Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Paul Tristram- Two Poems & Sketch


Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published
in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging
empty graves for innocence at midnight; this too may pass, yet.
 

Buy his books ‘Scribblings Of A Madman’ (Lit Fest Press)  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1943170096
 

‘Poetry From The Nearest Barstool’ at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326241036
 

And a split poetry book ‘The Raven And The Vagabond Heart’ with Bethany W Pope
at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326415204
You can also read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/





I Warn You Away


She is extra-terrestrial
on the inside,
a predatory changeling
with powers
forged in the dark side.


She is only capable
of selfish feelings
so her weaknesses
are strange and many,
they are indeed a sticky web.


I have felt the force,
tasted the flame,
survived the nightmare
and now a half-being
I warn you away.


© Paul Tristram 2006


Published in Handshake (The Newsletter Of The Eight Hand Gang) No 68, December 2006




Not My Type


Still she knocked at my door
tormenting the wood with her aggression,
squaring up like a boxer
to the wrong side of the spy hole,
flipping the letter box with her fingers
as if annoyed by it being there.
She usually sat out there for hours,
I telephoned for strippers,
flowers, balloons and food.
Placing my feet into starting blocks
I menaced the hallway, sucking on my gimp mask
and waiting for the door to come alive.


© Paul Tristram 2006


Published in Instant Pussy (USA) Numero Tres, 2008


                                                                 "Moonshine"


Monday, January 25, 2016

Jason Constantine Ford- Three Poems


Biography: Jason Constantine Ford is from Perth in W.A, Australia. He works at a book shop and has over a hundred publications of poetry and fiction in various literary magazine, ezines and journals from around the world. Bram Stroker, Phillip K. Dick, Edgar Alan Poe and William Blake are his main influences. 



Dream Woman

After having spent a day in desert heat
Harsh enough to erode an ordinary will
Inclining itself towards the dryness of defeat,
I look ahead with desires that cannot be still.

I walk to a sign among bushes with words obscure
And cannot grasp a word that is written down
Before noticing a woman with features demure
Adorned with an orange, red and yellow gown.

After friendly greetings are exchanged between
Her and I, I ask her a question as to where
I am among bushes previously unseen
And receive silence as a response unfair.

Without a warning, her body splinters apart
Into fragments the desert air consumes.
Her non-existence is hitting me like a dart
As my search for reality resumes.



Morning Hangover

Images are flashing back as sparks ignite
Delusions I suffered from the other night.

The girls I encountered at a party appear
To be here as they speak with words I endear.

They are talking about values I evoked
Within the span of sharing weed we smoked.

I leave my bed desiring to embrace
A girl until she is gone without a trace.

In that moment, all the others have left
As I devolve with emotions bereft.

The boundary separating fiction from fact
Appears obscured in a manner most exact.

I cannot even tell the difference between
Reals girls and those who have never been.



Flashback of Pain

Images of her return within my sleep
As a set of brittle memories entering deep
Into both conscious and unconscious thought
Until images are gone away to status nought.
One image returns with bitterness immense
From the day she cruelly chose to withdraw
Her love resulting in affliction of each sense
Of mine unto a state of me being sore.
Memory of how she pulled her hand away
Is a form of bitterness that decides to stay.

Although I attempt to remove this image,
Chambers of thought suffer from the damage
This image brings into my state of mind
As effects of bitter years which always grind.
Each year which is dissolved into the dust
Of sadness is sprinkled with the pain of knowing
How I am simply left with less than the crust
Of years of bitterness that are still blowing.
In my sleep, the wind blows against my back
With the full force of an emotional attack.



Ford, Jason Constantine, Dream Woman, Morning Hangover, Flashback of Pain, The Tower of Illusion and Entrance into the Tower of Illusion, posted on October 19, 2014 at Mel BrakE Press website, http://melbrakepress.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/jason-constantine-ford-poetry.html , October 2014.


Ayaz Daryl Nielsen- Two Poems


VERDICT

You come to us through word and deed,
those without a trace of redemption.  
Your incontinence, weeping, sobbing, 
a mental coupling to an endless embrace 
within the knowledge of your true name.




south-bound wind
shamans of earthen folklore 
geese overhead




ayaz daryl nielsen, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (26+ years/130+ issues), homes for his poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Dead Snakes, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane, and!   online at:  bear creek haiku  poetry, poems and info


Alan Catlin- Three Poems


 A New Life, Maybe

 He was the kid who used to live
 across the street none of us live on
 anymore.  What I read in The Gazette
 told me he was up for a Felony DWI‑
 what he told me was it was the third one
 in a year and he was facing serious time
 and it wouldn't be in County Jail where
 his father the cop could stop by and look
 at him as if he were the most disgusting
 thing on earth with a junior after his name.
 I always felt he was a good kid going
 in the wrong direction on dope and alcohol,
 he said he was off for good at the halfway
 house he was staying at.  At least, when
 he blew the 2.6 they caught him for,
 he wasn't driving up an exit ramp of a major
 highway as one of my friends was from college
 who might have blown more if he could still
 breathe.  There wasn't enough of him left
 to stuff in a plastic garbage bag, at least,
 junior was flying low now, keeping the yellow
 double lines in place instead of watching
 them jumping from one hemisphere to the next,
 the oncoming headlights closing in, too close
 to avoid.



 An Evil Genius

 I looked around for the camera when
 they came in. Their being here could
 have been a documentary news thing
 and I would regret punching out the
 camera man, later, for filming it when
 law suits started being filed. 
 These guys had to be invented
 by an evil genius working the Welfare Rolls
 in lower Albany.  It's not often you
 get guys dressed in stolen clothes you
 would have had to mug a bum for,
 that smelled as if they had been sleeping
 in the Albany Landfill for seven years
 with one eye open for the rats.
 I wondered what the cabbie thought
 when they told him:"Just take us
 to Rapp Road, we live by the Landfill."
 I saw the guy from Duffy's rolling down
 windows as he pulled out from the curb,
 cursing me every inch of the way.
 I didn't ask those guys into the bar,
 hell, it was the first of the month;
 all the thawed out crazies were on the streets
 with hundreds of dollars they would blow
 by Thursday.  If the cabbie  thought
 the Stenchmen were bad, they should have
 been prepped for the guy I would give
 them after last call, the schizoid, alien
 hunchback of Western Avenue.



 A Song Without Words for a Soprano Who Has Forsaken Sleep
          
 She was singing an aria from
 an opera in a language she
 didn't have.  The initial signatures
 were transcribed by a madman
 and had a logic that didn't
 translate into Russian .
 She was changing languages from
 month to month that year, the next
 one would be Serbo-Croatian,
 an idea no one would recognize
 in Cyrillic although she attempted
 to augment her voice with Vodka
 and caviar. What emerged was a
 vision of a dust devil bursting out
 of a fault line saying unknowable
 words that break the skin, forming
 caverns the bats of her mind would
 fill and breed in, spreading an
 otherworldly sound, once heard,
 no one would ever forget.


Sunday, January 24, 2016

John Pursch- A Poem



John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, his work has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/whiteskybooks. Check out his experimental lit-rap video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l33aUs7obVc. He’s @johnpursch on Twitter and john.pursch on Facebook.



Into Speeding Dawn

The watershed has lifted, its stellar sigh imbued with teetering companionship, championed by wrought-iron gusts of yesterday’s stormy passion. Today’s already breeding immutable intent, flowing from dimpled cheeks of newborn babes to qualities unrecognized in everyday routine.

Creatures settle into voice of natural habitats, blend silently in deep-sea yearnings, perfectly suited to surround. A frozen hand emerges, deep in thought, to scratch an ear of corn from fertile soil, feeding untold stories back to surging power’s eminently grateful maw. Distant sheen of working man rescinds elusive slumber’s quiet bliss.

Storage vacates elemental ways for municipal tides, sweating into swarming quotidian gel. A balled pellucid coil, immersed in wisdom, turns thematic motives into play, tapping on replicated footfalls, pumping with controlled ferocity.

Urban eyes and ears, excited in tandem, respond in kindred respiration’s ambitious haze, stumble into shower cocoon of warm impending ambience, erotica erased for now. Byways already filled, coursing night continues into speeding dawn.


Saturday, January 23, 2016

Linda M. Crate- Two Poems


burning hell

sitting in the pouring rain
doesn't seem so bad
all the sadness
seems to vanish when i let it
wash away,
and all your condescending voices
of judgment and scorn
are silenced by the
roar of
thunder;
all your demons come out in the open
so i know which hearts to slay
on the jagged edge of
my angry tongue—
you think you've seen my
temper?
you've yet to see me truly unkind,
but when you see the fire
in my eyes it's too late
to stop heaven
from burning away every piece of your hell.



monsters, beware, should you not be good

i love it when it rains
and thunders and lightnings
hard in my soul
because i see all the masks fall off
all the villains come out
running, trying to hide their faces
but i always knew;
i'm good at seeing through people
and all their guises
it is the honest people you have to fear
for we house all your secrets in our
bones
we know your true nature,
and will slay you
if you become the vile monster—
evil monsters have no place living among the
innocent,
and so when the rain falls
i dance
because my light will forever even shine
even on the darkest days because my
joy and hope isn't in the sunshine but in life and love
and laughter and all the things that make my
heart and soul smile—
flowers can't grow without rain
so i'll embrace it all
good and bad,
but all the evil monsters will be stricken down.


Friday, January 22, 2016

Jennifer Lagier- A Poem & Photo


                                                         "Valley Oak at Sunset"

Sentinel
 
A scrap of Artemis floats
above filigree limbs,
hangs in icy sky,
glimpsed between
witchy branches.
Anorexic moon dwindles
to white, glowing rib.
 
In the house beneath ancient oak,
human deconstruction persists –
relentless slide into dementia.
Names of objects,
familiar recipes,
sense of time vanish,
family history erased.
 
Night is chill,
growing darker.
Sinister storm clouds
coagulate overhead.


Thursday, January 21, 2016

David J. Thompson- A Photo


                                                             "Mystic Skates"


Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Denny E. Marshall- Two Poems & Art


                                                                  "The Birth"


Bang, Bang

Universe the great time machine
The pyrotechnics of the big bang
Celestial eruptions of the stars
Shoot lava-like across the voids
Echoing the eternal flame
Some explosions remain divine




Sailing

The big bang of the immense universe
Travels onward like a ship of dreams
Forever on the expanding ocean
Full sails navigate the cosmic winds
Distant calls of newborn passengers
Hoping to catch a ride


Adam Swift- A Poem


Adam Swift lives in Massachusetts, where he has been a reporter for a number of local newspapers. He has previously been published in Lollipop and Rattle. He first read about UFOs when he swiped a copy of his uncle's Flying Saucers, Serious Business. Every time Adam tries to listen to Art Bell, Art Bell retires again.



Cryptozoopoetry

Flying Saucers are real.

The Loch Ness Monster is in
my bathtub.

Bigfoot wants to know if this record store
carries any Townes Van Zant.

Chupacabra needs his flu shot again.
Really, has it been a year already?

There's a special deal on memory foam mattresses
in the Bermuda Triangle. One hundred percent
American made.

Champy for president,
2016.

The Jersey Devil, still mad Martin Brodeur
retired before bringing home one more
Cup.

Frankenstein's Monster
was never real.


Sunday, January 17, 2016

David J. Thompson- A Photo


                                                                  "Babylon"


Saturday, January 16, 2016

Tamara Turner- A Poem


A Chocolate Tale

In days of old
A princess fair
Could never get enough
Chocolate
T’was her greatest craving
Nothing would satisfy
Her chocolate desire
Demon of the woods
Helped her well
To create a spell  
For more more more 
First it was milk and peas
Then the dinner spoon
Roses in the courtyard
Family parrot next
Soon her chocolate touch
Nothing it wouldn’t effect
The more she touched
More she ate
No cure for chocolate lust
Agony was it to be without
To that demon she did shout
Unable to control
Chocolate magic
Demon laughed and watched
As she found herself
Chocolatized
Yummy treat for a troll
Gnawing into her belly
Chocolate blood spewed
Running down his chin
As he bit again
Her chocolate guts were soft
Spilling and getting caught
Within black jagged teeth
He lapped it all up
Crunching her chocolate bones
And as he licked a chocolate tear
From her chocolate face
He took his last bite
Savoring her chocolatey taste


Denny E. Marshall- Three Poems


Three Haiku

Eyes flowed, like her hair
Felt her electricity
Wonderful aching

Feel her beating heart
Pumps the mind with images
Veins flow with her pulse

Radiation of her
Radiation of stars, like glass
Mirrored images

Friday, January 15, 2016

Lana Grey- A Poem


Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Metal heart thrumming beneath synthetic skin,
crisscrossing wires winding a web of veins,
arteries, capillaries.
I am alive.

Whispered words from creators’ tongues—
“Can she feel?” “Can she fear?”
“Artificial Intelligence,” they call it.
To her, it is simply “thought.”

I am alive.
The notion is inexplicable, stranger than the nanites
igniting like finite suns to endow her with strength
enough to snap these fleshy gods.


Lana Grey was born and raised in Illinois, and she currently studies English/Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She intends to pursue an MFA and teach writing at the university level while continuing to write and publish her own poetry and prose.


Thursday, January 14, 2016

Tricia Marcella Cimera- A Poem


Galaxy
 
My father is in his bed.
He has died and the Hospice
Nurse is washing him.
I stay close.
She tells me my father
was very sweet. I agree.
He was, but not always.
He was many, many things.
She doesn’t know.
She didn’t know him.
What he meant to me.
I help her move him so
she can bathe his back.
Then she washes
his hands, slowly.  Later
the funeral home people come
in a hearse, with a stretcher.
My mother, my sister, we say
goodbye to my father.
I follow the stretcher out the door,
down the walkway,
watch him slide into the hearse.
You see,
I was always the little planet
that circled him. He was the sun
of my world. I want to stay
near him. But he moves away,
headed towards a clean, new
galaxy.


Tricia Marcella Cimera is an obsessed reader and lover of words. Her work is, or will be, in these diverse places: the Buddhist Poetry Review, Foliate Oak, Hedgerow, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Prairie Light Review, Reverie Fair, Silver Birch Press, Stepping Stones and Yellow Chair Review.  Tricia volunteers locally, believes there's no place like her own backyard, and has traveled the world.  She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois/in a town called St. Charles/by a river named Fox.
 
 

Stefanie Bennett- A Poem


Stefanie Bennett has published several poetry books, a libretto & a novel & has poems appearing in The Fib Journal, The Kalyna Review, Illya’s Honey Journal, Message in a Bottle, Shot Glass Journal, The Provo Canyon Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Mad Swirl, Galway Review, The Camel Saloon & others. Of mixed ancestry [Irish/Italian/Paugussett-Shawnee] she was born in Qld., Australia – & her latest poetry title “The Vanishing” [2015] was published by Walleah Press ... available at Walleah, Amazon & Fishpond Books.
 
 
 
LIFE STILLS       
 
Mistaking this love
Would mean
That the air has
No rhythm
 
To beat its wings
Upon...

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Jennifer Juneau- A Photo


                                                         "Creatures in the Mist"


Monday, January 11, 2016

Sudeep Adhikari- Three Poems



Sudeep Adhikari, from Kathmandu Nepal, considers poetry to be an impersonal act, largely deriving its content from unconscious psychic undergrounds. His works have recently been featured in Verse-Virtual, Arlington Literary Journal and Zombie Logic Review. 


A Mountain is Never Quiet

The mountain is never quiet
it celebrates the solitude of noise
the ancient murmurs of life, death
and all the in-betweens
alternately overlapping
in the colors of quartz and sandstones
a mountain breathes the carbons of long bygones
and we breath her oxygen in return.

I remember that parable by D.T. Suzuki
"when I began to study zen, mountains are mountains;
when I thought I understand zen, mountains were not mountains;
but when I understand zen, mountains were again mountains"
But in my case, "mountains were me"
a noise mistaken
by society for silence.

I know you don't believe me
if I say mountains do speak
but if you can feel wearing
her canopy of junipers and pines;
a moment before, a piece of rock on her peak
touching the sky, the next moment
gravitates with all its might to the abyss
that "Plong !", if you can hear
and on a fine day, when she loses herself
to thousands of roaring landslides
you will know.

 watching the mountain,
all I can be is
a naked impossibility of death and silence.


Nothingness is Fractal

The garden of lovelorn mist
flowers the airy spaceships
made of stainless steel
and a pocketful of silver, 
mixed with few multiverses
of cobalt blue.

I saw UFOs
of weird shapes
hanging on the ether
like the wild wet berries
with the dimension
somewhere between 2 and 3,
fractal.

Elysium waitress
will you serve me today
the zen of gravity,
a diet coke
and a river for a serpent ?
when my head
is 1,000 non-thoughts
above the me-level.

Silence, sky, white-noise
the pregnant space
of formless many,
and their million shades
of dynamics and dance;
So is my soul
always tripping and pimping
on organized chaos,
strange attractors 
and few Jupitars
of butterfly-effect.


Cloud Nothingness

Solitary, stoic
silent and stoned
a god stands tall
with his fractal emptiness;
green, saffron and vermillion red
melting on his mighty chest
while the sleep-walking witch
sways in aqueous ecstasy
her silty mist of lust and love
pervades the effulgent infinity 
of absence
supreme and shy.

And I watch those flying saucers
of luminescent gold-fire
quietly babysitting the sons of silver silence;
I am the Schrödinger's cat
dead and alive
aware and amored
countless, yet one
I AM
virtuous-vicious.

I am the Godhead reinvented within 
a punk Buddha 
shitfaced in your cosmic disco;
A spectral shape of decay and dust
a psycho-sonic ripple
crafted out of your ocean noise.


Stefanie Bennett- A Poem


Stefanie Bennett’s poems appear in Dead Snakes, Haggard & Halloo, Agent Orange ‘poems
to empower all Agent Orange victims’, Communion, Snorkel, The Fib Review & others. Of
mixed ancestry [Irish/Italian/Paugussett-Shawnee] she was born in Qld., Australia in 1945.
Stefanie’s latest poetry title ‘The Vanishing’ [2015] is published by Walleah Press & available
from Walleah Press, Amazon & Fishpond Books.
 
 
 
THE SOFT DOMESTIC ECONOMY    
 
Via the vending maelstrom
Machine
I get a blighted
Portfolio poultice –,
An art-deco
Electric toothbrush –,
Three cut-out
Culinary
Square meals –,
A jump-to-it
           ‘Confederacy
Of confidence’
           Madrigal
Where nothing
Is as it
           Seems –, and
The usual
Acidic glare
From
My bed-sit
Night nurse
Who has
 
Madam Blavatsky’s
... Eyes.
 
 
[First published in Boston
Poetry Magazine]
 
 

Michael Keshigian- Three Poems



FIRESTARTER
 
Carrying small flames
in asbestos pockets
of an insulated overcoat,
he clandestinely traverses
city streets,
tossing a spark here,
a smoldering cinder there
that temporarily ignites
then extinguishes
but serves as an admonition
to all to take heed
within their present comforts
and disingenuous deeds,
this phantom in his dark cloak,
hoping to go unnoticed
on his way toward the cemetery
to abscond the souls
of those that think
they may rest in peace.



SNEAK ATTACK
 
It might happen anywhere,
anytime, day or night,
in your bedroom, at work
or in the field where you casually stroll
to view the beauty of sunsets
against the tree-lined sky.
There will be no yearning,
no nostalgic provocation,
the sun, the moon, and the stars
will not tip their hands,
but suddenly, without warning,
she will materialize in your mind
and breathlessly you will stagger
at the impossible tangibility
of her appearance,
the meteoric rise of your pulse
as her phantom touch
sends your thoughts asunder,
your dizzying need,
reflecting, and magnifying
that unquenchable desire
the years long ago absconded.



SECRETS IN MOONLIGHT
 
He sat upon the boulder
not quite centered
in the middle of the field
and flipped the pages
of nighttime‘s novel
to the chapter where the moon
ascended above the white pines,
fir tips giving the massive face
shaded stubble
as clouds on either side
shaved the surface closely
then departed slowly enough
for the stars
to begin the following chapter,
enhancing glows that extended
the moonbeam’s pale path
which he followed
off this rock of familiarity
to the page where dreams
dared to be considered
amid the sandy mesh of light,
descriptive details in separate paragraphs
which he read
upon these ashen pages,
eventually lifting his eyes from the glow
to absorb the mystical message
he received from the luminosity
as he closed the book,
shifted homeward,
bolstered by an aura of reverie
the translucent light imparted.