Two Poems by April Salzano

Whose Ostrich Is This

with its head in my sand &
a mouth full of mitigation?
What distance is really
unreachable with a pocket
emptied like a flag in the wind?
Varied & clumsy, all the horses
are dragging their riders into a night
that wears a crown.  A thorny
crucifixion bothers to martyr
the unarmed.


I Will Be Damned

if I do not make amends with this body
full of blame.  The mirror
reflects nothing worth gazine.
Eyes tax the reflection,
both ways/both ways.
What one version says,
the other echoes.  I cannot
stop them from trying
to eat each other's hearts
through glass.  There is no love
in this room.



April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons.  She is currently working on a memoir on raising a child with autism and several collections of poetry.  Her work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in journals such as Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle.  Her first chapbook, The Girl of My Dreams, is forthcoming in spring, 2015, from Dancing Girl Press.  The author serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press (www.kindofahurricanepress.com)

A Poem by Kelley White

The Last Issue

I have something caught in my throat.
I can't speak or breathe so we pull on
my ears and off it comes.  I am breathing
better but I can't speak so we put it back
on.  It snaps on quite nicely the first two
or three tries.  I sing a verse or two, blow
up a balloon, but then it stays severed,
a neat line across the neck, no bleeding
at all, but the face is getting puffed out
like those people Gahan Wilson draws,
fat running down like wax in a bowl.  You
are working at the computer with your back
to me.  I plait my hair in a french braid,
easier with my head on my lap facing away.
The hair is red and thin like Queen Elizabeth
the First's.  I tie a pink ribbon and I want
to explain this to you, this idea I have about
myself but I can't speak to get  your attention
and my hands are tied in my red knots.



Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire.  Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA.  Her most recent books are Toxic Environment (Boston Poet Press) and Two Birds in Flame (Beech River Books).  She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

A Poem by Taylor Graham

Wild

Mini-cougar in domestic guise,
the cat assumes his Crescent Moon pose,

a motionless dance.  You hardly notice
how he segues into Extended Sphinx:

claws retracted, energy uncharted.  Never
mistake it for giving up the more than possible,

though he radiates indifference, a mime
of Consciousness Exhaust.  Now

the dog, who's journeyed farther with you
from the wild, lies down facing him.

Palms reaching.  Dog touches finger-tips
with Cat.  Silence gaze-to-gaze.

Do you dare lie down with them,
speak to them as friends--

you with your load of expectations
in a language they don't share?

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada.  She's included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman's Library, 2012) and California Poetry:  From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004).  Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor, was awarded the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.  Her latest book is What the Wind Says (Lummox Press, 2013), poems about living and working with her canine search partners over the past 40 years.

A Poem by Martins Iyoboyi

Native War

Beat your butterfly
wings on the
leaves of my heart,
and suck sweet sun lights
that bend their rays
in mornings of luscious delights.

      *   *   *

eyes wild-opened
to gaze
            suspicious
                                     on
new dreams from fresh
                                     moans of
nearby brooks,
               many scriptures are
                                                written
in love's pining wings,
and
       when
                the
                      lights
                              of
                                   grace
spread effulgence from
                                     your
delightful gospel,
                          rash ruptures
that greeted
                   former scions of
                                              thoughts
are banished forever in the heart.

      *   *   *

I see innocence
    where darkness
              loomed,
              beauty
in labyrinths of voices
and prosaic forms,
                                                 where
love,
        long withered of warmth,
                                                  long
separated
           from
               true spirits
                                 of the
                                          moment,
                                                        reconnects.

I
  see
        joy
             renewed
and canvas immaculate
            spreads, inviting my
                                           long
                                                  suffering
brush to caress
            a love long longed for.

      *   *   *

after looking
                       into
many a
                       beauty's
face,
                       many a
mirror where
                       shimmers wooed
night
                       calls of shuddering
embraces, a prodigal
                       mien swept
clean toxins of
                       former ways,
toxins
            that separate
                      scions of saplings
                                  which

           grew
           in
concerts of common roots.

Your babblings
seared
like
hot knife through butter,
                         carry the
                         burning
                         flames
                        of ancestry,
and remembering
the throbs,
the drumbeats of spirits
                         calling
                         the many sons of the soil
                         to
the splendid squares
                        of former days of love.

      *   *   *

native aroma greets the
             dawns
             of
             delight,
native strength resumes her place
                           where
                           alien
                           concoctions
had once a monarch assumed.
sleep
        slipped
                    silently
                               slowly
                                         stretching
                                                        sound
currents
             carrying
                          curative
                                       compass
                                       to
                                the
heart, but now when I
                         hear
            your
steps
            mingle
                     with
                             the
                                   voice
                            of
                  dawn
               I
       look
with
       shame
                  on the
past, wasted past.

Poet, dramatist and author, Martins Iyoboyi was born in Nigeria.  His published poems have been published by Zone, Bending Spoons, Flask Review, 63 Channels, International Zeitschift, Contemporary Rhyme, Munyori Poetry Journal, Rhythm, Tenemos, MotherVerse, Poetry Cemetery, Boyne Writers Group, Chiron Review, The New Verse News, Collective Fallout, and Hat.

A Poem by John W. Sexton

Migrants

Please state your full name?

          seals
          dark blisters

What is your country of origin?

          on the surface
          of the ocean

How long have you been domiciled at your current address?

          fishermen claim
          that they hear them
          barking
          beneath the waves

Have you been actively seeking employment?

          that they lounge
          on the shoreline rocks
          for hours under the sun
          until daylight burns them
          into new shapes

Are you currently in receipt of welfare benefit?

          and then rising
          as plump men or women
          in leather coats
          will wade ashore

          live for months
          the mundane lives
          of villagers

State the number and names of any dependents:

          then take
          to the waters again
          having sired or conceived
          half-human pups
          in their sojourning
          amongst us

Failure to answer these questions truthfully may result in prosecution.

          moonlight leaves its signature equally on all

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent being The Offspring of the Moon, (Salmon Poetry, 2013).  He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTE radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes from 1999 to 2002.  Two novels based on the characters from this series have been published by the O'Brien Press:  The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into both Italian and Serbian.  He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem "The Green Owl" won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007.  Also in 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

Three Poems by Mark Young

Alcathoe's Bat

Two manuscripts by the
renowned Argentinian writer
Jorge Luis Borges have
vanished.  US Vice President

Joe Biden suffered electrical
problems when he heard the
news.  Still, he let me take
a photo of him as a barking

polyester & cotton blend tree
frog.  Only at night though,
& only if he was wearing hip
waders.  To further capture

these special candid moments I
am now having someone create
twin bedding for me.  Some items
cannot be returned for a refund.



Inanimate

I end up
watching
anime at
four in the
morning.  Cow-

boy Bebop.
There is a
jazz sound-
track but for
some reason

Sinatra is
singing 'when
I was seven-
teen' inside
my head.  It

is raining.
It is always
raining in
anime.  Out-
side & in.



Tic-Tac-Toe

     street

A simple numeric.  Trees have grown up to hide the passing trains.  He hesitated before using the word aura.  Cane thrash or cane trash?  The avenues run on an east/west alignment.  The smell of last week's fumigation was still strong, especially under the house.  What there are in the way of shops close early.  Everybody was being diverted away from the scene of the fatal accident.  He wondered if it was inspection or introspection that had brought him here.  An evening burning.  At least there was highway noise.

     avenue

The Delta Music Store.  Maybe a month before the mangoes ripen.  In a crossword puzzle the street would be the down columns.  Poltergeists lived in the walls of the room in his mind called memory.  The sound of lawnmowers.  Solar panels.  What is the opposite of furious?  He lay on a daybed trying to find connections between words that sounded similar but had no overlapping meaning.  The smell of diesel engines is not masked by the trees.  Proust.

Mark Young's most recent books are the ebook Asemic Colon from The Red Ceilings Press; The Codicils, a 600-page selection of poems written between 2009 & 2012, out from Otoliths & the eclectic world from gradient books of Finland.  Recent work has appeared in gobbet, Unlikely Stories, E*ratio, & Sein und Werden amongst other places.  He lives in North Queensland in Australia.

Three Poems by James Diaz

Mountain Never in the Gutter Belly

There
you are
spread like an animal
small talk

composition of seriousness
below the primal want

wed to painting
mother mouth
mourning in a time of laughter

day or sea
lit from the inner flower
bowing to lover
in Arabic
proximity

the nearness
of the invisible dead
falling asleep under
the door.

Here;  I threw myself-
I took the Occident
under my tongue
and bowled out the earth
from which the wound name
lived
pouring blessing
into the honey lung of hell.

Eye-

the double olive

pin prick

present
under a skirt
where the law cracks

to pieces
inside you.



Moth of Monad Brittle

quick and painless whole variety as possible
misrepresentation of e

spelling orbicular in the sand

its not Maybe this or that

pulling prairie lake wool
off the blind spots of the skin

a blessing gone deep
under fickle mountain
slept the blue stained H

an animal in the wrong yard

a yard in the wrong animal

bearing juniper trudging toward

and from there

deposited in a print that signals someone else's land.



Willow and Wanting

Let me buy you
no,

pleasant sweat  stood  startled could she
god me.

knew I  Red.  I knew red always  unlike the  fermented  trinkets

rib cage

I want some cotton
no.

Brocade
clothes yesterday
I ate the other half of the city.

I was not happy about it.

Some steward of the lord came round
fasting and environmentally
self righteous
I told him certain mysteries were hiding
at the county store.

It was mutually beneficial that this be so.




James Diaz lives in New York.  His poems can be found in Pismire, Epigraph, Negative Suck, Abramelin, and My Favorite Bullet.