Red Booth Review • Volume 7: Issue 1. January 2012.

Poetry
by Winston Thule
Eight Miles • B.Z. Niditch
Supermarket • Shannon Cuthbert
Still Life with Grapes • Howie Good
Faith, Stronger Than Water • Alan S. Kleiman
Tough Love • Jeffrey Park
Porterhouse Words • Ed McCourt
Two Poems • Neal Whitman

Photos
Two Photos • Winston Thule
Okaymuseum • Eleanor Bennett
Canyon #4 • Michelle Sandeen

Eight Miles • B.Z. Niditch

In a route
slavish with driving
instructions
when distant
lights flash
on musicians
with sax and drum
rosy politicians
with speeches
for city hall
an actor
in heightened shoes
adjusts a flamboyant wig,
a teenage country bride
with a child emerging
at the doors
even an assasin
mouthing forgotten
causes and prayers
of revenge
at the crash of night.


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B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Two Poems • Neal Whitman

Hiking Big Sur


on a hot hillside
overlooking the ocean
prickly pears
the cutback trail
is longer but less steep
far below us the Pacific
is a silent tide
fasten your tongue
watch your thoughts
I nap at noon
heat-dazed


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Training for the Big Sur Marathon

arise from bed
to attar of roses
and morning yawns
the day stretches out
run under the cloud
in cloud, breathing cloud
the taste of salt on my lips
the road newly paved


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Neal Whitman lives in Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula, where he aspires to become known as "The Whitman of Big Sur," though that moniker has been held by Robinson Jeffers (1887 - 1962) for some time –– Neal and his wife, Elaine, are docents at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House in Carmel. Neal and Elaine aim to capture the magic of California's Central Coast with haiga: a combination of his haiku and her photography, published at the start of each new season in their local newspaper, The Cedar Street Times.

Porterhouse Words • Ed McCourt

I want porterhouse words
with pock-marked
Bukowski Pathos.

The kind of box-truck verse
that chock the wheels,
foot the dolly,
and bleed the clutch.

Southpaw verbs -

for punch-drunk prose,
that rope-a-dope,
pitch a no-no and
buck-knife-slice the air.

And I don’t want to
apologize for them.


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Ed McCourt is an assistant professor of English at Jacksonville University. His essay “Watching Rocco” won honorable mention in the Bacopa Literary Review’s 2011 prose contest, and his poetry has appeared in the Bacopa, The Phoenix, and Handful of Dust.

Okaymuseum • Eleanor Bennett



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Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old internationally award winning photographer and artist who has won first places with National Geographic,The World Photography Organisation, Nature's Best Photography, Papworth Trust, Mencap, The Woodland trust and Postal Heritage. Her photography has been published in the Telegraph , The Guardian, BBC News Website and on the cover of books and magazines in the United states and Canada. Her art is globally exhibited.

Two Photos • Winston Thule




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Winston Thule is a rancher from Colorado.

Tough Love • Jeffrey Park

It refused to change
so we turned its face to the wall
threw cast-off items over it
and only thought about
peeking underneath
in the deadest hours of the night,
only talked about it
behind closed doors
with the radio turned up loud.
It makes us suspicious
of one another.
We sleep lightly.
If she gives in and offers it
something I know
all will be lost – tough love
is no coward’s game.


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Baltimore native Jeffrey Park lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school and teaches business English to adults. His latest poems have appeared in Subliminal Interiors, Mobius, eDanse Macabre, Darkling Magazine, My Favorite Bullet and elsewhere.

Faith, Stronger Than Water • Alan S. Kleiman

If ever there was a time for eating yogurt
and blue blueberries
or granola mash
this was it

Time stood for now now

Only harlequin readers
wearing lipgloss
from the just closing K-mart
understood proudly
where their next meal was coming from

We knew nothing
we believed
that is all
Faith based healing worked in the dark ages
it would work again

Billions believe in hocus pocus
not yours but theirs
theirs of their fathers
and he knows
everything
every single thing ever learned
we had to ask our father first
to know if truth was being told
or if not

Fear to believe our eyes
leads to gospel
comfort
soothing

I’ll never stray
what do you think
I’m superman?????


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Alan S. Kleiman's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse Wisconsin, The Criterion, Fringe, The Bicycle Review, Pyrta, Eskimo Pie, and The Montucky Review. He lives in New York City and works as an attorney. When not practicing law or writing, he spends as much time as he can in the open air.

Still Life With Grapes • Howie Good

for Barbara

In the last little bit of woods
where I sometimes walk our dog,
stepping over the beer cans
& take-home Styrofoam containers,
I found today a cluster of wild grapes
shining darkly in the dimness.
I picked one. It was good.
Maybe you’re right, after all,
about there being life on other planets.


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Howie Good is a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz. 

Supermarket • Shannon Cuthbert

I stroll the aisles, listless as lettuce and king crabs.
When I was king of Spain, I built marble sandcastles
and danced with duchesses,
ferris wheels in their gowns.
Ship lights poked through the curtains at night,
like tusks of ivory beasts slain in India
by some dashing maharajah.

Fluorescent lights above me, ghostly chicken carcasses
and graveyards of flesh around me,
a haddock’s toothless grin.

Today a girl in a bus window smiled,
bone structure so regal I was
surprised to find her toothless.
Does she run her tongue over the empty spaces,
a phantom limb?
Nightmares of
celery unsnapped, carrots uncrunched, she wakes alone.
I imagine one gray kiss at the bus stop,
my tongue draws back
at the stories these empty spaces tell.

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Shannon is a creative writing and psychology major from Hamilton College.

Canyon #4 • Michelle Sandeen



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Michelle Sandeen is a schoolteacher and mother. She has had showings in several galleries and shops in the Akron, Ohio area.