modernpoetryreview

Our Dear Creatures

The morning before the first faith, light is moving pharmacologically;
you choose not to consider the furniture;
the earth gives fever to our enclosure/forgets to breathe— uneasily
the chest that expels the sparkless ruin abandons itself to visible:
we’ve found the aftertaste of condemnation pinioned
around the dripping framework of delicate and venial knives;
of our thoughts replaying a Nehru blazer in velvet paisley blue,
fitted— neck loosely collared like guilty fondness in the backyard—
you discover chicken-wire, the first thoughts of incarceration,
footprints of giants permanently cast. We grope for veins of pleasure,
blindly exchanged like last night’s eventual riches,
protected by small nests slithering across botanical sand rifts
hoping to make sex and crazy babies together but it seems we both doubt
the motility of such sounds/waiting to be plucked like strange florets;
our dear creatures retreat/to later skulk back; don’t mention the position
of earth— foreign lands may sometimes obscure your guerilla vision
removing surest eyes/ I’m a smiling hostage to my own checkered plan,
an event dismissed by the greater requirements of background love;
outside the oppression of lubricant the world runs more loudly,
unwilling to do anything more than arouse without coming any closer:
in a stillness; we struggle to subconsciously/reveal translucent fruit
and optical crown, wearing the ribald face of shredded decency,
the curl and forward bend of your intimate body harshly maintained
by rejecting the wanderings of rogue surface waves running deeply.

Velvet Wolves

Inside you are two loves—

composed of velvet wolves
and predictable visibility
sinking beyond all inclination.

In the bleak museum
hundreds of feet within you

we spend hours leaning
beneath the rockabilly shirts
and mistaken claims

the pictures you refuse to return.

This sounds like a harpsichord—
whatever it is that’s going on between us

silk and gabardine fit perfectly
the duality
of our confused history

until a polar swarm
cuts across our branch-swept path.

Love is jealous of every other creature

real or imagined,
that dares to share its name.

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, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best of the Web nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.

Laika the Space Dog

Alone, she entered an abyss
bejeweled with blue giant suns,
white dwarfs, black holes, quasars
and nebulae like clouds of gnats
in the deep, the clockwork spin
of galactic arms across all dreams
as Laika, the Soviet space dog
was launched into heaven
for the Motherland and reached
the tonnage of night without food
or water and died, memories stirring
of chasing fireflies through sweet grass,
her hot breath lost beyond worlds,
Earth’s scent wisped to her brain
until her last thoughts began:

Look, there’s a darkness
and the blue globe is dimming.
I wish I could take the Earth in my mouth
and run with it across the stars
where my grave is laid in a bed of stars.

Here without hares or foxes
life is bigger and blacker
than I thought it could be, my paws
like wings floating in this gray car
where I’ll die lonelier than snakes
and drown in night’s deep river,
crossing the boundaries of touch
without stone or soil to walk on.

People sent me to the forever
where no flowers open smells,
only glittering specks blossom
and sleeping I dream of dogs
running over glaciers, chewing antelope,
chasing shaggy brown beasts, their tusks
like sharpened moons—I carry
my kind’s history to the end of ends.

Howling towards shadows’ outer layers
my ghost is fleeing to the world.

Dying I will come back, Yes, I’ll taste
tender air and amber sunlight
back from immensity. I’ll climb
the rainbow’s stairs earthward
back to green shoots and streets
cobbled with hardness, back from the timeless
seabed of space to the churning ground. Back.

Poem for Bobby Fischer: 1943-2008

Nothing soothes pain like human touch—Fischer’s reported last words

The universe scrolled on, stars like spurs
in heaven and northbound geese swept
over Reykjavik where he played
C4 for the first move of game six
and where he died bearded and schizoid
as King Lear, an anti-Semite loved
by his Jewish mother. At fourteen
he was the American chess champion,
a high school dropout, and afraid
the government read his thoughts
through tooth fillings. Yet

he stood like a kraken risen
above white whales drumming in the deep,
a god rounding islands with his will
while galaxies burn and wheel
their dreaming work on his grave raging
Icelandic poppies from the earth,
the sun’s wellspring soaking glaciers,
his rooks, knights, kings and bishops dance

in memory, before we, like all
who lived, wither heroically
vulnerable in our last nights
while our tears rust into frost
and the ocean rolls over its deep bed of stones.

About the Poet

Eric Fisher Stone lives in Fort Worth, Texas where heI graduated from Texas Christian University and work at a PetSmart. He is an incoming graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and Environment. His poetry has appeared most recently in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, Eunoia Review, New Mexico Review, Uppagus, Yellow Chair Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and Third Wednesday.

Field of Statice
In July the bright ones come
from the ground.
Stars on rented stalks
cover strings of silver
strewn by elven-folk
who live for but a day.

Tell me any color—
sea lavender,
limonium, marsh-rosemary—
I tell you l believe
in any memory
come from water.

A sky full of foam,
a fire burning
down the hatchery,
that’s the madness of July.
Give me the herb,
the everlasting calyx.

Dry me a bouquet
and quiet the wind.
Let night put out
even the boldest blues,
the most outrageous purples
and dissolute creams.

The Jacarandas
I left them
on boulevards,
veiled figures wresting
purples from the earth,
the breeze stirring
a kind of trouble.

I left them
as I left my youth—
a memory vivid only
in dream. I left
with my fingers
crossed behind
my back, the countryside
dry and golden
or simply brown,
ready to catch fire
with the first strike
of lightning, the cigarette
thrown from an open window.

I left my inks
there as well,
and the pens. If you don’t
believe me there are stories
of other women
equally bereft.

About the Poet

Judith Skillman’s recent book is Kafka’s Shadow, Deerbrook Editions, 2017. Came Home to Winter is forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions later this year. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, FIELD, Cimarron Review, Shenandoah, and in anthologies including Nasty Women Poets, Lost Horse Press. She has been a writer in residence at the Centrum Foundation, and is the recipient of a 2017 Washington Trust GAP grant. Visit www.judithskillman.com, jkpaintings.com, https://www.facebook.com/judith.skillman

Ars Poetica

A kettle boils for lemon tea, its scent
remembered like the chalk
dust of grammar lessons
on a thundery afternoon.
Words steep into endless
weeks of punctuation and run-on
sentences left to boil themselves dry.
But tea is less beverage
than act of literate poise
better kept to the ceremonial.
Lemon dresses it. With a twist,
all is solved in the tongue of ritual.
Do not ask whose tongue.
Do not ask whose ritual.
Do not dilute lemon tea with milk.
Add sweetener, if you like.
It remains lemon tea.

Transparent Language

When you raise your eyes
To the punctuated sky, you see
Letters of all scripts, scattered
In mock collage.

When you shield your eyes
From the glory of the sun, you see
The random spatter of the words
That matter most on your palm.

When your eyes no longer see
Anything but a mist of light,
The magnifier that should illumine
Sentences will brand your hand.

When you wish you had never
Known sight, you will listen
For transparent clauses
But hear the lonely Braille of “I.”

About the Poet
Claudia M. Stanek’s chapbook, Language You Refuse to Learn, was a co-winner of Bright Hill Press’s 2013 annual contest. Her work has appeared in Bitterzoet, Ithaca Lit, Sweet Tree Review, Redactions, and Ruminate, among others. In 2010 Claudia was awarded a Writer’s Residency in Bialystok, Poland, where her work has been translated into Polish. Her poem “Housewife” was selected for a commissioned libretto by Judith Lang Zaimont for the Eastman School of Music’s 2009 Women in Music Festival. She holds an MFA from Bennington College. Claudia lives among the birches in East Rochester, NY with her rescued pets.

The Stationary Point
a                                                                                                                         after reading Psalm 23

There needs to be a magic minimum because at both the end and the beginning there’s an infinite accrual and, God-given, it’s continuously differentiable. My enemies will envy me when I have table manners in their one-horse town, with knives and forks galore, what’s this one for, and manna only of my own.

Blind Spot

Hats do not just happen. Hats are caused by some one or some thing. The uncorrected full moon is a rosary, the rosary the opposite of entropy, the entropy the car of which the clowns do not come out. The muted trumpet plays a one-night, one-note samba, plays it soft. Some optic nerve you have – on endorsing one conceivable interpretation you’re implicitly dismissing all the others.

About the Poet
Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a past century, he attended a one-room country school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. His poems appear in numerous journals, recently in Spillway and Diagram, he’s the winner of the 2016 Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest, and his first book, Fractal Idyll, will be published by After The Pause Press in Fall 2017.

Feathers

Recall that morning
when there were so many feathers
blowing against the window
we weren’t sure for a minute
where we were or what the season was.
At first it seemed like snow,
but no, not in July.

Feathers, we mused. Maybe a firecracker
misfired and scattered a mourning
dove’s nest (dreadful thought).
Feathers, we laughed. Maybe they’d all come loose
from a goose-down pillow hung out to air,
carried away in a gust.

Recall over breakfast of coffee and eggs
it occurred to us that a fox
might have been in the hen house
but then we remembered we no longer
had any chickens in the coop
nor, sadly, children on the swings.
Recall how old we felt.

Recall toward evening we learned the swan
in the pond down the hill was dead.
Whoever aimed had probably not heard
the silver song amid her plummeting wings.
How sadder still than old were
fragile feathers blown against the window.
Why.

Dreams
(A villanelle)

One by one the blue cups broke.
She watched them shatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Her reveries evoke
a lively time of children’s patter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

Outside she listened to spring frogs croak
and raindrops splatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Sometimes when she slept she woke
to hear the loud accusing chatter.
One by one the blue cups broke.

When air was thick enough to choke,
she thought she saw the ashes scatter
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

Cold, she donned a heavier cloak
and told herself it didn’t matter.
One by one the blue cups broke
with little noise, but gone like smoke.

About the Poet
Marsha Foss returned to her home state of Minnesota after 37 years in Maryland.  She has degrees from the University of Minnesota and Johns Hopkins University.  She lives in Saint Paul and enjoys being connected to the area’s amazingly vibrant writing community.  She has had pieces accepted by Glass: Facets of Poetry and Down in the Dirt.

Tending by Succulents

Aloe, sedum, fox tail agave,
painted echeveria
and their baby-plump cheeks,
their water-storing tissues,
a hillside tutorial on thriving
sunbeam-leashed or less.
Hardihood, longevity, reaction, analysis,
I see them coat the fat like rind,
the veins a secret trailing
my lifeline and pinned thorn-point
inward. Drying out to the brink,
pushing blooms through
near loss, I will only think the name.

On a hike I never venture—
rattlers under rock—
spiny glimmer, green satin, pearly
tips, sleek skin, warm center, swollen
flesh strike love pierce my chest
like primal life and make of me
a desert.

The Overlook

Rail-side, people bend
like angle rulers to ogle
the lower-stream fish rush
and its fleet of fins
and its snippets of shimmer
baiting the river to rise
halfway and offer more,

or they scan the landscape
as if it were Atlantis
dug up and displayed
so that some eyes fill and others
fall somber. One fan twitpics it
“not a fiction, but true”
#IHeartNature.

Skyward, flocks of chatter
dive through blue
as a larger bird swallows
its distant kin,

wings, beaks, feet pushing

off canyon like fog

on a panorama settling up.

About the Poet

Martha Distress Quartet Nebraska Resist Kinship Metallurgy Seasing Shank Of Said
By Steven Alvarez, Kris Bigalk, Roger Camp, Ed Coletti, William Doreski, Lou Heron, Alec Hershman, Peter A. Manos, Daniel Lassell, Ian C Smith, and Jonathan Taylor

When we know the most is when we don’t
A melancholic outline of pale hills
This music kills flies.
Pastel cheerleaders ranting
Just another day of outrage, and the fat old white men grin around their cigars, victorious
with swirling birds girding virgin birch, flirting
horizontal frequency & vertical resonance lightening suave tonalities
Violet cries Lot at the edge of the inlet
His rocking arms besotted with pollen
All common side effects, the doctors warn.
Stick it to the moon.

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. 

Strange Shadows in an Empty Room
Wallace Mansion schmoozers not him
Bill sitting alone on green veranda ledge
sniffing aroma of mimosa at gloaming time
can poets really be this way?
too social very painful actually
.                                        friendship or artful rogering?
occasional nod and Bill so solitary hailed with
“are you the official greeter?” Hardly!
he feels he is the officious one.

Bill has his present gloom to not
share with such strangers as these
who profess to be artists of the word
he here solely to honor his friend Joseph,
nothing or no one else Bill enjoying
cooling humid night air carrying magnolia
on a breeze pinwheeling almost-black
leaves on an isolated norfolk pine wordless
chatter from within shearing his night.

Bill grows afraid, were he to discern actual
words he might melt like an evil witch
doused and dissolving in a urine of
insincerity into just one more specter
this evening, this place, this near reality
surreal in its apricot-impactful way
as non-poetic as poetry ever presents
itself night approaching to Bill lost again
this gloaming time light meniscus to the night.

Fruitcake
Hieroglyphs sweat projecting sun
Nothing can bear at all on each
twelve Christmas precision notes
timing rhythmic syncopation

Be they pizzas or Land’s End shirt
goods are delivered by gods and
Martha Stewart knows deities
must remain manifest not to lag

While Russian Christmas poetry
glistens only Pushkin pillars
with great Yeats miles from home nowhere
to go and centers cannot hold

Santa Claus—anticipated—
Will Ferrell and Robinson Jeffers
tower over different fields.
Only God knows how to make trees.

Scones pronounced scon don ginger
berry apricot—miles to go
before we sleep and sleeping dream
of fewer dreams closer closing

About the Poet
Ed Coletti is a poet, painter, fiction writer, and chess player living in Santa Rosa, California.  Ed recently has had work in The Brooklyn Rail, North American Review, Big Bridge, Hawai’i Pacific Review,  Spillway, Lilliput Review, and So It Goes – The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial  Library.   Internet presence includes  his popular blog “No Money In Poetry.” http://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com/. Coletti’s most recent book The Problem With Breathing from Edwin E. Smith Publications (Little Rock) was published during June 2015.

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.