Better Than Starbucks January 2019

By Better Than Starbucks

The Interview: A.E. Stallings & 3 Poems, Featured Poems: Barbara Loots, Shelby Anne Kruse, Felipe Botero Quintana & Ranald Barnicot, Sonnet Contest: winner Susan McLean, & 9 more poets, Free Verse: DS Maolalaí, Marc Carver, John David Muth, Doug Hoekstra, & more, Haiku: Peggy Verrall, Milton Ehrlich, Dianne Moritz, Jack Maze, Sravani Singampalli, Linda M. Crate, Mick Rose, Jerome Betts, Steve Denehan & more, Formal Poetry: Richard Wakefield, Susan McLean, Gail White, Aaron Poochigian, Edmund Conti, Jerome Betts & more, Poetry Translations: Giovanni Quessep, Felipe Botero Quintana & Ranald Barnicot, Rainer Maria Rilke, Susan McLean, International Poetry: Amirah Al Wassif, Muhammed E Rafeek, Mahnoor Waqas, and more, Experimental & Micro Poetry & Found Flash: Katie Vogel, Dori Elliott, Margarita Serafimova, & Karen Schauber, Sentimental Poetry: William Pitcher, Edmund Conti, Marjon van Bruggen, Alan Balter, & Phil Huffy, Fiction: DC Diamondopolous, Better Than Fiction!: Aragon Baggins

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359325931

Book preview

Better Than Starbucks January 2019 Vol IV No I

Copyright

Three Featured Poems

The Train

The Impure Clarity

Down the Barrel

The Interview January 2019

Three Poems by A.E. Stallings

Sonnet Contest 2018

Free Verse Poetry with Suzanne Robinson

Haiku with Kevin McLaughlin

Formal Poetry with Vera Ignatowitsch

Lighthearted Verse & Limericks

Poetry Translations with Michael R. Burch

International Poetry with Michael R. Burch

African Poetry with Michael R. Burch

Sentimental Poetry with Anthony Watkins

Experimental & Micro Poetry & Found Flash

Fiction

Better Than Fiction!

From The Mind

Contributors to this issue in order of appearance:

Better Than Starbucks January 2019 Vol IV No I

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 978-0-359-32593-1

Editor-In-Chief Vera Ignatowitsch

Founder & Publisher Anthony Watkins

Cover Image: Starry Night 1922-1924

by Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Three Featured Poems

Publisher’s Choice Formal Poetry

The Train

Editor’s Choice Poetry Translations

The Impure Clarity

Editor’s Choice Free Verse Poetry

Down the Barrel

The Train

Touching your face with my two hands at night,

like the last gesture love will ever make,

I sense you slipping, slipping out of sight

into the shadow from which none awake.

I wait for my own sleep, anticipation

fixed on the rumble of a distant train

until it arrives, rushing through the station,

mysterious windows flashing in my brain

a lifetime of looking, view after glancing view.

Beside me in the dark, your breathing slows.

And I pray to journey through the night with you,

in this or any sleep the spirit knows.

Barbara Loots is known in The Lyric, Measure, The Formalist, Plains Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin, and other places friendly to traditional verse. Her poems are collected in Road Trip (2014) and Windshift (2018) both from Kelsay Books.

The Impure Clarity

It is also in our dream that time ignites

its fable-making denial. No one ever

forgets that dying is this impure

clarity. Like the sea between doves.

Who is to be deemed guilty? (Ah hope,

the matter of invented days.)

Our dreams get lost, someone utters words,

failures, founderings: ships, for our sakes,

fly on towards legend.

All is exile, all sea, all is its depth,

its rim, its never, its time it recounts to us.

La impura claridad by Giovanni Quessep translated by Felipe Botero Quintana and Ranald Barnicot. Original and more in Poetry Translations.

Down the Barrel

Staring down the barrel has me frozen

my heart is beating slow

my legs firm and relaxed.

He is watching me.

The smell of cold iron awaits

as the mechanized clicks of Smith

and the grains of Wesson running against my shoulder

are keeping time stopped in this place.

He expects me to be his way,

in a place that is supposed to be home.

Here the desert wind is a dry cold

and threatens to break blisters on my hands

that are covered in my father’s gun oil

smelling of fireworks

as I hope he might feel proud

of me.

Staring down the barrel

at targets of rusty metal and shattered cardboard

held by desert rocks and shifted sand.

The wind downdrafts the smell

of the targets right at me

taunting what lies in the chamber

from the other side of the range

taunting me

to aim for my father’s heart

where I am supposed to rest.

I’m never fully home.

Staring down the barrel

just one bit of silence

One exhale

One more round as I aim

guided by instinct passed down to me

Aim

breathe

exhale.

Pull the trigger as I stare down the barrel

and hope this bullet reaches home.

He looks away

and says nothing.

I missed my target.

Shelby Anne Kruse is a fiction writer, musician, and works in ABA services in Riverside, California. She is currently working on a fantasy novel.

The Interview January 2019

The Interview with A.E. Stallings

by Vera Ignatowitsch

A.E. Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia, in the previous millennium, and now lives in Athens, Greece. She has published four collections of poetry: Archaic Smile (University of Evansville Press), Hapax (TriQuarterly Books), Olives (TriQuarterly Books) a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Like, recently out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has published a verse translation of Lucretius’s philosophical epic, The Nature of Things, and Hesiod's eighth century B.C. almanac, Works and Days, with Penguin Classics. An illustrated and annotated translation of the pseudo-Homeric poem The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice is forthcoming from Paul Dry books. Stallings has received a translation grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, the 2008 Poets’ Prize, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she was a 2011 Guggenheim fellow and a 2011 MacArthur fellow. She lives with the journalist John Psaropoulos and their two Argonauts, Jason and Atalanta.

BTS: You’ve said that you wanted to be an author since you were a small child. What led you to poetry?

AES: Initially, I thought I’d write in all the genres, I think. But I have always had a special relationship with poetry. While reading a novel, I’d get lost turning the pages, and lose