Robert Nisbet, “Exam Room”

Exam Room

They’re known as ‘A’ levels, a test, a tilt
at adult standing, competition’s prize.
The young are safely gathered into rows
in a stuffy hall whose intermittent sounds
shuffle a wavering path round echoing space.

Teacher, invigilator, padding round,
believes (he really does) in love-of-learning
(that afterthought in education’s screeds),
but knows, in ten weeks’ time, he’ll map them out,
two A’s, three B’s. My pass rate. My results.

The pupils, concentration’s ants, scratch on,
minute by minute, in the silent hall.
Someone has just forgotten Darcy’s name.
Someone remembers, panicking, the steps
by which Othello’s wrought to jealousy.

The past two years included shafts and rays
of insight, happiness, the learning thing.
They’ll go now to their colleges, while he
recalls the mornings when the classes’ track
stumbled on unexpected grains of joy.

 

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Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who taught English in high schools for over thirty years, and creative writing in higher education for a further twelve. His poems have been published widely in Britain and the United States, including San Pedro River Review, Constellations, and Verse-Virtual.

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Mitchell Grabois, “Gus and Darlynda”

Gus and Darlynda

Looking for scratch paper
Gus rips a page from one of Darlynda’s
Victoria’s Secret catalogs

He figures she keeps them as a form of masochism
as she is hipless, flat-chested, and plain

He is no more attractive
with unruly reddish hair and a gangling walk

Now fifty, Gus knows they’re headed for ugliness—
he only hopes they get there tardy
as he always did to school

He still remembers Darlynda in second grade
hanging from monkey bars
a cute little sparkplug despite her buck teeth

This Victoria’s Secret model
has dark eyes and a midriff smooth as ice—
more appealing, he’s sorry to note,
than any current portion of Darlynda

Still, he recognizes that a fashion photographer with an airbrush
could probably make Darlynda sparkle
as she had when they got married, three decades back
on the shore of Lake Michigan
near their hometown of Windchill
where winters are more brutal than fate

 

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Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve hundred of his poems and fiction pieces appear in literary magazines in the United States and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.

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J. I. Kleinberg, “The Window’s Memory”

The Window’s Memory

I don’t know what the storefront
once displayed—pots and pans,
perhaps, or typewriters. Plumbing
fixtures. A dressmaker’s dummy
and a sewing machine.

Years later, when I moved there,
claiming the remnant air
and echoing rooms, the bay window
offered only the dark carcasses
of flies and curled shreds of wallpaper

flayed by the sun’s hard glare,
gold lattice on white,
water-stained and rippled.
What the sun had begun
I continued, pulling down wallpaper

and beneath it layer upon layer
of newspaper with narrow columns
of fifty-year-old news.
And that too I worried from the wall,
peeling strips delicate as sunburned skin

to reveal the eager reports of weddings
and scandals, the paper falling to flakes
in one place, hard as cement in another,
the stories already old
when they were pasted there,

already forgotten. The layers stuck
crosswise, one on the next,
indifferent as I scratched each
from the other, as if the one beneath,
or beneath that, might contain the truth.

 

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A Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2016 Ken Warfel Fellowship, J. I. Kleinberg is co-editor of Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington (Other Mind Press 2015). Her poetry has appeared recently in One, Diagram, Otoliths, Poetry Breakfast, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com and thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com.

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William Miller, “Hardy’s Soldier”

Hardy’s Soldier

His uncle dug
the body up
with a garden spade.

It was time to plant roses,
Spring in Wessex,
turn the ancient soil.

And there he was,
one spade at a time—
bones, breastplate, sword.

The neighbors came,
even the rector, to see
what was left

of an army that fought
the old tribes, claimed
this land for Rome.

Hardy was a child,
a young boy, and saw
the look on the old people’s

faces—fear mixed
with wonder. The past
was not the past

but the start of a new
season. What else was buried
beneath the soil,

the loose fertile soil,
layer upon layer?
He never forgot that day

or the soldier who
was a boy himself,
someone who

fought when he was
told to, died before
he met the girl

who gave him children,
a piece of foreign land,
a garden of his own.

 

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William Miller’s fifth collection of poetry, Three Roads, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press in 2012. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Penn Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

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