Poems by Clara Burghelea

FALLING APART

I cannot sleep, flitting back and forth between the sheets,
together we hunt gravity with a rusty musket, except you
are in the upstairs bedroom, naming all the ways in which
wood can burn, rot, splinter, stain, and break, its flame,
a residue of coughing fits, on the couch, the air tingles
with lust for all the cravings that fit the tight space, pull
a bee from a rose with my bare lips, feel the sick sneeze
of the Akita on my cheek, save my favorite Skittles color
for last, let a tall man ink-stain my breath, engrave mosaics
in his rough skin, hold a sandtimer between my thighs,
and this house, striving to stay unharmed, the edgy silence,
a loitering moon inside its lids, honeysuckling the wait.


GIFTING

A mother has a glass tongue,
the spinal cord of the sun
exhausting all her cells, then
follows a succession of leavings,
little deaths or explosions, the son
tearing up flesh to grow flesh,
a daughter exhumed every year
to appease guilt and hang desire
by the throat, eat your fill, cradle
those hungers, says the man who
tries to shatter every sliver of her
tongue with his metaphor-laden
teeth, a mother knows how to open
her mouth into a snow globe, every
soap flake into a boy, girl, lover.

Poems by Timothy Pilgrim

WINDING UP WINDING DOWN

Memories swirl by un-queued, like a top
spinning, wobble, mere beginning
of turning to un-spun. Dreams

askew — blur of gold, fuchsia,
white, blue, careen to blackness,
dizzy journey along sunset frozen red.

I carve a last whistle from willow,
cliff-paint mantis, stilted, still,
sculpt ravens in salt, outline them

with snow. I forget lies, slights,
crawl diapered in circles ever more wide.
Fear the final letting-go,

I don’t know you, call you evil,
wish you dead. Bitter end of the end,
I forgive myself, then forget.


AFTER THE TITLE

comes more memories, iced,
their color, blue. Similes signal

another interlude. Regret
guides the cursor, moves

my fingers down. Cruel slights,
to begin, go, sleep alone, no more

midnight swims, no forested hike
to meadow, camp, fish, count stars,

spoon all night. Stoke the echos
with reluctant strokes, let regret

spill over line edge, plunge deep
in pool below, struggle to surface,

float. Admit love tossed, the loss,
let pulsing guilt stream out.

Poems by Bob Beagrie

THE FOREST AT THE BACK OF THE THROAT

Curl    unfurl

a girl of ash paths

inhabits 

her

leaf-blown body

stalked by gen-

erations

nations       notions

of implanted    fear

reach strain

test the cliff behind 

the cliff-face

spider race inside 

the bone-house

balancing china

bowls like skulls

judder  stutter  putter

he plucks cobweb  

strings of a lyre

croaks for the thin wraiths

in the forest 

behind the eyes

jaw stretch lip   husk

retch    rust    and reek

how do we 

get used 

           to this?

THE MAKING OF A WALKING MORT

These walking morts be not married. These for their unhappy years doth go as a autem-mort, and will say their husbands died either at Newhaven, Ireland, or in some service of the Prince…

            Thomas Harman, ‘A Caveat for Common Cursitors’, (1566).


It begins at daybreak with a corn dolly dancing on the cloth of gold
embroidered with threads of birdsong, their bodies bursting from bushes

then settling like anxious flakes of ash further along the plough lines.
The Oak Fair in full swing, the May-Maid will be forever remembren

the day she was a queen, with the stook-deer racing boundary stones
like a frisk-mage, tail alight, carrying the morrow’s foredooms

of militiamen, under orders, erecting fences to tame the wilds,
to wall us out of our livings, erase the village, turf us into Bethlam.

Parcelling England for productivity, along lines of private progress,
how ale and blood will stain the grass when tempers spark

over eatwell boards, over grievances of forced evictions.
What kind of commonweal did our poor fella’s kill for?

So a bloke with a squint and wort on his snout can charge us at the gate
counting us in and clicking us out, keeping the tally straight.

Watch the lord’s herd drift into tree shade, the long languid stare
drinking the estate, the wobble of a wire under the weight of trespass

and I thought it possible to imagine another version, to recognise it
like a long-lost friend from a previous existence

or the burr of a childhood dream of an apple which, once bitten,
tasted so sweet it couldn’t be anything but the soul.

Poem by Jeff Harrison

CINNAMON CONSTELLATIONS

citizen fragrances cathedral amorphous
swan drink, sharp new stunning
& happy, I get scrupulously after narrative
so green painterly speaking failure
explosions like shore dissolving lava falcons
drifting all to harbor, this the sentence
acknowledges gingerly, whitecaps easily
purchased, along with malted fevers
what vanished -- voice rare, island-famous?
a splotch to end pier, struck bobbing buying
during decades when portholes speak little
determine thimble work in the ago lounge
the shop-green knows who admires parody-taking
to say nothing of cinnamon constellations

Poems by Jen Schneider

ON NEW BEGINNINGS & FLAVORS OF YESTERDAY :: STAY AWHILE

metal cutlery scrapes freshly washed ceramics. all souls hungry. all plates clean. fork tines clank spoon edges. egg whites glisten. yolks spread. grape jam greets whole wheat toast. sliced atop oven browned potatoes. neatly diced. delicately seasoned & seasonal layers blanket & warm. square pats of butter bubble. one. two. three. then melt. three. two. one. cream cheese on biscuits. dark & light liquids change hues. soft clouds smile. then morph. puff. poof.

casseroles cool. cameras click. ballpoint pens scratch. high gloss photos on laminated plastic menus crystallize. sugar cubes stack. coins drop. familiar lyrics linger in air heavy of unfamiliar costumes & customers. charlie brown chatter. lucy calls from the counter. linus reads an oversized text in an undersized corner booth. small circular bowls of salted peanuts. tall cylindrical glasses of icy colas. opposites attract.

comics curate laughter. even as charlie brown oscillates & linus reflects. beagles need to be fed. bagels need to be toasted. houses of all sizes need to be tended. lyrics warm even as they unravel. stories need to be told. grains & grinds absorb all evidence of physical being. inhale. air heavy of favorites. turkey bacon. oatmeal. black coffee. one cream. two sugars. always sweet.

him. either just on or off shift. blue and brown plaid wools. all buttons secure. brown corduroy caps. suspenders hidden from view. always looking up. until up took sides & gravity pulled on suspenders. even as worlds crash. closing time. can no longer stay. can’t go. no more home. he is home. scents of musk linger on fabrics. wools & cottons merge. overcoats find new roles as blankets. shield harsh winds. wind new paths. nighttime walks. ten blocks north. seeking home.

woodstock whistles. eggs sizzle. tunes take stock. all plates clean. all souls hungry. ready to put on a smile. & stay. for a while. for new beginnings.


ARCHIE MET VERONICA AT THE COUNTER & THE FONZ MOVED IN :: HOOKED AT THE 24-HOUR DINER

the soda fountain drew regulars while the booths were reserved for business. mostly convos on races, of horses, arms, and happenstance. i’d rotate from a single red vinyl spiral to a worn booth in the back. the dime-a-song jukebox a draw. the ninety-nine-cent cup of endless coffee also appealing. some days, i’d flip a coin. heads for the booth and an extra song. tails for the counter and a bottomless cup. one sunday, the counter won and riverdale and i took an empty seat. my fingers traced archie as his eyes tracked veronica through pep comics issue twenty six -- a classic, while the coffee, a deep roast, caffeinated -- two creams. extra milk. as i welcomed an extra slice of apple crumble and a scoop of vanilla custard. the spiral to my right spun and unfamiliar boots, black combat, settled. i turned and a gentleman, dressed in a leather bomber, winked. i blushed. florence, from behind the counter, fussed. “coffee or tea?” “a slice of blueberry and a pint of milk for me,” the man replied. he wore a white short-sleeve tee and slim-fit jeans. a fonz look-alike by all means. i worked my crumble while he nursed his pie. the black and white television spun tales of roadrunners and frontrunners. channel ten cartoons plus a plate of politics on the side. the man with style (& styling pomade) expressed an interest in archie. i offered a look. he sensed an opening and put out a hook. i was caught without knowledge, every fonz has his tricks. thirty years and four kids later, he still has the kicks. & he’s still my perfect ten.

Poems by Keith Nunes

APPASSIONATA

He wakes to clouds fastened to the sky,
Something inside his head is keening like a lovelorn narwhal,
He shaves, everywhere,

Kneeling, his hands in kid-gloves, touching her naked body as
she stands in high heels, back to the front door
‘He never touches my soul’ 

Morning bird-song collapses into a mourning dirge,
She’s quavering under the piano, drinking Finlandia from the bottle,
He runs Beethoven’s Für Elise over the keys,
“You wretch! Why that piece!” she shouts,
“Equivocator! You said I was forgiven.”

The renowned portrait artist waits wrathfully,
beside his easel, for
his silly-rich subjects to settle


GORKY 

Arshile Gorky
paints from
inside the Peculiar,
Triumphantly!
He paints the word
bravado without a say-so,
Trauma is spelt with
a flourish
registers as a B flat,
The titular character
in his oil-on-canvas novella
is pawned off,
You can see him mashed & draped
resembling a trampled
Chagall perpetrator
&
Maxim Gorky,
writing in the shadow
of the gulag,
‘To paint is to bear a child,
To write is to raise the child’
Once he bled Tolstoy blood
On Moscow snow,
Now there’s only blood in his eyes,
He looks up,
‘Is it a sign?’ says his muse,
‘I can’t see where it wants me to go’ says Alexei Maximovich,

The GORKYS,
Once were cousins,
But never again

Poems by Andrew K. Peterson

DECISION
after Sonny Rollins

a kiss
on your novocaine mouth
little abrupt blocks
wander on the changes

trees from branches –
these tender senses –
it’s apparent The Hawk
surprised the speaker:

a breakdown
with transparent tone
crackle of a naked flame’s
opaque swaggeroso

baby
I got rhythm
with a Honeysuckle
bridge

extras echo from before
could you feel a thing


ALLERGY

i fight last
night in the
dream fight
the writing
by writing
a poem i forget
this morning
i apologize to
the morning
i reach for
the writing
in the dream
i remember:
(eyes water
what they
inhale, sneeze
a hem-fresh batch
of rococo confetti:
sarcasm
pronounced
s o u r chasm)
mornings
in the mouth
of the beast
i sleep with
Dream Queen
spinning
on the platter
soft hugs
for a delicate
flower
still smells
like yesterday’s
sun

Poems by Eileen R. Tabios

BLUE CHAPTER #10

Stone on finger drops
dissembler sky with a lie—
the color “azure”

azure is defined as impossible

Perceptions of color depend on vision, light, and interpretation, such that an understanding of color involves physics, physiology, and psychology. To see the sky on a ring’s gemstone is to experience desire. To see the sky as pale is to feel longing. To feel longing is to have known the many scales of loss, from a genteel pain to almost-obliterating anguish. Truth would be better served if your ring’s gemstone was a small fragment of a mirror. Raise your hand before your face and you will see your eyes. But reflections require vision. Often, we cannot maintain a gaze with a mirror—it is impossible for regret to hide and, thus, avoid discernment. Azure is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the blue color of the clear sky.” Thus, azure means “impossible”—the sky is never clear. If our world exists because color is a narrative, it is almost impossible to avoid the existence of gods.


SHADOW CHAPTER #11

Survive shadow worlds
by letting tears reign and rain—
see how rainbows bring color

a shadow transcends reflection to create a threshold

He trained himself by the standards of an inheritance he did not want. If he wished, he could eradicate anybody who shared the planet with him. But if he did, he would be invisible because no one would see him. He knew the mistake of shadows rebelling against merely reflecting when their existence depended on others to reflect. Mourn with tears when no one is looking; tears improve vision. See. See enough to see the downside, like oligarchs who can’t exist without their ostentation witnessed by others. “Oligarchs need not just to be but be seen as filthy rich, a need that rises with economic wealth,” advised psychologists when the world warred against Russia’s elite after Russia invaded Ukraine. “No more shopping / in Hashtag Milano // No more partying / in Hashtag SaintTropez // No more diamonds / in Hashtag Antwerp.” In a world where reality functions on hashtags, shadows also become thresholds to alternatives.

Poems by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal

A LIGHT SO INTOXICATING

The street lamp hung on its
every word, foul-mouth moth,
playing around the light bulb.
The moth spat out stories from
its night before. It would not stop
and continued to make the street
lamp blush. The moth was drunk
with warm light. It asked the
street lamp to go steady. It told
the street lamp it never felt a
light so intoxicating. It moved
in back and forth, mouthing foul
words, until it was out of breath.
It pressed against the light bulb,
a burning hunk of moth.


FALL AT MY OWN RISK

I fall
at my own
risk, gave up
on wings

featherless
without
bitterness

blue always

but
still
there

Poems by John Bradley

DEAR ADA LIMÓN

When a hawk lands
in the backyard birdbath
and opens it wings
to claim: This too,
revolves around me
we know
this is poem-worthy
but not a poem
not until
a small squirrel
(pesky, perturbed,
and possessive)
leaps up
from groundcover
and plunges
into the hawk-occupied
birdbath
causing the hawk
to flee far
beyond the trees
this, this is a poem—
if it can be told
in one sleek breath.


MY OTHER HAND

I don’t want you to stall and stammer
in the asking because eventually you will. So

I’ll tell you now. My other hand,

the one you’re not looking at, has recently
grown a small mouth. It’s too shy

to say, Note the fruity, sweet breath.

The delicate, sharp teeth. Jaw that snaps
shut in one-tenth of a second. I tell you this

because I know eventually you’ll try

to poke or stroke it. It can detect the slightest
scent of self-delusion, my other hand. Awake

even while asleep, it preys upon the unaware. Look

at it now, quiet as a dangling modifier, waiting
for your next move. What’s it saying?

Lean close, to better hear me. My friend,

I swear it’s the other hand—so smooth
and toothless—you should beware.

Poems by Jack Galmitz

HILLS

Sure you like to climb
but you hesitate
because you like
to maintain distance
to what's there
otherwise, if you step
on the trail that ascends
with labored breath
you'll realize it will end
and what then


UNTITLED

When she talks
I hear her
four guitars off
maybe it's a viola
I could be wrong.
It's drawn across
the heart I'm sure
and rises up
as I lean down
and there's four stars.
I saw her before,
but where I can't recall.
Maybe at the mall
with her girlfriends.
She was taller.
And all to me
missing from the décollage
of my investigation
of (if you'll excuse the word)
being was in her.

OPUS 4

We're introduced
and engage in small talk -
String Quartet, Op. 4.
All the score:
the notes in each bar,
the articulation, the tone;
we have so much
to learn from one
another.
We listen closely.
More than once.
We watch the night
paint surfaces and we
take notes.
What more can we do?
The music becomes richer,
more precise as we draw
closer than before.


DO YOUR PART

Bison were shot
dead until there
were few left.
Their hides were piled
up like mountains.
That was then.
Now that they've been
brought back they're made
into burgers.
What else
would you expect.
They say the meat
has a pleasant taste
when flame broiled.
I've never tasted them
and I think I'll pass on this.
Why? So the Plains Indians
can regain their stature
in an alternate
future.

Poems by Rich Murphy

GUTTER LIVINGS

The beggar serves to warn
the busy worker who doesn’t read
for democratic purposes.

An ignorant majority buys into
the deserve storied architecture
and the self-blame cemetery plots
generations into feudal futility.

The server begs for tips
to a better life (casinos, horse races,
a buck?), pleads to assist with personal
belongings to belong,
a pathfinder for the panhandler,
moocher, bum, hustler, alms arms.

When the hand with the tin cup
listens to and obeys the boss,
help arrives for both: Win/bin!

The bottom-line solution
houses for the homeless:
A masseuse sleeps in every basement.


MAKING AN OMELETTE

When the shell cracked open,
the O-zone oozed out
into the solar system and beyond.
Soon the rooster roasted,
and the chicks deep fried.

Shale and beef gas grazed
across the atmosphere
in rumbling trucks, trains
on plains from inside the shield
that would have shamed Achilles.

Fossils dinasaured an energy epoch,
a last gasp revenge on grave disturbers.
Scientists and technocrats scramble
for alternative fuel pools
and for chimney scrubbers with brushes
that reach 100 years into the past.

Don Quixote, buried in solar panels
and windmills, apologizes
to Sancho Panza the quiet wind bag
who wears a Speedo and flipflops.

Nuclear fission hands off to fusion
and barrels into a hole in the ground
to replace the animal imprints in rock
. . . but remains accessible to financiers,
the tag team at the breakfast table.


ARRESTING THE MOOD MOB

At the self-police station,
the once disguised DNA,
a turncoat on a spiral staircase,
hands out badges and ammo.

The fingerprints for emotions
record on a hippocampus
(friction ridges for melancholy,
joy, desire, fury, and good will)
for oncoming moods that creep
along a spine, flash from the eye,
or press from the outside
squeezing the cranium.

Flat affect and pointed questions
sign up for the uniform,
but the commitment required
that sneaky sleuthing begin
with foot patrol and a smile.

Anger piles in the morgue;
depression stinks in a crowd;
but compassion challenges
in any neighborhood.
Rumors and innuendoes
mumble from past experiences
and a love blind spot knots
to tomorrow the day after.

Ambushes and hideouts
complicate for the detective
tracking down grief instigators
to subdue tear ducts and a tongue.
Many times, strangers ID
before the cop spies a humor.

Poems by Oz Hardwick

THE TIME OF MY LIFE

Smoking at the window, our elbows on the ledge, balanced like eggs. I was having one of those days where I felt like feeding my arm into a savage machine, just to add spice to a tired soap. She was having the house redecorated from top to bottom but couldn’t decide on the colour to paint her nails. Cumulus. Blue mist. Island sky. She coughed. Coffin nails. Our elbows brushed and swept the slate clean, and I couldn’t decide where to start rewriting the script. The analyst wants to know about my childhood. I tell her I’m telling her. Sitting on the edge like nursery rhymes, reaching for long-necked trees, our arms were rickety bridges without foundation. I was having one last cigarette before she tied the blindfold, an extra in a late-night movie. She was having a baby but didn’t know the colour of its father’s eyes. Coastal grey. Wedgwood. Boathouse blue. She blew a smoke ring out above the nodding trees. One of us slipped. One of us was having doubts and misgivings that would run and run like repeats of a 90s comedy show. All the king’s horses nickered on the verge of speech. The analyst informs me that my window is closing and asks if I have a light.


PLAYING DEAD

Remember when we’d cover ourselves with soft white sheets, as if we were furniture in a house locked up for the winter? Our young flesh – what it was to be young as sparrows in chimneypots – became worn wood, scuffed by hands and elbows, while our hand-me-down ambitions – the sea still called like a great bronze bell – adopted the shapes of dressers and longcase clocks. We were melting snowmen, briefly sketched ghosts, thought bubbles in comics still searching for the right words. We were bulbs that glowed in clean-lined corridors – what it was to shed our shadows – and we were foam fingering the nap of a bleached beach. Deep inside, we knew – sure as tongues trace the lines of taut muscles – we were bones and empty houses, but we still believed that when we stripped off those sheets – naked as the first word in a new language – summer would be painting all the windows gold.


HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN

Yesterday they told us that the weather would be restless and irresponsible, so we weighted down our loose garments – It’s funny, you said (or maybe it was me), how fashion’s more voluminous in disastrous days – to ride out its feckless shenanigans. But the weather was good as the gold in a rapper’s incisor and we felt somewhat foolish, shackled to the ground by retro threads and the heaviest household objects we could find: the bed still swamped in boys and girls from Christmases past; the corner sofa with our parents and grandparents tutting at the length of skirts on TV, and the chest freezer stuffed with enough roadkill deer for a greenwood banquet. You speak treason! you exclaimed out of habit. Fluently! I retorted as the fashion police arrived from the 80s in their white satin jumpsuits, a mannered breeze barely rustling their shag-permed mops.

Poems by Mark Young

A LINE FROM JERRY GARCIA

Sitting on a bench at a local café
Heidegger criticized the current
prevailing philosophy of "Beat the
rush & apply for your child's birth

certificate early," describing it as
equivalent to the pencil-&-paper
efforts of someone who can't draw.
What happened to the brain? he asked.

What happened to exercise, to pick-
ing up new hobbies? Why are these
euphemisms being bandied about?
A death is authentic, despite the

lack of candles. It is an heirloom we
will all inherit. Straightforward in
its description. Unless, of course, you
can contribute a better translation.


A CLASSIX TORRENT DOWNLOAD

Clearly, this is a bowl. Or,
perhaps, a cylinder seal with
schematic workings. Could even
be a noun denoting substance
& subject to authoritative &
up-to-date scholarship. That’s
why finding the provenance of
an old favorite item is often a new
way to conceive a creative work.
Here's another silly dance track.
What do you like to do for fun?


MEANWHILE, ON WALL STREET

Under that untidy
& diffuse body of
essentially feudal
law that binds the
U.S. Postal Service
to something app-

roximating reality,
the book, How to
Quit School & Get a
Real Bisphosphonate-
affected Guinea Pig, is
now not classed as

a statement of intent
but as a congruence
of theoretical
orientation. Broker-
ages are viewing the
scrip as undervalued.


YOUR ORDER IS NOW EQUIPPED FOR SHIPPING

A man runs through London's
Hyde Park. Footage of the im-

mediate aftermath was shared
on social media & now experts

want pork pulled over cancer
concerns. There are important

things to note: summoning
glyphs is completely hereditary

& the Red Sox have no one to
blame for failing but themselves.

Poems by Jeffrey Side

WHEN YOU WERE TEMPERED WITH DELIGHT

When you were tempered
with delight
your virtues were taken
down and forests
that you passed through
were not finite.

When you were
tempered with delight
you kept the
saddest oceans,
you kept
the proudest streams.
And wild pens
would
not strain your sight.

When you were tempered
with delight
you carried sand
upon your necklace and
cream upon your
lips. And you
never made the journey
through the park.

When you were
tempered with delight
you were
consumed by bikers in the
light and
nurses in the dark.
And taut strings
pulled
on you forever.

When you were tempered
by delight
strong bars were
held around your
fortress
and strong men
could never kiss the
wound you
would always hide.


THE SEEDS WITHIN ME

The seeds within me
formed my shape
and sorrows
long before I knew them.

Like some inevitable
punishment I'm
blind to
they cause predictions
to be true
and disasters to be
just right.

They stopped me
climbing in the fields
and falling on the
slopes that
framed the lake.

They made me like a
fallen tree whose
rings can be counted
and whose memory
can be read.


BOOKS THAT SOOTHE THE DYING

The humming sounds
like the
primrose singing.
New across your gaze
whole pillars torment you
between journeys.

Everywhere longings
that occurred gradually
finally overflow you.

And intently felt irony
is like bread
to the sentence of
imagination.

Also, sitting appears
doubtful
even while the wakeful
man
goes straight in
the parlour.


SKETCHES OF THE SMALL TOWN

Over provided to the
small point. Stop or water.

The highest touches are by the
snowdrifts.

But towards the waters
all sides are to the sea.

Moist flight south,
and valleys, more
finally,
become lovelier.

World looking,
listening.

Gone, distant happiness.

Poems by Andrew Darlington

GIRL GLIMPSED IN A SUBWAY TRAIN

(with thanks to Ian Watson)

she wears green alien earrings
and spikes on a belt around her throat
she sits across from me in the tube-train,
I see my reflection in the saucer glass of
her eyes, I see myself through her gaze,
she wears the sky as a hat so she knows
the secret moist and coil of clouds, for luck
she blows a kiss as a hoop to snare the sun,
she hears the soft conversation of
fungus that whispers in the dance of spores,
her fingers branch the branching of trees,
her tongue tastes a vanishing point where
flights of birds burst from out of our skulls
making the day fearfully dense with light,
she flips the world into new states of being
she wears a belt of spikes
and green alien earrings…


KAREN’S BIRTHDAY POEM

when I was nine years old
I set out to create a new colour,
one that no human eye has even seen
I mix pigments and scribble crayons
squeeze bright fruit and blossoms
through the blender in gushes of hues,
but I was never satisfied,
when I was nineteen years old
I set out to create a new colour
one that no human eye has even seen
by gobbling huge concoctions of
psychedelic drugs made in secret labs
until my head is crammed with a
vivid choreography of rainbows
but I was never satisfied,
when I was twenty-nine years old
I set out to create a new colour
one that no human eye has even seen
by elective retinal surgery to expand
the range of my sensory perception
into the ultraviolet and infrared spectra
until I saw the world in a dance of
charged subatomic particles
but I was never satisfied, finally,
when I was thirty-nine years old
I found you, looking into your eyes
I see every colour I ever want see
for the rest of my life
and I am satisfied…

Poems by Steven Bruce

FRACTURED

For most,
the early mornings
are a rush.

For most,
the late afternoons
are clamorous.

The sunlight
shows our sorrows,
and we are too busy
to notice.

We go unattended
into the noise.

We become
a little more

f r a c t u r e d.

We drift apart
from ourselves

until the reflections
are not our own.

We drift apart
from each other

until we are so alone
the ache becomes routine.

The night comes, and we sleep
and hope to remember our dreams,

that they will still come true.

The blue transmutes to black,
and we are dead to the world.

The stars hold their tongues
above us as if in quiet reflection.

The saccharine moon bows
as if in mourning for our hearts.


SOLACE

Another day gallops
by like a riderless horse.

Finally, with the sun shot
out of the Spanish sky,

the clock hands land
at a quarter to midnight.

Sitting here at this blank page
with fresh coffee and a lit cigar.

A universe of possibilities rest
in my fluttering finite fingertips.

Bach plays low.

Inside, a moth beats his wings
like a fatalist drum.

Outside, the crickets compose
lunar symphonies.

Someplace, a ravenous wolf
grips the nape of a bleating deer.

             All of us wild
and fighting for our lives.

In the fragrant wilderness
of this blue night,

my heart sings along
with the other nocturnal beasts.

Poems by Nathan Anderson

Print Water


////////////
shape/shape/shape/shape
///////////



the time is
[now!]



averaging out this
tape on the loop
to:
ppppppppp
pppppppp
ppppppp
pppppp



the arrow is the known
device
and gone as sequential
answers


a hope is now the coldest
thing


ssssssssssssss
sssssssssss
sssssssss
ssssss
sss


///////////////
he close
//////////////
he lose
//////////////
he smile
/////////////



Planetary Script Reception 


corpuscular
(additive)
(addictive)


a rectangular thread
goes...


+
+
+
+

leaving empty


sweep//gone
sweep//gone


soldier/this/to
/breathe/with/
left/lung/only

...

...

...



Holy Mountain (cascading_cascading) 


intubate
polarise

(polarise and intubate)


repeat//
repeat///
repeat////


gone+are+the+days


are as...


gone 
gone
gone 


_RETURN_


and-
speak-
-a-name

Poems by Norman Jope

ASSIGNATION

Away from the wrought-iron pier, with its view across the bay to the city with its one tall building white against greying skies, there’s a tea-room where piano music plays and the early Fifties returns like the vaguest of scents. The shabby mascots of the pier look on from the outside, and Exmoor’s a flat line in the distance. The twin breasts of the Mumbles – from the French, mamelles – protrude as I sit in a jacket, open-necked shirt and cords and await the hourglass figure of my beloved in a film that could either be a romantic comedy or a tragedy laced with melodramatic orchestral music, Dream of Olwen territory. But sadly, I conclude that my beloved is sixty-five years older than I am and a mere quintessence of dust. This persuades me to head back along the curvature of the sea-front, to Oystermouth where, at exactly noon to the second, it begins to rain… we could have walked in that rain to the end of the pier, and pledged our undying love, but love has been cancelled for the day and the shabby mascots, rhinos, seals or whatever they’re supposed to be, have the pier to themselves. Earlier, a man who couldn’t stop saying the word Fuck handed his partner a purple ice-lolly, from his shopping bag, at ten AM in the bus-queue and that, I conclude, is the closest that I’ll come to an assignation all day. A dark cloud shaped like a piano is all I need to see me back to my hotel, via the indoor market where sheets of water cascade across a roof of glass in the presence of cockles and laverbread.

BOLERO ON THE WESTERN GHATS

It’s a smoky tea-stained morning… mist rises from the Kodakanai sleepers, ethereal as their snores. I make my way to the veranda, where an immaculate breakfast is laid out and the waiter calls me Sir for the first time in my life. The air is dense and the gables of a place that could be in Surrey or the Scottish Highlands make me nostalgic… alas, for a past that I have never experienced. And, whilst I sit at the table downing chai after chai, working my way through toast like a caterpillar through privet leaves, the music in my head is incongruous… ʹBoleroʹ by the French band Heldon, relentlessly sequenced acid-rock from the sadder end of the Seventies. I hallucinate a Parisian suburb full of odd-shaped concrete constructions and a future that made sense four decades ago. Richard Pinhas’ guitar is coiled, astringent, a snake that winds its way through the undergrowth but has neither head nor tail, no after-snake to give it definition. The waiter asks me if I’ve finished and if I’d like to make my way to the high plantation to watch the tealeaves being plucked. At that moment a friendly mountain-goat, a sahr, appears and begs me for the remaining slice of toast. I apologise for all the English bastards who claimed its forebears as trophies… and stride into the verdant upland as Pinhas wields his axe.

 

BRIEFLY, THE AEGEAN BECOMES VISIBLE

The tintinnabulation of the masts in Sutton Harbour stipples the evening. Ghosts drift through the aquarium as sea-bass glide on autopilot. There are smells of iodine and musk on this July evening when separation from the south is impossible. So you follow that sightline from Fisherman’s Nose and brush the Hesperides on the way to the equator. Turn left past the Pillars of Atlas and enter the wine-dark sapphire-encrusted sea. Follow that line past Sicily’s impossible ruins and the steaming shadows of Etna.

Suddenly, there is a filigree of islands whose blazing stone imprints itself upon the eye. Blue-washed buildings are laced with scents of olive and thyme. A sharp moon sinks and night is pungent and rich. Follow the track from the hilltop village, through the broken crockery of the field-walls, to the summit of the most miraculous of islands where, if the lure of legend holds, you will see out your days in the strangest of exiles.

Back home, there are costumed figures entering the mall with scythes and unkempt Maenads keening to predict the end of the world. And predicting the end of the world was always the surest of prophecies as the only question is When? But as you sit on a rock to contemplate the marriage of earth and water, the fornication of azure and marble, the assassination of time by halberds of pitiless light, the shimmering intensifies and sadly/gladly you are back there, standing on the Mayflower Steps ten minutes’ walk from home.

You look up at the prawn on its plinth and smile at the sight of it, listening to the tintinnabulation of the masts and the hydra-tongued tourists and knowing, once more, that anywhere is everywhere on a finite world.

 

EXPERIENCE NOTHING

Walking through broken shards on the battlements of Monemvasia, I remember that I have a life to return to. I make my way through narrow streets of the old town, past Yannis Ritsos’ birthplace. There’s a faint smell of lemons and a dog is standing on its hind legs in a courtyard. A stork flies overhead with a melon in its mouth. I listen to a thousand obscure languages… all sound like Greek but all are different. Europe stretches all the way to Nordkapp, Eurasia to the Chukchi peninsula - I stretch back to my birth in a measureless sequence of silhouettes. Ahead, the road descends into the road and I must go down to a place where I am expected to shed my name, where experience becomes as invisible as last year’s trampled fruit and shredded leaves. Monemvasia would have been a perfect hideout… there are fewer people living there now than in the year 1400, so I could have taken the place of any one of thousands. But there’s no future in being a Greek medieval revenant, crossing myself by the minute and watching mastic bob up and down in a glass of increasingly sticky water. And as I conclude that I must leave the stork drops the melon, an amber arsenal exploding at my feet.

 

IF THESE ARE THE END TIMES

Night’s aromas shape the island, on a soft spring night with a pulchritude of stars. I descend to the back streets of the hilltop settlement, listen to scents of thyme and lavender that tint the air around closed doors. The sea conceals its monsters, the sky conceals its gods. The only difference is one of direction. And what if this all came to an end, this island in the Aegean that I prowl in pure shadow, this landlocked sea that contains it, this continent, this world, this universe? God might decide on one of His days that he has no more desire to prove Himself by exerting his energies, His essence being sufficient to recline in… a less judgmental judgement but no less lethal. In the back streets of the hilltop settlement, a hundred steps above the monastery that shelters a recess in rock where time slammed shut, my shadow contemplates the absence of all shadows, a permanent noontide as pure as the darkest night.

Poems by Jeffrey Side

B BLOCK

You keep your
services for them.
You keep
the church they know.

And they make
donations regularly
with
one hand on your head.

They lean you
down towards
the cup.
You sip the overflow.

You lick your lips
and move your fingers
far apart.

You have no town
inside you
now.
You have no
travellers there.

Did you send them
home again?
Or did they leave for
better fare?

I was the one who
landed upon
your
lessened wing.

You had me
and then you had
your king.

I came to you a
broken ring. I danced
inside
your mouth.
I gave you all my

money
before you let me
in.
I couldn’t be a
saviour now. I couldn’t
be a queen.
I keep looking around
for things
I haven’t seen.

I seldom wandered in
your night.
I seldom took
the fall.

Now deep inside
I know
there’s no
one else to call.


VOICES IN THE LIGHT

Sometimes voices
in the light
will call me back to
them.

Back out of this
place where
I have spoken
from.

And then I will turn
my
back on you,
and on
the storm-bled sea.

And even
on the sleeping faces
that will
never
wake for me.

I will find myself
expanded
out of limitations
plight.

And no
earthly cause
or battle
will keep
me in this fight.

And what will
seem like
nothingness to
those
that have remained,

to me will seem like
childhood
when in
the time of May.


SHE WAS AS TALL AS THE EIFFEL

On the journey back,
riding on a lonely track
beat-up.

My memories of you
are packed deep inside
a sack.
I never knew your mouth
or your soil. I never
knew your fingering.

Begging
lonely men you begged
me, and I gave you
something then.

I can't remember
which or what
or when.
Or if it was
something I once sent.

But is it time?
You left them
abruptly.

And is it true about
the merchant?


CAN’T TALK ANYMORE IN THE OLD WAY

On the days I'd go to visit.
I knew
she would be free.

In the mornings she'd do
the Sun Salute,
and in
the evenings
make peppermint tea.

I first caught sight of
her in the designer sea,
when she was captive in her
swim suit
and the water beckoned me.

On crowded nights she'd
calm me down
with all I expected and without
any sound.

And on days
like this, when the coast is clear,
I'd travel
up to see her there.
Then back at
dawn to my place, here,
by morning I would repair.

On days like this I'd visit her,
when her lover was
elsewhere.

And into the darkness I would slip,
until she ceased
to care.

Poems by Daniela Voicu

THREE POEMS

1.

Young night around your lips.
She dances on peaks of dreams
that come from a perfect picture.

Color flows,
a bright red fall in a sky hand
- guess the future

On a scale, an angel descends
from a mouth's corner. Blue eyes
look at me,
flying on butterfly wings
into my hair.

Young I am.

Night makes the creators
- children.


2.

A failure brings a success.
A hand washes on the other,
and vice versa.

The night carries the day in its back.
The mornings washes smoked windows of time,
and vice versa.

You do not know which fills you:
overnight with billions of stars,
or a day in which you don't know
what surprises await you.

We were born from nothing,
and the nothingness has made fruit,
and makes the fruit until it is
destroyed,
until origins…
How wonderful can be life!

How wonderful can be life!!!

How much can be life,
and how much can be miracle?


3.

Stones crying rivers,
kisses the feet of the shadows
forgiven by the sins of the world.

I still learn to walk on the earth.
My soles do not know yet
to swim...

There are stones that weep in flights
over all the wings.