POETRY PACIFIC
Tuesday, 5 May 2020
PP(9.1): Editor's Note
dear All PP Patrons,
this is our first annual edition, in which we are honoured to present 65 poets and 3 artists.
from now on, we will try to showcase more poems in each upcoming edition to make up for the loss after we switch into a yearly publication.
just a brief note for all submitters: while we are deeply grateful for your (continuing) support, please wait a six month period between two submissions, and at least two issues after appearance in PP.
happy reading/viewing, and stay safe & well in these hard times!
- eds. at PP
this is our first annual edition, in which we are honoured to present 65 poets and 3 artists.
from now on, we will try to showcase more poems in each upcoming edition to make up for the loss after we switch into a yearly publication.
just a brief note for all submitters: while we are deeply grateful for your (continuing) support, please wait a six month period between two submissions, and at least two issues after appearance in PP.
happy reading/viewing, and stay safe & well in these hard times!
- eds. at PP
PP(9.1): Call for Submissions
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES [Revised]
WARRANTY & AGREEMENT
By submitting to PP, the submitter warrants that
s/he alone has created the work s/he is submitting and that
s/he owns all rights to it. The submitter will indemnify and
hold PP and its staff harmless from and against any and all loss,
damage, costs and other expenses arising out of claims,
whatever their nature, resulting directly or indirectly
from breach of this warranty. At the same time,
the submitter/contributor agrees that PP can use
part or all of his/her accepted material, including responses
to PP's interview questions, on its Facebook and/or
other similar social networking vehicles for promotional purposes.
* All poetic and photographic works are carefully read/viewed
year round on a rolling basis for PP's annual edition,
to be released on 5 May;
* Multiple and simultaneous submissions, as well as previously published work,
are all equally welcome insofar as you still hold the copy/publishing rights;
* sorry, this is not a paying market, but a site for
true lovers of words and wisdom;
* Please send up to 5 of your best shorter poems each time
by pasting them all together with a brief 3rd person bio note
within the body of your email
within the body of your email
to editors.pp@gmail.com,
or visual artworks as individual separate attachments;
* Please feel welcome to send us a query if, for instance,
your accepted work does not appear as scheduled;
* Our response-time is four months though often much shorter than that,
only those accepted will get a reply;
* we never require you to mention us as the first publisher of your work;
Once accepted by PP, please allow at least two years
before submitting new work to us
- Many thanks for your kind support of PP & Gooooodluuuuck!
Once accepted by PP, please allow at least two years
before submitting new work to us
- Many thanks for your kind support of PP & Gooooodluuuuck!
********
book/chapbook manuscript submissions
are closed until further notice
are closed until further notice
1 Poem by Ray Greenblatt
STAGE-SET
The dense groves of trees
have been stored in the wings,
they’ll be pushed onstage
again tomorrow.
The ocean fretful
all day churning huge teeth
somehow quiets under
cover of darkness.
Late arriving ship
nudges into harbor
ts bright spotlight eye
glaring into all bedrooms
then snaps off for the night.
The actors are now at home
their roles in another dimension,
music filed in memory.
It is time to sleep
to think about today’s events,
let dreams expand our lives
into Romance or Tall Tale
or even—who knows—Myth
Bionote
Ray Greenblatt is an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple-OLLI University in Philadelphia. He has recently been published in International Poetry Review, Ibbetson Street, Comstock Review, and Midwest Quarterly. His most recent book of poetry is NOCTURNES & AUBADES (Parnilis Press, 2018).
The dense groves of trees
have been stored in the wings,
they’ll be pushed onstage
again tomorrow.
The ocean fretful
all day churning huge teeth
somehow quiets under
cover of darkness.
Late arriving ship
nudges into harbor
ts bright spotlight eye
glaring into all bedrooms
then snaps off for the night.
The actors are now at home
their roles in another dimension,
music filed in memory.
It is time to sleep
to think about today’s events,
let dreams expand our lives
into Romance or Tall Tale
or even—who knows—Myth
Bionote
Ray Greenblatt is an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal and teaches a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple-OLLI University in Philadelphia. He has recently been published in International Poetry Review, Ibbetson Street, Comstock Review, and Midwest Quarterly. His most recent book of poetry is NOCTURNES & AUBADES (Parnilis Press, 2018).
1 Poem by Gary Duehr
Quick Vacation
And here’s a couple who’s unhappy
Arguing in a crappy
Airport lounge. She’s listening and she’s not.
He’s trying to explain, not out
Of urgency but as a way of killing time—
Which is already dead. Their crime?
The neurons in his brain are firing at their full capacity
While hers are barely flickering on, thanks to the rapacity
Of his interrogation.
Between them, an absence is evoked, a quick vacation
Of the senses. Colleagues, lovers, friends?
Maybe all of the above. It ends
With a whimper as she pushes back her hair
Behind one ear. There.
And on his lap is spread the daily paper
With a headline and a date, the way a kidnapper
Proves the victim isn’t dead.
Beside them is a vacant chair, a shiny red
That’s like an ad for emptiness.
In front of it a briefcase. No one’s? Hers? Guess.
Like in a movie, it could contain a bomb
Or stacks of hundred dollar bills. Take your pick. Stay calm.
Bionote
Gary Duehr has taught poetry and writing for institutions including Boston University, Lesley University, and Tufts University. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Journals in which his poems have appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His books of poetry include In Passing (Grisaille Press, 2011), THE BIG BOOK OF WHY (Cobble Hill Books, 2008), Winter Light (Four Way Books, 1999) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press, 1999).
And here’s a couple who’s unhappy
Arguing in a crappy
Airport lounge. She’s listening and she’s not.
He’s trying to explain, not out
Of urgency but as a way of killing time—
Which is already dead. Their crime?
The neurons in his brain are firing at their full capacity
While hers are barely flickering on, thanks to the rapacity
Of his interrogation.
Between them, an absence is evoked, a quick vacation
Of the senses. Colleagues, lovers, friends?
Maybe all of the above. It ends
With a whimper as she pushes back her hair
Behind one ear. There.
And on his lap is spread the daily paper
With a headline and a date, the way a kidnapper
Proves the victim isn’t dead.
Beside them is a vacant chair, a shiny red
That’s like an ad for emptiness.
In front of it a briefcase. No one’s? Hers? Guess.
Like in a movie, it could contain a bomb
Or stacks of hundred dollar bills. Take your pick. Stay calm.
Bionote
Gary Duehr has taught poetry and writing for institutions including Boston University, Lesley University, and Tufts University. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Journals in which his poems have appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His books of poetry include In Passing (Grisaille Press, 2011), THE BIG BOOK OF WHY (Cobble Hill Books, 2008), Winter Light (Four Way Books, 1999) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press, 1999).
5 Poems by John L. Stanizzi
***
10.22.19
7.17 a.m.
45 degrees
Philosophical about my dream; the pond swarming with ducks,
overreaching the banks, packed in wing to wing. I know better, of course, but there is a
neighborly pair here, wary, who swim around a moment considering my presence, and then
draw their wings in, then out, take to the sky, and disturb the pond’s stillness for one lovely moment.
***
10.23.19
7.46 a.m.
61 degrees
Paradox this breeze, cool, yet mixed with the sun there’s a warmth,
overdubbed with the whoosh through the leaves that are left. And this morning small
knurls of frogs peep and at my approach, having made their way a good
distance from the pond, leap now into the stream, and vanish under the mud.
***
10.28.19
11.07 a.m.
54 degrees
Peau-de-soie of the pond’s surface caught between sunlight and
overextended cloud cover, two places at once; the pond glistens and is absolutely still.
Neurasthenic little breeze courses across the pond at its best, and
doorsills of simple waves lead us to what is right in the breeze, perfect in the stasis.
***
10.29.19
1.29 p.m.
54 degrees
Protégé of the sheerest, most delicate lace, this air is mist,
oracular, hardly there at all, and these past few days a
noblesse of battered and leftover leaves and twigs has left the landscape
divided, caught between the bite of winter and the grace autumn falling away.
***
10.30.19
11.54 a.m.
58 degrees
Proceeds from last night’s storm still jewel the early afternoon grass.
Observable wetness on the spare leaves, trees, the road; today, the harbinger of tomorrow’s storm.
Noontide and the stream is active; a male cardinal drinks, a sparrow swoops and observes,
doves, wings squeaking, fly into the brown grass that was green, to what was here but is now gone.
Note: They are from a one-year-long project called POND -- The poems are acrostics.
Bionote
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. His newest collection, Sundowning, will be out this year with Main Street Rag. John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. His work has been translated into Italian and appeared in many journals in Italy. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. John has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. He is also a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
10.22.19
7.17 a.m.
45 degrees
Philosophical about my dream; the pond swarming with ducks,
overreaching the banks, packed in wing to wing. I know better, of course, but there is a
neighborly pair here, wary, who swim around a moment considering my presence, and then
draw their wings in, then out, take to the sky, and disturb the pond’s stillness for one lovely moment.
***
10.23.19
7.46 a.m.
61 degrees
Paradox this breeze, cool, yet mixed with the sun there’s a warmth,
overdubbed with the whoosh through the leaves that are left. And this morning small
knurls of frogs peep and at my approach, having made their way a good
distance from the pond, leap now into the stream, and vanish under the mud.
***
10.28.19
11.07 a.m.
54 degrees
Peau-de-soie of the pond’s surface caught between sunlight and
overextended cloud cover, two places at once; the pond glistens and is absolutely still.
Neurasthenic little breeze courses across the pond at its best, and
doorsills of simple waves lead us to what is right in the breeze, perfect in the stasis.
***
10.29.19
1.29 p.m.
54 degrees
Protégé of the sheerest, most delicate lace, this air is mist,
oracular, hardly there at all, and these past few days a
noblesse of battered and leftover leaves and twigs has left the landscape
divided, caught between the bite of winter and the grace autumn falling away.
***
10.30.19
11.54 a.m.
58 degrees
Proceeds from last night’s storm still jewel the early afternoon grass.
Observable wetness on the spare leaves, trees, the road; today, the harbinger of tomorrow’s storm.
Noontide and the stream is active; a male cardinal drinks, a sparrow swoops and observes,
doves, wings squeaking, fly into the brown grass that was green, to what was here but is now gone.
Note: They are from a one-year-long project called POND -- The poems are acrostics.
Bionote
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. His newest collection, Sundowning, will be out this year with Main Street Rag. John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. His work has been translated into Italian and appeared in many journals in Italy. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. John has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT. He is also a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
5 Poems by Jonathan Minton
from *letters*
This letter begins with a blinded god, his golden mask.
Someone is drowning in the dark. Someone is speaking as a ghost.
When the language is private, I recover an image: wet rock, a red canyon.
When spoken, you appear as the girl with her bare, white shoulders.
This letter begins as a sound from a king's mouth or his globe.
You stand before another cave and listen for the echo.
A heart of string hangs from a map on the wall.
It marks the spot where you will enter. It marks this new kingdom.
This letter begins with locusts and wild honey.
It feeds the mouth of the hermit. He is clothed
in a thousand little words like this. It is a murmur. It is a state.
But it will fade as you fade. It is not the same as pain.
This letter begins as something once held as belief
like water or the fossilized bones of a fish.
This letter begins not as a fathom but a gate that swings open or shut.
There was never a horse, its head bending low to drink.
from *letters*
Dear reader, our stories might keep us satisfied,
but we must pause at each sacred, categorical vow.
I would never break your heart or say anything
to embarrass you. We will listen to each other
because we must cooperate with the news of the world.
We could gather in public squares and sing this as an anthem.
Dear reader, we were lonely, and became characters
in the dark, like flowers crawling up a wall.
We’re more than our sentence. We’re more
than this mouthful of air. If you’re telling me
there are rivers moving between us, I will believe you.
We fill the gaps with what we think should happen.
from *letters*
You spoke of uncertainty as if it were a nest. You gave me
its singular unguarded beauty. It was a gold cup. It was a lake
that I could drink or drown in. You caught me as I was looking,
as if I were looking at a crowd gathering on our shores.
They were speaking your name. I stuttered, and it startled
your sense of home. When we left, the scene darkened.
Is it enough to sing about this? Enough to say what we kept?
In another sentence, a machine replaces the word green for darling,
but this is the story of the lake and cup. I am in it as someone speaking.
You are like the green curtains that open or close.
from *letters*
I've written this letter before. The first time
nothing was moving. You were waiting in another house.
It was made of stone, you said. The yard was dark.
In the other letter, I circled every word for home,
and then rewrote it as directions to another neighborhood.
I described laughter from across the harbor.
This time there are no imaginary cities of wire and ash.
This time it will unsettle at the bottom as if it were a river,
and I were of water and you were on the shore.
This will be the ghost of a ship. It will carry only air, like a bubble.
Your hands will never trace its wreck. You will think
of what to say but will never say it. You will shrink into a sentence.
This will be a wellspring filled with lungs. The walls
around them will crumble, and dust motes will gather above.
This will mean something like sunlight, or moths flickering.
from *letters*
You said our days were like keen eyes watching a small, brittle yard.
This was not an omen, but there are other words for "keep."
Think of all those books of ancient weather, illustrated with characters
and their little red caps, hawks on their arms, and all the gestures
we can only take as private, like a girl leaning against a fence, a boy
tugging at someone’s sleeve.
You said this with your head in your hands.
Someone else would give you a cup for salt or water.
When you say goodbye, you should leave these things behind.
Bionote
Jonathan Minton lives in central West Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Glenville State College. His books include *Technical Notes for Bird Government* (Telemetry Press, 2018), *In Gesture* (Dyad Press, 2009), and *Lost Languages* (Long Leaf Press, 1999). His poetry has appeared in the journals *Ecolinguistics*, *Conotation Press*, *Asheville Poetry Review*,
*Coconut*, *Eratio*, *Columbia Poetry Review*, *Reconfigurations*, *Free Verse*, *Trillium*, and elsewhere. His poetry has also appeared in the anthologies *Oh One Arrow* (Flim Forum Press), *Poems for Peace* (Dyad Press), and *Crazed by the Sun* (Cyberwit Press). He edits the journal *Word For/Word* (www.wordforword.info).
This letter begins with a blinded god, his golden mask.
Someone is drowning in the dark. Someone is speaking as a ghost.
When the language is private, I recover an image: wet rock, a red canyon.
When spoken, you appear as the girl with her bare, white shoulders.
This letter begins as a sound from a king's mouth or his globe.
You stand before another cave and listen for the echo.
A heart of string hangs from a map on the wall.
It marks the spot where you will enter. It marks this new kingdom.
This letter begins with locusts and wild honey.
It feeds the mouth of the hermit. He is clothed
in a thousand little words like this. It is a murmur. It is a state.
But it will fade as you fade. It is not the same as pain.
This letter begins as something once held as belief
like water or the fossilized bones of a fish.
This letter begins not as a fathom but a gate that swings open or shut.
There was never a horse, its head bending low to drink.
from *letters*
Dear reader, our stories might keep us satisfied,
but we must pause at each sacred, categorical vow.
I would never break your heart or say anything
to embarrass you. We will listen to each other
because we must cooperate with the news of the world.
We could gather in public squares and sing this as an anthem.
Dear reader, we were lonely, and became characters
in the dark, like flowers crawling up a wall.
We’re more than our sentence. We’re more
than this mouthful of air. If you’re telling me
there are rivers moving between us, I will believe you.
We fill the gaps with what we think should happen.
from *letters*
You spoke of uncertainty as if it were a nest. You gave me
its singular unguarded beauty. It was a gold cup. It was a lake
that I could drink or drown in. You caught me as I was looking,
as if I were looking at a crowd gathering on our shores.
They were speaking your name. I stuttered, and it startled
your sense of home. When we left, the scene darkened.
Is it enough to sing about this? Enough to say what we kept?
In another sentence, a machine replaces the word green for darling,
but this is the story of the lake and cup. I am in it as someone speaking.
You are like the green curtains that open or close.
from *letters*
I've written this letter before. The first time
nothing was moving. You were waiting in another house.
It was made of stone, you said. The yard was dark.
In the other letter, I circled every word for home,
and then rewrote it as directions to another neighborhood.
I described laughter from across the harbor.
This time there are no imaginary cities of wire and ash.
This time it will unsettle at the bottom as if it were a river,
and I were of water and you were on the shore.
This will be the ghost of a ship. It will carry only air, like a bubble.
Your hands will never trace its wreck. You will think
of what to say but will never say it. You will shrink into a sentence.
This will be a wellspring filled with lungs. The walls
around them will crumble, and dust motes will gather above.
This will mean something like sunlight, or moths flickering.
from *letters*
You said our days were like keen eyes watching a small, brittle yard.
This was not an omen, but there are other words for "keep."
Think of all those books of ancient weather, illustrated with characters
and their little red caps, hawks on their arms, and all the gestures
we can only take as private, like a girl leaning against a fence, a boy
tugging at someone’s sleeve.
You said this with your head in your hands.
Someone else would give you a cup for salt or water.
When you say goodbye, you should leave these things behind.
Bionote
Jonathan Minton lives in central West Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Glenville State College. His books include *Technical Notes for Bird Government* (Telemetry Press, 2018), *In Gesture* (Dyad Press, 2009), and *Lost Languages* (Long Leaf Press, 1999). His poetry has appeared in the journals *Ecolinguistics*, *Conotation Press*, *Asheville Poetry Review*,
*Coconut*, *Eratio*, *Columbia Poetry Review*, *Reconfigurations*, *Free Verse*, *Trillium*, and elsewhere. His poetry has also appeared in the anthologies *Oh One Arrow* (Flim Forum Press), *Poems for Peace* (Dyad Press), and *Crazed by the Sun* (Cyberwit Press). He edits the journal *Word For/Word* (www.wordforword.info).
3 Poems & 13 Photos by Keith Moul
Spring Purple
Crocuses shoot up
and I look for a way into myself.
The soil is mush,
still in the sun, too full
to suck down the last puddles,
and the wind will not help.
Over on the island, I walked
through dead brush, kicked
small rocks, and found no key
to my head lodged in the season.
That was winter. That
was fat corpses of maple leaves
dying into the earth, hugging it
wet with love
while the air clung, a heavy cloak.
These flowers spring purple,
yellow and white. These flowers
sweeten the ground, some tree,
a mountain, this sun.
I could eat these flowers.
At least they
would get into my head.
"Dogsoldier 3," "Five Poems," 1975, p.63.
Reprinted in Red Ochre Lit, March, 2012
Spring
strings attached
eleven boys
fly orange kites
no strings at all
robinsrobinsrob
insrobinsrobins
Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, August, 1972, p.236.
Spring, 2012
Forecasters predict deepening snow later tonight.
Spring by calendar, winter still by the cat’s full fur:
wet unreliability for which the season is known.
I recall so clearly a halcyon day forty-six years back
when we lay contentedly, luxuriating in sweet grass
of a Missouri spring, recommitting our pastoral love.
A force flushed us; thrust through unwrapping buds;
propelled puckish nuthatches to birthing tender chicks;
mixed dormant chemicals in us; urged caressing summer.
Rapt, we felt our mouths might suck the moistening blooms;
felt easeful body heat uncurling straight the sticky loops;
felt only pleasure, not heeding scratchings by blanched sod.
Winter winds re-encircled us, our exposed skin goose fleshed.
Privately I begged that Spring assure my love in its making,
that love’s spell not be sacrificed to planetary recalcitrance.
But, under blackening clouds, our desire did not retard the ice.
We pushed, winter smothered us, back and forth. We rode passion
until our ardor persevered and peevish winter assumed irrelevance.
TWO CITIES REV ACCEPTED 6/16/15 FOR APPEARANCE IN THEIR FEATURED WORKS BLOG August 2015
Crocuses shoot up
and I look for a way into myself.
The soil is mush,
still in the sun, too full
to suck down the last puddles,
and the wind will not help.
Over on the island, I walked
through dead brush, kicked
small rocks, and found no key
to my head lodged in the season.
That was winter. That
was fat corpses of maple leaves
dying into the earth, hugging it
wet with love
while the air clung, a heavy cloak.
These flowers spring purple,
yellow and white. These flowers
sweeten the ground, some tree,
a mountain, this sun.
I could eat these flowers.
At least they
would get into my head.
"Dogsoldier 3," "Five Poems," 1975, p.63.
Reprinted in Red Ochre Lit, March, 2012
Spring
strings attached
eleven boys
fly orange kites
no strings at all
robinsrobinsrob
insrobinsrobins
Riverside Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3, August, 1972, p.236.
Spring, 2012
Forecasters predict deepening snow later tonight.
Spring by calendar, winter still by the cat’s full fur:
wet unreliability for which the season is known.
I recall so clearly a halcyon day forty-six years back
when we lay contentedly, luxuriating in sweet grass
of a Missouri spring, recommitting our pastoral love.
A force flushed us; thrust through unwrapping buds;
propelled puckish nuthatches to birthing tender chicks;
mixed dormant chemicals in us; urged caressing summer.
Rapt, we felt our mouths might suck the moistening blooms;
felt easeful body heat uncurling straight the sticky loops;
felt only pleasure, not heeding scratchings by blanched sod.
Winter winds re-encircled us, our exposed skin goose fleshed.
Privately I begged that Spring assure my love in its making,
that love’s spell not be sacrificed to planetary recalcitrance.
But, under blackening clouds, our desire did not retard the ice.
We pushed, winter smothered us, back and forth. We rode passion
until our ardor persevered and peevish winter assumed irrelevance.
TWO CITIES REV ACCEPTED 6/16/15 FOR APPEARANCE IN THEIR FEATURED WORKS BLOG August 2015
Bionote
Keith Moul is a poet of place, a photographer of the distinction light adds to place. Both his poems and photos are published widely. His photos are digital, striving for high contrast and saturation, which makes his vision colorful (or weak, requiring enhancement).
http://poemsphotosmoul.blogspot.com/
2 Poems by Louis Gallo
THAT NIGHT
What happened to those happy hours
And where is the sweet bouquet of flowers?
--The Shirelles
We oiled ourselves with Sloe Gin
And Bloody Mary’s as the calliope
Of the U.S.S. President blasted out
“You Are My Sunshine” before leaving dock.
Later on the upper deck we could faintly hear
Fats Domino at the piano in the ballroom—
“Blueberry Hill,” my favorite.
How we spooned in a cloud of moonlight,
How we stumbled when trying to dance
As we watched a trio of pelicans swoop
Across the river en route to Algiers.
What do I remember aside from these
Poignant images? Not much, just a feeling
Of perfection and fulfillment and
The scent of magnolia.
I don’t quite remember who you were,
What you wore, though it must have been fancy,
I in a white tuxedo.
The occasion has slipped into the crevices
Of memory, the year, the destination
And return, the anchoring, the drive home.
Who were you? Who was I?
OUR DAILY BREAD
Wheat fields may be beautiful in their way
Though one could mistake them for weird grass
Run amuck, yet some primitive genius thought,
Hmmm, I can make bread out of this stuff.
He was probably a nerd, outcasted by his
Mighty, manly fellow hunters—couldn’t hunt
Worth a damn—but the bread caught on and
Issued in civilization and usurped the hunters
Who soon caved in to the farmers.
No one knows that genius’s name or when
His eureka happened—not as with Guttenberg’s
Printing press or Edison’s light bulb or Eli Whitney
Or Henry Ford. He remains an anonymous
Visionary, long gone, though the bread lives on.
I like to think also that he sang poems (no writing
Then) to his children about bread, lyrics, maybe odes,
Since the process alchemizes one thing into another
The way mere words transmute into beautiful artifacts
About love and death and time and every now and then
Bread.
So I celebrate that lone failed hunter here, that
Anonym who first separated the wheat from the chaff.
Bionote
Two volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Crash and Clearing the Attic, will be published by Adelaide in the near future. A third, Archaeology, has been published by Kelsay Books; Kelsay will also publish a fourth volume, Scherzo Furiant, in the near future. His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
What happened to those happy hours
And where is the sweet bouquet of flowers?
--The Shirelles
We oiled ourselves with Sloe Gin
And Bloody Mary’s as the calliope
Of the U.S.S. President blasted out
“You Are My Sunshine” before leaving dock.
Later on the upper deck we could faintly hear
Fats Domino at the piano in the ballroom—
“Blueberry Hill,” my favorite.
How we spooned in a cloud of moonlight,
How we stumbled when trying to dance
As we watched a trio of pelicans swoop
Across the river en route to Algiers.
What do I remember aside from these
Poignant images? Not much, just a feeling
Of perfection and fulfillment and
The scent of magnolia.
I don’t quite remember who you were,
What you wore, though it must have been fancy,
I in a white tuxedo.
The occasion has slipped into the crevices
Of memory, the year, the destination
And return, the anchoring, the drive home.
Who were you? Who was I?
OUR DAILY BREAD
Wheat fields may be beautiful in their way
Though one could mistake them for weird grass
Run amuck, yet some primitive genius thought,
Hmmm, I can make bread out of this stuff.
He was probably a nerd, outcasted by his
Mighty, manly fellow hunters—couldn’t hunt
Worth a damn—but the bread caught on and
Issued in civilization and usurped the hunters
Who soon caved in to the farmers.
No one knows that genius’s name or when
His eureka happened—not as with Guttenberg’s
Printing press or Edison’s light bulb or Eli Whitney
Or Henry Ford. He remains an anonymous
Visionary, long gone, though the bread lives on.
I like to think also that he sang poems (no writing
Then) to his children about bread, lyrics, maybe odes,
Since the process alchemizes one thing into another
The way mere words transmute into beautiful artifacts
About love and death and time and every now and then
Bread.
So I celebrate that lone failed hunter here, that
Anonym who first separated the wheat from the chaff.
Bionote
Two volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Crash and Clearing the Attic, will be published by Adelaide in the near future. A third, Archaeology, has been published by Kelsay Books; Kelsay will also publish a fourth volume, Scherzo Furiant, in the near future. His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Change, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction. He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.
3 Poems by John McKernan
MAGICIAN
The old man lifted himself from the chrome wheel chair and stood bravely before the audience. He waved a red bandana in the air, spun around three times, and slid into a pair of hiking boots. We could hear his leather belt mooing beside the scuff marks on the rubber soles. Slowly his wool slacks floated to the floor covering a herd of tiny sheep hooves. We watched the fibers of his white shirt flow like sunlight through the window out onto the cotton fields across the highway. Buttons rolled to the corners of the stage.
“He must have been a nudist” we said as we left the auditorium applauding wildly.
Outside, a dirty parking lot kept ejecting sports cars into the speeding highway
Some of us peered in through the side windows and noticed the magician’s watch dangling from a bird’s nest
It was still ticking and a few light rays kept bouncing off a jumbled pile of medals lying on a practice putting green
SACRED SPOON
A single silver spoon lay untouched
On a coffee table in South Omaha
At my grandmother’s house
Stolen – she claimed – from Edmund Spenser’s
Irish castle before it was torched
Wrapped in flannel
Carried aboard a ship
Bound for Nebraska
Via the Brooklyn Bridge
The ice cream & cookies & cake
Were great at Birthday Parties
But what made her think
We wanted oat meal & old bananas
Which would always taste
Like a rotting potato from Ireland
SUSAN LIKED TO DANCE
In her orange & green cheer leader outfit
Out on the side of the highway
Rouged
Jeweled
Fearless in the onrush
Of million dollar RV’s
Porsches
Unmarked ambulances
& motorcycles
She enjoyed the wind rush
Of a Harley zipping by at 80
I received a phone call
From her in the ER last night
I don't know what I'm going to do
Me Neither I whispered
Bionote
John McKernan is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching 42 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in Florida. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines
The old man lifted himself from the chrome wheel chair and stood bravely before the audience. He waved a red bandana in the air, spun around three times, and slid into a pair of hiking boots. We could hear his leather belt mooing beside the scuff marks on the rubber soles. Slowly his wool slacks floated to the floor covering a herd of tiny sheep hooves. We watched the fibers of his white shirt flow like sunlight through the window out onto the cotton fields across the highway. Buttons rolled to the corners of the stage.
“He must have been a nudist” we said as we left the auditorium applauding wildly.
Outside, a dirty parking lot kept ejecting sports cars into the speeding highway
Some of us peered in through the side windows and noticed the magician’s watch dangling from a bird’s nest
It was still ticking and a few light rays kept bouncing off a jumbled pile of medals lying on a practice putting green
SACRED SPOON
A single silver spoon lay untouched
On a coffee table in South Omaha
At my grandmother’s house
Stolen – she claimed – from Edmund Spenser’s
Irish castle before it was torched
Wrapped in flannel
Carried aboard a ship
Bound for Nebraska
Via the Brooklyn Bridge
The ice cream & cookies & cake
Were great at Birthday Parties
But what made her think
We wanted oat meal & old bananas
Which would always taste
Like a rotting potato from Ireland
SUSAN LIKED TO DANCE
In her orange & green cheer leader outfit
Out on the side of the highway
Rouged
Jeweled
Fearless in the onrush
Of million dollar RV’s
Porsches
Unmarked ambulances
& motorcycles
She enjoyed the wind rush
Of a Harley zipping by at 80
I received a phone call
From her in the ER last night
I don't know what I'm going to do
Me Neither I whispered
Bionote
John McKernan is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching 42 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in Florida. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines
2 Poems by Beate Sigriddaughtr
A Prayer for the Swans
My dear one,
many troubled years ago
I had a dream
in which you killed
six flying swans.
I was so angry
that I told you of my dream
and you were deeply hurt.
Now I will come to you again.
Let my swans live.
"A Prayer for the Swans" was previously published in the anthology Old Friends (Celadon Press 1979) under the author's prior name Beate Goldman.
Snapshot: City Night
pink satin high heels
with a bow at the ankle
the owner smoking
a cigarette
with her peach mouth
so much depends
on hours she spent
getting ready for this
puffing with her
girlfriends in the rain
"Snapshot: City Nights" was previously published in Mad Swirl (2018)
Bionote
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, is poet laureate of Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), USA. Her work has received several Pushcart Prize nominations and poetry awards. New books out in 2018 were Xanthippe and Her Friends (FutureCycle Press) and Postcards to a Young Unicorn (Salador Press).
My dear one,
many troubled years ago
I had a dream
in which you killed
six flying swans.
I was so angry
that I told you of my dream
and you were deeply hurt.
Now I will come to you again.
Let my swans live.
"A Prayer for the Swans" was previously published in the anthology Old Friends (Celadon Press 1979) under the author's prior name Beate Goldman.
Snapshot: City Night
pink satin high heels
with a bow at the ankle
the owner smoking
a cigarette
with her peach mouth
so much depends
on hours she spent
getting ready for this
puffing with her
girlfriends in the rain
"Snapshot: City Nights" was previously published in Mad Swirl (2018)
Bionote
Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, is poet laureate of Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), USA. Her work has received several Pushcart Prize nominations and poetry awards. New books out in 2018 were Xanthippe and Her Friends (FutureCycle Press) and Postcards to a Young Unicorn (Salador Press).
5 Poems by Heath Brougher
Lost Cause
Looking out the trapezium-shaped window
I notice the postman going from house to house,
so heavily steeped in the abstraction
of Humanity's tar pit of false realities.
The predetermined societal trappings
have consumed him. He knows nothing
of actual Truth. He is just another lost cause
among the masses' massive disregard
of the plain as day Universal Truth abound.
Thought Poisoning
There they are again; no one
alone in the vicinity, all in hordes.
Indiscernible as blood
in tomato soup.
They worship and follow,
coining tradition along the way.
Their paths commingle throughout
the guts of centuries; flesh burns off,
war ripples like a California fault-line;
that Thought beckoning in the back of minds
for what seems to be forever the question
of integrity and myth—
This is nothing new.
It is the usual.
Sometimes doves come,
but usually it's the vultures.
Evanescence
You stuck your hand out the window
just as the storm was fading away
saying you wanted to catch
the last drop of rain.
Silent Parade
Never allow
your life
to become
a silent movie—
even if
you go
completely deaf!
Uncommonly Cold
She comes in from the tulips,
frowning in a downtrodden shade
of stained glass wine bottles.
Another one died, she says,
for the tenth day in a row,
holding me, then raveling
my unthorny head and neck
around her slimmest of writs.
Bionote
Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee as well as winner of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award from Taj Mahal Review. He has published 6 books, the newest of which are To Burn in Torturous Algorithms (Weasel Press, 2018) and The Ethnnosphere's Duality.(Cyberwit, 2018).
Looking out the trapezium-shaped window
I notice the postman going from house to house,
so heavily steeped in the abstraction
of Humanity's tar pit of false realities.
The predetermined societal trappings
have consumed him. He knows nothing
of actual Truth. He is just another lost cause
among the masses' massive disregard
of the plain as day Universal Truth abound.
Thought Poisoning
There they are again; no one
alone in the vicinity, all in hordes.
Indiscernible as blood
in tomato soup.
They worship and follow,
coining tradition along the way.
Their paths commingle throughout
the guts of centuries; flesh burns off,
war ripples like a California fault-line;
that Thought beckoning in the back of minds
for what seems to be forever the question
of integrity and myth—
This is nothing new.
It is the usual.
Sometimes doves come,
but usually it's the vultures.
Evanescence
You stuck your hand out the window
just as the storm was fading away
saying you wanted to catch
the last drop of rain.
Silent Parade
Never allow
your life
to become
a silent movie—
even if
you go
completely deaf!
Uncommonly Cold
She comes in from the tulips,
frowning in a downtrodden shade
of stained glass wine bottles.
Another one died, she says,
for the tenth day in a row,
holding me, then raveling
my unthorny head and neck
around her slimmest of writs.
Bionote
Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Awards for Best Magazine. He is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee as well as winner of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award from Taj Mahal Review. He has published 6 books, the newest of which are To Burn in Torturous Algorithms (Weasel Press, 2018) and The Ethnnosphere's Duality.(Cyberwit, 2018).
5 Poems by Allen Qing Yuan
Red Letter
a patch of red intentions
with seemingly ordinary shape and size
about to slip out of my sweaty desires
in my bleak twisted fantasy
the dots of doves
are swaying in a fall of crimson
rain unloved
slackly sealed with a zebra depiction,
a Bengal tiger colourway,
a messenger of the actuality that I couldn't have rode the other way
as if it could be for anyone, replaceable
your writing is the most flavorful painting
but blasphemy to my tastes
how much i yearned for those brief but weighty words
that 3 word statement
that 8 character declaration
but the end was just like
the end of a favour
“thank you, and good bye”
*
Accident
Fiction hit
The fact hard, and ran
With truth per se
Being the only witness
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
All that is liquid flows into data. All
That is conceptual evaporates into cybospace. All that
Is genetic/ scientific condenses into an algorithm
All that is artistic /spiritual/cultural disperses into
Digital being. All that is human evolves into story
π
let it
be the predetermined constant
in human algebra, or simply
happiness
(or wisdom?)
the ratio of a lifetime’s length L
to its spiritual growth S is then:
π = L/S
that is, if happiness is something fated, fixed
the more spiritual growth you attain
the longer you would live
0.618
Like the Confucian principle
Of the Golden Mean
The ideal (optimisation)
Times this magic number
Yields the best
& most practical solution
Just a bit above the average
You can enjoy the benefits
Of all the possible best
While avoiding their pitfalls
Bionote
Allen Qing Yuan, author of Traffic Light, is a 2-time Pushcart and 2-time Best of the Net nominee. A co-editor of Poetry Pacific, Allen works as a junior accountant in Vancouver. Since grade 10, Allen has had poetry appear in more than 70 literary publications across 16 countries, which include Cordite Poetry Review, Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Scotland, Shampoo and Spillway.
a patch of red intentions
with seemingly ordinary shape and size
about to slip out of my sweaty desires
in my bleak twisted fantasy
the dots of doves
are swaying in a fall of crimson
rain unloved
slackly sealed with a zebra depiction,
a Bengal tiger colourway,
a messenger of the actuality that I couldn't have rode the other way
as if it could be for anyone, replaceable
your writing is the most flavorful painting
but blasphemy to my tastes
how much i yearned for those brief but weighty words
that 3 word statement
that 8 character declaration
but the end was just like
the end of a favour
“thank you, and good bye”
*
Accident
Fiction hit
The fact hard, and ran
With truth per se
Being the only witness
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
All that is liquid flows into data. All
That is conceptual evaporates into cybospace. All that
Is genetic/ scientific condenses into an algorithm
All that is artistic /spiritual/cultural disperses into
Digital being. All that is human evolves into story
π
let it
be the predetermined constant
in human algebra, or simply
happiness
(or wisdom?)
the ratio of a lifetime’s length L
to its spiritual growth S is then:
π = L/S
that is, if happiness is something fated, fixed
the more spiritual growth you attain
the longer you would live
0.618
Like the Confucian principle
Of the Golden Mean
The ideal (optimisation)
Times this magic number
Yields the best
& most practical solution
Just a bit above the average
You can enjoy the benefits
Of all the possible best
While avoiding their pitfalls
Bionote
Allen Qing Yuan, author of Traffic Light, is a 2-time Pushcart and 2-time Best of the Net nominee. A co-editor of Poetry Pacific, Allen works as a junior accountant in Vancouver. Since grade 10, Allen has had poetry appear in more than 70 literary publications across 16 countries, which include Cordite Poetry Review, Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Scotland, Shampoo and Spillway.
5 Poems/Postcards by Will Schmitz
Bionote
Will Schmitz: novelist, short story, screenwriter, poet, co-translator with Mary-Susan Iosue of Cocteau's Opera and The Cape of Good Hope, graphic artist. Likes what he does and tries to do it most every day. Living in Waimanalo, Hawaii close to family and friends.
1 Poem by Anna Banasiak
Mother's Hands
You baked for me the world
smelling of bread
of childhood
still warm
from words and emotions
Your hands full of memories
stopped time for me
run out from my poems
I will hide you in dreams.
Bionote
I'm a poet and occupational therapist. My poems have been published in New York, London, Surrey, Australia, Canada, India, Africa, Japan, China, Israel. I'm the winner of poetry competitions in London,Berlin,Bratislava. I'm the winner of poetry competitions on Poems and Quotes. I'm the winner of gold,silver,bronze medal on All Poetry. I’m the winner in All about Love Challenge. I published a book for children, book of poems "Duet of Waves" in English and Japanese co-authored with Yoshimasa Kanou and "Duet of Tears" co-authored with Noriko Nagaoka. I'm interested in art and psychology. I belong to Japan Universal Poets Association and Kamena Literary Foundation.
You baked for me the world
smelling of bread
of childhood
still warm
from words and emotions
Your hands full of memories
stopped time for me
run out from my poems
I will hide you in dreams.
Bionote
I'm a poet and occupational therapist. My poems have been published in New York, London, Surrey, Australia, Canada, India, Africa, Japan, China, Israel. I'm the winner of poetry competitions in London,Berlin,Bratislava. I'm the winner of poetry competitions on Poems and Quotes. I'm the winner of gold,silver,bronze medal on All Poetry. I’m the winner in All about Love Challenge. I published a book for children, book of poems "Duet of Waves" in English and Japanese co-authored with Yoshimasa Kanou and "Duet of Tears" co-authored with Noriko Nagaoka. I'm interested in art and psychology. I belong to Japan Universal Poets Association and Kamena Literary Foundation.
5 Poems by P. C. Vandall
Waste Not, Want Not
(For Sherin Mathews who was found dead in a culvert
after her adopted father force-fed her milk)
Consider everything —the small spaces
between bones and teeth, cracks of light, hollows
of darkness, calcium and cartilage.
Contemplate whether the clouded glass
was half-full or half-empty. Should we weep
if milk spills like moonlit rivers across
cold granite tables? Somewhere a stove pot
is frothing at the lip and boils over,
and somewhere it’s soothing a wee one’s cry.
Perhaps, if the cup had been brimming
with twilight then the stars could flitter
like fireflies and burn holes through the blackness.
Maybe someone thought the milk was spoiled
and poured it down the drain, not knowing
it might get caught in the pipes and clog.
If the milk had been left to stand awhile,
it might've grown skin. Even something
seemingly sour can be turned sweet again.
In the dead of night, I hear coyotes
taking nips at the moon and the details
film over like a half-digested dream.
It wasn’t so long ago that missing
children could be found on milk cartons
and folks knew better than to dispose of them.
(Previously published in Prism)
Applesauce
You were a good dancer, knew all the steps
until we ended up in the back seat
of your father’s Fairlane and I forgot
who I was and became the huntress,
forging ahead through the velvet brush
down the fuzziness of your soft navel
to the golden warm undercarriage
of your body. I could smell the sharpness
of leather mixing in with the mustiness.
It was hot that night like the summer
the air was thick with flies and manure.
I had gone to the cellar to cool off
among the jars of peaches and apple sauce.
The peaches were sweet and firm, delicious
and cold. The cellar was ripe and heady
in the sweet-sickly scent of nectar.
Peaches bruise easily when plucked like that.
With you, it was more like applesauce.
(Previously published in Prism)
Salmon Run
I never told you but I left you once.
It was September, and I packed the kids
in the car, caught a boat to Nanaimo,
and checked into the Coast Bastion hotel.
It was there I pondered leaving for good.
No one stays here for long. Even Salmon
know when it’s a good time to run, to take
that leap up freshwater streams to migrate
to their ritual spawning grounds. They`ll risk
life and fin for their unborn children
before rotting into ocherish dust.
All night the fog horns wailed in the harbour
like women in mourning and I felt numb
as I sank into the soft-red ashes,
the sweat and dander, the microscopic
bits of love left on the pleated sheets.
There’s an emptiness that will reel you in
like a riptide, a vacuum sucking you
inside while the blue-silvery light swims
out into the tapering darkness.
In the half-light, I bundled up the kids,
followed the long-narrow halls past vending
machines and ice and then crossed the lobby,
vast as an ocean with no ships in sight.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Three Minutes
The time it takes to make the bed, grab
a hot shower, boil an egg, or fold
a paper airplane. Three minutes. The time
it took my mother to make up her mind
to leave my father. I can still hear
the cap popping off of her Final-
net hairspray, the spurts of air hissing
out and freezing her blond curls into place.
Sometimes winter scars the land, conceals
the lesions and diseased tissue below.
Everything appears so spotless and clean,
almost beautiful in its rebirth
but If you pull the snow back like a scab
it will bleed. I wonder if the earth aches
when it thaws. Three minutes. The time it took
the doctor to uncross my legs, grab
the cryoprobe and shoot a steady stream
of arctic-blue liquid nitrogen
against my cervix. Three minutes
before a glacier unearthed my body,
once beautiful as unbroken black ice.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Ode to a Poem
I wrote a poem Neruda would blush at,
Blake would find innocent and Ginsberg
would howl at. The poem was bathed in the plum
shade of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower.
Imagine, blooming a poem like that,
words perfuming the body in one sweet scent-
ence after another. I wrote the poem
last winter before the snow or perhaps
it was September, ripe and red as the wood
stove pushing heat up the smoke stack to pant
hot spurts into the starry sky. The poem
had no heart, soul, or glass to shatter it.
There were no carnal apples or oranges
sliced but it quivered like a grove of aspens.
No poem --not even the sallow sunflower
dripping seeds from its black eye or the weight
of a song could compare. The poem –not
this one, was the best poem ever written,
and when I read its sublime words out loud,
there was a silence that was unheard of.
I wish you could have heard it. The poem
fractured time and space and each word splintered
the bone white page. The poem rose like a ghost-
ship out of water, breaching the surface
like a whale caught in a bohemian fog.
I wanted to share that poem with you
today, but the poem had a previous
engagement and sent me in its place.
Great poems can do that. Poets can’t.
(Previously published in The Stinging Fly)
Bionote
Pamela is the mother of two children and the author of three collections of poetry, all of which she considers her babies. She has babies forthcoming from Oolichan Books and Porcupine’s Quill.
(For Sherin Mathews who was found dead in a culvert
after her adopted father force-fed her milk)
Consider everything —the small spaces
between bones and teeth, cracks of light, hollows
of darkness, calcium and cartilage.
Contemplate whether the clouded glass
was half-full or half-empty. Should we weep
if milk spills like moonlit rivers across
cold granite tables? Somewhere a stove pot
is frothing at the lip and boils over,
and somewhere it’s soothing a wee one’s cry.
Perhaps, if the cup had been brimming
with twilight then the stars could flitter
like fireflies and burn holes through the blackness.
Maybe someone thought the milk was spoiled
and poured it down the drain, not knowing
it might get caught in the pipes and clog.
If the milk had been left to stand awhile,
it might've grown skin. Even something
seemingly sour can be turned sweet again.
In the dead of night, I hear coyotes
taking nips at the moon and the details
film over like a half-digested dream.
It wasn’t so long ago that missing
children could be found on milk cartons
and folks knew better than to dispose of them.
(Previously published in Prism)
Applesauce
You were a good dancer, knew all the steps
until we ended up in the back seat
of your father’s Fairlane and I forgot
who I was and became the huntress,
forging ahead through the velvet brush
down the fuzziness of your soft navel
to the golden warm undercarriage
of your body. I could smell the sharpness
of leather mixing in with the mustiness.
It was hot that night like the summer
the air was thick with flies and manure.
I had gone to the cellar to cool off
among the jars of peaches and apple sauce.
The peaches were sweet and firm, delicious
and cold. The cellar was ripe and heady
in the sweet-sickly scent of nectar.
Peaches bruise easily when plucked like that.
With you, it was more like applesauce.
(Previously published in Prism)
Salmon Run
I never told you but I left you once.
It was September, and I packed the kids
in the car, caught a boat to Nanaimo,
and checked into the Coast Bastion hotel.
It was there I pondered leaving for good.
No one stays here for long. Even Salmon
know when it’s a good time to run, to take
that leap up freshwater streams to migrate
to their ritual spawning grounds. They`ll risk
life and fin for their unborn children
before rotting into ocherish dust.
All night the fog horns wailed in the harbour
like women in mourning and I felt numb
as I sank into the soft-red ashes,
the sweat and dander, the microscopic
bits of love left on the pleated sheets.
There’s an emptiness that will reel you in
like a riptide, a vacuum sucking you
inside while the blue-silvery light swims
out into the tapering darkness.
In the half-light, I bundled up the kids,
followed the long-narrow halls past vending
machines and ice and then crossed the lobby,
vast as an ocean with no ships in sight.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Three Minutes
The time it takes to make the bed, grab
a hot shower, boil an egg, or fold
a paper airplane. Three minutes. The time
it took my mother to make up her mind
to leave my father. I can still hear
the cap popping off of her Final-
net hairspray, the spurts of air hissing
out and freezing her blond curls into place.
Sometimes winter scars the land, conceals
the lesions and diseased tissue below.
Everything appears so spotless and clean,
almost beautiful in its rebirth
but If you pull the snow back like a scab
it will bleed. I wonder if the earth aches
when it thaws. Three minutes. The time it took
the doctor to uncross my legs, grab
the cryoprobe and shoot a steady stream
of arctic-blue liquid nitrogen
against my cervix. Three minutes
before a glacier unearthed my body,
once beautiful as unbroken black ice.
(Previously published in 3rd Wednesday)
Ode to a Poem
I wrote a poem Neruda would blush at,
Blake would find innocent and Ginsberg
would howl at. The poem was bathed in the plum
shade of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower.
Imagine, blooming a poem like that,
words perfuming the body in one sweet scent-
ence after another. I wrote the poem
last winter before the snow or perhaps
it was September, ripe and red as the wood
stove pushing heat up the smoke stack to pant
hot spurts into the starry sky. The poem
had no heart, soul, or glass to shatter it.
There were no carnal apples or oranges
sliced but it quivered like a grove of aspens.
No poem --not even the sallow sunflower
dripping seeds from its black eye or the weight
of a song could compare. The poem –not
this one, was the best poem ever written,
and when I read its sublime words out loud,
there was a silence that was unheard of.
I wish you could have heard it. The poem
fractured time and space and each word splintered
the bone white page. The poem rose like a ghost-
ship out of water, breaching the surface
like a whale caught in a bohemian fog.
I wanted to share that poem with you
today, but the poem had a previous
engagement and sent me in its place.
Great poems can do that. Poets can’t.
(Previously published in The Stinging Fly)
Bionote
Pamela is the mother of two children and the author of three collections of poetry, all of which she considers her babies. She has babies forthcoming from Oolichan Books and Porcupine’s Quill.
1 Poem by Tom Ball
POEM FOR ILLUSIONS
I
Everyone has them. But MRT (mind reading technology) smashes your illusions and leaves you with stark reality
But you say without your dreams you don’t want to live
II
You have to know what reality is
By traveling and meeting lots of people
You need to compare different places to know your own country
Some people just lie to each other
And call it reality enough for them
III
Spins…
People see reality differently
Some say reality is all an illusion
We all surround ourselves
In a bubble/illusion
Pretend we have the best
Of all possible worlds
But future people will laugh
About how obsessed we are with non-imaginable “reality”
A big joke
IV
In the fantasy video game cyber worlds of the future
They will claim they are living in reality
Layers and layers of depth to these “worlds”
One needs illusions to survive, can’t live without them
Reality is just a big joke
Bionote
Ball has published extensively with PBW, Down in the Dirt and, Magazine Conceit. He has also published a number of works for Gargoyle, Spillwords. And has also appeared in Lone Star Magazine and Postcardshorts.ca.
I
Everyone has them. But MRT (mind reading technology) smashes your illusions and leaves you with stark reality
But you say without your dreams you don’t want to live
II
You have to know what reality is
By traveling and meeting lots of people
You need to compare different places to know your own country
Some people just lie to each other
And call it reality enough for them
III
Spins…
People see reality differently
Some say reality is all an illusion
We all surround ourselves
In a bubble/illusion
Pretend we have the best
Of all possible worlds
But future people will laugh
About how obsessed we are with non-imaginable “reality”
A big joke
IV
In the fantasy video game cyber worlds of the future
They will claim they are living in reality
Layers and layers of depth to these “worlds”
One needs illusions to survive, can’t live without them
Reality is just a big joke
Bionote
Ball has published extensively with PBW, Down in the Dirt and, Magazine Conceit. He has also published a number of works for Gargoyle, Spillwords. And has also appeared in Lone Star Magazine and Postcardshorts.ca.
2 Poems by Roger Sippl
The Sweater
The doctors tell me the main tumor
in my chest is the size of a softball.
She uses a double strand of yarn
and thin knitting needles so the arms and walls
to cover my chest and back will be thick.
There are more in my bronchial system,
my neck, below my diaphragm, and maybe
in my spleen. The sweater will warm me
even in the wind. She had to do Catholic
Penance, a mother’s labor, she repeats
non-stop clicks with yarn, mostly acrylic,
so it can’t be eaten and
will never decay. She says it is her
fault. She should have stopped me from
sneaking onto that stupid golf course at night, swimming
with mosquitoes, diving the black lake for lost balls
through industrial fertilizer and green dyes, as if
she knows what caused my lymph node cancer
when no one else does. She tries to cure me, feels
my forehead, clicks the needles together again
and again until her fingers hurt and wrists ache
and she can hardly stand up from sitting so long.
So I tell her that leaves on trees blow left
then right, some rattle and flip,
some move hardly at all, yet some are first to fall
to the ground. I tell her the sweater
is coming along great as she watches me lose
weight lying in bed. The needles click as she approaches
another threshold of pain that relieves her.
Everyday
All through each long day
our nightgowns hug each other
on the bedroom hook.
The Sweater was first published in the Ocean State Review in 2016.
“Everyday” was first published in Smeuse Poetry, a print anthology, in 2017.
Bionote
Roger Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He’s been published in a few dozen literary journals and anthologies, including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review. Before that he was a pre-med who survived Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which changed everything.
The doctors tell me the main tumor
in my chest is the size of a softball.
She uses a double strand of yarn
and thin knitting needles so the arms and walls
to cover my chest and back will be thick.
There are more in my bronchial system,
my neck, below my diaphragm, and maybe
in my spleen. The sweater will warm me
even in the wind. She had to do Catholic
Penance, a mother’s labor, she repeats
non-stop clicks with yarn, mostly acrylic,
so it can’t be eaten and
will never decay. She says it is her
fault. She should have stopped me from
sneaking onto that stupid golf course at night, swimming
with mosquitoes, diving the black lake for lost balls
through industrial fertilizer and green dyes, as if
she knows what caused my lymph node cancer
when no one else does. She tries to cure me, feels
my forehead, clicks the needles together again
and again until her fingers hurt and wrists ache
and she can hardly stand up from sitting so long.
So I tell her that leaves on trees blow left
then right, some rattle and flip,
some move hardly at all, yet some are first to fall
to the ground. I tell her the sweater
is coming along great as she watches me lose
weight lying in bed. The needles click as she approaches
another threshold of pain that relieves her.
Everyday
All through each long day
our nightgowns hug each other
on the bedroom hook.
The Sweater was first published in the Ocean State Review in 2016.
“Everyday” was first published in Smeuse Poetry, a print anthology, in 2017.
Bionote
Roger Sippl studied creative writing at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and Stanford Continuing Studies. He’s been published in a few dozen literary journals and anthologies, including the Ocean State Review and the Bacopa Literary Review. Before that he was a pre-med who survived Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which changed everything.
5 Poems by Charles Pinch
All for Frances
SUMMER
Joe, when I say I want
to get lost in the green
what I mean is to climb
into the experience…
To grow not up, older,
Sideways but into—
like you grow into a body.
Like Daphne grew into a tree.
FOX
Why should the fox be?
A slip of flash and mud.
Existentially charged
And
Landing with a
Thud!
HE AND I
My body’s grown a tumor.
I’ve given it a name.
One day Bob will kill me.
Isn’t it a shame?
LOVE POEM
Moment to moment
Over and over
Time after time
Again and again
DOG, INFINITY…
On a hill with Blackie
The universe spins around me
In perfect pitch.
The music of the spheres is
Is the sound of
Exploding atoms.
So silent. So still.
Even if I reach for it
My arms are
Miles
Too
Long.
Bionote
Canadian Charles Pinch hold degrees in Art History and Philosophy from McMaster University. Many of his short stories have been published both in print and online. He is co-founder and senior editor of the literary journal Fleas on the Dog. He lives with his boyfriend, writer Nick North in a place that shall remain nameless.
SUMMER
Joe, when I say I want
to get lost in the green
what I mean is to climb
into the experience…
To grow not up, older,
Sideways but into—
like you grow into a body.
Like Daphne grew into a tree.
FOX
Why should the fox be?
A slip of flash and mud.
Existentially charged
And
Landing with a
Thud!
HE AND I
My body’s grown a tumor.
I’ve given it a name.
One day Bob will kill me.
Isn’t it a shame?
LOVE POEM
Moment to moment
Over and over
Time after time
Again and again
DOG, INFINITY…
On a hill with Blackie
The universe spins around me
In perfect pitch.
The music of the spheres is
Is the sound of
Exploding atoms.
So silent. So still.
Even if I reach for it
My arms are
Miles
Too
Long.
Bionote
Canadian Charles Pinch hold degrees in Art History and Philosophy from McMaster University. Many of his short stories have been published both in print and online. He is co-founder and senior editor of the literary journal Fleas on the Dog. He lives with his boyfriend, writer Nick North in a place that shall remain nameless.
3 Poems by Marie-Andree Auclair
Blue Iris
It blossoms on her cheek
morning bright, for all to see
writes a tale her shame
cannot articulate.
Night flower arising
from underground vessels
unable to contain their blue ink
leaking sorrow.
Mouth used to wordlessness,
her face blurts out an itinerary
she wants to refuse and she prays
not just her mirror would read.
imbroglio
I’
m
braiding
roadways
out of oneiric
galaxies
locked
in
orbits
obelized
in
latent
geo-magical
obfuscations
rotating
best when
manipulated
imaginatively
Silence Number 1, Begetting
silence is stone
polished smooth
by decades of words
the teeth of which
silence itself wore down.
Bionote
Marie-Andree Auclair’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications in the United States, Canada, Ireland and in the United Kingdom. Her chapbook, Contrails was released by In/Words Magazine and Press/Ottawa. She lives in Canada.
It blossoms on her cheek
morning bright, for all to see
writes a tale her shame
cannot articulate.
Night flower arising
from underground vessels
unable to contain their blue ink
leaking sorrow.
Mouth used to wordlessness,
her face blurts out an itinerary
she wants to refuse and she prays
not just her mirror would read.
imbroglio
I’
m
braiding
roadways
out of oneiric
galaxies
locked
in
orbits
obelized
in
latent
geo-magical
obfuscations
rotating
best when
manipulated
imaginatively
Silence Number 1, Begetting
silence is stone
polished smooth
by decades of words
the teeth of which
silence itself wore down.
Bionote
Marie-Andree Auclair’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications in the United States, Canada, Ireland and in the United Kingdom. Her chapbook, Contrails was released by In/Words Magazine and Press/Ottawa. She lives in Canada.
5 Poems by Koon Woon
Nostalgia
Nostalgia – my most ready and dispensable currency, rain
Trickling down the windowpane and
The useless clock failing
To stop time as forty years came and went,
In this underheated room that
Always had been underheated.
I stare into deep translucent green not
Believing much of what I did
Believe,
Like a priest confronting nature
For the first time.
And things could have happened
Otherwise,
Though I won’t say water running uphill.
But the heart does pump blood to
The zenith of the head.
And let all hurts revert
To their primeval virgin
States.
I met you then-
We were both swimming a
Turbulent river.
We barely had the strength
To say “hello,”
But there we were
Spending several Springs until Autumn fell
On us, and we parted before snow could
Pile on our heads.
We reached for the sky as
All young people do.
But the sky is always up there for
Aspirations and not for one’s
Possession.
So we waited until
Memory graced us
Like second-hand clothing from
Salvation Army counters. And whatever
Slight inflictions we suffered
Had healed beyond the point of memory.
Now like a hologram you still
Come alive
Before me as my memory dives again
Into lost summers. Yes, living was dizzy then
As bees in a frenzy before honey-potent
Flowers. Life was indeed for our taking.
Now, however, between shaves, I grow
In years that bear witness to your absent
Hand stroking as you would a pale
Fire on its glow on the chin of your pet.
Between shaves, I have lost you
To the grottoes and grovels of the underground
Upon which the city was built
By nameless women and men,
As I ponder what to give you were you
In the flesh before me as I know myself now
By the repetition of meals.
In this underheated room with water running down
The windowpane, I conjure you again
In far fields when you were a spring blossom and we
Had danced to receive the sun.
And I had given you something three-leafed that was
Not a clover and it had startled you into magic.
Magic now is my defense against loss and memory.
It is the shield that I protect the memories
No currency can purchase, for they were
What you had given me to ease
Me through this temporal tunnel
That some call time itself.
Mist
Within the mist of the world,
my own mist of being,
as rain drops cling
to tips of branches.
Reluctant to let go
that ill-defined resignation,
as far hills chill my limbs,
that reluctance again!
This time inside my bones,
the knowledge I was never
the man I thought I was,
merely slate, I was,
and now, erased.
But!
I am glad to be empty –
to hold nothing,
and to have nothing,
withheld.
20 paces from the bus stop
I have lived in many rooms 20
paces from the bus stop,
where two men
stand back to back,
walk 10 paces, turn,
and shoot.
Pigeons disperse,
much insane laughter,
pigeons again flock
together the instant after,
in this neighborhood
of many dwellings
each with its own story.
I was merry a boy,
respectful of the law,
and in awe of higher education
that lead men to destinations
as the bus pulls up,
I realize I left my lunch.
Midnight
What human business is best done at night,
when it costs candles to provide light?
And what military posture straight in the day
is best executed in the simplest way?
The heart without convolutions
will unthinkingly answer a midnight knock,
while, a heart coiled in the dark
is apprehensive of barking dogs.
“In a dark time the eye begins to see”
all the foul hearts on the ceiling above,
blacker than black, espousing brotherly love,
like adding white sugar to saccharine tea.
But brothers, all I need is a simple love,
as delivered by the feather of a single dove.
Then, I can turn the corner past midnight,
winning the war without a fight…
Apologies to Lorca
I am in a city without time
while the three friends ascend the green balustrade
to view from the balcony the changeless sea.
I am in a house without a number
where food & sex are being squeezed out of tubes
and sleep and meals come at unpredictable hours,
as deep beneath the green water
lie, fathoms deep, sunken Greek ships full of
corroding treasures.
Maria hides behind the purple curtains when
the three friends descend the balustrade
talking of white horses with black manes,
comparing the saddle to the mantle piece.
By & by came Lorca himself,
speaking sadly to his friends:
“Mocitoes, if I am able, this house is your house,
and your horse is my horse,
but I am no longer I & my house is no longer my house.”
The three friends bid the old man adios
and vanished in the Andalusian air.
Sadly from Maria's green, green eyes,
silver tears begin to flow
when the moon climbs further with the night.
I am now in a city without name,
as the three friends gallop from the high mountain pass,
headng to the water, where silvery streaks
in the moonlight tell again of sorrows, where on the beach
there is a note in a bottle
with the script of the Chinese Empress no one can read.
Leaving the bottle on the sand,
the three friends gallop now to another city,
another city without time,
as the waves undulant, undulant roll in,
and beneath these fathoms of green, green water,
lie sunken ships with useless corroding treasures.
Bionote
Born in a village near Canton, China, Koon Woon immigrated to Washington State in 1960. He earned a BA from Antioch University Seattle and studied at Fort Hays State University. He is the author of The Truth in Rented Rooms (Kaya, 1998), winner of a Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland, and Water Chasing Water (Kaya, 2013), winner of the 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His poetry appears in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), among others. Woon is the publisher of Goldfish Press and the literary magazine Chrysanthemum. He lives in Seattle.
Nostalgia – my most ready and dispensable currency, rain
Trickling down the windowpane and
The useless clock failing
To stop time as forty years came and went,
In this underheated room that
Always had been underheated.
I stare into deep translucent green not
Believing much of what I did
Believe,
Like a priest confronting nature
For the first time.
And things could have happened
Otherwise,
Though I won’t say water running uphill.
But the heart does pump blood to
The zenith of the head.
And let all hurts revert
To their primeval virgin
States.
I met you then-
We were both swimming a
Turbulent river.
We barely had the strength
To say “hello,”
But there we were
Spending several Springs until Autumn fell
On us, and we parted before snow could
Pile on our heads.
We reached for the sky as
All young people do.
But the sky is always up there for
Aspirations and not for one’s
Possession.
So we waited until
Memory graced us
Like second-hand clothing from
Salvation Army counters. And whatever
Slight inflictions we suffered
Had healed beyond the point of memory.
Now like a hologram you still
Come alive
Before me as my memory dives again
Into lost summers. Yes, living was dizzy then
As bees in a frenzy before honey-potent
Flowers. Life was indeed for our taking.
Now, however, between shaves, I grow
In years that bear witness to your absent
Hand stroking as you would a pale
Fire on its glow on the chin of your pet.
Between shaves, I have lost you
To the grottoes and grovels of the underground
Upon which the city was built
By nameless women and men,
As I ponder what to give you were you
In the flesh before me as I know myself now
By the repetition of meals.
In this underheated room with water running down
The windowpane, I conjure you again
In far fields when you were a spring blossom and we
Had danced to receive the sun.
And I had given you something three-leafed that was
Not a clover and it had startled you into magic.
Magic now is my defense against loss and memory.
It is the shield that I protect the memories
No currency can purchase, for they were
What you had given me to ease
Me through this temporal tunnel
That some call time itself.
Mist
Within the mist of the world,
my own mist of being,
as rain drops cling
to tips of branches.
Reluctant to let go
that ill-defined resignation,
as far hills chill my limbs,
that reluctance again!
This time inside my bones,
the knowledge I was never
the man I thought I was,
merely slate, I was,
and now, erased.
But!
I am glad to be empty –
to hold nothing,
and to have nothing,
withheld.
20 paces from the bus stop
I have lived in many rooms 20
paces from the bus stop,
where two men
stand back to back,
walk 10 paces, turn,
and shoot.
Pigeons disperse,
much insane laughter,
pigeons again flock
together the instant after,
in this neighborhood
of many dwellings
each with its own story.
I was merry a boy,
respectful of the law,
and in awe of higher education
that lead men to destinations
as the bus pulls up,
I realize I left my lunch.
Midnight
What human business is best done at night,
when it costs candles to provide light?
And what military posture straight in the day
is best executed in the simplest way?
The heart without convolutions
will unthinkingly answer a midnight knock,
while, a heart coiled in the dark
is apprehensive of barking dogs.
“In a dark time the eye begins to see”
all the foul hearts on the ceiling above,
blacker than black, espousing brotherly love,
like adding white sugar to saccharine tea.
But brothers, all I need is a simple love,
as delivered by the feather of a single dove.
Then, I can turn the corner past midnight,
winning the war without a fight…
Apologies to Lorca
I am in a city without time
while the three friends ascend the green balustrade
to view from the balcony the changeless sea.
I am in a house without a number
where food & sex are being squeezed out of tubes
and sleep and meals come at unpredictable hours,
as deep beneath the green water
lie, fathoms deep, sunken Greek ships full of
corroding treasures.
Maria hides behind the purple curtains when
the three friends descend the balustrade
talking of white horses with black manes,
comparing the saddle to the mantle piece.
By & by came Lorca himself,
speaking sadly to his friends:
“Mocitoes, if I am able, this house is your house,
and your horse is my horse,
but I am no longer I & my house is no longer my house.”
The three friends bid the old man adios
and vanished in the Andalusian air.
Sadly from Maria's green, green eyes,
silver tears begin to flow
when the moon climbs further with the night.
I am now in a city without name,
as the three friends gallop from the high mountain pass,
headng to the water, where silvery streaks
in the moonlight tell again of sorrows, where on the beach
there is a note in a bottle
with the script of the Chinese Empress no one can read.
Leaving the bottle on the sand,
the three friends gallop now to another city,
another city without time,
as the waves undulant, undulant roll in,
and beneath these fathoms of green, green water,
lie sunken ships with useless corroding treasures.
Bionote
Born in a village near Canton, China, Koon Woon immigrated to Washington State in 1960. He earned a BA from Antioch University Seattle and studied at Fort Hays State University. He is the author of The Truth in Rented Rooms (Kaya, 1998), winner of a Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland, and Water Chasing Water (Kaya, 2013), winner of the 2014 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His poetry appears in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), among others. Woon is the publisher of Goldfish Press and the literary magazine Chrysanthemum. He lives in Seattle.
5 Poems by Yuan Changming
Cage||Bird
I am a cage, in search of a bird. -- Kafka
Wherever my mind flies, it’s still
Confined tightly
To this world, this very cage of
Sensory & imaginative cells
In other words, I is the cage, while the whole
Universe am a bird
All Voiced Equal
Given the Top Four Most Common English Verbs
To be [or not to be
Whatever or whoever you are]
To have [or not to have]
Whoever or whatever you may wish]
To do [or not to do]
Anything or nothing you would prefer, &]
To say [or not to say]
Nothing or anything you may intend to]
We are all rendered equal as we cross
Every borderline, filling in every gap
In action as in thought
[Or otherwise]
Crows Are Being Born Again
It is an undeniable fact now:
They have arisen from the bare ground
Like the phoenix flapping its wings out of its
Legendary ashes, where are they going?
Nowhere but high up into a virtual space, a world
That, like history book, is full of black headlines
Big names, & bold details. All transmitted
Into numb numbers. Even the most unidentifiable
Has become a comet shooting above its dark caws.
Each
Taken for an angel winged with the rainbows
Of tomorrow, while all cranes and swans are lost
In their dances to the tune of death
East Etymology: Introduction to Chinese Characters
臭：stinking results from just one bit of too much self-conceit
黨：party in politics means to uphold the principle of darkness
认：knowing someone involves paying attention to whatever s/he says
值：worth is determined by how straight a person stands
债：debt must be paid because it’s a human responsibility
武：military forces are used only to stop war and maintain peace
吻：kiss is an act of not only the mouth but also the heart
D-Dream
When I was a dream child, I dreamed of all that was dreamable, including a remarkable ancestor in particular, whom I could brag about to my playmates. However, as I grew older, I learned that my grandfather had left us nothing but an unknown family name, while my father was no more outstanding than any other in the street. So, I began to dream about attaining enough fame, wealth and/or power to become someone in my own right.
Alas, despite a thousand weeks of psychological and physiological hardships in the past, I have come only to prove myself as ordinary as my father and grandfather, whom I have been striving so hard to emulate and, to my greater dismay, that my sons are even lesser.
Now I still dream from time to time. In the most memorable one, I come to good terms with my mediocrity. After all, being no body is a standard form of human being, perhaps no less than a form of nirvana.
Bionote
Yuan Changming started to learn the English alphabet at age 19 and published several monographs on translation before leaving his native country. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Writing credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Jodi Stutz Poetry Award, Semifinal Judgeship for 2020 Canadian Poetry Recitation Contest (Poetry in Voice), eight chapbooks (most recently East Idioms [cyberwit, 2020]), Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-2017), BestNewPoemsOnline and publications in 1,676 other literary outlets across 45 countries.
I am a cage, in search of a bird. -- Kafka
Wherever my mind flies, it’s still
Confined tightly
To this world, this very cage of
Sensory & imaginative cells
In other words, I is the cage, while the whole
Universe am a bird
All Voiced Equal
Given the Top Four Most Common English Verbs
To be [or not to be
Whatever or whoever you are]
To have [or not to have]
Whoever or whatever you may wish]
To do [or not to do]
Anything or nothing you would prefer, &]
To say [or not to say]
Nothing or anything you may intend to]
We are all rendered equal as we cross
Every borderline, filling in every gap
In action as in thought
[Or otherwise]
Crows Are Being Born Again
It is an undeniable fact now:
They have arisen from the bare ground
Like the phoenix flapping its wings out of its
Legendary ashes, where are they going?
Nowhere but high up into a virtual space, a world
That, like history book, is full of black headlines
Big names, & bold details. All transmitted
Into numb numbers. Even the most unidentifiable
Has become a comet shooting above its dark caws.
Each
Taken for an angel winged with the rainbows
Of tomorrow, while all cranes and swans are lost
In their dances to the tune of death
East Etymology: Introduction to Chinese Characters
臭：stinking results from just one bit of too much self-conceit
黨：party in politics means to uphold the principle of darkness
认：knowing someone involves paying attention to whatever s/he says
值：worth is determined by how straight a person stands
债：debt must be paid because it’s a human responsibility
武：military forces are used only to stop war and maintain peace
吻：kiss is an act of not only the mouth but also the heart
D-Dream
When I was a dream child, I dreamed of all that was dreamable, including a remarkable ancestor in particular, whom I could brag about to my playmates. However, as I grew older, I learned that my grandfather had left us nothing but an unknown family name, while my father was no more outstanding than any other in the street. So, I began to dream about attaining enough fame, wealth and/or power to become someone in my own right.
Alas, despite a thousand weeks of psychological and physiological hardships in the past, I have come only to prove myself as ordinary as my father and grandfather, whom I have been striving so hard to emulate and, to my greater dismay, that my sons are even lesser.
Now I still dream from time to time. In the most memorable one, I come to good terms with my mediocrity. After all, being no body is a standard form of human being, perhaps no less than a form of nirvana.
Bionote
Yuan Changming started to learn the English alphabet at age 19 and published several monographs on translation before leaving his native country. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan. Writing credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Jodi Stutz Poetry Award, Semifinal Judgeship for 2020 Canadian Poetry Recitation Contest (Poetry in Voice), eight chapbooks (most recently East Idioms [cyberwit, 2020]), Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-2017), BestNewPoemsOnline and publications in 1,676 other literary outlets across 45 countries.
2 Poems by Buff Whitman-Bradley
Neighborhood poet
All alone atop a light pole
Above the busy thoroughfare
A smokey gray pigeon is doing its best
To strike an eagle pose
Meaning to convince itself
I suppose
And those of us speeding by below
That it is no mere plebian scavenger
But a knight of the air
A fierce and intrepid raptor
Of aristocratc lineage
Standing guard over the wide world
As evening comes on.
Nice try.
And when we were young
Didn’t many of us do something
Very similar
Emulating the bearing
And the manner of speech
The style and the attitudes
Of celebrated ones
Hoping by some sort of sympathetic magic
I suppose
To become as brilliant and profound
As acclaimed and admired
As our idols?
I know I did.
I did my best to imitate the way
Certain revered poets
Famously carried on,
Which involved a good deal
Of tumultuous behavior,
While I maintained a fervent belief
In my own talent
And waited with confident anticipation
For the heavens to rain greatness
Down upon me
And deathless verse
To begin erupting from my pen.
Didn’t happen.
And now I am seventy-five,
Long past my days of drama and heat,
An enthusiastic observer
Of local comings and goings,
A happy collecter of bits of daily news
From up and down the block,
Alert for little flickers of wild vitality
In the commonplace and everyday,
A neighborhood poet,
Content among the pigeons.
Heron and turtle
The heron walks ever so daintily
Along the half-submerged fallen tree
Being careful not to intrude
Upon the several turtles
Sunning themselves thereon.
But perhaps from being overly cautious
The bird makes a misstep
And bumps one of the lazing amphibians
Off the waterlogged trunk
And into the drink.
Realizing at once the consequence
Of its errant footfall
The heron launches itself up and away
Into the azure afternoon
Far from the opprobrium
Of the dislodged snapper,
While the turtle so rudely evicted
Hauls itself up out of the cold pond
Back to its spot in the sunlight
Sighing and muttering about the travails
A turtle’s life entails
But so very happy to be warm again.
Lakeside afternoon
Standing near the tip of the branch
Extending several feet out from its nest
In the dead treetop
The juvenile osprey is in a panic
Crying out urgently and ceaselessly
From its uncertain perch
High above the lake,
Will somebody please do something!
But no parent osprey appears
To offer direction or advice
Or even an encouraging word or two
About this monumental and transformative moment
When a young bird will step into thin air
For the first time
And must master aerodynamics
In a matter of only a few seconds
Before it plunges head first
Into the dark green waters below.
The frantic young osprey does not realize
That this absence of a backup crew
Is the ancient wild’s way of saying
You can do this on your own now, little sister,
No need for further assistance.
But after more long minutes of plaintive pleading
An instant arrives
As it does in all our lives
When there is nothing else to do
But to obey the primeval instructions encoded within
Step lightly off the spindly branch
Into the invisible embrace of sky
And just fly.
Bionote
Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poetry has been widely published in print and online journals. His latest book is “Crows with Bad Writing.” His podcast, “Poems for the Third Act” (thirdactpoems.podbean.com) features his poems reflecting on aging, memory, and mortality. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.
All alone atop a light pole
Above the busy thoroughfare
A smokey gray pigeon is doing its best
To strike an eagle pose
Meaning to convince itself
I suppose
And those of us speeding by below
That it is no mere plebian scavenger
But a knight of the air
A fierce and intrepid raptor
Of aristocratc lineage
Standing guard over the wide world
As evening comes on.
Nice try.
And when we were young
Didn’t many of us do something
Very similar
Emulating the bearing
And the manner of speech
The style and the attitudes
Of celebrated ones
Hoping by some sort of sympathetic magic
I suppose
To become as brilliant and profound
As acclaimed and admired
As our idols?
I know I did.
I did my best to imitate the way
Certain revered poets
Famously carried on,
Which involved a good deal
Of tumultuous behavior,
While I maintained a fervent belief
In my own talent
And waited with confident anticipation
For the heavens to rain greatness
Down upon me
And deathless verse
To begin erupting from my pen.
Didn’t happen.
And now I am seventy-five,
Long past my days of drama and heat,
An enthusiastic observer
Of local comings and goings,
A happy collecter of bits of daily news
From up and down the block,
Alert for little flickers of wild vitality
In the commonplace and everyday,
A neighborhood poet,
Content among the pigeons.
Heron and turtle
The heron walks ever so daintily
Along the half-submerged fallen tree
Being careful not to intrude
Upon the several turtles
Sunning themselves thereon.
But perhaps from being overly cautious
The bird makes a misstep
And bumps one of the lazing amphibians
Off the waterlogged trunk
And into the drink.
Realizing at once the consequence
Of its errant footfall
The heron launches itself up and away
Into the azure afternoon
Far from the opprobrium
Of the dislodged snapper,
While the turtle so rudely evicted
Hauls itself up out of the cold pond
Back to its spot in the sunlight
Sighing and muttering about the travails
A turtle’s life entails
But so very happy to be warm again.
Lakeside afternoon
Standing near the tip of the branch
Extending several feet out from its nest
In the dead treetop
The juvenile osprey is in a panic
Crying out urgently and ceaselessly
From its uncertain perch
High above the lake,
Will somebody please do something!
But no parent osprey appears
To offer direction or advice
Or even an encouraging word or two
About this monumental and transformative moment
When a young bird will step into thin air
For the first time
And must master aerodynamics
In a matter of only a few seconds
Before it plunges head first
Into the dark green waters below.
The frantic young osprey does not realize
That this absence of a backup crew
Is the ancient wild’s way of saying
You can do this on your own now, little sister,
No need for further assistance.
But after more long minutes of plaintive pleading
An instant arrives
As it does in all our lives
When there is nothing else to do
But to obey the primeval instructions encoded within
Step lightly off the spindly branch
Into the invisible embrace of sky
And just fly.
Bionote
Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poetry has been widely published in print and online journals. His latest book is “Crows with Bad Writing.” His podcast, “Poems for the Third Act” (thirdactpoems.podbean.com) features his poems reflecting on aging, memory, and mortality. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.
5 Poems by Brian Sheffield
and your teeth were floating up there
among the long winding
sutures of the sky.
a few looked up as people do
and saw themselves there
beautiful
with outstretched arms
and grins that demanded
“come over here and
drown with us.”
This small turnout just south of Carmel Highlands
holds more of the Holy than I am able
to capture here. I am sitting in the bed
of my mom’s Ford something, which she selflessly
lends to me any time I come back here
and I am thinking of impulse, foolishness,
and self-exile, though in the scope of
all history, I’m sure this is pretty dumb.
All I know now is that god’s land has been long
occupied, and though the waves crash wildly
against patient rocks and the wind hisses an
eternally drumming note, this place feels
domesticated; it’s displayed like a wicked
petting zoo. A few free things make their home
in the sky, though even they depend on
the will of people to preserve something
fundamental here. Only the deep fault lines
waiting to rise and stretch their stiff bones remain
unmanageable. There are always other
powers that will refuse to bend under the
pressure of human desire--unseen, still,
a cold and unfeeling creature which will
carelessly bring to dust a whole world of
convenience that invites millions to forget:
The only ones telling the stories are us.
L O V E / / R O O M
Though I love
Though I am inclined to sin(g)
Though Pontevin’s Spirit still
dances ( inside of me )
Though my words hang above my
head like a halo or
a crane
I am still confined to the three rooms I have made.
There is a room with - out
windows / or / lights
and I can only go in when
t h e d o o r o p e n s
but I can never see what’s inside.
There is a room of
stolen gold that is
locked so nobody else might
steal it/backfromme.
There is a room I
tried to burn away once (
look how it only
dulls the bright of my
eyes / look
how the ashes settle
in the spaces under my eyes
).
there is nothing sad about broken.
each of us is a
patchwork car job
held together with
duct-tape & bailing wire
and the world is an
invisible factory floor
chopping together
chunks of body & heart
with a ricocheting clash
like armies and storm clouds
in the dark. memory might
be lain upon the flesh
as a thin layer of whatever paint;
and the back fender that was
never readjusted, slapped
as if to say
“there is nothing else to do here.”
a portion of some wall rises
letting the light of reality
ooze in like water or sludge
and another broken thing is
released, playing on a limping
tire like a skip and finding
in the junkyard of the soul
the immortal scraps of each other.
you are not dead
you are dying, but
you are not dead
your dying is of the dead
and you’re dead are never dying
still, you are not dead
my dead asked me about the dying
the dead always seem to forget the dying
while the dying always remember the dead
until they are also dead
my dead asked me about the dying
as the dying became a part of the dead
the dead opened and the dying went in
and the dead always seem to forget the dying
i am not dead but I sometimes forget the dying
the dying come to me and remind me of the dead
for the dead exists in all the dying
and the dying is absent of all the dead
the dying sometimes imagine the dead are singing to them
the dying build vessels for the dead
but the dead never inhabit them
the dead are always forgetting the dying
still, you are not dead.
Bionote
Brian Sheffield is a performance poet living and working in New York. He is Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Mad Gleam Press, which publishes POST(blank), a French-American Word Art journal. He has been published internationally through small and independent journals and anthologies.
among the long winding
sutures of the sky.
a few looked up as people do
and saw themselves there
beautiful
with outstretched arms
and grins that demanded
“come over here and
drown with us.”
This small turnout just south of Carmel Highlands
holds more of the Holy than I am able
to capture here. I am sitting in the bed
of my mom’s Ford something, which she selflessly
lends to me any time I come back here
and I am thinking of impulse, foolishness,
and self-exile, though in the scope of
all history, I’m sure this is pretty dumb.
All I know now is that god’s land has been long
occupied, and though the waves crash wildly
against patient rocks and the wind hisses an
eternally drumming note, this place feels
domesticated; it’s displayed like a wicked
petting zoo. A few free things make their home
in the sky, though even they depend on
the will of people to preserve something
fundamental here. Only the deep fault lines
waiting to rise and stretch their stiff bones remain
unmanageable. There are always other
powers that will refuse to bend under the
pressure of human desire--unseen, still,
a cold and unfeeling creature which will
carelessly bring to dust a whole world of
convenience that invites millions to forget:
The only ones telling the stories are us.
L O V E / / R O O M
Though I love
Though I am inclined to sin(g)
Though Pontevin’s Spirit still
dances ( inside of me )
Though my words hang above my
head like a halo or
a crane
I am still confined to the three rooms I have made.
There is a room with - out
windows / or / lights
and I can only go in when
t h e d o o r o p e n s
but I can never see what’s inside.
There is a room of
stolen gold that is
locked so nobody else might
steal it/backfromme.
There is a room I
tried to burn away once (
look how it only
dulls the bright of my
eyes / look
how the ashes settle
in the spaces under my eyes
).
there is nothing sad about broken.
each of us is a
patchwork car job
held together with
duct-tape & bailing wire
and the world is an
invisible factory floor
chopping together
chunks of body & heart
with a ricocheting clash
like armies and storm clouds
in the dark. memory might
be lain upon the flesh
as a thin layer of whatever paint;
and the back fender that was
never readjusted, slapped
as if to say
“there is nothing else to do here.”
a portion of some wall rises
letting the light of reality
ooze in like water or sludge
and another broken thing is
released, playing on a limping
tire like a skip and finding
in the junkyard of the soul
the immortal scraps of each other.
you are not dead
you are dying, but
you are not dead
your dying is of the dead
and you’re dead are never dying
still, you are not dead
my dead asked me about the dying
the dead always seem to forget the dying
while the dying always remember the dead
until they are also dead
my dead asked me about the dying
as the dying became a part of the dead
the dead opened and the dying went in
and the dead always seem to forget the dying
i am not dead but I sometimes forget the dying
the dying come to me and remind me of the dead
for the dead exists in all the dying
and the dying is absent of all the dead
the dying sometimes imagine the dead are singing to them
the dying build vessels for the dead
but the dead never inhabit them
the dead are always forgetting the dying
still, you are not dead.
Bionote
Brian Sheffield is a performance poet living and working in New York. He is Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Mad Gleam Press, which publishes POST(blank), a French-American Word Art journal. He has been published internationally through small and independent journals and anthologies.
3 Poems by Melyssa G. Sprott
Havoc
Dusk blossoming
from lonely seeds,
through gentle moonlight,
wandering roots thrive.
Stone-weighted soul,
withering at the bottom of the river—
the surface looks so calm.
Bloom
You love my petals and my stem,
but can’t see my roots or dark within.
My stretching leaves and twisting vine,
shielding me from what’s outside.
I hide my pain and petals torn—
I’ve been destroyed by my own thorns.
My pallor gives way to deeper hues,
like my thoughts turning to you.
I will stay here, as I will be—
growing wildly, but never free.
The Lot
Each leaf on the tree
every branch a trusted friend
I know this lot well
Every little squirrel
chipper morning companions
frolicking joyful
All of the creatures,
the trees, the leaves, the branches—
I belong right here
Bionote
Melyssa G. Sprott was in born Pittsburgh and lives in Ashtabula Harbor of Northeastern Ohio, United States; she is a writer, artist, and award-winning photographer, using many different means and mediums of self-expression.
Melyssa had an early desire for writing, having begun composing poems and songs and spinning tales from before she was old enough to hold a pencil. Her mother would transcribe her words for her. This young love for poetry would grow into a burning wild fire. Poetry became a survival skill to get her through hardships and a reminder that when the world—or even home, wasn’t a safe place—she could escape to the comfort of her pens and notebooks.
Though known as a “dark poet,” or one whose subjects are generally more morose topics, her works should be viewed as more of a survival guide—if she can make it through the hard times, so can you. Creativity is catharsis.
She has written and published over 10,000 poems so far over the course of her life, in thirteen poetry collections and eleven children’s books in thirteen years, and has contributed to numerous collaborative short horror collections, and countless poetry anthologies.
She spent several years as senior moderator at one of the world’s largest online poetry forums as well as teaching poetry forms. She found it quite a privilege to help instruct others on some of the many forms of poetry, whether they had been novice or experienced poets, English speaking or from outside the United States. Other credits included: Co-Managing Editor and Staff Writer of the VoicesNet.com Literary Journal, Poet-in-Residence, and the VoicesNet Hall of Fame.
Physical art, cutting and manipulating paper and texture is a current favorite activity—especially regarding paper roses, woven paper art, and children’s book illustrating. When acting as photographer, she enjoys capturing flora, fauna, insects, architecture, nature, and anything else that might be of interest at that moment.
She is employed as an Administrative Assistant and the entire Art Department at a small non-profit. She and her family volunteer at a local food pantry every week and very much enjoy helping others.
Dusk blossoming
from lonely seeds,
through gentle moonlight,
wandering roots thrive.
Stone-weighted soul,
withering at the bottom of the river—
the surface looks so calm.
Bloom
You love my petals and my stem,
but can’t see my roots or dark within.
My stretching leaves and twisting vine,
shielding me from what’s outside.
I hide my pain and petals torn—
I’ve been destroyed by my own thorns.
My pallor gives way to deeper hues,
like my thoughts turning to you.
I will stay here, as I will be—
growing wildly, but never free.
The Lot
Each leaf on the tree
every branch a trusted friend
I know this lot well
Every little squirrel
chipper morning companions
frolicking joyful
All of the creatures,
the trees, the leaves, the branches—
I belong right here
Bionote
Melyssa G. Sprott was in born Pittsburgh and lives in Ashtabula Harbor of Northeastern Ohio, United States; she is a writer, artist, and award-winning photographer, using many different means and mediums of self-expression.
Melyssa had an early desire for writing, having begun composing poems and songs and spinning tales from before she was old enough to hold a pencil. Her mother would transcribe her words for her. This young love for poetry would grow into a burning wild fire. Poetry became a survival skill to get her through hardships and a reminder that when the world—or even home, wasn’t a safe place—she could escape to the comfort of her pens and notebooks.
Though known as a “dark poet,” or one whose subjects are generally more morose topics, her works should be viewed as more of a survival guide—if she can make it through the hard times, so can you. Creativity is catharsis.
She has written and published over 10,000 poems so far over the course of her life, in thirteen poetry collections and eleven children’s books in thirteen years, and has contributed to numerous collaborative short horror collections, and countless poetry anthologies.
She spent several years as senior moderator at one of the world’s largest online poetry forums as well as teaching poetry forms. She found it quite a privilege to help instruct others on some of the many forms of poetry, whether they had been novice or experienced poets, English speaking or from outside the United States. Other credits included: Co-Managing Editor and Staff Writer of the VoicesNet.com Literary Journal, Poet-in-Residence, and the VoicesNet Hall of Fame.
Physical art, cutting and manipulating paper and texture is a current favorite activity—especially regarding paper roses, woven paper art, and children’s book illustrating. When acting as photographer, she enjoys capturing flora, fauna, insects, architecture, nature, and anything else that might be of interest at that moment.
She is employed as an Administrative Assistant and the entire Art Department at a small non-profit. She and her family volunteer at a local food pantry every week and very much enjoy helping others.
2 Poems by James K. Beach
UNCIRCUMSCISED NOSTALGIA
"A film from the '60s. Set in the Arctic in an igloo. In the igloo lived an Eskimo. The Eskimo went out to work every day by digging a fresh hole in the ice for catching fish to feed him -- his family of a wife and a toddler. After he caught his per diem of fish he would hike back on snowshoes, to his igloo, to feed himself and his wife and a baby with the daily fish. Before supper, you know the wife, do you know what she did? She took off her furs and warmed his feet under her breasts. Yeah, and that was their life!"
ERASING FOOTPRINTS
My carbon footprint is small because I use public transportation and buy used clothes sometimes. Yet there are those who wanna erase my every imprint on this planet-- even the harmless internet stamps I leave from time to time. My cleaners carefully dust or sponge off any dirt on my prose, pocket those most poetic lines, then claim them as their own... All the while I keep trying to get a word in edgewise. Pity those fools for dirtying their hands! My life is witnessed and known despite the audible shushings and covert collusion of their jealous and or snobby group. My carbon-based life is getting erased character by character (double-meaning intended) whilst the ones with filthy mitts look squeaky clean despite the mess they create in their loud, expensive, materialistic plane of existence; my poor plane is a private jet of the mind next to their public first class bourgeois charter to wherever I've wanted to go or ever been... My footprints are their bane and their glory.
Bionote
JAMES K BEACH opted to overindulge in poetry and lit before discovering that bohemian professions are a bit more challenging and dangerous than they appear... But anyway. Taking risks is a risk, as anyone knows. Since 2002, he's used his Bachelor's in Writing to amass 150+ journalism bylines in 20 venues, be managing editor at AWAREing Press, and do related tasks in publishing. Currently he's working various temp jobs in the USA, looking at graduate schools, and considering the significance of mating young. CREATIVE WRITING CREDITS: Antique Children Journal, Blue Monday Review, Danse Macabre Online, The Exhibit Literary, Jivin' Ladybug Journal, Mad Hatters' Review, Paraphilia Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Smokebox Commentary, Warhol Stars UK, Wood Coin Magazine, and others.
"A film from the '60s. Set in the Arctic in an igloo. In the igloo lived an Eskimo. The Eskimo went out to work every day by digging a fresh hole in the ice for catching fish to feed him -- his family of a wife and a toddler. After he caught his per diem of fish he would hike back on snowshoes, to his igloo, to feed himself and his wife and a baby with the daily fish. Before supper, you know the wife, do you know what she did? She took off her furs and warmed his feet under her breasts. Yeah, and that was their life!"
ERASING FOOTPRINTS
My carbon footprint is small because I use public transportation and buy used clothes sometimes. Yet there are those who wanna erase my every imprint on this planet-- even the harmless internet stamps I leave from time to time. My cleaners carefully dust or sponge off any dirt on my prose, pocket those most poetic lines, then claim them as their own... All the while I keep trying to get a word in edgewise. Pity those fools for dirtying their hands! My life is witnessed and known despite the audible shushings and covert collusion of their jealous and or snobby group. My carbon-based life is getting erased character by character (double-meaning intended) whilst the ones with filthy mitts look squeaky clean despite the mess they create in their loud, expensive, materialistic plane of existence; my poor plane is a private jet of the mind next to their public first class bourgeois charter to wherever I've wanted to go or ever been... My footprints are their bane and their glory.
Bionote
JAMES K BEACH opted to overindulge in poetry and lit before discovering that bohemian professions are a bit more challenging and dangerous than they appear... But anyway. Taking risks is a risk, as anyone knows. Since 2002, he's used his Bachelor's in Writing to amass 150+ journalism bylines in 20 venues, be managing editor at AWAREing Press, and do related tasks in publishing. Currently he's working various temp jobs in the USA, looking at graduate schools, and considering the significance of mating young. CREATIVE WRITING CREDITS: Antique Children Journal, Blue Monday Review, Danse Macabre Online, The Exhibit Literary, Jivin' Ladybug Journal, Mad Hatters' Review, Paraphilia Magazine, Poetry Pacific, Smokebox Commentary, Warhol Stars UK, Wood Coin Magazine, and others.
2 Poems by Milton P. Ehrlich
A SEASONED PROFESSOR GOES FOR A STROLL IN OAKLAND
He’s intrigued
by the many shades of skin,
having published papers
forecasting the future
of a world population
with coffee-colored skin.
He’s well aware of how
institutionalized racism
makes people of color
sometimes want to be
whiter than white,
even with a hue of blue.
He himself prefers light
dark skin, like Lena Horne.
When 2 young women
pass by with his preferred
skin color, he fantasies
about how much they
might want to spend
a night in bed with him.
MISCHEVIOUS BLISS
When she spreads her legs,
he wanders in.
It’s a safe place to call home,
somewhere he hasn’t been
since his life began.
Like the music of his youth,
Pack up your troubles
in your old kit-bag
and smile, smile, smile.
Ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny.
Bionote
Milton P. Ehrlich Ph.D. is an 87- year-old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. He has published many poems in periodicals such as the London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.
He’s intrigued
by the many shades of skin,
having published papers
forecasting the future
of a world population
with coffee-colored skin.
He’s well aware of how
institutionalized racism
makes people of color
sometimes want to be
whiter than white,
even with a hue of blue.
He himself prefers light
dark skin, like Lena Horne.
When 2 young women
pass by with his preferred
skin color, he fantasies
about how much they
might want to spend
a night in bed with him.
MISCHEVIOUS BLISS
When she spreads her legs,
he wanders in.
It’s a safe place to call home,
somewhere he hasn’t been
since his life began.
Like the music of his youth,
Pack up your troubles
in your old kit-bag
and smile, smile, smile.
Ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny.
Bionote
Milton P. Ehrlich Ph.D. is an 87- year-old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. He has published many poems in periodicals such as the London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.
1 Poem by Anthony Watkins
Arbortorturaium vidas migratius
Upon leaving the garden of eden
They moved into cheap mortal
Off sunset
Low slung window
Set against the pavement
Gondola chandeliers
Sailed across the yellowed
Plaster sky
And the lord rested
And said, this is a good day
Bionote
Anthony Watkins has been writing poetry about the south for over 50 years. He lives in South Florida and publishes Better Than Starbucks: betterthanstarbucks.org
Upon leaving the garden of eden
They moved into cheap mortal
Off sunset
Low slung window
Set against the pavement
Gondola chandeliers
Sailed across the yellowed
Plaster sky
And the lord rested
And said, this is a good day
Bionote
Anthony Watkins has been writing poetry about the south for over 50 years. He lives in South Florida and publishes Better Than Starbucks: betterthanstarbucks.org
5 Poems by Truth Thomas
Born in the City of Lakes
Purple made the Richter dance,
drummed through gates
of every ear’s resistance,
triggered high heel boot tsunamis,
heck-a-slammed godly,
the body of all guitars, the only one
to make them come, running —
Purple, crumble-cracked walls
of MTV's segregated keep,
swallowed up record label masters
over masters —
crushed them mofos whole,
in Paisley jaws
of sequined tectonic plates —
this Purple, our Purple.
And God said it was good,
as doves cried happy tears at the news,
and Sheila played timbales into glee,
and Mayte dressed up smiles
to dance upon their graves.
And God said it was funky —
damn funky, the epicenter of this quake:
the sound of a train approaching —
a "Slave" shaking out of his name.
At Motel 6
Bedbugs worship every mattress concert — suckers
for
humping
headboard
drums
for
pillows
playing
moans
for
Every worshiping bedbug, mattress concerts suck —
The Bloody Red Wheelbarrow
(after WCW)
so much is built
upon
a black mother’s
child
pooling blood in
streets
shot by the white
police.
In Chicago
his badge of blues, made Rekia blood fruit
firing
his
homicidal
entitlement
firing
his
acquittal
Ammunition —
firing
his badge of blues, made Rekia bleeding fruit.
What Officer Weekley Said After Shooting
Seven-Year-Old Aiyanna Jones
“It fired. The bullet hit a child, ” like his gun
was
crop
circle
mystery,
was
poltergeist
tantrum
possessed —
was
like a child, his gun — It. The bullet fired. Hit.
[theskinnypoetryjournal@gmail.com]
Purple made the Richter dance,
drummed through gates
of every ear’s resistance,
triggered high heel boot tsunamis,
heck-a-slammed godly,
the body of all guitars, the only one
to make them come, running —
Purple, crumble-cracked walls
of MTV's segregated keep,
swallowed up record label masters
over masters —
crushed them mofos whole,
in Paisley jaws
of sequined tectonic plates —
this Purple, our Purple.
And God said it was good,
as doves cried happy tears at the news,
and Sheila played timbales into glee,
and Mayte dressed up smiles
to dance upon their graves.
And God said it was funky —
damn funky, the epicenter of this quake:
the sound of a train approaching —
a "Slave" shaking out of his name.
At Motel 6
Bedbugs worship every mattress concert — suckers
for
humping
headboard
drums
for
pillows
playing
moans
for
Every worshiping bedbug, mattress concerts suck —
The Bloody Red Wheelbarrow
(after WCW)
so much is built
upon
a black mother’s
child
pooling blood in
streets
shot by the white
police.
In Chicago
his badge of blues, made Rekia blood fruit
firing
his
homicidal
entitlement
firing
his
acquittal
Ammunition —
firing
his badge of blues, made Rekia bleeding fruit.
What Officer Weekley Said After Shooting
Seven-Year-Old Aiyanna Jones
“It fired. The bullet hit a child, ” like his gun
was
crop
circle
mystery,
was
poltergeist
tantrum
possessed —
was
like a child, his gun — It. The bullet fired. Hit.
[theskinnypoetryjournal@gmail.com]