Announcing Kind of a Hurricane Press's First Annual Poetry Contest!

SUBMISSIONS FOR THE 2013 KIND OF A HURRICANE PRESS EDITOR'S CHOICE POETRY AWARD ARE NOW OPEN!

First Place Winner gets $200 (US)  Payable via PayPal

for more details check out the Kind of a Hurricane Press Editor's Choice Poetry Award Site:

http://editorschoiceaward.blogspot.com/

Three Poems by Michael Brownstein

QUESTIONS FROM THE AGES AND TIME MISSPENT IN THE CITY 
  
I am past fifty and wondering where I am going with this. 
Hanukah has ended, Christmas is past, Kwanza is gathering mass. 
A hundred feet from the trail, the horse barn has the smell of horses, 
Sweat and sawdust stained and sticky, mold drenched in snow. 
A son cannot understand the reflections of a father, 
A daughter asks if God wears clothes all of the time, 
And a sister says she knew an angel once: She never wore anything. 
Early morning, the resident blue jay hops on its branch: 
Glory. Glory. Glory. A wife has an inability to see, 
A son combs his hair without a mirror, a daughter dresses in the dark, 
and a sister says: I met God once.  She is always naked before the mirror.

GUESTS 

 

The dog

Living in my house

Does not belong to me.

 

The woman

Across the street

Is someone I do not

Wish to know.

 

The tree topped

By the City of Jefferson

No longer can be climbed.

 

We enter doorways

Acred across fields

Of storefronts, broken casings,

Coyotes, raccoon teeth.

 

 

 

AS THE ICE MELTS, THE BLOOD BEGINS TO BOIL

 

Do you not understand the strike in lightning,

the thunder curse that comes after,

the unsustainable armadillos moving

northwards with the warm waters?

Rootworm, boll weevil, red-winged

blackbird, great grizzly of the western caves,

West Niles virus, give us your best shot. 

The Australian box jellyfish drinks

in the oxygen of a change in weather,

its long tentacles black lipsticked tire treads,

wind worn, wind weaved, a car careening

out of control, its driver breaking ferociously,

an oak, thick weed, tall grass, the only future

either will ever know. Make sure

the last woman alive turns out the lights. 

 

 

 

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published. His latest works, Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (http://booksonblog35.blogspot.com/) (Camel Saloon Books on Blogs) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missori, 100F Outside and other poems (http://barometricpressures.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-katy-trail-mid-missouri-100f.html) (Barometric Pressures--A Kind of Hurricane Press). The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100F Outside And Other PoemsHis work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), and I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011: (http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/i-was-a-teacher-once-by-michael-h-brownstein/). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

A Poem by Zach Fechter

A Burst Belly

What if my belly burst

And belched forth the entirety of the world?

Springing beautiful women

And visions of steam above hot springs

And schools of squealing tires

And exotic skins leaning in repose

Against staccato walls

And dangling cigarettes from slender fingers

Yawning forth haze

The kiss flowing between our lips so close

White on black 

And a Maître d staring into the distance

And all the world settling down on you

So open your mouth and swallow it whole

The mouth opening to scream

Or smile

And nothing appears

 

 

 

Zach Fechter lives and writes in Southern California. He has been published in Poetry Quarterly Magazine and Kind of a Hurricane Press. He is a graduate of Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. 

A Poem by Marc Carver

Circle

 

The woman in the shop

had three boys

two were in a pram

that she pushed around.

 

As she got to the checkout

she opened the inside of her arm to pay.

There were deep cut marks at equal distance

along the forearm.

I looked away

looked at her three kids

they were all stroking the long

hair of their dolls

one each.

They were all girl's dolls.

Three Poems by Walter Ruhlmann

Three Times Thirteen – Black Balloon, The Kills

Quarter pounders,
a full plate of coleslaw, soda
chips, crisps, chocolate coated biscuits,
snickers, Mars bars, sauces, saucers of gluttony.
The food you eat is not the one that will sustain the corpse you bear.

The grey veil covering the sky is your worst enemies in the mourning.
He was a chef, an artist, gardener, she wrote it.
Did he believe in God more than he
ever believed in you? You
will never know it.




Four Times Thirteen – Here Comes the Rain Again, Eurythmics

Spring is late and you wait for the blooming trees and the carnival flowers
sowed in the borders and the beds, but the pouring rain washed them away.

The light dark prince sang about the snow that sometimes falls in April,
it fell as a love symbol earlier, just to cover slightly the side-walks
and the roads,
the lawn in the garden, the stains on your skin and the many secrets
kept inside your head.

That rain is like those tears, you held them back as much as you could,
especially when the sixteenth window appeared before your eyes and you
dared passing through it despite your former spite and scorn for what it
meant.

Seven windows prior to it, the ninth showed up.
That one is like your end, for what it also meant for you.
The Christian name you bear since you were born, the many times it
brought you down, before you worked it into the most charismatic part of
your narcissist self.

Twelve panes following the latter, reminiscences of this day you learnt
so many troubling secrets, sour to you, encumbering words that had not
been spat yet. All those hidden snakes like so many epiphanies for the
letters and photographs and the unsaid you thought your clan was
sheltered from.

Still Spring is late and the black blanket above your head keeps making
that landscape you now dread the tomb in which some parts of your father
will rest for ever.




Five Times Thirteen – Desire, Anna Calvi

Maybe the sound of the keyboard tapping in my head had an effect which
was like a block of rock on a rail road. Derailing totally, loosing it
all and feeling charming invincible, almighty, fit and able.

Maybe I'm wrong but I believe no one can fight feelings coming from
one's depths, from the moistest part of one self, the bottom of the
well, some signs of well being being eradicated, slashed, erased by
desire – a whore of a pressure that pushes against you and won't leave
you at rest.

Maybe his smile, maybe his hair, maybe the will to go back to my late
teens and forget about the leprechaun telling me what to do, where to
go, why exist, when to eat..........

Maybe that frustrated desire of a son of mine, of a younger brother who
have never existed and will never turn up for the sake of them, for the
safety of myself.

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. Walter is the author of several poetry chapbooks and e-books in French and English and has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in various printed and electronic publications world wide. Nominated for Pushcart Prize once. His latest collection Maore was published by Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2013.        His blog http://http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/

A Poem by Brandon Figlionlino

Tiny Dancer

There's no monster under my bed;
it's on the bed, trapped within the spun cotton fibers of my pillow.
In the mask of nightfall, it burrows and digs
searching for salvation.
I hear it after my nightly prayers,
my ear pressed to the pillow
eyes shut, one heavy breath away from slumber.

It speaks to me in subtle teeth gnashing and guttural growls.
I respond with solemn whimpers and slight shaking.

I imagine it to resemble a worm, long and curling
sharp spikes covering its hard shell casing
twisting like a tiny dancer, contorting its body to the rhythmic melody of my pulsing temple.

One day, my tiny little dancer will escape its synthetic hell
and burrow into my ear while I rest.
Blood will drip from my wound,
a trail for it to find its way back out.
But it won't need it, for rooted deep in my brain,
it will always be in good company.



Brandon Figliolino is a recent graduate of the University of Colorado's Creative Writing and Political Science programs.  He currently lives in Denver.  He's been published in several literary journals and currently help manages the poetry section of Red Fez Magazine.

A Poem by Richard Schnap

Cold Draft

I can see him now,
Crouched in the corner

Of some anonymous bar,
Alone with a Bass Ale

As mad genius visions
Erupt within his mind.

I can see him burn.
Remembering her face,

Her touch, the black laws
Unleashing the fury,

The eternal penance,
The bottomless pit.

I can see him sigh,
Draining the glass,

Ordering another,
The next masterpiece.



Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

A Poem by Ray Samuc

Washed away

cold spray
for lush grass surprises
and pricks the skin-- sudden like words
to a poet
landing on the page from a curious
somewhere. The absent breeze
frustrates you--positioning yourself
in its line of fire dares it
to drench you--
wet enough for the ink
of words
to run
from a page
and disappear forever.



Ray Samuc is an administrator and philosophy graduate from the North West of England. He has a poem published in Mused, and one forthcoming in Blue Lake Review.

Three Poems by Sy Roth

 

Homage to Kilgore Trout's Supposed World

Supposed.

A trapezoidal quandary
parallel lines like trees somewhere
perhaps.
Wry, twist-your-mouth-into-sour lemon O’s world
mired in crap,
r e v o l v I n g,
e v o l v I n g.

Homo sapiens abide there without discovery

adrift in their banality.
Drag other like junk carts along
Jouncing the contents
Cacophony of
killing,
goring,
reciting nattering fish stories
adrift on intemperate oceans.

Barrels of Laputan feces

Rest beside their scientists
covered in it like FedEx men
a delivery for odoriferous humanoids
who live above.
Below a planet crammed to bursting with creatures
who oink greetings through pursed lips
turn y’alls into eternal frowns.
They squeal love through gritted teeth
covered in soft down of masticated bran muffins
mocha love grimace through their irregularity.

Writing poems of mayhem

squashing them dead on bloody parade grounds
where beautiful words bellowed sweetly
lie hidden beneath bellicose chatter.
Utterances falling from the wind
clatter crystalline no one hearing them,
buried in patriotic fervor.
            Cosmic mind-fuck he called it.
Images rest uneasily on thorn-headed pates
Spiky crowns rest on
a world that Kilgore supposes.




Through an Eschatological Prism

Stamped at birth
Rubicund swatch of prickly
Nucleic acids.

Tattooed cells

Adrift on an ocean of being,
Temporality

A mixed mission of seeking

The end of days.
Machinations of the righteous.

Their gods

Resplendent in their sureties,
Captaining

Rafts of drifting souls.

In their dream suckling virgins
And ripe green apples.

Only One way,

One implacable force
Kicking them to the middle

Running water

Eroding
Their existence.

Colors of the prism

Laved
To blackness.




He Drowns in His Loneliness

Helter-skelter cascade of silent words.
Once a Hindenburg thunder of
Gaseous explosions
All could hear in the Jersey hinterlands.
Now mere dust
Bunnies that hop timidly off into an empty glade.

In the room they come and go

Hurricane of words,
His lips moving to their rhythms
As they lock into their conversations.
Their heads do not turn to him.
Their news flashes silently flapping in their breezes.

His eyes follow them,

Mind a nomad wandering in a private desert
In search of the mirage of inclusion.
It does not come.
They march in lockstep away
To Dylan tunes
While he drowns in his loneliness.

Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, the head is bowed by reality; other times, he is proud to have said something noteworthy. cRetired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai , far from Moses and the tablets. This has led him to find words for solace.   He spends his time writing and playing his guitar. He has published in many online publications such as in Leaves of Ink, Ithaca Lit, Fat City Review, Haggard and Halloo, RAP, Crisis Chronicles, Parentheses, Poet and Geek Magazine, Gloom Cupboard, Pif Magazine, The Circle Review, Poetry Super Highway, Millers Pond Review, Earthborne, Nostrovia, Cyclamens and Swords, The Germ, Rockhurst Review, Wilderness Interface Zone, Red Ochre,  Bong is Bard, Danse Macabre, Mel BraKe Press, Larks Fiction Magazine, Exercise Bowler, Otoliths, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, brief, The Weekenders, The Squawk Back, Bareback Magazine, Dead Snakes, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Peripheral Surveys,  Scapegoat Review, The Artistic Muse, Inclement,  Napalm and Novocain, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash, Subliminal Interiors, South Townsville Micropoetry Journal, The Penwood Review, The Rampallian, Vox Poetica, Clutching at Straws, Downer Magazine, Full of Crow, Abisinth Literary Review, Every Day Poems, Avalon Literary Review, Napalm and Novocaine, Wilderness House Literary Review, St. Somewhere Journal, Carcinogenic Poetry, The Neglected Ratio, Windmills Magazine and Kerouac’s Dog.  One of his poems, Forsaken Man, was selected for Best of 2012 poems in Storm Cycle.  Twice selected Poet of the Month in Poetry Super Highway .  His work was also read at Palimpsest Poetry Festival in December 2012. He was named Poet of the Month for the month of February in BlogNostics. Included in Poised in Flight and Point Mass anthology published by Kind of Hurricane Press.  A Murder of Crows named Poem of the Week in Toucan. Best of Poem selected for inaugural edition of The Second Hump, volume IV. 

 
 

A Poem by Richard Schnap

Anonymity

He sat in the backs of buses
Lingered in the corners of coffeehouses

And when he went to a movie or concert
Chose a place in the very last row

He did not know why he did this
He just felt more comfortable in the margins

As if the spaces between light and shadow
Were reserved especially for him

But he noticed that as he grew older
He seemed to become more transparent

To blend in like a chameleon
Till he was barely visible at all

And somehow he knew when he died
He would enter neither Heaven nor Hell

But a room that was lined with mirrors
To forever be alone with himself

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

A Poem by Christina Murphy

Dappled Stars

 

We are searching for wildflowers on a misty day.

 

We are walking, and I am wishing you would tell me

something you want me to hear, but I have made my peace

with our silences. Our lives have become coextensive orbits,

visible, but not in range in any meaningful way

beyond our mundane daily rhythms.    

The trail is streaked with wildflowers captured by the wind. 

I would like the wildflowers to be like gems—stationary

against all the changes of times and seasons that will come

to claim them as fragile beings. And I would like my heart

to be motionless on this spring day in which the weight

of the mountains against the horizon is almost unbearable.   

 

Soon you have found the wildflower you love most

for its gentle blue color that makes it look as if

the sky bent down for a moment and lost itself in mystery.

 

The blue wildflower and the blue sky that we are tempted

to think of as one even though the blues do not touch,

and the blue sky seems another illusory world away

filled with dappled stars and incandescent meanings.

 

The mist is now rain, steady with a soft

drumbeat of insistence. You draw your jacket

tight and brace yourself against the wet winds

as I watch the wildflowers get beaten down, as if

their colors were tears draining off into the land.

 

I reach for your hand and hold it, feeling the coldness

the wind and rain have instilled. For a moment, my sight

is blurred by rain or perhaps by tears, but everything

is silent, and I would like to believe that we can escape

our sad hollowness of spirit.

 

I am hoping for this as I listen to my heartbeat,

my own pulse, and wish that the

chill of icy rain could comfort me and pass for feeling.

 

 

 

Christina Murphy’s poems have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Cease, Cows, Chicago Literati, and Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure.

 

Two Poems by Laura Rojas

when you cross the street like a sailor breathing underwater

 

there's something about

the

cold

and the

sadness of winter

that makes

a cat curl up

and

makes my hands

curl up

and makes everyone in the world

long

for someone else in the world and

yearn

for something else in the world

     something more in the world

so I listen to your voice

until I fall asleep

and it's spring

 

 

 

 

(now, dear)

 

If I sit on the train
and the seat goes
backwards
I’ll watch fields green with rain
people lonely or together
holding bags, umbrellas, hands
a collective of rain jackets
stitched together like a colourful plastic quilt
and sleeping
people sleeping
talking on the phone
the earth muddy and promising
trains driving on parallel tracks

but we divide so easily
thin hairs or blades of grass

and people are fragile
soft bodies soft flesh
imbalanced things, so tentative
with mouths for kissing
each other’s mouths
and kissing
each other’s hands
which we hold together
in prayer in movie theaters under school house desks
under heavy blankets
in the daytime rain
my seat goes backwards
and I go back 8 hours
to the blue sky of morning and
a city
talking on its own

 

 

 

 

Laura Rojas is a 19 year old university student currently living in Toronto, Ontario but originally from Bogotá, Colombia.  She dreams of publishing a book of poetry as well as saving the Amazon rainforest.  She's in love with everything, so she writes about it. 

 

A Poem by Taylor Graham

Geology of Teeth

The puppy has left

jagged enamel
with a drop of blood at the root

on the bedspread this morning:
pre-molar, mini-Sierra.
The Minarets, The Needle -

sharp rock of puppy-tooth.

Geography of peaks and passes.
Take her out on leash,
she pulls me toward horizon,

aspiring to know

Earth's whole landscape by scent,
by taste, by tooth,

a world entire to a dog's mouth.

Teeth that itch to grab
and hold - tug-toy, my hand.

Teeth that ache for news-

paper, my left boot, this very
moment, Life.  She leaves

scant evidence
on the bed:  sawtooth puppy
fragment.  Fossil

of her time already past.



Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada.  She's included in the anthologies (Everyman's Library) and California Poetry:  From the Gold Rush to the Present.  Her book What the Wind Says, poems about living with her canine search partners, is due out later this year; and her latest chapbook, Walking the Puppy, is about to be released by Lummox Press.

Two Poems by Diane Webster

I PRAY FOR SUN

I crack the window barely an inch
and like cats hearing
the can opener’s first buzz
everyone flings wide every window,
knocks each other down
to rev air conditioner to high cool,
rolls out hurricane fans
that plaster unsecured papers
to window screens bulging to bust
out the debris like a
decompressing airplane porthole.
While I pray for a ray of sunshine
all my own that follows me like a halo
so I can bask like a mama cat
with her young nestled
in a contented wad
of feline fur and purr.



　

SLEEP DUO

My cat lies on my lap
as I sit in my chair
in front of the TV
until she closes her eyes,
and her head nods
heavily on my leg
as she jerks in kitty dreams.
I smile
until my leg jerks,
the cat jumps
with claws seeking traction,
and I realize I missed
the last program due to
the sleeping duo
who woke up
to go to bed.




Diane Webster realizes poetry ideas present themselves daily. Diane’s challenge is to remain open to the opportunities and to write as soon as possible. Diane’s successes have been printed in “The Old Red Kimono,” “Rockhurst Review,” “Wilderness House Literary Review” and other literary journals in print and online.

Two Poems by Bill Jansen

Picnic/tsunami

on the beach
one day
gulls became the sand

the same day
a soccer ball
gazed at us
from 7 waves

salt & light

in flagrante
on flocks of dunes

stoned kimono dragons
in kudzu

nude
conscientious objector
sun
took the 5th
and half
the wine

we are social animals
but not
that
social,
I reply
to something I misunderstood
her say.



Crime tape 

The used bookstore has moved a few blocks
from where I remembered it.  Used bookstores
make me tough/potent.  I become Charles Bronson/
Charles Bukowski in film noir fedora and suit.
The slim volume of poetry has no chance to escape.
A woman who looks a lot like Rita Hayworth
in tweed flounce/glasses, giggles uncontrollably
as I pay her for the book.  Nice kid.  But I got
that appointment with Nike rep at Guantanamo.
I have some difficulty with door, but stumble outside,
change direction a few times to throw them off,
then move south like something lethal in Bermuda shorts.
The book is by some smart dame I never heard of.
I assume the photo on the cover is her, sultry, cool.
She's sitting on a sidewalk, tambourine tip jar,
her back against a concrete wall tagged by Rimbaud.
Everything points to summer in Berkeley, 1972.
About 20, fake Hippy, fondling pill bottle in left hand.
Minoan eyes, closing.  Elizabethan smile.
Something about the set up reminds me of dead Jews
in Poland, 1940, or the gaping corpse of a Nun
in Madrid, 1936; some sneering anarchist with his arm
in a sling blowing cigarette smoke into her dry face.
As I look for my Mazda in Hillsboro, Oregon, 2013,
I shuffle past her in betrayed revolutionary sunlight.
To disguise my shortness of breath I stop frequently
and feign interest in my surroundings and thoughts.
A strand of yellow crime scene tape tied to a meter.
Dissembling, inquisitive wind is blowing the tape,
like fantasy hair of stoned free love goddess
panhandling in front of a KGB cafeteria.
I throw the book in trash can.  Unbelieving. Just in time.

Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.  Work has appeared in various ezines and journals.  A poem is scheduled to appear in Gap-Toothed Madness in September.

A Poem by Richard Schnap

Signposts

We are not born fully formed
But in stages, our first school day
A book beginning, our first kiss,
A flower opening, our first job,
A road unraveling, till the face
Of the world is fully revealed
In all its splendor and with
All its sorrows

And so it is with death,
A slow letting go, our withered
Bodies, candles dimming, our friends
Leaving, songs ending, landscapes
Changing, seasons shortening,
Until we hear strange languages,
The dawn of new dramas we will
Play no part in

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

Two Poems by Anthony Ward

Belles

 

Those dowsabells,

With their heads bowed low,

Their coquettish nature

Polishing their apples with polite phrasings

Of melancholic anguish

In attempt to triumph in a race to their heart,

Completely inebriated without having touched a drop-

Eyes sheepish from all this folly,

Causing their thoughts to resemble conscious tinnitus,

Until they’re nothing but the infatuation

That sings their praises.

 

 

 

Laws of Attraction

 

Drawing eyes

Like poles

Deflecting

Their yearning

Keeping them apart

Unable to look at one another other

Until their back’s turned.

 

 

 

 

Anthony Ward tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including The Faircloth Review, The Pygmy Giant, Jellyfish Whispers, Turbulence, Underground, The Bohemyth, Torrid Literature Journal and Crack the Spine, amongst others.

A Poem by Bob Brill

Empty Bottle Blues

sunlight passing through an empty bottle
casts a green shadow on the wall
such effects are commonplace
yet my skin bristles
as if this time
the universe is telling me a secret

but I don't quite get it
hoping to grasp it more fully
I open another bottle
by the time it's empty
the sun has set
the shadows are gone
an owl is calling
from somewhere in the darkness

Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist.  He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and more than 100 poems have appeared in more than two dozen online magazines, print journals, and anthologies.

A Poem by John Casquarelli

a hundred ways to die in summer longing

for Salvatore

 

Tuesday, May 28^th, 2013

7:51pm

 

my father enjoyed collecting musical instruments.  he never played any of them.  he just seemed to take pleasure in imagining the music.  my father would also listen to the same four stations on his car radio.  sometimes the last note of your favorite song resonates long after the song is over.

 

in San Juan

Sammy told a story of a cloud that wept

when it forgot the ocean’s lyrics

 

if there’s one regret it might be

never having said I understand

 

there are days I wish for

8-track tapes and a bottle

of Don Q

 

remember

it’s only a memory if you let me in

 

arms shake while holding the side bars of his Hospice bed. a tsunami crash that parts every inch of his body with each labored breath. notes that include directions on Xanax, Haldol, morphine, ibuprofen, and oxygen. a comfort pack in the fridge that’s not very comforting, and still no way of knowing how to say goodbye. eventually all palm trees lose their branches.

 

when Hugh Hefner dies

no one will say he went to a better place

 

maybe I’ll find the strength

to leave my doubts behind

 

study stars until they give me an answer

or leave me with new questions

 

he would leave his bedroom door open just enough to remind me how safe I could feel every time the winds picked up. by no means did he rely on nostalgia to make me lose my sense of time and place. so I waited until he walked past his closet, beyond my vision.  I waited until I began to understand my limitations.

  

I sit on my father’s shoulders

through years of grey sky wonder

 

sing a hymn about doves who rise

past whirling winds

to feed a dream’s appetite

 

it’s so serene when you’re 20000 feet in the air

perhaps gravity will look away

and allow us a few moments of peace

 

there’s a postcard on his dresser of a sailboat falling off the edge of the world. the setting sun is searching for a short-haired woman holding a lantern. it understands how empty the landscape is when all we do is live in canopic jars.

 

if an echo could undress a rose bush

it would leave everything unfinished

 

each window is a letter

about leaving home

 

if you must dance

do so under a street lamp in January

when the neighborhood girls are watching

 

we exit I-95 at Hillsboro Boulevard, head east and speak in riddles for awhile. his condo isn’t far away, but we decide to head to the pier instead. the waves are choppy and a couple of teenage surfers are pointing at a section of whitewater, anticipating their next foam climb. I keep staring at the moving waves because they remind me that any moment may be a new discovery.

 

follow tracks to midnight meditations

reach for hillside country

until we pass outhouses

that line the edge of the fields

 

somewhere between the pieces

I see the green summer grass

and find you there

John Casquarelli is an English Instructor at CUNY Kingsborough in Brooklyn, New York.  Beginning this fall, he will be directing the poetry club for students at Kingsborough.  John received his M.F.A. in the Creative Writing program at Long Island University.  He was awarded the 2010 Esther Hyneman Award for Poetry.  His work has appeared in several publications including Pyrokinection, Kinship of Rivers, By The Overpass, The Mind[less] Muse, The Poetry Project Blog, The International Rebecca West Society, Having a Whiskey Coke With You, and Napalm and Novocain.  His first full-length book, On Equilibrium of Song, was published by Overpass Books (2011).  When not reading and writing poetry, John can be seen drinking way too much iced coffee.

A Poem by Trina Gaynon

Down my Chimney

　

Pissed when it meets the damper,

Spring wind tries to lure

me into opening

to it with tales of sweeping across

the Pacific Ocean

and islands

where air is heavy with green rot,

soil fertile from volcano ash.

 

But I keep sweeping up last

winter’s ashes. The wind,

finding its way

through chinks

in the bricks, has taken to scattering

ash over the furniture,

reminding me--

the remains of some fires never

 

feel roots creep from seeds

buried

where ocean going birds and wind drop them.

 

 

 

Trina Gaynon’s poems have appeared in the anthologies Bombshells and Knocking at the Door, as well as numerous journals including Natural Bridge, Reed and the final issue of Runes. Her chapbook An Alphabet of Romance is available from Finishing Line Press. Forthcoming publications in anthologies include: A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, Saint Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, Obsession: Sestinas for the 21^st Century, and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium.

A Poem by Les Merton

Equilibrium

 

In another time:

he could have been a warrior, 

a Celtic Chief or a Norseman, 

balancing

power over the life

or death of anyone.

 

In another place:

he could have been a Hell's Angel,

a marauding biker 

balancing

a Harley Davidson

at breakneck speed.

 

In our time:

in Lanzarote

he is the Artist of Living

Lebenskünstler - Sepp Bögle 

balancing

stones, making sculpture 

out of the here and now.

 

 

 

 

Les Merton is Cornish and proud of it. He earned his living in a variety of ways:  grocery shop manager, coalman, bus conductor, factory worker, canvasser, film extra, fortune teller, entertainment agent, and after failing as a comedian, the other jobs are best forgotten.  He’s dabbled at writing on and off from the age of 16, however it was in 1996 he decided to give it a go properly. In 2002, he founded Poetry Cornwall/ Bardhonyeth Kernow and as been its editor ever since. In 2004, his endeavours were recognised when he was made a Bard of Gorsedh Kernow for services to Cornish Literature. His Bardic name is Map Hallow (Son of the Moors).  Les has also appear on: ITV’s That Sunday Night Show, BBC TV Spotlight News, and the following Radio Stations: BBC Radio Bristol, Duchy Hospital Radio, BBC Radio Cornwall, BBC Radio 4, Pirate FM, BBC Radio Five Live, ABC Radio Canberra Australia. He enjoys performing  and has given readings all over the UK and in Ndola Zambia.