2018

 

 

 

FEBRUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

Jan Ball, Debbie Collins, James Gering, Adam Gunther, Carol Levin, Todd Mercer,

 Ronald Moran, Deepa Onkar, Winston Plowes, Fiona Sinclair, J. R. Solonche,

Grant Tarbard, Dale Wisely.

 

 

 

 

 

JAN BALL

 

Exhalations

 

Your exhalations

in my study, where

you sleep

after your long travels,

make the spiderwort grow

greener on the windowsill;

 

the cactus blooms

with little blue flowers

when your garlic breath

permeates its spikes and

the mother-in-law tongues

stand straight as Vatican

guards inhaling Italian air.

 

During the day,

with you gone, I sit

at my desk, mindlessly

shaking the snow globe

you brought back for me

with the Cathedrale

Saints-Maria Majeure

de Marseillie trapped

in the middle of a blizzard

I create although I’ve

only seen the church

in breathless summer.

 

I know Isle d’if is just

across the bay where

Dumas let his character

almost drown when he

escaped from prison,

gasping for air as he

crawled onto the mainland

rocks exhausted, then later

became the Count of Monte

Christo who exuded lavender

but was venomous with revenge

in every breath he took.

 

252 of Jan Ball’s poems appear in journals such as: Calyx, Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, Nimrod, and Phoebe, in Great Britain, Canada, India and the U.S. Jan’s two chapbooks, accompanying spouse (2011) and Chapter of Faults (2014), were published with Finishing Line Press as well as her first full-length collection, I Wanted to Dance with my Father (2017). When not working out, gardening at their farm or traveling, Jan and her husband like to cook for friends.

 

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DEBBIE COLLINS

 

Hey Sugar

watching you fish that cherry

out of the bottom of your drink

was the sweetest thing I'd seen in a while

 

you were drinking a something-rickey

and had drained the glass, leaving

a cherry and an orange slice

at the very bottom, under a glacier of ice

 

your determination showed

as you bit your bottom lip and

stabbed at your prey with a straw

that was smudged with your lipstick

 

you finally got that cherry, and when

you ordered another drink, you said

"please put the cherry on top"

Debbie Collins is a Richmond, Virginia native, and usually writes about irredeemable people in untenable situations.  She is a chaos magnet.  This poem is a departure for her, as there is some hope and fun in it. Cheers for her drinking buddy.

 

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JAMES GERING

 

Aaron’s Favourite Avenue in the Blue Mountains

 

Aaron and Zoey rode their push bikes beyond

       the apple trees on the ridge where perky llamas posed

            in pairs heads cocked, as if waiting for an event of magnitude.

 

The lovers passed the prison warden’s house that Aaron viewed for sale

  during the ailing years of his marriage when he’d nursed the hope

       a tree change, a retreat to nature, could fix anything.

 

Aaron had met the prison warden’s wife in the billiards room.

           She’d hung back, a shadow. The warden said she wanted to go back

                   to her home town of Lithgow, friends waiting.

 

The lovers pedalled up the spine of Mt Blackheath, the avenue flanked

               by trees leaning in, boosting them the way cycling fans

on mountain roads support their favourites heaving past.

 

The road succumbed to gravel and the lovers slowed a little

       as the summit opened out, revealing orange cliffs plummeting

                                 to green-hued pastures lining the valley floor.

 

             Aaron and Zoey rode side-by-side into the clearing at the end

       set down their bikes and followed a faint track into a glade

where they lay in pleasure like newly minted spouses.

 

James Gering has been a diarist, poet and short story writer for many years. His poetry and fiction have won awards and have appeared in a number of journals including Rattle (#56), Every Writer, Meanjin and Cordite. 

 

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ADAM GUNTHER

 

July 4th

 

In this bar

There is no country music playing,

there are no American flags hanging from the ceilings.

 

There are old men and women eating carnitas,

sucking on $2 beer and fingering with their motorcycles in

95 degree heat.

 

In this time

where it's so

fashionable to be draped in

plastic patriotism

or

"daring" hatred of ones'

chosen home,

I remain steadfastly proud of this American life.

 

Black homosexuals walk in

and take the stools next to mine.

The mature, toned Latina bartender knows them each by name.

Why are *each* of us here?

A complex question, but a fun one

for a poet.

 

Yes,

how many Americans will find themselves

bedded with a lover tonight?

how many Americans will remove the pubes from their tongue with a smile on their dirty little faces?

 

We've all come from somewhere else,

for this moment.

 

It certainly doesn't exist everywhere

or in abundance,

not even in the

Once Sacred

white house.

 

But in this shit bar

in an impoverished,

post-industrial,

rusted out,

shit neighborhood

here we are:

smiling and celebrating,

until it's time to go home and fuck our loved one.

 

Perhaps *that's* the American spirit at work,

or perhaps,

the same spirit exists in Lithuania,

or Colombia,

or Sierra Leone.

 

Or maybe not.

 

I've never been to any of those places but for some reason

I have a hard time believing it.

 

or at the very least this place is my home,

our home,

and it's worth believing in.

there's work to do!

But it can all wait,

until we're done fucking,

and working,

and fucking working.

 

It feels as if America is built

one cheap, cold beer at a time.

 

Adam Gunther is a 21 year old up-and-coming poet who hails from Bay City, Michigan but now living in the gritty part of Chicago. His work has been published in Sun and Sandstone Magazine, Dark Run Review, Word Fountain, and an upcoming issue of Edify Magazine. 

 

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CAROL LEVIN

 

Red Industriously Brighter Now

 

Go-getters count moist money earned 

by surrounding a mouth in the gaudy 

 

lip of profit for what red lips mean to men.

Smooth face-skin, pulsing melanin 

 

pigment of a blazoned vermillion zone, 

is a cupid’s-bow protuberance.

 

Flashes, flares, and flames load bids 

on the curved circumference of the fringe’s 

 

tactile sensory organ to pleasure you, 

not to articulate sound through the aperture

 

sound flows. Not to pucker-into trumpet, 

clarinet, flute and sax, but shove gloss as a

 

lasciviously bright spit in your eye asset. 

Cleopatra’s red sometimes included lead,

 

bright from crushed carmine beetles and ants 

in a blend of castor oil and wax or olive oil or mineral 

 

oil mixed with those boiled cochineal bugs, insects 

that live on prickly cacti, stewed bodies bubbled 

 

to velvet in ammonia. Suck, dear, our plumped 

pillows fuming, imagine drinking-in dye laying 

 

a lip over these lips, imagine gulping lovely

net gross globed-on payrolls of goo. 

 

 

Then Everyone Ate Cake

 

My semi-transparent cheeks and unsteady

heart give notice, desperate for potassium.          

High time to titillate appetite.

 

Described as a light soft

silver-white metallic element

found disguised in sun-colored

 

dried apricots and sheltered within

green buds of broccoli, cabbagy green

brussels sprouts, green

 

spinach-green, nature’s amalgamation

of yellow and blue. 

Sensationalize with a smoosh of red 

 

to proffer the mineral corrective

for misfiring muscle contractions 

as molecules teeter

off balance, precipitating mortal weakness.

 

Oh sweet

potato feed me sweet potato.

Better yet draped in soft light, ply

me with deep cut dark red, 

a dense

 

red so much 

more than a raisin more than crimini mushroom

certainly more than one raw lettuce leaf.

Your husky essential nutrient

 

your mineral throated heart shaped

self is an is, you are, oh strawberry,

between my lips.

 

Carol Levin is the author of two full volumes: Confident Music Would Fly Us to Paradise, MoonPath Press 2014 & Stunned By the Velocity, Pecan Grove Press 2012 & two chapbooks. She’s an Editorial Assistant on the journal, Crab Creek Review. She teaches The Breathing Lab / Alexander Technique in Seattle.

 

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TODD MERCER

 

The Sexton’s Lunch Break

 

The needle moves an inch on the historical record,

then I’m done and in a graveyard, which is mowed

nicely right now. I bought rights to a rectangle

of ground, before I took the job

digging other people’s rectangles. On lunch hour

I sit in my own plot to get more familiar with it,

In case after I die awareness trails my body,

before it flies off to the next incarnation.

Or to Nothing. Science isn’t sure.

My time spent here on Earth equals

an accidental crackle in one track’s groove,

one track on one album. No one knows

the size of the record collection. I’m a crackle

that sounds like smudged fingers

marred the playing surface. The insignificance

is hard to accept. But it grants latitude, perspectivizes

mundane bullshit that comes with a day.

Will this matter X years from now? The answer—

Almost always, No. And that moment passes.

The record itself won’t last indefinitely. Intelligent aliens

who visit from far galaxies in search of friends

or free labor might think this rock was always empty.

I can’t visualize that far ahead and feel attached

to a given outcome. I can mow my own grave though.

And do. I eat my sandwich sitting here, old man resting,

a crackle in a track, closer to the closer

than the opening riffs. That doesn’t worry me.

This is a good life. It’s enough to live it.

 

 

Nowhere International is a Humor-Free Zone

 

Today’s lesson: crack no jokes at airports. Curtail that. We don’t say, “bomb”

in the slang sense unless we mean exactly “bomb,” and we’re eager

to be treated like assholes moving explosives. Terrorists.

 

At the TSA checkpoints we refrain from weed-related quips. Otherwise,

the blood-chilling snap of gloves going on and a talk heavy on “orifices.”

Pernicious security creep, the shift from customers to suspects. A slow smear job.

 

Definitely don’t shout “hijack,” in there, unless you crave

the fleeting fifteen minutes of dubious fame. Maybe a masochist would

like to watch their own beatdown footage on the news networks

 

from a small cell while the ACLU lawyers dicker with the prosecutors

over fine distinctions such as who’s a harmless smart aleck and who

is a monster bent on crashing planes. Use that healthy brain, Hat-rack.

 

Please stow the next public Civics lesson on free countries and the sacred right

of self-expression. Don’t air that out while boarding the Denver connector

between Club Fed and the Home for the Wrongfully Defamed. Refrain.

 

TODD MERCER won the Dyer-Ives Kent County Prize for Poetry (2016), the National Writers Series Poetry Prize (2016) and the Grand Rapids Festival Flash Fiction Award (2015). His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, appeared at Right Hand Pointing. Mercer's poetry and fiction appear in EXPOUND, Peacock Journal, and Vending Machine Press.

 

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RONALD MORAN

 

Like an omen in a dream,

 

last night a bird hit the large window

in my office, and, as the usual beings

prepared feast rituals, I picked it up

 

and buried it out back in the flood

zone, deep enough so that the rush

of ready predators, all sizes, might

 

pause before plying their death skills,

even though they circled the mound

as it befit their instincts, but, finding

 

no signs, moved on, just as we would

after the death of loved ones, now or

then, time like an open door on grief.

 

 

New Year's Day

 

I said Happy New Year to my dead wife

                        and parents

when I awakened this morning, after a-not-

                        too-inviting

New Year's Eve, but one time follows

                        another

 

with so many cross-fertilizations and lives

                        that

I am never freed of my own imperfections,

                        as if,

say, it rains vigorously on the day before,

                        will

 

a clear and dry sky in the morning serve

                        as redemption

for swollen streams and rivers flooding

                        lands,

houses, the lives of too many people I know

                        and love?

 

Ronald Moran lives in South Carolina. His poems have been published in Asheville Poetry Review, Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. In 2017 he was inducted into Clemson University's inaugural AAH Hall of Fame.

 

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DEEPA ONKAR

 

Fruit market near the Chao Praya

 

Fruit glow on the pier

like uncut precious stones

on the body of a river-god

Dragonfruit,Rambutan

Mangosteen. I roll the names

on my tongue, taste

their strangeness

murmuring the syllables

as if they were a fragment

of a chant.

 

Now I sit by a flank

of the grey-blue water

and let my teeth battle

hesitantly, with spike and spur

and integument.

The piquant juice floods

my tongue; I match taste

to colour, sound

to the sudden glimmerings

of a silken light in the sky.

Dusk is here, and I need

a mnemonic to recall the licit

beauty of this moment

when I return home.

Passers-by brush past

boatmen call out the names

of hotels and ancient temples.

 

 

Khlong poem

 

Out my taxi window

this watery Khlong;

Luang – long,

infinitely long

reinventing the straight line.

A sort of life runs by it

parallel. Dilapidated

huts, an empty hammock

children playing:

by the axiom never

meeting the dappled

green. We weave past women

as they fish. Old trees

paint in more dimensions

with the brush-ends of

branches: a wisp of a wind,

the sky, fluttering reeds.

Then, empty factories

burnt out, violent smells.

Travel and abstraction

are useless, dangerous – some old

avuncular voice in the head

says. I cannot find

a retort. The shimmering

half-moons of sunlight flash

reassuringly again, calm

the metre of my breath,

the rhythms of heartbeat.

The journey turns

swiftly pellucid; just

in time, I remember

to take the right turn.

The body finds a home

in itself, only after much

observation, much movement.

I rest my case.

 

Deepa Onkar currently lives in Merseyside, United Kingdom. She grew up in Chennai and Hyderabad, India, and obtained degrees in Maths and English Literature at Universities there. Her life has recently been filled with travel and adventure but she hopes to settle down to a more routine life soon. She has been an educator, editor and journalist. Her poems have been published at the Sunflower Collective and are forthcoming at Vayavya.

 

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WINSTON PLOWES

 

Visiting Hours at HMS Royal Oak

 

Flicking through thumbnails of your ship

on the Free Wi-Fi in St. Magnus’ Café,

our hands shielding X-rays on the screen

through the milky-green

one hundred foot down in Scapa.

 

Then later, fingers fidgeted with flotsam

found on the slipway at St Margaret’s Hope;

a scallop shell, a rubber stopper

and a length of crushed copper pipe,

mementos of you I salvaged

to replace the ones I never had.

 

The sun played tag with showers

as we walked along New Scapa Road,

it was further than I thought

and we hoped that you might meet us,

instead there were fallen silk petals

red like your ships’ propellers.

 

We looked in vain for heart urchins on the strandline

things that might have your name on

things covered over by the sand

and an hour later stood at the wet bus stop –

where words wouldn’t come.

 

 

Completed in 1916, HMS Royal Oak was one of five Revenge-class battleships built for the Royal Navy during the First World War and first saw combat at the Battle of Jutland as part of the Grand Fleet. On 14 October 1939, Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland, when she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-47. Of Royal Oak's complement of 1,234 men and boys, 833 lost their lives and the incident had considerable effect on wartime morale, before which the Royal Navy had considered the naval base at Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack.

 

Winston Plowes lives aboard a floating home in Calderdale which doubles as a home for lost books. He teaches creative writing and was Poet in Residence for The Hebden Bridge Arts Festival 2012-14, 17. His collection of surrealist poetry Telephones, Love Hearts & Jellyfish, Electric Press was published in 2016.  www.winstonplowes.co.uk

 

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FIONA SINCLAIR

 

Pick n’ Mix

 

Perks of working in a chemist?

Patients handing in unwanted meds like an amnesty.

Her quick eyes camera capturing their names,

before chucking them in dedicated bin with faux casualness.

She learned fast; pumped the male pharmacist,

using youth and pretty face assets, 

for drugs legit purpose, as if dead keen to learn,

then googled for their recreational benefits.

 

Her cheery ‘Enjoy’ as chemist left for lunch,

customers drying to a trickle,

she raided the repository like an adult pick n mix,

tingle in finger tips, breast, clitoris

as she conjured mental audit of its contents

panting in climax thrill at each panhandled find

Pregabalin, Paracodol, Prozac

lucky dip of unfamiliar meds deposited by other assistants

she extreme sports shrugged Give them a try.

Sometimes the black truffles of diazepam,

stuffing her stash in shop lifting big bag.

Afternoon spent high already on anticipation

like an assignation with a drop- dead lover.

 

On sofa, party food for one; crisps, biscuits, chocolate.

On coffee table, spliff making paraphernalia and med haul.

Takes her pick, then settles back to shed 20 years’ worth,

children pointing What’s wrong with her?

adults gawping at father’s thalidomide legacy.

 

Fiona Sinclair's first full collection of poetry, Ladies Who Lunch was published by Lapwing Press in September, 2014. A Talent for Hats (D & W Press) was published in April, 2017. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle.

 

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J. R. SOLONCHE 

 

Poetry

 

A student came to my office.

“I know what I want to say,

but I don’t know how to say it,”

he said.  “No problem,” I said.

“Read through this for a while,”

I told him as I handed him

a fat anthology of contemporary

American poetry. “You’ll learn

how to say it sooner or later.”

Another student came to my office.

“I don’t know what to say, but

I have this funny feeling that

I already know how to say it,”

he said. “No problem. You’re

already a poet,” I said as I waved

him out of my office and down

the long dark stairs.

  

 

Nothing Ghazal

 

When writing a ghazal, you can’t go wrong to quote the Masters,

such as “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

 

Or this one, also by Master Shakespeare:

“Nothing will come of nothing.”

 

Speaking of Shakespeare, he wrote some really funny plays.

My favorite funny play is “Much Ado about Nothing.”

 

Here’s a nice example by the brothers Gershwin,

Master George and Master Ira, “I’ve got plenty of nothing.”

 

And here’s one by the Irish master, Samuel Beckett:

“Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.”

 

This might be the best, from Master Plato’s The Republic:

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” 

 

           So, Solonche, why not quote Master Bukowski to end this thing?

“It was good in there, nothing ever occurred in there, no people, nothing.” 

 J.R. Solonche is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions), Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (forthcoming in April from Kelsay Books), 110 Poems (forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions), and co-author of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

 

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GRANT TARBARD

 

Luggage

 

The writer grumbled,

donned serious glasses.

A Fez was considered.

 

He takes with him

only the vinegar of his kiss

wrapped in brown paper.

 

The luggage of a writer

is of juvenile memories-

sitting by the window

 

and watching all of Man

as the sunset burned

into the thirsty pall.

 

Beside his muddled socks

dreams are kept in rings of smoke,

with any troubles his feet tickle.

 

In his baggage there are women,

their look — wire stiff and redhead.

They kept the strangest flowers,

 

murmurings of lotus-eaters,

under the weight of their fabric.

The writer is a collector of fibres,

 

his thin appearance between

buttons seals him in a plumage

of masks and strung up hands,

 

little wrists like nightingale skeletons.

The writer is a jacket of beauty annoyed,

words teething in a head of rags.

 

 

Letter to a Funnel-Web Woman

 

If, say, you were on a train pulling away

I’d smell the scent of your fresh kill. The blood,

 

its distinctive iron would pull me like a magnet

onto your balled fist carriage. Would I sit

 

beside your carapace packed neatly away?

I imagine your eyes would regard me as prey,

 

would they recognise one you loved once

if it was only the time it takes a spring flower

 

to wither? Cocooned in silk rags over lamps

making the light take a gulp of breath.

 

If I did see you would you echo my hellos

just for an ambush to add my limp sequence

 

of cells to your catalog of skeletons? Your eyes

are opium, they anoint and anaesthetise me —

 

the absence of physical sensation allures my pain,

as if I were in a burning house and you were water.

 

If, say, you were on a train pulling away

I’d miss you as if you were the air in my lungs.

 

Grant Tarbard is an editorial assistant for Three Drops From A Cauldron and a reviewer. He is the author of Loneliness is the Machine that Drives the World (Platypus Press) and Rosary of Ghosts (Indigo Dreams).

 

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DALE WISELY

 

Coltrane in Nagasaki

 

Like the psalmist’s deer

longing for water,

Coltrane, just off the train

in Nagasaki, moves urgently

toward the shrine.

 

He stands, bowed,

before the pillar,

his arms outstretched,

hands together and pointing,

and prays.

 

The flash, the flesh, the ash: 11:02 AM.

 

From the depth of our hearts,

where dwells a core knitted

of peace and agony,

we ask that you hear us,

as your spirit hears our intent.

 

He knows now

why his side pierces him,

that this is his last tour,

and that soon his horns--

tenor and soprano--

will cool in their cases.

 

Take our wickedness,

our fear, our greed,

our despair,

our unforgiveness,

and rain fire down upon us.

 

Dale Wisely is a psychologist in the Deep South, U.S.A. and is an unindicted conspirator in the cases of Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, and White Knuckle Press. 

 

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