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Avoidance

by on Apr 26, 2017

Waiting for catastrophe
I keep busy with things
that don’t matter,
avoid starting what
I might not finish,
try not to mourn,
or spend myself in rage,
wasting energies
I can’t replace.
Grief will come
when I think I have
outrun it.
I already have too many
sympathy cards
and sleepless hours enough
to find thousands
of bad endings
that become easier and easier
to imagine.

 

—
Mary McCarthy has always been a writer, but spent most of her working life as a Registered Nurse. Her work has appeared in many online and print journals, including Earth’s Daughters, Gnarled Oak, Third Wednesday and Three Elements Review. Her echapbook Things I Was Told Not To Think About is available through Praxis magazine online as a free download. She is grateful for the wonderful online communities of writers and poets sharing their work and passion for writing, providing a rich world of inspiration, appreciation, and delight.

i woke this morning

by on Apr 25, 2017

to a neutral voice intoning
bombs in marketplaces
and refugees washed upon the shore

to music of breath and skin
dark cascade of pillowed hair
gossamer feather of touch

to dreams of justice
from the vast sea’s edge
to beyond the distant shore

to a jacaranda blue day
dancing through the curtain
and kookaburras’ liquid burst of song

 

—
Neil Creighton is an Australian poet whose work as a teacher of English and Drama brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work often reflects strong interest in social justice. His recent publications have been in Poetry Quarterly, Autumn Sky Daily, Praxis mag online, Rats Ass and Verse Virtual, where he is a Contributing Editor. He blogs at windofflowers.blogspot.com.au

When My Youth Catches Up with Me

by on Feb 22, 2017

The one I am is fragile in the mirror.
The one I was still lives wildly
along a nature trail, throws rocks
through windows of pools, makes waves,
never grows up but climbs the tallest
of an old-growth forest. He still growls
loudly in my ears, though the lines
he cannot cross are trails worn
so deeply in the past and on my face.

I grumble, clear a hole in the window fog,
replay a film on the pane, eyes flickering
along the forest path where the barefoot boy
is lost forever. Still an echo calls,
not to warn me, but to lead me through
long winters, the snow settling deeper
and deeper in my hair. The trail beneath
my slowing steps whitens, frozen in time
but for a time still cracking like glass.

 

—
Robert S. King, a native Georgian, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review,  Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014).

The Next Generation of Stones

by on Feb 21, 2017

Spring finds new stones forced into the world,
children of winter’s long hidden labors.
Not even keen ermine sensed their coming
under that crystalline surface.
But they were there awaiting shifts,
pressures, erosions to bring them out of hiding,
into the leveled field to trip up horse and plow.
The only way to light they take is tearing.
Seeing fields now marred and broken,
farmers root them out, preserving them for walls
when they should be buried back.
Summer brings even plots that welcome seed,
but crops will wilt, and snow will hide
the next generation of stones.

 

—
Amy Kotthaus is a writer, translator, painter, and photographer. Her poetry has been published in Ink in Thirds, Yellow Chair Review, and Section 8. Her photography has been published in Storm Cellar, Ground Fresh Thursday, Crab Fat Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and Digging Through the Fat. She currently lives in Maine with her husband and children.

their affair

by on Feb 20, 2017

 

their affair
the pattern of stones
in a zen garden

 

—
Deborah P Kolodji is the California Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America and the moderator of the Southern California Haiku Study Group.   She has published over 900 haiku and other short poems in numerous journals both on and off the web.

beneath the surface

by on Feb 17, 2017

 

—
Marianne Paul is a Canadian novelist and poet who recently transitioned to short-form poetry, primarily haiku, senryu, haiga and haibun. She was the winner of the 2016 Jane Reichhold Memorial Haiga Competition, multi-media category. Read more of her writing on twitter @mariannpaul, and on her website literarykayak.com.

The Road Dreamers Take

by on Feb 16, 2017

We draw our maps in darkness,
get lost and trip on fallen signs,
detour like wingless birds
into night’s black holes.
Feet as heavy as our hearts,
we wait for morning’s widening light
when trees gleam and lean apart
for our passage—and where the road
shines ahead for a day,
we follow the fickle light
of dream again.

 

—
Robert S. King, a native Georgian, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he serves on the board of FutureCycle Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including Atlanta Review,  Chariton Review, Kenyon Review, Main Street Rag, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. He has published eight poetry collections, most recently Developing a Photograph of God (Glass Lyre Press, 2014).

The Sound of Taste

by on Feb 14, 2017

There’s a yellow boat on a blue sea.
It’s a drawing you made, and the sun

is like an olive in the sky.
Maybe you were thinking Martini

thoughts, or maybe you were drawn
to that horizon which always seemed

to mark your work, that blurry line
of spray and cloud where the world

disappeared. Some artists render light
as if it were something you could touch

or breathe, but you always drew
and painted taste, a world made of lemons

and salt. Your objects melt and fade,
like something sweet on the tongue.

What lasts cannot be trees,
their trunks and leaves, but a flavor

caught for an instant, a sensation
in the act of fading into itself.

Your landscapes hang on my walls,
and every meadow, every sea cliff,

each green field, lingers in my mouth,
the sound of taste, another lovely, long farewell.

 

—
Steve Klepetar has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including four in 2016. Recent collections include My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto and The Li Bo Poems. Family Reunion and A Landscape in Hell are forthcoming in 2017.

Grief’s Engine is a Flower

by on Feb 13, 2017

Today each shadow is a giddy cosmonaut
navigating fields of light.

Wherever I stand sprinklers go off
and invite rainbows.

The transparencies of air feel
vertiginous as sky.

Every cloud is pregnant with rain that never falls.
Every tree vibrates with telepathic zest.

Ossicles spell out a symphony
that began in the Mesozoic with giant lizards.

The migratory patterns of vampire bats
have been rerouted to your house in the suburbs.

Politicians in Washington and everywhere else
wear overalls and are muzzled with honesty.

A virus somewhere has decoded the gene
for happiness.

All our liminal angels reel in the dark

 

—
José Luis Gutiérrez is a San Francisco-based poet. His work has appeared in Eratio, Scythe, Margie, Poemeleon, DMQ, Jetfuel, Caliban and is forthcoming in Metonym, Xavier Review and Kestrel, among others. His first poetry collection, A World Less Away, was published in 2016.