A Poem by henry 7. reneau, jr.

psalmandala

these acts of water
flowing from where we come &
who we are & what we do
painting expletive syllables of subliminal graffiti
resonating the same signature
as the maddening shroud

of recollection
photo-shop edited by the recursive bravado
of ego
coloring loose narratives of the soul
that tumbleweed mechanically
crow-cawing a gravel-throat blues wail
what becomes within
an elastic heart of cindered empathy

like a lipstick letter scrawled across a vacant motel mirror
sifted through the sediment of childhood nostalgia
become
wood

become bone
& panoramic heart
washing through ten thousand forms of fear
cover the sky
with carrion crows
where nothing beautiful is perfect unless it is destroyed

henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words in fire to wake the world ablaze:  free verse illuminated by courage that empathized 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 e-chapbook entitled , physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), which was released in December of 2014.  Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance, and is currently working on a book of connected short stories.  He is a Pushcart Prize Nominee.

A Poem by Sam Barbee

Fantasia

Cacophony without orchestrations, first violins
compete to silence second chairs.
Blatant bickering between the shiny flutes.

You Mozart about, so busy before the pauper's grave.
The unflappable maestro, you score us with purest heart:
instruments shoulder to shoulder, shaping your magnum opus.

Ah, homely but we oblige enchantment.  All-call for an ovation
to the strum of a harp, but crescendo of iambic brass
trumps any heavenly solace.  Percusses with a rumble,

an overture to adore like a mist upon blue hills,
within a smear of forest, and, in the center,
a pond of muck crowned with lotus,

where a single croaking toad secretes a wart
of contentment amid thunder's token harmony,
its lullaby dying between each clap.

Sam Barbee's poems have appeared in Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology VII:  North Carolina, Potato Eyes, Georgia Journal, St. Andrews Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine, and  Pembroke Magazine among others; plus online journals Vox Poetica and The Blue Hour.  His second collection, That Rain We Needed (Press 53), will be published in April of 2016.  He was awarded an "Emerging Artist's Grant" from the Winston-Salem Arts Council to publish his first collection Changes of Venue (Mount Olive Press); has been featured poet on the North Carolina Public Radio Station WFDD; received the 59th Poet Laureate Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for his poem "The Blood Watch."  Sam lives in Winston-Salem with his wife and has two children, and is the current President of Winston-Salem Writers.  His day job for 31 years has been with the Winston-Salem Recreation Department.

A Poem by Jennifer Circosta

When I Called Her Name

When I called her name,
Her breath-
           Lit up the face of night!
And a star,
          Sparked in her soul-
She
Turned her skin over
And saw life,
                      Moving,
                                 --Through her bones.

And he,
        Whispered-
He said,
The sky begins at your feet . . . 
And then he stole,
                      A glimpse-
                            Of her raw being
            Vulnerable
       Yet-
Devastatingly,
                   Bold.

Jennifer Circosta is a truth seeker and artistic expressionist!  She is a poet at heart and author of life.  She is the published author of three books with a fourth one in development entitled, "Poems from Passion."  She has a degree in psychology and theater arts.  Jennifer serves the community as an emotional wellness coach, yoga instructor and energy therapist.  She offers innovative workshops in meditation, self-exploration, and healing for couples and individuals to support the greater development of their intimate, soulful-selves.  Currently, Jennifer is the creator and facilitator of, The Healing Project which is a community based support and learning initiative that focuses on two key aspects:  Self-Discover and Healing.

A Poem by Bill Brown

The Note

I leave this note on the kitchen table
                                                            like a plant of fruit,
sliced orange and cantaloupe,
                                                   covered to stay fresh.
so you can nibble
                                   through the day.
Like all writing
                             they contain seeds to be discarded,
or spat at the cat,
                               a police distraction from her nap.
Parts of the note
                              like orange are sweet and citrus clean,
but the cantaloupe tastes pungent,
                                                          earthy, fraught with
twisting vines and climbing tendrils.
                                                             You must attend
to any words so close to their source
                                                              that their meaning
appears muddled,
                                for these control what I wish to impart
but can't.  
                  Just know that the words, like the fruit
come from the sacred ground
                                                   on which you walk,
ground rich enough to
                                        make both the confusion
of the cantaloupe
                                and the sweetness of the orange.

Bill Brown is the author of nine poetry collections and a writing textbook.  His most recent titles are Elemental (3:  A Taos Press 2014), The News Inside (Iris Press 2010), and Late Winter (Iris Press 2008).  In 1999, Brown wrote and co-produced the Instructional Television Series, Student Centered Learning, for Nashville Public Television.  The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts awarded him The Distinguished Teacher in the Arts.  He has been a Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a two-time recipient of Fellowships in poetry form the Tennessee Arts Commission.  Brown has published hundreds of poems and articles in college journals, magazines and anthologies.  The Tennessee Writers Alliance named Brown the 2011 Writer of the Year.  He lives with his wife, Suzanne, and a tribe of cats in the hills north of Nashville.

Three Poems by Brigitte Goetze

Dreams

They are your neighbors, living across the street,
in a rambling house, at the edge of the forest,
an extended Chinese family
with strange customs and odd behaviors.

You see them now and then, coming and going,
overhear a mixture of English and Chinese,
and, occasionally catching a phrase, you ponder:
what was that about?

Getting curious, you initiate contact
and soon you share the bounty of each other's gardens,
they teach you the rules of Feng Shui and Chinese astrology
while you google for them the exact date of the next eclipse.

They offer you strange remedies of your bruises,
delight in your poems, (but did they understand them?)
only to frown on you the next time for--you know not what--infraction,
then seem unresponsive when you try to make amends.

And yet, they water your garden and feed your cat while you are on vacation,
bring their generator when the power goes out,
warn you about cougars or ghosts prowling at dusk,
which makes your hair stand up, though you can't see either.



Nexus

The image came first:
an opened fan, emerging from a black dot,
origin as well as lynch pin to a triangle of frayed strips,
their originally joyous yellow, flaming red
dulled to a rusty orange by a warp of pewter threads,
tying them to the left, to a stiff flame of blue light
whose tip is straining away from both, the rust and the lead,
so preoccupied with its own urge towards liberation,
it hasn't yet sensed an enclosing circle
of interlacing pad locks.

Then the commentary:
Leaving an icy road, I followed a young man
of unclear affiliations with the green party
into a humongous bus, traveling the autobahn.
Only 11 km, he proclaimed, to Copenhagen,
that sane and civil place in the North--
with one of the highest suicide rates.

I followed the tenuous thread of this slight discomfort
which I didn't dare to voice--
wasn't I being helped?
Didn't I love there once, extravagantly?
And yet, my body knew, it didn't need more cool.

Though the other travelers, contently, face forward,
I need to get off the autobahn, leave my green knight,
so sure in his youthful chivalry,
listen instead to a tall, thin crone,
who, wearing her kayak, circumnavigated Lake Superior,
her solitary effort supported by a community of friends.

In her presence, I found--at last--
my own white charger,
inside my personal pouch,
that innocent energizer of my Nexus,
my still silent, black tablet, now able to connect
to a library of books, two already downloaded,
Mogli side by side with the family Robinson,
telling stories of the wildly blooming South.



The Phantom in My Opera

I have glimpsed him, now and then.
His sable cape can't hide
red gargoyle eyes burning
over a black-blue beard.

His silent glare insists that I follow
the old pattern, offer myself
like a delectable gingerbread house
to the ravenous tearing of every needy child.

He is the one who stirs
a host of bats into a frenzy,
whenever I dare to be
different from what's expected.

He still can tighten a chain
around my throat,
thus keeping me
from dwelling in my own body.

But I have drawn his picture.
Though badly distorted,
the enfolding circle holds.
The hunted has become the hunter.

Brigitte Goetze spins her yarns in Western Oregon.  An apprentice of Rumpelstiltskin, she is learning to transform the prickly straw of experience into the shining gold of awareness.  She has been published by Calyx, Women Artists Datebook 2011, Oregon Humanities, Four and Twenty, Outwardlink, New Verse News, Mused, Oudrant Journal and others.

Three Poems by Lyn Lifshin

Parma Dream of Violets

of sky the color of lilacs,
mauve liquid in an antique
mirrored cabinet, grappa,
honey, sugar and the
essence of violets.
Slopes of Parma violets.
Purple haze.  The same
violets Napoleon kept on
his desk that grew on
his wife's grave.  Its smell
on her fingers, skin.
Color his lover wore,
painted on plates, engraved
on calling cards, picture
frames, vases, fans
so the smell would always
be with him as the smell
of vanilla or hyacinth
keeps my ghosts



Barbaro's Dreams, Mid-August

lying half asleep
in timothy grass

grapes brightening.
Forgetting pain,

forgetting breaking.
Forks of light

past the ICU.  Does
he dream of the

push of promise,
the flaring wound in

black eyed susan
wind.  Painted daisies.

This dream of leaping
still wild as a

deer thru jade fields,
escaping.



Another Barbaro Dream Mid-August


his body remembering
speed, longing to give

up pain, the shattered
fragments and become a

flaming arrow of fire
flung over the track

The wind, a horse whisperer
beckoning, moaning

hurry and darling

Lyn Lifshin has published over 130 books and chapbooks including 3 from Black Sparrow Press:  Cold Comfort, Before It's Light and  Another Woman Who Looks Like Me.  Before Secretariat:  The Red Freak, the Mircacle, Lifshin published her prize winning bookd about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter:  My Year With Ruffian and Barbara:  Beyond Brokenness.  Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead, All True, Especially The Lies, Light At The End:  The Jesus Poems, Katrina, Mirrors, Persephone, Lost In The Fog, Knife Edge & Absinthe:  The Tango Poems.  NYQ books published A Girl Goes into the Woods.  Also just out:  For the Roses poems after Joni Mitchell and Hitchcock Hotel from Danse Macabre, Secretariat:  The Red Freak, The Miracle and Tangled as the Alphabet--The Istanbul Poems from Night Ballet Press.  Just released as well Malala, the dvd of Lyn Lifshin:  Not Made of Glass.  The Marilyn Poems was just released from Rubber Boots Press.  An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out:  Lips, Blues, Blue Lace:  On the Outside.  Also just out is Femme Eterna and Moving Through Stained Glass:  the Maple Poems.  Also out from Sick Fly Tangerin Press is Paintings and Poems.  Forthcoming Degas Little Dancer and The Silk Road.  Her web: www.lynlifshin.com

A Poem by Carl Palmer

less tar

us in the bus
carpool lane
riding past her
with cell phone
and cigarette
red BMW convertible
lane-locked in traffic
our eyes meet
reveal to each our dream
she the desire to move swiftly
me wanting to taste the nicotine
from her lips



Carl Palmer of Old Mill Road in Ridgeway VA now lives in University Place WA.  He has a 2015 contest winning poem riding buses somewhere in Seattle.  Carl is a Pushcart Prize and Micro Award nominee.  MOTTO:  Long Weekends Forever  www.authorsden.com/carlpalmer