Welcome to Spring 2022 Issue #9 of Lightwood magazine. It continues to be a difficult year on multiple fronts for all of us, and we at Lightwoodpress.com want to send you some positive reinforcement. This issue of Lightwood brings you exciting fiction, poetry, book and music reviews and essays to help you move into Spring and beyond.
We want our focus to remain on the restorative properties of the arts. And no matter how toxic the viruses of disease, violence and ignorance are that strike at us, we can be comforted that our world-wide arts community will bring the seeds of healing. We must not let April be the “cruelest month” but one of hope and rejuvenation. Enjoy the offerings of these writers and artists, and please look over the earlier Lightwood issues for pieces that you have missed. And contact us with comments, ideas and future submission thoughts.
Stay well and keep your forward motion.
L. Carr, Publisher
Table of Contents:
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Welcome to Lightwood Spring Issue #9
Welcome to Spring 2022 Issue #9 of Lightwood magazine. It continues to be a difficult year on multiple fronts for all of us, and we at Lightwoodpress.com want to send you some positive reinforcement. This issue of Lightwood brings you exciting fiction, poetry, book and music reviews and essays to help you move into Spring…
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Paradise Loft/ poems by Laurence Carr/book review by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
One rainy Sunday, I decided, was the time to read and be illuminated by Laurence Carr’s new volume of poetry, Paradise Loft. I was thoroughly enriched by his meditations on such philosophical states as being and nothingness, absence and presence, permanence and flux. In these works, he explores in highly original, evocative ways how we live in…
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White Bird/Bare Tree and Was It Basho//two poems by Ann Lauinger/ photo by Pauline Watts
WHITE BIRD / BARE TREE An egret, or maybe a heron. This bird-app’s terrible: I need a better guide. Look at the bird, how calmly prodigal. It would be a shame to waste the light it throws. In its candid plumage, the stripped boughs are leafed again. //////// WAS IT BASHŌ who regretted that his…
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First, the Clowns/ fiction by Gregory Seth Harris
First they came for the clowns, herding the sad-faced funny men into wooden carts donated by upstanding citizens happy to contribute to the cause. They chained the clowns by the ankles, their brows drooping, their weary oblong faces peering through the slats, red noses pressed against the coarse wood. Anyone wearing oversized floppy shoes was…
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To the Person at the Zoom Poetry Reading, Unmuted, Doing Hand Laundry, June, 20, 2020/ poem by Suzanne Cleary
I hear you. Meaning not only that I hear water circle and splash, the burp and swish of hands lowering and raising fabric at a sink within earshot of your computer. I mean that I hear you. I hear your need to stand and do something useful on this spring afternoon thousands march through the…
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“Underground Figures” music by Nkeiru Okoye, Julia Wolfe and Florence Price/ music review by Laurence Carr
I recently had the pleasure of attending a live concert, something missing from my cultural life over the past two years. The concert, titled “Underground Figures,” presented the works of three American women composers and was performed by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. The evening more than filled my live music void and was one of…
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Li-Po, Larry and Bill: thoughts and poems inspired by the Chinese master poet
Over these last months of self-hibernation and self-reflection, my friend and fellow writer, William Burnett and I discussed our long-time interest in the classic Chinese poets. This included our reading and rereading of Li Po, Tu Fu, Weng Wang, and T’ao Ch’ien, all brought to the English-speaking ear by the master translator, David Hinton. As…
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I Want to Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe/anthology edited by Susana H. Case and Margo Taft Stever/ review by Laurence Carr
Years ago, when President Barack Obama asked composer/director Lin-Manuel Miranda what he was currently working on, he replied, “I’m writing a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton.” Obama, with either a wry smile or a blank look, I forget which, said, “Good luck with that.” This was pretty much my reaction when editors Margo Taft Stever…
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Woman Seated Before an Easel/ poem by Mary O’Melveny
. . . After paintings by Camille Corot In one frame, she stares at his easel. In another, her hand touches the canvas, as if she could imagine having tipped her own brush into the oil, then onto grassy ground, cypress tree, ivory sky. Her golden taffeta skirt rivals the framed landscape for our attention.…
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mooncussers/ poems by Mike Jurkovic/ book review by Joann Deiudicibus
Mooncussers is published by Luchador Press and is available from online sources. Modern life moves at lightning-fast speed, only to be outpaced by the greed of certain politicians and their forked-tongue rhetoric, while poetry slows us, braking to stop time until we can finally hear ourselves think and breathe. Amid the glittering American Dream rat…
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Over the Moon…Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini/ poetry chapbook by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt/spotlight review by Laurence Carr
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt has brought her own conjuring trick to readers. This insightful, often moving chapbook collection of poems reincarnates the spirit of Bess Houdini, bringing to us her emotional life through fictional auto-biographical pieces, placing her husband, “The Great” Harry Houdini in the background. This is a timely poetry collection, and it adds a…
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Thinking of Billy Collins on My 66th Birthday/ poem by Matthew J. Spireng
As I’m leaving Bodacious Bagels and approaching my car, I notice a man going in who looks a lot like Billy Collins, enough like Billy Collins that I consider going back in and asking him if anyone else has ever told him he looks like Billy Collins, but, given the state of poetry in America,…
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The Damage Done/ poems by Susana H. Case/ book review by Laurence Carr
Susana H. Case’s The Damage Done is a unique poetry volume and one of the most hybrid pieces of writing I’ve come across in recent memory. The author leads the reader through poems (traditional, experimental and epistolatory); a fictional biography of Janey, the protagonist; political investigation; cultural essay; and memoir never losing the thematic threads of the…
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Hilda and Mack/ micro-fiction by Jess Nadelman
Hilda and Mack made their way up the stairs of the downtown Starbucks, to the reading room with mini coffee bar. The baristas working the evening shift were delighted to see Hilda and Mack come into the store. Both were dressed in formal clothes. Hilda always wore a knee length silk dress, made balloon-like by…
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that each drop/ poem by David Appelbaum
that each drop in the ocean is what makes up the ocean a long movie . . . . the round shiny stones in the mason jar I covered with sea water so they could drink the saucer on top is to keep them feeling wet . . . . I want to suck each…
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In Cataluya/ travel essay by Carole Bell Ford
The Costa Brava Sheer cliffs punctuate the shoreline; the color of the water constantly varies in shades from light blue green to dark inky navy due to changes in its depth. The vegetation is tropical with cactus, olive trees and spindly firs; the gardens are filled with brightly colored geraniums and roses, and red and…
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Liberty Call/ novel by Dennis Doherty/ spotlight review by Laurence Carr
Liberty Call takes Radioman Petty Officer Walter Schmertz and his shipmates on a maelstrom cruise though the South China Sea in 1980 aboard the USS Outland. It’s a man’s world, and even more a U.S. Navy man’s world where emotions and actions heighten, spill over and leave a wake of personal and military codes of conduct…
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you know what the wind means/ poem by Elena Botts
you know what the wind means, when you dream of wind you have ships to sail i guess, we will encounter one another comfortless in your bed but not at ease, you investigating the wrappings of the wound leaves from the trees you made, something missing like these, the happy pockets of light in the…
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The Time Between Dawn and Daylight/ poem by Sara Vinciguerra
A strange hour for awakening in the dark morning that keeps the day coming and the coffee leaking from the pot in the kitchen. All this surrounds my meditation— A dark roast on a dark morning from a dark, dark, dark night And in darkness, a chance for conscious quiet in the sounds surrounding the…
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Mother Kingdom/ poems by Andrea Deeken/ book review by Laurence Carr
Mother Kingdom, a chapbook of poems by Andrea Deeken is an intimate reflection of family played out in fourteen individual but connected pieces. The book won the 2021 Slapering Hol Poetry Chapbook Competition and is published by Slapering Hol Press, a prolific Hudson Valley publisher of numerous books over the years. The intriguing cover art…
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Pajama/ poem by Linda McCauley Freeman
The poet Thomas Lux once told me he loved the word pajama. Use it in a poem and shake the whole thing awake. Pa-Ja-Ma. The ja a German yes between my parents. Pa-Ja-Ma. I see my father, although I never called him Pa, nor saw him in pajamas— he was an underwear sleeper, like my…
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