Three Poems by John Pursch

Manitee Tarantula Pants

Ovations sit atop the cabinets of origami dictionaries, lining floozy paraphernalia in gearbox cramps, asking floral pastries for skillful etching techniques, properly auxiliary.

Tens emit urging shoulder squeals, grossing timid gavels amid laborious Gaelic tenterhooks, fleshing into cooly held privation's foreign pounders.

Pineal sleaze slakes our filial trust release, blushing at shrieking glades of hornswoggled youth in passe sundries, unshelved by univocal pastures.

Cartwheels effervesce in postal dunce chemise, contradicted daily by mammaries of brotherly injections, craving tenderloin pages when evergreen Epsom halters shop for wounded sapphire.

Prunes age till despotic antics vacillate beyond sequential hedgerow rebuttal's butane carrying kit, humming hymnal overtures in triplicate.

Mainsprings defy a slumping tributary, careening through gasket ears to fulminate in piecemeal quietude, sneaking past presidential tonsure in manitee tarantula pants.



Nightstand Debutantes

Barking clouds limp gingerly across a skewered highlight meal's electronic faucet train of silvered sedition aerodromes, cutting to blackballed erudition's sisterly plover reel.

The surgeon's demographic purge to gut swans of purloined sulfur reduces qualitative palliative choirs to barometric free-for-alimony bubble blowers, listing in the lasting cataract's verdigris.

How filled with hounds and watered foundlings, this neuropsychiatric melange of flowing lab coats, cratered Danes, and morphed Sephardic wonders of omitted childhood's pungent breath!

Havens respire in shaky sextant moos, filching cow town catchphrases from praiseworthy prairie bogs, filtered into cipher sieve marines.

Cropping obstetric gofers, rawhide remainders remand atypical slugs to cauterize imploding wind police, huddling in a glacine montage of airy benevolence.

Clippings depict annular rotation wriggles of anaerobic nightstand debutantes in seedy beefy clubfoot sandwich shop oregano mistakes, spoken hourly before schematic pundits wash voluminous infatuation from effrontery's puissant synchopated shimmy.

Dimes bring fashion mimics to streaming stain tar's humble spelling sea, still defiled in soupy ciliated kinship's eternal umbrage, but billowing doubtful esquire destiny's pedestrian motif in clods of specious tumbrels.

Hats wear off, revealing hazy pairwise smooth encapsulated insurrections, stunning diaphanous encephalopods with tanned soliloquies.



Sternum Traitor Underwear

In light of day we see greener parity's fruitful pomp, dabbling with ursine shallows of postulated turpitude in personal sagacity's stern tilings.

Exclusionary camaraderie loops from stein to porous luminal breastplate, dousing axial cotter pins with frugal gestation comas, remanding slanted epigrams from tinted leisure's pulsing hominy critter police.

Nomination pits crow in silky distaff coughs of scoundrel scheming, traipsing through calumny's worsted swells to satisfy paternal lunges with hammer schlock and shrapnel coinage.

Satin seethes amid ecstatic cameos of infamy and gradual reset, focal points anointing garrulous cravers with destiny's sown chalice of Benedictine sleepover sauce, compounded into trolley bliss.

Raiding high-bar seamstress cabarets, glossy-voiced parolees sweeten amplified adjudication with cufflink locker noose allotment beaks, cabling expired pardons under transpiration's imminent perusal.

Watching amply generic saucer fish turn sadly hemispheric dishes into beastly cobra salesmen, entitled croquet teams abbreviate an ovoid Ferris steeple with trunk line cavalcades of sternum traitor underwear, borne by nocturnal matchmakers to seasoned hills of unattended domicile distraction glyphs.

Venial swallows tree amazing slingshot mice in easily deformed magenta corpsmen, sanding easement cleft tornadoes into snivels of colloidal abridgement geese.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona.  Nominated for Best of the Net in 2012, his work has appeared in many literary journals.  His most recent book, Intunesia, is available in paperback from White Sky Books at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks.  He's @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.

A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

eleven things about wet noodles that everyone should know:

     -- a six-year-old nicknamed Chuck-a-muck often drapes wet noodles over his 
     ears (when his mother isn't looking)

     -- Chuck-a-muck's sister Maria doesn't drape wet noodles over her ears

     -- Thor didn't eat wet noodles as a kid (Odin and Elvis did and still do)

     -- every wet noodle is first cousin to all other wet noodles

     -- wet noodles give boa hugs

     -- dry noodles sometimes hesitate before accepting boa hugs from wet 
     noodles (but never regret it afterwards)

     -- unintentionally stepping barefoot on a wet noodle means good luck

     -- unintentionally stepping barefoot on several wet noodles means a gooey foot

     (but in a between-the-toes goody sort of gooeyness)

     -- wet noodles are allies of wet beeps, drippy faucets and poets with writer's 
     bloc

     -- wet noodles -- so cool when hot!

     -- and hot because we're always  so  cooooool!

     and we wet noodles (us) of every where/when/how/dampness thank you

       for reading (and appreciating) eleven things everyone needs to know ...

                                               about wet noodles!

ayaz daryl nielsen, husband, father, veteran, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs) and x-hospice nurse, is editor of bear creek haiku (24 + years/116 + issues), his poetry's homes include Lilliput Review, Yellow Mama, Verse Wisconsin, Shamrock, High Coupe and Shemom, he has earned some cherished awards and participated in worthy anthologies -- his poetry ensembles include Concentric Penumbra's of the Heart and Tumbleweeds Still Tumbling, and, in 2013, released an anthology of poetry titled The Poet's of Bear Creek -- beloved wife/poet Judith Partin-Nielsen, assistant Frosty, and bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com (translates as joie de vivre)

Two Poems from Your Editor, A.J. Huffman

With Iron

icicles carved from moonbeams, I battle

mind-monsters crawling from moments

of half-sleep.  My adrenaline-junkie REM

ranger rides past me.  His dune buggy

laden with long lost sleep dust.  The bitter

little bastard bites his thumb at me.  I string

a streak of bloody wishes, watch them erupt

just under the skyline.  Spin out, double

flip.  Bogey!  My score is definite

ly improving.

Rhinestone Butterflies

Striped leather strips scar make-shift necks.

Glowing.  Cold.

                           Colder.

                                        Coldest.

                                                       Breath

bending fire

no one can own.

I am their energy.

I am their fight.

Impact

mirrors the image, doubles the weight.

Heavy things cannot fly,

though they can sparkle:

all the same.

A.J. Huffman has published seven solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest.  Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com

A Poem by Mike Cluff

Alpha poem- letter V

Vichysoisse on the veranda
waiters in pure white waistcoats
Xhosa spoken sub rosa submerged
yips from hyenas
zooming around in BMW's
along the updated Autobahn
bellicose owners of foreigners'
contracts held in perpetua.
Dahomeans denied passage
emigrating north is negated
for people of colour
groping for dreams
halted in vitro
institutions of separation deny
justice to anyone not their own
kin and kind.
Landmines may be placed between the US and
Mexico according to men not up to the minute
negotiating deserts in gas machines or even mules
or oxen if deemed divinely necessary
protecting images of self-aggrandizement
quaking in cowboy boots to
remain ensconed and regal
superiors to those who
threaten their boxed-up and homogonized
umbras and unfounded preachings of Manifest Destiny.

Mike Cluff is a writer living in the inland section of Southern California. He is now finishing two books of poetry: "The Initial Napoleon" and "Bulleted Meat"-- both of which are scheduled for publication in late 2013/early 2014. He believes that individuality is the touchstone of his life and pursues that ideal with passion and dedication to help the world improve with each passing instance .He also hopes to take up abstract painting in the next several months.

A Poem by Michael Lee Johnson

Untitled I Walk

 

Untitled I walk

through life

with a shrink

from Yugoslavia,

who is as large as Bigfoot.

With a novel in one hand, 

and shaking his fingers at me

with the other,

he wants to control me with a shovel,

tie me in knot balls, emotional twisters,

and squeeze the emotional pages

out of my life like a twisted sponge.

I retaliate, control him back,

wage war in a vicarious cycle

squeeze his testicles like electrical wires

inside my mind’s eye,

cut his tongue with razors,

dull his clinical words.

Play his game, only better.

He picks up the play phone,

threatens to call the police,

leashing me in my corner

like a trapped dog

forces me to bark

into submission

like a beagle basset bitch.

He treats me with word babble.

I tell him he is a damn Ukrainian idiot.

Peeved off I race

to the parking lot, head to the bushes,

like a blue racer snake threatened,

hop bunny rabbit into my S-10

Chevy pick-up truck,

memo pad in hand,

scribbling ruminating notes

I surrender naked until my next prescription,

untitled I walk.

 

 

 

MICHAEL LEE JOHNSON lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era:  now known as the Itasca, IL poet.  Today he is a poet, freelance writer, photographer who experiments with

poetography (blending poetry with photography), and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois, who has been published in more than 750 small press magazines in 26 countries, he edits 7 poetry sites.  Michael is the author of The Lost American:  From Exile to Freedom (136 pages book), several chapbooks of poetry, including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night and Day, and Chicago Poems.  He also has over 69 poetry videos on YouTube.

Links:  http://poetryman.mysite.com/.  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/promomanusa

https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos

http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000058168/The-Lost-American.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-American-Exile-Freedom/dp/0595460917

 

Two Poems by Ken L. Jones

Folklore He Never Remembers

Hollywood reboots the voyeur like a horse drawn
Transformed dream etched in platinum Italian ices
Plucked from daily tabloids hurtling through
Outer space and wearing prerecorded petticoats from Mars
Contains the DNA of dozens of extinct parallel dimensions
Popping up like the tentacles of a thought balloon
There are no Hallmark Cards for the bloody glove
Everything is not only to be tolerated
But is fifty inches long and inflatable too.



Unicorn Hunt

The mind drinks up the highway straight ahead
Dogs and cats in slow motion
On a night full of the evil thoughts of typewriters
Drowning in the dish water of comic books
The image is a loaded gun that must be burned
A well read stomach that must be fed
It lights such a candle that it tapes up your mouth
Like delirium in a red brocade smoking jacket
Inching across your lawn like a snail
Then down the streets of fever in the morning
In a vertigo of top forty song lyrics
Gathering dust on the lips of millions of women
In the navel of a love manual
That can't be purchased at any store.


 

Ken L. Jones has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to dialogue for the Freddy Krueger movies for the past thirty plus years.  In the last three years he has gained great notice for his vast publication of horror poetry which has appeared in many anthology books, blogs, magazines and websites and especially in his first solo book of poetry Bad Harvest and Other Poems.  He is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.

 

Three Poems from your editor, April Salzano

Out of Thin Air

I must choose my words, carefully
and quietly, so they do not hear me coming
with a butterfly net and a straight jacket.
I am diving up/through loose threads of sleep.
Neither will not come willingly & Both/
is too heavy for me to lift//on my own, what
goes unhomogenized will settle at the top
to be skimmed/from another dream.

 

I Will Rise Above

Hallelujah cliché

I sing as I

rise

           to sky,

palm balls into fist,

          body into air

in my dance

of mending.

 

 

here i am inside

[jackpot]

of your mouth

(w)hole/home

dish liquid/dreams

lubricate/domesticated

fuckery//

 

obsolete breed (less

obscure) monkeys see

dildos do/the trick & quick

before anybody comes--

money shot//

 

faceful of miracle

(whip)

 

 

 

April Salzano teaches college writing in Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two sons. She recently finished her first collection of poetry, for which she is seeking a publisher and is working on a memoir on raising a child with autism. Her work has appeared in journals such as Poetry Salzburg, Convergence, Ascent Aspirations, The Camel Saloon, Centrifugal Eye, Deadsnakes, Montucky Review, Visceral Uterus, Salome, Poetry Quarterly, Writing Tomorrow and Rattle. The author also serves as co-editor at Kind of a Hurricane Press.