A Poem by Maureen Kingston

sym-bi-otico: a notorious liberal bastion prepares for the fall semester

(when god closes a door he opens a window)

 

 

beverage trucks back up to the student union

(is it coke or pepsi school?)

 

bookstore clerks stockpile knapsacks

(discover-visa-mastercard inserts inserted)

 

rope lines are staked for the frosh free phone pick-up

(unlimited data mining access)

 

all-faculty memos flutter in mailboxes

(re: the budget: no travel money this year

unless you’re attending a conference

that teaches you how to raise money)

 

old signs are taken down / new ones put up

(English Department / Humanities /

Language Arts / Mass Communications /

Business School)

 

 

 

Maureen Kingston is an assistant editor at The Centrifugal Eye. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Camel Saloon, Dead Snakes, Gone Lawn, Gutter Eloquence Magazine, Red River Review, Rufous City Review, Stone Highway Review, Terrain.org, and Wild Orphan.

Three Poems by John Pursch

Elevated Napes

 

Precariously poached peccaries fulminate over easterly woven conundrums, flitting above deckhand stipend domiciles, pretending to capsize in trebled mischief canary milk. Puppets fly off toboggan veils, half interred between moustache dings, popping tooth carnage for flippant iota berths. Entangled plainclothes pterodactyls imbue lice scans with erstwhile periodontal knapsack dreams, serrating farewell jeremiads per dominant ogre pinnacle speech palms, grossing southern hayseed pabulum. Twice begotten periwinkle brows imply an archaic trump slot, mocking inborn derby wafers, singing of angled gumshoe quarts in Samoan foxtrot eaves. Circumnavigated cloves defy steeping dove mutations, catalyzing treed limb posers with impetus ferocity, blanking into elevated napes. Lioness umbrella darts reseal bucolic crab tree licks, fluttering wisely into flashing credibility maws, speckled beyond solidity urchins. Easing her canoe through wallowing shutters, the grotto’s faux heretical nouveau scooter blends her ambit with puritanical chokehold coos, filming nightly waistband motifs for ankle shams.

Shadow Oxen

 

Gaslight depilatories impose shoveled emigrants on emissary effluvia, wafting alluvial handstands past aching slivers of collared torpor, flicked in statutory tremolos by looming igneous troglodytes, yearning to speak of intravenous whaling bubbles. Phantasms deduct steroidal naphthene from horological stepping colons, mossy in tiered dishrag arteries, queried to oblivion by puerile space bats in shapely toss-ups. Pushing sectarian sidearms for hauntingly belated grist, dweebs easily weave through cemetery whistle stops, crafting cello smirks from chafed clef pajama tops. Blotches swelter amid saffron contrail grifters, salivating at pint-blank tracer angst, cropping shared crowbars just behind an aural telethon’s pellucid grappling snip. Perched epidurals elucidate till drowsy calendars curl up in jangled juice surmise, pressing gonged tarantula slogans into thirsty bell peppers, depriving a paprika junkie of alligator chaff detergent. Termagant floss gloats headlong and fanciful in freed laundry tolls, piecing gathered menses into collaboration spew police. Galoshes encumber frozen stamens, bet on dusty maunderers for blowhole stings, and steer akashic corridors beneath an irrigated jellyfish tantrum, copping to scream blues in wily tweezer action. Fearsome hearsay obeys sobriety’s luminal biscuit proxy, fulminating at octal arbitrage. Spindrift aisles grin ably, counting gorilla enclaves far from enabled zephyr cones, spilling numb ownership below the shuffled and specious whinny. Toucans seize unwinding pheasants, beckoning decanted ambits, predicated on goose parades. Sapient artisans defy trick artichoke tears, adoring agility’s tumid potato breath. Listening to hatched defusers, thatched kumquats sail for Qumran at providential clapboard siding’s feisty yawn, jangling encoded rooster ale into bedeviled frenzy’s holster. Hefting shipped static, particulates deploy heirloom caricatures, soaking an elbow in porous poodle stink, retrenching an alien pursuance for heinous whiners. Plaudits land in flexible crates of carotid quail, dumping vegetables in brotherly callings, furnished by midtown lariat seers. Nocturnes cloud the urinals with piebald electronics, defraying amniotic sunlight through spider web intrusion felt. Po-boy triage revolves in shadow oxen, mouthing battered affluence at irreligious octogenarians, sheltering the crawling pestilence in blazing casement cheese. 

 

Yo-yo Quartets

Swimming through busty deadlock straits of annual hideout jangle mist, interlopers kill off hours in licentious unlimited credo breath, flimsily denying nominal upstart comical anger, smoking a headless seamstress behind closet towers, inching neck-deep before panned altimeters read negotiated heresy’s nearby pathway rebuttal ploy, stammering under tightwad locomotion’s impassioned embrace, groaning out of awkward tonic hallway grease, spoken in wheelbase carrion flecks of tendonitis chrism, piebald and soapy when earfuls cake the nozzle. Metallic unguent speeds down corridors of human zeal, washing off embodied egg drop sloops, doffing canned inferno mold to fructify cephalic ductile means. Tamely wounded cellar fish meander coyly, plod beside torrential work crew mastiffs, and ease to dalliance in commissary cacti, neutered for belief patrol incipience, leasing sapiential apiaries to fortnight windage. Traceries pend in afterimage cloth, drenching retinal undercarriages with lacquered haystacks, cobbled to cauterized weal from thermal idioms of plangent ancillary gravy yard steam. Towing mouth pipe garbage on barking lineal cribbage blurbs, oarsmen cavil till daybreak freezes oaken tenterhooks, wigging over canonical anise spouts, flushed from pluralistic yo-yo quartets. Squeezing trackballs harken buckled tomahawk reducers back to molting lackadaisical tolerance, enabling knuckleballs to spawn recital plumes before cellophane docks can immolate reminder gunnels. While eateries claw three whales, bucking brinkmen tally hotly truncated service ululators, quenching oxygenated devil’s feet with kegger fries.

 

 

 

 

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His poetry and fiction has appeared in many literary journals. 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 Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia

And Tracked

Dusk settled in ,

                sirocco

                                stayed away

                from shore

And the pewter

                is die-cast

                                where the new

                awaits its turn

                                to wax

                                                again.

Steps same as earlier

                seem different,

                                quick

                                                on tiptoe

                through puddles

                                idling at corners.

Crosswalks

                and highway dividers

are the wrinkles

                                of America

                where the micro-expressions

                                come to reveal

                                                the tells

                of bluffs made

                                about upward

                                                                trends.

And the eye

                                riding coastline

                                                has been

                                                                watching

                                                                following

since leaving Spain –

                                                the one still standing conquistador

given new names

                -male-female-male

                                categorized

and tracked.



To Pursue

Neither laughter nor tears

                in the drought

as the prostitutes work each corner

                with no other task.

The air is followed

                and lead

                                until cracking brings

drops from ice

                in need of a buck.

The mug is filled for no more

                                and a winner

                is not declared.

Where is where one is going

                of course

                                with no business

to pursue.




Fading Comes Easily

Light is aloof

even with its need

to drag shadow

with it

everywhere

                it takes a moment

                to shine

How detached

luminescence

are you?

So fast as yet to be beaten

And easily shattered

with a prism

into living secrets

And taking time

each year to become

                less and less

Then of course,

fading comes

easily.

Kenyatta Jean-Paul Garcia is the author of This Sentimental Education and Enter the After-Garde along with two other collections of poetry. He was raised in Brooklyn, NY and has a degree in Linguistics.  He has studied several living and dead languages in addition to philosophy and poetry at SUNY Albany and Hudson Valley Community College.  He spent over ten years working in restaurants – cooking, washing dishes, etc.  Currently, he works overnights putting boxes on shelves.  By day, he runs kjpgarcia.wordpress and altpoetics.wordpress.com.   

Three Poems by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Memory

It’s memory, they say,

the brain cap secure and work///ing
seven armadillos in momma’s bottled cats[up]
the charm of a Frisco trolley.

It’s memory on the cheap,

neurons for sale
look there –
don’t you see it?

memory    memory    memory

I (re)member the tiny scampering universe
child prostitutes taking it in the rump
on Taiwanese beaches

look –
more memories…

you can catch them
if you’re fast.

<<
no memories for me.

>>>Laying here
in the dark
in green socks.

My brain stem
like a l-o-n-g and hungry
flower.

Cry Me N

          **Slippery little tadpole

of a thing
through my hands
                    sure as winter
candy apple sticky
       a tiny )))Oppenheimer
on the end:

            women to right of me

            women to left of me

            women all ‘round

my slippery little

                     (((tadpole                
   into a giant frog
of t-h-r-o-b-b-i-n-g
          each time you walk
in the room          

sprite as any field
gazelle. 





A Gathering of Many Whiskered
Thoughts

               Crusaders and ginger snaps -
all things brought to grief yellow;
       superintendents whistling down lonely halls
beige overalls over the shoulders of professional mountains
high    high    high
                     rejoicing in candelabra
                     rejoicing in Milan
    rejoice      rejoice
in the frozen windpipes of suckled thunder,
                                 watch parsnips dance in bony pawnshop windows
                park benches stripped of their wooded fire
rejoice      rejoice      rejoice
there are clean glasses in the cupboard
                     and much wine to drink
and we have come together
to drink it                    
               like big cats
              >round the watering
               hole.                 



Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a wheezing asthmatic who loves short walks on the beach.  He lives deep in the Canadian Shield with his toaster over and his muse.

Two Poems by Michael H. Brownstein

A DORMITORY TOO MANY WISH TO ENTER

 

In the dormitory of perfect birds there lives a passion for perfect violence

 

and you go into old age with all of your lies,
reminiscing by the telling of these lies
until every lie you know
is a lie you own
alone.

  

But everything is OK—

I will leave this place and let my life live out somewhere else.

 

 

 

 

A PHILOSOPHY ON DYING

 

On the way home this evening, I died.

It’s rather interesting, this dying.

Color fades into dyes

And a two and a four appear on the die

 

Nothing makes sense for a moment, dying,

Dyes, the roll of the die

 

But here it is, you’re dead, so you died

 

 

 

 

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks includingThe Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

Three Poems by Bill Jansen

Votive Candles

soft tom toms in car radios--
music interrupted
important news
about suspicious figs...

the President laughs

night traffic
stopped for miles,

votive candles
waste
in the sky

like a pride of luminous
lions
leaving the savannah

without permission.




Guide to Albanian Grammar

I sat at a vintage picnic table
in front of the Pizza Schmizza.
Christmas has been painted on the windows
using a dragon's tail.

Lediana and Platformsoles
strolled by with the seven muses on a leash
(on their way to the lagoons of Venice)?

A waitress practiced seduction.

The chatter of teenage girls
like the reasoning of angels. 




Delicate Moment in the Void

though stars got there first and wreaked the white hill
the nights are not disappointing

we think of Eisenhower in a jeep in London
briefly
but the new constellation turns out to be
a cosmic taco wrapped in a Jiffy Lube coupon

a fellow townsman drew us a map to this place
based on our credit card numbers

if you keep flipping through your high school yearbook
the dead Latin teachers warned us
you will end up racing hares

in Armani sackcloth for days into the redwood forest
now one of us must leave the safety of the group...

the cubic fog of evolution
invites our sleeping bags to grow wings
and leave us in the past.

Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon. His most recent work has appeared in Asinine Poetry and Hypothetical Review.

Two Poems by J.K. Durick

Alone

 

First there's door sounds

Opening      in the distance
then
the whoosh of closure

closed

the silence holds your breath
hushed
anticipates

next

the steps' sound
anticipates

slow sidesteps or tiptoe

just touching on a threat
or a rush at you

even a voice calling a name

any name at all

something

a bell could ring

anything to complete this sequence

satisfied.

How It Should Be

 

I should be able to arrange these things, set them in predictable motion and just sit back and await the results. I should be able to sit down at this keyboard, and the words should come like sheep to their shepherd, bees to their keeper, fish to their fisherman. I should be able to sit down at this keyboard, and the words should line up like the homeless at a soup kitchen, like teenagers at a movie or rock concert, line up like depositors at a bank, like mourners at a wake. They should be pounding on the door like police with a warrant, like a landlord with questions about a bad check, like firemen at a burning house. I should be able to sit down, and the words should call up, ring me up like telemarketers, political survey takers, credit card collectors, ring up like an old friend in town for the day who remembers me and thinks I’m still home, the friend who sat with me drinking and smoking half the night saying things we hardly believed. The words should pile up on the lawn like leaves, like litter, or junk cars, pile up like debts and regrets, like all the things I meant to do, should have said. They should pile up like snow does, drift up to the door, enough for snowballs and shoveling, enough for Christmas and snowmen and angels. They should wrap themselves in useable images, memories worth the record, phrases and lines that work and matter, that summarize and save, that take on a life of their own, call me, demand I sit at this keyboard ready to get them all down, down here where they all belonged in the first place.

 

 

 

J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Northern New England Review, Napalm and Novocaine, Third Wednesday, and Common Ground Review.