Five Poems by Douglas K Currier

 

Last dance                                            

                

Maybe it’s not the tune you imagined,

not a music somber and suited to momentous. 

Maybe the dancefloor seems foreign,

no place you’d choose for a last dance. 

Your partner has been chosen for you. 

You already know her, of course; you’re

waiting on the floor for her to join you.

 

You find you’ve not much choice at all,

except for those dances – music, partners,

lights, drinks, that trip rhythmically and

counterclockwise through your memory.

 

In this solitude, waiting for the band to start up,

the needle to drop, “play” to be pushed, it’s

nothing like those other ballrooms, milongas,

barrooms, family parties.  It is somber and formal

and so very last, and you hope to make it to

the end of the piece with some vestige of grace. 

 

 

Dancefloors

 

                                                                        for Darlene Hurlburt

                                                                       

I remember those that are no longer

– La Ideal in Buenos Aires, Montreal,

the old quarter, that studio that taught us

tango, the Champlain Club in Burlington,

where we put on milongas, then so many

high school gymnasiums – those basketball

ballrooms – and the bars with postage-stamp

floors – drinking in that hug and sway of desire.

 

The American Legion by the railroad tracks

in Randolph, Vermont, when I was 10 – socks

and space and dimmed lights – I fell in love

forever with the touch and smell of girl

and had no idea what was coming for me. 

 

 

Ballast 

                                                                       

There is a difficult generosity in age,

that willingness to give more of everything

than one has – money, wishes, time, hopes.

 

We learn it late, almost at the end, when

to volunteer means to be needed.  It is a sort

of redemption for our rush, our haste in

advancing to the head of the line, our greed,

avarice, our selfish thrift, cruelty.

 

My mother died, but the charities kept asking

for months – the return address stickers, the keychains,

small calendars, bookmarks, promotional postcards

– all those appreciations she hoarded.

 

We learn late the needful grace of utility and the lesson

of sharing drummed into us to no immediate avail

in childhood.  We learn that we own nothing, that the truism,

disbelieved and ignored by pharaohs and kings, potentates

and czars, tyrants and rulers of every stripe, is indeed true

– there is no taking it with you.

 

My father did not die before ridding himself of all

his children ever gave him and our mother.  I received

again the school photos, letters, books, awards, knick-knacks,

and whimsies I thought would please.  We carry them

for ballast and put them over the side into the water

of dark, wanting lightness and to float a bit longer.

I am finally learning this now; a lesson life shows

to be ubiquitous.  We own nothing.  It seems to require

constant reminding, needs to be believed the way

time is believed, the way flight is believed,

and buoyancy and love and death.

 

 

Lasts 

                                                                                               

Our optimism keeps us from considering

all of what might be last.  In age dwindling,

memory replaces repetition, revisiting flavours,

odours, a touch not as urgent. The lasts are there

the same – last times good and bad. 

Of course, some of them we’ve had already

– not realizing the meagre chance we’ll again

enjoy or endure a moment already taken.

 

Consider endings, bidding goodbyes, farewells,

the knowledge that we won’t be doing this or that

ever again – seeing, touching, tasting.  Age is giving

– giving up and giving in -- and recalling

the lasts, ever watchful.

 

The lasts – last day of work, last cigarette, last drink,

last fuck, last visit, last letter, last conversation.

Last touch, last chore – when breathless we say to ourselves,

“We won’t be doing that again.” the last pet, last snowstorm,

last swim, last book, last love – all so sweet, so satisfying,

we would do them again – plan and strategize,

but they are lasts, my friend, and so . . .. 

 

 

Fast food 

                                                                                               

Death stopped by my table

at the fast-food place on the corner,

you know, near the house.  She didn’t

sit, just stood by my shoulder, tapping

the table with her fingers.  “Really,”

she said, “a triple quarter-pounder

with cheese and bacon? You know, they

have to put the calories on the menu now,”

she said. “And a dill pickle slice for vegetable.

Maybe you want a diet drink with that.”

She took a fry, “Love these,” she said, “so salty.”

I stopped chewing, put down the burger. She

stopped with the tapping.  “What the Hell,”

she said. “Enjoy it,” she said.  “I’ll see you soon,”

she said, over her shoulder on her way out.

Douglas K Currier holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Pittsburgh and has published work in a number of anthologies:  Onion River: Six Vermont Poets, Getting Old, and Welcome to the Neighborhood and journals: “Café Review,” “Main Street Rag,” “Comstock Review” as well as many others, both in the United States and in South America.  His chapbook “Senorita Death” was recently published by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He lives with his wife in Winooski, Vermont.

 

Two Prose Poems by Elena Malec

 

single room

I saw only a pile of books, a watering can and two white geraniums, writing brushes and paint brushes, coloured pencils, bottles of nail polish, curled apple peels  and the white of the walls; no picture, no painting, he took ladybugs out of a suitcase and pinned them in her white bridal veil in which her naked body was wrapped; the wedding bed was missing, maybe it was too early to sleep, he was watching her draw a bird without wings, only flying high in a fuchsia-coloured sky, she with the brush in the air bemused. Then she leaned over him, down on the immaculate wall grew blank verse following a writing brush that devoured the lime from the walls, climbing to the ceiling her drawings with birds and gazelles or just multi-coloured stars in clusters; when they stopped writing verses and drawing, they laid back  with a book in their hands, in the room there was a smell of Jonathan apples coming from a box between the books, time did not measure with a pendulum, but climbed the white walls in verses and colour, he fell asleep with his hands on the bird painted by her with its beak bent to suck dew, she kissed his unspoken poems only with the eyes of a metallic green or blue, no shell could have reflected so many pearly glitters as her eyes, a wild voluptuousness, lifted her higher and higher on the walls now half-covered with the desires that became one; when the sour juice of the Jonathan apples ran around the corner of their mouths, they let the brushes rest and sank into the books; the painted walls had cracks of dazzling light emanating from the verses and the multi-coloured stars filling the ceiling with wingless birds, only high flight and the ladybugs in her veil stretched the elytra in unison, the calligraphy dripping on the veil, it floated in the light and like champagne spilled over the rim of the glass, the walls collapsed into them and were suddenly free.

 

 

the branch

 

a green branch sprouted from my chest, rose to the sky in abundance of small branches, children and adults looked at me in amazement, the light slipped through the leaves and buds, in spring I was dazed by the hum of bees, in autumn there were reddish berries, round as rosehips. which were picked up by passers-by, hurried to fulfill their good wishes with them, over the summer birds came to sunbathe, flutter their wings, trills, restlessness saw my eyes and delighted my hearing, until exhaustion and sap rose from its veins to the branches so that the winter did not have the power to defeat the green, I did not know where the frosted sparrows came from to warm up a bit, I did not have money for grains and I recited verses from memory, sometimes I drew a sun on each branch one morning I woke up with a handful of stars in the higher branches, I walked through the cities and people always greeted me with a real smile, I had started looking for its roots for some time, I fell asleep with my eyes on the handful of stars in the sky and when I kneaded the homemade bread I thought about it, I hadn't found the roots anywhere on earth, only if I touched that spot on my chest I knew it must have come from longing or maybe from a dream.

Elena Malec is a philologist by trade, poet and artist by choice. She has published literary criticism, prose, poetry, essays, haiku, books of gourmet cooking, ikebana, morimono, and art. She lives with her husband in Southern California where she dedicates to painting, writing, making rag dolls, ikebana and haiku. Her books can be found on Amazon. Her haiku and senryu is published in many online journals.

Two Poems by Dennis Daly

 

Three Untethered Psalms Composed by Doctor John Faustus

 

1.

As some men race through their life spans

We mutiny against perfection

And its rapt, its glorious display.

O miscreant rabble, follow us

Up from the abyss’s babbling depths

Where Nimrod reigns in his partial tower

Of perjurers. Free your foul needs,

Fetch us a drop of earthly water

That refreshes our memories

And loosens the outflow of dreams.

 

2.

In this tepid soup of polished blackness

Pure spirit swims, ever tormented

With thoughts like jagged thunderbolts

Searing all that’s left of knowledge

Of what we were in the triumphant heavens

Next to him. Now chosen only

As tempters, not part of him

But separate. We provide

Perilous opportunities

For souls to transit through our midst.

 

3.

I see in a mind of despoiled darkness

The morning star from high careening

Into clay hillocks and vales cut

With mist. Godlike, he had girded

To fight emblazoned enemies of his own kind.

His forward plot a fit offense

Against M and his empyrean prism

Of dazzling aerial forces

Before sin, before awful goodness

Enflamed these parched, desolate environs.

Playing Pinball at the All-Souls Lounge

 

Plunged into the busy, bitter world

Of bumpers and double bonuses,

My life, like a silver ball, flutters

Afield, nudged offbeat, irregular.

Its descent, too swift, much too dizzy

For its own good, ends with a new launch

Into the backboards, collecting points,

Caroming up, controlling nothing.

Flippers in readiness, the tilt threat

Beyond my ken of outside strategies.

 

Three bright orbs or opportunities

In this brutal life. Watch the display.

As we age, the machine makes changes,

Values appreciate or dissolve.

We see it in some flummoxed faces

While they calculate goodness by score.

Learn to hold one’s fate on a flipper,

A momentary rest, a comma

To vicissitudes, mindful or not.

Then send the ball on toward completion.

Dennis Daly lives in Salem Massachusetts. Daly graduated from Boston College and earned an M.A. in English Literature from Northeastern University. He has previously published nine books of poetry and poetic translations. Among other jobs Daly has worked as a dockworker, a Union Leader of a 9000-member industrial local, a city department head, and a community corrections director. He has travelled widely in central Asia. Please visit his blog here: dennisfdaly.blogspot.com.

Three Poems by Nolcha Fox

 

Grief is a

 

rain-soaked T-shirt

clinging and cold.

 

It’s a suit coat

two sizes too small.

 

It’s a necklace

that chokes.

 

It’s a hole in a shoe.

that attracts pebbles.

 

It’s the pebbles 

in the shoe.

 

It wasn’t buried with the body.

It didn’t leave with the lover.

 

It’s a bad wardrobe to donate

to the Salvation Army.

 

Alone

 

Another broken promise.

Another night without him.

She takes off the ring

he gave her.

She swallows regret,

walks out on waiting,

failure falls away from her shoulders.

For the first time in years,

she savours the silence.

 

Freedom tastes better than diamonds.

 

What’s Wrong with the Old Normal?

 

We lock our doors against the world

but danger still walks in.

The milk delivered to our door

is filled with cyanide.

The bakery truck that stops nearby

sells drugs of carbs and sugar.

The Fuller Brush man is a thief

who looks for goodies he’ll steal later.

The ice cream man makes popsicles

of kids who have gone missing.

Don’t walk barefoot in the park,

the sand hides nails and razor blades.

Now we must be supervised

by cameras and TV

because we’re all too stupid

to know that something’s wrong.

 

Nolcha Fox - Nolcha’s poems have been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Alien Buddha Zine, Medusa’s Kitchen, and others. Her three chapbooks are available on Amazon. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net. Editor for Kiss My Poetry and Open Arts Forum. Accidental interviewer.

Website: https://bit.ly/3bT9tYu

“My Father’s Ghost Hates Cats” https://amzn.to/3uEKAqa

“The Big Unda” https://amzn.to/3IxmJhY

“How to Get Me Up in the Morning: https://amzn.to/3RLDaKc

Twitter: @NolchaF

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nolcha.fox/

 

Five Poems by John Drudge

 

Across the Bank

 

My Paris includes

Intemperance and darkness

On the nights

That scream at the moon

From across the river

To the other bank

Where we once shared

Our hearts

With the shadows

At the Ritz

And waltzed

Across the glitz

Of eager anticipation

Before tripping

On the narrow

Stone streets

Of our bleeding  

Aftermath

Around Town

 

Below our apartment

In the worn

Part of town

With our dreams

Drowned out

By the sound of the train

On the hour

Every hour

And the rhythm

Of the buses

And the cars on the street

With all the same people

Saying all the same things

And everything tight

Like a snare

In the places

Where our hearts broke

And we lost friends

Along the way

Falling

Into one more groove

Around the block

Doing our best

To survive the strain

As the sensations

Of our surroundings

Settle in

As Tears Glisten

 

Sick and torn

On the faded horizon

Of a dream

With a calloused soul

Worn by wind

And the songs

Of beaten hearts

Wandering lost

Down broken dusty roads

At the end of a story

As the sun rolls long

And high

On a warm country breeze

And tears glisten

In a thousand

Rearview

Mirrors

Moving On

 

To stare

Into the abyss

Is to be taken over

By mistakes

Too ugly to be forgiven

Drunken reactivity

In a synchronization

Of slick moments

Miscalculations of Karma

Wormholes

And excavations at midnight

In the boneyard

Behind the main house

Raw images

Of the unconscious

Slipping

Into a subversiveness

Of mood

Feeding the blood-gods

Of obsession and lust

Trapping

The last rain drop

From a broken sky

And moving along

A collapsed vein

Of self-belief

Beyond the tatters

Of lost penitence

And ever dimming

Relief

Night’s Lament

 

Chewing on rage

With the immediacy

Of night upon me

Threadbare

And unhinged

As the echo

Of something

Slips by

Into the darkness

With a misery

Deep inside

Like a hard stone

And a tongue

Full of Yesterdays

And nothing

More

John Drudge is a social worker working in the field of disability management and holds degrees in social work, rehabilitation services, and psychology.  He is the author of four books of poetry: “March” (2019), “The Seasons of Us” (2019), New Days (2020), and Fragments (2021). His work has appeared widely in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies internationally. John is also a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and lives in Caledon Ontario, Canada with his wife and two children.

 

 

 

 

Two Poems by Kelly Sargent

 

Drought

I wandered, innocently.

An illusory, eloquent invitation beckoned me.

I     wandered         innocently. 

A veiled breeze intent on seduction 

brushed the ripened skin of my back bare.

A taunting whisper hushed me into place

using tender, copper reeds as her accomplice, 

braided blinding by sun’s smugly-nimble fingers 

that winked at my ignorance, intimating collusion.

Scorched and alone,

I inked the earth.

She absorbed me like a parched canvas.  

Desert rains

                yielded

 

     naught.

I didn’t know until I came

that I wanted to come,

and succumb to innocence feigned.

 

*A slightly different version

entitled “The Canvas” appeared in New Note Poetry.

 

 

Revelation 

Beside my cabin, a reflection shimmers on humid luminescence

that bewitches me curiously within,

captivating me against my will. 

The brazen luster measures without apology 

my depths and my shallows without my consent,

revealing secrets I’ve kept surreptitiously hidden

from sunlight

that continues to remain loyal

whether I deserve it or not.

Entranced in a mesmeric gaze, we eye one another

uneasily

until a dragonfly skims the surface

and breaks the enchantment.

I am revealed in ripples that disseminate

an imperfect nature.

*First appeared in Nothing Divine Dies: A Poetry Anthology About Nature (Vita

Brevis Press).

 

A Vermont writer and artist, Kelly Sargent is the author of Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion (2022) and Lilacs and Teacups (2022). Her other works, including cover and award-nominated art and poetry, have appeared or are forthcoming in more than sixty literary publications, including  Rattle, Chestnut Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, and Eunoia Review. A recognized haiku poem received a placard in Washington, D.C. this year. She currently serves as the creative nonfiction editor of The Bookends Review and a reviewer for an organization supporting the artistic expression of sexual violence survivors. Visit http://www.kellysargent.com to learn more about her.  

 

Five Poems by Richard Weaver

 

Callahan’s Irish Social Club

 
I’m off to play with my dog.
We’re going to the cemetery.

We go every day.
She’d chase the sun if I’d let her.

If she could chew the wind she would.

I swear, anyone can chase tail. But only a dog
can find happiness in a circle.

I wonder what it is about the cemetery
makes her want to run so much?

It’s not like we have somebody buried there.

 

Reptilian brain grammar

Is a lizard’s eye
more distant,
more determined
than the end of this
sentence? Would
its missing tail
mind for the moment,
posing as a comma?
 

 

Front Porch

When the front porch swing
sang against the wind in the shade,
we pushed its music higher and higher
towards the tongue-and-groove
pine ceiling, and higher still,
daring the eyelets to keep us
from crashing through
the ivied latticework behind
where yellow jackets nested
in green shaded safety.
Back and forth our legs pushed,
though the chain links protested
our collective light weight.  
We pushed as high as we dared,
my brothers and I, and then beyond
in the same swing where our grandparents
had courted.  We dreamt—
the green swing flew without us,
its metallic song rubbing against our ears.  
We pushed against its ageless light.
We pushed until the sky no longer
received our thin shadows.
 

 

A Tortoiseshell rabbit sits

in a homemade kitchen cage, curious about the daily smells:
bacon grease kept in an electric skillet until it overflows,
and the less interesting smells of canned vegetables or things
thawed and dumped without ceremony or seasoning into boiling
water, all causing its nose to hop. They were constants at least,
sometimes mildly variable, but unchewable, like the cage wire
but not its wood frame. Sweetie Pie the rabbit waits each day
for freedom time, a chance to roam the house, where walls
close around. She always hides under the far left end of the living
room couch, where it waits for a weight above to announce
her favourite has arrived. Where the linoleum floor feels good
against its teeth and the deep dark sound of springs descending
beckon from above. And scamper out she does from the muted
dark, and leap upward onto the lap of the Other who always sits
closest to the outside light, the door where the other world waits,
sometimes green, moist. Hop it would when happy around the
two-legged smaller others, but prefers being closer to the earth
listening to light emitting sounds as it waits for the springs to sound
above. This other who always tastes of salt and rubs its ears in amazing
ways. Later, when light had flared and died, it wakes to noises around
its hutch, it smells a darkness brewing, a deep, rich flavored one
it welcomes, knowing that soon it would be free and a warm dish
of brownish water would be its alone. Coffee. Almost as good as the
cold green icy mixture given each night, a small bowl of pistachio
nut ice cream. An earthly delight every rabbit surely dreams of.
 

 

A Cat sneezed at a large animal clinic

and immediately became a leper. Then a camel eructated its organs and was blessedly resurrected as a pillar of kosher salt and tri-colored peppers. When a dog tweeted, it was transmogrified into an obscene lowku: prayer. A goose replied cryptically in an online only literary magazine. A disgruntled maggot took to Facebook and savaged the goose who had mocked the tweeting dog who’d responded to the camel’s projectile vomit when it heard a rumor of a cat’s all-covering sneesynge. Soon Sprinklr dribbled, incontinent as a cloud with a weak bladder, and Squido inked out, Dudu responded in Mandarin Esperanto, and Kaboodle kicked its kit across the Net before Pinterest punted an avalanche of imagery, drowning servers on 5 continents, excluding Australia & Antarctica. Internet war was on. Global warming Climate change End times be damned.

Richard Weaver - Post-Covid, the author has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other recent pubs: conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, & New Orleans Review.

He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). Recently, his 175th prose poem was published. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry.

One Poem by Jessica Weyer Bentley

 

A Widow’s Daybreak

 

I can see the gymnasts on the lawn at the break of day.

The pink elephant of fate.

That ever enveloping blackness as the shade of life creeps down.

The moments begin to outweigh the sum.

The secondhand drums-the trumpets call.

Summer’s last crimson sunset fades to watercolour.

The thrusts of the aorta are tallied.

Failings are weighed with peddlers’ iron.

His warm hands-

his slow breaths in slumber,

are totalled as if Mickey Mantle himself

signed his thorax.

My grip on the concrete world has turned to sand.

Oh! To stretch the grains,

melting the molecules of glass.

Alas, I awake with a strand of my hair over one hazel eye,

bracing myself for the inescapable horror to set in.

Imploring for the mundane from the day before,

I swing my bare feet to the cold opaque floor,

yearning for his familiar stirring in our marital bed.

Jessica Weyer Bentley is an Author/Poet. Her first collection of poetry, Crimson Sunshine, was published in May 2020 by AlyBlue Media. She has contributed work to several publications for the Award-Winning Book Series, Grief Diaries, including Poetry and Prose, and Hit by a Drunk Driver. Jessica’s work has been anthologized in Women Speak Vol. 6 (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), Summer Gallery of Shoes (Highland Park Poetry), Common Threads 2020 Edition (Ohio Poetry Association), Appalachian Witness Volume 24 (Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel) and Made and Dream (Of Rust and Glass), 2021and online blogs including Global Poemic and Fevers of the Mind and countless other anthologies, magazines, and journals. She is currently penning her second collection of poetry, Down Below Where the Canary Sings, slated for publication in Spring 2023. Jessica currently resides in Northwest Ohio.