Defining Algorithms

The autumn colour warmth
needs to be reprogrammed.
The approaching winter equinox dictates
recipes for hearty soup connection.
Grey chill skies demand a closeness
absent in the other seasons.
Soon depth of winter will encapsulate
and the coding must be secure.

Prehistoric Allure

I am going back to the caves.
The cool dolomite calls me.
Autumn is a good time to go.
There’s a freshness in the breeze
and it is too early for the bears.
I need the Native American paintings
especially the one of the man and woman
cooking over the stone-ringed fire.
Last year while hiking, we found them.
I know you remember.
Love was strong then
and promises held so much hope.

No One To Hold Tonight

Most of the time
after a hard harvest,
it simmers
and spills over
like some
neglected Marina sauce
with dried red splotches
staining aluminum
until the need
for the through scrubbing
clean up.

But tonight
like a scalding broth
falling from the stove,
without logic or intent,
it just spews.
And the residue
is everywhere.

R. Gerry Fabian is an published poet from Doylestown, PA. He has published five books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, Wildflower Women, Pilfered Circadian Rhythm as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound. In addition, he has published five novels: Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, Seventh Sense, Ghost Girl and Just Out Of Reach.

You can find more of Gerry’s work here on Ink Pantry.

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The Shared Apartment

My house-mate’s wallet was full of cash when he threw it at the sliding
sash, busting a hole, fragmenting everything with the glass.

Colder and colder draughts of Wednesday morning
ricocheted in a strumming bass thudding in with the glass.

The false gold halos of coins winked and plashed at our feet burying
into the shag-pile carpet’s tufts, permeating the room, needling it with glass.

We pulled blunt edged pounds, two and ten pence pieces out
from beneath the sofa and attempted vacuuming the glass.

He didn’t say anything much after that and I moved on a few months later.
The window between us becoming a crevasse shattering with glass.

The cellophane we stretched over the break frayed into thin and thinner
slivers like my memory of what we had sliding into a vanishing glass.

That apartment was in roughly in the middle of town, now cars
rush where we once slept in the room still cracking with glass.

Vote

Can one mark matter? Can one X
be a kiss and affirmation
crossing lips or a voting box?
Can one mark matter? Can one X
change thoughts, score the path people fix
do lives hinge on one decision?
Can one mark matter? Can one X
be a kiss and affirmation?

Fear is a Common Denominator

Stumbling through 5.30 AM
and clasping a Tupperware container –
instead of sleeping – I am saving a mouse

from my cats. It hunches, shivering
amongst looming furniture
fright’s seeds germinating
beneath its fur
scrabbling against the carpet.

I can’t tell it the domed plastic box
isn’t a steel trap where air will expire
spent breaths as blood filled chokes
or that the day will
not vomit scratched-up pain

I can only show it open
alley-ways mazing behind the street
and let it run from me
back to dank undergrowth.

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.

Chemistry, Controlled Chaos And Connection

I can feel you still ‘smiling’
when I (briefly) look away
… and you caught
my faint ‘stammer’
inside your delicate mouth
whilst I was explaining
the way my ‘insides’
dislodge and fall…
the very moment you awake
… and we conspire
over re-introductional kisses
… to neither dim ‘Trouble’
nor hide from its
… cRoOkEd pathway…
through the topsy-turvy Day.

He Killed Everything In His Garden
~ the short story which accidentally turned into a poem ~

Fingertips (slightly) bouncing
off piano keys a-tremble
at the edge of my nerves
… and the morning blackbirds
look the way double bass
strings sound with arco…
melting away heavy rainfall.

Sorry, I got distracted again
… here’s your chance
to do your jigsaw thingy
and fit an ‘imagery embrace’
snuggled right up
into my meandering thoughts.
What I like about you best
is that when I show you
my ‘nice side’
… you instantly reciprocate,
rather than… ‘Menu-Browse’.

“… Is the ‘Finger-walking’ cryptic?”
Pausing to answer
deflates MOMENTUM
… work it out yourself or stay
confused… my involvement stops.
“You’re mistaking ‘Garrotting’
for ‘Disembowelling’… is it
Lucy? Cool, send her my love.
It’s sort of like ‘Lexical-Gustatory
Synaesthesia’… I can taste
the smell of old lady beggar hands
which have been re-counting
pennies whilst clumsily drinking
Styrofoam cupped tea… whenever
she says the word ‘Cuddle’…
any other female and it
tastes like cherries, or cake dough.
No-no, I absolutely insist
… you take ‘All of this/that’…
I’m quite content with the Doorway.”


Top-heavy Indian Summer

I’m busy,
psychically
pebble-skimming
the late afternoon
… rippling
pockets of peace
and quiet
with my curiosity
and sideways view.
I’m not, exactly,
intruding,
more observing
with outside-the-box
perception.
Dipping my
inquisitive toe
into the rhythmic
pond water
which dwells
in-between
what’s yet to be said
… in answer…
to what has already
been spoken.


To The Root

The excavation was a lengthy operation,
to say the least.
The emotional support beams buckled daily.
Each cavern grew smaller in size…
as the throbbing pulse drew her down deeper.
There was a waterfall of thought, halfway in,
where a dim glow, I shan’t call it a light,
radiated melancholia,
and a strange, eerie, out-of-tune melody
strangled itself, over and over again,
to the background drumming heartbeat.
The shelf of regret, just below,
was unstable to both foot and hand holds,
and the moths of vertigo face-fluttered
in demented, blinding, fury.
At the very bottom,
she found the essence of herself, at last…
rocking back-and-fore,
upon the floor of a hut
made of the bones of memory.
Cradling a snake to her breast,
which emanated a beacon of false hope,
whilst at the very same time,
devouring twice the prize it was deceptively giving.

Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, flash fiction and short stories published in hundreds of publications all around the world. He yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet. 

His novel “Crazy Like Emotion”, short story collection “Kicking Back Drunk ‘Round The Candletree Graves” and poetry collection “The Dark Side Of British Poetry” are all available from Close To The Bone Publishing.

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 on Amazon.

You can find more of Mitch’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Rites of Passage

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).

Opposites

What
goes
together

but
opposites

like
bread
and
butter
pickles
and
olives.

Sweet Times

Snow
sifting
through
the
clouds

cooking
up
sweet
times

like
a
delicious
dessert.

What Beauty

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.

Return Revitalized

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; & The Magritte 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.