A Poem by Richard Schnap

Winter's Debut

He first felt its touch
In the arctic of his home
When his father cried out
How he wanted to kill himself

Then when he discovered
His mother's hidden vodka
He often caught her drinking
As tears froze on her cheeks

Next when his sister
Introduced him to drugs
That eventually caused his mind
To transform into ice

Now he looks out
At the snow shrouded world
And wonders how many others
Still wait for it to melt

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 ayaz daryl nielsen

with grey, metallic indifference, the highway
bridge spans homestead foundations, dry
creeks, rotting walnut, oak and apple stumps
as I whisper to no one but myself
grandpa                  grandma and grandpa




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

Two Poems by David Fraser

He Has Often Wondered About The Little Ones

Is he maybe at a bus stop,
Kapuskasing, or Laredo
or with a thumb out on a road
that stretches straight forever
with a line of boreal, on the Trans-Canada,
or along a dry stretch of gulch grass and Prickle Pear
on the US interstate, driving, radio cutting in and out
or the same CD looping through miles and miles?
Is he passing churches, with names like,
Holy Mother of Lost Children's Tears.
Mosques stoic in their contempt for infidels.
Synagogues with their plain lines of suffering--
the big tree houses of worship that he has shunned,
despite his appreciation of their beauty, and his
sadness for the sheer slave labour to make them be?

He passes all the houses that could be anywhere
so non-descript, so unremarkable, with
a wheelbarrow tilted full of weeds
caught in the snow, below a light at a window,
an opening to someone's woe or joy or both,
and he wanders across this landscape and
worries what to make of all this witnessing,
this sediment that drifts in the current of a river
that he's dipped his whole life's body in
while searching for something more nomadic
where there is a god, where truth is not tangled
with the cries of little ones before they go to sleep.




There is a Time for All of Us to Come to Rest

I'm putting on my socks beside the bed.
The old dog comes to rub his face against my knees,
feels my hand upon his head and ears.
He cycles back for more until the socks are on.
Something is akin, here, as he grows older in his days
to mine for this morning the junco stories come,
bathing in the shallow stream,
how they reach your eye with patient watching,
and there too something is akin.
Once in some lives there is a thumb of feathers against glass,
sudden, final, while doing other things.
I recall how one junco lay on the deck,
its body built into a mound of snow,
how its mate beside him sat
until his features disappeared.
And the other day another junco, dead
beside the sliding door and how
later in the afternoon a raven came,
and took his body into the trees.

David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, on Vancouver Island.  His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, and in Tesseracts 18 (forthcoming).  He has published five collections of poetry and is a member of the League of Canadian Poets.  His next collection, After All the Scissor Work is Done, is forthcoming in the fall of 2015, published by Leaf Press.

A Poem by Aidan Clarke

For the Macbeths

I suppose by now you know
the dark and violent sea
the two of you are crossing
has no far shore.
Come back to the beach old man.
All great Neptune's ocean
will not wash that blood clean from your hand
but a thimble of tears is enough.
Tell your weeping lady wife
all the perfume of Arabia
will not sweeten her little hand
but a petal of love will suffice.

Aidan Clarke has been a writer for more than 3 decades during most of which he has lived, worked and walked around in Newcastle Upon Tyne.  He has been performing his poetry at Spoken Word events for 4 years.  His USP is a menu of around 140 poems each of which he can perform off by heart on request.

A Poem by Abigail Wyatt

On the Anniversary of the Death of Edgar Allan Poe, 7th October, 1849

     Almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time
                                              -- Charles Baudelaire

Your sadness, my friend, takes little guessing at;
it has settled like a vagrant in those eyes:
restless, hopeless, too long weary of the road
but still too much enamoured of the night;
and anguish, perhaps, was the price you paid
for the jewelled toad you carried to the graveyard.
Your losses, after all, were too green and too many,
too precocious a burden to bear well.  Now
that high, square brow, the hair line receding,
though it pleads with me to treat you tenderly,
speaks to me, also, of the kind of handsome rogue
on whom I spilled the salt tears of my youth.
I fear that you are like them:  pleading forgiveness,
a frail and insubstantial hero.  A mother's love,
a child's love:  these are things you needed too much.

Abigail Wyatt was born in Essex but now lives in Redruth in Cornwall.  Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and journals including, most recently, Wave Hub:  New Poetry of Cornwall (ed. Dr. Alan Kent).  She is a Pushcart nominee and the author of Old Soldiers, Old Bones and Other Stories.  In 2012, she was the winner of the Lisa Thomas Poetry Prize.

A Poem by Michael Lee Johnson

Sadly, We Die

Sadly, we die in little black suitcase boxes,
cave into our fears and the top falls down.
Save the laughter, celebration, thunder clapping,
rats experimentally test shed light at end of life's tunnel.
Death is a midnight stoker, everyone living goes home.
All windows bolted, all smiles switched off.
Sad on examination tables,
in little rooms, red, with lightening we die,
move on.

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 27 countries, he edits 8 poetry sites.  Michael is the author of The Lost American:  From Exile to Freedom (136 pages book), several chapbooks of poetry, including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night and Day, and Chicago Poems.  He also has over 70 poetry videos on YouTube.

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A Poem by Mark J. Mitchell

A Version of an Arabic Poem

     After the Arabic of Abdullah Ibn al-Mu'tazz 861-908 C.E.

A quick girl
comes to me tonight
fleeing her innocence.

Her body tells the breeze:
If you were serious
this is how
you'd shove the branches.

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz.  His work has appeared in the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Line Drives, and In Gilded Frame.  He is the author of a chapbook, Three Visitors, and a novel, Knight Prisoner, (both available on Amazon).  A full length collection, Lent 1999, is due from Leaf Garden Press.  He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian, Joan Juster.