A Poem by Michael Lee Johnson

Children in the Sky

There is a full moon,
distant in this sky tonight,

Gray planets planted
on an aging white, face.

Children, living and dead,
love the moon with small hearts.

Those in heaven already take gold thread,
drop the moon down for us all to see.

Those alive with us, look out their
bedroom windows tonight,
we smile, then prayers, then sleep.

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era:  now known as the Illinois poet, from Itasca, IL.  Today he is a poet, freelance writer, photographer who experiments with poetography (blending poetry with photography), and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois, who has been published in more than 750 small press magazines in 26 countries, he edits 7 poetry sites.  Michael is the author of The Lost American:  From Exile to Freedom (136 pages), several chapbooks of poetry, including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night and Day, and Chicago Poems.  He also has over 69 poetry videos on YouTube.  

Links:  http://poetryman.mysite.com/  http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/promamanusa
https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos
http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/Products/SKU-000058168/The-Lost-American.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-American-Exile-Freedom/dp/0595460917

Three Poems by Zach Fechter

Already Too Late

He is impatient
It is already too late

A red room
A man sits on a white rough chair
Eyes closed
In the red

Surreal
Purple silence
A woman stands and stares
Beyond your head
Silence

A jazz room under the city
Dark light and faint smoke
Warm and snug
Under the harsh cold cement

A deep singing down and low
A world class thrower
Is taken below in a struggle
And his arm is cut off

He stares into the distance
Later
Over a frozen lake
Into whipping winds

An old goddess stands in red
Vacant stare in front of a red wall
Smoke drifting from her lips
As she gazes beyond your eyes

She is trying to quit heroin
And it is so hard
So she holds tight to the carpet
And stares at the thermostat for hours

An old silver statue
Crying in the golden sunset
Arms at the ready
Staring into the crashing red sun

When she was pregnant
He would not leave her side
Slow motion cutting motion
Across his face as he looks deep into you

Everyone is falling in the rain
Back first into the mud holes
Everyone with their own
And their one



The Glow of the Night

Turning and again turning
Through the light
We break the pane
But the pain shines through

Surely life will be good then
When I have
When I am
When I see
When I breathe
When we are prey to God

And I see bodies falling from the trees
And I see trees falling from the skies
Who would drive it home tonight?
The pain surrounds me tonight

Oh men of the Earth
Oh women of the soil
I see clouds forming into a break
Through the sky
I've got . . .
What?

Naught but a tremble in my finger
And in a world full of people
There's always some meant to be sad
You may see a room in black and white
You may see a valley in blue and purple
So we just go to the tropics
And fall into the reggae and rum and cool wind

Sad though
I've never seen such a thing
So we must
Cut down the dead ones



Head Down

There is a festival
Where all the thin people
Sit with their heads to the ground
And the great sound washes over them
And they are happy
And their arms are draped over
Guitars and drums
And their arms are swathed
Over each other
And they are silent
And yet the sound comes
And their eyes flutter
And they cannot help but smile
From under their hair

Zach Fechter lives and writes in Wilton, Connecticut.  He has been published in Poetry Quarterly Magazine and Kind of a Hurricane Press.  He is a graduate of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.

Two Poems by Susan Dale

Courage

Sleepwalker at the edge of a cliff

To step back into an old familiar
I must lock up my restless heart
And vow I'll not develop the film
On my camera's restless recalls
Of breathless passions

Long weary of clocks
Tick-ticking backwards in time
And of yesterdays dry ghosts
Withering, crumbling

Weightless -- beating with wings for freedom
My soul with sail billowed
To ride turbulent tides of fear
Past security's shallow waters

And gamble everything
On tomorrow's turn of the wheel



Streams of Poems

From far off skies mellow with moonbeams
There was I swaddled on to a shooting star
And raced to a planet I felt throbbing with life

And burning in her race towards death
The star smoked into ash before she could tell me
That I was a moon child that once swam
In milky way streams foaming with the poems
I was carrying to earth

Lost, I wondered and wandered
Until a crescent moon gathered me up
In her pale shroud
She missed me her vagabond child
And sailed off with me across the night
And into the milky way streams
Of my bliss

The poems I dove into, I would swim with,
Splash amongst, and embrace
For all my days to come

Susan Dale's poems and fiction are on Kind of a Hurricane Press, Ken*Again, Penman Review, Inner Art Journal, Feathered Flounder, Garbanzo, and Linden Avenue.  In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.  She has two published chapbooks on the internet:  Spaces Among Spaces by languageandculture.org and Bending the Spaces of Time by Barometric Pressures.

Three Poems from Joan Colby

Broke -- 2

Faultline where the crack was mended
Devalues the vase on Antique
Roadshow.  If only some careless
Ancestor or maybe you, yourself
Had not allowed that slip of hand;
Irremediable loss.  Then blame,
That holy glue suggests
A good-as-new deception.
You blink the barely visible
Damage.  White line where the scrutiny
Of an expert in breakage
Will not be denied.  Incurable
As heartache.  This heirloom.  This
Imperfection.  How the worth
Of anything involves condition.



Broke -- 5 -- Break Dancing

The body sheds
Discursive plaints, to embrace
Chaos.  The backward flip
Into the text of revolution.
Spin and twirl, out of sync
With measured steps.
The flailing limbs induce
Discord and joy,
Spell what the body can dispose:
Clause, comma, semi-colon.
The crooked delight
Of question mark,
Exclamation point.



Broke -- 11 -- Broken Pediment

The mahogany china cabinet,
Its burden of ruby goblets.
Gold scalloped dishes from a lost century,
An alphabet mug from which
Five generations of children
Gulped sweet milk.

Remembering how it stood
In her proper dining room
Before age broke her
Into a comma curled in a cot.

When we were asked to choose,
This is what we took.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner.  Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature.  She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009,2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008,2010).  One of her poems is a winner of the 2014 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest.  She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois.  She has published 14 books including, Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press.  Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter from Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books), Bittersweet from Main Street Rag Press, and The Wingback Chair from FutureCycle Press.  Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Amid the Frigid

Midnight's spaceship wears a James Brown cloak
The stars above the valley below
Are so like an Enchantment Under The Sea dance
Even though I know they are "Signed Epstein's mother"
The bottomless seaside has a musicality to it
That clings to the menagerie of beach houses that dot its shores
While beautiful young teenage girls in saddle shoes
Climb on The Pikes' cherry pie rollercoaster
Seated by a carny who looks at them like the cat who got the cream
And I find that I remember them all
All of those memories now have become
Like some Stonehenge arrangement of rocks to me
Even as I punch the buttons of this childhood dream
So like moon glass brought back at such a price
That the interest in it should not have so quickly passed
In this new century where there is no Max Headroom or anything as cool as that



Ashes in a Hearth

As this day of pink petaled lingering summer vanishes
Peppermint street lights turn on like daydreams
As I revel in the crumbling of my diminishing memories
So like an old Ouija board with lettering peeling
And as I ferment in the melody of her voice
That is now but a tattered postcard in the used paperback of my last days on this planet
Where as I look at the stars and at last realize
Why birds have wings as they arc majestically over this cradle infested valley
All the angels I will ever need in this world or any other
And as I pick up my paint brush of misgivings waiting to sail to a far different beach
On an island of the rarest minerals where I will soar forever
Like all that is abandoned finally at last Mr. Natural and Dr. Strange at the same time
Once I leave forever behind this dreadful world of meat trucks
Rattling down to where the trains and stoplights are but late night ballads unto themselves
That can cut the pages out of your most reevaluated reasons
With hardly any effort and such sleath
That nobody but you will notice the difference in all their meanings
Or much of anything else



Shooting Clay Pigeons

I've needed you so bad ever since I was a baby
And now that topaz and silver Miles Davis
And country fried Mozart softly play
Till comes our theme song from half a century ago
That we first heard on an unbelievable beach back in the day
Just two rootless loners misspelled on life's message board
Who never stopped turning the cheese squirting pages
Not even long after Maya Angelou had become a phantom
Wandering in this blink and you'll miss me thing called reality
And if I get my wish my last meal will be
Understanding all that my sweetheart ever spoke softly of to me
Slathered with a supersized portion of the cameo like perfection of her face
So like some starfish caught in the net of all that I'd ever dreamed of
On this rugged coastline of gnarled olive trees




For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.  

A Poem by Rose Lu

Childhood Friendship

     -- To Hongzhu, My Friend

To those without close affinity,
Parting means to be parted forever
You and me, having strong appeal to each other
Are fated to meet again to continue our friendship.

When we meet again after an interval of more than twenty years
I see you are still so pure, though suffering a little hair loss.
Others appraise your today
But I can tell what you were when you were a little girl

Who says you are already middle-aged?
That skip before my eyes are clearly
Your childhood smiling face and glow

There are shadows of your childhood
In every of your moves
I can make you return to the childhood you
Even without turning into a fairy to do it.

The brave you once took a pair of scissors
And cut my long braids short
With one stroke.
In those years
We led a sweet life
With empty purses
In those years
We were as charming as lily
Though we couldn't afford slip dresses.

We used to play under the same clover tree
That was a pure land that refused pollution
We used to sing in the same boat
On a holy water that didn't tolerate infringement.

The puerility we made
And the junior years we got through together
Typecast both your life and mine.
Your childhood is mine
And mine is yours

It's true
That mountains may change into seas
And seas may change into mulberry fields
But the unchangeable is childhood friendship,
It's the most beautiful broad accent
It's the origin of life
From there a cluster of white doves
Sets out on a flight toward future.

Rose Lu (Bing hua), originally named Lihua Lu, a popular and famous pure-hearted Chinese-American Poetess, is currently an accountant in Maryland, USA.  Advisor of China Poetry, column poetess of many Literature websites abroad.  She has authored the well-known anthology of poetry, This is Love, and Roses by the Stream, and co-authored Morning Dew and Drifting Petals.  Popular for her beautiful, fluent and pure style.  Each poem is also a statement about her life, that has made readers nod, smile, and shed a tear.  She's been named Rose in Poetry, Woman Sage of Love Lyrics, Angel of Poems, Queen of amatory poems, etc.  "The Heart of a Lotus" won the Gold award in the Love Story world-wide Chinese Poem contest in 2010; "It's Neither Frivolous Nor Drifty" and "A Fan" won the award in XXXI Wold Congress of Poets in 2011.

A Poem by ayaz daryl nielsen

Poems, escaping

Dodging my pencil and skipping from
the study, whispery gossamer chortles
seep into daytimes and night dreams
from somewhere just-so-slightly beyond
any possibility of remembrance.



ayaz daryl nielsen, husband, father, veteran, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs), hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/120+ issues), homes included Lilliput Review, Jellyfish Whispers, Writing the Whirlwind, Shamrock, and bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com (translates as joie de vivre).