Empires Fall One morning you leave the house feeling good. Great, in fact. The wind just right, a constant certain breath in the air, refreshing in a soft, invisible way, a reassurance that every step you take is a correct step forward. Or, if not forward, then correct in its improvised arrangement, its volition to arrive somewhere else. Somewhere new. So you keep leaving without having meant to. And you think, Nowhere to go but there. Where I’m going. You notice the sunlight filtering evenly through the leaves and decide, Perfect, just as it should be. Blue patch of sky showing between rooftops and trees, carrying the faint ghost of last night’s moon like an afterthought. Yes, all is well, the voice inside continues. Exactly the way you believed it could one day be. Without turning to look, you see the house now behind you, the shut windows, the closed door, everyone still asleep, the white porch paint beginning to peel, flag on a stick barely stirring. You watch it all recede, growing smaller with each quickened step. Your eyes fixed on what’s in front of you growing larger as you near. Eighteen years. A lifetime ago. But you feel no sorrow, only joy. Or, if not joy, determination. You’ll visit again, now and then. Each visit more distant than the last. But for the most part you know this is it. This is change. Farewell. Hello. Time to move on. While there’s time. And that voice inside reassures, This is good. This is right. This is always how it had to be. Goa, India To the woman crossing the intersection of Bogmalo and Zuari Roads at 2:21 in the afternoon, February 28, 2019, a Thursday, with a big blue office cooler-size bottle of sun-bright plastic water perfectly balanced, hands-free, atop your purple covered head, and which stayed there, balanced, glowing aquamarine, even as your head turned abruptly to catch me attempting to take your image with what I thought to be a surreptitious camera eye, and the look on your face: can I ever forget the sad quiet anger that said, unmistakably, “Don’t!”? And I didn’t. Lowering the lens, then my gaze, shamefully toward my knees. Though you, no doubt, believed otherwise as the light turned green and the taxi where I sat safely ensconced sped off in a different direction. Greater that a rich man will crawl through the eye of a needle than you will ever read this. And yet, as Lord Shiva is my witness, I want you to know, unequivocally and with absolute contrition, I didn’t! To a Small House The tests are back. You’d die laughing through leaves if you knew. (Myself silly too.) Which is how, no doubt, it all began. And I wonder now if, perhaps, we could have found it in History with a capital “H” and stopped it in its tracks? Or at least on an old calendar with a small “c” and mostly X’ed-out dates, though a few circled (some even starred) in red, as well. Remember? In any case, one of us judged (or was it misjudged?) the way light appeared, entered obliquely, gave a party (think: shine on shine) and we were (or so we believed) radiant lines of pure poetry. Something like an eternal silver wedding cake, one tier for each year of transparency, i.e., blissful indifference. But now the roses on the bedroom wall are peeling, the sofa just sits and sags, and hands and feet look, if not ugly, then certainly funny. In the end (according to the tests (oh, you’d laugh!)) it will all swell unhappily off course and, of course, much too late. Chasing Potholes Two roads diverged in a sallow wood. With a load of blacktop, I traveled both. For one was just as hole-y as the other. Lucky me. Each led to Starbucks and a KFC. Oh, morning pee, where is thy stream? In a week, I’ll be 53. Age is but a number of debilitating ailments increasing rapidly. Maybe I should have been a plumber? What if I have a question but can’t raise my hand? Will the little girls understand? I flush with a blush. Verily, verily swirls the dream. Nothing to do and no one to do it with. The spoon is missing the dish. Pave it all to Hell and back. Paradise is locked. I watch my night-sky screen saver pocked with stars. I pick one and make a wish. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found Whittle with the wind. Blubber and bleed at each end. Drag your self with both fists down an alley of cut sharp rib. Let your rap hole reek of hemlock. Turn one white sock into an ill-fitting glove. For one buck, or less, do a killer moonwalk. Scream: “Not hungry! ANGRY!” See that highway stretching sea to oily sea? It goes nowhere you need to be. Pass people on the street curled up fetal, or laid out straight as a needle, and never know if they’re breathing or not. Play “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Liver.” Fifty little puffs of cloud descend upon the Giver. It’s just a world, rigged and wired, rather silly. A crumpled atlas, really. One shrug, one cartoon K-9 ditching its fleas and—poof!: no more ground beneath your knees. The Kernel* I was all kneecaps and embedded lace. You were liquor on a paper terrace, eyes rimmed with salt air. The Paris moon was a pistol in a mad cop’s face. Between poems, I swung legs true and bare above my head until my hands split like sacks to spill human sugar and Voltaire. You threw a bottle of broken English at the plate glass window’s ear, ordered the maid to slice more mango. I tongue tied a T.V. cord round the neck of 2008, hung it like a good year. The green parrot squawked Merde! on the one clean scrap of floor. You cut the table in two. The House was divided with peach halves, lamb’s blood. The daily bread was blue. Between poems, commercials offered salves on a gold and cushioned tray. Our raison d’etre was easy. Governing was our forte. (*This piece borrows and repurposes a number of words from Carolyn Forche’s poem “The Colonel”.) American Sonnet Sitting here helping my fingernails grow. Skating around my own mental rink. Hello’s but a stone’s throw from the immanent brink. The tape’s running slow. My lips aren’t in sync. All night I crow. All day I blink. Can’t know! Don’t think! Watch Aristotle spin down the sink. I pass Love the bottle and Love takes a drink. John Martino is a writer, educator, and avid traveler currently residing in Hong Kong. Some of his wayward poems have found a home at North Dakota Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Packingtown Review, and BOMBFIRE, among others. He is the Executive Editor at Home Planet News (homeplanetnews.com).
Monthly Archives: July 2024
Poetry from J.D. Nelson
Three Haiku first day of July— lightning above the mountains to the west of here — electrical storm! radio static crackles during the ballgame — small bird in the air attacks magpie on its perch guilty on all counts — bio/graf J. D. Nelson is the author of eleven print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *purgatorio* (wlovolw, 2024). His first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit his website, MadVerse.com, for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
Music from Texas Fontanella
More music and information from Texas Fontanella here.
Poetry from Mesfakus Salahin
Epic of Love The depth of your eyes is endless There is a vast sea I lost there in my every breath I touched the waves of the sea I want to be a boat of your sea I want to be a sailor of the ancient sea. My heart is a hut It is poor and tiny The space of your heart is great It is greater than hundred worlds It is full of dream and liquid love I want to be a dreamer I want to be a true lover I want to swim in your love sea. The flagrance of your breath is sweet It is sweeter than all the flowers of the world It is unconditional and true I wan to touch your breath I want to take a bath with your breath. The rhyme of your voice is pleasant It is more pleasant than the verses of my poetry It dances the air surrounding you I want to be a listener of your voice If you are mine forever. I want to stop writing poems As, you are the epic of my love. You have a soul that connects me When l saw you first but that was not first inside me I conquered you before your heart bit.
Poetry from Vernon Frazer
Threads Baring
new lapels disfigured mediation
busters harried to the tenth extreme
seek remedial disasters planned
under wedging banter associates
columnar when their vocable thread
transforms cased carrier remnants
to particle misgivings that hedge
the bettors shrubbing their green
with a nonchalance left unsuited
for the tidal remnant massage
dismembered as any catalogue
request impaneled many stairwells
casing the place for customer jars
buried as a threat of last return
to the clever parlor tricks turned
in Reno slot machines corporate
as any corporeal inflation suit
litigated under a fading gauntlet
or store a subterfuge in the pine
casket longing for a short return
on a retreat binding loose shrieks
to vacant cleanser armies trapped
in arrears or security bank lifts
its torrential rhetorical compendia
toward reactor bastions dancing
cradle riffs under moonshine wind
somatic upturn notwithstanding
the columnar implication dread
gradually shedding incumbents
of dormant centipede infraction
prints tracking lawns long gone
to granite vestibule packaging
arthritic numbers in stale heat
to lessen the platelet impact
consumed as a quadrant vocal
turning silent on a squeaky pivot
No Cigar Too Close
a Havana leak imploding
ratchets calcium in spite
a disconsolate liquidator
frying pawned banter
erased porcupine litanies
molting solar remuneration
developed darkening eyefuls
where headboards scattered
paradiddle femurs to daze
solar paperbacks with shock
the witch tonsil ache foiled
leaking punctuation reform
one bored seawater escape
released a subliminal jotting
and stapled scarves divulge
queasy octagons needle
rampant spitfires encompass
the disconsolate liquidators
harkening scripture grouches
recycle their pauper caravan
Kindling Ash
a conflagration mentor
firing up a passion lost
conical invitations rapt
in fashion
gear turned to spark
and catch
the lessening arc of the flare
as touched
by inspiration
inventing the fashion
of the passion come
much before
aspiration circuits
fence convention tents
along the downslide glow
the grin
in the dark
inspired
lightening the shouldered
incentive that fear turned
cynical the will untapped
despite
the endless recitation
a replay deployed
cylindrical
invective rations
a rhetorical spin
and out
no invitation needed
after dark
Vernon Frazer’s most recent poetry collection is MANTIC PANDEMIC, a C22 publication.
C22 will publish Frazer’s Voyage in Port in July 2024.
Poetry from Echezonachi Daniel
NOT FOR PLEASURE In the sun-lit beauty of the evening I watch as a flock of birds travel across And it hit my mind, like a sort of knowledge previously unknown That birds do not fly just for pleasure. These birds may, like man, have hustled the whole day In their own type of office and school And are returning to rest their aching feathers. They fly to get home, not for pleasure. Sometimes they fly to escape threatening danger To save their lives and slip away from death At this point they fly for safety Not for pleasure. They fly to find sustenance for their little ones Like man they too need something for their belly So as I watch them now fly past I know for certain that they do not fly for pleasure
Poetry from Mark Young
Dictum It is when words fall that they lose their im- pact. Must remain in the air for more than a second or two, cling- ing to clothing or twist- ing upwards in the way that cigarette smoke does. Articles I like using articles to end a line. Sometimes an article of faith, sometimes of clothing. & occasionally a particle of speech to give the space between lines that extra bit of frisson. It is a continuity, the way forward, not the end of the line that some flat-earthers seem to think it is. The Clearing Not how I re- remembered or would have left it. Too much foliage, as if no one has been here to tidy up since I last came by. Tradition always suffers when the oracles move into the marketplaces. A kind of census The mind’s mosaic has been taken in for intro- spection. Why learn for the sake of learning? Un- necessary facts might just as well be fiction for all the use we get from them. The fragments are taken out for sensual inspection. Left so the air can breathe on them. Those that acquire color are kept to form new pathways of the mind. The bland are used to pebble pathways in the garden. Another Sunflower Sutra In sunflower I find pistil & stamen, their output arranged in a Fibonacci spiral. & following on As the sun sets, the credits start to roll. This day was brought to you by the seven ayem garbage col- lectors, a poem that glistened just beyond the edges of the trawl- ing net, Sketches of Spain with Miles Davis & Gil Evans, four coldcall intrusions, all declined, The Last Samurai on cable, washing off the line. No special effects were provided by either Industrial Light & Ma- gic or Marvel Studios.