Two Poems by Jordan Jamison

T.S. Eliot’s Veins

 

The apartment festers like open sores on feet, memories of dope itches and milky spoons of diseased liver brown, Coca-Cola brown, everything is brown.  I continue to think of you, T.S. Eliot; would you write a poem about the apartment, about working-class beaner friends who double as modern day Dantes?  Probably not, but my arms hurt.  My veins are an adorable apple bruise barely oxidized.  I love my veins, always have.  Sometimes when I can't sleep and my nose is running and I can hear the water in the wall and the delicious couples screaming at each other out on the sidewalk, I wonder if you love your veins as much as I love mine.

 

 

 

Phoenix

 

Anne drowned in Gatsby's dirty bathtub-listening to Marge Simpson pubuc hair and A Tribe Called Quest.  Saint Peter rejected her at the gates of Glendale coffee shops, Auschwitz and Wrigley Field.  She sat in her car all morning eating cups of tetanus nails and chasing them with atom bombs, Olde English, and Fentanyl enemas.  The Buddha turned out her formal complaint and Maricopa County Superior Court appeal by sticking a lit cigarette through his bellybutton and she laughed her Zkylon B laugh walking to the psychiatrist on 51st and Thunderbird muttering why why why.  Her sister respected her but didn't understand her and they went to Holocaust Addicts Anonymous meetings in Wall Street church basements also used as shooting galleries by truckers and priests and John Coltrane.  She knew enough was and shot a 20 dollar bag of saline and Gary Sinise's favorite ping pong paddle and walked to Nitrous Row thinking about Otto the Orange and Dutch courage and another hit of hipster typhus and she could cop it quick and easy from any Dominican in Tempe if only she could hustle up the paper.  On the way up to the whippit spot she talked Dali into using her as his model for The Persistence of Memory and he agreed greedily in Gestapo glee and asked for a list of her references and she told him she was Jack's original pick then that bitch Rose showed up but she did a photo shoot at summer camp last year and he told her to call him Salvadore from now on or if she preferred The Bear Jew or Teddy Ballgame.  She left him in the smog and walked over flaccid fool's gold and Prius windshield cow paddies and yen pox opium left out to dry and suckly by Mao and Stalin to give their timed orgies a rush and she breathed out methylenedioxymethamphetamine and she felt the Turkish semen and steak and eggs and pocket cocain from yesterday blurp out on the basketball court of Parkridge Park and she left before Neil Armstrong's neat anal probe could catch up to her because it was not welcome on the Row and Buzz Aldrin was always too sober to walk to Daisy's raves.  She saw Osama's palace and the crematorium pouring out virginity and hope and balloons and empty Reddi Wip cans.  Jesus was on the stoop and he fingered his pet Chia Cheeseburger and his quiet disciple Lee practiced target shots reliving the glory days of November nineteen sixty three bragging that Newt Gingrich was next and he texted Himmler calling him a Jew loving communist and when she walked by they whistled and asked her if she wanted any good Soviet ketamine and she ignored them and made it in the mansion and didn't say hi to anyone and immediately saw Gahndhi across the room blowing Spice smoke down on a stinkbug the he carried around to conquer anorexia and John Travolta jokes and the Pakistani Raj flag and she grabbed his hand from twenty feet away and they went in the bathroom and had a fifty-six day hunger binge and she drowned.

 

 

 

Jordan Jamison is from Phoenix, Arizona.  His poetry has been featured at Hayden's Ferry Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Magazine, and Ploughshares, among others.  He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently working on his first collection of poetry, Dancing With Trains.  He is alive and well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Poem by Emma Ambos

GreenLad

Green without gills

they f-loop-p-ed in the sun

(when mama’n’papa napped)

they raped with delight

the ecstasy of RuffLife

color-skinned they duked the cat

‘nd took-another-toke

 

 

 

Emma Ambos is a writer of oddities and outcasts and all that is just too lovely.

Two Poems by John Pursch

Imogene Tonic

 

Whipsaw implications lack accords of inner rations, alimentary and propagated by tea, catching surds in bifurcated mule team anguish. Sheltered tropics coagulate in sandbar trowels, vexing pitchmen, ordering tuple sundaes for indigenous gulfstream brides. All unfurnished showers cringe at ballroom candy herbivores, leafing overture pennies into brawny wedge parole, spooning with barge heroes. Entropic smidgens migrate beneath a neon silence, seemingly orphaned by lewd ichthyosaurs, loving drainage floss. Transparent steeples topple dawning feather eaters, petting yellers, skimmed of fallen cash coat monkeys. Slanting toward skylight seals, some condor iterates on very able consonants, violating sequestered nouns, incensed to fabricate esteem. Speeding ingots cauterize inculcated boondock plaques, coursing out of sounding kittens, fathoming a phantom’s pure acidic greed. Knotted whorls incorporate to bleat exploding banter, carding ungainly orchid beasts to denigrate affluent leisure tones. Rangy oodles peculate embattled haughty sidebars, carting stirrups into hickory jargon’s ouster. Truculence uncovers bimodal effluent, forming concrete emetics from animal drought, keenly spattering moot octopi. Winged gloaters gesture blithely, imitating Popeye, drawling to jejune caboose fanatics, crippling the sunshine. Gaffers spill enough garrot munitions to jangle strung caverns into botched cone trails, smugly interceding for soliloquy germs. Watchmen wind down corkscrews, venerating alluvial bans, effacing stucco fashion cans. Whoever derives crested hedges from cereal goiters will turn a frozen pestilence into dollops of steamboat clues, sampling Dixie’s barnstorming daze. Cyclic hose engulfs sentinel broth, boiling allied waddlers in craven mothballs, stamping in renewal plunks. Tightened foam decries belittled mace plats, rescinding Hoosier teal erasure’s statistical Skee-Ball heft. Trying eighteen jurors, smelted trains imbibe deferral truncheon booths, filed to notable lenses, spinning ozone into baroque cottage lashes. Slinking off the fantail, lasers drive a shaven seed to trollop loot eugenics, hoping canker pores wilt before a thespian’s instep peels. The softer glow of droplets, clean and prescient, volunteers our salivary oeuvre, quavering with beef. Sacred causal sediment dissolves in coastal Imogene tonic, flapping morning stove gorilla feet to fan the vernal hoax in basted claims.

 

 

Oxide Swirls

 

Grain clangs on serried childhood spume, cacophonous and geriatric, ruminating on cresting queues of avian piasters. Gargoyles immerse corn sheds in crepe shutters, forging eastern pollywogs for timely caravans of nude Peruvian cheeks. Fists of shamanic zeal tailor mockeries from sand, glossing impasse rituals into mossy gloom, caricatured in lox. Gables girdle gravel groves, losing gimbal lock, skating highway elbows in placid osmotic valor. Parking clots, emblematic of owl police, cruise on hirsute streetcar piles, hedging for answer feast emergence, easier to wind than iffy oxide swirls. Paws eat ordinary spacesuits, dribbling ancillary gypsies down louvered matchsticks. Ample reflectivity inures the margin’s canny cellar to skinny sidecar storms, flexing a warning’s windscreen till crop dust tiles the clovered sky. Sleuths employ erstwhile garnish jewels, clucking off knackered berms, working up yardarm cheese for banyan toasters, ominously understated.

 

A toffee blurter winds historic aerials between decaying bark mobiles, slashing titration grates to cool diffraction pellets. Trained organs plead for lemon tines, chomping on pseudonymous raffles, baiting interred castaways to festive ergot pools. Money sets on sidling carbs, flits across a pineal droop, and catches analytic mirth in diverse chanting trilobites, only to deem an uncle’s loopy fencepost swarthier than dueling dermal existence cares to rusticate. Pin setters can’t interview exogenous wolves, gearing down to relish cards, flossing tallied Rotarians with jungle goo. Sinusoidal flagrancies glom and cower, scaring currency hives to haystack trades. Salting raises chippy snores, harshly owned in superbly stenciled toes, grinning head-to-county-oven-trees, shipping soiled mystics to orphans for a loafer’s fueling pod. Havens sew respiring clout into agoraphobic gist, epitomizing naughty icicles, crooning for spurious beets. Needled strays incite a cackling sty to sleepiness, merely maundering for tinsel tonsure’s diatonic haze.

 

 

 

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 Amit Parmessur

Kit Kating

I tear the red wrapper. What

a confection. Compared to

hypocrisy, in endless supply.

I eye the two middle bars.

Truth is as usual in the middle.

I snap the two bars free

recalling Forrest Fenn’s poem.

Terrific man the old guy

calling us to find

a million dollars of antiques,

compared to friends who call

when their Titanic hits an iceberg.

I cut the Kat

and sweep the sweet mud

off the wafer with a thrilled tongue.

I am not a man to keep

the mouse out of the house.

Not a painter keen

to wake up on his page missing.

Kit Kating brings me to Macau.

Freedom.

Kit Kating brings me to Groppi.

Transcendental bliss. I

Kit Kat while my black Kat

(thats how I call her) purrs

pleasure into my veins.

I become slightly political.

Walking about, I learn that 600

million Indians have no electricity.

Well, I need to Kit Kat on the moon

and learn tagalog some time soon.

Amit Parmessur lives with his black cat and two cute dogs nowadays. Since 2010, his poems have appeared in over a hundred literary magazines, like Ann Arbor Review, Salt, Hobo Camp Review and Red Fez. His book on blog Lord Shiva and other poems has also been published by The Camel Saloon. Born in 1983, he was nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Award and lives in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius.

A Poem by Janet Rice Carnahan

A PEEK INTO THE NIGHT

 

Lifting the darkened curtain,

Shaking off awkward,

Wayward stardust,

Scattered by,

Winds of wonder,

Drifting down,

By hidden,

Delightful designs,

Unknown,

To anyone,

Other than itself!

Mindless minstrel,

Attuned to an unseen band,

Orchestrated brilliance,

Not attracting,

Even the closest cluster,

Of constellations,

Entrance not allowed,

Forbidden,

Unless an open welcoming invitation,

Responds to the subtle draw,

Of harmony!

If others came,

Unattended,

Unassuming,

Unprepared,

Without careful discernment,

Imbalanced intruders,

Miscellaneous space junk,

Off course orbiting objects,

Hurling odd shaped meteors,

Bounced bits of old rocket pieces,

Would edge their way,

Into the continually tightening field,

Altering the well hoped for date with destiny,

No paths dare to change,

Even dream into existence!

The longed for whispered desire,

Unspoken deepest wish,

Blown into the night sky,

While without warranted fanfare,

Peace arrives . . .

Ready to be,

A living reality!

 

 

 

Living in Laguna Beach, California, among artists, photographers and writers, Janet loves the unique setting of the Pacific Ocean and nearby beaches. Born on the northern California coast, her muse has always followed the sea for inspiration. The natural freedom of oceans is a joy shared with her husband, adult children, family and friends. Janet’s published work includes a cover photo, caption and poems in an anthology, “Prompted: An International Collection of Poems”, December 2011. Recently her poems were published in, “Pyrokinection”, “Jellyfish Whispers”, “The Camel Saloon”, “The Mind[less] Muse” and “Three Line Poetry”.

A Poem by Laura Winton

Dustbowl

 

who will mark the day

when you've been dead longer than you were alive

the chickens have come home to roost and the cock

cannot stop crowing his lungs burst as they strain to summon the day

you carry all your worldly possessions in a brown paper bag

 

teach a man to farm teach him to march in rows stand straight when ordered and hide among the crops during the hunt and his napalmed hands will fertilize soft baby skulls, tattoo plaid and pastel flowers onto flimsy flesh           hammers and anvils and drums make music more pleasing than a funeral march the unfamiliar streets will swallow you up before you can build your myth          epic by epic before your tasks are finished and the stables are cleared

 

the prophet saw huge metal birds and resurrected monsters, how we burn ourselves up inside brick and steel solid structures the pyramids will outlive our bleached bones muscle by muscle I melt pulled apart like a wishbone        my empty ribcage still moves by habit after my head flies off

 

there are not enough hands to cover all of your shameful parts

 

the kevorkian babies cry all night chase pigeons with fat pink faces not born of sand and rice paddies their pictures play in courtrooms        the playground becomes a tragic mecca outlined at ground zero, a pinata full of scorpions burn down your temples and churches

 

your god no longer lives there           remember your mother and cry

as your chair falls from the sky

 

 

 

Laura Winton, aka Fluffy Singler is a writer and performer currently living in Minneapolis . She has been writing for more than 25 years and her poetry has been published and performed around the world. She has performed her experimental poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and Bar 13 in New York , the Green Mill and Trace Bar in Chicago and at dozens of venues in the Twin Cities. She published Karawane: or, the Temporary Death of the Bruitist, a journal devoted to experimental writers who perform their work, for roughly 10 years. She loves Surrealism and Dada and believes that the Surrealist goal of the liberation of the imagination is the most political act that a writer can perform.

Three Poems by Felina A. Soriano

from Quintet Dialogues

 

Of bass

 

║7║

 

tributary relocation

localized embodiment each section of bodied movement

adjusts to/of/at

 

within/almost/lyrical

 

approximations to an altered occasional slur, whispered

in the mentioning of this

upright embodiment of sound:

 

________, an exact performance valuated trusting metaphoric

 

retrieval

 

 

║8║

 

conflagrations engage in the humanized

verdict

                        burn-burn the temporal

malfunction of misused vernacular

                                                               the unsaid mistake in tandem

on(in)to within

flesh in the varied

accumulation               regarding regardless

temptation to

excel beyond

surface-deep language of the a la mode

 

 

║9║

 

summer in the exhale rendition

            weakened in the September of swollen rain|s

                         such language

induces subsequent relief

as then or when-at Winter’s untraceable feet

dissipate into twirl of the hovering ballerinas

 

 

 

 

Felino A. Soriano has authored 54 collections of poetry, including Quartet Dialogues (white sky ebooks, 2012) Of language|s| the rain speaks (quarter after press, 2012) and Of oscillating fathoms these nonverbal chants (Argotist Ebooks, 2012). He publishes the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation in philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He lives in California with his wife and family and is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.

Two Poems by Denis Robillard

The Pacific Trash Vortex


There’s an 18 minute video about a shopping bag

on a Ulysses quest of self.

I’ve seen it a few times now.

A grocery variety bag, now an internet star

questing a field at knee angle

then wind launched

it lobes along a stubble track

and a deserted road

like a paper kite searching its maker

in its simple American Beauty.

It prates anonymously a moment among horses

wraps itself onto a statue

but after a brief struggle manages to flee

like a circle circus it grizzles and

grouses

on the immortality of plastic

via Herzog as Omniscient narrator.

　

How many stunt bags were used

Warner, for this pop star bag

to navigate the wind a dozen times?

What are its Signs of Life

as the white Wastec Truck delivers it to the

Wasteland of plastic junk,

only to be later pushed

into the pacific trash vortex

and eaten by monsters hiding

in a scatter field of Teutonic debris?

In 6 years this little traveling baggy

will turn and churn into a pelagic soup

wind driven currents sucking it

into horse latitudes

where the whale music is already trapped

forever.

 



BEAR DREAMS



Sometimes late at night

Half asleep

Half awake

A black underworld does its biding

Drawing me into a

slow slow drift from bed’s thick forest

I am soaked in sweat

By this evening of fur sighs

Growled visions from

shape shifting anxiety

Memory is encoded

in bear spit there

The slather of probe tongue

Leaving acid markers as totem

It wasn’t the mystic dancer

on the Delhi Road

But we used to see them

hustle across the tar bled road

In late August

Large Skulking spirits

shaking the shadow roads alive

With X ray drama glistening nostrils

In dark geography

These blind sniffs,

Twilight grunts and growl hungers

Rip through Obfuscated darkness

And reach Behind trailer thin walls

where I sleep this nightmare again.

 




Denis Robillard was born in Northern Ontario and now teaches high school in Windsor, CANADA. For the past 15 years several of his poems have appeared 90 times in the small presses and on line magazines across Canada, The USA, England and Scotland. Some of those include: Rattle, Rampike, Word Riot, Nashwaak Review, Algoma Ink, Cliff Soundings (Michigan), Sidereality, Orange Room Review, Dogzplot Magazine, Dusty Owl, Dufus and many more. In 2011 Robillard was published in Windsor Review, Bolts of Silk and Ottawa Arts Review. He is an avid photographer and traveler. You may see his article work on occasion in the pages of Hey Philippines Magazine.