Yosemite High Camp
 
Cloud fingers,
Swift as serpents,
Steal stars from a frosty sky.
First snow,
Dancing the opening dance at winter’s ball
In wind’s embrace,
Flirts with pine needles
New in May,
Whispers promises rich beyond measure –
If she lingers.
 
Robert Walton

Robert Walton is an experienced writer with several dozen poems published.  His novel Dawn Drums was awarded first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors Association’s literary contest and also won the 2014 Tony Hillerman Best Fiction Award.  He is a retired teacher and a life-long rock climber.

 
This is not a pipe: La trahison des images, René Magritte
 
This is not a love affair.
This is not an affaire de coeur.
This is what the piper cost.
This is a sinking ship.

Maybe it is a one-way street.
Maybe it is a dead-end street.
Maybe it is a pipe dream.
It is not and never has been an apple.

It is a hat wearing a man.
It is a giraffe in a wine glass.
It is a rose ad infinitum.
It is the past waiting to be the future.

It is a play. Act IV, Scene V, Ophelia drowning
and the electricians walking out on strike.
It is a snuffed candle, an altar pulled down.
It is a broken ski, a key of ashes.

It is a letter dropped and run over by an ambulance.
It is a war just getting underway.
It is the legend of the centuries.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Janice D. Soderling

Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor. Recent and forthcoming work at Mezzo Cammin, Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asses of Parnassus, Boston Literary Magazine’s "Best of” anthology, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology. Her chapbook ms. "Political Woman" was honourably noted by Minerva Rising.

Marguerite at Midnight

A woman, standing near the fires, seems
alone, the flames behind her glowing red,
whipped by a swirling wind, eternal, torn
by air to tongues, by voices harmonized
as if the chants, renewed in light, were born
a thousand years before, and overhead
merge with both flame and smoke, casting a shade


along the unmarked track her footsteps made
moments ago. I can’t say where she’s been
or even know the messages she heard:
illuminated darkness realized
within her voice, recrafted as a word
whispered in vortexes where embers spin
around each other, blazing into ash.


But on her open gown, those same tongues flash
reflections of themselves in linen folds
moved by one wind together, and her hair,
backlit, distracts my vision, hypnotized
by radiance, by her. Now everywhere
voice, fire, form, combine, a flood that holds
unearthly echoes in its glowing stream.

W.F. Lantry

This poem was first published in The Nervous Breakdown.

W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree 2015), The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012) winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Chapbook 2011) and a forthcoming collection, The Book of Maps. He received his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry (US), CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), and the Potomac Review and Old Red Kimono LaNelle Daniel Prizes. His work has appeared widely online and in print in journals such as Aesthetica, Gulf Coast and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He currently works in Washington, DC. and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.

Pink Angels 
 
Feminist angels decry boudoir-pink banalities,
buttock-curved seated figures, that resemble them
not in the least. At the most swishes of blurred colour
 
are all that humans, with their faltering flicker-fusion
threshold, can see when, in their carelessness,
passing angels flap their wings lazily, warp
 
the refractive properties of air and suck erotic pink
and regal gold from blue sky, from white clouds,
from God's eye, the sun.

Roy Beckemeyer

Roy Beckemeyer is from Wichita, Kansas. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals including The Midwest Quarterly, Kansas City Voices, The North Dakota Review, and  I-70 Review, and in anthologies such as "Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems," (Woodley Memorial Press, 2011) and "To the Stars through Difficulties: A Kansas Renga," (Mammoth Press,2012).  Two of his poems were nominated for the 2016 Pushcart Prize competition. His debut collection of poems, "Music I Once Could Dance To," published in 2014 by Coal City Review and Press, was selected as a 2015 Kansas Notable Book Award by the State Library of Kansas and the Kansas Center for the Book.

The Bottle Picker
 
The crash said I must have startled
him, no mean feat, taking out my trash
at that worm-catching hour, broken green
glass at his black-booted feet.
 
Peering out from under the bill
of his old foam-and-mesh baseball cap,
mangy black beard dotted with salt, his
regard arrested me and my garbage.
 
Dark green Hefty bag slung over right
shoulder, his left fist gripped a Rossignol
ski pole, I guessed for spearing rats and
fending off dogs.
 
That's how I knew him standing thus--
the bottle picker, I called him, dirty worker,
dawn crooner—looking down at the wine
vessel remains, don't worry, that's just garbage,
he said, garbage.
 
But these here, them's nickels,
and from the bottom of the dumpster
he plucked a box of empty Corona
bottles, transferring them one by one,
clink by clink, into his unslung bag.

Jeff Nazzaro

Jeff Nazzaro lives in Southern California, where he writes fiction and poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Talking Soup, BareBack, Oddville Press, Flash: The International Short-short Story Magazine, The Angel City Review, and other fine literary venues.

PANEGYRIC OF A FLUORESCENT SAGUARO WHICH ROUSES
“IGNATZ MOUSE” FROM TURPITUDINOUS SLUMBER
 
The ziggurat Zabbuto boasts a brick of someteen thousand years --
but kall that brick no special kase -- for someday's sun might melt it to a “beer jug.”
And on the sun today a howdah, friend. And overneath three brickbats fly.
And windy klockfaced mesas running redward back as rust.
‘Pon yon vermillion dais suns and stirs a “Kat” whose hardy noggin waits.
“She” knows what love is -- strokes “her” kornered basking-bed of brick.
 
So old, the ruddy ventricles of every kiln-fresh brick!
So ancient, all us players -- all us pieces -- dizzy in the blowing years --
but kreases never come a-krazing “kat” cheeks, cause “he” kannot learn to wait.
To stir the sun “she” plinks a raga on a banjo-bodied “gourd,”
and wizened tumbleweeds below “him” spin in puffing tufts of rust --
You see them, “Mouse” -- their jouncing tangoes — someday they will fly.
           
As sure as every brick you heft has panged and pined for flight --
and sure as “mice” may trust all kactoid exegeses on the quiddities of bricks --     
on high “she” dreams of hurled kisses, loving not to sit and rust --
we pieces all -- o flourpot and jadeplant, sodaflat, o thornsharp notes, o years --
kraving all and one to shimmy -- o to shimmer, o forever -- soul to be -- one “soul”
thereby -- one soul. O eld’rous “Mouse”, you're young as “he” – don't wait.
 
For sometimes kats -- like suns we meet -- will rise for lack of wait.
Observe “her” tilt a soda-straw toward that kobalt-blue and drowsy bottle-fly --
“he” puffs the cracker-yellow mesa wind to tickle 'cross its “wings” --
not bored, our “Kat” pursues the now-viridian kalliphore down terraced brick.
“She'd” never think to stay -- but wandering, “she’d” yearn verbillion years.
The secret bakes beneath the open-shuttered sun -- there’s nothing rusts but rust.
 
O snatch your geriatric love-projectile, “Mouse” -- its silty billow isn't rust --
as teetering Zabbuto mutifies into a stand of pines without its keystone's weight --
now crouch behind my jangle-needled trunk, all windswept, tall with years,
and fondle frantic fingerfuls of firmly fired fill -- for feline frolics forth –- full fly!
“Kat's” hazy kranial bone karessed by ever-most heartfelt of zipping bricks!
O dented temples, “Mouse”, o sodapop and holy Swiss -- o names of “love”.
 
Alas! My newly-shooted kwaternary trunk conceals “Pupp” -– that kop whose “love”
for justice, rectitude and “Kat” kompels him pound you off to rust --
o fuming “Mouse,” you’ll whip your tail, carving days upon your oubliette of brick.
But sure as moons turn blue -- or gorgonzolas gibbous – freedom's no long wait.
A single kop’s got heartmeat newsprint-soft -- he'll blot a sentimental hanky as you fly.
Someday I'll sprout a hand – I’ll toss konfetti in the blowing years.

Noah Wareness

Noah Wareness makes fiction and poetry by hand with scratchy black pens. He does a lot of live storytelling at DIY shows, but Meatheads is his first novel. It first circulated in the folk punk and speculative fiction communities as a handmade zine with wheatpasted cardboard covers and speaker wire for binding. He went to school for writing on the west coast, and now he lives in Toronto with some friends.

Pittsburgh O

        Calvin: I wonder where we go when we die.
        Hobbes: Pittsburgh?
                               strip of 20 December 1985

    Pittsburgh, O spidered
-- like Mars! -- with
    canals, running
carb'nated milks of the
    moon -- where specters
don isinglass
    snorkels and dance upon
tensionless quicksilver
    spumes -- out in
Pittsburgh the stars
    jungle up through
the dark, like skins
    of white grape
packed with light -- but
    sweeter than grape
to the teeth of
    the throat,
and seeded
    with peridot
bright --
    Iö! Pittsburgh!
Iö! Bare-skulled
    they blow
tripletime out of
    sousaphone-socketed
eyes -- jaws
    creak with cigars and
phalanges uncork to
    that voodoo that
smoulders and flies --
    and the swinging moon
flips like a disc
       o
           O
       o
ball as it waxes and
    blushes surprise --
Pittsburgh! Each
    rooftop bends,
licks at the next
    till the street comes
apart with their
    thrusts -- Such music
unhinges bones
    musty and dry til    the
dead -- O the dead O
    the dead -- O th
              e dead O
        the dead -- O the
                      dead re
                 mem
                     ber
                        lust

Noah Wareness

Noah Wareness makes fiction and poetry by hand with scratchy black pens. He does a lot of live storytelling at DIY shows, but Meatheads is his first novel. It first circulated in the folk punk and speculative fiction communities as a handmade zine with wheatpasted cardboard covers and speaker wire for binding. He went to school for writing on the west coast, and now he lives in Toronto with some friends.