Picaroon Poetry - Issue #17 - July 2019
Featuring poetry by Sharon Phillips, Peter Burrows, Kitty Coles, alyssa hanna, Crystal Anderson, John L. Stanizzi, Chris Hemingway, Sue Kindon, Kathleen Strafford, Jenna Velez, Maureen Daniels, Samuel Guest, Charlie Hill, John Son, Beth Bayley, Visar, Bethany W Pope, Luke Kuzmish, Gerard Sarnat, Chris Hardy, Erik Fuhrer, Christopher Hopkins, John Raffetto, Andrew Shields, Bo Meson, Brian Comber, Martin Zarrop, Kristin Garth, Maiya Dambawinna, David Bankson, Jeffrey Zable, Rickey Rivers Jr, Anthony Watts, Donna Dallas, Chuka Susan Chesney, and Tobi Alfier. Picaroon is, as always, lovingly edited by Kate Garrett.
Featuring poetry by Sharon Phillips, Peter Burrows, Kitty Coles, alyssa hanna, Crystal Anderson, John L. Stanizzi, Chris Hemingway, Sue Kindon, Kathleen Strafford, Jenna Velez, Maureen Daniels, Samuel Guest, Charlie Hill, John Son, Beth Bayley, Visar, Bethany W Pope, Luke Kuzmish, Gerard Sarnat, Chris Hardy, Erik Fuhrer, Christopher Hopkins, John Raffetto, Andrew Shields, Bo Meson, Brian Comber, Martin Zarrop, Kristin Garth, Maiya Dambawinna, David Bankson, Jeffrey Zable, Rickey Rivers Jr, Anthony Watts, Donna Dallas, Chuka Susan Chesney, and Tobi Alfier.
Picaroon is, as always, lovingly edited by Kate Garrett.
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Beth Bayley<br />
Communion<br />
The Novena Catholic Church has been rebuilt and made grand enough to<br />
accommodate nearly everyone’s Sunday morning, though at Christmas they<br />
needed a tent outside and a video screen for overflow. We could see it from the<br />
bar across the street, where they know us well (a phenomenon I’m ambivalent<br />
about), as we had our communion of lager and thin, crispy pizza.<br />
So Sunday’s crowded, but Wednesday is, too, and sometimes even the lunchtime<br />
throngs head in for a Jesus fix. That’s when I usually see her, at the bottom of the<br />
church steps, with a dowager’s hump under her floral blouse and the brightest<br />
magenta lipstick on her wrinkled mouth. You aren’t allowed to beg in Singapore,<br />
but you are allowed to sell packets of tissues, three for a dollar, and she holds<br />
three yellow packets in her left hand. Sometimes there’s an uncle in a wheelchair<br />
selling them too, one leg a stump that the crowds have to walk around; but it’s her<br />
I go to with my coins, her lipstick a beacon and beckoning.<br />
I blot my own lipstick with her tissues later, as I get ready to go to the bar, leaning<br />
into the mirror to examine my own wrinkles, empty riverbeds, dry tributaries seen<br />
from space.<br />
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