A Poem by James Mirarchi

piñata

voodoo janitors

blindfold each other

in boiler room

play piñata

with hanging yuppie

all oily & gucci

combo of steam, guffaws

& thick accents

synthesize into party music

they twirl each other around

(blood-thirsty ballerinas)

swinging sticks

(panting & stumbling)

oily gucci yuppie gets struck

releasing

waterfall of hershey shit kisses

voodoo janitor cries:

can’t you say thanks when i pick up your trash?

that’s all i ask

oily gucci yuppie cries

as he gathers all his crap

stuffing it back into himself:

can’t i remain cute & full of shit?

that’s all i ask

 

 

James Mirarchi grew up in Queens, New York.

In addition to his poetry collections, "Venison" and "Dervish," he has written and directed short films, which have played at festivals. His poems have appeared in Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Poydras Review, gobbet, Boyslut, Dead Snakes, Subliminal Interiors Magazine, and others.

 

Two Poems by Christopher Barnes

Bail-Out

 

Hullabalooing can tip you

A wrung throat.

The misfit scandal

Froths its venom,

Animated in the public spirit.

Clinching frowns of fortune

Main-springs indigestion,

Cranches teeth.

 

We did not self-govern

These disgraced clientships.

We’re meat in the web

Hissing dissent with daylight voices,

Bound

To make the seamless machine

A losing game.

 

 

 

 

Vote – Don’t Vote

 

A vinegar aspect gimcrack – The Murdoch’s fishiness

Grates to a prompt-memory hammer out

(Knock-to-atoms lives, a populous).

First-fruits we glimmer,

The prescription, divide-and-rule dogma.

 

Our soft hearts, trollops as they are,

Go up for tender cash. Ding-dong.

The hymn of hate echo – get off, corpse

On your own misjudgement.

In 1998 Christopher Barnes won a Northern Arts writers award. In July 200 he read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology 'Titles Are Bitches'. Christmas 2001 he debuted at Newcastle 's famous Morden Tower doing a reading of my poems. Each year he reads for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and he partakes in workshops. 2005 saw the publication of his collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh.

Two Poems by John Pursch

Mudflat Closets

 

Arpeggios of faucet news, inhaled by foolish soldiers, work away at newfound thoughts of stacked dominion’s cemetery paste, pinning lurid histories to floor show antiques. Broken queue compartments fill the plenitude’s respiring girth with ill-begotten somersaults and gainers dipped in heavy salt, trickling through enveloped trains to gingerbread trauma sinkage. Loosening didactic pennies from a cardboard savior’s vaulted brace, the backstreet beckons to sunlight’s hazy cure, resonates with plural dockside chatter, and replicates suburban yields of soggy daisies, sentient chairs, and omnipresent underlings, clicking epiglottal hoppers for an amber litter’s psionic felt-tip kitten. Up the fluted passageway, tomographic welders flee the scent of almond furor, pounding boomtown sheiks with quaint amphibious beliefs. Ripening softly in mudflat closets across the grated siphon’s plausibility field, children regain saliva with beechnut simplicity, crossing vernal tenderloins with tipsy hurriers, molting into orchid vials beneath enchanting lampreys. Tomes surmise in porous silence, grafting conked allusions to unprotected sparrows, gifting leitmotifs in offhand delicatessen shoots. Terminals leap embargoed truths, skating down stylized cinnamon bonds to valentine moons, orbiting dissolving postcards. Sacks converge on individual iterations, damping extraneous neutrons into carload trays, casting breaded chicken feed to gulag inexpedience. Habitual corpses write off crafted carrier gaps, lending amorphous stoners to another streetcar’s brachial cloister. Yelping cod bubble up in sentimental fistulas of logical pond cremation, washing into ropy calm.

Fizzy Laughter

 

Mavens grow, stow away on lullaby yacht connections, and transfer sleepy cabbage into wholly straddled parakeets, craning global nectarines at waggling wings. Elevators plunge from next-door louvers, longing for a strident ransom, settling into basement soup and causeway sterility. Humbling a pegboard perpetrator, comatose sectarians play the mumbo-jumbo groan at twenty times the jet stream’s statutory pace, lacing tourmaline with comic lime, hefty and lagging in eight-ball blues. Saved by bowling trios, carnivores exceed illegal haddock at emery villages, nurturing a regal stallion on ciliated presence. Neighborly sprites comb the sock hop for breadcrumb spew, chewing till the prudes come home. If only dextrose had ruled with ironic fistulae in temporary origins, as loggers were taught to bereave; then thermal canned munitions might’ve morphed into differential Turks and instance dwellers could’ve looked alive at seeding rapture contests, divesting roaming rawhide oafs of thermoplastic munchkin tools, in time for summer’s tidal wash. Between a chalky plush surprise and goulash gals in bodice groups, our tasty destined kneeling feed became a cyclic wonton’s newly christened plight, dazzling us with prescient films and cereal toucan canes, lazing in the month of maypole ritual days. Kaleidoscopic stereos ignore exalted pirouettes of cave motifs and turtledove gazettes, enlisting faraway geysers to simulate a laboratory monkey. Drogue chutes entrain our wildest emblems of fueled theatric myth, mourning full-speed into nocturnal emissary tunes, played by voluptuous stamens. Evening settles into dusty miracle wolves, baying at an actuary’s cheesecloth toupee, rendering palatial pardons in kazoo clefs. Knots withstand a severance knoll, implying woolen daubs of gravity scotch, pelted with potato icing by cadaverous caterers. Mule team ramparts exhort a bladder climber to spare encrusted melons, fortifying fusiliers for frenzied French fajitas, factoring gherkins in partitioned op-ed bits. Wells pop, spilling fizzy laughter, gargled by pneumatic newlyweds, fencing for impacted endocrine release. Fluids fly, farming out form-fitting overalls for overhauled kneecaps in nativity plumes. Aging waifs assign insignias to iliadic coaxers, scooting historic mumblers down the sodden gangplank, truthful spearmint notwithstanding.

 

 

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in The Camel Saloon, Counterexample Poetics, experiential-experimental-literature, and elsewhere. His fiction piece “Watchingstoned, T.V.” was recently nominated for the Sundress Best of the Net 2012 Anthology. His first book, Intunesia, is available in paperback from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks . You can follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/johnpursch or on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/john.pursch .

Three Poems by Felino A. Soriano

in the poem of rhythm

 

or

in

            the immanent faculty of language’s methodology…

 

staggered

                        sentiments

upon emotional aggregated fathoms, whole or whole in the halved architecture of

 

a sonnet’s implicit salutation

 

echoed

 

 

in the wholeness of rhythm

 

querying the immanent self (subjective as the mirror’s rotating back)

                        can

a

            section be

considered whole in the aspectual meaning of dictionary intelligence?

 

then

                                                as though the body ignites becoming interior to the flame’s

oval-fingering

recalling unzips its etching phenomena

reenacting reactive

oppositional consultation

resulting in the remembering of youth’s antediluvian                        achromatic

feature:

 

whole is

the naturalized experiment

realized amid extent of thoughts’ physical

composition of an echo’s unfailing

dissertation

 

 

in the morale of rhythm

 

containing

 

                                              deconstructed fathoms as meeting the need of tonal

                        refinement

            of

sound

                                                         in the symptoms of absolute healing

                        hearing

                                              hoping

upon a mathematical

style

                        logic constructing balance hardened by the delivered

meaning of

confined fervor

ability application excitation,             belief

 

 

 

 

 

Felino A. Soriano has authored 55 collections of poetry, including In the parallel of pursued occurrences (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Quartet Dialogues (white sky ebooks, 2012), and Of language|s| the rain speaks (quarter after press, 2012). He publishes the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation in philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He lives in California with his wife and family and is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.

A Poem by D.M. Aderibigbe

MR TICK-TACK

The new English teacher has been re-born through
The mouth of the school children, and re-named.

His new name is Mr Tick-Tack. Reasons

1. He tickles the bridge of his nose a lot.
2. He tackles the students for being sapient and for being vapid.

A week after Mr Tick-Tack resumes, he resigns. Reasons

1. He tells a girl in my class to come and tickle his
Stick-like manhood with the tip of her tongue.

2. He tackles the school principal for lampooning him
Over his preposterous exploit.



D.M Aderibigbe is a 23-year old Nigerian. An undergraduate of History
and Strategic Studies of the University of Lagos. His poetry and short
fiction have been published or forthcoming in 8 countries, in journals
such as Wordriot, The Applicant, Red River Review, Ditch, Kritya,
Thick jam among others. He's a die-hard Inter Milan fc fan. His poetry
is greatly influenced by writers such as Octavio Paz, Seamus Heaney,
Ilya Kaminsky, Natasha Trethewey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Maya Angelou, Wole
Soyinka and Lola Shoneyin. And singers such as Bruno Mars, Ne-yo among
others.

A Poem by G. David Schwartz

Don't Talk
        
Don't talk thought your nose
thats not the way that thing goes
not normally anyway


G. David Schwartz - the former president of Seedhouse, the online interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue and Midrash Working Out Of The Book. Currently a volunteer at The Cincinnati J, Schwartz continues to write.
His newest book, Shards And Verse (Baltimore, PublishAmerica, 2012) is now in stores or can be order on line.

Two Poems by Jordan Jamison

T.S. Eliot’s Veins

 

The apartment festers like open sores on feet, memories of dope itches and milky spoons of diseased liver brown, Coca-Cola brown, everything is brown.  I continue to think of you, T.S. Eliot; would you write a poem about the apartment, about working-class beaner friends who double as modern day Dantes?  Probably not, but my arms hurt.  My veins are an adorable apple bruise barely oxidized.  I love my veins, always have.  Sometimes when I can't sleep and my nose is running and I can hear the water in the wall and the delicious couples screaming at each other out on the sidewalk, I wonder if you love your veins as much as I love mine.

 

 

 

Phoenix

 

Anne drowned in Gatsby's dirty bathtub-listening to Marge Simpson pubuc hair and A Tribe Called Quest.  Saint Peter rejected her at the gates of Glendale coffee shops, Auschwitz and Wrigley Field.  She sat in her car all morning eating cups of tetanus nails and chasing them with atom bombs, Olde English, and Fentanyl enemas.  The Buddha turned out her formal complaint and Maricopa County Superior Court appeal by sticking a lit cigarette through his bellybutton and she laughed her Zkylon B laugh walking to the psychiatrist on 51st and Thunderbird muttering why why why.  Her sister respected her but didn't understand her and they went to Holocaust Addicts Anonymous meetings in Wall Street church basements also used as shooting galleries by truckers and priests and John Coltrane.  She knew enough was and shot a 20 dollar bag of saline and Gary Sinise's favorite ping pong paddle and walked to Nitrous Row thinking about Otto the Orange and Dutch courage and another hit of hipster typhus and she could cop it quick and easy from any Dominican in Tempe if only she could hustle up the paper.  On the way up to the whippit spot she talked Dali into using her as his model for The Persistence of Memory and he agreed greedily in Gestapo glee and asked for a list of her references and she told him she was Jack's original pick then that bitch Rose showed up but she did a photo shoot at summer camp last year and he told her to call him Salvadore from now on or if she preferred The Bear Jew or Teddy Ballgame.  She left him in the smog and walked over flaccid fool's gold and Prius windshield cow paddies and yen pox opium left out to dry and suckly by Mao and Stalin to give their timed orgies a rush and she breathed out methylenedioxymethamphetamine and she felt the Turkish semen and steak and eggs and pocket cocain from yesterday blurp out on the basketball court of Parkridge Park and she left before Neil Armstrong's neat anal probe could catch up to her because it was not welcome on the Row and Buzz Aldrin was always too sober to walk to Daisy's raves.  She saw Osama's palace and the crematorium pouring out virginity and hope and balloons and empty Reddi Wip cans.  Jesus was on the stoop and he fingered his pet Chia Cheeseburger and his quiet disciple Lee practiced target shots reliving the glory days of November nineteen sixty three bragging that Newt Gingrich was next and he texted Himmler calling him a Jew loving communist and when she walked by they whistled and asked her if she wanted any good Soviet ketamine and she ignored them and made it in the mansion and didn't say hi to anyone and immediately saw Gahndhi across the room blowing Spice smoke down on a stinkbug the he carried around to conquer anorexia and John Travolta jokes and the Pakistani Raj flag and she grabbed his hand from twenty feet away and they went in the bathroom and had a fifty-six day hunger binge and she drowned.

 

 

 

Jordan Jamison is from Phoenix, Arizona.  His poetry has been featured at Hayden's Ferry Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Magazine, and Ploughshares, among others.  He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently working on his first collection of poetry, Dancing With Trains.  He is alive and well.