the moon rises a dog barks a car drives over a broken tree branch
the branch cracks under the weight of the car
the moon rises a dog barks
snap snap
elastic broke
almost blinded him
when he looked out the window all he saw was himself looking back
he cried a lifetime
then he laughed
words i have no choice
they created me
eat shower work supper bed
no sex tonight
Grant Guy is a Canadian theatremaker, poet and visual poet and arts programmer. His theatre and performance have appeared in Canada, the United States and in Europe. He has published in hardcopy and online. He has visual poetry in the United States, Argentina and Brazil and in Europe. He is the recipient of many grants and awards.
The core of the self is a magnet which pulls in the physical world and the stuff of human nature, good and bad. Once trauma is caught there, it is hard to dislodge, the power of the magnet being strong
In this space occupied by “I” is sunlight, water, air and earth, also a little child who remains worried and fearful, petrochemical sludge, viruses and bacteria, a need to love and to be cherished and a desire to avoid pain
In this space is pollen, sunlight dispersed in a different form, and seed, infant plants, who blow over high desert and grassland past cows and squirrels and fish finning in ponds. In this space is intelligence and strategies designed to enable survival but which may actually sabotage survival In this space are tools, ever more powerful, with which we strive to dominate our world In this space is art, and sensitivity
In this space is air, sometimes still, or moving steadily or gusting, or appearing as wind, at times fierce, which carries spirit from the far corners of the past into the space of the distant future Our small parcels of light meld with the brilliance that streams from our star and our drops of water join the ocean
We may clothe those winds with fantasies of reincarnation in which we are kings or queens or famous scoundrels However hard we work to clear our minds, sometimes we backslide into bizarre, irrational ancient mythologies because their fantastic fictions, tailored to the human psyche, ease pain and give hope
But these fantasies take us out of the here and now, which is the only place one can be Even the immortal soul is transient
Deadly pathogens and fatal hostilities are fed by the greed, anger and delusion which reside in all human hearts We are like the Tasmanian Devil When we feel threatened, In this universe which, some claim, is made of love we viciously bite each others’ faces
Like orange lava, pollutants well up to run uncontrollably downmountain toward cities and towns which fill with ash and sulfurous smoke
Meanwhile, the need to love and be loved embraces all persons’ identical craving and pain shatters against the jagged afflictions of others
Mitch Grabois has been married for almost fifty years to a woman half Sicilian, half Midwest American farmer. They have three granddaughters. They live in the high desert adjoining the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They often miss the ocean. Mitch practices Zen Buddhism, which is not a religion, but a science of mind (according to the Dalai Lama). He has books available onAmazon.
You can find more of Mitch’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Encountering grief is a rite of passage, like love and yet unlike it, for grief is a long time coming, a tiger dancing in the dry grass, our bullets are pills and sometimes we run out of them, sometimes we play dead, hoping the tiger will go away, sometimes we are tired of losing so much, we have nothing to tempt or trade with grief, nothing to scare him away, and grief takes no prisoners, has no calm, no qualms. In our grief we speak of the dead so often now, we wake them, we envy them, we sing them lullabies.
After the rain, there will be rainbows
Illness is like damping of wood but once it dries, irrational hope will flicker, with the confidence of candles against raging stormy winds. But damp birds don’t fly well. So we sit and hope, for hope is a waking dream. We shiver to warm our bodies and ask, for we can only ask, our bouncing heart to settle, to brace for impact, as we mould ourselves again, again begin twig by twig, after the rain, when the nests are destroyed, gone like the dead, gone like the wind. We bring healing, twig by twig, for new nests and new hopes.
After the rain, there will be rainbows.
The watchers in the rye
No cow turns to see us pass, or that distant running train, we, holding hands, so that, should we fall, we fall together. We pass by where there was a yellow wood, where now, a yellow building slants, stands. We, white as snow, as death, as bones, as birds’ eggs in nests who do not know that the mother bird is dead, far away. Dead like a plant in cosmic darkness. We like statues, the scarecrows of the elegant house gardens, eternally grave in all tricks of lights, watching the all too familiar glint of the moon on broken glass, on shallow eyes of broken people, the sick and sickening, who once played hide and seek with us, sat with us in schools, who we met at birthday parties and broke lunch boxes with, who are taller than us now and their ears can’t hear us,
who we almost touch like the wind, and then refrain.
Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati is a physician and poet, previously published in nearly 50 international literary journals and magazines such as Prole, InkPantry, Palisades Review, Dreich, among others).
What beauty is snow anyway but for children making snow angels snowmen and having snowball fights, while adults stay warm by the fireplace drink hot chocolate or have a glass of wine.
Danny P. Barbare resides in the Southeastern USA. He works as a janitor at a local school and writes poetry in the evening.
I stab the earth’s soft soil, Murdering a pure life As I dig into its malevolent heart, Burying Ghosts of the Past.
They drag me along In graves Deep, dark, dismal. To chasms abysmal.
Phantoms and specters, Residing in the labyrinths of my brain, In chambers of my heart. A memento echoes.
An ember star glimmers, Shining faint hope Over the remnants Of my memories.
The grave hauls me within. Trapped amid its jaws I plead for light, Struggling to reach the surface, Each crevice Haunts me.
A rose wilts Over my grave. I drown in the earth’s soft soil, One with its malevolent heart, A miserable life murdered. Till stars blow into oblivion Bound eternally; To Ghosts of the Past.
Ayaan Fahad is a poet from Lahore, Pakistan. He aims to write poetry that emotionally resonates with people and captures things left unsaid, incorporating raw emotion within his works.
Take comfort in, not the small things but the familiar. Return to raw Miles, those first pick-up
bands that occasionally found Coltrane in there, equally raw. Or the Sherlock Holmes stories. Bach
for the first time, de Chirico & Hieronymus Bosch. Byzantine plazas, gardens of earthly delights which were
previously un- known but so familiar. An- cestral memories, the starting places at which you still stop by, to
stand still for a moment, focus, & come out of ready to hit the ground running.
Circumnavigating the bee yards
Take what’s on offer & then move on, an op- portunistic journey. Circles that trace the outside of other circles, in the nomadic
manner of those beehives that I saw alongside the gravel road tracing the south bank of the river.
for Denise Levertov
some of the time
the line goes taut o- illogical
& I am beaten to the body
left only with a grab-bag full
of glassy- eyed
head- lines
“…the last day the sharks appeared.”
Mark Young’s most recent books are One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths in June, 2024; Alkaline Pageantry, published by Serious Publications in September, 2024; & TheMagritte Poems which came out from Sandy Press in October.
Yu can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Sharp whistle shrieks between stops from December Street to Jan Way— Two, four, eight eye to eye, face to face on a one-way train— thu-thud THU-Thud! THU-THUD!!!
On track to a transitional pause, doors seal all into a lit tube engulfed by black for an extended enough time to get attached— to feel connection while speeding spark-lit rails to a next destination— THU-THUD!!! THU-THUD!!! THU-THUD!!! JOLT!
Meeting eyes break with a whiplash at a platform where all migrate on, off the train. Last looks, farewells, goodbyes, wonders— if any meet again face to face on surface, in train, someday, while simultaneously swapping each out for a fresh gaze— THU-THUD!!! THU-Thud! Thu-thud thu— thud.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like Cholla Needles, The New Yorker, The Literary Hatchet and others.
You can find more of Michael’s work here on Ink Pantry.
When Master-Mistress madcap Jake fishes for veins and waters, This lucent poem-page gets microphoned with ghosts and flashes; And, wherefore a fatalism promotes sex for devishes and lashes, limers Must annoint the birds of the worlds with bustlers and nailering swiners: O, all this damned whored year, we have hardened O, all these slammerings render puffers from adders and severings.
I intended to preach in a cold godspace but my penis daren’t pray. And, these fractionatives hereby sunder-space from dogs on trays. And the whirlers for dementives come sirenising for chronic slain Wicked seagulls come easily for homers and proud slept eye-wind; O, whence slazeners beget hurt from stoners then
To work all the nightlong days we protest for the skies of this mind, Cosmos-made, delvered, shaggering with mad warblers under trees. And, whenever summers snaps, a curtler for cad bumblers will use seeds For some aldening blirter of a cat come loving and listening. And we shall extemporise natural head-rests with shimmerings and tea, And I shall abuse for the utmost best then fade to fucking graves.
These Wolf Eyes
These wolf-eyes will eternally feed mess to the meadows Will, with a winded sun-at-sea gone grey, brokers for gallowers, Shrapnelled, blurted, slammed, Beget cool hard VDs from silly eggcups and teasers and facers And I will send some deadener of a god-mumma come Entissuing after a doubler of a walnut tree come sylvan for squirrels And, whence wenders scrape doos on gut, Me and macadam Eden-Aarons will wash all cups
And it was merely one million years ago when a ripply beauty came Entertaining the all with prehistorics and fossilers and Oh, and I have water-spind weedlers with contumely and distant rain, Creepily enbriding some dodgy moon-flitters And it was just about when true earth burned when hecklers on trains Behested for stoned boys. I am alone in my vocal head-world. I am intended to wed no-one.
We sink under vast rats as pilliory pled pillows with snaps and pearls. I Have to hasten now to some maladies which, Comedy-crafted, happens to die for bitchers as blakers use wits for wide Woollen city-masques; and, oh, as we enbitcher for saviours, Wiveners for dizzy farms will sickler for geezers unfound across sailors And you are the famous child god used to own.
Do sweet memories forevermore affixed to lost valves and dementias Or is it (with all the minds we seize) come charnelising after sickers; O, men Must overturn the utmost sides of a swan-swarm And, whatever the wynd of fears, Me and madam macadam Naplers guested for pickers and lost spawns.
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied hard and sat entrance exams for Oxford University. Jim has won three full awards for his poems. Jim has a fine frenzy for poetry and has written in excess of 22,000 poems. Jim adores the art of poetry. He lives for prosody.
You can find more of Jim’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Impoverished child— for nickels, dimes— bought by beauty. Taught grace, not from love— but life confined.
Glamour-touched teen— trained to speak— to walk for lust-filled eyes. Stripped of name, wrapped in robes, to the highest bidding price— child purity sold.
Woman fully realized— through fog of an aged mind— drifts upstream from cherry-coloured Kyoto to childhood slum on a seaside, the missing sister, the parents long passed. All gone— without goodbye.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives in the Middle East and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary magazines like Cholla Needles, The New Yorker, The Literary Hatchet and others.
You can find more of Michael’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The marvellous winter has come with the most tender Christmas Eve
Klaus Werner Swamp-Man awaits dream august Moment is revealed
Klaus a forester lives alone in a clear home amidst the grove
In the evening praying by table he enjoyed freedom of silence
Oracular characters come after rook has visited his
The rook knows from the black raven that there are marsh-treasure hidden
Next hydra bangs on the window she gives to Werner the obol
He enchants tenderly the guest:
The eternal moor! Dream with us!
Then a Stymphalian’s birdlet comes flying in dazzling-brilliant ways
The bird gives away an obol the man told him the gorgeous words
Eternal moory landscape dwell! such for the ghosts a meek landscape
Hereafter attends – Dionysus sir of numinous moory homes
Third obolus – given away therefor can be valid Klaus’ dream
Oboli are being given
Be the fen full of tender myths!
Mister Swamp-Man boasts of marshlands they are free in eternities
Rook is nidifying in tree the plant stays over the moor-mist
Bewitched landscape and dreamy bog and women dream of moory fog
Two women seem to have been enchanted of the boglet (Paweł’s neologism) plainly in a propitious way.
Paweł Markiewicz was born 1983 in Siemiatycze in Poland. He is poet who lives in Bielsk Podlaski and writes tender poems, haiku as well as long poems. Paweł has published his poetries in many magazines. He writes in English and German.
You can find more of Paweł’s work here on Ink Pantry.
