Better Than Starbucks
Poetry and Fiction Journal
. . . if you love diversity and creative writing in any and every form, then you’re in the right place . . .
May 2021
Vol VI No II
Published quarterly:
February, May, August,
and November.
Formal Poetry
with Vera Ignatowitsch
Night Visit
At two or three a.m. the aid car screams
through Golden Acres, where everyone’s in bed
by nine. The wailing echoes in their dreams.
It’s loud enough, they joke, to wake the dead.
One man back in bed after pissing, again,
lies and listens while it threads the maze
of streets. He does a rollcall of the men
he golfs with Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays:
One’s X-rays show sclerotic arteries,
one’s watch reminds him when to take his pills,
one’s breathing has become a gurgling wheeze,
one’s ruddy vigor masks pernicious ills —
and he himself: his LDL is high,
though not enough for statins, they say, not quite.
The siren in the distance passes by
and leaves his street in silence for tonight.
Richard Wakefield’s publications include East of Early Winters (winner of the Richard Wilbur Award) and A Vertical Mile (short-listed for the Poets’ Prize). His new collection, Terminal Park, is due for publication this year.
Love in the Garden of Birth and Death
Shall I touch your beauty among these dry heaps
Of curling leaf, where the long pupa sleeps
Until its case is shed, wide wings begin
To quiver, ringed antennae stretch, then spin
Tentatively in the cool, feathery breeze,
And a bright swallowtail shakes under the trees?
Let us fear the green mantis, stealthy and strong,
And let us take our flight before the tongue
Of a lithe skink emerges from death’s cave
And snatches us into an ancient grave,
Where lizard enzymes turn wings into pulp,
And flight to fat in a slow, tailward gulp.
Bob Zisk is retired and lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His education was in classical and medieval languages and linguistics and philosophy. His poems have been published in Lucid Rhythms, Vates, The Hypertexts, and others.
Resurrection
The clouds are cinereous, full of gaping mouths
that chew the billows. Death blossoms alone.
The face collapses on itself and eyes
fade to a cinereous gray in empty darkness.
Wind sweeps across the mountain pines
that billow under cloudy green.
Along the crest their endless lines
shadow the slate of a valley stream.
The body hardens. Those who look on it
see memories shadowing stony lips.
Decisions voiced to ruthless love or hate
haunt them with words of lacerating pain.
The river never sees its home.
It cascades as the flower blooms.
Decisions harden into stone
the torrent leisurely consumes.
The mountain stream reflects no cinereous sky,
no gaping mouths gnaw at twilight fallen
among the pines to burnish cloudy green,
their shadows lost in endless night-filled waters.
The body falls to earth, and eyes
once blind now see the stars again
ascending distant, placid skies
bright with the silence of lucid pain.
Steven Willett is a retired Classics professor specializing in ancient Greek and English versification. Much of his work has been in poetic translation in many languages.
Home Movie
Someone came up to him with a cassette
of his own sermon on the mountainside.
“Do as I say, mankind will be all set,”
he answered, took his cross again, and died.
Wearing the tape out on his VCR,
someone wrote a whole script just from that scene:
“What trick is there in loving those who are
deserving? Love the bullies, the obscene!”
No one asked the deserving how they felt
being passed over time and time again
while troglodytes showed up in trophy pelts,
loved for their bloody march against the grain.
Like clockwork, the deserving were put down,
and people who depended on them starved.
“It’s not my fault,” exclaimed the virtuous ones
till once again the sun, a little heart
of Valentine-style love, came up above
the eastern side, suggesting a new start,
and the deserving swore they’d only love
those more immaculate than classic art:
no room for faults, not even in good fun.
There could be no forgiveness for the least
trespass: cross that fine line, and you are done,
rejected, hanged, fed piecemeal to a beast.
So the deserving, rightly criticized
for lacking human traits, were made to fall
in the same pothole as the Antichrist
while the obscene ate cake and had a ball.
Somewhere amidst the rubble, on the floor
of someone’s medieval cutting room,
more tapes piled up, never picked up before,
of Christ detailing how, when and to whom
love should be given, counter to their sins,
and all the nuances of what that means.
No one has bothered to review those since:
the world survives through necessary means.
And though it creeps ever so slowly now,
we know it wasn’t quicker in the past.
So we get over it, pick up our plough,
and cultivate our gardens in disgust.
First published in The Raintown Review.
Anton Yakovlev’s latest chapbook Chronos Dines Alone (SurVision Books, 2018) won the James Tate Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, Measure, and elsewhere.
Vacancies
Six hundred signs on windowpanes, For Lease,
and autumn sun below St. Albert’s cross.
This boulevard at dusk, a haunted peace.
All those with wings have hidden, fled—gulls, geese
and ravens, fat from stale pork buns, soy sauce.
Six hundred signs on windowpanes, For Lease.
Graffitied buses, idling, release
thin plumes of listless passengers, exhaust.
This boulevard at dusk, a haunted peace.
Terse downstairs neighbors hoard apologies
with canned pineapple, bourbon, flashlights, gauze.
Six hundred signs on windowpanes, For Lease.
These, too, have flown away—our ecstasies,
silk kites. What lingers? Curfews, trespass laws,
this boulevard at dusk, a haunted peace.
Light fades. We fade. No tunes, no melodies,
a limbo in a hush within a pause.
Six hundred signs on windowpanes, For Lease,
this boulevard at dusk, a haunted peace.
Previously published in Tilt-a-Whirl and The Typists Play Monopoly.
Kathleen McClung’s books include Temporary Kin and four others. Winner of the 2020 Rattle Chapbook Prize, she edits poetry for The MacGuffin and judges sonnets for the Soul-Making Keats contest. She lives, teaches, and writes in San Francisco.
Canyon Temples
In the red wall has stood for eons
A Petra carved along their way
By those nomadic Nabataeans
Water and Wind, who never stay.
Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor. His poems and translations have run in many magazines, including Better Than Starbucks. He lives in the Texas Panhandle.
Kodiak
Sits, with blackberries all around,
and samples first
This cluster, that, but makes no sound,
does not exert
Itself, and is in paradise,
or close as one
Can come, who mainly knows but ice
and cold, the sun
Gone dim, months underground — and now,
to have all this,
With light and warmth returned somehow,
is surely bliss.
Jared Carter’s seventh book of poems, The Land Itself, with an introduction by B. J. Omanson, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. Carter lives in Indiana.
To the Flame
Unmourned,
his death
too small
a breath
to call
to us,
the moth has burned.
His greed
for light
we deem
as slight,
no theme
for us
his dreadful need.
But stark
the plot:
He was.
He’s not.
Because
like us
he feared the dark.
Max Gutmann has contributed to dozens of publications including New Statesman, Able Muse, and Cricket. His plays have appeared throughout the US and have been well reviewed (see maxgutmann.com). His book There Was a Young Girl from Verona sold several copies.
Deserted Cemetery
The yews point toward the sky,
but there are none to see,
none now who can say why
the yews point toward the sky,
promising those who die
All that is still to be.
The yews point toward the sky,
but there are none to see.
The melancholy lanes
between the graves are still.
No living thing complains.
The melancholy lanes
and stone are what remains
as time now wreaks its will.
The melancholy lanes
and stones, all, all are still.
The yews point toward the sky,
but none now can say why.
The lanes, the stones, are still.
And time now wreaks its will.
Bruce Bennett is Emeritus Professor of English at Wells College in Aurora, New York. His poetry website is https://justanotherdayinjustourtown.com.
Memo from the Cat
The truth is simple, no need to ignore it:
I’m good at killing and you prize me for it.
I keep your living quarters free of mice
By methods some call skill and some call vice.
You had me neutered young — I’m calmer for it —
And once that mojo’s gone one can’t restore it,
But even in my less rambunctious age
I feel some lost red undertones of rage
When you complain about your soiled floor. It
Seems beneath you to upbraid me for it.
The work I do, it sometimes leaves a trace,
Entrails or vomit in some awkward place.
Just deal with it. Don’t scold Bad kitty! for it.
You’ve got that odor-killing liquid. Pour it,
Mop up as best you can, move on with life.
I’m sleeping now, so spare me all your strife.
Chris O’Carroll, Light magazine featured poet and author of The Joke’s on Me, has poems in Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology.
Death of a Fly
A fly in some cretaceous ointment, lost
in that K-T event that made extinct
the dinosaurs that could not fly, as host
and parasite both died when Nature blinked,
fell on sticky traps, like T-Rex dung
that beetles rolled, or blood that insects sucked,
bit and jabbed — the long-legged fleas that hung
upon a pterodactyl's wings, and mucked
about in mud, in amber reappeared.
But was it asteroids that killed the brutes
or pathogens? And should new plans be feared
to milk the ancient resins, frozen time’s recruits,
for arboviruses that stilled the breath
of dinosaurs we raise again from death?
Royal Rhodes is a retired professor who taught courses on global religions, death & dying, and literature. He has done art / poetry collaborations with Catbird (on the Yadkin) Press.
Pro-creation
We lie to our children without really trying;
Worship mawkish innocence, censor dying,
Through pure instinct. It’s beyond right or wrong.
The lying’s the point — it’s why they’re here:
To conjure the dream-pastoral that disappears
Once we’ve seen things clearly a bit too long.
The readymade excuse, that it is they
Who need this, flops. Consider how they play
When we recede. A more carcass-strewn den
Can hardly be imagined. No, it’s we the mature
Who need these lies, need the doltish, pure
Barnyard bleatings of animal friends
Who never fuck or kill, whose tender foals
Are never weaned, and never get old.
Axell Cushman is a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.
Lighthearted Verse
Airbnb
Volcano House, the premier b&b
on Kilauea’s crater, lacks a/c,
as do all the other b&bs
in the immediate vicinity.
“Our rooms are cooled by a steady breeze—
air conditioning’s unnecessary.
Plus wifi and hot breakfast are both free.
Great deal—four stars for the price of three!”
That steady cooling breeze, unfortunately,
blows from the volcano, not the sea.
The air is sulfur laden and quite hazy—
some days there’s zero visibility—
and now and then it suffocates somebody.
But, oh, what luck, to die high in Hawaii.
Richard Cecil has published four collections of poems and won a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Indiana University.
Archive of Formal & Rhyming Poetry by issue:
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June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017
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April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016