Category Archives: poem

“Mother, Father, Child” by Patty Paine

Her mother threw herself
down the sundeck stairs,
over and over
until bones flew
apart inside her body.

Her father slipped
into her room, told
how he dreams of nothing
but the pigeon he killed
when he was a child.
Every night he stands over
himself weeping and ashamed.

Next morning she slides open
her father’s chest and sees
a gleaming
row of wrenches,
each mouth gaping
wider and wider.

She palms the smallest
and can almost slip
her pinky between its steel lips.
The largest grips her
wrist. She twists
until it catches skin, bites
bone, until the cold
concrete sways beneath her
bare feet, and pain opens
her like a wing.

–Patty Paine,
The Sounding Machine
Accents Publishing

Patty Paine is the author of Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and many other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is assistant director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

“Pear” by Kristine Ong Muslim

68 Replies

It was that kind
of yellow-green
mourning

which had nothing
to do with losing
something.

One wild-eye less,
it swayed—a stout
hourglass.

–Kristine Ong Muslim,
Bigger Than They Appear
(Accents Publishing)

Kristine Ong Muslim has poetry and prose appearing in hundreds of publications, including Boston Review, Narrative Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, and Southword.

“Oxygen” by James Doyle

13 Replies

How it crosses
the Mississippi, swells
with water, rubs
itself spare
on the Rockies, lean
and young to colonize
empty space, stops
short in the great deserts
of the Southwest, splatters
primary color
across the heat scrim
that wavers
from sky to land,
sidles down dry
creek beds like a crest
of transparent water,
fills the drifting
bones with pores,
chases its tail
over the sand, curves
dunes into the shapes
of sidewinders, bakes
fallen shards of cactus
flat so they scatter
like lizards, browns
the sun for touch
so we can gulp
air down, gorge
our lungs and curl
around ourselves
to hold it in
for as many centuries
as it takes.

–James Doyle,
The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water
Accents Publishing

James Doyle is retired, 75 years old, and lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado. His publications include The Governor’s Office, The Sixth Day; The Silk at Her Throat, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, and Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes. James Doyle’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s PBS radio show, The Writer’s Almanac, and on Poetry Daily. Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry has featured his work, and his poetry has appeared over a dozen times on Verse Daily. His poems have been reprinted in many anthologies, including Prentice Hall’s Literature: an Introduction to Critical Reading, used in universities across the country.

“The Sound of Civilization” by Suchoon Mo

10 Replies

the sound of two cats fucking
is the sound of our civilization

sadly this is my conclusion
it is sad because cats are not sad at all

the sound of one hand clapping
is the sound of our civilization

sadly this is my conclusion
it is sad because he lost his hand in the war

–Suchoon Mo,
Frog Mantra
Accents Publishing

Suchoon Mo is a Korean War veteran and a retired academic living in the semi-arid part of Colorado. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and taught at the University of Detroit and Colorado State University. He is the author of a number of scholarly papers and articles. His poems have been published in The Battered Suitcase, The Bitter Oleander, BlazeVOX, Dissident Editions, epiphany, Hobo Camp Review, Journal of Truth and Consequence, Lucid Rhythms, Mad Hatters’ Review, Message in a Bottle, The Muse, The Ranfurly Review, Segue, Spillway Review, The Tower Journal and others. His music compositions have also appeared in a number of publications.

“The Sixth Station” by E. K. Mortenson

13 Replies

It is stifling here in this room.
It is in the front of the house
and all day the sun bakes
it through the wall.
The window is small,
large enough only to let in heat.
All night the walls close in,
press upon me. But Uncle is kind
enough to allow me here, so I can’t complain.
Even sleep has become a burden.
It is my sickness. I know this.

My body rebels against itself.
I lay all night in my sweat,
and when I wake,
the yellow ring where my body was.
Sometimes, too,
there is blood.
It seeps into my hair, and delicately paints
the head of my shadow self.
I cannot tell, in the dark,
what is sweat or blood.
I am too weary to turn on the light,
to wipe anything away. Some mornings
I wake to find my bladder
or bowels have betrayed me during the night;
my image painted in everything my body expels.
Each dawn I must walk painfully to the river
to wash the sheets. I do not want Uncle to see my shame.
I wash them again behind the house so that he may see them clean.
See that I obey his only command.

This morning
I am too weary
to walk
and the stones
of the dawn
are too hard.
The river,
too cold.
I shall fold up this sheet,
hide it
beneath
the mattress.
It hurts
to eat,
burns
to drink.
My body now
has nothing
  left
  to stain.
All that was left in me
      is now
beneath
the bed.

When Uncle goes out to market today,
I shall take a fresh white sheet from the trunk.
I shall drape my bed in it. I shall lie down and wait.

–E. K. Mortenson,
The Fifteenth Station (2012)
Accents Publishing

E. K. Mortenson is the author of a chapbook, Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010), and a full-length collection, What Wakes Us (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming). His work also appears in both print and online journals and anthologies. He was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is poetry editor at Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor. He writes and teaches in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and two children.

“Ljubljana” by Georgi Gospodinov

10 Replies

One evening
in my hotel room
on the government radio news,
to hear the newscaster
exhaust the entire dark chronicle
with the one and only announcement:
black kitty lost
downtown… .
(That is all from us, goodnight!)

That’s how I lost sleep
in the calmest of capitals.

–Georgi Gospodinov,
translated from the Bulgarian
by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger:
Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
(Accents Publishing)

Georgi Gospodinov was born on January 7th, 1968 in Yambol. He holds a Ph.D. in literary history from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He is a poet, writer and playwright, and one of the most translated Bulgarian authors since 1989. Georgi has published four poetry books that have received national literary awards, among them the National Debut Award and the Best Book of the Year Prize. His poetry has appeared in many international anthologies, and his book Natural Novel has been translated into over 20 languages. He has authored screenplays, as well, including the short feature Omelette, which received honorable mention at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. Georgi is an editor of the respected literary gazette Literaturen Vestnik. He lives and works in Sofia.

“titleless” by Mark DeCarteret

1 Reply

in a field
familiar
in every
way but
the birds
flying in
forced
exhalation
unlike any
I’ve seen
then it’s winter
I’m a fountain
of trembling
in a house
w/white walls
& a lady bug
struggling
to get back
red again

-Mark DeCarteret,
Bigger Than They Appear
(Accents Publishing)

Mark DeCarteret served as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire from 2009–2011. You can check out his Postcard Project at pplp.org.

Jim Lally Featured Reading

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The first two poets Accents had the privilege of publishing were Jude and Jim Lally (The View from Down Here and Stick Tight Man, respectively).

The above video is Jim Lally’s reading at our premiere of these two books. The second half of the reading is below.

Jim Lally is a Kentucky poet known for his curly white beard and straggly ponytail. He is a member of the Poets’ Supper, Poezia, and Holler writers’ groups as well as the founding member of Writers at Artcroft. He graduated with a degree in English from Brescia College where he was the editor of the school’s first literary magazine. Jim has been the Spoken Word artist at the Walk for the Arts in Berea for the last two years. He is a partner with his wife, Jennifer Gleason, in the organic farm business of Sunflower Sundries. His poetry ranges from the irregularly scattered to the tangle of the stranglehold.

“The Birth Mother on Her Daughter’s First Birthday” by Sarah Freligh

15 Replies

It’s late and the woman one cell over
is finally quiet. Awake, she’s at war
with life, that motherfucker, fights
sleep when it threatens to take her down
for the night, struggling
and punching the thin sheets
to keep what she imagines is hers.
The guard says it’s snowing—
a real sonofabitch to drive in—
a foot already and more to fall.
On our first date, your father
drove to the KMart parking lot
and carved figure eights in the new snow.
I sat in the passenger’s seat and said
go faster because I liked
how his biceps looked
under his flannel shirt
when he yanked that steering wheel
and made that car obey him.

I should tell you
everyone’s innocent
in here. Guilt is a nametag we wear
for therapy sessions, tear up
and discard on the way out.
We sit in a circle and drink
bitter coffee, tell stories
that scald the tongue.
The day you were born you felt
like a bowl of hot pasta the doctor
spilled on my stomach. The nurse said
your baby is beautiful but she was wrong.
You looked like Eisenhower,
and you were never mine,
just something I might
have borrowed for a while.

–Sarah Freligh,
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
Accents Publishing

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Brevity, Barn Owl Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Woman, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly and on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and an Artist’s Exchange grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.

“Figure 6: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus” by Matthew Minicucci

14 Replies

Why are you kneeling? Why have we both knelt?

Only in this way are we alike
in stature and statuary.
We say drop or fall

when our knees touch
the ground, like a stone from your palm,

but really we mean pulled
a common center
an endless patch of dirt pocked by heels.

This place is smaller than the hairs on a nettle;
each lonely in their sting and solitude.
Until now.
Believe me

when I tell you I’ve dreamt of this fabric
a simple swatch of cloth held over a patch of violet flowers,
their papery bracts.

I think I understand now the worn path, the wine-dark
of the sage flowers
that can’t help but grow.

Why do I look to their faces after seeing yours?

The oblong leaves;
these split veins and inflorescent whorls.

What I mean to say is
you’re both beautiful;

what I mean to say is sometimes
we see a menorah in something as simple as sage.

–Matthew MiniCucci,
Reliquary, Accents Publishing

More from Reliquary:

Matthew Minicucci is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous journals, including: The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cream City Review, and Crazyhorse, among others. He has also been featured on Verse Daily. He currently teaches writing at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois.

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