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. 

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.