What Cannot be Extinguished
by Teresa Méndez-Quigley
I like the way that the light,
this time of year,
nudges the night,
stretches the daytime
from an early easterly sunrise
through to the foldaway
of morning glories,
as nighttime eases back in.
When Hephaestus gave man the gift
to make fire over sticks and stones,
flickering more powerfully than the stars,
no one could predict what was to come:
Men gathered
at what would have been
the close of day,
darkness shoved back,
and with it came
the dangers of storytelling,
of igniting ideas,
the spark of rebellion and greed,
the rise of nations from the ashes.
Swimming Lesson
by Kyle Heger
As my four-year-old splashes
and bobs, freeform, in the
shallows, gleefully ignorant
of instructions followed by his
fellow students, who move as
precisely as members of a
synchronized swimming team,
I am torn between desires to
applaud him and to rush in and
demand his compliance so he
will be spared the consequences
of spontaneity.
Post Postscript
—i.m. Seamus Heaney
—for Greg P.
by David Livewell
And today we make the time, through online maps,
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
Because it’s autumn and you have been gone for a month—
But your words seem printed on the clouds and shimmering waters
You said we had to see on this narrow road
You drove with friends, this held line that keeps
The lough and the Atlantic from merging as one.
Now two readers are here below this massive sky
(The second life of art of which you spoke?),
And, shockingly, so are the swans you saw, mere specks
Of white on the lake as we click the forward arrow
To navigate the curve by a stone wall.
Then, to capture it even more without
Flying there, we spy a car that’s stalled
On the gravel shoulder, a driver you may have prompted
As well with buffetings from your poem’s breath,
Another unguarded heart blown open. Now…
You are here and there as known and strange things pass.
The Painter in Delgany, Ireland
—in memory of my mother
by Lavinia Kumar
There it was – her world, our world,
a cluster of stone houses
near the out-of-sight brook,
slate-blue roofs darker than the sky,
a white fence. Red poppies
hinted by the door
(oh, for roses to creep the whitewashed wall),
the Sugarloaf behind.
A gardener’s hand had planted poppies –
he would have welcomed us in for a cup of tea
had the brush-stroked colors
not been a canvas world for us to keep.
Algebra
by Maria Ceferatti
Yes, I know
you’ll never
use this in real life
No, no one
is trying
to torture you
Of course
that’s why God
invented calculators
What I want to tell you
but, no, not yet
but what I want to say
is that one day when you’re already late
and your car battery dies or
you hear the desperate ring
of the phone in the middle of the night or
you witness a lonely polar bear
on a shrinking ice cap or
you find out about a baby
who doesn’t wake up one morning or
you understand that nuclear war
heads are gazing in our direction or
you hug your wife and the sound of her sigh
is the complicated opposite of love
you may gain comfort remembering
the beautiful logic of fives
in two fractions that cancel each other out
and revel in the simple sanity
of integers and their rules
and perhaps with fondness
you’ll recall
a small
but not insignificant
x
whittled down
boldly alone
face-to-face
with its equal.
About the Poets:
Maria Ceferatti is a music teacher in the Philadelphia area and an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Rosemont College. Maria teaches writing with the Young Writers’ Day program and is the music director of Acting Without Boundaries, a theater group for actors with physical disabilities. Her previous work has been published in Apiary Magazine, Driftwood Press, Minerva Rising and The Best of Philadelphia Stories.
Kyle Heger, former managing editor of Communication World magazine, lives in Albany, CA. His writing has won a number of awards and been accepted by 55 publications, including London Journal of Fiction, Nerve Cowboy and U.S. 1 Worksheets.
Lavinia Kumar’s books: The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid Life (2017) and The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Chapbooks: Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications, 2016) and Rivers of Saris (Main Street Rag, 2013). Poems have appeared in US and UK publications such as Atlanta Review, Colere, Edison Literary Review, Exit 13, Flaneur, Kelsey Review, Orbis, Peacock Journal, Pedestal, Pemmican, Symmetry Pebbles, Lives You Touch, & US1 Worksheets.
David Livewell won the 2012 T.S. Eliot Award for Shackamaxon. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Threepenny Review, and other journals. He is at work on a new poetry collection.
Teresa Méndez-Quigley was selected as Montgomery County Poet Laureate in 2004. She received Judges Choice Award by Mad Poets Society in 2001. She attends poetry workshops by Dr. Christopher Bursk. Her work has appeared in Not What I Expected anthology, Best of Philadelphia Stories, Philadelphia Poets, College of Physicians, California Quarterly, and Feile Festa, among others. Teresa resides with her husband and son, surrounded by untamed gardens, a feisty cat and not enough books.