Frost It was a 100 years ago when Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening first appeared in print. Staring out at the white mountains on a snowy morning, I wonder how much of that beauty is killing people or wildlife. I think I know some of those roads, though I cannot see the houses. I would not want to live there. The snow and cold would be too much. It looks beautiful in films, the frozen lake, the farm- house, and starlit evening. I shake just feeling that cold when by mistake I leave a window open only just a bit. The cold wind fills my bones. The lovely mountains filled with snow I see are miles away. I see them before I go to sleep. * Isn’t It Nice? Whipped cream clouds, white out stars and moon, yes, I know, do you? Calm waves all day, the red fish bleeds. Turn up the volume Mother Earth sings. Isn’t it nice that fresh air is free when you can get it? Bread is money and dove is a pacifist, chocolate, and soap. * Hungry Dogs Eating Flowers Never set your eyes on the sun as you lay in the grass facing the sky. All around you, can you see and hear the trees suffering? It keeps me awake most nights. How much pain can they take? I keep my eyes on the draperies that keep out night’s moonlight. There are things going on in the fabric, hungry dogs eating flowers. It takes the weight off my mind. There are men, women, and children dressed as doves and hawks. I worry about the flowers being eaten.
Monthly Archives: April 2023
Poetry from Philip Butera
Ill-Fated I am scholarly detached, uncertain, a teardrop between uncomfortable and not belonging. Like a neglected wound I am scarred and imply, what I don't say. I have no illusions about distractions. I remain a wanderer waiting for storms to uproot what I find grounding. I cannot remember a journey without doubt or a romance without glossy wings, beautiful as a rainbow but always ill-fated. For wind and time become errors in an abyss refusing to concede. As I contemplate the unsettling darkness of characters I've played self-deception curls about me. I sought the exceptional, but found the visceral. I have trapped words and used them as lures. Outlined with silver garlands they shimmered giving me an advantage. But I distrusted precautions and when the stakes were the highest I walked away alone. Bells That Toll Did you hear the bells? Bells that toll must have a purpose like love or death. The bells rang boldly when I was a child. I heard the bells they captured my attention like America, like life. I heard the bells near a playground, near a station, on a back road. Those bells sounded and they beckoned. My mother heard the bells, in the distance, in the future, she felt the motion inside her as she wept putting fresh flowers on my sister's grave and my brother's. Bells sound, like needs like intentions like loneliness. The bells sound. They call. They chime after a tragedy, after a wedding, after a war. Bells, bells clang and bang but the silence between rings booms. I see the Face of my own Ghost The night is no friend. It is a heavy black overcoat hiding away the moonlight and stars. Alone on a cliff, aware of my misgivings, I ask for clarity. I search to uncorrupt the darkness but the cold sea gusts and heavy mist ascend from the angry waters below to drench me in tears. I fall to my knees aware of my fright. In the dark nothingness I see the face of my own ghost. I am, an unwelcomed guest an insignificant wisp woven into the night's indifference. I Slept with Lady Macbeth I slept with Lady Macbeth before the witches spoke. Her breasts were large- milky-white kissed with pale pink. Nude and mellifluous, our bodies met heat and passion, exploring all desires. How it pleased her to be touched. Our intimacy was beyond fault, lips everywhere without blushing. We loved more than all the stories to be, from time undone to moments to come. When an author recognized her beauty, we ran swiftly into tomorrow's distance. To chivalry, to Arthur, to Robin Hood. Guinevere offered us a bed, and Marion wept. Soon a pen found paper, and we could not remain. Binding ourselves together, we tangled- on damp earth and shattered glass, our obsession roared. I slept between her soft legs, her scent intoxicating. Finally, the moon's blueness became the bookmark. Fate is never timely, and Shakespeare had no choice. I was erased from her thoughts, and she became a tragic heroine searching for reality. A Loss, Nonetheless I trip, I fall, I used to be sure-footed, now I am sure of very little. I turn off the news, I turn off the noise. I turn away from what is irrelevant, all those loud, noisy voices out there. What I thought was background, is now forefront, birds chirping, ducks gliding, squirrels scurrying, and rabbits on the run. I sit and listen to what is anchorless to what is subject without a predicate. Those sounds of life living and not caring about the lies we use for language. I abandon all those worries that I wove into myself and that lightness brings me to this lawn chair. To a daily view of simpleness. The sweetness of belief beyond pretense. The life I was living, living, what an ambiguous word, was just waiting for the promise of Spring. But I never recognized the change when it arrived only the silhouette in the moonlight as it sailed away. The ducks scold each other yet they stay together. A solitary Egyptian Goose has a broken wing. She will never fly again every day I feed her. She comes closer than the others but we never touch and I realize a loss can be a win but a loss, nonetheless.
Philip received his Masters’s Degree in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published four books of poetry, Mirror Images and Shards of Glass, Dark Images at Sea, I Never Finished Loving You, and Falls from Grace, Favor and High Places. His fifth, Forever Was Never On My Mind, will be out Summer of 2023. Two novels, Caught Between (Which is also a 24 episodes Radio Drama Podcast https://wprnpublicradio.com/caught-between-teaser/) and Art and Mystery: The Missing Poe Manuscript. His next novel, an erotic thriller, Far From Here, will be out Fall of 2023. One play, The Apparition. Philip also has a column in the quarterly magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.
Poetry from Mesfakus Salahin
Rebirth of Love See the heart of the world It is not imagined by lovers so called The sun rises everyday in eyes Everywhere the dream independently flies Mountains travel beautiful places The tree talks to its branches With sweet voice fountain sings Beauty flies on the air's wings The sky sleeps on the flying cloud Raindrops play like brotherhood Love deserves loneliness Relation builds on avoiding ugliness Birds adore first night Nature refreshes morning sight. Rebirth reproduces generation's wheel Though the world will be a shelter of nil.
Poetry from Mark Young
Court-métrage The Rōshi enters the meditation room. All is silence. He claps his hands. "How can you tell when a persimmon is angry?" he puts to the room. The silence deepens. Circumstantial Every human being needs to feel that they are important, valued. Now is the time to move from rhetoric into action. The path to sustainable development must ensure that people living in poverty are included. Communication styles can help. Music can inspire. Its manifestations permit the possibility of a chance encounter between trans Americans & the current Pope. À la campagne School. Public phone box. Un- used hall. Over- grown racetrack. A gravel road lies ahead. DoNuts T.®ump looks to swallow up The Holy See I can change my cookie settings at any time, but can't change the cookie cutter paradigm. Which means that if I don't get in & get a share of the Vatican action before those oligarchs arrive & buy up all the available building land, it’ll have to be the Sistine Chapel that gets pulled down to make way for the new Trump Vatican International Hotel. The conspiracy fairy left me a silver dollar for my tooth Jerry Fletcher is a man in love with a woman he observes from afar. Whoopi Goldberg questioned the Moon Landing on "The View." Jesse Ventura & his team of experts examine some of the most frightening & mysterious conspiracy allegations of contrails, which consist of ice crystals or water vapor condensed behind aircraft. Any gap in official information on such violent events is filled by online theorists proffering a "big explanation." Hoaxes go viral because the public rarely makes the distinction between conspiracy and misinformation in the aftermath of tragedy. Secret schemes that shaped the world around us are hiding in the footnotes of our history books—you just need to know where to look. Urbandictionary.com is being used for governmental purposes. The government is finding out ways to control us, through an event or set of circumstances created as the result of a usually secret plot by powerful conspirators. Secretary Wolf calls these rumors "full of misstatements & misapprehensions." The ads in this column are not endorsed by the author.
Poetry from J. J. Campbell
another sign of getting older here comes a sexy woman in glasses my knees just got weak is it love or fucking arthritis ----------------------------------------------------------- on the lonely nights i still remember you standing in front of me in only a towel you kissed me and dropped the towel on the floor on the lonely nights i think of you and your family out west all the years of what could have been the towel was maroon and i still remember your sweet taste -------------------------------------------------------------- slowly creeping along as much as people warned me that time flies when i was younger i'm stuck in the days of it slowly creeping along i like to believe i can bend time and slip in and out of the creases of existence sadly they don't make those drugs anymore ------------------------------------------------------------- welcome to this ugly world if beauty is in the eye of the beholder i imagine we all need to have our eyes checked again ---------------------------------------------------------- waiting room chairs they don't make waiting room chairs for someone with a bad back damn good thing i enjoy the pain
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Black Shamrock, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review and Yellow Mama. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
Poetry from Duane Vorhees
WE ARE THE PROGENY OF THE BIG BANG I'm no comet, no constellation, just a telescope on our sky, observatory of meteors and moonly progress. I see we are not ourselves only but also parallels and echoes of the ones who came before. Not only our own singularities, but also we are in part products of our planet's climes, times, crimes. Properties of the universal particles. The passed is my present, given for your predictions, as light is the shadow of infinity's origin. SUNSHINE PACT Love did survive the midnights though when we swore each other our love would last forever we meant mainly in sunlight. But at last it was the fire that burned us into liars. SOME FOUR OR FIVE DESCENTS SINCE Natural selection's neutral in terms of progress and morals. Random goes unpredictable-- noble or reprehensible. Once, in effect, we had five hands-- two top, two down, and one behind. We lost our old prehensile tails-- the cost of opposable thumbs. We got better, sensible brains by trading touch for cranium. THAT ANCIENT GENTRIFICATION Your good neighborhood is rezoned. The lawns have given way to bones, mausoleums of expired hours, and dank granite-dungeoned towers. After your last mortgage was paid the real estate mortician made that inevitable deal: Trade your habit-practiced house of flesh for a dormitory of death. AMPHIBIANS Part of us is feather, another is anvil. As reptiles of reason and fishes of passion we are amphibians that define the betweens, a muddle of middles among brakes and throttles. And the trajectories of our biographies trace patterns of lurches and runs and reverses and rises and lunges and ripraps and wrenches and pauses and passes and misses and catches. Ah! Those rubs and doublings. CORRECT ATTRIBUTION The thrust, parry, and riposte are claimed by the saber, yet, the point, the edge, the hilt imply a duelist. As though there were no poet, the pen boasts the epic; and the hammer, the palace as though no architect. So do not infer agents are the inspiration.
Shelby Stephenson reviews Stephen E. Smith’s Beguiled by the Frailties of those Who Precede Us
TRUTHS AS IMAGINED MEMORIES
Review by Shelby Stephenson of Beguiled by the Frailties of Those Who Precede Us written by Stephen E. Smith (Kelsay Books, 502 South 1040 East, A-119, American Fork, Utah 84003: Kelsaybooks.com)
These are poems, for one thing, about the “there” – there!
Beguiled by the Frailties of Those Who Precede Us: the title tells all, if it could, for Stephen E. Smith shares the joy of family, father and mother, a son, and graves popular as Mortality’s song that others will come along, even after “released on bond.”
What mortal words bring to knowing and not-knowing brim in these poems. See “Stepping Out of Poetry.” Stephen’s father was a boxer: the poem deals with many subjects, the main one, I think, racial prejudice: the conviction of Jack Johnson “by an all-white jury of violating the Mann Act—transporting a woman (in this case his wife) across state lines for immoral purposes—and he was sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.” Stephen presents his father pondering Humanity. The color-line dominates, still does—in our lives and in American poetry.
Loiter and laugh as wakening comes again: “Last July” shows the natural Unnatural as a child cries as his father leaves him for a podium to read poetry to an audience, the child, now grown, moving us to the window-light.
I did that this morning: opened the blinds. The world said, Hello!!
This book does too, gives light–big time.
Stephen E Smith lives in Southern Pines, North Carolina. His reviews and essays are featured in PineStraw, Walter, and O. Henry Magazine. The book is available here from Kelsay Press.