Jeffrey Park- Three Poems

AFTER THE STORM

 

Oily shimmers spread slowly across

the face of the reservoir like

a toxic rainbow fallen from the heavens

 

and on the sand at the bottom of the pool

a twisted confusion

wreckage of metallic carapaces and

alloy-armored appendages

 

man-sized mechanized crustaceans

poached to a coppery hue and abandoned

to the fierce affections of oxidation.

 

Long after the waters have leached away

their burnished sheaths and corroded their

gauntleted clamps, their optical lenses

still flicker with dream images

 

of glorious battles fought between bloodless

pitiless soulless adversaries

beneath an endless sea of ink

scored by a thousand burning satellites.

 

 

CONTACT

 

To them it was odorless,

colorless, flavorless, detectable

only through application

of the most sensitive instruments

and why give a name to something

whose very omnipresence

belies the fact of its existence?

 

And as my gleaming chitinous

integument begins to melt

before their luminescent

eyes, they all twist their shapely

limbs in sympathy, thinking

perhaps what a shame it is

that we should meet

 

by sad coincidence just at

the moment of my spontaneous

but, for my kind, quite inevitable

dissolution.

 

 

DONOR

 

I saw the boy with my eyes again

this morning, and a middle-aged woman,

her faced marred by my too-large pores,

felt my heart beating painfully hard

as a jogger slogged past me in the street,

heard my stomach growling from inside

a half-open door. And again, and for

the thousandth time, I asked myself why

I must be plagued by this peculiarity,

this wretched ability to give and give and

give some more until I can’t even look at

an attractive woman without feeling

a stab of incestuous guilt. Ever the

unwilling benefactor, I try locking myself

in again, closing my eyes and ears

to the endless pleading – knowing that in

the end I’ll give in once more, lay

myself down and allow them to help

themselves to my constantly regenerating

bounty. It’s tissue they’ll be wanting

this time, I’ve seen the smoke rising on

the horizon. And they’ll leave me flayed

and writhing on the table, dreading

the horrible itch of the new skin to come –

altruist, angel, philanthropist,

great sobbing bundle of shattered nerves

and freshly grown replacement parts.

 

 

 

Bio: Jeffrey Park's poems have appeared in journals such as Subliminal Interiors, Danse Macabre, Crack the Spine, and Right Hand Pointing, and his digital chapbook, Inorganic, is available online from White Knuckle Press. His poem "Hard To Reach" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A native of Baltimore, Jeffrey now 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.

Linda M. Crate- A Poem

star child 

 

there is something cold and blank behind her smile 

a falsity sincere, as if she's trying to drink in the

opposite of her apparent tears; a star that one day

fell from the inky indigo black of night to fall upon

the earth, and start a new life it must have been

a start to break upon the glass of a new reality while

hers had been smashed — river stones mark her

entry way into the field, crooked and disoriented as

the teeth in the mouth of the man that tried to smile

at her she could not bring herself to do anything more

than the pained grimace meant to be a smile; hearts are

delicate and fragile things breaking easier than the

sinew of formerly broken bones, and all she could think

of were her father stars and their heavenly thrones —

knowing not the reason why she was thrust upon the earth

she resents everything from the birds to the bees,

but most of all she resents her very birth into human kind

for she remembers the tears of stars not the tears of men.

Donal Mahoney- A Poem

Pilots of the Dawn

We were pilots of the dawn, launched

from our mother's womb screaming,

flying higher than we ever dreamt.

We sought to navigate the sky 

and make the sun our prisoner.

It was just a sinkhole in the path

of everything we had to do. 

Now, many decades later,  

we've done everything we can

and glide like gulls, aimlessly.

One by one, our planes plummet

back to Earth without a warning  

while the rest of us are slowly

running out of fuel.

There's nothing we can do.

We flew for years to get things done  

and now it's time to tally up our score

but that's not part of our assignment.

Mark Fleury- Three Poems

Ready To Fly To The Beam of Sun Ship 

Ready to fly to the beam of Sun Ship.

Maybe it's because space is so common,

That it's hard to see forms are only

Its shadows. It's the same beam that if a poem

Leads to the edge of a mental cliff,

The next poem is a way to the other side.

Ready to fly to the beam of Sun Ship,

Revealed with each exhale;

Openness Light vibrations.

Light and Sound when added to breathing, heart

Beat of time, opening the Ship's fifth dimension.

Tears of joy because you're returning. 

Breath

Breath wants to touch the heart of the beat,

Rhythm, internal space, Heaven, Sun-pouring from the shore of 

Complete openness; Holy Ghosting, forming, vibrating

Against the human body. 5D beam of 

Breath within lamp, desk, chair, touched

By the heart of Heaven's beat;

Breath's vibration, ground for Muse

To open the fourth dimension: to take flight

From a ground floor window. Its opposite, speech,

Impresses the page with

The only place left to turn: Spirit,

Colliding with hearing to form

The syllable. And sentence's beam

Fills up the beat of breath,

The ground of self-sacrifice, the intestines

Of a sunset. The interchangeable heart. Diamond 

In a ring. 

Form is mathematical, a beat for Muse

To fill up. She'll offer it to you as she rises 

To this surface: breath, in and out, flutter 

Of her wings. The tendency to look back 

At her reflection in the window 

Before taking flight is Sun Ship ready to leave. 

My Furthest Outside 

My furthest outside 

Is the skin of a sunbeam. Not giving off 

Enough light to warm the moon.

The darkness

Around the angles 

Of a street lamp

Is the marrow

In my glass jaw. My smile is shining

From the dawn's horizon on the other side

Of a bus stop.

The silhouetted skyline is in between

The cold of dark 

And cold of light

In the icy blue skeleton driver

At the top of the steps.

I pay my fare with the skin

From the shedding sunrise. It falls

As a feather into his bony hands,

Cupped then clasped until the shaft 

Is snapped in half and the time I've spent

Waiting for the bus to take me home bleeds

From the broken quill. 

From the back of the bus I can see 

The building's window on the ground floor,

Where Muse is on the sill, looking 

Into her reflection one last time.

She says "The past is pain.

I can fit all of it in my spine,

Where all of my out-of-body experiences are.

Space Shore is in there, too, the Ship 

I'll fly to when I'm done looking

At myself. It's up there, east,

Over my shoulder.

The Sun Ship of space fits in 

My pain, where the quill is bleeding

And the bus is leaving. An open space

For the ink to bleed in, as the bus

Takes my pain west to its grave."

John W. Sexton- Two Poems

Fossilized Sky

chunk of coprolite ...

not even a whiff

of the rancid prairies

dry lake bed a down-

wards tower ... ghost sharks

patrol a fossilized sky

Phobos and Deimos

the loudly named

mousy pebbles

Nitwits of Now

Verne's spinning-top

space-machine ... puréed Parisians 

to the Moon

jellyfish arrays

conduct thought to psychbanks ...

release the safety cough

the realtime Time Machine

we went missing a week

to come to this

myth-representation …

nitwits of now

are always the gods of then

John W. Sexton lives in the Republic of Ireland and is the author of four previous poetry collections, the most recent being Vortex (Doghouse, 2005) and Petit Mal (Revival Press, 2009). His fifth collection, The Offspring of the Moon, is due from Salmon Poetry in spring 2013. He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.

Robin Dunn- Three Poems

Visitor

I have arrived at Albemuth.
The sun is blue, and dreamy.
A man greets me:
“Hello!”
“Hello,” I say.
“What freedom did you want?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Did you want freedom?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, what kind?”
He shows me some of the offers at hand.
There is the hermitage,
And there the madhouse.
Between them are the oligarch,
And the poet.
“This wasn’t what I was looking for,” I say.
“It’s all we’ve got this century,” he says.
“Can I see the transmitter?” I ask.
“Sure, over here.”
It’s beautiful, old fashioned, looks like it’s made of wood.
“Wow,” I say.
“Don’t get too close.”
It feels so dark, suddenly, freedom.
And I huddle by the post, and watch its messages travel into distant darks,
Tempting men and aliens like me to break with their traditions,
And journey towards this strange center.
Why is it so dark?
Why so lonely?
“You should go,” the man tells me.
“Yes.”
“You come on back now, you here?” he calls after me.
Albemuth, O Albemuth.  Your ichor burns.



Transmitter

I know the locks;  I know the girders of your histories.
I have a map some man worked out about your face,
And its aegises wrought cold and solemn,
Shields designed to suffer aeons of bad luck,
The pain of human generations,
Cross statistical patterns of the movements of your upper lip.
I wield my key, my key of freedom,
Knowing it is horrifying and must remain unseen,
Must remain unwritten,
Must remain a sign you hear between stations,
A word you understand before it’s swallowed by static.
And now I find a man, a young man,
And whisper in his ear.
And the city is no longer asleep.
He hears the city think.
He watches it move,
And knows like I do that it watches him and worries him across its thighs,
Willing him to semi-blindness, an accommodating smile.
I have planted a seed.



Love at Albemuth

The final sleep, the tied knot,
And the untied chromosomes,
Its freedom of the promise of death following love,
Its knowledge of this strange waystation on the Mississippi or the Nile,
And its fear of the river,
For what lover wants to move too fast or too slow?
We must unhinge and flow,
If we’d embrace the slavery of a woman’s smile,
And all that follows.
We cannot claim uniqueness or surprise,
Not in this,
But we can define.
I can buy a gun,
And paint on placards,
Wave you nude across the street,
And photograph the crowds,
Tell a neighbor that the government is lying,
And count the pentameter of my hymnal march,
Planning exodus.
Where will I go, Albemuth?
I’ll always need a woman.
I’ll always know I failed to free myself from flesh,
Whatever dreamers may say.
What were your intentions?  How delimited and how surmised?
Was it only a half-joke, a warning shot, a simple coup d’etat?
What biology sunders your dreams?
Are you commingling even now in your last awareness of your battery’s power,
Fencing off your doubts and swallowing ‘em,
Knowing that your purpose can never be explained?
Perhaps it is a new flesh you dream of,
Some dystopia held beneath the table like a gun.
Perhaps it’s life itself you hate, the chains of flesh.
Liberation, conflagration, expiation, Albemuth,
Your sins are my sins.
Tell me, and we go blind to Betelgeuse or Arcturus,
To burn the lie out of the hand,
And break the bone that feels the glory of a long career,
The bone that keeps the student in their seats,
To while away their heresies.
We’ll break it to half-burn,
And take the charred remnant and attach it to your pole,
Whatever your ultimate designs.
I can feel your heart twitching.



Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in The Town of the Queen of the Angels, El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, in Echo Park.  He is 33 years old.

Bradford Middleton- A Poem

I KNOW WHAT I SAW

I know what I saw I pleaded

I know it sounds weird but I know what it was

All the planets were aligned

And the moon was huge in the daytime sky

When there it was

I know what it was

But I don’t want to say

I’m sick of being ridiculed

And having my claims put down

I saw it from a long way off

It hurtled across the sky

At a velocity and direction I knew was strange

And then there it was

Hovering over the end of the pier

People stood, rubbing their eyes

Unsure of what to say or how to behave

But I know what I saw

Because I’d seen one before

That night many years ago

I had been a young schoolboy

Travelling through northern Italy

On a coach full of rowdy kids

Two bright lights translucent against a big black sky

But even then I knew what I’d seen

Aged ten years old it was clear to me

We’d been visited from beyond the stars

It was just the same on this fateful day

The non-believers stood aghast

Not sure of how to react or what they saw

I knew what it was and knew I had to stay

Watching the unbelievable

Whilst knowing it was only too real

A flying saucer had made its way

Across the universe and had landed

At the bottom of my street over the bloody pier

I know what I saw I’d seen one before



 

BIOGRAPHY

Bradford Middleton was born in 1971 and is a writer of poetry and short fiction who currently resides in Brighton after coming of age in London and then being somewhat transient for a while during which he lived in both Surrey and Staffordshire.  He has so far attained the status of Contributing Poet at the Mad Swirl, and has been published online in numerous places, including Word Riot, Foliate Oak, Dead Beats and Horror, Sleaze Trash as well as in print through the Poetry Quarterly journal. He has a novel near completion entitled Dive which someone will get to read soon.