2014

 

 

DECEMBER ARCHIVE

 

 

Edilson Afonso Ferreira, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Laura M. Kaminski, Kevin D. LeMaster,

 Michael Mark, Devon Marsh, Kushel Paddar, Bethany W. Pope, Richard Thomas,

Diane Tucker, Igor Harry Vesmensky, Annette Volfing, Justin Watkins

 

 

 

 

 

EDILSON AFONSO FERREIRA

 

 

My history says.

 

I hear from silence, the more silence I have,

the more I hear.

Then, my soul connects with every sort of souls,

some I am acquainted to, some unknown.

Mainly when I am at my church, no mass or cult being,

angels and saints say they know me since my early days,

yet before I was born, even before I was conceived and

only drawn on the dreams of young loving couple.

They say they do not forget joy and hope I caused

and that this is spelled with all words in my history,

forever and ever.

I believe in their words, are not they angels and saints?

Then, a renewed man goes home.

A defiant and reliant one.

 

 

Edilson Afonso Ferreira is a Brazilian poet who writes in English rather than Portuguese, in order to reach more people. Has been published in four printed British Anthologies, online or printed reviews like Cyclamens and Swords, Right Hand Pointing, Boston Poetry Magazine, West Ward Quarterly, TWJ Magazine and some others. Short-listed in four American Poetry Contests, began to write after retirement as a Bank Manager, is seventy-one years old, lives in a small town with wife, three sons and a granddaughter.

 

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ANNE-MARIE FYFE

 

The House at World' End

 

Dwelling, Hiraki Sawa, 2002

 

Every room in the house congested

with airborne replicas, nose to tail:

Lancasters, Harriers, Messerschmitts.

Late flights are grounded by midnight.

Then radio silence until first light,

when he launches them one by one,

taxiing off from dressing-tables,

worktops, any level surface: watches them skim

mirrors, toothmugs, steers them safely

past lightbulbs, the telltale signs,

small vapour trails across bathroom tiles.

I’m advised to keep my head low,

tune into the sudden close hum,

the waspishness of a tiny Mig fighter.

One by one they learn to adapt

to emergency flightpath restrictions,

the indeterminacy of destinations.

 

 

What the Dead Don't Know

 

Grows quickly, daily, from the perimeter

of a postage stamp, until it’s twice the size

of Norway, and growing fast.

 

What the deceased can’t understand

is why they don’t still hear from us

day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

 

What the departed don’t see

is how the lead story has moved on.

 

What the dead won’t say

is more or less what they didn’t say

when they had the chance. Diplomacy,

tact, reserve: these things endure.

 

Anne-Marie Fyfe (b. Cushendall, Co. Antrim) has four collections of poetry including Understudies: New and Selected Poems and a fifth collection, House of Small Absences,due from Seren Books in Spring 2015; has won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Prize; has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings and workshops at London’s leading live literature venue, the Troubadour, since 1997, organises the annual Hewitt Spring Festival in the Glens of Antrim, and was chair of the Poetry Society from 2006-2009. http://www.annemariefyfe.com/

 

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LAURA M. KAMINSKI

 

Sands of Home 

after, and with lines from, Bliss Carman's "A Vagabond Song" 

I watch the drooping autumn 
leaves through the frost-edged 
window, place my brush back 

on the palette, close my eyes 
and take another walk through 
the mausoleum of my memories, 

and my heart is like a rhyme, 
with the yellow and the purple 
and the crimson keeping time 

and I find I've wandered further 
than I meant, my feet are bare again 
and scuffing dust upon the road 

leading to old Kano, red clay 
walls, then trickles north, half-paved 
remains of the Trans-Sahara highway. 

And the scarlet of the maples 
can shake me like a cry, yet my hand 
refuses to sketch these temperate 

trees upon the canvas -- it is always 
like this when I try, my heart a steadfast 
stone too loyal to its origins, 

it will not paint the autumn but 
returns again, again to the scarlet 
of the flame tree, branches burning, 

lit with petals, again the purple 
blossoms weeping from the jacaranda, 
again the pale yellow promise 

of the guava's skin, the bite 
of sweet pink, swallowed seeds. Truly 
something in the autumn calls me, 

calls and calls each vagabond 
by name, calls in each wave, vast 
separation ocean, rounds and echoes 

off of every hill of flame, 
finds me beside this frosting window 
with my camel-stubborn paintbrush, 

every year, still painting 
sands of home. 

Laura M Kaminski grew up in Nigeria, went to school in New Orleans, and currently lives in rural Missouri. She's an Associate Editor at Right Hand Pointing; her poetry blog is at arkofidentity.wordpress.com.
 

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KEVIN D. LEMASTER

 

Dead Cat

 

when our kids were little

I would explain death

by making the face

a cat makes just before breath leaves

its face frozen

 

they would giggle

and make the face themselves

mimicking the half open eye

the bared teeth

 

the small spittle

dripping from one side

like pus from open sores

simulating all things dead

 

when their grandma died

we could no longer replace

her with the dead cat

 

her body slaked

in her moment of sleep

 

not mangled

not torn by passing car

 

not the half smile

a cat would have

after choking on canary feathers

its last great meal

seen from the outside

in

 

Kevin D. LeMaster has written since high school but more seriously in the past seven years. His poetry has been inspired by many people, including, but not limited to, Robert Frost, Billy Collins, Henrietta Goodman and Edgar Allan Poe. He currently works as a student of poetry, and has served as poetry editor for Silhouette magazine, and prose editor for Twizted Tungz. His works have appeared in several journals both online and print, and he has participated in Tupelo Press' 30/30 project. He currently resides in Northern Kentucky with his wife and children.

 

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MICHAEL MARK

 

The trees' prayer  

 

May our falling leaves

not cause too much frustration

for this lonely man.

 

So that he doesn’t really

“Chop us down.”

 

They are our way

of keeping him active.

 

A promise made

to his concerned wife

before her passing.

 

May all baby birds

make it safely

into the air. 

 

Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared in Angle Journal, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Empty Mirror, Forge Journal, The Lake, Lost Coast Review, New Verse News, Petrichor Review, Ray’s Road Review, Scapegoat Journal, Spillway, Red Booth Review, Toe Good Poetry, Wayfarer and other journals. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

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DEVON MARSH

 

Lucky Place

 

Seldom do I arrive

at a store to find

a vacant space

close to the door.

On this Saturday I do.

When I drive up

to the studio

where my daughter

dances, I see

a front-row space.

My headlights turn

toward me in

the window,

stare a moment

to size me up.

They fade out

when I turn the key.

Then I see

my reflection

in the pane, and through

myself I see my daughter

dancing in place,

watching herself

in the mirrored wall

that makes the room

seem so large.

She doesn’t see

me behind her,

cannot see my reflection

watching me in the car

watch my little girl dance.

 

 

Devon Marsh served as U.S. Navy pilot and now works as a risk manager for Wells Fargo Bank. Father of three and husband of a night-shift nurse, his poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Dark Matter, the Kakalak Anthology. Visit his blog  http://devonmarsh.com/poetry/ 

 

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KUSHAL PODDAR

 

Here Colors Return In Autumn/Winter 

 

I cannot say I see all

the colors its wings display, 

I’m told, thirteen in total,

flapping and fluttering into

one- everyone has his blindness,

and in early November

aged butter thistles fly

everywhere in the air.

My brother’s blood-work comes back,

bad news all over it. I 

find him in the yard, pushing

a needle of light into his tumor.

 

  

Frightened, We Lost Our Soul

 

From the hollow grassland inside

the skull of a small animal

dusk crawls out, its tail skyward, 

shivering, warning about 

the death it does not hold but

pretends to have there, and when

 

my brother picks it up I shriek. 

He drops it, lets it creep before 

he crushes it to night. The ants 

will take care of everything,

he says. I'm not afraid of that, 

brother. I am not afraid of that.

 

 

Summertime Necklace

I can go back into the summer pond
and retrieve her lost necklace, but you know 
that a string of time never survives time.

Those small pebbles scattered, the evening drug
dragging all shadows on back of the haze,
I wait for the half eaten leaf to fall
from three fingers of a writhing bough.
On the water your orange beads skip
towards the darkness. Everything means
something I didn't mean to say but say nonetheless.

 

Kushal Poddar has been widely published in various anthologies including The Company of Women, Pen International, and has featured in various radio programs in Canada and The USA. He is presently living in Kolkata, Inda and writing poetry, fiction and scripts for short films when not engaged in his day job as a counsel/lawyer in the High Court At Calcutta. He authored The Circus Came to My Island and the forthcoming books Kafka Dreamed of Paprika and A Place for Your Ghost Animals.

 

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BETHANY W. POPE

 

Persephone Walks the Winding Road

 

 

1.

The Raven

 

Even Death has a secret. This Raven –

very old (passably wise) – was the girl’s

exclusive keeper. ‘It’s hard.’ She said, ‘I

remember a dark corridor whose thin

yew-wood walls glistened with sap beads, like blood.

Stay with me, Spirit Bird. I’ve gone blind. The

terrible black has whited my eyes. Yea,

only you can guide me out.’ Raven thought.

‘Returning to the Sunlit Lands, where Death –

your lover – fears to follow, would kill this

bird. But I know the way out of this Hell.

Even if it kills me, I’ll lead you.’ A

groan parted his black beak. He plucked three thin

iridescent feathers to light the road.

 

2.

 

Three feathers for eyes;

replacements for the

twins Death stole from her

skull to trap her here.

Two in her sockets,

 

one clutched in her fist

to illuminate

secret paths. Raven

gave her all he had.

He’d dreamt of sunshine –

 

he was Apollo’s,

in another life;

before he was Death’s.

The castle walls were

thick. The girl dug through

 

fast. Her tattered bird

rested like a soul

(exhausted) on her

thin, corpse-white shoulder.

She ran. Death gave chase.

 

The forest was dark,

filled with howling wolves.

The moon was a bowl,

full of fresh blood. Death

ruled over it all.

 

 

3.

The Wolf

 

The woman was naked when I found her,

hands and feet bloody and torn. She said, ‘I

escaped through the wall, clawed my way from Hell.

Just these hands, these torn nails bored through wood. No

ordinary prison – it was rich, you

understand – lined with silken tapestries,

redolent with fine perfume. But the bones

never stopped stinking. The dead weren’t quiet.’

Even a one-eyed wolf like myself, a

young, hungry predator, has some pity.

I knelt before her, said, ‘Now, saddle up.

Step lively. This forest speaks through blood. You

pretend not to hear it, or you’ll find your

escape blocked by clawed branches.’ We ran free.

 

4.

 

Wolf knew his sister

when he saw her. Thin,

filth-streaked, but lovely

to him. Wolf carried

her through the Forest

 

of the Suicides

where the dead whispered

through bloody bark-wounds

opened by harpies.

Death has dramatic

 

flair. He knows every

dark atmospheric

trick. Hanged man’s Forest

opened up into

The Swamp of Despair

 

where wet, mummified

corpses curled – foetal –

awaiting re-birth.

The swamp ended at

the foot of the mount,

 

the white path climbing

through desolate rocks

where there was no sound

of wind or water,

and the damned keened loud.

 

 

5.

The Woman

 

Death, my lover, pursued me. He saw my

escape and gave chase through his gray land. No

argument could sway or slow him down. You

thought borrowed wings, the wild wisdom of Crow,

helped by Wolf’s white teeth, claws, could save you? I

wish. Magic isn’t enough. I climbed that

invisible staircase, that Orphic path

leading out into sunlight. The sweet breath

(life, it smelled like life) blew through the door. I

Thought I heard the meadowlarks singing. Lies.

Enough for centuries. The road from Hell

moves beneath your feet. Out shifts to In. No

path leads away from His castle. The shiv

that impales you is knowledge: this is Home.

 

6.

 

My friends lent me all

the virtues they had.

Raven gave his wings,

Wolf, his teeth and claws.

It came to nothing.

 

I climbed the mountain,

tasted the warm breath

of spring on my tongue.

I found the rough hole

leading out into

 

daylight. I pushed through

the gap like a child

being brutally

born. I squeezed between

the jaws of the earth

 

expecting to find

the field Death plucked me

from so long ago.

Instead, I landed,

breathless, back inside

 

His blackened, skull-lined

throne-room. It was as

if I’d never left.

Death smiled, dressed me in

my old silks. I wept.

 

Bethany W. Pope is an award winning author of the LBA, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards, the Cinnamon Press Novel competition, and the Ink, Sweat and Tears poetry commission and she was commended for the Poetry London competition. She received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program. She is Assistant Editor at Epignois Quarterly and has published three poetry collections; A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), and The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014). Her third full collection Undisturbed Circles has been accepted by Lapwing Press and shall be released later this year, and her fourth, Persephone in the Underworld has been accepted by Rufus Books and shall be released in 2016. Her work has appeared in many magazines including: Envoi; Poetry London;  Poetry Review Salzburg; Every Day Poems; Magma; Ink, Sweat and Tears; The Antigonish Review and the anthologies The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear); Gothic Anthology (Parthian Books); and Raving Beauties (Bloodaxe Books).

 

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RICHARD THOMAS

 

In Memory of the Travelled Gardener

 

He tidied up their vegetable plot,

plump marrows and spindly rhubarb

addressed with equal measure,

 

and he thought how he might like his own,

a garden – a home, similarly -

the moon projected its ghost’s face out

 

like a white cone over all of the plots

and the junk-heaps of the wired city -

some kind of up-all-night type city -

 

sweet potatoes warmed in the soil,

and he heard the worms sliding about

all up and around them as he lay,

 

his cheek and then his ear growing cold,

as his head sunk in to the plot for sleep,

dreaming of Paris, Omaha, Berlin.

 

 

Candy Darling in Conversation with Him and Herself

 

After ‘Candy Says’ by The Velvet Underground

 

I can clink the china now, fingernails

like drying roses now, as the nail polish

I have eyed up, since I started skipping

showers at high school, cracks – is this hair

 

too peroxide, these eyes too heavily

pancaked? – and my lips can mark their blot on

the mug I pull up to sip off, like the

 

crayon kiss that marked the jacket of my

bumper book for boys; coffee at Max’s is

real good, it’s like hot treacle slopping my

tongue; good to sit down a while, take the

 

weight off my bloody heels, these white ones

are skin-splitters (bone and blister), but it’s

paid off with every look; it all started

 

with the shoe and his gristly face full and

apple red – as he slipped it in slow I

wriggled, a quick shove and a grunt and it

was done, I had my shoes; I’d seen those Long

 

Island girls – all height, legs, wonderfully

shaved – the cotton of my mother’s skin was

desirable; so here I am, thinking:

 

oh, ‘Jimmy’ really is just not going

to do at all, and ‘Hope Slatterly’ won’t

cut it – The Golden Girls had such lovely

names, and Jane Fonda was such a doll (sweet

 

Barbarella); I slurp down on the rest

of the mug before the milk begins to

curdle, sticks in my throat – is this decaf?

 

Richard Thomas lives in Plymouth, England, where he studies an MA in Creative Writing; he is Creative Writing Editor at Tribe Magazine, and his poems and haiku have been published internationally; Richard's first collection of poems The Strangest Thankyou was published by Cultured Llama in 2012.

 

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DIANE TUCKER

 

The Wine

 

White wine isn’t white; it’s golden.

It’s light through wet linen.

It’s the throat licked cool by a slow lover.

Candlelight’s cradle strung for your weary limbs.

 

Every movement in the cloud of wine is en pointe,

an arabesque held precisely, sharp as a scythe.

Every finger runs with pale fire. Every thought

is revelation, is ultimate, is the secret of eternal life.

 

O wine, you ardent admirer, you flatterer,

you stand on the beautiful border

between spouse and stalker. How do I break free?

How love any other with my whole body,

with the firm tangent of my entire body?

 

Winter without you is a muddy path.

Rain’s long nights parch me, their dry darkness.

 

I’m not kidding. How do I get out from under

you, the one who fills my whole body

with desire that is its own fulfillment, with the love

of love, with love loving its own unceasing golden desire?

 

 

Canadian poet Diane Tucker has published three poetry books (God on His Haunches, Nightwood Editions, 1996; Bright Scarves of Hours, Palimpsest Press, 2007; Bonsai Love, Harbour Publishing, 2014) and a YA novel (His Sweet Favour, Thistledown Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in over sixty literary journals in Canada and abroad. 

 

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IGOR HARRY VESMENSKY

 

Two poems

 

The bitter haze froze in mid air

like a wingless song.

You liked your tea without sugar.

The slices of the lemon,

steeped into the dawn,

were bleeding on the saucer,

when my shadow fainted  

and touched your picture on the wall.

The autumn

was weeping in the kitchen

like a lonely she wolf. 

 

 

I'm ready for a flood.

The traffic light is my lighthouse.

I'm sailing through the staves

like a forgotten note,

nowhere,

silenced

by this unstoppable toccata,

sheets of the score are being torn by winds.

Here comes a lightening.

An angry question mark?

But I no longer have an answer.

Here comes a thunder!

Fugue in D minor.

 

 

Igor Harry Vesmensky is an English teacher, 48 years of age, speaking 3 languages - English, Hebrew and Russian. He lives in a small town in the middle of Israel, currently. vefig@netvision.net.il

 

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ANNETTE VOLFING

 

Exposure
 
You are the khaki dust,
the splintered light,
the precise point
 
when the temperature rises
from hot to fucking hot,
as it did that day in the Namib desert
when we reached Solitaire;
 
you bulge with pockets,
clank with straps;
 
you are a washed-out scarf,
a rash of sun-burn, smeared with cream,
a sweaty cap, a grin, a final click
of gravelled lust –
  
 
 Christmas Eve
 
 You will read out Isaiah’s gospel of straw while the guinea-pigs squirm in my lap
We will pin little bells to our sweaters
I will stir the rice pudding for over an hour – spoon in my left hand, phone in my right
 We will finish a bottle of Chateau Ksara while we’re still cooking; will remember the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah and the Song of Songs
We will eat figs with the lights off and hear candles fizz on the tree
We will stay up almost to midnight, but not quite
 

Annette Volfing is an academic teaching medieval German literature at Oxford University.  Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in a number of magazines, including Magma, The Interpreter's House, Antiphon, The North, Other Poetry, Ink Sweat and Tears, Obsessed with Pipework, Snakeskin, Structo, and Under the Radar.

 

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JUSTIN WATKINS

 

Waiting in a Stranger’s North Dakota Home

 

He set various ammunition

On the dining room table

Told us about the day a tornado

Picked up his sister’s house

 

Picked it up

Spun it around
Set it down

Quarter mile away

 

We nodded and fingered
Heavy stamped cartridges

Heavy brass and silver colors

Meant for taking things apart

 

And hell, the crows, too

They’d sweep in, big murders

Just savage the grain fields

We gassed ‘em but EPA stopped us

 

Sun through windows

All slant dust motes

No one spoke

A few long ticks

 

The house sour, abandoned
Curse words piled in corners

Peeking out from behind

Fading family photographs

 

Floods too, we’ve been stricken

With any number of plagues

He sucked the thick atmosphere

Through his acrid cigarette

 

Ammunition of various shapes

Do you know what this is

Yeah, we know what this is

And we set them down

 

Heavy brass and silver colors

Loud on the cheap veneered table

They were heavy on his family table

And we walked out

 

 

Holy Water Road

 

We found a spined pig

High in a tree
A forager

 

Just off the two-track
Holy Water Road

Circa 1980

A wandering father
A son, quiet under

Hooded sweatshirt

The gray, orange of fall
And he asked me
Should I shoot it

That porcupine
Should I shoot it
Just there in the tree

And the decider
Slow to reply, then
Yeah, shoot it

Are you sure
Yeah, shoot it
From high in the tree

It fell loose and heavy
Obscure in leaf litter
And we walked on

 

Justin Watkins lives in the bottom-right corner of Minnesota.  His poems have been published in The Talking Stick, Lindenwood Review, Minneapolis Star Tribune and regional anthologies.

 

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