modernpoetryreview

International Color Chart

“Tahitian Sunset,” The Musee d’Orsay the morning after the Millennium
When the doors opened there was no line of tourists waiting,
the same was true of the stairs inside. An empty room of
Renoirs opened on an empty room of Van Goghs opening
on an empty room of Monets. The room of Gauguins held
two guards playing hide and seek. Who says French civil
servants are rule bound, having no sense of humor?

“Bristle Grass,” Lodi Gardens, Delhi
According to the sign on the grounds of the garden
Lawns are maintained by the Archeological Survey of India.
In the background, a cow harnessed to an industrial
green lawn mower pulled it leisurely across the vista
while a sister cow followed, chewing contentedly from
the trail of clippings.

“Dove Beige,” Bharatpur National Park, India
Our young guide led us through the forest to the home
of the holy one, a shallow cave, where we found the man
draped on his bed, a doe and fawn at his feet. An orphan
that had adopted the man, this fawn now grown with a child
of her own, this scene as ordinary as the birds nesting unmolested
in the electrical wires in the hallway of our hotel back in Agra.

“Million Dollar Red,” Reference Desk, Santa Ana Public Library, California
She approached with girlish reserve, a professional
redhead soliciting information about penal code
647. Reaching for the tome, her coat spread, the
trademark thigh high boots and velvet shorts unveiled,
while her body huddled over the statues, engaged
in an act to coax intercourse from print.

About the Poet
Roger Camp lives in Seal Beach, CA where he gardens, walks the pier, plays blues piano and spends afternoons with his pal, Harry, over drinks at Nick’s on 2^nd. His work has appeared in the North American Review, Pank, Southern Poetry Review and is forthcoming in the Tampa Review and Gargoyle.

This morning, the park

full of trilling bright bluebirds
empty of people;
cerulean brushstrokes flit
from tree to tree, sixteenth-notes
blooming on a staff
of a dewy cast iron fence;
silence like a gate
ajar, waiting for warm wind
to blow open shade to day.

Missing

Long gone belonging, a silver earring, loop
hooked around itself, fashioned after its twin,
or maybe before – longing so long it curved
to meet itself so the longing would stop, or be
infinite, dispersed throughout itself like blood
inside the fascia of a wire, electricity feeding
itself instead of sparking at either end.

To miss is to long too long, unbent, uncurving,
to miss is to follow the road and not stop
to consider the ocean, the dome of the sky.
To miss is to lose oneself, like a waterfall
forgets how to fall in the winter, silvered
into a mimicry of itself, a frozen forgetfulness.

About the Poet
Kris Bigalk is the author of the poetry collection, “Repeat the Flesh in Numbers” (NYQ Books).  Her work has recently appeared in the anthologies It Starts With Hope, Down to the Dark River, and The Liberal Media Made Me Do It.  She directs the creative writing program at Normandale Community College in Minnesota.

Energy Pulsating on Shelves
Who will relive lives in my hundreds of books
when I have read my last chapter, final stanza;
narrators, characters, voices major and minor,
luckless, dwelling in mouldering hotels,
itinerants jumping freights, thin coat collars up,
staring through sparks at spectres of their past?
What about those, wild blooms pressed to breasts,
swept by desire after fleeing a tainted liaison,
when I am no longer around to cherish them?
Minimalists’ economy hovers,
suggestiveness deadly,
chance, sudden swerves producing electric tension,
my bookmark kept waiting, waiting again
until I discover why characters do the things they do.
Won’t somebody see headlights pierce a quiet street,
win at the track, regret by a grave, wear a uniform,
try to light a trembling fire in an arctic waste,
play a guitar plugged into feedback frenzy,
swear pacts, fail, embark on fateful journeys,
bump into unimagined strangers, changed forever?

Sorrowing
Out early striding fast, you deviate on a whim to follow
a previously overlooked sign to the boardwalk
fording the lake’s eastern arm, low sun already bright.
No way back now, mindset to hew to this vast wetland
rippling for miles of a higgledy circular hike,
elegant pelicans’ grace, a calligraphy of swans,
silent companions as etched hatred in the Middle East
fades until realisation that no sight nor sound
of another has pierced your consciousness for hours,
feet, hip, sore, sore, slower now, sun behind you
creating reed, leaf-dapple, mind no nearer to solving
the riddle of why the future must be unknown,
how we scheme, only to review life with astonishment.
Then at last the old Swing Bridge, closed to traffic,
a wedge-tailed circling eagle-eyed overhead,
a vaguely familiar young man jogging toward you,
his mind a welter of ideas, plans, destinations ahead.

About the Poet
Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in , Australian Poetry Journal,  Cream City Review, New Contrast, Poetry Salzburg Review,  The Stony Thursday Book, Two-Thirds North, & Westerly.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He lives in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, Australia.

If only Ken Burns

could get his hands on this footage. Telemachus,
aged eight years, already thickening, athletic
but still uncertain in his movements. The big neighborhood
ballgame against the brutes who would become
known forever as the suitors. Third inning,
towering popup to left. T. calls for it
the whole way, but Odysseus snares it barehanded
just inches above the boy’s outstretched glove.
Not hard to see how such a move might confirm,
I don’t really trust you, son.  A boy can spit
into the dirt for comfort, rub at it with his cleated sandal,
but these are the moments that burrow deep,
that fester, only to surface once the boy becomes
a man, armed with a ninety-plus per hour sinker
that dives like a trained falcon — a gift honed alone
chucking rocks against rocky hillsides during long
and fatherless summers beneath the white Ithacan sun.
Odysseus. Broken king. PTSD. Bone-heavy, slower now
of wit and reflex, already an hour or two deep
into his cups. Does he understand his son’s words
carry more of a threat than an entreaty?
In his hands the prince carries two weather-beaten
lumps of broken cow-leather. Hey, Pops, he says,
what say you and me have a quick game of catch?
And holds the gloves out, not quite in offering.

About the Poet
Justin Hamm is the author of a full-length collection of poems, “Lessons in Ruin,” and two poetry chapbooks. His poetry has been awarded the Stanley Hanks Prize from the St. Louis Poetry Center and has appeared in Nimrod, Sugar House Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and New Poetry from the Midwest.

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.   

Two Views of the Sky
Motors churn for the hillside. Outside
the glass           up        sky floods, rolls
on cirrus flicks, feathered souls, new
wave keyboard notes—enough clarity
.           to tip it back in a blue
.           bottle, enough stretch
.           to sprint the next care.
.           Enough azure to rise.

I know not the different types of clouds, still,
to think what’s given me. Is depth in my eyes
to see what she prepares? And the human catch,

to look for elsewhere desire—the other side, now
bleeding streaks in purple          and break-light red.
You could grab your own running blood and pour
it in a glass                    taste the particles running
the heavens. This is not for display. This is home.

I turn. She creeps along the aisle with cane, between
two skies, down the steps. Off the bus, into the street,
words lisped about cans on the ground, and the fixx.

About the Poet
Timothy B. Dodd is from Mink Shoals, WV.  His poetry has appeared in The Roanoke Review, William & Mary Review, Big River Poetry Review, Crannog, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere.  He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Texas El Paso.