The Dumbwaiter

Here she is, anything
can be asked of her
sea gravel underfoot.
Behind a guillotine before
the soda jerk opens it
to a glass vegetable spread
with cutlass smiles,
her mime complexion
in this 8mm photograph
to be still life beauty
before a night of trekking
because she only wants
to escape our plan
to move away from a Lady in a Lake
through dumb waiter
lobbies filled with hands
crawling to catch her
spilling voodoo guitar hands
The bug carnies sing
the same song,
but different as a melody
polished
by children with cancer,
or to brush
her filament wings as angel flutes
which can break the sound mirror
with a cough;
to share a tune
with black space,
and kinless troubadours
to light a wick
over their tents
so they can run back
with flashlights.

John Thomas Allen wants to be a cat man instead of a cat lady, thus engendering a gender revolution. He likes Christian tarot, JK Huysman’s, and Charles Wright. He’s been in Arsenic Lobster Journal, Sein Und Werden, and Grey Sparrow Journal.

Seasoned inductions

Drifts-in with clenched brow 
a hovered frost clear.  
It stands for dark streets 
their catchments 
marketed cards sing.  

The stilled winter scene 
resigns to shadows effective 
what forbids we praise it that
music to these ears 
it could not rinse in 
but elaborate for frames
eloquence withstood.  

Now there’s no place to call as own 
beyond what scene depicts 
and this its shallow friends—
solstice, snowman, if then birds—
all un-cheered, outcried
in solitary spring-fraught wish.


A room to labor

If comes prominence
its course is run 
in lit remarks kept sleek
these fastened nights that did.

But the shorted feast
clasps urge to rift
and brings a heart entranced
to levelled fields that mend 

that light as dusk bursts in 
and veers the gathering made 
to last-out careless breaths
a ribald company shapes,

sunk in soft knits
crisp allotments show
so that more, not less,
should beat the heart to quick.

These are both pieces that celebrate moments of encounter. They attempt to show a cohesiveness that can arise out of random events or spontaneous milieus.  

Seasoned inductions describes the randomness and chaos inherent in a winter scene and the profound effect on the viewer, in this instance regarding through well-ordered panes of glass.  The spontaneity of a storm is met through the comfort of a home. A room to labor is a chronicling of events, if planned or spontaneous but in many ways haphazard, that arise out of an initially discomfiting office party.  Again, it is the milieu that fashions encounter.
In both poems I have experimented with an ordering of lines that would indicate shifts in energy for the voice.  The degree of rhyme, itself somewhat a manner of synchronization, is only to serve this purpose.

Andrew Cyril Macdonald considers the role of inter-subjectivity in poetic encounter. He celebrates the confrontations between self and Other and the challenges that occur in moments of injustice. He is founding editor of Version (9) Magazine, a poetry journal that implicates all things theoretic. You can find his words in such places as A Long Story Short, Blaze VOX, Cavity Magazine, Fevers of the Mind, Green Ink Poetry, Lothlorien, Nauseated Drive, ODD Magazine, Unlikely Stories and more.  When not writing he is busy caring for seven rescued cats and teaching a next generation of poets.

A GENIUS FALTERS

Somewhere, Bukowski wrote
that few dogs had style,
while cats had it in spades.

My late dog Dolly,
a Shepherd/Fox Terrier, had style.
For 14 years, she endured
my human failures---
too numerous to list here---
and never once showed me
her teeth in anger.

She sat and listened,
with love and sympathy
in her eyes, while I spilled out
my fears and frustrations.
Yes, you sometimes reach
that point with other people
where a dog is your last,
and best, audience.

Now that she's gone,
I console myself by
remembering how I made sure
Dolly heard the words "I love you"
every day of her life. 
"A day and a dollar short, chump,"
says a voice, which sounds like mine.
"You said those words to Dolly. 
But she lived them for you."

My only experience with cats
concerned a mangy gray stray
with the yellow eyes of a demon.
My sister, then a teenager, 
dragged the cat home one day.
She said she'd rescued the tom 
from some asshole kids
who tried to set him on fire.

Sure enough, he stank of gasoline.
The few times I tried to pet him,
the cat hissed, bared his fangs 
and lashed at my jugular vein.
I suppose nearly being french-fried
might've colored his attitude.

Ensconced in our garage,
the tom stayed but one night.
He'd vanished by morning---
but only after spraying
everything in the garage,
including the interior
of my mother's Buick. 

The aftermath?
The garage smelled like
the Devil had held 
a fart contest
with Death itself.
Death had won.

I've taken the long way
around Mary Oliver's barn
to make a single point:
Bukowski was a genius.
But sometimes, even 
a genius falters.

J.P. Lowe was born and raised in Chicago and currently live in Edwardsville, IL. His writing has appeared in Cajun Mutt Press, Poetry Super Highway and Everyday Fiction, among other outlets. His most recent book, Flashbulb Danger (Middle Island Press, 2018), is available on Amazon.com.

City as replica

subjective stabilization
mirrors archeology
 
an ecosystem in the fur
and stomach a hypothesis
 
non-narrative pavements
resurface as ghostly blueprints
 
coordination scaled down to trivial
tho delineations never existed
 
zero marks the obelisks imagined
featured integrated hung from subfloor.




The green ruins aesthetically pleasing

Using materials anachronistic
though talking pyramidal shape
in various contexts risks
and a permanent fixture conflicts
but reflects priorities damp and cool
proved fertile yet theoretical
like fauna inhabiting buildings.






Ranging dope fence beard

Flicker vacuum punch
          this bowl
          shifts released
          fighting stomp
          differed a mile.

Shrimp
coat of arms
               best vest
               inflicted mania
                        dirt
                               no sense.




Open strategies

dispossessed as past
in particular
subtleties 
meditate
variegated
horizons

centers produce
rural forging
finding effective
authorized
passages an ever-
receding relevance

formal alien fast
dissolves pre-
history.



materials size device astronomers

snivel less an art
aforementioned encore avenue
city sweeps certain roast

covered in juice
squeeze portrait
grasshopper brow

eye gauges sneeze guard
once membrane vest

cloth
broth
sauce

gangly grizzly grimace
buzzword picked
to bits
drowned
soap dish

coming from wheat engineer
tools for transportation flicker
lighter fluid scrapbook promenade

weapons civil
as a planned computation
against ascertained scope

The Gallery Group

I feel like I’m in the “Gallery Group,”
ex-officio; for those who don’t know,
the participants are Democrats who
shared the January 6th experience
secreted in the space for the public 
and the press to observe 
the proceedings of Congress.
Surrounded by marble relief
sculptures, the likes of
Hammurabi, Suleiman, 
Simon de Montfort, Napoleon,
visages in this place
identifying that begun
long before the founding fathers,  
these men and women, white,
black, and brown, enduring a
nightmare in daylight
while the mob marauded. 
For an hour of horror 
before the hallway  
cleared by Capitol Police 
allowing an escape, 
a former Army Ranger, 
a Marine who fought
in Iraq, a prior UNICEF
employee, a previous
CIA operations officer, 
one who had been a labor organizer
whose immigrant father was
a farm worker and immigrant
mother, a nursing home laundress,
U.S. Representatives all, they spent
this time of terror hunkered down, 
pleading in prayer that went viral,
afraid of what would become of
them and America. I feel much 
the same, one year after.
A member of the Gallery 
Group happened to be
carrying a scarf that day,
bearing the Returns of Qualified
Voters and Reconstruction Oath 
of her great-great-great-grandfather
granting him the right to vote after being 
freed from slavery. He could not write 
his name, so he signed with an ‘X.’


Afterword—Lisa Blunt Rochester, U.S. Representative from Delaware in remarks made in Congress to commemorate January 6th recalls her great-great-great-grandfather, a freed slave and those who came before her: “I have continued to hope even when I feel hopeless – my ancestors wouldn’t have it any other way...”


News source: “Trauma in House gallery bonds members of Congress even a year later”



Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words (Scarlet Leaf Publishing), is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His book Political (Cyberwit Press) is the 2021 American Writing Awards winner in poetry. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, forthcoming from Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary. He is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory.

Four Poems

Written by Chinese Poet Yuan Hongri

Translated by Yuanbing Zhang


 

God is Ourselves after Waking up

 

You can’t catch every worldly thing like you can’t retain the days.

You can’t see the truth of all things on earth like you can’t see your own soul.

Happiness and tribulation may not exist as if there is no night

and daylight in the Kingdom of Heaven,

And the universe is merely the phantom of the light of our soul,

and God is ourselves after waking up.

 

上帝是梦醒之后的自己

 

你抓不住世间的一切犹如留不住时光

你看不见万物的真相犹如看不见自己的灵魂

幸福和苦难也许并不存在犹如在天国没有黑夜与白昼

而宇宙只是自己的灵魂之光的幻影而上帝是梦醒之后的自己

 

City of Dreamland

 

You walk in the city of dreamland but forget that you are the unique creator.

For your soul is the unique God that lives in the Kingdom of Heaven;

And you believe the riot of colours in a dream–

the pulsating of life and the blight of death;

And the muse of love makes you look like butterfly that hovered lightly in the garden

and forgot that your name is Zhuangzi.

 

梦境之城

 

你走在梦境之城却忘了自己是唯一的创造者

而灵魂是唯一的上帝而且居住于不可回忆之天国

而你相信了梦中的赤橙兰绿那生之绚烂与死之枯萎

而爱情之蜜酒让你如同花园里翩跹飞舞的蝴蝶而忘了自己名曰庄子

 

Universe is the Heavenly Garden of The Stars

 

Emptiness-nothingness will save you and wipe away all of the worldly scars,

Until you are fresh as the beginning and as fragrant – beauty as another spring.

The world will never fade because the universe is the heavenly garden of the stars.

The other you is that giant who is arriving in a huge spaceship

from another city of the sun.

 

宇宙是天国的星辰花园

 

空无会拯救你且抹去世上的一切伤痕

直到你鲜艳如初芳美若又一个春日甘醇之大明烝烝

世界永不会凋谢因为宇宙是天国的星辰花园

明天的你那乘坐星际巨舰的巨人正在另一个太阳之城驶来

 

King of the Universe

 

Seek thyself and seek your soul which is a lifetime mission.

The soul is both in your body and the Kingdom of Heaven,

Because the eyes always deceive you, thus you are lost in the illusion of the world.

You will be the king of the universe when you find yourself or else you have nothing.

 

宇宙之王

 

寻找自己寻找自己的灵魂这是终生的使命

灵魂在你的体内也在遥远的天国

因为眼晴总在把你欺骗而让你迷失于世界的幻象

当你找到了自己甚至一无所有也将成为宇宙之王

 

Yuan Hongri (born 1962) is a renowned Chinese mystic, poet, and philosopher. His work has been published in the UK, USA, India, New Zealand, Canada, and Nigeria; his poems have appeared in Poet's Espresso Review, Orbis, Tipton Poetry Journal, Harbinger Asylum, The Stray Branch, Pinyon Review, Taj Mahal Review, Madswirl, Shot Glass Journal, Amethyst Review, The Poetry Village, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. His best known works are Platinum City and Golden Giant. His works explore themes of prehistoric and future civilization.

 

Yuanbing Zhang (b. 1974), is Mr. Yuan Hongri’s assistant and translator. He himself is a Chinese poet and translator, and works in a Middle School, Yanzhou District, Jining City, Shandong Province China. He can be contacted through his email-3112362909@qq.com.

 

Email:3112362909@qq.com Hongri Yuan Phone:+86 15263747339

Address:No.18 middle school Yanzhou District ,Jining City, Shandong Province, China

 

 

GROWING UP

Linda Hibbard

              It is the autumn of my 7th grade at school.  The first year at Frick Junior High.

            The school is large and dirty and very impersonal.  Perhaps it is the first year of my life that feelings seem to have any importance.  I think I am lost, lost in a large world of uncaring people. It is as if I turned around and found myself in something I couldn’t understand and most of all didn’t want to understand.

            I wonder what am I doing here and why?  Why am I sentenced to this setting.  Last year I didn’t seem to feel much of anything.  I was a child that was taken care of and I want to go back, but I know I can’t.  Now I’m something that is not a child, but what am I?

We’re told to go to period 1, that is P.E., so I go.  The teacher always looks so strange. Her legs are thick and bulky and she wears short socks and heavy white shoes.  Her face is like stone, no emotion, she acts like something of a man and woman combined.  I am scared.  We dress in a cold room, it is always cold in that room.  We dress in queer looking blue shorts with elastic in the legs and snaps on the side.  The shirt is blue all blue with snaps in the front.  Everybody looks alike, we are now going to play tetherball, and we do.  Then the loud whistle brows, it blows in my ear and I can hear the ringing for the next ten minutes.  The game is finally over, nobody seems to know who won or lost and nobody cares.

Next we shower in dirty stalls and hear laughing, giggling and yelling.  My hair is a mess and the day has just began.  I wonder will I get through Period 2.