A Poem by Jude Neale

We Sing Ourselves Back

We are born singing,
orchid air in freefall beneath our trapeze feet.
We open our jaws wide,
balloon our throats
swing ancestral anaconda notes down
across the emerald city.
We dance antic swags, ellipses, somersaults,
wound the air
with our bass, treble, bellowing melodies.
The women go first
and the men sing back in waves,
above the recitative.
And later with dusty feet,
we wander like leathery kites
shipwrecked with words.
Wanting again to float above it all,
we drill underground instead
to look for our voice,
deep inside the belly of the whale.
We sing ourselves back
and become once again whole.

Jude Neale was shortlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), The  International Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (U.K),The Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize  (UK), The Wenlock International Poetry Prize(UK), the RCLA short story and poem competition and she was nominated for the Canadian ReLit Award and the Pat Lowther Award for her book ‘Only the Fallen Can See’.

 

A Poem by John Casquarelli

plug into confetti ballroom 

 

cross the tropical galaxy threshold

                        my hair in knots

you said you loved me

but those were old threads

the champagne     the mussels

like birds are distant in flight

                        they melt into

            moonlight static energy

            on dusty interstate

            searching for a new equinox

 

each curve that embraced

            the morning splendor

            on the back of your neck

along the crest of the moving sea

trembled and fluttered in distant breeze

over fence     onto countryside road

 

where jasmine whispered and muse cried

these words were never hobbies

or listless daydreams

they're midnight blues

with a million quivers of glitter dust

                        welcoming yesterday's page

                        the hidden story

            the smile's echo

 

 

 

John Casquarelli is an English Instructor at CUNY Kingsborough in Brooklyn, New York, as well as a faculty advisor for the Kingsborough Poetry and Creative Writing Club. John received his M.F.A. in the Creative Writing program at Long Island University. He was awarded the 2010 Esther Hyneman Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in several publications including Pyrokinection, Kinship of Rivers, By The Overpass, The Mind[less] Muse, The Poetry Project Blog, The International Rebecca West Society, Having a Whiskey Coke With You, and Napalm and Novocain. His first full-length book, On Equilibrium of Song, was published by Overpass Books (2011).

A Poem by John Pursch

Corrugated Sunset

 

Sameness warps embezzled baubles, heading often over four-souled seizure cruises of realized despotic birthright noons and tambourine malt grooves. Gutting shallow semaphores with crampon wheels, studded wallet lice ingest resected hippie nylons, gargling buckle heirs till escapades patrol sedated ditch saloons for whispering motels. Geese swallow camshaft wobbles in tender secondary paddleboat fiascos, mixing mossy axes with hazelnut ire sweeteners for wilting swordsmen.

 

Paralegal dice emetics croon shyly at swaying libertines in crawdad cucumber lessons, planting escutcheoned wharf grinders in Manichean toothache ads. Creases breach the blotto with portable heliotrope musician tweezers, flaying croutons to preferential bivouac clots of gourds in tiki roundup kitsch colonic olfactory soap.

 

Mowing heavenly shaven plowboys into barricaded beer hall pundits, treed carousels erase sour expatriates from softly shorn tower grime, swishing leafy choir exemptions within estrangement’s peculated rapport. Bedroom brigands exfoliate sidewalk brothel sores, resealing public sway marines in laminated sardonic aardvark whistles. Detuned rodeos pull hovercraft tantrums on sidling taxidermy patients, subtly tooting salty shadow ploys for sloped erectile dignitaries in channeled stupa silo grout.

 

Grieving toes rebound on baked soil cousins, filming carnies swilling looped paratroopers in pallid poltroon cunning slacks that flit about facial heirloom sirloin quips with pesky philatelic spandex teases, bento pox deluded. Roaring shanties cavil for doorman yen but fetter newfangled fumes with shoed nun consonance and queerly infarcted casuistry whelps.

 

Stopgap stamina repeals summed paragons of purview’s frail owl direction clips, eclipsing connected dames with tufa peristyles of jellied dungeon transfusion blimps. Hotter whiz deflection fleas engorge seven water pugs on gimpy cribbage pedestals in waggish country candy phone booth downfall wax, replete with genuflecting stupor scars, annealing in frenetic grooming towers.

 

Welded grappling lions float through traumatic fainting gills, spreading pleasure eels in glandular hoopla mixers, swapping cattle for hosed entrepreneurs and corrugated sunset. Dollops of exploding angst submerge crisply wafted pageant queens in blooper relic gunny shins, planting crenelated beer mechanics in phased-out quandary bunts, inching for clifftop dawdlers, befuddled by pluralistic fish masks.

 

 

 

 

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. His recently released experimental lit-rap video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.