THE HOW Your quality – how was it shaped? I was glacier before I was prairie, Your character – how organized? I was beached before I was tide, a grave before I was buried. Your proportion—how was it trained? I burned long before I was sacrificed. Your quality—how was it shaped? I’m the silence that amplifies the noise and the boiling part of the freeze. Your beauty—how ornamented? I’m the mute portion of my voice, still a prison after I’m freed. PARADISE UNFOUND Firework flowers bonfire the ink ocean. We too ignite as though comety sparks in the dark spacious nothings between stars. Attentive, like hero-shades bored with Hell, astronomer geckos crowd across walls to observe binary-system motions. We awake after a morningless sleep to the birdsong notes of a bamboo flute. We breakfast on mangoes and passion fruit from the wooden bowl on the wicker chair beside the bed. The hardwood floor is bare. The room is quiet and cool, as are we, till together goes interminable. Soon, palmtree shadows begin to revive. We smile and sound silently our goodbyes. And then I return to under the sun to dissipate the burn of my alone knowing full well it is invincible. Later, the beach exchanges bikinis for cruising wear and yellow lights erupt and eyes and spirits conspire to corrupt the sanctified romance of the harbor and adventurers penetrate borders and discover new springs of poetry PROPERTIES I wanted only a life unmortgaged-- how many stories I would furnish! When I took hold of my time, my mansion, I didn’t know how still I’d be transient. CIRROUSSESTINA Dust is the forgotten heart of my cloud, a child of the earth orphaned in the sky, a whisper of thunder before it's loud, an ambition too humble to be proud, as innocent as fleece before the dye. Soot is the forgotten heart of my cloud. No such elevation should be allowed, (they say) and nothing so lowly should get so high, a whisper of thunder before it's loud. Cloud-me may be alone or in a crowd, my composition ordered or awry. Smoke is the forgotten heart of my cloud. This shriveled world is covered by a shroud that shifts and gathers like unanswered Why?, a whisper of thunder before it's loud. I wish you too to live your life unbowed from your time of youth to the time you die. Sand is the forgotten heart of a cloud, a whisper of thunder before it's loud. HIGHWAY 14 I never went to Luxor though we once drove to Rushmore We loved the minestrone we ate in Minnesota en route to South Dakota. The skies were paved with zircons that she said must be diamonds. And I thought of Ramesses when we found Orion’s Belt, though eager for Roosevelt and Washington and Lincoln, Crazy Horse and Jefferson in all their granite glory. Milky Way spilt through the night like a Nile through vacant blight. This Hathor cowboy obsessed over sphinx and obelisk, so we detoured off 14 for benben on Silent Guide. My oracle realized when we crossed the Bad River toward the Six Grandfathers Up South Down West, North, and East that our stars weren’t carats, they were our fatal scarabs.
Photography from Isabel Gomez de Diego
Poetry from Precious Moses
Echoes I dreamed a dream in my dead sleep, But I dreamt not of my weightless limping cry. I dreamed of hope, on their palms they balanced the scenery, scenery of a better tomorrow. I hear many voices, Like its said a madman hears. I hear trees talking, Like its said a medicine man hears. Maybe am a medicine man, hearing, taking saps. For the voices are luring me to walk where springs and fountain unite in solitude. In the damp half light, dream wakes and the voices fade, now they become shadows that cling unto each other, but kiss the air only, only beneath the moonlight, where the waters tide blows them under. Fear squats at the feets of the faithful , And the sharp cries cut keen as knives. The souls of men are stepped in stupor, And pain shudder shoulders, even to the bones. The drunkard drink of the spell of beguilness And tonight men eagerly drink from the bottle of greed. But turn now brothers, turn upon your side Where we will settle to the sleep of the innocent. ©®Precious Moses Country:Nigeria
Poetry from Bruce McRae
A Big Thank You
I would like to thank the bluebird
for introducing me to the concept of evil.
Also, a note of gratitude to that cat-thief
in Copenhagen for relieving me of my worldly bounty
(you know who you are).
Some of these pauses were first published
in the Giant Book of the Head.
Without the assistance of spectres
this line would never have seen the light of day.
And I want to take this opportunity
to mention the red-assed sprites
cavorting in my mind, and to also thank them
for their unquestioning support,
as well as the bent angels, their advice
being given freely, whether called upon or likewise.
Lastly, a big nod and wink to the blind horse,
for which none of this would have been,
or should have been, made possible.
Carrying On In The Same Manner
Nobody remembers how the universe ended.
Some aren’t even aware that it did.
“Imagine Creation’s Big Bang, but in reverse,”
suggested a prominent physicist,
time scattering like shattered molecules.
Time a monster with a lamb in its mouth.
Earth shaking like a ride at a fairground.
“Carry on as if nothing has happened,”
the constable talking in his sleep instructed.
“Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind,”
Emerson obliquely commented from the garde de robe,
unaware he’d been dead for many decades,
the cosmos reverting to its standard darkness.
Double Feature
An empty cinema, a few last shattered dreams going about
the business of expiring. You can practically hear the stars
in dialogue. You can sense the disbelief, suspended from
a spider’s web-strand ever since the advent of the talkies.
On the ‘silver screen’ is a fine powdering of laughter and
ashes. In the back row are two apparitions locked in a kiss,
quite oblivious to the Age of Reason.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been performed and broadcast globally.
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
After Reading a Play by Aeschylus Torn by the god between the rocks of the Aegean and the high wave of the Caucasus, she falls on the black glass of the stage – Io, beloved of Zeus, driven across the world, maddened by jealous Hera; turned, grotesquely, into a cow. Prophecy lies: there is no end to the voice of her suffering. The god’s love is the storm of the ten thousand eyes of Argus. He is blind as the sun in its munificence moving across the air exalted after pleasure. Humankind is a child of water made of stone. Their pain is darkness and silence. The mouth of a hero who knows everything and nothing buzzes with gadflies and ashes. Yet the woman’s cry is the daughter of generations. It reaches us, gnarled in a distant wind. It echoes long in the canyons of time. It does not allow forgetfulness or peace in suffering traced in a poet’s words wrought of gossamer and iron. _____ Christopher Bernard’s book 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. His two children’s books, the first stories in the Otherwise series – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . (serialized in Synchronized Chaos under the title “The Ghost Trolley”) and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published in November 2023.
Poetry from Michelle Adegboro
Atavistic memories I riffle underneath the image of a child counting 5 on her palms, I want to exhale the alternative of a dark desire. In the telescope- I see the stars in dark_black shades up-down. My desire is to clutch you in my arms and watch the white board with images of relics, Elicpse of reaching heaven. Am in the 5th & I still wander in the shadows of dark paintings, I see images of waking wounds with a girl standing on her feet. I was told in the 7th heaven, The eclipse-relics of every song that begins with letters"" Morphs into the image of a black girl surrounded by white skins with tattoos of heaven. Michelle Adegboro is 14yrs old, a poet, short story writer and essayist. She is a lover of art who believes she can make waves and an impact in the world through her voice, words and works. She is a member of hcaf Abuja.
Poetry from Edward Lee
THE ARTIST DESPAIRS IN HIS FAILINGS He attempts to paint a still-life, but finds life keeps moving, fruit rotting, flowers fading, limbs blurring. He discovers himself better able to stay still, imagining the paint on the canvas, the brush stroking the image into being, the finished picture better than anything he could have ever painted, and yet, false for all that, false. THESE FLOWERS OF STONE, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE A flower of stone grew from the seed I found in a dream of a land I didn't recognise and yet still somehow knew. It had no colour, this flower of stone, but grey, no green nor red, orange or white, simply grey, faded and dirty, like a cheaply designed and poorly realised building left to time and decay. It was still beautiful, though, in the way such seemingly abandoned things can be. It could still steal your attention for minutes as you studied it, tentatively touched its form to see if it was real and not some illusion carried over from a wish made but forgotten even as it was spoken. It lasted one winter, this flower of stone, before the cracks began to appear, tiny tears in its stem that passed up to its petals, then the summer wind came and blew it to dust, each particle scattered wide, growing into new stone flowers, until half the world was covered, the cycle continuing on, spreading them farther and farther, until, for a season or two, nowhere on this earth was without one. The evolution of survival strengthened them through each generation, these multiple flowers of stone, until they were able to last all seasons long, the sweeping eye unable to find a place where one did not grow. REAP/SOW Our world crumbles around us, or more to the point, reaches the end of the collapse, begun lifetimes ago, and when we are called to explain, we simply say we didn't know, we had our eyes closed this whole time, our fingers in our ears, like children refusing to see or be seen, refusing to hear, children suddenly made adults refusing to collect what we owe.
Edward Lee’s poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. His poetry collections are Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge, The Madness Of Qwerty, A Foetal Heart and Bones Speaking With Hard Tongues.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy.
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com