Two poems by A.J. Huffman

Entropy

Sandcastles fall from the smallest winds,
turning order over/through/[and] against itself.
I trundle under the devastation with tools
I have been forbidden to touch.
A new wall breathes against my surface.
Sharpened by its preceded hollow, it leashes
my strategy -- I begin forgetting myself
in the middle of sentences . . .

Still momentum is built.  By desistence,
I acquire acreage (mental not physical).
The tally:  loss negates gain
as we flounder in [diminishing?] circles
fueled by our own divisible foot
                                                  steps.



Leading to the Moon . . . 

Dial it down to the crocodile's tears.
The butterfly house is abandoned and dripping
with brackish dreams.  Three cats whisper
our feathers across the moss.  An empty
bench catches them and collapses
from the weight.  Of imaginary alliances
is the battle cry from the bushes
no one sees.  The bridge
stays silent:  collecting unspoken payment
for passage back.  To sanity?  Surely,
we pledge a toast to total compliance
with each other's wonder at waterfalls
made from dying vines.

A.J. Huffman's poetry, fiction, haiku, and photography have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, 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.

A Poem by April Salzano

The Girl of My Dreams

She is thin in the morning and fat
by nightfall, loose seams tearing apart, death
a wish that comes as much as it goes,
a passing fancy, a fancy passing.
She watches a string dance, umbilicus
of dust laced from ceiling to cupboard,
she is sure it is not the reverse.
She watches it blow but never fall.
Falling and mingling with the rest of the filth,
it will go undetected.  Her skin has a mouth
that eats everything in sight.  Careful,
she thinks you look delicious.
Dust bunnies romp in the garden of her
dreams, unflowered, save the dandelions
with all their heads popped off
because of people who had babies
and made rhyme out of reason,
not the reverse.  Laughter is her echo,
a paralyzing fit of convulsions.
She is contradicted.
Look into the mirror.  Her
reflection is yours.  Now read this
backwards and see
how lovely she is.



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

A Poem by Jude Neale

We Sing Ourselves Back

We are born singing,
orchid air in freefall beneath our trapeze feet.
We open our jaws wide,
balloon our throats
swing ancestral anaconda notes down
across the emerald city.
We dance antic swags, ellipses, somersaults,
wound the air
with our bass, treble, bellowing melodies.
The women go first
and the men sing back in waves,
above the recitative.
And later with dusty feet,
we wander like leathery kites
shipwrecked with words.
Wanting again to float above it all,
we drill underground instead
to look for our voice,
deep inside the belly of the whale.
We sing ourselves back
and become once again whole.

Jude Neale was shortlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), The  International Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (U.K),The Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize  (UK), The Wenlock International Poetry Prize(UK), the RCLA short story and poem competition and she was nominated for the Canadian ReLit Award and the Pat Lowther Award for her book ‘Only the Fallen Can See’.

 

A Poem by John Casquarelli

plug into confetti ballroom 

 

cross the tropical galaxy threshold

                        my hair in knots

you said you loved me

but those were old threads

the champagne     the mussels

like birds are distant in flight

                        they melt into

            moonlight static energy

            on dusty interstate

            searching for a new equinox

 

each curve that embraced

            the morning splendor

            on the back of your neck

along the crest of the moving sea

trembled and fluttered in distant breeze

over fence     onto countryside road

 

where jasmine whispered and muse cried

these words were never hobbies

or listless daydreams

they're midnight blues

with a million quivers of glitter dust

                        welcoming yesterday's page

                        the hidden story

            the smile's echo

 

 

 

John Casquarelli is an English Instructor at CUNY Kingsborough in Brooklyn, New York, as well as a faculty advisor for the Kingsborough Poetry and Creative Writing Club. John received his M.F.A. in the Creative Writing program at Long Island University. He was awarded the 2010 Esther Hyneman Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in several publications including Pyrokinection, Kinship of Rivers, By The Overpass, The Mind[less] Muse, The Poetry Project Blog, The International Rebecca West Society, Having a Whiskey Coke With You, and Napalm and Novocain. His first full-length book, On Equilibrium of Song, was published by Overpass Books (2011).

A Poem by John Pursch

Corrugated Sunset

 

Sameness warps embezzled baubles, heading often over four-souled seizure cruises of realized despotic birthright noons and tambourine malt grooves. Gutting shallow semaphores with crampon wheels, studded wallet lice ingest resected hippie nylons, gargling buckle heirs till escapades patrol sedated ditch saloons for whispering motels. Geese swallow camshaft wobbles in tender secondary paddleboat fiascos, mixing mossy axes with hazelnut ire sweeteners for wilting swordsmen.

 

Paralegal dice emetics croon shyly at swaying libertines in crawdad cucumber lessons, planting escutcheoned wharf grinders in Manichean toothache ads. Creases breach the blotto with portable heliotrope musician tweezers, flaying croutons to preferential bivouac clots of gourds in tiki roundup kitsch colonic olfactory soap.

 

Mowing heavenly shaven plowboys into barricaded beer hall pundits, treed carousels erase sour expatriates from softly shorn tower grime, swishing leafy choir exemptions within estrangement’s peculated rapport. Bedroom brigands exfoliate sidewalk brothel sores, resealing public sway marines in laminated sardonic aardvark whistles. Detuned rodeos pull hovercraft tantrums on sidling taxidermy patients, subtly tooting salty shadow ploys for sloped erectile dignitaries in channeled stupa silo grout.

 

Grieving toes rebound on baked soil cousins, filming carnies swilling looped paratroopers in pallid poltroon cunning slacks that flit about facial heirloom sirloin quips with pesky philatelic spandex teases, bento pox deluded. Roaring shanties cavil for doorman yen but fetter newfangled fumes with shoed nun consonance and queerly infarcted casuistry whelps.

 

Stopgap stamina repeals summed paragons of purview’s frail owl direction clips, eclipsing connected dames with tufa peristyles of jellied dungeon transfusion blimps. Hotter whiz deflection fleas engorge seven water pugs on gimpy cribbage pedestals in waggish country candy phone booth downfall wax, replete with genuflecting stupor scars, annealing in frenetic grooming towers.

 

Welded grappling lions float through traumatic fainting gills, spreading pleasure eels in glandular hoopla mixers, swapping cattle for hosed entrepreneurs and corrugated sunset. Dollops of exploding angst submerge crisply wafted pageant queens in blooper relic gunny shins, planting crenelated beer mechanics in phased-out quandary bunts, inching for clifftop dawdlers, befuddled by pluralistic fish masks.

 

 

 

 

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. His recently released experimental lit-rap video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.

A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

turtle oneness

a woman and her cat
are one as
a man and his dog
are one
and they stand upon
a turtle
standing upon
another turtle
standing upon
another turtle
an infinite descent
of turtleness
and a woman and her cat
and a man and his dog
and turtles
all
the
way
down . . .
are one.

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

A Poem by Ken L. Jones

Last Call

Night descends like a billboard
Travis Bickle spreads his wings
This century has become a window
Opening onto Warhol's Last Supper
An empty soccer stadium
Has come to represent me
After a day when the summer sun
Reminded me of before the Beatles first arrived
And of days spent on a succulent
Violet Mecca of a beach
Back when four drops of Edgar Allan Poe
Could cancel the very laws of physics themselves
As all about me pummeled my aluminum foiled senses
While Lois Lane drenched in champagne

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.