A Poem by Byron Beynon

The Furnace Quarry, Llanelli

after the painting by J D Innes (1887-1914)

The industrial juggernaut

has continued

into a new century.

A background of stacks and smoke

in a town by the sea.

A primal wound,

the cleft made on the shocked land.

The quarrying goes on,

filling the world elsewhere

with promises of progress,

remembering too

that nature's mind,

in all her eternal guises,

will observe undaunted

the pillaged scene.

 

 

 

Byron Beynon's work has appeared in several publications, including Jellyfish Whispers, Montucky Review, Worcester Review, Poetry Wales, Poppy Road Review and London Magazine. His most recent collection is The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions).

A Poem by Ralph Monday

Dinner with the Ghost of Marilyn Monroe

An odd pair these two,
Marilyn's ghost, Rush
And his cigar, dinner date
For the living and the perished
Though difficult to fathom
Which airwave specter
Truly voices knobs of desire:
A lipstick microphone or a
Golden ass pundit braying.
She didn't discuss Robert
Or Jack.
He never mentioned femi-Nazis,
Obama or Romney.
She dined on ghost bites,
He on filet mignon.
How can one distinguish the
Living from the dead?
Radio or movie dittos
Slaughtered images,
Soundwaves slicing dead air.
Marilyn blonde, unbloodied;
Rush balding, forever eating
Progressives, Marilyn drinking
Presidents, they inhale the
Same group vapors and she
In her dress, he in his tie,
Are removed from the land
Of the living.

 

 

Ralph Monday is an Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing courses. In fall 2013 he had poems published in The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Fiction Week Literary Review, and was represented as the featured poet with 12 poems in the December issue of Poetry Repairs. In winter 2014 he had poems published in Dead Snakes. Summer 2014 will see a poem in Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology of Best Present Day Poems. His work has appeared in publications such as The Phoenix, Bitter Creek Review, Impressions, Kookamonga Square, Deep Waters, Jacket Magazine, The New Plains Review, New Liberties Review, Crack the Spine, Dead Snakes and Poetry Repairs.

A Poem by Cherise Wyneken

Noise Pollution

A gaggle of geese
waddle toward the pond
shattering the day
with clatter.
One lags behind
pecking at crumbs
beneath the picnic table.

The Goodyear Blimp
hovers overhead
droning home
from a Dolphins' game.
Tires squeal, sirens blare.

I long to lag behind
peck at crumbs.


Cherise Wyneken is a freelance writer whose prose & poetry have appeared in a variety of publications.  Her book publications include:  prose:  Round Trip, Freddie, Spaceship Lands in Africa, Stir--Fried Memories/ poetry:  Touchstones, Seeded Puffs, Old Haunts, Things Behind Things.  Plus a children's cassette.  Her poem, "Borne Again," was nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize.

A Poem by Sy Roth

“Morrass”ic Park

mired in diluvian muck.

DNA imprints scratched
into our caves,
hashmarks of unkept promises,
a calumny of flaccid dreams.

message whispered,

hogtied behind its cell doors,
Fed-Exed addresses
dressed in fecal-brown disguise.

the goo bubbles

in those caverns.
to become a swampy grave
without succor,
or outstretched hand.

markers linger,

dit-datting its Morse code.
morassic phantom follows
eating out our rheumy eyes.

salvation,

a dormant volcano
belching ancient gasses,
into deflated balloons.
entreaties of unrung doorbells 
followed by meak surrender.

she holidays on a tropic isle,

while they wuther,
drink-umbrella fluttering lightly in her hand
followed by their mud-sucking drowning.



Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out. Oftentimes, head is bowed by reality; other times, he 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 Visceral Uterus, Amulet, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Barefoot Review, Haggard and Halloo, Misfits Miscellany, Larks Fiction Magazine, Danse Macabre, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Bong is Bard, Humber Pie, Poetry Super Highway, Penwood Review, Masque Publications, Foliate Oak, Miller’s Pond Poetry, The Artistic Muse, Word Riot, Samizdat Literary Journal, Right Hand Pointing, The Screech Owl, Epiphany, Red Poppy Review, Big River, Poehemians, Nostrovia Poetry’s Milk and Honey, Siren, Palimpsest,  Dead Snakes, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mindless(Muse), Em Dash and Kerouac’s Dog. 

 

A Poem by Ron Yazinski

Revision

(The ashes of Shelley’s heart were sent back to England.)

 

In the Protestant Cemetery in Rome,

At the foot of Shelley’s grave,

Is the marker for Gregory Corso.

 

The only time I ever saw the man

Was in New York,

At a Beat celebration of Jack Kerouac.

I laughed when he slurred,

“Kerouac hated me for two reasons:

“First, because I slept with his woman.

“Christ,

“I’d have no friends if I stopped talking to everybody who slept with mine.

 

“And second,

“With his drunken notion that all great writing

“Should be as spontaneous as jazz,

“He called me a lying moron for revising my work.

“Hell, I told him

“Every time I rewrote I did it spontaneously.”

 

For years after his death,

Friends and lovers petitioned for the right

To rebury his ashes here.

When they finally succeeded,

They beatified the ceremony with a reading of his poems

And a joint of the finest weed

Brought all the way from Colorado;

 

In this way,

Revising the lost ashes of Shelley’s heart.

 

 

 

 

Ron Yazinski is a retired English teacher who, with his wife Jeanne, lives in Winter Garden, Florida.  His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Mulberry Poets and Writers Association, Strong Verse, The Bijou Review, The Edison Literary Review, Jones Av., Chantarelle’s Notebook, Centrifugal Eye, amphibi.us, Nefarious Ballerina, The Talon, Amarillo Bay, The Write Room, Pulsar, Sunken Lines, Wilderness House, Blast Furnace, and The Houston Literary Review. He is also the author of the chapbook HOUSES: AN AMERICAN ZODIAC, and two volumes of  poetry, SOUTH OF SCRANTON and KARAMAZOV POEMS.

 

A Poem by Sue Neufarth Howard

       Message

 

In catch-up conversations now and then

with an old friend, forty years since

our paths last crossed, we reminisce

our youthful free-spirit ways.

 

He calls with news of loss - a life-long friend

for him, an old flame for me. Flooded with

hot memory, my passion rekindles,

regret for our parting lingers.

 

Hope for a chance encounter forever ended,

feeling empty, I try to send my thoughts -

how important our story is to me, say

goodbye before you're deep into eternity.

 

In my garden, a butterfly, cinnamon

brown, intent on a path toward me, swoops

down to alight, rest, and fan-open its

black-edged wings on my book.

 

 

 

 

Sue Neufarth Howard is a Cincinnati native, published poet, visual artist, former business writer in marketing and sales training at DuBois Chemicals, retired. Graduate of Miami University, Oxford (Speech-Radio/TV) and UC Evening College (Associate in Art).  Member, Greater Cincinnati Writers' League (GCWL) and Colerain Artists. Received Third Prize and/or Honorable Mention in several Ohio Poetry Day Contests since 1998. 1983 Poet Laureate for Clifton Heights/Fairview - Cincinnati Recreation Commission Neighborhood Poetry Contest.  Poems published: In Storm Cycle – 2013 Best of Anthology, Kind of a Hurricane Press;  January, 2014 issue of Cattails online journal; Point Mass anthology, Kind of a Hurricane Press;  the online journal High Coupe; the online magazine AEQAI; the Journal of Kentucky Studies - 25th Anniversary Edition; the Mid-America Poetry Review; Nomad's Choir; The Incliner - Cincinnati Art Museum; the Creative Voices Anthology of the Institute for Learning in Retirement, City of Cincinnati; in several For a Better World - Poems on Peace and
Justice by Greater Cincinnati Artists anthologies; and Poetic Hours Magazine, Carlton, England.   Poetry chapbooks, self published via Lulu.com in 2012:  TreeScapes, EarthWords, In and Out of the Blue Zoo.

 

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Incursions And Cracks

Hardscrabble winter is now just a feather weight remembrance

That I still hunt and peck through like it was honey
But still through it all midnight has such a build or drop tenderness
Where I am the Zen master of her tapestry of sighs
As together we weave folktales that breathe green fire
In a hotel room that is now only one long strange dream
But that like Val Lewton’s horror films will haunt me forever
In thoughts most bottomless and vision inducing.

Appears To Be Rimbaud Speaking  

My shadowy wraith like goldfish pond is only bones and gristle

An ominous childhood collage of fairy lands
That causes my living room to speak in a gravelly whisper
And here where you first have to descend into Kurt Schwitter’s Prelude
Of nasty red welts to where the railroad tracks beat their wings
Near a city that has become a touchable phantom
As its asphalt comes awake and the lost jazz
Of Ezra Pound is played upon a punctured saxophone most red
Till it becomes a key turned in the lock of that egg spoon hour
When poetry pulls my strings till my hands do ache
Before it releases me from its power once more
Until later it once again lights my powder keg.

 

Tomorrows I Have Walked Along

Autumn evening is full of poetry and brush strokes

Lost in the roots and trunks where tamed doves wander
Like mysterious shadows towards precipices so delicate
And forsaken that are dusty and patched as potato steam as
They begin their fading scrawled in black chalk like a piano chord
Breeze swept and beyond the reach of all rationality
As the stars and moons and planets spread out like a peacock’s tail
Till all in foaming lace doth sleepth
And my dreams become pale melancholy peasant hovels
Where I pour out these sentences that have recently foaled
And yet are still so pregnant with the winter’s sorrow
That only the aged can truly know.

Ken L. Jones has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to dialogue for the Freddy Krueger movies for the past thirty plus years.  In the last three years he has gained great notice for his vast publication of horror poetry which has appeared in many anthology books, blogs, magazines and websites and especially in his first solo book of poetry, Bad Harvest and Other Poems.  He is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.

A Poem by Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll

Appellation

 

 

I.  In June I Changed My Name 

 

It happened during my wedding, right at the very end,

    when I was being kissed. 

 

Then the two of us and our nine grandchildren

    clambered and scrambled

 

into the wagon and my son started the tractor,

    drove us by river and cove.

 

After eating cake we swam and sailed

    all sunny afternoon.

 

It’s so different this second time – different river, wagon, us.

   

 

II. Switchbacks

 

For our honeymoon we’re climbing a mountain—

    me with a pacemaker, him

 

arthritic knees.  It’s his first crack

    at this crest, my third,

 

each time lugging a different

    name.  At our trailhead

  

the forest is lovely, leafy.  But

    why didn’t we check

 

the forecast, memorize the maps, why did we choose

    this track of many stones?  Midway,

 

I’m thinking we’re drinking

    too much too quickly from our canteen; late,

 

we argue but cannot resolve:

    why is it all so steep?

 

   

III.  Precaution at the DMV

 

This is the third name I’ve driven

   and it feels

 

like I’m grinding my gears. 

   After the cake and tossing

 

of flowers, it only took a week

   for our first fight, “minor tiff”

 

his terminology, though I asked myself

   just what my name is anyway.

 

First time around I threw my birthname

   out without a second glance, rubbernecked

 

the new one like grass

   on the far side of a fence. 

 

This time maybe I should stow that old friend

   in the glove compartment—

 

keep it close

   just in case.

 

 

 

 

 

Wendy Elizabeth Ingersoll’s book Grace Only Follows won the 2010 National Federation of Press Women Contest and was a finalist for Drake University’s 2012 Emerging Writer Prize.  Her poems have appeared in Naugatuck River Review, Passager, Caesura, Controlled Burn, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination.  She’s a retired piano teacher.

Two Poems by Jonel Abellanosa

Tricycle

Metal madrigal for the masses,

Minute-by-minute maelstrom,

Engine croaking like alien nightingale,

Tooting from marketplace, plaza

To bus terminal, delivering the fat lady’s

Daily bread: soiled aprons, fruit, vegetable

Baskets, crabs, dried squid, towers

Of egg trays, daybreak truculence to her

Jobless partner, cellphone crazed helps. 

 

Seven of the itinerant’s assembled philomels  

Race from uptown, waiting sheds disgorging

The habitually tardy.  Ugly droning dissymmetry

As three students, a saleslady in apple-green

Uniform and a security guard climb in. 

Next driver in queue doesn’t have to yell

For passengers – four in the sidecar, one or two

Behind him on his creaking trike.  The bank’s

Loans officer offers 50 pesos for solo ride. 

 

Who hasn’t heard this cockcrow cacophony? 

Claustrophobic circuit of the drunk and the stoned. 

Free rides to the police station.  Fit in like sardines. 

Don’t open your umbrella.  Coins only, please. 

Passenger weight syncopate engine heavy metal music,

Tires skirting potholes en route to jeepneys

Like airy stomachs, the carless from bumpy ride

To bumpy ride.  When my turn comes

My heart will leap and sing.

  

 

Lucid Dream Fragment #3 with Julian Assange

The Australian with a new hairdo

On the balcony for free speech,

Holding a sheet of cadenced words,

His other hand guiding the symphony

In cheering hearts.  His villains are asleep,

Their twin pussies rioting from Sweden.

 

“Hand over the messenger,” the British said. 

The Ecuadoran juggles Milosz’s words: 

“Reluctantly, under unbearable duress and only

With the hope that good spirits, not evil ones,

Choose us for their instrument.  For our house

Is open, there are no keys in the doors.”

 

 

 

Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry is forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The Lyric, Ancient Paths, and has appeared in Windhover, PEN Peace Mindanao anthology, Star*Line, Liquid Imagination, Mobius Journal of Social Change, Inwood Indiana Press, Golden Lantern, Poetry Quarterly, New Verse News, Qarrtsiluni, Anak Sastra: Stories for Southeast Asia, Fox Chase Review, Burning Word, Barefoot Review, Red River Review, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic.  He is working on his first poetry collection, Multiverse.

 

A Poem by Bill Jansen

Sacramento

One dachshund on its side
three remain standing by Washington Monument
which is being slowly pulled underground
by gap-toothed gophers.
That's what the cop wrote on the back
of my ticket.

A barely holding on bar in Sacramento.
Tonto heard the fundamental sound of a fender bender.

I left a quarter tip,
asked the bartender to remember me for ever
and ever and left.

A few modular days later I catch a ride into Eugene
where every one in the English Department
is barking and chasing a daffodil.

Leaned against a hard copy of Spring
aluminum ladders are smoking cigarettes
robins bring them like worms
pulled from the grave of some immortal fool.

Bill Jansen lives in Forest Grove, Oregon, less that 2 blocks from the gas station where he was born in 1946.  A poem, he has no memory of how it happened, said to be in queue to be published this year in Gap-toothed Madness.  Perhaps the title will down load anyway.  He also cannot explain how many other poems have appeared under his name in various ezines and journals.

A Poem by Ben Rasnic

Urban Still Life

“A 23-year-old female was shot in the head tonight outside
of a flower and card shop. She died a short time later.”

Splashes of rain
tattoo neon pools
of pitted concrete.

 

Pulse of random gunfire
startles the quiet,
flashes revolving sirens

 

in wreathes
of splattered crimson
and shattered glass.

 

The 10 o’clock News
punctuates the day’s
events—violent and pointless;

irreconcilable episodes
between unbearable
silences.

Ben Rasnic is a native of Jonesville, a small rural town in Southwest Virginia with a population <1000.  A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2011, Rasnic still considers as his greatest literary achievement, electing to publish two short poems by Yusef Komunyakaa while serving as editor of his college literary magazine, Jimson Weed, in 1978—16 years before Komunyakaa received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.  He is the author of two volumes of poetry, “Artifacts and Legends” (2012) and “Puppet” (2013), both available on amazon.com.. Ben currently resides in Bowie, Maryland.

 

Three Poems by Alan Catlin

Blue Nudes

Not melting as stop watches do
in desert heat but as bodies do
as seen through half-filled
glasses; white wine and colored
water, attenuated edges aglow in
focused light, writhing as if in
anticipatory pain or pleasure;
these revelations, this nakedness
so dangerous they never touch.



Dawn on the Fringes: A Still Life with Piano

 

The piano is an emblem

suggesting creatures from

another world, metempsychoses

and partial hallucination, real

time measured by glowing busts

of Lenin rising from the keyboard

like poison mushrooms, death watch

beetles, spiders with hourglasses

painted on their carapaces; 

decaying body of a dead ass laid

to rest beneath the propped up lid

of a baby grand; the apotheosis

of Homer or the nostalgia of cannibals?

 

 

 

For the Angel Who Announces the End of Time

 

This could be the world after

End Time: the sea dissolved in

sunlight, hard baked into deserts,

exposed shells thick as colored glass

nothing is reflected in, the steel

plated arch to nowhere sightless

birds perched upon flexing their

bloated wings as if they were

bladders of sulfured tea. Once

punctured, a killing rain is released,

slowly descending like some primordial

ooze, challenging the laws of gravity,

on to the unprotected heads of those

lost and wandering below, sun struck

and amazed at the chemical hues,

sunsets that expand the view beyond

the limits of conventional sight.

 

 

 

 

Alan Catlin has been been publishing since the seventies earning him the  title Venerable Bard, not toe be confused with the Venerable Bede, an entirely different kind of writer.  He has published a number of chapbooks and full length book including a chapbook of surreal poems illustrated by collage artist Michael Shores titled, “The Insomniac’s Gift”, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Book Award.