Wishing
unfinished

When a white crow
can just escape death
and scramble up to fly,
is that a kind of sign –
good or bad for who?

Let’s say: never mind,
or may we live together
on our brave best behavior?

On a bramble branch
a buzzard chick is listening
as if life is not clutched in a fist.

Life is reciprocal; we can perceive
a glimpse of the complete picture.
We’re dancing on toes or firm feet,
our nimble fingers will reach the distance.
For eternity we can participate in bits of that and this.

Poet and novelist Arno Bohlmeijer writes in English and Dutch, is the winner of a PEN America Grant 2021 and has been published in renowned journals in five countries, including Universal Oneness: An Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World, 2019.

Footfall

I keep waking to these lost days
of late dawns and early dusks

of blue light
and black
mountains

of your coffee
cold on the
counter

and the absence
of your
footfall

on the hardwood
floors all
around me.

Ryan Brennan lives in the Catskill Mountains where he writes poetry that just barely exists. He has recent or forthcoming work in Cider Press Review, Frost Meadow Review, Pacific Poetry, Brazos River Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Mantle, One Sentence Poems, amongst others. 

At my age

those who were married
are now divorced
and maybe
remarried
and maybe
divorced again
and those
of us
who
were never married
long
for anything
other
than the life
we lived
and I
have to catch
myself
from falling
into
the gaps,
imagining
what it would be like
to be held
by a person
who will be
snoring
in minutes
instead of
all of this
humming
and everything
in my apartment
exactly where I put it
when I wish
someone
had misplaced
at least
something.

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize.  Right now, Riekki’s listening to The xx’s “Islands.”

Pour me an epiphany on the rocks sunny side up with a twist

_____Ah! tout est bu, tout est mangé!
__________–Verlaine

Of the totally abstract
______hopelessly inscrutable
____________powder of the cosmiverse
______to fuck up everything I sing I sing.

Into the valley of death they ride,
“Half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward,”
they chant and I quote with all of my hurt
prominently displayed upon mirrors of infinity
apposed obliquely under duress.

Perhaps a bit of exposition channeled through diversion
even inversion and a series of “You don’t say” type blurts
would be the odor of the placental creatures’ wool.

Cries of “nonsense will avail you nothing” won’t suffice
to berate the lack of meter and asolnonce
for now is a time as adequate as any for the total exclipse
formerly shadowed in doubt. For egsample::

Logic is the last refuge of scoundrels peddling the sins of the fathers.
Nothing proceeds without big lies since the decay of verse into prose fiction.
That one is the only one and no one is only sly nomen or Noman though not a pipe.

And all these yestodays blighted pools the fey to musty breath.
To borrow and to borrow and to borrow craps in shits sweaty place
from say to say til the last shibboleth of imported grime.

Play it again in Café Americain for old times’ sake. If she can stand it, I can.
But Dooley was a drummer and he couldn’t do it. Try Ella.
Why did she have to go? Why does anybody?
“It’s the beast of boredom,” calms the Joyfreud,
“come to fertilize us all.” Ah shit.

____

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, including 6 Pushcart nominations, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worcester Review. He has a chapter in Hypermedia Joyce, and his book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher. He seeks to marry the experimental, non-narrative with the lyric and traditional in the manner of Nietzsche’s marriage of Apollo and Dionysos. He generally avoids accessibility for its own sake, and the prosaic personal story with superimposed line breaks that is ubiquitous these days.  

Hollywood Party Scene(s)

During one of my better periods – okay, damn good – I made the Hollywood and Beverly Hills party circuits, the social connections better than the professional ones for me. I’d usually find myself surrounded by people who were all in “The Biz.” Word had gotten around I was the only writer in town not writing a screenplay while claiming to have no intention of doing so, something apparently never seen before and impossible for many to fathom. They liked me but I came to be viewed as The Freak Who Didn’t Care About Fame.

At an artist friend’s party high up in the Hollywood Hills, I met a certain Oscar-winning director and people stumbling around high on the juice got ticked off at me because I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t really care. Guilty of insufficient deference. Well, he didn’t know who I was either, so I thought that evened things out. Not that Oscar winners all knew me by name, but I never did feel like kissing ass just cause someone’s rich, powerful and famous. Of course, that attitude didn’t go over well with some and I got burned a few times, but it was still a hard habit to break.

The director was typical Hollywood good looking, showed little plastic work, got along famously with the ladies – although Heidi Fleiss was there so maybe it was within some context – but everyone spent the night getting loaded and paying homage to his film – except me. I mean, I hadn’t even seen it and it’s not like he was the only Oscar winner in the damn place. I’d been nominated for a Pulitzer but no one cared about that, so call it what you want. I just retreated to the back of the room and started doing shots of Patron Silver. Despite everyone being hammered and doing lines of anything within reach, I seemed to upset the host. He stalked over to the corner I’d taken refuge in and demanded to know why I wasn’t mingling, what was my problem. He knew I wasn’t big on mingling, so when I reminded him of that I seriously had to fight the urge to take a swing at him – and the director too – while somehow avoiding the Beautiful People. I swear I could hear the room muttering, Hagland can’t write anymore anyway, I liked him more when he wrote funny shit. 

Screw that! I cut out – the ultimate sin since no one arrives early; everyone arrives and stays late in Hollywood. I went home, retched at the kitchen sink while sliming the counter instead, let my bile get the best of me and wrote a lousy story before throwing the director’s film I’d been gifted into the dumpster out back. Besides, I was going over to Dennis Hopper’s pad in Venice the next day and he’d always been more my style.

Scott C. Holstad has authored 60+ books & has appeared in Minnesota Review, Exquisite Corpse, Santa Clara Review, TODAY Show, Long Shot, Chiron Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Southern Review & Poetry Ireland Review. He lives in Gettysburg with his wife & cat & his website can be found at https://hankrules2011.com.

the world is my prayer mat

this morning on bahía san carlos
fat doves strut along imagining family matters
prayer flags release into the breezy sonoran waltz
frivolous wrens flirt with little yellow flowers
as the sky greets sea with open embrace

while crisp blue sky is decorated with fluffy white sculptures
a fisherman and his tiller nestle like twins into the wind
a newborn seal pup wonders into the wind ignoring
a squabble of seagulls who continue their discussion
arguing into the fearless northwesterlies

in some distant place a frightened neighbor shelters
a youngster from the burning rath of a bomb,
broken families sob at graves of children shot in schools,
starving hearts and tummies turn toward hollow days
with dried up gardens and empty shopping bags,

but the sun rises again, i turn toward the wide world,
heart moaning with what might-have-beens
give deep gratitude for earth’s innocence
and bow low to horizon’s passionate gift of hope
with a simple prayer, may there still be time

Sharon Lopez Mooney, poet, retired Interfaith End-of-Life Chaplain, received: a ’79 California Arts Council Grant for rural poetry series; a “Best of the Net” nomination, “Peseroff Prize” finalist, & two other publisher’s honors. Mooney’s book is slated for publication in ’24, and her poems are in national and international publications.

Mittens

you know conditions are arduous and hostile when the whole liquor store parking lot is backed into their spaces, in case engines need jumping make it home barely reverse in my spot as well hoping to get this beast starting still each morning too

a goat
climbs down the mountain
grudgingly bidden

Jerome Berglund has many poems in a variety of forms, including haiku, haibun, and tanka exhibited or forthcoming online and in print, most recently in the Bottle Rockets, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. His first full-length collection of poetry, Bathtub Poems, was just released by Setu Press.

Observing

and the parts
within

the soul
searching for
escape

the spirit
higher powers
for fair
weather
past here
to somewhere

that’s what
he saw

Dr. Roger Singer is the Poet Laureate of Old Lyme, Connecticut. He has had over 1,000 poems published on the internet, magazines, and in books and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize Award Nominee. He is also the President of the Shoreline Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Trying

I keep bringing up the things I should have done;
you are no longer listening.
To be fair you should
close the door and lock it.
I am really lost, but
I am trying.

I have a family to remember,
an image crafted so close to perfection
it is a work of art.
I gave them what I could.
I barely see them now
but not for want of trying.

Just so things are clear,
in the light of day, I see what I have done.
I try– repeat prayers, wait for answers.
Waiting is what I do,
but the horizon is a straight and empty line,
beyond, there is no one left but me.

Richard Rubin is a retired librarian and library educator. Recently he decided to try and publish some of his current poetry, and he has been fortunate to have work published or accepted for publication in The Dunes Review, Great Lakes Review, Green Silk Journal, The Main Street Rag, I-70 Review, and others.

Eyes Open

Blood work revealed that my cancer was hiding.
Cancer is alive and feeding in a bone of my spine,
a metabolic membrane seen on a radiologist scan.

Diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, a metastasis
discovered after years of being unseen.
I am told that a radiation cyber knife
will cut into the cancer’s home.
Hormone therapy will be injected into my sunless thigh,
turning off my maleness, shouting at my efforts to sleep,
wringing out unneeded sweat throughout the day,
swallowing my softened muscles and bones,
licking away jars full of memories.

I begin an unrehearsed sobbing,
an emotional shedding of my future life.

My wife leans over and holds my tense hand.
She lovingly says, “we are planning a vacation together
with our family and grandchild. Let us think
of how memorable this holiday time together will be.”

I touch her heart-felt loving words,
looking forward to getting away.
But, I pause, feeling emotionally weak,
lost in my own vulnerable being, unable to be brave.
I feel myself becoming a forgotten name.

And, I say, “I do not want to die in my sleep.
I want to meet the last moment awake,
seeing my last breath leaving a mask of air.
I want my eyes open, to feel the last stream of light
stopped on the surface of my fading gaze,
like a narrow mountain stream
that has been blocked by a fallen tree.

I want to see who is present in my last room.
I want to see what I will be missing.”

David Lipsitz has been writing poems for over fifty years. His poems have appeared in BIG WINDOWS REVIEW, CAPE ROCK, CHAFFIN JOURNAL, FROM THE DEPTHS, MAIN STREET RAG, UPPAGUS, WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW, and other literary publications.