Three Poems by A.J. Huffman

Embracing Change . . .

I’m settling in

and every minute can be

daunting.  Becoming

your nothing, I’ve met

with suggestions

on tweaks and additions.

One of the biggest developments

is a hope that you devour

what you love.

And what you don’t.

Masterful Interpreters of the Human Vibe

I thought everything was right

with the world.  I saw dark

eyes below the surface.  There were deep

days of secrets.  I thought I had everything

contained.  I soon learned betrayal

was a one-room efficiency

across the parking lot.  I have one foot

in a place I knew I could never leave

without dying.  I did not want to grow

up.  I did not want to learn

about wearing my sins like a blanket,

but I was in no position to change things.

The risk of chaos was always near,

and poison literally hung in the air. 

I saw it as the subtle difference

between hope and desire.  There was still

something pure about that.  Of course,

it helps to be able to breathe

in dirty air.

Ungusted Wind

Heavy silence

weighing on lungs,

waiting for another breath

of memory.  A tussled-hair anticipation.

A relief from smothering

heat that never comes.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve full-length poetry collections, thirteen solo poetry chapbooks and one joint poetry chapbook through various small presses.  Her most recent releases, Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink), A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press), and Familiar Illusions (Flutter Press) are now available from their respective publishers.  She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2500 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, The Bookends Review, Bone Orchard, Corvus Review, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

A Poem by John Pursch

Flytrap Knuckle Sawdust

Into hand and out of mind, the coldest of ancient time-lapse fusion generators peddles its wares to childhood memories of long-forgotten carousels of nameless visages gone to fallow graveyard icicles in soldered unknown pirouettes of bifurcated ovens, folding subterranean rivulets in periodic building creaks, settling boneyard catacombs for futuristic generations to dream about in wanton heat replay of slo-mo's levitating jungle.

Stumbling into memorized rotisserie of highfalutin crockery and tailings sifted hourly by time-reversal junkies stirring cream in partly cloudy skyline beach on lunging temporal islands, standing lunatic lobotic leaders in numbered turnstile overcoats of fleshy gabardine solution sets, frosting differential brainpan gears with choicest bits of drilling sturgeon sideways glance from hovering groupies bent on pants regard and buttoned flytrap knuckle sawdust, pent in pending pentagrams of sawed-off cocktail roundhouse blues, topless scurvy shopping lists, and catatonic spouse machines, left beached and frantic, unattended in the checkout eyes of cancelled kisses.

Down to final swallow of succulent drip-shoot coffee canteen cafeteria blintz eruption police evasion escargot, she laughs a lot in solid rewind perspiration, seated over caustic influx bellhop door of dourly diurnal dihedral detrimental daguerreotypes of dawn-smoke doppelganger decoupage, deftly daft in toffee-tapered topographical toboggan tense of crammed grammatical thunder, cashing year-long photographs of librarian heads in thuds from well beyond eternal stacks of spearfish periodicals from decades drummed with thumbing thigh-scan surgery of lost enabled duodecimal decisions dogs on skewered impetuosity to sweaty fever omnibus in cornered trimaran of basal hat collection crosstown catnap snips, ferociously entailed in governed mental squad rant volume population drift.

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

A Poem by Linda M. Crate

100% Cruel

there's a 1/16th
of me that's curious to see
where you went,
but the other 15th of me is just
glad you're gone;
i wouldn't want to live a life
catering on you
24/7
i could only imagine how exhausting that
would be--

                                                            i told them to tell me
                                                            when you fell flat on your face because
                                                            i wanted to see it
                                                            part of me still does while
                                                            the other 1th of me
                                                            says that's just plain cruel;

can't be any crueler than the 100%
of you.

Linda M. Crate is a Pennsylvania native born in Pittsburgh yet raised in the rural town of Conneautville.  Her poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print.  Recently her two chapbooks, A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press--June 2013) and Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon--January 2014) were published.  Her fantasy novel Blood & Magic was published in March 2015.  Her novel Dragons & Magic was published in October 2015.