毳：three pieces of hair put together indicates as much subtlety as sensitivity
贔：three mounts of money deposited together stands for hard work
鑫：three kinds of metals stuck together signifies prosperity
垚：three units of earth piled together represents a mountain towering against the sky
森：three trees standing together presents a whole forest
淼：three bodies of water flowing together describes a vast expanse of sea
焱：three fires burning together refers to an extremely bright flame
Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, Jodi Stutz Award in Poetry & publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1,689 others worldwide.
After my father abandoned her Mother moved back to the country to live with her sister in the house in which they grew up
My aunt was feeble as she’d been in childhood but my mother was strong from all the farm labour she’d done and still resentful of her sister whom she considered a malingerer
Mother did some work for local farmers who felt sorry for her She put on overalls and pulled on high boots Behind her back they called her “Martha the Hired Man” She worked harder than any of the men though she could be mean to the animals if they gave her trouble
The plaster in the farmhouse was cracked and getting worse as the house, after a century continued to settle
Mother bought adjustable metal poles from Ace Hardware went into the leaky cellar did some wrenching propped up the first floor
All around her were cans with dribs and drabs of paint tools rusted on shelves old, decayed baskets
Mother looked over the baskets and remembered the Indians who had lived in rough houses at the border of the property where the lumber train used to run
Spiders made homes in canning jars The rusty cream separator looked arthritic and thirsty like Old Man Creighton down the road
The cellar clutter depressed her She carried the cream separator upstairs and flung it into the yard She put her arms around the gasoline-powered washing machine –it must have weighed two hundred pounds– carried it up the rickety stairs
fired up her dad’s ’55 Chevy pickup and backed it through the yard
She ran over some day lilies her mother had planted to the consternation of her weak sister who stood behind the screen door a handkerchief held to her mouth
Mother hefted the metal into the truck bed threw in some pipe and a well pump and drove to Padnos’s recycling yard where she sent it all crashing to the ground
Smoke drifted around her and a front loader shoved around mountains of junk Rain was starting to come down
She took the grubby bills the attendant gave her and drove back to the farmhouse the truck rattling over every rut
She went into her bedroom where she had a laptop hooked to a satellite
went back to what she’d been doing for most of the day every day since she’d returned
staring at photos of international orphans with cleft palates and abused dogs and cats
You can find more work from Mitch here on Ink Pantry.
I stumble in to the Royal My stool between dark woman and fair man Ghost-woman drink a beer from a coffee can Unreluctance mobility loyal Steaks on to broil Fair man’s name is Dan Fishing tomorrows plan He puts in hid beer fish oil Half mad deathless God Making friends without half trying Moon mid-watchers awed Gloaming gray sky Alabaster silence Izadi The dark woman is shy
Sleepy Whale 372
She only bikes to Bluebird Organic Vegan food and beer Everyone wearing biking gear Radio music’s Blackbird Alabaster Peanuts absurd Radio’s too loud so all can hear We’re saving the Earth and Deer Save all I herd Ghost Candle lights Neologisms scrutinize way Sun flung flint glass daylight Emmy and Tess Hopscotch play No sun’s solar-power making light Now snowing, where my sled
Sleepy Whale 373
She hitch to the Bear Pit Bar Don’t drink the Morning-Glory Bar-Maids from the Dormitory Suzie Gruff playing her guitar She’s like a poor tuned car Unshed tears sky, like an observatory Too much beer to tell a story See the shooting Star Smelling Geysers through a crack in the door Lost Yellowstone in glass Deck drinking on the second floor July’s Christmas Hiking days, now I’m sore Were at the bottom of the Hourglass
Sleepy Whale 374
Flying star ship to Dragonfly Where’s everyone’s Jetson’s shirt Maladroit silk skirt Atonic fast Barfly Ship to the moon glorify AREA 51, lost in the desert UFO’s alert Mars-Woman’s lullaby Catalectic tetrameter North-Star Mid-watcher moon, Rocket She’s playing atomic guitar Singing for Spacey Sprockets Her bars bizarre She put a Sprocket in my pocket
Sleepy Whale 375
It’s snowing I run to Way Side Inn Snows falling Christmas Eve Ghost Woman in the corner weaves Butt of cigar, Ashes on her Chin Rich silk stockings Feminine It’s Christmas, hard to believe Unshed tears, Crucified shirt’s sleeve Ashland’s forty year Gin Where’s the horse slay? Hearth sitting Sabastian’s glow In the light he’s Gloaming gray Snow falling, wind’s starting to blow Ghost woman begin to sway She’s wanting under the Mistletoe
Sleepy Whale 376
I woke up in a bar named Sue Sitting next to fair lady and dark man Drinking Fat-Tire a condensed milk can I roll over for a brew Pot smoking in the corners new Ghost woman’s sitting next to Ann Alabaster silk stocks wearing Ann’s plan West Wealthy the Well-To-Do Bluebird Oyster Soup Life from Outhouse Booze A game with a mini Basket-ball hoop Outcast woman came back to snooze She almost flew the Coop Closing time she sings the Blues
Sleepy Whale 377
We like drinking in Ogden, a Bar on Wall Old Farmer dropping money in the Jut-box Ghost woman’s alabaster skin and red hair Lox I grab a stool next to Paul He high talks on Jazz Basket-ball Green St. Patty’s foaming Ale paradox Crash?! Snot Green Mustang taking-out the mailbox She screams Last Call Ghost woman’s nobbling her beer Wall hanging my eagle Art Deathless Gods atmosphere She talks like she’s so smart Jut-box won’t stop so we can hear She turned out the lights, now time to depart
Sleepy Whale 378
Octoberfest for a month, Snowbird Waning for Beer at Barfly The tram fly’s the blue sky The Mug size not absurd Eating dropped pop-corn, Black-Birds Don’t let the birds drop in your eye She is she, and I am I She’s princes Lady-Bird Blowing the foam off, Foaming Ale Smoking butt of an old Cigar Sabastian’s alabaster black tail Only standing seats in the Bar Wearing her shocking Electric blue dress She began playing her guitar
Sleepy Whale 379
Doing a Jig to be at Piper Downs As I traverse the maze to my seat Slide past a Ghost woman In green silk Drinking a foaming ale in candle light Dark woman and fair man Hiding in the corner dancing Man with sea cold eyes Smoking gun powder cigarettes Brief gestures to sit Human shell bar maid Gerrymandering Poker playing Farmer’s won’t Stay Sat down
Sleepy Whale 380
Won’t find a key they’re always, open Bar Maid Butt of cigar ashes always on her breath Black Forest Clock-mocking twelve times Fashionable charming, Cotton-ball Barons Wearing rich silk alabaster stockings Such is life Outhouse sewage breath Weasel rats basement, swimming
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.
The tick-tock of horse hooves rouses me from sleep. I crawl from the bed to peer over the hotel balcony.
A man’s red hat bounces steadily below. Wooden wheels click against the dirt in this early hour before any cars pass this way.
The gypsy’s song interrupts the damp morning air. As he drives his cart to market, his voice swells with richness,
beauty from the Old World passed down through the years, now nestled near his heart, the story of his fathers.
It arrives along the same path every day down through the mountain pass, carried by wind and want over the ancient stone.
Scrambled Eggs and Ben Franklin
I remember Saturday mornings at Grandma’s house. I can almost still see her, looking outside of her kitchen window with its blue and white plaid curtains and saying, “Yes, siree, looks like it’s going to be a sunny side up kind of day!”
The air would smell like cinnamon strudel and everything good in the world. Grandma’s spoiled tabby cat, Ben Franklin, would wind around my legs as I sat at the kitchen table, meowing impatiently until I snuck him some of my scrambled eggs.
Grandma said she named him Ben Franklin because he had more common sense than most folks she knew.
In my eight-year old way, I thought life would always be that simple.
But now I’m grown. Ben Franklin’s gone. Grandma’s in a nursing home where some stranger fixes her eggs in the morning. She doesn’t remember us anymore, but every now and then, I see her moving her hands across her lap in a stroking motion.
I always wonder if where she is, she’s dreaming about scrambled eggs and Ben Franklin.
Amy L. George is the author of three chapbooks, the most recent one being The Stopping Places (Finishing Line Press). She holds a doctorate in Literature and Criticism and teaches at a private university in Texas.
Don’t quote what scientists had thought of the heart that lay unburned amongst a pyre’s ceremonious coal, a handful of gold, on the Tuscan shore.
Don Juan had drowned in an ugly storm whose wrath had claimed Percy and all on a voyage of doom, but Keats’s poems were bound to endure, enshrined in a pocket in Percy’s coat to identify his corpse.
In a shroud of silk his heart reposed, befriending Mary wherever she roamed, a grail for thoughts.
Her death bequeathed to us what she adored, wrapped in a poem in which he mourned the death of Adonais, Urania’s orb.
Amulets
My totem is a rivulet
I make amulets of the relics of friends. a few hairs from a feline pet, the leash of my assassinated dog, my dad’s watch which malfunctioned shortly before he died.
My talisman is my second sight, a precognition of events to come: of seas trespassing over grounds, of birds remapping their ancient charts, of bullets rebounding to hunters’ chests, of Zest depleted of its zest.
Her smile, a charm around my wrist and words she whispered in my dreams, I wreathe with lilies to deflect my fears.
Edward Scissorhands
With silver blades, Edward sculptured art, the unique youth endowed with scissor hands, vying with masters whose fingers carved everlasting marks!
I grew to cherish every blade of grass that Grandma tended in her hospitable house. Emerald had coloured every childhood trance, bequeathing to me a fructuous cast of mind.
I view the dubbing of chivalrous knights with blades of glory from ancient times and wonder if a woman like myself can earn the title Knight with a blade of ink.
Expansive
My flat mate had once informed me that she could only become expansive after a glass of intoxicating wine.
I told her I had the opposite problem for I readily wore an expansive smile which a friend used to discourage in our misapprehending times.
I’m aware of this trend for smile enhancements to which some actors and politicians resort, but my smile does not serve a purpose, it does not placate, appease or enthrall. It merely mirrors an inner comportment.
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.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Yesterday I ate ten dollars’ worth of salad. Here is how it happened: My wife was at her book club And, recalling those Teacher appreciation lunches They used to throw for us, Stylish young parents in Black Cadillac SUVs— Exotic salads, all manner of Rice and pasta, marinated vegetables, Olives, oregano, oil and vinegar— I betook myself to an affluent market Near our upscale shopping mall, Passing the hot bar, pizza and sushi, And started filling my biodegradable box With commingled delicacy. Next to me were three men about 50, Business casual, Speaking a European language I did not recognize: Strange place for a power lunch. I thought to myself: There’s a metaphor here someplace; If you wait, it will emerge.
They charge by the pound. Embarrassed by my excess, I took some home. Julie was coming over With her young, two kids With different stories. I shared with her kale greens In a balsamic vinaigrette.
Cairns: Rye, New Hampshire July 2015
Places are prompts So I always bring paper and pen To Odiorne Point.
From a distance The cairns look like people. Up close, some are: Children, rock upon rock, Add to the gallery, Silhouettes, mist rising, Burned off the promontory. Some are engineered, like pyramids. On this one a little girl, maybe four, Places a third rock atop a second: It is enough, Trail markers not needed, a holy site.
Moments past low tide, Shimmering bands of water inch landward. I walk back across the gravel beach To where my grandsons look for crabs. Another family approaches. Someone says, “Oh, I do hope the tide comes in.” It has every day So far.
In The Days Following Hurricane Katrina: August 2005
We sit before cable TV In sick, entranced numbness; Cathode ray exudes an unspeakable pain. A chapter in our lives Washed over by waters toxic with despair: We hid from a storm there once, A third of a lifetime ago. Now, with anger and revulsion, Love and hope, We grieve for the losses of friends, For the place where our children were young.
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.
You can find more of Bob’s poems here on Ink Pantry.
She finally moved from Fukushima fled its failed, toxic nuclear plant I wasn’t close to her, don’t want to be close to her
I get nervous when she moves toward me, arms wide with a smile unnaturally bright like the ladies who painted radium on watch dials and licked their brushes to keep them pointy
I don’t want to love her don’t want to be inside her No means no
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.
More work from Mitch, including his Inky Interview here.
Ancient stump with brown pine needles sprinkled on the forest floor. No sign of the trunk and canopy that was once rooted Through and by this humble stump. Further ahead, a hickory stands like granite. Around its crooked and askew trunk winds a vine, Embracing the hickory. The vine is splayed, its fingers fly out Like the digits of a child touching the air. To my left, a white pine, the monarch of trees, Massive and straight and soaring to untold and mythical heights. Directly in front of me, two trees, Soldered together like conjoint twins. Are they/is it one tree Or two? Do they nourish each other? Sprinkling the forest floor, White flowers as delicate as spiderwebs. Lazy in the sun that bleaches the air. The breeze is gentling, Touching my skin like a breath.
Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s been a merchant seaman, a high school English teacher, a corporate communications writer, a textbook editor, an educational consultant, and a free-lance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, Chicago Life, Across the Margin, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Blue Lake Review, The Literary Yard, Scarlet Leaf Review, Spillwords Press, Fiction on the Web, Sweet Tree Review, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.
Our children, Who art of future generations, May your lives be blessed, Your dreams fulfilled, Your hearts content for now and ever after. Forgive us our socio-political mistakes and the work it will require of you, As we must forgive our own parents and previous generations. Do not be led into the temptations of hatred and hypocrisy, But deliver yourselves from the paths of injustice and inequity. For your children’s kingdom Depends upon what you leave to them.
Revealing
The life I thought I’d have, But wasn’t it at all, Became as much a surprise to me As tulips in the fall,
That odd expectancy Of unanticipated pregnancy. Or, life bled from a story As from humanity’s great vein.
A blanket was unfolded To find, instead, a tapestry. And, I didn’t so much unfold it, As stop preventing it being opened.
Torn Photo Legacies
Towards the end, You were tearing up photos When we came to visit you, Bring you chicken from your favourite restaurant, Brew you coffee in the machine We gave you for Christmas.
We asked you why you tore them. You had a guilty look, but a realistic reply. “No one wants them. I don’t have anyone left.” It was true. What were we to you? Family, yes, in a sense – but not relatives. We don’t know anyone Who knew who you once knew.
But, then again, Breaking bread with you Alongside our children Was always more important Than whomever you once Broke bread with.
Mourning the Future
Children cry for many reasons That adults ponder for many seasons As they cry too To understand The tears of babes, The punishments of man.
Freshly birthed, departed From all that’s known, unaware of all that’s started The healthiest Newborn cries, As mournfully as a parent Who sees their grown child die.
Parents and children are separated Because of politicians who have long loved to hate The poor, Vulnerable, and innocent, While inculcating Policies of ignorance.
Yet crying fails us. Or does it? It may not solve what ails us. But it expresses A need, For acknowledgment, Making demands for a future we must heed.
Samantha Terrell is an American poet whose work emphasizes social justice and emotional integrity. Her poetry has been published in a variety of chapbooks and journals, including: Algebra of Owls, Dissident Voice, Dove Tales by Writing for Peace, the Ebola chapbook by West Chester University (PA), Knot Magazine, Lucky Jefferson, Peeking Cat Poetry, Poetry Quarterly and others. Raised in the American Midwest, Samantha and her family now reside in Upstate New York.
True, back then, he was a foolish fellow – mind lost in mazes, avant garde for fame. The dawn he heard those warblers singing in the willow wood ended his foppish ways.
He let his lyrics amble, breathed the songs within the trees, came to the river bank. The pipes of Pan unstrung his childhood pages. He saw Ratty and timorous Mole rowing.
He waved to them. Badger, Badger, they called. Badger he became. A life of black and white.
The Fencers
His habits build a fence with hammer and nail, unplugged rhythms gives pulse to purpose. He pins the wood as if it were untamed. a greening thirst rooted in earth. His son thinks him daft, hungers for things electric. Time is money, he mutters to himself, scoffing the bara brith his mum had made. Cake defeats him. Binds the beat of his heart.
Matins
The stoop of cloud broods a hunchbacked cumulus. Work beckons.
Slowly drying she switches on another humming light
and mumbles along flowery margins tying curtains that thread
to rituals of waking with tea and toast and thick cut marmalade.
Repeating and rehearsing and repeating will map the muddle of intentions
but she swims the waves with mermaids long after the breakfast hour.
Phil Wood studied English Literature at Aberystwyth University. He has worked in statistics, shipping, and a biscuit factory. His writing can be found in various publications, most recently in: Fly on the Wall Press (Issue 6), Ink Sweat and Tears, Poetry in Public, Poetry Shed, Allegro.
