Two Poems by J.R. Carson

Glucose

keys::locks::doors
swinging
o[pen]
closed

                                   stuck

unhinged

in some haphazard fashion like the

smile _hanging from her

dis[illusion]ed lips the night

she walked away - that night

I said "p[each]es" when I
should have said "apple"

fruit

low-hanging fruit d[angling]
from a dead

            tree

in some concrete grove filtering the lives of
barren women
and fetid men;

men like [badge]rs chucking and fucking and

pret[end]ing to love her

dis[illusion]ed lips holding
up the haphazardly hinged smile like
some rotten fruit oft [romantic]ized by
grizzled faces

at        l  a   n   g   u   i   d                     paces

in some coffee shop on the edge of town:

"apple"

she s[cream]s

and on my own tongue I still

taste

p[each].

Prayer for Dissimilation

Organized hate is no more divine.

A church of peace can not crusade.

The politic of religion is oxymoronic.

A god that divides will never reign.

These are undeniable truths denied

every day by crass

individuals speaking for masses

that have          voice,

that have          mind,
that have          faith,

though you’d never know it through

the thick and bloody fog of
             murder             excused
as war.

I am not the one

that bombed your hospital
with the red cross as target,

I am not the one

that reduced your house of
blocks square to rubble ragged,

I am not the one

that stole your husbands and sons from
your homes in the lie of night.

I am not responsible for these things, yet

I am represented by those who
are.

(this is where you pause to think)

Fair is a four letter word

                         (like race),

that means nothing yet is fought over by

hordes.

One man        hates       another

for his            love         of a third yet claims
an all-loving  god.

One child strikes another

for his shoes made by a third
an                                                                  ocean away.

Whosoever protects the weak -
           shall be treated as weak.

Whosoever defends the different -

           shall be treated as different.

Whosoever cries out against ruthlessness -

           shall be treated ruthlessly.

So sayeth the Shepherd -

           so sayeth the sheep!

 

These are undeniable truths upheld

every day by sanctified individuals
speaking at masses

with    voice,

with    mind,
with    faith,

such that you’ll never know the truth through

the thick and ruddy fog of
            rape disguised
as disease.

These passageways were

meant for boys
            to become men,

not the reverse,

            not the perverse,
                        not the verse:
                                               chapter:
                                                             book

of words changed by the ruling

party                 countless times

over                  thousands of years.

Would that god(!) should leave a mark,

a footstep not filled by those
crushed

by the weight of his church

                for believing

in some           other god,

but the                        same god,
yet a               different god –
not                 my god.

A building and two sticks don’t make

one pious,

a prayer and two songs won’t grant

one salvation,

a tear and two hands won’t bring

one forgiveness.

But a gun and two bullets…

                                                                       (one for you
                                                                                                      and
                                       one for me),

what a wonderful world it would be.

Amen

 

 

 

 

J.R. Carson has multiple prose pieces in publications such as Anathematic, Skive Magazine, and Defenestration. An award-winning playwright, his poetry placed at the 2006 Sandhills Writers Conference and garnered him an invitation to Bread Loaf in 2007. In most of his work, he tries to tell at least three different stories from at least five different points of view, or whatever the cosmos may give him.

Two Poems by Christopher Kenneth Hanson

A Fictional Heist

Dostoyevsky sits in sudden shock-
tumbling down the dust bound safes
and missing keys-
They are locked tight of course,
his action, known to be quite in desperation.
The crew will let sparks fly past
steel black compartments and greasy wheels of chance-
While two blundering buffoons pry and push the black kettle safe
into the mid-day light.
As now, their dear patron- Dostoyevsky now
wipes two tears from a worn cheek,
slips outside of the bank-
And remembers his father, killed by thugs-
whom used liquor to suffocate.
Stressed out completely after seeing this cogently- this image in mind,
Dostoyevsky takes his crimson bandana off- drops his paint gun rifle,
finds a space under a nearby cherry blossom- locates a ball point pen,
then finishes final chapters to Notes From Under The Earth.



Stray Animal Blues

Instinctual antecedence,
as dual incidence-
said inference drift through sullied court,
daft and wanting,
As newborn scent; As newborn scribe-
flummoxing by known pristine points
In awkward relief of reality.
Cantankerous, yet baffled by jovial types bearing contingencies.
Yet, let that same type laud the insurmountable stone wall,
that peaks *here*
And keep out or in a system of belief that requires
sanctuary as left posited concern:
Quite quixotical with sordid symbology,
so seemingly incongruent poesy,
as only systemic assumptions of truth lie dependent-
Indeed, advantageous with word play,
No mechanical, socially stratified
controls *here*: stray animal blues.





Christopher Kenneth Hanson (ckhanson81)
ckhanson81@gmail.com
http://sites.google.com/site/ckhanson81}
https://www.youtube.com/user/ckhanson81
https://sites.google.com/site/indieartsl/

A Poem by Brenton Booth

PINCHED

yes yes yes

egg faced sand tango’s
stone legged tourists smile and break
soap edged guillotines lather weary grey palings
orange peel crabs drink stinging bees—
running barefoot on the melting ice

contemplating

the sledgehammer jabbing away at my coward spirit

like lightning chewing on an albino cat:
while cars drive by worth more than my last five working years
and i worry about losing the next.



Brenton Booth resides in Sydney, Australia. If you would like to read other work of his, you can find it in 3:AM Magazine, Thunder Sandwich, Dogzplot, Underground Voices, Shot Glass Journal, Red Fez, Gutter Eloquence, Citizens for Decent Literature, Zygote in my Coffee, Mad Swirl, Rusty Truck, Full of Crow, Camel Saloon, Yellow Mama, Napalm and Novocain, and Storm Cycle(Anthology).

Two Poems by Sy Roth

Fences

Headless creatures buried in performance.
Arms entwined like fence wire surrounding an open field
they wrap their emotion in cellophane in a
profane desire to keep it fresh.

Around them machines twist and squirm

through the mud of their lusty imaginations,
digging holes where none existed,
then filling them with ambrosial thoughts of satisfaction,
uncompromising sounds of squeaking foundations
built on that which will ultimately rot.

Peeping toms measure and define duration and viability,

a circadian rhythmical moment.
Like dying embers that float on a mission to nowhere,
expunged with one delectable breath of wind.
The front loader mounded with dirt
buries them both under it and
they breathe in the pungent odors of their labors
without desire.

Embossed

They said he was worthless because he had contradictions.
They wanted straight, he gave them crooked stories
that travel at the same speed as two passing trains, giving the illusion of standing still.

Their lavish tales a scarlet letter hung from him like an awful name imposed at birth.

Suitcases were crammed with those stories,
inauthentic, gold-embossed, stamped prime tales in which
real deeds lay festering, pus-filled vestigial organs corrupting the body.

Maligned by the tattlers and naysayers converts into reality.

Empty entities shadow-stretched over sidewalks and bifurcated roads,
miserables nestled among the miserables find room for their aggrandizement
in The Inquirer or poisoned words in liquid ears.

What they say, fixed in time and space, sediment clouding the sweet wine.

He must bear the albatross pursued eternally by them, waiting for the silence.
Incarceration the reward for being hungry for freedom.


Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, the head is bowed by reality; other times, he is proud to have said something noteworthy. cRetired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai, far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace. He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in many online publications such as BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Danse Macabre, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Bong is Bard, The Artistic Muse, Palimpsest, Dead Snakes, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash, South Townsville Micropoetry Journal, Vox Poetica, Clutching at Straws, Downer Magazine, Every Day Poems, Avalon Literary Review and Kerouac’s Dog. One of his poems, Forsaken Man, was selected for Best of 2012 poems in Storm Cycle. Also selected Poet of the Month in Poetry Super Highway, September 2012. His work was also read at Palimpsest Poetry Festival in December 2012.

A Poem by Lynn Hoffman

the intelligent design cafe

you were probably wondering what happened
to life’s first drafts, the rough sketches, paper models
and little cream cheese sculptures molded on the kitchen table
with a butter knife-you know, the ones with peppercorns for eyes.

you may have had a moment of sadness thinking
of the three-eyed people and the frogs with wheels for legs.
maybe you wondered about the squirrels with glass-clear skin
and rubber teeth and the whiskerless cats with radar.

well step right in you finished product you,
take a walk around the intelligent design cafe.
the place where the first drafts have a draft
and the dead ends sit chatting on their dead ends.

the Designer, it turns out, was a pretty decent guy
and he figured that if you worked for Him
you shouldn’t get laid off. the distinction of extinction?
well, he’d leave that for the evo-devo darwinists.

and that is why this very day, in the intelligent design cafe
the influenza virus is bellied up to your cytoplasm with the virus that
only tells fart jokes and that all the people who believe
in the intelligent design cafe
can somehow breathe the same air as all the ones who don’t.

Lynn Hoffman has been a merchant seaman, teacher, chef and cab driver. This year, he's been Visiting Professor at the Academy of Culinary Arts in Mays Landing and Visiting Professor in Hospitality at Hoa Sen University in Saigon. So far he's published two novels, The Bachelor's Cat and Paula Sherman and the National Rifle Association. He's also written The New Short Course in Wine and The Short Course in Beer. Right now he's working on a second, expanded edition of the beer book. A few years ago, he started writing poetry. 

His poem, The Would-be Lepidopterist has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Other poetry has appeared in Angelic Dynamo, Melusine, gutter eloquence, Off the Coast, Waterways, Abramelin, Referential,The Broad Street Review, Sephyrus and Short, Fast and Deadly. His main influences are Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake, Billy Collins, Groucho Marx and Ogden Nash. There is a chapbook forthcoming from Thunderclap Press called Boom: Poems for a Certain Generation.

Three Poems by Felino A. Soriano

from Of these voices

blue

serrated tongues’ connotation versions a being

collaborates into emotional tissue of connective
disparity

queried rolling of mind-body anecdotal parallels

                           then of stone the imperative patience

improving upon mood of abandoned intervention:

                                                        change

green

ideology has

              al
t
                              er
                                                   ed
                                                                                an elegant stirring finger
whose structural caress

              (of guide then gilded affirmation among gratitude’s desire)

is the broken bend now of reflectional disparity:           as/or

                                       when/if

change’s intuitive

momentum
                           fades then attaches
to the tail of an echo’s fundamental annex

until the disagreeing of political becoming shoves

distinction of self into a visual alteration,

obnubilated

blue in the green of distance

rust, the spectrum’s other beautiful manifestation

                           combination |colors| coincide

                                        in the accentuated flow of collision

brand the

undead rendition of meld                    or

melting of pluralized meaning

                                                                   which

meanders and instills

as does the water unfading by arid
articulation

                                                                                                  touching distance’s precision

with a modulating inheritance of interpretive
                           windows

Felino A. Soriano has authored nearly five dozen collections of poetry, including the collaborative volume with poet, Heller Levinson and visual artist, Linda Lynch, Hinge Trio (La Alameda Press, 2012) rhythm:s (Fowlpox Press, 2012), and Quartet Dialogues (white sky ebooks, 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 the director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.

Two Poems by Damien Healy

Tofu

 

The round protein-laden pearls of gold.

Slowly warmed and soaked in a brine of saltwater.

Ground into an off-white nourishing pulp.

Allowed to settle and treated to a sprinkling of yeast.

Packed into wooden boxes and held in place with wet gauze.

Heated till congealed and cooled in a bath of slight alkalinity.

Sliced into hand-sized blocks of smooth creaminess.

Served with a topping of spring onion and ginger.

Dipped in a salty condiment which was once its’ neighbor.

White gold for the price of a bus fare.

 

 

Judgment Day

 

Irrefutable damage,

Liaisons with Lucifer,

The deeds of the victim scrutinized.

What you bring to the table either makes or breaks it for eternity.

Dealing with the small print and all that entails.

Angels and demons hovering around ready to take you with them.

Locked in discussions over written laws and how to interpret them in this day and age.

Waiting and hoping for a bright outcome.

Regrets over what one did in that short time in that ugly little place.

Resigned to accept what will be, will be.

As quick as a flash one group grabs you and off you are whisked.

 

 

 

 

Damien Healy was born in Dublin, Ireland but has been living in Osaka, Japan for the past 20 years. He holds an MA in Applied Linguistics and teaches English language at a Japanese university. He has written three textbooks for Japanese university students and has published several papers on language teaching. He has recently found the time and energy to start writing poetry again. He has had poems published in "The Weekenders" and "Ofipress".