Varnish “Hold me oldly,” she says. for love, not for long. dipped in the darkness of the dancing night. Ephemera Once we were. once there was a sensation of stillness in a kiss. once the air lapsed pinkly before your lips—collapsing camellias. Tryst A room awash in the wan androgyny of the moonlight. she tells him, “Say little words, they end quickly but last longer.” Eric Mohrman is a writer living in Orlando, Florida. He's the author of the chapbook Prospectors (Locofo Chaps, 2017), and his work has appeared in The Citron Review, Otoliths, One Sentence Poems, M58, Moss Trill, Gone Lawn, BlazeVOX, Eunoia Review, and other journals.
Category Archives: CHAOS
Poetry from Taylor Dibbert
Sri Lanka, Again
He’s just booked
His next flight
To Sri Lanka
And is bound
To sleep well tonight.
Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, was published in May.
Poetry from Mahbub Alam
Dreams, not the Dreams Only
Would I be able to stand before you?
You are living in my world
Reading your eyes I proceed to hug
The doves on the branch I see now and then
I think of the birds’ life
So loving and caring for each other
Like the Hercules I start my journey
And build a castle of love on our ground
Everyday our hearts visit the heaven
When the eyes are closed
We engage ourselves like the doves in the garden
Our dreams are not the dreams only
When heaven opens the doors to sustain.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
25 October, 2024
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
The Choice Not an easy one, to be sure: We call them “Republicans” and “Democrats”: self-righteousness, sometimes half blind, versus greed, often naked; entirely real fascists against sometimes dubious progressives. On one hand, possible dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy’s end here; on the other, cultural anarchy weaponized by pity, the cruelest of false virtues. Both sides flirt with visions of anarchy masking a hunger for power, to bully and frighten the rest of us, throwing us to confusion whether stirred by the 1619 Project or the latest billionaire. Both sides support mass slaughter of children and women “for the sake of security,” crowing for blood or weeping tears to disgrace a crocodile. How can anyone sane, decent, honest, caring, choose between them? And yet they are not equal. I ask myself: Has either side shown signs of bending toward decency, even honesty? Does either side admit its human fallibility? Has either side ever corrected before a truth it did not, exactly, welcome? Did it then change, even if reluctantly? Or does it drive relentlessly toward the farthest edge of its own lunacy, double down in hatred, threaten our destruction rather than admit error and never defeat? If a time comes when we must choose between two madnesses that cannot face a truth they do not wish to face; that live a fantasy of vengeance, lies, and hate, drunk on certainties that face any doubt with calls for silence, removal, blood; that will not turn the helm an inch to escape the ice before them and certain catastrophe for the rest of us— then there will be no choice. Nevertheless, there is the question: is it a necessary evil to choose between evils when it is simply an evil to refuse the choice? No, it is not an easy one. _____ Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He recently helped to organize and host “Poets for Palestine: A Poetry Marathon to Benefit the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance” in San Francisco.
Poetry from Maxliyo Axmatova
The sun Light shines in the sky Makes the word happy. People are happy When the sun rises in the morning. Crops keep alive, People are centuries old When the cloud comes down. When the sun rises in the morning. It lights up the word, Governs the whole body Rooster is thick. When the sun rises in the morning Maftuna Rustamova. Bukhara region Jondor district Ravot village. 30 school 8-"a" class.
Poetry from Duane Vorhees
JUST STUPID, I GUESS — OR BLIND —OR INATTENTIVE — OR…
“So, Jean — (somebody), I said, “do you believe in love at second sight? I mean — Rum toddy, Waitress, for her; I’ll have a screwdriver — going dateless ‘s obscene! Dumb! Big crime to do! Shouldn’t I have realized the very first time?”
VAN/ITY (for Natalya)
The happy inconvenience of forced reliance on these, the sole tools I own
for prying below your oh so frozen golden skin,
The patient persistent application of these blunt lips, this inagile tongue,
trying to learn entire the inarticulate soul hiding within —
peeling it away layer by layer
from the long & blonde cool slim softvanilla Ukrainy icecreamcone
lying frostdelicious beside my pillow.
I (reluctantlustily) Bonaparte after you Kutuzov:
who hawkodineyed watch for every movement upon your flanks and
(engaging not, engaging, not) withdraw, withdraw
withdraw apace, another pace—
all communication broken,
knicking off my van/
/ (engaging not, engaging not)
/
/ till
/
/ suddenly
/
/
/ confront we :Borodino
/
/ frontal attack into your center
/ bodies blood contorted everywhere
/ ferocious punishment on either side
/
The c/ity of tsars ash against stars and ice
and our dreadful painful slow long extraction begins.
FISHING WITH A LINGUIST
I never claimed my German was good
but I can conjugate worm and hook,
and I can understand your language
by knowing of your hopes and anguish,
of your cathedrals and your ruins.
We all communicate in Human.
I’m not fluent in Russian or Greek,
but I practice my Reason and Grace.
PEOPLE LIVE IN CIRCUMSTANCE
Prophets
coffin fears.
They undim the years
and make futures clear.
Each instant starts new infinities and we want to learn our world before it leaves and the present in constant process of departure is all of time we possess and we want to change reality we say but won’t imagine others until prophetic language speaks itself and inertia is the prophet’s strongest weakness.
Poets,
clothed in words,
are philosophers
who live as paupers,
ambassadors of imagination, and their hands acting as mankind’s tongues make
the machinery that molds humanity and their chisels read our marble’s manuscript to free its sheltering angels. The poets’ sort of characters presses their texts on the stubborn world’s soft tissues.
Healers
seek to cure
the pains of the world,
improve the impure
with powders potions pellets promises prayers prophylactics and prosthetics and redeem the work of their harbinger barbersurgeons, barbarous locks smiths, who balded us while tonsured ones whittled our natures away.
Teachers
reach our minds
by opening blinds
to show us our signs
bright enough to darken our sight, reveal our oceans’ icebergs, use their mistakes instincts and stimuli to instruct our eternal youth eager only to grow old.
Scholars
caulk the cracks
in the walls of fact
caused by careless lack
of application as their brains’ gray boredom yearns to learn about all the abouts to catalog and diagram and quest to close the gap between the sag of our intellect and the stretch of actuality, but our tired libraries strive for arson because we know when nothing is left all will be understood.
Rulers
view their role
as plugging the holes
in their fated goals
and they deploy their troops their laws their clubs their crusades their mobs and their parades to advance their cause of making the patch of our earth a carpet for their comfortable feet and leave us as shirazless as Shiraz. We say we need rulers to draw our lines straight but the rules rulers impose are intended for us ruled ones only.
Soldiers
know: to kill
they must always drill
and harden their wills
to deform enemy stones into tombs and they expect command and stratagem to stand up their haughty uniforms against opponent motley and bayonet resistant pacifists.
Judges
budge the law
from hammer to saw,
from justice to fraud,
they are the chaste prostitutes who should always be on trial for verdicts that sentence abstinence with masturbation and we must prepare to wear our loudest scarf to their dockets their gallows and their guillotines.
Prophets live in confusion, poets in fantasy, healers in contagion, teachers in ignorance, scholars in mystery, teachers in ignorance, rulers in entitlement, soldiers in destruction, and judges in wickedness.
WHERE DO THESE, OUR CASTRATI, GO?
On the march–
the rag, the drum, the bugle’s linger.
In the church–
the wine, the crumb, the seedless singer.
By the curb–
the road, the thumb, sundrunk and cindered.
Remnants of sacrificial souls.
…
Poetry from Terry Trowbridge
Unemployed, Dating, Self-Esteem Issues I wish I was naked with you, but when I am naked with you I wish I was invisible. But you might find me by touch, so I wish I were room temperature. But you might find me by smell so I wish I was sleeping in your bed for a week beforehand. But you might find me by sound so I wish to hold my breath for as long as it takes for you to fall asleep waiting for me to come back from wherever you think I vanished to. But when I reappear, I would have no present and you would think I had gone somewhere and returned empty-handed and that empty-handed sheepishness is why my self-esteem is so low. That is why I am not answering your phone calls. Disney women of the 1980s The women of Disney’s Saturday morning cartoons were not princesses. They lived serious lives and were empowered, but somehow we have forgotten them. We should remember three: Gadget Hackwrench, Rebecca Cunningham, Sunni Gummi. Gadget Hackwrench was a S.T.E.M. gearhead who maintained an airship. She soldered spy equipment. She could drive, off-road, every vehicle that fit a mouse. She dressed in mechanic’s coveralls and was the only Rescue Ranger who wasn’t obsessed with their own image. Rebecca Cunningham was a single parent who ran a shipping company. She owned a plane. She masterminded supply chain management, international trade regulations, and her daughter’s PTA. Her main employee was a man who starred in a movie without a single female protagonist and she was uncompromisingly his boss. And she did all of these things on screen. Sunni Gummi infiltrated human castles and posed as a princess, boy crazy and a bit servile to a blonde rich girl until she learned some Hawthornian lessons about life. She became a talented squire, and devised plans on behalf of teenage girls that outwitted politicians, patricians, and her own favoured brothers. She was a savant flute player. She fought with monsters, bare-fisted.She fought with men, naively, but unflinchingly, a pawn played by an older human princess to deflect the violence of Machiavels. But she represented more than a throwaway piece because no mere pawn could do these things in an urbane world and return home to a rustic family of druids and Gnostic secrets with dignity. They are not prissy movie princesses. The role model women of Disney were everyday women of Saturday morning. Let’s talk about working class breakfast cereal and break the chains of royal popcorn. Let’s ask where these women vanished to when we went to college. Why did we stay silent about their absences when they were replaced in the 1990s by shows named after men like Squarepants, Doug, and other Nickelodeon disappointments? Why did we let our fascination transfix us on the vapid Disney instead of the empowering one? Two Magics Your fairy godmother has a spell to give you an enchanted pizza topping in your suburban driveway. She throws sparkles over a semper vivum. It stretches and inflates into an egg on a stem. Voila Bipitty bopitty artichoke. A prince steps out of his Range Rover with a Vessi in his handcasting chill. Netflix looks around. Terry Trowbridge has appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He has some grant funding from the Ontario Arts Council and hopes that more poets can benefit from their programs in the next cycle (and Terry votes).