The Zingara Project

Month: April 2016

  • Hinting at Eternity by Bruce McRae

    My stars, if I may be so familiar,
    what’s with the silent routine, the timeless aplomb,
    this whole ‘distant and aloof’ business?
    You are, en masse, incorrigibly gifted,
    dripping with syrupy mysteries, and these
    suggesting inner depths and untapped powers.

    It is we who’ve endowed you with abilities
    never stated, and never intended.
    We say you are birds just released
    or souls or goddesses or burning sands.
    We ponder our existence as compared to yours.
    We dabble in sophistry, just because we can;
    we who are instilled with awe,
    infused with the wonder of beauty.

    —

    Pushcart nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over a thousand poems published internationally, including Poetry.com, Rattle and The North American Review. A new book has just been released, An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy, and his first book, The So-Called Sonnets, and both are available on Amazon. To see and hear more poems go to ‘BruceMcRaePoetry’ on YouTube.

     

     

  • Seeing a Picture of 2 Guys I Knew 40 Years Ago by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri

    I knew them like fluid,
    like we were all connected,
    linked by our roaming molecules,
    like we shared the same skin cells,
    bumped arm to arm in sparks.
    Like cigarettes lit, glowed, burned,
    light one with the suck of the other.
    You could smoke in the diner then,
    and at night we sat in a bar
    which burned down last year.
    Drinks included crème de menthe.
    Its sweet child body slipped down cool
    and came up hot and undigested,
    baby puke, no bits of stomach lining,
    no pieces of the pulmonary system.
    Though as I inspect the picture of these two,
    slender, hair to the shoulders,
    dressed in chinos and moccasins,
    one smiling under a mustache
    and the other worried, keys in hand,
    I believe that a cardiologist
    may detect a nick or two
    missing from my aorta—
    pieces of me left behind
    on an Ohio lawn, should a machine
    be invented that could measure
    the weight of a moment lost.

    —

    Though Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has written poetry and stories for her entire life, she also earns a living in other fields, particularly as a bookkeeper at a private school, and as a vendor of antiques. Her poems and short fiction have been published in two anthologies (In Gilded Frame 2013 and Poems Of The Super-Moon, 2015), and several literary journals, one of which, Slipstream, nominated a poem for the Pushcart Prize. In 2014 and 2015 she was a contributor at the  Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a book of poems and a novel.

  • Sister Earthworm by David P. Miller

    An earthworm breaches the surface
    of the pitched hillside where a boy
    sits, knees up, sneakers braced
    against a grass-stained slide
    to the street. The creature stops
    the boy’s breath, not from fright
    but from greeting. Child zoologist,
    his glass-jarred toad dreams in alcohol.
    A real cat’s skull from a specimen
    catalog reigns on the shelf. Today
    the surge of a worm to his side.

    The boy runs to his room
    knowing this joy could be written.
    Some exact words about sister earthworm.
    Grasping pencil, he turns into a child
    too consciously thinking himself as a child
    inspired to write what a child
    would write if a child were inspired.
    He gapes at the paper. Writes nothing.
    Goes back outside.

    For five decades he wonders what he could say
    for a single stray earthworm in spring,
    unaware of him, both above ground
    in the shade.

    —
    David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014 by Červená Barva Press. His poems have appeared in publications including Meat for Tea, Ibbetson Street, Painters and Poets, Fox Chase Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Oddball Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Incessant Pipe.

     

     

     

     

     

  • Infinity Dance by Derek Piotr

    When you cut the root,
    thick and yellow from the earth,
    the root regrows immediately
    purple edged and defiant,
    fed by underground rivers
    and searching endlessly
    while April rain nails blooms
    sideways to the saturated lawn.

    In this you find the infinite,
    the mouth of something in
    something else, feathers
    where there ought not to be,
    a moment of dissonance
    bringing clarity to the dying
    elms, a single crane cutting
    the sky with its bowed wings.

    —

    Derek Piotr is a Poland-born producer and composer based in New England, whose work focuses primarily on the voice. When he has free time, he likes to write. His work with sound has been nominated by the jury for Prix Ars Electronica (2012), and featured on Resonance FM and BBC, and his written works have been published by The Broome Street Review, Hanover Press and The Newtowner.