bonfire
that day i torched all the poetry
i was a sick but determined man
i was looking for liberation like
the great bra burners of the 60s
in pajama bottoms at high noon
i dragged out the olive trash can
gathered up 29 years of poems
every one i could lay hands on
doused them with liquid starter
struck a match and tossed it in
con-trary
having known desire
having drank of pleasure
and purple pain
i stand in front of the mirror
a ghost stirring inside me
inside my musty mind
a hand and
suddenly a razor
rushing through me
one
day someday
one never knows
yaka mountain
lets bury our dirty little secrets
in gods backyard
under yaka mountain
in the heat of the desert
lets challenge the devil
lets dig a hole
sylvias mother
listens outside sylvias door
what is that girl doing why
wont she come out
for dinner why
wont she talk to anyone she
doesnt understand
ripvan winkle
white hair down to his knees
white whiskers of time asleep in her arms
--
Jeffrey Spahr-Summers
Poet, Writer, Photographer, Publisher.
spahrsummers@gmail.com
www.jeffreyspahrsummers.com
www.jaspersfollypoetryjournal.com
Bio: Jeffrey Spahr-Summers is a poet, writer, photographer, editor, and publisher. Jeff is the editor and publisher of Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal.
Ajibola Aljanat is a budding poet. She is an undergraduate of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She tends to write poetry as a means to express and interact to and with the environment. When not trying to write, she struggles with a book or could be caught catching up with something on the phone.
Rollercoasters let it ride, but I can’t be so winding theme park laissez-faire.
Bugs Bunny never went to war. Made his 1940 film debut in the animated short, A Wild Hare.
And it was good times for our resident carrot chomper after that.
The boys in uniform, not so much.
They should have sent a talking rabbit to the war.
That would have scared the shit out of the Germans.
Instead of pandering for laughs at home.
One of Disney’s longest tenured employees.
Probably draws a Fabio-handsome pension though.
All the finest carrots from all the best soil.
The war over just long enough to start a new one all over again.
The Dominatrix Always Wins
There are candles that burn out on you and then there are candles put out on you.
Private first class Hot Wax reporting for duty.
The Dominatrix always wins. Not a single losing season among the madams.
Simple as that.
Pierce the flesh and pocket the monies.
Five-inch cockroach killers and not a single off-white pest killer cube van in sight.
Just clothespins pinching the nipples like a brand new way to do the laundry.
Furry handcuffs without the key.
And this final warning of warnings:
there are no safe words when the censor comes for your mouth or mind or body.
Montezuma’s House of Revenge
It was back in the limestone city. Passing this small strip mall near Bath Road.
This martial arts place on the second floor. Over the ESL joint that never taught you why polish and Polish were the exact same word, but completely different when it came to nails.
And the sweat dripping down my face, a most unforgiving summer.
That green sign with black Kung-Fu movie lettering that read: Montezuma’s House of Revenge – Karate, MMA, Ju-jitsu, ninjas
It was that last option that seemed most intriguing.
Blue Antifreeze Snow Cone
I walk by this frozen driveway with the snow knocked off a parked silver Hyundai Elantra.
Look down to this blue antifreeze snow cone sitting there in a bed of fresh white snow.
Think of all the kiddies building snow forts that may never come home for dinner.
Under the silence of a grey bird-less sky.
Some half-witty bumper sticker hanging on by sticky last holdout corner.
While a joyous German Shepherd two doors down tries to catch shovelled snow in its mouth.
Jumping gleefully into the gaping black ice cosmos.
If this is winter, it is hardly the worst of it.
Even that long biting wind taking the day off.
This mortuary still way I watch my own breath like seeing ghosts.
Lean Years
There were some lean years there, let me tell you! he said.
Let me tell you, good sir, that for the poor every year is a lean year.
The Man from Ryoca
He arrived with none of the necessary papers, but all the intent of a happy holiday maker, this man from Ryoca, though none could place it on a map, and the birds in the sky seemed to fascinate the man, dressed strangely for the season, but completely affable so that no one knew what to do with this tall pale gentleman who helped you dig through his luggage as if leading some prestigious archeological team from the university, so that when the questioning began, it was friendly enough; tucked away behind glass like a fine martini, and when the man folded his hands, it was with all the lost beauty of 1000-year-old origami; if you found yourself charmed, you were happier than you’d been in years and hardly alone. A Completely Made Up Poem
He was tasked with putting the garbage out for the night.
Tossing the black bags over the lip of the dumpster in the side alley, listening for that startled shuffle of raccoons that normally came.
You still open? a sudden voice came from behind.
He turned and squinted. Held his hand over his eyes so he could make out the vague silhouettes of three men.
Beat it! he said.
Pulling out pipes from behind their backs, they edged closer.
That’s the plan! the big one grinned.
Blue Steak
She says that is what they order when they want it raw, so I sit up and give her the swanky blue steak of this poem to chew on, waiting for her many complaints to come running back to the deaf ears of this saucy stainless steel mate’s rates kitchen.
She Whistles When She Snores, I Can’t Even Whistle When I’m Awake
Some people have different talents. Think roaming Galileo eyes as sudden baking soda volcano.
I never had a talent, so I never once entered the talent show.
Sat cross-legged in the nosebleeds poking at my belly button over my shirt.
Wondering if I could tickle my spine if I stuck my finger in far enough.
This, of course, is not a talent. No one claps for the skinny quiet kid that keeps fingering his own bellybutton.
But this one beside me now, she has talents. She whistles when she snores, I can’t even whistle when I’m awake.
I sound like a mouthful of crackers without a mouth full of crackers.
Lay awake, barely moving for the full seven hours.
When we get up, she asks If I slept well.
I tell her I did. Take ten hours to drink a single glass of orange juice.
Blame the heavy black bags under my eyes on miniature clothes shopping women that can never get enough.
3 Types
She is looking through my notes again, notices 3 types of handwriting: normal, stoned and drunk.
All completely different. A handwriting expert would swear these were written by 3 different people! Look, she says.
I look. It is true.
No resemblance at all.
The normal being much of what I remember from my youth.
The stoned is small and tight and focussed in the extreme while the drunk is loose and loopy and hard to make out.
This is NOT healthy! she holds up the piece of paper.
For which one of me? I ask flamboyantly.
That is the drunk me speaking. I wonder if we all speak differently as well.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle though his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Synchronized Chaos, Literary Yard, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Yellow Mama, Terror House Magazine and Horror Sleaze Trash. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
I sit in my room wondering what shape the world will take up next. My body weary from alignments, and compressions, and expansions, and pathless arcs. Outside, there are dragon-flames, the age of Fire: every tongue, a funnel of combustion, fuelled by time’s solubility. The world itself, malleable in destruction—its very essence sets it off on a path of deconstruction, the theory of ashes. Not that my room is resistant but it is the only place I can shed my skin without shame, burn on the altars of solitude. And if this poem is the beginning, my room is Eden. An apple walks into my mouth and I taste Eve’s skin: crunchy with guilt, sugared with condemnation. Something about the tongue veers us away from the palls of redemption. Although I am naked, I am not Adam—I cannot begin this odyssey of perambulations with a crisp curse; what do I say to the serpent when he knocks? Spare me the goodwill, I have seen shapes and shapes and shapes but I have never seen an hour move so strange ticking with shadows and shadows and shadows as though light is a taboo. Spare me. The world is a shapeless plot and before my room ingests a sheet of flame like a story with an incendiary twist, I will say a prayer for this garden where the seeds of death blossom.
Testaments of Highwaves
in this poem you are the restless body of a country courting the apocalypse. your conscription, a willing
plunge, an endearment of desolation, hieroglyphs of manifestation etched on your forehead. you say
it is no scandalous affair: bones forged as effigies of self-denial. the proof sprouts, entombments seeping
out, serpentine strands of hair. how can your lips crave honeyflowers yet revel in the crater, snuffing
gunpowder? what’s the taste of ashes gnawing your tongue? your spine is a dystopian song.
how can you pine, ploughing day’s breath for miracle ridges yet copulate night’s pronging palms on inferno-futons
of unbelief? what’s the taste of ashes gnawing your tongue? your spine is a dystopian song.
a rhino-horn burgeons from your pericardium; ode to an extinction that detests aubades. your thorax, a mapped
sortie of malaise, and your navel is the nascence spurring the great flood. what’s the aftertaste of these songs
when your waist wiles every crevice for climax? in this poem, your heritage is the romance of tragedy
where love is death, and dismantling bodies are borderless memories of dust, the testaments of highwaves.
Mob
All the memories of the past revisit me as ghosts and beckon me to a conversation at time’s table.
I yield like a shore to the carnivorous strides of a drunk tide, unbolt my body for the incursion.
Memory, the foreskin of consciousness, unwithering, undying, hangs with the panache of palatial garnitures.
I try to flee, far from this unheralded swinging of shadows minted in lightspeed, but everywhere I set
my teeth of dust is an enclave of something that refuses to disappear, or admit evanescence. Eyes of fireplaces
knitting snow-forests, the owls in cyclical obsession where my body is the night of oblivion, a disciple that
should be ingested by the drunk tide. Something about the past weaves the caskets of darkness with canes
of grief and ships them to heartposts. And the peril of the hour is that there isn’t enough light lurking
in our marrows to turn these graveyards to regales of pristine fireworks. So, we unbolt the lids and lower
our bodies into a congregation of fleshless beings where every man’s bone is an artefact of nothingness tirelessly marauding the earth as time’s loyal mob.
Osieka Osinimu Alao is a Nigerian writer and poet. His works have appeared in International Human Rights Art Festival, Lumiere Review, Of Poetic Yellow Trumpets, Arts Lounge Magazine, Nantygreens, and elsewhere. He is @OOAlao_ on Twitter & Instagram.
I’ve never gone too far home past my Lola’s house and my Lolo’s grave.
I’ve never seen that blue, the one of the Philippine Sea, and I’ve never even swam with my cousins (who are competitive swimmers). But I’ve seen my Lolo’s poem, his vows to my Lola, hung on my aunt’s wall, and I’ve faithfully listened to all the old stories. Even though the memories don’t fit, I have an old lunchbox where I keep a pen with my Lolo’s favorite Bible verse,
and a flashlight he once gave me. Maybe I’ll print out a poem of his to place in there as well. And I’m more than just one story, one distant set of islands, one lunchbox holding my remaining grief. Sometimes the memories shrink to a single raindrop as I remember long past days. I swear I try to catch every drop in a glass, so maybe one day I can drink it and see my scattered life come together for a moment.
Lessons (Rebellions)
My mom once told me not to wear cropped shirts, as we passed some girls on a street. I giggled and nodded then, my hand reaching upwards to hers.
Now i feel the chill as i walk my dog, midriff exposed. the wind never warned me that its bite would make my stomach blue too. My hands dance downwards with the leash, looping and loosening the gap between the sidewalk and the rope. They too, turned blue with the cold and with the echoes in my bones, of days on jungle gyms the light dipping beneath my head as I climbed trying to catch the last drops of sun. But now i have goosebumps on my stomach and my hands are curled in shivers
because i didn’t keep my mother’s promise. (It was only hers, after all)
