THOM TOM

By Marc Carver

 

My son asked me 

if Tom Wolfe had stayed with us 

last night.

 

You know daddy 

Tom Wolfe 

the  poet 

the one from the Simpsons.

 

No it was another Thom 

and besides Tom Wolfe is not a poet 

he is a writer

 

Whatever.

 

No you are right son 

there is no real difference

they are just names

 

_________________________________

 

Approaching Rembrandt

by Martyn Halsall

 

Ochre heat, melt of rain; Dutch light

harried through clouds at different speeds, the sea

rumoured among them, never far from reflecting

dredged shadows along canals, a drain of blues,

left-over mudflats, sheen of creeks and eels.

Indoors a painter rephrases Caravaggio.

 

Outdoors becomes indoors, oils framing

a family starched to Calvinism among courtyard roses,

their silence a prelude to letters from the New World.

A woman peels apples with utmost concentration,

as if to break the spiral would disrupt horizons.

Behind glass, landscapes maps confront interiors.

 

Still lives: lemon rind, oysters, water encrusted

with jewels about a shattered breakfast glass.

Hazel nut, twist of newsprint, iris, porcelain.

A night watch of birds; a pelican flared by lightning.

 

Quickly it could become October, the same

turning into twilit landscapes of greyed varnish, where

Rembrandt is weighing shadows, re-casting his portrait

as the Apostle Paul, borrowing Italian chiaroscuro.

The landscape along his forehead is engraved with doubts

an apostle would dismiss, but an artist harvest.

 

Perhaps Thursday, quizzical; you hear leaves

gathered by a Delft wind, inside the studio you sense

raindrops from the mirror he is using, a deliberate

turning away as he re-defines biography.

His hat's a swirl of meringue with a lemon pause.

His eyeline follows the evening, into the next world.

______________________________

 

Sunday Morning

by Louise Hastings

On Sunday morning
silence lands
in a world of sleep
as rain patters
to a halt and the sun peeks out.

Among the calm
two birds take flight
beating wings
to the rhythm
of your half sleep,
scattering air-brushed blessings,
feather soft against your cheek.

You roll over
mumbling to your lover's side
trailing hands along his back,
connecting in a way
that tilts the angle
of the earth,

light to dark
and back again,

to the beginning
of the story,
bookmarked
to when the rainbow
climbed above your heads.

 ______________________________

 

Jamaica

by Chris Jackson

 

The moon was a slow strobe, lilac-ing your skin;

the night illegible with salt, vaster than our meeting.

You pressed down on my collarbone, half-angrily.

Beyond our hut, clouds succeeded one another,

like border territories over time, sped up on a graphic.

A hawker called prices along the beach,

proclaiming our peace by his lack of any takers.

Waves elapsed, equally different and the same.

On the balcony opposite, a hammock

was heard to ruminate, he balanced a djinn

on his lips, then addressed the banana tree.

A friend was in a car crash with some Dane,

they drove into the hotel for no reason.

The hammock declared the crash ‘a scary pigeon’.

We fell asleep to his sudden declaration

that he’d eat ‘all the nearby marshmallows’.

At dawn, the beach was bright, even in sunglasses.

You kept on saying surprising things that came in

slant, like birds from a bay I’d not yet visited.

We’d not see each other again, and the hammock

was lucid about our returning, X-raying us

with something about the hard luck in life.

 

_____________________________

DUSK

by Thomas Land
　
 
Blind windows high in the sky
returned the glow of the evening
at Centre Point (for long
an empty skyscraper: issue
of our divorce from our purpose),
when life settled down on the kerb
below to rest her feet.

The lingering glare of the light
still burnished the homeward flow
of cars in the traffic congestion.
Oblivious of your beauty,
you tired pedestrians morphed
into deities texting urgent
messages through the ether.

A saxophone player took loving
leave of the day. The colours
then hesitated as dusk rose,
billowing out of exhaust pipes,
engulfing London, and slowly
life filled her yearning lungs
with that mellow, polluted air.
　

_____________________________

 

Is A Poem Fiction?

by Bruce McRae

I’m writing about a forest of pins.
It’s a poem underwater.
It’s a book about sharp edges
and the wee wee hours.
A story about a story setting off
over an apparitional horizon.

Editor, please find enclosed
a borrowed vowel,
the infused souls
of dust-mouthed scribes,
the tale of the stone and the ballerina,
my dog-faced diary,
the chronicles of delightful bedlam,
the legends of squid . . .

I’m writing on a page
of frozen tundra, the moon
dreaming my verbs, mouse-thoughts
encircled within parenthesis;
like smoke rising
in a valley of icy alphabets.

I’m writing a thesis on silence.
A note reminding myself
about what not to forget.
Instructions on how to
take a rip out of the air.
I’m writing on a black envelope
with white letters.
(Suffering requires black lettering.)

I’m writing on my hand,
a parable gestating
at the back of my mind
for the past seventeen years.

 

There’s blue blood in my pen,
and pencil shavings in my hair.
I’m writing without consonants,
Saturday unrolling its broadsheet.

I’m a book, I want to be read.
The real world a faint glow.
What’s actual vaguely interesting.

I’m carving arbutus,
a calligraphy of blackened sap.
I have an imageless imagination.

My God, I’m my own life sentence.

Dear oh dear, I’m the last of my line.

 

 

 _____________________________

 

AT WALDEN POND

by B. Z. Niditch

 

Quoting Thoreau

to an eager audience

along the bridge

in a windburn July

the soft breeze wafts

by veiny Evergreen

echoes as words

in my grasp

and falls as hyacinth

next to still tourists

listening and overheated

before our leafy eyes

unsure of a summer's guide

among insects,bees

and the pond's stones

our shadows above waters

in visible horizons

giving off sun

from gilded nature

around us

worthy as a filament

of luminous sensations.

 

_____________________________

 

Kneeling on the Redwood Floor

By James O’Sullivan

 

Parting her stinging lips, she inhaled, deep, and savoured

the tasteless air upon her exhausted tongue.

Leaning upon the creaking divan, she rose,

knees raw from the redwood floor, chest laboured,

slowing the beating of an old heart in a body, young.

 

She blessed herself and reached for her clothes.

 

Deep in her pocket she could feel its rustle –

true sustenance for the day ahead.

She rubbed her blemished skin, pulling

back on perpetually taut muscle.

The tattered notes for which she had bled

passed from her grip when none were looking.

 

Bruised, she lay upon the fetid floor,

hands tightly bound by their own grasp.

Eyes shut, she spoke with him.

Cowering, as blood wept from every pore,

she bargained, with a frightened rasp,

and cast herself upon his whim.

 

______________________________

 

Orrery

by Mark Stopforth

 

 

Out of the bedroom’s pocket watch dark,

the lamp shade curls an edge of white,

a new moon hanging in its box of

picture book stars, headlights

passing in the fox hide night,

draw the phases new to old,

and back again to a lunar eclipse,

that slowly creeps across the walls,

orbiting the pillow locked dreams of

those who silently turn planets in their sleep.

 

______________________________

 

THE FLYING MONKEYS

by Ron Yazinski

 

It’s her own fault she takes such small steps

And can’t keep up with her mother

In their walk around the development.

 

If she moved faster,

As fast as her mother,

She wouldn’t notice the two black vultures in the oak tree above her,

 

Each as tall as she is, looking like the Wicked Witch’s Flying Monkeys,

From the WIZARD OF OZ,

Shaking their branches as if taunting her for letting go of her mother’s hand.

 

Across the street, a bickering of twelve more vultures

Gouge an armadillo in a neighbor’s yard.

Suddenly three of them screech up in a squabble

 

And with their ragged wings veer across at her, almost at eye level,

Frightening her with their slobbering mouthfuls,

Before swerving farther down the block.

 

And the little girl would like to scream,

But her pretty mother, with her ear buds firmly in

And her music turned up loud

 

Is in that special place she calls the dark side of the moon,

Where crying cannot reach;

And so the little girl whimpers and hurries to catch up.

 

 

 

______________________________ 

 

Contributors

 

Marc Carver

I have just published my fifth collection of poetry with Lapwing press based in Belfast. I perform my work to anybody who will listen, probably more in America than England. I work for a poetry publication in New York as a sub editor and have had well over two hundred poems published around the world but most of all, i hope people like my work and in some ways respect it.

Martyn Halsall

Martyn Halsall is a former staff correspondent with The Guardian, now working as a communications adviser to the Church of England from his home in rural West Cumbria. His most recent publications include a commission from the Lancaster Literary Festival, and poems in New Writing Cumbria and Third Way magazine. In 2011 he was awarded the Jack Clemo Memorial Prize for poetry, for the third time.

Louise Hastings

 

Louise Hastings is based in the beautiful county of Somerset where she gains much inspiration for her writing. The connection between the inner workings of the human psyche and the natural world interest her deeply. She has been writing for over a year now, as a way of allowing her thoughts and emotions to breathe through the powerful medium of poetry, and has found it profoundly healing to her soul and spirit. She has had several poems published in various anthologies and online sites. You can read more of her work here at: http://poeticdelusions.com

 

Thomas Land

 

Is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent writing for global syndication. His poetry, reviews and polemics appear in current issues of Ambit, Contemporary Review and Orbis.

 

B.Z. Niditch

 

is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.

His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review;  Denver Quarterly;  Hawaii Review,; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France);  Prism International;  Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. 

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

James O'Sullivan

James O'Sullivan is a journalist, researcher and creative writer from Cork city, Ireland. James' first collection of poetry, entitled Kneeling on the Redwood Floor, was published by Belfast-based Lapwing Publications. James is a graduate of both University College Cork and Cork Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Bray Arts Journal, Motley Magazine and The Southern Star. Further information on James’ work can be obtained from josullivan.org.

 

Mark Stopforth

 

I'm currently Head of Art in a school in Gloucestershire and as an artist I have exhibited several times at The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol as well as being a finalist in the Exeter Contemporary Art, International Open 2009. As a poet I have been published with Leeds University Press, Sentinel  Champions Magazine and Writer’s Forum, winning Fleeting Magazines “short writing of the year 2010”. I was shortlisted for Poetry in the Brit Writers’ Award 2011.

 

Ron Yazinski

I am a retired English teacher who, with my wife Jeanne, divides time between Northeastern Pennsylvania and Winter Garden, Florida.  My poems have appeared in The Journal of the Mulberry Poets and Writers Association, Poets Online, Strong Verse, The Bijou Review, Recursive Angel, The Edison Literary Review, Lunarosity, Penwood, Jones Av., Chantarelle’s Notebook, Centrifugal Eye, amphibi.us, Nefarious Ballerina, The Talon, Amarillo Bay, The Write Room, Pulsar, Sunken Lines, Wilderness House, Blast Furnace, The Houston Literary Review, Menagerie, H.O.D., Forge, Miller’s Pond, Muscle and Blood, Indigo Rising, Sixers Review and Crash. I am also the author of the chapbook HOUSES: AN AMERICAN ZODIAC, which was published by The Poetry Library and a book of poems SOUTH OF SCRANTON.