UNDO THEIR FLOW ON THIS
Become.
Many deals, the city and – you
and just years ago It’s through open not change, and deal with the Capitalism story
deeply and Basically, we and void, we’ve So much coiled code – redirect into motion
Support each other with insect calm. Continue reading “Undo Their Flow on This by Mat Blackwell”
Ghosts
In this desolate place I can almost hear
the sacred buzzing of bees, glimpse
an endless canopy of emerald leaves
pulsing against a clear cobalt sky. Continue reading “Ghosts by Lucy Whitehead”
the temple.
(faces).
…
cave. (dark. (ruddy-brown (‘v) rocks)). …
—a gate(‘s (door)way) – entrance. …
(open(s)).
Fire Water
All this was was the vibe of a smile,
a nod to the past,
an undeniable…anything,
“if I’m being honest…”,
please,
only be that. Continue reading “Fire Water by Kevin R. Farrell Jr”
Minister for Flowers
gone
the minister for war
gone the guns,
the minister for rain and rivers
in conference
with minister for forest and
minister for music and poetry, Continue reading “2 Poems by David Hallett”
Continue reading “Checkmate by Konstantinos Papacharalampos”
Not the Waking World
so when we
sleep the adventure of what we can never recall / take slumber as an icon-download of gentleness / Continue reading “Not The Waking World by Mike Ferguson”
II.
I see, I said, when I saw, but if I am to believe, be it in science or in faith, then what I said, I saw, I did not see. There was something else entirely, and it was there, right there, for me to see, but I only see what I saw, and what I saw was not there. Continue reading “2 Prose Poems by John Peter Apruzzese”
Drawing/illustrations made in Procreate, spatial VR remix poem made in Tilt Brush, and overall design/collage by ReVerse Butcher.
Original linear poem, and flower photography by Kylie Supski.
Continue reading “Circle Series: Woman With Poem by ReVerse Butcher and Kylie Supski”
1. Calculate
I plan ahead
Preparing for the best outcome
and defense
I stay alert for the minotaurs
that live in my maze
Each day I puzzle and calculate
But in the woods
I wonder
Why do my decisions come so easily?
Trusting
I step off the trail
feeling my way around
Prickers
Thorn trees
Barbed wire fences
Picking up deer trails
I follow them without knowing where they’ll take me Continue reading “Strategies by Lisa Fazio”
She sleepwalks in your washi house in crin-
oline, emaciated mouse weeks you
forget to feed, a nibbler, toenails, skin,
until feet bleed free, soil sheets, bamboo
floor, trafficked hardly anymore except
somnabulistic scarlet toes who
map labyrinths, shake off bedclothes, accept
razored teeth in pale furrows. Ankle chewed
until, unconscious, she seeks the ground. Bandage,
next time you come around — rose macaroons
gunpowder tea — into a paper cage
fantasy, unbolted door, girl you freed,
six months ago, believes enough to bleed.
Kristin Garth is a Pushcart, Best of the Net & Rhysling nominated sonnet stalker. Her sonnets have stalked journals like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Luna Luna, and more. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry including Pink Plastic House (Maverick Duck Press), Candy Cigarette Womanchild Noir (The Hedgehog Poetry Press), the forthcoming Flutter: Southern Gothic Fever Dream (TwistiT Press), The Meadow (APEP Publications) and Shut Your Eyes, Succubi (Maverick Duck). Follow her on Twitter @lolaandjolie and her website kristingarth.com
Covert art credit: Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash
Oh sad potato wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer I might have been Caroline Calloway I might have swallowed a yellow sundress a lemon yellow orchid a story to tell by a bonfire at night in a forest in Montana
my tell is a magnetic lie
my tell is a rotting animal
my tell is a broken knuckle
my tell is a tent pitched at Flathead Lake
where I traveled backward into wilderness where fire and blackberries devoured my girl soul where soil and conifers met at the trout mouth edge and blue water and black deep did not restore my sister but we rose her anyway we opened her stone and chanted up her finished flesh and worshiped her little dress her lilac crown her apples her plush rabbit
I played my violin in the forest
I thought music could fix my disease
I thought music could raise the dead
when my face doesn’t unlock my phone I panic I have become Caroline Calloway my life mere electricity I have disappeared into caves among the stalactite’s green glisten the ocean never closer than my memory of Montana there might have been horses there might have been giant hares there might have been my father building a fire raising my sister from the ashes look he said look at her perfection Continue reading “There Might Have Been Horses by Rebecca Loudon”
“The poem surpasses the other literary arts in every way: in its depth, potency, bitterness, beauty, as well as its ability to unsettle us.” Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Unsettlement is a recurring theme in Tony Messenger’s debut collection ‘poems to be found in the desert’. Colonial unsettlement, traversing an uncomfortable environment,
d i s l o c a t i o n and the blurred lines of imaginary \\\borders///. \\\Boundaries/// & limits that appear, settle and dissolve.
This conflicting duality works to unsettle the reader, forcing them to ???question??? their place in the vast Australian →landscape←, an environment where nothing seems as it appears.
The epigraph for the opening section of poems comes from Ely Williams “I find that out in the desert my words wander too because here thoughts and words are things unleashed.” A warning that the collection is peppered with thoughts and words unleashed, a cryptic murmuring, a maze of ideas that circle, repeat, fade and reform. It is easy to become lost in this text, thinking you’ve already experienced an image, but a refresh and a re-read show slight differences, an erosion, a morphing of concepts.
This is the desert where the obvious is not so obvious.
The collection opens with the poem “longifolius” (the scientific name for the spiky spinifex grass that is abundant in the central deserts). The poem can be viewed as a metaphor for Australia itself. The grass grows in a ◌circular◌ clump, and as it ages its shape becomes nest like, with the centre ►dying◄ off as the grass uses all the available nutrients in the soil, the newer stems sprouting on the outside forming ◌concentric◌ patterns. The inner “►dead zone◄” is a haven for ants, who feed on the ⸙seeds⸙, and reptiles and birds, who feed off the ants. Hence the ◌circular◌ shape of the poem. Something that may appear barren is in fact teeming with life. Look to the centre not as an ⸔inhospitable⸕ place, look for details, enquire with a local pair of eyes.
Continue reading “Review ‘poems to be found in the desert’ by Tony Messenger”
stilted words
stillborn
slide out
from torn
slash flesh
blood red
lipstick mouth
spews out
bloodless ugly triplets
‘I / love / you’
I choose ‘I’
not love
not you
not seeing eye to eye
but
fighting tooth for tooth
forebears cry out
they see
everything
from top
of swaying
family tree
daant ke lie daant
don’t lie Continue reading “Hir Qing Sorrow by Iain Fraser”
Sing Me the Song
after John Lyon
When the exiled pioneers stared at the Salt Lake Valley, they drank clean air. A sky framed by Nature’s Bulwark presumed their own. They slept in the open next to trees in the crux of the canyon, and night came. An armistice with ground, as each fire began to smell less and less like Buffalo chips. Crowded by the grid system, I search for a street where I am not spied on by a steeple. Imperfect Zion sleeping in Pioneer Park.
Nor the Sound of pollution voice is heard?
I am the visitor, welcome on the back row with handshake full of grease brought again to sacrament meeting. Ceiling fans spin backward the longer I stare. Hymnodic. I remember as a kid, a deacon, I once put Sprite in the cups for sacrament’s water. Nursery tastes like blessings.
But where shall we find this fairy vale
Where the naked are clothed and the hungry fed Continue reading “2 Poems by Jeff Pearson”
Labyrinth Song
Not everyone enters
their maze on a mission.
Some of us wake one day
curled inside a darkness
that stretches in all directions
for countless miles caught
in a lacework cage reaching
beyond years.
…………………Ever winding
we wander half blind
through rotting corridors
searching for signs of life
stumbling over pits that beckon
beneath wearied feet
in the yawning velvet dark
wrestling
with dead ends that glint
with knives and chains
slamming shut doors
that open silently
into nothingness
…………………chasing golden
voices not our own over
floors that sharpen suddenly
into spikes through
mirrored courtyards where
we glimpse our aging faces
catch sad minotaurs
behind our eyes.
We become adept
at surviving stripped
of all but our existence
at times weaving
the gleaming edges of pain
into armour and amulets
fortifying our bones Continue reading “Labyrinth Song by Lucy Whitehead”
Just a Thought
For the warming comfort of snow,
to thaw that which has been left frigid,
to repress is to die,
refrain and move on,
this is life persisting,
death meanders on,
run ragged,
pursue more,
a salivating void of all emotion,
numb to escape,
place distance between what happened
and any attachment to it,
two contradictory planes of existence,
abandon “your” self, rid the vessel of “my” anything, Continue reading “2 Poems by Kevin R. Farrell, Jr.”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 