Author: Post Road

What inspired you to write “Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War” and “Afternoon in theMeadow?”

Both of these poems were written at about the same time. My wife and I were in North Carolina visiting our first granddaughter.  We were eager to be with her and anxious about the world she would inherit. I nearly always travel with the poets of the Tang dynasty. Why?  Nothing  about their life and times was easy. War, famine, vindictive emperors, sickness and personal loss were commonplace and still these Chinese poets find daily consolation through friends, nature, memory, the next destination. They subscribe to a simple yet profound aesthetic that you also find in Whitman, Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Merwin, and dozens of other poets:  pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.  The poems that interest me the most are the ones where the world intrudes on some private moment and you find in these poems a blending of external force and internal power.  In that way, both of these poems, Dusk in March and Afternoon in the Meadow, attempt to engage the world as it is without turning away.

Was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process?

I am always in the hunt for what I think of as observational oddities, like a tongue seeking the jagged tooth, what Camus called writing that’s “heavy with things and flesh.”

This hunt always includes looking at the derivation of words.  I never tire of learning that words often begin in one place and like stones gathering moss, end up in another world of meaning.This process alone provides for discovery and astonishment.

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers?

I read as much fiction as poetry.  Lately, I have discovered Irish women that I should have known about:  Jeannette Haien, Claire Keegan, Edna O’Brien.  I am always reading Linda Gregg who remains the most submerging of all contemporary poets.

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

I have been around a while.  I’m not that hard to find.  I have published two novels and seven books of poems.  More of me and what I’ve been up to can be found at jpwhitebooks.com

What inspired you to write “Trigger Warning, “Nostalgia and other risks” and “between us?” And was there anything unique or striking about the writing or research process? 

Of these three, “between us” has the clearest origin story: a trip to the zoo with my siblings. Time with my siblings often prompts me to write because they are simultaneously the humans I communicate best with and the humans I communicate worst with. And I love writing in response to zoos and museums; we go to these places to encounter animals or artifacts, but what we actually encounter is often our distance from those animals and artifacts–arranged and choreographed into an experience that we move through. Any time I can combine fact-learning and people-watching, a poem is likely to result. 

Have you read anything recently that you’d like to recommend to readers? 

I’ve just reread (for maybe the 10th time) Stolen Air (Christian Wiman’s versions of Osip Mandelstam’s poems)

Where we can learn more about you and your work?

www.ceridwenhall.com

ART
Paintings – Bascha Mon

CRITICISM
Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna” – Rick Moody

FICTION
A Groundhog’s Day – Patrick Duane
I’m Tom Hanks – Mark Leidner
Crushed – Matt Leibel
The Program – PJ Henry
Tornadoes – Andrew Graham Martin
The Loaves – Phoebe Baker Hyde
The Pirate  – Peter Gordon
Hope  – Rebecca Pyle
We Don’t Joke About Such Things  – Neil Serven
Calendar – Maeve Barry
Other Living Things  – Alexander Fredman
Particulation Glitch – J. Paul Stein
The Blue – Mary Helen Specht

NONFICTION
The Ways to the Cabin  – Chris Fink
Why She Cried  – Larry Allen Pankey
The Dive Reflex  – Kayleigh Norgord
Young Girls, Like Me  – Nina Semczuk
This Land Is Your Land  – Abbey Cahill
Finding Our Way: On Maps and Mapping  – Priscilla Long
Sunfish – Lynn Eustis
Necessary Things + Cheap Sleep  – Gordon W. Mennenga
Alternative Education – Abigail Carl-Klassen
Feathers in Tar – Joel Long
The Woman in the Factory Who Will Cut the Fish  – Katherine Cart
The High Pass – Frank Light
Pleasant View Drive  – J.A. McGrady
Dr. Pangloss’s Intelligence Quiz  – Debra Coleman
Head on a Swivel – Juliana Gray
The Year We Were Almost Famous – Katiy Heath
Puzzle Box  – Jeff Ewing

THEATRE
Eat and Be Eaten: A Play – Carter St Hogan

POETRY
Tell Me About the Glaciers – Kaylee Schofield
For John at St. Vincent’s + Adonis + Final Visit – Cindy Milwe
Learning to Pronounce /L/ + Body Tree – Daniel Ooi
Dusk in March, 755, China, Civil War + Afternoon in the Meadow – J.P. White
Life Poem 2 + Caravaggesque – Elisa Gabbert
Paper Flowers + Paper Cranes + Paper Flowers + Paper Flowers – Brandon Shimoda
Patina + Some Fairly Useless Reflections on Cakes & Pies +
This is Not a Rehearsal – John Dorroh
Soundings + Fable – Sarah Carriger
Getting Lost – Ryan Fitzgerald
Love Canal – Claire Christoff
Too Happy – Luke Bloomfield
Syntax Practice – Hannah Rego
The Fugitive Lands – Christopher Brean Murray
Have I Been Too Much? + The Great Song of the World – Chris Martin
Poem + Room – Sean Singer
Shroud (Ghost Apples) – Sébastien Luc Butler
Little Volcano + Nothing But Time + Metro, North – Jared Harél
Don Juan, + soiled + Midnight Mass – Javier Sandoval
Itch [some sunburned writing] + Bacon Cheese Combo +
Dappled + God Salsa – Benjamin Niespodziany
Elegy + Character Witness + Reluctant Inheritance + Gingko Tree as ASL Interpreter – Beth Ann Fennelly
The Bat – Jeremy Voigt
currents / recurrence – Amelia Bell
Svalbard, Two Days Before Polar Night – Georgia M. Brodsky
April 23, With a Glancing Thought + Begin – Eamon Grennan
The Reverent Spaces of Childhood + The Neighbors Took Down Their Twelve-Foot Skeletons Today – Andrew Hemmert
Trigger Warning + Nostalgia and other risks + between us – Ceridwen Hall

Too Happy

by Luke Bloomfield

We’ve buried our sadness
and all the spades of therapy
can’t dig it up.
In public it’s embarrassing
people trying to hide
their mild feelings.
Looks like we missed out
on misery this year
we say in line
at the sandwich shop
while clinging to despair
but despairingly feeling it slip away 
like a terrified frog
with its panicky little heart
puckering its sides
while it wriggles out
from our child’s grip
and jettisons itself
all crazy legged into the weeds.
People just aren’t depressed
the way they used to be.
Deprived of melancholy
there’s a sadness to that.
We all feel it, that longing
for something worse.
The therapists are taking it extra hard
going to work like
weary travelers coming home
to a desolated empire
dragging themselves up the cracked
and ruined stone steps
to the crumbled ziggurat
of their former greatness.
We try not to look at them
muttering their medleys
of incantation
around their measly fires
while we mournfully
feast on bulls by the hundreds
and lap up lakes of wine.

Patina

by John Dorroh

I hate new growths, every day
another one, some white wart 
the size of a cherry tomato, hard
as a bone.

A single white hair
climbing out of some godforsaken
pore on the left side of my neck.

The toenail on my right big toe
begins to wind around itself
like the shell of a snail, &
a white patch adorns my left arm
just inches from my elbow. 

What the hell is going on, 
this stain, such testing
of who I am inside, outside
the dull imperfections 
that tarnish my once-fine exterior.

John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano, nor has he caught a hummingbird. However, he did manage to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, North of Oxford, River Heron, Wisconsin Review, Kissing Dynamite, and El Portal. He had two chapbooks published in 2022.