Stefanie Bennett- Two Poems

Stefanie Bennett is of mixed heritage [Italian/Irish/Paugussett-Shawnee].

Born in Townsville, Qld., Australia her latest poetry title was published by

Walleah Press and is available from Walleah, Amazon and Fishpond

Books.

 

 

 

TOWER           

 

Fetch me a line, one that won’t

Prop up the Nation.

 

Moon, toss back the dog – it’s

Given you narcolepsy.

 

Be damned you horn-locking

Demons masquerading

                       Culture

 

Tasering the body you’re

Hoping to save...

 

Lend that wit, Sociology. That

Wit festering in memory-bank’s

                       Zoo... just

 

Take yourselves to bed; don’t

Question what I’m about to do

                       With your tools:

 

By morning you’ll inherit

The labours you crave.

 

 

 

INCURSION      

 

Only the most fiery

Of our poets

Are prepared

To burn

Their

Most chosen

Scraps:

 

This of course

Does not

Prevent

       Repetitive

Smoke chasing.

 

 

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.

Assuming Quicksand

Embarking adoration rips acetic eyeliner loot from second-can tobacconists before a pensive shiver ever ruptures, crepuscular in muted metal rain of wagon sickle hiding squeak.

Nods withstand explosive giggles, gaggles of frocked wolves, and messy old smiths, all flying on method dreams, passing casual clay and sunny glimpses of imbibed recycled calendars, traduced to marginalia by posed ergodic flippers.

Punchy cardigan pairs irrigate erotic tackles, plucking blockhouse bullion into phased legality’s codicil of sullied keister casuistry, breaded to alpine consanguinity by a Merovingian quadrant’s hortatory usurpation.

Jocks morph twice, rowing through floating thighs, christening the shapely seagoing gulls with lungs of needy illusionists.

Melodious weeds throw secondary towlines in estranged attempted basket-chaser freebie whist, carping at neural streets of vortices, equivocation becalmed by sonar.

Finally, theta ran into homey guardians, cordoning coughed talons, fusing anisotropic ideas within another pout, assuming quicksand.

Nancy May- Three Alien Haiku

headline news

an alien found dead

at the crash site

hearing the news

of the alien autopsy

one heart, two lungs

alien space ship

floats amongst the clouds

planning a new route

Nancy May’s haiku can be found at 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, Kernels, Mused – The BellaOnline Literary Review, Danse Macabre – An online literary Magazine, High Coupe, A Handful of Stones, Lyrical Passion Poetry E-Zine, 50 Haikus, The Germ, Boston Literary Review, Be Happy Zone, Every Day Poets, Cattails, Ppigpenn, Creatrix Journal, M58, The Camel Saloon, Haikuary, the Plum Tree Tavern., Dead Snakes, The Poet Community and Poems and Poetry. She has reached The Heron’s Nest consideration stage twice and the Chrysanthemum consideration stage once. She is working on her first haiku collection.

Bruce Mundhenke- A Poem

The Wire

Come on out of your shell,
Take a walk upon the wire,
Watch that you don't fall,
Beware of the fire.

Look down at the abyss,
Fire down below,
Careful as you move along,
Take it nice and slow.

Fire down below you,
No way to ascend,
No way to know what is ahead,
When the wire has reached its end.

Don't think about the abyss,
Pay no attention to the fire,
Dig each righteous step you take,
As you travel on the wire.

No way to go backward,
Back into your shell,
The wire is now your home,
Your shell has served you well.

But the wire might lead to heaven,
Or the wire might lead to hell,
But it's your wire to travel,
Pity if you fell.

Robert Lavett Smith- A Poem

CONCERNING ANGELS

Although she is usually loath to be seen
so scandalously under-dressed, Beulah Rock
actually owns—stashed in the back of a drawer
somewhere—a prodigious yellow tee shirt
bearing the slogan I Believe in Angels
in bold blue letters as vivid as a summer sky.
A gift from Myrtle several birthdays ago,
it’s aired out once a year, at the annual picnic.

Some insist these celestial messengers are merely
symbolic, but she and the Reverend know better:
Many’s the time, at dusk when the diminished light
transforms fields and trees to a brief, dusty gold,
she’s sure she’s heard them softly singing,
voices concealed behind the rustling leaves
or in the patient refrain of the nearby river.

A reassurance, perhaps a benediction,
the words are strange, and vanish instantly,
like fragments of a conversation overheard
and then forgotten an instant before sleep.



Raised in New Jersey, Robert Lavett Smith has lived since 1987 in San Francisco, where for the past sixteen years he has worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional. He has studied with Charles Simic and the late Galway Kinnell. He is the author of several chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Widower Considers Candles (Full Court Press, 2014). He has recently been working on an new collection of sonnets—his second foray into the form—which is entitled Sturgeon Moon, and which will hopefully be published by Full Court Press sometime this year.

Sudeep Adhikari- Two Poems

The City of Men

The ravens gang up

on the lone tree

in my neighborhood

house of sticks and ether

besides the towering

jungle of silicates;

gloss of stupor double-binds

 the schizophrenia

of Gods' city.

 A pocketful of plate-tectonics,

a few quantums of love and hate,

a sleep-walking inertia

living the dreams

of ancient mummies;

let the gods sleep

 in their UFO drones. 

There are no doors to heaven

there are no truths

 to seek

are you there, my friend?

are you awake?


First appeared in "Novelmasters"

Multiplicity Nothingness

 

Glitch and gravity, both
bend the space
time-warp my already
whacked-out reflexes
I make the Mobius strip

and a couple of more paradoxes

out of my psyche;

God must be a geometer
as Kepler has thought once.

a sonic excess of noise
or the rhizomatic fuzz
inside the root of a pepal tree;

life oozes out of
every impossibilities

in a path

nor straight, neither curvilinear
fractal, probably.

 

Have you ever tried

to make nothingness

deep-dream in Google?

to get countless virtual raves,

multiverses, cat-eyes

for the laser-light
and few psychedelic

shinto temples.

 

matter and mind

weave an irreducible

 psychoid whole
related and plural

 undivided, yet many

The Tao of psychophysics.

 

All my life, I haunted

for the single truth
and ended up finding

many whores,
some sleepless rivers that flow
straight from a beer-factory,

few deathless trees that refuse

not to dance for a second

and some coked-out gods

who like to party

wearing a blood-soaked skull
for a cap.

 

I am not a sell-out
but I find no difference either.

 First appeared in "Zombie Logic Review"

Sunil Sharma- A Poem

Gorgon!

You are a strange creature, O, Gorgon!

Snakes braid your head, unheard so far!

Your gaze turns the viewed into stone.

You, of dreadful visage and poisonous locks.

Being immortal, you do not dread the Hades, like us

Because---

You are the epitome of death,

The terrible figure, a minor deity;

Not only the ancient Greeks but

Rest of the humanity has been in thrall of you and your other sisters.

Fanged teeth, eyes popping out of sockets and protruding tongue pictured

On the walls in Athens frightened others with evil hearts and protected

Residents from harm or malevolent eyes;

Your mythic being sprang up from fear and continue to dominate the creative imagination.

At the same time, you got great powers:

Blood taken from your right side can heal,

While from the left flank, if administered,

Can prove fatal!

Same person, contrasting sides,

Dualism of sweetness and poison

Contained within!

Creativity and destruction; life and death

You are the eternal source for both.

Femininity---dreaded and revered

Goddess and demon;

Combining animal and human sides in an odd body.

Gorgon, the serpent-woman, a hybrid of terrible aspects---

You symbolise patriarchy’s deepest fears and anxieties

Snake venom,

Deadly stare,

And the capacity to turn the spectator into an object,

What deadly combo inscribed in a woman's loving heart!

Although advanced, the world deifies the ugly and markets

Such strange depictions of an imagined dark figure, for the horror industry.

How misunderstood Gorgon, you continue to be, in our age!