Category: Poetry (Page 41 of 43)

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A mind like a broken arm

9 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Mieke Leenders

The room screams… YOUR BODY IS NOT WELCOME
White cloth and alcohol remove anything human.
“Why did you run out of class?”
The only human thing, a stain just below her collar
She leans forward.
“It got too loud.”
The orange stain, a calming desert.
“You were in the middle of an exam. No one was talking.”
She notices my gaze. She looks down at her coat and frowns.
White cloth and alcohol.
“I need your help with a small task. Will you help me?”
Hazy orange desert. I see you from behind a foggy window.
“I need this note delivered to the principal’s office.”
Principal’s office; stale coffee smell, worn carpet, unused file cabinets, pale rings on desk, …
“I’d like you to put it straight into the principal’s hand.”
… one window on the top, always open, doesn’t mask the smell …
“Her secretary will let you through, I already called her.”
… door with patched varnish, loose threads on the curtain, wooden closet with a secret.
She snaps her fingers. “Hey!”
The stain is gone. The coat is different.
“Here you go.”
She smiles. Her wrinkles are canyons filled with orange dust. An orange desert.
“Hurry now.”
I take the note. I know it says I can go home.

Mieke Leenders is a freelance writer and editor with a Masters in Art History and certificates in Teaching, Journalism, and Editing. Originally from Belgium, she set out on a solo backpacking trip which led her to put down temporary roots in Costa Rica. Mieke is passionate about travel, hiking, literature, photography, animal welfare, social justice, and art.

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Black Lines

8 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by J.V. Foerster

Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
Simone de beauvoir

I imagine my body
free from its bones
the wind my invisible sister

Free from waking up
and weighing myself
each morning to see what place

I have on the ground in
this world of obsession
to form and insolence.

I dreamed last night that birds
were flying at me and behind them
they left lines in the air.

Thin black lines to hang up my
desires or to dry out my regret.
I think they came to show

me that when the eye can no longer
find its place in the ordinary you
must sleep and dream another life.

J.V. Foerster has been published in Eclectica, Agnieszka’s Dowry, Red River Review, Midnight Mind, and many others. She was nominated in 2011 for a Pushcart for “Apple Girl” by Fox Chase Review. J.V. has work in the Rosemont College Press and Philadelphia Stories Anthology “50 Over 50: Celebrating Experienced and Emerging Women Writers.” She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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A Collection of Three

4 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Philip Davison

For Instance

Dents in cars
red ivy
enormous trees,
you don’t want to
miss these
when out
buying sausages
or looking for love.

The Living of a Life

There and back
is the sum of it,
though that can’t be confirmed.

Celebration

Planning a play date
with her best friend
over the phone
she says –
‘The first thing we’ll do
is put on our masks and hug.’

Philip Davison lives in Dublin. He has published nine novels. Quiet City is his most recent work. He writes radio drama, has written two television dramas and one stage play. He co-wrote Learning Gravity, a BBC Storyville documentary on poet and undertaker, Thomas Lynch. His poems have appeared in various journals.

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To Old Grass and Weeds

3 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Darrell Petska

Sap-shorn and light-forsaken,
quashed by winter’s boot

you wait, underground exiles
spending summer’s store
till earth’s cold armor chinks.

Old friends, lend us once more
dreams of sunny surfeit and green delight.
Rekindle our faith that spring winters
snugly in bone as in root:

though shoot and flesh till different fields,
life seeds one urge to rise and thrive.

Darrell Petska is a retired university editor. His poetry and fiction can be found in 3rd Wednesday Magazine, First Literary Review–East, Nixes Mate Review, Verse Virtual, Loch Raven Review and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.

Snowscape

2 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Frank William Finney

Sinking in the snow
after feeding my hens.

A light bulb peeks
through the coop’s icy mesh

Feathers feast
on frozen mash

as the flurry buries
a trail of my footprints.

Frank William Finney is a poet and former lecturer from Massachusetts. He lived in Thailand from 1995-2020, where he taught literature at Thammasat University. His work has appeared in Hedge Apple, Lemon Peel Press, The Raven’s Perch, and The Thieving Magpie; New work to appear in The Deronda Review, Freshwater Literary Journal, and Press Pause Press. His chapbook The Folding of the Wings is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Mud Season

30 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Emily Donaldson

A scrambled egg breakfast,
a pocket clementine, tea.

Heavy boots pulled over wool socks,
knowing each step will be unsteadied
by the hungry latch of mud season.

Resident red breasted robins dart in undergrowth.
Crows call to each other from the wood.
Steam rises from the tea, curls like frost smoke
above the last vestiges of snow.

A wrack line of melting ice gravid with topsoil, softening.

The mud-stirred rush, sharp and sweet.
The ovary of a former flower, pulled first from its branch,
and then from my pocket. Clementine peels dropped as eggshells,
as petals. Pulling spongy ribbons of pith from half-moons, as fine as root hairs,
jagged as lightening.

A striking vision of seasonal return, this jeweled orbit:
ruby-crowned kinglets, blue-headed vireos,
yellow-bellied sapsuckers reclaiming their home
amidst black capped chickadees and wheeling starlings.

Calling the promise of nests, of precious eggs cradled in
loose twigs, chaos ordered with care. Their nocturnal flights
under cover of darkness like glittering comets,
bringing new life to beloved ground.

Showing us to make home in the dead wood.

And I, having devoured the world in a morning,
wingless, nursing citrus sting on cracked lip,
whisper thanks.

Emily Donaldson writes as a way to connect with everything around her, and to explore the relationship between the natural and our inner worlds.

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My Eyes Are Small

29 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Walter Weinschenk

The portals of my eyes are small
But through them I see the Pleiades,
And when the atmosphere is clear
I see them staring back at me.

My ears are also small:
Narrow halls through which I heard,
One dismal afternoon,
The steady drum of Death,
His footsteps loud upon the stairs;
Steady at first, then tentative,
They slowly faded as Death retreated
For no apparent reason.

In the silence of the morning,
Some trifling sound – a chirping bird,
A broken twig, it doesn’t matter which –
Is loud enough to rouse
The mountain from his sleep;
He lets roll the snow
And it decimates a town
That took a thousand years to build.

And so it is that the enormity of love,
Too immense to understand,
Is born within the gentle press
Of pallid lips together,
And the touch of tiny fingertips
Across the boundless space
That lies between two sets of eyes.

Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. His writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including the Carolina Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words, Griffel, The Raw Art Review with work forthcoming in the Iris Literary Journal and Sand Hills Literary Magazine. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C.

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Lost On The Mountain

27 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Brian Yapko

left knee buckling, hungry, thirsty, i fall
onto a carpet of sharp pine needles and
groan from the pain. lost among endless
brambles and branches, there is no clear
way back down and i know no one will
rescue me – not after the shouting, the
broken dishes, the explosive words that
are beyond forgiveness. truly lost. each
direction the same, endless trees the green

of envy, of tarnished bronze, of grimm
brothers witchery. i am haunted by sounds
that once enchanted but now threaten. i
lift a pine branch to serve as a crutch. i
check my dwindling water supply. i hold
my last bag of m&ms to my heart, thinking
the red-green-blue that melts in your mouth
not in your hand will be my last meal
on earth. hot tears. like a savage i pound

my chest and. rip my shirt. i drop onto the
dirt pondering every soul who has wounded
those he loves and then fled up to the
mountains. were any of them as regretful
as i? three long days, no cell reception,
no sign of humans. i think of lost friends
and find the fossil of a trilobite. it lived
right here eons ago. this mountain was
once at the bottom of the sea though it

now trespasses among the clouds. what
tectonic force raised it skywards? and why
do i shout, slam doors, climb mountains
and then weep away what little water i
have left? i put the fossil in my pocket.
if i want to live i must begin the hike down
to the plain below. it looks as far as the
craters of the moon. i will go back down
anyway. even though i’m not sure i want to.

Brian Yapko is a lawyer whose poems have appeared in multiple publications, including Prometheus Dreaming, Cagibi, Poetica, Grand Little Things, Hive Avenue, the Society of Classical Poets, Chained Muse, Tempered Runes, Garfield Lake Review, Sparks of Calliope, Abstract Elephant and others. His debut science fiction novel, El Nuevo Mundo, will be published in Summer 2022 by Rebel Satori Press. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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The Lovers: VI

24 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by J.T. Whitehead

Superstition adversely possesses the peace of my mind

better judgment once occupied.

God knows it tried.

Others take an image, in fragments, through multiple eyes,

with which to do whatever they wish.

I think we’re simpler & bigger than this.

If you could start a slew of words with “If you could” –

& you can – then we can play & learn.

Are you with me?

I’ll know I am playing my role in color, better than Bela Lugosi,

hungry & fatal if not eternal.

Let’s make a scene.

Few things are equally over-riding & under-lying & over-arching –

few things are so . . . superlative.

These are our themes.

J.T. Whitehead studied social and political and Eastern philosophy at Purdue where he received an MA in philosophy. He spent time between, during, and after schools on a grounds crew, as a pub cook, a writing tutor, a teacher’s assistant, a delivery man, a book shop clerk, and a liquor store clerk, inspiring four years as a labor lawyer on the workers’ side. Whitehead lives in Indianapolis with his two sons, Daniel and Joseph.

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Astronomers Estimate That There Are at least Seven Letters in the Word “Romance”

23 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Rich Boucher

Maybe I could be a bird
that will always live outside your window
and just when you need inspiration
I’ll just start talking
but you won’t be scared,
even though you were expecting birdsong:
you’ll be so shocked and then
this shock will blossom cracklingly
into inspiration; I wish I could tell you
what was whispered in my ear
when I asked why I existed
in kindergarten and a teacher leaned down
and actually told me the reason;
you can laugh at my fear of mailmen
all you like but when was the last time
you got a letter that wasn’t lying
when it said you should be happy;
mock my faith in the primary colors
but tell me you’ve never felt the intensity
of red and chose instead to call it a kind of blush,
tell me your shivers don’t call to mind blue,
swear to me you’ve never seen a yellow ambulance
and found yourself in complete agreement.
I’d love to meet the person you need me to be
and tell him that I might not be much
but at least I don’t have a degree
in the study of room temperatures;
romance is a word that has just enough letters
to spell itself and put me into a weird headspace
where I’m the one person who never learned
how to take sticks and turn them
into the because of fire,
but if you ever need someone
who can genuinely be afraid of the dark,
well, that’s something I can certainly do for you.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Bending Genres, Menacing Hedge and Stink Eye, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Boats Against The Current and Amethyst Review. Rich is BOMBFIRE Magazine’s Associate Editor, and he is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me.