Artist

She’d announced,
“The only culture in this place is an active yeast infection.”

Now she was bailing out--
trudging thirty-five miles to the local university.

She packed food and camping gear, then
set out on Highway 62.

Appalled by carcasses
of animals run over by cars,

she’d cradle the body of each victim
to the nearest roadsign,

where she’d drape
a distinctive breed of message.

Two days later
(after the Missing Person report),

the police discovered her ten miles out,
sobbing on the gravel shoulder,

a dead possum around her neck.
And they arrested her.

Mark Blaeuer

author's note: "This poem builds on an incident reported as true, described in a Fayetteville, Arkansas, paper called The Grapevine. The article about this artist came out c. 1980-82, when I was a grad student. I attended an exhibition of her paintings around that time; they were, if memory serves, family portraits in which the subjects' skin had been omitted so as to reveal the musculature. Sadly, I don't recall the artist's identity, but I believe her first name may have been Julie."

Mark Blaeuer’s poems and occasional translations of Spanish-language poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dark Horse, Ezra, The Found Poetry Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, Measure, Nimrod, Verse Wisconsin, Westview, The Windsor Review, and many other journals. Kelsay Books/White Violet Press published a collection of his work, Fragments of a Nocturne, in 2014. He lives a few miles outside Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas, where he was employed as a ranger for twenty years. His M.A. (in anthropology) is from the University of Arkansas.

thinking of vincent
​
autumn sky
full of stars
dying

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Mercedes Webb-Pullman: Graduated from Victoria University Wellington with MA in Creative Writing 2011. Her poems and prose have appeared in Turbine, 4th Floor, Swamp, Reconfigurations, The Electronic Bridge, Otoliths, Connotations, Ekphrastic, Typewriter, and Main Street Rag, among others, and in her books.  She lives on the Kapiti Coast, New Zealand.

Good Fortune 

What good fortune
to have layered sky--
grey clouds stretched 
onto periwinkle canvas--
above our evening home.
Better fortune that the inside
is lit with tangerine edges
of setting sun.
And the luckiest of all--
the cosmos stitching stars
in the root cellar
stars whose light seeps up
through floor boards
like stems to vein 
quarter moons
into being
sharp lamps hanging
in every room.

Taunja Thomson

Taunja Thomson’s poetry has most recently appeared in Peacock Journal and Half-Baked.  Two of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005 and “I Walked Out in January” in 2016.  She has co-authored a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry that is due out in May of 2017 and has a writer’s page at  HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter" https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter.  A worshiper of nature, her summers are filled with water gardening, and her winters are spent obsessively feeding the birds and other wildlife that appear in her one-acre slice of heaven, a field.  

Dutch

Lump-rumpled buns gurn over soft eggs, over-churned
mayonnaise on everything even fries. Lapping at the upward
swathe of the weather-moon makes you want to varnish your own arm,
and eat that too. Lay your ample

frame under silver halide and contemplate each pore collecting
refuse from cobbled paths in darkened alleyways, inert-gas lights haunt
the girl walking with her back to the canal and the sign that reads
gesloten. Lettuce on plates. Slather on lavish-thick like

sea scum on the gel-bellied whale, pressing an ever more present
sonogram into the sea wall where glass eels
slot into latch-key diagrams
to hide the smell of their DNA. The sternum

connects the clavicle, stars hide the oldest
of their songs. Lace curtains are gamma rays. Cocktail umbrellas hover above glass and the

meisje’s red hair is still visible above the sand, who shot and killed Nazis. And in
Haarlem tonight the woman in the window is awfully present. Women in the
Sahara. Women in Dublin back-alleys and
migrant workers in Dubai. Amsterdam is like

Phoenix, someone said -
Rotterdam is like New York. Buildings slung wide
and bunker-sunken like wooden peg blocks,
wharf lapping the ashes out of their reclaimed beer steins and
bombed out of all recognition.

Jo-Ella Sarich

Jo-Ella Sarich has practised as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Cleaver Magazine, Blackmail Press, Barzakh Magazine, Poets Reading the News, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.
 https://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/, @jsarich_writer.





​

Charity to Her Husband Upon His Arriving Home Late

If you think this serene look has anything to do 
with motherly love, Husband, you are mistaken.
It may be the poppy tea I drank after you left 
for the Senate this morning, when this babe, 
suckling so contently at my breast, was screaming  
her bloody little head off. Or, perhaps, the three cups of wine
I consumed at lunch, after I finally got that sweet sleepy-head 
I’m covering with a blanket as you stagger through
the front door, toga in disarray, to sleep.
Do I discern a slight flush under your beard? 
That late meeting, was it, possibly, held in a brothel? 
Take this naked little fellow off my hands.  
He’s been grabbing and pulling at me all day. 
I’ve wanted to smother him in the folds 
of my billowing red robe for the last hour.
While you’re at it, put that smelly bird he’s so afraid of 
back in its cage.  When I told you I didn’t want chickens, 
why did you buy a pelican? She never lays eatable eggs, 
just pecks and pecks and pecks away at her breast, 
bleeding all over the palazzo. Please, show some charity 
to our slave who must scrub the floors.

Gillian Nevers

Gillian Nevers’ poems have appeared in Silk Road,Wisconsin People and Ideas, Pearl, Pirenes Fountain, Verse Wisconsin, Right Hand Pointing, Architrave Press, Heron Tree Review, Silver Birch Press and other print and online literary magazines and anthologies. She won second prize in the 2008 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters statewide poetry contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011. Gillian lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband, Dan.

The Choice

Four options sprawl before my eyes, one choice
to make – one path to take, three to forsake.
The first is sit, to simply sit: rejoice
in nothing, stare at dirt and dogs and break
up time with sleep. The second is to use,
abuse each branch or beast within my reach.
The third is wave the world away, to lose
all will to play a part – a walking breach.
The fourth, an option that I try my best
to leave as nothing but a selfish spree:
to chase, to hunt, to take, to grab, to wrest
the fight or flight that’s thought reality.
Somewhere between the city and the sky,
I try to choose the one that’s least a lie.

Luigi Coppola

Luigi Coppola teaches and writes in London, England. Poems have/will appear in: Acumen, Anon, Equinox, Fourteen, The Frogmore Papers, Gold Dust, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Iota, Lighten Up, Magma, The Ofi Press, Orbis, Other Poetry, Pennine Platform, Poetry Digest, The Rialto, THE SHOp, Snakeskin, South, Strange Poetry and Stride Magazine.www.luigicoppolapoetry.blogspot.co.uk

Cinnamon Sky (after Van Gogh after Hiroshige)

Cherry-brown burl reaches up
in angles

past spring grass and onlookers
in blues and yellows
(vague and unimportant)

past grey tree trunks
whose only role
is to carry a firmament
of silver and citrine
cloud-petals

past all this 
and up to a cinnamon sky
that serves as backdrop
for the occasional 
albescent cup-petaled plum
blossom    tousled faces
that turn this way
and that.

Taunja Thomson

Taunja Thomson’s poetry has most recently appeared in Peacock Journal and Half-Baked.  Two of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: “Seahorse and Moon” in 2005 and “I Walked Out in January” in 2016.  She has co-authored a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry that is due out in May of 2017 and has a writer’s page at  HYPERLINK "https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter" https://www.facebook.com/TaunjaThomsonWriter.  A worshiper of nature, her summers are filled with water gardening, and her winters are spent obsessively feeding the birds and other wildlife that appear in her one-acre slice of heaven, a field.  

​Here’s to Smoke in Your Eye

The veilfall of snowy petals is itself like pale fumes
that never rise—falling, always falling. Occasionally,
accumulated drifts quiver, snowlike, over the ground.
Your soul follows fast on her silence-shod hooves.

One eye is your demon eye. You can’t see the forest
for the light. Reddening at your own visions, you look
only toward what you don’t want. A trickle of cherry-
ripe blood moistens your mouth, its hidden teeth.

Alcohol is a folding fan you keep closed and hidden
until the winds die. Sometimes you blow your own
pink conch shell to summon sirens, the empyrean
energizing with the gyre of your personal storm.

You are sure that forget-me-not skies will still be
waiting beyond the clouds when you are ready to shine.

F.J. Bergmann

F.J. Bergmann edits poetry for Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com) and Mobius: the Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. A Catalogue of the Further Suns, winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook contest, will appear in 2017.