Friday, March 28, 2014

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/

Thursday, March 27, 2014

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”.

Monday, March 24, 2014

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

Sunday, March 23, 2014

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.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

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 MacabreThe Rainbow JournalIn 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.