A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

turtle oneness

a woman and her cat
are one as
a man and his dog
are one
and they stand upon
a turtle
standing upon
another turtle
standing upon
another turtle
an infinite descent
of turtleness
and a woman and her cat
and a man and his dog
and turtles
all
the
way
down . . .
are one.

ayaz daryl nielsen, husband, father, veteran, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs) and hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (24+ years/116+ issues), poetry's homes include Lilliput Review, Yellow Mama, Verse Wisconsin, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane Press, and Shemom, has earned cherished awards and participated in worthy anthologies -- poetry ensembles include Concentric Penumbra's of the Heart and Tumbleweeds Still Tumbling, and, in 2013, released an anthology The Poet's of Bear Creek -- beloved wife/poet Judith Partin-Nielsen, assistant Frosty, and! bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com (translate as joie de vivre)

A Poem by Ken L. Jones

Last Call

Night descends like a billboard
Travis Bickle spreads his wings
This century has become a window
Opening onto Warhol's Last Supper
An empty soccer stadium
Has come to represent me
After a day when the summer sun
Reminded me of before the Beatles first arrived
And of days spent on a succulent
Violet Mecca of a beach
Back when four drops of Edgar Allan Poe
Could cancel the very laws of physics themselves
As all about me pummeled my aluminum foiled senses
While Lois Lane drenched in champagne

Ken L. Jones has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to dialogue for the Freddy Krueger movies for the past thirty plus years.  In the last three years he has gained great notice for his vast publication of horror poetry which has appeared in many anthology books, blogs, magazines and websites and especially in his first solo book of poetry Bad Harvest and Other Poems.  He is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.

 

A Poem by Bill Jansen

Chinese Take-Away Sky

Muttering something from Shakespeare,
perhaps "Woe, alas, time calls upon us!"
the nuthatch pokes sunflower seeds
into a cranny of the psychiatrist's palm.

The shrink asks him again how many followers
he has on Twitter...

--Over a million, he replies,
including the Boston symphony Orchestra.

--and how does that make you..

--feel?

_ I don't feel, Doc, I fly..

The psychiatrist makes a cage with her fingers,
and starts over:

--in our last session you were checking the pulse
of a Hawthorne
in the 12 thousand block of Martinazzi Avenue..

--that's right.

--tell me again exactly what happened or did not happen.

-- well, Doc, there were these two hearts
carved into the bark, old hearts,
stuffed with micro jitter and boneless parades,
twerking mites smarter than Pascal,
but unintentionally funny like Sid Caesar..

--and how does that make you..

But the nuthatch had hidden himself
in a Bonsai tree
on the left edge of her enormous desk.

When his hour is up
the psychiatrist takes a carton of Chinese takeaway sky
out of her backpack
and stares at the sun inside.

 

Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.  His stuff  has appeared recently in Gap-toothed Madness and Asinine Poetry.

Three Poems by John Pursch

Manitee Tarantula Pants

Ovations sit atop the cabinets of origami dictionaries, lining floozy paraphernalia in gearbox cramps, asking floral pastries for skillful etching techniques, properly auxiliary.

Tens emit urging shoulder squeals, grossing timid gavels amid laborious Gaelic tenterhooks, fleshing into cooly held privation's foreign pounders.

Pineal sleaze slakes our filial trust release, blushing at shrieking glades of hornswoggled youth in passe sundries, unshelved by univocal pastures.

Cartwheels effervesce in postal dunce chemise, contradicted daily by mammaries of brotherly injections, craving tenderloin pages when evergreen Epsom halters shop for wounded sapphire.

Prunes age till despotic antics vacillate beyond sequential hedgerow rebuttal's butane carrying kit, humming hymnal overtures in triplicate.

Mainsprings defy a slumping tributary, careening through gasket ears to fulminate in piecemeal quietude, sneaking past presidential tonsure in manitee tarantula pants.



Nightstand Debutantes

Barking clouds limp gingerly across a skewered highlight meal's electronic faucet train of silvered sedition aerodromes, cutting to blackballed erudition's sisterly plover reel.

The surgeon's demographic purge to gut swans of purloined sulfur reduces qualitative palliative choirs to barometric free-for-alimony bubble blowers, listing in the lasting cataract's verdigris.

How filled with hounds and watered foundlings, this neuropsychiatric melange of flowing lab coats, cratered Danes, and morphed Sephardic wonders of omitted childhood's pungent breath!

Havens respire in shaky sextant moos, filching cow town catchphrases from praiseworthy prairie bogs, filtered into cipher sieve marines.

Cropping obstetric gofers, rawhide remainders remand atypical slugs to cauterize imploding wind police, huddling in a glacine montage of airy benevolence.

Clippings depict annular rotation wriggles of anaerobic nightstand debutantes in seedy beefy clubfoot sandwich shop oregano mistakes, spoken hourly before schematic pundits wash voluminous infatuation from effrontery's puissant synchopated shimmy.

Dimes bring fashion mimics to streaming stain tar's humble spelling sea, still defiled in soupy ciliated kinship's eternal umbrage, but billowing doubtful esquire destiny's pedestrian motif in clods of specious tumbrels.

Hats wear off, revealing hazy pairwise smooth encapsulated insurrections, stunning diaphanous encephalopods with tanned soliloquies.



Sternum Traitor Underwear

In light of day we see greener parity's fruitful pomp, dabbling with ursine shallows of postulated turpitude in personal sagacity's stern tilings.

Exclusionary camaraderie loops from stein to porous luminal breastplate, dousing axial cotter pins with frugal gestation comas, remanding slanted epigrams from tinted leisure's pulsing hominy critter police.

Nomination pits crow in silky distaff coughs of scoundrel scheming, traipsing through calumny's worsted swells to satisfy paternal lunges with hammer schlock and shrapnel coinage.

Satin seethes amid ecstatic cameos of infamy and gradual reset, focal points anointing garrulous cravers with destiny's sown chalice of Benedictine sleepover sauce, compounded into trolley bliss.

Raiding high-bar seamstress cabarets, glossy-voiced parolees sweeten amplified adjudication with cufflink locker noose allotment beaks, cabling expired pardons under transpiration's imminent perusal.

Watching amply generic saucer fish turn sadly hemispheric dishes into beastly cobra salesmen, entitled croquet teams abbreviate an ovoid Ferris steeple with trunk line cavalcades of sternum traitor underwear, borne by nocturnal matchmakers to seasoned hills of unattended domicile distraction glyphs.

Venial swallows tree amazing slingshot mice in easily deformed magenta corpsmen, sanding easement cleft tornadoes into snivels of colloidal abridgement geese.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona.  Nominated for Best of the Net in 2012, his work 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 ayaz daryl nielsen

eleven things about wet noodles that everyone should know:

     -- a six-year-old nicknamed Chuck-a-muck often drapes wet noodles over his 
     ears (when his mother isn't looking)

     -- Chuck-a-muck's sister Maria doesn't drape wet noodles over her ears

     -- Thor didn't eat wet noodles as a kid (Odin and Elvis did and still do)

     -- every wet noodle is first cousin to all other wet noodles

     -- wet noodles give boa hugs

     -- dry noodles sometimes hesitate before accepting boa hugs from wet 
     noodles (but never regret it afterwards)

     -- unintentionally stepping barefoot on a wet noodle means good luck

     -- unintentionally stepping barefoot on several wet noodles means a gooey foot

     (but in a between-the-toes goody sort of gooeyness)

     -- wet noodles are allies of wet beeps, drippy faucets and poets with writer's 
     bloc

     -- wet noodles -- so cool when hot!

     -- and hot because we're always  so  cooooool!

     and we wet noodles (us) of every where/when/how/dampness thank you

       for reading (and appreciating) eleven things everyone needs to know ...

                                               about wet noodles!

ayaz daryl nielsen, husband, father, veteran, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs) and x-hospice nurse, is editor of bear creek haiku (24 + years/116 + issues), his poetry's homes include Lilliput Review, Yellow Mama, Verse Wisconsin, Shamrock, High Coupe and Shemom, he has earned some cherished awards and participated in worthy anthologies -- his poetry ensembles include Concentric Penumbra's of the Heart and Tumbleweeds Still Tumbling, and, in 2013, released an anthology of poetry titled The Poet's of Bear Creek -- beloved wife/poet Judith Partin-Nielsen, assistant Frosty, and bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com (translates as joie de vivre)

Two Poems from Your Editor, A.J. Huffman

With Iron

icicles carved from moonbeams, I battle

mind-monsters crawling from moments

of half-sleep.  My adrenaline-junkie REM

ranger rides past me.  His dune buggy

laden with long lost sleep dust.  The bitter

little bastard bites his thumb at me.  I string

a streak of bloody wishes, watch them erupt

just under the skyline.  Spin out, double

flip.  Bogey!  My score is definite

ly improving.

Rhinestone Butterflies

Striped leather strips scar make-shift necks.

Glowing.  Cold.

                           Colder.

                                        Coldest.

                                                       Breath

bending fire

no one can own.

I am their energy.

I am their fight.

Impact

mirrors the image, doubles the weight.

Heavy things cannot fly,

though they can sparkle:

all the same.

A.J. Huffman has published seven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest.  Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com

A Poem by Mike Cluff

Alpha poem- letter V

Vichysoisse on the veranda
waiters in pure white waistcoats
Xhosa spoken sub rosa submerged
yips from hyenas
zooming around in BMW's
along the updated Autobahn
bellicose owners of foreigners'
contracts held in perpetua.
Dahomeans denied passage
emigrating north is negated
for people of colour
groping for dreams
halted in vitro
institutions of separation deny
justice to anyone not their own
kin and kind.
Landmines may be placed between the US and
Mexico according to men not up to the minute
negotiating deserts in gas machines or even mules
or oxen if deemed divinely necessary
protecting images of self-aggrandizement
quaking in cowboy boots to
remain ensconed and regal
superiors to those who
threaten their boxed-up and homogonized
umbras and unfounded preachings of Manifest Destiny.

Mike Cluff is a writer living in the inland section of Southern California. He is now finishing two books of poetry: "The Initial Napoleon" and "Bulleted Meat"-- both of which are scheduled for publication in late 2013/early 2014. He believes that individuality is the touchstone of his life and pursues that ideal with passion and dedication to help the world improve with each passing instance .He also hopes to take up abstract painting in the next several months.