A Poem by Colleen Payton

The Proxy

You hang, head down, a fiend’s joke

dangling in a cave.

Our words fill the hollows with lightning, rain,

bat clicks. When you bite into my ribs,

drums echo against the banks of the river.

I clap together this numbskull’s grin

and swallow the dank air to keep from

laughing:

those wild, yellow curls are lost to me.

You wait, smelling, almost hearing

blood, this damp earth where I bend over.

Colleen Payton is a dance critic and teacher of college English and humanities. Her poetry has appeared in The King's English, Oklahoma Today and Bluestem magazines, among other publications.

A Poem by Jesi Bender

Mortir: This is a Lesson in French


Stained stones under pink ridges
These are les os, these are the broken
Perforations of skin undermined by or
Overwrought with brown lacings of dried blood
This is the ugly machine inside
Schadenfreude thick and
That painful doubt
That finally sinks into digestion
Something things just never break
This bleu, these strings holding in place
This chambered master is a quilt
Of anarchist memories
This failed poet
Full on ennui
This self-deprecating muscle
Full of its love-hate
This … je ne sais quoi.

This beating animal reverberated
Against its hollow sanctuary
Where faith remained beautiful
But always unattained
Unsteady, only hitting three instead of four,
It strove, it tried, but it never performed
To expectations
Like other organs, le cerveau par example,
Grew tired as
Eyes, les yeux, grow tired, straining,
Dry spotted, the din of die,
Like the broken skin
But there was once vert as vast as the sea
And dreams, those manifold complexities
Where desire lay hidden in its crypts,
Swam freely in its intangibility.
Le corps caged.

Now there is this,
Now there is nothing.
Haven’t yet learned of
Connections of antithesis
Or myriad meanings
Within a singularity.
Self-aborted kamikaze,
All inside moves towards light.
A gentle murder,
Though with fiery violence,
Merciful in its ultimatum -
La joie de vie for le petit mort
Seems like a fair trade
When love no longer is a factor
And the monotony becomes only
A series of mantras willing not-death
But never living.

 

 

Jesi Bender is a poet living in Manhattan's East Village. After graduating from Cornell University, she moved to New York to further her artistic growth and to pursue her Masters in Library and Information Science at Pratt Institute. Examples of her work and her bibliography can be seen on her website - www.jesibender.com. 

A Poem by Rishan Singh

MY LOVE FOR YOU

1.
My heart can only express,
m y feelings,
my gestures,
my wants,
for you, my love.

Feelings overwhelm desires
Love is sweet,
when it is delectable to see,
encapturing to watch ,
forgiving when your eyes
meet mine and my body
escapes into a world unfamiliar
with the blood
roaring through my veins.

My love for you,
is like an ocean.
Do you oversee my mistakes
of being too wide and
taking over my thoughts?
Do you oversee an excuse
of being hasty at times,
if not too feisty?
Would you ever delete a lie
of me being bigger
than I really am?
just for me, my love.

My love,
my love for you is a sight,
seen in my eyes,
sought by (a love),
a once first love,
a sadness combin ed with
the redness;
a thunderous exuberance, of this love,
that engulfs my soul, burning me inside,
fever rising,
blood rushing to my head,
craving the passion undefinable
between our voices.

Your love for me
blooms with no rain.
I perceive your correctness
of being too defined and
perfect for my being.
I deceive your actions
of being too perfect,
if not dejected by choice.
I hold you in my arms
to cure and massage your pain;
to mend my own.

2.
My love for you,
makes me nervous.
do you ever forgive?
do you ever give?
do you ever thrive
for my love too, love?
But how is your love for me?
How do I teach you to love
when the words of your heart are etched
on the tombstones of your father,
and the strings of my heart
slain and in vain.


Rishan Singh is a South African, prize-winning, poet who was born in KwaZulu-Natal, a province in which the city of Durban in based in the Republic of South Africa. He has had poetry published in journals and books and has worked as a tut or in Biochemistry and Analytical Biochemistry at the Durban University of Technology in Durban, South Africa. His achievements in poetry initially saw him start as an amateur p oet struggling to even find a publication or platform to showcase his work, to being recognised as a literary icon in 5 different countries by ordinary people and award-winning poets and English Professors. Writing is one of his professions.

A Poem by Ronald McFarland

Post-colonialists to Partake of African Cuisine

                                   from The Daily Trust (Lagos)

We have come to sip from Africa’s rich

black fountains of oil

and nibble its exotic minerals,

tribal arts, strange smorgasbord.

The chairman offers kola.

We appreciate his bitter hospitality.

These people amaze us.

They feed our imagination even after

whetting our appetite with gold,

ivory, trophy heads, and excess population.

Provide them yams, cassava, rice,

a few handfuls of millet.

They can survive on practically nothing.

We admire their rigorous diet:

hippo, locusts when in season,

monkey brains, random bony fish,

occasional goat (best when barbecued).

When we visit they serve us

only the best cuts of beef,

breast of chicken, rack of lamb,

fat lobsters, the whole hog,

a quick, sweet

calabash of the local palm wine.

But what do they have for dessert?

Come brothers and sisters, they say,

dine with us, the road is famished,

feast on us.

Ron McFarland teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Idaho. His most recent books are a critical study of regional memoir, The Rockies in First Person (2008) and The Long Life of Evangeline: A History of the Longfellow Poem in Print, in Adaptation and in Popular Culture (2010). Ron’s fourth full-length of poems, Subtle Thieves, was released by Pecan Grove Press in early 2012. Chapin House Books published his memoir of growing up in Florida, Confessions of a Night Librarian and Other Embarrassments, in 2005.

A Poem by Joseph DeMarco

The Incumbent Must Die

From the tops of the skyscrapers
To the freedom bells that ring,
Let all the registered voters
And poor children sing,

'We have had quite enough,
Of this corrupt game;
We must vote them all out
Or suffer more of the same.'

Politician marionettes attached to
Wall Street banks and Big Oil,
Public interest groups partying it up,
While citizens suffer and toil.

Health care companies
Drive prices to the skies,
Then manufacture candidates
With a hidden agenda of lies.

Campaign finances are kicked back
Through greed and corruption;
Monuments built to the politician's vanity
That contribute to the environment's destruction.

From our once purple mountain majesties
To our diminishing amber waves of grain,
It is time for the incumbent
To feel some of the pain.

For WE have the power,
And we must take it back,
Chase them politicians,
Go on the attack!

Vote them all out,
Tell their lips that all lie,
Vote them all out,
The Incumbent Must Die.

Joseph DeMarco was born in New York City; he grew up in Buffalo, NY. He has taught seventh grade on the island of Oahu, Hawaii for the last ten years. He is the author of the novels Plague of the Invigilare, The 4 Hundred and 20 Assassins of Emir Abdullah-Harazins, At Play in the Killing Fields, Blind Savior, False Prophet, and Vegans Are Tastier. He worked on the restoration of Pu'u Kohola Heiau

Two Poems by P.A. Levy

Jericho Men

 

on their way home from the pub the men

with their shirt sleeves rolled-up

ready for good old-fashioned violence

shout at a wall

urinate against it to demonstrate contempt

throw bottles as an act of intent 

 

aggressively the wall collapses

towards them

the men in their rolled-up shirt sleeves

have their faces smacked

by their own voices

instantly they are emotionally crushed

but from under the rubble they’re couch

ready for a spot of therapy

 

because these days we’re all camera

protected and the current trend tends to be

wire fences

it makes shouting pointless

as the sound goes right through

and is never heard again

 

 

 

 

A Top Secret Affair

 

Above the table

they were swan like, haughty

in their uninterested demeanour

but she had slipped off her shoe, and her

inquisitive stockinged foot advanced.

Probed

between his legs as she sighed

in morse.

Their first behind the lies engagement.

 

After the main course

the dessert campaign begins with

a silence, perforated by sips of wine,

fidgety adjustment of a silver necklace

and of a polyester tie

becoming a hand-ironing of the tablecloth.

Smooth.

Their first inter-course.

 

After a drink of Dutch courage,

they loitered in the hotel lobby to sign

the register: false names, trying,

ever so hard, to look casual

in an awkward un-classified quiet.

But they were all fingers and thumbs.

Anticipation of

their first undercover assignment.

 

 

 

 

Born East London but now residing amongst the hedge mumblers of rural Suffolk, P.A.Levy has been published in many magazines, from ‘A cappella Zoo’ to ‘Zygote In My Coffee’ and stations in-between. He is also a founding member of the Clueless Collective and can be found loitering on page corners and wearing hoodies at www.cluelesscollective.co.uk

A Poem by Dr. Ernest Williamson III

Etymology of the word Please

can you stay here with me?
I've made peanut butter soup
lentil soup and broiled asp;
to drink there is me and a bottle
of aged vodka.
it is good;
also I have a kiss waiting for your trouble.
and money!
lots of it!
ready to fold and strain
in your pocket!
I know you can stay here with me,
even if I don't look as your desire requires
I can grant many of your wishes with haste
and locks from my head are
pleasant
real
free for you to admire.
never mind my wet and salty face;
I just know things before they happen,
especially before they happen
to me.


Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published poetry and visual art in over 380 national and international online and print journals. Some of Dr. Williamson's visual art and/or poetry has been published in journals representing over 30 colleges and universities around the world.His poetry has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology three times.Dr. Williamson teaches at Nyack College in Manhattan, New York and at Essex County College. Visit Dr. Williamson's website: www.yessy.com/budicegenius