A Tuesday like the last, sauntering not jogging after peddle-bikes with hope dangling from a green stick. Forever it stretches in the distance, far from my grasp, yet always flickering, refusing to merge with the night.
A cycle repeated, the same street never forged in memory. Despair pooling and festering like weeds, fungus, and disease. Feet blistered with miles forgotten. The blinding glimmers and aspirations that leave a view forever unpainted, wasting in thick blue light.
But all wells run dry and all memories retire. Look here, look now, travel the coast with your gaze. Breathe the yellow and amber scorching the waning sky. All is reset by the morning.
How do I mourn the living?
It’s not your body or flesh that has decayed, It’s my ability to stand next to you. It’s the conversations weighted in your favour, a son who carries his father.
But how do you mourn a heart that beats twenty miles away? Do I throw dried petals to the earth, clinging only to the good? Do I walk across the sand where my footprints once lived within yours and drown in the tainted memories?
Whatever it takes, I have to mourn you, not because you can’t change, but because you won’t. I have to grieve while you live, accepting that one day the guilt will fill every ounce of my being, when I have to mourn you for real.
Benjamin Parker is a poet based in North Wales with works published in publications such as ‘The Uncoiled’, ‘Free Verse Revolution’, and ‘Nawr Mag’. Benjamin graduated with First-Class Honours in English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University and is now studying an MA in English Literature.
Let the light pass by you first time around. Take nothing in. There may be windows of which you are not aware, with marks on them you do not want
to hear about. Climb into a car late at night & let it take you where you do not want to go. Give nothing away. Not yet. Let the light come round
on a later sweep & then step out into it. Tell all that is relevant to this second position. There is a certain liberation to it, but you still retain your secrets.
The implicit burden of discourse
Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. Be warned that those who profess such a doctrine are themselves practising the deceit they con-
demn so much. Contradiction usually only exists between two statements, occasionally within the one. Here there is clearly one with no contradictions. How to
banish resemblance? Any higher pipe lacks coordinates despite a certain attention to forms & cere- monies; & even about this ambi- guity, I am ambiguous. Give to a
woman the knowledge of the forms & its implicit burden. The polished surface will then throw back the arrow. Thus the spirit of politeness exists in some form in all countries.
Sources: This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette (1860) by Florence Hartley
Profiler
Claimed he could categorize a person through a random selection of their words. Put some together for him. Was assessed as being an unmarried male between the ages of twenty & thirty-nine, white, of average intelligence & with a childhood spent masturbating whilst I tortured small animals. I fit the profile of a serial killer. Am left wondering which is the more inexact science, poetry or profiling, & extremely glad I didn’t show him one of my really dark pieces.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional Juru land in North Queensland, Australia. He has been publishing poetry for sixty-five years, & is the author of over seventy books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, memoir, & art history. His most recent books are Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in March 2024; the May 2024 free downloadable pdf to your scattered bodies go from Scud Editions (Minnesota, USA); & One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths (Australia) in June, 2024. His TheMagritte Poems will be coming out from Sandy Press (California) in late 2024.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
The bubble reflects my dream so perfectly it could be made of glass. Perhaps it is made of glass as the sharp leaves don’t break it. it just rests there, waiting.
Birdsong
I close my eyes and listen to the birds. I can’t name them, but I can still feast on their song for now.
Some sing beautifully, others need to learn. I sympathise with them, I can’t sing either, but It doesn’t matter. No one will hear me if I join in now.
Cloth of Gold
I called it my cloth of gold it was so special with a bit of this and a bit of that remnants reclaimed and woven with love woven with tenderness into a cloth of shining colours making memories to wear wrap round memories like threads of time for all our time, memories that in time became our shroud.
I didn’t know it then.
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today’ competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Capsule Stories, Gyroscope Review and So It Goes.
You can find more of Lynn’s work here on Ink Pantry.
‘All habits are tinged with sadness, / for being habits.’ Paul Theroux
During pre-dawn silence, no longer part of noisy families, greeting another day released from night’s hobgoblin dreams, he reads mostly depressing news with derivative sub-headings. He tackles delivered newspapers in the same sequence after removing glossy feature sections like a rich man ignoring a beggar – Epicure, Money – that sometimes slither unwanted to his floor. Ritually, he begins with the front pages’ clamour, then sports from the back, saving word puzzles he completes nonchalantly until last. Serious reading, a cello’s sumptuous notes enhancing his mood sometimes, comes later in the day.
His coffee brewed in a pot the same as he sees in favourite movies, those with brave direction and storylines, he sips from the same mug, its handle missing, stirred the same number of times, rattling lightweight pages, some filled with ads. Loathing advertising since youth, its chief crimes banal repetition and boneheaded appeal, this irony is not lost on him. He could catch radio news afoot to counter chores’ tedium, or when driving, ditto with his phone attending to life’s quiet desperation, yet he reads newsprint days into weeks, months and years uncaring what narrow minds think, of him or anything else.
Wide reading spurs recollection. He lowers a paper or book to his lap reminded of old haunts he falls into again, street by street, fizzing along vaporous memory’s fraught trails where the splendour of scenes like cherry blossom didn’t even exist in the imagination. Only church bells chiming on Sunday mornings offered an approximation of beauty. He hears their idiom, tawdry yet sweet, redundant now, so elegiac, and relatives’ voices, sees his classrooms’ faces. Some names hover just beyond reach, as do smells he wants to breathe once more. Feeling like a character in one of his books he time travels over and again. Those harsh precincts remain fertile for him but they are all changed of course, gentrified now.
He collects what amounts to a muse carnival. Although being overcrowded with gewgaws instead of people, he can’t resist op shops and market stalls, their ridiculous bargains. One favourite site, within a fenced off rubbish tip, is on an island where pre-loved items left by locals and holidaymakers are displayed in a tin shed by volunteers. To the sound of seagulls’ cries you can leave your own unwanteds and/or help yourself to others’. Hats, clothes, board games, wetsuits, a beautiful statuette suffering a broken ankle, Mozart on vinyl, curios and chronicles, even damaged stained glass imbued with classical hues, from the gimcrack to the magical, are free.
Convincing himself he is not addicted, just obsessive, he moves his treasured trash around, but not much. Glancing in certain dusty directions he sees its artful reflection in mirrors. He has found an oil painting, its canvas lumpy, possibly a pentimento, and a watercolour, both by unknowns, and famous books written long ago that he should, and probably won’t, read again. Other relics from cobwebbed lofts and musty chests of drawers remain, as he does, freighted with keeping everything unchanged living alone on the plains of sorrow. Like the band playing on the doomed Titanic this trove comforts, so too, his coffee and memory accompanied newspapers that contend with his awareness of incomprehension’s replication, a kind of hideous virus.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Offcourse, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.
where is the sky from where are the drops of silence from where are the freckles of the mirror from where are the human silhouettes of the scream from where are the silent indignations of the apple wind from where are the woollen night milky lips of the cemetery from under my iron blanket-eyelid
cycle of return grass sings glass hurts bones crunch ears shrink leaves cry hands pray bush rises and forest opens autumn rain
the birds’ needles go to sleep in the cherry tree and they wake up on the branches of falling leaves
the look opened the night cries so the pupils meet another dead suicide
my hands dream of dying as a hydrangea
sleep can’t sleep quiet don’t keep quiet speak lips are dry drink river is dry eat stomach burst die it’s too late the cemetery is asleep
Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, TheNewVerse News.
Nuanced woo sleeves the trees absolutely, limbs, trembling arabesques, re-enacting their valedictive wave-shrug to April.
Constellations of light-green stars allay the grey disposition: blazed artifice erasing rafts of winter entropy.
Feathered seraphim inhabit the grove’s ethereal umbrella (abstention from fussy havoc not optional), daft sanctuary for the ephemeral.
Great Blue Heron
Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.
—Mary Oliver, ‘October’
Busy inhabiting my world— blazing car, radio blather, coffee buzz that wouldn’t last—
I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse, so quick I didn’t see you flinch, yet so outstanding, you could’ve been
a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos that another morning enthralled my neighbour’s lawn.
Stark still, ankle-deep in that transitory water, only the one side, one-eyed,
wide as disbelief, you looked just like you looked, posed in the Natural History Museum,
1963: for again, all those slender angles, the spear of your bill,
that deathless intensity marking your stick-form way, only now in a mid-May puddle poised
between the intersecting rushes eastbound, 196, southbound, 31. And you, still doing
what you’ve never known you do, still finding your life wherever you find yourself—
while I, still fixated as always on finding myself, as if that were to find a life,
saw again how wildly I am alive— how I always want to know it.
When the Water and Sand Dance
When the water and sand dance, whence (whence?) their music? What is that music? What sense, what composition surfs itself in? Yes, the water—its bazillion droplets, the mini-jetsam line it etches. Yes, the sand—its gazillion granules, the sponging gauze-and-muslin of them. But what but mind imagines there’s music? Perhaps the end of your century also hauled along its ton of sadness as did mine. And perhaps the years have finally worn it down to barely nothing of your day-to-day. The sun and shadows play again their fetching fine effects. The moon and birds and even dying leaves relieve your smallest residue of gloom. But mind—must it remember anyway? And is it therefore grateful, more than happy in that moment, to cue its private music, then tune your needy ear to every measure when the water and the sand dance?
Walking the Beach, We Show Our Ignorance about Stars, Constellations
before mentioning the dead ones mixed in, the snuffed ones, how they’ve guided the race, we figure, since long before the faintest flicker of a first-hand myth; but dead, even then, and now, this side of infinitude, this side, let’s say, of Gilgamesh, how the discerning words of the long gone still illumine our forever primitive way.
Gazpacho for the Soul
How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life.
—Jane Kenyon
How much better even to muster a quick sample of what is better:
*
Finding the old apples scattered out back for the deer vanished while you slept.
*
Leaving the lit tree up well past New Year—a new who-cares tradition.
*
Not only seeing but hearing your granddaughter’s Instagram giggling.
*
Road-tripping to Chicago, those skyscrapers arising over the Ryan.
*
Doing burger Thursday at the What Not, stressed-out Will for your server.
*
Reading at 3 A. M. with your reassuring spouse, who can’t sleep either.
*
Cycling the back roads south of the new house, turning west toward the lakeshore.
*
Counting out haiku with your deep-brown-eyed daughter: re-frig-er-a-tor!
*
Switching from notebook to computer, suspecting a poem’s in sight.
*
Beating your fetching wife to the punch: Happy ‘Leventh Anniversary!
*
Having the silly luxury to reckon a best order for all that’s better.
True North
The lone crow on the lone pole where the weathervane used to whirl insinuates my need for misdirection.
He is an arrow of skittish attention, of scant intention: the cock and hop, the flick and caw toward anything
on the wind. Now angling east, now south by southwest, he designates with beak then disagreeing tail feathers,
with a lean-to and a shoulder scrunch, with an attitude from his beady black eye— as if he were ever the one to judge.
And once he’s spun like a pin on a binnacle past all points of some madcap inner compass— once the clouds have bowed to push on
and the grasses have waved their gratefulness— he unfurls the shifty sails of his wings, and the breeze relieves him of his post.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching university writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, USA. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his work has appeared internationally in a wide variety of anthologies and journals.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
There’s a world in the word “I”, which is you, a universe whizzing with activity, a wild ride no one will ever afford lifetime admission to
There’s a world in the word “forgot”, which is us… or me. Our shared yesterdays reduced to stacks of files shredded to make room in a limitless cabinet.
“I changed my mind.” A silent truth unspoken that would have been such a sweet sentence to hear you sound out.
Self-Absorption
Self-absorption sits on top of the senses, cutting circulation off to clear thoughts. Delusion straddles a reliable horse ridden rugged, strains four legs forward toward dreams, things— wants.
Stomps his hooves, tosses the head. Neighs, blows, snorts— for food, for rest— but is spurred to speed up.
Self-absorption— Me, me, I, I on the mind, the thoughts it thinks— thoughts so loud they drown out the heat, the sweat on the brow, the pet horse’s needs.
Drags his hooves, hangs the head. Not a neigh, blow or snort for food, for rest it needs— just digging, skin-scraping spurs shrieking for speed.
Outside self-absorption, the mind boiling over with “Me”s and “I”s— the faithful horse dies. Now, two legs untrained, find loneliness on an isolated plain.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Roque discovered his love for poetry and prose amid friends on the bleachers of Pasadena City College. Now he currently lives outside of the US and is being inspired by the world around him. His poems have been published by literary Magazines like Aurora Quarterly, Veridian Review, and Cascade Journal.
Everyone remembers the forest leads to ruin the world needs space to be related to nature
Even though we are unmarried hope still lies in the sheath of fate woven into threads of colour
Powerful axe swing the tree falls and the fruit from it causing global warming due to human negligence
It is important that someone warms up while humanity suffers glaciers are also melting accordingly, nature does not tolerate carelessness
Lots of floods and tears in baby fat which every day he just wants real play and fun
Glaciers when they melt general unrest is created because panic reigns in people and the world
So let’s take care of the trees because every day is special and let’s protect nature she is everything to us
NEMOJTE SJECI DRVECA
Svi se sjecaju šume vodi u propast svijetu je potreban prostor biti u vezi sa prirodom
Iako smo neoženjeni nada i dalje leži u korica sudbine utkana u niti u boji
Snažan zamah sjekirom drvo pada i plod sa njega izaziva globalno zagrevanje zbog ljudskog nemara
Bitno je da se neko zagreje dok covecanstvo pati gleceri se takode tope shodno tome, priroda ne podnosi nemar
Puno poplava i suza u bebinoj masti koja svaki dan samo želi prava igra i zabava
Gleceri kada se tope stvara se opšti nemir jer vlada panika u ljudima i svijetu
Pa hajde da se pobrinemo za drvece jer svaki dan je poseban i cuvajmo prirodu ona nam je sve
Maid Corbic, from Tuzla, is 24 years old. In his spare time he writes poetry that is repeatedly praised as well as rewarded. He also selflessly helps others around him, and he is moderator of the World Literature Forum WLFPH (World Literature Forum Peace and Humanity) for humanity and peace in the world. He is the world number 44 poet and 5 in the Balkans. He has over 10K of successes on Facebook.
Your reflection is gone. Mine is all that’s left in these waters.
Your voice isn’t here either. The woods are full of bird song, a rustle or two in the brushes, but nothing human.
In the house, you’re merely missing.
But here, in the forest, you’re never coming back.
The grander the scale, the greater your absence.
Her Seventieth
If lives grew vertical, she’d be at
the highest point. The burning candles
would celebrate this milestone as if she were Hillary and Norgay
conquering Everest. But a life’s ascent
is as brief as a prayer, slopes downward for a time
before dipping precariously. So she looks up
at the years lived already and down at those to come.
She’s less Sir Edmund and Tenzing
and more Florence Hillary and Maureen Norgay.
Those two both have trouble going up and down stairs.
He’s the Champion of the World
He’s shy they say but I believe that’s just focus. He ran a great race today. His new book is in the stores and garnering rave reviews. And what of his concerto. Or the flex of his upper-arm muscles. And to think, a CEO at his age. A leader in touch-downs, a mountain climber par excellence.
He’s never been married. But the task at hand is a wife. Run, write, compose, work out, rise to the top of the business world, then catch the ball in fluid motion, while pegging your way up Everest. What’s not to love.
He gets anxious when he stops like this. What if the world goes on without him? The price for dalliance is living like the rest of us. Marge is just about to introduce him to her daughter Sarah. He nervously shakes hands. Their eyes lock. He’s doomed to lose his titles.
Sitting by the Pool, Watching the Swimmer
Twilight sets in but she’s still doing laps of the pool. What was once smooth and blue is now vague and shadowy. She’s pulling herself through water, kicking her feet like flippers to double down on her intent. Every afternoon, it’s thirty times up and back, which is about a hundred swims in my reckoning but just the one long marathon to her. She conquers something that, to my mind, is not in need of conquering. But, then again, she writes no poetry. And nor does she see the need. She’s streamlined, perfectly built for gliding through water. I’m romantic, contemplative, easily distracted from the real world. I’d likely drown if I applied this elsewhere.
A Year of Solitude
Who said it would be okay? And I will know it when the time comes? And where it lands it will stick? And maybe it is here already?
Was it the sound of her footsteps? Or waves lapping the shore? Or the creaking of these floors? Or the fluttering green leaves of my backyard oasis?
Meanwhile, there’s all this stuff I’ve been writing, the pen, the paper, the overhead lamp, the desk, the coffee, in hope that the work, once completed, will be an answer to all or any of these questions.
But now, there’s me on one side, the unknown on the other. There’s what I know now and the mystery of what I will become.
I’m home. It’s quiet. Outside ploughs the soil with rain. Dark clouds match it with headlights. Blue curtains keep me separated. Creation is the perfect foil to this weather. And so is holding out for the next thought that comes to mind. Too bad, they’re getting harder and harder to think.
Yet what I hunger for doesn’t change. That much life has taught me. And, with each lesson, it gets worse. For I’m all alone and marking my own papers.
The Usual
I often wonder where I would be without the predictability, so much more common than randomness, as every scene feels like the one I always come across whether it’s children playing in the park or a sale sign in a furniture store window.
Your “good morning” is like reading the same page of as book that I read yesterday and the day before. And the taste of every vegetable on the tongue never varies whether it’s boring spinach or crunchy and invigorating raw carrots.
Yes, people fall from cliffs. Or they win lotteries. They’re shot in a case of mistaken identity. Or they’re spotted by an agent, turned into a movie star.
But mostly everyone who enters a room leaves that room unchanged. Each footstep is a continuation and a preview of footsteps to come. The words we say, we’ve spoken before. The face in the mirror is unsurprised by the face looking into it.
With so much sameness to back me up, I feel secure when odd things happen. Like when I pause for a moment when a car nearly hits me. I can return to where it doesn’t.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, ”Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.
