modernpoetryreview

Cutting Edge
Note: This poem is written in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin.
Dere’s wun invisible razor
slashing through da ages

forevah sharp
and constantly in motion.

It wuz always moa
den just wun passing whimsy.

It wuz wun ascendance
from biological servitude.

Da progression has been moving along

evah since da big bang of da mind
wen explode into da brain.

Take wun look
at all da accumulated knowledge to inherit

in da awakened realm of homo sapiens.

While da earth spins on its axis
and da universe keeps expanding

it’s amazing to realize
dat evolution is wat you make of it.

Units of culture
and replicated means

passed along in wun baton
can now double as wun scepter.

King of da apes
is presently emperor of da solar system

and to tink
it started somewheah back wen

aftah our simian ancestors
left da safety of da trees.

Wit one slice into da darkness
all da neurons wen flash

and consciousness wen advance itself
to set da world on da cutting edge.

About the Poet
Joe Balaz writes in Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai’i Creole English) and in American-English. He edited Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.  Some of his recent Pidgin writing has appeared in Otoliths, Snorkel, Juked, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and Revolution John, among others.  Balaz is an avid supporter of Hawaiian Islands Pidgin writing in the expanding context of World Literature.  He presently lives in Ohio.

Candlelight is a Form of Good-bye
This is my caged bird, that’s roasting night sounds,
measuring secrets. In the meadow, a wicker-haired

godmother waits with clear eyes, taking slugs of the
overripe darkness. We dive headfirst into a steel

canyon, distend to a sky-worn quilt. Prince watches
from his balcony; wants to say forever, or till I

break the spell.  But lies rattle on branches, erase my
candlelight. At the birthplace of our de-creation, the
sky leathers clay furrows.

I offer cinnamon thrushes. He already knows. Memories,
just as hearts, became ungenerous with time.

About the Poet
A Prundaru is a visual artist, writer and translator, who lives a stone’s throw away from the birthplace of milk chocolate. Her work is forthcoming in Litro Magazine, 3 AM Magazine and Rattle. She has a photo blog at https://socksinflipflops.wordpress.com/.

The Forgiven
It must be a distant place,
beneath notice, far beneath
the zone where the despised
triumph by despising.
And where the masters, who must have
something of everything and believe
that victims are admired,
proclaim themselves in some way victimized.
They never notice us
and therefore do not envy. There is
an outside, but so compromised
by what’s within, drafty and damp,
that even when we can we seldom
go out into its endless curtailment.
Meals are our seasons, and the expressions
of those who ladle them,
neither kind nor interested nor hostile,
are what we have of nature apart from time.
We eat, and meditate
on what asparagus gave up for us,
the community of soup,
the rumors borne by even the weakest
coffee; then linger
until we’re told to go, and are equally
satisfied with leisure or the command.
There’s a room with books and games,
and an old broken medium whose green-
grey screen shows all we need to see.
Pieces are lost, the cards
have passed through many hands;
the books as is their habit came from elsewhere,
and move too fast, so that no one can catch them
or if we do we let them go.
Sometimes sun breaks through the frayed
curtains or bars. Then on the yellowed
paper in every drawer, somebody writes
for hours, mumbling, bringing
pen to lips, then crumples what was written,
which is what it was for. And sometimes, two
pair off. It’s always obvious,
and we, as subtly, applaud them for it.
When they don’t show up for dinner, breakfast, tea,
we discuss the efficacy
of love. It offers
a world beyond the world beyond our own,
escape, a motive for escape,
a fantasy of the first person plural.
Deliberating which, we fall
silent as dreaming
functionaries in gaudy white
pass through. For they themselves are dreams,
and normally don’t bother us.
But “we” is the most sacred word,
even when casually, unworthily
invoked in kingdoms of the I,
or whispered to oneself behind a wall.

V-Letter
Badiou compels agreement
when he says that the epic
corresponds to the age of the warrior
(king, feudal thug)
while lyric is the art of the soldier,
whose allegiance must be bought, and bought in bulk.
Whatever I wrote, I wrote
on a bunk in a troopship
amid the smell of feet
awaiting a torpedo.
Whoever I was, the “I”
in every other line
was mostly a matter of luck.
And you, who I hoped would read
the words found beside me
in trench or bunker
(they would be handed to you like a flag)
were always the one real thing.

About the Poet
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness, both published by Story Line Press, and the author of a collection of shorter poems, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015). He has appeared in Hudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Die Gazette (Munich), The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Representations, Magma(UK), Iota (UK), Bateau, Main Street Rag, Fulcrum, etc.  His poems have appeared online in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Diagram, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Occupoetry, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Thunderdome, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, etc. He is currently adjunct professor of creative writing at George Washington University.

Encaustic Sun
You were told it threw off threads
of flame—coronas—told it was
a roiling star, a ripe orange set to rise.
That its combustion, like your youth,
would never end.

You were shown how, at its heart,
a great store of fusion lay untouched,
the furnace of forever.
A summer’s worth of flies,
blackened swaths burning beside freeways.

Spikes of cadmium yellow,
and plates thrown to break
their china finish. Each new day
like the last, vain for an hour
beneath its fog and frost.

Place of ghosts, of the stick-hands
witches wear when they pinch
to punish children.
Small pane of glassed-in combustibles,
tar-faced grid of fir behind fir behind fir.

Where were you asked to stand
in the picture of your life?
What pose had you to hold?
Who didn’t want to?
Which one had to press a button in order to shine?

Enchanté, you said, on meeting this star
and the sun worked harder
to make you pretty.
Until the earth grew old in its orbit,
years like shells imploding.

Artillery the dirge-song,
a cold-hardened ground
where the shy star stays close
to the horizon, well-behaved
as any mercenary.

About the Poet
Judith Skillman’s new book is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. The author of fifteen collections of poetry, her work has appeared in J Journal, Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Poetry, and other journals. Awards include grants from the Academy of American Poets and Washington State Arts Commission. Skillman taught in the field of humanities for twenty-five years, and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French. Currently she works on manuscript review. Visitwww.judithskillman.com

Small Pond
Look through the window.
Trees have a singular purpose
and it’s not to be beautiful
or to shed leaves, like tears,

into the pond (which knows many forms)
once more lapping against its muddy borders,
once more housing hearts, heartbeats,
heart leaks.

Yesterday, a month ago, two seasons ago, a year ago,
six-hundred full moons ago, eons ago, star-births ago,
now minus X ago—it was a solid as cinder
and the children were playing hockey—
falling, fighting, learning physical laws.
A nose bled freely onto the ice;
the reeds shivered and bowed.

Nothing is temporary; everything is forever.
Though we must forgive ourselves
for our misinterpretation of time.

At some point along liquid infinity,
our atomized hearts will coalesce again
to pass along one last throbbing missive:

submit sooner—sublimate with grace

and then break apart once more
scattering their quarks
out to the milky perimeter,
the ineffable border of the stretching plane

where they will glide across the black gulf
like pucks slapped towards the net.

About the Poet
Amir A. Tarr is completing his M.D. at University of Miami with a focus on psychiatry and gender identity. He received an M.S. in bioethics from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a B.S. in psychology from UW-Madison. His poetry and fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, One Throne Magazine, Rust+Moth, The NewerYork, and elsewhere. His work in the field of medical humanities has been featured in the The American Journal of Psychiatry, Academic Psychiatry, Medical Encounter, Neurology, Psychoanalytical Perspectives, The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and JGIM.

Letter from Amsterdam
As I write, three boys are playing poker
in the corner with a deck of nudie cards.
The naked women shush over each other
as they’re shuffled, whisper secrets

from other lives. Can you imagine? Playing
cards when the real thing is out on the canals,
beckoning for their attention, their wallets
and bulges. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so

crude. Is that why my letters return unopened?
The prostitutes in the Red Light District
call out to me when I walk in the morning,
but I’ve been good. They swat at the glass

like manatees at the aquarium. You told me
once that sailors mistook those for mermaids
long ago. I think that happens here, too,
when night falls. Beggars, so far, leave me

alone. Maybe they sense that I am broken,
like them. You wouldn’t like me saying that,
I know. Yesterday, I opened the hostel door
and a cat sauntered in as if it had a bed

reserved. It smelled of burnt lemon
rinds and blood and I thought about the night
you perfumed yourself for me. The owner’s
daughter shrieked and chased it with a knife

that cut the air in front of me into thin ribbons, all
the way from the kitchen. I know even a single flea
could be the end for them, but I wish I could stop
thinking about what happened next. That whole night,

a German fellow on mushrooms kept asking
me if I saw colors and faces in my dreams.
Then, without pause, he asked if I dreamt at all.
He drove me crazy with his questions

and fractured English so I read my braille
mathematics textbook for six hours, to anchor
myself in its numbers. I was on mushrooms, too.
I wasn’t going to tell you that, at first.

I was going to pretend that this trip was all
about tulips, Van Gogh Museum audio tours,
and wooden shoes. You would have believed me, too,
or acted like it, at least. But I’m tired of that.

I’m composing this letter to you in my mind
because all my notebooks have been stolen
from my bunk. It doesn’t matter. This is the only way
I can reach you anymore, anyway.

About the Poet
Ross Losapio is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served as Lead Associate Editor for Blackbird. His poetry appears in Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the minnesota review, The Emerson Review, and elsewhere.

Prosthetic
Overhead, the night geese search
the frozen surface

.              In lotus pose, marble Buddha,
.              left hand resting palm up in his lap,

below. A woman struggles
to remind herself

.              his right hand reaches downward,
.              fingers chipped off by vandals.

it could be
so much worse.

.              He sits intending
.              to touch the earth and call it to witness

Be mindful,
practice detachment,

.              in a winter garden overgrown with ivy.
.              As geese overhead continue

she struggles to remind herself—
unhooking her bra,

.              to seek, he can never
.              reach the ground.

she sets her new breast
on the nightstand.

Song of the Spores
Tabernacled deep within the forest, cloistered
in fern, I listen while two wrens
lob ontological proofs across the no-man’s land.

Loam is Lord

A half-hearted drizzle in half-light plays
patty-cake with maple leaves in rhythms
encrypting the oracle of chlorophyll.

Loam is Lord

The pond proclaims an epiphany—baby
wood ducks—no one explains why the wind riles
its perfect surface, rekindling our addiction to mirrors.

Loam is Lord

The trail serpentines through old growth fir, and the State
plantation, trunks ribbon-tied with empirical questions,
tagged graffiti orange, like boxcars.

Loam is Lord

I dare not speak the Latin name of the poseur,
the red columbine, pretending—“hey, look at me,
I hang like a Tang dynasty lamp.”

Loam is Lord

Yea, though I find no taste to snowmelt filtered
through volcanic rock, I still wonder who
first tickled the spores on the private underside of a fern.

Loam is Lord

About the Poet
David Hargreaves is a poet/linguist living in Oregon. Most recently, he translated a collection of poems, “The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets,” by Nepal Bhasa poet Durga Lal Shrestha, which was published in Kathmandu in the fall of 2014.

There Dewy Driven Zero Medium Lacuna Fantasy
by Charles Bane Jr, DeMisty D. Bellinger, Alicia Hoffman, Tom Holmes, Allan Kaplan, John Lowther and Christina Murphy

Is no nothing as I sleep inside your soul.
Sticky neck, nuzzle closer, get stickier still
I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.
Time, within the white shadows floating, like delicate smoke
and in the space between
between the patio and the oak, her grief bled into a field of red poppies.
Is there an artificial sweetener that won’t damage any internal organs?

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. 

Souldrifting
Into a dry lakebed of black salt, into the dead oasis,
denuded husk, crest of dune, sand-vortex and grit,
I came to you from another place, an aged denizen, almost next door—
skin-worn and foot-fatigued, broken-hinged and hungry,
bent-backed, bow-legged, flat-footed, tired,
the standard of your presence rebuffing grains thrown by wind.
Deja-vu trickery: we’ve been here, heard that; seen this before.
I want to remember the only time this was real, a tangible togetherness,
sometimes vulture-eyed, sometimes raspy-voiced,
my snake-fangs and coyote bones sinking in a hazy ravine
just like the people of yesterday who were also me.
Moon-sputtering gloss in arid radiance, fingers curled to fist,
neither fully dead nor fully still alive,
I who am and will never be,
a quietness of lung-taking, releasing blue puffs to the natural beyond
like voices falling through to an openness of space,
hands touching spirit-vistas and the walls of eternity,
as you anticipate, soon to sleep in this place at last,
the place that holds the taproot of my life,
without me or without you and only certain-to-be.
There is no doubt you will remember how you found me here,
existing in the fear-of-death which is death;
driest reptile-skin and rattle-tail disappearing,
feet bound in gauze and linen, mouth grimaced open,
depleted essence letting me drift from that world to this,
the I who was certain would not die, the necessary birth, but no different;
so turn away from my scars and weary lines,
the woebegone hair, the lizard-tongue rough of my face,
failing eyes, bad knees, deafened ears, weakened heart;
knowing the soul’s simplicity makes a sacrament of everything else.

About the Poet
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. Writing for six years, his work has appeared in more than a thousand publications including The Louisiana Review, Bluestem, Emrys Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Roanoke Review, The Red Cedar Review and Crannog. He has poems forthcoming in The William and Mary Review, Sugar House Review, Plainsongs, Free State Review and Milkfist.

Canyon
Pop Art happened mostly in Manhattan.
A dirty hanging pillow swings from string
& holds a plum pit in its many mouths.
Nightingale sings from the lawn. Carroway
seeds in the green harbor light, the way
an eagle applies paint: with his beak
until he finishes art school, then he covers
himself in cyphers & flops around. Dig
tonality under the museum. Like the re-
contextualization of ephemera. Like the re-
configuration of magicians with pigeons
in their coat pockets. Everyone sweating
in the painting of a red candle turning blue.

About the Poet
Jim Davis is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in Wisconsin Review, Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Contemporary American Voices, among many others. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he reads for TriQuarterly and edits North Chicago Review.