A wonderful afternoon at Antonella Manganelli’s house where I presented a short history of the gothic novel and then read from Woman in the Abbey. Thank you, Antonella, and to all who came.
Stay tuned for more.
As Far As I Can Be From It
Jib sheet clinking against the mast
In the hot sun and cool breeze,
We climb small waves
Wondering what wonders await us—
Flying fish,
Dolphins or whales
Frolicking in the sea.
Aquamarine waters
Splash against the white of our hull.
A young spouse steering,
My crew, My lover
Out in the Pacific.
Clouds and storms far away,
No reason not to let the boat steer its way.
Later hours spent next to each other at the tiller,
Feeling the width of the horizon,
The depth of the sea,
The height of the sky,
Till the sun's last glow,
Leaves us with the twinkling stars
Bright as our iridescent wake.
The sails bring all these dimensions and forces
Together,
As we
Cross the universe,
One wave at a time.
Copyright 2025 Dennis Price
Bio:
Dennis Price
Lives in a sloppy house,
With his sloppy wife,
And two sloppy cats,
Who all sleep in a sloppy bed.
And eat sloppy joes for breakfast.
He’s making a sloppy living as a handyman.
He can be found at his sloppy desk--
Surrounded by sloppy pictures
Of his two sloppy adult kids--
Drawing with a sloppy sharpie,
Like the President of the sloppy United States.
When not playing sloppy pickleball,
In quiet sloppy moments
He writes sloppy poetry.
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 formatting, this poem has been saved as a PDF. Please click on the link below to access it.
Bio:
Marion D Cohen has two new books, “A Lady of 80” (Alien Buddha Press) and “Reasons and Remedies for Insomnia” (dancing girl press). Her books total 36, with “Statements and Theories” forthcoming from Adaptive Press. She has taught a course she developed, “Math in Literature”, as well as “Societal Issues on the College Campus”, at Arcadia U and Drexel U’s Pennoni Honors College.
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
Let’s Not Talk About Cancer
In memory of Gena Glicklich – 1942-1988
Rather let’s defy
diminishment
embody the one-breasted
warrior woman as fierce
as the roaring inside her
Let’s meet at the threshold
of Hell’s Gate
soothe one another’s
battle-scarred bodies
in steaming sulfurous mud
We’ll travel light free of
the should haves and what ifs
untethered
as we ride out expansive
on the first and last
silver-ferned breath
Copyright 2025 Emily Ferrara
Bio:
Emily Ferrara is the author of The Alchemy of Grief, winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Borderlands, the Lowell Review, San Pedro River Review, POESY Magazine, Worcester Review, MiPOesias, and Sinister Wisdom.
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
Das Quintett
The tiny musicians are poised
Ready to play the piece
Each has spent much of
Their days, months, lives, practicing
Rehearsing, a homage
They are equally spaced, all five,
on a sturdy, wooden, plank,
teetering on the tip of a jagged rock
Jutting, out of the sea
The sky is a grey
The bow of a small sail boat
Can be seen to approach,
carrying the cancer
You would not suspect it
While the music plays
Each note carefully crafted
Like a scalpel
cuts through the cool sea breeze
To the wooden boat
Carrying the cancer
Copyright 2025 Suzann Heron
Bio:
Suzann Heron is a poet, multi media artist, and psychotherapist living in
Shutesbury Massachusetts
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
My Good Side
I was seven when, sledding, I hit the car face-first.
Nine stitches in my right brow.
I rolled my eyes up, watched the doctor sew.
My mother begged him: Be careful with her face!
Someday she has to find a man!
Fifty when I fell in the street
on the way to a reading on the rich side of town.
Blood on my face, my white blouse,
I hoped I looked a little renegade, a punk poet,
and not like the low-class klutz I was, and am.
Sixty when I tripped on the living room rug,
dropped the plate of hummus, heard the skitter of chips
and the smack of my skull on hardwood,
lay there, stunned, as my husband, unaware, bless him,
hurried to clean up the spilled food.
This is where the little carcinoma was, that same plane
on that same plain face. The right side, above my eye.
I’ve got so much character there you wouldn’t notice it.
Like my other escapades, it was less about pain,
more about fear. They got it all, they said. I hope.
As she prepped my face, the assistant chirped:
If you have to have cancer, this is the one to get.
Copyright 2025 by Pamela Murray Winters
Bio:
Pamela Murray Winters lives and writes in Maryland. She encourages everyone to wear sunscreen and a hat.
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 Philosophy of Cancer in Six Quatrains: For Betty Lou Baker
1
In biology class she had to draw
the parts of the cell in pen and ink:
Protoplasm, chromosomes, nucleus.
She labeled the parts with red ink.
2
Somewhere inside, even then, waiting,
her own cells wanted to be feral, devouring,
wanted to send wrong messages
and explode madness from cell to cell,
3
She felt the lump in her breast,
like the growing lump in her womb
when she was pregnant. Each birthed
from her the bloody tissue of her sex.
4
When she looked at the sutures
in her chest, she wondered how
she could be unzipped so easily,
her breast removed like a worn jacket.
5
She tries to imagine cells gone wild,
the tumors regrowing, like drawings
of cells in ink. She stands, strong, normal,
except for the madness of her body.
6
It is an odd way to die, she knows
her body building itself insanely,
misreading its own diagrams,
turning itself into a lump that kills.
Copyright 2025 David Anthony Sam
Bio:
David Anthony Sam lives in Locust Grove, Virginia with his wife, Linda. His poetry has appeared in over 100 journals. Eight of his poetry collections are in print including Writing the Significant Soil (2023), winner of the Homebound Poetry Prize. A ninth, Geographies of the Dead, was published in 2024.
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 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 200th 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
