Summer, Issue 42

GREY SPARROW’S NATIONAL TREASURE
Ghost Choir, Carl Phillips

POETRY
A Theory of Devotion, Beth Brown Preston
Erik Satie’s Umbrellas, Ben Macnair
Crazy Horse Canyon, Charles Pease
Sestina for a Connecticut Farmer in Springtime, Poem for Vera to Read Aloud, Jenny Sherman
Riverkeeper (An Elegy), J. Mark Cooney
On a Wing and a Prayer, Jim Tilley
Old Highway 99, Casey Killingsworth
Ghosts of New Orleans, William Miller
Historical Present (Autumn 2019), Massimiliano Nastri
Home, Royal Rhodes
Five Cinquain, Jack e Lorts
Waiting in Palermo, Ruslan Garrey
The Rains in March, Vandana Kumar
Water and Mirrors, Peter J. Dellolio
A Village in Perspective, Roger Camp
Just Like Her Daddy, Frank Freeman
Old Romeo, Wherefore art thou?, Paul Kindlon
Bad boys grow up to be bad men saith, Gale Acuff
Toy Run, Fiona Sinclair
Rust Trust, Diane Webster
The Beginning of Something Else, Jo Ann Baldinger
The Fleets Have Marched, Prithvijeet Sinha

FLASH FICTION
Flutterbys, Jessica Hwang
Postcards from Camp, Paul C. Rosenblatt
The Continuing Struggle, Michael Bloor
Mel’s Test, David Sydney
Ambition, Ken Poyner
Learning to Sleep, Beth Kephart
A Little Grief, Please, Stuart Watson
Franky and Johnny Made a Snowman, Kelley White
Rough Bark, Linda Briskin
You’ll Come Running Back, Lee Hammerschmidt

BIOGRAPHIES

GREY SPARROW’S NATIONAL TREASURE IS CARL PHILLIPS

“Carl Phillips is the author of several books of poetry, in-cluding Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.” Pulitzer Biography

CONTRIBUTORS

Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. His poems have appeared in Ascent, Reed, Arkansas Review, Poem, Slant, Aethlon, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Roanoke Danse Macabre, Ohio Journal, Sou’wester, South Dakota Review, North Dakota Quarterly, New Texas, Midwest Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Adirondack Review, Worcester Review, Adirondack Review, Connecticut River Review, Delmarva Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Maryland Literary Review, George Washington Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ann Arbor Review, Plainsongs, Chiron Review, George Washington Review, McNeese Review, Weber, War, Literature & the Arts, Poet Lore, Able Muse, The Font, Fine Lines, Teach.Write., Oracle, Hamilton Stone Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, Cardiff Review, Tokyo Review, Indian Review, Muse India, Bombay Review, Westerly, and many other journals.  Acuff has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.

Jo Ann Baldinger writes poems and teaches yoga in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Stirring, 2River View, Stickman Review, Verdad, Twyckenham Notes, White Whale, Monarch Review, and Cirque, among others.

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilarations of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com)

Linda Briskin is a writer and fine art photographer. In her fiction, she is drawn to writing about whimsy, fleeting moments, and the small secrets of interior lives. Her creative nonfiction bends genres, makes quirky connections and highlights social justice themes—quietly. Her writing has recently appeared in South 85, Fictive Dream, South 8, Barren, *82Review, Masque & Spectacle, The Schuylkill Valley Review, Canary, Tipping the Scales, Montreal Serai, The Ekphrastic Review, Rise Up Review and Cobalt Review among others. As a photographer, she is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. Recently, her photographs have been published in Humana Obscura, ilanot Review, The Hopper, Flare Journal, Alluvian, Canadian Camera, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Burningword Literary Journal and High Shelf Press. https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/

Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he muses over his orchids, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons reading under an Angel’s Trumpet with a charm of hummingbirds. When he’s not at home, he’s photographing in the Old World. His work has appeared in Pank, Rust+Moth, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review, and Nimrod.

J. Mark Cooney writes in the Detroit area. His works have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Eunoia Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Yale Anglers’ Journal, and elsewhere.

Peter J. Dellolio born 1956 New York City.  Went to Nazareth High School and New York University.  Graduated 1978: BA Cinema Studies; BFA Film Production.  Wrote and directed various short films, including James Joyce’s short story Counterparts which he adapted into a screenplay.  Counterparts was screened at national and international film festivals.  A freelance writer, published articles on the arts, film, dance, sculpture, architecture, and culture, as well as fiction, poetry, one-act plays, and critical essays on art, film, and photography. Poetry collections A Box Of Crazy Toys published 2018 by Xenos Books/Chelsea Editions and Bloodstream Is An Illusion Of Rubies Counting Fireplaces published February 2023 by Cyberwit/Rochak Publishing.  He is working on a critical study of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock’s Cinematic World: Shocks of Perception and the Collapse of the Rational.  Chapter excerpts have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Literature/Film Quarterly, Kinema, Flickhead, and North Dakota Quarterly since 2006.

Frank Freeman’s poetry has been published in Maine Sunday Telegram, Sehnsucht, The American Journal of Poetry, The Aroostook Review, The Axe Factory, The Decadent Review, The New York Quarterly, SN Review, and Tiger’s Eye, and is forthcoming in Verdad and The Opiate Magazine. His book reviews, essays, and stories have appeared in many venues. He grew up in Texas, Connecticut, and California, but mostly Texas. Moved to Boston for grad school, married a Maine woman who wanted Maine back. House, kids, dog, cat, chickens, small family business. Writes in the mornings to stay sane, keeps the books of family business in afternoons.

Ruslan Garrey is a Russian-born poet, now based in Miami, Florida.  He previously founded the North Fork Oklahoma Writers and his work has appeared in The Torrid Literary Journal, The River Poets Journal, and The Scarlet Leaf Review, among others.  In his free time, he chases dogs through haunted forests and beaches, and works as poetry editor of the Sublunary Review.

Lee Hammerschmidt is a Visual Artist/Writer/Troubadour. He is the author of the short story collections, A Hole Of My Own, It’s Noir O’clock Somewhere, For Richer or Noirer, Flash Wounds, and Pulp Stains. Check out his hit parade on YouTube!    http://www.youtube.com/user/MrLeehammer

Jessica Hwang’s fiction has appeared in Reservoir Road Literary Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, Mystery Magazine, Tough, Shotgun Honey, Uncharted, Failbetter, Wilderness House Literary Review, Moss Puppy Magazine, Samjoko and Pembroke Magazine. You can find her at jessicahwangauthor.com

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some three-dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher of memoir, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Her new book on craft is Consequential Truths: On Writing the Lived Life. Her new memoir-in-essays, My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, is due out from Temple University Press in November and has been called “eloquent and unique” by Kirkus Reviews. More at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com

Casey Killingsworth has been published in numerous journals including The American Journal of Poetry, Better Than Starbucks, The Moth, and 3^rd Wednesday. His latest book is A nest blew down (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new collection, Freak show (Fernwood Press), is due out in early 2023. Casey has a degree from Reed College.

Paul Kindlon’s journey through life has been marked by 7 years as a stage actor in Chicago and 25 years  as both a journalist and college professor in Moscow, Russia. Now residing in Buffalo, N.Y. he has more than 100 publications to his credit. These include poetry, plays, topical essays, flash fiction, aphorisms, and a memoir. He has been a regular contributor to Mystery Tribune for the past 4 years and is the editor of the International Journal of Creative Arts.

Vandana Kumar is a French teacher, translator, recruitment consultant, Indie Film Producer, cinephile and poet residing in New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in national and international websites of repute like Mad Swirl, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Piker Press, Dissident Voice,  Borderless journal, Madras Courier, Outlook etc. She has featured in literary journals like Fine Lines and anthologies like Harbinger Asylum, Kali Project, But You Don’t Look Sick etc. Her cinema articles appear regularly in Just-cinema, and The Daily Eye. She was among 40 participating poets in the INĐIJA PRO POET 2023 festival held in June23 in Serbia. Her poem was translated into Serbian in the Pro Poet anthology published there. Her debut collection of poems Mannequin Of Our Times was published in February 2023.The book has been awarded The Panorama International Book Award 2023.

Jack e Lorts, a retired educator, lives in rural eastern Oregon with his wife of 63 years, Celia, with 25 of his kids and grandkids living nearby.  His poems have appeared widely, if infrequently over the past 50+ years in such places as Arizona Quarterly, Kansas Quarterly, English Journal, Arsenic Lobster, Chiron Review, Rattle, Tipton Poetry Journal, Verse Daily and myriad other places. He’s the author of three earlier chapbooks from Pudding House and Finishing Line Press. His most recent book is The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt, (Uttered Chaos Press 2019). 

William Miller’s eighth collection of poetry, The Crow Flew Between Us, was published by Kelsay Books in 2019.  His poems have recently appeared in The Arkansas Review, Lullwater Review, Apricity,  The Courtship of Winds and Lowestoft Chronicle.  He lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Massimiliano Nastri was born in the south of Italy in 1973, but grew up in a small German-speaking village, up on the Alps.  A rather uneventful life—he attended university and completed a Ph.D.—with odd episodes as an extra for an HBO series (The Tudors).  He had a couple of lines in theater productions (messenger in Aeschylus).  Nastri works as a teaching assistant at Queen’s University, Belfast, endlessly revising a book about the interwar collapse of center-right parties and the rise of fascism.  He’s also guilty of an unpublished political novel, and of writing a second, to be equally unpublished.  Writing poems in English enables him to control the distance between what he thinks, and how he expresses it.  The authors: Zbigniew Herbert, Akhmatova, Bachmann and Vittorio Sereni—all witnessed history, and tried to remain humane. His recent discoveries are Antonella Anedda, Fiona Benson, and Anne Carson.  His writing has been published on Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Ink Sweat and Tears, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Charles Pease was born and raised in Chicago by a Southern family, a long-time Californian, retired/widowed who has been writing poetry for several years. His publications appeared in October Hill Magazine, as well as BlazeVOX, The Blue Nib, North Dakota Quarterly, Calla Press, The Voices Project and Vagabond Books.

Ken Poyner’s four collections of brief fictions and four collections of speculative poetry can be found at most online booksellers.  He spent 33 years in information system management, is married to a world record holding female power lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish.  Individual works have appeared in Café Irreal, Analog, Danse Macabre, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places. www.kpoyner.com

Beth Brown Preston was awarded an AB in the Philosophy of Language and Music Composition from the Bryn Mawr College, 1976 and an MFA in writing from Goddard College, 1981 with additional graduate studies at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has been published in Adanna, African American Review, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, CLA Journal, Goddard Review and other literary and scholarly journals.

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator, trained in the Classics and global religious traditions. He taught for almost forty years, including a course entitled: Meanings of Death for several decades. His poems have appeared online and in print in a number of literary journals, including: Amethyst, Ekphrastic Review Challenge, Chained Muse, Plum Tree Tavern, Snakeskin Poetry, and The Montreal Review. He is especially committed to collaborative work with visual artists, and some of that work has been published by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

Paul C. Rosenblatt has published short stories in October Hill Magazine, Grey Sparrow Journal, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Shark Reef, Avatar Review, The Writing Disorder, and other venues.  He is a retired academic whose academic teaching, research, and writing focused a great deal on family issues.

Grey Sparrow Editor and Reviewer Natalie Schriefer, MFA is a bi/demi writer often grappling with sexuality, identity, and shame. She loves asking people about their fictional crushes (her most recent are Riza Hawkeye and Gamora). “A Best of the Net” nominee, her work has appeared online with CNN, Wired, Insider, and NBC, among others. Find her on Twitter @schriefern1 or on her website at www.natalieschriefer.com Schriefer reviewed Tim Stobierski’s Dancehall for this issue of Grey Sparrow Journal.

Jenny Sherman is an editor for a research institute and former journalist who also writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, and creative non-fiction. Sherman has poetry published in anthologies by Girls Write Now and Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters. She grew up in Minnesota and lives in New York City, where she’s mentored teenage writers and acted as a regional judge for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She’s interested in encouraging a balance between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, so she often explores science, nature, and biology in her poems. Sheman enjoys the alchemy of mixing metaphor with fact, and hopes that by doing so she can make both a little more accessible to readers. 

Fiona Sinclair ‘s new collection Second Wind will be published by Dempsey and Windle Press, in Spring 2022. Her poems, which are broadly autobiographical, deal with the possibilities of later life; from learning to ride pillion on a motor bike to falling in love again.  Fiona has an ambition to have a poem nominated for a Pushcart prize .

Prithvijeet Sinha is from Lucknow, India. He is a post graduate in MPhil from the University of Lucknow, having launched his writing career by self publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog An Awadh Boy’s Panorama (https://anawadhboyspanorama.wordpress.com/)  Sinha’s works have been published in several varied publications as FemAsia Magazine, Hudson Valley Writers Guild, Inklette Magazine, Piker Press Online, anthology Pixie Dust and All Things Magical published by Authors Press( January, 2022), Cafe Dissensus, The Medley, Screen Queens, Confluence- South Asian Perspectives, Reader’s Digest, Borderless Journal, Lothlorien Poetry, Live Wire, Rhetorica Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, The Kolkata Arts, Aze Journal, Dreich Magazine, Visual Verse, In Plainspeak and in the children’s anthology Nursery Rhymes and Children’s Poems From Around The World ( AuthorsPress, February 2021) as well as Soul Spaces (AuthorsPress, 2023) among others.

Tim Stobierski presented through the lens of his own experiences as a queer man. His poetry has been published in a number of journals, including the Connecticut River Review, Midwest Quarterly, Grey Sparrow, HOOT Review, and more. His first collection of poetry, Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer, was published by River Otter Press in 2012. His newest book of poetry, Dancehall, was published by Antrim House Books in July 2023. To pay the bills, he is a freelance writer and editor focusing on the worlds of finance, insurance, and software. 

David Sydney is a physician. He has had pieces in Little Old Lady Comedy, 101 Words, 50 Give or Take, Microfiction Monday, Friday Flash Fiction, and Entropy Squared.

Jim Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. He has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next book, forthcoming in June 2024 from Red Hen Press is Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems.

Stuart Watson wrote for newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. His writing is in  yolk.literary, Barzakh, Two Hawks Quarterly, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bloom, Fewer than 500, Mystery Tribune, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), 433, Flash Boulevard, Revolution John, Montana Mouthful, Sledgehammer Lit, Five South, Shotgun Honey, The Writing Disorder, Grey Sparrow Journal, Reckon Review, Muleskinner Journal and Pulp Modern Flash, among others. He lives in Oregon, with his wife and their amazing dog.

Diane Webster’s goal is to remain open to poetry ideas in everyday life, nature or an overheard phrase and to write. She enjoys the challenge of transforming images into words to fit her poems. Her work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review and other literary magazines. She had a micro-chap published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022 and one of her poems was nominated for Best of the Net.

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, NO. HOPE STREET, was recently published by Kelsay Books.