Monday, September 30, 2013

Three Poems by Les Merton


In The Garden
 
Eve reached
              beyond knowledge

            through icy leaves
            past imagination
            into shadow
 
her innocent hands
cupped succulent temptation
 
her body trembled
she thought
of Adam, of Adam, of Adam…
 
       
Papyrus
 
In Cairo
at the Pyramid Street Museum.
 
Blue depth shadow
sunwashed with twilight rests.
 
The Nile reflects quivering
moons of felucca sails.
 
Here feathered arms protect
the dead of a thousand years,
 
Isis is unveiled
in flights of fantasy
 
by delicate brush strokes
and generations of knowledge.
 

Sandalwood
 
The fragrant heartwood
incense makes me think
of a soap never used,
of a guru never found,
of a time when…
 
Everything made sense.
 
San Francisco
was as close as the flower
in your hair.
 
Love was all that was needed
to change the world.
 
India
wasn’t that far away -
 
Sanskrit
was perfect for Om.
 
And the lingering
aroma of Sandalwood
is the evergreen link
to a wise old saying
from the east:
 
When the time is right
your guru will find you.
 
 
 
Les Merton is Cornish and proud of it. He lives in an historic heart of the tin mining area and he has become a prolific writer with 20 books to his credit, (many of which are available from Amazon and other online retailers.) Les has been published in magazines around the world and he is the founder editor of Poetry Cornwall which started in 2002.  In recent times his first play, The Last Cornishman, was performed and he appeared on ITV's That Sunday Night Show.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

A Poem by Paul Tristram


The Punch And Judy Man

They found him hanging
TODAY!
In the small beach hut
where he kept his equipment.
He was wearing
an Edwardian waistcoat,
a Highwayman’s cloak
with his face painted
into that of a sad clown.
There was an empty
litre bottle of vodka,
a handful of barbiturates
and thirteen shillings found
below his dangling feet.
His dolls were propped up
upon a trunk
looking up at Master.
In his breast pocket
was a one worded
suicide note
which simply said
“Goodbye!”



Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.
 

Monday, September 16, 2013

A Poem by J.K. Durick


In My Spare Time

I have done it all – painted masterpieces in my head, from Hudson Valley School, with my mountain tops blurring to mystery, to abstract impressions, with my colorful moods splashed here and there. I have hummed rhapsodies and symphonies of my own composing, waltzes and minuets, grand things I hum very softly, become performer and audience at once. I have imagined great novels, novels filled with everything human, our plot-structured lives, with love and sex and death and all those things that rise or descend to be parts of people. I have written immortal poems in the air, traced words worth saying, lined up metaphors, personified truth and walked her down invisible pages, felt the magic of the well realized line, the lilt of rhyme. I have appeared on stages set in motion in my dreams, starred in well-made plays I made that well, in tragedies so painful that I even heard tears of relief at curtain time, in comedies that I saw myself in and learned the humor of my ways, and all alone I laughed out loud. I dance beautifully at certain times, when I’m alone and my muse strikes the right chord, interpretive dance, I’ve been a bird, a butterfly, a bamboo forest, rain falling softly, falling in torrents, I have felt the heat and dryness as I moved, held my partner just so, held the moment just so, never knowing where the dance left off and I began. I have sung my heart out in the shower, hit notes only shampoo can bring out in me, became the music and words of the songs I would sing in public if only, if only, if only, and then it all goes down the drain, leaves nothing worth mentioning, not even an echo. I have done it all, but it adds up to only this.  
 
 
 
J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Write Room, Poetry Super Highway , Mad Swirl, and Clutching at Straws.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

A Poem by Sarah Thursday


Viscosity  
 
Viscosity is the
resistance of fluid to
eventual deformation by
 
shear or tensile stress.
Viscosity is due to
friction of opposing
 
parcels of fluid at
varied velocities.
Pressure is needed to
 
overcome the friction between
the layers and keep the
fluid moving.
 
Viscosity depends on
the size, shape, and
attraction between
 
particles. For example,
honey has a higher
viscosity than water.
 
A fluid with no
resistance to stress is
known as ideal or
 
inviscid fluid. This
explains so much about
my life. Am I honey or
 
am I inviscid?
 
 
 
Sarah Thursday was mostly raised in Long Beach, California.  She teaches 4th and 5th grade, is obsessed with music, and has only recently dove into poetry again. She has forthcoming or has been published in Stylus Magazine, The Long Beach Union (CSULB), The Atticus Review, Eunoia Review, East Jasmine Review, Yonic South, poeticdiversity, and a project called Please Judge: Short Stories Based on the Songs of Roky Erickson. She has also made five chapbooks over the years. Recently, she has become the editor of Cadence Collective: Long Beach Poets, almost by accident, but completely on purpose.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Three Poems by Felino A. Soriano


from Of isolated limning
 
 
 
on (a) reacting to her
 
                                                —for my daughter
 
I met you amid a photograph’s earlier presentation                profile
 
contouring into explanation of your face’s familiarity
 
                        the hybrid of grays engaged hanker to
view prophecy of the finished becoming (ulterior)
 
            perhaps the oval frame of the months’ teaching (waiting)s
 
would interact with the artistic dimension of language’s valued
personal excitation…
 
 
on studying
 
we find sense—the mathematics
“work” wandering into the self in
fitting, numerical order
 
I or, worthy of the I of a puzzling
rawness, searches within the philosophy
of interpretive devices and the language
momentum speaks toward
 
reaching or needing a spatial integrity
loses translation once the hand of a
damaging tongue
reorganizes
 
meaning into linguistic misrepresentations
 
 
reality or the supplication of touch
 
prosaic prayer un
            fold
s
                                    holding                          in the help-partition of the mind’s
 
incessant carrying and
the noted persuasion of yen, altered by text of a moment’s
realized alteration
                  if/when or simplified if
 
music etches into worded hands’ dimensional warmth                  crawl-through
eventual widowed window this
alone parallel of exacerbated
hanker
 
 
 
Felino A. Soriano’s recent poetry collections include Of these voices (whitesky ebooks, 2013) Pathos|particular invocation (Fowlpox Press, 2013), Extolment in the praising exhalation of jazz (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2013), and the collaborative volume with poet, Heller Levinson and visual artist, Linda Lynch, Hinge Trio (La Alameda Press, 2012).  He publishes the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Differentia Press. His work finds foundation in philosophical studies and connection to various idioms of jazz music. He lives in California with his wife and family and is the director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities.  For further information, please visit www.felinoasoriano.info.