Poetry – THE CITY KEY

“Maastricht, 1496” by Jake Price

I never noticed architecture
until you kissed the flutes
in my cheekbones.
–
We sat on a park bench,
hands clasped together,
watching strangers and pointing out dormer noses
and bay window eye sockets.
My body turns to rubble when you smile.
I would never tell you that.
–
The arch of your spine, facade to facade,
Romanesque afternoons mixed with wine
and latticework and I exist I exist I exist.
–

We used a crumbling statue as an ashtray.

I want to marry you here and then go back to the States

and forget about you.

Jake

Jake Price is a junior at Susquehanna University pursuing a degree in Creative Writing and a minor in Art History. He was born in Texas and currently resides in McConnellsburg Pennsylvania. He spends most of his time reading his work to his cat, Raven, who has yet to give him any feedback. His poetry has been published in Philadelphia Stories, The Poet Magazine, and The Viridian Door. His short fiction has been published in Cream Scene Carnival and Querencia Press.

Please note: Poetry is compressed to fit smart phone screens. If you are reading this poem on a phone screen, please turn your screen sideways to make sure that you are seeing correct line breaks for this poem.

“Waking with the City” by Judith Rosner

How I love when Florence wakes and
we share the day’s beginning together.

I walk on stones polished by centuries of wear
as I sip my cappuccino and watch the moon

give up his seat to sun as she rises behind me
lighting buildings birthed in Middle Ages.

I check out recently shined shop windows
as street lamps blow out like birthday candles.

The Duomo, looming large, preens for me,
showing off her white and green marble stripes.

I wave as I pass, happy to see her before she is
blocked from view by tourists as they pose for pictures.

Statues lining piazzas flex their chiseled muscles
reminding me it’s time to plan my day.

Judith

Judith Rosner’s poetry appears in the literary journal HerWords, the Living Peace 2019 Art of Poetry Anthology, the Jewish Literary Journal, the Gulf Coast Poets Anthology, Harmonic Verse, and the Bards Against Hunger 10 Year Anniversary Anthology. She holds a doctorate in sociology and retired from a successful career as professor, leadership developer, and executive coach. Judy and her husband split their time between Sarasota, Florida and New York City.

“A Walk Through Town” by VA Wiswell

My favorite sweater, beautiful wool
cables burnt an olive green,
a fleet of the moment, flea
market purchase,
previously owned, I’d bet
money, by Father Time,
scratches my skin. A
living reminder, an existential
answer:
I itch; therefore, I am.

On my street, storefront lakes
of concrete and glass stretch
into infinity, I think to paddle
past, not in need or
want of anything, instead,
always in want and need of
something, I stop to peer at
the glittery trinkets napping on
their velvety pillows, bored of
the endless admiration. In the
window, a face of youth absconded
joins me. I imagine, then, a cartoony
thief sneakily stealing year after
year, their crime unnoticed by this
poor stranger until too late.

Inside my favorite house,
affluent Arabica air, infused
with stranger-to-stranger
conversation, I wander to the
counter and toss my order,
complete in two extinct words:
Black drip,
onto the barista’s counter.
Behind me, in the line of my past,
a thousand soft-skin dinosaurs
celebrate my retrogression by
stomping and laughing loudly.
With my order, molten lava
secured in a throwaway paper
cup, I stay for a beat, daring to dip
my toes into the house’s blend.
Around me, human thumbs crouch
like lions, hovering over bright
screens of prey, restless to swipe
at the first flash of light. Clutching
only my coffee, I stand out, a herring
in a field,
bright
and golden.

Later, after hours locked in my time
capsule, a windowless space
heated with historical dust, I
manage to compress thoughts
that escaped days into bite-sized
bites, ideal for storage and
effortless consumption and
guilt-free disposal.

Now, I stand lectern sturdy,
self-examined to the
bone, before a passel of
glossy, scrolling eyes,
a galaxy vast and black,
and listen to the leak of
a lifetime escaping
between us.

VA Wiswell lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family. Her work has appeared in Writing In a Woman’s Voice, The Lake, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, 34th Parallel Magazine, Sad Girls Literary Magazine, Ignatian Literary Magazine, and OJA & L Magazine. She has poems and short stories forthcoming in Front Porch Review and Crab Creek Review. You can find her on Instagram at @vawiswell and http://www.vawiswell.com

“Standing at the Edge of the World” by Christen Lee

Dylan, Cohen, and Cash wail melodies against the night sky,
sound waves amplified by these four walls
on which your own story is written in love and loss.

There’s something about the way you find hope
without hoping,
solace without soliciting, meaning without divining.
Just being here feels like salvation.

You’re not indifferent to this life you live
with its silver carpets, holly and honeysuckle-lined streets,
peeling birch and towering oak trees.
Just look at the azure sky, brandishing jewels on this golden
November day
where, together, we walk the crystal coastline,
press our feet into cool shallows,
steady our gaze upon an ocean that stretches beyond
the gold horizon.

In your backyard, grapefruit, lime and persimmon trees
sway with last season’s sweetness.
There are a thousand names for reinvention—
beauty begetting beauty, awakening from winter’s blight.
Today, you gather fresh mustard greens, cilantro,
blend hot chilies into chutney, simmer curry on the
stovetop.

We are so much more than what we make,
more than this returning bounty,
more than these cycles of giving and dying,
more than this hillside where you lead me
to show me the glowing city.

You could have all this, you say, tiny worlds
dancing at our feet,
dust and shadow parting ways for the starlight in our eyes.
You could make another life out here, but you know,
you can’t escape the hurt.
Even what’s lost can find you. It can buoy you
or it can drown you.

Keep close the memory of all who’ve gone before you.
Press your heart against the jagged edges of your pain
and bleed a bittersweet offering.

Savor the good, the unfiltered, the unholy potion,
ripened beneath an enchanted sun.
Believe in everything that brought you here,
while trusting nothing that promises you forever.

The world withers, you say.
Everything, someday, goes away.
But even then, even at the very end,
we’ll still be standing here.
Somewhere at the edge of the world.

Christen Lee

Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World, Sad Girls Club, 2022 New Generation Beats Anthology, Wingless Dreamer, The Voices of Real 7 Compilation, Ariel Chart, The Elevation Review, and Moot Point among others.

“Above the City Tracks” by Alexander Etheridge

The train moves far below this tower room
with a sound like a slowly drawn-out gunfire,
a strangely underworld story
unfolding—a question to an answer, coming apart
inside the mind. In the landscape of God’s ceaseless
memory, human thought grows backward and turns
from snow into time. In those outer fields, forgotten prayers
are common as dustgrains, and shreds of hope
define themselves on a background of burning seeds
and jagged hail. At a certain point, joy becomes an answer
to ongoing silence, like the peace of a star as it begins
collapsing, a spellbound amnesia returning to the heart,
and leaves of grief becoming rain on the rail line.

Alexander

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Ink Sac, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, God Said Fire, and the forthcoming, Snowfire and Home.

“Daydreams and Prayers in the City” by Alexander Etheridge

I can see what I want in people—You, stranger,
I think to myself, you with the empty gaze

are the beautiful Eden snake, and you with the sad eyes
are an apple from the one forbidden tree.

I can see in the world another world.
I can dream up apocalypse or creation

in any landscape, corner, or shadow of the city.
Why else should I go anywhere, and why else

should I look into anything? I bring with me everywhere
a few grains of nightmare and paradise, I keep them hidden

in my pockets with my pen and my crumpled paper. What now
gives me faith in anything? The barely discriminating love

of dogs, the judgelessness of dusk and dawn,
the absolute indifference of black empty galaxies,

and all that exists without a question—
Even in the punishing chill of my mind,

I can find a shred of love, a thread of
compassion—they live there without a doubt,

or need of gratitude. I pray they imprint onto me
their pure design, their ancient elegance,

even in fields of hail, or on mountains of frost—
In the ongoing cold I look for salvation. Find me,

I say, find me even now, where I’m without name
or shape, or even a memory of light.

Alexander

“Strange Flowers” by Alexander Etheridge

Strange Flowers
—after Tom Waits

In that deep uncanny
world, dark blue clouds
ride low,
raining all night—
The crowded metropolis
is long hushed.
Everyone there is

an orphan leaving behind
their opulent palaces.
They’re all out

on the stormy streets, roving
and wordless.
Black ivy

grows over empty chapels
where crows fly in
through broken stained glass,
nesting in the high
rafters. Hooded figures kneel

in flooding gutters,
with their snakes
and torn prayer books.

And flowers never seen before
grow up through
cracked concrete
in ruins of the great
city

where every sound
but the rain
is extinct.

Alexander

“A City of Wish and Tone” by William Doreski

The brilliant pinpricks of light
I see when I shut my eyes
are glimpses of neon glamor
in a city I wish I could visit.
It’s a mass of granite and steel,

bronze and glass architecture
festooned with laughter and screams
more rowdy than even Times Square.
You don’t believe this city exists.
You think it’s hopeful thinking

applied to prismatic effects
shattered by my fragile eyesight.
Often I dream of long avenues
undulating over rolling ground,
framed by marmoreal buildings

displaying taverns and pawnshops.
These are the outskirts. The city
itself lingers out of my reach.
I can’t walk through miles of crime
to reach the horizon spiked

with flamboyant geometries
architects and engineers admire
for their leverage against the sky.
You claim this city’s an amalgam
of Shanghai, Manhattan, Dubai.

You challenge me to anchor it
to a page in the Times atlas
or find online photos of streets
that web the city I imagine.
The pinpricks of light are rich

enough to prove this city exists.
Its secrets blaze red, blue, green
in a dimension I can’t share with you
because you’d only deflate it
with a gesture brisk as a scythe’s.

william-doreski175

William Doreski has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Venus, Jupiter (2023). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals. He is a regular poetry reviewer for The Harvard Review.

“Bus People at the Fordham Road Station” by Amy Soricelli

There are jury duty people on the bus from the
courthouse, you can see their mustard fingers from
the hotdog truck on the corner.
They are carrying right and wrong in the spaces
between the seats and judging with their eyes open.
Some of them have wax paper between their fingers
that they study with every bite.
The Bronx air creeps through the windows passing
nameless streets: no one keeps their lips
open long enough to sound them out.

I used to take that bus in the days of cold sandwich
lunches eaten before noon, and the steady drum
of fear I played inside my head.
No one on that bus knows which seat was mine but I
left my breath on the glass.
The coded letters fell off my notebook like
wild hearts on fire.
I would rock my feet under myself and pray for
salvation from geometry.
No one held my hand, only keys, and tongues, and
torn sweaters unraveling on my back.

The old couple in the longest seats is trading
words into their ears and covering their arms with wool.
They are cold in ways we can’t discover.
They look at others one by one; their separate
eyes judging from sneakers to hats.
They think they know you from the small bags you
carry or the way you keep your hands in your laps.
They could be jury duty people too with their pointing
fingers and glazed-over eyes.

Amy

Amy Soricelli has been published in numerous publications/ anthologies including, The Westchester Review, Literati Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Rumblefish Quarterly, The Bronx Magazine, Glimpse Poetry, *That Plane is not a Star (to be released 4/2024/Dancing Girl Press, *Carmen has No Umbrella but Went for Cigarettes Anyway, Dancing Girl Press 9/2021, Sail Me Away, Dancing Girl Press, 10/2019. *Pushcart Nomination: 2021, Nominated twice; “Best of the Net” 2020, 2013, Nominated by Billy Collins for Aspen Words Emerging Writer’s Fellowship/2019

“City Bus” by Ley Wire

I ride the city bus
with strangers – strange as me.
We’ve nothing to discuss,
we sit there quietly.
The wheels beneath us
purr as they roll,
they hum a melody
of Industry
and Soul.

The Homeless, the Well-Dressed
The Young, and Elderly
Hip Cats, Top Hats, and me.
We sit silently,
listen as we roll
to the humming, purring, drumming
that’s coming from below.

I ride the city bus
every single night –
there’s no need to fuss,
it gets me home alright.
The bus exhales poetry,
in its gentle sigh,
we ride in darkness,
the driver and I.

The night cries,
the bus sighs,
we sit silently.
We listen as we roll
to the humming, purring, drumming
that’s coming from below.

Ley Wire

Ley Wire is a Wisconsin native, poet, children’s book author and fan of all things quirky. When Ley is not writing she enjoys long bike rides through the country and hanging out with her eight, rambunctious kids. For updates on her upcoming projects, visit leywire.com