Poetry

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.