When you reflect on darkness,
that it doesn’t thrust forward
but shrinks to secret corners,
when you see how birds
fold languidly into it, cheeping
softly in their feathers,
the way cats’ eyes expand, yellow
pupils taking furry draughts
of its enticing blackness,
how it spreads its viscous skirts
over jeweled windows and ruinous
gutters, over kisses and slaps,
washing over feasts and graves,
leaving every absence filled,
every sorrow lost to dreams,
it is oddly understandable
why the weary old, the damaged
do so calmly come to death.
—
Sharon Scholl is professor emerita from Jacksonville University where she taught the western humanities courses and non-western studies (Africa, Japan). Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Single poems appear currently in Adanna, Caesura, and Kalyna Language Press. A musician/composer, she maintains a website that gives away free music to small choirs. She lives in Atlantic beach Fl.
Peter all in blue
flies from Mr. McGregor
drops one shoe in cabbage
and forfeits his jacket
slipping under the gate.
My hero outwits this farmer.
In my story
Peter finds me
with a pink suitcase.
But don’t mistake us
no Alice and Mad Hatter
no Grace and White Rabbit.
We’re Chella and Peter
in a wood at dusk
far from family noise.
He tells me his grandfather
sacrificed his own tail
to save Otter.
I confess
my father shoots otter
and bruises me.
I say
some pain is worse
than dying.
Peter takes my hand
under the harvest moon
and stars float downstream.
—
Chella Courington is the author of three poetry and three flash fiction chapbooks. Her poetry and stories appear in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, Nano Fiction, and The Collagist. Her recent novella, The Somewhat Sad Tale of the Pitcher and the Crow, is available at Amazon.
In the center of this chest, is a solar system
hovering above an empty plexus because
someone left the light on. When the the stardust
in these veins burn out, that Blackhole will find
his way home and thank me for naming him
after a wish. Terrified by the sound of his own vacuum,
and everything else I left behind. Cursing me,
beneath his beating breath, for all this space to fill
and the unnecessary dying of the chakra.
—
Hakim Bellamy became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque on April 14th, 2012, at age 33. He’s the son of a preacher man (and a praying woman). His mother gave him his first book of poetry as a teen, a volume by Khalil Gibran. Many poems later, Bellamy has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships, and has been published in numerous anthologies, as well as AlterNet, Truthout and Counterpunch. He was featured on the nationally syndicated Tavis Smiley Radio Show and has had his work displayed in inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright and community organizer, Bellamy has also received an honorable mention for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize at the University of New Mexico and the Emerging Creative Bravos Award. His first collection of poetry, SWEAR, won the Tillie Olson Creative Writing Award from the Working Class Studies Association. Bellamy is the founder and president of Beyond Poetry LLC. For more information on the author, please visit www.hakimbe.com.
sift the soil as if it held the delicate shell
of your mother
archaeology of dreams unfulfilled or pending
astronaut adventurer marathon dancer
dig up her wishes layered as onion, replant
where memories of loss, disappointment
threaten to overrun days in moon’s shadow
there is no way to know the flowers that bloomed
for a morning their scent may have lingered
too faint for recognition
with life ephemeral as blaze of autumn leafing
fragile as moth wing in summer light
take no notice of strident voices or mud wasps
you know what this jewel is worth
what facets still face away from sun
it takes only a hand to turn them
—
Carol Alena Aronoff, Ph.D. is a psychologist/teacher/writer whose poetry has been published in numerous literary journals/anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and has five books of poetry: The Nature of Music, Cornsilk, Her Soup Made the Moon Weep, Blessings from an Unseen World, Dreaming Earth’s Body. She lives in rural Hawaii.
Odd that earlier we existed,
felt our own substance before
disappearing to despair,
sometimes gone by nightfall.
We may linger awhile but
the lamp will be snuffed out—
and unless we steel ourselves
to loss, our own and more,
moons will dispel around us
like a vase of flowers with wilted
stems sinking into cloudy water—
then we will lose our grasp.
Surely, this early today, there
remain the skins of opaque ghosts
not yet torn from our ribs
though we may remember the feel
of yesterday’s body extinguished
in our blood, lingering at daylight.
—
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Over 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.
The interesting thing about him was that he never used to shared too much of himself. He made it clear to others who went fishing in him that they could catch nothing but his very chilly cold. He despised it when they shared too much information. Then he paid back. Once, a woman at an office party said she used to take her husband to a cottage down South, but that he was not the first man she took there, only the first that she knew she would be with. He paid that woman back with: “That’s a wonderful story, Ann. I lost my virginity at a drive-in theater in a train.” She never shared anything with him again. He considered himself liberated from her. After that happened, we were stuck together on an elevator. I sensed discomfort. I asked him, “How are you?” I didn’t want an answer, really. But I sort of cared. He answered, “Terrible. I’m going through a divorce.” “That’s terrible,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “She fucked the Regional Director.” This time I knew it was the truth. He wasn’t saying it to keep me away. He wasn’t making it up. He wasn’t paying me back. His wife must have really fucked the Regional Director. His eyes had been scooped out. They were melting in some one else’s cone. It must have been the Regional Director’s. I had belief. This was truth. “Why did you tell me this?” I asked him, as nonchalantly as possible. “Two reasons.” he said. “First, if people know that I’m going through a divorce, and I don’t tell them I was the cuckold, they will think that I was the Regional Director, the fucker, in all this. Second, every time I tell someone, it’s like pulling a feather from a bird . . .” I said, “How?” He said, “I’ll have a naked chicken. Like one of those rubber chickens they used in those old vaudeville acts, to hit someone in the face.” I asked him, “Did anything come of this?” He said, “No children.” I said “Well . . . in a manner of speaking.” Then he hit me in the face. With a rubber chicken. And laughed.
—
J.T. Whitehead has had over 160 poems accepted for print by over 75 publications. He is a Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and a winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. He is the Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. His first full length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, (The Broadkill River Press, 2015), was nominated for the National Book Award.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When a pool is bloomed
in a desert
and a blossom on a rock,
an unknown thirst crawls
in my body
informing
a new spring is nearby.
When the sky
gets down to land
and the dozing fate
from its bed,
an optimism traverses
in my mind
announcing
a new spring is nearby.
When the prayer is cared
by someone divine
and the ashamed gap
by someone I love and care,
a purity evolves
to sterilize my soul
whispering
a new spring is really nearby.
—-
Pijush Kanti Deb is a new Indian poet with around 261 published or
accepted poems and haiku in around 90 nos of national and
international magazines and journals. His best achievement so far is the publication of his first poetry collection, Beneath The Shadow Of A White Pigeon, published by Hollow Publishing.
Since about the mid-twentieth century, feminists and historians have gradually, and, sometimes painfully, worked to restore the voices, images, and contributions of women and reinstating them, incrementally, into history and the literary canon.
While it’s long been understood that women are as instrumental as men in the making and destroying of empires, whether domestic or of a grand scale, their contributions have consistently been relegated to dark corners and back kitchens.
In time, perhaps women’s roles will be as obvious and as representative as those of men, and to that end, I offer today’s prompt, which incorporates two distinct approaches to poetry: ekphrasis and persona.
Ekphrasis, in simple terms, is a response to a piece of artwork. Contemporary poets often stretch this tradition to include popular culture, music, television, movies, and every day objects, in addition to traditional or contemporary art.
Persona, on the other hand, is stepping into another’s shoes and telling a story from their unique perspective. This approach takes a great deal of imagination and is often tweaked to fit a poem’s purpose.
You are probably familiar with the novel, Wicked by Gregory Maguire, which explores the untold stories of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, and Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, which reinvents the female subject of Vemeer’s painting of the same title. Both stories respond to existing works of art and both consider the perspective of withheld or otherwise down-played characters to create a compelling story.
For today’s prompt, consider works of art which were created by or feature women. Think expansively and include in your perusal everything from ancient art to modern Hulu favorites. Your piece of art may be a song, a hand crafted item, carefully prepared food, a character from mythology, or even an image as recognizable at the Mona Lisa. Don’t give up too easily; instead trust that you will know the right subject for your poem when you see it.
The exterminator has taken away
the small carcasses
and left the smell of Lysol
and coiled snap traps
baited with peanut butter.
Your eyes mourn
those tiny missing lives
wanting there to be
a mouse heaven
free from human dominance.
My laughter makes you wince
and cry even harder.
I hold myself open to you
but even
in my most comforting arms
you cannot find
the slightest hint
of comfort.
—
Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, IL, USA with his wife, Vickie and daughter, Sage. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and a Best of the Net nominee whose work has appeared in more than a thousand publications.
Be early, though you’ll inevitably be late. Don’t forget
to tip whoever drives your cab, your shuttle bus. Tolerate
children. Your passport photo will never be flattering,
because you are not allowed to smile. Bring liquor
or melatonin or antihistamines or whatever sedatives are legal
these days. Sleep to avoid jet lag, or exhaust yourself to avoid
jet lag, or don’t bother with either, because they won’t work.
Gum won’t stop your ears from popping. Say Bless your heart
to flight attendants and ticketing agents and mean it. Think Bless your heart to TSA and customs agents, but don’t say
anything, because it might come out wrong. Observe
how Earth is only a map when you’re 30,000 feet up. Accept
the loss of control, admit you’re at the mercy
of mechanics, logistics, weather.
—
Allyson Whipple has an M.A. in English and a black belt in Kung Fu. She is currently studying poetry through the UT-El Paso Online MFA Program. Allyson serves as co-editor of the Texas Poetry Calendar, and is the author of the chapbook We’re Smaller Than We Think We Are. She teaches at Austin Community College.
The Zingara Project 