Mike Maggio

To preserve formatting, this poem has been saved as  a PDF. Please click on the link below to access it. 

You’re Still Hung Up On Something That Happened in 1950?

Bio:
Marian Kaplun Shapiro, 85, is a practicing psychologist in Lexington, Mass.  Upbringing, her latest book of poems, was published by Plain View Press in 2023.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Mindfulness

I always feared the thief might come.
Genes, not choice, invited it in. Now
I’m trying to hold on and keep “up”.
I just want it out. I want it gone.
As soon as this thing is finally out
of my body this ordeal will be over.

With just a couple more CCs to inject,
the blonde, blue-eyed 30-something
hair streaked and smartly coiffed
looks normal, perky, indicating
her life’s tenuous foundation 
has not been severely shaken.

Me, I remain seated, still waiting
striving for a state of mindfulness
breathing in, breathing out.
Breath meandering, a determined
river flowing in and out
wishing this my Bodhi spot.

My monkey mind takes a rest and
while mindfulness caresses me,
I acknowledge the moment, this 
challenging moment, not before, not after.
This is my life. This is what there is.  Yet
enlightenment eludes me.

I realign myself to enable energy flow to
where nerves are cut, endings activated
in state of on with no view of off...
hoping to awaken positive feeling,
pleasure sensations, not only pain,
waiting for mindfulness’s next embrace.


Copyright 2025 by Joy Martin 

Bio:

Joy’s writings have been published in Muddy River Poetry Review, Midway Journal, Radical Teacher Journal, Ibbetson Street Press, Josie’s Trunk, and Blended Voices.  She serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club and is a member of The Poetry Society of Virginia and Newton Poetry.  Her poems explore multitudinous facets of life, including her and broader humanity’s place and challenges within it.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

To preserve the formatting of John Haugh’s “Let’s Pick Our Myth with Care,” this poem has been saved as a pdf. Click here to view.

Bio:
John Frank Haugh’s writing has appeared in publications including Poets Reading the News, storySouth, The Roanoke Review, The North Carolina Literary Review, the Tipton Journal, and The Wall Street Journal.  He has been anthologized in Endlessly Rocking: Poems in Honor of Walt Whitman’s 200^th Birthday and Monsoons and elsewhere. Haugh won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize in 2022, has poems on posters through Poetry in Plain Sight, and lives in North Carolina. 

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Six Years

Not everyone can make death wait;
You meet it well-prepared.
You do not deny your fate,
But have faced it long and well-aware.

Though the bloom must leave the rose
The end need not come soon.
All the doors are not yet closed.
Why wait alone in an empty room?

Life has slowed to match your pace;
You often pause and rest.
Illness may have lined your face,
Yet you are patient with your distress.

Life is as it ever was;
The people you know, the place you live.
There never was a need to rush:
To become the one named palliative.

Many leave this life without a prayer;
Without a vision in their soul.
Suddenly they leave their life of care,
It seems—their cup half full.

To some your progress may seem sombre,
But it is a blessing—not a curse.
An examined life is full of promise;
A foretaste of heaven, and of peace on earth.

Copyright 2025 Michael Ferrel

Bio:

Michael, a retired social worker,  has been writing poetry for more than 30 years.  His poetry blog is Cosmic New Thresholds. He lives in Toronto. 

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

A Constitutional 

I think I’ll go outside
to walk and let the body
pursue its job of healing:

filter air and water,
turn food into energy,
into thoughts that turn 

and twist, embracing action, 
embracing harmony, 
discarding perpetrators

of chaos. This new day
appears to hold a wild
promise of spring. My DNA

asserts itself again, 
insists on being seen
in full array. I think 

I’ll walk down to the Capitol
amid the shocks, invasions,
intrusions, to perform

a solemn welfare check
and see whether its fibers 
are still holding together.

© 2025 by Claudia Gary

Bio:

 
Claudia Gary’s poems appear in anthologies and journals internationally. She teaches workshops on Sonnet, Villanelle, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and more at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

The Magic Bow

Sophocles tells us 
When Philoctetes suffered a rotting wound
And could not fight at Troy
He was abandoned on the island, Lemnos—
With an intense slow
Eating away of flesh—

It doesn’t matter what the malady is called—

The story is that men landed on the island
To steal what is invincible—
Wicked Odysseus among them because
His Trojan war must be won, thus the
Struggle for justice or autonomy was begun—

And as the cave darkened damper
And the sun subsided
And the winds blew foul
All the birds stopped singing—

Some say the Herculean sword was given up
Some say it was taken from him
But Philoctetes went on to fight at Troy—

And the wound healed, as all wounds can
When Gods enter the arena of mortal men. 

Copyright 2025 Grace Cavalieri                                   

Bio:

Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate. She founded, and produces “The Poet and The Poem from The Library of Congress” celebrating 48 years on-air. She’s seen 31 books  and chapbooks of poetry published; and several plays produced  in NYC and throughout the country.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Cloud of Unknowing					
 
All I do is eat, sleep, drink, and be negligent.
                        John of Dalyatha, monk and mystic (690-780)
 
Just how did Paul arrange his days?
All those Epistles must have taken time.
Distraction was not possible for him.
One monk moved into a pharaoh’s tomb
to get away from it all.  Yet from the midden
heaps and notes he left behind, it seems 
he was busy arranging deliveries of spices 
or asking his sister for clothes and food,
although fasting is said to focus the mind.
Sleeping can keep one from praying
unceasingly so was often discouraged,
but why fight a losing battle?  No rest
for the weary, my mother used to say,
though she stayed in bed later each day,
practicing negligence, dreaming away.
Simeon of Stylites lived on top of a pillar
for over 35 years near Aleppo, which must
have been hard to do.  What could he do
to cope but pray and stare up at the sun
or haul his food in a bucket with a rope?
Why does my mind wander during prayer?
John of Dalyatha lived in a monastery
on the mountain where Noah’s ark
was found, which could have sparked
his lectio divina in a profound way.
I went to Madonna House downtown
to stay overnight in their Poustinia 
space and promptly fell asleep,  
feeling not negligent, but released.
Prayer can lead to a meditative state –
a cloud of unknowing, a mystical place.

Copyright by Bonnie Naradzay for 2025

Bio:

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books.  For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community, all in Washington DC.  Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and many other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary.  There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations. Her web site is https://www.bonnienaradzay.com

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma |Society.

Thank you

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

In 2012, I was diagnosed with a type of leukemia known as hairy cell. Thanks to the miracle workers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), those nasty little hairy cells were put into remission where they remain today.

Several years later, I was diagnosed with bladder cancer and have had several surgeries and treatments since. Again, thanks to the doctors I have been lucky enough to find , this too, is in remission.

Now, I have been diagnosed once again with a another kind of cancer: Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia (CMML). This has left me somewhat incapacitated (fatigue, shortness of breath, loss of appetite) though I am now on a treatment plan which will hopefully lead to better days.

As a result of the seemingly never-ending recurrence of this disease , I came up with this year’s theme: “Let’s Not Talk About Cancer.” It’s a curious call because, though the directive seems to dictate avoiding the topic, it has spurred almost everyone on to do just the opposite: to write poems about their own experiences, either as patients or as caretakers. And that’s just fine, because this is a topic that needs wide-open discussion since cancer is a disease that touches almost everyone in one way or another.

And so I present this year’s 30 for 30 for National Poetry Month. Once again, it is sponsored by the good people at Potomac Review. And, once again, a winner will be chosen to receive a one-year subscription to that illustrious journal. This year’s judge is Joan Dobbie who hails from Oregon and who has participated in 30 for 30 in the past.

In addition, I will be asking for donations this year to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Donations are voluntary and anonymous. However, given the nature of this disease and the good work both of these organizations do (besides supporting research, they offer support in many forms to both victims of cancer and their caretakers), donations are encouraged.

And so let the poems begin. As usual, they can be accessed at www.mikemaggio.net. I hope this year’s 30 for 30 speaks to you in numerous and profound ways. May we all lead healthy and happy lives.

Best,
Mike

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review