Chance, as always. Sudden rain & a street without awnings. Open double-doors nearby, the room beyond gaslit. A small hand-painted plaque, Maximilian Planck’s Wunderkammer, read in passing, interpreted inside.
*
A personal museum, small as they always are. Once might have been a doctor’s surgery or a dance studio. Not even a shop. Windowless. A widow’s pension- eking pittance, the widow’s mite.
*
He’d seen them before. Usually military, the bits left over from a life that was never shared. Medals & Mauser bullets, though never the one that got them in the end — if they died that way. Most caught the pox or plague, or fell from their horse in a drunken stupor.
*
This one medical. Abnormal an- atomical specimens on shelves against the back wall. Inherently dangerous. Jars full of alcohol. The spluttering sconces on the wall.
*
Had seen better. Had friends at St Bartholomew’s.
*
But still, but still. The honesty of the items stopped his heart. For a moment, for this moment. Later, as he thought about them, it would happen again.
*
He knows there will be one time it will stop forever.
Mark Young’s most recent books are Songs to Come for the Salamander: Poems 2013-2021, selected & with an introduction by Thomas Fink (Meritage Press & Sandy Press); Your order is now equipped for shipping (Sandy Press); & The Advantages of Cable (Luna Bisonte Prods).
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
walking at night and the financial district fires, I guess because they leave the lights on so the night-cleaners can work.
seen from a distance it looks damn impressive, propped up against the velvet of some soft and studded sky like stacking racks of driftwood gone ember on a lakeshore and just far enough away that if you didn’t know you’d never guess the length –
during daylight city towers goliath and sometimes I walk in it, forever in the foothills of a mountain range solid as the edges of eagles in the sky, enough to disrupt gravity and leave the birds that die in flight falling sideways and toppling through windows and ruining board meetings.
but at night on the way to the store for wine or tonic water you see them for what they are; the imitation of the lazy flame gloriously burning like christmas trees. without self-knowledge, feeding on themselves, showing their true light only to those who cant afford to work there –
in 500 years not even our bones will be remembered.
This time last year
I try to shy, somehow, from this tiresome “topical poetry”. to just write the day as it paces and lays itself out. as if everything weren’t an echo of everything. just writing, just living, things always bounce in. life all around me – awareness of life. and
it seems, this time last year, that everyone wanted some statement of Pandemic Poetry. “Love in the Time of Covid” the “theme issue” title that every third magazine chose. consciously, I didn’t write them, but still, I did write – and by doing so, probably did. I am a personal poet. but things happen – they do – and I hear of them. of course they effect me – the room
that you sing in will alter the shape of the song. an opera house. showers. the kitchen, making coffee. different sounds, ringing, though you use the same notes. the room you are standing in changes the shape of your singing though what people sing of is so rarely ever the room.
(March 2021)
Red.
red hair. fiery strwby hair. nipples red, a sofa, patched red with grey patches rubbed bald by our asses and hands. and her name was red in gaelic, and a tv on with something unimportant – these are the memories:
16, her 15, doing badly at sex worse at love thinking about her friend her thinking about her friend’s boyfriend.
now she is in a queer relationship and her old boyfriend is somewhere unthreatening anymore.
we used to screw together and quite slowly in her mother’s apartment after school next to the window in view of the red decks of buses.
Talented friends
the story goes: vonnegut (he tells in a book) was not really feeling inspired. he wrote to a friend about it –
feeling like that – and the friend then wrote back – was a poet, apparently – and cut up the text of
the letter. made it into a poem, or to look like one, anyway –
the moral, apparently, to tell him that even uninspired he was able to write. I don’t know if it helps, even if you’re kurt vonnegut,
when you feel like that, having talented friends.
Moments happen.
sure, yes of course, there are moments we argue, as must any people who make any plan.
I forget where things go. let saucepans boil over; she’s sarcastic about it and I lose my cool. moments happen,
but they’re bricks which a life is made up of. they are not what we’re building to live in.
DS Maolalai has received eleven nominations for Best of the Net and seven for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in three collections; “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and “Noble Rot” (Turas Press, 2022).
someone telling you it’s almost too late your entire life, and then it is, and is this comedy or is it tragedy?
do you outlive your children or bury them all one at a time?
and maybe i’m part of this particular picture
maybe the sunlight is never as pure as we remember
you’re smiling at the edge of a field of flowers, but there are always shadows spilling across your face
there are always angry voices reach in from other rooms
blame to be assigned and refused and some of us grow up while others just grow old
some of us grow wings
none of us escape
what you feel about this never really makes any difference in the end
in mercy blind
here in this bluegrey room and suffocating beneath the idea of failure of mine of yours of everyone’s and here beneath this twilight sky in the kingdom of oblivion
age of lies and age of truth
of pregnant women butchered by soldiers of children sold into slavery of endless fucking massacre and in the end all we are is proof of the futility of man-made gods
of untrue democracies
of all power coming from weapons or wealth and maybe we are even hope
maybe we can still learn to dance on the graves of tyrants and false idols with bloodthirsty joy
maybe we are not quite lost
heretic
collision isn’t fatal but the blood offers possibilities
tv on the wrong channel and the president speaks of raping babies
shouts about the importance of wealth, the need for vengeance, the illusion of victory and everything spoken through a mouthful of sawdust and dogshit and then the man with the gun laughs
says there’s no such thing as something new
says this, and then he takes his own life and, in a world without safety, there can only be promises kept or promises broken
can only be darker shades of grey and red
the two of us alone in a stranger’s room and waiting for the first light of day
with broken wings, with bruised hearts
& the future is prisons, you see, and the future is loss
let go of yr house, of yr children, but hang onto the hatred that defines you
give up christ
give up all those pretty songs your mother used to sing
close in on holiness like a soldier taking aim
one from the valley of ashes
motherfucking high in the bathroom, nosebleed spraying all over the wall, the mirror, dripping into the sink and julie laughing about the broken glass
laughing about the beginning and the end
all of the shit in between
gods & priests & kings and the trails of corpses they always leave behind
a wasted mouthful
nothing to lead and nowhere to go and no one cares if you die anyway
no one cares if you live in sight of the land
we are all kingdoms, right?
we all go to sleep
we all burn
and don’t apologize, but don’t expect any applause, either
the best gifts remain unspoken
the best years are always referred to in the past tense
do you see how that’s funny?
do you understand the alchemy of corpse into god?
talk to cobain about his cure for addiction
ask if he sees the irony in the voice of a generation being a suicide
once you’ve got that sense of humour, there’s really nothing else you need
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A FLAG ON FIRE IS A SONG OF HOPE (2019 Scars Publications) and A DEAD MAN, EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).
You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The source of night finally enters the city. Unwedded to sense, it conjures up a storm. An effort to become whole through union with another is thwarted by a stab of lightning, a roll of thunder. An imaginary picture in the mind is set aflame. So phony and brilliant can’t get together with conceited and raw. Too much changing, transference, transforming. Sustained energy comes in the form of bad waking dreams. Secret knowledge scratches and shrieks and howls. Suggestions are true and make everybody nervous. It’s a sideshow. It’s a trapeze act. It’s no longer about people. A strange face emerging from the shadows suggests a different function.
Regarding my Creation
You were in error to give birth to me. If you want, I’ll stay away and you can replace me with ceramics or quilts. That one moment of heat can be your hands feverishly working the potter’s wheel, making shapes that stay shapes, articles so useful or so decorative they never outstay their welcome. That dream of family can be you gliding long patient needles through endless skeins of wool while folds of warm and loving fabric gather on your lap. It’s how we make sense of those infrequent times I visit. Yes I could have made something of myself. But you could just as easily have made something.
The Fruit of Middle Age
A plump squash plucked from the field, she hugs all the way to the house like a new baby. Or breasts when she lifts it high. Or her stomach when her arms sag.
Her man watches from the widow, opens the door as she approaches the stoop, ushers wife and fruit into the kitchen where she plumps her prize on the table.
She grew it, he’s thinking. It’s an extension of her flesh, her bone. He runs his hands over the smooth, hard rind. Best of all, it’s new. And at a time when nothing else is.
Romance
Hasn’t happened yet but I hold out hope: the sidewalk café in Lyon, the beautiful young French woman at the next table, sipping her expresso, reading Arthur Miller’s “Tropic Of Cancer” in English, looking up at me with pale green eyes, soft mouth, and with an accent like a get-together of all romance tongues extant, and who asks, “Can you help me with this word?”
You might think that the more settled I am, the more contented in my marriage, the less likely I’m to be in such a situation and, even if it did happen, I’d act more like a language professor than a young man in thrall to delicate beauty, inviting demeanor.
But, all my life, I’ve known the word, have kept it close, awaiting the opportunity to explain, translate or just say it aloud. It’s a mighty word. I would hate to waste it.
The Saga of my Office
Fingers tap an invigorating rhythm. And I’ve never known a pen yet that didn’t burrow like a rabbit in a bundle of papers. And look, the coaster and the CD are transposed. Can’t keep the desk from wobbling. I’m buried in junk. Disarray will have to be array for the immediate future. This DVD has been watched once but will never be seen again. But it’s with me until the end. That’s what I like about trash. It doesn’t complain. It stands by me. Every ill-suited thing has always been suited to me. I give my dress-sense as evidence. Throw in the mix-tape that combines Def Leppard with Carnival of the Animals. And where did I put the screw driver? And do I really need it now anyhow? Meanwhile, I rest my coffee cup on Ray Charles. And I’m surrounded by printers. It’s all a mess but so is a field of wildflowers. And it so resembles what I imagine imagination to look like. But I wonder where I put that poem I was revising. My brain says toss out what you don’t need. But my heart’s having none of it. Besides, who knows what use the useless will someday provide. My books are up to their old habits. They just won’t stick to alphabetical order. The one I’m looking for is around here somewhere. So much else is. Why shouldn’t it be?
At the Border
Shocked out of sleep. Coalpit dark. Bus at a standstill. Windows coated in dust.
Men in uniforms, with guns, usher us into a nearby building.
A thousand questions in stumbling English. A thousand stumbling answers. How long, who with and where. Best innocent expression.
Passport glared at, begrudgingly stamped.
I’m one of the lucky ones.
Another guy is dragged off to a different room, door closed behind him. He does not get back on the bus.
More sleep. In a different country this time.
Part of the pleasure of travel. Not wanted. But not wanted nearly enough.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages and Memory Outside The Head, and Guest of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.
You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.
My adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Villette, and The Waves have been adopted by three Hollywood directors for the big screen, with Hans Zimmer as the main candidate to write the music themes. My first collection of poetry is a best-seller in numerous countries and in Glasgow there are endless queues before WH Smith.
I plan to purchase with the massive revenue a small cottage overlooking some Scottish lake and a rowing boat that bears my lapdog’s name, away from sirens, bullets and roaring war planes. I also intend on the thirty-first of May to dance away the privations of the last three decades in a club that plays the music of the eighties for my sixtieth year.
The constant wagging of Lucia’s tail terminates my self-hypnosis, taking me back to another bland day for we need to descend and ascend flights of stairs with the absolute absence of electricity. My mouth retrieves its bitter taste. My nostrils quiver with revulsion at the smells emanating from neighbours and cafes. My eyes dread encountering the habitual, banal scenes. The cost of living in daydreams is an extra acrid flavor to fermenting reality.
The Cost of Living in Your Heart
The cost of living in your heart was the rising blood level that swamped my hearth every time your eyes encountered a bonny lass.
It was also draughty with your outdoor style, so much skiing, so many golf rounds, chilling my bones on many lonesome nights.
Your heart accommodated so many rooms, so many corridors and bolted doors, so lavishly furnished with extravagant halls, a labyrinth with no exits, a citadel with rings of moats.
It was always resonating to international news, to the Stock Exchange, to the price of oil, so enterprise had mounted its hallowed throne.
The cost of living in your heart was a sheer waste of my blighted youth.
A Renegade
I was caught with a surplus of dignity hidden between the folds of my brain, with grams of self-respect that exceed the permissible weight, with currents of smuggled passion that the throbs of my heart betrayed, with psychological and emotional treason.
The PBI, Psychological Bureau of Investigation, issued a warning that was stamped on my passport and my ID, a chip was inserted in my wrist to monitor my pulse and inward heat for I was a possible renegade with my inability to hate.
Heroes in the Seaweed
“There are heroes in the seaweed,” Leonard Cohen sang in Susanne, whose shortened form is the name I was given as a new-born, after a character in The World of Suzie Wong.
How can the seaweed whose frailty is an established metaphor conceive heroes who are usually born of mighty gods with lineage, immortality, and some aesthetic form? I always pondered but eventually forgot myself in the poetry and music that enthralled.
Perhaps the ‘in’ refers to their dwelling place, inhabiting the deep with anonymity, performing their miracles and then vanishing without making a public speech to win the masses’ acclaim!
Who are “the heroes in the seaweed” of the twenty-first century “when charity is a coat you wear twice a year,” as George Michael reiterated and pacifists are impotent before the wars that incessantly rage? Hunger is still marching at a strident pace and persecution is competing with the best torture tools of the Medieval Age!
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 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.
Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The chains we forge in life are heavy. The sound and movement of James Hyland as Jacob Marley (Deceased), struggling to breathe, carrying the chains, navigating the stage with such expertise, inviting us to believe that a dead man could walk, talk, and morph into many other Dickensian characters without costume changes, yep, sold! My suspension of disbelief was well and truly suspended for the whole performance. To complement this, Chris Warner, composer and sound designer, added a delicious gothic array of disturbing morgue echoes. Well, what a special way to begin the festive season.
The Crewe Lyceum Theatre staged this terrific production on 5/12/22: A Christmas Carol – As Told by Jacob Marley (Deceased), adapted and performed by multi award-winning actor/writer/artistic director, James Hyland of Brother Wolf Productions. Established in 1998, Brother Wolf Productions is an award-winning company whose previous successes include the acclaimed 5-star monodrama, Jekyll & Hyde. The company has produced award-winning theatre, TV, film, and radio productions, including numerous nationwide tours at other prestigious venues in the UK, such as the Royal Albert Hall, the Alban Arena, St George’s Hall, the Stockport Plaza, and the Leicester Square Theatre in London’s West End.
Hyland is mankind! He literally jumps from character to character, from Marley to Scrooge, to the magpie people pinching deceased Scrooge’s belongings, even to the adorable Tiny Tim. Such energy. Such force. Genius.
Hyland gives us strong flashes of Albert Finney, and Alastair Sim, at their darkest. He not only lights up the stage with his vibrant personality and skill, but terrifies us too, so much so that at times I was scared to look directly into his eyes. What make-up! Extraordinary work by costume and make-up designer Nicki Martin-Harper.
In a happy memory of Christmas past, we are invited to a festive party to join the host, Scrooge’s old jolly boss Fezziwig, where Scrooge recognises people from the past, in the audience, making us feel part of the story. Scrooge sees himself as a young man. Regrets? He has a few…
One haunting line that really stood out for me was that Scrooge is ‘aligned to the child’, Tiny Tim. The warning is that Scrooge’s decisions and ensuing actions in not giving the Cratchit family a living wage (Hyland so captures the zeitgeist, take note, greedy government and employers) could have grave consequences for the well-being of the poor Cratchit family, especially Tiny Tim. After his character development arc in gaining wisdom, Hyland’s portrayal as Scrooge speaking from a window, down to the boy who fetches the prizewinning turkey, is joyful and heartwarming (with only a chair as a prop, incredible!) and he captures the true essence of this precautionary tale.
Ok, so what did we learn about Marley that we didn’t already know? Difficult question. I think that Marley is, excuse the pun, deadly serious about his warning to Scrooge, he is truly sorry for his avarice, and is in agony, in purgatory. Great, but oh dear. Will he be eventually released now he has helped Scrooge? Maybe one day, but not quite yet…
Do go and see this one-man-show if you can. You’ll have no regrets (Marley’s groan).
After crossing the bridge over the Yellowstone River south of Laurel, Montana, Paul turned off Highway 212 onto River Road. “Three miles to go.”
“Are you sure it’s still there?” Margo said.
“Yesterday Google said it was. Somebody could have put a match to it between then and now, of course.”
Paul pulled off River Road into a patch of weeds and turned off the engine. “It’s still here.”
Margo leaned forward and peered through the windshield at the dilapidated house a few feet from the car. “This is what we came to see. Your boyhood home.” She spoke as if she was announcing the time of day or the ambient temperature.
“Yes.”
“We drove 800 miles from Seattle, so I can look at a tumble-down shack.” Her voice remained flat, distant.
Paul looked embarrassed. “I guess so.”
“Now are you going to tell me why we’re here?”
When he didn’t reply, she squeezed his arm and said, “I’m so tolerant.”
Paul grinned. “That’s why I married you.”
“Nonsense. You married me for my pension.”
Paul laughed. “Well, yes, I did, but you’re not supposed to know that.” He looked at Margo. She was the only person he knew who could smile with just her eyes. Her eyes were glowing with warmth and humour.
He opened the car door. “I haven’t been here for sixty-eight years. Let’s look around.”
They got out of the car. Paul surveyed the ruins of the house where he had spent the first thirteen years of his life. Gaping holes, like vacant eye sockets, loomed where window glass had once been, and the doors were missing, having been pulled from the hinges years ago. All the exterior clapboards on the house’s south wall had been stripped away by old-wood scavengers, exposing warped studs that looked like the ribs of a skinned animal with its thorax split open.
They walked to the house. “Are there snakes here?” Margo asked.
“Could be. One day the old man beat a rattlesnake to death with a hoe right around here.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” she said, eyeing the thick growth of dead weeds scraping against her legs. “It doesn’t look safe. Don’t you dare go in there,” she said when they got near the house.
He thought about her caution as he gazed at the ruin; don’t go in there. An acid taste flooded his mouth. “No, I’m not going in. There’s nothing inside I want.”
He looked up. Two rusty corrugated metal sheets, what remained of the roof, clung to the rafters like brown scabs on a wound that refused to heal. He grimaced at the memory of him and Annie, his little sister, trembling with fear when torrential summer rains or hailstones hammered the metal roof with such fury they thought the house would tumble down and bury them under its wreckage.
He put his hands on two exposed studs, leaned forward and peered into the house. The pine floorboards had long ago collapsed onto the earth below. Weeds growing between the rotting pieces of wood stretched upward, reaching for the sun pouring through the open wound that was the missing roof. “We never had rugs. Even in winter when it was so damn cold, we never had rugs on the bare floor.”
Margo stepped beside him and peered into the house. Most of the plaster had fallen from the inside walls, exposing the underlying laths, splintered and shriveled with age. “It looks ghastly in there.”
“It wasn’t much of a house to begin with. In the winter, frost was so thick on the windows Annie and I could scratch our names in it or leave hand prints like the 45,000-year old prints in those caves in Spain.”
“Did you and Annie scratch your names in the walls like condemned prisoners do when they’re locked in some dark cellar cell awaiting execution?”
Paul smiled. “No. We weren’t prisoners.”
“But you were. Every little kid is someone’s prisoner.”
Prisoner.The word shimmered in his mind. More thoughts flooded in; were we prisoners in this house, held like criminals, unable to escape? “I never looked at it that way.”
“I would have frozen to death in this house,” Margo said.
“We had a kerosene stove for heat. The area around the stove was the only warm spot in the house.” After a moment, he said, “And we had kerosene lamps for light.”
“Was it difficult for you and Annie living here?”
Paul shrugged. “No. We didn’t have much choice. What else could we do?” He smiled at the memory. “Like most kids, we survived, even if we had the worst jailor in the world.”
“Your father?”
“Yes, the old man.”
“This is so depressing.” Margo hugged herself. “Why did you even live here?”
He thought about her question. Was there a way to explain the failure of a parent who subjected his family to abysmal conditions when there was enough money to provide for a better life, a decent home, warmth, and enough food? Probably not, so he said, “Rent on this house was ten dollars a month. The old man was thrifty. The less he spent on us the more he had to spend drinking, gambling, chasing barflies and the town’s whores.”
“That is so harsh. What a horrible childhood you had.”
“It sounds like an ugly childhood now, but it wasn’t then, not to Annie and me. We didn’t know any better. It should not have happened, of course, but it did, so there it is.” The anger rumbled in his gut, ready to spill out if he let the heat of memory get too high. “It can’t be changed. I don’t dwell on it.” He pushed away from the studs. “I’ve told you all this before.”
“Yes, you have.” She looked over the week-choked ground. “ Where was the outhouse?”
Paul pointed. “It wasn’t too bad in the summer, except for the mosquitoes. In the winter, when it was ten below zero, nobody lingered reading a magazine, that’s for sure.”
Margo laughed. “I’m sorry, Paul. I don’t mean to laugh, but that is something I can’t imagine.”
She swatted at an annoying fly buzzing around her face. The fly landed on her cheek, irritating her with its delicate crawl across her skin. She brushed it away. The summer heat annoyed her as much as the fly. “Now are you going to tell me why we came here?”
“There’s something I want.”
“We’re not here for memories, are we?”
“No. I’ve got enough of those. I want the pump. It’s on the north end of the house.”
Margo followed him around the house to a cast iron pump, caked with rust and missing its handle, surrounded by a thick clump of dead weeds. Margo watched Paul push the weeds aside, put his hand on the pump’s spout and stroke it as if he was caressing a lover. “In the winter, if we forgot to drain the pump at night, it froze and we couldn’t get any water in the morning.”
“What did you do?”
“We melted snow and poured the warm water over the pump until the pipe thawed. But even when we drained the pump to keep it from freezing, we still had to prime it in the morning.”
Margo shivered in the hot August sun. “You lived like it was 1850.”
“I guess we did. The pioneers and us. All we needed were wheels on the old house and a team of oxen. We could have rolled across the prairie, going West.”
He pushed more weeds away from the pump, dropped to his knees, looked at the pipe then stood and brushed off his pants. He walked to the car and returned carrying a hacksaw. He got on his knees and attacked the pipe with the saw. After a few minutes the pump fell to the ground.
She followed him to the car and waited for him to stow the pump and the hacksaw in the trunk. They got in the car and stared at the old house. Neither one said anything for several minutes, then Margo said, “What are you going to do with that pump?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve always wanted it.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and peered at the ruined house. “I should burn it down.”
“You’ll be arrested,” Margo said, sensing anger and grief in his voice.
“Might be worth it.”
“You can’t destroy memories by burning something down.”
“No, you can’t,” Paul said.
“Then let’s go home.”
Paul started the car and drove away. “Maybe another time I’ll burn it down,” he said as he watched the old house recede in the rearview mirror.
Margo put her hand on his arm. “Now will you tell me what you’re going to do with that pump?”
Robert P. Bishop, an army veteran and former teacher, lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has appeared in Active Muse,Ariel Chart, Better Than Starbucks, Bindweed Magazine, The Blotter Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Clover and White, CommuterLit, Ink Pantry, Literally Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine and elsewhere.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Strappy flyby provides you with the occult nonsense the Gardener demands you play, when your own notebook is filled with love songs. Still, there’s nothing to be done but pick up the sticks and get down to business. Tonight Nairobi, tomorrow, who knows, but you’ve always wanted to see Accra.
Credo
I believe that people can be like they are in the movies
I believe that there is purity left out there in the world
I believe that some of the girls in the red sports cars are virgins (even if men are driving)
I believe that the wisdom of the dead has its place in the minds of the living
I believe that love can rule a nation
I believe in the future of surrealism
even if the old lechers never get their women
I believe that god is an erotic being
I believe that Hans Bellmer was a great artist
and polyhymnia help me I believe in the sanity of poetry
Greek Snow
I awoke naked, covered in contusions, in the middle of the Army/Loyola halftime show. I carried a bass drum, but no mallets, and I did not recognize the song we played, nor could I discern which team I marched for; everyone else wore silver spacesuits save the drum major, decked out in MacLeod of Harris Ancient with a neon purple sash.
It was no more than five seconds later the hawk phalanx screamed groundward from a cloudbank that looked for all the world like a corncob that used Thor’s hammer as a cob holder. This to be sure saved my bacon, but those in the stands stood as one, recited the prayer to St. Rita of Cascia at the top of their lungs, and exited stage right. With no audience left, the band quit playing, removed our shakos, and began to stuff them with predatory lenders.
Imaginary Borders
the mines splay out under the town spiderwebs in reverse
Nature’s Revenge (after Joseph Payne Brennan)
Something with stalk-eyes creeps from the lake tonight
It asks with those eyes sad but aware, for food
something crunchy that won’t turn to jelly when it bites down
something with a meaty flavour, perhaps
Popcorn for You, Apples for Me
The smell of cordite in streaks up to the stars, the only light left afterimages in the eyes of children. We drive home bleary with time, snow, one too many burgers, try to get the kids into the house while still asleep. It never works. We sit on the front step, eyes red, look up at scattershot stars in a thousand thousand colours and tell their stories until small eyes close once again.
Tom McCarthy
The colours explode in the matted fur of what hands what great beast
slouches trucklike from the swamps of Bethlehem
the letters on its license plate inverted
a flag flown upside down
international incommunicado
Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Of Rust and Glass, The Museum of Americana, and Quill and Parchment, among others.
You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.
when I see the evening, with it’s ordinary sounds and shapes so full of unbelieving composers and mistakes coming in- something wakes, and I begin.
what I can’t affect is getting colder as I grow older, retreating inside- I could be your wreck if I was bolder and called you over, over this side-
through the honeysuckle arch of midnight, moon like a lid bright shield in the sky; on the grass where footsteps last in this light- making a cast where you walked by.
I’m Getting Old Now
i’m getting old now- you know, like that tree in the yard with those thick cracks in its skinbark that tell you the surface of its lived-in secrets. my eyes, have sunk too inward in sleepless sockets to playback images of ghosts- so make do with words and hear the sounds of my years in yourself.
childhood- riding a rusty three-wheel bike to shelled-out houses bombed in the blitz, then zinging home zapped in mud to wolf down chicken soup over lumpy mashed potato for tea- with bare feet sticking on cold kitchen lino i shivered watching the candle burn down racing to finish a book i found in a bin- before Mam showed me her empty purse and robbed the gas meter- the twenty shillings stained the red formica table like pieces of the man’s brains splattered all over the back seat of his rambolic limousine as i watched history brush out her silent secrets.
Notes on Scraps of Screen Papyrus
notes on scraps of screen papyrus, symbol songs of our belongs- inspire us in the coffee smokes of day where the fire was in humid heats ashtray- inside us far away. the new consensus doesn’t show nomads in the census of its blow whose glow glads the past they left too slow: and the falling befalling where we now need to go- misfits the steps of the facefits in this trough of peaks and parapets. so we want wildly the wilderness that isnt fear- cut off, empty, smiley, pallet clear- the colours changed so rearranged and us not here.
Symphonic Waste
a quiet night. even the candle flame isn’t flickering- think i’ll just blow out its light and turn down the radio bickering. symphonic waste between the two goes back space for what is true- and the same discontented self dismantles every shelf of previous obsessions contaminated with old confessions. then your persuasions window walk in panes of pillow talk- inside this how, in here, in now- where no mortal elements can darken our consoled consents with ribbons of ripped repents that leave membranous scars: and when they do, they are no more than me, or you- everyone is subservient to the stars.
Life is Flamenco
why can’t i walk as far and smoke more tobacco, or play my spanish guitar like Paco, putting rhythms and feelings without old ceilings you’ve never heard before in a word.
life is flamenco, to come and go high and low fast and slow-
she loves him, he loves her and their shades within caress and spur in a ride and dance of tempestuous romance.
outback, in Andalusian ease, i embrace you, like melted breeze amongst ripe olive trees- dark and different, all manly scent and mind unkempt.
like i do, Picasso knew everything about you when he drew your elongated arms and legs around me, in this perpetual bed of emotion and motion for these soft geometric angles in my finger strokes and exhaled smokes of rhythmic bangles to circle colour your Celtic skin with primitive phthalo blue pigment in wiccan tattoo before entering vibrating wings through thrumming strings of wild lucid moments in eternal components.
i can walk as far and smoke more tobacco, and play my spanish guitar like Paco.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Melbourne Culture Corner; Literary Yard Journal; The Honest Ulsterman; Poppy Road Review; The Galway Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; A New Ulster; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine and Dissident Voice.
You can find more of Strider’s work here on Ink Pantry.
I think we knew each other too well our intimate details were like close ups on the big screen you finished my sentences and my fries yet nobody was better at lies and we were both equal at tearful alibis and funny asides during tickle fights and just before we achieved absolute perfection like a Russian dancer there was a defection you left me for your oh so discrete indiscretion
Mister Liberty
You just don’t get me I’m playing life by ear by the seat of my pants with no net and my beating heart is the castanet my flamenco flame-throwing passions become the melody of the song and everything that can has already gone wrong but once upon a glass of cheap Chilean wine I got drunk with someone pretty in the big bad city and woke up when I wanted to because back then neither mother nature nor father time dared tell me what to do
Stage Fright
I have attempted to crack the code break the bank unravel this mystery or understand that lecture while chewing on some profundity within the proximity of someone who went viral because at the right time they had the right face and I have craned my neck to witness the Sistine Chapel while some girl named Eve complimented my Adam’s apple and yet I am still a garden variety dude fumbling with a Rubik’s Cube puzzled by the fact I am an understudy in my own play and lack the talent to truly act
Check, Please!
Let’s not kid ourselves the past thirty years have been a dirty joke told by a drunk coworker over a loud jukebox playing hits from the eighties in a bar full of the strangers who attended the weekend convention about self-actualization the contents of which they have not retained because the law of attraction and quantum physics don’t mean a thing when you ain’t got swagger or an iota of the swing yet everyone still expects you to pick up the bill when you’re over the hill
Totally Rad
Sleep next to me in the cheap motel of my fogged memory then in the morning we can drive up the Specific Coast Highway of my vague vagabond dreams because I used to know where I was on the map now I can’t put my finger on exactly what has gone wrong and find myself relating to some yacht rock song because when it came out everyone I truly loved was still alive and arguing over a trifle or a waffle in the kitchen anyway ignore what I am saying cause I’m just bitching
Easily Persuaded
I haven’t yet captured that illusive image that one might hang in a gallery or museum but I still have seen some things that are permanently ingrained in the trauma centre of my third eye and those snap shots I show nobody no way, no how until you demanded with your sultry eyes and pouty lips that I reveal those secret branded watermarks to you now
Over-Thinking
Look I wish there was fairy dust or glitter rain and that everything and everywhere was disco Disneyland rather than average everyday last minute cancelations and inner Nixon-like resignations or opaque self-realizations like fallen cake birthday wishes making you feel like a kitchen filled with dirty dishes after a party where love was once again averted because you never even flirted with the idea that it will take someone else to get you to step out of yourself
Bedroom Layout
Yes, she slept with him and no, you won’t take her back into the fold of your blankets and your sheets even if winter is approaching and it’s going to be a bitter one for the record books it says so in the Old Farmer’s Almanac and it’s time to admit you have become such a fuddy-duddy hypochondriac, insomniac now that your honey ain’t never coming back to your sugar shack on the wrong side of the tracks
Ivan Jenson is a fine artist, novelist and popular contemporary poet. His artwork was featured in Art in America, Art News, and Interview Magazine and has sold at auction at Christie’s. Ivan was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to make a painting titled Absolut Jenson for the brand’s national ad campaign. His Absolut paintings are in the collection of the Spirit Museum, the museum of spirits in Stockholm, Sweden.
Jenson’s painting of the “Marlboro Man” was collected by the Philip Morris corporation. Ivan was commissioned to paint the final portrait of the late Malcolm Forbes. Ivan has written two novels, Dead Artist and Seeing Soriah, both of which illustrate the creative and often dramatic lives of artists. Jenson’s poetry is widely published (with over 1000 poems published in the US, UK and Europe) in a variety of literary media. A book of Ivan Jenson’s poetry was recently published by Hen House Press titled Media Child and Other Poems, which can be acquired on Amazon. Marketing Mia has published the hardcover. Ivan Jenson’s new bestselling thriller novels, The Murderess, and his top 4 Amazon UK and US bestselling novel, The Widow, are both now available on Amazon. A new collection of Ivan Jenson’s finest poetry called, Mundane Miracles, will be released worldwide November, 29, 2022.
