1

Four pigs, three dogs,
two patient apple-acres waiting
wrapped in brown papers
for the Market Act
of their life’s drama.

From the goats to the pigs
I walk picking up fallen apples
and bring food to the dogs.

Let me change the water in your bowl,
let me sit with you, friend mutt, forgetting
without wine the one fact of my life.

_______________Visiting a farm
_____near the Northern Capital about nine months
_______________into my psychosis.

2

I take the keys, take money,
close the door, cross the tracks
where trains approach the city’s heart
and then I cross the bridge
and go down to the river.

Green plant floating
under drizzling rain.
Good-bye, my friend.

The way back up
not burdened by you
is steeper than before.

__________Giving proper funeral
_____to the green plant with brown leaves
__________on my balcony.

Ilya Gutner writes, “These poems are written in a style adapted from the English sonnet, reduced to its minimal components, number of lines and metric numbers. Instead of counting syllables, one counts the words, and counts the title as part of the poem, setting out its context. Since the great majority of English words are either monosyllables or natural iambs, the sound remains a unity even without the steel string of the syllabic meter. Since the English language has a great variety of natural demetrifications which make it be a choppy, backward language except where it has had its hair combed slick for a presentation, the same counting of words instead of syllables makes also for the variety of sound. Then, too, the lines are varied by units of equal number of words, which again makes for a local unity and a local variety of sound, making for ordered units in a chaos of loose parts. As to the author of these things, his (that is mine) name is Ilya Gutner and he (I, that is) used to live in the United States, a PhD student at Brown in a department of Slavic Studies but now live in China, a PhD at a university in Shanghai, reading philosophy at a department of Chinese Politics. These poems are offered now to the wise interest of their readers: to improve on leisure and to exercise the mind.

Nordmarka

Imagine each spring
a writer goes to a forest in Norway
to hand over a book
that will not be read for 100 years
until the trees are cut for paper
and words once hidden
wake from silent madness
tying nature to art
and the past
to our unknowable future.

In This Silent Room

in the quiet of the Deichman Library
a century of words will wait
for one thousand growing evergreens
for our children’s children
and for the promise of tomorrow.

Lara Dolphin is a chocolate addict, slacktivist, and determined dreamer. A recovering attorney, novice nurse, and full-time mother of four amazing kids, she is elated and exhausted most of the time.

Who Doesn’t Want to Make Love to Someone’s Wife?

I

Right from the word Go, I knew well that I’d have to
__cut down on fantasies, that I might even have
to hide from society’s moral pretension
__the process of pupation to get transformed

as a well-loved butterfly. You know people do wrongs
__lovingly or so they say. Yet while it’s
not totally wrong, I’ll go the extra mile for it;
__who doesn’t want to make love to someone’s wife?

What it boils down to is that its manyfold answer
__might sound harsh. Could I borrow you?
I promise you will be returned unhurt to him
__who’ll know nothing of rain’s work on a taro leaf.

It’s not a long distance love affair, rather a thrill
__of honey collection from a wild forest. Rekindle
your fantasies about how or when love is enjoyed at its best.
__Let’s do it in whatever ways we can.

II

I’m sure both of us have never been to a vineyard.
__Yet the moment someone utters “vineyard”
I start dreaming of making love
__to you who I’ll do everything to live with forever,

on a vineyard’s drained soil
__littered with gray leaves and pruned canes,
yes, of course, between rows of vines full of red grapes
__with the sunlight making them look like rubies.

I also want to do it with you under the moonlight,
__between rows of vines with clusters of ripe grapes
staying covered except for the star-spangled sky,
__before harvesting grapes rich in color starts in late summer.

But I don’t think the owner of any winery
__will let it happen. Maybe you to whom I hope this won’t
seem to be a one-night stand know
__most of our fantasies might remain fantasies.

Sofiul Azam has three poetry collections Impasse (2003), In Love with a Gorgon (2010), Safe under Water (2014) and edited Short Stories of Selim Morshed (2009). His work has appeared in magazines across the world. He is working on Persecution. He currently teaches English at World University of Bangladesh.

Antics

Grandma cooked swill again tonight. She
hates us. Brother shaved the dog with a
one-blade razor tossed by the roadside.

No salve to its nicks. Sister snipped off
every rose’s flower. Peonies and dahlias,
too. Claimed Morticia Addams spurred

this behavior. Brother blazed the trash
bin in World History class. Blamed the
quiet autistic kid in the back. Sister

blackened her ex-friend’s eyes. Joked
about us being abandoned by a duo
currently drugging it up in a seraglio

somewhere. Swill settles the gurgle but
won’t palliate the ridicule. Maybe
running away can.

Robin Ray, formerly of Trinidad & Tobago, currently resides in Port Townsend, WA. Educated in English Composition at Iowa State University, his works have appeared online at Scarlet Leaf Review, Darkest Before the Dawn, Red Fez, Fairy Tale Magazine, and elsewhere.

Pulling Silver

On my 21st birthday
I pulled a single silver strand from my head
and saw my future life flash before my eyes.
I saw myself through the mirror
waiting by the phone for my grandkids to call
pulling the final white strand from my bald head.
Trying to remember the day I pulled my first.

Mike Maple is a 4th-year Communication, Culture, and Media undergrad at Michigan Technological University. In his spare time, he participates in the local music scene and writes songs for the band We Should Be Laughing.

Summer Love

The places he’d been, with convoluted names
were as exotic as the places he’d lived
men bent spades into birdhouses

I wanted so badly to be with him in Colorado
to stand in the exact spot where four state lines met
and survive it all. He kept saying, Next time, next time, I promise.

I waited by the lake for him to come and get me
visions of Indianapolis burning holes in my brain
but he never came back to get me, never took me away.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Plainsongs, The Long Islander, and The Nashwaak Review.

Wen I Wuz Eating

Genghis Khan
wen suddenly materialize before me

in da fast food restaurant
wen I wuz eating my meal.

He told me dat he wen kill moa warriors
and bagged moa women

den I could evah hope to
in one hundred lifetimes.

I wuzn’t impressed

and I wuz actually moa irritated
wen he kept asking me

why I nevah like mayonnaise
on my burger.

He keep pressing da issue
on how much he enjoyed it

so I had to tell him
if he liked it so much

den moa bettah
he go order one foa himself.

Genghis got angry wit me

and two huge bodyguards wit axes
instantaneously appeared at his side

and dey wuz staring me down.

I told him and da adah guys,

“Eh, Temujin,

no try muscle in on me wit your goons
especially wen I minding my own business.”

Da buggah went ballistic
wen he heard dat

and started ranting and crying
cause I wen use his kid name

dat wen remind him
of his rough and unfortunate boyhood.

I heard he had to wear wun big yoke
around his neck foa awhile

but I nevah have anyting to do wit dat.

Howevah

making him aware of his past
wen work foa me

cause Genghis

went storming out
da front door of da fast food restaurant

taking his bodyguards wit him.

Now I could at least enjoy my meal
in peace.

Dats wat I taught

until Attila the Hun
came out of da restroom

and sat down in front of me.

Maybe because of his bloody reputation

he kept asking me
ovah and ovah again

why I put so much ketchup
on my French fries.

I almost wen answer him

wen Alexander the Great
wen burst into da front door

and immediately pushed to da front
of da line

so he could order wun strawberry shake
and wun new world taco.
I tell you

dis is da last time
I coming to dis place on Halloween.

Joe Balaz has created works in American English and Hawaiian Islands Pidgin (Hawai’i Creole English). He presently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and he is the author of Pidgin Eye.

Poem about Death Ending with Reincarnation

———-after Matthew Olzmann & Tarfia Faizullah

Blood has its own democracy.
My father & I puncture steaks
& watch them ooze—deep maple
walls eavesdrop as steel teeth

scrape & claw the porcelain
we use to distract our manically
clenching jaws. I’m well-practiced
in this ritual: empty & fill, empty

& fill, until there’s nothing.
Our filets gone, we sit & stare
at the eggshell table spread,
abdomens swelling like silence—

They found a mass.
She’s having surgery next week.
I had always planned for him
to be first. Now the woman

fifteen years his junior, mother
to my twin baby siblings, is dying
or might be. I’ve been rehearsing
years for this talk, except it isn’t—

my father, held only by the dim
lighting that shrouds his silhouette,
reduced to heaving. I envision
the stepmom it took me eleven years

to embrace being lowered carefully
into the damp earth, an old man,
flanked by two teenagers, watching,
& I will be there too: an overcast

Tuesday that no one passing by
will remember, & as usual, I won’t
be able to get the dimple right
in my tie. For a second, although

we are nowhere near the mountains,
I will smell the crisp air she so
loved & remember the first time
we walked without the heaviness

of that first encounter both of us
carried for far too long. But on that
unremarkable day for most, a light
rain will interrupt the hike I am on

in my mind, a man will read overlyrehearsed
words from a book she
did not believe in, & we will stand
like guards, numb. We will watch over

the sacred earth she spent an entire
lifetime trying to protect, now her
home, flanked by roots cross-stitching
the rich soil, what becomes the promise

kept to those endless rows of buds
ready to push through & that twisted
symmetry just above, a dangled blade
from a mouth chewing in first light.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet and the author of Hijito, winner of the Broken River Prize. His writing has been published in the New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Carlos is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. http://www.CarlosLive.com

the bent spines
of chimney smoke-
a cold winter day

—–

a house filled
with your absence

ayaz daryl nielsen, veteran and former hospice nurse, lives in Longmont, Colorado. Editor of bear creek haiku (28+ years/150+ issues), he is online at: bear creek haiku poetry, poems and info. A recent collection of his poetry, a nameless stream, was just
released by Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Magazine.

In the Strange Light Before the Storm

Robed in hushed
starlings, the maple

longs for a violence
that will tear loose

a near-forgotten cry.
The earth’s breath

goes before the rain
and touches your face.

Lightning rips open
a cloudbank like

a sudden flaw in memory.
Among those leaves

already fallen, a red
worry rustles and stirs.

James Owens‘s most recent book is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Adirondack Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.