Photo credit: Kevin J. McDaniel
Dear Readers,
Behold these wonders “for the ages”: a frozen shark, museum-worthy; a scorching sirocco, a cardinal caught in a jar, the poet Shelley in a Studebaker, a deer as a dancing partner, a body shot out of a cannon “melding with the Milky Way,” the ritual of a startling childhood “marriage,” a spectral ceilidh, a farm on the edge of diminishment, an epic sea battle, and many more “for the ages” in this fall edition (5.2) of STR. To order a copy of Fall 2023 (5.2), readers can contact STR at speckledtroutreview@hotmail.com. Please put order in the subject line. Single issue: $8.00.
Peace&Hope,
Kevin J. McDaniel, Founder of Speckled Trout Review
Nancy Dillingham, Associate Poetry Editor
Featured Poets: Joe Cottonwood, Paul Doty, Theodore Eisenberg, Chris Ellery, Robert Gibb, Karen Paul Holmes, Tom Holmes, Abigail Michelini, David Mihalyov, Susan Morritt, Lauro Palomba, Carol Lee Saffioti-Hughes, Jane Shlensky, Annette Sisson, Adam Whipple
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Ecologue
I saw a cardinal in a jar, nowhere
near where any jar should be. The jar
stood upright on the ground without a lid
except the air but, though he hopped
and beat his wings against the glass,
the cardinal could not rise.
He sang a warning to the woods.
I scanned the trees for mate and nest
but saw no fluttering among the leaves
and heard no signal of distress.
A jar can be a useful thing,
but this was like a well, a pit
he’d fallen in. A tomb, and he
was some poor Lazarus or Christ
who’d come alive inside his grave
with no messiah to call him forth,
without a god to roll the door.
What accident or impulse put him there?
What band of brother jealous of his coat?
Did he see a cat gone feral
far away from town and jump inside
in fear of claws and teeth? After all,
some people, with their bigger brains,
have leapt into a refuge that became a keep.
More plausibly he spied a seed
or chased a bug, unaware
that there is such a thing as glass,
solid, but invisible as air.
Unaware? Who leaves a jar
out in the wilderness, and why?
I hope whoever placed it there
forgot or lost it and did not
intend to trap a living thing
so gorgeously essential to the world.
A self asleep conceives
the cruel or careless act.
Startled by those words, which came
to me as if the bird had spoken them,
I backed away. I listened.
I watched the cardinal watching me.
The sky and forest seemed to gather all
around the jar, and it became
umbilicus of earth, and he,
the bird, the unborn heart of everything,
the wild, red life always eager to arise.
The self awake bears
every kind and caring deed.
Kneeling there,
I gently, very gently, tipped the jar.
Its lid of air became an open door.
Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, the Betsy Colquitt Award, and the Texas Poetry Award.
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A Witness during the Sirocco of Monday, April 24, 1347, and the Medium of Despair
The wind blows from the sun
and upturns in the sea. Ships
hugging the coastline with sails
fully furled launch from waves.
They fly inland. Seagulls drop
and sink. Bystanders gasp
sand into their lungs, cough.
On the docks, merchants banter
food and trinket bargains. The wind
delivers spittle into customers’ lungs.
They cough at the offers. At home
with their bag of fresh lentils, they cough.
They cough at a boil on their thigh.
Bird droppings are everywhere.
They try to not believe. They drop.
Clouds burn. Anyone at all alive
gestures breaking of bread, drinking
wine, and hears their horizon sizzle
the sun. And anyone able to pray
cannot recall a future tense—
hope is their birds in an upturning sea.
Tom Holmes is the founding editor and curator of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (Xavier Review Press) and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College (Clarksville). His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.
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How to Lose the Farm
Somewhere nearby in sickness, age, and strain
is someone who can’t keep up with the work
of farming, growing, feeding, making do.
The rusty droop of barbed wire on old posts,
long-leaning fences lost in undergrowth
are proof enough neglect will sell a farm.
Somewhere beneath the weeds and cedar sprouts
lies pastureland that fed a herd of cows,
maybe a horse or two because they shine,
grazing a green stretch harbored in the minds
of those old farmers who once kept it lush
and rolling, made of gardens, lawns, and barns.
No more. The old ones die. The young don’t farm.
They say farm life’s too hard, too great a risk.
Better to sell than lose it to taxes.
Not long from now, bulldozers will move in,
and scrape away past generations’ work,
transform what now seems wasted, wretched, poor.
Gone the sheds and barns, the rusted fence.
Gone the ponds where fish and frogs sang out
on summer nights and snapped at dragonflies.
Gone too, the lessons learned while working ground
of what courage it takes to plant and wait.
Jane Shlensky, a veteran teacher and musician, holds an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. Her recent poetry and fiction appear in sundry magazines and anthologies, including Writer’s Digest, Pinesong, KAKALAK, Southern Poetry Anthology: NC, moonShine review, and Nostos. NC Poetry Society and Kakalak have nominated her poems for a Pushcart four times. Her short fiction and nonfiction pieces were finalists in Press 53, Thomas Wolfe, Doris Betts, James Applewhite, and Rose Post contests. Her chapbook is Barefoot on Gravel.
Speckled Trout Review 