Luck
The red lane to the lyrical boat tied at an angle to the wharf, a geometrical boat full of rooms tucked between grooves. When he looks into the V’s, vistas open at eye level: pastures accustomed to grass’s green trim and ruminant animal sound. It’s only a façade but he understands it’s to help him pause his conqueror’s stride and become instead a visitor from another country. And the rooms themselves – he fumbles with the key, it lets him into a rose-walled room that leans slightly to the left toward the replica of a gold sun, even though the white mountains through the window make him shiver and notice the cool blue floor that mounds up under his feet. Suddenly he wishes that nobody had sent him here, he wishes this were simply a spontaneous villa his peripatetic wanderings led him to, like a lucky nickel, found in childhood, on someone else’s driveway. Grace Marie Grafton Grace Marie Grafton’s most recent book, Jester, was published by Hip Pocket Press. She is the author of six collections of poetry. Her poems won first prize in the Soul Making contest (PEN women, San Francisco), in the annual Bellingham Review contest, Honorable Mention from Anderbo and Sycamore Review, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poems recently appear in Basalt, Sin Fronteras, The Cortland Review, Canary, CA Quarterly, Askew, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Ambush Review.
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Sinking Hearts Wallace Hartley’s last hours onboard the RMS Titanic We played on, eight band members soothing the passengers fearful of just this: the deep. Impersonal overly long crushing defeat. What despair, life so brief, leaving shocked bloated faces. The icy black sea held its breath several beats as I reached for my violin then turned to the White Star song book for some favorites that might calm some. A ragtime tune brought no solace, so on cue we played a favorite, Autumn. I studied the stars reflected in glassy waters as Nearer, My God, to Thee soothed so few. No one lingered spellbound. No lifeboats for us. First Class rushed frantically in search of loved ones some half-falling into lifeboats. Sleepy children, hoisted down in mail sacks. Some fell overboard. A man shrugged, jumped. On I played, clutching my violin, each note, my last until my very last would bubble up. Margo Davis Margo’s poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Misfit Magazine, Light: A Journal of Photography & Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Midwest Quarterly, Slipstream, Agave Magazine, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and several Texas Poetry Calendars. Forthcoming poems are to appear in Civilized Beasts, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, Main Street Rag's of Burgers and Ballrooms and Echoes Off a Canyon Wall. Margo says she thrives on closely observing film, photographs, and natural settings. And eavesdropping. Felt Suit
In the glass frame, it houses clothes moths, their eggs and larvae, as you stand before it, guarding it day and night, at your back, I look at you in a felt suit, no moth ever flees, no egg ever hatches. Two schoolboys fly through us, like ostriches. Antony Huen Antony Huen has published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, the Shanghai Literary Review, Eborakon and elsewhere. He is one of Eyewear's Best New British and Irish Poets this year. After Rodin’s Sculpture, The Kiss, 1901-04
I feel your hand on my hip Your hand speaks to me Is the story of our finding one another The story of the moment And never letting go The story is in the hand That held the book In which you read The story of Francesca and Paolo In Dante’s Inferno Our story My breasts come into being Full of you Remembering you My kiss feeds you all I know My strength in the Face of knowing they will Kill us for this And send us to hell And still we dare To be as we are Together Here All eyes on us Knowing only what They want to know Only their story Into which we disappear By virtue of our eternal Nakedness. Arya F. Jenkins Arya F. Jenkins' poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and zines. Her poetry and fiction have both been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her flash, “Elvis Too” was nominated for the 2017 Write Well Awards by Brilliant Flash Fiction. Her work has appeared in at least three anthologies. She writes jazz fiction for Jerry Jazz Musician, an online zine. Her poetry chapbooks are: Jewel Fire (AllBook Books, 2011) Silence Has A Name (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry chapbook, Autumn Rumors, has just been accepted by CW Books and is slated for publication September 2018. Her latest blog ishttps://writersnreadersii.blogspot.com. One Day Ours was the house ahead, grey shell, shadow of itself alone in a corner on the edge of this jaundiced landscape. They say it’s terminal: it shows in pain-etched face, eyes weary of light, spent lungs of rooms inside abandoned core of a body that once echoed life into underground roots - until everything starved. Nobody knows what drained colour and left so little; spring- summer air empty of flower-scent infusion and insect hum; unexplained absence of people, pets, animals, trees - mystery of where birds go to make song. It draws me back to lie, ear to the earth, and listen for heartbeat, sensing one day I will witness you, weather-beaten, fall and break into crumbs, merge into the endless ordinary. Paul Waring Paul Waring is a retired clinical psychologist who once designed menswear and was a singer/songwriter in several Liverpool bands. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming at Clear Poetry, Prole, The Open Mouse, Amaryllis, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Eunoia Review, Anapest, Reach Poetry, Rat’s Ass Review, Foxglove Journal and many others. His blog is https://waringwords.wordpress.com Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room) It reminds me of my family. Only half the table spreads beneath the window: glass of wine, pyramid of plums, pottery bowl and creamer arranged next to a basket of bread. You’d expect the whole table. And why does the blue striped cloth fold toward us as peonies scatter along the wallpaper like firecrackers? My mother sits there in the shadows while Father slumps in a chair, his face turned away toward the window. He’s grown tired of domestic detritus, the artillery of leaves, claustrophobic battles of mothers and daughters among china platters. Beyond the narrow room stretches the storm cloud of his nearing death. Soon the table will tip and crumble. Death’s hand hovers over pears. Geraldine Connolly Geraldine Connolly is a native of western Pennsylvania and the author of three poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press) and Hand of the Wind (Iris Press), as well as a chapbook, The Red Room (Heatherstone Press). She is the recipient of two N.E.A. creative writing fellowships in poetry, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the W.B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has had residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Chautauqua Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review and Shenandoah. It has been featured on The Writers Almanac and anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework and The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her website is http: www.geraldineconnolly.com Woman Working
Her eyes focus downward on the parsnip as she peels A faint smile She loves to work by sunlight from the window beside her Early afternoon late fall or winter Morning frost threaded through the grass has gone Somewhere else in the room just returned from the cold air must be a quiet man Red cheeks hair smelling of wood smoke Bending at the knee he opens his palms to the crackling fire Ashley Mabbitt Ashley Mabbitt lives in Brooklyn, NY and works in international STM publishing. Her poems have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal and Avocet Weekly, and she studies poetry in workshops at the 92nd Street Y. She also studied with Ruth Stone and Liz Rosenberg as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Birth of Athena
Look at that spackled face. The starched curls. The lah-de-dah veiled hat. And that rose! That rose is a second entity, Athena sprung fully formed from Zeus’ head. That’s the way it is with roses. One second they’re as tiny as a baby’s puckered palm. But turn around to water the azalea, or admire a cardinal, and boom! There’s the rose already world-weary and reeking of perfume. Listen. Don’t admire the woman’s lace collar. Or her perfectly tailored jacket. Or the purse white-knuckled in her hand. Behold the blot of red that sits atop her lips like a bloated heart. There’s a smirk beneath that layer of paint. And it’s for you. Tina Barry Tina Barry is the author of Mall Flower, poems and short fiction (Big Table Publishing, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2016, Drunken Boat, The Light Ekphrastic, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, among other journals and anthologies. Barry lives with her husband and two cats in the village of High Falls, NY. Triptych
From the beginning you can glimpse the next. Do you remember, from the viewing platform, that climate called “all over,” a diaphanous layering and movement with no centre, no privileged area? In the darkness there, one person’s nightmare and the ocean’s tides are meshed, as is the bursting of a bubble and the clamor for a victim from the crowd, as it is in life. ‘Its colour parallels the picture plane, but does not of itself say which is forwards, what is backwards here.’But then I thought we saw an opening in whorls, which formed as when between the ceiling cracks a gap appears so when it rains a portion of your room gets wet as water in a river drifting on, the way that thoughts drift on -- only the idea of an idea, the clear symbolic rational gleaned from irrational thought, the seeming appearance of a vision--however, light is falling like fall leaves into a well and hence we can not see too well. One can’t always tell, at first, but if you take, reformat this onto a smaller page, then would the line-breaks change, and if so is this therefore what’s called prose-poem—or would it then be only prose, a draft of criticism, section of a unit not yet optimized for oily apparatus? The night condensed the dew upon the windows; the wind-blown twig-grown branches made a fading grid of scrapes, through which we only view the fog outside, where void and solid, human action and inertia are metamorphosed and refined to energy sustaining them, which is their commonest denominator. I remember what I wanted from you, I’ve given up, but still I wait, and at times the solitary spleen of grace escapes the right hand of fantasy, and the tissue of reality. Today it arced across the room, almost to the door, and mixed with the trace of paint spilled on the floor. Here forms and textures germinate and climax, coalesce, decline, dissolve across the surface with no space we recognize or sequence of known time except that seeming never ending present. Although we are not left spinning; a visualization of remorseless consolation is presented—in the end is the beginning. Eric Fretz Eric Fretz studied art history in Hampshire College and CUNY, was a National Health Service union rep in London, and now divides his time between Brooklyn and Beacon New York. He has written sporadically about both radical politics and contemporary art, and is the author of Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography (2010, Greenwood Press). Fall Couture
The gown clings to the wearer’s shoulders with vines, the first garden, ensorceling flesh, the apples of the knowledge of good and evil fanning a ruddy starburst over the mons, Adam and Eve’s heads just above the invisible knees, Eve’s hand reaching for the woman’s bold enough to trod about (in this garment in) the garden. Two serene deer observe, omniscient, this perfect moment before forever after, its shimmer of toile, God turning away the better to pretend surprise and ask, Where are you? Why do you hide? Devon Balwit Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements(Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). More of her individual poems can be found here as well as in The Cincinnati Review, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, The Inflectionist; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Noble Gas Quarterly; Muse A/Journal, and more. |
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