects her published work on a blog: https://marthamagenta.com/
Marc Mannheimer is a mental health peer supporter by day who spends too much of his other time sleeping. Poetry is a nervous habit he cannot shake.
Michael McInnis served six years in the Navy and founded The Primal Plunge, Boston’s original bookstore dedicated to ‘zines and underground culture.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. (Note from the editors: And with that resume, he still sends work to RHP, and is a long-time contributor.) With his wife he runs a 142-year-old bookstore in Memphis.
Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, kjmunro now lives without an umbrella in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
Lee Nash lives and works in the Charente, France, and writes poetry in an attempt to stay poor. Her website is leenashpoetry.com.
Jade Riordan lives in northern Canada. She’s probably cold right now.
Bradley Samore currently lives in North Carolina and is a high school English teacher. He has also lived in Spain and Florida.
Penelope Scambly Schott's newest books are Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic and Bailing the River. A past recipient of the Oregon Book Award, Penelope lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon.
Shloka Shankar is a freelance writer, editor, and visual artist from Bangalore, India. She is the founding editor of Sonic Boom. Twitter: @shloks89.
Trent Walters: "Morpo Press published my chapbook, Learning the Ropes. Poems of mine have appeared or will appear in Asimov's, Minnesota River Review, Nebo, The Pedestal, and Typehouse, among others."
DWisely
return to start of this issue