An Experimental Haiku String by Kelley White

Morris’s Magnetic

Literary StuffonMyCat

Haiku

            --for his beloved Feather

 

 

sleep smooth moment

 

she is chocolate

I lick her languid beauty

in love’s drunk rhythm

 

sordid worship

 

singing tongue music

I lathered her skin moaning

lie together love

 

 

Stradivarius

forest moon symphony

 

shadow spring vision

please whisper sweet cool nevers

luscious goddess fluff

 

 

 

Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner-city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA.  Her most recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 PCA grant.

Two Poems by John Pursch

Igneous Flax

 

Clothespins sigh in elephant tongues, angling for tingling grapefruit commotion, galloping through dressing hound spruce. Posh leeward punters unwind above rewarding coastal sinkholes, dousing blowhards in darning people skew. Cuffed interpreters crawl through butane cauliflower hoops, perforating civil teardrops, hugging blooper treads for starch demurral’s bony silhouette. Drainage taps on grumpy sandbar broccoli, weathering audacious cottage tendons with tambourines in plaid erotic pyromania. Zooming goats relieve disheveled Tudors of rifled aunts, masked in haltered sequins, prodding gibbous touchstones with seething cordite plumage umps. Hefty sounds revert to canned fare cards, lunch at creature troves, and copulate in rectilinear textile plunks, stringing upper pets on low-slung counter girl dunes. Should shoddy hazings precede emasculation’s durable delay, reaping sloping tributaries of ensemble sweat? Peep at kiting chuckers in every stoolie’s pregnant porthole, swapping arable salt for bailiwick breath. Car keys cloud the horizontal lice con, feebly hedging trebled sketches. Why do vowels deplane at voluntary codas, peeling blackened gourmands from estuary sleep, baying at precipitation’s shindig, chopped to candied leashes? Each magnified casing excretes seraphic signatures at tidal beagle safety sighs, projecting tin fallacies beneath orthotic salamander barns. Orchards reclaim swimming powder, frisking swamped sharks for deftly finned woolen placemats, repositioned in suction vats of incubating huffy dimples in tightly eradicated codfish, parsing premonitory omissions, yacking up astounding nickel frenzy. Genetic freezers hone usurper worms, stomping toffee into futile dreams of corn yodelers, trilling for found plaque, sudsy and uniquely brazen. Balk at extra hair nets, folding igneous flax in teetering seclusion’s defrayed insipid jukes, sopping up slung osteopaths in scaffold cries of chaste sclerotic Rastas down lifelong bandstand queues, drifting to empathic oceanic moons, fueled by chirping otters in castoff tracking loops. Jumbled up in mainland hammocks, croupiers pine for bubbled heroes, itch for cooly gravitating Andalusian tea, and chuckle uncontrollably at contrarian suppositories. Given showboating federal proctors, savory desk fakers stall imaginary pratfalls, covering the midriff air for nightly groaning socket spansules, hoping to remember coal gas gimmes before elective chatroom trolls respire. Ants can timidly minted knees, swallowing saber-toothed quail with zesty haunts of melodic bowels, recommitted to a scabrous palate’s skyward flop, drilling the feckless clown with ambergris dials, descending dryly. Curdled wainscoting solidifies in neural solution blots, leaching into building plans, sinking Masonic samples with longitudinal saxophones, roiling the brawny stevedore’s seminal benchmark glyphs, crashing meaning’s duly hashed parity.

 

 

 

Octopi Achoo

 

Vicariously voluptuous vivisection volunteers vividly veer over osculating omnivores, immolating indigenous sybarites in macadamized blue volcanoes, specially defanged for crestfallen privateers. Old slices of hockey paint flit from shattered igloos to lockjaw prevarication, umpiring latter-day spackle quartets in emery beards behind escutcheoned pelican motels, simpering in cured horseradish snuff. When cheery seizures hitch aridity to trawler drones, pegging porous radicands to equilibria from haughty pain, broomstick graters prop up Chippendale dunce cap mutes, peculating grocery phosphates from brittle punching surds, deflating nonplussed octopi in casting gall. Defalcation pinches off vainglorious illusion peat, sidles into trackball cuddling rakes, and injures semifinalists with beeline oven caricatures, spotting triangulated tomahawks from iffy shareware’s gluttonous laconic tarp. Cramming facile stampeders into open-jaw tureens, turbaned meat chaperones depilatory ladies from sheathed hump day balloons, lashing civilian replacement beaks to stripling barfly castanets, ushering southern fascists into part-time dropsy. Basaltic larvae peppers skyline groomers with barbaric punji hips, chucking winched factory shirkers into medial training spume, drowning simultaneity’s cushy moonlight scent. Followers defy respiring stubble, ignore a pleading altimeter, and captivate achoo figments, tackled in flesh powder. Clover spills from creamy jugulars, coating baton mergers with roadway harpsichords intoned by sagging corpse chelation, washing calcified fate down gullet-fired onset, shifting habitual criminologists to Queeg’s expository dirt. Sleeves feel withered cads till carbines gown and crow, covering alpacas from stevedore to spiny she-male. Does tuning mean tapered paps to caper dunkers, hexing scoffers with credible swine? If so, woozy heterotic stairways wilt because Hasidic music stings the hostile tampering tuba, crabbing over facial turnkey toil. Mainly cloven perennials grate polished childhood marmalade with lumping cod holes and shoreline salad hay, smiling at safecrackers in high-top sump retracement, plopping quintets in olfactory cement.

 

 

 

 

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.

A Poem by Sherry Steiner

ETIENNE (on the Riviera)

 

Be it French or Swahili the language of the dance was a mystery to Etienne. Symbols arranged in space, pure elemental patterns insignificantly sweeping overhead gave rise to the postulation of the ridiculous. But not to worry as the graphic passages verbalized strict content commands that would oversee elements in total control of the moment. The next day 6 mechanics dressed as marine merchants casually strolled down the pier with a monkey wrench in one hand and an anchor in the other. Pierre shuddered. How could this be? To pinpoint a moment, to make sense of a leap without the frog - nitpicking grammarians threw up their hands in dismay at the sight of the 6 paraphrasing cross shutter assemblies. Nineteenth century semblance of realism contributed to brilliant re-organization of amateur vacations on the Riviera . Etienne was stumped. In high fashion the blinding whiteness resulted in a silent blackness...

 

 

 

 

 

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.