------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
naked and smiling at me
back are the days
of sitting in waiting
rooms and dreaming
of the hot blonde
receptionist being
naked and smiling
at me
this is the normal
of a few years ago
hopefully, the poems
won't be far behind
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old traditions should be let go
the fucking groundhog
said there would be
six more weeks of
winter
less than two weeks
later and it will be
seventy degrees
tomorrow
i think there always
comes a time when
old traditions should
be let go
i'd much rather lean
on science than shadows
and people dressed like
it is still the 1800's
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fish tank
staring at a fish tank
in the waiting room
of a dentist office
it nearly takes up
the entire wall
i guess a portion of
what my mother will
be paying today will
go to food for the fish
or maybe one of those
plastic castles from
some pirate adventure
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safe to assume
heard from
an old lover
last night
she responded
to a message
i sent her
a year ago
i guess it is
safe to assume
she isn't missing
me that much
at all
of course,
i responded
immediately
-----------------------------------------------------
new enemies
old friends often
becomes new enemies
in this crazy world
lack of communication
or greed or just good ole
time can do such things
i quit trying to hold on
years ago now
i never was any good at
making friends
and that certainly hasn't
got much better with age
so fuck it
live and let live
we all end up in
the same place
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know where all the bodies are buried. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Yellow Mama and Terror House Magazine. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
Burning up and down Like the highest peak can’t be touched down My dolce et petition My sweetest devotion Cracked open I made my religion break open Through cracks and bones Amongst midnights and alleyed bones Little fragile heart at my doorstep Visiting my underworld stairway My heavenly coldness Crowns in my living room way The porched open house Little graffiti artistic pursuit Of my hotspot on the opened door Aside from the bottom line Made my phone book worthy Like living waters The transparent ghost My front porch open window Burning lilies hanging open My superbloom my resilient religion.
do you ever remember the spring or summer sun, the rains that make the wildflowers to blossom and the wooden and metal bridges that lead across the marsh water and creeks? do you recall the hawk and his friends high in the skies near the lakes, or the northern bald eagle way out there agile and like a dream? oh the countenance of the lands- loams and trees old their bark and branches wild shapes that sometimes look like spirits and tell all kinds of stories and make you think of poems and songs. the summit and valley, and oriole and blue jay, a coy deer and a running fox, porcupine in a tree, buzzing working bee, little spider and ant, the moth has its own beauty and the butterflies definitely so don’t you know? think of the grace of the wild orchids that live down the way off the trail, and the hundreds of yellow buttercups that receive the afternoon sun. path journey and scenery. do you remember such sights as those? maybe they can keep our spirit warm somehow, against reason and logic, in the winter air, the solemn dusk, the long night lonesome and witching hour gloomy. oh April-May the promissory notes for a better day. ah sand or June under blue sky, and July’s dawn river washed stones. yes August petals and the world in bright colour. calm let us be. waiting. waiting on light and warmth. waiting for a new dream dreamed by the universe. waiting for love.
storms baptisms worlds
there was a long corridor made of the deepest green painted cement. it was far south, and the off season, w/nobody around. I went along it and noticed that it had begun to rain. yet the rain was warm and soothing and made sounds as it went off metal railings and stucco walls. at the end were steps and the walls had openings so that one could see where they were going on their journey. outside of the dark stairways was seen the sea. even though a storm was half-arrived, you could see the sea, discern the whitecaps boasting up, then dissolving, rising again, and disappearing. to the right a far way was a pier, not seen then. to the left just as far, a lighthouse. I wonder why we always went right and not left, though right was beautiful. if I go back maybe I will travel by foot left instead, to see the lighthouse. but with nobody then, sibling or peer, I was on my own. those were the same storms the pirates experienced. and the first settlers. and the people indigenous to the lands. those storms carried some ancient message that was beyond literature, philosophy, or science. they were mystic storms. I waited in the rains, under the warm sky-water. I looked up so that the water would touch my eyes. I had been borne w/a double crown. I put my head straight again and the water landed on the double crown. I baptized myself in the strange feral storm world before returning to the earth that was normal, orthodox, prosaic.
beyond the forest and near the loam-
there was a large forest and beside it a winding valley. the valley was mysterious beyond belief and the farmer who owned the land was afraid to go there but would not exactly admit it. you could read it in his body language and in his speech when he spoke about the valley. and you could just sense it. but I therefore went deep not the valley alone and walked it’s complete length. and yes it was strange and weird. but i didn’t mind. stop and out from it was an open field. a series of three large fields. in the summers…moth butterfly agate chaga ant insect flower vine chaparral stone leaf abandoned tractor sandpit tree stone wooden fence blue sky and white cloud. in the winter…ice and snow and grey and mystery and loneliness pronounced and actualized. you and yourself and the vexatious winds. and there was at the purlieu a strange beginning to a farmland where feed corn was grown. I stood there sometimes and in the distance could make out the farmer’s house and barn. a solitary hawk sometimes flew. I breathed deeply. I felt I knew something other people didn’t know,- being there so alone, having hiked all that way. but I didn’t know anything. well nothing if words and mind perhaps. and then it would be time to turn and begin the long walk back. step by step by step. sometimes my feet were warm and sometimes cold, but I loved it anyhow,- against odds and reason I loved the winter overcast w/its dark skies and frightening valley. I would overcome it all or it would overcome me. I continued. I carried on. I was courageous and went further than the few others that even went that far. sky sky sky, woods woods woods. season enthral, trees full and tall…….
there are wolves in sky and, during the waltz of the hidden, epistolary episodic belles lettres to the shoreline unknown ~
the past is a long while away, when there was the dream of an orange city and the night, and another and me caught in fright, trying to make our way. or the great and grand cathedrals north. I told the woman, ‘there used to be a church under the ground, and I went there and it was beautiful and old and functional,’ and the woman surprised me by saying first, ‘I know,’ and secondly, ‘it is gone now…’ and I thought about all that and there were wolves in the firmament one two three maybe more. and I listened to so many things, hundreds of things, and read until my eyes couldn’t function, but in the end I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the rainstorms. Mata once read The Thorn Birds near southern balconies whilst I watched the skies over the sea. and one day, someday, I will live in the skies over the sea. why do you long for much? opulence. fashion. power. fame. money. food. the new. the gauche. the decadent. more. more. more. why, if you were different, you could live in the sky ov’r the sea. w/me. we could live there forever. w/the wolves. I will be there anyhow. you should stop by. oh one time I went down there after a long strange dream and walked the coastline at dawn. joggers. yoga people. walkers. the world. but I was always a stranger. I only looked up in the end and yearned for home, longed to live again in the air, w/out a care, where the astral wolves sway by the thousand fold lair.
shadows near dawn, letters home to a soul unknown ~
and the lake is a paramour, a mistress, much loved but not the essential. because I recalled something else forgotten. i remembered suddenly that I had gone out and seen the sea, and it was dawn, and everything was contained there yet bursting out in light. parapets stucco. old catamaran to sit upon. the darkness and shadow slowly being warmed and lit as if from a paced and deliberate spiritual fire. the mind far away, the heart speaking to this hearth, a hearth from and source unknown. and I could hear the waves lapping and thought of all the souls that passed through there during those years, and maybe the years before I knew if it. the whole and existence had brought me there…karmas, providence, fate and fortune, circumstance. and I knew where the sandbank was and the pier that went out and out,- oh all the things. and I had gone alone the path, the sand path framed by verdant palm leaves in humid breeze, yes trees that spoke still a little to the moon and even to me, shadows near dawn, telling the most marvellous and intriguing of secrets that you ever heard.
the other world songs
after the dawn and it’s mist, was the day, prosaic and normal, clear and neither good or bad, and then the strange dusk where shapes melt away and night afterwards overtakes streams and estuary, inlet and lake, boulevard and rural road and city street. that is when the angels used to arrive, or be heard, finally heard. they sang songs together, actual angels, and the songs were melancholic and rueful, crestfallen and lamenting something. I wondered why they sang. I wondered for years and years and years as I listened to them. they didn’t bother me, or comfort me too much. they were on the side of good and not bad. but why were they always sad? oh how deep and intense they were, w/their songs. but now they are long gone and sometimes how I miss them so. oh angels, come back and sing your songs. astral tunes. limbo lyrics. other world whines. complaints from eternity. what would or could a mystic orphan lost soul do in a suburban place surrounded by mediocrity, ambition, modernity? nothing, that’s what. but I miss the songs. please sing a song old friends, just once, somewhere sometime somehow. perhaps in the deep and still witching hour when the wind whistles wild unencumbered through the distant reeds on the edges of towns hardly known, when one is all alone, near lonesome loam, far and far and far my friend, so very far from anything like home.
Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian poet and photographer. Recent work appears at The Notre Dame Review.
Bare life
During the period of the spring German rains
My son and I are making a globe of cardboard boxes
Today we have made a big one
We wrapped it with collage paper
And placed it in the middle of the studio apartment where we have lived
Mum, where is Dad, he asked
Before I glued the last
Cut colours of the Balkan.
The vignette
Dismembered atoms of my good husband
Will never have a chance to be the perfect father.
Unlike me
And my atoms which even dismembered don't abandon this skin.
In our studio apartment there is no single picture of a prevoius life
We only found pictures of grey autumn mountains in this residence
My son and I are like the walking vignettes among them
That boy Alfonse, is playing Nintendo with his father
We can hear them talking loudly and laughing
But, we comprehend only that they are laughing
Mum, why are those people laughing so loudly?
They are out of silence.
What if we borrow them?
The white clouds
I wake up with the scent of the women
Who abandoned their homes
On the thresholds they left the traces of their blood
All clothes from their children, memories on their first cry
While the sounds of the Muslim's call to prayer and church bells echoed in the background
My body is filled with memories
While the children's heads are being lost in the high grass
Of the uncut graves
This is the place where my brother fell for the first time
This is the place where my father's soul moved to the better place
At one time this was her house, says my husband while staring
At the debris I am drawing on a sheet of paper in the refugee camp
Draw the white clouds where your memories live
Says the life teacher
Emina Đelilović-Kevrić (Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina) After studying the b/h/s (bosnian/croatian/serbian) language and literature at the Philoshopical Faculty in Zenica she got her master's degree on the subject „Memory construction in the South Slavic interlinear community: typical models of the war camp experience in literature“. She is the author of the poetry collection „ This time without history“ and the short stories collection „ Erased lives“. Her collection of poems „ My son and I“ is awarded by the Publishing Foundation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021. In 2022 she won the second place in the international literature competition „ Isnam Taljić“. She is the winner of the second award for the best short story of the regional literature competition "Zija Dizdarević“ 2022, and she won the first place on international literature competition „Nastavi priču“. 2023. she won a third place on international poetry competition „Ossi di Seppia“ Italy.
This land, the one, you used to reside in, who do you think, gave it for free? everything free, the air, the wind, the sky, the rain, the bloom, the feeds, yet you thought, you are powerful enough to defeat me, enough to dictate everything, just because all these became a reality like de ja vu, you really think it shall be like that, how futile of you lunatic and psychotic being, invincibles yet imbeciles. so it shall be, all you have designed and dictated? Then you must be the god, the god(s) you pray tol, now the god is you, do your best to be the god or perhaps the dog. please reflect the god in you, you damn Abaddon, Abram cove, let me tell you, you are the god(s), but none shall have recognized, excepts of pious, the purity levels, is nowhere closed to the human touch, your arse-crawler, passed your levels. So please be the god now, am tired of your creative stupidity, you think you can kill me? Me of all people? Me that’s me? Me that’s you? Me is the power, the pen, you can’t know forever, for I can’t let you, please look forward and be in solace, Abyssinia.
You all, we are toxic both of us, including me, because destiny is the bad bitch, she chosen me nonetheless, the cupper, now it changes to cunning man, so you all blind cupids, open your damn useless eyes and see me, I am here, your closest at that, yet, I dare you to tempt with me.
You literalist, so stupid, coward of a being, few exceed my crunch test, I gave you all, this kind of cupboard love, but failed, majority of you does, many follows the road of destructions of ashes, I tried my best with you, I don’t care now, where you choose to be,” let the damn ship sinks” everyone shall escape or die, the death itself is brassed off, and like a brass knocker, it awaits you.
Bilatu Abdullahi is a Final year student from the department of biological sciences, Gombe state University. She was passionate about writing poetry as her hubby despite being so good in her sciences. Her dream is to bring change to her community through her pen.
Chirashi
(Note: Chirashi is a Japanese dish of raw
fish and seafood served on top of a bowl
of rice. It means “scattered.”)
A bright, cold winter day.
The memories are fresh
as the roses in the hall
though they are far away.
They’re light as leaves in autumn.
Like birds lined on a wire,
hopping wire to wire,
like notes of music, charming
as music long remembered
and forgotten even longer,
she seems now to say.
She seems now to say,
from the far edge of the table,
but her words are silent now
like music long remembered
and forgotten even longer
in the jammed restaurant’s clamor.
Her eyes are glittering
like the gleam of heated sake
in its white and tiny cup,
in the laughter, silent laughter.
There is laughter, silent laughter,
warm and silent laughter,
in the memories in the restaurant
concentrated in a cup,
in a modest porcelain cup
hardly larger than a thimble,
a little thing of matter
in the bright, cold winter day.
Between the miso and the shoyu
and wasabi with its tears,
and the sake as it lowers
in the cup and disappears,
like sashimi called chirashi
they disintegrate, dissolve,
and disperse and fly away
like a flight of birds
until there’s nothing left
but a cooling empty cup,
a demolished luncheon tray
on a table set for ghosts
and memories as they scatter
like sashimi called chirashi,
like music long remembered,
and forgotten even longer,
yet remembered even longer
on this bright, cold winter day.
For Keiko
_____
Christopher Bernard’s third collection of poetry, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. He is a founder and co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
red bull for dinner
prawn
pawn
peon
---
duck, duck, goose
wetlands
in my head
---
with me
is the dollar sign
scrambled, or
---
lake or blake
why can’t I be the borrowed
crumbs now?
---
gumbywood
eye / pro
you’ve
---
bio/graf
J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poems have appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of ten chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *Cinderella City* (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Nelson’s first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Colorado, USA.
