On The Tides Of The New

Draped in dull glow of a pale sky
the city awakens to its own rhythm;
Metro rail snaking its tortuous way to
ease flow of life in a paradigm.
Distances dissolve; brows no more wet
with sweat for one to dig his shack;
Gone was the sea lore when a voyageur
took years to anchor his bark.
And too weary to revel in his triumph.
Now beyond home lurk the avenues
on the arc of change; tech wizardry
unwinding windows to aspiring millions.
No romancing the sky, black or blue.
Earth is borne on the tides of the New.

My Tryst With Squirrel

I watched the spry squirrel
scamper away hearing
my footfall; Its ear turned
to even slight dissonance of
sound and it rushed to guard
Its nest; a fretful companion,
content to feed its
squealing offsprings, also
hearkening to my short fuse.

Its energy was unfailing;
it would sweep to the
terrace to grab any morsel
It could feed; the red stripes
on its back, caressed by a mythical
Lord kept egging it on
perhaps; It knew when
the windows would
drop down at night to squeeze
inside for a nap in its niche;
Its squealing heralded
the dawn of dawn too.
Nudging me to open
the window to the trove
of morning breeze flowing in;
And it would rush out.

Wonder what is its missive?
“Wake up Man, it’s time.”

Superannuation

When the destined place of arrival closes in
a leaf of memory throbs with the long
memento of landmarks reached and missed.
Let missed calls die out in the log.

Regrets ever remain in unused folders,
pop up to be trashed into the bog;
Monsoon flies buzzing around the bulb.

On the winding path skirt the shrubs,
breathe the fragrance of fresh blossoms.
Things lost or denied count less than
trees flitting across the train’s window.

Spinning on its thumb the earth has seen
the revolving ends of despair and hope.
On the orb of this rolling circus?

K.S.Subramanian has published two volumes of verse: Ragpickers and Treading on Gnarled Sand through the Writers’ Workshop, Kolkata, India. His short stories have appeared in indianruminations.com, setumag.com, indianreview.in, Tuck magazine and museindia.com.

Arrest this lament
this false flag of endeavor
parachute of the midnight aplomb
splendor soils christened by an exorama
defouled by a parasite cancel
who are you in the liturgy of night?
nameless index
of heathen imperial purple
no margin, no reprieve
augur of ceremonial reimagining
of unnoticed thoughts
searing in erasure
murmur of accidental day
a chastised saucerful of secrets
eviscerator heaven on call

Inky Interview Exclusive: Rus Khomutoff, a Neo-Surrealist Poet From Brooklyn

Poetry Drawer: Prisoner of Infinity: To Felino A. Soriano by Rus Khomutoff

Poetry Drawer: Sonic Threshold of the Sacred: To William Carlos Williams: by Rus Khomutoff

Inkphrastica: Song of Freedom Oasis by Rus Khomutoff (Words) & Now That’s What I Call Blue by Mark Sheeky (Oil Painting)

Poetry Drawer: Four Poems by Rus Khomutoff

In search of a morally uni-vocal answer
There is either right or wrong,
No tertium quid, no equivocity

Seek for the truth,
and meet with scandals and horrors
in multivocal clamor

You do not need bombs and bullets
to hush people’s gums and blur the truth
Terror can be masqueraded as substantive laws

Superpowerism as a promotion
of global movement for democracy
A regression of freedom into monarchical dictatorship.

If plongeurs thought at all,
they would long ago have gone on strike
Eric Arthur Blair mutters over his Chardonnay

The truth is diluted like wine
the sheeple are thrown into a quagmire
“Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear”

Inky Articles: A Spotlight on Miltos Sachtouris: by Sofia Kioroglou

Cathy Across the Table

My best friend scoots
into the restaurant bundled
against cold spring air. We search
the chalk board and waitin’ line. We
should get a cupcake to
mark the occasion, she says, about
to move 300 miles south
of the Arctic Circle. We toast
our friendship with bowls
of lentil soup, her eyes
sparkle with girlhood
surprise at our window table when I hand
her an afghan I crocheted to warm
Alaskan nights. April showers
pound the glass calling
up our sunlit kayak trip that ended
rain-swamped and overturned. We laugh
and slurp our memories. I want
to make this last and sidestep
good-byes. Tomorrow, Cathy
will leave and despite
promises, our connection will
cease in a relationship
void of commitment.

Lesson Learned

Below a window-framed parking
lot, beside a cushioned time-out
chair, a gray bucket hosts
rock weapons. Six-year olds,
desperate for food, fresh air, try
to stare the classroom clock
into warp

speed. Ms Thompson
hoists the rock bucket
onto her desk, holds
forth active shooter defense strategy. Suzy

reaches for the teddy
bear hidden in her desk, while Jeremy
sucks his thumb and Nicholas imagines finger
painting his rock, before Jane says, My
Mommy won’t let me throw rocks. The lunch bell rings.

Jeremy grabs the newly
vacant swing, as an older boy
pushes him aside, to climb
skyward. Jeremy
fires a rock at the blonde
airborne head.

Decency

In a cobwebbed corner of my mind, it hides before
stepping out in top hat and tails
for a carriage ride across the city, proceeds
to the homeless,
documented
on the Society Page, it

dons a pink
tee-shirt, race number, raising
cash for breast cancer, finishing
time splashed
across Facebook. It

donates to a wildlife society, covets
polar bear gift socks under
my slippers. In

the forefront of my mind, it
sometimes dances, in silent satisfaction
helping a neighbour with
trash, listening to
a co-worker, making
an afghan for a homeless woman.

Inky Interview Special: Poet Karen Wolf from Bowling Green, Ohio

Poetry Drawer: Who She is Not by Karen Wolf

Poetry Drawer: Claustrophobia by Karen Wolf

Tumbling south, swifts and swallows blur the sky
with their numbers; geese wedge their sonorous way
toward longer days before the first frost falls,
each driven or led by a urge sensed
and accepted beyond our comprehension.
But the heron overhead, alone except
for the patch of dawn it carries on its back,
decides each day which pond or beaver bog,
which river bank to haunt–a compass rose
of courses to choose from with each sunrise,
and no flock to follow, or shift in seasons
to shoulder this daily decision we share–
necessity’s mundane miracle
of industry and resolution.

I know better than to leave a place
And expect to find it
Exactly where I left it
This time, I return home a foreigner
I’m not sure I ever really belonged here
Forever the pre-trembling of this half-broken house
Always on the verge of collapse
Foundation rotting, eaten away
I fit here like a baby tooth already lost
Nothing grew in my place
I don’t complete this empty face
Not lost, just out of place
I teeter on the edge
And disappear without a trace

Inky Interview: Shannon Donaghy from Montclair State University, New Jersey

Poetry Drawer: Occupied by Shannon Donaghy

Cabin

There is a place in Maine,
near Belfast, where the oaks
trundle up to the oceanside,
fifty feet of shattered rock
separating soil from surf.

The cabin sits behind
that rock, the clearing hewn
some years ago, the house
built, then, two rooms
and shed, then added
onto later.

This place. This
is where I want you.

Let me carry you inside, show you
wood and varnish walls, oaken floors
worm smooth with centuries
of footsteps. The desk, the bed
walnut carved
within this house and never moved.

Through the door, the kitchen
cast iron and wood stove
two chairs, an ashtray
made of stone. When the house
was built, there was no shower;
the builder’s wife, waist-length hair
bunned up, stood naked
in the washtub as he poured
lukewarm water over her
washed her back with hands
calloused from carving.

Now building codes have intervened,
a bathroom added, papered
and electric, running water.
Some things, though, never change.
Undress, expose your body
by the flicker of the lantern
step into the tub
and close your eyes.
Let me wash you
in the water we have heated
touch your back
with calloused, trembling hands.

Cold

The motel room this morning
I woke up
and all traces of you were gone

I kissed the sheets
where your musk scented them
took a tape
you’d left on the TV
and looked for you
shivering
in February morning air

your apartment was empty
your scent absent

your favourite stores
the bus stop
our corner booth at Tiffany’s
all were air-conditioned
in the chill
and you were in none

I left another message
pulled the blankets close
sat down to wait
for your call

Phillipe Soupault Wouldn’t Have Done This

I wish
I could smoke
in these grey
academic cages

or that this crowd
of harried housewives
and eager idealists
practicing Art
could meet in a bar
biweekly

instead of being outcasts
like the great wretches we read
who go to Cabaret Voltaire
and drink absinthe in the rain
pass folded papers
and scrawl drunken notes

we sit in our cells
and watch the war
in the Persian Gulf
write dry lyrics
to dead times
stroke old wounds
on new battlefields
comfortable and dry

I want to go
to the dream
of white-eyed
engineers and
headache pills
who talk.

Come with me
walk through the rain
to a little restaurant
on the corner
of 13^th and Pine
we can eat
and talk
and write

bars down the street
to drink in
cheap hotels
for quick liaisons
when the pen
is sapped of ideas
and the air!

Dark, smoky,
filled with falafel
and feta cheese
perfect place
to write and talk.

Illicit lovers tryst
by the window
read each other’s
poems palms
and psalms to sex

in the corner
a skinny artist
with rimless glasses
looks up, looks down,
sporadic scribbles
intertwined with bites
of falafel sandwich
watches the lovers

(yes, even Starving
Artists can afford it)

who are engaged
in nothing but themselves
first exchange
of poems takes
all their concentration

they look up
and laugh
and kiss

Phillippe and friends
wouldn’t have hated it,
I think, not like
this antiseptic room

pen strokes paper
pulls purrs
of lust and moonlight
from the fibers
lovers wrestle in between
and tigers roar
rivers run
the moon dies
its nightly death.

Shrove Tuesday

Lost and running, searching for you,
I am crushed by mountains.

Seeing you is pain,
A pain of too much honey tinged with blood.

Goddess, I cannot look at you
over rivers, or sunlit lakes. I cannot
demand your presence, no more than I could
see your face by staring at your hands.
Even kiss me once, my goddess,
let me feel your lips on mine, your perfect
Lips of honey tinged with blood.

Inky Interview Special: Poet (& Noise Maker) Robert Beveridge, from Akron, Ohio

Poetry Drawer: A Lesson in Composition by Robert Beveridge

Poetry Drawer: The Drowned City by Robert Beveridge

Poetry Drawer: To Be or Not to Be by Robert Beveridge

In At The Kill

Pigeons on the rooftops,
a body of prey,
hawk claws grip telephone pole,
take a hundred different forms,
a picture perfect pose
the right way to measure –
look up, a symbol,
changing at the blink of an eye.

If I ever had the strength
to peek through that book
of concentration camp horrors,
difficult words, unconscionable phrases
would compete with one another
for a better grasp of evil’s history
though for how long
could the mind still claim to be master?

I could trace iniquity, back and forth,
from the unborn to the living
to the relief of never having brought
a child into the world,
the darkness repeating itself,
maintaining both depth and surface,
in bodies draped across each other,
bald heads, dead eyes, that depart
from what I know of people,
then the ashes of the ovens,
the Nazi Auto-da-fe,
the acts that overstep even
the worst that I can imagine,
ordinary people
taking on this ghastly form of reality,
owed an impossible apology
to go with the sorry plots and crosses.

Pigeons on the rooftops
do not hone the mind’s values,
can never be noble,
like the hawk
that eyes the fattest of them,
is about to swoop,
satisfy its hunger.
I am fine with it.
I have learned that each kill is different.
Some must always be remembered.
Some grant the witness license
to go home and hug his loved ones.

Sorry But

Regarding making your home,
partly my home,
I’m afraid the furniture
is too ugly for my tastes,
likewise the colour of the drapes
and, most of all,
your expectations.

I find I work best
as a solitary man
who interacts with others of his kind occasionally
but finds that overdoing it
can lead to changes in dress sense,
in habits, clean or otherwise,
and strange food in the refrigerator.

So I find I must refuse
your kind offer –
same for your disagreeable demand.

Poetry Drawer: An Awkward Meeting in a Coffee House by John Grey

Inky Interview Special: John Grey, Australian Poet, USA resident

In the womb of the restless sea:
a place, deep dark- green moss and a slippery floor
with mottled plants, shining fish
other aquatic creatures with
exotic eyes/limbs.
There—lies buried the
treasure of memories made up of hulls broken and rusted iron
railings/anchors and chests, all
dreamed up by the mercenaries and hunters, in every greedy age.

Divers find pictures, logs, guns and other trivia there, attesting
to a fragment from the past that
wears a human face in those murky zones.

In the subterranean depths where the sun does not exist
but the moon can walk in and light up things
of mystery. There lives a pining mermaid
seen earlier by a Dane.

And later on, by other believing eyes, startled
by the hybrid form, some say, mythic.

Is love the property of humans only?
The other species might feel identical joy and pain.

That mermaid and the foamy underworld once
ruled by the Poseidon in a dim past, it
still exists someplace far-off but now
relegated to the margins of the collective
imagination of an age cynical.

Inky Interview Special: Mumbai-Based Academic & Author Dr. Sunil Sharma