A Poem by Kristin Roahrig

THUNDER RUMBLES SWEETLY

Thunder rumbles sweetly

A familiar grumble like the sound of an empty beat

A comfort, knowing the familiar signs

that can bring a harshness or a cure, depending on the timing

to lull me into a sleep

One where my eyes close while I rest as the thunder weeps

The water runs- formed from our sweat

The sky, already changed to gray blends with the clouds, neither able to be seen

They wrap around me- invisible- letting me dream

A sleep that never let me gain rest

Soon enough the storm passes, leaving behind a solitude

Leaving a musky sun in it’s wake that changes the leaves to a languid green

Like the tone of my own body in the glare of dimmed lights

I rub my hands down the newly shaved legs beside me,

skin a greenish tinge that dims against the dark covers crumpled up beside us

Laying quietly after the thunder

After the rumbles that sweetly took the sky, leaving all rest sundered

 

 

 

 

Kristin Roahrig's poetry and stories have appeared in local and regional publications. Her poem, "Dance of the Drums" won the Melba Geoffrey Memorial Poetry contest in 2010. She is also the author of several plays and lives in Indiana.

Two Poems by Adukuri Jagannath Rao

Lake

this side of lake is colors in evening

of hordes of birds around the rocks

rocks are their colors, birds’ colors

paddling and resting before paddling

flying away from them,and to them

the ripple is colors of spinning sky

tree shadows , green on blue, black

and dense in the core, gray to ring

rocks are birds flying low in the sky

the sky is lake ,white cotton cloud

lake silent in tree like summer sky

tree is stuck in the blue sky of lake

lake is left holding the baby of tree

the rocks paddle , fly away as birds

low flying birds of sky around birds

of white hovering on trembling lake

the lake trembles in blue of the sky

On the other lake is an orange fruit

trapped in the distant birds of rocks

its skin peeled away as sheet of gold

its birds fly from rocks to apartments

the houses fall into a trembling lake

lake left holding the baby of houses.

rocks rest and fly to the other rocks

birds paddle to rocks that do not fly

they fly in lake that has turned sky

the sky is now trembling in the lake

the sky is eating up the orange fruit.

 

 

 

 

Larvae

From trees, on a gentle wind from the hills

A new light shall fall on the fluff of marigold

Its petals scattered for bees to tempt smells

On antenna of viscous honey, pollen of love.

The larvae are growing as luminescent dust

In beams of light that travel down from the roof

In chinks of old tiles, awaiting their change

After the moss turns on them black in sun

When new tiles will replace them, by workers

Sitting on the roof as if they are sky-birds.

The larvae are growing in white water- clouds

Hoarding river and sea for tomorrow’s festival

When they will be beating tin-roofs like drum

And send down snakes of water to our ground

Pushing dried flowers down their corrugations

Of light dust and snowflakes the larvae will grow

Till evening when they will vanish in our pages.

 

 

Adukuri Jagannath Rao is a retired banker who lives in Hyderabad, India.  His poetry can be found at http://adukurispoetry.blogdrive.com

 

 

 

 

A Poem by Agholor Leonard Obiaderi

A TALE TOLD BY A TREE

 

Winter has a red throat and

a black eye ring.

Ice flakes

 

season pale red blood

courses down with sap

thoroughfares of many tree rings

forcing my beauty to drift

 

in the snow. Bark cracked,

lips broken by the kiss of

frost.

 

Ice my veins, scanty leafy

tresses frozen by gusts of chilly

wind cruel harbinger of black eyes.

 

My femininity flees to hide

until spring

comes. I shed black

eye rings, discard mourning.

 

In Spring, I stretch

into colourful attires. Pink lipstick,

eyelashes of

green envy.

 

Summer;

I heal. Cracked bark seals

the bloodied wounds .

The magic of sunny fingers

calms me down to my

roots.

 

My flowers blossom, attract

bees in search of romance.

 

Autumn

comes message of leaves

falling. Each note holds

 

another winter

of red throats and black

eye rings. 

 

 

 

 

AGHOLOR LEONARD OBIADERI lives in Delta State, Nigeria. He holds a Bachelor's degree in the English Language. He loves poetry, crime novels and wrestling videos. His poems have been published in UptheStairCase Quarterly; Barnwood International Magazine; and Pyrokinection.

e-mail; obiaderi@yahoo.com  

A Poem by William G. Davies, Jr.

The Lewistown Narrows

 

The sun unzips

Along the uneven teeth

Of the pines

Before folding

Into a ruck

Of umber,

Stirring crows

From their huts

To speckle

The sapphire sky.

 

 

 

The writer has been happily married for 38 years and lives in a valley of birdsong and wildflowers.

He has published in Jellyfish Whispers, The Cortland Review, The Wilderness House Review,

The Blue Lyra Review and others.

He eats PBJ sandwiches everyday for lunch!

A Poem by Janet Rice Carnahan

EMPTY WELL

 

Bottom,

Dwelling space,

 

Echo into the night,

Begging,

 

For fullness to come,

Silent if needed,

 

Stir the stars,

Into action,

 

Prepare,

To overflow,

 

Once heard,

Through cloudy mist,

 

Doubting the downpour,

May chase,

 

Pounding potential,

Deep underground,

 

Afraid to sound,

The call again,

 

Despite all,

Whistle,

 

See if rain,

Drizzles, drips,

 

Wind whips the sea,

Snow melts fast enough,

 

Perhaps just the dew,

Of a million flowers,

 

Will, at least, cover,

The empty depth,

 

Never to drain out,

Needlessly . . .

 

 

Again!

 

 

 

Janet Rice Carnahan lives in Laguna Beach, California, among artists, photographers and writers and all who enjoy the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean. Born on the northern California coast, she’s inspired by the sea, a joy shared with her husband, adult children, family and friends. Janet’s published work includes a cover photo, caption and poems in an anthology, “Prompted: An International Collection of Poems”, December 2011. More recently, her poems were published in, “Pyrokinection”, “Jellyfish Whispers”, “The Camel Saloon”, “The Mind[less] Muse” and “Three Line Poetry”.

A Poem by Andrew J. Stone

A Lane with Poplars

 

(after Vincent van Gogh, 1885)

 

decaying

pumpkin-color

leaves litter

the dusk-

dry grass

 

they are the

impressionists

brush, painting

their canvas

like a withered

Van Gogh

 

 

 

Andrew J. Stone is a nineteen-year-old dissident attending Seattle Pacific University. His poems can be found here or there, but most recently, at Aberration Labyrinth. His debut chapbook of poetry, "Teenage Angst & the Ekphrastic Exercise," is forthcoming from Collective Banter Press. He dwells in the graveyard from time-to-time: http://andrewjstone.blogspot.com/

A Poem by Laura Winton

Autumn

 

Listen how feathers

borrow the wind from trees how they

steal breath from the candle dreaming

of light off the glass. Feel your hands

on the cookie you read

it like a braille book, explore the

texture see how they

taste on your

fingertips.

 

 

Laura Winton, aka Fluffy Singler is a writer and performer currently living in Minneapolis . She has been writing for more than 25 years and her poetry has been published and performed around the world. She has performed her experimental poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and Bar 13 in New York , the Green Mill and Trace Bar in Chicago and at dozens of venues in the Twin Cities. She published Karawane: or, the Temporary Death of the Bruitist, a journal devoted to experimental writers who perform their work, for roughly 10 years. She loves Surrealism and Dada and believes that the Surrealist goal of the liberation of the imagination is the most political act that a writer can perform.

A Poem by Denis Robillard

The Spirit World

Late autumn. Snow covers every inch of this place. No more walks to the Damm Festung or the Hauptkirche. A solitary black bird perched on a pine tree calls and cackles a wintry echo across a barren field. Northern winds murmur up and down the spines of endless trees. Something hollow like Scheidt’s Galliard Battlagia. Dolorous trumpets blow down dead gone leaves. There is a strangeness here even Leibniz would not understand. At every step I wake up ghosts in synaptically connected trails. Spirits know no boundaries. Everything is passable and transparent like a thin veil of ether.


Denis Robillard was born in Northern Ontario and now teaches high school in Windsor, CANADA. For the past 15 years several of his poems have appeared 90 times in the small presses and on line magazines across Canada, The USA, England and Scotland. Some of those include: Rattle, Rampike, Word Riot, Nashwaak Review, Algoma Ink, Cliff Soundings (Michigan), Sidereality, Orange Room Review, Dogzplot Magazine, Dusty Owl, Dufus and many more. In 2011 Robillard was published in Windsor Review, Bolts of Silk and Ottawa Arts Review. He is an avid photographer and traveler. You may see his article work on occasion in the pages of Hey Philippines Magazine.

A Poem by Shelby Stephenson

A Selection from Country

All over the place forceful resources

double and riffle effect into Ownership,

 

multiplying and dividing the Wide Sea of

Heartbreak, object as dream-lover wrecked as the

 

lives of tenant-farmers “throwed away” to

unending poverty, as Linda Flowers writes,

 

art as business done for, fallen to pieces like

the unused dollhouses of pasteboard little

 

girls worship or a Ken that never catches on,

though 2012 may be his year, Barbie already

 

on the road again to fame, however rocky, wide

and deep, as the one leading Don and Phil Everly:

 

you tell me some brother duets − harmonious,

splendid with faith in a permanent artistry

 

and belief in entertainment as a business too

and I’ll show you the Everlys − Kentuckians,

 

moving to Nashville for stardom in the glory of

dashing neon, their meeting with Felice and

 

Boudleaux Bryant who wrote “Bye Bye Love”

for the boys who eased right on out into easy

 

pickings: “Wake Up Little Susie” woke up

Joan & John Q. Public: the brothers left

 

wakes of success right and left, showing up

on the Ed Sullivan Show and Dick Clark’s

 

American Bandstand, the Bryants contributing

“All I Have to Do Is Dream” and “Bird Dog,” a

 

silly song, I thought, until I remembered my

father’s hounds: as I’ve said before, Daddy

 

said Slobber Mouth could outrun the Word of God

with the Bible tied to His tail. Whose oh

 

Whose? Somewhere the rainbow fills of gold.

The Everlys wrote “Cathy’s Clown,” “Devoted to

 

You,” “When Will I Be Loved”: they parted

ways, on and off again, you never know: the F

 

word I wonder about, too, if it could be the

flourishing fad or fenced-in finish to

 

coherence, where the popular flap-doodle

dies over one syllable which means what it

 

says, the after-glow of love-making strung with

strings of the violin family and held, the word

 

dedicated to music in rows down and back;

plows plovers follow, crying in soft autumn,

 

killdeekilldee, the breaking furrows folding

and following, leading the feet of the plowman and

 

Fever, his mule, without worry, the Sea of Clods

there in the swimming landscape, harking

 

back to the Greeks and Romans, perhaps called a

“cither,” as words get cited and bend out of

 

shape along the decades, fiddlers keeping

Time, especially on viols shaped like Europe

 

I revered in Miss Jones’s fourth-grade class at

Cleveland, upon hearing the words Tigris

 

and Euphrates, rubbing my fingers across the

cover of the Geography Book, the future

 

tuned in four strings of varying thicknesses − and

fixed, stretched across a bridge on a box, adjusted by

 

means of pegs inserted in the head, tuned and

played by the fiddler’s pressing down or

 

stopping the strings with fingers on the fingerboard,

all part of the neck, scrolled: what sounds come when the

 

bow vibrates those strings, a continent of worlds −

North America, blending traditions, fusion in

 

styles from England, Ireland, and Scotland,

varieties of styles, the stiles turning, tuning in

 

concert halls and honky-tonks, barrooms, backyards,

fields and fields of festivals, bluegrass, new grass,

 

country, western, classical, jigs, reels, hoedowns,

throw-downs, general stores (check out R.A. Fountain General

 

Store and Internet Café, Fountain, North Carolina),

hootenannies, jubilees, jamborees, camp

 

meetings, barnyards, cornshuckings, turkey-trots,

pig-pickings, taffy pullings at St. Peter’s Basilica,

 

church socials, tractor-pulls, picking parlors,

living rooms, back-porch swings under last night’s

 

full moon, the fiddler pulling a bow with

many other fiddlers served by Mastertone

 

banjos and Gibson and Martin guitars,

Kay bass fiddles and Gibson mandolins,

 

Emmons or Speedy West steels and some snares,

keyboards, underlining the Fiddle. Ashley’s

 

hammer finds the finishing nails whackwhackwhack:

he’s been here since early morn, building a

 

shelter for the Equator, the Leonard, and the

Grumman: I’m into the well of F’s, take one:

 

placed a poem yesterday in White Pelican Review

out of Tampa: “The Burr in My Stride”: I feel it

 

now, really a page or two from Paul’s Hill:

Homage to Whitman: I need you O bearded

 

Father of Long Lines, innovator-equator

riding the I-am with busted tires on our open

 

road, for poetry, digs yielding rich lodes:

saw in the paper today someone around Hiddenite,

 

North Carolina, dug in one of those gem

mines and a vein the size of a seven-up-bottle

 

yielded an emerald worth 1.5 mil: now

that’s a chunk of change: my tank, cap-less,

 

coolant corrosive down to my Hanes around

my ankles, I am wobbly as a new-born calf

 

reeling out from its mother’s tits, the cow herself at loose

ends, tail raised for a brown gully-gusher − oh if

 

she were a gazelle with legs to spraddle and run

fast from the lips of her new-born babe.

 

 

 

 

Shelby Stephenson's Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl won the 2008 Bellday Prize for Poetry, Allen Grossman, judge.

A Collection of Cinquains by Marilyn Braendeholm

SUMMER MEMORIES

SKIPPING STONES

Coddled
And mottled, licked
Smooth as glass. Flicked and slicked
Skipping stones, tripping alone on
The waves.

HERMIT CRABS

Vacant,
Silent vagrant,
Takes up new house and home,
Room for one, he lives alone in
Seashells.

SAND DOLLARS

White doves
Flying free in
Sand dollars. Bony white,
And dried hot on stones and salty
Sunshine.

DRIFTWOOD

Wind kissed.
Stripped and ripped bare.
Fair tides are welcoming
from beyond and afar. You are
adrift.



Marilyn“Misky” Braendeholm lives in the United Kingdom. Her interests include gothic architecture, gardening, recipe testing, baking yeasted and sourdough bread, photography, and writing. She has poems and fiction published with Mouse Tales Press, Poetry Quarterly, Sprout Magazine, B-Gina Review, Pyrokinection, Jellyfish Whisper, and Napalm and Novocain.

A Poem by Heller Levinson

Manitou

                          (Winter/12

 

brown weep warps the earth

                                         homeowners rake

groom the ground

                                vegetal shroud

covering → the covered the coveted the cosseted

lymph brocade

 

rulings administered through beams of a solar canonical the leaf

suspended for months in licentious tease blushes, bruises with color, with a crimson erotic fervor, then lets go, releases, anthems the soil, the grass, the rock, . . . the pulled down things

 



s(or)(au)cering nutrients

             --allocation allot alight alit

concupiscence wearied

                                     (some will survive the Winter, some will not

sturdiness laced with lamentation, ... oblongs pathos,

underbellies melancholy

the considerations have time to harden, to frost, to ice

leaves await their orders

 



 

not retreat          but entrenchment unthreading        baring

cold disrobement

robust exposure

trees peeled to skeletal gasp

strike skyward

souse-calendric surreptition performs

a squat           shearing

to silhouette             the language

hardy, lean, ...

noun-things

 



month to month

soon it will be February

clasp burnish

mouth to mouth

a month is a mouth opens & closes

with less frequency

 

the tree tidy in its time-li-ness, in the long longitude of speculation, absentees the cursory, the provisional is pronounced, a stuck in the ground, a struck upon gourd, the components that ‘make it work,’comfortably furtive

the fleet protecting their knowing

 



 

this season of no leaf

of little splash

-- the hunkering

thick & not without pleasure

 

 

 

Heller Levinson lives in NYC where he studies animal behavior. He has published in over a hundred journals and magazines including Alligatorzine, The Cartier Street Review, Counterexample Poetics, ditch poetry, First Literary Review-East, Hunger, Jacket,The Jivin’ Ladybug, Mad Hatters’ Review, Mad Swirl, Mid-June, Moria, Omega, Otoliths, Poets for Living Water, Skidrow Penthouse, Street Cake Magazine, Sugar Mule, Sulfur, Talisman, Tears In The Fence, The Wandering Hermit, The Toronto Quarterly, A Trunk Full of Delirium, Venereal Kittens, and Wood Coin. His publication, Smelling Mary (Howling Dog Press, 2008), was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Prize. Additionally, he is the originator of Hinge Theory.
His latest book publication, January 2012, is from stone this running, Black Widow Press, order from www.blackwidowpress.com,

Or Amazon.

Two Poems by Alan Britt

ODE TO A COMMON SPIDER,
GREYISH-BROWN WITH ZEBRA
SUSPENDERS

There's this spider
webbed to our patio door.

Disappears, sleight-of-hand,
during routine human traffic.

Vanishes like the pea
in a New York City shell game!

Sure, I love his lust for freedom,
and emulate his fluid, arachnid guile,
buy, mostly, I'm jealous
of his endearing patience
for every fingernail moth of fate.



THE BEE
 

So, this portly black bee

with gold suspenders

hoisting his hippopotamus rear

dances our encounter.

 

He says to other bees halfway across the yard:

Don’t go near that patio. The man

sitting there is not a flower!

 

I wonder…my genteel Italian cologne,

or perhaps this faded sweatshirt

like wrinkled geranium petals fallen from grace?

 

Suddenly, like a drunken bullet,

the bee grazes my chin,

then vaporizes into tropical overcast

at the edge of the patio.

 

 

 

Alan Britt's interview with Grace Cavalieri for The Poet and the Poem will air on Pacifica Radio in January 2013 (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html). He read poems at the World Trade Center/Tribute WTC Visitor Center (TributeWTC.org) in Manhattan/NYC, April 2012, at the We Are You Project (WeAreYouProject.Org) Wilmer Jennings Gallery, East Village/NYC, April 2012, and at New Jersey City University's Ten Year 9/11 Commemoration in Jersey City, NJ, September 2011. His poem, "September 11, 2001," appeared in International Gallerie: Poetry in Art/Art in Poetry Issue, v13 No.2 (India): 2011. His recent books are Alone with the Terrible Universe (2011), Greatest Hits (2010), Hurricane (2010), Vegetable Love (2009), Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). The Poetry Library (www.poetrymagazines.org.uk) providing a free access digital library of 20^th & 21^st century English poetry magazines with the aim of preserving them for the future has included Britt’s work published in Fire (UK) in their project. Britt’s work also appears in the new anthologies, The Robin Hood Book: Poets in Support of the Robin Hood Tax, by Caparison, United Kingdom, 2012, American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Chicago/Athens/Dublin, 2009 and Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), a bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008. Readings & Presentations: Panel Chair for Poetry Studies & Creative Poetry for the PCA/ACA Conference 2008 in Boston, Ramapo College in Mahwah, NJ (2009 & 2012), the WPA Gallery/Ward-Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, NY (2008), Ultra Violet Studio, Chelsea/NYC (2008 & 2009), White Marsh Library, Baltimore (2011 & 2012), Enoch Pratt Free Library (Canton Branch) Baltimore (2011), Pedestal Magazine Reading at the Writers Center, Bethesda, MD (2012). Alan currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University and lives in Reisterstown, Maryland with his wife, daughter, two Bouviers des Flandres, one Bichon Frise and two formerly feral cats. Links: http://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/potw.html#fp1;

http://spectrumofpoeticfire.com/Reader%20Directory/Alan_Britt.htm;

http://theliteraryunderground.org/wiki/index.php?title=Alan_Britt;

http://www.therecusant.org.uk/#/morrison-on-saponia-and-britt/4556998367; and

http://aliensareus.wordpress.com/

A Poem by D.M. Aderibigbe

AT THE BEACH

The rambunctious water is rising like a cat's hackles,
It charges towards us like a lion does to an antelope.
   
I'm with a mannequin, our legs are being buried alive,
By the water-logged beach,
As minutes are brutally murdered by the day.

The water runs towards us,

She holds me tightly, begs me not to desert her if
The water attempts to abduct her.

The water runs towards us,

People scamper to safer areas with their histories stamped
On the soft soil, trailing them
I'm scared, but can't tell her to let us
Run, I'm valiant, I'm a liar.                                

The water runs towards us,
         
I pray against the upcoming water, My prayer clouts the water's adrenaline,

It becomes calm, cleanse our legs with its spillage,    

And withdraws back to where It comes from.
       
"Yeah, the water just washed away my sin." She says
"Of course, but it'll come back with your sins, if we didn't leave here." I reply.  

We go away before the water returns back
To us.  


D.M. Aderibigbe is a 23-year old writer from Lagos, Nigeria, an undergraduate student of History and Strategic Studies of the University of Lagos. He writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, plays and lyrics. His work has been published or forthcoming in the UK, Canada, Australia, Nepal and the United States by, Vox Poetica, Pressboard press, UP Literature, HUSMW Press, The New Black Magazine, Misfits' Miscellany, Thickjam, Ditch Poetry, Bluepepper and The Applicant. His debut novel Sisyphean, will be published in America, soon. He lives and schools in Lagos.

A Poem by Emma Ambos

4:00AM

In the morning

tooearlyforlife

(very-much nightlike

in fact)

 

the periwinkle snails

str-etch-th-eir-le-g-s

and go for a stroll

 

the coldcoffee-cockroaches

have wings like gossamer

and, alight on the backs

of fairy-terns, they

lookdown on us

(in all our slumbers)

forthevery

first time

 

the pistol-shrimp

shed their Great Grey Skin

pull on Pink Party Dresses

and dance to ‘Swan Lake’

-Perfectly-

 

the breadandbutter-flies

draw too near thefire

and make themselves intotoast

 

the new-dawn fawns

dappledwith thieves fingertips

tie their roller-skates up

and clumsy-clatter do-

wn the street

(they’d never leave-

Rudolf out)

 

in the morning

when our bedclothes lully-byeus

something extra-

ordinary

greets the day forus

 

 

 

 

Emma Ambos is a writer with itchy fingertips and a love for the great Outa-Doors.