Poetry from Eric Mohrman

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.

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

Middle aged South Asian man with reading glasses, short dark hair, and an orange and green and white collared shirt. He's standing in front of a lake with bushes and grass in the background.
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).