My poetry collection The White Trash Pantheon (Vox Press, 2015) and my current chapbook, Poems UnderSurveillance (Finishing Line Press, 2013) are currently available in independent bookstores and on Amazon. The opera for which I wrote the libretto, entitled Lotus Lives, was performed in the New York and elsewhere in 2012 and is currently being considered for broadcast by WGBH Boston, and another operatic work for which I wrote the libretto is slated for production in California in 2017. I have been nominated for the Pushcart four times. I have been featured on Poetry Daily. My work has recently appeared in Iowa Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review, Bridges, Barrow Street, Connecticut Review, The Pikeville Review, Rio Grande Review, English Journal, New Song, The Penwood Review, Sow’s Ear, The Madison Review, Atlanta Review,Grasslands Review, WSQ, Global City Review, Comstock Review, California Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, The Red Rock Review, and many other publications. In Europe, my work has appeared in Current Accounts, Iota, Poetry Salzburg, Nth Position and in Ireland, I was in an issue of Crannóg last year. In Asia, I was published inQuarterly Literary Review Singapore and Yuan Yang. I have been anthologized multiple times in both the US and the UK. I have done residencies at Yaddo and Vermont Studio Center. INSOMNIA The quilt the sheet the mess The errand I forgot The dog the shoe the phone The neighbor’s cats yowling The low snore of my spouse The floor creaking the drip The blink the itch the cough The sharp twinge down my thigh The lips of my mother Mouthing old rejections The old embarrassed cringe The regret the deep breath The dark the salt truck light The stillness the stillness REPLY ALL This e-mail is addressed to Facebook friends. It c-cs i-o-us and o-m-g. It abbreviates, says nothing, then ends In l-o-ls – the language of Ouija, The dead spamming the dead in effigy. I tweet on twitter with nothing to say. I have no thoughts, but I have street cred, G. Communication? My communiqué Might conversate; meaning is refugee. Eloquence? Google “archeology.”
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I graduated with a M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College in 2013. My poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such literary journals as Barely South Review, Eclectica Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, New Millennium Writings, and Crab Fat Literary Magazine. In 2011, I co-founded a social justice-themed online literary magazine, Words Apart. While spending my days as an early childhood educator, I spend my nights writing poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Tattooed Lady in the Bowery In the hole of a home, color runs riot across my needle point body when Tommy Lee barrels on in with whiskey on his breath and a limp dick in his trousers: an Old Testament man stands in the splintered doorway, demanding I unshackle my bra in his unholy presence. I claw and kick and squirm against our bolted window, skin alive in a heap of naked darkness where a kitchen knife, flush to the sky of my eye, slices through the jelly — oh god oh god -- to my native daughter sight. His grip only tightens across my spine as I fall to the floor, screaming for those Bowery blackberries beneath Aunt Maddy’s stomping feet. I must amend: the Living Bible is an Old Testament man in variation. On his back, Moses raises his staff, but the Red Sea fails to part. On his chest, Abraham slays Isaac, shank in the heart. The Tattooed Lady in Manhattan’s Belly Down at Harry Hill’s, a hive of ink-laced bees stung my hand like Miss Saunder’s fist walloping her victim with a right cross. In purple-knee breeches, she moved in to take on the attack . . . oh what a lively mill they all decreed. Yet alas, I turned away, weaving my frame through the crowd’s spit and shouts. A man leaning against the exit sunk his eyes into my garden of lilacs, vines growing into my breasts. I slipped past his denim onto an East Houston shin-high in the muck lit by electric light. The bulbs burned onto the Goddess of Liberty stretched along my ‘Fuck You’ forearm. Locked in our newfangled glow, a strange woman sliced open a stare as I hooked my sight upon a carcass lying in the cobblestone mud. The horse’s flesh rotted through to the heart, a once beating pump now exposed to the flies circling their supper. Yes, believe me now: summer still battled along the Bowery’s incision where death clung to my white bodice on that hot September night. Heath Brougher is the poetry editor of Five 2 One Magazine. He has published two pamphlets with Green Panda Pres. When not writing or editing he helps with the charity Paws Soup Kitchen which gives out free dog/cat food to low income families with pets. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yellow Chair Review, Chiron Review, SLAB, Main Street Rag, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Riprap, Crack the Spine, Gold Dust, Of/with, Third Wednesday, eFiction India, and elsewhere. Come of Age Listening to the old failing songs of younger days, of late-adolescence. Waiting for my fate among the butterflies, school bells ringing in the distance up the hill and it all begins again. Endless high school prevails and pulses outward into my present thoughts, to the jugular of the world, its infectious, contagious criticism. Turning red in the face, heart and nerves fluttering inside, looking down at my hands, picking my fingernails and knuckles. This was my daily routine. An endless humiliation I have yet to conquer. I still feel the pangs, I still have the dreams, I still feel the weight of that teenage injective. I am tied to time. I am still suffering through this generation. I am stuck in the niche of recurring suburban humiliation, constant reminders of this epoch, this Day and Age, to suffer through this mangled and toxic generation. I have and will continue to suffer the generation itself. Just Thinking I was just thinking about the possibility of a Pantheistic Universe the Earth itself is a Pantheistic planet a many-Goded planet, for instance—the sun, the ocean, the air, the gravity as the pressure ripens and our latent fuss begins knocking at our hearts and minds, ready to burst, to spill forth its intellectual ejaculate upon the Earth pitch-black curtains draped like eyelids over all the populations that never activated their Intellects. Not an Ode to November Feeling dangerous, as in I feel danger at every corner. Fear creeps down every one of my thoughts. I can’t take this swishing world of 17 different shades of green towels. I usually just barely make it out of each Winter alive and if I am this far down and it’s only November, I don’t think I’m going to make it through this one. All the leaves are gone, and with them, so is my Spirit. My inspiration has retreated so much so that I am already done writing this poem. Hollow-Headed The fact that most people in this world do not do their own thinking can be proven thusly: people are always saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of Insanity-- only one problem—that’s NOT the definition of Insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is actually the definition of Stupidity, the word which defines the very people who speak this thoughtless cliché. Pyromaniac Orchids An ice-coated shard of wintry berry pierces my tongue. I drape the black cloth over the stains, faintly swallowing remorse and dining on sorrow. The aromatic blankness stifles hopes from ever gloating in the paste of fierce orchids sifting through the fiery embers of a hazel sun. Drear returns to feast until a flammable emotion distills and blazes in the brief freedom of a candle’s short wick. Wax glorifies itself and smothers the flame as the crackle of liquid flower beats against the eardrums. Debasis Mukhopadhyay lives and writes in Montreal, Canada. He has a PhD in literary studies from Université Laval, Quebec and poems published in several magazines in the USA & UK including Yellow Chair Review, Thirteen Myna Birds, Of/With,Silver Birch Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Foliate Oak, Eunoia Review, Snapping Twig, Fragments of Chiaroscuro, Words Surfacing, The Curly Mind, I am not a silent poet, With Painted Words. Follow him at https://debasismukhopadhyay.wordpress.com/ or @dbasis_m on Twitter. I stayed with you when it was dark
I left you dead at dawn with no sea around inside an empty rental room where paper flowers crouching before the matter of sky through the shattered window pane with no darkness to become one flesh with you. I can now look afar off your dead hands which are not beyond the scope of a poem. Mirador Bouncing over my blue you rolled over like a damn boat as I kept watching you standing in the silence that claimed the night of your skin, the salt of your whispers and sighs, the roses of hope that'd colored my gaze on your smoky skull. Brittle and alone across the page, I look for you in the recesses of my dreams. That dance was meant to be our last waltz, Soledad, where did you go? Inkblot i had known it from the start she said in sepia and turned away i tried to touch her the membrane felt and felt a song the overcast bounced and rolled over like a damn boat a hundred years now to stretch away from each other we imagined scars where had been living the extreme rust thereafter came the leftover poems and i got up only to walk up to monnet's poppy field against the wall and i bent down to the swaying flowers thinking of her words gone in blood the flowers bled to let loose in the meaning and to lose the meaning i tucked my dreams and dreads in her chest again so quick she too opened her ribs that kept ticking all our corpses are swimming back up and the clock filled the room a hundred years the inkblot now made some sense Dylan Macdonald is a recent graduate of the University of San Diego. He has been published or is forthcoming work in the Columbia Journal Online, Rust + Moth – A Journal of Poetry and the Arts, Red Paint Hill Poetry Review. Mother Never Ate an Avocado When I was young I would stare at the sun until I went blind. Stop That! Mother’s work heels sunk into the parched cement behind me. The sun’s shade lay green on the back of my eyelids. There was only light until there was shadow. Then: the sun-baked jade driveway, the hopping sparrow with its crimson chest protruding, the grey-blue-green Jeep, the unconcerned golden terrier leading his lost owner out of our little cul-de-sac, the maroon roofs checkered shingles, the blurred avocado tree its untouched fallen fruit piling, and, finally, mother’s six inch emerald blue work heels. She folds her long red hair into a bun. The sun seeps into the nape of her pale neck. Before I Ever Published a Poem I had published a thousand poems, had even recorded a few to music. I was choosing art over money, honey, while making plenty of both. I was bigger, then, people said, and they could see me from far away through their telescopes, glowing, and sort of floating, as well. Kendall loved me, moved in with me, could tolerate me for days, even weeks at a time. We had a dog named Triscuit and a son named Rexi, and I stayed home with them on the week days and on the weekends I was Jesus Christ and I would push breath into the wind and warmth into the blood of vagrants. Nothing is quite so cold as the uncoiling of your own mind. Most Nights, From Our Window, We Could Almost See the Moon We could have planted a White Ash tree atop the amber hill. We could have scooped, in cupped hands, tadpoles from the puddled porch. We could have left the crumpled stoop, the stunted tire swing, the ramshackle roof. We could have run beside the dogs never looking up. I Have Only Seen an Uncooked Turkey Once She stumbles out of the forest clutching a bottle of merlot. Her baby sits on her cotton back yelling, Fly, Mother! Fly! She leaps into me, cracking her knees and bruising, with the stones in her mouth, the thin skin above my sternum. The baby falls from the mother’s back, landing on my socked foot, breaking its lean leg. Can you not fly, Mother? she cries. The turkey puts down her wine glaring at me and picks her child up in her quivering beak. Something Resembling a Poem about Love I’m tired today. Cold, too. And I’ve forgotten how to write a poem. I love this girl. She’s got legs and hair, and a face; she has eyes. She has a thin stomach. She is soft. Sometimes, when I hold her close to me at night I take a little of her heat away. Shazia Ali is a Professor of English at Eastfield College in Dallas, Texas. Shazia was born in Karachi, Pakistan and spend her childhood in Dubai. As a teenager she returned to Karachi and worked there as a journalist for 3 years. She has been living in Dallas, TX for almost 17 years now. She received her Ph.D in Humanities and Literature from the University of Texas at Dallas and has been writing poetry and fiction for the past decade. She has been published in DFW Poets Anthology and Red River Literary Journal. Shazia gives voice to the Asian-Muslim immigrant experience and the disparate identity crisis of every immigrant. The Color Yellow That silly, bright color Shining amongst the drabness Of an ocean of colors. It smiled at odd moments And skipped through the paths Of dull browns and gaudy reds. It sparkled on the shiny cheeks Of bashful, young brides. It filled shattered homes With a dash of joy And a sprinkle of sunshine. It bravely marched Through darkened alleys Between rioting mobs And weeping families As they rubbed their dead With a blob of yellow That silly, bright color. I ask them They ask me, Where am I from? Born in Asia, brought up in the Middle East, Living in Texas Calling myself American Where am I from? They ask me, What is my language? I dream in English, I cry in Urdu, I spell “color” as “colour” But I do not speak Arabic. So, what is my language? They ask me, What is my religion? I am a Muslim, who covers her hair, Who smiles, laughs, and cries And feels pain when impugn Yes, my religion is Islam. They ask me … But I ask them, Does my birth country Make me a little less American? The most years I have lived Have been in the dry lands of Texas Inhaling the scorching heat, Walking barefoot on prickly grass. I ask them, Does my head gear Change my language? My words of love are spoken In the same language as yours. I have shed tears and lost words When faced with pain like yours. I ask them, Does religion deform And taint my soul? I have prayed for peace In days of terror. I have asked God for help In the stillness of foggy nights. I ask them, But they ask me again. Mitchell Waldman's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Waterhouse Review, Crack the Spine,The Houston Literary Review, Fiction Collective, The Faircloth Review, Epiphany, Wilderness House Literary Magazine, The Battered Suitcase, and many other magazines and anthologies. Waldman is also the the author of the novel, A Face in the Moon, and the story collection, Petty Offenses and Crimes of the Heart (Wind Publications), and has served as Fiction Editor for Blue Lake Review. (For more info, see his website at http://mitchwaldman.homestead.com). Snow Every day there were more and more reports that the snow was coming. And he would wait dull-eyed, tired propped by his window searching for the first crystal flakes of winter. Locked in his room he was impatient in his waiting-- with walnut cane he would hobble through the streets on rickety legs, bones cracking, down to the diner for his daily soup. And then he'd walk back as if his life were a clock ticking down the streets a still life of man with cane in a world no longer his. His eyes would meet no one's only sweep past the rushing flash of a coat or dress or boot. Creeping back through the silence back through the musty hallway back to his room feebly rubbing his hands by the stove huddling in a blanket by the window he would sit, waiting for the snow. Cockroach Cockroach bedamned orphan of kitchen counters you scurry across I slam to squash without thought fleeing on wires for legs your leprous body screams to the cracks and corners I slam so hard great reasoning bug that I am your life your crime I crush inconvenience blast it plow it or stuff it to show! I'd burn a million six million of your kind so you don't find the sugar but pray bow to the God in you and with each smack of the hand my soul lurks beside you falls deeper in the cracks. Hey Jack Hey Jack Jack Kerouac you got lost on that road of yours Jack (and we got lost with you) in your travels with Neal in your taking on the world and life and life and life needed someone to pull you back show you the way but you got lost went to a place from which you will never return those days gone forever gone gone gone your words your life your world. Come back, Jack, come back. Just Before the Light The whispering winds breathe your name echoing the words that rush from my lips as I cry tears of longing in the snow and rain and thunder, wanting to reach out to you across the expanse of our scant and scattered lives, so far apart yet so close: in the still silence of the early morning just before the light I carry you inside me everywhere I go in a secret pocket in the hallowed ground of my heart and soul, my One, my tender love. Bar People We walk into this dank dark place trying to remember why we came walk into this swell of bodies a carnival of faces and exaggerated expressions laughter coming from unseen corners drinks spilling on the fabric sorries and gleaming long toothed smiles crossed eyes (don’t know where they’re looking) and greasy haired slit-eyed stares (no question where he’s looking) sunken-cheeked woman arms covered with bracelets talking in a non-stop blare beer bellies rolling high-heeled, boot steps aimed forward but angling dangling toward the edge hanging on to the chipped bar’s edge to breathe and then the call: “Gather round, gather round!” so the circle forms sweaty, hot and smelly, a match and the candle is lit lights go off no one breathes as the child-baked cake with the number “50” and the toy Jim Beam bottle on top shines (“It’s her favorite,” the elfin one with wide eyes said, his palms turned up at his sides) as a baby is rocked in her mother’s arms the candle light in her eyes and everyone sings off key off-kilter and sharp-edged limbs flail the bar people dancing and talking rocking and shouting pointing and laughing slapping backs holding on to each other’s elbows to keep from falling remembering a time past the music too old floor too sticky smiles too wide laughs too loud to forget the days to return to that place they think they used to be. FERN G. Z. CARR is the President of Project Literacy Kelowna Society, a lawyer, teacher and past President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A Full Member of and former Poet-in-Residence for the League of Canadian Poets, this Pushcart Prize nominee composes and translates poetry in six languages including Mandarin Chinese. Carr has been published extensively world-wide from Finland to Mauritius. Honours include having been cited as a contributor to the Prakalpana Literary Movement in India as well as having had her work taught at West Virginia University, set to music by a Juno-nominated musician, and featured online in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Her poem, “I Am”, was chosen by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate as Poem of the Month for Canada. Carr is thrilled to have another one of her poems currently orbiting the planet Mars aboard NASA’S MAVEN spacecraft. www.ferngzcarr.com
In Passing Iron bars do not a prison Make love not War and Peace in our Time is Money makes the world go Round off to the nearest decimal Place the ring on her finger and repeat after Me? I never touch the Stuff that dreams are made Of course I don't Mind your Step to the front of the Line of Fire burn and cauldron Bubble Wrap up the Meeting one-on- One swallow does not a summer Make Merry Christmas one and All for one and one for All hell broke Loose lips sink "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence." * * Tales of a Wayside Inn. Part iii. The Theologian’s Tale: Elizabeth. iv. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Annis Cassells is a writer, teacher, and life coach in Bakersfield, CA. In 2015 she began to claim her voice as a poet with a poem published in Yellow Chair Review. Her first short story was published in Scarlet Leaf Review. Annis facilitates memoir writing classes for senior adults and conducts writing workshops through her local Art for Healing Program. She is a contributor in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for the Young at Heart. Annis is a member of Writers of Kern, a branch of the California Writers Club. Read her blog at www.thedaymaker.blogspot.com. Relocation 1973 Bruised blueberry tears From windowpane eyes Darken my breasts Heart hammers Stomach somersaults Brain bellows What roadblocks will rare up today? Sorry we just rented that apartment Haven’t had time to take down the sign My little brown kids are too young My little brown kids are too old You need a bank account or cash to get that TV Sorry Sorry Sorry What have I done moving here? These people do not see me do not know who I am Nor do they care. First Taste The Cassells home-place cellar, A real cellar -- earthen-floored, must-scented , raven-aired. Grandma Annie Cass - sells and ten-year-old me, heave worn wooden doors, throw daylight underground, pick our way down brick slab steps, stand still, let our eyes adjust. She leads Bound for thick, unpainted plank shelves Jammed against the far wall. She reaches For a dusty jug amongst canned pickles, peaches, beans. She pours a half-pint jelly jar one-quarter full, announces, “grape juice.” She savors A long dark liquid sip “Ahhhhh.” She passes the almost-empty jar to me. She cautions “Just a little now. It makes you feel all warm inside.” She stretches her eager knobby fingers for the rest as the jar leaves my lips. We ascend Hugging peaches and pickles, like nothing else ever happened down there. Don’t Slice My Bread Don’t slice my bread Measured segments bore me The best we can hope for, a yeast bubble Or slight deviation in height Uniformity restrains Let me savor haphazard hunks Catch crumbs Inhale the yeasty aroma of finger-hold fissures Oozing melted butter. Let me gouge out boulders Leave none untried, Avoided or ignored. Let me taste it all In its simplicity In its complexity Stale or fresh, The staff and stuff of Life Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh. Her latest work, published by Connotation Press: An Online Artifact was nominated for the Sundress "Best of the Net," the Dzanc "Best of the Net," and the Pushcart Prize. And with deep gratitude to Connotation Press she’ll have a book, forthcoming soon. A-mericus The earth opens. The earth closes Its double doors like a tomb Preservation; its past Companions. Dark from the foothill, running Along the scrub weeds to the fruit woods turning After the wooden houses, practically The whole cluster thrown back the vanishing In rapid bloom, more ruined than blooming Than the coloring, the way the bright petals Feathering off, the way the Argus once flocking Off those couldn’t be salvaged, I hear the loosening Light in the canopy, the great fig Sanctuary dismantling From deep shadow, the ancients moaning The descending, and the losses’ Asylum thrown in fleeing splendor-- I was young. I’d asked for flight—more than once I have stood in their threshold Reaching in, calculating with conviction The randomnesses of my two hands to the multitude Colors still in light, still not yet assimilated Into the earth Mounds, each bloom-- Autumn. The New Jersey tropical’s almost bare Inside the frosted glass, but for a few lilies Uprooted earlier-- Then outside the season’s arc, I watch the falling pattern Themselves at the perpetualness of a sufferance, the winded; its history Of travel at one arrival of an ending, ground. Grounded, like detritus gives the forest floor This morning, alone, I watch a young boy raise his hands to the fallen In driftage, turning over to the rest, scattering the ground As if giving a way home. Night Boat Is it the moon you hear swimming Slowly in me? A river’s flooded; isn’t it Drowning? Sinking like a stone Skipped to plummet Beneath the waves Over the ragged body sinks. Sink. I know where the bottom is. It is dark, thick and taken The many hands below surface (Skimming) as if blind I am searching for vision; feeling out the fog So thick no tree can rise. For the Rest of the Children: Cry if You Must Between nightmares. No one will hear in this dark. It’s thus as I now stand, however Then I dropped quickly to my knees. I cried for mercy. I cried for my mother and father. I cried for justice That had denied me, and still I couldn’t help but hoped For them. At the time, not much I wanted And not much I knew of war, Words about war, about America, about freedom To bomb, about the Vietcong, about the Khmer Rouge And their purpose to slaughter because my immediate elders had been scattered Detained, or sent so far into the rice fields. There was no way to know then Life had given me death After death until the rest are now Captives in my dream of dream. There are so many. To count a million is hard Yet two, for a second grader. It’s getting crowded. It’s getting hot with all the angel faces Burning before me. Naturally, I was scared, Didn’t know what to do, and couldn’t Find proper words because So many were put in my mouth. I went quiet I went still I went numb I went dumb Until my baby cried. I wake up and it’s still dark: Everything is the same, pale curtains Breathing calmly, the door is open—as it must After the war, so as no one is left out or in-- But no one follows through. Don’t be sad. My purpose is not here. Though, the first few times, I didn’t know what to feel Or what to do with all their breaths floating me. It’s quiet outside Again something I am drawn to. There’s just nothing I can do: I must go wherever They blow on me. So back to the fog, To the millions lost Still searching throats. |
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