Here are the 2024 Pushcart Prize nominees. I wish them well, and much success.:)
Lorraine Caputo "A Weekend Escape"” (poem)
Beverly Collins Beverly M. Collins's "Cost of Knowing" (prose)
Kitty Jospé's "Someone's Birthday is Someone Else's Death Day" (poem)
Fay L. Loomis's " Writing Poems While Asleep" (poem)
Lisa Marguerite Mora's "Afterwards the Moon"(poem)
LB Sedlacek's "One Hit Wonder"(poem)
One Hit Wonder
The corn stands tall
a deep grass green
brown decay on top
and I lean slowly
back in the chair
soft plaid, blue-green
waiting for my favorite
songs to play on
the old black rectangle
a radio that sits
on the dresser in
my parent’s green room
the shade lighter than
the green cornfield slaughtered
in fall stalks cut
down fresh fodder for
wild geese dining in
moonlight, the walking path
borders around the cornfield
laid bare walkers, bikers
exposed to the elements
and while the field
sleeps seeds are planted
anew in spring and
the corn leaps up
lashes out at sky
relishing its deep green
its hearty cycle of
repeating a popular tune.
© 2024 LB Sedlacek
Bio: LB Sedlacek is an award winning writer and poet. Her latest poetry book is Unresponsive Sky, published by Purple Unicorn Media. Her latest short stories book is The Renovator & Motor Addiction, published by Alien Buddha Press. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize both in poetry. Her mystery book, The Glass River, was nominated for the Thomas Wolfe memorial prize. She also enjoys swimming and reading.
Instagram: @lbsedlacek
Facebook: @lbsedlacekpoet
Twitter: @lbsedlacek
Afterwards the Moon (when my cat died)
It was a large white disk low in the sky. It didn't glow. It was cloud color. And kind of defiant about it. I stopped walking down the slant of hill and said, wow.
What are you supposed to do with the moon? In another time, another era, maybe I would have raised my arms, or genuflected or offered something to the fact it was there, rising as it always promises to do.
Something real and solid but still ephemeral. Mysterious, because while reliable you never know when you’ll see it or where. Or what it will look like. The moon is hard to pin down.
I resumed walking, but looked for it again between the buildings. I looked. But the clouds had shifted and were darkening to blue. It was no longer there. I’ll never see it like that again, that size, that color, framed in just that way. The moon was gone. A single granule of time.
These moments as they slip by are baffling. Not designed to be held. The heat of life pressed against my chest, as I tenderly cradled its bones and fur. And then the life is gone, slips into invisibility. My eyes cannot adjust. My eyes cannot stay wide enough to take it all in.
Yet still I search the skies.
© 2024 Lisa Marguerite Mora
Bio: Lisa Marguerite Mora has been published widely including in Chiron Review, Rattle, Literary Mama, Public Poetry Series, California Quarterly, Rebelle Society, Serving House Journal, semifinalist Tom Howard Poetry Contest, First Place winner Micro Fiction for Dandelion Press. Nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her first novel is searching for a home while she writes a second.
Neutrals Don’t Suit Anyone
A one bed flat is hardly
likely to be kitted out
ready for a House Beautiful
photographer, but even here,
the run-down part of the city
smooth textiles in neutrals,
cover windows, except one.
A flash of gold, a brief sunny
spell picking up its glittery
strands. The sort of fabric
that could be a barely-there
dress which outshines
the outsized sequins
complementing the huge
hoop earrings, tall beehive,
platformed stilettoes
siren red smile, heavy kohl
worn by someone out
for a night of drowning
sorrows, a few hours
before tottering home
to a single bed. A kitchen
that would just about cope
with a hangover busting fry-up.
A shower to flatten hair
to accommodate a wireless
headset, an office suit, a smile
that never reaches the eyes.
© 2024 Emma Lee
Keep it Real
Slick suits and shades slide across a stage,
the singers’ mouths obscured by headset mics,
the choreographed moves muffle accents.
In a standing room only venue where the roadie kicks
the amp into action, the sound engineer compensates
for the quirks of a cobbled-together set-up. A broken
string could throw the rhythm, a spilt beer could
electrocute a guitarist, the crowd could drown the vocals.
The suits shimmy off stage and are ushered to a dressing
room where they wait to be bused to a hotel. Wash,
rinse, repeat. Every minute scheduled, accounted.
The men in jeans, faded tees, rough shirts step over
the sticky patches, taped wires, plug in, limber up.
There’s an hour’s workout ahead. Music thumps against
a ribcage, loosening the heart’s imagination before
it’s burnt by a stubbed cigarette, leaving smoke.
It’s too easy to say the suited choreographed
singer/dancers wouldn’t last five minutes in the bar.
Their lyrics an opaque gloss of unknown lives.
The bar band shy off stage, stamped applause
vibrates through the floor. This is their moment,
a hyped audience vibrant in the post-gig shadows,
band absent, music still thrumming through the amps,
kept alive by the memories of people now drifting home.
© 2024 Emma Lee
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
The Fire Game
I didn’t set out to be a rage-a-holic,
but it crept up on me, what with
certain friends and family
turning out to be rabid
abled supremacists and all.
I didn’t start out with burning contempt
for my fellow Americans, for other poets,
for Republicans, for the entire South,
for the unvaxed, the unmasked.
I just smoldered until I burst into flame.
I want to smother it in human kindness,
but every time I start to get there,
another disabled or elderly friend
drops dead, or the ERs fill up,
or somebody gives me shit
for wearing a mask to a party,
and I just want to unhinge my jaw,
yell “Dracaris,” and incinerate
the whole freaking fiesta,
then crawl back in my cave.
© 2024 Jan Steckel
Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans came out from Zeitgeist
Press in 2023. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a
2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist
Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks
(Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist
Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in
Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere.
She lives in Oakland, California.
This Connection is Not Private
She feels like she’s been struck
breathless
into a blue so intense
she can’t imagine any other color
She seems to be standing on a river
The sky is falling in a thousand tiny rainbows
salted with stars
She tells herself, it’s just a story:
Cinderella bootstraps
Overnight sensation
a story that repeats
over and over
in a meteor storm of falling stars
She feels like a star
maybe already falling
She tries to bring the stars inside
tries not to dissolve inside that storm
But she, too, is story
maybe just a story
just another story on the internet
Alone at Midnight: In a Field in the Rain
Lightning sparks a repeated prayer
against darkness. In the thunder,
she senses a path between centuries,
a narrow approach winding through shadows.
She feels a repeated blue presence
floating languidly.
Flickering starlight, seen only
in deepest darkness, is leaving traces
everywhere, is pulsing inside her:
a god’s strange silver feet
dancing across the sky,
dissolving what once was.
She feels ravenous, eating nothing,
overjoyed to be turned upside down,
enfolded into the sacred. Scarred,
but not scared. When asked about it later,
she doesn’t have to answer.
Her psyche is shaped differently now.
© 2024 Cynthia Linville
Cynthia Linville’s work has appeared in numerous poetry anthologies, and her two books of collected poems, The Lost Thing and Out of Reach, are available from Cold River Press. She served as Managing Editor of Convergence: an online journal of poetry and art for ten years and as Poetry Editor of Poetry Now for two years. She has received three mini-grants from Poets & Writers to perform in collaboration with musicians. Linville has taught in the English Department at Sacramento State University since 2000. You can see more of her work at CynthiaLinville.com.
