Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

In the Throes of Missteps
(for Kurt Cobain)

He's been put upon the darkest of pedestals
Because he used his guitar sprawl as a paintbrush
Both lethal and revered
And the aftermath of his lyrics
Which were a storage locker full of recorded phone calls
Still speaks to us murkily after all these years
And after his flannel heroin is there anything left to be said
Except that he explained himself as both the lost and the found
Until a shotgun went off while a flicker machine spun
As all of that was lost to a seagull
Then he departed us led by black angels
Who reminded him of butterflies
To something more exquisite than the Emerald City
Where dreams of becoming is only the beginning.



Retractable Elegance

The ghosts who whistle within my copper teakettle
Are like vintage video games long ago played by my young sons
That I still remember like icy crow footprints
Now preserved until spring on this April day of winter rain
And now are only rose petals which when strewn
Take on the shape of the stars and moon.



The First of Many

This rain and gloom is like T.S. Eliot wrote it
The titillation of winter is now gone
Fished out of a sea of somewhat untraceable
Recollections that lets my curiosity become a
Waterfront whose dance metamorphs
Into all that is low lying on an island of museums
I once visited that was a purge of my image banks
Back when I was a young god of such innocence
Till I found a lost passport of tacos for lunch
And then in the spoken word sculptures that became my forte
I hitched a ride on mixed media collages
And quit forever the bands whose symphony halls
Where only their family's garages.




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.  

Two Poems by ayaz daryl nielsen

Solar Beings

Solar beings, we circle again as the
sun hisses "This is it!"  Time won't return
your inner sacredness, the sacredness
dark winds have swept away, and those
dark winds never blow the same way twice
Hidden are even the faintest murmurs
of your sacred inner magics  Our sun,
insisting, "What is sacred may be recovered.
Merge all your knowns with the unknown,
your past, with the future, all as one solar
presence, a presence without any
neediness of claiming anything other
than chance from every hometown
street corner's solar zephyr of
sacred celestial existence"



Within

Within these hollow cities
the pallor of shallow nights
when sleep isn't enough
The loneliness of those
who were born to sing,
empty acolytes brave enough
to hear a seemingly whispered
presence, to wear a seemingly
invisible robe of gold
Those who have had time for
their mistakes and move on to
a grateful sense of sweetness,
the sweet embrace of the genuine,
because we are, after all, always
somehow someone that is needed.

ayaz daryl nielsen, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/125+ issues), homes for poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Shemom, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane Press and online at bear creek haiku.

A Poem by Denny E. Marshall

Herd

Not easy to lay still
In a big lonely world
Like butterflies above water
Find place hard to land
Wings turn like birds
Lost on long migration
Mountains magically appear
Block warm wind currents
Transform into clouds
Drifts never touch down

Denny E. Marshall has had art, poetry & fiction published, rejected, and no responses to submissions at all, some recently.  Credits include Camel Saloon, Poetry Pacific, and Dead Snakes.  See more at www.dennymarshall.com

Two Poems by Ken W. Simpson

Red Lights

A solitary solecism
Premonitions and superstitions
Withered hopes
Amorphous, insubstantial
Episodic swings
Digressions and detours
Changing lanes
Accelerating and overtaking
Swerving
Inhibitions colliding.



Rock

Strobes
yellow, pink and blue
bounce and change
with a relentless rhythm
probing faces bathed in gold
arms waving
wailing, accelerating
adrenaline pumping
surreal, orange skin
shining eyes, hypnotized.

Two Poems by Phil Poyser

Ten Things to Do with Your Lover in Your Studio on the Cote D'Azure When it Rains in April

1.  Look out at the dancing palm fronds.
     See hairy tarantulas dripping venom.

2.  Make a cup of tea.  Share a croissant.
     Talk of baguettes and petits pains.

3.  Write postcards home, one pen between two.
      I sign yours, you sign mine, one "X" each.

4.  Read books, Paris Match, Le Figaro,
     ("Baghdad est tombe"), paper bag, cereal box.

5.  Snooze and drift away on a tide
     of tangled reveries in the lapping swell.

6.  Count the unfamiliar coins into piles.
     Count again to be absolutely sure.

7.  Make more tea.  Eat banana.
     Talk of local strawberries' succulent flesh.

8.  Watch the raindrops, erratic as hamsters,
     scurry to their gravitational destinies.

9.  Reflect on previous trips, lives,
     Universes, everythings, nothings.

10.  Play "I spy," "Hangman," "Hide-and-Seek,"
       Find yourselves (at last) entwined.
       Coming, ready or not.



St. Elvis Presley Precisely:  The Ten Commandments

1.  Thou shalt have no other teddy bear but me.  Please, please, love me true, I beg of you.

2.  Thou shalt put a chain around my neck and lead me anywhere, but graven images--no way, as I don't have a wooden heart:  unless of course it was something in Jailhouse Rock (though keep in mind what happened to Jael with the nail).

3.  Thy Daddy's name is "Big Boots," but don't take that in vain.

4.  It's Saturday night and thou just got paid.  But remember the Sabbath and keep it cool.  Good Shep.  Old Shep--thou ain't nothin' but a hound dog.  You ain't never caught a rabbi and you ain't no friend of mine.

5.  Honolulu, baby.

6.  Thou shalt not kill, even in "GI Blues."

7.  With little sister, don't, though I guess that's incest rather than adultery.  Nor with the girl of thy best friend, though that's not really what I mean either.  Whatever.  For if thou dost, thou shalt be down at the end of lonely street until the third generation.  It's called Heartbreak Hotel.

8.  Thou mayst burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from the old fruit jar, as long as thou truly repenteth and asketh forgiveness, but thou shalt not step in my blue suede shoes.

9.  There ain't no such thing as those "little white lies."

10.  "Don't, don't.  Don't, don't."  That's what I say, each time I behold you this way.  This you can believe, I will never leave you, baby.  Just don't, that's all.  Just don't.

The element, carbon, has played a pivotal role in Phil Poyser's life.  He comes from a family of miners with its roots deep in the area around the Nottinghamshire coalfields and his natal village of Mansfield Woodhouse.  His university studies at South Kensington's Imperial College of Science and Technology let to a career in organic chemistry (the myriad compounds of carbon), whilst retirement from the pharmaceutical industry in 2007 saw a move to organic gardening and the flourishing of his lifelong love of poetry:  a primrose path from C-reactive protein to C-reative Writing, so to speak.  No coincidence then that he's a member of Macclesfield Creative Writing Group and an active open-miker in and around the North-West.

Two Poems by Christopher S. Knodel

The Coma

Months in a coma,
ended for him suddenly
--without an explanation.

His eyes opened wide,
to see a sterile white room
--a place he had never been.

A doctor rushed in
to see his patient awake
--an unexpected event.

He had been broken.
Many organs had ruptured.
--all damage had been severe.

What, then, had happened?
How had he come to be here?
--where were the answers he sought?

The doctor approached,
and injected a serum
--directly into his neck.

The patient expired,
as the doctor unfolded
the "Do Not Resuscitate."



A Crimson Silence

He heard the silenced shots.
Dull, moist impacts echoed through the silence.
To his right, his wife collapsed, as if made of melting wax.
To his front, crimson sprayed from his daughter's blond locks.

Then, receding footsteps.
Silence.
Emptiness.

He was alone, with nothing but the cooling bodies
of everyone he ever loved.



Christopher S. Knodel is an author, poet and ultra-distance runner in San Antonio, TX.  He is a freelance journalist and writes a weekly syndicated newspaper column.  His poetry and short fiction have been featured in The Asses of Parnassus, Ealain (MPA Publishing), The Wolfian, The Write Place at the Write Time, The Zodiac Review and Zombie Logic Review.  He can be easily spotted by his kilt, tattoos and six inch, flaming-red, Van Dyke goatee.

Three Poems by Lana Bella

A Photograph

Warmth mingled in your breaths.
Inches from mine,
charged with unsealed joy or anticipation.
I turned my face to where
the shutters' noise from the camera clicked.
You became a blurred object in
my peripheral vision,
angled as it bunched at the edge,
yet, that glint of gold reflected in your eyes
was caught in the hurried lenses
of the photograph.
And for that one small instant,
our gaze clutched tight to a memory,
with my heat at the foreground,
and yours tilted at the nape of my neck--
unleasing a stillness that turned into a whisper
of a promise yet to be named.



A December Face

December and I were in a steady race
to see who would relent first--
where I went,
it followed;
I moseyed on by the roundabout way
over the ice-capped bridge through the park,
when December leapt from atop the pine
onto a vertigo of light
above the flophouse where mother
held the weight of disappointment just so
that I'd begun to sprout ulcers
within the entrails.

While the hours knitted moments
gathering in rhythmic tangos and half-
whispers clung to prayers,
how much time was left for me as I heaved
the pendulum of consternation
on my shoulders and over my back?

During which snowfall has planted
iced orchids upon wreaths of thorny crowns,
knee-deep,
not one boulevard was left for my walking,
turned back,
giving a quiet nod of surrender toward
this long impasse with mortality,
peeling off the ripcord handle
from December's chute.
Reading to jump.



A Nameless Thing

there is a croak,
something shimmies
out of the ripples of the air that
I cannot help to bristle
my inked quill over
the papyrus,

at first, the sound
leaves a ghost of restlessness
loose on my fingertips,
the more I tug it,
the less it struggles,

drawing epithets with
shadows from the squiggly loops
of calligraphy, i cannot
exhaust the fuel of
this nameless thing that
touches the tip of my ennui,

its tail brushes
my bent wrist like a bird flitting
through a bridal-veiled sky,
quivering the pages
so faintly that I can almost see
the script on the other side--

A Pushcart nominee, Lana Bella has works of poetry and fiction published and forthcoming in over 150 journals, including a chapbook with Crisis Chronicles Press (Winter, 2016), Abyss & Apex, Chiron Review, Foundling Review, Fourth & Sycamore, Harbinger Asylum, Literary Orphans, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Quarterly and elsewhere.  She divides her time between the US and the coastal town of Nha Trang, Vietnam, where she is a wife of a talking-wonder novelist and a mom of two far-too-clever-frolicsome imps.  https://www.facebook.com/niaallanpoe