modernpoetryreview

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.

Hooligan’s Pity

A car turned over the ledge of a cliff,
burning a hole in the lake.
The lip of my dog is cut from a fight
he picked with another dog,
and the scab is hovering on his whiskers,
as if contemplating a suicide to carpet threads.
The straw of my iced coffee knows
it’s more sugar than coffee down there,
and I should be ashamed.
A life on couches is only a sadness
that doesn’t have the will to walk outdoors.

 

I, Narcissist

My friend said I wasn’t fat, but she was, and we
would go on that way, back and forth.
.               —LaWanda Walters, “Goodness in Mississippi”

This mirror, bound devil,
hangs on red walls.

I sift through dreams
and multiply them
.             like miracles.

Bring to me
that which we deem beauty
and let it linger.

I know well that you are
the colors of the sky at 7pm.

I know well that I am
second to that, though I would
be last to admit it.

You know me, you know me.

I do not know how
to speak and look and love
the way you do.

The way you are
.              is a way,

and I am
a vagabond traveling
what space I will.

And isn’t it suitable
I would find,

as I look into puddles,
myself?

 

About the Poet
Daniel Lassell is the winner of a William J. Maier Writing Award and runner-up of the 2016 Bermuda Triangle Prize. His recent work is featured or forthcoming in Slipstream, Hotel Amerika, Atticus Review, Split Lip Magazine, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Columbia Journal Online, and The Poet’s Billow. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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.

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.

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.

Mount Sinjar

I am the jar which contains
war. Placed on the summit
collecting the last rain water

of inaudible hollowness and sleep.

An internally controlled whatever: whatever says, whatever
suffering does, whatever
I cool becomes holy.

Radiant where the radius disintegrates.

I go far remaining on Mount Sinjar— confetti obliquely

descending and rising
after new ascension.

The pieces expose so many colors: emerald, gold, one after
another— blue; chaos, collusion, one after another— plum.
I count backwards to one. I’m the temple on the summit. I trap none.

 

About the Poet
Lou Heron is a graduate of St. John’s College. She lives in Chicago and works in administration for a university. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Poetry Review, Epigraph Magazine, and The Columbia Review.

 

Apnea
While a woman in white waits upriver	standing
	in the distance her minion is
by my side pushing me underwater	and while he’s
	drowning or baptizing me,
helpless for a breath, I’m sensing in her	presence
	a vague incorporeal
familiarity, her intentions	less
	religious or malicious than just
spiritual, yet, dammit, I’m about to	breath water
	and that’s malicious enough!
As I panic, a column of air	between the water’s
	surface and my mouth
forms, or my assailant may be blowing	air
	into my lungs. My arms waving like
a baby, I awaken grateful, shaken.

 

State of the Disunion

After the rebuttal’s rebuttal
we can watch secondhand reprimands
from technocrat-fed commentators
whose scripted questions and answers
are inflated in significance
based on ratings we as the audience bestow
with a generally nettlesome blessedness,
depending on whose side we are watching
and whose side we are on.

Whether we believe what is said
and are incredulous about the disbelievers,
or do not believe what is said
and are incredulous about those who believe,
we are all resting our heads
on the side of a spurious luxuriance
given the fact that nothing feeds us
better and fatter than the fodder
of our endless righteous indignations.

Our ruminations duplicate the well-fed
decadent ancient royals and nobles
whose high, reclining sofas
were designed with high tables
to align their food at the same height
as their mouths, so they could
gorge and lounge easily
feeding at the same decadent height
as the screens feeding us now.

 

About the Poet

The poetry of Peter A. Manos has appeared in The New York Times, Yellow Chair Review, Provo Canyon Review, Elohi Gaduji Journal, Atlanta Review, Prolific Press, Avocet Review, and elsewhere.  Peter is the author of a monthly “Smart Utilities” column in Transmission & Distribution World Magazine, and is a consultant in the renewable energy and electric utility industry. He has a BA in Philosophy from Vassar College, and a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Marketing and Finance from NYU.

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.

The Moustache of Hieronymus Bosch

The light comes off the library façade so heavily it topples the man begging with a cardboard sign. It reads, “Dead Man Strolling Sponsor My Walk.” I toss a dollar onto his groans to stifle them. Hieronymus Bosch has become famous again. Everyone’s discussing his torrid moustache, his tie-dyed smile. No wonder his paintings hurt so lusciously. One includes this man lying under his cardboard sign. Another includes me as the rump of some huge severed animal. The library, a bastion of culture, roars its approval. Faces beam in its tall windows, the faces of scholars who’ve spent lifetimes studying the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I wonder if they recognize me, or merely approve of the insouciance with which I threw a dollar onto that supine fellow. Shrugging off his flimsy sign, he rises to thank me. God will save, he assures me. The moustache of Hieronymus Bosch twitches with humor. He has already placed us in the paintings of his choice, and no blessing can repaint with skill sufficient to negate this judgment.

 

Like a Tree of Perching Ravens

After a night of drunken tourists,
smashed glass and busted condoms
litter the sidewalks. The lilacs,
stripped of blossoms, grieve aloud
with small pale cries inaudible
to meat-eaters, sots, and atheists.

I scout up and down the streets
for the corpse I saw dragging
its length through the happy crowd.
I find it so fully deflated
it barely smears the cement.
The police won’t believe this

once was human. They’ll order
the nearest property owner
to spray it with a garden hose,
erasing a minor disgrace.
Today the regrets will settle
like a tree of perching ravens.

Parents will explain to children
how seams split and expose us
to each other in shades of blue
we hadn’t thought bruise could bear.
From this distance the clamor
of skyscrapers topping the sky

looks more suspicious than rant
of tattoos and piercings last night.
From this spot on the street where
something audible deceased,
the revisions of the architects
look troubled by the nightmares

that dishonor every childhood.
Those frights that shouldn’t frighten
with their bulging eyes and sneers
leave us restless and migrant,
always looking back to shudder
at shadows the color of stone.

 

About the Poet
William Doreski recently retired after years of teaching at Keene State College in New Hampshire (USA). His most recent book of poetry is The Suburbs of Atlantis (2013). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors.  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

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.