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.

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.