Better Than Starbucks September 2019

By Better Than Starbucks

The Interview: Joan Retallack & Four Poems. Featured Poems: John Beaton, John Dorsey, Jacob Butlett, Kushal Poddar, & Emmanuel Stephen Ogboh. Free Verse: Steve Denehan, Megha Sood, Shelby Lynn Lanaro, Shalom Galve Aranas, & more. Haiku: Armando Quiros, Diana Frybarger, Manoj Sharma, & more. Tribute to John Whitworth: Janet Kenny, Ed Shacklee, Ann Drysdale, & more. Formal Poetry: Aaron Poochigian, Alfred Nicol, Catherine Chandler, Jennifer Reeser, & more. Free Verse: Stacey Z Lawrence, Gloria g. Murray, & more. Poetry Translations: Robert Schechter, Ono no Komachi, Michael R. Burch & more. International Poetry: Amirah Al Wassif, Dragoş Niculescu, Partha Sarker & more. African Poetry: Lazola Pambo, Francis Ocran, Ngozi Olivia Osuoha & more. Poetry Unplugged: Greg Huteson, Devin Guthrie, Lisa McCabe & more. Experimental & Form Poetry: Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo, Fang Dayu, John L. Stanizzi & more. Fiction: Arthur Powers. Flash Fiction: Maximilian Winters & Vernon Waring. Better Than Fiction!: Terry Barr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359888511

Book preview

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Copyright

Copyright © by Better Than Starbucks. All rights reserved.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Contributing authors retain copyright to their works.

First Printing: ISBN 978-0-359-88851-1

Editor in Chief Vera Ignatowitsch

Founder & Publisher Anthony Watkins

Cover Image: A Waterfall, 1910,

by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

Five Featured Poems

Editor’s Choice

Formal Poetry

Regeneration

Hay ripens. I sharpen my tapering scythe blade

and chamfer its wafer of paper thin steel

with stone swoops; it’s hooked like a peregrine’s talon.

The snaking shaft sweeps and the first swathe is side-laid

beside me, clean slain. As I swing I can feel

the gravid field yielding. Sheaves kneel and then fall in

the breeze in formation. Their early seeds dance there

like next April’s rain showers shining in air.

The cocksfoot and rye grass and fescue are falling,

the rogue oats, the sedges—I harvest the field where

they shaded the clover and none do I spare.

The sun sets on stubble where hay stalks lie sprawling.

My father stood here in the old days like one

of the stalks that made hay as they fell in the sun.

John Beaton writes metrical poetry. His work has been widely published, won numerous awards, and he recites it in spoken word performance. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, he now lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.

Publisher’s Choice

Free Verse

Boo Radley Will No Longer Protect Us

from our own nature

while the blood moon of alabama

hangs around our hearts

like a noose around dreams

in a mute sky

of disbelief

it’s all backward here

but none of it

is fiction

young girls let out silent screams

like torch singers

in the alleys of the dead

without even knowing

how they got there

the landscape is a broken time machine

in museums of youthful abandon

dedicated to their grandmother’s concerns

as if they never went away

harper lee where are you now

scout finch was once

a feminine flower

of a girl

now she’s just a pile of bones

eventually all our role models turn to dust

when what they fight for

are nothing more than words

on a page.

John Dorsey is the author of several collections of poetry, including Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016), Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017), and Your Daughter’s Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019). Reach him at [e-mail].

Haiku

Editor’s Choice

cold black skillet

congealed islands of fat . . .

summer sunshine

sunlit maple trees—

riverbed tasting moss

soaked in deer blood

rehearsing their elegy

white robes fluttering tonight . . .

a congregation of swans

summer morning—

dark ferns fan

fallen infant robins

potted plant in the park—

pink tulip blooms

in a dead robin’s skull

her shiny little stove

her spongy lemon cake

her empty kitchen chair

Jacob Butlett holds an A.A. in General Studies and a B.A. in Creative Writing. Some of his work has been published in Panoply, Cacti Fur, Rabid Oak, and plain china.

Publisher’s Choice

International Poetry

What Buddha Advised

In the end

clouds matter to the feline

with the new kittens,

and rain matters

to the farmer. His hand

keeps the pesticide nearby,

and he leaves proper instructions

for his sons.

The one inside his wife, it seems,

eats its way out.

The wife floats, a husk.

In the end the slice of moon

harvests the sighs, and the farmer

almost sloshes pesticide but it doesn’t

matter.

Kushal Poddar is from Kolkata, India. He has authored seven volumes of poetry including A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Scratches Within, Eternity Restoration Project—Selected and New Poems, and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse—A Prequel.

Editor’s Choice

African Poetry

A Woman’s Troubles

She is the girl you lost

To toothless waves of your selfishness’ sea

First drowning, struggling to find herself

But soon overwhelmed by duty

A duty to love and honor

A duty to ‘put family first’

Hiding her tears in cups behind the mirror

When you were blind to her blistered hands

Reaching out for help, grasping for support

Her lipless ghost is left to roam

Searching for her, searching for herself

But there is nothing to find

Only a breathing corpse, wandering on,

So that when you are finished with this mirage

There’s no wife to find

And there’s no home to stagger into.

First published in Fourth Wave.

Emmanuel Stephen Ogboh is a young Nigerian poet. He started writing poetry—his observations and experiences—four years ago and has been published in several literary magazines. He can be found at https://medium.com/@Stephenecdotes, and www.fb.com/semmanuelogboh.

The Interview September 2019

The Interview with Joan Retallack

by Anthony Uplandpoet Watkins

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Joan Retallack is the poet-essayist who responds here to Anthony UP Watkins’ questions with pleasure. She is the author of The Poethical Wager and lives in the Hudson Valley, NY.

An American poet, critic, biographer, and multi-disciplinary scholar, Joan Retallack has authored a dozen books, including Circumstantial Evidence (1985), Icarus FFFFFalling (1994), A F T E R R I M A G E S (1995), Memnoir (2004), and The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times (2017). She is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor Emerita of Humanities at Bard College where she has taught courses in poetics, poethics, and experimental traditions in the arts. In addition to other awards and honors, she was awarded the Pushcart Prize in 1985 for High Adventures of Indeterminacy; Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d was an Artforum best book of 2010.

AUP: Reading your poem, Not a Cage, it occurs to me that you start about where I leave off, or maybe a little further down the road. Of course, you are both a master poet and a very good student of poetry, but I am still amazed to read your description, in the most offhand way, of things that may or may not exist. How did you develop to be the poet you are?

JR: This is a bit difficult to answer. I don’t actually think of myself as the poet I am so much as a lucky lover of language who gets to make things out of what I discover in words, with serious, or playful, or seriously playful intent. An important part of that, for which I would not have to be called poet, is enjoying encounters with words in what I read; in what I see or hear as I move around in our very talkative, writing assertive world. That means languages (foreign or domestic) of everyday life as well as the literatures of a variety of disciplines. From philosophy to science to journalism, to instruction manuals, to poetries