Middle-Age Superpowers

Can read difficult books even in dim light. Can overeat at lunch and then again at dinner even after having a big breakfast. Can correctly use affect and effect, accept and except, there, their, and they’re. Can get laundry clean without separating whites and colors. Can hold back intestinal gas during job interview, usually. Can win footrace against four-year-old niece if given proper training and warm-up time. Can return mangled paper clip to moderately usable shape with only his bare hands and pliers. Can pass badly dressed teenagers on the sidewalk and withhold comment. Can understand that superpowers are overrated.



Words to Warm a Teacher's Heart

Do we get extra credit for showing up to class? You weren’t kidding about that exam thing? Syllabus? What syllabus? There’s a textbook? My paper is only a month late. I missed class—did we do anything important? You gave me a B—why do you hate me? My paper is about the dangers of seatbelts. I saw it on the internet, so it must be true. I missed ten weeks of class. Is there any way I can still get an A? How much will I get when I sell the textbook back? Do you get paid for this?


Lies his Fifth-Grade Teacher Tried to Make him Believe

Every day, most people on earth pass within twenty feet of a murderer. Human bodies contain three cents worth of minerals. The average fast food hamburger contains 1.7 ounces of bovine hair. While sleeping, human beings swallow or inhale an average of eight spiders during the course of a lifetime. The average bottle of ketchup contains 1.3 worms per cubic inch. Turkeys are far more intelligent than chickens. The Russians established a colony on Mars in 1963, then abandoned it due to lack of funding in 1967. Too much television causes eyeballs to explode. He would never amount to anything.


Everyday Ironies #3

The Mercedes has a vanity plate: AVG JOE. The beer truck is badly parked. After the long skid on the icy road, he has a pretty good idea what his last words will be. Home sick from work, she notices that every clock in the house tells a different time. The snow-covered street is named for a tropical fruit. From the prison by the freeway, a lone inmate near the double-fences waves hello. There is nothing good on television, every channel, for about three hours now. The guy at the bus stop is arguing with the telephone poll and losing.


Everyday Ironies #4

In the bank vault corner, somehow, there’s a scattering of autumn leaves. Fluttering in the breeze, her butterfly earrings. On the lake, autumn leaves float through the reflection of autumn leaves. Just beyond the deer crossing sign, there’s a bear. The neighbors’ bad-tempered cat is dog-eared. The only quiet moment of the day, being third in line for the drive-thru cheeseburger. In the middle of the argument, even his stomach growls. The “back in five minutes” note has been on his office door for about three hours now. Stuck in the breakdown lane, she finally started to understand her life.

SCAR OF RAINBOWS

The moon as displayed
by night wears a ribbon
around its chest
The stars fits into bikinis
Each time I hid and watch the
Sky through my windowpanes,
They dance in barley
Each time harmattan knocks
At the door, there is always
A stretch scar on my face
That shows that I belong
To the sky
Mama's broken portrait
Is fading upon me
Father's beautiful stare from
The broken frame catches
My mood into tears of dawn
The rainbow in the sky
Was made a lollipop to the sun
Each day I see the rainbow,
It reminds me of grave
As it fades in all its colours,
So be me someday on my bed

It flings from mouths to mouths
And from ears to ears,
Through the narrows of generations.
It is mumbled into minds,
In the corners of their four-angled fences.
As they rave and rant it every day:
'The readers are the leaders of tomorrow!'


Let us, for a while
Stretch their throats to confession,
To tell us, in exact,
When will the readers become the leaders?

Is it when the dazzling dreams
And blooms of bright visions,
Are wickedly drenched off,
Under the weeping faces of wrecked roofs,
Inside our cages of learning,
Will the readers ever become the leaders?

Is it when, with scratched skins, the brainiest kids
Are worn with pieces of ragged wears.
Ragged wears still soaked, with tears.
Tears craving new books and pencils,
As their farming fathers, too peasant to provide.
But the dullest Senator's children,
Adorned in the fittings of the finest suits,
Will the reader ever become the leaders?

Is it when the best-built laboratories,
Are open to the ones bred,
With silver-spoon in their mouths only,
While those decked with destitution,
Are to carry out their scientific experiments,
Under the shivering shades of trees,
Will the readers ever become the leaders?

Is it when the most intelligent heads,
On the race to conquer unemployment,
Are made to turn around a million miles,
In the burning rage of the sun rays,
And the brutal beatings of the rain falls,
Still all efforts in vain,
Will the readers ever become the leaders?

Is it when the Executive of vampire,
Shielded inside the hollow of Aso Rock,
To butcher the fleshes of unfulfilled hearts,
In order to serve the beefs of their delicacies,
And gulp the springs of striving bloods,
To make the wines of their thirst,
Will the readers ever become the leaders?

Let us, once more, ask them,
Why they have made the ladder to leadership,
As tough as a tiger's tail.
Is it when brightening visions blurred,
And dazzling dreams drowned.
Is it when aspiring hearts shredded,
And all hopes turned grave -- death,
Will the readers ever become the leaders?

Bio- Shilpa Bharti, pen name- Rose is a published poet. She has served on the editorial panel(open leaf press review) of several literary journals. She has been on the judging panel of poetry contests including the poetry pea journal haiku contest. She had her work published in failed haiku journal; poetry pea journal of haiku and senryu; creatrix haiku journal; neo literary journal; narrow road literary journal (young voices slot); an ode to the queer journal; howling press; throat to sky magazine,origimi review journal and ressurection press. Her forthcoming work includes poems in the SAHITYA AKADEMI and Her Artwork has managed to appear in several other art journals.

1.


hot pavement—

summer plays hopscotch

barefoot


2.


antipode—

the widening pupil

of a ghost eye


3.


white rainbow—

the sunstruck film

from last summer 


4.



divining tomorrow

from a feather—

 

a dove

turns blue

to match the sky


5.


darkening rain—

the legibility

of dream words 

Everything is lost

Love is dead

Death hides in life

Life is dead

Even death is dead

It is a dead land in the dead world

Only time is alive

Time is the chief guest of the funeral of love

 Memories make fire

Love is burnt and so on

Time is burning everything

Dead souls are lamenting for the past

The sun stands behind the ceremony with pain

Tears of air blow over desert in vain

Procession of absence is an  imagination

Death bends all and each

Only death is true, nothing else

There is none to love.

Fenny


      hat in hand 
but it’s mortal soul in other 
      that’ll fetch a few farthings  


      Ron the Sewer Rat! 
snakes the toilets 
      unstops disposals 


      Renfield fashions himself Vlad
grotesquely pantomimes
      fear factor 


      the postmodern struggle:
man versus himself
      …try harder 


      headline surly fest 
then take singing lessons —
      hold steady route 
 
                                
  
               Garter


      no kill shelter in boonies
only responsible option 
      for a mad dog 


      character or actor drunk?  
Stanislavsky school 
      makes no difference 


      sooner get to sleep 
sooner can be back at work
      rinse and repeat 


      telltale recycling: 
eco-conscious tip their hands 
      to busy-bodies 


      The tomb… is empty!!
      First closed room mystery

                                
  
               Great Horned


     only when hands are full
do pants start to slip – 
     Murphy’s the kigo 


     flashes money  
‘round wrong dive… as he stumbles out
     several rise, pursue 


                      the danger for pranksters :: wolf appears


      crimson bedbugs marks – 
at last
      something common with Issa 


      bus pulls over, 
but haven’t the fare or expertise
      should by now 

Jerome Berglund, recently nominated for the 2022 Touchstone awards, graduated from the University of Southern California’s Cinema-Television and spent a picaresque decade in the entertainment industry before returning to the midwest where he was born and raised. Since then he has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Jerome has exhibited many haiku, senryu and haiga online, including through Synchronized Chaos in early April.  He has also shared micropoems in the Asahi Shimbun, Bear Creek Haiku, Bamboo Hut, Cold Moon Journal, Daily Haiga, Failed Haiku, Haiku Dialogue, Scarlet Dragonfly, Under the Basho, and the Zen Space.