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POETRY: PRINT & ONLINE JOURNALS

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BENDING TIME                                                                         

I’ve outgrown the person I use to be,

clutched by pearls of propriety, society,

tucked into a pocket of politeness...

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Woman, Spotted                                                          

             After Veruska Vagen’s dot de verre mosaic 

                    “The White Hat” (fused glass mosaic)

Beneath / your white hat 

Taylor Swift / red lips / languid

Daisy Buchanan / eyes / blue / daring

me / Step closer / No / too close... 

August 2025
May 2025
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HOW TO CLEAN A FISH                                                                            

Silently, we stood waiting our turn

behind a line of boisterous, back-slapping fishermen, 

inching our way to the marina’s only cleaning table—

my mother grabbed the hose, sprayed away blood...

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December 13, 2024

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Fall 2024

Half-Moon Mantle – June 1994                                               

 

From my aisle seat, I see him—The Mick—board

my flight from New York to Chicago. Shuffling his gait 

and girth into my adjacent seat, he orders a whiskey, neat...

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December 2024

WHEN WE WERE TOO YOUNG                                                    

 To read the words on the box / of Blue Diamond

Matches / you were old enough / to strike

the stick tips / sending red / and yellow sparks

into the air /....

2024 CONTEST FINALIST

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INSIDE RIZZOLI’S BOOKSTORE, WHEN IT WAS ONCE ON WEST 57th       

My fingers trail across the cover of Mapplethorpe’s Pistils, 

smooth and cool as the skin of your inner thighs...

 

INVINCIBLE, WE THOUGHT                                                                           

It’s a wonder we weren’t snatched from the streets,

 we two tween girls in summer halter tops... 

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Things You May Find Hidden in My Throat                                                         After Mosab Abu Toha

 

                         1.

A bud, tight pink, a cough caught

in the windpipe of my breath, until

I break into songs of the sixties: Monday

Monday,  California Dreamin,’ (I Can’t Get 

No) Satisfaction—lyrics, like scratch marks 

on a 45, leap from my lungs—but deep

in the sea of me, cat calls from bag boys 

delivering wild strawberries, corner boys whistling 

crude invitations to open my bloom.

 

 

                        2.

A howl lurks there too, longing

to rip loose, to be seduced,

to vibrate postponed truths—fears

shelved, discounted, craving

a buyer, an open ear. Unnamable

sensations burn as traveling fever dreams 

banging the back of my larynx,

seeking an exit sign that isn’t there.

 

 

                            3.

Dissect my trachea, and you’ll find spiraling 

traces of 8th-great-grandmother’s DNA, her voice

strangled in the loop of a rope, strung 

high on Boston Common, 1660. 

Three hundred years later, illnesses begin,

always in my throat—my sinew remembering

the force she felt when the boards dropped

away—voice box crushed, tongue hushed.

January 2024

Chiron Review #134: Fall 2024
Aboard the Sea Gal...pg 78

Aboard the Sea Gal, Sea Legs Wide

She steadies her galley stance, rolls egg noodle dough—

her hip-sway syncs with surf’s rising tide.

Spring lines, tied dockside from bow to bracket, 

creak and groan....

Dear Virgin of Remedies

                  After Remedios Varo’s painting “Rupture”

 

Uncloak your lamentations / let fly your defiance 

of dictators / shred their orders to annihilate 

art / fling them to the winds /.... 

        SEMI-FINALIST - BLUE 29

  WINTER / SPRING 2024 CONTEST

Blue 29                                                    

                                             
In Memphis, she drank whiskey 

till dawn at the Blue Moon Saloon. 

Danced with an indigo-blue man,
her breath bitter as bleu cheese,

her cheek’s faded bruises, faint 

robin’s egg blue. When she blew 

out her candles, the light in her 

lapis eyes wicked away, 

disappeared into the navy-blue night, 

invisible as Blu-ray waves. Chilled 

wind rattled an azure-stained shutter,
made her shiver, made her blue,
made her drop the needle 

on Miles’ disc Kind of Blue.

She’d forgotten to make a wish.

Too late? She grabbed a box of Blue 

Diamond matches, snatched a

thin sliver of hope, struck its tip, 

held the shimmering blue-red flame

atop each of the twenty-nine

blackened-blue wicks, wishing, 

as she often did, for a brand new

sapphire-blue, do-over life.

The Danger in Meeting Your Lover for Lunch                   

You’ll consent to alcohol when he orders 

Ouzo—even though you’re to meet new clients 

at 2. You’ll repeatedly glance from him 

to the door with the rhythm of a minute-hand 

ticking off time, worried someone you know 

will see him holding your hand, massaging 

your fingers, signaling his desire to skip

dessert. Distracted, you’ll miss him ordering 

for you—a Greek salad—once again, 

you’ll realize he’s forgotten how you abhor 

olives—how he says nothing when you flick 

them aside—how you plan to end this meal

with a whisper to his ear, Mon amor, Plus jamais,

yet knowing, he will silence your lips with his—again.

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January 2024 Issue

Dancing for the Dead                  

 

forgotten are the living           who disappear 

       into skyscraper sugar clouds          eyes perched

above check bones      necks searching    for the Sun 

      inside lightening       autumn’s iron spoons 

dance    shuck and shuffle      the Clapper Fandango 

      stirring      desert silences        into applause 

from    afterlife performers          praise-sounds 

      echo       from tongues     clattering     inside skulls  and teeth     chattering          as lipless jaws      shout                                 bravo     brava

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September 2023 

Cooling Off
Inside the walk-in cooler of my father’s 

bodega, I take refuge from summer’s heat...

 

Baby's Breath

Spilling along my garden path— 

               their panicles 

heavy with airy white flowers

            a sway in the summer breeze:...



Sharing A Tasting Menu
 

It’s my fault, really, how fine dining 

feels like a necessity, not a splurge.

It began, I think, with your 10th birthday—

September 27, 2023 Issue
Daredevils

We once held beads of mercury in our palms,

rolled them around our bowls of skin and bone,

ignorant of the poison at hand....


While Viewing the Black Marble Clock
 

It’s not how Cézanne’s bright white linen upstages

the ebony clock without hands,

nor how the porcelain saucer and cup teeter... 

Self-Portrait as Mailbox                    

 

Fickle as a witness / in a court case of knives

and bespectacled assassins / my nearby compatriot

groans / overstuffed with envelopes / from lopsided

mythological lands...

Issue 24, Spring '23

Summer Issue 2022

Theme  - Blood

Summer Camp

 

the axe

the tree

            the branch

            across 

her bow

her blood

            flowing

            like the

rushing

Snake River—

            the girl 

            caught 

in the

canoe—

            cuts her-          

            self free—

one day

her blood

            will flow

            again when

hormones

call her name

            when lanky

            boys long

to touch 

her leg

            finger

            her scar

asking

if she

            will bleed

            for them

Featured in Issue 28 - Summer / Fall 2022

her below-the-knee skirt to mid-thigh height

as she walks to middle school one morning? 

Is her mother the first in a long queue 

of adults who school her on the rules 

and restrictions of good-girl dictums?

After braces and finishing school,

she walks in teen fashion shows, 

learns to turn her head just so—beguilingly 

tossing her hair, smiling on cue

for the photographer. To relax her 

clenched fingers, he teaches her to shake 

her wrists as if air-drying wet hands. 

His trick works long enough for the shot. 

As she walks off set, she sucks in her cheeks,

curls her tongue, tight inside her mouth—

strides like a model girl, fists swinging.

Someday I Will Love Merna Louise                                                After Susan Rich, Ocean Vuong, & Frank O'Hara

 

When nearsighted eyes fool her

footsteps—and tumbles turn her

early childhood days into skinned 

knees and face-first falls onto sidewalks

chalked with hopscotch forms, and 

scattered stones—this gangly girl,

captured for a moment, stands 

beside the blue family Buick, posing 

defiantly—fists on hips, ragtag dress 

hitched up—curled tongue sticking out 

from her frowning lips—her response 

to her photographer father, whenever 

he orders her to smile.

 

So, when does she begin to bite her tongue,

bury it deep in the well of her mouth?

Is it when she’s caught rolling up 

   Breakfast With My Father

I was standing on a cliff above a roiling sea—

my father, from behind the morning paper,

relayed his distressing dream...

  Featured in Spring 2022 online& print edition

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AFTER SELLING YOUR LAKE HOUSE 

 

                        You’re sure, after your child drowns,

you will never return—yet, from across the lake, 

                        you watch the house...

Featured in Fall Issue, 2021 & 2022 Print Edition

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Featured in Vol 6, Issue 2, Fall 2021
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     I Pretend I'm a Long-Distance Jumper

Visiting child of the other woman / barefoot / I bound

          through the four-room house / of my father’s first wife—

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 Featured in:

       Lily Poetry Review, Print Issue 7 Winter 2022       and Quartet Fall Issue, 2021

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Summer 2024 "All About My Mother" Poetry Series
 She Could Have Lost A Hand
 

Sea-legs wide, on the aft deck, my mother readies her lure—

threads fishing line though eyelets, loops filament

 

into one tidy knot, pulled tight with her right index finger, 

its tip cut deep, scarred, decades ago, into an upturned smile...

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 Secret-Keepers of Eastern Island

​I must tell you of the wild horses of Rapa Nui—

thousands of feral creatures, who, in daylight,

meander coastal ridges of volcanic rock—

indifferent to drop-offs, to surging seas below...

The Bullet Guys and Me
 

I once showed oilmen how to brighten their sheen—

           taught nicotine pushers 

                    tricks to blow smoke.

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Prelude

Issue 4 2022 

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The Ekphrastic Review,

August 15, 2021 

My Paris Birthday
 

In the early morning, mother and I stroll the Catacombs.

Empty skulls stacked fifty deep...

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Clocking Time 

O, to climb inside a clock!

To slip between the gears—

The Impermanence of Sandcastles      

Perhaps a glint of sun blinds you, 

Or we are laughing too hard 

To notice.... 

 

The Haunting of Room 125 at The Campus Inn

I’ll climb out of the room when you stop obsessing over words—

your clattering keys disturbing my thoughts...

FEATURED WRITER FEB 27, 2021
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Volume 13 -  2021

ROCKING CHAIR                                                                             

                        

Ever so slightly, I press one foot upon the floor

        setting my rocker in motion

back and forth
       forward and back.

Hardwood floorboards creak their greeting.

 

Shaped like a human body at rest,

         the rocking chair shores up arms, supports legs, 

cradles my spine—

         only my neck and head bend and release

imperceptibly to the rhythm.
 

My gaze unfocused, breath slow and subtle
         as if the chair breathes for me.

My mind, like a fishing line,
        casts forward, seeking what?

Inspiration?   Reprieve?

 

How clever of Thonet to reject wood’s rigidity,

         unravel a way to bend beech—to mimic 

a body’s curvature.

         Water, heat, force,

time—the furniture maker’s agents

         of transformation.

 

Renoir, with charcoal-stained fingers, sketches such a chair

     —curlicues swirling beneath a reclining woman,

fully clothed, corset-tight.          

          Surely she needs the chair 

to help her breathe.  In repose, her eyes, like mine, 

          dreamy, quiet.      

Science tells us motion is therapy—

          how many psychologists have replaced their couches 

with rocking chairs?   Recalcitrant patients tip themselves

         forward and back

back and forth— 

         feel no judgment 

in arms’ smooth curves, find strength 

         in stretchers beneath their buttocks, 

behind their backs, untangle 

         long-held secrets of shame

or, simply let their gaze ease—

         blur surrounding walls, windows—

       

breathe in and out—

          and in their rocking, create 

a gentle stir of air—awaken 

         their subconscious to words   

waiting.

                                        

So, let us thank the timber, sawed and sanded 

            into spindles and splats, rockers and rails—

let us praise cherry and birch, steamed and bent—

           applaud the stacks of cane, soaked and stripped, 

woven thick into seats of thatch—

            the rocking chair will bear any weight we bring. 

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Walking My Golden on a Rainy Day

I squint to see picked-over whalebones

along the inlet path...

Catch and Release

Father’s thick fingers bait our hooks and cast our lines,

sending shimmying circles across the lake...

A Private Revelle

The cook slips from the kitchen

in the pre-dawn gray...

BEFORE GRAVITY                                                                     

Remember when we skipped everywhere?

Arms moving like counterpoint melodies,

knees rising, pedaling air,

ponytails swinging....

SUBJECTIV JOURNAL
SPRING 2021 - Free Download

          STAR 82 REVIEW
            Issue 2.2    2014

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MiPOesias

June 2014

MOJAVE RIVER REVIEW

 
HOW TO TALK YOUR WAY OUT OF A TRAFFIC TICKET       IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY                                                                         
 

And Officer, it was as if the tree reached out from the woods,

just there — do you see the slick of leaves and snapped branches?

And the rain beat down so hard the wipers wept

 

and my eyes stung with smoky mascara.  Sir,

the mascara — it’s not supposed to run. Why does everything run?

 

And that pine fence blew loose, blocking my path.

And the funeral, it’s started by now, and I’m not there, sir.

 

Lo siento, sir.  It’s getting cold. You have snow on your mustache,

sir. Yes, so easy to brush away — still, snow can smother a boy.

Lo siento, sir.  My papers must be here, buried in my bag.

 

Do you have children, sir? Niños?  You’re lucky. Perhaps

it was the mailbox I passed — with its latch undone. And I was wondering,

will the casket be open?  Do they do that here?  I was wondering,

will my son’s blue eyes still shimmer beneath his brittle lids? 

 

 

 

                                                     

 

 

 

 

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF TWO APRONS 

 

She hangs the gingham apron loose around her neck.  Frayed grosgrain ribbons edge three pockets.  Sewn in her youth and stored in her hope chest, the apron hangs low over breasts heavy as breadfruit.  She pulls wooden clothespins from a pocket.  Bites them between her teeth.  It is laundry day on the prairie.  She hangs her man’s clothes — lets them stiffen on the line.  An errant rooster feather clings to his shirt snapping in the wind.  She plucks it off and tucks the bit of red in her pocket.  She will tickle him with it later.

 

 

 

She pulls the butcher’s apron over her head. Wraps the ties twice around her waist.  Her white sheath catches drips of red as she lifts a tray of beef scraps.  It is hamburger-grinding day.  She pushes twenty pounds of cow through churning metal teeth, blends it into strings of red meat.  Smeared with blood by the end of her shift, she flicks errant bits of gristle from her chest, wipes the knives clean against her white thighs.  She will cash her check at the corner bar — lick white foam from atop a stream of beers and kiss any man with clean nails.

 

                                                   

CATCH AND RELEASE  

                                                                        

Father’s thick fingers bait our hooks and cast our lines,

sending shimmying circles across the lake.  When

the ripples smooth to nothing, I sigh, as if with them. I am five.  

 

Dragonflies helicopter overhead.  My line jerks with my first fish —

too small to keep.  Father releases it — it’s mother-of-pearl scales

glimmering in the morning light, cold body undulating deeper until it disappears.

 

Shrimp carapace scattered on a white plate. I am twenty-five.

The difference between the wind in my hair and the wind on the waves —

nothing more than quarks in motion here or there.

 

Buttery fingers wiped on white linen leave the DNA 

of ancient crustaceans.  On the table, a splayed lobster tail, 

crab shells sucked dry and the diamond ring I’ve cast aside.

 

I slip from the room while this man who once seemed so alluring

takes a call.  Survival is a question of instinct, moving this way 

rather than that.  Seeing the bait bag for what it is — a test.

Summer 2014 - vol 1 no 2
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THE SQUAW VALLEY REVIEW

          ISBN 9780988895331

NAMING AN HEIR, A PARENT

       SILVER BIRCH PRESS    

"ALL ABOUT MY NAME" POETRY SERIES

SOUTHERN BOUND WHITE GIRL

 

Traveling slow as heat along the Dixie Highway

we pass bare bottom brown boys digging in dirt.

An old woman sits outside her one-room shack

fanning her skin, creased as dried mud.

 

Further on, a khaki-covered white man

sits atop a horse — rifle in hand.

Bound ankles shuffle, chains clink a dusty song

and twenty sweat-soaked black backs

bend, digging a ditch already dug. Across the field

a bright Georgia road sign promises

    Peaches Grits Biscuits Just Ahead

                ____________

  

    White Only       Colored       

I am six — sunburned pink

I follow the arrow for Colored

 

 

 

 

 

 

     SILVER BIRCH PRESS         "ME AS A CHILD" POETRY SERIES

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© 2022 Merna Dyer Skinner

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