Breathe The maple trees told me it's in the ashen branches Where the squirrels hide Their little child soul set afar from human conditions I surmise the longing of things From near and far Where the river is spread out against the sky The night stars are falling around I saw in a sleep The jumpings and quiverings of non living things Stay in my mind like a biscuit parchment paper I blew the dandelions too loudly Alas they catch the midheaven star The North node of all our dreams where they shine I now think of the maple trees The red apples sodden With arched bow whites I know not what to name these Perhaps they carry their own destiny A hidden blush of lost stars and milkyways I breathe in thee.
Category Archives: CHAOS
Art from Raquel Barbeito
Poetry from Pat Doyne
LADY LIBERTY CHANGES HER TUNE *
The “tired” and “poor” now fleeing to our borders
can just turn back. Go home. It’s not my problem.
If they face massacre—Scrooge said it best:
“Decrease the surplus population.” Yes!
These “homeless,” “tempest-tossed” are welfare pests.
Let “huddled masses” huddle somewhere else—
not in my backyard. Or in my country.
We’re not averse to proper immigration.
We spread a welcome mat for white-skinned Aryans—
rich, well-fed, well-heeled—like Musk and Murdock.
Let’s face it—God’s another sticky problem.
Those who call God “Allah” or Jehovah”
are heretic, like brown-skinned Papists; those
whose culture sees God through a different lens
should just convert, be born again, conform.
It’s time for Christian nationalists to rule.
I lift my lamp and sneer at shithole countries.
We don’t need “wretched refuse” eating cats.
A golden door for some; for most, a wall–
with tariffs on all imports. Brave new world!
* THE NEW COLOSSUS
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
–Emma Lazarus, 1883
Copyright 11/2024 Patricia Doyne
Poetry from Philip Butera
A Miss At Twilight
They were called marbles.
They were called reasons.
I am never where I am
when I need to be.
When “I’m sorry” is necessary
or “I’m leaving” is the only response.
I fear life is destructible
and consolation
is a round-trip ticket
to go round and round.
It’s in your eyes.
Your eyes looking into mine.
Counterfeit glances
through a snow globe,
leaving tiny droplets
behind on the surface,
soon to gather and stain.
Gather and stain.
Suffering
is a repeatable offense,
a language
the soul whispers to the heart
on a dark, lonely night
with darker contemplation
to come.
To gather and stain.
Broken and repellant
in a bookstore
that sells small bags of marbles
I see
Cat’s eyes and beauties.
Tragedy radiates from them,
they have no function,
except to be.
Except to be.
Reason teaches us
that
to be completely forgotten
is to climb into ourselves
and be put
in another’s pocket.
I am a miss at twilight.
At dawn
I separate myself from the chasm.
Somewhere in between
you have a thought of me
and I tremble
involuntarily
like
a visitor
at a cemetery.
The Woman I Need
I am as seaweed on a stone
either clinging from the last pass of water
or anticipating riding
on the next wave.
I am a silhouette of myself at times.
Burdened
with modern unforgiveness,
holding my hand over
a candle burning
through
one day from another.
If one is to dream
love is an extravagance,
yearned
from the bedroom
while
experiencing
the cold nights of winter.
I can hear the seams
losing strength.
An allusion
bearing the solemnity
of difficult questions
I ask myself.
And music
provokes reminiscences,
devoid
of a predicate.
What remains
are desire’s
bittersweet
scars.
Experiences,
are dangerous grounds,
abandoning oneself,
abandoning
what is necessary
to understand
tragedy’s consequences
or
contradiction’s demands?
I
yearn to foresee,
to weave a net
across
the enigmas
and dissipate
the contrived
influences.
There is a pier
where beneath,
the waves splash in rhymes.
Every Sunday at dusk
a woman
with long brown hair
stands at the furthest end
and smiles
every time a cat
strolls along the
guardrail.
I lose interest in myself,
while
watching that woman,
that woman.
That woman
is the woman
I need.
Philip received his MS in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published Five books of poetry: Mirror Images and Shards of Glass, Dark Images at Sea, I Never Finished Loving You, Falls from Grace, Favor and High Places, and Forever Was Never On My Mind. Three novels, Caught Between (Which is also a 24 episodes Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/), Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript, and Far From Here. Two plays, The Apparition and The Poet’s Masque. Philip has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.
Poetry from Kass
My hands don’t tell me to touch another,
not to hug them, not to kiss them,
not to slap them, not to stab them,
nor even feel for them at all.
My hands write,
write the scenarios I played out for crowds.
I write until the skin on my hands disintegrates,
blood puddles on the paper,
scattering stories unable to be spoken.
When bubbled crimsons agile hands daunt an
unchased stars truthful lies,
no escape to tame relocation.
Although memory stings like rays,
escaping towards shallow shadows,
hollow to silent foretelling fate.
Dried up hopes flourished again,
lines weren’t nothing but stables for either.
We know yet fear the ideas
of a galaxy collapsed fate.
Fate connects us more to ourselves
than any addiction punctured into our backs.
Told they will suppress our emotions,
we quote what they tell us
in grief,
in love,
in translucency.
Our bodies tell the truth.
addiction is emotion in hiding
when they are not to be.
Emotions are never more alive
when cut into you.
Poetry from Brooks Lindberg
A Child of God:
Writer has a few questions.
William Blake insisted that at age four he’d seen God watching him, his head pressed against Blake’s window.
Scholars and layfolk cite this as the beginning of Blake’s prophetic afflictions.
God-believing scholars and layfolk.
But the eyes of the Lord are in every place, no?
After all, a thing unseen is neither good nor bad.
As Heisenberg and Schrödinger proved, it’s only thinking that makes it so.
And who worth their weight in salt doesn’t watch after their children?
Brooks Lindberg lives in the Pacific Northwest. His poems and antipoems appear frequently in The Beatnik Cowboy, Horror Sleaze Trash, and elsewhere.
Poetry from JoyAnne O’Donnell
On Earth
We are quiet
we are calm
we are word hunters
we are labors
we are cookers
we are timekeepers-
of our stars
with the sun warm stars
with the moon our resting heart
with the days we become strong
We sometimes sing a song
when we are happy in life’s psalm.