it would be late for you to come to my bed wake me brush my forehead and say belatedly "I'm proud of you." Maybe that's why we die. When it's too late. ******** Shadows are elongated today. I am slouching the other way toward an art supply store to pick up some canvases, tubs of paint, pig bristle brushes and charcoal. It's cold. The earth won't yield to my weight. A stray dog and I look at each other. Neither of us can decide whether we're right for one another. Then we separate. A woman hides behind her window curtain. She's beguiled by me, my smile. I agree with David Hume. What I see are the ideas I work with. The row houses to my left are appealing. As are the pinnate leaves in the gardens. As are the people. ************* You have to have a barn. The warped red wood the sunlight through its slats the straw that's left on the ground. It's required if you want to write a poem to a country meant to last. You just say what you see. You are a cirrus cloud. You are a witness. Like the scarecrow there in the dry brown field wearing the farmer's hat who has left to work in Long John Silver's restaurant in town. The supervisor is strapped to his back. He plows the people. He fetches bags of fried fish and hamburgers. His mule is now a tube of glue for children's projects. He makes about 20K a year. Enough to make repairs to the home he built to last for all his years.
Poetry from Ian C. Smith
Foreknowledge
My mind drifts to arcane words, then I read,
turn pages, find them waiting for me there.
Are these eerie messages I should heed?
Chance? A higher power, malignant, fair?
Loose thoughts alight on out of contact friends,
presaging their emails in my Inbox
banjaxing me, more disturbing godsends
nearing my final act, hands circling clocks.
In these times of surveillance, a feeling
of being monitored persists, a weight,
also, mumbo-jumbo’s cant, this reeling
from sense for one dubious about fate,
yet I like the image of shadows cast
by guardian angels’ wings. Safe at last?
**************
Their Names Daydreaming of youthful trove’s cloth of gold, I can’t recall the name of an old flame, names’ past mode gentle, today’s, blazoned, bold. I see her, hear her voice, this long-gone dame. Stab in the dark searching keeps us apart. Stymied, my tired brain reaches impasses. I tick off the alphabet, letter smart, cease rummaging, revisit schools, classes. Alma, Beatrice, Cassandra, Diane, Elvie, Florence, Gwenda, from days sublime, Helen, Irene, Judith, her golden tan. Katie, Lorraine, Meredith, down through time, names’ threnody, faded array of choice. I think that haunting flashback dame was Joyce.
Biog: Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
Poetry from John Thomas Allen
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.
Poetry from Andrew MacDonald
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.
Poetry from J.P. Lowe
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.
Poetry from Joshua Martin
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
Poetry from Howard Richard Debs
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.