River, Blood, And Corn Literary Journal

César Love Poetry

Four Corners

you share with me a picture of your sunset

I would give one back to you

But my balcony faces east

instead, I offer you

A midnight

dawn

And noon

three corners of the sky

with your sunset, they are four

one diamond of the night and day

Orange

In the grocery store aisle

one belly button orange with a scar

others pristine, unblemished

others soon to be sold

Between perfect sisters

one unbidden sphere

branded by two discolored inches

not to be held

not to be tasted

A globe passed over

oceans never plunged

forests never inhaled

landscapes never painted

A world unfathomed

with a navel and a canyon scar

is the canyon east or west?

north or south?

perhaps along her belly

or across a breast

maybe against her cheek.

Moonlight at Noon

The Moon, My Shadow, and I make Three. – Li Po

I would bake on this planet

If not for the Moon I invited

She agreed to let me keep her

Tucked beneath my blouse

Her cool face against my belly

I lounge in her quiet

I swim in her well

I bloom in her sanity

The Moon brought me a friend

One who used to follow me

She mimicked my every movement

At first she flattered me

Then she mocked me

Finally, she ran away

I screamed at her,

Come back here!

I tried to put a leash on her

But she was too smart

I threw a plum at her

Of course, she thew one back

We did this for months

Then the Moon told me her name

The Poet’s Tent

North or South, she travels

Always with her tent.

On chosen ground,

She slides its rods into the earth.

She places cloth on its frame.

A cloth she imagined

Something like a Mexican rebozo

Something like an Amish quilt

A cloth that exchanges colors

That switches latticework

Cloth that vibrates to the heartbeat of deer

Cloth that answers the whispers of trees

The poet smooths the floor

She unrolls her carpet

Psychic knots detach from its tendrils:

abandoned theories

dropped desires

jettisoned memories.

They pulse on her floor.

Soon to transform

Soon to become

feral opals

protean metals

iris crystals.

She prepares the door

Butterflies of every stripe arrive

Cesar Love is a Latino poet influenced by the Asian masters. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, he is also an editor of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. He is the author of Birthright and While Bees Sleep. cesarlovepoetry.yolasite.com

For Q

by Kim Shuck

Pull on a different mountain range

One leg at a time

You time travel in poem

He told me

I've seen you do it

We went relic spotting

More than once

Through the line up of the '53 Dodgers

Before his heart was broken

Memories never sit as neatly in a prong setting

As a heart solitaire

Memories never sit as neatly

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of 9 books, co-authored one, edited another ten and has contributed to a vast array of anthologies, journals, curriculum guides, tours, and protests. www.kimshuck.com

To my bystanders

by Deborah Jang

People stand by during attack of elderly Asian woman – Associated Press

Did you catch a whiff of lilac

on that warm summer eve

while we gathered at the bus stop,

each wandering our mind?

Out the corner of your eye

did you flinch, did you see him

rushing twilight, pushing rudely in?

In a flash of recognition,

did your stomach tell your throat

what was going down?

Did you see my toes curl fetal

while I lay sideways

on the concrete stunned?

Did you freeze in fear and horror?

Did you look the other way?

Did you reach down for your phone

or was it already in your hand?

Were you scared to intervene?

Did your silence cheer him on?

Was it you who kneeled down

and whispered something kind

I didn’t understand?

Did you see my bruised face on TV?

Did they say my name?

Did they even try?

Deborah Jang’s creative practices include assemblage sculpture and poetry, based out of Denver, Colorado and Oceanside, California. Her debut poetry collection is titled Float True (Shanti Arts, 2020). Her new chapbook is Last Will and Best Guesses (Finishing Line Press, 2022). deborahjang.com

LAST WILL AND BEST GUESSES by Deborah Jang

"Deborah Jang knows the terrain of the human heart. In Last Will and Best Guesses she offers an unflinching meditation on mortality and mystery. Jang taps into our shared experiences from the pandemic to racial reckonings, the environmental crises, the plights of refugees. She writes candidly about the workings of her mind, which are the unspeakable workings of ours too. She muses on connections and consciousness that alter and deepen through recent and ongoing trauma and settles into grace. This is a rich, relatable book to pull out again and again." –Terra Trevor is a contributor to 15 books including, Take A Stand: Art Against Hate.

"Deborah Jang writes through a raging global pandemic, when a “planet [is] spinning off its axis,” gathering strength to face its uncertainties and attendant anti-Asian violence and sentiment. This is a reserve, for herself, and future generations, and I am nourished by her work." –Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multi-media artist whose book, Ghost Of, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

“Mind bent, nose blown, fingers crossed./Head bowed, going home.” Deborah Jang writes to the rhythm of life while examining death and all its intricacies. This chapbook is an exhale and a deep breath." –Vogue M. Robinson is the author of Vogue 3:16 (2014) and served as Poet Laureate (2017-2019) for Clark County, Nevada.

Last Will and Best Guesses by Deborah Jang, Finishing Line Press

Community

by Kim Shuck

Grandma lived with this peppernut

Sapling and tree

They drank the same water

I know that the creek is here

Under ground

Under thought

Near the lilac

Someone’s relic of a different life

Someone’s idea

Carried from somewhere else

On a quiet day

When there has been rain

Rest your cheek on the trunk and hear/feel

Water

Running in cracked pipes

Grandma

The tree

The elderberry

The salamander

The sense of humor

The fog

Each water particle

Rhymes with the life here

Whispers kinship

To the cracked and layered

Rocks on this

Hill

Kim Shuck is the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco Emerita. Shuck is solo author of eight books and one that is on the way. She has edited or co-edited ten volumes of poetry. She contributed essays to the recently released de Young 125, a collection of writing about and photographs of pieces in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her most recent collection of poems is Exile Heart from That Painted Horse Press. www.kimshuck.com

Assassination Nation

On the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1968

by Robert Bensen

Whoever we might have been,

whatever grief or fury we might have shared

were lost when the mighty arm

that God and the weight room gave him

brought down, I believe

a set of knuckles to open my skull

to the complicity of my complexion

and turn us, like the twilight, black and white.

A half-hour later: dizziness, nausea,

a swarm of psychedelic lights.

The brain trauma specialist

asked if I always sweat like this.

—Yes, I said, yes, yes,

I always sweat like this.

Police stacked the table with album after album of mug shots,

thumbnails of beautiful black males, growing older, somewhere, maybe.

Maybe my main mugger-man in there, or the brothers who shot up the neighborhood

night after night I lay sweating bullets on the floor, that summer the night

one of their grandmothers took a slug through her picture window into her heart.

None of those faces belonged above the arm

I can still see silhouetted against the cool dusk of April 4, 1968,

before it descended like the wrath of Jehovah

who smote the hard, hard hearts of the children

all the harder because they were his children.

—Officer, I said, I never saw the man’s face.

Cop thinks —This guy’s a waste.

But I had seen the heraldry of race, an arm raised,

and locked in the fist, a club, a mace—

trapped in this row after row, page after page

of sullen faces. Many frames, one rage.

I wonder: could he pick out of a college yearbook,

or a line-up of my entire despiséd race,

me, whose head got in the way of his fist?

Did this startled face serve in place of him

who cocked the hammer and aimed the rifle

and pulled the trigger that fired the bullet

that flew through Memphis

that lovely April afternoon, the bullet

that has been flying for half a century,

bullet flying still—

would this one do, who did nothing to stop it,

nothing whatever to stop it,

this one who’ll never undo the nothing he did

with the nothing he wouldn’t do, if he could.

First published in Piltdown Review.

Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta NY). He also taught at Parkland College and SUNY Oneonta, and conducted community workshops, including the Red Herring Workshop (Urbana IL) and the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell NY). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. robertbensen.com