Fred Postles CC



Frothy Landscapes

There is a mystery behind these frothy landscapes
With millions of milked wintery gusts
Left battling the leaves in the wisps of ghosts in the Autumnal atmosphere.

Years repressed in the straitjacket
I’ve been waiting for your resurrection
I’ve been waiting to pick the cherries
After your nursing home crucifixions.

The loner from the wrong land
Can’t find his shadow anymore
The loner is on the tracks
Invisible to the trains
With hemorrhages to the sound.

You’ve been many strangers
You’ll always have your lasso
To pop the bubbles in the cowboy’s dirt
They’ll always scatter your puzzle 
Where your broken heart will swarm your disappearing mind.

And when you finally breathe
As your last stranger
Your best strength was your secret
That nobody even tried to decipher in the blizzards.

​

          Fred Postles CC



Water Lily 


Our relationship was like 
two kids climbing 
to the top of a tree 

who had no idea the branches
would become thinner 
the closer they got to the clouds.

In the same way
the neighbors would 
call the cops 
if they saw me 

sitting in their yard
talking to my imaginary friends
and drawing faces in the mud,

if I pulled up to your apartment
tonight and pretended like 
nothing has changed,

you’d probably think 
I’d came from the parallel universe
where our story ended with
forever and always. 

Okay, I doubt you’d think that.
You’d probably just think
I forgot to take my medicine again, 

but it would be pretty kickass
if some version of ourselves 
found a way to make it work, right? 

If I called you Water Lily 
and told you that the smile on your face 
when your hands are lost in my hair 
is as awe-inspiring

as seeing a UFO 
pass through the desert sky 
from a tent at 3 AM,

you’d look at me as if I were a frog 
you caught in the woods,

cupped in your hands
and tried to run home with,
but accidentally squeezed to death.

Now, whenever I think 
of sneaking into the jr high pool
and skipping stones in the deep end, 

the smell of coconut soap 
still faint on your skin 
the morning after love, 

all I can hear 
is the crack of that branch 
beneath my shoes 

and the head rush 
of falling backwards 
with the leaves. 

           ​Fred Postles CC



​I Dream I Have a Hole in My Hand


Not an exit wound or stigmata but a porthole. 
Holding my hand over my eye, I see the mountain 
framed in a rose window of vanished bone. 

The opening is both telescope and microscope.  
I see stars up close and magnified cells of blood 
floating like lifesavers down a river of light. 

The hole is a halo around each broken stone, 
each wing feathered with ice, each holy leaf limned 
with gold in God’s infinite eye.

​

           Fred Postles CC




​Indoors, we watch the wind press
against things

My hearty cabbage flower is rotting. The
basin where I took it was marred from
overuse. I watered & peeled it apart, looking
for a husk not yet unresponsive. You are a
tweed scurvy pretending to play with plaids.
My fork is at rest from digging. Eyes burn in
the distance like an outline of gray hills on
gray sky: all is a hue of light.




An early sandwich

Bitter herb, take it or leave it,
no stands taken
on this night, coarse & reticulate
as a cantaloupe skin,
mercurial dark
gushes in from our cosmos
where we're gravityless
& yet, & yet, we're a form of light
                                                                  seeding




​
Shira Dentz is the author of five books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK, 2020), and two chapbooks. Her writing appears widely in venues such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, New American Writing, Love’s Executive Order, Lana Turner, Apartment, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series (Poets.org), and NPR. She’s a recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award, and Poetry Society of America's Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. Shira is currently Special Features Editor at Tarpaulin Sky and lives in New York. More about her writing can be found at www.shiradentz.com

​

           Tom Bennett CC



The Realism of Magic

Years ago, when I was one of Freud’s finest, 
my friend Stan, a psychiatrist, asked what I 
wanted to accomplish with my patients.
I thought of D. W. Winnicott’s answer: 
the goal, he said, was for the analyst to survive 

and get paid, which outraged my theory-
challenged psychoanalytic colleagues who
couldn’t grasp that an analyst surviving
the patient’s unconscious hatred permitted
them to experience the messy multiplex

of all their feelings, while paying the analyst
established the analyst as an Other with whom 
the patient had to deal regardless of his or her 
desires or fantasies. Think of that! Patients could 
hate without destroying love and cross

the desolate desert of narcissism to discover
that other people are separate with their own 
desires and destinies. But what about my answer 
to Stan’s question? I said I wanted patients to 
confront who and what they are and see that 

there is no magic in the world. Stan was appalled: 
magic, he said, makes living in the world worth it. 
I pushed back: once patients recognize who and what 
they are, belief in magic enables them to never alter 
anything but insist that mere understanding will

make their failing marriages succeed, or take off
the pounds, or get them that promotion without 
ever having to work harder. I knew analysts 
who kept patients in analysis for years, never urged 
them to actually do something to change themselves.
 
Stan was unconvinced: he wanted magic in his life
and the lives of his patients. If you’re a good person,
somehow life works out. If your love is pure, your
love life will be fine. Sit back, let life take you where 
it will. Years later Stan suffered a massive heart attack. 

It came out that he had no savings, no retirement plan. 
He survived, but had to immediately return to his practice 
in order to pay the mortgage, grocery bills, car payments. 
That’s where he is today: working a forty to sixty-hour week, 
riding the comet-tail of magic into his eightieth year.
​

​

Charlie Brice is the winner of the 2020 Field Guide Magazine Poetry Contest and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), An Accident of Blood (2019), and The Broad Grin of Eternity (forthcoming), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, I-70 Review, The Sunlight Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere.

            Tom Bennett CC



​
​How Few There Are 
 
if you can find beauty 
in the way the sun kisses
broken Skid Row glass
and 
a three carat diamond
on Rodeo Drive
 
if you can find it
roaming downtown streets unwashed
among the tents and tarps
and
cruising the curves of Mulholland
chrome wheels flashing
 
if you can find it
in oil-sheen rainbows
on dirty puddles
and 
in the sea's blue miracle
Malibu at midday
 
if you can find it
in jaded eyes that glare 
until time itself stares at its feet
and
in the shy glance of a child
hidden in his mother's skirt
 
and if you can find it
in fallen and rotting fruit
as much as spring blossoms
and in the thorn and the blood
as much as the rose
 
then no matter who you are
or where you stand
there is already a beauty in you
and you need no nod 
from friends or family
from the mindless crowd
from god
or even 
from yourself



​
Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada. He writes free verse poetry, and has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag and others. His latest poetry collection, “Night At My Throat” (2020) was published by Pony One Dog Press.
​

            Tom Bennett CC

​

Spare Parts

Mid-January Sunday afternoon in Vermont, 
shovel in one hand, tool box in the other, 
wife and newborn waiting in a borrowed car,
I trudged the junkyard, looking for AMC 
products of a certain vintage. When I dug,
the snow came up in thick chunks,
the kind that make igloo bricks.   
Good luck— the tire and rim are gone,
leaving only a brake drum between me 
and a rear axle shaft that will save my ass,
for which I gladly pay ten dollars.
Another two hours work in my dooryard
put me back on the road.

Years later the old man up north
who had an orchard full of Volvos:
I tell you what, Mister, 
the way my arthritis is today,
you pull that caliper yourself, 
I'll pretty much give it to you.
The Winooski River flowed by
and I worked slowly in the warmth
of early August, gave praise
that so far, my own joints
had not betrayed me; 
that the only pain
is the skinned knuckle 
I got when a grudging bolt
finally yielded.  

I have always seen beauty
in the stained-glass red of blood
pooling on a grease-black finger, 
have heard my father's voice
It's not worth calling it a job 
if it doesn't draw blood at least once.

Older now, more likely to pay
and let someone else do the work,
my driver's license has a motorcycle
endorsement and a notice that I am
an organ donor — 
the two have always seemed a fitting pair.

And when I think of myself lying in the dirt
under winter's snow or summer's weeds,
it seems altogether proper 
that I might be shy a kidney or lung --
still useful in death,
like that Matador, the old 240 DL, 
the blur of VW bugs and JEEPs
whose lives I jumpstarted 
in new bodies so long ago.
​



Arnie

His mother ran the cash register 
at the grocery by the train station.  
From there she spoke to everyone 
at least once or twice a week,  
and she traded in gossip 
as much as she did in S&H Green Stamps.  

From her Arnie learned to listen 
to everyone, to put the pieces together.

Three high school boys stand behind the store,
peer around the corner every minute or two;
The town drunk clutches a ten dollar bill, 
heads down the aisle to the beer cooler. 

Sadie, always a full bodied woman, 
is putting on weight around the middle
though her husband is overseas in Korea; 
The choir director at her church is distracted,
and his scrawny wife is in a silent, dark fury.  

In time, Arnie will go off to join the Navy, 
come back and get work as a part-time cop, 
eventually move to full time. He will ticket 
us when we speed, 

One day one of my kids complains 
Arnie was wicked abusive to him 
just because his VW wasn’t inspected
(or registered, for Christ sake, but
he let that slide). The next day 
Arnie grins, tells me he thinks it will 
be a while before the kid tries to drive 
an illegal car again. 

                                         My beef with Arnie
is my dog. Yes, there’s a leash law,
no, I don’t observe it (or more accurately 
Tasha, my big happy Golden Retriever doesn’t).
Once or twice a year he comes down my street, 
opens the back door of the cruiser, and Tasha 
hops in, glad for a ride to the Vet, who boards 
the strays and the scofflaws, and calls me 
to tell me it will be $35 to get her back, 
more if he keeps her overnight.  

In the Spring, law enforcement slows down,
because Arnie is running the sugar house, 
and that’s damn near a round the clock deal.
We all stop by, shoot the shit, fill the wheelbarrow
with pine slabs, throw them into the fire 
under the big stainless arch. Fifteen minutes of 
yakking, and the arch needs another load. 
Arnie tells us about the out-of-state jerk 
who was doing 90 on Elm Street — 
even those of us he has ticketed agree 
that guy had it coming. 90 in a 30 
will cost $500 or better, but our kids ride bikes there,
so fuck him.  

A few hours, and we are tired, and we say good-bye.  
If we worked long enough and the run is good,
he gives us a pint of syrup. If not, we buy it,
for a lot less than it would be anywhere else.  

Last year I built on some acreage outside of town;  
I haven’t been in the village much. The few times I went by 
in early March, I didn’t see smoke, and the road 
wasn’t plowed out. I don’t know if he retired, 
if he’s ill, or even if he died. I don’t keep track
of all this small-town stuff —  
now that his mother’s gone, that’s Arnie’s job. 
​

​

          Peter Organisciak CC





I fell in love with the silence


Tonight I wait

Under the eye

In a yellow silence

With streaks of purple

The eye wall the quiet I crave

A reincarnation of a world before

Before bird songs

Bill Evans on the keys

Birthing light

Light bright universe

Where the color of the sky

was never blue

First light pulses

A moment of understood

heartbeats circulating

Blossoms of love

calling out to the streets

My echo plus your echo

blossoming into

Musical arrangements of first light

The eye

Our calling

turning night to day

Beckoning us

To be 




Love Supreme  

Crows mingling with seagulls:
a riff on the space time continuum

Like the DeCarva photo of Coltrane

Hands and instrument

a blurry union

Eyes tightly shut

If you look closely the sheen on his forehead

A gateway to galaxies

Where there are no isms

Where all the old white guys never come to power

Where instruments are the key

Where everyone who picks up a trumpet trombone sousaphone saxophone

blurs out of focus

At warp speed

Traveling backwards and forwards

Communicating with all the world's creatures

Discussing and describing the beauty of a warp 10 sunset

Until the last note





Poetry reading in space

Synapses firing in my mainframe

Startek on the brain

I want to be in the world boldly

This poems debut has taken me to the beta quadrant

Where I recite words to

One dimensional future

humanoids who thought they knew New Orleans

CNN stories of devastation implanted

A 1000 years into the future

Where destruction still overshadows a people

These future beasts

Howling and growling like pundits 

Beam this so called poet back

He knows nothing about New Orleans

Beam it back 

Beam it to it's present

On my balcony smoking cigs and drinking coffee

Where galaxies fade behind my eyelids

Now open

I watch a moment

A woman in a hot pink dress

Bending down

Looking at her reflection in a car window

Oooooh I like my new wig

Her voice

Moving through me

Her smile

Her stride planetary

Her heartbeats the voyages

I've traveled light years

To understand her song




Super Powers 

I'm thinking of a word
On the tip of my tongue

Tastes, like my great grandmother's pierogies

Her underarms undulating like waves as she rolled the dough

Smells, like dandelions that I would rub on my palm as a child

Hoping a flower would sprout from my hands

Sounds, like the first time my father said I love you

His self no longer hidden by his idea of manhood

Sight, a friend's eyes while talking about making art 

our heartbeats intertwined like strands of DNA

Touch, my mothers hand as a child while we waited in line at Dairy Queen to order banana splits

Knowing she'd look over, smile, and pull me closer

I'm thinking of a word

I'm thinking of a word

On the tip of my tongue


​

Jason Kerzinski is a poet and photographer living in New Orleans

                katie chao and ben muessig CC




PROPHECIES OF NULL

Off his meds
Goes North won’t listen
Messages from Facebook asylum
‘What’s up?”
slept in his car
getting advice
from the falling leaves




SECOND REASON

My new driver’s license
Has old man’s eyes
The photo man at the DMV
Asked why I left California
“Too expensive.”
“Your second reason?”
“It’s on fire.”




Saw him dying in a North Beach bar
(For B. Kaufman)

Tombstone granite laughter
and dirt, dust in the sea from an urn
a mouth that announces fragments of teeth & bone
spelling poems among the plastic bottles
& emptied sewers of the deep




LIVE MASK

John with Parkinson’s
now gains weight
electricity in his head
a crescent scar
Shiva’s moon or Frankenstein’s
mark of Cain
during this virus world
we live masked
Halloween surgery
in the sickness age
​
​

            ​Peter Organisciak CC



​How Now to Read the Text

How does a Bukowski line 
go down without the warm burn of alcohol? 

Like a lump of warm tears in the heart
that burns brighter and brighter,
as it slowly makes it way to the laughing star, lost waaaaaaay deep inside.

Sitting in explosive yearning is in fact smarter
than studying the ecstasy of the same old numb experience. 
Hard to believe when exploding through the giddy wet lens of drunkenness
recalls as the luminescent interlocutor found behind the clank of a liquid jail. 

Can the good old tranquilized emotions of dreams
be de-neutered of their anesthetic origins,
like shaving off the pimply bumps of facial brail,
so that the heart only senses a baby’s smooooooth skin?

Though we cannot see the soft touch, we can ask,

Who are we poets who have survived the alcohol wars,
sustaining ourselves on the confetti of the Beatnik’s document,
crazy text bits of deep paper texture that rain down 
from the fountain of the inner sky.

This bliss of peacetime, so they say.