Spring 2014
Poetry
My Grandmother’s Sheets
- M. Bouvard
In My Sicilian Cart
- S. Buttaci
Irish Prayer
- N. Byrne
In the VA Hospital
- M. Candela
My Immigrant Grandpa’s Cottage
- A. Curran
Assurance
- F. Diamond
A Dream of Joe
- C. Dodds
He Never Shut Up
- L. Dolan
La Sicilia
- J. Going
A Kind of Sacrament
- T. Johnson
I’m Writing Brochures for Travel Companies
- M. Lisella
Grandmothers Speak
- P. McClelland
All the Way
- J. McKernan
Cahir Castle
- K. Mitchell-Garton
Return to New York
- T. Peipins
Memorabilia
- F. Polizzi
Lu Friscalettu/
The Reed Pipe
- N. Provenzano
At the Protestant Cemetery
- D. Pucciani
Evelyn McHale
- J. Raha
Gerry Summons Up The Past
- G. Sarnat
Doing Her Proud
- M. Trede
My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School
- L. Wiley
Finbarr Enters the Poet’s Mind
- H. Youtt
Beyond the Animal Farm
- C. Yuan
Spring 2014
Prose
Plenty of Places
- A. Annesi
The Italian Cultural Garden
- M. De Julio
Dancing with the Best of Them
- J. Duncan
Doña Carmen Dreams Of San Vito
- G. Fagiani
Stones and Roses
- J. Going
Review of Leonard Covello’s The Heart is the Teacher
- R. Holz
Crates
- J. Kierland
Review of Anthony Di Renzo’s Novella, Trinàcria:
A Tale of Bourbon Sicily (Guernica, 2013)
- T. Zeppetella
Featured Artist
Andy Kover
BIOGRAPHIES
Contributors
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In the VA Hospital Blue tattoos, purple IV bruises. Needles to hydrate instead of fix MOTHER in a heart to show how young he was when he took part with all the world in mayhem. He thanks the nurses or thinks he does, not sure if he speaks aloud; he’d never complain in public, anyhow. Most days he lies nowhere deep in the mind that carried him, a not-there pierced by sickbay stenches. Old ones on cots cry out against one last infantry slog. That ditch after a night of rain, his brother dead in it. Men and rats in trenches, The Great War. Never again, they swore. His sons had more. Baseball, a blue sky, cheers for his play. Spring Mist, the nurse says, spraying away some foulness. Heat re-enters him, a whiff of horses, pennants whipping, cupping a crackling cigarette, a sweet win that day. He quit the farm, said he’d leave the drunk, his father’s eyes blue as the sky he labored under. A hard blow for the old man, but everyone wanted Brooklyn then. That last look on his father’s face, God. His children’s names escape him, Tough to hold to which one shamed them, Women a welter, his wife gone. Daughters, daughters-in-law, their clean sheet smell, digging his bristles against their slack arms. Old fields rush back, like ground streaming up from the hole in the car floor. Embers from a tossed cigarette, glowing ribs of cord and his first business gone. There were laughs. He went on. A chicken’s red eye blinks through a battered fence he wanders by, his mother’s song lifts the wind aside, in the Irish he once scorned, love-syllables squandered. Potato flowers wink at him. The blue sky. Nothing after, nothing before. |