Poetry

Copy Right
I hope someone tries
to steal my words
and pass it off
as their own.
This poem is yours
if you grab first.
I don’t want
to be the only
crazy one.

About the Poet
E.T. Milkton writes from the clouds beyond the horizon. He enjoys hiking, fishing and eating meat.

Light Thinking
Think of light, that’s one move one
ought to be able to make,
for surely the thought

of light is light, a light thought,
say, of the lovely lift
of a blue balloon

slipping out of the grasp of a
small child’s hand,
the sudden puff

of a light breeze,
the loosely held string
slithering right on through,

nudged along by the thought
of winning a goldfish by
simply tossing a dime

out to a small glass plate, and
having it stick, why I
could certainly do that

and the goldfish will
be mine, a pleasing thought
to keep in mind, and thus

the balloon simply sailed off and away
into the blue, now gone, that blue
balloon, and the child

pondered his weighty loss,
until the goldfish, the dazzlingly
golden goldfish, came back to play.

A Jelly At The Pier

                                               For Barbara

1.
The drift of me so often hard to figure,
Me, a freely floating jellyfish,
Slopping around
As the current tends,
Permanently on vacation,
Luminous easy thing that I am.
I wonder why I sting on contact?

Hardly neighborly, but then
I sense that, I know that.

Settling down for me, maybe not an option.
Spurned and spurning, the natural me?

Yes, I am touchy, so don’t you touch me.

2.
I’ve been often asked this:
Why not simply shift to a let-down-all-defenses mode,
Open to experience,
A curious harmless companion?

Well, think about all that I don’t have:
No feet legs hands arms eyes, face,

None of it wired into
A unified and unifying
Control system,

I mean a viable me, a ready at hand self
To do as it wills and can, given its circumstances,

I could deal with being so, but not me as now, not me as a patsy.

3.
Do you think I like this free floating slavish
Rolling in and out water-bound life style?

You call this stylish, being swept into pilings?
Sharp mussels ripping me.
My jell, like your flesh, does rip.
Did you ever think of that?

Being pummeled by pilings!
It’s not much fun, pushed in, out, back, forth,
Helplessly adrift, then scorched by a rasping wharf.

An unintentional bumper into everything I’m not.
Listen, I’ve got big stress, my life is a mess.

4.
Would that I could shape up and have a say!
If I did, I’d scurry everything out of my way.
I’d hold real sway, I’d scuttle the kids, those brats
Who poke me with sticks, and giggle when I quiver,
Flip me like a pancake, but wary of my stingers.

5.
I oughta get in shape? I gotta get a shape.
I thought about doing push-ups,
But I’ve got no hands, how could I push?
And as for running, you see any feet?

Like I said, I’m poked by kids with sticks!
It makes me want to change, improve,
Makes me want to shape myself up,
To stand tall, erect, commanding, dangerous,

Able to defend myself, get my way, make use of
Newly formed fully functioning fists,
From Jelly to granite in one swift move,
Not cowering in my gooey field display
Of sloppy slurpiness, that would be over.

6.
Behold the prompting sweep of a rock hard left, a right,
Then a solid sock to the jaw, I’d lay them out flat,
Then let the tide wash those cads away while I stand firm.
Sure I’d stay around, be notable, not a washed-up has-been.
I’ll start right now on learning how to seed my jelly sag self
With legs feet toes hips a towering spine, everything.
That done, I’ll step out of the sea, I’ll stand tall,
They’ll all fall, and the loud crowd will quiet to a hush
As I bellow out of my newly freed mouth, my mouth
Finally rid of anus sharing- talk about a
Screwed up design! An automatic potty mouth!
And that was for openers!
That’s just part of what I’ve had to deal with,
And I have dealt with it! Moving on:
Into my now mostly clean mouth hole
I’d take in a breath and then
From that fine mouth I would shout out loud and clear:

This beach is mine!

7.
I’d be an astonishment,
Venders would gather around me ,
Offering up their trinkets,
Jewelry blankets t-shirts various ointments,
They’d freely give me most of it for nothing,
Asking only my protection in return.

I’d rule them, rule them all,
Beach beauties cooing at my many sides,
Celebrity volley ball tournaments held in my honor,
That would be so cool.

8.
But I might lift myself only to find myself
Still down, stranded by the tide,
A broken egg yolk,
Sand grit rough on my under belly,
New structures of limbs and laden spine,
Fallen back into formlessness,
Any efforts, any trials, quickly lost
To boat wakes,
Tide wash,
Moon shifts
Lifting me back to where I was, nowhere,
Alone, helpless but for my trailing tentacles.

But they do have their sharp stinging points.
Points? instruments of pain!
Even as I am, you better watch out.

9.
Beware, don’t you ever touch me.
And if you do,
Be ready to scream and jerk away.

And don’t you dare blame me,
Fault me for being what I am,
An unwilling formless left behind
Menacing lurk of a passive retributive violent
Attack mode innocent victim of the sea, but also

A bit of jelly fully formed beauteous flower too, so true,
But only if left isolate, statuesque stunningly
Elegant unworldly balanced design
By a god who knew beauty when he saw it,
And who said yes to me completely,
And in saying yes saw himself anew,

Basking in early light, a penetrative being,
Held beyond gloom or joy, saw and still
Sees an instantaneous wonder, wholly itself,
Forever unapproachable, so step back why don’t you,
Take a good look at me, I’m so far beyond you,
Really, what more could you ever possibly want to be, but me.

About the Poet
Ken McKeon is a retired teacher and active poet living in Berkeley. He has been writing verse for most of his life. published two books: Winter Man and Spring Equinox, studied with Thom Gunn and Josephine Miles at UC Berkeley, also served as Miss Miles’ T.A., and was a founding member of the Rhymer’s Club. He presently teach meditative inquiry at Berkeley’s Nyingma Institute.

Time Garden: A Sestina
With careful rake he manicures the sand
And sets the rocks just right within his work
And pine tree’s molded branches in the type
Of stage, almost a watercolor set
In shades of yellow, gray, and green which meet
In fragile scene that could be caught in time.
We stop and look, slow down and take our time
Amazed at artful nature made of only sand
Which laps on trees and rocks where sidewalks meet.
Such beauty, grace and spirit are the work
Of art expressed in simple strokes, the type
Against the silence of the ages set.
The promised quiet beauty now is set
The day is slowly running out of time
And garden as a work of art is type
Of symmetry that could be made of sand,
A simple frozen image of the work
Where light and stone and swirling sand now meet.
Now as the light is failing spirits meet
And hover on nature’s stage now set,
A simple statement that for now will work
And lift us out of body, out of time.
Eternity within the swirls of sand
With rocks and trees of just a single type.
No great award is given for this type
Nor any is expected. Now we meet
The frozen image of the swirls of sand
Within our spirits now so firmly set
As if the universe and all of time
Are pictured in this single simple work.
The artist was very skillful at his work
The garden is nearly perfect for its type
So fragile yet it will stand the test of time
Its purifying power we shall meet
It is more perfect than this attempt to set
Impressions of this art in lowly sand.

And so the work in earthly rock and sand
Is but a type of beauty that we set
Our time to savor the beauty that we meet.

About the Poet
Dr. Emory D. Jones is an English teacher who has taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for three years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for two years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years.  He joined the Mississippi Poetry Society, Inc. in 1981 and has served as President of this society.  He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by this society in 2015.  He has over two hundred and thirty-five publishing credits.

Pacha*
We fell to the earth
in a reckless body of white fire
exploding in the dark
against the formless pale sediment.

We cut a bowl in its rock
loosing the water from its shut eyes,
carving rivers out of the land
and flooding the world with sound

Years later, we returned to the water to drink;
our fingers traced the tattooed rock, the swirling rainbow of ancient soil,
but we could not recognize the imprint of our body

Because we had become lost in the motion,
in the ceaseless beginning of everything everywhere:
perplexed, we called it time and left.

*In the Quechua language, the word “pacha” means both land and time.

About the Poet
Nick Hilbourn lives and works near Philadelphia.  He writes columns and articles for Defenestration, Pointsincase.com and headstuff.org.  He blogs at largethingslargerthings.tumblr.com.

Prosthetic
Overhead, the night geese search
the frozen surface

.              In lotus pose, marble Buddha,
.              left hand resting palm up in his lap,

below. A woman struggles
to remind herself

.              his right hand reaches downward,
.              fingers chipped off by vandals.

it could be
so much worse.

.              He sits intending
.              to touch the earth and call it to witness

Be mindful,
practice detachment,

.              in a winter garden overgrown with ivy.
.              As geese overhead continue

she struggles to remind herself—
unhooking her bra,

.              to seek, he can never
.              reach the ground.

she sets her new breast
on the nightstand.

Song of the Spores
Tabernacled deep within the forest, cloistered
in fern, I listen while two wrens
lob ontological proofs across the no-man’s land.

Loam is Lord

A half-hearted drizzle in half-light plays
patty-cake with maple leaves in rhythms
encrypting the oracle of chlorophyll.

Loam is Lord

The pond proclaims an epiphany—baby
wood ducks—no one explains why the wind riles
its perfect surface, rekindling our addiction to mirrors.

Loam is Lord

The trail serpentines through old growth fir, and the State
plantation, trunks ribbon-tied with empirical questions,
tagged graffiti orange, like boxcars.

Loam is Lord

I dare not speak the Latin name of the poseur,
the red columbine, pretending—“hey, look at me,
I hang like a Tang dynasty lamp.”

Loam is Lord

Yea, though I find no taste to snowmelt filtered
through volcanic rock, I still wonder who
first tickled the spores on the private underside of a fern.

Loam is Lord

About the Poet
David Hargreaves is a poet/linguist living in Oregon. Most recently, he translated a collection of poems, “The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets,” by Nepal Bhasa poet Durga Lal Shrestha, which was published in Kathmandu in the fall of 2014.

This Isn’t Just To Say
That I have envied Dr. Williams
His indulgent wife
Who tolerates his breakfast thefts
For the sake of art.
But a suspicion creeps in
On little cat feet
That those extra trips to the grocery
And wiping the rain
From the glazed, red wheelbarrow
Make her weary
When the lights go out,
Which might explain
Why the happy genius
Who couldn’t get his own plums,
No matter how sweet and cold,
Spends evenings dancing
By himself.

About the Poet
Mitch Earleywine was born in California, grew up in Missouri, and currently teaches at the University at Albany, State University of New York. His poetry has appeared in Columbia Review and his non-fiction has been published by Oxford University, Springer, and Hogrefe.

There Dewy Driven Zero Medium Lacuna Fantasy
by Charles Bane Jr, DeMisty D. Bellinger, Alicia Hoffman, Tom Holmes, Allan Kaplan, John Lowther and Christina Murphy

Is no nothing as I sleep inside your soul.
Sticky neck, nuzzle closer, get stickier still
I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.
Time, within the white shadows floating, like delicate smoke
and in the space between
between the patio and the oak, her grief bled into a field of red poppies.
Is there an artificial sweetener that won’t damage any internal organs?

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. 

A Trial Separation on Trial
I’m still not clear on how it happened.
Or even where.
Sure, there’s people not happy about it
but their ranks have thinned over the years.
What’s that you say?
Sorry, I can’t hear.
My ear’s in mothballs.
And please don’t scream.
You’ll wake the baby.
Of course, there is no baby.
No mother either.
I’m so alone, I could die in my pajamas,
staring into the fog of death, mistaking it for sleep.
That’s me.
Always on the cusp of life and death.
A study in Hermeneutics and predestination.
Cross my o’s, dot my t’s,
before truth and method get here.
And suddenly a phone call from out of the blue
rings like smoke spirals rising from a cigarette
Wrong number? Forgiveness?
Forgiveness but still a wrong number?
Who can bear these oblivious distances,
people standing in their bright tropical garb
while I am huddled up in the chill off my own body?
It is she, says the voice.
It is she but without the urgency.
She sounds calm as if nothing every happened.
But everything’s happened.
If not, why am I in such
advanced stages of myself?

About the Poet
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Big Muddy and Spindrift with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Sanskrit and Louisiana Literature.   

The Girl On the Tasseled Filly

for Cecil J.

It’s a dirty-trick, the tick-tocks. You’re held captive,
caught in a kind of snow-globe musical sphere where
you whirl with a thousand flying flakes. The end awaits,
but you don’t know exactly when, or what’s promised.

You really feel sorry for next of kin, the sudden trickle
of jacketed friends, the curious, young and aging, who
peek at what’s left of your body. Some quote from
the bible, even recite psalms. Can there be a heavenly

or mythological rescue? Others with fond memories
just hold steady, commemorating you. Remembrances
are embroidered: how you saved a child in Betsy Head
pool, leaped to catch a ball hit by Hawk Aaron at Ebberts

Field. You loved pickle juice. Yes, DJ Clay Cole once
introduced your doowop group, the Novas, at Wingate
High. Onlooking choirs sang your praises as if feeding
you tubes of Gatorade. Precious Lord. But they shouldn’t

have worried, though you couldn’t say that. A nurse
whispered, “He’s done,” not seeing the burst of white
doves overhead as you pedaled full speed ahead on your
red-and-blue tricycle. Fading in the light, you whispered—

told me about old passions, not the expected story:
the kids, Disney, you with your wife in that hot, heart-
shaped tub. The director’s cut was Angie, who I didn’t
know, barely seventeen, a tease in her curvy peddle-

pushers, a budding Dear-Lord rosebud halter. She
galloped on a tasseled carousel filly, a jumper at
Coney Island. From your saddle, you kissed her in
mid-air, tasted lemon meringue pie. As you circled,

she giggled, said it: “You’re the best jockey ever.”
Walk-to-trot, trot-to-canter. She was your first, you
hers. But life is life. At the funeral, you said I’d see
this old lady sitting in the church’s padded last pew.

Nobody would see the violet flash her under her flare-
out skirt—not on the college quad, not there. She’d be
the last to leave, tears soaking her pony’s mane, brass
pole, the garden road where you’d soon meet again.

About the Poet
Isaac Black, an MFA graduate of Vermont College, has work published or forthcoming in journals like the Beloit Poetry Journal, Callaloo, Fjords, Poetry Quarterly, Boston Literary, Bop Dead City (interview), San Pedro River Review and Spillway. Founder of a major 501(c) college help organization, he’s been awarded the Gwendolyn Brooks Literary Award for fiction and Broadside Press Award for poetry. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he’s also been a recipient of poetry fellowships from the New York State Creative Artists Service Program (CAPS) and New York Foundation of the Arts. Isaac’s the author of the African American Student’s College Guide (John Wiley & Sons).

Collapsible Animal
How we saw the female whale circling figure eights
in the river that snaked its way through a bursting
verdant land near the coast of Oregon. How we took

too many photographs, were disappointed none came out
the way we had hoped. How they in no way framed
the largess of the belly, not to mention the expanse

of the fanning tail. How we later read in Klamath papers
the whale did not swim more than a day longer till
it beached and baked in the scorched sun of a long August

far from the salt it wanted. How in stillness it is impossible
to glimpse the rush of movement the spraying water
brings to the surface any collapsible animal must feel

surging like blood through the veins on the days we bear
witness to a beauty so surprisingly out of place we can only
shrug and lift the darkness from our skin to splay and pierce

the frigidity of this foreign air. How some days we are a prayer
answered. How we are peopled here as the folding of hands,
standing even now on the metal grid of a bridge in a country

so far from our own.  How even here there is an invisible
something swimming through the blood, with us even
on that hidden beach in Big Sur, the one where the stones

thrust their monuments of geology straight from the briny surf
and I searched all afternoon for a starfish I never found and
the surfer out on the waves was so remarkably young.

With us even as we piled the pink skin of the pickled radish
onto steaming tortas pollo off the truck on La Brea.
All the strange offerings.  Intestine.  Heart.  Tongue.

How later we weathered a storm as the Pacific came out
of the clouds so instantaneously the lightening blew
the darkness from our sight like a camera flash before

the rains came and upturned bathtubs upon our bodies.
How we used to sing a child’s game – closed palms,
intertwined fingers.  Here is the steeple.  Here all the people.

How there was no meaning in the verse – just a joy circling
a dizzy planet of youth.  How the whale circled and spun
in the dizzy figure eight of its own losing. How I wonder

if pleasure in the new air of the freshwater can be found
even as it slows and exhausts every recourse for finding
the way back to breathe.  How we never know the meaning

of the rose even as we ring ourselves around it.  Ashes
to ashes.  Dust to dust. How when the sky is burning a boy
can hang a lapel of posey onto his blouse before swimming

into an ocean of his own drowning.  How we know the ending
to every story.  How we become giddy with the telling of it – just
listen to our voices rise and lift and quicken our very own falling.

About the Poet
Alicia Hoffman is originally from Pennsylvania,  but now lives, writes, and teaches in Rochester, New York. Author of “Like Stardust in the Peat Moss”(Aldrich Press, 2013), her poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including Tar River Poetry, A-Minor Magazine, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, Camroc Press Review, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop.