A Poem by Andrew J. Stone

The Girl in the Mirror

Marble-eyes sunk in ghosted flesh can only remember the red letters: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.

 

 

 

 

Andrew J. Stone is a 20-year-old dissident attending Seattle Pacific University. He hates the sun, sleeps under its shine. His debut chap, "Teenage Angst & the Ekphrastic Exercise," will be available from Collective Banter Press in January 2013. Other work has been featured in over 75 literary journals including: right hand pointing, Zygote in my Coffee, Misfits' Miscellany, Yes Poetry, Jellyfish Whispers, Four & Twenty, Full of Crow, & most recently, The Germ (inaugural issue due out in January 2013). Find him in the graveyard: http://andrewjstone.blogspot.com/

Two poems by Duane Locke

TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO. 408

A hegemonic dominance of the social, the ideological,
The cultural, the economic has distorted the humanity
Of people into dehumanization. We have been taught
So much that must be unlearned, we had too many
False factual and false axiological beliefs spoken
Into us without our awareness to discriminate or
Evaluate and we must exorcise from our corporeality
What has been spoken into us. There are too many
Explanans that are lies within us. We must unconceal
These lies and subdue their power over us. The improvement
Of society can only be achieved only through the improvement
Of a radically singular individual and the improvement
Can only be a self-improvement. So our future is bleak.
People rejoice in their current state of dehumanization,
People love and cherish the lies they live miserably by.
Dehumanization and a fraudulent axiology have become
The foundation for our society.



TERRESTRIAL ILLUMINATION NO 412

The event whether it being an opening
Of a door to a blasphemed room with
With the slanted burnt black wicks of
Quasi-melted candles in white saucers
or watching the yellow and red bill
of a gallinule as its moves
To grasp a crumb of bread tossed by a tourist,
The event is more complex than
The perception or knowledge of the event.
A selection of a part is the consequence.
The selection depends on background equipment.
The event is a performance always ambiguous, always uncertain.
A slice of an event influences us, the selection generates.
The whole might be concealed, but it shouts,
Its shouting is an echolalia that is not understood
But transforms more than what is understood
As what is understood requires mediation of a a media
That keeps changing its masks. We are the masks changers.
The masks are made out of words. Intersubjectivity
Is a masked ball.




Duane Locke lives in Tampa, Florida near anhinga,
gallinules, raccoons, alligators, etc.
He has published 6,701 poems, includes 29 books of poems. His latest
book publication, April 2012,
Is DUANE LOCKE, THE FIRST DECADE, 1968-1978, BITTER OLEANDER PRESS.
This book is a republication
Of his first eleven books, contains 333 pages. Order from
http://www.bitteroleander.com/releases.html,
Or Amazon.

A Poem by Doug Bolling

Chatterland

Sizzle in the brain pan.
Your eggs toward an omelet
of what diameter.

Twenty devils marching on the rim
of a single biotic molecule.
How did we become freed up from
those nitroglycerin memories
of all those bad boys.

Rolling in the flour bin
faces painted with sin
pure as gold.

Take me to your leader.
Bless me with your silver
umbrella just before it
rains down doom.

Another year.
We gather here to measure
our fate in a thimble.

Do you remember Joanna.
How she flew into Boston
to deliver the goods.

How she told her poems
from that table top
in the Bistro of the
Forgottens.

How afterwards we jumped off
the wharf and swam to China
for the first showing of
"Superbug In Hell."

Seriously, we are burning up
here amid the icebergs
our flasks half empty
writing, writing.





Doug Bolling's poetry has appeared in Poetalk, Blue Unicorn, Tribeca Poetry Review, Hurricane Review, Indefinite Space, Illuminations, Iodine Poetry Journal and Convergence among others.


He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and currently resides outside Chicago in Flossmoor, Illinois. His poetry has been both experimental and traditional.

Two Poems by Raymond Keen

The Weather Report

. . . or G. Gordon Liddy,

on TV playing himself.

Is this a great country, or what!

Rosland Capital sells gold,

real GOLD!

“. . . and I always get my GOLD

in 10 days or less!”

Is this a great country, or what!

Moving on to local news,

a pregnant mother murdered

her only living child,

her 4-month old daughter,

who just barely fit into

her MICROWAVE.

A GE Model JES2251SJ.

It’s the BIGGEST and it’s the BEST!

Is this a great country, or what!

Now let’s break for commercial.

Now let’s break for the stock report.

Now let’s break for the weather report.

Coming Next Fall:

MEDIA NEWS FLASH announces

a new reality show:

“Mothers-on-Parole who murdered their infants –

Pajama sleepover with Anderson Cooper.”

Don’t worry, America! Anderson is gay.

Verbs & Nouns Don't Clog Arteries

Surprise?

Or Bacon,

as in

I bacon you to believe

in earnest

Money

$$$$$!

No action

in sadness.

I dedicate this

POEM

to

onomatopoeia

or Pythagoras,

whichever comes 1^st.

(In a right angled triangle:
the square of the hypotenuse is equal to
the sum of the squares of the other two sides.)

a² + b² = c²

I rest my case x 3.

I rest my case x 3.

I rest my case x 3.

Now go take on the Day!

 

 

 

 

RAYMOND KEEN’s first volume of poetry, Love Poems for Cannibals, will be published in December 2012. His drama, The Private and Public Life of King Able, will be published in early 2013. Five of his poems appeared in the July/August 2005 Issue of The American Poetry Review. Since 2010, Raymond’s poems have been accepted for publication by 24 literary journals.

Raymond spent three years as a Navy Clinical Psychologist with a year in Vietnam (July 1967 – July 1968). Since that time he has worked as a School Psychologist in the USA and overseas, until his retirement in 2006. Raymond lives with his wife Kemme in Sahuarita, AZ. They have two grown children.

Two Poems by Steve Klepetar

The King’s Rage

Who could be angry when little
girls dance in the shadows of a
king's stone chair?  Where will

he put the wind of his voice, his
chest full of smoke and air?
Will he laugh at these small vibrations

on an earth he believes he owns?
Are we looking for a miracle here,
a pair of eyes glistening with crystal tears?

Who will request the violet sea of relent?
Who will watch dolphins breaking
waves near the horizon in knife-sharp sun?

Our questions tumble to earth in a rain of words
and again the thread has slipped from our grasp.
Where in his hall will he cradle the sound of bells?



Fire Thoughts

Winter creature in a dream
of cold, yoked to my
un-detachable name, that long shadow
in the useless evening sun.

How it sticks
to my heels, how it rubs
against rough piles

of dirty
snow.  Even
if I could manage a run on this slippery
ground, that slithery
shape would follow, wild

and mocking, sliding up sheer walls, gnarled
trunks of iron-gray oaks, light and hollow and empty of sound.

Steve Klepetar teaches literature and creative writing at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota. His work has appeared widely and has received several nomination for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His latest chapbooks, both from Flutter Press, are “My Father Teaches Me a Magic Word” and “My Father Had Another Eye.”

A Poem by David S. Pointer

Calibration

Flaunt your
task lamp stars
as I’m staked out
forever realmed
in honesty…..

chauffeured
limo fumes,
rogue
statisticians
won’t write
me up without
funding and
cosmological
repercussions
don’t flow up
like newly-
minted credit



David S. Pointer writes from Murfreesboro, TN.

Three Poems by Heller Levinson

Corner of Main and Spring

tally                                                abate

                 comeuppance

                  assortment

        ~                                     ~

gather

gathering opportunity

swivel

swivel opportunity

invite

Corner of Thoracic & Pine

limn                                  lyric dust

             mote flotation

               brushfully

Corner of Abeyance & Audit

accounting                             measure

                                                measuring-up

                                                       (curational

                                                       (cut-off/up

                              (cur-ing

                                    (casting    (cast-off

             (caution       (cus-to-dy          (car(ing)e         (care-ful

calculation

in the p(a)u(r)se of calculation → burble

                                                            buckl(ings)e

from calculation this abeyance,

toss-up , limb-meander , sprig-folly

sinkers barming in non-arbitrational conveyance

 

 

 

 

Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior. He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Alligatorzine, The Cartier Street Review, Counterexample Poetics, ditch poetry, First Literary Review-East, Hunger, Jacket,The Jivin’ Ladybug, Mad Hatters’ Review, Mad Swirl, Mid-June, Moria, Omega, Otoliths, Poets for Living Water, Skidrow Penthouse, Street Cake Magazine, Sugar Mule, Sulfur, Talisman, Tears In The Fence, The Wandering Hermit, The Toronto Quarterly, A Trunk Full of Delirium, Venereal Kittens, and Wood Coin. His publication, Smelling Mary (Howling Dog Press, 2008), was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Prize. Black Widow Press published his from stone this running in 2011. Additionally, he is the originator of Hinge Theory

A Poem by Sherry Steiner

In The Forest...

 

For two hours straight

night begins to fall.

Deep in thought

shall I open the window?

These violets smell sweet.

The odds are that

everyday except Tuesday

you can catch more flies with honey

than vinegar.

Yes. To handle with kid gloves

to pull one's leg, O…

she cuts her finger in the forest.

To stand one's ground

year in and year out

I am exhausted!

Yes, to saddle with responsibilities

to be a horse of another color -

Consequently he prefers to go to Italy !

Yes, to rise up in rebellion

within an inch of

Unscrupulous behavior -

my head whirls…

at dawn

at dawn.

 

 

 

Sherry Steiner

Housatonic ma

www.sherrysteiner.com

Two Poems by John Pursch

Siamese Overcoat

Eyed from antler’s smiling swoon to filings of a civil action, measured actors play with salivation’s normal growl, citing code and suction, pinning feathered drafts to leeward primping jewels, shipping ants beyond galactic heat, peeling stalks from blue-ribbon tent cities. Aching ornithologists prevail on tarmac arrestors, forming raspberries in lobotic dipsticks. Sepulchres overflow with soiled gas, bowling under dawn’s easy spinster, gawking at her frilly entree, plugging faux vagrancy, hailing feral cheapskates as the clamoring official horde. Most whirled migrants blend en route, conform to immigration head-count, millions downshift to thousands in whirled quota, hundreds of personalities slip into housewife overnight: “Leader, he lobot; you cheap protoplasm rig.” Babies nothing next to prized lobotics, but far above mass walk-in heaps, addled spinning wheels, whiplash schism’s rampant Siamese overcoat, sweating into melded personae, handbag stew neuroses, flophouse beef. MM-22 was first female lobot to spring from Lung Island’s phosphorescent shores, far surpassed the Montauk boys in pure lobotic heaven: public teleportation, fully automated ghost towns, maundering lattices, pain-free rebirth, closed-caption ESP… Blowback’s inevitable perfect-whirled kids stow away for kicks, unmatched prints turn up in all across the system, submerged in low-crime tunnels from Lost Annulus to Your Nuke. Total argon vapors clip arrhythmic breeding, leafing through a hoagie, stoking the garrison’s sold-out emery board with wedgies. Riflemen utter nougat to pet operands, addling crouton alleyways in fusion crates, rendered off-duty and deliciously unchambered by a flock of floozies, chapped and spoiled and chartered, shipped into poses at lusty minuets, dancing to a greatcoat waltz. Too much for horses in firehouse pose to stand, hearing popcorn underwear from hometown automatic foundry’s popsicle faker. Careening livery stoolies pounce on patriotic bedrolls and mulish morale, surreptitiously canonical in every crouching iced-over crockery kook known to pole-sliding highwaymen. None can feel for actuated poisoned bygones when locking down teething barrels and leering at heat-defying specimens.

Plural Burn

Heretical egrets peel away Parisian humps, pleased to belie colloidal treason, ossified in cramp glue. Philanthropic applicants sequester foals with dignitaries, igniting maelstroms before pumice crawls to Easter. Hosing out mixed futures, tiled causeways code rebirth into cobbled warehouse genes, flashing looped serration. Bedtime’s altar vainly flushes, pummeling days with argon pauses, slinking into coronal unction’s terrifying storage flan. Putative emitters teach reposing stealth to unrefracted density, monthly or veering at spoken flecks, aching into dialed tirades. Glomming on, monadic strains emit a moaning vision, nominally beastly, quashing robbed ballistic porters. Past irony pedals into molten gales, gawking at aromatic sonars from launching angles, scented with lilac for the coming trance. Brooding fiddles cop opinionated coils, scrambling laser etchings with peaked oodles. Stomachs change to sedentary technique, icing acknowledged ravings. Potted hoots scowl at sloping arthritics, bustling through soft borders of sputtering ejecta, creating timed dilutions. Hexed speakers peer along plunging lupine halls, ticking off curdled artillery for laudatory chestnut shoals. Spurning return vouchers, safecrackers salt prehensile minks with digitalis, deftly scraped from mumbling serenaders in a barking lunar zoo. Houses land an inky plaster for walled-off scimitars, deafening a swordfish with silo medics. Pinned events reset broiled factors, crossing dimly floating hearings with glossy turf. Springing to filed integument, extra personalities spill straight through facial troughs, insensitive to lofty hems, out of canned contextual mistresses. The party thus imprisoned knocks off yearly, fences wicked shivers for plodding teasers, and garbles for syntactic poking joints. Strobed intention telescopes to chronologic speed, hitting snow propellers, cast to diurnal memories of systematic youth. Planted histories dissolve in ruminating keels, flashing into transferred camera splints, boxing off eternal sight, lost in shuffled feet. Echoes reverse coined messages, touring idiosyncratic mouths, dealing in taped counterparts. Sliding gorges intimate fiords of vacant gloaming, catering to plural burn.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in The Camel Saloon, Counterexample Poetics, experiential-experimental-literature, and elsewhere. His fiction piece “Watchingstoned, T.V.” was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net 2012 Anthology. His first book, Intunesia, is available in paperback from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks . You can follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/johnpursch or on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/john.pursch .

A Poem by Neil Ellman

Bird Woman

(after the painting by Joan Miró)

 

Bird

(as bird)

woman

(as bird)

singular species

(born

borne

reborn

phoenix/avatar)

metamorphosis

(of mind)

reincarnate wings

(neither woman

nor bird)

but still

(a woman)

with wings

(a bird)

with arms

(almost woman

almost bird)

the soul

of she

of it

transmogrified

eternity

it flies

(whatever it)

on wings

of hope.

 

 

 

Twice nominated for Best of the Net, Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey. More than 600 of his poems, many of which are ekphrastic and based on works of modern and contemporary art, appear in numerous print and online journals, anthologies, broadsides and chapbooks throughout the world.

 

A Poem by KJ Hannah Greenberg

He Thrives while I'm Exsanguinated

 

He thrives while I’m exsanguinated; buckets beneath, lines above.

Middle aged, too, he needs no needle hyjinks, suture speculation, or loose change.

Those verbal fangs suffice to draw blood.

I merely espoused the vicissitudes of the mass media; likewise, unplugged some such devices.

Chocolate drops, sour tea, also penny buns, need to replace screens, modems, intercoms.

Convergent media makes for untidy snacking.

Meanwhile, she kicks golden dust, that sonika-child; lives as a fresh, enlivened generation.

Wombtime ill-sufficed to integrate regular rules’ litany into her psyche.

Such individuals, empowered, make dust of elders’ diatribes.

We form family; our textured veracities get served up alongside each morning coffee.

Concurrently, extra hours of sleep escape us, young and middle-aged, alike.

Gasping, evermore, we recognize the confluence of domestic factors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

KJ Hannah Greenberg, a two time Pushcart Prize Nominee, one time Best of the Net Nominee, and an actual National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar, gave up all manners of academic hoopla to raise children.  Currently, she flies the galaxy in search of gelatinous monsters and assistant bank managers.

 

 

 

 

A Poem by Christopher Kenneth Hanson

A Symmetric Hectic

 

 

 

Of the ship shape

debacle, an illusive

crime- Of a tale in the

gusts of heat, that turns-

sets sail and removes

to a distant island- where the

sun, a lemon yellow blaze melts

the ice between

tacit and implicit knowledge

Creates a strange emotion

you be the judge?

Thanks for listening

as the game goes on-

A neon tongue,

illuminates prone dialogue

haste, comatose debauchery

(illumination stations to

disagreeable concepts)

inept diabolical stain-

apply to known

procedure- debacle, illusion

parsimonious crimes as illusive-

praise be, the porter

of intuition; of constant

abbreviation-

cold, caught and hungry

here fall, pedantic unknown

that ship shape debacle.

A Poem from Doug Draime

Ode To Harry Langdon

I lift the
heaviest weight
in the
world

and when
I
shoot
myself
from

a
cannon
to
a
trapeze,
it's
a
sensation

that
you
pop corn
eating
movie goers
can't
imagine



Doug Draime has a full-length collection due out from Interior Noise Press in 2012. A presence in the underground literary movement for nearly five decades. Most recent books in print include: Los Angeles Terminal: Poems 1971-1980 (Covert Press) and Rock 'n Roll Jizz (Propaganda Press ). Awarded small PEN grants in 1987, 1991, and 1992. Nominated for several Pushcart Prizes in last few years. He lives in the foothills of Oregon.

A Poem by Sy Roth

Forsaken Man

I am a camera, panning and zooming in on me,
squat figure eaten by the heat of a midday sun,
knees forming an armadillo hollow
from which I ease into the world,
hunched-over mass of twitching muscles rippling lazily
at flies finding resting places to gnaw and regurgitate.
eyes glued to my hiking boots casting shadows on
wilted spaghetti laces cocooned in a neon glow.
arms wrap ever more tightly about my knees
flesh and bone held tenuously together --
a forsaken melting man
the best I could do that morning with trembling hands.


Sy Roth is retired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai , far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace. He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in Visceral Uterus, Amulet, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Barefoot Review, Haggard and Halloo, Misfits Miscellany, Larks Fiction Magazine, Danse Macabre, Bitchin’ Kitch, Bong is Bard, Humber Pie, Poetry Super Highway, Penwood Review, Masque Publications, Foliate Oak, Miller’s Pond Poetry, The Artistic Muse, Word Riot, Samizdat Literary Journal, Right Hand Pointing, The Screech Owl, Epiphany, Red Poppy Review, Big River, Poehemians, Nostrovia Poetry’s Milk and Honey, Siren, Palimpsest, Dead Snakes, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya and Kerouac’s Dog.

A Poem by Walter Ruhlmann

Late Epiphanies

MOTHER
shouted at MHR -- my very own sister
and cried -- she hardly does
that was yesterday after dinner -- the eve of leaving

What happened?
How come?
Y
?

Blows:  I hate to hear them banging in my head.
Epiphanies:  they often come too late.
Castaway:  I always feel alone in these long journeys.
Awful:  ET was drunk, raving again, fidgety, and restless.
Unnecessarily:  he started cleaning the kitchen at an undue time.
Sometimes I wish he could go away and leave
Eternally our tribe, go hunt for fresher flesh.

ASK ISIS
IS she only happy with him?
IS she scared when he shouts?
IS her hair raised when he looks wild?
IS she aware that no one has ever liked him?
IS there a way she could dumb him for good somehow?
IS their young son fitted with the same kind of neurotic chromosomes?

ASK WILL
WILL FATHER finally react?
WILL his own epiphany come too late too?
WILL he have passed away before anything good comes out?




Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. Walter is the author of several poetry chapbooks and e-books in French and English and has published poems and fiction in various printed and electronic publications world wide. He is an associate editor at Poet & Geek journal. Nominated for Pushcart Prize once.

His blog http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/

A Poem by Alan Britt

Rhinoceros Cockroach

The rhinoceros cockroach weighs two sparrows
and lives over ten years.

Most nights he drags his coffee ground body
(one giant fingernail) across sandy darkness
and crumbling gum leaves, rummaging tasty
morsels of rotting eucalyptus.

The rhinoceros cockroach weighs two sparrows
and lives over ten years.

But, tonight, as I relax in my Scandinavian teal
recliner, the rhinoceros cockroach, older than
human civilization, rustles the humid floor
of my tropical poem.


  Alan Britt's interview at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html#alan-britt) will air on Pacifica Radio http://www.pacifica.org/index.php in January 2013. His interview with Minnesota Review is up at http://minnesotareview.wordpress.com/. He read poems at the World Trade Center/Tribute WTC Visitor Center in Manhattan/NYC, April 2012, at the We Are You Project (WeAreYouProject.Org) Wilmer Jennings Gallery, East Village/NYC, April 2012, and at New Jersey City University's Ten Year 9/11 Commemoration in Jersey City, NJ, September 2011. His poem, "September 11, 2001," appeared in International Gallerie: Poetry in Art/Art in Poetry Issue, v13 No.2 (India): 2011. His recent books are Alone with the Terrible Universe (2011), Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). The Poetry Library (www.poetrymagazines.org.uk) providing a free access digital library of 20th & 21st century English poetry magazines with the aim of preserving them for the future has included Britt’s work published in Fire (UK) in their project. Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, The Robin Hood Book: Poets in Support of the Robin Hood Tax, by Caparison, United Kingdom, 2012, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin, 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008. Readings & Presentations: Panel Chair for Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry for the PCA/ACA Conference 2008 in Boston, Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ (2009 & 2012), the WPA Gallery/Ward-Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY (2008), Ultra Violet Studio, Chelsea/NYC (2008 & 2009), White Marsh Library, Baltimore (2011 & 2012), Enoch Pratt Free Library (Canton Branch) Baltimore (2011), Pedestal Magazine Reading at the Writers Center, Bethesda, MD (2012). Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formerly feral cats.


Links: Ragazine: http://ragazine.cc/2012/08/sohar-on-brittreview/ and http://ragazine.cc/2012/08/1wtc/

Two Poems by Bill Jansen

Tear Gas In The Tip Jar

Surrounded by appearances
by us
by saltines
and scalping knives.

Pony tracks on the cafe ceiling . . .

Waitresses load logical objects.

I pull the pin on a blueberry muffin.
WMD wired to maraconi.
Tear gas in the tip jar.

Yellow Formica tables
barricade the windows.
Obsidian arrows
break against them.

We should hold out
to the last burrito,
Jill said.




Curiosity

Per usual the people who know are dust
or preserved in honey,
tight-lipped in brass and marble monuments.

I have no time to wonder
about that jackass four hundred centerfolds from now
who wants to know what only I know.

I would say to that artificaly conceived man
to google they yellow pages for worm farms
and shove the rest up his memory hole.

I am just tired of being a sucker
in the subjective correlative audience
of this strip tease that ends in invisibility:

that white empty glove cooling on the dark stage.
That pale spot light about to turn out.



Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.  His works have appeared in various ezines.

Three Poems by Raymond Keen

Scattered Angels




(\o/)
 /_\   (\o/)
         /_\      (\o/)
                    /_\     (\o/)
                              /_\      (\o/)
                                         /_\
                                                    (\o/)
                                                     /_\

                                                                              (\o/)
                                                                               /_\       (\o/)
                                                                                           /_\

(\o/)
 /_\        (\o/)
              /_\

(\o/)
 /_\

       (\o/)
        /_\               (\o/)
                            /_\
                               (\o/)
                                /_\    (\o/)
                                         /_\
                                                       (\o/)
                                                        /_\
                                                                     (\o/)
                                                                      /_\

  (\o/)
   /_\
       (\o/)
        /_\

(\o/)
 /_\

These are the Scattered Angels ---- DUH!





Fill-In-The-Blank Quiz-Poem on Modern Art


Francis Bacon
looked like
an angel
and painted like
a _____.

Francis Bacon
looked like
a devil
and painted like
an _____.




Do You Think (This Poem Is Too Long)?

Do you think it is fun being human?
Do you think it is distracting being human?
Do you think it is bourgeois being human?
Do you think it is nasty being human?
Do you think it is coincidental being human?
Do you think it is marginal being human?
Do you think it is parsimonious being human?
Do you think it is credible being human?
Do you think it is “a stretch” being human?
Do you think it is pathetic being human?
Do you think it is remarkable being human?
Do you think it is something being human?
Do you think it is anything being human?
Do you think it is nothing being human?
Do you think it is worthwhile being human?
Do you think it is exciting being human?
Do you think it is “goodbye, farewell, adieu” being human?
Do you think this poem is too long? Too short? Just right?
Do you think this is really a poem? The Socratic method
Out-of-control? A childish interrogation meant to demean
The human spirit? An homage to Donald Barthelme? An
Historic first attempt to allow the reader to complete a
Poetic work of art? What? You tell us. (Fill in the  blank… ………………………………………………………....
…………………………………………………............…………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………)





RAYMOND KEEN’s first volume of poetry, Love Poems for Cannibals, will be published in December 2012. His drama, The Private and Public Life of King Able, will be published in early 2013. Five of his poems appeared in the July/August 2005 Issue of The American Poetry Review. Since 2010, Raymond’s poems have been accepted for publication by 23 literary journals.

Raymond spent three years as a Navy Clinical Psychologist with a year in Vietnam (July 1967 – July 1968). Since that time he has worked as a School Psychologist in the USA and overseas, until his retirement in 2006. Raymond lives with his wife Kemme in Sahuarita, AZ. They have two grown children.

A Poem by James Mirarchi

piñata

voodoo janitors

blindfold each other

in boiler room

play piñata

with hanging yuppie

all oily & gucci

combo of steam, guffaws

& thick accents

synthesize into party music

they twirl each other around

(blood-thirsty ballerinas)

swinging sticks

(panting & stumbling)

oily gucci yuppie gets struck

releasing

waterfall of hershey shit kisses

voodoo janitor cries:

can’t you say thanks when i pick up your trash?

that’s all i ask

oily gucci yuppie cries

as he gathers all his crap

stuffing it back into himself:

can’t i remain cute & full of shit?

that’s all i ask

 

 

James Mirarchi grew up in Queens, New York.

In addition to his poetry collections, "Venison" and "Dervish," he has written and directed short films, which have played at festivals. His poems have appeared in Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Poydras Review, gobbet, Boyslut, Dead Snakes, Subliminal Interiors Magazine, and others.

 

Two Poems by Christopher Barnes

Bail-Out

 

Hullabalooing can tip you

A wrung throat.

The misfit scandal

Froths its venom,

Animated in the public spirit.

Clinching frowns of fortune

Main-springs indigestion,

Cranches teeth.

 

We did not self-govern

These disgraced clientships.

We’re meat in the web

Hissing dissent with daylight voices,

Bound

To make the seamless machine

A losing game.

 

 

 

 

Vote – Don’t Vote

 

A vinegar aspect gimcrack – The Murdoch’s fishiness

Grates to a prompt-memory hammer out

(Knock-to-atoms lives, a populous).

First-fruits we glimmer,

The prescription, divide-and-rule dogma.

 

Our soft hearts, trollops as they are,

Go up for tender cash. Ding-dong.

The hymn of hate echo – get off, corpse

On your own misjudgement.

In 1998 Christopher Barnes won a Northern Arts writers award. In July 200 he read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology 'Titles Are Bitches'. Christmas 2001 he debuted at Newcastle 's famous Morden Tower doing a reading of my poems. Each year he reads for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and he partakes in workshops. 2005 saw the publication of his collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh.

Two Poems by John Pursch

Mudflat Closets

 

Arpeggios of faucet news, inhaled by foolish soldiers, work away at newfound thoughts of stacked dominion’s cemetery paste, pinning lurid histories to floor show antiques. Broken queue compartments fill the plenitude’s respiring girth with ill-begotten somersaults and gainers dipped in heavy salt, trickling through enveloped trains to gingerbread trauma sinkage. Loosening didactic pennies from a cardboard savior’s vaulted brace, the backstreet beckons to sunlight’s hazy cure, resonates with plural dockside chatter, and replicates suburban yields of soggy daisies, sentient chairs, and omnipresent underlings, clicking epiglottal hoppers for an amber litter’s psionic felt-tip kitten. Up the fluted passageway, tomographic welders flee the scent of almond furor, pounding boomtown sheiks with quaint amphibious beliefs. Ripening softly in mudflat closets across the grated siphon’s plausibility field, children regain saliva with beechnut simplicity, crossing vernal tenderloins with tipsy hurriers, molting into orchid vials beneath enchanting lampreys. Tomes surmise in porous silence, grafting conked allusions to unprotected sparrows, gifting leitmotifs in offhand delicatessen shoots. Terminals leap embargoed truths, skating down stylized cinnamon bonds to valentine moons, orbiting dissolving postcards. Sacks converge on individual iterations, damping extraneous neutrons into carload trays, casting breaded chicken feed to gulag inexpedience. Habitual corpses write off crafted carrier gaps, lending amorphous stoners to another streetcar’s brachial cloister. Yelping cod bubble up in sentimental fistulas of logical pond cremation, washing into ropy calm.

Fizzy Laughter

 

Mavens grow, stow away on lullaby yacht connections, and transfer sleepy cabbage into wholly straddled parakeets, craning global nectarines at waggling wings. Elevators plunge from next-door louvers, longing for a strident ransom, settling into basement soup and causeway sterility. Humbling a pegboard perpetrator, comatose sectarians play the mumbo-jumbo groan at twenty times the jet stream’s statutory pace, lacing tourmaline with comic lime, hefty and lagging in eight-ball blues. Saved by bowling trios, carnivores exceed illegal haddock at emery villages, nurturing a regal stallion on ciliated presence. Neighborly sprites comb the sock hop for breadcrumb spew, chewing till the prudes come home. If only dextrose had ruled with ironic fistulae in temporary origins, as loggers were taught to bereave; then thermal canned munitions might’ve morphed into differential Turks and instance dwellers could’ve looked alive at seeding rapture contests, divesting roaming rawhide oafs of thermoplastic munchkin tools, in time for summer’s tidal wash. Between a chalky plush surprise and goulash gals in bodice groups, our tasty destined kneeling feed became a cyclic wonton’s newly christened plight, dazzling us with prescient films and cereal toucan canes, lazing in the month of maypole ritual days. Kaleidoscopic stereos ignore exalted pirouettes of cave motifs and turtledove gazettes, enlisting faraway geysers to simulate a laboratory monkey. Drogue chutes entrain our wildest emblems of fueled theatric myth, mourning full-speed into nocturnal emissary tunes, played by voluptuous stamens. Evening settles into dusty miracle wolves, baying at an actuary’s cheesecloth toupee, rendering palatial pardons in kazoo clefs. Knots withstand a severance knoll, implying woolen daubs of gravity scotch, pelted with potato icing by cadaverous caterers. Mule team ramparts exhort a bladder climber to spare encrusted melons, fortifying fusiliers for frenzied French fajitas, factoring gherkins in partitioned op-ed bits. Wells pop, spilling fizzy laughter, gargled by pneumatic newlyweds, fencing for impacted endocrine release. Fluids fly, farming out form-fitting overalls for overhauled kneecaps in nativity plumes. Aging waifs assign insignias to iliadic coaxers, scooting historic mumblers down the sodden gangplank, truthful spearmint notwithstanding.

 

 

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in The Camel Saloon, Counterexample Poetics, experiential-experimental-literature, and elsewhere. His fiction piece “Watchingstoned, T.V.” was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net 2012 Anthology. His first book, Intunesia, is available in paperback from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks . You can follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/johnpursch or on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/john.pursch .