modernpoetryreview

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Time of Change
The programme tells me it was a Time of Change
with a montage of Ringo Starr and twisting mini-skirts
or punks, studs and disgruntled preachers
or placards, flying pickets and Mrs. Thatcher,

as if the documentary is an older professor
swirling a glass of brandy in an upholstered chair
recounting with a condescending nostalgia
the history of his misspent adolescent years
full of spots, wet dreams and anger,

unaware, it seems, that behind the first
sits another, even older history professor
recounting from an upholstered chair
that earlier self, now seen as pubescent, puerile,
(and no doubt simultaneously male-menopausal)
going through a Time of Change

and behind him sits another and so on
each speaking from the wise upholstered stasis
of the present about strange Times of Change
which are always and only ever in the past.

 

About the Poet
Jonathan Taylor is an author, lecturer, critic and editor. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester in the UK. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.

 

To The Sky His Druzy Forehead
The crevice lip to cheek makes
soft as chalk.
.                       The emergency
isn’t mine I step back from—
the neighbor taken by police
from his house like hair
from a chin.
.                       What poison
had he manufactured for
his wallows, the rumored wife
not seen for weeks? Which one,
knowing this, was gentle
and tipped his head to put him
in the car?
.                       Twenty-four years
of weather visits our awareness
with nothing but the clear, globed roe
of words unpassed
.                              —a silent music,
as between two spoons that never touch.
By some point it seems too quickly
we replace the people in our days;
the strangers all are vapors
and on dark occasions, rhyme.

 

Solitude More Than Any Other Style Keeps the Time Exactly
An owl moves its navy eraser
in a world of its own purpose.
There’s a second horizon
where the stars start
to appear. That there should be something
to eat, and that the meteor of ambition
is beyond me are just hunches,
and often belated, lighting my face
with a fool’s glow of hindsight:
she must have given herself
to the chewing of the waves as as
to a suitor known the minutes
to a kiss. Solitude, more than any other style
of travel, keeps the time exactly—is paid
in prey for its parabolic swoop. I step solid
in the knowledge of the slippage
at my back : turn to look : the train’s
one headlight seems to bring
the tunnel with it—sidereal, meek,
and keeping pace. It pulls beside me
for a cosmic minute, then beside me for its past.

 

L-M-N-O-P
The difference between meaning biscuits
and well-meaning biscuits is inestimable

insofar as four letters and a hyphen find
a socket as where a doorknob at my back

turns pushy and brassy and attaches
and we know it exactly—

one is gnostic and tagged by accident
while the other disappears, neither true

nor untrue, a space between me and a hole-
in-the-wall in which the leaning balances.

 

About the Poet
Alec Hershman lives in Michigan. He has received awards from the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, The Jentel Foundation, Playa, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. More of his work appears in recent issues of Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Mantis, Western Humanities Review, Cleaver Magazine, and elsewhere. You can learn more at alechershmanpoetry.com.

Honor Among Thieves

is wildly, vastly, confusingly overrated. IMHO. Was there a focus group

I missed, for God’s sake? Or a convention of felons who gathered

in the illegal dark gym of a Teamster’s Hyatt in New Jersey to work out

 

the uncompromising details? And agree, actually shake hands on this

impalpably ironic bull? LOL. Less likely than winning trifectas back to back

on consecutive Tuesdays with rain both days. It’s not so much our thing

 

you know, all in the silent family. We’re loyal to money. Take that to the bank.

But don’t expect no check. We don’t do business that way. Know what I mean.

Silence is the best loyalty, and loyalty is a silence no one can afford to forget.

 

About the Poet
Richard Weaver lives in Baltimore Maryland where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank. His book, The Stars Undone, was taken from a larger manuscript about the Mississippi artist, Walter Anderson. Four poems became the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars, composed by Eric Ewazen of Juilliard, and performed four times to date. His 2016 publications or acceptances Aberration Labyrinth, Allegro, Clade Song, Conjunctions, Crack the spine, Dead Mule, Five 2 One, Gingerbread House, Gloom Cupboard, Gnarled Oak, Kestrel, Little Patuxent, Louisville Review, Magnolia, MPQR, OffCourse, Quiddity, Red Eft Review, Southern Quarterly, Steel Toe, Stonecoast, Literateur, & Triggerfish.