Robin Wyatt Dunn- A Poem

When You Feel like the Center of the World

Fire then fire
thrum under bier my bear my burr
flume rot and hue my face
with your truer terror red:

Fire and more fire
On my own
On my face
Transmitted to you:

The novel is the story of you
Come off that planet you dreamt of
and an avatar is only a victim
of the alien mind control ray

(but still, I want you to enjoy it)

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

High Altitude Bomber

He was on a flightless

strafing run from Planet

Weird, his tie‑dyed

Hard Rock Uranus t-shirt

torn, grass and mud stained

blunting the wild, bright

colors as if he'd spent

last night being dragged

behind a tractor in a

cornfield way past

East of Eden.

"Say, partner, mix me up

one of your best High Altitude

Bombers.  I'm going to need

lots of rocket fuel for a

long midnight run."

I didn't need to ask what

occupied country that flight

might take.  His cruising

altitude was in a stratospheric

ozone layer beyond search

lights, no topo maps needed

for targets, everything was a

primary objective in this

comprehensive search and destroy

mission of his life.

The Afterburner

His interplanetary space exploration

party was on the last legs of a

journey in the dark, badly in need

of fresh supplies, pure oxygen, rocket

fuel that might propel them beyond

the severe gravitational pull of heavenly

bodies doped into a fourth dimension

beyond star charts, maps of the known

world and what lies on the other side,

running on the last alcohol fumes at

the bottom of the tank, the captain striking

matches in the poorly lighted bar, trying to

check the levels of intoxicating fluids,

bank notes necessary for a fresh supply

of whatever might keep them going,

afraid of a crash landing for everyone

aboard, a desert planet, flash points

of their collective ozone layers

flaring briefly before going out for good.

Hell Cat

After dark she comes

alive, emerging from

shadow worlds so Un-

earthly, so unreal her

skin is almost trans-

parent, defined by

garments that seem to

have no weight, no

substance, no existence

of their own, so that

when she leans forward

over the bar to accept

a light, she never seems

to have been anywhere

else, not exactly having

arrived so much as

simply existing wherever

she needed to be, her voice

an intaken breath held,

unspoken thoughts co-

mingling with yours, a

heartbeat away from

suggesting trading your

soul for a week of endless

nights on the town, never

glimpsing the light until

debts accrued were to be paid.

Ayaz Daryl Nielsen- Two Poems

an old grey god sighs

his drunk acolyte's

mumbled devotions

from a window well in

another dead-end alley 

just enough room

for both of them

'stop being so jealous'

my sister reiterates

'you know well enough

only the oldest sibling

inherits a third eye'  

ayaz daryl nielsen, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/125+ issues), homes for poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, Dead Snakes, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane, and!   online at:  bear creek haiku  poetry, poems and info

Denny E. Marshall- Art

                                                           Venomous Creature

Denny E. Marshall- Three Poems

Worlds Collide

Countless solar systems and worlds collide
Expanding billion light year quasar skies
Cold black gravity brings the great divide
Near absolute zero answers can hide
Born binaries molecules deep inside
Stars in creation cluster matter dies
Countless solar systems and worlds collide
Expanding billion light year quasar skies


Space #1

The time guilds across the sky
Like the plane
Lost above the atmosphere
Looking for the bottle
That fell to the bottom
Of the sea…picked up and tossed until
Crashed across the moon…or slid
Debris jetting
Into volcanoes shot into Jupiter


Centaurs

Out far away in the Kuiper Belt
Centaurs elliptical journey begins
The tug of Neptune’s gravity is felt
Asteroids to comets from the ice melt
Changes will color on the orbit dealt
In the last chapter the gas giant wins
Out far away in the Kuiper Belt
Centaurs elliptical journey begins


Denny E. Marshall has had art, poetry, & fiction published, some recently. To see more of his works visit www.dennymarshall.com

 

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

Wolfwoman

All the gestures she

used to repel evil

spirits, projected auras,

embodied voices speaking

variant tongues, were

of no use, insufficient

for the task of banishing

the one she was in

need of most, an unfriendly

servant of the distilled

ones, he who was denying

her service, jet fuel for

an internal rocket launch

she was determined must have

to leave the current, mundane

gravitational pull of sobriety

or so she seemed to be

saying, in an incredibly

roundabout way, eyes

glazing over, wide with

adrenaline, fears she can

no longer control, in total

denial of what was be said,

"You want to leave now?

or should I call 911 for

valet service?""Valet service!?

What are you talking about?"

"Handcuffs, strap down gurneys,

full body restraints, shots of

Halodol with Thorazine chasers---

you know, the usual stuff."

"You think you're so smart.

Just wait for the next full

Moon. I'll be back for you."

And she would be, fingernails

filed as claws, teeth as fangs,

the wind howling at her back.

Frostbite

Wherever it was

he'd been doing

time, there was

a premium paid

for head cases,

cold blood running

thin as the long

white scars that

would never com-

pletely heal on

his face as if

some wild thing

had tested its

claws for sharp-

ness there & a

demon had picked

the scabs off

at night from

each end creating

running sores down

his neck & forehead

where the black

eye patch sd.

CLOSED above

the socket where

the eye should have

been & what was

left in his mouth

like teeth was

gold capped, though

the spaces in be-

tween were black

crowns waiting to

be honed to a point

like those fingers

of his rattling

dollar coins on

the bar surely any-

thing they touched

would die a horrible

frostbitten death

 

 

 

Hell Hounds

"Do not eat anything in the underworld"

Wherever they had been,

their environment had treated

them in an unkind manner,

unless they were accustomed to

wearing clothes that had seen

the inside of forest fires, lakes

of industrial wastes that could

only be encountered wading,

knee deep, through concrete

sewage pipes into culverts

where stagnant runoff bred

mutant insects, plants resistant

to every known defoliant,

every toxic killer spray

currently in use.  Surviving

these ordeals had made their skins

tougher than rawhide: sunburnt

and cracked where thin coats of

muscle, sinew, flesh covered

bone met their clothes that had stiffened

into something like denim armor,

layers that glowed in the dark with

a strange phosphorescent aura of

other worldliness that made their

eyes mostly off-white with pale

shaded liver spotting where irises

should have been, their black tongues

flicking broken stubs instead of teeth,

their breath a visible waste cloud

as they hissed something about a

powerful, more than one keg of beer

thirst, a kind of smile on the desiccated

strips of skin where their lips should

have been, their cheeks the last firewall

of resistance for what burned inside.

John Pursch- Two Poems

Antoinette the Unfurled

She were an inveterate liar from day one,

hull the whey through gradient school

of minority fledgling ink retardant fish mechanics,

to chesty right of your every nocturnal daydream,

stumbling in misappropriated gumdrop milk bottle

stoolie spansules of hopelessly caressed soap dish

legal fruitcake surprise raids.

Her confidantes were all simple farmhands,

existing in dubiously simultaneous rat traps

of fire escape jungle chop suey lingerie commotion,

devoted to antiseptic notational blues of pall bearer

shock resistance masterpiece triage interludes,

conjoined at chopped porpoise measuring flan

torpedo feather proving groins by hobbled alien

Ferris wheels.

How a man could ever have munched

a shucked and solemn indemnified charity

for such lowbrow and ostensibly purposeful

an action figurine as Antoinette the Unfurled

Screech of Diabolical Cordite Menses

is so tarred and bulimically scratched

to bullfrog salamander salami swami stupa

schlock as to tender feet for pavement dues,

in trebled publican nudie galleries,

soiled to caterwauling fish rag sarcasm junkies

in flexing glass erector suits on washboard alley

bailiwick ablution headquarters just south of

slanted bollocks biscuit shoots of bamboozled

bubonic choke points.

Umbilical Flotilla

Bleary quiet mumbling chunks of human waste

erosion shots impaled our spacecraft sidebar

lollipops with ladled lobe deflection mantras,

toiling surreptitiously till thimbles cried a

troweled dear certificate of silken sinkhole

sap secretion’s classic flyer lossage streak

down thigh lunge pewter’s importuning

opulence to cold cream petulance to mossy

mixer beeswax bunk bed shellfish amplitude

of crawdad feasibility in nightshade denouement.

Hemmed showers curtailed paws into tensor overload,

fixing crabby cesspool collapse with old cry stairwell

topsoil pleats of plaintive skyline humping blackout

Sterno peaks and ontological eruptive cinders,

bent in mutinous backlog.

Hats evoked my cranial engraving sire’s imperial tie dye turban,

toppling a one-eyed swordfish into winking elbow halter moons

beneath a British sunset.

Sanded yetis posed for flowing fantail blitz bereavement spunk

in beveled spender comedy endowment jeans of caustic pliers,

torn pajama cookie trikes, and hortatory embassy police.

He paused to conquer shaven city sea lane apple

clapboard talismans of taut religious derrieres,

flexing prostitution welts in elevated train

shot dateline smudge coulisse,

spent wickedly for daylight traipse parades.

The curtain rose on yet unaltered plethora

of morbid hulk Cyrillic coverall repellant fleas

in dubious enchantment chard’s umbilical flotilla,

casting yawns from epiglottal foxhole teeth to coxswain gel

to grossly underestimated prose coyote taste bud grease

to sympathetic liner grout of salient and mordant peculation.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and 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.