Saturday, August 31, 2013

Announcing Kind of a Hurricane Press's First Annual Poetry Contest!

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 2013 KIND OF A HURRICANE PRESS EDITOR'S CHOICE POETRY AWARD ARE NOW OPEN!

First Place Winner gets $200 (US)  Payable via PayPal

for more details check out the Kind of a Hurricane Press Editor's Choice Poetry Award Site:

Friday, August 30, 2013

Three Poems by Michael Brownstein


QUESTIONS FROM THE AGES AND TIME MISSPENT IN THE CITY 
  
I am past fifty and wondering where I am going with this. 
Hanukah has ended, Christmas is past, Kwanza is gathering mass. 
A hundred feet from the trail, the horse barn has the smell of horses, 
Sweat and sawdust stained and sticky, mold drenched in snow. 
A son cannot understand the reflections of a father, 
A daughter asks if God wears clothes all of the time, 
And a sister says she knew an angel once: She never wore anything. 
Early morning, the resident blue jay hops on its branch: 
Glory. Glory. Glory. A wife has an inability to see, 
A son combs his hair without a mirror, a daughter dresses in the dark, 
and a sister says: I met God once.  She is always naked before the mirror.




GUESTS 
 
The dog
Living in my house
Does not belong to me.
 
The woman
Across the street
Is someone I do not
Wish to know.
 
The tree topped
By the City of Jefferson
No longer can be climbed.
 
We enter doorways
Acred across fields
Of storefronts, broken casings,
Coyotes, raccoon teeth.
 
 
 
AS THE ICE MELTS, THE BLOOD BEGINS TO BOIL
 
Do you not understand the strike in lightning,
the thunder curse that comes after,
the unsustainable armadillos moving
northwards with the warm waters?
Rootworm, boll weevil, red-winged
blackbird, great grizzly of the western caves,
West Niles virus, give us your best shot. 
The Australian box jellyfish drinks
in the oxygen of a change in weather,
its long tentacles black lipsticked tire treads,
wind worn, wind weaved, a car careening
out of control, its driver breaking ferociously,
an oak, thick weed, tall grass, the only future
either will ever know. Make sure
the last woman alive turns out the lights. 
 
 
 
Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published. His latest works, Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (http://booksonblog35.blogspot.com/) (Camel Saloon Books on Blogs) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missori, 100F Outside and other poems (http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-katy-trail-mid-missouri-100f.html) (Barometric Pressures--A Kind of Hurricane Press). The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside And Other PoemsHis work has appeared in The Café ReviewAmerican Letters and Commentary, Xavier ReviewHotel AmerikaMeridian Anthology of Contemporary PoetryThe 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: (http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/i-was-a-teacher-once-by-michael-h-brownstein/). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

A Poem by Zach Fechter


A Burst Belly

What if my belly burst
And belched forth the entirety of the world?
Springing beautiful women
And visions of steam above hot springs
And schools of squealing tires
And exotic skins leaning in repose
Against staccato walls
And dangling cigarettes from slender fingers
Yawning forth haze
The kiss flowing between our lips so close
White on black 
And a Maître d staring into the distance
And all the world settling down on you
So open your mouth and swallow it whole
The mouth opening to scream
Or smile
And nothing appears
 
 
 
Zach Fechter lives and writes in Southern California. He has been published in Poetry Quarterly Magazine and Kind of a Hurricane Press. He is a graduate of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. 

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

A Poem by Marc Carver


Circle
 
The woman in the shop
had three boys
two were in a pram
that she pushed around.
 
As she got to the checkout
she opened the inside of her arm to pay.
There were deep cut marks at equal distance
along the forearm.
I looked away
looked at her three kids
they were all stroking the long
hair of their dolls
one each.
They were all girl's dolls.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Three Poems by Walter Ruhlmann


Three Times Thirteen – Black Balloon, The Kills

Quarter pounders,
a full plate of coleslaw, soda
chips, crisps, chocolate coated biscuits,
snickers, Mars bars, sauces, saucers of gluttony.
The food you eat is not the one that will sustain the corpse you bear.

The grey veil covering the sky is your worst enemies in the mourning.
He was a chef, an artist, gardener, she wrote it.
Did he believe in God more than he
ever believed in you? You
will never know it.




Four Times Thirteen – Here Comes the Rain Again, Eurythmics

Spring is late and you wait for the blooming trees and the carnival flowers
sowed in the borders and the beds, but the pouring rain washed them away.

The light dark prince sang about the snow that sometimes falls in April,
it fell as a love symbol earlier, just to cover slightly the side-walks
and the roads,
the lawn in the garden, the stains on your skin and the many secrets
kept inside your head.

That rain is like those tears, you held them back as much as you could,
especially when the sixteenth window appeared before your eyes and you
dared passing through it despite your former spite and scorn for what it
meant.

Seven windows prior to it, the ninth showed up.
That one is like your end, for what it also meant for you.
The Christian name you bear since you were born, the many times it
brought you down, before you worked it into the most charismatic part of
your narcissist self.

Twelve panes following the latter, reminiscences of this day you learnt
so many troubling secrets, sour to you, encumbering words that had not
been spat yet. All those hidden snakes like so many epiphanies for the
letters and photographs and the unsaid you thought your clan was
sheltered from.

Still Spring is late and the black blanket above your head keeps making
that landscape you now dread the tomb in which some parts of your father
will rest for ever.




Five Times Thirteen – Desire, Anna Calvi

Maybe the sound of the keyboard tapping in my head had an effect which
was like a block of rock on a rail road. Derailing totally, loosing it
all and feeling charming invincible, almighty, fit and able.

Maybe I'm wrong but I believe no one can fight feelings coming from
one's depths, from the moistest part of one self, the bottom of the
well, some signs of well being being eradicated, slashed, erased by
desire – a whore of a pressure that pushes against you and won't leave
you at rest.

Maybe his smile, maybe his hair, maybe the will to go back to my late
teens and forget about the leprechaun telling me what to do, where to
go, why exist, when to eat..........

Maybe that frustrated desire of a son of mine, of a younger brother who
have never existed and will never turn up for the sake of them, for the
safety of myself.




Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. Walter is the author of several poetry chapbooks and e-books in French and English and has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in various printed and electronic publications world wide. Nominated for Pushcart Prize once. His latest collection Maore was published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2013.        His blog http://http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/

Sunday, August 25, 2013

A Poem by Brandon Figlionlino


Tiny Dancer

There's no monster under my bed;
it's on the bed, trapped within the spun cotton fibers of my pillow.
In the mask of nightfall, it burrows and digs
searching for salvation.
I hear it after my nightly prayers,
my ear pressed to the pillow
eyes shut, one heavy breath away from slumber.

It speaks to me in subtle teeth gnashing and guttural growls.
I respond with solemn whimpers and slight shaking.

I imagine it to resemble a worm, long and curling
sharp spikes covering its hard shell casing
twisting like a tiny dancer, contorting its body to the rhythmic melody of my pulsing temple.

One day, my tiny little dancer will escape its synthetic hell
and burrow into my ear while I rest.
Blood will drip from my wound,
a trail for it to find its way back out.
But it won't need it, for rooted deep in my brain,
it will always be in good company.



Brandon Figliolino is a recent graduate of the University of Colorado's Creative Writing and Political Science programs.  He currently lives in Denver.  He's been published in several literary journals and currently help manages the poetry section of Red Fez Magazine.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

A Poem by Richard Schnap


Cold Draft

I can see him now,
Crouched in the corner

Of some anonymous bar,
Alone with a Bass Ale

As mad genius visions
Erupt within his mind.

I can see him burn.
Remembering her face,

Her touch, the black laws
Unleashing the fury,

The eternal penance,
The bottomless pit.

I can see him sigh,
Draining the glass,

Ordering another,
The next masterpiece.



Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.


Friday, August 23, 2013

A Poem by Ray Samuc


Washed away

cold spray
for lush grass surprises
and pricks the skin-- sudden like words
to a poet
landing on the page from a curious
somewhere. The absent breeze
frustrates you--positioning yourself
in its line of fire dares it
to drench you--
wet enough for the ink
of words
to run
from a page
and disappear forever.



Ray Samuc is an administrator and philosophy graduate from the North West of England. He has a poem published in Mused, and one forthcoming in Blue Lake Review.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Three Poems by Sy Roth


 
Homage to Kilgore Trout's Supposed World

Supposed.
A trapezoidal quandary
parallel lines like trees somewhere
perhaps.
Wry, twist-your-mouth-into-sour lemon O’s world
mired in crap,
r e v o l v I n g,
e v o l v I n g.


Homo sapiens abide there without discovery
adrift in their banality.
Drag other like junk carts along
Jouncing the contents
Cacophony of
killing,
goring,
reciting nattering fish stories
adrift on intemperate oceans.


Barrels of Laputan feces
Rest beside their scientists
covered in it like FedEx men
a delivery for odoriferous humanoids
who live above.
Below a planet crammed to bursting with creatures
who oink greetings through pursed lips
turn y’alls into eternal frowns.
They squeal love through gritted teeth
covered in soft down of masticated bran muffins
mocha love grimace through their irregularity.


Writing poems of mayhem
squashing them dead on bloody parade grounds
where beautiful words bellowed sweetly
lie hidden beneath bellicose chatter.
Utterances falling from the wind
clatter crystalline no one hearing them,
buried in patriotic fervor.
            Cosmic mind-fuck he called it.
Images rest uneasily on thorn-headed pates
Spiky crowns rest on
a world that Kilgore supposes.




Through an Eschatological Prism

Stamped at birth
Rubicund swatch of prickly
Nucleic acids.

Tattooed cells
Adrift on an ocean of being,
Temporality

A mixed mission of seeking
The end of days.
Machinations of the righteous.

Their gods
Resplendent in their sureties,
Captaining

Rafts of drifting souls.
In their dream suckling virgins
And ripe green apples.

Only One way,
One implacable force
Kicking them to the middle

Running water
Eroding
Their existence.

Colors of the prism
Laved
To blackness.




He Drowns in His Loneliness

Helter-skelter cascade of silent words.
Once a Hindenburg thunder of
Gaseous explosions
All could hear in the Jersey hinterlands.
Now mere dust
Bunnies that hop timidly off into an empty glade.

In the room they come and go
Hurricane of words,
His lips moving to their rhythms
As they lock into their conversations.
Their heads do not turn to him.
Their news flashes silently flapping in their breezes.

His eyes follow them,
Mind a nomad wandering in a private desert
In search of the mirage of inclusion.
It does not come.
They march in lockstep away
To Dylan tunes
While he drowns in his loneliness.




Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, the head is bowed by reality; other times, he is proud to have said something noteworthy. cRetired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai , far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace.   He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in many online publications such as in Leaves of Ink, Ithaca Lit, Fat City Review, Haggard and Halloo, RAP, Crisis Chronicles, Parentheses, Poet and Geek Magazine, Gloom Cupboard, Pif Magazine, The Circle Review, Poetry Super Highway, Millers Pond Review, Earthborne, Nostrovia, Cyclamens and Swords, The Germ, Rockhurst Review, Wilderness Interface Zone, Red Ochre,  Bong is Bard, Danse Macabre, Mel BraKe Press, Larks Fiction Magazine, Exercise Bowler, Otoliths, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, brief, The Weekenders, The Squawk Back, Bareback Magazine, Dead Snakes, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Peripheral Surveys,  Scapegoat Review, The Artistic Muse, Inclement,  Napalm and Novocain, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash, Subliminal Interiors, South Townsville Micropoetry Journal, The Penwood Review, The Rampallian, Vox Poetica, Clutching at Straws, Downer Magazine, Full of Crow, Abisinth Literary Review, Every Day Poems, Avalon Literary Review, Napalm and Novocaine, Wilderness House Literary Review, St. Somewhere Journal, Carcinogenic Poetry, The Neglected Ratio, Windmills Magazine and Kerouac’s Dog.  One of his poems, Forsaken Man, was selected for Best of 2012 poems in Storm Cycle.  Twice selected Poet of the Month in Poetry Super Highway .  His work was also read at Palimpsest Poetry Festival in December 2012. He was named Poet of the Month for the month of February in BlogNostics. Included in Poised in Flight and Point Mass anthology published by Kind of Hurricane Press.  A Murder of Crows named Poem of the Week in Toucan. Best of Poem selected for inaugural edition of The Second Hump, volume IV. 
 

 

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

A Poem by Richard Schnap


Anonymity

He sat in the backs of buses
Lingered in the corners of coffeehouses

And when he went to a movie or concert
Chose a place in the very last row

He did not know why he did this
He just felt more comfortable in the margins

As if the spaces between light and shadow
Were reserved especially for him

But he noticed that as he grew older
He seemed to become more transparent

To blend in like a chameleon
Till he was barely visible at all

And somehow he knew when he died
He would enter neither Heaven nor Hell

But a room that was lined with mirrors
To forever be alone with himself




Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

A Poem by Christina Murphy


Dappled Stars
 
We are searching for wildflowers on a misty day.
 
We are walking, and I am wishing you would tell me
something you want me to hear, but I have made my peace
with our silences. Our lives have become coextensive orbits,
visible, but not in range in any meaningful way
beyond our mundane daily rhythms.    
The trail is streaked with wildflowers captured by the wind. 
I would like the wildflowers to be like gems—stationary
against all the changes of times and seasons that will come
to claim them as fragile beings. And I would like my heart
to be motionless on this spring day in which the weight
of the mountains against the horizon is almost unbearable.   
 
Soon you have found the wildflower you love most
for its gentle blue color that makes it look as if
the sky bent down for a moment and lost itself in mystery.
 
The blue wildflower and the blue sky that we are tempted
to think of as one even though the blues do not touch,
and the blue sky seems another illusory world away
filled with dappled stars and incandescent meanings.
 
The mist is now rain, steady with a soft
drumbeat of insistence. You draw your jacket
tight and brace yourself against the wet winds
as I watch the wildflowers get beaten down, as if
their colors were tears draining off into the land.
 
I reach for your hand and hold it, feeling the coldness
the wind and rain have instilled. For a moment, my sight
is blurred by rain or perhaps by tears, but everything
is silent, and I would like to believe that we can escape
our sad hollowness of spirit.
 
I am hoping for this as I listen to my heartbeat,
my own pulse, and wish that the
chill of icy rain could comfort me and pass for feeling.
 
 
 
Christina Murphy’s poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Cease, Cows, Chicago Literati, and Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure.
 

Monday, August 19, 2013

Two Poems by Laura Rojas


when you cross the street like a sailor breathing underwater
 
there's something about
the
cold
and the
sadness of winter
that makes
a cat curl up
and
makes my hands
curl up
and makes everyone in the world
long
for someone else in the world and
yearn
for something else in the world
     something more in the world
so I listen to your voice
until I fall asleep
and it's spring
 
 
 
 
(now, dear)
 
If I sit on the train
and the seat goes
backwards
I’ll watch fields green with rain
people lonely or together
holding bags, umbrellas, hands
a collective of rain jackets
stitched together like a colourful plastic quilt
and sleeping
people sleeping
talking on the phone
the earth muddy and promising
trains driving on parallel tracks

but we divide so easily
thin hairs or blades of grass
and people are fragile
soft bodies soft flesh
imbalanced things, so tentative
with mouths for kissing
each other’s mouths
and kissing
each other’s hands
which we hold together
in prayer in movie theaters under school house desks
under heavy blankets
in the daytime rain
my seat goes backwards
and I go back 8 hours
to the blue sky of morning and
a city
talking on its own
 
 
 
 
Laura Rojas is a 19 year old university student currently living in Toronto, Ontario but originally from Bogotá, Colombia.  She dreams of publishing a book of poetry as well as saving the Amazon rainforest.  She's in love with everything, so she writes about it. 
 

Sunday, August 18, 2013

A Poem by Taylor Graham


Geology of Teeth

The puppy has left

jagged enamel
with a drop of blood at the root

on the bedspread this morning:
pre-molar, mini-Sierra.
The Minarets, The Needle -

sharp rock of puppy-tooth.

Geography of peaks and passes.
Take her out on leash,
she pulls me toward horizon,

aspiring to know

Earth's whole landscape by scent,
by taste, by tooth,

a world entire to a dog's mouth.

Teeth that itch to grab
and hold - tug-toy, my hand.

Teeth that ache for news-

paper, my left boot, this very
moment, Life.  She leaves

scant evidence
on the bed:  sawtooth puppy
fragment.  Fossil

of her time already past.



Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada.  She's included in the anthologies (Everyman's Library) and California Poetry:  From the Gold Rush to the Present.  Her book What the Wind Says, poems about living with her canine search partners, is due out later this year; and her latest chapbook, Walking the Puppy, is about to be released by Lummox Press.



Saturday, August 17, 2013

Two Poems by Diane Webster


I PRAY FOR SUN

I crack the window barely an inch
and like cats hearing
the can opener’s first buzz
everyone flings wide every window,
knocks each other down
to rev air conditioner to high cool,
rolls out hurricane fans
that plaster unsecured papers
to window screens bulging to bust
out the debris like a
decompressing airplane porthole.
While I pray for a ray of sunshine
all my own that follows me like a halo
so I can bask like a mama cat
with her young nestled
in a contented wad
of feline fur and purr.



 

SLEEP DUO

My cat lies on my lap
as I sit in my chair
in front of the TV
until she closes her eyes,
and her head nods
heavily on my leg
as she jerks in kitty dreams.
I smile
until my leg jerks,
the cat jumps
with claws seeking traction,
and I realize I missed
the last program due to
the sleeping duo
who woke up
to go to bed.




Diane Webster realizes poetry ideas present themselves daily. Diane’s challenge is to remain open to the opportunities and to write as soon as possible. Diane’s successes have been printed in “The Old Red Kimono,” “Rockhurst Review,” “Wilderness House Literary Review” and other literary journals in print and online.

Friday, August 16, 2013

Two Poems by Bill Jansen


Picnic/tsunami

on the beach
one day
gulls became the sand

the same day
a soccer ball
gazed at us
from 7 waves

salt & light

in flagrante
on flocks of dunes

stoned kimono dragons
in kudzu

nude
conscientious objector
sun
took the 5th
and half
the wine

we are social animals
but not
that
social,
I reply
to something I misunderstood
her say.



Crime tape 

The used bookstore has moved a few blocks
from where I remembered it.  Used bookstores
make me tough/potent.  I become Charles Bronson/
Charles Bukowski in film noir fedora and suit.
The slim volume of poetry has no chance to escape.
A woman who looks a lot like Rita Hayworth
in tweed flounce/glasses, giggles uncontrollably
as I pay her for the book.  Nice kid.  But I got
that appointment with Nike rep at Guantanamo.
I have some difficulty with door, but stumble outside,
change direction a few times to throw them off,
then move south like something lethal in Bermuda shorts.
The book is by some smart dame I never heard of.
I assume the photo on the cover is her, sultry, cool.
She's sitting on a sidewalk, tambourine tip jar,
her back against a concrete wall tagged by Rimbaud.
Everything points to summer in Berkeley, 1972.
About 20, fake Hippy, fondling pill bottle in left hand.
Minoan eyes, closing.  Elizabethan smile.
Something about the set up reminds me of dead Jews
in Poland, 1940, or the gaping corpse of a Nun
in Madrid, 1936; some sneering anarchist with his arm
in a sling blowing cigarette smoke into her dry face.
As I look for my Mazda in Hillsboro, Oregon, 2013,
I shuffle past her in betrayed revolutionary sunlight.
To disguise my shortness of breath I stop frequently
and feign interest in my surroundings and thoughts.
A strand of yellow crime scene tape tied to a meter.
Dissembling, inquisitive wind is blowing the tape,
like fantasy hair of stoned free love goddess
panhandling in front of a KGB cafeteria.
I throw the book in trash can.  Unbelieving. Just in time.




Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.  Work has appeared in various ezines and journals.  A poem is scheduled to appear in Gap-Toothed Madness in September.


Thursday, August 15, 2013

A Poem by Richard Schnap


Signposts

We are not born fully formed
But in stages, our first school day
A book beginning, our first kiss,
A flower opening, our first job,
A road unraveling, till the face
Of the world is fully revealed
In all its splendor and with
All its sorrows

And so it is with death,
A slow letting go, our withered
Bodies, candles dimming, our friends
Leaving, songs ending, landscapes
Changing, seasons shortening,
Until we hear strange languages,
The dawn of new dramas we will
Play no part in



Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Two Poems by Anthony Ward


Belles
 
Those dowsabells,
With their heads bowed low,
Their coquettish nature
Polishing their apples with polite phrasings
Of melancholic anguish
In attempt to triumph in a race to their heart,
Completely inebriated without having touched a drop-
Eyes sheepish from all this folly,
Causing their thoughts to resemble conscious tinnitus,
Until they’re nothing but the infatuation
That sings their praises.
 
 
 
Laws of Attraction
 
Drawing eyes
Like poles
Deflecting
Their yearning
Keeping them apart
Unable to look at one another other
Until their back’s turned.
 
 
 
 
Anthony Ward tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including The Faircloth Review, The Pygmy Giant, Jellyfish Whispers, Turbulence, Underground, The Bohemyth, Torrid Literature Journal and Crack the Spine, amongst others.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

A Poem by Bob Brill


Empty Bottle Blues

sunlight passing through an empty bottle
casts a green shadow on the wall
such effects are commonplace
yet my skin bristles
as if this time
the universe is telling me a secret

but I don't quite get it
hoping to grasp it more fully
I open another bottle
by the time it's empty
the sun has set
the shadows are gone
an owl is calling
from somewhere in the darkness





Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist.  He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and more than 100 poems have appeared in more than two dozen online magazines, print journals, and anthologies.

Monday, August 12, 2013

A Poem by John Casquarelli


a hundred ways to die in summer longing
for Salvatore
 
Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
7:51pm
 
my father enjoyed collecting musical instruments.  he never played any of them.  he just seemed to take pleasure in imagining the music.  my father would also listen to the same four stations on his car radio.  sometimes the last note of your favorite song resonates long after the song is over.
 
in San Juan
Sammy told a story of a cloud that wept
when it forgot the ocean’s lyrics
 
if there’s one regret it might be
never having said I understand
 
there are days I wish for
8-track tapes and a bottle
of Don Q
 
remember
it’s only a memory if you let me in
 
arms shake while holding the side bars of his Hospice bed. a tsunami crash that parts every inch of his body with each labored breath. notes that include directions on Xanax, Haldol, morphine, ibuprofen, and oxygen. a comfort pack in the fridge that’s not very comforting, and still no way of knowing how to say goodbye. eventually all palm trees lose their branches.
 
when Hugh Hefner dies
no one will say he went to a better place
 
maybe I’ll find the strength
to leave my doubts behind
 
study stars until they give me an answer
or leave me with new questions
 
he would leave his bedroom door open just enough to remind me how safe I could feel every time the winds picked up. by no means did he rely on nostalgia to make me lose my sense of time and place. so I waited until he walked past his closet, beyond my vision.  I waited until I began to understand my limitations.
  
I sit on my father’s shoulders
through years of grey sky wonder
 
sing a hymn about doves who rise
past whirling winds
to feed a dream’s appetite
 
it’s so serene when you’re 20000 feet in the air
perhaps gravity will look away
and allow us a few moments of peace
 
there’s a postcard on his dresser of a sailboat falling off the edge of the world. the setting sun is searching for a short-haired woman holding a lantern. it understands how empty the landscape is when all we do is live in canopic jars.
 
if an echo could undress a rose bush
it would leave everything unfinished
 
each window is a letter
about leaving home
 
if you must dance
do so under a street lamp in January
when the neighborhood girls are watching
 
we exit I-95 at Hillsboro Boulevard, head east and speak in riddles for awhile. his condo isn’t far away, but we decide to head to the pier instead. the waves are choppy and a couple of teenage surfers are pointing at a section of whitewater, anticipating their next foam climb. I keep staring at the moving waves because they remind me that any moment may be a new discovery.
 
follow tracks to midnight meditations
reach for hillside country
until we pass outhouses
that line the edge of the fields
 
somewhere between the pieces
I see the green summer grass
and find you there




John Casquarelli is an English Instructor at CUNY Kingsborough in Brooklyn, New York.  Beginning this fall, he will be directing the poetry club for students at Kingsborough.  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).  When not reading and writing poetry, John can be seen drinking way too much iced coffee.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

A Poem by Trina Gaynon


Down my Chimney
 
Pissed when it meets the damper,
Spring wind tries to lure
me into opening
to it with tales of sweeping across
the Pacific Ocean
and islands
where air is heavy with green rot,
soil fertile from volcano ash.
 
But I keep sweeping up last
winter’s ashes. The wind,
finding its way
through chinks
in the bricks, has taken to scattering
ash over the furniture,
reminding me--
the remains of some fires never
 
feel roots creep from seeds
buried
where ocean going birds and wind drop them.
 
 
 
Trina Gaynon’s poems have appeared in the anthologies Bombshells and Knocking at the Door, as well as numerous journals including Natural Bridge, Reed and the final issue of Runes. Her chapbook An Alphabet of Romance is available from Finishing Line Press. Forthcoming publications in anthologies include: A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, Saint Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, Obsession: Sestinas for the 21st Century, and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

A Poem by Les Merton


Equilibrium
 
In another time:
he could have been a warrior, 
a Celtic Chief or a Norseman, 
balancing
power over the life
or death of anyone.
 
In another place:
he could have been a Hell's Angel,
a marauding biker 
balancing
a Harley Davidson
at breakneck speed.
 
In our time:
in Lanzarote
he is the Artist of Living
Lebenskünstler - Sepp Bögle 
balancing
stones, making sculpture 
out of the here and now.
 
 
 
 
Les Merton is Cornish and proud of it. He earned his living in a variety of ways:  grocery shop manager, coalman, bus conductor, factory worker, canvasser, film extra, fortune teller, entertainment agent, and after failing as a comedian, the other jobs are best forgotten.  He’s dabbled at writing on and off from the age of 16, however it was in 1996 he decided to give it a go properly. In 2002, he founded Poetry Cornwall/ Bardhonyeth Kernow and as been its editor ever since. In 2004, his endeavours were recognised when he was made a Bard of Gorsedh Kernow for services to Cornish Literature. His Bardic name is Map Hallow (Son of the Moors).  Les has also appear on: ITV’s That Sunday Night Show, BBC TV Spotlight News, and the following Radio Stations: BBC Radio Bristol, Duchy Hospital Radio, BBC Radio Cornwall, BBC Radio 4, Pirate FM, BBC Radio Five Live, ABC Radio Canberra Australia. He enjoys performing  and has given readings all over the UK and in Ndola Zambia.