Three Poems by April Salzano

Spoke too, Gone too

soon.  Decubitus.  Succubus.
Fuck you, bitch.  Trapped
between two worlds, one all goddamnit &
other polite and subtle as a hemorroid.
Excuse me.  The disease
of powerful seething, driving
to distraction.
Phone on hold.
Hold the phone.
Stop the fingers
on screens they aren't really
touching.  A book
on Auschwitz.  Life
on fire.  Death at the door.



I Know Where My Hands Have Been

They find things in the dark,
proud tongues talking, taking
signs away from languages and cupboards,
cupping the moon and casting it
aside in favor of brighter light.
How bare their intention,
how wrinkled their skin.



Let Every Sound Be

anything but familiar, all excuses,
original as origami
animals and balloon breasts stuffed
high in shirts that are too
small.  Let anyone who can,
do, and those who can't, crawl
on fours across floors
made of water.
Let the sun go out.
Keep the moon on hold.
Dictate the way the cards will
fall, and sweep them under hand-
loomed rugs and quilts of clay.

April Salzano is the co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press and is currently working on a memoir about raising a child with autism, as well as several collections of poetry.  Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle.  Her chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is available from Dancing Girl Press.  Her poetry collection, Future Perfect,  is forthcoming from Pink. Girl. Ink.  More of her work can be read at aprilsalzano.blogspot.com

Three Poems by Joanna M. Weston

The Depth of Cold

a wedge of rime on the sky
this glacial sheet of stars

where tossed paper napkins
and a footprint coin snow

pigeons lost in hoar-frost
are speared by fallen icicles

an apron of milk spilt
the gelid end of solstice

in a river of ice-floes
shards of arctic moons



Unfocused

     -- 1st line from Sylvia Plath's "Years"

they enter as animals from the outer
rim of countries stretched by hunger

stealing comfort from the night
fleshed bones gnawed to the pith

incoming nightmare spectres
spiders weave old catastrophes

each broken promise spells our past
these strained smiles glisten

a paralysis of searchlight fear
marooned in focused high beams

horror's welcome plastered on skin
time disables our emotional centres

faith blankets all uncertainty
disbelief burned at every stake



These Nights

     -- 1st line from Thomas James' Love Song

love, the gold mouth has broken open
silver tongues spill on creased sheets

an arm fingers cradle moonlit words
the night's shadows waver over skin

a movement of dream in curled limbs
whispers of sweat speak wild roses

what questions can be asked of love?
lips caress night's hand and breast

the tide falls and sleep moves in
mouths close on raptured speech

Joanna M. Weston is married, has two cats, multiple spiders, a herd of deer, and two derelict hen-houses.  She has a middle-reader, "Frame and the McGuire," published by Tradewind Books, and poetry, "A Summer Father," published by Frontenac House of Calgary.  Her eBooks found at her blog:  http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/

Three Poems by Mark Young

Satisfying the Mittag-Leffler Condition

If grandma gets a bedsore the best thing
to put on it is a discernible cluster of
shamanic metaphysical teaching
features--an enclosure of plinths in a cube,

Frobenius extensions of rings via centralizers,
endomorphism towers locked in position
at the base of the pole, or people from the

settling basin of the Palo Verde Irrigation
District who like to make use of the "boys
& motors" obsession.  The final depth
of the mulch should be three to four inches.



A Line from Dante Alighieri

A narrow stone stairway
leads down to a cave cut
into the rock.  Worms are
passive creatures unless

they're part of a zombie story
set in a secluded area of the
Tasmanian rainforest.  The same
stuff that cleans your toilets

or bleaches your hair travels
through to the upper nasal
& oral cavities & lights up
your next dinner party.

Lychee Lodge sits within a
dark wood.  A Jungian analyst
mentors single men & women.
This website feels right for you.



Asterion

Minoan civilization
is an artificial wave
in the hair.  Diacritics
dreadlocked in instead
of beads.  Genetic markers,
carrier codes.  Meaning
imparted by their up-
braided placement.  The

color has already been
bred in, an aposematic
act, an unsubtle warning
to the traveler that not
everything is what it
seems to be.  Metabolism
abounds.  Bulls pace the
mazes of the royal palace.

Mark Young's most recent books are Bandicoot habitat & lithic typology, both from gradient books of Finland.  An ebook, For the Witches of Romania is due out from Beard of Bees.

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Rising in the East

Now that I am so very old
I often think about being young
A baby sometimes but mostly earlier
And what it felt like to be in that liquid room
Where a heartbeat was my metronome
And I and she were as one
Something I did not understand
Until I too was but a small part
Of repeating all of that



For Those Who Love Black and White

The candle's wobbles splinter the glory days
Oddly moving and big time unexpectedly poignant
Santa Lucia in a flying Barca Lounger
That whips you back to live long and prosper's psychedelic rock
That I once heard in the Huntington Botanical Gardens
That had all the stunning beauty of after it rains
Where I remembered reading Ant-Man in a used car of great wonderments
Near my favorite pizza place that was an Oz all of its own
Back when every Christmas was a necromancy
An aluminum foil that was molded into the cherry orchard's great coats
Back before I became chained to the oars of the glaciers
That still slowly advance over the red clay roads
Towards a certain long closed barber shop
Where as always my heart lies in repose



For the Snow

There is a seasonal cool that is settling in on the dry cornfields
That are near her secondhand shop so like a dark wood ruby
And later there will be a disco ball in each glass of wine
That we will drink near downtown tribal streets
That are milled out of all that has been recovered
From the frenetic duck and cover that is constantly tinkering
With winter's thinly sliced silhouette until it becomes
But a Lego set of all that we have lost




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.  

A Poem by Pamela Ahlen

Night Life

A dark and diazepam night,
when wake-time's saxatile,
crawling out from under the rock
and roll of an old picture show.
I read from Dali's secret life,
the childhood part about bestial women,
as manically absurd
as a re-run of badgers roaring matriarchal,
gnawing on the bones of my obedience.
Yes, the babushkas,
a clutch of beet-boiling dumpling-beaters,
their sauerkraut sweat and fruitcake disapproval,
serving shame, my every tick watched, stopped,
congealed like stinky cheese in the clockarium of my brain,
beasts whose DNA I bear, whose garnets I wear--
the persistence of memory
preying on my pillow like a mantis alive and busy.

Pamela Ahlen is currently program coordinator for Bookstock (Woodstock, Vermont), one of three Vermont literary festivals.  She organizes literary readings for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth).  Pam received an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.  Her poems have most recently appeared in About (Black Earth Institute), Bohemia, The Sow's Ear, and The Comstock Review.  She is the author of the chapbook, Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press).

A Poem by Ruth Bavetta

Last of the Summer Wine

The silver bracelet around my wrist
was forged from snakes and desert air.
All around me figs and honey
gathered moths with crayoned wings.
As the colors flowed and fused,

I ran to join the festival.
There, among the rhymes that failed,
I drank champagne and laughed and sang
without a thought of coins or shoes
or where the other guests had gone.

When the tide swarmed through the door
and the lanterns sizzled out, I was left
to burn my fingernails for light.
The sea was dark and deep and cold,
but as I sank below the waves,
I held my ten small lamps aloft
and birds flew down to kiss the flames

Ruth Bavetta is an artist and poet whose poems have been published in Rhino, Rattle, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, North American Review, Spillway, and Poetry New Zealand, and many others.  Her work is included in four anthologies.  She has published two books, Embers on the Stairs (Moontide Press) and Fugitive Pigments (FutureCycle Press).  Two more books, No Longer at this Address (Tebot Back) and Flour, Water, Salt (FutureCycle Press) are forthcoming.  She loves the light on November afternoons, the smell of the ocean, a warm back to curl against in bed.  She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut.

A Poem by Arturo Desimone

Despite My Best Efforts at Arriving Late to Every Meeting, There it Persists, A Fetal Clock Nascent in Me

My hands like leaves,
my 2 gentle hands:  husband and wife

I want to pull husband from wife
child from mother
master past his managers
politician past stage managers
they have misunderstood unity
and reunion is not in the air-conditioning
It is at the frontier of death
and the lovers are many
solitudes

the winter kills the beggar saints
who could pay radius
the winter kills micro-organisms, but the demons
will awaken, with or without the pagan carnival
that allows the stupid country-folk to remain animate
and survive the demons, mocking them in the anonymity
of the act of wooden masked mating.

The solitudes can be lovers
and never partners, and never
house-bound, for that is
the heart's death
preferred to its wings set
on inexterminable fire:
my only race was concealment.

Arturo Desimone's poems and short fiction pieces have previously appeared in Counterpunch, New Orleans Review and The Missing Slate.  A recent artistic collaboration with the Netherlands-based Iranian film-maker, Atousa Bandeh, brought his poetry into the video art film The Apology Triptych.  Arturo was born and raised on the island Aruba, in the Dutch Caribbean, and is currently based between Buenos Aires and the Netherlands.