modernpoetryreview

Sunset Scumbles the Ochre

Kayak’s Hull with Blush,

as we sit on the dock, sipping

Burgundy from clear plastic cups.

Love is so subjective anyway,

like shadows on the dazzling azure sea.

In fact life can look peachy one day

and be blood red fury the next.

To me a broken quahog is beautiful.

She likes seashells perfectly scalloped

and bone dry. I am attracted to

the colors of the mallard, its neck

sheened purple and green.

She stays clear of that palette.

Color is just a thought.

Even the loyalty of a Golden

Retriever is, by nature, blind.

About the Poet
Grey Held  is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing.  His  first book, Two-Star General, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press. His second book, Spilled Milk, was published by WordPress.

Meditation on Three Spaces
He is always looking out the peephole
at the hallway’s off-white walls and
hoping no one will be out there.
But at the same time, he is lonely,
the sameness—that moment,
a dead cat in a parking lot—
is like nothing left to understand,
a lump of coal bathed in the moon.
Someone could be coming
up the stairs and he would not know
until his head, then his chest and arms,
and then his legs stepped up to the landing,
and that would be the beginning.
The space between them then would be
denser than the sky that hangs
thin without reason to the earth,
as if it could be peeled like a rind
to get at the wet truth underneath.
The lost cosmonauts still float
into the giant pupil of space,
and must have died realizing that
they were only inside the things they saw,
not the things that mattered. They
will drift for a billion years of nowhere,
and even they will cease to be,
as on earth, all traces erased,
before and after photos showing
they were clearly never there.
Maybe no other place exists but
the woman who let him spread her out
like a canvas stretched beneath him.
Years ago, he thinks. He wanted her
to make something of him, as well,
an image, or a self, or an other,
even a blank page waiting for words,
so many words that he would not know
one from another or where one ended
and another began. The world is
an agony of waiting rooms, a promise
of stitches, and a healing now, a healing
this time, but not every time, so he knows
something is coming. A parking lot sits
wrapped in wire outside his window,
the wisp of oxygen like blood
flowing beneath his pear skin.
Footsteps. The punched gut of waiting.
He thinks, I am small now, a painting
of pinpricks seen from across the room.

An Honesty
Be monogamous with a paper doll,
buy a pair of ice skates, or build
a firefly’s home in a mason jar,
and you will see how possible
the world unmakes us. Always
her other cutout selves will yearn
to tear away, the skates will blade
each other to ribbons, and if
you forget to poke holes in the lid
the fires will all extinguish. You
are barely here, and what else
could she do? Days fall in shambles
of sameness, and the cotton candy is
spun with spiders. As if someone
wants you falling all over yourself,
leaving a trail of blood on the ice.
You are no dynamite lover, for sure,
and what you capture won’t last
unless you smash the jar. If these
are your first best intentions, you
might try gluing that jar back together,
cutting the strip of connective paper,
applying bandaids. Whatever you decide
will be wrong in most situations, and this
is all as useful to you as a map
of Constantinople. Smile and consider
the past that wasn’t what you wanted,
the present that wobbles at the touch
of your hand, the future that might
never come. The path that was chosen
by people you’ve never met. Petroleum
and pesticides, plastics and wars.
All you have is the firefly you made
yourself let go. That counts, right?

About the Poet
Todd Heldt’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Anti-, and many others. His first book of poetry, Card Tricks for the Starving, was widely ignored in 2009, and he has a novel available for your kindle here: goo.gl/luWVq. His first feature length film, Critical Nexus, was an official selection to the San Diego Black Film Festival in 2014. Todd was recently nominated to not win a Pushcart Prize again this year. He lives in Chicago with my wife and sons, and mostly feel ok.

My Antithesis

I. The Beachcomber

Still unfit to be tied, I’m down at the shoreline
gloating over my escape from fossilization.
abalone images, open these rills;
I’m diving to reach your matrices.

Undercurrents roll shells; hand-to-foot shapes emerge.
mollusk tracks, three toe holes bore through the shell,
one pushes against the shell for leverage.
I will need this design.

Stretched on my brain, Penfield homunculus
circumstances move us forward, leaning, flexed
to grasp sandy gems, connect ideas to the hand.
Through my gills I hear the call for familiar form.
Can’t their minds swim in quantum physics,
like Shakespeare’s vision of this “baseless fabric”?

Three-cornered stones spin over the lake.
I follow, entering opaque pockets stuffed in the clouds.

I still live to ride in those shadowy nests:
a tree-climbing fish’s dream.
Being macropterous has never been easy,
but it has its advantages.

Others may judge this scene as merely a trompe l’oeils.
No matter; so they can’t find the rungs.
What if the Universe is like a hologram?
Let go of small ideas about information density;
look past the images flickering on the wall of the cave.

II. The Push

Is this too slant for you? How far have you climbed?
Level, fake turf is easy for surefooted, psuedo-sciolistic,
football-catching somebodies riding “scholar”-ships,
fat deals, never experiencing violet waves of vertigo
– breathless confinement – or the cornea shock
of being delivered up too soon in the early mind.

III.  The Core Refitted, the Ocean its new shell
(noli me tangeré)

Always the call for closure; you’ll sell more books.
Yet these vespers; and who listens to what is not spoken?
There is a form I see, strange to share with anyone, yet

I’m not ashamed anymore of this stony-hearted squid
that keeps washing up at the end of my beach in my dream.
Its tenticles keep growing back, reaching the velate core,
squeezing out the phrase that betrays my profession.

Just before walking on the shore I hear the blasphemy
announced like a taboo incantation, in spite of my
pressed suit, GPA servitude, vertical profile,
–an incriminating record of my own voice:

“I feel most at home with wordless things.”

About the Poet
Lloyd Milburn has been teaching composition and creative writing for over fifteen years in the Rochester, New York area. He earned an MA in English after completing a creative writing thesis with William Heyen’s advisement. In addition to having work published in Permafrost, Willow Review, Ithaca Lit, The Sandy River Review, and Talking River Review, he is currently nearing completion of his first two books of poetry. His lifelong love for music and a personal interest in synesthesia inform his writing and music.

The Thunderstorm Thief’s Weekend Assessment
Infrastructure: minor
security breach. No assistance
needed. Visitors and babies
obscured by portable cover.
Potted ferns—the perfect place
to hide duffle bag. Three
flashes will alert the sky
to intrusion. Blankets
will be necessary to prevent
scarring. Conclusion:
in and out before dinner.

Skittles and Hollow Points
The appetite of a courtroom
shakes
.           like a late-
night television
.                          host.
An opening
monologue renders the moon
not guilty,
and our eyes are healed.
.       Our minds,
.                               transmitted
to oblivion, focus
on a bad joke about a gray hoodie.
We close
.              like little red,
our chests heavy
with scarlet.  We look candy-
coated and start to wonder what
letter will cross the screen

when we’re gone.

About the Poet
A.J. Huffman has published twelve full-length poetry collections, thirteen solo poetry chapbooks and one joint poetry chapbook through various small presses.  Her most recent releases, Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink), A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press), and Familiar Illusions (Flutter Press) are now available from their respective publishers.  She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2500 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, The Bookends Review, Bone Orchard, Corvus Review, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

My Boredom With Film

Dither at the fairgrounds, where black-faced clowns
used to slide away from broncs flopping past,

and the ice rink skidded with homemade skates
so that the children could grow to be as nostalgic.

The photographers could come back in and look
at what does not suit a proper frame, like a cow

dressed as a bull, and the losers winning the race
before the trumpets play a military tune like blasts

from dynamite off the top of a coal-rich mountain,
which becomes a ski-resort, then a film set today

as I sit directing from a plane zipping back and forth
to scout the site for the classic American western

where all the nations divorce the two coasts when
these meteors and diseases start falling like ashes

happening in a far eastern funeral or a wiccan bonfire,
and the crescendo of the piece is lauded by critics,

but I pound my chest and cry blood at simple vision
instead of human complexity in my work, so pop,

but unnerving to the sensitive who revolt at prints
and galleys and merchandise, too. The crowd and

the very smart just shout and brag. A snoozer hit.
Here comes a smarmy sidekick to give the work

more depth than the script imagines, and a glimpse
at what the history drew from, then drew away from.

 

About the Poet
J.S. Clark was born in 1979. His writing has appeared in brickplight, Slink Chunk Press, News From Nowhere, Section 8 Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, USA.

Las Floridas

right now I’m
kinda messed                                       stairs
.               below                           moon
.               up                    us swimming in ourselves         shells               O
me now open
..                                                                                       all day
I hear here words & wind                              smooth
.                                                           sure
air full                                                             pure

let’s break                                           alas
call for best of both sides                                 jive
.               .                imagine the lives lied & living
lived
.                                                         did
.              lied                  yeah                   know it well

.   swallowed multifarious meanings                                            blurred

.  melt a ring                  dear     stars                               April

.                 sun shone down on us all today

.                                                                                    baby

.                 sure shone down                                     sure     pure

 

you sd I ain’t no poet yo soy un libertine

 

About the Poet
Steven Alvarez is the author of the novels in verse The Pocho Codex (2011) and The Xicano Genome (2013), both published by Editorial Paroxismo. He has also authored two chapbooks, Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus (2014, winner of the Seven Kitchens Press Rane Arroyo Poetry Prize) and Un/documented, Kentucky (2016, winner of the Rusty Toque Chapbook Prize). His work has appeared in the Best Experimental Writing (BAX), Berkeley Poetry Review, The Drunken Boat, Fence, Huizache, and Waxwing.

Bladders Eponymous Leave Bouquet Kaleidoscopic Waterlight Upstaging
By Sara Backer, Hayden Bunker, Timothy Carter, Joanne M Clarkson, Timothy Dodd, Gary Heath, James Jackson, and Kailey Tedesco

A fresh sag sits across his instruments
The tree god lost many leaves laughing.
The stars drowned me in their swarming
Some tell the tree to lift its roots
The wedding was a breeze.
Turning words shift the rose window
& her pale thighs splintered the waterlight clean from the white faucet
(the question returns in the form of a squirrel)

Note: This is a different version of an exquisite corpse with no restrictions. Each poet contributed a word for the title and a line for the poem. Everything will be organized according to whoever responded first. The resulting poem can be a little chaotic, since each poet does not know what has been written or what will be written. 

Diabolus Ex Machina

God waits in the theater rafters
in white robes, and straps
that wrap his torso to a crane’s hook
that will lower him onto the stage
at the cue of a trumpet. His drop-in speech
is the quick save for his writer’s poor plot,
for only a god can make
the ludicrous convincing.

The devil lounges below the floorboards,
listening to footsteps crisscross above his head.
He knows each move and line: the understudy
for every actor. He waits by the trap door
to catch the one who falls into his lap, to pamper
him with wealth and petty power, ply him
with cognac, and then assume his role on stage.

About the Poet
Sara Backer won the 2015 Turtle Island Poetry Award for her chapbook Bicycle Lotus. Recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle, The Pedestal Magazine, So to Speak, Marathon Literary Review, Silver Blade, and Strange Horizons. Follow her on Twitter @BackerSara or sarabacker.com.

Permafrost
Greyhound wheels turn through the bleak grey of a winter rainstorm cracking the Midwestern
sky – we twist, fly, turn jagged.  Outside our windows the world stretches gaunt, tight-lipped and
shattering quiet like lying in bed and trying to think of all of the right things to say this time —
discovering our empty mouths.   Come here. Plant your roots in my stomach and love can grow
like a vine through us both before we say goodbye, say I’ll see you again when I’m hunger pangs
in a bloated stomach and you’re made out of faded eyes and all our missed memories, saying
love is a vine but my stomach is sick and I won’t last another winter without something to keep
me full. Your mouth is the gaping of an empty cave, bone deep cold, and winter is killing me, is
crushing me under your heel. So goodbye everything between the gulf of your body and mine –
maybe there’s heat beneath but we have to find it, to dig in, to claw through permafrost where
even acid can’t burn to it. We have to get down deep enough, and there it will be, safe, hidden
like the seed of everything we’re wrapped up in if you peel away enough layers, if you’re willing
to bleed knuckles against ice, to dig in deep enough.

About the Poet
Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is currently a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. Her work has appeared in various journals including Siren, Gravel, Proximity, andNimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and is forthcoming in several other publications.   

Pool of Narcissus

Hypatia, we came onto the constellation of our child,
proclaiming: Alas! the spirit goes, somehow knowing it to be true.
Turning back dials until day went black,
turning back dials until our fear-sores pussed,
turning back dials until fate arrived to us.
Christians broke your devices for watching the suns,
death gassing under their robes (like Eliot’s yellow fog, I think).
Butter knives, ceramic shards—
I saw them drag you by your hair to the plaza,
vivisect & pyre your limbs on a cross.

I barely know you anymore, you had said to me,
Barely remember who we once were.
There was pain, I recall, and something of a tribunal.
Will love be again? Will our love be again?
On the stand you labored
like a wet-tusked walrus sucking its mustaches.
Love is cruelty—please don’t get me wrong—
cruel that it fosters the disfigurement of vanity.

.               My sister came then to find me seized at my mirror,
.               clutched me back from the dark,
.               back out of the frying pool of Narcissus.
.               (Is he still looking? Has he yet risen?)
.               Turns out there was no you, Hypatia, just me and my reflection.
.               I swear I saw you peering back, eyes welled white with tears.

About the Poet
Hayden Bunker previously studied poetry and creative writing at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT and Hellenic International Studies in the Arts in Paros, Greece. He has a background in youth and community theater, and is currently pursuing a B.A. in English Literature at Reed College in Portland, OR.