Lindsay Marianna Walker Commentary

6 Things I think when I think about "The Josephine Game:"

I used to make my parents play this game over and over when I was a kid and we lived near Chicago. Me: "I one the Sears Tower." Dad: "I two the Sears Tower," "blah blah blah" Dad: "I eight the Sears Tower." Me: "You ATE the Sears Tower? Hahahahaha." And every time it was hilarious. It still hasn't gotten old, in fact.

Euchre is a fun game. I wish more people played it everywhere.

Jaime Sabines

In stanza 8 "Slump" = "plums" (anagramish stanza from William Carlos Williams's "This is just to say." I stole it cause I love it.)

I knew a lady here in Mississippi who, during the Civil Right's movement, went down to the polls to vote. She had to "take a test" before casting her ballot. The question the city officials asked her was: "How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?" Seriously. Needless to say, she didn't get to vote. There were some other crazy ass questions she got asked, but I've forgotten them now, sadly.

If my love life had a footnote it would be stanza 2 of "Variations on a Theme By William Carlos Williams" by Kenneth Koch:

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.


4 things I think when I think about, "Josephine in the Tower:"

1. I used to watch a lot of Road Runner and Coyote cartoons when I was little - a lot.

2. Once a lady yelled at my little sister for horsing around near the edge of the Grand Canyon. My mom got mad at the lady. I observed the whole scene from a reasonably safe distance.

3. I am fascinated by people who lick peanut butter off the knife.

4. My little gas stove and its hand-sized burners.



Lindsay Marianna Walker is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Southern Mississippi. A finalist for the 2009 Walt Whitman Award for her manuscript, the Josephine letters, she has served as Poetry Editor for the literary journal, Juked, since 2005. Her poems have appeared recently, or are forthcoming, in: The African American Review, Valley Voices, West Branch, The Southeast Review, Gulf Stream, and others. Winner of the Center for Writers 2009 Joan Johnson Award for Fiction, she has published stories in: Smokelong Quarterly, Pindeldyboz and 971 Menu. Her play "Boy Marries Hill" is included in Gary Garrison's guide to playwriting, A More Perfect Ten.

Marguerite Scott-Copses Commentary

I recently submitted a packet for the much-dreaded "third-year review" process at my university, and I put my current manuscript in what's called the "supplemental binder." It included this poem, and many others about adolescence and early discovery/loss. After having turned it in I felt so vulnerable...like I'd put my childhood wounds on display for the entire department. I talked to a good friend and colleague about this, and he joked that "Come Visit My Childhood Wounds," was the almost-title of his first book. I guess there are some things we just can't get over about those years. I'm fascinated by the ways in which adolescence is such a blur, something like what Virginia Woolf calls "being blown through the Tube," but how, also, time becomes so crystallized by key moments that roll over us again and again. I wonder about what our emotional memories do to these moments, how distorted and energy-charged they become through time. "No. Final Answer," is about one such memory. Cue the Smiths, "Well I wonder..."



Marguerite Scott-Copses is a native of Charleston, SC where she currently teaches composition and poetry at The College of Charleston. She earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from The Florida State University and her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, The Journal of Poetry Therapy and The Green Hills Literary Lantern. But, she thinks these career facts much less important than her role as a new mother. Her days are spent, mostly, juggling classes, jotting down new surprises on scratch pieces of paper, changing diapers, and laughing at the absurdities of love intersecting with stress.

David Prater Commentary

"The Germ! The Germ!" is from an unpublished MS called Leaves of Glass, which is loosely based on correspondence between Walt Whitman and the Australian poet Bernard O'Dowd in the 1890s. In these letters, O'Dowd revealed much about his inner desires and passions. The title of the poem is taken from O'Dowd's poem "Cupid" in which he concludes:

"So that it live The Germ ! The Germ !
It matters not to me
If sheep or tiger, man or worm
Earth's victor-captain be."



David Prater's publications include The Happy Farang (self-published, 2000), We Will Disappear (papertiger media, 2007) and Morgenland (Vagabond Press, 2007). He is managing editor of the online poetry journal Cordite Poetry Review.

Sherry O'Keefe Commentary

every winter i plant a bulb in a pot and place it on my kitchen table. my kids were raised with blooming bulbs in the middle of winter. we would even bet when the plant would bloom: before christmas? after new year's? one winter, the bulb would not bloom. i was in a new home and thought perhaps i hadn't discovered the right pool of sunlight for it, so i moved the plant (with 28 inch stalks!) from here to there in my kitchen, but still no bloom. i could relate. i was not exactly blooming where i was either. the ranch supply store in this poem is in an old part of town. the ceilings are low and the floor groans. i love the sound of boot heels on the wooden floor— it's as though you've gone back in time and at any moment you'll hear the stage coach roll to a stop outside, with a bag of mail for the tiny post office across the street. if you linger in the store, you will gradually realize that you are not the only person in the store who has come to the store for a sense of comfort. this year, i have paperwhites from the store— the bulbs handpicked by floyd's nephew. guaranteed to bloom. want to bet we'll see blooms before the third snowfall?



Sherry O’Keefe, a descendant of Montana pioneers, a mother of two, sister to four, cousin to dozens, credits/blames her Irish upbringing for her story-telling ways. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Switched-on Gutenberg, Barnwood Poetry Review, Avatar Review, Babel Fruit, The High Desert Journal, Main Street Rag, and others. Her chapbook, Making Good Use of August was released in October 2009 from Finishing Line Press.

Corey Mesler Commentary

My father really worked all his life for DuPont. The plant, where family could only visit one day a year, was a place of mystery for me. Also mysterious was what my father did all day. Or indeed what DuPont did all day. I knew it was something to do with chemicals so I imagined Dr. Jekyll’s lab. Now, my father is gone from the world but the chemical plant lives on. The ergot was added to the poem by my friend Rebecca who lives “out near the chemical plant.”



Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). His first full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations, appeared in March 2009. He also has two novels set to be published in the Spring of next year, The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (Bronx River Press) and Following Richard Brautigan (Livingston Press). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, (1988), and Chloe, (1995). With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Jeff Crandall Commentary

Jugular Ghazal

Peter Pereira had given me a copy of Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English which had languished unread on my shelf for many years. Bored one night, I plucked it down and opened it up, to my delight and surprise. The editor Agha Shahid Ali and I seem to have the same sensibilities. I quickly knew that I wanted to rise to the challenge of writing one. And a correct ghazal at that (pronounced, as he tells us, "ghuzzle, the gh sound . . . excavated near unnoticeably from deep in the throat").

I don’t remember how/when the sonic line "--ow I kill you" came to me, but it did, and it revisited me every night before I went to bed for a good week. So finally I sat down at the computer and pounded out "Jugular Ghazal."

It is absolutely not a "correct" ghazal, because it violates one of the main tenets of the form: each couplet must be "autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself." My enslavement to narrative has betrayed me here. But the poem does follow the correct rhyme scheme with the qafia (--ow) and radif (“I kill you”), surpasses the minimum five couplets, and evokes an "atmosphere of sadness and grief" while reflecting the form’s "dedication to love and the beloved", admittedly here on a rather creepy level.

Losing Oz

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot was a stultifying mystery to me for years, until the day I was emotionally devastated by the betrayal of my “life partner” (his words, not mine). Then each line of that poem stung with a depth of pain that I fully understood, as if arrows of Eros were being yanked out of my flesh. This is my version of the same experience, without the brilliant help of Ezra Pound (dang it!).

Jeff Crandall is a poet and glass artist living in Seattle.

Ryan W. Bradley Commentary

Nothing quite brings out my "three drinks in at the bar" personality quite like reading Bukowski, which I tend to do in phases. In everyday life I put a lot of value on amusing people. There's nothing better than entertaining, making people laugh, but a lot of my writing tends to take more serious or somber turns. When I get in my bar mode, though, my smartass-ness starts to shine through. "Everywhere I Look is Pornography" and "Death is Driving this Car" are both by-products of this mood, which seems to ebb and flow with the year, coming and going like a transient hooker longing for my attention and money.



Ryan W. Bradley has fronted a punk band, done construction in the Arctic Circle, and now manages an independent children's bookstore. He received his MFA from Pacific University and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a myriad of publications including The Oregonian, Third Wednesday, Sir! Magazine, and PANK. He lives in Southern Oregon with his wife and two sons and blogs at ryanwbradley.blogspot.com