Harvey Steinberg

Looking up from the book
I don’t say I should continue,
I say I want to continue.
Reaching a peak in my decline,
knowing it’s there,
seeing it shift to an open ocean’s drift
flipped, submerged, lifted
and almost in place, subside again
to go on.
So it moves to island
beached with blackened weed
that I might
taste it,
knowingly.

About the author
Harvey Steinberg is indeed 88 years old. He is a long-time resident of Lawrenceville. His poetry has appeared in many literary journals across the country and in Canada, England, and Israel. An artist and photographer as well, he has most enjoyed merging his texts with his visual art to create unified works of the two. Together with his wife Marcia he has written feature articles for area newspapers and for magazines with wider circulation.

Lois Marie Harrod

after Pietro Longhi’s Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice, 1751

Oh, poor Clara, the long boat ride from India in dark quarters
and then the shuffle around Europe until you came to a barn
in Venice, once a day trotted through the alleys by your trainer
who in Longhi’s painting holds your horn and a flail that looks
more like a fishing pole than a whip.  I hope it did not sting
when it hit your skin.  I hope your skin was much too thick. 

It’s obvious the people in the stands are not watching you,
they have the vague look of people sitting for portraits
in a drawing room, paying to become faces in another setting—
a penitent at the foot of the Cross, a pope at the Ascension–
here, the audience at your rhino rink. I do not know why
the Grimalis wanted you, an odd-toed ungulate, in the family picture,
when they are so obviously not sitting in your stall
or sniffing as you chomp your hay, which Longhi oddly
tinged with gold as if spun by Rumplestiltskin.
Hay—maybe a nod to their gold not yours. Half the Grimalis
wear Carnival masques; the others look elsewhere.

How we make much of the helpless. 

About the author
Lois Marie Harrod’s18th collection Spat appears in May 2021. Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016; And She Took the Heart, in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press), in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and. pre-pandemic, at The College of New Jersey. Links to her online work http://www.loismarieharrod.org.

Dorothy Anna Timberlake Moore

Like a fish hook,
one bare tree
has snagged the moon’s
white lip.

I watch it pull.

About the author
Dorothy Anna Timberlake Moore, also known as Dar, recently graduated with a major in biology from Mercer County Community College, where she was a member of the Society Of Unusual Literature (S.O.U.L).

Dorothy Anna Timberlake Moore

The sun reaches over
Tree roots of twilight

For my hand.

About the author
Dorothy Anna Timberlake Moore, also known as Dar, recently graduated with a major in biology from Mercer County Community College, where she was a member of the Society Of Unusual Literature (S.O.U.L).

Nancy Demme

The mortgage came due again
again, and again,
and he prepared.
Stole a cart from the Winn Dixie lot,
strolled it home.

Took the grey blanket
from his empty marriage bed,
packed cereal, rice,
noodles, canned beans and soup
from the pantry in clear plastic bags.

Clothes he took from his closet,
boots, socks, shirts, underwear,
a pen from the kitchen drawer,
a notebook, a can opener,
the fisherman’s knife
he’d been given for his 52^nd birthday,
a painter’s tarp.

From the back closet
he salvaged his slicker,
the one he’d worn fishing,
and a heavy green jacket
Though the temperature was already rising,
he put these on,
wondered at his calm.

After a last look at his home from the stoop,
he threw his keys on the straw doormat
for the creditors.

He clutched at the fiver in his breast pocket,
His hand over his heart.
If he needed anything more,
he’d figure it out.
He was clear-headed
knew his uncertain fate
and pushed his cart past Ted Plumstead’s home
filling his pockets
with fallen apples,
sour, gnarled, crabbed.

About the author
Nancy Demme is a retired children’s librarian with a penchant and passion for writing. Her novel, The Ride, was published in 2019. She has also published flash fiction, a short story and poetry in The Kelsey Review, Confrontation, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Willard & Maple, and US 1. She teaches ESL: Writing in English, facilitates the East Windsor Senior Center Writers and the Twin Rivers Writers.

Lavinia Kumar

Does it involve an overpowered sense
of magical thinking or am I actually in the stream?
Rolling Stone, May 13, 2010

Small fishing boats tossed uncertainly
at the end of the river as it reached
incoming waves from the sea,
which earlier had seemed gentle,
but now hefty, threatening.

I felt a hand on my shoulder
look to my side, see not you,
but Uncle Fred.  He told me once,
in a long letter, he was afraid to die.

Each winter he dove into London’s
Serpentine lake, ice or not.
He biked by the sea for years,
carrying his bike over sand
to sit on rocks each noon –
it was the water he loved to see.
And, yes, he was buried near.

Yes… it was you by my side,
you who told our children
in the face of waves,
calm down, be brave.
As I had wished to say.

About the author
Lavinia Kumar’s latest books are Hear Ye, Hear Ye: Women, Women: Soldiers, Spies of Revolutionary and Civil Wars; No Longer Silent: the Silk and Iron of Women Scientists; and Beauty. Salon. Art. Her poems range from science, to surreal, history, and the everyday. Her poetry has appeared in US, Irish, & UK publications. Her website is laviniakumar.org.

Elane Gutterman

Talia, June 2020

When Talia’s hips snake, she leaves behind caution.
When her shoulders shimmy, she celebrates.
When she vines her steps, she turns vibrant.
When her head is flipping, her curls flying,
she overflows.

She is living La Vida Loca with Ricky Martin.
She Breaks Free to Ariana Grande.
She is sailing with the Greek, Kalidis.
She is feeling good to Lizzo

I’m also feeling good to Lizzo,
taking my daughter’s Zumba class,
from the distance of online,
she in our basement, me in the room above.

When Talia’s hips snake, she grinds away resistance.
When her shoulders shimmy, she celebrates.
When she vines her steps, she turns vibrant.
When her head is flipping, her curls flying,
she’s unstoppable.

About the author
Elane Gutterman is Chair of the Literary Arts Committee at the West Windsor Arts Center, where she is also a founding board member. Her poems on family, travel and community have been published in in Kelsey Review, Patterson Literary Review, U.S. 1 Summer Fiction Issue and The New Verse News. She kept her sanity during the pandemic by writing poetry and discovering an abundance of NJ nature that is surprisingly close to home.

Lauren Stanzione

My mother is setting down the blue canister of flour, white bleeding into my sleeve as I sop up the dust I’ve spilled. She is smiling and the light catches her eyes, ones I’ve always wished she gave me: golden rings, flying blue saucers floating in peridot. Enigma eyes.

This is like my mother, who in her own way has no secrets and many. Today I am sitting around the island, our island of skeletons, and I am pulling her strings, opening her so she will tell me about the past, one I promised as a child I would write for her.

She is telling me about the lump on her throat when we were one person. It was like a ghost, methodically pulling at the delicate, thin skin on her neck. It was a ghost, and I summoned it as it lay barren within her. I try not to think of the notes she would be able to sing if I could have derived from some other time and place.

My eyes are pulled to the red exclamation mark that hugs her skin, the specks of crimson against faint hues of tawny. Pain rolls through my esophagus when I think of the incision. I look away.

My mother begins unfolding the story of the bump along her neck; she begins one along the outskirts of her mind. She is telling me about a waiting room, about a placental hemorrhage and a world where we both had fallen into the void, where I would have been a cell or two and she would have left a baby and a man.

Later, when I am lying in the safety of my childhood bed, I write down six words:

I AM MEANT TO BE HERE.

About the author
Lauren Stanzione is a graduate of North Hunterdon High School and a future student at New York University, where she plans to major in journalism and minor in creative writing. She is from Clinton, New Jersey, and has dreamed of being a writer her entire (so far short) life. She hopes to funnel her interest in writing either through a journalistic or creative avenue, depending on where the world takes her!

Lauren Stanzione

In Little Italy
I buy a book: Living Italian
falling through pages,
I search for myself
down the spine.
Matt sends me pictures
cacio e pepe
he uncovers
our blood
plasma in parmesan
the only part
of our world
I see myself in. 

Women on the street:
their hair sways like gentle linguini
eyes water against sicilian shores
skin pale as flour lathered on dough
they are thin, orderly
like the tip of the boot,
foreign mutterings in my canals.
La donna
Our fingertips
dance across the ceiling
The Creation of Adam
I reach out
where is Eve?
did Michelangelo
forget how
to paint?

I breathe in pages,
imploring them to whisper
between the folds of my brain.
grazie ciao prego
words of
zucchero on my tongue
tu sei una ragazza
LEI NON APPARTIENE
the green cover
stains my mela verde tongue
with proper Italianness-
listerine
the english on my breath
untangle
the women I
can’t fit inside
arrivederci Lorena!

I write my grandmother
ama l’ignoto
love the unknown
she tells me
she’s never heard
Italian spun
so beautifully.

As I walk home
I think of my mother
our blood boils
the same 37.777°C
our kitchen
the thermosphere
beyond our walls
the mesosphere,
liquid ice
on earth.
She shivers, telling me
go Lauren Rose!
Go!
Italian girls
need
Italian women.

I fly to the top
of the Vatican
cracking open
a dome
of goldy heaven
collecting fistfuls
of light
between my webs
I watch home&unhome,
dimensions of Lauren
the arches
and ridges
of my architecture
silk
against my palms

I tell myself:

AMA L’IGNOTO
Italian girls
need
you, Lauren.

About the author
Lauren Stanzione is a graduate of North Hunterdon High School and a future student at New York University, where she plans to major in journalism and minor in creative writing. She is from Clinton, New Jersey, and has dreamed of being a writer her entire (so far short) life. She hopes to funnel her interest in writing either through a journalistic or creative avenue, depending on where the world takes her!

Carolyn Phillips

He sits in massive bronze repose
the flowing cape he wore at Yalta
hides the well-kept secret

Eleanor in sensible shoes
her coat collar awry
smiles slightly

Fala watches patiently,
his tousled bangs golden
from persistent petting

Segal’s plaster men
hunched with resignation
slouch toward a soup kitchen

And granite blocks
piled one on one recall his words
as waterfalls plummet into pools.

An old man leans heavily on a cane
and climbs the steps to touch his hand

About the author
Carolyn (CAT) Phillips, a resident of Mercer County, is a retired teacher of English. She has enjoyed publication in several journals, both local and national. She twice won a contest for ekphrastic poems describing sculptures at Grounds for Sculpture in NJ She convenes a group of poetry lovers at a local senior center.