Poetry

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Diabolus Ex Machina

God waits in the theater rafters
in white robes, and straps
that wrap his torso to a crane’s hook
that will lower him onto the stage
at the cue of a trumpet. His drop-in speech
is the quick save for his writer’s poor plot,
for only a god can make
the ludicrous convincing.

The devil lounges below the floorboards,
listening to footsteps crisscross above his head.
He knows each move and line: the understudy
for every actor. He waits by the trap door
to catch the one who falls into his lap, to pamper
him with wealth and petty power, ply him
with cognac, and then assume his role on stage.

About the Poet
Sara Backer won the 2015 Turtle Island Poetry Award for her chapbook Bicycle Lotus. Recent poems have appeared in Gargoyle, The Pedestal Magazine, So to Speak, Marathon Literary Review, Silver Blade, and Strange Horizons. Follow her on Twitter @BackerSara or sarabacker.com.

The Water Cycle

I.
These flowers carefully gathered are,
for the moment, my organs.

And I couldn’t tell if I was real

until a butterfly
landed on me.

II.
My body to be carried down to the river
to be dutifully contributed to memory—

yet you didn’t even notice how I was floating,
watching from just above the trees.

III.
Rain is a tension of surfaces,
clinging to windows and wet branches.

Your eyes, full of weather.

Memories rolling in
from great distances

dark clouds over the heavy arms
of a few neurons.

IV.
My face
looked up at
my face

in another sky.

V.
Dreams seem to be great instances
seeping through your ceiling.

Your face splashed with handfuls of rainwater.

VI.
Do not confuse as I confused
this body with that

which is ceremoniously dumped
in the river.

There is no need to bury water.

Rain is attention
to surfaces.

Careful the rocks are slick
with thought.

About the Poet
Tim Carter is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. His work can also be found most recently in The Seneca Review, Copper Nickel, This Land Press, and Willard & Maple. He frequently plays straight pool with old army vets and walks around the frozen city.

Becoming Seraphim
The ghost laments in the burnt-out foxglove.
Eats the ash-filled apples, the phantom fruits.
The blueness of death filling the air
Like early spring.

His body fades, and he feels the wind
Expand his organs.
They burst like bulbs at high voltage,
Like blood clots to the brain.

In their place the simplicities of light,
Of hidden fractals,
Vanished joints that form new systems
Of bone,

Astral marrow, cartilage the color
Of forget-me-nots,
Nerves like new philosophies,
Hesitant at first, then ending civilizations.

Among the conifers, the brackish undergrowth,
The memory of stilted fields,
The ghost is growing hexagonal wings
Bright as camphor,

Is setting dark, unnerving eyes
Like hot stones in his panicked sockets.

About the Poet
Seth Jani currently resides in Seattle, WA and is the founder of Seven CirclePress (www.sevencirclepress.com). His own work has been published widely in such places as
The Coe Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Gingerbread House and Gravel. More about him and his work can be found at www.sethjani.com.