section 1 (arkava das - ira joel haber)

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arkava das - you can change, The Question of Spaceman Spiff's Bath
Ashley Vajgrt - My portside Portland
Ben Nardolilli - O Bright and Beauty, Manhattan Morning
Aaron Angello - yes birds
Andrew Taylor - Digital Home Communications Terminal, Route Recalculation, She looks like Television
Corey Mesler - Night like a Thief's Pocket, Remaking
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé - as with prosopopoeia an old haiku, Vignette 014, Vignette 016
Piper Ivasheva - Above Rule (for a painter who was mine), Freedom
Elle Pryor - The Inability of Attraction
Jason Bradford - Cassiopeia Nose
John Lambremont, Sr. - HETEROCLITE, AMERICAN DREAM, CARGO
John Sibley Williams - Portrait(s), Invitation(s), Flight
Kanev Peycho - Big as the Sun, Interval
Kristin Joi Lockridge - Birthing
Kenneth Pobo - UP FROM THE GRAVE
ira joel haber - collage 594

section 2 (L. Ward Abel - Ted Jean)

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L. Ward Abel - Water, Paris, White Dog
Laura LeHew - With No Apparent Lapse in Consciousness, Suggestive Short Phrases
M. A. Schaffner - Q12 Engagement Score
Matthew Dexter - A Child’s Intuition
ira joel haber - Head of a Boy
Michael McAloran - Sharpening-
Michael Lee Rattigan - Thanatos (After Alan Mills)
Nicholas Michael Ravnikar - BEACH VACATION
Orchid Tierney - Hollow Shaft
Pat Hauser - My sunsets are always victims or devices
Rosalee Thompson - You Will Have All the Tools You Need
Julie Dru - Her Ghost
Ron Campbell - Tin Cup, Speak Now
Ryan Quinn Flanagan - Madness is as Easy as Changing Your Socks
Sara Fitzpatrick Comito - Dark Island Landing
satnrose - THE SUPERSTRING THEORY OF EVERYTHING (a troped poem)
Sergio A. Ortiz - Flat Voices, Dear God
Ted Jean - Love at the townhouse window 1977

arkava das

you can change

event-related
hunting
in foul weather
trapped
elevator
(in a pitch)
& concrete
patch X
and Y both realize
variants of a single
property or two
subsequently differing
bellwethers
              rain low-angle fading then
              a variable beam incidence
near
actuation stiffness
siding
a new catch drift
if only
the topic-comment
(now
peevish half space)
saw things much before
implanted gaps
signed off
therapeutic
opportunity
to leave
the window
to itself
 

The Question of Spaceman Spiff's Bath

 Center–surround inhibition
quickly heeds
a density-morphed
commonplace
coughed-up
enzymes
issued
chloral
plastids
between sharp
safe inter
prates
we have to
keep
duct X
lips
actuator
gripper
side
takers
for
foraging
need
needle
needle
scent
snot
trail
NOOS
sphere
dilemma

Arkava Das lives in Kolkata, India. His work has recently appeared in Blackbox Manifold, BlazeVOX 2kX, ditch, Moria, Otoliths, The Delinquent etc.

Ashley Vajgrt

My portside Portland

Up and down Burnside,
Lives proof of a simple symbolic territory, Saturday Market
where Elvis and Jimi Hendrix have risen to take pictures with tourists,

This place a rip-zipping, button-popping kiss of color
sweetly slammed into your cheek

the towering city of books recommends
poetry, photography that doesn’t fade

so I will sit and wait for the number 20 bus, my
favorite number working for my favorite city...
under the Bradford pear trees, listening
to the glass canaries tattle on the sun, slipping down the clouds

I pull the yellow cords at Hawthorne, not giving a further
thought to things like feet, the Red Light glows summer,
and I keep mine around my neck, a jellyfish encased in glass

Ben Nardolilli

O Bright and Beauty

Away!
Eastward now, avoid the hours of its decline,
before this power, that pole.

We make land fast,
the saint's vision presses for the ambrosial,
in tin, things are flowing.

Lightning glazes the sky,
the gods shop for men in the Christian market place,
we must walk and be profane

Manhattan Morning

The sky is stuffed with lavender,
So the buildings are rose,
With a slab of chocolate
Here and there along the street.
Mosquito motorcycles are gone,
All is quiet, no drunks congress,
Streets are empty
And the lamps are off.
The clock in the dome glows,
As the breakfast man,
Drags his aluminum store
Down the avenue to prepare
For another business day.
Stoplights switch from gem,
To gem,
Emerald to amber, amber to ruby.

Ben Nardolilli is a twenty four year old writer currently living in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Houston Literary Review, Perigee Magazine, Canopic Jar, One Ghana One Voice, Baker’s Dozen, Thieves Jargon, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Poems Niederngasse, Gold Dust, Scythe, Anemone Sidecar, The Delmarva Review, Contemporary American Voices, SoMa Literary Review, Gloom Cupboard, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, Black Words on White Paper, Cantaraville, and Mad Swirl. In addition he was the poetry editor for West 10th Magazine at NYU and maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com

Aaron Angello

Aaron Angello is wrapping up his MFA at the University of Colorado. He's been published in Pacific Review, Springgun Press, TitMouse, Two Hawks Quarterly, and a few other places.

Andrew Taylor

Digital Home Communications Terminal
 
Too much voltage too much buzzing
light is in strips
weak blood in veins forces insomnia
 
to call at 3.00 a.m.
like the North
Atlantic Drift linked souls in
 
time zonal shift language bites
lights switch on automatically
 
in grey corridors so are you here to haunt me?
 
so here we are
 
four months on five years on
clothes change faces burn
like retinas
 
into the brain past slow active ?
diseases pass slow active disease
 
at night the hotel corridor
shuts down returns to dark
 
while dreams get littered
with women and disaster
 
so what is divine? Can I get to you through prayer?
 
can I rewind the tape and find you there?
watching the video shot on May 6th 1989
 
is like having a knife slowly scratch
initials into the forearm
 
oh fellow explorer of gardens and gaps
I miss you

dreams of invasion and seeking
family to move away from danger
 
and to take shelter to watch from
a distance
 
when the heart explodes it causes
severe damage that lasts a lifetime
 
I'm scarred all over
 
Travel fatigue escape in service
stations refuel
 
seek shooting stars and the sound
metronome of red lights versus white
 
a balance
 
Junction 13 and I'm near enough
to appear in her dreams
 
when I call she refuses to speak
to me and who can blame her?
when Millie Pig is in the washing
machine
 
It's about priorities Andrew
 
and inspiration and poetics
love and lies and throw poverty
into the mix
 
The mist makes the road shrink
 
on trains heading north I feel
the pull
 
I can't exist without you
 
The smell of hyacinths announces
the passing of winter into spring

The light across the bay brings
with it warmth
 
and August brings the sweetest music
 
September with its dappled green
and parks of change
 
offers winter cusp of sanctuary
and security
 
it is time to end this
 
madness
 
You make my heart melt

Route Recalculation
 
England's motorways run
river like coast to coast
 
All roads lead north
 
where the heart remains
unappreciated
 
Occasionally we meander
like a tributary
 
Through dark mist shrouded
lanes and for an instant
like granules in a jar
 
I settle

She looks like Television
 
Cathedral at dusk all souls
congregate
 
They've built public toilets
near centuries old resting places
In reception reading
The Independent and Wallpaper*
she looks like television
 
arm cast a hundred messages
in a hundred colours
 
She can dance in nightclubs in the city
 
Taking air amongst the trees
the eaves house swallow nests
the lake is reclaiming the land

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection of poems 'The Sound of Light Aircraft' comes from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Poems have recently appeared in Heavy Hands Ink, Durable Goods, MUST and The Journal of Heroin Love Songs. He has a PhD in poetry and poetics.

Corey Mesler

Night like a Thief's Pocket
 
 
Light-headed
as if turned on
 
I stumble back into your arms
 
pitying the darkness
which used to hold for me
 
such dense pleasures.
 
 
  
 
 
Remaking
 
 
My daughter takes a few poly-
chromatic pipe cleaners
and makes for my heart a small safe
room. Outside the de-
molition continues, reconfiguring the
makeshift neighbor-
hood. I watch the colors rise and fade.
I watch my daughter dance
with the suncats to the music of umbrellas.
 

Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He also claims to have written "The Martian Hop". With his wife, he runs Burke's Book Store, one of the country's oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé

as with prosopopoeia an old haiku
 
beyond baron’s cove
kirrin island a blue dot
life buoy in a book
 
the more pulled the sun
the more pulled the waves
sliver, silver moon
 
and ideas, cloistered – by whom?
 
take the shortest route
take the line, triangulate
wide eyes, cold palms
 
the mainsail goes on and on
 
eggs and cartons on the floor
cracked and yellowing
 
and our shouts adrift, downwind

Vignette 014
 
This was possibly the impending apocalypse everyone had heard about, which had become a seer’s bad word among the Hedoskeptics and Vicoccupians, their eight hundred theories of how time changes light and its movement never once explaining whether time could stop, completely stop the way you could close in on its behavior, fold your fingers into a fist like Hyperion and make light disappear. Or would the stopping of time be another illusion, the little things merely wispy and phantasmagoric, stashed away for a while.

Vignette 016
 
I just have to see your numbing spectacle and exposition, Resident 97 thought, gingerly lifting the flyaway fire from its cube and then, in one bold stroke, painting his immediate sky with it, so he looked right through the sponging as if it were a glass window. In it, he saw the other side, of the northern district growing old, its dilapidation more severe and the salt lakes now solidifying into a muddy, unworkable state. Over the hardening magma, a heavy rainfall of snow. Water crystallizing in mid-air, now trifoliate flakes. Maybe someone would know how to pray for the rolling plains. For the entire landform and its safe return.
 

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, Desmond is a recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award. He has recent or forthcoming work in Copper Nickel, Dark Sky, Fence, Grey Sparrow, JOTAC, Nano Fiction, Sixers Review, and Spork Press. Desmond also works in clay, his commemorative pieces housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

Piper Ivasheva

Above Rule
(for a painter who was mine)

Like the pines and paint thrashed together and illuminated in your skull,
your body reposing I superimpose over the country in which you live:
 
blackberry bushes and your blushed mouth,
the river and your rib.
 
Did you know that Gertrude Stein was always burning?
Hot to the touch, in fact –
white light in her cheeks,
and ruddy, jagged flame scraped the landscape.
She always walked above ground:
in the claw of a tree;
in gossamer blue extending like a spilled glass.
 
Smudge her out in oil pastel!
I am clicking her in my mouth like perfect stones.
 
In your absence my heart falls to jabbering.
I’ve heard the stones tumbling since you left.
Come to me, my love,
for a truth like God’s.
Come to me.
 
Please fall at my feet now.

Freedom
 
I want to remember hashed and harried houses
with charcoal shadows and yellow illnesses.
 
At this hour the streets know quiet
has dropped like a cold hand to a fevered head.
I am inside the frizz of colored lights.
My brain – frying with the neon sizzle,
    becoming food.
Let my poetry flop on the concrete like an organ beating –
like a fish on a hook, exiled - breathing.
 
Bathe me in winter –
lock my mind in the freezer,
                             it is too rich, there is too much –
it wants excision, preservation. 
It is wanting porcelain,
and the constricting confines of cellophane.
It will be there in spring for you
when again there is hunger.
 
Lock me up in the gridwork of lace
posed by the shadows on concrete.
 
Unleash the houses.

Elle Pryor

The Inability of Attraction

Lovely enters and so tolls my bending strength
weakness runs through my body stealing my legs
we are at parallel, two beings who never intersect
Euclid says to lean, then we will indefinitely meet
for I am rooted, a captive of able forces unknown
you must lean to me, follow only a crooked arrow
diverge from this line to merge with my long sigh
for in its airy lair I stay confined, then move close
curse my scourging blood with tricks of clumsy
dropped head unsteadiness and fluttering fragility
like the slender flower stems that you didn’t send.
Refrain from tracing the grainy details of this face
for I am doubtful you will skim about here easily
rain will caress my skin before you notice me
umbrellas will protect and deflect your downfall
while I am drenched in a lynch of sly storm water
to see you once more, then again once more after
so on looking infinitely, the only known medicine.

Elle Pryor is based in Florida and is a graduate of the University of Wales. She is published or will be published in South Jersey Underground, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, Black Lantern Publishing, (A Brilliant) Record Magazine, Crows Nest, Pens on Fire and Kerouac’s Dog. Two of her short stories are included in the anthologies ‘Dusted’ and ‘Caught by Darkness’.

Jason Bradford

Jason Bradford's chapbook Remembering the Future won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the NFSPS. His poems have appeared in The Coe Review, Colere, and The Pearl.

John Lambremont, Sr.

HETEROCLITE
 
Snow storm in
Sugar Land,
tree blanches,
verdant rock hosts
ice lichens' negative
color snaps,
park shivers
in reverse,
white crow caws
for still life,
Monkey Man
smokes with both
fish sauce
hands.
 
 
 

AMERICAN DREAM
 
Just a random chalk-soaked Thursday,
fax me over opium,
a slow ride through the house d'accord
on the back of a gambling gibbon.
 
Mornings are all getting smaller,
afternoons just seem prolonged,
vox musica is broken, and I turn
to the blinded windows
in search of sustaining rain.

CARGO
 
I am a ship of the Palace, adrift 
between chaste and six.
 
I am the serviceable abuser
hidden in the life jackets.
 
I am a lantern with limbs,
whiskers jutting,
port-side grin.
 
I rub twines across pine,
orchestrate debris,
one drum beach.
 
I was born in my hold
a pressurized insert,
do not tamper with it,
even when I’m empty.

John Lambremont, Sr. is a poet living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has a B.A. in Creative Writing and a J.D. from L.S.U. John's poems have appeared in more than twenty literary reviews and journals, including Red River Review, A Hudson View (2009 Pushcart Prize nomination), Boston Literary Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, and Lilliput Review.

John Sibley Williams

Portrait(s)
 
So long validating in cloud-shapes
a more intimate portrait
 
that within this promise of second heaven
absorbed what glass once sung.
 
 

Invitation(s)
 
Slipped beneath my wiper
an invitation to festivities
held in the empty factory
I just left
where once mirrors were assembled.
 
 
 
 

Flight
 
We swiftly took to the road.
But there was no road.
Nor lines upon the road.
But we followed the lines.
One of us turned up the radio
to kill off any song.
And we hummed silently
together to the end.
But there was no end.

John Sibley Williams is a poet and book publicist residing in Portland, OR. He has a previous MA in Writing and presently studies Book Publishing at Portland State University, where he serves as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for Three Muses Press. His poetry was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize, and his debut chapbook, A Pure River, is forthcoming from The Last Automat Press. Some of his over 100 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, Euphony, Open Letters, Cadillac Cicatrix, Juked, The Journal, Hawaii Review, Cutthroat, The Furnace Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Aries, and River Oak Review.

Kanev Peycho

Big as the Sun
 
The light penetrate our bones
as butter and we stand tilting
blank faces up in the bitter sky.
 
We saw the past and the present,
we saw the cows laying in the fields,
with their udders foaming under the sun,
looking calm and happy as Buddhists.
 
I remember standing on the ridge
stretching our hands beneath the light
and softly whispering our names to
the sunbeams,
 
watching them go back to the far end of
the galaxy where the first thing uttered
in the eternal darkness will be -
 
Eve.

Interval
 
Silence falls down on the ground
Sad and slow song dies right away
The wheat leans slowly forward
and its sunshine explode with it
Oblivion is just another name for the Cycle
The whiteness of the children’s smile
Copulation within the core of the violet
Tiny bricks of Buddhist’s happiness
Mole trapped in the lamp-shade
The dome of the church is completely tenantless
Nameless sanctuaries in the obscurity
Frozen desire sucking the dust of the dream
Rock rolls unrolls
The needle on the vinyl like leprosy
Beads of tears dance in the fairy-tale.

Peycho Kanev’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, Welter, Ann Arbor Review, The Shine Journal, The 13th Warrior Review, Mascara Literary Review, The Arava Review, The Mayo Review, Windmills, The Aroostook Review, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, 322 Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is available at Amazon.com. His new poetry collection “Bone Silence” will be published in September 2010 by Desperanto, New York.

Kristin Joi Lockridge

Birthing

Used to be
I sat down
And it came
Didn’t ask for
I breathed it.
And he knew
They all knew.
I felt something.
I feel no more.
Now he asks
Why shudder and stumble
Close my eyes
Bury my head
Why hide
Underneath skin
Like a child
In the womb
Waiting for rebirth
For simple solution
To recondite answer.

Kristin Joi Lockridge is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Fiction Writing and a current MFA student at UNC Wilmington with a concentration in Fiction. She has previously been published in the SN Review and You Must Be This Tall To Ride.

Kenneth Pobo

UP FROM THE GRAVE
 
He arose we sang many
a Sunday.  Jesus had a triumph. 
My own barely registered—
 
getting up for school,
swishing peas down with milk.
I wondered how would
 
Jesus look freshly risen?
Shiny and fresh,
as if he had gotten a perm
 
and a manicure, not tacked up
on some cross, speared,
thorn-skulled.  We didn’t
 
want to picture his close-up
without him looking his best.
He had to be Fred Astaire
 
dancing to glory, not one more
done-in corpse freshly animated. 
The organ pumped and we
 
walked out into suburbia, ready
for baseball, Parchisi,
and fried chicken.

Kenneth Pobo won the Main Street Rag poetry chapbook contest in 2009.    His poems appear in Windsor Review, Naugatuck River Review, Forpoetry.com, Mad Poets Review, and elsewhere.

ira joel haber

Collage 594

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows  both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows  including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work  is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art,  New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings,  drawings and collages have been published in many on line and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, DeComp, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ  Review,  Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration,Chick, Flicks, Softblow,  Eclectica Magazine, Backwards City  Review, Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine,  Brew City  Magazine, Fiction Attic, Mastodon Dentist,  Blue Print Review, Ellipsis,The Indelible Kitchen, Crickret,  Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine,  Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, Glassfire Magaine,The Houston Literary Review, Lilies and Cannonballs,  Wheelhouse Magazine, Terra Incognita, Qarrtsiluni, The Tusculum Review, Multidementional, 34th Parallel, Wood Coin, Sacramento Poetry, Art & Music, Anti-Poetry, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Mom Egg, Disenthralled, etcetera, & sea stories. Over the years he has received  three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowship, two  Pollock-Krasner grants and most recently in 2004 received  The Adolph Gottlieb  Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in  Brooklyn.