1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by David L O'Nan 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. David L O'Nan is a poet/writer/editor living in Western Kentucky, He is the editor along with his wife Hillesha for the Poetry & Art Anthologies "Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest" and has also edited & curated "the Avalanches in Poetry: Writings & Art Inspired by Leonard Cohen". He has self-published works under the Fevers of the Mind Press "The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers"(soon to be revised) "The Cartoon Diaries"(2019) & "New Disease Streets" (2020). He is a Best of the Net Nominee for his poem "I honored You in Pennyrile Forest" in Icefloe Press. David has had work published in Icefloe Press, Rhythm N Bones Press off-shoot Dark Marrow, Truly U, 3 Moon Magazine, Elephants Never, Royal Rose Magazine, Spillwords & more. His website can be found at www.feversofthemind.wordpress.com. His Twitter is @davidLONan1 and @feversof for Fevers of the Mind. Facebook Author Page: DavidLONan1
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1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Austin Davis 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. Austin Davis is a poet and student currently studying creative writing at ASU and leading Arizona Jews For Justice's unsheltered outreach program. Austin is the author of "The World Isn’t the Size of Our Neighborhood Anymore" (Weasel Press, 2020) and "Celestial Night Light" (Ghost City Press, 2020). You can find Austin on Twitter @Austin_Davis17 and on Instagram @austinwdavis1. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Beth Copeland 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. Beth Copeland is the author of three full-length poetry books: Blue Honey, recipient of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize; Transcendental Telemarketer; and Traveling through Glass, recipient of the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. She owns and operates Tiny Cabin, Big Ideas™, a residency for writers. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Shira Dentz 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 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Charlie Brice 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. 1/31/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Brian Rihlmann 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. 1/31/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Roderick Bates 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. Roderick Bates is the editor of Rat's Ass Review. He has published poems in The Dark Horse, Stillwater Review, Naugatuck River Review, Cultural Weekly, Hobo Camp Review, Three Line Poetry, Red Eft Review, and Ekphrastic Review. He also writes prose, and won an award from the International Regional Magazines Association for an essay published in Vermont Life. He is a Dartmouth graduate with a degree in Religion. Mr. Bates lives and writes in southern Vermont. 1/31/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Jason Kerzinski 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 1/31/2021 3 Comments Poetry by Marc Olmsted 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 Marc Olmsted has appeared in City Lights Journal, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and a variety of small presses. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including What Use Am I a Hungry Ghost?, which has an introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Olmsted's 25 year relationship with Ginsberg is chronicled in his Beatdom Books memoir Don't Hesitate: Knowing Allen Ginsberg 1972-1997 - Letters and Recollections, available on Amazon. For more of his work, http://www.marcolmsted.com 1/31/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Adam Shechter 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. Adam Shechter is a poet and psychotherapist in private practice. His poetry explores the psychotherapeutic intersection of theoretical and emotional experience. Mr. Shechter’s writing has been published in numerous print and online journals. He is also the book review editor of the psychoanalytic journal Vestigia. |
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