Poetry

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.

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.

The Thunderstorm Thief’s Weekend Assessment
Infrastructure: minor
security breach. No assistance
needed. Visitors and babies
obscured by portable cover.
Potted ferns—the perfect place
to hide duffle bag. Three
flashes will alert the sky
to intrusion. Blankets
will be necessary to prevent
scarring. Conclusion:
in and out before dinner.

Skittles and Hollow Points
The appetite of a courtroom
shakes
.           like a late-
night television
.                          host.
An opening
monologue renders the moon
not guilty,
and our eyes are healed.
.       Our minds,
.                               transmitted
to oblivion, focus
on a bad joke about a gray hoodie.
We close
.              like little red,
our chests heavy
with scarlet.  We look candy-
coated and start to wonder what
letter will cross the screen

when we’re gone.

About the Poet
A.J. Huffman has published twelve full-length poetry collections, thirteen solo poetry chapbooks and one joint poetry chapbook through various small presses.  Her most recent releases, Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink), A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press), and Familiar Illusions (Flutter Press) are now available from their respective publishers.  She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2500 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, The Bookends Review, Bone Orchard, Corvus Review, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

My Antithesis

I. The Beachcomber

Still unfit to be tied, I’m down at the shoreline
gloating over my escape from fossilization.
abalone images, open these rills;
I’m diving to reach your matrices.

Undercurrents roll shells; hand-to-foot shapes emerge.
mollusk tracks, three toe holes bore through the shell,
one pushes against the shell for leverage.
I will need this design.

Stretched on my brain, Penfield homunculus
circumstances move us forward, leaning, flexed
to grasp sandy gems, connect ideas to the hand.
Through my gills I hear the call for familiar form.
Can’t their minds swim in quantum physics,
like Shakespeare’s vision of this “baseless fabric”?

Three-cornered stones spin over the lake.
I follow, entering opaque pockets stuffed in the clouds.

I still live to ride in those shadowy nests:
a tree-climbing fish’s dream.
Being macropterous has never been easy,
but it has its advantages.

Others may judge this scene as merely a trompe l’oeils.
No matter; so they can’t find the rungs.
What if the Universe is like a hologram?
Let go of small ideas about information density;
look past the images flickering on the wall of the cave.

II. The Push

Is this too slant for you? How far have you climbed?
Level, fake turf is easy for surefooted, psuedo-sciolistic,
football-catching somebodies riding “scholar”-ships,
fat deals, never experiencing violet waves of vertigo
– breathless confinement – or the cornea shock
of being delivered up too soon in the early mind.

III.  The Core Refitted, the Ocean its new shell
(noli me tangeré)

Always the call for closure; you’ll sell more books.
Yet these vespers; and who listens to what is not spoken?
There is a form I see, strange to share with anyone, yet

I’m not ashamed anymore of this stony-hearted squid
that keeps washing up at the end of my beach in my dream.
Its tenticles keep growing back, reaching the velate core,
squeezing out the phrase that betrays my profession.

Just before walking on the shore I hear the blasphemy
announced like a taboo incantation, in spite of my
pressed suit, GPA servitude, vertical profile,
–an incriminating record of my own voice:

“I feel most at home with wordless things.”

About the Poet
Lloyd Milburn has been teaching composition and creative writing for over fifteen years in the Rochester, New York area. He earned an MA in English after completing a creative writing thesis with William Heyen’s advisement. In addition to having work published in Permafrost, Willow Review, Ithaca Lit, The Sandy River Review, and Talking River Review, he is currently nearing completion of his first two books of poetry. His lifelong love for music and a personal interest in synesthesia inform his writing and music.

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.

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.

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. 

Percussion/Swimming

we are rhythms a rattle

.                                        of bones

arms the wind at war

.                                        zagging

to the blue of chlorine

.                                        finish

.            when the water
.            triangles

.           crystal bewilderment

.            when you don’t know
.          how to breathe

.           or won’t

you know the sound

.                .           .               the way words drown

.                .           .   and worlds

.                (the beat

.                .           an absence

.                .           .         .      of universe)

submerged and

.                .           .how to get away

About the Poet
James Croal Jackson’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, Rust+Moth, Glassworks, Thin Air, and other publications. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, spent a few years in Los Angeles, traveled the country in his Ford Fiesta, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find more at jimjakk.com.

Burying the Cat

It’s rough digging, the roots and rocks halt
the spade, and I’m reminded of the “joke”
the nosy old neighbor told me oh now three times
(“See now that’s why they call it West Rocks-bury!”).

Her husband, but blind bones now, told her that.
In a cardboard box beside us stuffed with
grave goods (toys, her food box) she stiffens and
we feel sad and silly, adults mourning a cat.

A cliché, the torrent makes November
that much colder and the squelch that much
louder. These dumb rocks—rocks I toss
among the dying grass only to bury

again, like a dragon hoarding gold, rocks
that as a child I’d gather in July
to blind some giant pond; or if it still could see,
make its pupil dilate, scatter all the dark.

About the Poet
Andrew Szilvasy teaches British Literature outside of Boston and lives in the city with his wife and two cats. He earned his MA in English Lit at Boston College. Aside from writing, reading and teaching, Andrew spends his time hiking and brewing beer.