I asked Princess Di to dance She was biking across the heath in a glum mood
wearing an expression that might have suited Thomas Hardy
In fact, she would have taken up my offer She would have danced with me Who knows what else she might have done? what we would have done together
But a tornado had blown down Windsor Castle and she had to hurry back to make repairs
I saw a trowel in her bicycle basket caked with cement I knew that besides being a princess she had many other skills and here was still more evidence
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over fourteen-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes, and was awarded the 2017 Booranga Writers’ Centre (Australia) Prize for Fiction. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, is based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. His new poetry collection was published in 2019, The Arrest of Mr Kissy Face. He lives in Denver, Colorado, USA.
I live way out. It gets real quiet. Little random adjust- ments have been made to keep me there, & filmed in
one continuous shot. People in these small municipalities often pass the time in strange mixes of activities — juggling
chain saws while wearing a two-piece bathing suit is a not unusual example. The culture can be different even when it
stays the same. This book was company for me; but the suits I wear when I work in major cities would cause division here.
The Pound Cantos: CENTO V
Sound drifts in the evening haze, North wind nips on the bough; & in small house by town’s edge—
slung like an ox in smith’s sling— now was wine-trunk here stripped, here made to stand, stilling the ill
beat music. A young man walks, grave incessu, at church with galleried porch, drinking the tone
of things. Brown-yellow wood, & the no-color plaster, all flat on the ground now, making mock of
the inky faithful. When you take it, give me a slice. A poet’s ending.
J7 on the selection list
Today, again, it is The Supremes who propel me into the morning. An interwoven medley, Love Child & Reflections, no reason for that particular pairing — it’s just the way of things, the past, un- bidden, rising up to push the hidden jukebox of the mind along.
The doors
Everything has continuity; though the light changes shapes & some things resonate with memory whilst others stay silent in the hand. Each has a number.
*
Grasp as in within. With- out. The door open, the doors closed. The way picked through. The detritus is a picked- over poem. Number unencumbered, the writing not the same.
*
To find the expression first design the primer. Sequence. Consensus. Homogenous percentage.
*
There are things scattered around the door. Pieces of glass in different colours, paper wasted since the writing’s all the same. A couple of statues, one stained with blood. Bowler hats piled up on top of one another.
*
Two doors beyond.
*
Everything might be remembered in time but it’s the linkages & the lack of space to keep them near that make it difficult.
*
Memory is not linear. Straight lines are for planning a future where you write yourself preliminary notes & leave them in strategic places. So that, whenever it is you arrive at where you were going you can open them up & see what was penned, then compare it with what actually hap- pened along the way.
*
Everything has contiguity; though the night changes shades & some things emanate from memory whilst others shape themselves within the hand. None has a number greater than one.
Visual & text poems by Mark Young have appeared recently in several journals including Indefinite Space, E·ratio, X-Peri, Word for/Word, & Futures Trading.
Mark Young lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia, & has been publishing poetry since 1959. He is the author of over fifty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, & art history. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. His most recent books are a collection of visual pieces, The Comedians, from Stale Objects de Press; turning to drones, from Concrete Mist Press; & turpentine from Luna Bisonte Prods.
I lost my reason And my will And my books And my children And the woman I love and still I never gained
Insight
No Victor
Prostrate in the bed we used to share On a Sunday night Staring at all the nothing And thinking about how swell life was For those too brief interludes Between the disasters When you would hold me so close And I could feel your heart beat
Wondering what you’re doing now Since you broke my heart in two And disappeared with my light And my hope
Just then the phone rings Just like it used to When you’d make your “Sorry I’m calling so late” Phone calls
My heart mends for a moment And I answer it Not knowing what I will say But screaming I Love You I need your voice In my mind As my pulse pounds In my ears
I answer the phone And when the man on the line Asks to speak to Victor I tell him he has the wrong number Because there is definitely no victor here
And there never will be
Poem # 226
Just as I was ready for her – Her feet upon my rug, Her body in my bed, Her coffee smells in my nose, The way her upper lip looks when she sips;
Her positivity, her proclivities, Her anger when drunk, Her endless enigmas…
Just as I was ready for her She was not ready for me In spite of how long We both waited
So here’s another poem about that.
A Plucked Flower
I refuse to be a plucked flower That is pulled from the ground, Clipped, sprayed to look shiny And put in a bouquet or garland
With the others.
There is all over the world
There is all over the world, but I live here. There are these millions of women everywhere, but here I am with you. And I have this job, and I raise these kids, and I eat this food you place before me.
I come and I go with each tide of chance, every ripple of circumstance.
It had been dragged to the edge of the field, now just a mound inside the barbed wire
fence, the windowed panel of a wedding tent draped over it, failing to hide the mottled coat,
bloated body, as I drive by in the northbound lane, following the saturated bank of the Connecticut
River, thinking of those whose lungs have become wet sponges, who are slowly drowning, dying alone.
Corey D. Cook’s fifth collection of poems, The Weight of Shadows, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019 and is available for purchase online. His work has recently appeared in Boston Literary Magazine, Freshwater, The Henniker Review, The Mountain Troubadour, Trouvaille Review, and Viscaria Magazine. New poems are forthcoming in the Aurorean and Muddy River Poetry Review. Corey works at a hospital in New Hampshire and lives in Vermont.
It is a marvellous Memphis evening and as I get on the trolley, I catch an immediate glimpse of her. While I deposit my money, I find her fixing breakfast with those soft blue eyes shining. During the day, I call just to her the lilt in her voice. At supper, I envy the lettuce that feels the taste of her soft lips and wet tongue. I lie in bed awaiting her gentle slide into bed nuzzling her silken skin next to mine.
The trolley jerks to a start. She is in her middle twenties and as I am approaching social security. The best I can do is smile and sit across form her hoping a breeze will carry a breath of her perfume at least until her stop.
Eating Chicken Bones And Broth With An Old Gypsy Voodoo Woman Outside Of Shreveport
She pulls the carcass out of the boiling water placing it on a plate filled with herbs, spices and root powders. Breaking off a steaming rib bone with her wrinkled thumb and forefinger, she fries with, in a herb based olive oil. Eat this for fortitude. Using razor sharp shears, she cuts the shoulder blade apart and grinds it into a damp powder. Dumping it into a pan of boiling water which contains three magical ground roots, she pours it into a blue metal cup. Drink this for humility. Using wooden tongs, she extracts a bare chicken wing from the broth. This she mashes into a paste and spreads it across a slice of French bread. Chew this for moments of indecision. Finally, she strains the remaining stock through a metal mesh and then again through old cheesecloth into a chipped ceramic bowl. Into the bowl, she sprinkles five love herbs: lavender, basil, rosemary, hibiscus and patchouli. This she pours into a pint bottle and corks it. Sip this and kiss your intended lover. The depth of love will be revealed.
Rule Number One – Location
She likes to make breakfast for poor people. Even before the rooster, she’s up collecting, banging and frying.
When it’s all done she drives to the station and sets up her booth.
The poor people hate her. The food is overcooked and usually on the cold side.
She’s a braggart and a gossip. A big hand-lettered sign informs – NO CREDIT.
R. Gerry Fabian is a retired English instructor. He has been publishing poetry since 1972 in various poetry magazines. He is the editor of Raw Dog Press. He has published two poetry books, Parallels and Coming Out Of The Atlantic. His novels, Memphis Masquerade, Getting Lucky (The Story) and Seventh Sense are available from Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble. He is currently working on his fourth novel, Ghost Girl.
Water is my element, hence the Summer became a girlhood’s favourite scene, heralding swimming, boats and vanilla ice-cream, but it took English Studies in my late teens to make me enamored with autumnal traits.
Grey became imbued with a literary hue, with the Brontës roaming the Yorkshire moors, the Romantics in melancholic moods, and the Graveyard poets contemplating mortality amid tombstones.
My book cover of Wuthering Heights showed a Byronic hero against a livid wold. The wind howled in my soul. No distance could estrange Catherine and Heathcliff who taught me spiritual fortitude.
And dark clouds that omens forebode began to change their dismal discourse since what blessed Coleridge’s ancient mariner with rain-outpours evoked the very spirits that sent the frozen ship on its course though no breeze breathed or spoke, a metaphor for divine intervention despite the transgression of an errant soul.
The elms so thinned by Blair’s rude winds not even two crows could build a dwelling now mirror the nudity of my old age, shedding its sorrows and tenacious grief, preparing for the flight beyond the grave.
A daughter takes after her father
When I was nine years old, I pouted my lips to blow a tune through his trumpet, my hands unsteady beneath its weight.
At seventeen, I puffed at his pipe. liked neither its taste nor its swirling clouds. It merely imbued me with fatherly pride.
He always pondered over his books, his bent back indicative of a speculative mood, inspiring my long spells of solitude.
He tended the wounds of stranded birds. A recuperative hand became his trait that lent to mine an addiction to aid.
The shades of blue he constantly wore evoking the sea that buffeted our boat have left the flow that ripples my thoughts.
Yonder
I catch a glimpse of the vibrant yonder, a radiant house that sleeps beneath a fluttering, yellow maple tree, a lake seducing the lucent moon to quiver on its heaving bosom, a lawn on whose silken skin pirouettes a barefooted nymph, a dray of squirrels that emptied nuts of all their sealed contents, a herd of horses who’ve never been ridden, a flock of sheep that roam un-chidden, a cluster of violets awaiting a breeze to caress each enraptured face, a shadow that saunters all alone longing to mingle with my own.
Deeds
What deeds have you deleted from your subterranean archives, the ones you keep in your subconscious, diaries, and half-written memoirs? Torturing, when a child, a clan of ants, locking butterflies in tight-shut jars, peeping though keyholes at a neighbour’s wife, compromising savings by stealing a dime, seducing a schoolmate with a fake smile, wetting your bed in the middle of the night, playing the heroic when you are afraid to die, breaking every promise your tongue contrived, slighting many a devoted friend, adhering blindly to a deadly trend, attempting suicide for a frivolous wench, accusing falsely to shirk a debt! I always marvel at the scale of events deleted from CVs, bios, and self-narratives.
Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.
Unravel the mystery of the half-burnt toast a slice of brown bread that couldn’t succumb to fire.
One day you’ll know what it means.
A pale, brown woman with unkempt tresses walks along the pavement. The asphalt and concrete cracked with age: A barren thoroughfare of desires – A road to hell in-the-making
Her black eyes look around the remnants of a half-eaten apple look tempting.
She hides it secretly inside her cleavage – A feeble attempt at a brutal revenge those once altruistic soldiers become mannequins.
My poor Pakistani mother in a slum too has feelings, too has rage.
They say have patience, you will get the aid you deserve.
Don’t they know the toast has burnt and the jam is now wet?
Fizza Abbas is a Freelance Content Writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her works have been published on quite a few platforms including Poetry Village and Poetry Pacific.
A well-known poet was doing a reading in New Hampshire. He started to read a poem about his father. After about three lines, he stopped and looked up at us: “After all these years,” he said, “you’d think I would have this figured out.” But of course you don’t.
My Father’s Toolbox
My father was not much at fixing things But he had a tool box, The colour of an Army Jeep, Marvellous nest of compartments, Secret places for wrenches and chisels, Trays for bolts, screws, Nails of different size. It still sits in the guest-room closet, Artifact of wonder To a childhood on the pond, Seventy summers ago.
I do not have a toolbox And few tools, beyond those: A plastic container with A screwdriver, the little hammer My great-aunt used To pound away at pewter. And a heavy-duty staple gun, Mightiest instrument I ever used.
We did not have sons. Our daughters learned To repair some things And married men Who could fix others.
His Gradebook
I came upon my father’s gradebook today, On the cottage shelf Where we left it when he died, Twenty years ago now. I wish that he’d retired While his memories were all good ones. I see him in his classroom by the pond, Leaning forward, wanting to tell a boy or two, Sullen, not unkind, needing credits, About the Generation of ’98, But struggling with the preterite, I think. Then the meaning comes to me: A tutor is someone who keeps you safe.
Third Sunday in June
Of the Father’s Days In my growing up I remember Inexpensive after-shave And 45’s that turned out Not to be the Dixieland he loved; Yet his smile showed thanks for my intent.
So it did not seem such irony That the week before Father’s Day this year We took him to the “rest home,” (Curious euphemism, that): Entrepreneurial caregivers, Protestant ministers, Meaning well enough, I suppose: They cannot tell us a theology of Alzheimer’s. Early on Sunday morning, Father’s Day, They took him to the emergency room; Four days later, Shortly after lunch, With Mother and me there with him, He dozed off into eternity, Slipped loose at last From that most outrageous of diseases. I had few tears left for The funeral home, the cemetery. I left them all at Elmhurst, In his little room, his chair, In the grand confusion Of the end of his days, Left there by those who cared for him most.
The monitor above his bed Went blank: A shrill, dull monotone, Solid amber line across the screen; On the shelf below, greeting cards From cousins he could not have named And an unopened bottle of Williams Aqua Velva.
Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.
the office they gave me held a view of birds. how then should one focus on scheduling appointments and booking calls with contractors? flight stretched like a long arm over mountains and tangled tablecloth.
Going back to London
it looks like I’m going to be going again – something in my life bringing me back to London. it’s not weather, god no, and I’ve no friends I want to see; I lived it a time, it’s true and have some happy memories but none of those will light my way tonight.
me and this girl are renting a car, taking it from Bristol all across the country. she has appointments she has to keep or something. something to do with a visa. I’m going along because I like to drive and want to see if some barstaff there remember me.
there was this place I used to go to – in Camden. I lived in Golders and it was handy, that’s all. they played folk music, and sometimes jazz. I got drunk there most nights that I got drunk. it was pretty good. once someone thought I was an A&R man and set me up – free drinks all night. the walls were a squeezed waterbottle and the air blue as fruit.
me and this girl are going to London. we’re going tomorrow morning. it’s June now, and the weather’s looking fine. I’m angling that we drive along the coast, even though it means getting up early. we’ll go east, our eyes flying to sunrise and Paris will be rising to our right.
Ice cream
she is sitting on the ground outside of tesco.
she is sitting with legs flat, taking little licks off the top of an ice cream cone.
she looks about six. she looks about happy. her dad or someone on a bench nearby pouring down a bottle. the sun is out. it’s summer.
she looks happy. I go on in, buy vegetables and bread, fresh fish and wine. when I come out she’s still there, eating her ice cream.
Describing Cheryl
Cheryl; black as a red cherry plucked out of a blue earth, good a fuck as any animal, clever as candlewax, ambitious as a bee in spring.
look: I tried so long to reduce you down to an essence in poems and now I feel like you need an apology – look at the shaggy order into which I’ve put things.
The bait
my mam says she likes about half the things I publish – she is very honest when she likes something. when she doesn’t – that is to say when it’s one of those poems about drinking or the ones about chasing girls – she’s honest too, in a different way,
saying “well done” quietly and going on eating her dinner.
sometimes she asks why I don’t write the nicer poems all the time to which I don’t really have a response.
when you drop some bread on the pavement in a crowd of flocking birds you don’t get to decide if a starling will get it or a seagull.
. . . . .
D.S. Maolalai a graduate of English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin and recently returned there after four years abroad in the UK and Canada. D.S. has been writing poetry and short fiction for the past five or six years with some success. Writing has appeared in such publications as 4’33’, Strange Bounce and Bong is Bard, Down in the Dirt Magazine, Out of Ours, The Eunoia Review, Kerouac’s Dog, More Said Than Done, Star Tips, Myths Magazine, Ariadne’s Thread, The Belleville Park Pages, Killing the Angel and Unrorean Broadsheet, by whom D.S. was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Work is published in two collections; Love is Breaking Plates in the Gardenand Sad Havoc Among the Birds.
Mauna stuck in a bottle-neck light Over her shoulder fly’s a peacock That’s not COVID aloha for you to rock How many hearts broken at twilight Steams of coffee drinking all night Un-shed tears of a lonely hawk Shadow-less early morning flintlock Midnight is my time for walking until daylight Meadow of a murmuring lizard Lonely silence of a duck’s quack Star thrown shadows of a blizzard Unmentionables torn from the back Like a grasshopper sticking in the hat of a wizard Sun was nearing the steeple of Jack
Her Pal
Her pal wears an alabaster grass Ball-Dress to write Improper overtures of COVID from men Writing with Tortoiseshell Pens Gaps between shutters for light Frost- bound Coachman arrived at midnight We needed him at ten Swelling caves aloha in silk hose until then Insulting to any lady’s double-envelops white
Terry Brinkman has been painting for over forty five years. He started creating poems. He has five Amazon E- Books. also poems in Rue Scribe, Tiny Seed, Jute Milieu Lit and Utah Life Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, Poets Choice, In Parentheses, Adelaide Magazine, UN/Tethered Anthology and the Writing Disorder.
