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2/17/2020 0 Comments

Poetry by Maeve McKenna

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                    ​  Richard P J Lambert CC



Cat Mirror

They clung to walls in places we called home, 
plotted revenge, like the claws of that feral
we tamed with scraps of food 
and a newspaper bed. The shards we could 
never piece back together, bodies unfolding
inside coats hanging in halls, the fickle latch
shadowed in fatherless homecomings 
as the evening sun settled over other houses.

The slap of morning water smeared itself 
across our attempted childhood 
and each sunrise her smile froze; 
compacted glass face glistening in a handbag,  
beside her lipstick, in the follicles of a hairbrush. 

Once, she invested in a life size one. 
We crawled about, contorted, watching our bodies
be other animals; all rickety bone, matted hair 
and little else, while she flounced under 
the reflective plume of a French cigarette, cradling 
the cat like a new fur coat, in the pose 
of a dinner-dance goddess.

​


Deleted

We better not talk of it anymore; this chalky blue tab gagging 
at the back of my throat.  Now I’m barely breathing. 
Your social vice-grip on my middleclass mediocrity 
is insidious pain and my heart has less than seconds to flat-line
into one of the withered, but lauded, apples 
from your orchard, photographs of which you flaunt 
beside anaemic diatribes on vaping and consumerist unbelievers.

Your callous blocking swipe I will bear, and worse, know 
how little you care, as if we might never meet, 
be just cartoon eyes, glancing past the narrow lanes 
we both travel, little room for both of us here, and in steering 
our guzzling machines (your spiel),wing mirrors touching, close 
as we’ll ever be, we must stop, have the grand day moment 
and I won’t have the second account to follow with so, how are you,

because you have silenced me. A farmer you wave to is cutting 
the hedgerows too early. A Yellowhammer, another cause 
for your perfect, protest life, is happily tweeting outside our
inch-open windows as you scurry by and home to post horrified 
one-click opinions on artistic bursaries and the catastrophic level of plastic 
in the Ganges River and my fingers are tapping the steering wheel,
urging the bone of my thumb into another deleted comment.

​


Bullet Proof

You strut about packing metal, 
lipstick smeared
across your collar, like the blood 
of that kitten you hunted

and double checked for a flat-line
 heart; eyes like marbles 
glistening in fluid, motionless
in disbelief at your fatal handy work.

Later, you can’t remember 
the reason you became it,
just that you had to be like them, loaded 
in all the right photographs, even 

as you slept at a certain angle 
so tears wouldn’t retreat 
back down your throat or congeal 
in your stubble. But they have proof; 

a square bullet, its trajectory your 
decimated heart and a thousand likes 
on your story as evidence 
you don’t give a fuck. 

​
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Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her poetry was shortlisted, highly commended and longlisted in 2018/19 in several international poetry competitions.  She has been published in The Cormorant and Sonder Magazine and widely online. Maeve is working towards her first collection of poetry.

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2/17/2020 0 Comments

Poetry by Jasmine Ledesma

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                ​Richard P J Lambert CC



Winter, 2009 

It’s really unbelievable. 
Ten years of working this shift and now 
I am an involuntary cheerleader. 
Stuck in a pleated skirt, the ripe fabric 
swiping at my legs. My hair foams at my shoulders. 
My mother and I are in the crook of Dallas. 
The air is salted with hauntings. We are
in a waiting room that smells of dust. 
A choked up water fountain and a 
Dr. Phil rerun make music nobody 
could even twitch to.  
A real doctor appears in the doorway 
with an emergency sporting a buzz cut. My sister.
We walk down a hallway filled with signs. 
Ward is a pretty word. We sit down on a plastic couch. 
My sister’s head looks like a peach I’d steal. 
There are fuzzy bandages around both of her wrists. 
She is twenty years old. 
You look so cute, she says and says. 
I never ask what hurts. 
It is enough to know that it does.

​

​
Ode To Vomit

My mother is afraid 
of fat and break-ins. 
She thinks they are 
the same thing. 
I am ten and scared
of fire and vampires
in that order. 
My reflection greases
along car windows like
smears of blood. 
I steal my brother’s mirror
and spend decades
looking at the girl in there. 
She looks like a cloud, 
moody and formed. 
The first time I make myself
throw up my room is grey
with afternoon. My head
full of unfinished dopamine, 
I chase my first impulse and
crawl into my throat. 
Everything comes up like surprise.

​
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Jasmine Ledesma can be found eating diamonds in New York. Her work has been published over twenty times in places such as Vagabond City and Gravitas.

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2/17/2020 1 Comment

Up Here by Bill Arnott

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Down Here

I’m just down here 
and he’s up here

my dad would say
placing his hand like so
and then again
just so

Convoluted 
pecking order
handed down 
and kept alive 
by those 
up here 

For years it didn’t 
quite seem right
but dad at times 
held on to things 
held on to 
by his mom 

I realize just why 
it never quite seemed right
I’m almost certain 
now that he’s 
up here 
the rest of us 
                              down here

​
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Vancouver author, poet, songwriter Bill Arnott is the author of Gone Viking: A Travel Saga, and Allan’s Wishes. His work is published in Canada, the US, UK, Europe and Asia with numerous features in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. Bill has a 2019 poetry prize and honorable mention from Pandora’s Collective and is a finalist for the Whistler Independent Book Awards with Gone Viking: A Travel Saga.

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2/17/2020 0 Comments

Poetry by Marc Harshman

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                 Richard P J Lambert CC



FURTHER AND FURTHER
 
 
Wearing his thrift shop cape,
                he stalks the alleys with his cane
                and the many fevers a man carries 
                who’s lived too long in his own company.
The single room above the convenient keeps shrinking,
                the acreages within his kingdom reduced 
                to the size of the single window.
A letter comes through the slot in his skull
                and he finds upon it his mother’s address
                and on the envelope a nickel stamp.
How old is he?
He could’ve ruled many kingdoms, made her proud.
Zeppelin had pointed him out of Mordor
                so he’d memorized 
                the roads through Middle Earth
                smoked a toke down in Mexico--no,
                it doesn’t go like that. Fuck.

He tries the mirror, but that’s no better.
He sees a pigeon perched on the bank steeple.
He concentrates until he knows for sure
                it falls into 
                flight and out of 
                sight because 
                he willed it to do so.
He could live by his special powers
               he tells the hash cook the next morning
               waiting in line for toast and eggs and coffee.
You just have to keep everything in focus. And try hard.
Try harder, his mother had told him.
He is, still is, trying, 
               harder and harder,
               and falling, 
               every day, 
               further and further
               out of sight.





ON THE WAY DOWN


I land in a small elevator with hundreds of people
              pressing against me, waving unanswered letters,
              unpaid bills, shouting complaints, pleading
              for answers to e-mails . . . 
Everyone knows my name.  
Worse, I know theirs.
They absorb all but the silence.
Someone gives it a swift quick out the door.
I see it glowing in the distance on a headland
               above a noisy sea.

At every stop more voices:
               speech bubbles boiling over with debts and trespasses.
A coffee can filled with stones is shaken relentlessly
                outside that moment childhood ended.

Mother is screaming about the toothpaste being left open,
Father is growling under the floor about the missing pliers.

Ghosts with black tears keep begging for forgiveness.
Babies tear words from the air and
                fling them against thin walls of skin
                under which my soul crawls
                toward the solace 
                of wall flowers, cruel friends, brave enemies.
Abased, and bruised, I scratch my nails
                into their faces as they shimmer
                inside the mirror’s still horizon.

I wait for the dumb waiter to call my name, 
                announce the last course.

​

Harshman’s WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, published by Lynx House Press. His fourteenth children’s book, FALLINGWATER [co-author Anna Smucker] was published by Roaring Brook/Macmillan in 2017. He is also the co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.  Poems have been anthologized by Kent State University, the University of Iowa, University of Georgia, and the University of Arizona.  Appointed in 2012, he is the seventh poet laureate of West Virginia 
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2/17/2020 0 Comments

Poetry by Charles Byrne

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               Richard P J Lambert CC



Free will

I was looking out and over
the long crowd on the High Street
thinking of the submerged grief
that river is carrying, and the hard
bone of the shoulders

of the woman in front of me
ebulliently swinging her child
from the line of her arm,
the shaking they must
be made to do at times

when she is alone,
the thought of lifting her arm
to another the feeling
of lifting all the arms
that have come before.

This is when trying to understand
the world only brings harm to oneself,
and more harm.

When trying to suss out the free will
is ungathering the haystack
in search of the straw,
and then, lain prone
in a golden field,

worn raw from crying,
seeing that one has
forgotten what she
was looking for.

This is why we must
choose to ride that river
at its mirrored surface.




Mine

Lying in the tunnel, black mountain wound
where I cannot stand, staring upward
to my sky of loam.  Thinking of how I
began at nine years old, when I could tuck
in every nook, the first time I saw
the mouth of the mine.  Since, the coal
has benighted my skin, settled the beds
of my fingernails with bitumen, filled
my mouth with its taste, and has never left me.
Starting out, I had dreams every night
of eternal incubation in the hole.
And my muscles – how they burned precipitately,
and, I feared, never-endingly.  At home,
mother would stupe my wounds, stroke my neck,

            straighten my back.  But since, it’s the slate
      of my mind when I’ve been down in the hole,
            blank, benumbed; and when I’ve come up,
                            stooped, the sun’s coalescent burn
                   on me, I am aware of nothing but days
                          having passed.  But all for the faith
                                      of a distant descendant, a son
                of a son of a son, unknown, nonentitous
                              boy, unseen, nonexistent progeny,
                                 who will extract the light of day,
                               transpose it, press pencil to page.
                It is he who will create, forge something
                         out of this dark hollow, his forever
                  unseen birthright, his unknown history. 

​
​


My mother’s purse                                                                                  

In the black sea
bottom an eddy

of crumbs, candies,
pens and needles,

and a pill or two.
Bright red and blue,

notched, the smooth
gelatin of horse’s hooves –

were they the pills
that should have killed

you in 1962?
Year upon year,

the cyanide to bite
should they capture you?

​




Having killed myself,                                                                         having lost myself,

drain cleaner                                                                                           I cannot tell which.
being my final choice,                                                                          
something has run                                                                                One time recently,
its course through                                                                                 before the acid cocktail,
my veins.                                                                                                    I meant to look for some
                                                                                                                       answer in nature --
In life, each suicide                                                                                to give it one last shot,
was a little death for me.                                                                     after all what’s to lose –

As when my son found me                                                                 but no answer
the time previous,                                                                                  presented itself.
the time I had trembled                                                       
downstairs to the basement                                                              Instead, I became lost
and set the buzzsaw                                                                              in our town’s preserve –
to screaming about my arms,                                                            not far from the Japanese
and quivered upstairs,                                                                          formal garden, yet far enough
blood running free and black                                                             to lose my orientation.
in the colorless crepuscule,
upstairs to the bathroom,                                                                    And that was it.
my crypt, the tub my casket,                                                               I couldn’t think
pulling the curtain shut after me.                                                      of a thing to do.

I say he found me. But                                                                            So I edged down
when I woke, thin-blooded,                                                                  to where the stream spoons.
his eyes had such gravity,                                                                      I held my hand in the cold water,
yet I was too fluid-empty                                                                       watched it ripple beneath
to make tears.                                                                                             the sunlight-inflected surface, 
                                                                                                                          and felt something
After that, his mother left me,                                                             drain out of me
and ipso facto he, and I am                                                                     as a spring
persona non grata —                                                                                  feeds a river
for either her having lost me, or I                                                      feeds an ocean.


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Charles Byrne is a teacher and poet in San Francisco, with publications in After Hours, Clarion, and Poetry Quarterly.

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2/17/2020 7 Comments

Poetry by Juan Pablo Mobili

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                    Richard P J Lambert CC



The Wish 

I dreamed my mother was alive and young again
 
Buenos Aires in the ’50s
sitting at the beauty parlor
getting her hair done
talking, of course
 
It’s Saturday
it’s early
she’s drying her nails
and she’s happy
 
I remember
nodding at her
and that she smiled
I remember I only wished the best for her




They Thought They Were Angels 

Those were the years when the Flying Panini Brothers
would soar onto the modest void of their small tent
holding a rose’s stem between their teeth like a bear carries her cubs
 
As imperfect as they were, they thought they were angels;
on the ground they were fallible creatures, but in mid-air
they felt holy, like hummingbirds God made with His own hands
 
Those were the years when young women came back from the prom
with their brand-new dresses ripped under their coats
after some holy boy dropped them off at their homes
 
You could see them driving away, drunk and laughing
down the street, and disappear into a darkness that would last
forever in the young girls’ hearts
 
Those were the years where all of God’s voices led us to silence
to admire men because they seemed to glide under the circus tent,
unimpeached by conscience or society under their tiny capes
 
and now they are beginning to fall one at a time
like the fruit of a misshapen tree that finally dies
like impostors with wings who thought they were angels.
​
​



Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is an adopted son of the City and State of New York. 

The son of a teacher and a poet, he came of age in his native country during a tragic period of its history, when many thousands of young men and women, who came to be known as the “disappeared,” were unconstitutionally detained, tortured, and murdered.

His poems bear the memory of those times but also embrace the cultural tradition and language of the United States, his home for over 40 years, although he still believes he writes “Spanish in English.”

Alongside with being a poet, Juan Pablo has been a music critic, a professional translator and interpreter in several languages, and, for a number of years, a Leadership Development consultant and coach to organizations around the world.

His writing has appeared, in English and Spanish, in Mutantia and Expreso Imaginario (Argentina); B2 (Germany); and River River Journal, The Poetry Distillery, and First Literary Review-East (United States). In addition to that, he released a chapbook of poems in collaboration with Madalasa Mobili, published by Seranam Press, called “Three Unknown Poets.”

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2/17/2020 0 Comments

queer me by Stephen House

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               Richard P J Lambert CC


​
queer me

angry man sits in car 
screaming into phone
i walk past
glance at him 
impinged upon by booming rage 

what the fuck are you looking at faggot he spits     
at me

i say nothing
make my strolling escape

he drives by fast and loud 
holds up menacing finger 
skids aggressive wheels

fucking faggot he spews     
at me

i don’t feel wrath 
just warning bells
chiming loud and strong 

i am me
queer
mostly happy  
sometimes fearful

i have been kicked down before

poor him
a product of his stuff
locked into whatever place it is

car roaring
face burning with hate 
eyes glaring         
at me

for being me
queer me

​
​
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Stephen House: has had many plays commissioned and produced. He has won two Awgie Awards (Australian Writer’s Guild), an Adelaide Fringe Award, First Prize Rhonda Jancovich Poetry Award for Social Justice, The 2018 Goolwa Poetry Cup, and First Prize 2018 SA Writers / Feast Short Story Prize. He has been shortlisted for: 2019 Lane Cove Literary Award, 2018 Overland’s Fair Australia Fiction Prize, Patrick White Playwright and Queensland Premier Drama Awards, the Tom Collins, Robyn Mathison, Eyre writers, Mindshare Poetry Prizes (and more), The Di Cranston Script Award, and a Greenroom best actor Award. He has received Australia Council Canada and Ireland literature residencies, and an Asia-link India literature residency. He has seen his work published, including by Currency Press, Australian Script Centre, Australian Poetry Journal, Third Street Writers USA, Page and Spine, The Blue Nib Ireland (and more), and many literary websites internationally.  His poetry collection “real and unreal” was published by ICOE Press Australia in 2018. He continues to perform his acclaimed monologues, “Appalling Behaviour” and “Almost Face To Face” widely.

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2/17/2020 0 Comments

Poetry by Joe Cottonwood

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                         Richard P J Lambert CC



Chachoo: Good Work is Good Work 

Scar on throat, no voice, 
croaks like a crow 
looking for work, for strictly cash.
Up north the season is short, labor is precious.
Already got Petey with PTSD, Iggy the Inuit warrior, 
not real names. I say we’ll try you out. 
Call him Chachoo.
He’ll move dirt, carry lumber 
and next thing he’s walking the top plate 
balanced like a bird setting trusses, no fear. 
Short, squat, strong as two men in one body. 

Every noon a skinny girl brings
a hot salmon sandwich
and they sit together, quiet.
In sunshine his body sweats
like a cold glass of Coca Cola.
Anybody tries to talk to the girl, eye contact,
Chachoo jumps in his face like a grizzly.

A dark cloud, cold wind 
as Chachoo is tossing scraps in the dumpster, 
final cleanup when the deputy’s car pulls up front. 
Warrant from Louisiana, name, photo. 
Never heard of him, we say
because good work is good work. 
A single leather glove, all they find.

A year later, warm city — hey — it’s
the daughter near the bus station,
give her some cash, tell her
it’s back pay which some of it is.
“I’ll see he gets it,” she says.
“Did he really kill a man?”
Her eyes, deep brown, so wet. 
“He was protecting me.”
I say, “All they found was his glove.”
“He don’t need it.”
Then like Chachoo, she’s gone.




Morning, Chancellor’s Handyman 

Two dogs promise 
with sincere snouts, soft whimpers: 
Set us free to run this fenced yard 
just a few minutes. We’ll be ever grateful. 

With human fingers I unlatch chains. 

Whoa! Like deer they leap the gate. 
Gone, the Dalmatian and the big goofy mutt 
through mud and wet weeds sticky with seeds. 
Call me sucker. Call me fool. 
I say to you, this world needs more softies.

Here comes Dr. Markoman tying a bathrobe shut 
asking why I let his dogs out in the early morning 
so I jog around the private school campus 
among beautiful young minds 
embedded in goofy (but graceful) young bodies 
not unlike the dogs that are waiting in the back yard 
when I return. Warm tongues, happy tails.
Now who’s the fool?

Monday’s first task is to stuff ten cubic yards 
of spread-out rained-on garbage into five cubic yards 
of dumpster. Shove. It squirts. Rinse, repeat. 
Call me dirty. Call me smelly.
I say to you, deal with your garbage. Or deal with me. 
Choose. 

Next, this old door is sticky, delaminating. 
Glue and clamps, grease the hinges, shave the edge
while in the next room for donors an elegant breakfast 
of croissant, crème fraîche. Give me crunchy bread 
with black coffee, then let me run with dogs. 
I fix things. You need me. What’s next?



​
Joe Cottonwood has worked as a carpenter, plumber, and electrician for most of his life. He lives in La Honda, California, where he built a house and raised a family under (and at the mercy of) giant redwood trees. His most recent book is 99 Jobs: Blood, Sweat, and Houses. More at: joecottonwood.com.
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2/17/2020 1 Comment

Did You See Him by Darcy Smith

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​Did You See Him

in every mirror          did you 
                   hear him          behind each door another coat
  your lips red orange          painted courage cracked
                when your son             left you 
didn’t dare ask or dig past            his veins collapsed 
                             
                     he moved on           clefting the web
           of skin between            his toes.

                          Your new slipcovers 
                            brightened the living room 
                               which was never truly warm.
 
                      He came back
                      woodstove            gone cold
          seizing not quite        convulsing
             spit gurgling            not throwing up not

that there’s ever                  any noise when 
winter nights turn black        his eyes
                                          rolling       past
                                      then back        to you  
                                               and Dad       then I got shooed
                                                        back        to bed 
                                                              shivering.



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Darcy Smith works as a sign language interpreter. Recent poems have appeared and are forthcoming in New Reader Magazine, Sequestrum, Coe Review, Two Thirds North, January Review and River Heron Review. A Buddhist and a kickboxer, her current obsession is executing a six punch three kick combination with perfect form. 


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2/17/2020 1 Comment

Poetry by John Tustin

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THE ANGELS BURST FROM MY CHEST

At some point
When I am drinking
At night
Sometimes
If I drink enough
In a short time
The angels burst from my chest
And a bright light
Steams from my torso
 
They shoot words from trumpets
Handed to them by God
 
I don’t remember the words I say
Or the poems that come
But the next morning
Is all about
 
Editing
And apologizing
 
For God’s angels
And the trumpets
He has bestowed
Them




THE FALLACY OF HUMANITY 
 
I was going to write
That there is no love
In the world
Anymore
 
But the fact is
There never was
 
We are just herd animals
Running in our packs
Dumb bumbling tribes
 
Huddling for warmth
Comfort
The pretense of sympathy
 
The fallacy of humanity
 
Always ready to murder
At the promise
Of the tiniest
Crumb
 
What does it matter
If the mode of seduction
Is a compliment
The promise of shelter
The allure of potential joy
The lies of love
 
Ever since we conquered fire
Harnessed it
 
We’ve spent our lives
Searching for light
Then dousing it
When we catch it
 
It’s you against me
It’s me against the world
It’s me against you
It’s you against the world
 
Our backs against the falling fence
 
The alliances shift
With the motion of the waves
The placement of the sun
The dearth
Or plenty of clouds
 
Nobody really loves me
Nobody really loves you
It was never us against the world
It was me
And it was you
 
No love
Never love
It will always be this way
 
I tell you this
Because I love you:
 
There is no love
 
Never forget that




THIS IS MY DEATH 

this is my death
stepping over toys in the living
room with scabby eczema-ravaged feet,
beer burps and flatulence and false crown
 
this is my death
greasy lips disconnected slightly Neil Young blasting
as I contemplate pornography and
impossible dreams
 
this is my death
of subservient immolation
and the fear of
forward movement
 
this is my death
of steak and potatoes
and Sam Adams and Dr. Pepper
and Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bar
 
this is my death
of writing without reading
acting without thinking
needing without comprehending
 
this is my death
of words without action
of thought without deed
beautiful blue eyes surrounded by excrement
 
and fast-folding lies
medicated for comfort
dedicated only
to the promise that tomorrow will come

​
​
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John Tustin began writing poetry again a little over a decade ago after a hiatus just as long. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

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