A strange glance from my right, the benches that frame this monument leak bodies sat upright, static in this heat. Their brows are reflective, but without thought, as magpies rattle and dance in trees too thin to cast shadows.
This stone pillar, a crude reminder of those ravaged by a lack of cohesion; just another product of a time which refused its clocks to stop, if only so it could recoup and strengthen its path, to open its eyes productively.
The faces carved into inappropriate places fail to resonate as intended; the grass hill like a dandelion sprouted on a derelict pavement. A hundred bodies lay under its foundations, unaware of the lack of progress that turn their graves to mere memories.
Late summer heat allows us this lazy observation, to avoid absorption of the remnants of this landmark. We move drunkenly back towards the city, as the last passing dog of the evening slavers upon its steps.
The Broken Bar
Shattered glass frames the feet of aging yuppies shuffling in Birkenstocks, the walls absorb the clink of ice cubes in glasses and hands. A barrage of bad politics masquerading as “opinions” rides over any conversation that would otherwise heighten this more than lowered tone.
The tiny speakers that spew forth this music never threaten to fall, and hang like badly carved gargoyles, they remain as blank as these faces, that attempt pensive expressions but only manage to execute bovine grins, that answer each question with the same depletion of substance.
Their reputations as stale as the two-for-one drinks that fuel their afternoon; broken laptops and cufflinks pile high in their thousands as the final bell tolls in this shattered bar, as they take the last sip of their grime filled nectar, they finally retreat, if only to replenish their funds.
Jonathan Butcher has had poetry appear in various publications including The Morning Star, Mad Swirl, The Rye Whiskey Review, Picaroon Poetry, Sick Lit, Cajun Mutt Press and others. His fourth chapbook ‘Turpentine’ was published by Alien Buddha Press. He is also the editor of the online poetry journal Fixator Press.
disarray bustle as they group slide off bus treading quickly holding useless bundles spouting too many words to register as real carrying reasons unrelated to time as is into blend of light rain and cars too loud
a laugh or shout or scowl binding a pinch as truth unfolds while spilling into veins of pathways and roads for next attempt at situation that could easily go unnoticed in body mass of many separating in light
and me in my after-covid fog no better clutching at strongest black coffee found relishing seat at too wobbly outside table trying not to return to thought of sick bird flapping in my overgrown back garden
another bus stops and out they fall again and i become locked in why happenings the corner fight between two meth-heads my partners kind eyes when concerned and has bird already been killed by cat
a guy asks me for a cigarette and i jump and instead of sorry mate or i don’t smoke i nod a feeble decline and he mumbles off while i gulp coffee aware of small pleasures crowds on buses and a dying bird’s plight
Stephen House has won many awards and nominations as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s had 20 plays produced with many published by Australian Plays Transform. He’s received several international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts, and an Asialink India literature residency. He’s had two chapbooks published by ICOE Press Australia: ‘real and unreal’ poetry and ‘The Ajoona Guest House’ monologue. His next book drops soon. He performs his acclaimed monologues widely.
Proud and professional, these beds thread proud blooms of mystery, give back a long, lingering orb to every schizoid smile. Bright, glossy, fay, charms on their backs, they come to rest on every ward: all streeted slab minds are visited.
The nurses strewn midst warts and brogues or children running from the trees past cells and wimpled swingers seize each wild and whitened face that tops each champing blanket; momently, as madness matters swathe and marry:
And sense now the rolling scentedness that cries beneath all dreams made blue, and for a second greet the high soul, so healthful, mad and fucking true. The patient wards conceive. ‘My, My’ they whisper at their own dismay.
For formed away in some deep wound may flow the insane yell of lust round lonely living so near death’s end, and what was revered in its dead crust amongst blind tears, the wrangled rend of familial mummy dadas, there
At last time starts to heighten. Far from the constraints of christs that lie unreachable inside life’s tombs the doctors fart and let sex fry through closer things than what has come, and thrill to mind-mess all men are?
Recusancy and After?
How recusant, the departure of good minds down alleyways, or watching the lean doors opening past the milk-white strain of ashes, rising and falling.
Mad-man or soldier? both are fazed to dream; and, oh, they simply get married or content themselves with killers mourning… Whipped beds of sex deem so explosive that
Men note melodeons appear praying, or the tiny decks of water cloying and spraying, or, on late evenings, watch cross-hearted waders washed in lime?
Like new stored clothes, the huge decisions spread out like feet and invent a new way of treading; this is the random wake of minds, the
Close call of the murderer running. Here subventing each wade and rote, the stolid brain suffuses and closes right away.
We Cannot Hear the Sleep of Words
We cannot hear the sleep of words Under the seas, under the flowers, under the tides of out lots And the bustling over sheets in skies depleting Or our infinite whispers unheard. How Inevitable silence whisks us is the tune That, like the spires of monks, grows tired with the trends And, dreaming about the text, Shies into the fire. Words Are as remote as the stars and their staring dawn, As perceived as God. Does This quiet sleep of words hide schemes, hide fears? Does the last lash of the wind and the failing wing Outwardly spiel an end? Let us listen, Open the mind and listen For a sigh, a sign Of speaking unadorned. There is No cry, there is only The one weathered night whose wakefulness stings and Hoots the Word over and over Until the speaking dies.
Through a Glass Darkly
And no-one can deny That love is more tedious than lies Seeing the mirror of the third When fearing time’s cries Creates behaviour a mind can’t stir
I have slowed in my swagger to find That death cannot ever ride The waves of its occidental sea The nut-strewn road and its cavalry Refine lust and its plans.
Coins in hands work for a life And regal banks are sworn Dead by a majesty of man-and-wife This thurible holds intense Incense; so too, starved tears
Weep from their command A mute space sears the bent Cities are altogether shent And no-one can deny That love is more tedious than lies
The blind fo’csle inside this brain Must swear till death dies.
I Neglect Nothing
I neglect nothing – Your furled scent, the bitter tea, The merciless maxims spurting Diamate into the fire.
I conclude us both, like a Will – The one impressed is me, And you are filigree wrought, Your stare as kvetch as desire.
(Now you must own no friends – With your head howled back, Like a sightless toy, like A figurine, you must seem closed.
Childless, your mouth is contorted, Splintered, epileptic – mine Is an ovum, disposed As an idol on a grave).
You placed a cigar to my lips – I, laughing, put out the fire, Congruous and calm. Yes, I recollect babies and flowers: A slap about the face of death..
And then you quietly rocked From side to walled side and moaned Like a gale of sadness starting.
A Kind of Decalogue
Item, an animal, and how it changes shape, Now a slick leopard, then a white air Of tigress, ape or lemur. The forms won’t take One simple pattern for long. Item, the crow
And then the simple blackbird, gathering up Hunted petals. Item, a demesne of guns Hotly presented to a potted face, A shaft of holly leaves, darkness begun And flapped astray. Item, motors without grace, Churning the fair aside. Item, the bones
Of reservations, now Plot One, Plot Two Purveyed by engineers. The hunters are half-conscious of their Deeds And cackle. Signs are made, sometimes honed,
And then the silent Blue?
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.
Bound to North Not home nor far Made by escape, A hope to fight
Trust lantern lost Believed or touched Fade made by dark, And light by light
When cold turns warmth And prayer divides Be either sail in storm, Or spark from night
Made Up in Laughing
Frame half-open windows Slip out of billows Stomp on the sunlight stamped in the sidewalk Dry and kind
Call off a shadow Tripped up in meadow The sere breath is casting, made up in laughing Holding all chance others left behind
When day drops to fair-low Return not its sparrow Its echo’s in moonlight, verve in the clockwork Draped in the caul of what we can’t unwind
Port of Call
Damp stains Beneath a starlit sky
The gutter is calling For all memory; it’s time
Let go The winds already fled to leave behind
A world not falling Port of call and not again
The Pronation of Shangri La
Bellowed to the threat of any falling leaves Softcore Shangri La is gone but far from freed Caught in the tired idea that petrichor is wrong
Upended by some heathen in the scattered steam A valley that’s been dried out yet not quite cleared Cross-eyed, unremarkable garden forms a path
Retreaded by many so-and-sos just like me To the beacon of kingdom con and its seams Whatever’s being kicked up stains twice, and
there’s no going back
Trading Post at the Edge of Known
Empty more mistaken pearl to curl fate
and find oneself
somewhere with no stars and no fear, no knots and no ends
The varied cost not haggled, just peaked and tipped
Traverse naught and koan, and trust the seed into the flame
leaving only an epitaph of sand
Go without stars Go without fear
Joe Albanese is a writer from South Jersey. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in 12 countries. Joe is the author of Benevolent King, Caina, Candy Apple Red, For the Blood is the Life, Smash and Grab, and a poetry collection, Cocktails with a Dead Man.
I’ve picked up skills from unlikely sources Some starker than others The strongest lessons coming from those With challenging circumstances
I’ve found it difficult to learn from anyone That never had to face adversity Didn’t have to hustle, at some point To keep food on the table, or a roof overhead
Those that didn’t have to wonder if things would ever improve
I want those in the liminal spaces That navigated the underground That know how to see in the dark And can find light in the most unlikely places
Those who speak the truth And give voice to the silenced Finding strength to keep moving forward Even when hated by the the bandwagoning masses
Skaja Evens is a writer and artist living in Southeast Virginia. She edits It Takes All Kinds, a litzine published by Mōtus Audāx Press. She’s been published in Spillwords Press, The Dope Fiend Daily, The Rye Whiskey Review, and The Crossroads Lit Magazine.
Louder than the island’s traffic cicadas’ shake a tinder percussion from long, straying grass.
They are as unseen as a writer, who years away, will tap at a keyboard
and listen to a printer scuttle over paper in the hope of recapturing the fizz of you and me waiting
for a bus amid buzzing cicadas -burning with songs more ancient than lyres joking about the bus being as mythical as Pegasus or Persephone
before scrunching the poem of it back into the blankness of letters hissing as they flicker out – incompleting a neon cocktail sign outside a city window, while miles away
your hand is still tightly holding mine as we clamber aboard a bus and pay drachmas for our tickets.
Trauma
She has no words in school today. To match, I make mine tiny, firm stones; imperatives placed next to pictures to round their requests,
balancing the real on a surf of swaying meaning. She responds, tracing sounds to her own.
Reading opens and closes its booked meanings. She decodes words into elephants, heavy, andante, stepping sense slowly from the page to something new from thumbed pages.
Her body folds beneath a uniform of crumpled grey polyester, as she hunches at the desk, skin prickling with webbed scabs, self-scratched; still raw, still red.
The bathroom’s razored blur smudging at the back.
Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website.
You can find more of Jenny’s work here on Ink Pantry.
We think of the fascinating charm. We fantasize about wizardry. We ponder on the amazing bard. We reflect on poetic beauty.
We muse about astonishing moon. We dream of the surprising vessel. We philosophize about fair throne. We describe awesome Indian summers.
We ruminate on the brilliant pearls. We remember overwhelming sun. We commemorate impressive tides. We daydream of bewildering souls.
We recall the staggering sailor. We contemplate the breathtaking storm.
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.
Dream of the Vulture the night before Find an eleven by fourteen inch canvas Sharpen a true H Pencil Sketch the outline of the Vulture between your tears Paint the white first and last Paint the sky blue of her eyes Drink a pint, let to dry Three yellows and two Reds Paint the beak, the eye Blood Red for her Head Paint feathers using last night fire ash Highlight the beak and eye so to speak Paint Cliff and toes with shades of sorrow Pen your name
Sleepy Whale 412
Gallivanting around Like Vultures hunting in the wet straw Driving dusty old Macintosh Cadillac Vulture-ugh subsequently ride Freely cracking with her Guffaw in the back seat Saints and Sages fly over like Hopscotch See-Saw Tiger Lilies Three half ones in a stack in the glove box Horns Dragon-Lilies Zodiac lie in a bunch on the floor Taste her Irish Brandy sniffer lips in Awe
Sleepy Whale 415
Spiritual condition of a Vulture falling slowly Eager anticipation drinking communal Wine Emunctory field of blue Apricots Haunting remorse with holes in her blindfold Motley affair nightly with her robot Solemnities of the very new sun rise Shiny used white flint pocket knife She covers the Biscuit Tin’s full of gold
Sleeping Whale 387
Humours of her midnight criticizing Dancing at the book release ball Dark woman, fair man’s brawl In the dark Gun Powder Cigarettes appetizing Life after life baptizing Eager anticipation for all Golden poop slips and falls Blue Irish eyes apologizing Drink a Pint to heavenly blessed The last come first Weasel rat pest Alabaster silent outburst Like a cat to its claws dressed All wind, piss with the worst Nobbling his last pint best Always knock first
Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. Has Five Amazon E- Books. Poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed. Winamop, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, Adelaide Magazine, Variant, the Writing Disorder, Ink Pantry, In Parentheses, Ariel Chat, New Ulster, Glove, and in Pamp-le-mousse, North Dakota Quarterly, Barzakh, Urban Arts, Wingless Dreamer, LKMNDS and Milk Carton Press.
You can find more of Terry’s work here on Ink Pantry.
That cold cube of ice against a flurry of fire escape lips, naughty rap rap knuckles so far beyond initial infraction, dead batteries for a dying world; I am twisted nerve endings like internal ponytails on the pull, and feelings don’t mean what tuk tuks mean, the data could not be less clear; sciatica for the flimsy paper plate rapture – Ostracism is a vast love of distance above all else, corrugated rooftops catch distant rin tin tin rain, this retina detached outlier behind weepy ronin pink eye sabbatical; unbroken briefcase cyphers so file folders can stay on the lam – you cannot touch me for I am unquarried stone on salamander prowl: biting, glacial, indifferent as a mild pooling blah.
Strictures
And who among you would censure moth for flame, spire from bell, who among the narrow-numbs should be first to fasten the restraints, limit passage, lob cannonballs of criticism? Count my absence as a disavowal, you who manage rank with truncheon-exact priggishness, wall in that wretched wild Thunderbird of ideas; from my wilting lamb’s lettuce, hissing radiators of this balding Rapunzel tower – listen to the plethora horns in the swelling streets below: all awe, all awe… toot toot toot toot.
Market Man
No need for the maudlin insincere, the man at market names his price which is never the price if you know better, the way he crosses his arms, closes himself off and prepares for battle; the barter system is total exhaustion if I am to be honest, my heart and head and more generous foibles never really in it, that absurd dizzying way bountiful hypochondriacs imagine themselves afflicted with every ailment known to medicine and a few the white coats may have not thought of, and the way my last monies leave my hand hurts more than any lover that has ever retired from once warm beds; that wrecking ball shame of heavy feet, of being taken again.
The Daily Catch
On one of my many chuffed-lung walks, past boxed-ribboned confectionery, beyond mossy breaker wall protections, the smell is what you notice before anything else; those large industrial pails below various trawler net-tangles, the daily catch on the death squirm, saucer-eyed dilations unaware of the descaling knives just feet away, the numerous yellow-smocked men with vicious nicotine faces, ashing down over the creaking wood haunt of the salaried man, unsavoury jokes exchanged in strange mother tongues as I nod half-friendly, pull my collar up for the cold; shuffling by in a Salvation Army Peacoat to the end of a rotting dock where the circling gulls squawk over the dead and dying throwaways from this morning’s briny fog-soaked haul.
Voila & Other Silly Little Miracles
Humiliation, yes yes, there is plenty of that & brackish homestead guile & voila and other silly little miracles so small you almost miss them, trip over your own feet and blame the laces of your premature birth, even the eagles in the trees bald before too long, squatting as much as nesting; nature is everyone’s landlord, the bees and the birds & chimney soot faces with glass golden briar hoppers for hands… the zipper on my change purse suffering from inactivity, Swan black Thomas Mann as clunky dialysis machine, it’s calipers squeezing infant brain juice from apricot dayglow, breakdowns along Bullshit Road – mold in the hinges of the kitchen cupboard now caught under nail; what I have is mine so long as a man is willing to catalogue his entire existence: Roman nose, Irish liver, enough beard hairs to invite a thousand men to the gallows.
Secrets Never Cease
Plucked treasure hunter eyes befall you, secrets never cease: the crimp, the golem, this patch-played foil derived which should offer exits for a saving face, whirling tango divots into lined gymnasium floor; I’m the poster child for posters, no eight ways around it… procrastination should be an Olympic sport, or at least a local watering hole with recycled beer and creaky wind-chattered windows.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Ink Pantry, Impspired Magazine, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
You can find more of Ryan’s work here on Ink Pantry.
