A Poem by Ag Synclair

Commuter Parking

         USE OF HAND HELD MOBILE DEVICES
        WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE
        STRICTLY PROHIBITED
        IN CONNECTICUT

 

/soccer mom/          /sales rep/                   /call home/
/beats her/              /slumped to/               /less than/
/furious fists/          /his left, dead/            /an hour/
/on the wheel/        /or wishing he was/    /chill me a glass/

From the safety of his boring suburban New Hampshire condo, Ag Synclair publishes The Montucky Review and edits poetry forThe Bookends Review. Widely published in the small presses, he manages to fly under the radar. Deftly.

Three Poems by Xanadu

Night View (Night show while sleeping among dwarfs of towering concrete)

lines to edges of roofs of pavilions . . . horizontals . . .
lights lit to high-rises at shores . . . verticals . . .

as dim the perimeters as busy the ads
as silent the rooftops as pulsing the towers
as simple the pavilions as complex the city

as mysterious the lake as overt the town

as square the houses as straight the highway.



Bountiful Harvest

(I)

Girl rising up like Philippines to take a papaya
as from center of the universe if not cosmos
wherefrom sixteen branches reach out to their leaves
larger than papaya in darkish and light green
painting a near geometrical firmament under brownish brown
of modernist Trinity after and beyond Michelangelo
depicting God possibly in moderately long white beard
and monk clothes shared by two women who stretch out lengthy
in a straight horizon to utmost leftist and righteous
beyond the breadth of God's crucified arms and hands
spiritually and supernaturally without any trace of nails anymore
echoing both Noli Me Tangere and eradicate images and visions of the Holy Spirit.

Colors stay within boundaries of black and white
exemplifying earthy and natural green brown and yellow
and only some blue and gray to delineate sky and clouds
strongly stylized as with help of Art Nouveau curvilinear repetitive lines
(like hatching in a Galo Ocampo sketch)
strongly condensed as by lack of a perspectival background
in a tale without horizon or vanishing point
but the center of the universe itself in the bountiful harvest
of the horn of plenty of bananas pineapples corns squash
and foremost papaya--favorite signature of Bolong--

Renaissance vision in modernist techniques.

(II)

Rising like the Philippines in high thighs
and without any sign of feet or shoes
like a force of nature--an extension of natures giant powers

as rooted in traditional colors of rural work and manufacture--
Five stylized nymphs engaging in rural work
of making food plucking nuts preparing rice
five women and two men--one carrying bananas through the women
another waiting in a carriage cum karabaw of rice pals--

Conservative brown of ecclesiastical furniture
in S. Agustin Church from moldave to narra
nevertheless compact like a vision before and beyond nature
and naturalism to evoke a new reality
where also God emerges like an earthy natural power
though spiritual in details.



Erasures
One More In-Between

Nearly erased paintings
showing some sinuses only
beyond black and white
demonstrating smears of yellow
into brown unto blue;
airy ink and silky paper
reduced to earthly connotation
beyond painting and sculpture
transparence and opacity
deterioration of materials
unto essence of elements;
in between matter and minerals
                accidents and chemicals
                coincidence and structure
                nature and culture
                who and what
                where and when
                why and nil
falls art--
stating duration of marble
as blurrings oppose consistency
of this very presence moment
when soil signs time like a seal
beyond every precious second
for it is just what you see and bear
right now right here rightly how.

Xanadu lives in Iv, Space of Infinite Imagination, Public's Home 0.  It consists in publications, performances and exhibits in poetry and art contexts.

A Poem by Darren C. Demaree

WE ARE ARROWS

#195

Segmented

fruit, we have
arrived in
stages, we
have entered
with a
piercing
action,
without sound,
without regret
for the
minimalist
thwack of our
descent.                       
        We have
no existence
until we
acknowledge
the width of
our own
shoulders.                       
        We have
no existence
until we
reassemble the
great path
that crumpled
to deliver us.                       
       We are
heart-
stopping, as
in our hearts
can stop at
any moment,
and this is
why we are so
desperate to
prove that we
have existed
at all.                       
       If you
trip near the
edge of this
problem, shed
your weight,
and it could
be flight you
have found.

Darren C. Demaree's poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Grist, and the Colorado Review. He is the author of "As We Refer To Our Bodies" (2013, 8th House), "Temporary Champions" (2014, Main Street Rag), and "Not For Art Nor Prayer" (2015, 8th House).  He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology. Darren currently lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children. 

Three Poems by Grant Tarbard

The Song of the Mean Eyed Cat and the One Eyed Fox
 

Cat was a gypsy of his street,

a loose tooth vagabond
with nimble ballerina feet.

 

The neighbours wouldn't know this
due to his sagging old linen belly
woven threadbare from the loom,
tattered but strong and ready.

Cat was the one on the fence
eyeing you with suspicion-
a ready claw, a ready purr
hinging on his disposition.

Fox was an old soldier
medals clung to his chest
along with dirt, leaves and all the rest.

He may of had a folding limp
when the air was hung with damp
but when the sun shone fiercely
he was an acrobat.

Fox was the eyes you felt
on your back from within the trees,
he was the uneasy chill
that made you pick up speed.

 

Cat, the one claw killer

(perfected over time)

of the starling napping 

on the washing line.

 

A giver of gifts left behind

on doorsteps cold at 5 am,

the prize winning fish-

a dissected corpse with a dangling eye.

 

Fox, the seventh cub of a seventh cub

intimate between the mists,

hands shook with comeuppance,

just another ration over chewed.

 

Dashing in red beret,

captain of those midnight raids

on dustbins laden with enemy supplies

destined for the home stomach.

 

Both roamed the bi-ways of the town

and had a paw in all things devious,

for the work of the Devil lies

not just in idle hands

but in all clean clawed creatures.

Below the Feather

 

Cuckoo agrees that

the guts of a pig

would make fine compost

in the garden of

Eden. His blatant

 

attempts to deflect

the butchering hoe

of Adam didn't work, 

cuckoo's hot bowels 

would be plucked below

 

the feather and placed

reverently on

the flush leaf mold, his

blush blood would be sprayed

as fertiliser.

Luka and the Spider

 

Luka was a poet and the Spider ate him.

He traveled through his innards with a box of swans

That he would open to go and fetch light.

 

Spider was an aching willows branch spindling downward,

Spider was black as a wordless night,

Spider was always moving about the terraces of the gardens.

 

Luka had pepper in his pocket, he always kept it there for he had lost the salt.

He clambered up to Spider's sinuses and blew the pepper,

With a hand of fine powder he sent out urgent letters of help, sequinned on the dewdrops thread.

Spider was sickly, he would scrape the paint off of saintly statues and serve it as medicine,

Spider used icons as godparents for his seven thousand children,

Spider watched the pontiff from the alcove murmuring funeral rites.

 

Luka had set up home in the spider's spleen,

He looked up from these rooms of wayward moments 

And uttered; "We all are just layers of masks". 

 

Spider was quite content with his lot, he bought his suits from a well respected tailors,

Spider was quite content with his full belly, nothing wriggled to trouble him,

Spider was quite content with his lot, he played the fiddle to entertain the children.

 

Luka opened the box of swans and tied their beaks together;

"Sometimes I miss where I am from".

He unleashed the entangled arrow of beaks into the sputtering inside of Spider's scented bare chest.

 

Spider's sacred heart pierced and broke up the day of the giants onlooking.

Spider's bewailing woke up the beak-less swans and they flew out of his chest, four and twenty.

Spider whimpered; "Oh pity! Cry for me when the tide comes". 

 

Luka was spat out of a storm of granite from Spider's gullet,

He looked back at his foe with his legs curled, jigging with St. Vitus' dance and the death twitch

And felt a great pity for a creature so powerful that it could swallow whole a poet of his fame.

 

uka had been low down in the blue dark for such a time he couldn't remember the swells of colour,

He had to be weaned of the murk a blink at a time for the sky was anchored by a titanic golden chain.

The other poets had no faces now and Luka spent his time around the arachnid enclosure of London Zoo.

 

 

 

 

Grant Tarbard has worked as a journalist, a contributor to magazines, an editor, a reviewer and an interviewer. He is now the editor of The Screech Owl and co-founder of Resurgant Press with Bethany W. Pope.  His work can be seen in such magazines as The Rialto, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Bone Orchard Poetry, BLAZE, The Journal, Southlight, Sarasvati, Earth Love, Mood Swing, Puff Puff Prose Poetry & Prose, Postcards Poetry and Prose, Playerist 2, Lake City Lights, Medusa's Kitchen, The Open Mouse, Weyfarers, Miracle, Poetry Cornwall, I-70, South Florida Review, Stare's Nest, Zymbol, Synchronized Chaos, BLUEPEPPER, Every Day Poetry, Tribe, Verse-Virtual and Decanto.

 

 

 

A Poem by Ken L. Jones

Cease To Be Human

Returned from the dead for very little reason

And wanted to go back again

To that sunny haunted island of old dreams

Moon star dreams of a drowsy silver rider

Near faded orange streets that snake out

Like a golden lasso

Into wintery alleyways full of smoke that make me

Wish that my dreams were a railroad

But they are just a ruined trumpet

That only I can get to play

And the notes that I am able to coax out of it  

Quickly dissipate like snowflakes

As soon as they touch the last light on a waterfall

That only has half a face

 

For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.