2017

 

 

 

JANUARY CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

 

 

Sudeep Adhikari, Chrissy Banks, Michael Brosnan, David Cooke,

Catherine Edmunds, Devon Marsh, Beth McDonough, Todd Mercer,

Maren O. Mitchell, Carla Schwartz, Pat Tomkins.

 

 

 

 

 

SUDEEP ADHIKARI

 

Few Ways to Die Like Leonard Cohen

 

There are few ways to die like Leonard Cohen. For example,

naming your woman Marianne and driving her more than 2000 miles

from Athens to Oslo in a rented car. That would be so

Cohen-ly romantic, falling somewhere between

 some fairytale love-stories, and Diotima's ideas on platonic love.

 

Or you can stay in Chelsea Hotel on 34th street,

and live the seedy tales of Sid Vicious and Andy Warhol

And if you are really lucky, you can jam with Jimi Hendrix

and get a blowjob from the inimitable Janis Joplin.

 

Or you can write a song about your friend's wife

and immortalize her in a Suzanne way. Or you can try

to bewitch a blue-eyed nymph from Deutschland, or write your

first novel to be read by Lou Reed. 

 

Or you can be a fervent Jew, strolling anxiously on the ghettos

of Montreal; your head fogged with aches, amour and

generically dexamphetamine.  Or go to a Zen monastery in California,

where wearing a robe may help to loosen some knots, but

is not going to pacify your boners and saudade.

 

Ain't no cure for love, and so is for this anxiety called Life.

 

Or you can stay by the side the of your son in hospital, who is

most possibly going to die, and read him Bible till he comes out of his

coma to ask you to stop. Or you can be a not-so-bad Zen master,

finding some solace between the space of Tibetan Book of the Dead

and Torah; in a mystical way, of course. Even magical. 

 

Or you can get ripped off of all your savings when your are old, tired and weary

but you forgive everyone, wear a nice suit, and go to India or some

far eastern country to find nothing. Or you can put on a silent fight

against never-ending swirls of black bile, yet be a "baffled king composing

hallelujah" to mend thousands broken souls.

 

There are many ways to die like Leonard Cohen, and dying with

your hard-on is certainly not one of them.

 

 

Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/Lecturer from Kathmandu, Nepal.  His poetry has found a place in many online/print literary journals, the most recent being Red Fez , Kyoto, Your One Phone Call, Jawline Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Yellow Mama, Fauna Quarterly, Beatnik Cowboys, After The Pause and Poetry Pacific. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

CHRISSY BANKS

 

The Death of Li Po

 

He’s ten parts love, ten parts

poetry. The rest is wine.

 

He’s tried his words on the full moon,

but there’s no wooing her.

She smiles to herself, her cool beauty

exposed to every man.

 

Fool, he’ll never possess her,

but a drunken romantic is doomed

to try to the end.

 

Tonight, he pushes his boat out on the river, reaches out

to stroke her face as it shimmers,

dodging his touch. Further and further he leans.

 

Face down in the water,

what use to him now are poetry and love?

 

But he expires, words on his tongue,

the moon in his arms.

 

 

Chrissy Banks lives in Exeter. Her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, most recently in Orbis, South, the North, the Rialto and Ink, Sweat and Tears as well as anthologies The Captain’s Table: Seventy Poets for Bob Dylan at Seventy (Seren) and The Listening Walk. A collection, Days of Fire and Flood, was published by original plus in 2005. She has recently written poems for the Trios project with photographers, poets and painters, forming a touring exhibition in 2017.  Her website is www.chrissybankspoetry.com

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

MICHAEL BROSNAN        

 

Trout Fishing

 

Its brook-slick skin -

a little copper, a little quartz,

 

flecked with the pink and gray of granite,

mud, the soft rust of dead leaves,

 

the suggestion of shifting clouds

in the alder shadows among mute stones
 

and the slow-tumbling detritus

of the river bottom.

 

Tonight, with a little luck,

we’ll eat it with the russets

 

you’ve dug from the garden —

a simple meal, as we live

 

now with the knowledge

of an ancient thing:

 

in this upriver constancy,

love wildly contained.

 

 

Michael Brosnan’s poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including Confrontation, Borderlands, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, New Letters, The Moth, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Rattle, and Ibbetson Street. In his day job, he works as the editor of Independent School, an award-winning quarterly magazine on precollegiate education. 

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

DAVID COOKE

 

The Robin

 

Try as I might to ignore it, there is no way

round it: grass is up to its tricks again.

So I hump out the Flymo, its blade clogged

in old growth, and cut a tentative swathe.

 

From the lowest bough of the apple tree

the robin sees me coming, appraising

my skill with a flex and the way one flick

makes it ripple when I cast it aside.  

 

Eyeball to eyeball he keeps his station,

maybe tame or maybe cocky, knowing

my patch is his domain. Inches apart,

I’m Montale and he’s like the hoopoe –

 

until I’m back fifty years, bird-spotting

through undergrowth that rips my hands and legs                                     

– like a natural barbed wire fencing –

around that derelict house in Johnsforth

 

whose occupants died or else migrated

to England or the States, leaving behind

a sanctuary for the warblers, wrens

and robins I once described in notebooks.

 

Today I’ve cousins who live in houses,

picket-fenced like those in Stepford.

If neighbours complain, the unruly lawns

get mown. You’ll find your bill in the mailbox.

 

 

David Cooke's poems have been published in The UK, Ireland and beyond. His most recent  collection, A Murmuration, was favourably reviewed in The TLS, Poetry Salzburg Review, The PBS Bulletin, London Grip and elsewhere. In 2015 he founded and now co-edits the High Window Journal and Press.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

CATHERINE EDMUNDS

 

The Night of the Paintings        

 

Five in the morning, and Mary’s ghost is riding the subway in Kiev,

baby Jesus on her knee. Three angels are in attendance,

playing violins and lutes to soothe the child to sleep.

On a tram, a satyr is discussing philosophy,

but four naked nymphs are determined to make him dance.

The satyr stays glued to the plastic seat, he’s hairy and muscular,

and the nymphs want him, his animal smell is far stronger

than the stench of dirty tram. None of them notice Judith kicking

Holofernes’ head like a football down a dark alleyway.

 

This is the night when the artworks are allowed

to escape their canvases and roam the city on the Dnieper River –

they could go anywhere, but they’ve discovered Kiev’s

highly developed system of public transport.

 

5:30, the city is waking. Jesus wants to suckle

but they have to get back to their canvasses. He starts to cry.

The angel with the lute strums hopefully, but a string snaps

and catches baby Jesus in the eye – he screeches.

Mary raises her hand to slap him, and this is precisely the pose

in which the artist caught her, hand raised as if to caress,

baby Jesus’ face screwed up in the manner of all Renaissance babies

painted by artists who’ve never fathered one.

 

The satyr now is fully aroused, to the nymphs’ delight,

they pull him from his seat and his sweaty backside peels away

from the dirty plastic. The tram judders and they all tumble,

grabbing at anything. Judith kicks Holofernes’ head at the tram

and it hits the window – his eyes stare in and his grimace splatters.

The nymphs scream. The satyr goes limp, but that’s how he has to be

for the purposes of an artwork suitable to be viewed by wives and servants.

 

Judith retrieves Holofernes and tucks him under her arm.

She skips back to the gallery, occasionally throwing the head

up in the air and catching it, doing tricks, spinning round.

They’re nearly back when he slips out of her hands and lands on the pavement –

she curses, and leans down to pick him up, a snarl on her lips,

and thus she is also captured.

 

The waiting artists exhale like a moan of doves

as all the pictures in all the world return to their frames.

They remember the time the Mona Lisa went to a comedy club

and heard a genuinely funny joke and guffawed—

they had to arrange for her to be stolen as she was not fit

for public view until she had calmed down a bit.

No such disasters tonight.

 

 

The Slurp-suck of closure        

 

Trees at night, smoke drifting,

you get yourself into the mood, but then I show you

a man, pink face, nappy pin stuck through his nose.

 

We wait at the lights, only fighting when moving.

You try to distract me with level crossings, dirty yards

you whisper the words, ‘A Small Good Thing’

and I laugh, I counter with hot-dog vans,

corners running with piss.

 

You go all poetic. Boys, blackened with dust,

the sound of the bath filling softly, like a phone in bed;

the space between our breaths.

 

You’ll be crying in a moment, caught in the tightness,

the beat of what remains unsaid,

we could be driving home, or dying

and Fido could be just another dog in the rain.

 

I can hear you chew,

I have fantasised about your death.

 

 

Catherine Edmunds was educated at Dartington College of Arts, and Goldsmith’s College, London. Published works include a poetry collection, four novels and a Holocaust memoir. Catherine has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has written for the Frogmore Papers, The Binnacle, Butchers’ Dog, and other literary journals.  www.freewebs.com/catherineedmunds/  

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

DEVON MARSH

 

New List

In the tool room I start a new list.
Not for a project we will build together,

rather items I might use without the thrill
I felt at twelve. Planes to shape
 
boards a sawyer has not unpacked;
patches for leaks un-sprung;

conductors, their current still within
the sun. List, he said, the tools you can

take, the ones you want. And the supplies
in neat rows labelled in bold marker,

indelible, handprint speaking in his voice.
I touch boxes of nails half empty,

unseen fasteners holding the world together
all around me. Not wanting to want,

I write ‘nails’ under Things to Take
with my father’s blessing.

 

 

Devon Marsh served as a naval aviator and now works as a risk manager for Wells Fargo Bank. Father of three and husband of a critical care nurse, he writes in the interstices between soccer games and business meetings.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

BETH MCDONOUGH

 

Viral

Papers forewarn, print out threatened death.
Illness ravages blackthorn. Prepared,
we thread already emptied ways to reach
the place of our barbed copse.
Near leafless. Lichen-beardy, all strung out, it drips

jewelled abundance:
John Clare’s jetty sloes.

Come next November there may be
none, or simply corpsing shrivel twigs,
perhaps unripened splits; but now
we pluck softening perfect beads,
bowl autumn’s last kind act.

Whatever changes, transfers, fails – today
riches for jelly, for gin.
 

I needle these gifts by my kitchen sink,
as I cradle into his call. Over crackles he forms
his hard-won gifts of words. Of joy.

All those sore-mouth puckers, those bittered tastes
round purple, diffuse with this leaching light. I stand
on just firmed ground between sops
make jelly, make gin
accept this handover season
for every dark to come.

 

 

Watering down a recipe

 

Ingredients:

drain Rannoch snowmelt.
Slurpdown brown through peathags.
 

Method:

Now, combine in burns. Tumble
downhill. Collect

                                    in the Braan
                                    in the Earn
                                    in the Isla and the Dochart.

Mix well. You may wish
to let it rest in lochs.

At this stage, note Perth’s new-made
liason with the North Sea tide.

Allow twenty miles of ebb and flow –
become briny for Dundee.

Sluice a rip below that Lifeboat pier,
eddy by the Ferry harbour.

On the beach with every high and low –
repeat, repeat  and make
that seabed pattern –
                                                     one hard rippled sandbank, smooth, a
                                            dip, then soft
                                                          undermining squish –  all this mystery.
                              Set in the memory of this firth.

 

 

Beth McDonough studied Silversmithing at GSA, completing her M.Litt at Dundee University. Writer in Residence at DCA 2014-16, her poetry appears in Gutter, The Interpreter’s House and Antiphon and elsewhere; she reviews in DURA. Handfast (with Ruth Aylett, May 2016) charts family experiences – Aylett’s of dementia and McDonough’s of autism.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

TODD MERCER

 

The Sexton Isn’t Ready to Retire

 

The call comes in, the duty notice. The Sexton fires up the backhoe

digs another rectangle within sight of the plot they’re saving for him.

He’d planned to hand-shovel the rest of his work years, but the county

sprung for good equipment, finally. Usually he doesn’t know

the people he’s burying. That’s better. He’s set in a few old friends.

Once a former lover—that was harder. Be careful what you wish for

in your angriest moments. The Sexton worries, wonders

if he’s deficient or forgiven. What are the odds of an afterlife?

The Sexton sets the concrete vault in place. He lays a tarp overtop

of mounded dirt—some mourners don’t want to see it.

Back after the service to fill in. The Sexton takes the tail end

of the day to heart. He continues with a course of antibiotics

and hocks gunk from his one good lung, head hung

over a bowl of steaming vapor. With the new machine

and modern medicine the Sexton aims to be here a year longer

than his critics predict. Maybe he’ll find a method

of never dying. Maybe he’ll let himself off the hook.

And again, be careful what you wish for.

 

 

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 100 Word Story, EXPOUND, Literary Orphans and Split Lip Magazine.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

MAREN O. MITCHELL

 

B, Unabashedly Buxom, 

 

is the kernel of life around

which we build, pearl-like,

 

layer upon layer,

without which we would not be.

 

Alphabeta, the first two Greek letters,

created the word for all our letters.

 

Except for “A,” it is the best grade

to earn, barring the Middle Ages

 

forehead branding of blasphemers.

When fixations strike, were bonnets

 

still in fashion, attention getting,

B would adorn.

 

It is the sound of fertilization

(although less and less), buzzing

 

from blossom to blossom, hind legs

loaded with gold, the sound that feeds us.

 

 

J, Descended from I,

 

is the walk we choose

  to heighten the sense

    of living in our skin,

     

to thumb our nose

  at the law and fate

    simultaneously;

     

on the list of inherent

  city dangers.

    The bird that has solved

 

the nanny, food hunt

   and never-getting-out problems.

      From childhood on into

 

extended childhood,

   the hook from which we hang

      our seasonal empty

 

stocking of expectations—

   whether just junk or justified,

      or a jazzed up combination.

 

 

Maren O. Mitchell’s poems have appeared in The Crafty Poet II, Hotel Amerika, Chiron Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Appalachian Heritage, The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Journal, The Lake (UK), Town Creek Poetry, such anthologies as The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Southern Poetry Anthologies, V: Georgia & VII: North Carolina and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in Poetry East, Tar River Poetry and Poem. Her nonfiction book is Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide (Line of Sight Press, 2012). She lives with her husband in the mountains of north Georgia, US.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

CARLA SCHWARTZ

 

My Netherland

 

I had planned

a brief, stealth planting,

in and out,

a bee in the flower’s mouth.

 

My hair, wet

under cap,

henna drooling down my cheek,

hoping not to meet anyone.

 

My neighbor walks over,

asks again

about my plans for my yard,

the undergrowth,

where the trees came down.

 

Mint, raspberries, fruit trees —

The garden of my dreams

streams from my mouth

over the wild mustard,

poison ivy, and bittersweet

that almost have me beat.

 

I say thank you.

She answers, regulations,

wild animals.

 

Later, after the digging, the yanking,

the spray of soil in my hair,

in the shower,

I feel an itch, mid-back,

where I cannot reach.

 

In the mirror,

a very small neighbor,

merged inseparably

with my skin,

a tick,

a mustard seed

of a tick.

 

 

Combination

 

Just before I last saw you, when I arrived at the pond,

I noticed your bicycle locked to the rack.

The combination, like your touch, I’d never forget.

 

I worked the lock deftly, and bagged it.

Not even the birds noticed,

but my blood bubbled, my heart raced.

 

Four numbers retained is no fair trade

for what you tore from my chest,

but I hurried off with my haul in shame,

locked it deep in the dark of my trunk.

 

 

Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Aurorean, ArLiJo, Common Ground, Cactus Heart, Fourth River, Fulcrum, Mom Egg, Switched-on Gutenberg, Poetry Quarterly, Naugatuck River, Solstice, and Ibbetson Street. Her book, Mother, One More Thing is available on Amazon.com. Her CB99videos youtube channel has had 300,000+ views. Learn more at carlapoet.com, or her blog, wakewiththesun.blogspot.com.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE

 

 

PAT TOMKINS

 

Mythless

 

The name, borrowed from the Greek alloy

of leopard and camel, suggests myth:

a hybrid as improbable as a sphinx.

 

But there’s no corresponding history:

No tales of adventures like the Centaurs.

No special talents or abilities

like the basilisk and manticore.

 

Where’s the mortal eager for godlike powers?

Or criminal turned into animal?

What about heroic deeds, a fatal sin,

accounts of seduction or revenge?

 

No wonder it’s hard to find the giraffe,

big but lacking bright lights,

outshone by the lion and the scorpion.

 

Lost among the zodiac,

the camelopardalis needs a myth.

 

A shy guest who joined the party late:

To lack imagination is a dismal fate.

 

 

Australian Immigrant

 

Tall and lithe as a modern dancer

invasive species in California

 

Supplier of food for cuddly koala bears

our only marsupial: the rat-tail possum

 

Elegant and ornamental landscape feature

an overgrown fire hazard in dry areas

 

Peeling trunk makes identification easy

long strips of bark and capsules litter the ground

 

Source of beneficial oil

after rain, smells like cat pee

 

Grows fast to more than 100 feet

brittle wood, useless for construction

 

So common, it’s a street in San Francisco

a very frequently misspelled address

 

 

Pat Tompkins is an editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Modern Haiku, KYSO Flash, the Worcester Journal, and other publications. “Mythless” first published in Astropoetica, 2008.

 

Back to POETRY ARCHIVE