Two Poems by Linda M. Crate

forty five percent

right and wrong are only separations in degrees
sixty six percent or thirty three?
i don't know,
my calculations always seem to grasp the
wrong instead of the right;
constantly berated for things i cannot control nor fix
i find myself wishing i were still a star
when i was no one would yell at me for shining
too brightly or not bright enough —
here there is knowledge unharvested hanging
in shadows of the trees, you don't know
something unless you can prove it
a girl tripping over her syllables and socially awkward
like me cannot articulate all she knows
so that must mean i'm an idiot?
i'm not, but they won't let go of that notion
let them think what they want —
finding my spark i'll just burn this world tomorrow,
and the ashes of my rage will betray everything i knew to
those full of apathy and indifference;
revenge is a poison you give to others yet you drink yourself,
but i'll gladly do it if it takes them out too
there's no reason their hatred should burn more
brightly than any star hung into the indigo black of night.




is the moon winter?

the world is
             o                                                              is the moon a land of constant winter?
             w                       snow                                                   l
f r   ow   n s are more common than                                      silver and lonely as
 a                                       i feel is
  l                                       l
   l                     f                ing, and all i can do is br | eak
    into the wind                                                     r
     n             s                                                        = n and lone,
      g            s                                                      o k e
                   u
                   r
                   e
                   d as the world that manufactured me
                                                                      e.

Three Poems by Felino A. Soriano

from Of these spiraled identities

I

an aggregative appearance (aspectual, observable)                   arches

                                         or

          arching (of the fundamental system an angle resumes, unheard —in the time)

                     away                or

toward an away rendition of
sound and straightened articulation these

mirrors of my looking refines the blur into

a
           radial
                                              significance:

this becoming a.m. aims at an onward defining                    song of swaying psalms

etched into a delivery of notions

igniting consonants                           advocating       probability amid an opening of

dialogical sirens’

appellative context

II

the crow whose calling my window’s favorite song

called

                                                         in the ballad of silent interpretations

            with flaming fingers

warming
                        range and its spectral thicknesses
focusing
                                   atop the curfew of my peripheral alibis

the language of echoes curled

into names and their local                 experimentations: my window’s breathing, near-pant

the hanker to absolve

serial closings

contained within an hour’s identified

collaborations

III

with remedies a hand involves

finding                     friction (of the warming necessities, plagiarized)

                      delegating worded braids into hopeful-building

as do the determined

inferring freedom as the holding heliocentric values

change, incurring inconsistencies amid an outward ordinariness

oval (as, sounds)

ontological (as, meaning)

objects (as, hand-being-involvement)

and the permanence of proving inherent deeds in the dialogue of

vocal connection                                         transparent

 

 

 

 

Felino A. Soriano has authored nearly five dozen collections of poetry, including Extolment in the praising exhalation of jazz (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2013), the collaborative volume with poet, Heller Levinson and visual artist, Linda Lynch, Hinge Trio (La Alameda Press, 2012) and rhythm:s (Fowlpox Press, 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 the director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.

 

                

A Poem by Derek Osborne

Nineteen in ‘72

Sea-Bright sand dune adorable midnight
ocean running mascara salting
my cellist fingers finding your note,
the small of your back l'Arc de Triomphe.

Do you remember that summer solstice
far far away from the madding crowded
envious bar in that Jersey joint,
freshman undertow tugging us down.

A name never asked, but what’s in a name?
More, sweet girl, than ever imagined
joy, epiphany, wisdom igniting,
to be so young once more in your eyes.

Something unspoken, some thing not offered
but given, taken, not given, entwined
one kiss we surrendered shining immortals
these days, these winters, I cuddle your light.

Derek Osborne lives in eastern Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Bartleby-Snopes, PicFic/Folded Word, Pure Slush and Boston Literary among others. His debut novel, Gadabout, made it into the final round of Amazon/Penguin’s First Novel Competition and is currently in re-write. This summer he will be one of the featured writers at KGB’s FIZZ reading series in NYC. To read more or contact, visit: http://gertrudesflat.blogspot.com.

A Poem by Joop Bersee

Weightless

There is no time left,
blessed and cursed as we are.

Not under supervision.
Nor hiding under a table because the enemy drops its bombs.

Flowers crawl towards your eyes.
The violent stupidity keeps me here.

No, I don’t know who we are.
Not even as the light declines.

We walk the streets, kill mice, stand on snails-
Weightless in the great stillness.

Joop Bersee was born in the Netherlands in 1958 in Aerdenhout. From 1989 to 1996 he lived in South Africa where he began writing poetry in English in 1991. His poetry has been published in South Africa, England, Wales, Canada, Brazil, India (in a translation),the United States and Ireland. In 2011 he was one of the winning poets of the Dalro Award in South Africa. Currently he works for the library of a museum in Amsterdam.

Two Poems by Kelley White

The Strong Poem

suicidal/death poets

form(all) {haiku}
experimentalBEAT
regional NH NE PA
m a i l a r t drow nekops
C O N C R e T E
political=social=feminist
small small press
AcaDemIcs (medical0
community ‘nayborly’
prison///(peace)
on-line hyperTEXT
sur(real)ist DaDaDa
hiphoprapstreet

Rubber Street, Jaywalk & Seer

pup tents benefit your
favorite charity the near club
of money behind the 200
vines on the elephant house
as if a flock of gulls called
a red car with mud
this dawn of shadows
chicken wire and crow’s feet

before the lion died

that was her only name
the birth of lead trees
an allegory of lumber
clarity splits ten
woven legends
that was law night
ape and maracas

Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner-city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 PCA grant.

why not a tree at

the corner of King &

Queen behind the zoo

A Poem by Ben Rasnic

The Awakening

Glistening in the essence
of Morning Star light,
it clings to the stellar fescue tips
like fresh teardrops
to a field of flashing knives;
silver linings to a world
which chooses to cloak
its thin skin
in bullet proof vests.     

Ben Rasnic is a native of Jonesville, a small rural town in Southwest Virginia with a population <1000 .="" span=""> His poems have been published in A Small Good Magazine, Bird’s Eye reView, The Camel Review, Camroc Press Review, Flutter Magazine, Gutter Eloquence, The Orange Room Review, Right Hand Pointing, The Rusty Truck, Short, Fast and Deadly, Subliminal Interiors, Victorian Velvet Press and numerous other print and online journals. He is also the author of two collections of poetry, “Artifacts and Legends” from Aldrich Press and “Puppet: Poems by Ben Rasnic” from Alabaster Leaves Publishing. A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2011, Rasnic still considers as his greatest literary achievement, electing to publish two short poems by Yusef Komunyakaa while serving as editor of his college literary magazine, Jimson Weed, in 1978—16 years before Komunyakaa received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Ben currently resides in Bowie, Maryland.

A Poem by Rick Hartwell

Room Enough for Love

When P

     R

     I

    D

& E G O

get in the way, there is no room left for L

                                                          O

                                                             V e

 

 

 

 

Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember, the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing, Rick would rather still be tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.

Two Poems by John Pursch

Painting With Flares

Horsehide grafts

coat starchy bumblebee quartets,
onerous and strangely fragrant,
slicking funereal fangs
with damp detergent dross.

Hip checks court a ciliated earring

in daylight tap-dance taupe,
gushing spiteful birthright clamor,
prancing into crux release.

Buildings spawn in gleaned collusion,

flicking tasseled telephones
at browning governors,
yearning to deify a rosy peak.

Incubating mufti feeders

defalcate a paratrooper’s final frown,
elicit glowing pork, and fructify
the policy of trading knees,
painting riverbeds with flares.

Heaving Ho

Secretions eat away

at full-bodied barrage balloons,
humidifying jugular resection’s
motile preference for shaft inspectors,
filtering blast furnace follicles
in bowties of crowded bunions.

Sweltering hoses gird dialed tendencies

with charismatic previews of mimed testimonials,
idling at the spackled hovercraft’s shingled prow,
finished off by trunks of selfish undertakers.

Hoping for tattered kisses,

semiotic amulets prevaricate
till dinner hours congeal,
recede to summer placemats,
and hint at interior matrons,
sewing yearnings from sticking point stew.

Heaving ho, elderberry crumble freaks

defy the quasi-stellar hospitality
of pheasants in a sickeningly bawdy county,
immersing glued entrails in honeyed trivia.



John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in many literary journals and was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net 2012 Anthology. His most recent book, Intunesia, is available in paperback from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. He's @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.

Three Poems by Allison Grayhurst

Why have I died

 

like Icarus? Or like cotton candy,

dissolving in lukewarm saliva?
            Five weeks without pay, and
the weather is morbid,
plays upon my skin like fireants.
           You took what I denied and changed
what was paltry into paramount -
my feet pressed against your calves, lifting
into the pressure, just
to have a choice.
           Why have I died? My neck cut against the broken window
as a resolution to my determination to see beyond the pane -
repeating like a recurring dream, developing a wider lack - lush pulsing,
possessing your sternum where I rest my panting will upon.

I am dead. Can’t you see my decay? Can’t you see

the violence expanding in my throat?
How have I died? before nirvana? after the bliss of a mother’s faith?

The sparrows come close. They know not to fear a dead thing.

They land on my foot with its multitude of intricate bones,
tendons and memories of backyard earth.
They look around, peck below where still remains some warmth.

Once I fed them - minuscule fledglings

fallen after a storm. Now I am over.
I do not eat. I do not feed you
or anyone anymore.

Long ways and no ways

Out of phase with the frame others are drawn to. At last,

illuminated, released from artificial expectations.
You will not correspond or accelerate into my atmosphere.
My magic is inward, and the gravel you picked up and misplaced,
rolling it over your lips to find a perfect indentation, I have held it
too - for moments at a time, swinging in the wind,
fruitful. But I know that is not my natural practise or
a possible habitation for me. I must stand behind boards with
the spiders, while you are sunning - an artery of pearl-like significance,
attentive, lubricating glory, improving your already abundant harvest.
I will not make you flash-cards to categorize my plight or give you
the pulley cord of my broken development to pull
and make use of. I am not a substitute for a makeshift wedding ring.
My only protection is to give up. So I give
you up. Your glorious atlas open, appealing to the otherwise
immobile crowd, but not to me. I’ve left the track, left this road
I picked - for one year I have been walking and have met
so few believers. It has been inadequate. You
have been fraudulent and have unknowingly plagued
the thrusts of my yearning. Energy matters: what doesn’t fit doesn’t
graduate into a tangible weight, will never be sun or iceberg.
Long ways I have loved. For hours, I have kissed the bridge of your nose,
conscious of my fixation. In my bed, I offered you supremacy.
Now summer draws me away, tells me this work is done,
asks me to go forward, to map and mend
a child’s ragdoll that fell overboard
where the ocean stretches on and keeps
no hidden crevasses for toys or wounds.

Dance

           Inside a fleeting redemption;

subterranean stones stoning
in ice-minutes; tenderness splintered.
My brain has formed a different
diameter - better without love, without
incantations and unprofitable rituals.
My hands have hollowed out the kitchen, pillaging
spoons, pots and sponges. This is no
communion. Here, no priest can enter
these floors clothed. Self-pity received in
a little container - opened and disposed of
but returning in mouldy residues. My legs
are hard to lift, hard to remember to own them like
I do these hands.
          Things I pretended to be
are gone. Choices have failed to strengthen.
Faith is a ghost the light shines through,
cannot be articulated, has morphed into a caricature
of past ripenings. How I wish I could close my eyes,
release myself from the weight of being.
           I could ride a train, take it across the border.
I could be like the young woman who fell – was she
dancing on the bridge’s rail and forgot the distance? or simply
bloated on drugs and insanity’s youthful wake?
How strange that her asymmetrical face
and lithe beauty remain, so you think of her
as one of the fortunate – because of the fall,
because she fell while dancing, and you have forgotten how
to surrender.





Allison Grayhurst has had over 200 poems in more than 130 journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and in the United Kingdom, including Parabola (summer 2012), South Florida Arts Journal, The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Wascana Review, Poetry Nottingham International, The Cape Rock, Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry, poetrymagazine.com; Fogged Clarity, Out of Our, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Decanto, and White Wall Review. 
 

Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995. Since then she has published nine other books of poetry and two collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman.

Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was recently published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012.

She lives in Toronto with her husband, two children, two cats, and a dog. She also sculpts, working with clay.