A Poem by Sarah Thursday

To Hello Kitty from My Little Pony at WE Labs

It's Christmas outside, green/red lines stretch out like a cat at noon.
I am galloping in the stars, cutting holes in the sky like crescent
moons.  But it's almost morning and I need a place to rest, be quiet
and color my pages in rainbows, like silver trees in purple lakes.
Hey, Kitty, did you get over your grudge?  Green/red eyes you keep
blinking at me.  I'm not listening to it anymore.  I'm choosing to
throw my reins out the window and not look back.  I can bring you
back flowers from windowsills stolen from dreams of honeycombs
and lucky charms and horseshoes (yes, I get the irony.  I always get
the irony, it's what I do).  So are you in or out?
--MLP

Sarah Thursday calls Long Beach, California, her home, where she advocates for local poets and poetry events.  She runs a Long Beach-focused poetry website called CadenceCollective.net, co-hosts a monthly reading, and just started Sadie Girl Press.  In addition, she co-founded Lucid Moose Lit, a small press focused on social justice issues, with Nancy Lynee Woo.  Her first full-length poetry collection, Aall the Tiny Anchors, is available now.  Find and follow her on SarahThursday.com, Facebook, or Twitter.

A Poem by Jason D. DeHart

Child of the Rebellion

a poster loaded with anachronism,
cry of the hawks,
a young person with fresh complexion,
gun thrown over the shoulder.
I grew up with guns, rifles like artwork,
watching the men clean barrels
with long, strange brushes.
I do not listen to their hollow metallic
sounds now.
I barely notice the flag over the child's
shoulder, but I do make mention
that the clothing is pristine, not yet
stained with fear or age or wisdom.



Jason D. DeHart is the author of the blog, jasondehartjustliving.blogspot.com.  His writing has appeared in a variety of publications.

A Poem by Judith Skillman

Below the Snow Line

The maid wields her duster.  She
Wears the apron you love to watch,
The one that bares her thighs.
She is meticulous, and young--too young
For such difficult work:  keeping
Each and every flake of snow from the needles
Of trees called Evergreen.  She smells
Of Paper whites, calls out your name
In a husky, Aussie accent--are you home?
Have you arrived back from the office,
Mission, dock, island, market where you
Picked up a crusty bread and a bottle of white,
Some cheese aged perfectly, the texture
Encaustic as if Brie were hot wax and we
Could bite into our portion of the painting,
Savor a glazed light.



Judith Skillman's new book is Angles of Separation, Glass Lyre Press 2014.  Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, Cimarron Review, Tar River Poetry, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Seneca Review, The Iowa Review, Southern Review, Poetry, New Poets of the American West, and other journals and anthologies.  Skillman is the recipient of grants from the Academy of American Poets, Washington State Arts Commission, and King County Arts Commission.  She has taught at City University, Richard Hugo House, Yellow Wood Academy, and elsewhere.  Visit www.judithskillman.com

Two Poems by John Grochalski

holding my wife after another bad night

i wish i could remember
what we'd been arguing about the night before

there'd been so much lately
loud neighbors and lights being left on
medical bills and inches of dust on countertops

things we shouldn't been have been arguing about
in the first place

cancer and mammograms
and federal jury summons
coming on the first day of vacation

it seems the arguments happen like magic

a bottle or two of wine and neil young on the couch
then poof we're going at each other's throats

another good night turned to shit

this morning
i'm holding my wife in bed
after another bad night between us

rubbing her stomach as we let the tears come

in between apologies
i'm searching in the dark for answers
but i'm only getting snippets

defiant pulls on wine
the sound of her feet stomping across corroded wood

idle threats
that sound like promises that should be kept

it's true that we do more damage
to the ones that we love

i wouldn't be caught dead talking to strangers
the way that i've talked to my poor wife

sometimes love
gives you the license to be a complete bastard
when it should put you at your most cautious

love is funny that way

still i wish i could remember what it was
that set it off last night

then this morning i'd have a better frame of reference
for the soothing words that i'm saying

for the tears she's streaking down the bedspread

just some inkling of what went down
so that we can begin to forgive and forget

get out of bed
make coffee or make love

get on with this business of living
for better or for worse.



ants

telly kept all kinds
of fast food bags in the office

he had the bags full of free trinkets
that he got at trade shows and other events

one of them held several hundred pens in it
although the bags still held the odor of food

the office smelled of rancid meat
and french fry grease whenever telly was there

in the spring the fast food bags attracted ants

some days there were just a few
but on most a line of thousands of ants

some days there were just a few
but on most a line of thousands of ants
went single file behind computer stands and desks
to reach the fast food bags on telly's side

instead of doing my job
i'd watch the ants scale the height of a bag

they looked like mountain climbers working in tandem

then they'd fall of the edge into the bag
as if committing a mass suicide into a volcano

there were many days where i had to take a broom
and get rid of hundreds of the ants

i felt like a grand executioner
killing entire colonies in one sweep

i knew i'd never be a buddhist doing this business

i felt for the ants
they were only doing what came naturally to them

at my worst
i'd have to take several
fast food bags and squash them

to the ants i imagined
it was like a bomb going off
one second fast food bliss
the other second mass annihilation

by the time telly came to work
both the bags and the ants were gone

he'd put his things down and then circle around his desk
looking at all of that negative space

where are my fast food bags?
he'd ask me, in that lispy way of his

but i'd just shrug and turn back to my computer

or i'd get up and go to the bathroom
to stare at my sinister self in the mirror

a mass murderer if ever there was one

before turning on the hot, brown water
trying my best to wipe the blood from my hands.

John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out (Six Callery Press, 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In the Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), the novel, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press, 2013), and the forthcoming collection of poetry, Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street, 2014).  Grochalski currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he constantly worries about the high cost of everything.

A Poem by Pattie Palmer-Baker

Color Lesson

I am brown --
dust
dirt
tree trunks
gold leaves curling into brown death
a sixty five million year old dinosaur
caught in a desert bronzed grave
brown teeth snarl-frozen.

I am white --
piled clouds
frosted maple leaves
yellow-drained winter sunlight
a dying mother's hair white-
whorled on her neck.
I am the clarity in the eye
of a sixty five million carat diamond
where the mother curls
around the salt-sculptured father.

I am black --
sightless sky
rain-slicked slate
panther foot falls
coal glittering on buckled rock walls.
I am the black hole sucking in
mother
father
diamonds
dinosaur
white
brown
red
yellow
and sixty five million shades in between
even the color of death
cannot escape.

Over the years of exhibiting her work, a combination of her poetry in calligraphic form and collages of paste paper, Pattie Palmer-Baker discovered (to her delight and surprise!) that most people, despite what they may believe, do like poetry, and in fact many like poetry better than visual art.  She now concentrates on poetry.  She still creates artwork but not as often.  She finds poetry is more engaging.  She loves words.

A Poem by Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Tane, Tu and Rongo

Ignore the Water Maiden
gnawing at corpses.  For her it's always
clouds or stars.  She thinks
her grandfather invented the world,
something to do with forestry.
His old friends still live out west;
one a paid albino assassin, the other
a cross-dressing macrobiotic
moon-planting earth-mother
who grows great dope.
If monsters walk out
of the waves and sing,
don't listen.  Weapons are
everywhere.  Her aunts
are into birds because
of all the trees, sixty-three
generations of light canoes.
The Water Maiden has no idea
her grandfather is a hero.
To some, he's the sun.
She thinks he's a horny
old has-been.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria University Wellington with MA in Creative Writing in 2011.  Her poems and the odd short story have appeared online, in print and in her books Food 4 Thought, Numeralla Dreaming, After the Danse, Ono, Looking for Kerouac, Tasseography, Bravo Charlie Foxtrot and Collected Poems 2008-2014.  She lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand.  www.benchpress.co.nz

A Poem by henry 7. reneau, jr.

breath of fire

for breanne sparta

its nucleus seething
ambition in chains
because living landscapes
constantly shift & earthquake
are just the truth of us
as once
we had all been flesh together

hunters & gatherers
now epithelium
in eruption more than mute perishing
a film of stratified cuboidal strength
that once lined
the inner & outer surfaces of us
contrived a conjugated dream of freedom
marking time in an expanding universe

we could never
get far enough away from ourselves
to see all the parts at once
the whole the sum of
stardust pinpoints of life
a fevered galaxy of tight
pavement-like cells
awakened from a stasis of dispossessed &
shouts their free will:
it is us!
           it is us all along!

connexin-ed together:
the surging omen
of water gathering force
the susurrus sound of wind
between silence &
the metamorphosis of becoming
gale force hurricane
its presence in a different sense
or at least
on a different plane of be-ing
wholly the Al Green color
of nothing except elemental

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words in fire to wake the world ablaze:  free verse illuminated by courage that empathizes with all the awful moments, launching a freight train warning that blazes from the heart, like a chambered bullet exploding inadvertently.  His poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press, 2014), was released in September of 2014.  He also has an echapbook, entitled physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), which was released in December of 2014.  Additionally, he has also self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistence, and is currently working on a book of connected short stories.