Stone Circle Review – Page 21 – A new online poetry journal

September

by Satya Dash

Waking up,
you realize some passions are long
gone, and it is at once arduous to count
the ones that didn’t fall
prey to time. You teach your sister a mental
trick to calculate percentages faster and she teaches
you back—it is not all about numbers. If you begin
to self-loathe, days start vanishing right at the stroke
of noon. Every squall of rain
grows icy in your glass
of whiskey. If you go on wanting
to please everybody, a good friend said, you will grow
into a demon. A second cup of tea warms
the cinders of your first
cup of coffee. Caught in traffic, someone sneers
at their doppelganger before the odd twitch
of self-recognition; someone reveals a secret
to a stranger during a casual conversation at the bus
stop; you scroll twitter and develop
an obsession with the seven-day
moving average of deaths
in the city. You switch off
your phone and sleep, slipping painless
into dreams where you meander door to door
selling books. Once by accident, you show up
at the house of someone you used
to be in love with
and give away all
your books. The way you separated from them
is the way you shall wake up tomorrow—startling
for water by the bed, moaning softly
into damp diagonal stripes
of the pillow cover.

Satya Dash is a recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Broken River Prize. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and Diagram, among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator. He has been nominated previously for Pushcart, Nina Riggs Poetry Award, Orison Anthology, and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack and now lives in Bangalore, India. He tweets at: @satya043.

The Editor2025-03-16T17:27:18-04:00May 18, 2024|

Dark Sister

by Catherine Arra

You arrive in concrete clouds.
Queen of unstable conditions:
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Unruly winds, low-pressure dread,
flash floods spin me down ocean depths.
Queen of unstable conditions:

you flatten in silence, salty.
The weight of water welcomes no weight at all.
Flash floods spin me down ocean depths.

I flick my caudal fin, swell fish-gill cheeks,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,
the weight of water welcomes no weight at all.

Doze away days above. Mask the mood.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
shine glossy green eyes. Home in undulating tides,

the barnacled gold of vessels sunk.
You arrive in concrete clouds.
I curl into beds of coral, commune with sea lions,
joy skyrockets, a lightning flush. This love.

Catherine Arra is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Unbroken, Impspired, Poetica Review, Piker Press, and Rat’s Ass Review. Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at catherinearra.com.

The Editor2025-03-09T22:35:21-04:00May 12, 2024|

Don’t Hold It All In

by K Weber

Ready the metaphorical sawback machete.
Back-track to scouting, campsite preparation.

You are the scamp of the earth-ends: been
through worst-ends; scrimped and scrappy.

Crimped posture-trudged, you made yourself
smaller than a pin’s head and just as quiet.

You have breath-held and lingered long
as an ellipsis… waiting to wade across water.

But the cost was too high to keep things running,
electric, after you leapt through kitchen’s fire.

Then you coughed the singed crust of ovens,
this planet. Kept going. Started your own blaze.

Called it light despite hands that needed you
to know hurt. Backpack sags with red memories.

They drag along what was once a tube
of lipstick, credit cards. Now knives and knives.

They got too close. What stung worse when
they finally ran away from you running away?

What if the earth pauses, pregnant, but still-
born. We just wait. We plan our next escape.

A ripple might wash us away, muddily, uneasily,
to the next chance at survival. Or we slide away.

And that pin was pulled from a grenade.

K Weber is an Ohio writer with 10 online books of poetry. She obtained her Creative Writing BA in 1999 from Miami University. K writes independently and collaboratively, having created poems from words donated by more than 300 people since 2018. K has poems featured in publications such as The Hooghly Review, Writer’s Digest, Fevers of the Mind & her photography/digital collages appear in literary journals including Barren Magazine and Nightingale & Sparrow. Much of K’s work (free in PDF and some in audiobook format) and her publishing credits are on her website: kweberandherwords.com.

The Editor2025-03-09T22:31:08-04:00May 11, 2024|

Grief Poems & Love Poems

by Matthew Isaac Sobin

I’ve been threatening my mother saying I will write a poem
about her. She says I only write poems about my father. And I say

be careful what you wish for, wielding banter as a bewildering shield.
You have to be so vigilant around a poet, lest they transmute your grief;

seize the narrowest slice of life & blow it up into a world. Like how
he was always worse than his worst outburst. The stunned face of the kid

who throttled me on the school bus, the strange threat. If you touch
my son again, I’ll touch you. A violet of love. Or how close we hold

marital oaths as sickness descends, because even a starless sky is
reciprocal. Safeguarding heavy microscopes, turning old toys into centerpieces:

we are but one insect wing away, why idling is death for some
& breath for others. Because shutting down a spouse’s phone after years

means you can never learn anything new about them
from a stranger. How grief poems & love poems often inhabit

separate regions of the Venn diagram. Do we shade red or blue, purple
or gray, listening to the slow ring, the inhale before hello

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from The Lumiere Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Midway Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, The Hooghly Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac and Instagram @matthewisaacsobin. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.

The Editor2024-05-05T10:20:40-04:00May 5, 2024|

Cursing Winter

by John Walser

People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.
~ Chekhov

Oh, Anton, the draughts
yowl right now:
February Vincent Street:
probably like Petersburg:
almost the steppe:
but without the wolves
that chase
the troika flicker lights
across the ice and snow.

Tonight I will sit
with the woman I love:
dinner, maybe some wine
we get out of our basement:
cellar cold:

and we will adjust
the thermostat all night:
the slow dry heat
that tries to seep
the slightest hope.

Under covers we will hold
each other: the steam
of bodies glowing with happiness:
but we will know it’s winter:

that belligerence of bitter air
that dropped from the boundary waters:

the hunched profanity
when we walk closed space to closed space:

the below zero windchill morning
when we carry the raw under our skin
sewn into the lining of who we are.

We take up that burden.

We will wake tomorrow morning
happy still
but cursing the snow blow
cursing the shovel and the plow
cursing the layers upon layers
upon layers I wear outside
even just to walk beside her car
as she down the driveway backs
to head to Wednesday work.

In love we still ask:
How long the frozen hands and toes?
How long the only bird shadows
the crows covering swaths of yard?
How long the agitation wind?
How long the gust thrash throb pine trees
like nervous uncertainty?

John Walser’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Spillway, Water-Stone Review, Plume, Posit, and december magazine. His manuscript Edgewood Orchard Galleries has been a finalist for the Autumn House Press Prize, the Ballard Spahr Prize and the Zone 3 Press Prize as well as a semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. A four-time semifinalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, as well as a Best New Poets, a Pushcart and a Best of the Net nominee, John is a professor of English at Marian University and lives in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie. John is on @JohnWalser5.

The Editor2024-05-04T12:36:07-04:00May 4, 2024|