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.