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 2022
Vol VII No II
Published quarterly:
February, May, August,
and November.
Regular Feature Pages
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Haiku with Kevin McLaughlin
Formal Poetry with Vera Ignatowitsch
Poetry Translations with Susan McLean
Poetry for Children with Robert Schechter
Experimental, Form, & Prose Poetry
Better Than Fiction (creative nonfiction)
From The Mind of Anthony Watkins
Featured
Insomnia’s Non Sequitur by Pamelyn Casto
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Sonnet by Rhina P. Espaillat
translating Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
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A Requiem in a Time of War by Ribhav Thakur
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What the poem did not say by Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi
haiku by Veronika Zora Novak
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br0ken by wmdavid
Seven Featured Poems
Mushrooms
Let us go now and forage for mushrooms,
My one true friend, let’s go! Let’s go
Where the earth feeds mouselike on these vacuums
And everything dances along in the flow —
Let’s search, let’s search, and find them, then love them,
Then speak with them, these dear dwellers on earth,
Our life in the vacuum with them, the stars, and
Waltzes of death, and mystical birth.
Dry out the ’shrooms, filter the tea,
And swim to the reach of the lightening road,
Consider the grooms, the lie after lie,
And wail against the communist ode,
And wail against the fascistic cry,
And lucidly dream of November with glee,
Agonise softly like each shooting star
In the crystalline night, and spill from the brain
Those words, for the world is clearly insane,
Utterly insane, marching like Kraftwerk — Oh, that they are!
While we are reborn again and again,
Let us forage for mushrooms.
Arthur L Wood is a poet from the UK. He has published two collections, Poems for Susan (2020) and Scarlet Land (2021). He has been widely published in poetry journals and runs his own YouTube channel ‘Poetry from the Shires’.
Freedom
Let me go about my day which doesn’t
belong to me like the forest next to my house
owned by another man who also doesn’t
own the trees oblivious to his taxes
or the dead grasshopper I found and placed
on the ledge of the courtyard outside my door,
oblivious in a different way. The winter
doesn’t mean to be so hard on us but still
is, making us wait in silence, in the steel
of its hard grip. After our little squabble,
I decided to give you a kiss and told you
my love for you is what holds me in place
though I know my love is not mine
or not only mine because it belongs to you
and that little kiss might lift you from worry
and you’d go about your day, free of me.
Anthony DiMatteo’s latest book of poems, In Defense of Puppets, has been hailed as, “a rare collection, challenging traditions that DiMatteo (as Renaissance scholar) claims give the poet the last word”' (Cider Press Review).
Childless
I will not sacrifice to death.
No son of mine is stripped and bound.
Among the victims whose harsh breath
Is cut, my daughters are not found.
And no decisions will be made
For me, when I grow old and ill.
No angry voices will be raised
About “our mother’s wish” — or will.
I move among familiar things,
Hide like a cat in what’s my own,
Heeding an inner voice that sings
It’s no disgrace to die alone.
And as to what may happen next,
Myself alone is pleased or vexed.
Gail White is a Formalist poet whose work appears regularly in such journals as Measure, Raintown Review, and Rotary Dial. She is a contributing editor of Light Poetry Magazine. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism.
his confession
the strangled seagull was left in front of the seminary building,
not the only thing that summer born of hate.
he apologizes. “i can’t say it, won’t say it out loud.”
he cries with tearstained syllables.
not the only thing that summer born of hate,
they played “smear the queer” in the fields,
he cries with tearstained syllables.
asked their girlfriends to dances with careful penmanship.
they played “smear the queer” in the fields,
slurs on the ears of the theater students.
asked their girlfriends to dances with careful penmanship,
wondered where they’d go for two years.
slurs on the ears of the theater students,
voice too light, too much blood on the sleeve.
wondered where they’d go for two years,
Christ’s name on the chest.
voice too light, too much blood on the sleeve,
my father not forgiven, at least by himself.
Christ’s name on the chest,
“it’s okay,” i say. “everyone changes.”
my father not forgiven, at least by himself,
thirty four years since.
“it’s okay,” i say. “everyone changes.”
to wash away his guilt, to offer absolution.
thirty four years since
the strangled seagull was left in front of the seminary building.
to wash away his guilt, to offer absolution,
he apologizes. “i can’t say it, won’t say it out loud.”
Corey J. Boren is a senior at Utah Valley University whose work has appeared in journals such as The Allegheny Review, peculiar, Essais, and Last Leaves Magazine, among others. Corey was longlisted for the Button Poetry 2020 chapbook prize.
The Interview — Joanna Fuhrman
by Anthony Watkins
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2016), and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She is a former poetry editor for Ping Pong and Boog City and served as the Monday-night coordinator for the poetry readings at The Poetry Project from 2001 to 2003 and the Wednesday-night coordinator from 2010 to 2011. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and coordinates the faculty and alumni readings there. Her poems often appear in literary journals, online and on paper.
AW: In your latest book, To a New Era, you seem to be reflecting on the realities of the past 4 or 5 years, especially in America. In what way do you think the poet’s world is different now? Or in what ways do you see the world has changed for any of us, poets or not?
JF: I don’t think the world is that different, but I think the election of Donald Trump made white people like myself aware of how much racism is still driving history. I should have been less naïve, but, well . . . In some of the poems in To a New Era, I’m reckoning with that. But in others I am also dealing with life in America more generally. The poems touch on precarity, sexism, consumerism, the pandemic, the role of art and poetry, etc.
This
What is this twinge,
this ache, this known routine
of how we scratch and cough
and clip our nails. The way
you fold your socks
and borrow back my shaving cream.
This truce of fixed points
and necessary distance.
This flash of eyes
that breaks and soars
like songbirds scattered by falcons.
This pause, this warm stopped bass.
This pulse in the night.
This love.
Michael H. Levin is a lawyer, solar energy developer and writer based in Washington DC. His work has appeared on stage and in three collections plus anthologies and numerous periodicals and has received poetry and feature journalism awards. See www.michaellevinpoetry.com.
Santa
What if Santa came to visit the day you were born?
And what if, right then and there,
he went ahead and gave you
every gift he would ever give you?
So many gifts!
Big gifts! Little gifts!
All kinds of gifts!
Enough for a lifetime.
But what if every year he climbed down
the chimney and took a few of them back?
You’d have no right to complain
since they were, after all, gifts.
You didn’t even ask for them
and you wouldn’t have
had them in the first place
except for his generosity.
But still, it feels kind of cruel —
your very favorite, the one you’d
played with endlessly and grown so attached to,
no telling when the fiend might snatch it.
And that one hidden in the corner — poof! —
gone before you even got a chance to open it.
Rob Cook was a founding employee at Pixar and received the first Oscar for software. His writing likes to hang out at the intersection of art, science, inner exploration, and worldly practicality.
Is there a blessing big enough
He’s got you and me, sister, in his hands.
He’s got the whole world in his hands.
Folk spiritual
Let me set this up for you. It’s early morning,
dark, and the storm they predicted three days
ago has arrived in earnest. I’m watching this kid
across the street brush the snow off his car
with bare hands in the bare cold glare of if he
doesn’t show up for work today he’ll be fired. And
it makes me cold, even sitting here in the heat of
my warm front porch, watching him smack his
headlight trying to bring it back to life.
And I’m reminded of how religions are the work
of old men in warm houses, how no young person
would ever say be only in the present, don’t worry
about the temporal, focus only on compassion,
and how, as in war, the ones who manufacture
dogma are not the ones who die defending it.
Sometimes I don’t know what bothers me more,
that this young man has to constantly hope for a
better moment, or that all of my good moments
are buried under years of brushing snow off of cars
in the dark. Someone else will have to sort that out.
Good luck, neighbor kid.
Be in the moment,
be in a moment,
be in a moment better than this one.
Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His first book, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995 and he has a new book out, A nest blew down.
Yair Mejía on Unsplash.