Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Dragonfly Words that I Once Swallowed

How does one fathom a dream
When all of my females were merely Cliff's Notes
In the Cafe De Seahorse where I recalled my youth
Which was like a Disney sonnet
Whose rose petals nodded at me
As oh so bone white they sighed
Heaving and sad and like a spinning wheel
While the fog held a seance to communicate with my dreams
That dissolved like some Cocteau film
As it pulsed from the Painted Desert
To Alpha Centauri and beyond
And then morning tore my ticket into a stub
While a rusting symphony of the frogs in the trees
Turned all this into a bewitched womb
That tilted and quivered like a playground swing
Near and freshly plowed fields that like pendulum clocks
Led me to the midway of the black b irds
Where gold fish swam in its carnival light
And where with the benediction of the clouds
Summer boarded up for winter in front of me with a sound most loud.



A Tarnished Whirlpool

Driving along in my father's speeding pickup
A thousand times I dreamt of flinging open the door
On my side and repelling out of it
My legs tucked under me cannonball style
Sure that I would magnificently fly before I died
When gravity finally did an Icarus on me
Many times I tested the door handle on my side
Wanting so badly to do it my mouth and throat gone dry
My blood pressure throbbing inside of me like a trip hammer a'pounding
Only to abandon such thoughts at the very last sweaty palmed moment
Then back to the pile of funny books I always carried
In the canvas overnight bag with me to day camp and everywhere
It always smelled pungently of peanut butter and jelly and suntan lotion
And bubble gum and of the four-colored comics it had made to bleed
I haven't thought of any of that in years without number
Then this morning it swam up from the depths to me
While I listened to Tchaikovsky's Russian sadness
Which was still engulfing me like some forgotten summer.



As Comes Snow

Goodbye is not gone as long as it floats you
To those few hours when she was an imposing beacon to me
And made me first believe in the portents
That turned her ginger cat into an old lion or so I believed
And as long as I was cloistered in those irrepressible footsteps now long gone
I trod on a ship's deck of different rhythms and envied
Those who dug in the soil that could play a violin if it so chose
My thoughts as surrounding and comforting as childhood jammies
While I made a wish as I sat down on the rooftops of those red lipsticked mansions
As the pink light rubbed a magic lantern that quivered through
The windswept catwalks of the somewhat eternal seaside's rocks.



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 Heath Brougher

Grunge Poem Get Well Card

Sleep precious my pretty pneumonia;
my rag-doll of bloodstream; you can
cough on me anytime you want
ever since I heard the life-rattle of the flu
in your bronchi;          the hospital
is spilling out with       patients like over-poured milk;

may your ribs not be razed by your incessant coughing;
may dusk work its way into this epidemic;
may the medical community invent a flu shot
that is strong enough to overpower this current string;
but most importantly, my pretty little pneumonia,
may you please wake up from your current state,
stretch your arms out wide, sigh a morning sigh,
and begin to feel like rain, that is, right as.



Burning Leaves

Something else after the fact rolled down
the sleeve unlike a raindrop or ball; more square
and untrustable than misshapen lies . . . this weaving path
leads nowhere, you may as well just let go now . . .
pig's vomit at the rainbow's end, the slaughtered leprechaun
(they're evil anyway), so we euthanize
their poor green goldless suits so flammable; feed them
dopamine and set them ablaze with flambeaus;
voids and vacuums and empty spaces are primary
to us today; the here and now is discombobulated
and confuses the senses, the sinus reaches through dense blockages,
for clarity, anything goes and nothing is right and relieved
and unveiled, the insane things . . . the sodas we shake and throw
into the air to explode and take off like rockets into power-lines
leaving them dripping sticky as we walk back inside
across the gluey ground
beneath our shoes.  Anything; anything at all to turn off this tedium,
anything so I don't just nod off . . . nod off . . . nod off . . .
nod off and gone forever.



A Nightmare in Purple

Down hollowest hill
a path twisted; born in the palm
of frigid gale, she wore a dress
that flowed through the fingers;
hard and high in the violets,
her face was a snapped-out-of-a-dream;
petite legs walking to the threshold
of a frightened wake.

Heath Brougher lives in York, PA and attended Temple University.  He has been writing his entire life but didn't begin to submit his work for publication until March of 2014, so he feels like he's got a lot of catching up to do.  He recently finished his first chapbook and has two more on the way as well as a full-length book of poetry.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Mobius, MiPOesias, BlazeVOX, *Star 82 Review, Otoliths, Of/With, experiential-experimental-literature, Van Gogh's Ear, 521 Magazine, Stray Branch, Carnival, Indigo Rising, Inscape Literary Journal of Washburn University, and elsewhere.

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.