Four Fascinating Prose Poems by Moe Seager

 

Meaning is to become, not to appear. You should dance for life. Rudolf Nureyev.

My childhood would be marked by song and dance. For most of it we had no phone. Dad would briefly bring home cars on their last crank soon to sit squat in front of the house before being towed away. He was equally adept at providing televisions with a life span short as a season opener. His favourite viewing was baseball played out daily on the t.v. from a nearby bar which was in act and deed his true home as ours simply served as a sleepover for his late night arrivals drunk and done with his day.

Mom popped out child after child. By the age of twenty seven she birthed nine children and two miscarries. Wen asked by startled inquirers why do you have such a big family?, I would borrow a response known to Irish Catholics; our t.v. broke.

Lacking the amenities common to lower class families we did however, possess two cherished instruments, a radio and record player. From morning through late night music accompanied, orchestrated our innocent young lives. Never a dispute over which station to listen to Mom fixed the dial to a popular a-m station that churned out the leading tunes of the day; rhythm and blues, rock 'n roll and country, Thus was my initiation into three music genres that shaped my ears and learned movements for a life to follow. This fusion would lead me by curiosity to discover Jazz, Bossa Nova Flamenco and Bach.

Mom herself was a die hard fan of radio play and a very nimble dancer. Confined to a cramped, crowded cluttered house she both coped and celebrated to music. Sweeping floors, doing dishes, washing clothes she did sing along and swing and sway to the hits of the day known as Top 40.

Instinctively we followed suit singing out of key , imitating Mom's steps. In the hot season with windows open we could be heard in chorus belting out to the likes of Elvis, the Beatles and Fats Domino whose hit Let the Little Girl Dance was Mom's anthem. I think I was ten years old when I procured my own radio, a glowing tube lit Zenith I set next to my bed. On Sunday nights the air waves were relaxed and I picked up shows from Buffalo, Fort Wayne and New York City. Listening I felt joined to a larger world, an ambition I was fixed on, confident that I would future grow to reside in. Books served to detail my knowledge of past and present that I aimed to curate. From these formative years at age 12 I attended my first dance in a nearby church hall. The d.j. announced a dance contest. I took a dance partner and off we gyrated, my grease loaded hair dripping like a petroleum spill. I won the dance contest. The prize a Beatles album. Chivalrous I handed it to my cute little Italian partner. Cheers and applause, local boy makes good.

After the dance I flew home excited to tell Mom I had won a dance contest, my pride ebbing sharing the news with her. She asked, where is your album honey? I gave it to the girl Mom. She smiled saying that's nice. I blushed for a moment in her presence. It was as if she and I had won the dance contest.

Show me how you do it son she asked. Suddenly embarrassed and shy to demonstrate in front of my teacher, hesitantly I made a few awkward steps. Mom slapped me on my hip saying C'mon honey lemme see you really do it. She strode over to the radio. In a raised voice that captured my feelings she hollered let's go, turn it up! 

At 10 years old.

 

Directly behind our ramshackle house. The tracks. A diesel pulling 74 freight cars. Its fumes invading my bedroom, distasteful. A wake up stimulant way past midnight. The window rattles, the room vibrating. I don't want to go to school in the thoughtless morning. The squeal of steel weighing upon iron calling c'mon, let's go, get a board, no time for the hesitant. Wheels kneading the rails. Rails a path to who knows where is odyssey. What is known amounts to nothing to hold onto like the boring food from dinner. Promise of the unknown, the currency of risk filling my empty pockets. Awake I dreamed of distant discovery. Sinbad clandestine for the concrete shores of metropoly. Broad lanes, smooth hard metal and bright lights. Buildings so high in the sky my mountains to climb. Dreamy darkness gave way to grey clad morning. Pigeons stirred and coohed the language of resignation. No sight or sound of the rolling stock. I cried that pass by like a train.

One Among Many

I am first born Son of my mother Who married my father Who brooded in shadows As she bore nine children We bury our dead The Plain pine boxes Thinly sewn into pockets of dirt Send off our kin Kin of a neighbour We give of our muscle Our tenuous time Pride in our part Played in the world We work to live, live to love, love to be We walk this earth together. I toil day after day And nights A simple labourer Simply making it. One among many On tired knees and weakly legs What burdens my back can´t carry Weights my shoulders cannot withstand What gifts too rich and plenty For my small hands to hold I share and share alike One among many Dream and dare Embrace the world Colours and tongues Shape our lives Room for all round table High times, low times Sometimes all we have Courage and trust The bond between us Between times We do the best we can For troubled waters Rush and they swirl Rushing and swirling About us all Upstream we surge Surging and spawning Spilling ourselves One among many I march, I run I sit and calm Oh let go, now dance I am rhythmic tic ´o time One among many Relinquished of the vigour, The vital of my spring Replenished in greater meaning This is love One among many I am the grass root.

6:25 a.m. in a place called Paris. //

No one is ever free. Even the birds are chained to the sky. Bob Dylan

Our hands are light blue and gentle. Our eyes are full of terrible confessions. Anne Sexton

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes .

Obese from experience , the gut of my mind oozing bittersweet. Moe Seager

Moe Seager is a poet and jazz & blues vocalist who sings his poems on stages in Paris, New York and elsewhere and has recorded 2 jazzpoetry c.d.s.

Seager founded and hosts Angora Poets (Paris) World Café,100 Thousand Poets for Change Paris and is one of the coordinators for le Fédération des Poètes Paris.

He has 5 collections of poetry and currently publishes with Onslaught press, Oxford, U.K.  Other poetry collections are issued from the French Ministry of Culture –

Dream Bearers,1990.

One World, Cairo Press –in Arabic translation, 2004 

We Want Everything in French translation, les Temps des Cirises, Paris, 1994

Perhaps, La Maison de la Poesie, Grenoble, France, 2006

Fishermen and Pool Sharks Busking editions, London, 1992

Additionally Seager won a Golden Quill Award (USA) for investigative journalism,1989  and received an International Human Rights award from the Zepp foundation, 1990.

He teaches writing in Paris.

Keep the Beat on the Pulse of Life!

Moe Seager
http://www.facebook.com/moe.seager

http://www.myspace.com/bluenotemetaphor

http://moe-seager.blogspot.com  

One Poem by Ginger Covert Colla

 

Meditation

Find a special place where you can

simply sit quietly in nature’s embrace.

 

This place may be a garden full of beautiful blossoms

where you can hear the buzz of bees,

melodious birdsong or the lullaby of the crickets at dusk

while drinking in the perfume of the flowers filling the air.

 

It may be at the seashore where you soak up

the sound of the waves lapping on the shore

and seagulls trumpeting their seaside serenade.

 

Your chosen moments of meditation may be a

mountain retreat where you can hear the wind

whispering through the pines and perhaps

a woodpecker tapping out his rhythmic cadence.

 

It may be a moment of solitude listening to a

steady rain on the roof or watching snow silently

blanketing the earth with a clean slate of white.

 

Yes, each day may you find a special place

where you can simply sit quietly

and bask in nature’s embrace.

Ginger Covert Colla has written poetry since she was a third grader and was inspired to become a poet when her very first poem was published in the elementary school newspaper. She is author of A Poet’s Life: Memories, Moods and Reflections, a chapbook featuring forty-one poems from her collection and  published in 2021.

 

Dr. Colla is a career music educator with degrees in music education, and both a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Conducting. She also enjoyed a 19-year career as a Kindermusik educator. During that time, she was inspired to create numerous children’s songs and stories. She is the author of a rhymed children’s picture book, The Christmas Elf, illustrated by Judith Gosse and published in 2021.

Five Superb Poems by David Estringel

 

Mother’s Milk

 

It’s been a year

since the blush was kissed from your cheeks,

stolen away

with the morning sun,

leaving us here

with only the chill of starless night

as a guide.

How the void you left behind

lingers

like restless ghosts of marigolds

and burnt almonds,

following

from room to room,

fingering dusty frames

and long abandoned books,

stealing space.

Yet, I see nothing.

Shall I look behind bookcases

or cobwebs in dark corners?

Under the stacks of magazines, you never read

or those secret places—

old purses and shoeboxes--

that hid your treasures

from prying eyes

and sticky fingers?

Where is that

thing

I once found bitter

that, now, tastes so sweet?

Won’t you sing to me

just one more time?

 

 

Fireflies

 

Quiet starfalls,

sprinkled from God’s fingertips,

slice and burn through Summer’s night

to dance and play atop the barley,

resting, gently, noble crowns upon

smooth brows of boys and girls

playing in the fields.

 

How these kings and queens of Earth (of nothing),

swathed in paupers’ cloth

with bodies, electric, of

hot blood and light,

laugh and prance in fountain-drunken promenade

through this mortal coil, blind

to cut and scrape.

 

O, flowers among the chaff,

with cheeks, sticky-sweet with red plum jam, and arms, outstretched,

I pray those luminous wreathes and heady scepters never fall

as you leap, and twirl,

and tumble

into the sweet oblivion of your starry fields, for

just beyond the horizon

fire flies.

 

 

False Knight on the Road

 

Atop a valiant steed with a head full o’ rags, the road beckoned, stretching—long—into a realm of darkening cloud but lined with gold (for the taking) that peeked just above its rough-hewn surface like new growths of spring through a winter snow. Emboldened—a plastic sword in one hand, held high and kissed by the sun, and Youth for a shield in the other, a battle cry, fearsome and loathing, escaped his pink lips, claiming what little was his (and everything that wasn’t)—its resonance, lost in the surrounding expanse of harvested barley fields, littered with chaff and cigarette butts from passing cars.

As a heralding thunder rolled in the distance, hazel eyes searched the summoning horizon for portents, signs of castles (and dragons) he could conquer beyond the ruins of his dying kingdom and dying queen, finding nothing but the billowy black of a closing road and hints of wet earth, disturbed by the fall of a heated rain. Seeing its glitter fade with the noon sun, he and his valiant steed abandoned their vain quest—never started—and returned home to the cold comfort of their crumbling halls---Truth weighing heavily upon frozen brows—to put away his toys and beat the Golden Bell’s call to jubilee.

 

 

Pomegranates

 

Lay me down

just beyond the back porch,

where the pomegranates grow—

a stone for my pillow,

grass and pink evening primrose for a quilt—

beneath playful trickles of sunlight,

sieving through branches,

that dance

to the burden

of those fateful red globes.

How I could pass these languorous days

lost in shadow plays

cast upon these eyelids too heavy with sleep—

quiet tumults

of mists and stars

that stretch and fade into

nothing

to the familiar knells of horned larks

that ring from behind

blush and yellow blooms

of lantana trees just beyond the gate.

Or to roll, smooth, pebbles and twigs,

caress the backs of shiny, black beetles,

between cold fingertips

dug deep into wet earth,

conjuring up ambrosial moments,

like ghosts,

of the taste of that sweet, red nectar—

those wanton streams of warm

blood-honey

that dribbled down my tongue,

my throat,

my chin,

onto countless white t-shirts

and crotches

of patched jeans,

leaving me forever wanting

(forever stained)

and feasting on shade.

 

Maybe…

…just maybe,

one day you’ll come along, take a bite and say,

“Hey, David’s tasting good this year.”

 

 

Sunflowers

 

Gold crowns, so eas’ly

snatched by morning star’s glamours.

Youth, a fickle weed.

 

 

David Estringel is a writer/poet with works have appeared in The Opiate, Azahares, Cephalopress, North Meridian Review, and DREICH. His first collection of poetry and short fiction Indelible Fingerprints was published April 2019, followed by three poetry chapbooks, Punctures, PeripherieS, and Eating Pears on the Rooftop (coming Summer 2022).

Four Poems by Rose Mary Boehm

 

Anamnesis

 

Acutely, I remembered you,

Navigating my days and nights for years.

Apostle-hood was nearly mine. You said: Do it in

My name. But after so many lifetimes

Nobody recalled the

Essential you.

Service in a name alone

Is not enough to avoid the terrible

Sacrifice of deeper truth.

 

 

Balance

 

It’s the time of life’s imbalance,

perception itself is up for review,

choices are based on illusions.

Once man walked humbly,

secure in the knowledge

that the earth was aware of him

and he of her.

He shared her soil.

A great stillness

was piercing the veil

and the stars were proof

of a celestial homeland.

 

Now is the time of narcissism,

denying the delicate threads

that hold our fragile planet on course.

 

Gaia seeks balance;

the fear, pain, and grief

of thousands soak as offering

into the altar of equilibrium.

 

 

Boil them

 

The silk-worm’s cocoon is made from one continuous thread of fluid silk,

produced in the worm's modified salivary glands, which hardens on contact with the air.

 

Silk moths can’t fly. They

can only lay more eggs

which you can store

in your fridge for years.

Planned silk-hood.

Bombyx mori grow

about 70 times their

original size feeding

on white mulberry leaves.

Ad: Silkworm Chow,

powdered and premade.

‘Stiff silkworm’ will dispel

flatulence, relieve spasms.

You must boil the cocoons

together with their owners

or they’ll destroy their own

raw-silk suits. By their small horns

you’ll know when the time comes.

Recently it was discovered 

that they began spinning

bullet-proof silk

after being exposed

to an electric field.

Someone said that silkworm

are able to learn.

But in thousands of years

they did not understand

that they manufacture

their own death.

 

 

Leaning drunk against a doorframe

Slaughtered riffs
join dreamy paper hats
around a table made
from dissonant words.
Rejects dance along
perfumed storms
in gaudy tassels stolen
from chanting choirboys.
The laughing preacher man
will get you.

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was twice nominated for a Pushcart. Her fourth poetry collection, THE RAIN GIRL, was published in 2020. Her fifth, DO OCEANS HAVE UNDERWATER BORDERS, has just been snapped up by Kelsay Books for publication May/June 2022. Her website: https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

Two Poems by Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

 

This Was the Room

 

This was the room

where I slept and

where I could be

found dreaming. I

suppose it was

too hot when it

was summertime.

I kept the shades

closed to keep the

sunlight out. When

the weather was

not so bad, the

windows were left

open to let

in fresh air. My

books gathered dust

over the years

due to setting

priorities

such as writing

over cleaning.

I need to learn

multitasking,

cleaning, writing,

and keeping dust

from gathering.

Unfold the Sky

 

Unfold the sky.

Decant the wine.

Stretch out the melody.

Relive your childhood.

 

The naked shadow

walks along the sea

as the cold rain

falls from the heavens.

 

Behind the clouds

more clouds are born

wandering, forming.

 

Seek out the mystery

the world keeps secret.

 

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal: Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems and artwork has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Mad Swirl, Nerve Cowboy, Otoliths, Unlikely Stories, and Venus in Scorpio Poetry E-Zine. His latest book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press in 2021 and his last chapbook, Make the Light Mine, was published by Kendra Steiner Editions in 2016.

 

Four Fascinating Poems by John Doyle

 

A Few Hours Later

 

The Virgin Mary strangled Ted Bundy

soon after Jefferson broke my pool cue

right across my back.

Nothing meant that much that night 

after I’d turned around,

Old Roscoe snapped in quarters

on the shamrock velvet.

Cop car lights chased a Mustang back to Nazareth,

me holding my dreams in four divorced shards -

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, I now called them -

like Bundy's neck missing from his spine - life separate 

from itself. I called up to Jefferson a few hours later, 

what was the fucking point?

his brother - as usual - more drunk as a sad old man 

sitting by the reservation,

just looked out the window -

told me go park somewhere else, this is poppa’s space -

then he grumbled and sneezed, 

as Jefferson somewhere deep inside 

turned wine into water

Angel in Garadice : 8:24 P.M.

 

I’ve become an Angel in Garadice, 8:24pm,

headlight boys hunting me from all sides - Coole, Agher,

 

some like dive-bombers

from Summerhill;

 

strange they know nothing about Bruce Springsteen,

roaming the flat and cobalt horizons, 

 

exact replicas from his V8 plots.

I am the Angel of Garadice, 8:24 p.m.

 

ascending to a layby

to write this scripture.

 

At Kilcock I turn down a dead-end street

so I can arise from death,

 

I see skeletons on their knees,

I’m disappointed.

 

This road is long and lonely,

these boys are shooting stars

 

who fade in scissored sequence

on my split-screen mirror - boys are grit crumbled on a lay-by

Mexican Stand-Off : A Northern Variation

 

There's an earth so flat

a song and a dance began sprouting like t'maytoes on it, 

 

Sunday's child in a fugue state stray cats neglected to take advantage of.

There's a recognition of an entity’s sense of self,

 

that Lacan slapped me across my locked-tight jawbone

thrice to edge on home, before cows came for milking,

 

before Charlie Parker lay on a sweaty bed with a strap

numbing his arm. A wheel that spun like falling coins

 

rained down slicing planets in half -

Henry - all 2 miles and 58 tons of him - looked out

 

from his bedroom window - 

it's late Henry, no-one hears those screams

 

said Henry's mom,

clawing down towards Australia a wooden window frame.

 

Henry?

Hello?

Burt Bacharach Sunshine Soundscape : Autumn Mode

 

I filled-up Emily's gas-tank,

as far as the good lord would let me. 

 

Hell, 

let's be honest,

 

a little more I poured just for the road,

for the blues-men who let the home-team down 

 

by somehow being alive.

I put a pretty penny through that tank

 

leaving for County Kilkenny before sunshine

got bored, twiddled its thumbs, and dropped its holster,

 

leaving my lawyer to fill me in.

He told me Hannibal Heyes had a grandma

 

from County Kilkenny, I said that's swell Mr. Smith,

now tell Cousin Jedidiah I know who he really is.

 

This was October; If I'd forgotten

that sad terrain October was -

 

brown as barbed-wire 

in the latter years of its life -

 

then Emily wasn't letting me forget,

singing another song about surfing,

 

how summer was on the way in Australia

two-hundred thousand light-years from here.

 

I clung to the left-hand side of my saddle

listening to Bacharach

 

pour his coffee, as his orange juice went flat.

In the back-seat of her French-made car

 

I held the fetal position long enough

to make her notice

 

how flat those fields were

with tractors hiding on their sides like horses,

 

a harvest lost in time this year, 

stuck in Swedish speaking homesteads

 

circa 1870; Emily never really left Stockholm,

I was not going to be another of her syndromes,

 

thumbing

on the side of the road just like Malcolm,

 

mixing a voodoo potion

to ooze forgiveness from his wife.

 

Just like a golfer comes home 

one day

 

to a heart attack and divorce,

a pair of grifters head south

 

instead of down - down to Australia.

Emily, she sure did rip that clutch a new one

 

trying to get us there;

County Kilkenny, hon?

 

Nah, let’s just never speak

to each other again...

John Doyle is from County Kildare in Ireland. He returned to writing poetry in February 2015 after a gap of nearly 7 years. Since then he's had 6 poetry collections published, with a 7th collection, "Isolated Incidents" due to be released by Pski's Porch in Summer 2021.