Two Poems from Your Editor, A.J. Huffman

With Iron

icicles carved from moonbeams, I battle

mind-monsters crawling from moments

of half-sleep.  My adrenaline-junkie REM

ranger rides past me.  His dune buggy

laden with long lost sleep dust.  The bitter

little bastard bites his thumb at me.  I string

a streak of bloody wishes, watch them erupt

just under the skyline.  Spin out, double

flip.  Bogey!  My score is definite

ly improving.

Rhinestone Butterflies

Striped leather strips scar make-shift necks.

Glowing.  Cold.

                           Colder.

                                        Coldest.

                                                       Breath

bending fire

no one can own.

I am their energy.

I am their fight.

Impact

mirrors the image, doubles the weight.

Heavy things cannot fly,

though they can sparkle:

all the same.

A.J. Huffman has published seven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest.  Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com

A Poem by Mike Cluff

Alpha poem- letter V

Vichysoisse on the veranda
waiters in pure white waistcoats
Xhosa spoken sub rosa submerged
yips from hyenas
zooming around in BMW's
along the updated Autobahn
bellicose owners of foreigners'
contracts held in perpetua.
Dahomeans denied passage
emigrating north is negated
for people of colour
groping for dreams
halted in vitro
institutions of separation deny
justice to anyone not their own
kin and kind.
Landmines may be placed between the US and
Mexico according to men not up to the minute
negotiating deserts in gas machines or even mules
or oxen if deemed divinely necessary
protecting images of self-aggrandizement
quaking in cowboy boots to
remain ensconed and regal
superiors to those who
threaten their boxed-up and homogonized
umbras and unfounded preachings of Manifest Destiny.

Mike Cluff is a writer living in the inland section of Southern California. He is now finishing two books of poetry: "The Initial Napoleon" and "Bulleted Meat"-- both of which are scheduled for publication in late 2013/early 2014. He believes that individuality is the touchstone of his life and pursues that ideal with passion and dedication to help the world improve with each passing instance .He also hopes to take up abstract painting in the next several months.

A Poem by Michael Lee Johnson

Untitled I Walk

 

Untitled I walk

through life

with a shrink

from Yugoslavia,

who is as large as Bigfoot.

With a novel in one hand, 

and shaking his fingers at me

with the other,

he wants to control me with a shovel,

tie me in knot balls, emotional twisters,

and squeeze the emotional pages

out of my life like a twisted sponge.

I retaliate, control him back,

wage war in a vicarious cycle

squeeze his testicles like electrical wires

inside my mind’s eye,

cut his tongue with razors,

dull his clinical words.

Play his game, only better.

He picks up the play phone,

threatens to call the police,

leashing me in my corner

like a trapped dog

forces me to bark

into submission

like a beagle basset bitch.

He treats me with word babble.

I tell him he is a damn Ukrainian idiot.

Peeved off I race

to the parking lot, head to the bushes,

like a blue racer snake threatened,

hop bunny rabbit into my S-10

Chevy pick-up truck,

memo pad in hand,

scribbling ruminating notes

I surrender naked until my next prescription,

untitled I walk.

 

 

 

MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era:  now known as the Itasca, IL poet.  Today he is a poet, freelance writer, photographer who experiments with

poetography (blending poetry with photography), and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois, who has been published in more than 750 small press magazines in 26 countries, he edits 7 poetry sites.  Michael is the author of The Lost American:  From Exile to Freedom (136 pages book), several chapbooks of poetry, including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night and Day, and Chicago Poems.  He also has over 69 poetry videos on YouTube.

Links:  http://poetryman.mysite.com/.  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/promomanusa

https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000058168/The-Lost-American.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-American-Exile-Freedom/dp/0595460917

 

Two Poems by Ken L. Jones

Folklore He Never Remembers

Hollywood reboots the voyeur like a horse drawn
Transformed dream etched in platinum Italian ices
Plucked from daily tabloids hurtling through
Outer space and wearing prerecorded petticoats from Mars
Contains the DNA of dozens of extinct parallel dimensions
Popping up like the tentacles of a thought balloon
There are no Hallmark Cards for the bloody glove
Everything is not only to be tolerated
But is fifty inches long and inflatable too.



Unicorn Hunt

The mind drinks up the highway straight ahead
Dogs and cats in slow motion
On a night full of the evil thoughts of typewriters
Drowning in the dish water of comic books
The image is a loaded gun that must be burned
A well read stomach that must be fed
It lights such a candle that it tapes up your mouth
Like delirium in a red brocade smoking jacket
Inching across your lawn like a snail
Then down the streets of fever in the morning
In a vertigo of top forty song lyrics
Gathering dust on the lips of millions of women
In the navel of a love manual
That can't be purchased at any store.


 

Ken L. Jones has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to dialogue for the Freddy Krueger movies for the past thirty plus years.  In the last three years he has gained great notice for his vast publication of horror poetry which has appeared in many anthology books, blogs, magazines and websites and especially in his first solo book of poetry Bad Harvest and Other Poems.  He is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.

 

Three Poems from your editor, April Salzano

Out of Thin Air

I must choose my words, carefully
and quietly, so they do not hear me coming
with a butterfly net and a straight jacket.
I am diving up/through loose threads of sleep.
Neither will not come willingly & Both/
is too heavy for me to lift//on my own, what
goes unhomogenized will settle at the top
to be skimmed/from another dream.

 

I Will Rise Above

Hallelujah cliché

I sing as I

rise

           to sky,

palm balls into fist,

          body into air

in my dance

of mending.

 

 

here i am inside

[jackpot]

of your mouth

(w)hole/home

dish liquid/dreams

lubricate/domesticated

fuckery//

 

obsolete breed (less

obscure) monkeys see

dildos do/the trick & quick

before anybody comes--

money shot//

 

faceful of miracle

(whip)

 

 

 

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons. She recently finished her first collection of poetry, for which she is seeking a publisher and is working on a memoir on raising a child with autism. Her work has appeared in journals such as Poetry Salzburg, Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Montucky Review, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle. The author also serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press. 

Three Poems by Felino A. Soriano

from antiphonies & spectrums

 

 

 

research

 

through these trees’ splayed fingers

?frozen? loose, —(perhaps winter-causational)

disconnected windows

rename ability’s purview, the vertical body

bends in the slight slouch of the toddler’s

drawing s, the base, oldest, gnarled

or oil-brown, either within the parallel of

succinct connoted experiential language—

 

distance draws a disclaimer: notice-or

disdain a memory’s focal fixation into

rage or indifferent ambulation: understood . . .

 

I enjoy the light’s normal procedure: ongoing—

entertaining spectrums of engaged angular

syntax, in the aspect of serenade these whispers

introduce eventual echoes’ access to fade—

 

within this noon of reactive reading, this repeat

of days’ rituals and ongoing plagiarizing of

focus on maintaining balance, thought or

meander move within, within

wander-thinking, sketching

characteristics of light and

fragmentary tonalities

 

 

upon recognizing

 

when watching, glances open-though slim as empty

homes whose corporeal experience

rise

of/from wings and adolescent circumferences of

emotional

mishandlings ————

 

                                     ————errors sharpen, shape-arrow

wrong-timeframe

aim

purity of idea

wanders

lost-from identity misinterpretation, the centripetal moveme(a)nt

ranges, reddened flame compositional music

the centipede’s legs ignite among

a synonym toward unrecognized

scent-though

beautiful in the contextual

pattern of range and somewhat

subconscious

believability

 

 

parallel as fixation

 

a multiplying motive spans itself:

cannot its version, this/now

interpretation — the language’s

fulcrum invites, incites what

excels within a watching version of

motivated simplicity, exceeding

virtue as rest, or visitation as

corporeal manifestation, rejoice

then when time’s verbal praise

relaxes muscular tendencies, and

the purity of comprised permissions

persuades within the action of

particular interactions

 

 

 

 

Felino A. Soriano is a member of The Southern Collective Experience.  He is the founding editor of the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press.   His writing finds foundation in created coöccurrences, predicated on his strong connection to various idioms of jazz music.  His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology, and appears in various online and print publications, with recent poetry collections including watching what invents perception (WISH Publications, 2013), Of these voices (whitesky ebooks, 2013) Pathos|particular invocation (Fowlpox Press, 2013), Extolment in the praising exhalation of jazz (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2013), and Hinge Trio (La Alameda Press, 2012).  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. Links to his published and forthcoming poems, books, interviews, images, etc. can be found at www.felinoasoriano.info.

Two Poems by Taylor Graham

LOCO-MOTIVE

 

This crazy puppy, electrified

energy, wild; even after all the systematic

training, official by-the-book –

 

it was brick-boring: sit stay down heel.

She lost the nova in her eye.

It broke my patience, keeping her close

 

as a bad secret.

I packed her in the truck,

headed away. End of pavement, wild-

 

flowers past their prime, faded

like ruined puppies; stems of wild carrot,

lupine gone to pod.

 

I unclipped her leash.

She leaped feet flying, rapturous.

I called, she circled back –

 

dashed off to scout the wind-blown

world. Free as spirit,

the dog I didn’t know I loved.

 

 

47 ZXX:

 

title of my latest draft, as typed

by the new kitten.

Compared to the sable bitch, his black-

sheen coat is satin. Not so the pin-

points of his claws. He

puts her in her place. Yesterday

from the shelter, six

months old – already he’s seasoned

seaman of shifting tides

and space, the diverse shores

of homelessness.

What does he wish?

He accepts our random clutter

after the shelter’s scrubbed floor

and fluorescent corners.

He’s found a dozen spots

to hide in ambush; clambers from

paper piles to computer table,

makes himself cozy on the keyboard,

bats at images on the screen;

revises my poems

into typos, and vice versa.

What I wrote on Saturday is dead.