Addict by John Grey

So hell has an address.
Death has a door.
And the devil’s in room 3A.
The kid on the stoop will let you in.

It’s up a creaky staircase.
It’s straight but seems to wind.
Old Clootie’s stretched out
on a maggoty sofa, grinning flames.

There’s a price even for agony.
Pay up or you don’t get to burn.
It’s your soul plus a week’s wages
at the restaurant, busboy.

So hell is a business card.
Death’s a transaction.
The rest is life.
But who’s resting?.

The Brake Job by Holly Day

she makes excuses for the rain,
covers her ears at the first sign
of thunder, feels her haze of fog
as the sun, the world, fades away
she makes excuses for the storm,
buries her head beneath pillows,
pretends to be asleep, pretends
to be deaf to the crashing world
the banging outside in the yard
she waits, still quiet, still inside
cautious of the returning storm,
creeps outside so slow after noon
topples the beer can pyramids
piled high all over the driveway.

The Light by Holly Day

you give me refuge from everything real, wrap
me in cool water, bright thoughts of tomorrow.
demons howl outside my door, vampires hide in
my shadow, persistent salesmen rap loudly
at my window–my life tries to get back in.
you make the dead buildings and dusty smog and
bloody road kill disappear, fade to creeping
ivy and tall, fork-toed waterbirds, present
me with talismans dedicated to some
silent, strong god, one that never interrupts

Where we’ve been by Holly Day

we rolled the windows
up against the rain
and my father said
“I wonder what that
rat-bastard husband
of yours is doing
right now” and I just
looked out through the glass
and said nothing, watched
countryside slide past
in varying shades
of green. behind me
the tired baby cried
in his car seat, tired
of being strapped in
for six hours straight and
I wanted to cry
but I don’t do that.
outside the car, corn
unfolded under
the onslaught of rain
sparse trees danced in waves
of rippling light
and everything I
was going to be
faded into black
far, far behind us.

Bandit Nights by Sergio A. Ortiz

I am tired
of this monotonous,
sedentary afternoon
in which long-faced gentlemen
vociferate their ignorance
of the Afghan war.

Dazed afternoon
under the scorching sun
watching a mangy dog
get up off the floor
unconcerned with the child
who just got shot
by its side.

I want to emigrate,
find nights sharpened by
the owl’s eye,
nights full of bandits
and consumptive whores.
I want to crumple up
like the wasp’s neurosis
on my bed.

Oh, outlet city,
how is it that my verses
are born in this ferocious
village? What empty lines
did I mistake for an oasis,
dark-dense people
full of shady passions?

In an hour by Sergio A. Ortiz

Like everything that finds me,
damned spring,
you’ve set a price
on blooms of bugambilias
around the periphery
of my brow.
And here I am drawing on
conclusions.
Who cares if love comes
and goes in an hour?
Goddamned lying spring,
allow me to kiss you
as if a kiss were more
than just a kiss.

Upon Receiving a Rejection Notice by Sergio A. Ortiz

Envy is the Lemonade
Countess, small cutesy
runaround with that oh, really,
yes-yes expression on her face
aristocrat macaques are
so fond of.

—Yes, Monsieur,
we love your rigadoon dance.
Your elegant word of the day,
volupté . But in our presence,
please, don’t mention frogs.
They multiply in the mirrors
at the king’s court.

The Horror by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Reaching
the point
of not knowing
we’re sinning
and believing
we’re not.

Nightly by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Homeless
night stars dim

finding his place
in a hole in the alley

sleeping in his shoes
ready to run

warming hands in his pants
street hard against cold bones

taking flight in a dream
he repeats, repeats
nightly.

greetings from nowhere by peycho kanev

to say goodbye to everything
while you are still breathing
is a small victory
over the big failure:
the light will fade out
like a blown up light bulb
and the eternal darkness will
grasp you in its gentle arms
like the first tone
that had rang out in the universe,
smile upon one sad face
that knows that the victory is not
so far

victory is death

I am dead

dead

I feel that I am screaming
as they are helping me to stand up
on my own two trembling feet again,
and walking again under the sunshine
that looks like something unimaginable
like the first man
like the last atom
outside
and inside
into the darkness 

the silence is coming.

Temps Perdu by William Doreski

The clock that leapt from the wall
to smash face-down on scuffed gray tile
when my seventh-grade teacher slammed
the door has always haunted me.

Pity warped hands waving at time
lapsed forever. Grieve for the glass crown
shattered into nasty little shards
we crunched underfoot with our Keds.

Our teacher, Mary Susan Davis,
kept her back to the wreckage.
She strode to the front of the room
and warned us our faces would look
as sad as that clock’s if we crossed
her path at too steep an angle.

The janitor dumpstered the clock
but after school I retrieved it,
bent the hands nearly straight and kept
the sorry white dial in storage
many years in my mother’s basement.

Cleaning out the house for sale
I found the white enamel clock
only slightly pitted with rust,
the black-rimmed case still intact.

Mary Susan in her seventies
still looked as shark-faced as ever,
so I dropped the clock on her front stoop
and crept away feeling guilty
and glad, one broken clock-smile
to flatter our mutual past.

pickings

by Jeff Crouch

ASPERITIES (or Bartlett’s Corrected) by Richard O’Connell

The world will perish of a surfeit of entertainment.

The worst kind of pedantry is quoting yourself.

The computer is as dumb as its programmer.

I believe in hate at first slight.

Absinthe makes the heart grow colder.

For Nietzsche the creation of Woman was carrying a rib too far.

He left no stone unthrown.

Power adores a vacuum.

I was admitted to the bar when I turned eighteen.

The majority lead lives of noisy desperation.

No bad novel goes unpublished.

In my experience the rain in England is the coldest and wettest.

When the Lion lies down with the Lamb it’s usually for lunch.

All credit card mistakes are made in favor of the bank.

In the Big Bang we all got banged.

Cell phones are a pain in the ear.

Marijuana is the opium of the people.

The funniest thing in Finnegan’s Wake is the long list of errata.

Work is the invention of layabouts.

He couldn’t remember why he took the viagra. .

Old age is a train wreck in slow motion.

The Irish never have a good word to say about each other. That’s what makes them so lovable.

Nothing dresses up a man like a beautiful woman.

When an American tries to be a roue he ends by merely being rude.

War: conspicuous destruction.

No one has ever won a war in Afghanistan.

A woman will do anything to avoid cooking.

New Jersey: where the Mafia bury their dead and living.

A scientist is a person who knows precisely what he/she doesn’t know.

All information will be used against you.

All marriages are marriages of inconvenience.

Divorce is the Eighth Sacrament.

He buried the hatchet in his neighbor’s back.

Americans no longer converse; we can only interrogate.

All questions are financial.

Florida: the last gasp of the superannuated.

Maine is the only state I know where you have to pay for your meals in advance.

If you speak correct English, many Americans assume you’re gay.

All tax loopholes benefit the rich.

Eating an artichoke is a labor of love.

Warning to marathoners: In the long run, everyone loses.

Success sucks.

The English ‘on holiday’ are holy terrors.

I never met a Welshman who couldn’t or wouldn’t sing.

I oppose capital punishment in principle. On the other hand, our killers impose capial punishment every day.

I caught the clock red-handed stealing time.

In the hospital there are two classes of people: the horizontals and the verticals.

Outliving your enemies is the best revenge.

Eating is a lifelong addiction.

Everyone is a tourist elsewhere.

Predictable as porn.

For most women the erogenous zone is the shopping mall.

There’s something morally corrupt with a country that sends tanks against tents.

You know you’re getting old when you no longer understand the cartoons in the New Yorker.

When she said she’d try anything once, I suggested cyanide.

The purpose of life is life.

Cats: to remind us there’s always a third choice.

The only dog I ever really liked was a Doberman Pinscher.

Trust no one, least of all yourself.

Few politicians are worth their haircuts.

Bailing out banks is like bailing out the Titanic.

What is so rare as a day in June?
A drink on the house in a Scotch saloon.

All history is contemporary. Cosmically speaking, human time counts for less than an eyeblink.

The rich not only want to be rich, they want everyone else to be poor.

Nobody can spell diarreh correctly

The rich are always with us—God help us!

The more you own, the more you’re owned.

Life is a box of bitten-into chocolates.

Warning to cannibals: You are who you eat.

Cogito ergo cogito sum. I think therefore I think I am.

After seventy, it’s all uphill.

Nothing ever has to be done except burial.

Better read than dead.

Your book went unregarded by your friends?
When authorship begins all friendship ends.

Always wear a red shirt when you eat Italian.

Poverty is not a virtue, nor is wealth.

Necessity is the mother of convention.

George Washington was a terrorist once.

Plagiarism is the great American pastime.

Blessed are the greedy, for they shall become CEOs.

My Endless Denial by Ben Nardolilli

silence is texture
and knocks compel my life
to a mind one can hear
inflated defenses

and reason to will
refuses at cliffs
and will shut very
strange heavens down

abandoned words
knocking on my door
look beautiful wailing
but aren’t even heard

more astounding
shadows often dance
singing of birds
with the lock of grass rising

grief is fierce and heavens
watch the wind
where’s the laughter?
at my pride and body

Death in Our Era by Ben Nardolilli

They shall not die in a chain,
But hands together,
They will fall as one, in one circle,
All longevity now
While the sun burns the nearby hills,
The collapse builds and the scythe
Is drawn to flash at once,
This is death in our era.

Darwinism by Gary Beck

The loss of habitat
eradicates more
then our myopic eyes
ever notice
and the ecosystem,
once completely shattered,
will remove the food chain
that sustains
birds, beasts, man.

American Myths by Gary Beck

The Founding Fathers devised
E Pluribus Unum
and are considered giants
in the annals of history.
Their intellectual stature
dwarfs our current leaders,
who face a level of problems
that might have stumped
Al, Tom, Jim, Ben.

Umwelt Spine by Andrew E. Colarusso

these are the oddities of my body, she points—
oui, mais ceci sont les seins de mes reveries l
ovage. larking, my dreamery around the galle
ries explaining blue to the blind; blue is when
you feel like this. she points— she sates thirst
of pocketed middle class children; descent of
fered reality. i’ve seen that she’s lived for a b
are soul. a near star whose distant yesterday
lovelier than its present begs a future of cold
thanatology. she speaks from sense memory
gold eyed the neglectful idealistic. she points—

Poetry Book Review

r by Peycho Kanev

As I begin to read r – an unusual choice of title for a book, I see in the begining lines of the poem, small revenge, how the poet is verging between the dividing line of sanity and incoherence. It is somehow reminiscent of Baudelaire, beautiful yet potentially destructive.

“I don’t care about the metrics, the iambus
and the rhymes-I have read the classics and then
I put them back on their dusty shelves:
we write about something that comes from the guts
and the nails as the flowers outside
explode…”

The above stanza appears to be setting a tone, perhaps an underlying theme whose recurrence will be observed throughout the book.

“the poetry, can I say that I don’t care?
I prefer to drink alone in this room in front of
one candle
as the shadows in the corners sit and show us
their ugly faces,
ah, I know that the words are greater that we thought
and we will fall in their holes,”

A subtle sense of nihilism hints at the mockery of conventional literary pursuits; poets and writers, who abandon society for the company of their solitude, because they have gone both ways, the past which did not serve them any good, and a future that seems oblique.

The following stanza in “something in flowerpot” stands out to me, for its berevity, and the personification used:

the night knows how much to fill my glass
and after that to stand up and
to pour water from the kettle
on the thing in the flowerpot

the night is dying of thirst like
wheat in August

r is about 99 pages in length, artistically composed, the poems hiccup at times, heave with tension, or simply concoct a complicated montage of ideas and images. Intellectualy invigorating, it leads the reader through various moods and attempts to dissect the emotion with relation to its experiences.

Peycho Kanev’s book can be purchased on Amazon.

–
June ‘09
Sana Rafiq

Updated Metaphor by Mike Berger

The metaphor that guides education
has become dated. “Filling an empty
glass with vintage wine”, has its problems.
This one size fits all metaphor fails
those kids who bring a full glass.
They must kick their minds into neutral
while the others are trying to catch up.

I’ve seen kids with an empty glass.
When given a crayon and piece of paper,
they eat the crayon not knowing what it is.
I’ve also seen six-year-olds who are reading
at a seventh grade level, bored out of their
minds stringing macaroni beads. Should
our educational metaphor apply only to
those kids with no time in the sandbox?
Surely they need all the help they can get,
but is there a better metaphor?

I think a better metaphor would be
each child is a precious piece of Carrara
marble. You chip away at the rock sculpting
a thing of beauty. Some delicate children
need a sculptor’s gentle touch. Some tough
little boys may need a heavy chisel and a
very large hammer.

To replace the old metaphor with the new
sounds as if it might create anarchy. I think
we should give it a try. Let’s start by firing
all the curriculum specialists in leaving the
design and carving to the teachers.

Gotham by Andrew E. Colarusso

brother cain knew gotham
even before he saw the ear
th respire. not of divine creation
from this distance, incoming

traffic appears the diamond
necklace of a rich elderly wo
man. the underside, urgent
red

a waning gibbous moon
quietly contemplating words worth
someday sharing; this will live
a few more days

in the loft. heels stamme
red their demands on my head;
with affectation &
dolor—asking

do you
live with a voice
that holds

the earth
to your back;
something cold
?

Swallowed Whole by G. David Schwartz and Jennifer Wiehe

Swallowed whole
in your endless control
Numbed by every word
Every phrase
Your manipulations only
Grow worse with age
You have the power
Sardonic and sour
To made daises deflower
And be swallowed whole

The Ethics of Ambiguity by Howie Good

1
Sometime during the night someone redrew the town line
with a length of string and a piece of chalk. There are
footprints that might be clues. A detective in an ancient
derby sighs and crouches down. Some of the footprints
belong to the green gloom of evening, some to ambiguous
silence.

2
It’s another day, but the detective is wearing the same
tearful expression. Perhaps it’s the only expression he
has. He shakes his head at the gray dust clotting the
trolley tracks and furring the sidewalks. This isn’t the
weather they predicted. In the distance he hears a
confused rumbling not unlike that of carousel horses
trampling children.

3
I don’t know how long it’s been, minutes or hours, since
the detective shook me awake. The uncertainty magnifies
the silence that surrounds every sound. He asks if it’s
true that the prophets go door to door and suspiciously
watches my reaction. Meanwhile, shadows drip down the
walls. But it’s only after he’s gone that the
fire-swallower appears in the window of my bedroom with
terrible burns on his hands and face.

After Rejection by Howie Good

I stopped at a yard sale.
The woman nodded hi.
There were many odd items –
matted hair from the heads of madmen,
baby clothes that had been worn
by a miniature pinscher,
a jar of eyeball jelly.
I asked about the typewriter.
She said it had spent
its whole life up to now
in a dark basement.
And as she spoke,
she randomly pressed the keys
as if for luck.

a b c d e oh so f u c k it has to be

i wish i had amnesia. here’s a brick.
anyone?

Afterbirth by Heather Ann Schmidt

She left me

& I was hollowed out–
carved heirogliphics
on my insides
made from the scar tissue
of birth.

But the ghosts stayed
& would not go out
into the world
even though I tried
to blow them out
with my cries.

& so I starved
the fear out
& my bones began

to show through rice paper skin.

…………Each fear,
……………….another layer
……………….another day closer
……………….to death.

Until I saw the lotus flower,
felt its skin
& longed for change.

Summoning Leaves of Grass by Heather Ann Schmidt

I celebrate myself

during the dawn’s tears
on the soles of my feet

like when you lie under
a tree and petals fall on you
and it feels like some heaven of light
because of the aroma of lilac

and this deeply colored world.

I celebrate when my irises open up
and catch the flecks in the atmosphere
and imagine the layers of molecules
woven underneath.

I celebrate the way my muscles move
when I run, dance, walk, make love
during a thunderstorm and the sound of my heartbeat
mixes with the tandem stomping of Earth.

This rain dance, this moment, this second
that reminds me what is is to truly be alive.

I celebrate the way stars die and then the womb
of a planet begins in colors streaming, sparking
against the black.

The way the universe could be held together
by strings, by light, by chance, by the idea
that we all have ideas.

I celebrate every mistake
because it shows what true goodness can be
and all suffering because it defines my joy.

Sage Femme by Vanessa Jubis

I must wait for present to become past
As the wind blows and I watch the heavy showers
The day becomes dim and the skies overcast
My body takes over and I begin to fall
I tumble into the land that they call “out there”
Time is still and meditation takes over
The only breath that I can watch
Blowing like daisies from my mouth
My full womb is speaking nothing but “surges”
The pain is like watching the departure of birds
They come and they go and they sing
I chant “let it go” and “let it be”–
“let it go” and “let it be”–
I must be patient and the patient
That does not watch the clock
In this meditative hour–
I trust the process…

And the sage femme simply waits.

Call of the River by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Left home hours ago
barefoot cool earth
night stars

escape
through last of woods
down along the river

slipping into water knee-high
standing a moment
ready to dance
cool tease of deeper waters

stripping to trees
fluttering leaves
branches easing within dark
whispers
someone there
watching

river pulling
neck-deep flow
over sand and rock and roots

on shore the world demon
clawing

moon cut
mother calling
weeping

decision already made
floating down the river
stone blue
blending into depths.