2014

 

 

OCTOBER CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

George Bishop, Randolph Bridgeman, David Cooke, Marianne Daniels, Laura Eklund, Deirdre Hines, Pratibha Kelapure, Sarah Lilius, Virginia Luck, Laura McKee,

Neha Mohanty, Angela Readman, Paul M. Strohm,

Nancy Lynée Woo, Thomas Zimmerman

 

 

 

GEORGE BISHOP

 

 

Remembering My Aunt

 

Always the face of something gone

wrong, words like hopeless and futile

inadequate as an angel on a dead tree.

Our family used to gather for dinner

each Christmas until her husband fell

dead in the driveway one snowy night.

I remember bringing my first camera

 

to the final meal, Santa’s last good idea.

I still have the black and white somewhere,

everyone at the table except me, the only

one alive now, eating at Bruno’s alone.

I remember the cheap flash going off that

Christmas, little lights dancing as they

faded in everyone’s eyes but mine.

 

 

Replacing the Dead

for Chuck

 

In bed with her for the first time, I began to feel

what you felt, taste the same salt in certain places.

 

And since secrets only share so much air, what

might’ve been always outlives what is—I wanted

 

to call her mine, and I did even though I knew

you didn’t have time to lose and I don’t have time

 

to win. What’s absent always keeps what’s here

a little more alive, the you in I love you populated,

 

warm, easy to mistake. My best friend called it

baggage—however, my heart, the one that’s made

 

a mess of most things, won’t be satisfied until

something’s satisfied. Our nightlight’s thick

 

in lies, preserving the kind of lust only the dead

desire as they feel for the dying deep in a pillow.

 

 

George Bishop’s work has appeared in Kentucky Review & Flare. Forthcoming work will be featured in Carolina Quarterly & Toadlilly Press. Toadlilly Press will include his latest chapbook, Short Lives & Solitudes.  Bishop won the 2013 Peter Meinke Prize at YellowJacket Press for his sixth chapbook Following Myself Home. He attended Rutgers University and lives and writes in Saint Cloud, Florida.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

RANDOLPH BRIDGEMAN

 

the poet laureate of cracker town
 
my father never wrote anything
but an IOU to his dreams 
raising five kids on the graveyard shift
sitting at the kitchen table writing checks 
on paydays the smoke from his cigarette
circling his head like an omen 
he said that he was robbing peter to pay 
paul which i’m pretty sure has something 
to do with paul hitting up the churches 
for traveling money 
paul who killed more christians than 
the coliseum lions and still he was more 
popular than peter the rock on which god 
built his church but it’s like my father said 
that’s the way it goes some people can fall
in shit and come out smelling like a rose 
which i’m pretty sure he was talking 
about my uncle who 
wrote bad checks 
went to jail
who couldn’t hold down a steady job 
and still was my grandparents favorite 


Randolph Bridgeman graduated from St. Mary's College of Maryland. His poems have been published in numerous poetry reviews and anthologies. He has three collections of poems, South of Everywhere, Mechanic on Duty, and The Odd Testament. His fourth collection of poetry The Poet Laureate of Cracker Town is forthcoming in the Fall of 2014. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

DAVID COOKE

 

Grand Designs

 

After the drip feed of bright ideas and tips

it slowly dawns upon them that the house

is past its best. It’s locked in a time warp,

where the colours are wrong

and the faded swirls of the carpets

are out of place in a scheme

they have unknowingly yearned for.

 

All it takes is TLC, elbow grease,

and a few bob which surely, at their time

of life, they can easily afford.

While she takes on the big decisions

he assumes the donkey work.

Wise with years and past mistakes, he senses

that patience will bring its own reward.

 

And so, to achieve gleaming surfaces,

he explores an archaeology

of ancient imperfection: the cheap paint

he favoured that still, decades later,

leaves its stubborn streaks in the places

where it ran; his ignorance of primers;

his half-hearted rubbing down.

 

With a long-handled roller

he has learned to make short work of ceilings.

With a steamer he softens the wood-chip

into an oatmeal pulp, beneath which

the plaster’s boxed. Hacked back

to its terra firma, he finds a man

to patch it up and  give it all a skim.

  

When he’s solved the mystery

of the pasting board – where it is, and then

where he’ll set it up like a rickety altar –

he mixes paste and spreads it

to the paper’s edges before he butts them up.

Like the pelt of a pampered racehorse,

he sleeks down each strip .

 

From then on it’s easy. A swipe of plastic

settles it all – the cushions, curtains, carpets –  

until once more in the back of their minds

they hear children squealing

who slid down a door on the stairs,

but now live hours away: they have little time

to decorate and even less for visits.

 

David Cooke won a Gregory Award in 1977 and has been widely published in the UK, Ireland and beyond. His most recent collection, Work Horses, was published in 2012 by Ward Wood Publishing. His next collection, A Murmuration, will be published by Two Rivers Press in 2015.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

MARIANNE DANIELS

 

Vampire

 

There is no real love left,

drained from the eye socket,

a small crate for a skull.

 

Around her shoulders,

her pleasant blood mark;

plunging, angry, shocking,

 

tooth-made, no-love left.

Her bones are cinnamon edged,

rust sweet when she cries –

 

metal in her mouth. This

is how a long night feels,

dried up in the twisting bed,

 

This is how it feels,

how it feels,

how it feels -

 

how it fizzes

in the morning sun.

 

 

Psoriasis

 

Under the hem of my jumper

rules of blood pinch, itch,

strange heat from 

 

my grandmother’s almost nordic

bones,

arrow grass from Irish

 

falling, where the shape of her thumb

and index bent. She couldn’t have guessed

this – that  on each,

 

we shared a shed of snow

creased over skins -

a blue frore 

 

with fire in the scales

of hurrying scales as if we were 

fish desperate to return

 

a Viking’s drowning heart.

In the sunlight, I see we are silver people,

our athletics stripped 

 

to the calcic root, pale joints

frozen, soldered

where winter found its vein.

 

 

Marianne Daniels has an MA in Creative Writing and lives and works in Manchester. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

LAURA EKLUND

 

The Casting of Bells

 

Are hidden from translations

like a black tar in the sky.

The night is a long, black oak

It’s blade a blue axel.

Apples are folding while cars ebb

to the guttural north

like a seed—

I can still smell the haystacks

from that world.

If I could feel the tenderness shatter

The light would be within.

I cook lunch, put the baby down

for a nap and wait for you.

Holding a lone and single note

Always I am waiting for you

high up on the mountain

Or under the sea of an ebbing face.

To the casting of bells

on one of those cliffs

or the smoke from a locomotive.

Where wild doves build their nests.

 

 

An August Day on Willow Drive

 

The quiet water

drops into the pool

at the bottom of the under world

evading the darkness

in its marvelous hues of dark red.

If orange was maroon

would stars still paste themselves

like ribbons and cherries?
Those sieves of tenderness?

The fans are whirring like a loud moon

as the August sun plummets dark shadows

into the speed of words

and clover changes its smell

decisive of day in red blooms.

White shirt and rosy cheeks

rise from the bed of our salty depth

like a dark current running

into red fire burning

of pure and brazen purrs.

The door turns like a curve.

You smile wide

though the stars will not jerk

with the day that overcame its reaches.

Only the flat sound

of your name will call.

 

Laura Eklund has published three collections of poetry including one selected volume. She lives in Olive Hill, Ky with the poet George Eklund. Visit her website

http://www.lauraeklund.org. She is also on Facebook, The Art of Laura Eklund.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

DEIRDRE HINES

 

Sestina

 

As bats flit flit across the wild river

and water rats surface to paddle past

the pines and oaks that cast forest shadows

that flickerdance along Beynac’s chateau

A pair of cats entwine under a moon

That dreams awake a forgotten story.

 

It’s best to close your eyes for this story

as it ferries her knight to the river

where he first made a wish upon the moon

Emblem of love and truth in ages past

that shone upon the stones of her chateau

Lying atop jagged rocky shadows.

 

Forbidden love can’t grow in dark shadows

She wants to live, not weave her own story

A Hundred Years of War, this French chateau

has fought against its foes, only if this river

dallying over sand can erase past

divides, can they entwine beneath the moon.

 

The wise ones said to find the house of moon

An old cazelle where crones scavenge shadows

To bind in trees that ties us to our past.

Journeys are like forest paths in story

That wind around the bends of a river

Always returning to that old chateau.

 

The crows that nest on top of the chateau

familiars of the crones who drew the moon

across aeons diverting the river-

Not since Bayeux have so many shadows

come back to change the meaning of story

No-one can wipe out the art of the past.

 

A swan alights, emblem of noble past

A crow circles around Beynac’s chateau

A chance encounter begins their story

The couple meet again beneath the moon

Open your eyes, not two but four shadows

are flit flitting across the wild river.

 

When love walks past the house of moon

again the old chateau rises shadows

that pull story as truth from this river.

 

Dierdre Hines’ first book of poetry, The Language of Coat was published by New Island Press in 2012. It included the poems which won the Listowel Poetry Collection in 2011. Some of these can be heard by clicking on the You Tube link on her website www.deirdrehines.com. She lives in Letterkenny, a small vibrant town on the west coast of Ireland.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

PRATIBHA KELAPURE

 

 

His Gait

 

Lately, his hand trembles when he lies awake at night.

He doesn’t remember the first quiver in his fingers,

when they began to lose the muscle memory that, by

years of holding the blue ink pen and releasing

 

trains of cursive words, he had amassed. A stray C

morphs into an O, soon, his U’s run into V’s, and

the letter train derails. Just as he makes peace with

those fallen words and defiant fingers, his steps

 

betray him. His shuffling feet in the family room

confuse his grandson. A question in the boy’s eyes

he won’t answer. He will not mention the Parkinson’s

as if saying the name would shift his life in reverse

 

 like his backward gait.

 

Pratibha Kelapure’s poetry has appeared in Sugar Mule Literary Magazine, One Sentence Poems, Mused – BellaPnline Literary Review, and other publications.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

SARAH LILIUS

 

Distorted Memory

 

My maternal grandmother’s bedroom.

A rocking chair by the open window.

Sheer curtains blow a rural summer wind.

She is dead or she isn’t.

I’m either very young or I’m not.

 

My memory is the rocking chair empty.

My hand runs smoothly along the bedspread.

My hand burns to open the closet,

to discover what was left by my grandfather

on that top shelf, a plank of wood

holding a box of his things

my grandmother refuses to go through.

 

My mother gives me his pocket change purse,

the brown leather soft and slightly cracked

but the silver metal, intact—opening and closing,

accepting change of any kind.

 

 

The Week After Your Death

 

Ants searched your house

for food, for shelter

from the rain.

 

I saw one on mother’s bed.

It crawled up my leg

and I didn’t care.

 

There was one in the medicine

cabinet wandering around

where your toothbrush was.

 

In the shower, they found

your dry soap.

I dabbed it with water,

 

touched it to my face—

the smell of you

rushed around

 

like the frantic

ants still searching

every room.

 

Sarah Lilius lives in Arlington, VA where she is a stay at home mother and poet. She is also an assistant editor for ELJ Publications. Some of her recent publications include Bluestem, Crack the Spine, and the Poetry Super Highway. Her chapbook, What Becomes Within, comes out this year.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

VIRGINIA LUCK

 

Keeper of The Dead

 

He runs his fingers through the frost-covered sand and waits

for the moon to come down on the lake

noticing every wrinkle in the water

and how they tremor like the slow moving clouds. 

His clothes are ragged and his shirt is torn. 

The skin around his eyes is sallow and flaking.

And what does it matter that she was beautiful? 

Her elegance, her shining hair means nothing. 

And what does it matter

since she walked into the lake at let the waves take her --

her dress blooming up around her like an echo?

And hour after hour there is only this grayness

this starless sky, these shapeless paths of moonlight

stretching out like the blurred and faded images of her ghost.

He thinks he too will disappear like the colors, the light, and the stars.

He thinks soon he will be no longer. 

He will no longer be cold,

when slowly it begins to happen.

Three lights blink on

one is red, one is yellow and one is a bird and the bird is singing;

its song, big and empty enough to hold two hands, two hearts, their movement

and thus for a moment his heart detaches and spills into the water

this steady stream of sadness

so cold, so bright white.

He closes his eyes and feels himself lifting off

the bird griping his shoulders

carrying him across the lake

more beautiful from above

reflecting the moon, the mountains, the light that spreads freely

up even further than he could have imagined

over the tops of the trees, the forests that expand across the land

and further up through the wind, the weather, and the clouds

to where the air is still, all black like an open field in the night

where the sound of the bird’s wings

beating the air travels in every direction for miles

can be heard in the heavens as the sound of ghosts, their voices

warm and pure and always constantly and forever spilling back toward them. 

He feels first her breath on his cheeks

smells her skin and then sees her words: 

soft and sorry and breaking open like black shining jewels all over his skin.

And the bird becomes what he could not have ever imagined

is not a bird at all

but is his grief that grows so large

inflates into the shape of silvery feathered wings

that fly crazily now

twisting and twirling and plummeting through the night

shivering in the darkness these laments of his heart: 

“I forgive you.”

“I love you.”

“I miss you.” 

He tugs at the bird’s dusky skinned ankles

claws at its soft black under feathers and yells: “I can’t take it.  I can’t!”

He didn’t know how much he loved her.

He didn’t know grief has wings and wants to be something alive.

He didn’t know it could almost bring her back

in the night sky

where a man can fall in love again and again.

It could almost bring her back

in the wings beating and eyes glancing down at him like a dark companion

glancing down at him and saying:

“Death is a way of getting to know someone.”  

 

 

Virginia Luck lives and works in the Seattle area with her husband and three kids.  She writes poetry and fiction.  Her work can be read in Pif Magazine, Burnside Writers, Otoliths, and Rawboned, where she is also an editor.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

LAURA MCKEE

 

 in the absence of your love here comes the science

 

and I am thinking about you
touching me

but I know it can never really happen

for scientific reasons

since your fingertips here
are just these whorls of atoms

 

iron filings in a random fling
linger as if something is meant

between us

intangible things

electromagnetism
and this heat is called transference

we think we can feel

but we’re pushing each other away

 

 

afterwards the gorilla went to the cafe

she kept touching the glass
between her and him
and smiling

 

they told her not to
told her
he wasn’t really smiling back

she knew they were wrong
said he always laughs

and at last

to put everything right
he came over the glass
to make

so many bite marks
with his friendly face
break all of her friendly bones

 

hitwoman

 

none of it really stood up
or held water

how she didn’t
aim for his head

 

end of
job done

get rid
instead

called his name
let him look

as she shook him
full of holes

leaking too many awful

bloody lines
 

Laura McKee started writing poetry a few years ago, by mistake.  Her poems have appeared in journals and online zines including, Aireings, Other Poetry, Obsessed With Pipework, Mouse Tales Press, Fake Poems, Nutshells and Nuggets, York Mix, Gloom Cupboard, Snakeskin.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

NEHA MOHANTY

 

Canta

 

When he was born

A flock of flamingos cooed him

To sleep, and then, awake again

And the pelicans

Pecked at his cheeks

And he saw stars

(small, but so was he).

His mother

Shooed them away

But the birds will sing

(for him)

(for now).

 

He wrote his first “s” backwards

But the magpie was

Waved aside and he

Learnt from a

“qualified children’s handwriting expert”

And his father

Closed the windows so the

Penguins couldn’t sneak in

(ever again)

yet the birds

chirp on the telephone wires.

 

He got a pair of socks for Christmas

(because Santa didn’t give a damn)

And his great aunt Gertrude

Bought him a geography textbook

and gave  his

Adventure books to charity

So all those birds

Sang a little bit quieter.

 

He forgot Pythagoras

In his maths exam so his

Teacher gave him a stinging red C

And speckled his

Short story on the zombie apocalypse with

Displeasing biro marks

And told him to

Get a grip

(but the pigeon croaked

a little longer).

 

He leans on a

Wooden stick to live 
(to survive)

He lost the bingo game (again)

And he doesn’t see stars

In the sky (anymore)

So the birds

Don’t sing

(won’t sing)

(ever again).

 

Born in India and living in London, Neha Mohanty, now 16, took up writing at the tender age of 9. While remaining in full-time education, Neha enjoys writing in her spare time, with her poetry and other works being featured in several school magazines and webzines. She hopes to study English Literature at university and pursue her dream of becoming a writer. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

ANGELA READMAN

 

The Language of Silence

 

I know the language of silent men,
the songs a room can sing of absence.

 

One spoon in a porcelain cup left
by a kettle clinks a glimpse

of mornings the sleeping missed.

The shed door opens like a bible.

Within, I learn rust, the soft psalm

a bee cupped in a palm, and lifted

 

to a window, can scribble

on a leathered hand. The vestments

of quiet men hang

 

on scaffold plank walls, sway

to hymns those who can

no longer whistle sigh, an aria

 

of winters when a man didn’t moan
it was cold, but attended the shed.

 

Such men stand in doorways listening

to wrens nesting in a coat pocket

 

amongst tissues, loose tobacco,

string -  feathers, a lighter lit up

by bubbling, churrs and scolds.

 

 

The Topography of Tears
 

Once they are dry, we photograph

our tears, press a pool between glass plates
as if stepping onto a frozen lake. 

 

We can barely blink at the microscope. 
Here, our sobs are silent, so small, a pipette
of water that thought it was an ocean

- How did we believe we would drown?
There is nothing to do but smear fog
off the lens, lean in and click, drop 

by drop, each tear as what it is. Beautiful,
unique as hands reaching out, breaking
away, a fingerprint of our sodden hearts.
 

The stills of our tears remind us

of deserts quaked in cracks, pale islands

floating closer on nights we laughed

 

until we ached in places we didn't know we had.

They are a rain of grief that leaked out of us

clearing cities into and almost blank page.

 

And, surprisingly, frost, a close up of onions

opening up a frozen faucet, somehow

scattering stars over our ordinary days.

 

Angela Readman's poems won the Mslexia Poetry Competition, and The Essex Poetry Prize, and been commended in Cafe Writers, the Arvon International Poetry Competition, and the Cardiff. She was published by Salt and is working on another collection.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

PAUL M. STROHM

 

God Is Good And Holy

 

When I was a child, you said

“God is good and holy.  Look at the sky boy.

See the birds, the clouds and all the bright stars.

God is good and holy.  Look up boy!”

 

I looked and they were good. I asked

“Where does God live and why?

And can God ever die? Can he?

Does he hear everything I say?”

 

You patted my head so softly, you said

“There are things that can't be understood.

Not all your questions will be answered.

You will learn silence and you will cry.”

 

I grew up clinging to your directions, I asked

“Why didn't you ever question? Why?

God is good and holy can’t be all there is.

Surely there is more, surely something more.”

 

You wanted a small quiet spot. 

I visit when I can.

I have learned silence.

I have learned to cry.

 

Paul M. Strohm is a freelance journalist working in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in HuKmag.com, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative, The Lake, WiND, and other literary outlets.  His first collection of poems entitled Closed On Sunday is scheduled to be published in late 2014 by the Wellhead Press.  He worked at the Humanities Research Center at UT-Austin cataloguing the correspondence of D.H. Lawrence.  If he had to count the number of times D. H. wrote that imaginative  line, “ Dear ____. How are you?” he would never read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

NANCY LYNÉE WOO

 

Memory Machine

 

Science says that the memory of our ancestors
may be passed down through genes.

 

That mice electrocuted to fear the scent of cherry blossoms
have offspring who also fear cherry blossoms.

 

My grandfather had a red beard.
Never knew his mother.

 

His mother.

Spat him out and gave him away.
Or they took him away,
no one is sure.

 

Whether she may have grown
to love him or not.

 

Lost in the backwards of time,
the rape never recorded.

 

Must have been about

a century ago, around 1915
in some small village eastward from here.

 

The men, taught to conquer.

Conquistadors we called them.
Their glory, our wombs.

 

Why I cringe when a man much larger than me
scowls, perhaps my DNA remembers
the bittersweet scent of cherry
blossoms wilting.

 

Nancy Lynée Woo spends her free time hitching a ride to the other side of maybe. She is co-founder and editor of a social justice-based literary press called Lucid Moose Lit.  Often caught cavorting around Long Beach, CA, this poet can also be found at www.nancylyneewoo.com.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

THOMAS ZIMMERMAN

 

The Guide

 Musée National Message Biblique Marc-Chagall, Nice

 

The closest that we get to God is when

we love another person, says our guide,

Chagall enthusiast, Parisienne,

who shuts her eyes to explicate the wide

array of angels, flowers, women, goats,

and men, most bent and smiling, upside-down

or floating, flying, paired—And this connotes

the child-like ecstasy that even grown-

up people feel when they’re in love, I hear

her say, her eyes still shut, so diva/muse

intense and beautiful to me I fear

my mind’s and heart’s responses, think I’ll lose

my bearings, drift with figs and donkeys, steer

myself to earthy-reds, not heaven-blues.

 

 

Wind

 

I cursed the wind this morning, walking west                     

with restive dogs and wife, my feelings best                      

repressed. Or sculpted here. I lack the wind                       

to write a novel, but I jealously                                                 

disparage co-conspirators in truth-                                         

behind-the-lie by saying so. That ode                                    

to wind that Shelley sings so zealously                                  

is muse- and mind-tooled art I’m too uncouth                   

to ape. And what of woodwinds buried deep                    

within this Mahler Fifth? Their iTunes-thinned-                 

out sound’s still rich and strange enough to steep                           

my tight-packed heart in essences too rare                        

for any waking lexicons. This code                           

I’ll learn with time, in dreams, in open air.           

 

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012. Tom's Website:  http://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE