Denny E. Marshall- Art

                                                                  In The Mist

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

The CHUD's

(Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers)

They only appear at night

wearing dark clothes, exposed

pale-as-death skin covered by

face paints, resins living things

stuck to as they made their way

down deserted platforms, under

turnstiles, past token seller/change

maker booths fire bombed for

effect, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE....

spray painted on the white tile

walls in bloodred coloring, graffiti

artist murals scene after scene from

an urban Inferno/Hell depicting alien

creatures much like those making

their way slowly, deliberately as

mollusks in trench coats, human slugs

trained in a silent ninja art of sudden

death inflicted by common household

items: church key bottle and can openers,

meat thermometers and rolling pins,

wires from antique egg slicers honed

to points as artery cutters, blood vessels

punctured so fast, death is almost instant,

almost painless, the aftermath grim

and disgusting, their cook fires sweet

and subdued confined to oil barrels

and trash cans well underground,

so far removed from human habitation,

no one dares track them.

Radio Kaos

Everyone on the island

she ended up on knew

her as the radio woman

dressed in multi-layers

all summer long as a

walking clothes tree all

the fabrics turned inside

out to preserve what

remained of original

prints, designs, logos,

perhaps as part of a

hidden agenda or a search

for sponsors of her personal

walking, talking one woman

news show she broadcast

in perfectly enunciated

disc jockey speak all of

the special events as they

were happening Live for

everyone's enjoyment,

ready or not.  Cynics

suggested: what would

happen if her transmission

frequencies changed and

she became a receiver

of conversations from

another wavelength or

if the format changed from

all news, all the time to

hard rock, CxW, classical

music?

Wireless Transmissions

Somehow mother had confused

her father's position as an

early executive with AT&T

with Marconi's intent to

make wireless transmissions

across the Atlantic extend to

the dead so that whenever

she picked up a telephone,

the expectation was that,

somehow, the person to whom

she was connected, their existence

was in another life beyond

this one, that is, officially

listed among the white pages

of the no longer living

and that by calling someone

in the book, automatically

reversed the charges and sent

valuable negative existence

ions into her world; the longer

you talked, the closer to death

you came, resulting in some

strange, one-sided conversations,

though, in retrospect, not brief

enough.

John Pursch- Three Poems

Faustian Fleas

Lipids zip along a panned diversion,

cashing humpback heels for coronary carpet torque,

stringing shoeless buckles skyward.

Rapport mingles with speared treason,

issuing shellfish to pointed stereo ribs,

gathering tight apes.

Slurps herd parabolic sisters into postcards,

guessing stark entrails from enclave bottoms.

Not to buy insoluble stains from venal urns,

antsy herbivores rake osmotic chrysanthemums

over clipboard fables, seeping under fueled purists.

Null cotter pins revoke putative stentorian milk,

sputtering when chosen toys dwarf a soothing newlywed.

Bilingual gymnasts ease pastoral grates aside,

extolling warm Victrolas.

Revelatory greyhounds spot Faustian fleas

on phosphorescent commissars,

pending soybean fusion.

Cookie

Sand crawls beneath

a soldered cookie’s

scribbled thong,

dueling gravy to a

statutory standstill

in moonshine facial

trickle stump’s

concubinal

virulence.

Her slacks

hang pouting

in diametrically

crepuscular

twine agreement’s

peninsular trimester,

foisted foibles leading

strange luminaries from

watershed synecdoche

partitions of Velcro vermin

to voluminous v-neck petters.

Wedged wayward

Jell-O boats flutter,

staffed with equestrian

daredevils piercing

soothing scythes

for chandelier

accompaniment

with menthol sword

profusion’s coyly

prefigured grind.

Sixteen Doubts

Sixteen doubts caress a cerebellar sampling shunt

with bailing coven wristwatch twinge serration myths,

locating the duly muffled sire of sworn dimples

in the pure pubescent smile of android stoolie crows

on necrophilic daytime creamery diffusion spokes

near hub town pardon scurrying nests of blown knee

Punic territory ale.

If sex were hauled to cracked upper staircase

catacombs by cataclysmically inclined plaster peelers,

what would becalm the titanic question barkers

of all incipient iterations of receptivity’s born retrieval,

cored to steamy ground improvement snow graphs?

Evenly sundered sots implore bland wagoners

to defalcate enduring singers twice a day in spritely

carrion traceries of codfish potion smoker krill,

posturing for blemished cloture counterpoint impellor hogs,

flowing round the hip-length sighs through featurettes

of well-constructed sallow boys who warp blue alley byways

into mime tureens to swallow hurtled gentry scavengers

in balky coder hovels. 

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.

Alan Catlin- Three Poems

              The End

                   

I should have been receiving food stamps

from Mars that's what she had written

on her:"Let's fly to the moon" itinerary

that included places in the Bronx no white

woman would dare to go:"The Bronx Zoo

holds animals that don't exist.  Seeing them

makes you  go blind.  You are allowing

your children to become agents of an

infernal being. This conversation is being

monitored by an unfriendly God."

She said things like that with a straight face

as we looked at African Beasts she claimed

came from two thousand years ago:

"They were reptiles when I took you

to the Natural History Museum. We could

go back there and learn about the past.

They flew beings that had no wings then,

they still do but no one will admit it."

They sure as hell flew things through her mind.

I woke up in a strange dream of New York City

in which there were street things neither man

nor beast would  admit to  knowing crawling

on my skin,  she would say, "I had acquired

a disease in the Bronx."

"What kind of a disease?" I would ask,

" A New York disease, New York is a

special place.   The God we recognize as divine,

died here.  I have proof. The Bible tells us

there is another  finer world.  Our skin diseases

no longer  exist there." She was singing another

life story  through my lips and all I could  

feel was the end,  a strange place that would

look like a Subway  Station in Upper Manhattan

but would be somewhere else that felt

like Manhattan in another life.

 

The Woman Who Came from Nowhere

They only poems she believed in

came from a white giant’s thigh,

trailed sea weeds like the green

hair of drowned women, mirror

images of the self anyone could

witness as she did, though glass

bottomed boats scratched and marred

by coral wreathes that held the scriptures

she read the holy words from, reciting

them in cadence the way nuns did

in cloisters at the end of a diseased

mind.  All the stories she wrote down

bore that taints of dried blood, self-

inflicted wounds sealed by an open flame

from hearth fires in a strange, afflicted

place she referred to as “where she was born.”

Annotated maps showed portals, called

stops, describing  the way from one place

of an evolving plain of existence she

traveled on, the links of which were

a colored lined grid for easy reading

underground where the artificial light

she read with was muted like the trumpets

of the fallen-from-grace-angels she

claimed were her consorts though no one

could see who she meant.

Where she was now could be described

as, lost in transition, or so she would say

when asked to explain what she scribbled

in between lines of the large print books

in a dead language of her own invention;

said it was a place like nowhere,

only closer to home.

Alien Thoughts

They say the body I came with

doesn't fit me anymore.

How can that be?

Nothing has changed since the hour

of my birth-19-it says on

the calendar of my life.

The big hand and the little hand

are pointing toward the place

of no return just over the sunset

where the darkest places are.

When I arrive, someone will

teach me how to smoke and

all ten of my fingers will be

blessed with fire.

The voice inside my throat

will be happy then and will

stop eating both the house and

the home we have been living in.

Maybe then my body will remember

who I am and come back to me

so we can get together and be

who we really are together,

not this person wearing these

clothes, pretending to be me

in the mirror,

behind the safety glass

where all the real secrets

are stored.

Scott Thomas Outlar- A Poem

An Ode to McKenna

 

Under the brilliant stars

in the middle of an open field

all alone

pondering existence

like some existential psych class

never bothered to attend

or some philosophy exam

never cared to be graded on.

Neither, though, could prepare

for what happens next –

these types of close encounters

aren’t graded on a curve.

Red and green track lights

open wide to flood the area,

spraying their rays, searching, seeking…something.

Sweet Holy Jesus!

Was the Revelation real after all?

Is the chariot coming

to take us all to Heaven?

Fat chance, sucker –

no such luck on this Winter’s eve.

Slack jawed, mouth agape, staring

at the beast of a machine

that is taking its precious time

to descend upon the scene.

Hovering above the grass,

a gate of incandescent energy particles

drips down like a waterfall,

somehow becoming corporeal in the process.

Who in the hell will ever believe

that the boy who always cried wolf

has finally seen a genuine miracle?

Or is it a death sentence

being issued by some strange denizens

from a far flung planet?

Answers will come soon enough it seems

as little brain-like beings

with chicken wings flapping

come hopping down the bridge,

cluck-cluck-clucking

in some twisted tongue

not understood at all.

Where’s the damned space age device

they pop on the ear

so all languages are instantly translated?

Where’s the Type-1 greeting

that such an important meeting

between two civilizations is befitting of?

Not here, Bubba.

Not on this strange night.

The chicken brain something-or-others

circle around and start dancing

in some type of weird voodoo ritual.

A hallucinatory rhythm

pops open the pineal gland,

expanding consciousness

down to a fine point microcosm of reality.

One tiny dot from which all creation explodes.

Geometric patterns pulsate in the crisp air.

Shapes and sounds forming out of the nothingness.

Little elves and goblin creatures

jibber-jabber in bizarre musical tones,

beyond the realm of simple consonants and vowels,

which are intuitively felt and understood

on some instinctive primal channel.

Wavelength frequency vibrations of chaos

coalesce cohesively into an ordered symmetry

of crystallized mandala Zen reverberations.

Body shock and mind fuck.

So this is how creation began?

This is what the Big Bang felt like?

Life’s path, purpose and meaning all bubble up

to the surface level in an A-ha moment.

Musical notes streamlining from out the

jellylike brains of the far-out creatures of

wherever, whatever, however…

Questions are meaningless in the shakedown

as everything synthesizes to make perfect sense

for a split-second flash of raw awesome perfection,

then, poof, gone, nowhere, nothing…

Eyes pop open, rain is drizzling from the clouds above.

No new friends anywhere to be seen.

Fuck, was it all just a dream?

Nah, it couldn’t be,

so it must have been

that second puff of DMT.

John Pursch- Three Poems

Habit

I cry

from coma’s deep

departure lounge,

warbling through

swollen turnstiles

of youth beam carousels

and tattered newsreels,

seated with a lonely

boxcar tart.

I come to

in waves of trembling,

subside to junked recital

phase of burnt munitions

ligament installment plan

for neural referential care,

taken hourly to support

imploding worm habit.

Car Lung Burbles

Coned luck fuels

delightful leeward lassitude’s

cremated lexicon of bobbled

sifted token ease, munching

steady crosstop praxis with

bingeing quick notation gel

on paltry ancillary drip-dry

factories of angular pelicans.

Stellar periodic jets immerse

amino placard gusts in punky

tawny pavement windows

turned to hourly benefactor

issues by eventful colocation

stance portrayal fowl.

Hefty laudanum conflates

inspired effulgent tributaries

with selfish sentry fallacies of 

“How comestible concoctions

mystify corrosive grape-tune

table spruce in stable dockyard

hooligans of sentience and

meatball praise.”

Etched orangutans mean

ladled soporific locket

quest confection mules,

currying in scurvy car lung

burbles of washboard

seashore dandelions.

Gurgling Bots

Time gives way

to nadir’s intro,

sanding jackets into

yellowed pagination,

plumbing stately gout

for footfall iridescence,

gaveled into silence.

The crowd rises, grousing slowly

at sequestered pitchman rodeos,

intoned by actualities of blindly

dotted highway soup in peaceful

signage minestrone bellows,

weaving turpentine collusion

mastiff flits from seashore tweed

to ever-ceasing mortal umbrage,

humbly heaven so extravagant

in skylight swing set diner

maws of basement twirling

foveal clock shadows cast by

newsprint time recorder.

At almost smacks ye wander husk

ant whore inguinal quest of ions,

iconic irony, stumped waveforms,

guideline gargoyles, gremlins,

and gurgling petty boxcar bots,

but noses spell the outer mullets

into teased disuse, used disease,

and dunderheaded dandelion

encyclopedic palimony coulisse,

molded into ornery pavement

numerology, chesty thyme

four grisly moths to skulk

and glow in bothered mall

rotation.

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.

 

Jason D. DeHart- A Poem

The Piano

She used to be a piano,

til they re-tuned her, then tore

out the strings.

Made something new.

Now, she has been given wheels

and rolls.

Occasionally, she has been taught

to make a joke.

Now and then, a crude gesture.

She is learning slowly how to be

human and how the keys work,

a melody here,

a dissonance there.

 

 

Jason D. DeHart is the creator of the blog jasondehartjustliving.blogspot.com.  His writings have appeared in a variety of publications.