waved heat
particled light
pollocked across
my canvas face
rays conceived
smack center
of middling sun
millennia before
homo sapiens
fell to earth
once escaping
the photosphere
gracile beams
strike my lens
and the star
is older than eight
minutes ago
i’m certain
my problems
are big picture
important
but relatively
###
Todd Wilson lives in Cameroon, West Africa. He is struck by the authenticity of the ordinary and the unifying power of spoken verse, and the status it maintains outside of the west. He is currently completing a collection of poems that explore themes of disaffection, cultural bridging, and the illusion of personal decision making. Frequently, you can find him on the beach with his kids, where nothing else matters.
They say to get over someone
You’re supposed to pick up a new hobby
And apparently the most cathartic
Are the hobbies where you make something
So you bring a woodworking bench
Past the film cameras, the roller skates, the bass guitar
And hope that a new birdhouse
Will take away memories
Better than the temporary
Reprieve granted by neon flavored shots
And long legs that walk in directions
You don’t really want to go
But one birdhouse only leads to another
A gateway carpentry
And pretty soon the whole living room
Is filled with 353 birdhouses
Then you realize you don’t even like birds
Fucking feathered freaks that shit on their own food
Why do they deserve to live in such palaces
While you can barely afford a one bedroom apartment
That smells of burnt out cigarettes and stale new beginnings
In fact you hate birds
You think about taking all the houses
Outside and lighting them on fire
To be rid of the clutter
But while you’re looking for matches
You run across a keepsake that you shouldn’t still keep
And pretty soon you’re staring at a blank text message
Trying to think of the right thing to say to the wrong person
Thinking honesty is the best option
You start typing out “I mis–”
But you can’t even stand to look at the words
As if somehow seeing them makes
Them more real and you know honesty
Is only appreciated by hearts that want to beat
Not by those looking for refuge behind walls
You throw the phone across
The birdhouse mountain range
And do the only thing you know
How to do at this point
Start on number 354
###
Jessica K. Hylton writes most of her poetry while driving. She has wrecked three cars, but she finished her dissertation.
In soft vanilla, melted morning dew,
Encouraged by a tender velvet blow,
Hydrangeas foam and froth in pastel cool
And hollyhocks stretch taut in rattling row.
A melon’s papier maché shell keeps safe
Within her orange flesh, eternal fla me .
A yellow acrid mist of old betrayal
Excoriates with bitter, barbed-wire shame.
Electric swallows’ arcs shred ozone clear,
Green potagers ruled corrugated straight,
A broken family refused to hear,
While soaring buzzards’ orange eyes predate.
Three Messieurs’ spades with rusty blades sharp tipped
Their filigree Mesdames sit steely lipped.
###
Clara Challoner Walker, the mother of two grown up children, cast aside the corporate life in January this year, to become a writer. She divides her time between Yorkshire and The Charente, locations which have so far inspired a novel, several poems and a couple of short stories. She has four cats, loves knitting and reading.
I am hungry; come soon. I looked
tonight at flames like you upon
the west and jewels winging
home. I hold you in my eyes
when I see what cannot
be stamped again. All the earth
is of a kind but for the rarities
that clamber unknowing of their
gifts on vales of purest light,
and look at the common life
of us in shade. Come beloved,
soon.
###
Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor, 2011) and Love Poems ( Kelsay Books, 2014). His work was described by the Huffington Post as “not only standing on the shoulders of giants, but shrinking them.” Creator of the Meaning of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, he is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.
Si soy la única aquíEn esta habitación
Entonces te nombro
Vaso
Te nombro
Mesa
Y eres mía
Silla
Soy yo quien decida
Hasta que entre otro
Y lo destruya
If I am the only one hereIn this room
Then I name you
Glass
I name you
Table
And you are mine
Chair
I am the one who decides
Until someone else comes in
And destroys it
### Rebecca Bowman has lived in the United States , Bolivia and Mexico. She has won awards for her short stories and plays in Spanish on the state, national and international level. Some of her titles include Horas de visita, Invitados, La vida paralela, Los ciclos íntimos, and Portentos de otros años. Her short stories have been included in several anthologies and her plays have been produced several times.
There are no intermediaries in the chasms stretching forward from the beginning to the end.
The rarity of timeless mediocrity delves to youth and being and the deathless.
For days and days the woman responded to little more than her own decay.
There was no sound within the mean days or partially covered oversouls as Emerson danced with the trees and complications of an iron string, endlessly repeated over days and nights beat forth into the wind.
Why don’t you have her by your side?
Why don’t you have meaning or solitude beyond what you can remember or destroy?
You are the beauty of the last falling leaf that made it through the winter but had to fall before the spring could be sprung.
Be. End. Endless.
What’s the color of your eyes in middle of the night?
The day built upon itself and lit a fire under desire seven letters before empire.
It is an undone relativity beyond usurped meals and blonde girls with no intention whatsoever and certainly not ones up to any good.
Done to a meandering solitude to mean.
You don’t mean it, do you?
Mean it to me and we’ll get on just fine; just fine. Just find.
And then we’ll be together again and hold hands and walk into fire with hearts open and meanings undefined.
Oh me oh my, with a finger in the pie and an endless living death.
Ha ha, that is beyond the time of dragons.
Wait. Really? No.
That’s another time.
With it in one hand and pointing to you we’ll have meanings and definitions to do it beyond anything you could possibly imagine.
There’s nothing you can’t joke about, can you?
Can you?
So there’s that and there’s you and there’s every moment you have ever succumbed to. All those nights and fireflies pointing to horizons to the summerless pointlessness colorings anyone could possibly be beyond any of these with enlightened lassies and embolisms.
No, that’s not right, is it?
No, no, it can’t be.
Play that piano.
Play it until the breeze stops blowing and the bread stops growing. Meet me at the world’s fair and before you know it a day will come where you will be shocked to find yourself as me and me with three of the past centuries’ ghosts in my hand and my hand in yours.
No, no joke kiddo.
The stars are mostly in hiding but with them a child can find anything in solitude with nothing.
###
Gregory T. Janetka is a writer from Chicago who currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama. He spends most of his time there hiding in his apartment, drinking tea with his cat. He blogs at gregorytjanetka.com. is a writer from Chicago who currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama. He spends most of his time there hiding in his apartment, drinking tea with his cat. He blogs at gregorytjanetka.com.
The Difference Between Writing and Speaking the Words Out Loud
by George Moore
Things that wants most to be said
never fits the names we choose for them.
I scale it back to the love hate loss
of grief endured. The languages of clay.
Men of clay. A heavier light filters through
the pines here at dusk. How do you say it?
Nothing performs well before a strange god
missing a heart.
Spoken in many tongues, but they are flesh,
frenulum, noise-anchor, blood vessels,
taste buds. The perfect but sacred text
are the taste buds. Writing
is a silence on the stillness. The surf below
can only be imagined. Rage for order.
As easy as falling down stairs.
###
Publications include The Hermits of Dingle (FutureCycle Press, 2013), and a collection coming out this year, Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry, 2014). I’ve published poetry with The Atlantic, Poetry, North American Review, Colorado Review, and a good bit internationally of late. Having taught for decades at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I presently live with my wife on the southern shore of Nova Scotia.
I beat the devil last night
she said fighting for her life
He was right there in the room
with me. I slammed all the
doors and windows of myself
closed. I willed my heart to
keep beating. My lungs to
suck in air. I am not ready yet.
Though my heart is blocked and
leaking. My kidneys have failed
and my body lies here pale and
tired. I want to always see the
beauty of a rose and my little dog
watching for me from the window.
I want to climb again the hills of
San Francisco with my grandson.
The place I am from. And my
granddaughter I love her with
all my heart. I have opened all
the doors and windows of myself
to let the air rush in.
###
Jean Varda’s poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Lucid Stone, Poetry Motel, The Santa Fe Sun, Avocet A Journal of Nature Poetry, River Poets Journal and Prompt online literary magazine. She has published 5 chapbooks of poetry, most recently, “She Was Attached To Symmetry”, by Sacred Feather Press. Her poem “Sister Morphine” that appeared in “Red River Review” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Portland,Or.where she works as a collage artist.
The b-movie dream black
and white, full of fog and
thick smoke the color
crumby ties and cheap suits
Those lugs from the tenth
ward won’t make a mug
outta me, you wait and see,
someday, I run this town
And that blond dame singer
at the old Parrot Club
she’ll be glued to my rod
with her mits on my wad
###
I am a retired HR professional living in SE Pa., with many poems published in a variety of publications.
Three Pushcart nominations and still enjoy the simple poetry I can fathom, that renders a moment’s joy or sadness.
Miss Hooker’s my Sunday School teacher and
she says that if you kill yourself you go
to Hell hands down, there’s no hope for Heaven
because suicide–it’s called suicide
–is sin and almost the worst one there is,
the worst one being I forget, maybe
not believing there’s a God at all. Me,
I believe but that doesn’t mean I’ll go
to Heaven when I die, no, I’ve got to
stop my sinful ways, no more chewing gum
in class here and at regular school and
no more cheating on quizzes and no more
not cleaning my plate during meals and no
more talking back to Mother and Father,
especially Mother, she’s not as strong
as Father and can do me less damage
and what that is is cowardice, I don’t
need Miss Hooker to tip me off to that,
so now I’m wondering if I’m not saved
already and don’t even know it, or
didn’t, but now I do, or sort of. But
I don’t feel much like praying or singing,
religious songs anyway, or going
to church and Sunday School any more than
I do now, or spreading the word of God,
witnessing is what our church calls it. No,
what I really what to do is die just
enough to know what it’s like but also
enough not to have to lay down my life
for good and the best way to do that is
bump myself off but only barely. Yawn.
###
I have had poetry published in Ascent, Ohio Journal, Descant, Adirondack Review, Concho River Review, Worcester Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Arkansas Review, Carolina Quarterly, Poem, South Dakota Review, Santa Barbara Review, Sequential Art Narrative in Education, and many other journals. I have authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives (BrickHouse, 2008).
I have taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.
It’s that bitter taste
again
it comes and goes like the seasons; the sun and the moon; the rain and the sky; the wind and the stillness.
It’s windy out here,
in the cold
in the open
so fragile
I am
out here
Does it ever stop
that feeling,
I ask.
Yes,
you answer, when you are dead. You tell me.
But why does it have to hurt, I ask you again.
You smile.
No, it doesn’t always hurt, I tell myself.
###
Anne H. Bakke is from Norway, and currently studying European studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Still some try to pile a stack of road maps and new apartments
To try to cover the roots that trace back to where we come from
Starting new life after new life
until the old ones are blown apart like clouds in the winter
Time is doing it’s best to destroy
our sentiments
Book stores are closing,
Art is easily skimmed through on quick trigger mediums
I fight not to forget,
I like the scars and the ink and my past,
The beauty felt through pain and joy
I like the tangible we carry with us
Bearing witness to the life we have stamped into the earth
###
Bryan Bradley is a junior marketing major at the University of Pittsburgh and was raised just outside of Philadelphia. He believes that the worst characteristic a person can have is an inability to laugh at themselves. He prefers to write later at night and considers himself an “insomniac poet.” His favorite poet and current literary idol is Allen Ginsberg. His major vice, which was passed down by his father, is Bruce Springsteen concerts. As friends and former teachers will note, he is friendly, “but never shuts up.” He envies your beard-growing abilities.
Beckmann, half his face left unfinished,
sitting in a sun-flooded room with a little cat,
grimly eyeing a trumpet he holds
as if wondering whether to sound it.
But that was years ago.
The toot came out nice and round.
Strange black flowers painted
on the sky by bursting ack-ack.
Tonight I will try again for the music.
Name a capital of a country.
Change the first letter to name
a familiar musical instrument.
Example: Lima = limp, limb, lime
###
Howie Good’s latest book of poetry collection is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.
I’m weary of those who talk
in slogans stamped and packed
by someone else, like
long distance truckers paid to drive
without knowing the weight
hauled onto that dark highway.
I want to walk, instead
where I can read the body’s slow knowing.
Where each thing watched long speaks aloud.
A spider tossed by the breeze casts
one strand thin as faith. As it takes hold
she dances between twigs and waits
within a design both beginning and end.
When the web breaks she starts again
tiny legs speaking in ways
we’re meant to hear.
### Laura Grace Weldon lives on Bit of Earth Farm where she’s an editor, nonviolence educator, and marginally useful farm wench. She’s the author of a poetry collection titled Tending (Aldrich Press, 2013) and a handbook of alternative education, Free Range Learning. Although she has deadlines to meet, she’s more likely to be hiking in inclement weather or nattering on her blog.
I have lost
our reciprocal letters
of my childhood friend
when he suddenly
passed out of my life
outside the sea home
now harboring pebbles
to throw back
in the ocean’s wave
when we built
the orange kayak
reflecting as the sun
gleams on a torn
blue envelope.
###
B.Z. NIDITCH is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.
His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.
He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
