Poems by Jeffrey Side

VIVIENNE DID HAVE HER OWN

Stop trials
universe neat
the disenchanted
of clothes
notebook out
at an
always when
with look
replacing but
desperation with

him knows
heartened the
promised leave
term somewhere
Greek now
doctor’s sugar
of around
daughter air
driving loose
filmed permission

Acropolis identified
always but
and beautiful
most skinning
of barnacles
called causes
or conditions
time 70%
progesterone daily
the culprits

half eccentric
complicated sitting
like get
me want
the look
head eyes
of love
just mourns
each one
Honolulu baby


YOU COULD HEAR THEM CRUNCHING

Are we really so
up and down the
next I heard her

say how have these
things happened anyway I
need not hanker after

comfort but now feel
I must carry on
for some nebulous end

so I went out
tonight and life was
headed alone made nor

stringent aspects ruling our
days I’ll never know
anyone else who’s been

part of my life
she said perhaps he
hated maps or some

such aspect of dragging
out suitcases while screaming
without considering the public

I had the morning
free and cut my
moustache it’s better like

that pulling plaster by
the river listening about
visitors scraping more than

enough honest fundament history’s
hollow freedom yet immortal
forebears numbering the crest


I TRIED FOR A DAY OUT

Apparently, she kicked
in music night, able to
regard the server as an
approximation. But ordering
chronologically was never
my thing.

And as many times as
you have, there can be
no real step forward. It
is much more than you think,
because he calls her often,
sometimes.

I don’t know why he
does, though. He’s just
desperate for a flush in
Cuba. I think something could
have happened, though. I knew
his son.

Nobody left to regard
you. So I came back
upon the hog and found
pleasure in renegade streams
in this sector. Don’t expect any
favours.

So much time is wasted.
Quantity is everything, it
seems. Sometimes I’ve got
money, so I’ve no need to tout.
You may hear of her soon, in
Baltimore.

Poems by Jake Berry

THE SIGNS 

nightshade
tomato

mandrake
lake bardo

years gone by
beneath the willows

the altar stone
light and feathers

take this cup
please remember

a flickering sign
leaks elixir

gone to seed
corn and thistle

your mission here
the embers whisper

paradise
is a motion

a simple face
lost in gazing


BORDERLANDS

He sat on the couch
and laughed like a man child

Mama said when he was a boy
Daddy tossed him up
and his head hit the ceiling fan

Now he listens to his Daddy’s
ruined jokes and laughs
like a chained dog barking

lighting in filagree
access the northern clouds

He stutters when he speaks
to echo the thunder


HYPOSTASIS

A promise

A priesthood
of the void

from which
all things flow

To be broken
in plain sight

to hear the
call

and answer
with a life

surrendered
into that

forever
opening
question

Poems by Keith Nunes

CATENATING IN PUBLIC 

Caught on the corner
As processional silence
Ghosts from one mourning phase to the next,
How many crucifixions to go?
Last man teetering
pays a Mind-Man
for answers,
sent to the corner with placards,
paying penance in IOU’s,
paying Peter the pipe-bomber to
be his avenger,
avenging
what,
no-one is quite certain


DOING IT OVER YOUR HEAD 

Landscapes pour
from tributaries of wistful road songs,
All decayed-decline perpetually behind us,
Eroded into grit atop blacktop,
Rivers of bold storeyed-lives flow
Like mercury in a heat haze,
Beckoning the rueful red rose,
Tan a-brown coppery
Short-stay and bronzed by time
Unburdening in full light,
Walking thru amber framings,
Writ in primal tongue orally set in refracting cheek,
Bobbling in speech balloons
Way over your head, deep in the ground!

Poems by Yoko Danno

TAKING A CHANCE:

a lollipop & luck in my pocket
i jump on a merry-go-round
with no sense of time or direction

                       *

my mind
is outside my heart unless
whirled in a washing machine


                       *

puffing and panting
high up to the hilltop ascending,
what will i expect to see

― the flat surface of a writhing sea?


ONE CHANCE, ONE MEETING

ping, one chance,
pong, one meeting,
back echoes from the ages of distance

ping, one chance,
pong, one meeting,
back echoes from the walls of difference

one chance,
one meeting,
fragrance of incense wafts to beings

yet unborn

                     ― from a bowl of green tea

Poems by Harrison Fisher

WILD WORLD CATHARSIS

Flickering shadows
bite and scratch and boil
in island stews to feed
the drug effect,

an army amassed
waist deep in a swamp
in a pact between witch doctor
and mad scientist
sealed with goat blood.

Their stuff is bad.
They use the spiny fish.
They make potions that
kill and keep alive.
Death is illusion
everyone wants most.

Wild world catharsis
produces sterile moons,
held by obedience
to the vainglorious core.

Marrow is formed blood.
Suet and lard
are bloods
under bloodless gray moon,
and the plants in its tide
intolerably musky.

When the feathered club
pounds the blowfish
to a poison paste,

when the gray moon
reproves the shallows
and what that might mean,
the gray turning fecund,

who can tell
the vegetable
from the mold?


POP GOES THE MOUNTWEAZEL

Speaking as someone
who has been in this bar
forever among upside-downers
and down-and-outers
taking in the hate cure,
the Celine solution,

my gaze can illumine
the infundibulum
of your soul, a panjandrum
of suggestio falsi
or suppressio veri:
Lie, or sit on your truth.


+


The wives
of David Niven
were, first, Primula
and, second, Hjördis.
Their names make him sound like
a downed man of myth, punished

by an angry god who turned
Primula into a flower bed and later
Hjördis into a fjord because Niven
once played an esquivalient, pop
bishop who foolishly called
the moon a balloon.

THE MONKEY’S RELIC

If you make processed meats
for a living, you don’t eat them.
You know what they contain.
If you write poems, you know

the routine of mis-execution,
of hearing too clearly
the interior’s elevation into canon
only to transcribe it with a paw.

If you continue to write poems,
you stop reading others’ poems
because you know they are wrong.
Beyond that, you can see

where the poets’ lives
have gone wrong, like the lives
of the saints,
ending in persecutions

and horrible deaths
so wrongful they inspire
the wrong works of followers
through the ages.

First of the mortifications
of the flesh, my wish upwells
to stick a pen in my blind spot
and write no wrong.

Poems by G. E. Schwartz

Will We Remember

…how when seeking some kind of confirmation,
            Annoyances that disrupted the newscycle like gnats
That might’ve have come in with us to escape the
           Coldening October air, whirling like electrons reminded
Us how the universe really started just above the skin
           Of the upholstered armchair, revealing its metaphor
Where the cosmos was a body and x-rays from far
           Quasars showed how continuous we were with
Streaks that scratched the atmosphere as with
           A slough of late-stage insects on Blue PLanet
                     Pronouncing enchilada enchilada to the moon?


Will We Remember

…how often so many things never fit together,
           How they were required to be patched, painted,
How frequently they peeled and the patches often
          Not of the same material, so a screw had to be added
Or perhaps Gorilla Glue, and how nicks were forever
          Unfinished, wood showing, how splinters, how a bed-
Knob was missing, and no one knew where it was,
          And how the side porch settled and the screen doors
Squeaked since who-remembered-when and then
          Never close properly, how bathroom calk, how old
Porcelain, how the pattern once clipped into octagons
          Had gaps, how often we, too, were described that way–
A structure leaning slightly, ever more dependent
                     On loosening parts on a side hill in Henrietta,
                     New York?


Will We Remember

…how at one time or another we had hoped to make
           The cosmos more homey, buckthorn removed like
Planets on their wires, beauty’s lush vocabulary hushed
           By distance’s invisible glove whose finger dragged
The night rivers through Upstate New York in such
           A local universe we hoped the sky might be encouraged
To finally make up its mind to rain or snow or shine and
          Be done with it and the moon might give up its cul de sac
                     Neighborhood and becoming the great lake it so
                                Longed to be?