Three Poems by Sanjeev Sethi

Summer Song

Plurality isn't enough to tickle you pink.
I've shared magical, misty evenings
with endless seekers via somatic unguents
but not unlimited with the one I wanted,
certainly not when I was a louse in love, when
all of me was a photocopy of priapic rush,
when monosemy of skiving left me with
a jack-o-lantern smile.  Numbers never woo.
It kvells to be in sync with one who soothes.
Per contra those consumed by tenderesse
on another day may thirst for other thighs.



Theurgy

The otherworldliness of poetry annexes
parts of me, urging me to inhale it.  True
to type, I acquiesce to its essence till the
terminus a quo of cadence and its sweep.
Words are my warriors.  No-one can nix
the urge to imbricate.  What has to must
spume.  It can be scrubbed or reshaped.



Transferal

Dossier of your doings is in the ashcan of
my interiority.  Smoking you was deleterious
to self-image.  I strolled to and fro in my mind,
alighted from staircase of fuzzy connections.
Fanfaronade is fine but dictums can't live it.
The rowing of ravens is shut off by soundproof
oriels.  How does one seal these anechoic squeals?

Sanjeev Sethi's poems have found a home in The London Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Off the Coast Literary Journal, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Oddball Magazine, Hamilton Stone Review, Dead Snakes, Literary Orphans, Crack the Spine Literary Magazine, Otoliths and elsewhere.  Poems are forthcoming in Sentinel Literary Quarterly Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Bitchin' Kitsch.  He lives in Mumbai, India.

A Poem by Michael H. Brownstein

Strength and Growth Rings

She called herself nice nasty
Dion of Hendrix's "Purple Haze."
She told of the growth rings of trees
And how they grow within our bones
Changing our network of outer appearance
Decade on the decade, nuances
Lean or thick, threadlike or rope.

Some days she would rise to the wind,
Let Janis know her overdose was recognized,
And other days she hopped beyond clouds
Into the throat of a melody loud and abrasive.
She told how the rings in our bones
Wrapped themselves around the marrow
Decade after decade--years of stress and change



Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published.  His latest works, Firestorm:  A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Books on Blogs) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside and other poems (Barometric Pressures -- A Kind of a Hurricane Press).  His work has appeared in The Cafe Review, American Letters and Commentary, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, and others.  In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005) and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011).  He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

Three Poems by A.J. Huffman

You Killed My Speaker

Without hesitation, your mind

brought immediate demise.

Fanatically final.  Though, in

your defense, she is often

bloodied and bare

-ly breathing.  Buried. 

Under some viscous liquid. 

Battling, cavorting, even wooing

some darker insanity.  Inside

(and outside) the frame

of lines such as these.

Yet somehow your betrayal

is worse than hers.  So dismissive

in its dissidence.  Maybe you were

trying to concede her silence.

(Or echo mine?)  The differentiation

is uncertain.  And certainly uncanny

in its noble pursuit of conclusivity.

If only my eyes wore such shades

of black and white.  Alas, it is

divisibility that continues

to flow.  In red and gray streams.

Rushing my mind, her robes,

and your puddled opinions. 

What a strange wave

we leave.  All shaved, shined,

but still lost.  Just outside

the idea[l] of communality.

Of Tissue

fragile

           box

filler

sneeze

catcher

            crumbled

germs’

disposal

Seeing ADD

Legal pads filled with partially

formed thoughts

laden table, floor.  Not

abandoned, just asided in attempt

to make                                     space

for next muse-forced

minding.  They flow past midnight,

into dawn, fumble

                              about meals,

                                                   forgotten

in frantic        forage for pen.        A long drive,

nightmare of paused

          pull-overs, safe

                                    attempts to salvage brilliant bits of

verse.  Days, weeks, months, later,

                   crumpled

words found, retraced. 

                                       Fresh eyes finding

conjoinment of several parts.  Finally,

                    a whole is formed.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com.  She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

Tell Us a Poem

your poem
a favorite poem
or sing us your song
Jesus Loves Me,
or, Roadhouse Blues:
"I woke up this morning
and got myself a beer"
just tell us your poem,
sing us your song,
or tell us a favorite story,
dance your dance
from the inside out
or will you whistle
The Heart Sutra, or Om Nabashi Bayu
Little Boy Blue, or The Internationale,
whatever is your favorite
through your puckered lips

I can only whistle on the in-breath,
have yet to learn how to whistle out
and I would whistle my
favorite melody for us, the
one about a little tea pot
surviving the war
of lost causes--

but my pucker is dry--
so--
I'll pause here--

and begin again.

Tell us a poem
a favorite poem
of yours
or sing us your song . . .



ayaz daryl nielsen, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/125+ issues), homes for poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Shemom, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane Press and online at bear creek haiku.

Three Poems by Mark Young

geographies:  London's East End

The helmet hairdo
is a minimally
edited cut & paste

of an email exchange
on the masculine
nature of the werewolf
in the arena of literature

between the loving
fans of Justin Bieber
& a more-than-modest
amount of tequila.

It is full of images of
luxury objects as trash,
but doesn't quite have
the same buzz as the

Congressional comb-
over with its loose
Lacanian metaphors.



A Line from Julius Caesar

In a breakaway from the
current, flawed model
there is a plan to close by
stealth the science that

depends upon necessary
conclusions being put in
place.  It is the first true
continental datum.  You

won't find mirrors or smoke--
the work is a paradigm of
proper reporting & stylistic
clarity.  All successful app-

licants will be assigned a
female pilot mentor.  All
points in time (including
erroneous statements)  will

continue to persist in some
way.  No single measure
can make it all happen.
MSG is toxic to the brain.

Syracuse

It was a

temporal re-

gression

from which

he returned

singing the

Marseillaise

between mouth-

fuls of a curried

egg & lettuce

sandwich.  Arch-

ival footage

shows there

were times

when he had

all four feet

off the

ground.

Born in Hokitika, New Zealand & is now living in North Queensland in Australia, Mark Young has been publishing poetry for more than fifty-five years.  His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages.  He is the author of over twenty-five books, primarily poetry but also including speculative fiction & art history.  His most recent books are a chapbook of visual poems, Arachnid Nebula, from Luna Bisonte Prods, Hotus Potus, from Meritage Press in California & the ebook, A Small Compendium of Bats, from Swirl Press in Sweden.

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Fingers Like Birdsong

There are strands of sunflowers on the tempestuous cliffs
And the music of the rain is on every vine
As I look out this chocolate box's window
Towards the heartbeat of the headless ocean
While random pictures hopscotch across
My paper-mache TV screen as I slowly
Become a forgotten library that shimmers even as it tingles
And as my backyard which has a most dry throat
Becomes enveloped in cigarette smoke
That smells like meat and dooms us all with its flickers
That bloom like remembrance
Of the day the earth stood still like a time machine
As it prepared me for Naked Lunch after being shown the way
By Dangerous Dan McGrew and teh beanstalk
And the Hound of the House of Usher
All of them kaleidoscopes that bred like flocks of birds
Above a blur of ocean waves leading me to dream adrift
About things that can't be plundered and were never carried on any ship.



Someone in a Dream

The birdsong in the cloying heat
Reverted into a catatonic state
As stroboscopic as the quickening dusk
Near where the sea splashes in the harbor
As faint as an epileptic fit
I want to remain sane
So turn off these machines
That are the footprints
Of some alien visitation
Where even the most beautiful of ants
Are eventually revealed to be gray hallucinations.



Becalmed Ballad

Glass after glass of vertigo becomes my distant shore
Where awakened remembrances that slither and slide
Most subterranean through the smuggled dreams
Of an old alleyway in the ebon circuitry
Of the midnight hour where all is one step beyond
All airlocks down where the lily pads that
Breed and breed until they become but mutilated
Broadcast signals near the frigid bones of a disfigured sea that drools
On my antennas bringing forth surrealistic tapestries
In the ruins of my hallucinations where my former feast of visions
Becomes the needle flesh of a dirty bed cloaked in toadstools
And blips of shadows wherein the breakneck torrent of my meat grief
I am left adrift in your fingertips in the silk of all that is forgotten
And all that once occurred in the Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland
Comes into a dream orbit of my ancient thoughts and plants seeds
Most wintry and mysterious while interplanetary seagulls call above
The rainy farmlands so like solar systems seen through the dwindling Martian rain.

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.  

Three Poems by Chris Wood

Handed Down

She was trained to be that way
I didn't know
I thought it was choice
Wild yet stoic
Her silence was not a contemplation
She was conditioned and resigned
in the lukewarm shadow
of the fighting feeding hand
Fear has matured into indignation
informs now her resentment
toward all bodies in synonym
The modern enigmatic flower
The bright future and stern face
Breaks from her loose dim chains
to serve a new master
absent of apparent identity
I pray she keep care
in the cast of her arms
lest she force the seed
in the breaking of light



Mare

cascading shimmer
shadowed being
carving history into quiet night
deafening to the touch
hard pressed to solidify
hold me to these silent times
take the mystery away from the living
show me a star
that I might know myself
hang me a new hunger
over the jaws of success
fear not the peace of death
shackled to moonshine
sequestered only from self
crying out for want of true laughter
stuttering starlight starved for the lark
tie me to the beams you envy



Untitled

to sleep
an independent
awake
an alien
self appointed
lone Master
of one and none
harbor of the unseen
molecule
a beacon
for the betrayed

Chris Wood is 35 years old, and lives in Tacoma, WA.  Originally from Dallas, TX, and attending high school in Northern California, he relocated to Pacific Northwest in 2010.  His poetry is inspired by his perception and reflections of both the personal and shared human condition in the modern world.  He holds the freedom of individual expression as well as interpretation in the highest regard.