Denny E. Marshall- Art

                                                             To Hide In Layers

Richard Schnap- A Poem

STRANGER

He felt like an alien
From another planet
Stranded on a world
He could never call home

Where the air stung his throat
And the water burned his tongue
While the creatures all wore faces
As monstrous as masks

But maybe he was wrong
And they were the aliens
Invaders come to claim
His world as their own

While they poisoned the air
And infected the water
Until he was the only
Human left alive

John Pursch- A Poem

Image Snow

  

She disembarks habitually in vitro, ritual slide through strata dead to miles below the Montauk Lighthouse, crashing surf line storms of vaguely noticed mummy time in pewter dented gutter stall from drowning seedlings shyly bowed in roadside hovels servicing the plowers that bleat the nightly bilge redaction myths of newfound factual demise.

Lola feels now surging pumping newly freshies through her brain inserting bodily coherence waxed in time-slip mojo, juiced parameters of solid city dignity winding waves to oceanic thought revival.

Ankle lockets spring from bubbled airway synch’s pedestrian emotion crux, revealing corridors of white-on-whiter, widening to open mind in finitude’s collapsing reel, unbounded plausibility moaning violins in retroactive histrionic serration, balking waning ruins across pomaded fate, repealing empirical shelves of sedimentary sedation’s schism from oneness whereabouts, interment cans to fleabag shovel drifts of image snow in knowledge sleeting cold fact omen persistence defiling predatory indications of traceback futility’s abortive temptation to segregate assimilated nurture garb.

“A liquid buildup still obtains, shafting all these precious years of corn starch perjury, cleaving to Your Nuke’s pristine lorry choirs,” she muses to no one in particulate resemblance, phasing down to bodily schematics.

Wherewithal our Lola grows beneath the sleeping cities, swapping stitched security with LL-1 in cloning bedsprings, huddling down the subtle consciousness to LL-n and n+1, defying all affinity for cross-bred limitation blur. The center fans from Feastin’ She’sbored to Mud-Atlantis hinterland, propping up the Chesscanspeak to Lungley’s hallowed corridors to skylit transfer’s existential placemat fog of Buggy Fatima’s liar’s knuckles, black bequeathed to Dearth in funnel jumps to spurts unknown to homespun Grayliens alone, where hybrids go by escargot in tawdry tandem oxen yoke assemblage escort solely by an EBGB boy toy, slacking off to Dolce Vita, flared to males beneath Lost Annulus and thence to Sandy Eggo’s staging groin for jump to Doyouwanna, Days Ago, by spatial ardor phlegm against the Puntagain’s embattled tossers.

Gazing at splashing subterranean drawl, she flashes back to latest interlude’s ecstatic attic, instantiating for Kabuki quite without intending: “Kabuk’, you fracking generalist, ye covered me with coal gas saturato plex!”

“Call me Clem fer nuthin’, nuanced wobblers training feet-to-chest resuscitation gabblers,” Kabuk’ rethinks, springing to soiled mammaries and shed beetles and sworn commands of condom cameos in mondo continuum nervosa.

“Yoyo dining flying wine phlegm your ghoulish coal gas bubbling buttress,” Lola muses, shivering in trained sheet en route to the Annulus.

“Barely headed?” Clem respires, him shelf comfy ensconced in Madhatter splat.

“Canned fry dental, you canoe drat, ya plastic idiom!” she cracks.

“Habla habba, hunchy,” thinking back to slimmer climes, sloughing into instant dream.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. An accomplished memorist, he recently recited the first 2,104 digits of pi from memory; check out his pi-related video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc . A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.

James Mirarchi- A Poem

censor

 

the censor taker is a hunchbacked automaton in clingy dress.

she looks human (despite being covered in synthetic peach fuzz).

like a parachute pack, her hunchback stores her metal origami wings.

she visits me in my home in the space trailer park for writers.

her purpose: to edit my edgy children’s stories.

meanwhile, other censor takers eerily fly about, tormenting authors.

think hitchcock’s “the birds.”

with her electronic fingernails (aka “dirt detectors”) the foxy censor taker

scans my stories for any obviously crass material.

when she catches some, she burns them away with her super phaser eraser.

one transgression, however, is perceived a felony:

turns out i made a freudian slip in regards to one of my lead character’s names:

“flavia” was misspelled as “labia.”

i am arrested and shackled piggyback to the censor taker

and flown to the vicinity of censorville

where i am greeted by a floating aerial sign stating: “symbolism is good.”

i am soon forced to endure a government cyber picnic

where the adults taunt me while dining on processed human steaks

made from children’s authors “gone astray”

and boast about their annoying brats, who jump up and down on astro turf,

blow battery farts into the sherbet sunset and feast like maggots on liquidy computerized cake.

i am then forced to join their assembly line of reborn “subversive” writers

who crank out hackneyed scripts for their holographic family films.

the only comic relief during these dark days is at noontime

when us writers spy upon mr. bossman and his mistress, in his office,

having epileptic sex on a flat metal sphere, their heads spinning like linda blair’s,

their joints dripping semen sparks, their mouth-holes squealing the words: “symbolism is good,”

while the docking sequence from “2001: a space odyssey”

plays above them on the imaxish ceiling dome.

they screech in ecstasy just as the rocket ship penetrates its space station.

yes, “symbolism is good,” especially for the sanctimonious

since it avoids confrontation with their true primal selves.

 

 

 

James Mirarchi grew up in Queens, New York. In addition to his poetry collections, Venison and Dervish, he has written and directed short films, which have played festivals. His poems have appeared in several independent literary journals. Links to his work can be found @: www.thehydratedpoet.blogspot.com/

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

 

The Yard Sale at the End of the Mind

They bring things that are

of no use, not to them,

not to you, not to anyone:

storm trooper masks, tricorders

for contacting space ships long

ago taken out by Vulcan war

ships, cracked hoses, watering

cans with no spouts, a Zen garden

rake; all this stuff they want to

pack into the overloaded truck,

the space where the back seat

should be, all that junk lifted

from landfills and roadside attraction

dumps.  A pry bar would be useful

for arranging latest acquisitions but

none are available at any price,

still the collecting goes on, after dark,

by the lights of their short circuiting

dashboard, control panels, the static

from their radio broadcasting secret

messages from the wild blue yonder,

up there, where the stars are.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

Half-sleeping in the heat,

some kind of alien invasion   

movie on the TV, maybe,

“It Came from Outer Space,”

or, maybe, “The Man Who Fell

to Earth”, frozen wastes

replaced by desert planet

well beyond a dark side of

the moon, Holst music,
            “The Planets Suite” becoming

“Mars Bringer of War” morphing

into Bowie singing,

“….. .. I ’m  putting out the fire

with gasoline, I’m putting out

the fire………”    lucid dreaming now,

so thirsty in the night, so thirsty

and all the water gone, only

Beefeaters and ice, all my pretty

ones dying in the sun burst, arid,

never changing night no rain ever

falls in, heat lightning and random

light, pale white men with cat’s

eyes, reflected visions in a bathroom

cabinet mirror, dissecting the dreamer

awake in another man’s dream of

somewhere else, gunfire in the street,

the first awakening into a long hell

to come.

The Alien Lover

“You’re a freak. I don’t mean that unkindly. 

I like freaks. That’s why I like you.”

            Candy Clark as Mary Lou

            in ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth”

She fell for this punk rock god

but he found her look to be way

middle class, bourgeois in the worst

way and told her so, “Compared to

you the girls I like are aliens.”

“I can do alien.” She said. Locked

herself in a salon with two demented

stylists on acid and told them to be

creative, which was a kind of death

wish, suicide by extreme makeover.
“What a total gas,” they said, “like

totally freaky. And we get paid.”

So they went to work. Attacked her

with a groomer’s equivalent of hedge

clippers, two kinds of hair dye, and

bleach, then got down and dirty on

her face with straight pins, rings, and

studs with semi-precious stones,

enlisting a tattooist somewhere along

the line who did her dirty with death

heads, smoking jesuses and his wiggy

apostles, until her body resembled a 60’s

witch on a psychedelic bender that might

never end. Good thing she was pasted on

peyote buttons too.  Looked into a mirror

and saw that it was good; the perfect picture

of a disaffected youth with a devil fetish,

death wish and a drug habit no street

fighting man with a microphone could

ignore unless he was as warped and as high

as she was when she took the plunge. 

A few months of total degradation, a stint

in rehab, and a hold on her trust funds

made the whole bad trip seem unreal. 

That and his flaming out  in some weird

murder/ suicide pact with an underage runaway

from Iowa City, made her see the error

of her ways. Took the European tour cure,

making it from one end of the continent

to the other, on some sexual joy ride like

Russian Roulette with bodily fluids that

threatened to get serious when she heard

conversations in nearby rooms about white

slavery, Saudi Arabian oil money and places

in the desert even heat seeking missiles couldn’t

find.  Back home she didn’t exactly live

the life of a nun but found the thrill was gone

now that the ultimate risk had been eliminated

from the game. Life was dull but she’d manage

and in ten years she’d be having all the best

laser surgery a six, going on seven figures a year,

allowance could buy. Still, no matter what she

did or, how much foundation she applied, the scars

would always show through.

 Alan Catlin has poems in Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Dreams and Nightmares, Ygdrasil and darkling Magazine. He has been nominated three times for the science fiction poetry award, The Rhysling Award and for the horror book award, The Bram Stoker Awards for his chapbook “The Insomniac's Gift” illustrated by collage artist Michael Shores. His latest full length book of poetry is “Alien Nation”.

Erik Moshe- A Poem

Gestalt Apartments

Housing complexes moved to the rhythm of a spider's heart
tricycle trickle down spring soil, full of leaded water tendrils
a many legged, many mania'd persona, of mortar and
brick, drywall blockheaded blueprint - the ritzy wallpaper
you'd find in a second hand metropolitan flat, worn by a
breathing commune of utilitarian buildings without literal
pulse, but the sum is greater than the parts

A stationary Gulliver being stapled down with fishing hooks
and cerebellum harpoons - sheepish men dying
to get a chunk of an oozing headline
Even monsters in closets of these homes have subconscious
qualms. The oldest property imaginable, wheat field greying
in the front. The kitchen smells like a Soviet stone onion,
similarly colored; goes well with the chamber music

An estate encased by birch tress and papyrus neurotransmitters
is founded on orphaned glass, stepping stoned into belongingness
In the known universe, if such a thing was plausible, then perhaps
objects can suffuse themselves into animus mundi
Maybe we're all Spinozists after all. Underground sludge
was blood plasma - the psychosomatic ceiling fan leaving a trail
from the wash room to the morgue to the dog's den
Nobody's home except an earthly allure; a lonesome attic shutter
whose protective width gives shelter to lesser known breeds
of lab rats and failed science majors

The heart of the matter is a mildewy air conditioning unit
the type that deals in Parkinson's dioxide
the reason you couldn't breathe indoors when an electrical storm
severed the spinal chord of casual suburbia period
Cellar doors remain shut; meta-cognitive pursuits unwelcome here
Security system ain't much - the chandelier is sensitive
the window curtains are vulnerable to sunlight
and the tire swing in the front yard is a nostalgic X-ray magnet
the repairs in the staircase are logical fallacies
the white picket fences aren't; skip the formalities

Why guard a psyche with a vaulted conscience when
an open neighborhood policy beckons sugar from the cupboards?
the lawn gnomes will rave about the sweetness of the banana bread
assimilated from lifetimes of SPAM, perdition, old piano keys
and career choices that never came to fruition

Butter-knives reminisce on the good times - when their steely thighs
wore wet molasses thenstead of death copper
In unharsh terms, the metal isn't even suitable for sanitarium vents
or decommissioned train buffers. The lamp by the parking lot
is an unauthorized light source. The swimming pool is paler than usual.
Clothes hangers bob on the surface like project paperclips.
The mind is a terrible thing to wade...



Bio: Erik Moshe is an aspiring lyricist from Hollywood, Florida who is currently working on a collection of poetry about the future of DARPA, robotics and artificial intelligence. He is also attending college for a degree in English. Find him at TheCentersphere.yolasite.com

Richard Schnap- A Poem

ROOMMATE

There’s a ghost that visits my apartment
Lounging around when I’m not there

Making himself cups of coffee
Watching pay-per-view movies on TV

Sometimes he reads a magazine
Cruises around on my computer

Or simply sits by the window
Watching the world passing by

I don’t mind his presence
For he never leaves a mess to clean up

Although he makes long distance phone calls
Or runs the air conditioner too much

And maybe someday I’ll meet him
Learning his face and name

But for now he remains anonymous
A stranger with nothing but time

Andrea DeAngelis- Three Poems

 Magnetic

a chained-up moment

caged in a delirious choleric storm

moan about lazy Suzy tornadoes

and 26 hour diner woes

filled to the brim with delirium

coffee spilling philosophy

and no eternity

she is always here

in the diner

stuffed in the corner

where you won’t see her

unless you want to

her elaborate mass eatings

consuming fleshy nippled visions

allow her to ask these boys

sweet stares as if crushing

tickles wandering minds

unwrap you naked

she is here

sucking attention

her skirt hiked up

to unflattering contours

rigid varicose valleys

of lost men and expectations

sit back and enjoy

the witching hour ride

while the room spins round

to your clucking demise.

seven minutes

Everyone acted normal in the abnormal light

everyone acted as if this was a common occurrence

as if the sky had just been swallowed

just for them

just for seven minutes

and their minimal generation.

Flattened

Do you remember that eclipse?

How everything was flattened within?

Shadows were fattened up

and everyone’s souls were stretched out

too thin before them.

I was not a part of it

because you were with her

and I was with no one.

In those seven minutes

loneliness had a heaviness

it dragged me to the ground

and drowned.

All my senses

grew sickened and senseless

like death never coming

like continuing to exist

after she kissed you.

A short bio

Andrea DeAngelis is at times a poet, writer, shutterbug and musician living in New York City. Andrea sings and plays guitar in the indie rock band MAKAR (www.makarmusic.com). Her writing has recently appeared in Tin House, Salome Magazine and Camel Saloon.

Denny E. Marshall- Art

 

Spiraling Out Of Control

Bio
 
Denny E. Marshall has had art and poetry published, some recently.  He does have a personal website with previously published works. The web address is www.dennymarshall.com.

John Pursch- A Poem

Fragments of Lola

Three weeks pass in flickered streetlight gazing, non-stop vacuum hologram delight beneath unconscious tunnel doors in ecstasy’s believer troll conundrum alleyways of thought spillage, glossed to baying nudie lifers bent by waterway seclusion into placement ovaries, soon to be rejected; shouts of handcuff fistulae and blending missed poor tuner tease reactions dotting highball misconstrual fees in satchel underarm theatrics, squashing offshore tankard semblance cookie hikes to daylight river gratings.

Lola tumbles weightless from compartmentalized tundra thoughts to bleed-through desecration’s hair bubble grafting kit, shoveling lungs from lobot headquarters to filigreed insane recliner ash heaps, aft of teleported zucchini arms. Situational broth brews to teapot regulation froth release, slipping threshold loops of augury to bilious stare-down freckle emoters, compounded wryly with cold stupor drooling fowl.

She bucks the ship to Mach a-zillion’s overnight refusal pantry, wigs to MJ-23 on largely spurned inactive arcs of sapience identified with carbuncular reset queens, nullifying suit bag fuel interrogation tricks remembered by a slew of lusty lossage flecks, now floating uninhabited, just interstitial grist aweigh to blimey ticks of wacky cloaking denture theft.

Meanwhile, far behind in time luck slowing, motion capers exhume her filial resemblance to homunculi, numbed much later by eschatology’s salivated tendon chewers, dining on brush palace axes of aged disco quacks and queening stratagems in bubbled pawn shop neuroses. She giggles through time goggles, calling entourage suffusion pelf, dredging deep-store Puntagain revival tryst semantic fists, per EBGB-88’s encapsulated loom.

Flaring persona dust in Terran Hoagie dishrag sparks, foil explodes in mental dislocation starch of LL-1’s presumptive symbolism, blasting lingual fervor with convergent disrepute from alien foreknowledge gunship whores in stack trace helicopter wallflower spume, descending into Your Nuke’s satiated pinball strip, below Groin Zorro tunnel faction berth.

“Far crying grime from punctured disco free-for-failing rapprochement required in dusty lusty L.A. zoo depriver’s reprobate incendiary pylon quilt,” Lola chuckles, thinking parallel contusions into sawed-off landing’s final trundle’s hyperspace emergence fit.

“Codger, we grapple louvered contour cramming proxy windy stallions, trendy floor suction into folding tranquil ideation trough complete,” a voiceless thought-secreting tower infuses from bot elastic’s shaven modal prying bower.

“Clad in stellar dynamism, tube bedeviled with cinch pros,” she formally responds, begins the wander blech to preset prescience of current active pinstriped subterranean resistance.

Les Merton- Two Poems

Last Orders

Earth Supreme Command orders

everyone to prepare themselves

at 23.10 for the apocalypse.

           

                        Rebels are proclaiming

                        do everything you’ve always wanted

                        to do in the remaining  hours -

Rebels Must Be Ignored - Repeat -

Rebels Must Be Ignored - Repeat... .

                        Ignored!

                        Ignored? The only thing to be ignored

                        is every government order ever issued!

                        From now on, anarchy rules, rebel, make love,

                        smoke, drink, eat, step outside of the system,

                        enjoy the remaining hours, most of all have fun.

                        They can’t tell us what to do any more!

                       

                        It is all over... .

Everything was obliterated by the nuclear destruction of earth

at 23.10 as predicted. Warnings on Earth for civil disobedience

were ignored. There are no survivors - Repeat - There are no survivors... .

Scifaiku

time for exploration -

an unmanned light space shuttle -

a soft breath of wind

Bio

Les Merton enjoys writing Sci Fi poetry. Most recently he has been published by: Star*line, and scifaikuest magazines. He is the author of 20 titles and the editor of Poetry Cornwall which he founded in 2002.

Jeffrey Park- Three Poems

THE VISITOR

 

Whether by fate or careful planning,

the visitor, searching for the deep

wisdom that only comes with maturity,

corporealized on the Alzheimer’s

floor of a run-down nursing home,

 

found himself in a spinning galaxy

of forgetful and forgotten grandmas

and grandpas, all of them muddled

and disheveled, and with bits of lunch

decorating their soft wrinkled chins.

 

He never did report back to his home

world – he’s still there, keeping out of

sight of the nurses, everybody’s favorite

nephew, though he seems to bear little

family resemblance to anyone at all.

 

 

 

TRAVELLER

 

The traveller traverses the kaleidoscopic

origami folds of interdimensional

 

space, counting his steps as he follows

an oblique course through gravitational

 

fluxes and clouds of asteroidal dust,

along shimmering streams of solar plasma,

 

across lava flows, sulfur lakes, desolate

sunbaked rocky plains and finally

 

into the smoke-filled alleyways of Zagreb,

Bangkok, Nairobi, Mexico City.

 

He scarcely notices the slow-moving

inhabitants of this neon-drenched landscape,

 

intent on survival and dreams of pleasure,

he steps again, alert for slight telltale

 

discrepancies in the periphery of his vision.

A ripple, almost imperceptible, moves

 

through a crowded Mumbai slum,

a Sao Paulo commuter’s heart skips a beat,

 

in a Texas town north-facing windows go

opaque for a fraction of a second.

 

The traveller steps, counts, recalibrates,

slips between the here and the now.

 

In the blink of an eye a million doors open

and close again with an inaudible sigh.

 

 

 

UFO GIGOLO

 

The thing is

he doesn’t know why they come

to him, it’s certainly not

his good looks (by what standard?)

or his intellect-

 

perhaps it’s his openness to the new

and the different.

He’s never been saddled with silly

prejudices

about skin pigment,

 

unfashionable body types

or unconventional constellations of

facial features,

scales, fur, antennae,

gills, the odd flexible tentacle or two

 

or twelve – in any case,

they do come,

are drawn to him, one might say,

and across considerable distances –

and he gives them what he can,

 

a sharing, a cross-cultural experience

they can tell

their methane-breathing cousins

about, a bit of warmth

in a cold, cold galaxy.

 

Sometimes at night he’ll gaze up

at the stars,

so distant, and wonder just how far

his terrestrial apples

may have fallen from the tree.



Bio: Jeffrey Park's poetry has appeared most recently in Danse Macabre, The Rainbow Journal, In Parentheses, and the science fiction anthology Just One More Step from Horrified Press. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey currently lives in Munich, Germany, where he works at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.com.

Nancy May- Three Haiku

radio on blink

alien voices

on the air

alien spaceship

army missiles

on the target

alien found dead

at the crash site

the reporter

Bio:

Nancy May has haiku published in Haiku Journal, Three Line Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Inclement Poetry, Twisted Dreams Magazine, Vox Poetica, Eskimo Pie, Icebox, Dark Pens, Daily Love, Leaves of Ink, The Blue Hour Magazine, The Camel Saloon, Kernels, Mused - the BellaOnline Literary Review, Writer’s Haven, Dead Snakes, Danse Macabre – An online literary magazine, High Coupe, A Handful of stones, Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine. Haiku will soon appear in The Germ, Every Day Poets and 7x20 magazine.  She has reached The Heron’s Nest consideration stage twice and the Chrysanthemum consideration stage once.  Haiku is published weekly on Haikuary.  She is working on her first haiku collection.