A Poem by M.V. Montgomery

Rainforest Honeymoon

  

This was to have been a working honeymoon:

the two of us were staying at an Amazon resort.

 

You asked me to bring you back some soap.

In the lobby, I was helped into my all-red uniform,

 

looking somewhat like a tree frog.  For you,

I stopped at the counter and pocketed a package,

 

apple-scented, half red and half green.

I then set off to explore before my shift began, 

 

abandoning the atrium, observing the uneasy

integration of commercial stalls and real jungle.

 

I ended up in an unused corridor, far away. 

The iguanas had reclaimed the terrain.

 

They were poised on the branches, silent.   

 

 

 

M.V. Montgomery is a professor at Life University.  His short story collection Beyond the Pale will be released by Winter Goose Publishing in May 2013.

A Poem by Peggy Schimmelman

Cozumel Moon

                                                             

Inside your head, I imagine by now

there must be a billion old memories swarming

clamoring for your attention as midnight sails past

and you lie sleepless, a captive viewer

of that persistent, disconnected display.

 

Is one of those memories, I wonder, a girl

green-eyed and wild, just this side of crazy

Corona-tipsy and starlight-stoned

who traced inside a heart your name plus hers

in the sand where she taught you to samba

and to whisper te amo, bewitched as you were

by the light of the Cozumel moon?

 

The girl who once would’ve traded her soul

to be more than a memory hitching a ride

on an aging, randomly firing neuron

as midnight sails past and you lie sleepless 

so far from the Cozumel moon.

 

 

 

 

Peggy Schimmelman lives and writes in Livermore, CA. Her work has appeared in Bella Mused, Everyday Poetry,The Las Positas Anthology, and 100wordstories.org.

A Poem by Bryan Murphy

In the Chair

 

Comfortable chair of suffering,

sculpted as if for the godlet Gazza

manifest in a Hong Kong bar

where the victim is seated open-mouthed,

anaesthetized with booze as he writhes,

till he disappears inside himself.

 

I too writhed, under the gas, barely ten,

dreamed of waking into the agony

of a dentist’s drill whining into my teeth;

then I did, and one was, and the spasm

proves Pavlov right these fifty years and more.

 

Now we are welcomed to the orthodontist’s

as old friends, our anxiety drained

by low-volume soap amid high-gloss magazines;

work plans are drawn up, each item on the estimate

set out with name and cost

and air of inevitability.

 

In the corridor, nurses come and go, dissecting Doctors Guglielmin and Sarafo.

 

And so it starts. The feeling is foul

as a probe into the gums

yields pus and blood as well as pain,

all in small quantities.

 

Infantilization rules as the hygienist talks

to the foreigner in childspeak,

while struggling to deal

with computer mapping of bleed-easy gums.

 

Next, the real McCoy.

Gentle Doctor Dentist delights in showing

slides of his good work down the years,

then settles into action,

trying to save the patient

the pain he needs

to pinpoint the rot.

 

Smoking Malay gum spirals from smouldering roots.

Before it assumes the shape of a genie,

it twists in on itself and disappears

as though into a black hole.

 

In toolboxes, colleagues nurture canal-filling gutta-percha.

 

I leave with an anaesthetic grimace, or smirk.

 

Hygienist again: the sound of her scraper

worse than the drill’s: more raw,

more like a personal attack.

I emerge as the city will from snow:

faded, jaded, presumably cleaner.

 

Next, a “Silent Way” language lesson

as dentist and assistant chatter

over my gagged mouth

before releasing me

into the everyday world outside it.

 

So many sessions that my winter walk

to that clinic and its counter-cultural search

for excellence melts into Spring.

 

It gets bizarre. At the hygienist’s,

a masked marauder arrives, injects painkiller,

announces a need for future pain;

dentist and assistant don

protective shades against disco lights

that turn amalgam hard.

 

A final chance for hurt: the dentist hacks

wayward cement from pulverized gums,

and then my greatest wish,

an end to pain outside my control,

comes true. 

Bryan Murphy divides his time among England, Italy, the wider world and cyberspace. He is the author of the e-books Postcards From Italy, Linehan’s Trip, Linehan Saves, Murder By Suicide,  Heresy, Breakaway and Goodbye, Padania. He welcomes visitors at: http://www.bryanmurphy.eu

Three Poems by Jason Visconti

What I Found At The Dead End

Nothing really stops--
Permanence is a sort of short way out--

The heart's startled brakes
Stall for a gasp of air

A lifetime in cement
Is a stunt of acrobatics--

Each lethal stone a white cloud in the sky.



Who Says I Want To Write?

The parable has a fuzzy breath
And the hymn stops on its prompt--

The rage of my compass
Rolls round and round like a terrored eyeball

And even the faith in my garden stinks like a rotten wreath.



I Practiced Being An Angel And I Failed

Curse those wings--
That's not what I said

I loved them
Like pure good--

An expert cut of gold:
Nothing faulty

It was I who couldn't see--
Or swim

Or fly.

Jason Visconti is currently pursuing a certificate in computerized accounting. He has been published in journals including "The Boston Review", "Orange Room Review", and "Indigo Rising".  He enjoys reading the poetry of Billy Collins and Sharon Olds.

Three Poems by Shinjini Bhattacharjee

Me o' Clock

 

The day see-sawed into night

And I, standing at the edge of the fulcrum,

saw the moon rise again

into nothingness.

Cactus breath and heartbeat drops

falling into

dreary ice wallpapering the

insides of my eye.

My mind karaokes to the tune of

the waves and the winged moths

behind the bushes.

My voice peels itself to reveal the

tortured body of the shriek within.

My bare feet the daughters of

illegitimate ecstasy and misbegotten inhabitants

of the forest floor .

The blue colored tendrils from the ocean

climb up the cliff,

gift-wrap my body and soul into a

haloed hug, overpowering me.

 

Life is best experienced as a freefall.

 

 

 

 

I to Eye 

 

I woke up as a hallucination

Wrung my brain dry

Squeezed it so hard

The bomb wires exploded.

Rotten memories hanging

From the weather beaten tissues

Like forgotten stalactites.

 

Words rest on a

Broken lexical bed

In a tavern forever lost

Tired after long carrying

The air which miscarried

The fragrance that

The sun smothered flowers

Gave it during the Ice-Age.

 

You asked my parched throat

To find a mirage in the chimney.

Told me to find a shrink in the

Blank pages of the diary

You gave me.

 

I stand alone on stage,

While the devils give me

A standing ovation.

 

 

 

 

Crunchy Wound

 

Your past tense breath delves among the ruins of the countries you and I made on the straw ball tuning the wind chime. Bare arms bloom in the meadows where swan breath cracks open every cell to let in glass shaped thistle veins germinate on the asphyxiated soil clinging to the vanishing feet of dinosaurs. Shadows of the branches bookmark your cave mouth walls scratched with the alphabets I never understood. We hammer the moon with the light of the sun. See the bruises? These are the creeks made by the diapered tears placed in wooden coffins. You warm your hands by placing them in the charred staircase of your jaw, where palm tree mirages drop dead like sparrows on a hot day. Call the warped ambulances to sinew our atrophied hands with Orpheus lute, because your hair carries my voice to the Bermuda triangle, the unwashed rock below the curve of the question mark. The bedroom floor avalanches stairs into the maroon carpet below, opening out into a cliff of hoarse lullabies. The bulbs dim to turn memories into silhouettes. An eagle swoops down and carries the sun away.

Shinjini Bhattacharjee holds an M.A degree in English Literature and is a self professed jabberwocky who loves to explore the poems garbed in emotions of varied hues every moment of her life composes. Her works have been published in, or are forthcoming in The Stray Branch, Nostrovia! Poetry,White Ash Literary Magazine, and Four and Twenty Poetry, among others.

A Poem by William G. Davies

4th Of July

 

There's explosions in the distance,

I imagine its what Egypt

must sound like or Syria

to an extreme degree.

We face paint the black sky

in the old Chinese calligraphy,

holding our babes,

nearer to the previous generation

than any other, remembering

where we were when we first

heard Jimi Hendrix’s rendition

of The Star Spangled Banner

and the casual aplomb

with which it was dismissed

over the snap of a 

cheap pack of firecrackers.

 

 

William G. Davies has published in Diluted Ink, The Artistic Muse, Absinthe and many others.  He is 2013 Poet Laureate for Perry County, Pennsylvania.   

A Poem by Richard Schnap

Vacancy

He always noticed the absence of things,
The hollows and holes, empty and unfilled,

An old woman passing his window on Sunday,
Her hand reaching out to someone not there,

A young boy tossing a ball toward a fence
For an invisible presence to catch and return,

Even the sky when the moon turned dark,
The world sunk most deeply in a realm of shadow,

And when he turned his gaze back toward his room
His eyes kept on finding the items it lacked,

A picture inside of a gold engraved frame,
A bouquet rising from a clear glass vase,

But much more than these was the vast quiet,
The silence that slowly slipped into his dreams,

Like a soundtrack for a film yet to be made,
A story he’d waited his whole life to know.

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.