small flame

atop a sturdy wick

yellow crocus

# # # 

stuck at the top

of the seesaw

fledgling

# # #

Corey D. Cook’s sixth chapbook, Junk Drawer,was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. His poems have recently appeared in *82 Review, Akitsu Quarterly, Black Poppy Review, Duck Head Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Nixes Mate Review, South Florida Poetry Review, and Spare Change News. New work is forthcoming in Freshwater Literary Review. Corey lives in East Thetford, Vermont.

No Loving Conversion Likely


the stuttered transaction

buff grows bright to give



                   more islet heating



a saturation foundation

          matriarch occlusion

below



          that loud enchilada

          snoring earless to soot



     vary a metier 

     surround the disease 



                      classification trampling





                                  (  )



		

leotard peninsulas

warmly recumbent

honed caliper men



              a monogram portent

              their hierarchical tipster measured



                        loose bits dark



  left to suffer a confused nodal portent



            quaking derision



                                       discharging the swipe





                                  (  )





then saturation thanks

before its brewers fin a winger                 

     of cultural radish



                  bent appointment ventures

                  aching the succulent droop



          perplexity encouraged grated theocracy



                                  to

                                  a reclusive vertigo 



                      its intended folly

                      watching for histories deferred






Hard Water



intimidating laundry

the inimical peasants cast

of thousands pored



            per square inch



raging 

           the shallow intimate

           through 

                        forced declamation



               rum vagaries inept

               at transfer flagons



           no lantern 

                            comes

                                         too soon





                     *



  for                     comfort



           wonder



               or

     

            winter



           allowed 

  

     a sneaky pastime

     remembered cleanser scent

     last, the shaded

                      

          horde of hinting

               elation

                          eking

fast line gorges

along the marrow plane



                     *



the lines converge

it surges its bone-sucking orgy



on wandering

crescents wet yet divergent





           as

               any

                     angle



           strike



bragging 

empty pleasantries



     soft

     as the sand 

     in the river 



                        wash



cackled 



              inimical tidings 



                                        to the current





Dropping the Ball


      1.



a pelota 

simulacrum for raffle 

            or rescue



included venom throttles



     toned scraping 

     exploded uses



              sycophantic

              as the empty grip



baring shaken 

before their metaphor blazer



     a retrofit lunatic 

     steaming a fetal caddy rim

     forking tunnels



             alongside usage latrines 



where distention refusals 

prolonged postponing belligerents



     dispose 

                   thermal cacophony 

     educate 

                   natal gaffe dragons



           to their vocation



                 2.



before encrypted withdrawals 

ferment the dubious underlings

their ballad affiliates will breed 



              forever 



                           express bristles

                           barter the groping circuit



              grimly

    

                           dissimilar to a wilding rant

                           the expectorant a missing 



                                       deuce voice 

                                       borne recumbent 



                             to a confrontation statesman      



                 3.



the nautical scaffold

turns finished landscape

     firing

   

             generation textile crises 

             before experienced play   



                  pelota comes                

                  horned in caramel



umber broaches

a scripted eventuality



     puddle hippies 

     cow the slipping pineal

                           at will



weakened entity feels the hollow



         tinted around

         its invective mirage



            missing suffer throttles 

                 in the simulacrum cushion loop

                 no raffle no rescue



face 



        the collective punctuality

                         

                                                of tomorrow





Snake Oil Enforcers


legacy doctors 

interrogate every mamba wrapper

labor no return 



buttress knots missing gluten



wrapper heading

crosses murals at the pablum bar

no fortitude express 



hooting a salami fortress



better left

for saying rather than

turn right



under the riot of interrogation 





Railing Toward Shore



bugbear vignette

slowed the scoreboard snatching

corpulent railways



spine borders

a garbled eyelash plunging to color

dangle hazing



the bartenders

waged paramour encroachments

pillowcase doubling



vigor fountains

trip a yawning mound prosaic

the nitwits climb



defeatist vigor

strata antler whereabouts

gleam the past



no serpentine

linguist scratches effervescent

on moonlight



tattle regimen 

near the summation unveiled

a feldspar lecture



essay finalist

a bicoastal maniac rose

flatly baffled



before waterline

plunges breed the convectional


foreground rise







BIO

Vernon Frazer’s most recent publications are Avenue Noir, a C22 Open Edition, and Gulf of the Purple Enigma, an Alien Buddha paperback.

Mystery of Love
Mesfakus Salahin

#####
The day is long
The night is endless
The dream is a mirror
A frame is imitated where
I hear a sound whispering
Mystery of love
That comes from the lap of Nature.

The fragrance  of roses
Smiles with the shining morn
About an angel
Who walks in the stair of breath
Plays in the garden of heart
Sleeps in the field of silence.
      I see and see 
      She lives in me
      Is this love?
...............then
     I am in love.

The fountains walk
In the heart of sea
Spreading a message supernaturally
Through waves
Love is strange to a stranger
           I feel  it
I sacrifice myself to love
And request to you.

when all is said and done 

when all is said and done
and our stories have been told
fade with me 
into the ground  
once we were 
life and flourished
flowers in spring

a dance upon the 
checkered floor
laughter in corridors 
of museums and gardens

yes once we were

once we acted upon
this stage 
once intertwined within
this ballet 
this grand facade of life
turn pages once white and crisp
now yellowed and stained
with time
dance with me in quiet dreams 
and in photos
dance with me 
in stark contrast to realities
of the dangerous world

we once did dwell
and while we rest
while angels swirl
and mortals may cry
they hold us dear
and candles flicker
our memories live on

our spirits sour forever




Seasonal Song


Season of rebirth,
shadows in the trees,
leaf's in hibernation
Spring hovering in 
dagger breeze.

Pessimist Winter,
that old frozen fool,
sliding away, clinging;
losing his grip slowly,
but soon
the inevitable will 

happen. 

Everything turns, even 
seasons, old man
Winter must
relinquish
and disperse 
giving dominion to
life again.  


Mystery veil lifts, reveal
intricate truth of mortal
waves crashing.

Compassion intermingling
with muddy river, burst at
the seams; flowers and dreams,
transcend and fusing. 

Life and death,
emotionless hand
of Winter,
and pollen-infused innocence
of Spring.


Show Me Mercy (forever a victim of the undertow)

Death picks us, off one by one,

like soldiers into the firing line,

like another sunrise; or cloudy

day.

A loveless night, passed out on

the beaches of Florida, a Niche

book laying limp by my side.

Karaoke and beer made me feel

like feeling again, helped me climb

back into the intellectual realms

again, here we go again, college

round 3.

Just wanting to live life and yet so

addicted to that psychological mumbo

jumbo.

Oh Jung! Oh Freud! Oh Janov!

You always speak to me!

You speak to me in riddles and rhymes,

intermingling with interludes of

Hesses' Glass Bead Game, and that

Siddhartha; electronic music swirling

always in my skull; ear candy from the

early 80's; I am forever the New Romantic.

I am forever a victim of the undertow.

L. Wayne Russell is or has been many things during his lifetime, he has been a creative writer, world traveler, graphic designer, former soldier, former sailor, amateur photographer, aspiring guitarist, singer, and creative writer. Wayne has been widely published in both online and hard-copy creative writing magazines. From 2016-17 he founded and edited the now-defunct online creative writing magazine, Degenerate Literature.

In late 2018, Wayne was nominated for his first Pushcart Prize, in addition, in 2019, he was nominated for Best of the Net. In 2020, Wayne had his debut paperback book of poetry published by Guerrilla Genesis Press; Where Angels Fear is currently still available for purchase on Amazon.

Poem



my word

              your word

my word

              your word



the same       different





the cat’s got our:your tongue





Poem



teat

teat



              rush hour



TOOT



              romance between 3:30 & 5:30 pm



Poem





?



for all/no



occasions 




Poem



It hurt my mother

It made me laugh



Make the bed



Father broke wind



Poem



A horse a horse

my …….



Is that porridge i see before me  




After about 5/6 years absence I have returned to writing. Before the five years I had many poems and short stories published online and as hard copy. I have had four books published: On The Bright Side Of Down (a collection of stories, prose poems and poems, Bus Stop Bus Stop (a collection of stories based on my experience of transcontinental bus travel), Blues For A Mustang (A collection of poems) and The Life And Lies Of Calamity Jane (a novella).



The poems submitted here do not reflect the previous work. The poems here a very reductive. They reflect more of the short (very) minimal theatre pieces I began during the time of COVID.You can view them on my Facebook page. In those works the object or the gesture was the event.  In these poems the words are the event. Each word and/or line can be connected as pieces of shards by the reader or each line and/or word can be seen and interpreted as is.



Recently had 5 poems accepted for a Spring issue of a poetry journal. The editor wrote I had a unique perspective. I do not know about that. Recently I dicovered Vsevolod Nekrasov has a similar perspective. But the poems are the current me.

PANTS ON FIRE

I'm not really this upset 
but despair reads better on the page.
And no one dips into poetry 
so they'll know how good I have it.

They're searching
for the anguished cry of someone
worse off than them.

So lying on a beach,
I give them dark and dismal.
High up on a mountain, 
I spread the verse with depths.

In love and loved becomes, 
with a click or two of the keyboard, 
unwanted and alone.

Poetry is the great lie. 
There, you heard it from me. 
So it must be untrue.



ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS

Now I prize 
the reformed alcoholics-
	all throats are dry,
	all keep this to themselves.

Instead 
of ripping at their own skin,
they sit in chairs
too tight for trembling
	and let the process work.

A month, says one.
Almost a year, says another.
Over two years, says a third.

Together in one room,
	they are a calendar
	of willpower and abstinence.

I drink to them
by crushing the glass.
in my hand.




HE PART ONE

He drinks.
He embraces me like an old friend. 
He finds his life works best
when people have  never seen the like before.
He has developed a number
outside the realm of 0 through 9.
He has the inside track
He hasn’t seen his ex in years.
He can make things out of stone and wood.
He leaves it to others to light his cigarettes.
He nibbles on whatever’s within reach.
He tosses trash at the feet 
of the guy sweeping the sidewalk.
He returns nothing he borrows..
He says he wants her exclusively for himself
He survives off a settlement for a car accident.
He transmits pleas skyward.




CARL SMOKES

Ten chimneys worth of vapor 
had climbed his nose, his cheeks,
drawn by the amber of his eyes.
His is the satisfaction of expression.
And the relief that it works so well.
For he is an illustration  
from out of poetry’s flaming words of poetry
Though just the scaffolding 
for he has yet to write anything down.
He’s staving off the pressure with a cigarette,
while he craves the presence of a sperm whale
that writes, with its fluke dipped in ink,
in some elemental alphabet with giant letters.
Yet he’s really clipped wings on a bird.
The Ring Cycle minus the ring.
A dropout from modesty and self-advisement.
A prisoner behind a tall wire fence.
The last breath of a trout in a net.
No one is hypnotized by the yellow of his sun.
No one reads anything into an empty page.



RUSSET CONES

I ask morning, as someone who is never really here,
just how secure is this room, these floorboards,
the walls, my body…and my life.
The light says something like,
“That’s my little secret.
In the meantime, why don’t I just shine in your face.”

I wonder in whose novel I have awoken.
And why the fierce dog below is staring up at me.
His concentration and my lack of gusto are appalling me.
But I agree with the beast that maybe we could rassle later.

I spend twenty minutes talking to the mirror
with my diffident face on.
But glass doesn’t recognize humility.
It only speaks in emojis anyhow.
My downward mouth cannot be held back.

The woman at the kitchen table looks up at me 
from her incorrigible remoteness.
How many years has it been since we first thought
we could anchor each other.
Now, she takes me for the back cover of a book –
one that she puts back down,
says, no I won’t be reading you today.
She could, at least, skim through the damn thing!

I try to not to say things that are merely anger.
That’s what pen and paper are for.
The lady of my life has perfected the silence, the obdurance, of the hill.
I look out the window.
Day is out there having followed me from upstairs.
It’s quite colorful, to be honest.
And not so distant that I can’t step out into it.
“Good question,” it says, when I haven’t even asked it anything.
“If you’re looking for the russet cones of red spruce,
focus on the top of the tree.”
I had not intended to. And yet, maybe I just will.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Jalapeno Quietly Gazed At

Plump jalapeno
intones shapely strawberry rumpus
green today but one day blush
percolating solar swelling
shock for the curious ovivorous
	dangles on aortic question hook
	stemmed at a bifolial end (between bilabial leaves)
		punctuational singleton frog-plop pepper slung over
		Basho’s garden as bosom equation derived into one dimension
									concentrated

Author bio (proving I am not a bot or AI plagiarist)

Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, The Academy of Heart and Mind, Canadian Woman Studies, The MathematicalIntelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of HumanisticMathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, StudiesinSocialJustice, Rampike, and The/t3mz/Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.