Monastery of Silence

by Milenko Županović

Priest every night
says a prayer
near the church
with the blue dome,
in a dream
music the last time
an unnamed grave
silence echoes
before sleep
strange visions
music dreams
enigma forever
at the door
garden full of flowers
through the light
of faith
the music of the past
through dreams
reaching out to him
with a cross
in his hands
a requiem for
forgiveness
an unknown grave,
dream prayers
light in centuries.

###

Milenko Županović was born in 1978 in Kotor (Montenegro). By profession he is a graduate marine engineer, but in his free time, he writes poetry and short stories. His stories and poems have been published by many magazines, blogs and websites, mostly in the Europe, U.S. and in Latin America.

In 2010 he wrote and published his first book, a collection of stories, and he also written and published few collections of poems (ebooks).

In 2015 he wrote and published his second book , a collection of stories and poetry.

In 2016 he wrote his third book , a collection of poetry (published in USA, project ”Poems for all”)

His book ”Martiri”was published in italian language.

Milenko is an ethnic Croat and lives in the town of Kotor (Montenegro) with his wife and 3 sons.

Chances

by Bob Lind

The stars held still in their places.
Below them, the majestic earth
Rolled easy through the night,
Moving with purpose but in no hurry.

On the ground, there were
Lilacs and Poinsettias.
There were spaces between
​Comfortable​, strong-limbed trees.

And in those spaces, endless
Opportunities for joy and well-being pulsed,
Chances to dance; chances to smile,
Happy life waiting to bloom and stretch
And reach out beyond itself.

Between the Earth and stars,
He scowled at his watch,
Slammed his tray table up
And thought he might be
Catching a goddamn cold
About five seconds before
The plane began to crash.

###

Singer/songwriter, poet, novelist and playwright Bob Lind helped shape and define the 1960s Folk Rock movement. His lyrics have been taught in colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada, and translated into nine languages.

His songs, including the Top-5 hit “Elusive Butterfly,” have been covered by more than 200 major artists including Aretha Franklin, Glen Campbell, Eric Clapton, Cher, The Four Tops, Petula Clark, Richie Havens, Marianne Faithfull, Kingston Trio, Dolly Parton, Johnny Mathis and Nancy Sinatra.
His short stories have been published in respected literary publications including Crescent Review and Karmic Runes.

His poetry has appeared in Poet’s Haven and other journals. His poem, “Watching My Girlfriend and her Coworkers Bowling for Charity,” was published in THE IODINE POETRY JOURNAL (15th Anniversary Edition).

He wrote the critically acclaimed novel EAST OF THE HOLYLAND.

In 2013, Bob joined Dan Fogelberg, John Denver and other music legends, being inducted into THE COLORADO MUSIC HALL OF FAME along with Judy Collins.

Sura by Ayham Jabr

a solitary thought

One can go around the world and not fall off.

—Stephen Hawking

a solitary thought erupts into
the dusty town o, be a butterfly—said
the child with one big eye
any many days to count—
the picture of the sky
ephemeral
like time
a single history or many more
like fluctuations
of light o, be the ocean steaming
cleaning up the dust
like hope
that bubble ready to explode

###

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, Ph.D. in French Language & Literature, is the author of several collections of poetry published in the United States, Romania and France. She writes poetry in English, French and Romanian and her poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Pleiades, Louisville Review, Ginosko, Laurel Review, Rhino, Wallace Stevens Journal, Seneca Review among others, as well as in a variety of literary magazines in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Romania. Her last collection of poetry I scrape the window of nothingness – new & selected poems was released in 2015 from Orison Books Press.

At the present she lives in Chicago.

Approaching Cuttack

by Nilesh Mondal

approaching Cuttack, she looks up
from the illuminated screen of her
phone, this city was almost made
capital, she tells me

almost, I ask, in my mind I think of
another night, another woman
who tells me, the thought of being
almost naked, excites her

Cuttack exists where two rivers
diverge, she tells me, and some
years, both would flood

some rivers grow up, believing
they hold calamities between
their thighs, not knowing, it was
the cities which were erected on
ground, that turned to quicksand

###

Nilesh Mondal, 23, is an engineer by choice and poet by chance.
He works as a writer for Terribly Tiny Tales and Thought Catalog, and as prose editor for Moledro Magazine.

His works have been published or are forthcoming in Muse India, Inklette, Coldnoon, Cafe Dissensus, and many more.
His first book of poetry, Degrees of Separation, is scheduled for a 2017 release

Mom Recalls How Dad Used to Walk for Miles

by James Croal Jackson

In those wild woods, poison sumac
would distance one from active tracks–
jagged moan, trembling steel, cerulean sky
waiting for your call: an endless horizon,
a warbler singing quietly
into night.

###

James Croal Jackson’s poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Rust + Moth, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. His first chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017) is forthcoming. He is the 2016 William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest winner in his current city of Columbus, Ohio. Visit him at jimjakk.com.

Spring Equinox

by Shari Jo LeKane-Yentumi

The blanket of darkness releases its hold,
in anticipation from winter to spring,
while each passing minute thaws into the light
revealing its slumbering secrets.

Such vulnerability merits respect,
for surely these tenuous moments in time
of sweet, gentle blossoms and soft, tender shoots
are subject to weathery perils.

Transitional focus brings strange ironies
across snowy gardens all newly exposed.
So raw are the changes, a new destiny
to be found in this fresh transformation.

Miraculous season, the Spring Equinox –
return of the bright, all her colors reborn
in a rainbow of flowers, and trees blooming full,
and the song of the birds and the bees.

###

Shari Jo LeKane-Yentumi (B.A.English/Spanish, M.A. Spanish, Saint Louis University Madrid/St. Louis) lives in St. Louis, Missouri, writes articles, literary critiques, poetry and prose. She is a not-for-profit, business, community development, education, leadership development, disability, and elderly advocacy consultant, and she teaches creative writing to men in a maximum security jail and to special needs students. She wrote a novel in verse, Poem to Follow, a book of poetry, Fall Tenderly, and many of her poems have appeared worldwide in multiple poetry anthologies, literary magazines, and most recently in spoken word with LOOPRAT on the award-winning CD, How Live? Shari considers herself a modern formalist, addressing contemporary issues in poetic verse with a stylized language.

The Road Home

by Leonard Henry Scott

She walks to her car in the IGA parking lot
Long striding and brisk in a flowered dress
Jim Dandy grits and Budweiser topping her cart
Dark eyes flashing at the orange night falling sky
She starts up the car and rolls onto the street
Squinting down creases of ebony skin one
Flat hand raised to shade the white glare from
The shimmering road and the bones of the town
Slowly she passes the yesterday mansions now
Moldered to wreckage and funeral homes
Where only the echoes and ghosts still remain
Drives carefully by and leaves them undisturbed
Then out on the road where the cotton scraps blow
And the Carolina sun clings faintly to the sky
Together they race through farms and plantations
While night creeping darkness remains close behind
Together they race through the gray desolation
From old things forgotten yet always recalled of
A long ago time unknown but remembered and
The restless dark spirits that still haunt this road

She drives fast and straight toward her destination
Away from the darkness that grabs at her wheels
If spirits are true and not false apparitions, best
To meet them in sunlight than here in these fields

She makes one last quick turn through the dust to
Her yard, and with door-slamming quickness looks Up at the sky, a lone sliver of light barely cuts the
Horizon, home safely again once more before night

###

Leonard Henry Scott was born and raised in the Bronx, New York where he attended Evander Childs High School. He is a graduate of American University (BS) and The University of Maryland (MLS), and was on the staff of the Library of Congress for many years. He and his wife, Hattie, live in National Harbor, Maryland. His essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in; Garbanzo, Foliate Oak, The MacGuffin, The Lyric, Poluck and other publications.

Lucky Barn

by Brian Beatty

I often dream of horses
asleep in dark stalls
surrounding a 1949 Chevrolet
beautifully midnight blue and chrome

like the earth a car that’s been parked for years
beneath piles of hay yellowed
by cracks of sun.

The farm hand who’s most likely me
in these dreams quietly comes and goes

a monk finding his place back in the world.

###

Brian Beatty is the author of two recent poetry collections, Coyotes I Couldn’t See (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and Brazil, Indiana (Kelsay Books, 2017).
He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Not Fair

by Carol Hamilton

The children keep bristling
like a cornered porcupine,
happy to point, complain,
run to the playground teacher,
they all righteous and aglow.
Whole peoples nurse
their grievances, and she, too,
remembering every slight
since childhood, fingering
hard and inedible berries
over and over. They are dried
beyond the escape of rot
and disintegration. The people’s
agrieved histores are not theirs,
exactly, but are appropriated
from their dead. These tales
have a bitter sheen like a highly
polished and poisoned apple,
a temptation. This is how
we push death back. We are too
angry to recognize her on the road.
We demand compensation
before we die. We are in no
mood to bargain with her.
###

Carol Hamilton: “I have recent and upcoming publications in Cold Mountain Review, Common Ground, Gingerbread House, Main Street Rag. Sacred Cow. U.S.1 Worksheet, Pontiac Review, Louisiana Literature, Abbey, 805, Poem, Third Wednesday, One Trick Pony, Plainsongs, O.V.S. Magazine, The Aurorean, The 3228 Review, Illya’s Honey,and others. I have published 17 books: children’s novels, legends and poetry, most recently, SUCH DEATHS from Vac Press Purple Flag Series. I am a former Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and have been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize.”

Speaking Through Sand and Salt

by Judith Kennedy Mazis

You take a tiny square of wood you have painted grey
and place it upright in heaps of sand. You find a box
of pine to place beside it and shape praying hands of clay.
A toy helicopter airlifts a plastic doll and a first aid kit
as eagles nest in trees on fire, and sparrows soar to find
more help. “My mom’s gone forever,” you say,
as you find transparent stones to form a “force field,
that can never be broken.” You look up and say,
“This is Jesus,” and “What is evil?” as your fingers form
pools and mountains in the sand and you gaze into the belly
of things you should not need to know at age ten.
Birds congregate outside the office window at high noon.
You gaze and say, “Why can’t you come to my house?”

###

My poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Ellipsis, Friends Journal, Mythopoetry Scholar and Poem.  One of my poems was set to music by composer Bruce Pennycook of the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin.  I have read my work at NEW CUE (Nature and Environmental Writers Conference of University Educators) in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.  I also write film reviews.  My review entitled, “Dissolution and Dwelling in Terrence Malik’s Film ‘The Tree of Life’” was published in Mythopoetry Scholar in the Winter 2012 issue.  Lastly, I recently published the edited volume with an introduction to my great grandfather’s Civil War Memoir entitled, The Civil War Memoir of Sgt. Christian Lenker, 19t Ohio Volunteer Infantry.  I am currently completing my first book of poems, decades in the works, As the Most Fragile Arise.

I reside in Lancaster County Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River with my husband and two dogs.

Untraveled Tracts

by Thomas Cannon

untraveled tracts.
among the shadows
I tread spongy turf
walk with care

take me into the windbreak
beside the shed
past the steel wheeled cultivator
plowed to a stop
in the pine needles
lead me down the path
of broken branches

the shed’s rain-made trough
leads to the equipment graveyard
I climb the sunken feed grinder
survey the fields

Thomas Cannon’s story about his son is the lead story in the anthology Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Autism. He also has his humorous novel The Tao of Apathy available on Amazon. His poems and short stories have been published in many print and electronic journals. Each year he is part of the planning committee for the Lakefly Writers Conference and is a member of the Wisconsin Writer’s Association.

The Assassin of Ether

by Larry D. Thomas

Centering the cross hairs
of the mercenary
squarely on the essence
of the atom,

he squeezes the trigger
of time. For his slingshot
of bewilderment,
he polishes the stones

of his thoughts.
His talisman
is the limit of knowledge.
Snagging rarefaction

on the fishhook
of the commonplace,
he scrawls, with the ink
of crows, the sacred

alphabet of angels,
sacrificing, on the altar
of language, the lamb
of his finest hours.

###

Larry D. Thomas has published several award-winning collections of poetry including As If Light Actually Matters: New & Selected Poems which received a 2015 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards Finalist citation.  He lives in the high Chihuahuan Desert of Far West Texas with his wife and two long-haired Chihuahuas.  His best friends are the Chihuahuan raven, puma,  great horned owl, coyote, javelina, mule deer, gray fox, Texas horned lizard, thick-handed scorpion, black-tailed jackrabbit, diamondback rattlesnake, and blue quail.

Rumi & the New ‘White Flag’ Physics

by Stefanie Bennett

“You can’t take the Kublai
Out of the Khan”
He said –
Slamming the notebook
Shut.

A sigh righted itself from
The doppler effect
To slide
Into the underlined sonic
Boom of the times…

Yes! And a tsunami of fly-buy
Eyelashes
Re-textured
The redwood’s
Torso

Of wild manna where
Ontology
Had fanatically
Ditched
The fallen.

###

Stefanie Bennett is of mixed ancestry, Italian, Irish, Paugussett-Shawnee. She has published several volumes of poetry, a novel, and a libretto and worked with Arts Action for Peace. Her latest poetry collection [2015] ‘The Vanishing’ was published by Walleah Press.

Dynamite

by Anders Carlson-Wee

My brother hits me hard with a stick
so I whip a choke-chain

across his face. We’re playing
a game called Dynamite

where everything you throw
is a stick of dynamite,

unless it’s pine. Pine sticks
are rifles and pinecones are grenades,

but everything else is dynamite.
I run down the driveway

and back behind the garage
where we keep the leopard frogs

in buckets of water
with logs and rock islands.

When he comes around the corner
the blood is pouring

out of his nose and down his neck
and he has a hammer in his hand.

I pick up his favorite frog
and say If you come any closer

I’ll squeeze. He tells me I won’t.
He starts coming closer.

I say a hammer isn’t dynamite.
He reminds me that everything is dynamite.

Originally appeared in Ninth Letter
###

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Best New Poets, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Narrative Magazine, which featured him on its 30 below 30 list of young writers to watch. Winner of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award, Blue Mesa Review’s Poetry Prize, and New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he was runner-up for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. With his brother Kai, he is coauthor of two chapbooks: Mercy Songs and Two-Headed Boy, winner of the 2016 Blair Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. He lives in Minneapolis, where he serves as a McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.