Archive #27
September, 2015

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Edjo Frank: The River And The Passage

Edjo Frank

​ Back Home

 pain arrives in waves
 washing the shores of my breast
reminds me it is time
to cross the holy river
into the unknown

so I count my breath
medicine men arrive
with bags of secret spirits
bring me to the house
where soft touching hands
​reign and care

so I lay back and surrender
they watch and nurse
I wait and learn
the timetable of river crossing
in the power of
the great orchestrator
​
so they smile me home

Read the poetry of Edjo Frank
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All New Haiku From Poet Chen-ou Liu

Chen-ou Liu

  from Selected Haiku

  brown spots
  on my graduation photo ...
                     my hands too

                       ❊

                       he said, she said
                       lingering in the room...
                       twilight deepens

                       ❊

                       unlit votives
                       in a country church
                       the stale smell

                       ❊

                       a crow's cry
                       flies into darkness ...
                       alone with myself


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We Warmly Welcome Poet Gareth Spark To The Pages Of VerseWrights

Gareth Spark

  The night has gone to the dogs

  And the streets are all wet; they’re singing
  In our favourite bar, a song about bones
  And we’re feeling the way we felt when lightning
Hit the trees that time, and we’re arm in arm
And not caring who sees,
And the entire world is dark and wet.
Men and women watch
Through the windows of the restaurant
As we dance and fall against a phone-box
In the light from an all-night bookmakers
Where they bet on steeplechases and football games,
And have beautiful lists of horse‘s names;
I squint across your shoulder
And see faces beneath the phantom shine
Of humming fluorescent tubes:
Red eyes caring forever, patience for the end,
old jackets, and no love;
And it strikes me then
So we stop
And stare hard into a night that has burned out
Into steam from the restaurant roof
and into curses from the street:
There is no love, where there needs to be,
 
There is no love.
 
Only the memory of something that might have been
love,
of burning days
When the whole world
Was a long street,
A garden and a room.

Read the poetry of Gareth Spark
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Roslyn Ross And The Turmoil Of
A Life Event

Roslyn Ross

 Infidelity

 The template made clear cut,
 fine-edged in skeletal relief,
 it's shadow thrown through blood
and bone, it's pattern ridged
with grief. Cold echo from the past,
still drawing shadows real,
to grip my heel and dog my steps;
dark memories unfurled.

This pattern locking time
and holding visions stark,
to throw lost image cross my mind;
slow cut around my heart.
will soul still hold this print of pain,
desire's design long-shaped,
to show again the place where love
first learned the feel of hate.

Read the poetry of Roslyn Ross
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We Extend A Warm Welcome To Poet Matthew Quinn

Matthew Quinn

   
   A Welcome to America Party

     I
     I telephone to let my family know
     we are back home in the States:
                         Our new daughter as awake as we are tired.
A voice replies saying Jamie is dead.
Dead.
A daughter gained and a nephew lost.
Such is the dreadful economy
of fate.

II
I pace around the empty,
darkened hotel ballroom with a roaring tiger
of a girl cradled in my arms:
seven months old, fifteen pounds heavy--
all lung from the neck down, it seems.
She is no conflict of emotions, my daughter, she is distilled
rage pouring out at me for daring to believe
it is 11:00 p.m. instead of noon.
So we waltz.
Actually, I waltz.
She marches to John Philip Sousa--
heavy on the trumpets and piccolos.
Ignoring her counter-melody, I continue to waltz lightly
and sing her sweet songs.

III
The lighting is dim, the carpet plush. The chairs are waiting
at the side.  We walk mournfully in a slow circle
around the ballroom again and again.  My newly
American girl screams in the night at what she does not know.
I also do not know or understand.  I scream within.
Her purple-faced, curled-tongued fury becomes my own,
touches another pain.  My  voice is the echo of hers
off the walls of this hollow room.   I rage at other,
much darker forces than she can know.

IV
I was at the baggage carousel, hunting
for two bags among so many—grab the handles
and draw up our store of memories
and treasure—waiting to be welcomed back home,
when you melted down the highway, Jamie,
parting from yourself.  Parting from us.
As your body cooled
we had little to declare.
Customs waved us on without a search.
Our girl was approved for permanent residency.
The tedium of ignorance.

V
Fourteen and foolish,
the last lost boy staggered into neverland
reeking of gasoline, gunpowder, and hormones--
walking wide-eyed as a deer
out of time, walking out
of night, walking past his blood
on the road. Walking with others he met
only in death.

VI
I travel from dim light to dim light, again and again
in this room.  Each time my daughter’s face is
illuminated, then swallowed up in black.
She is beautiful, even in wild anger,
and I remember that face as I wait for the next light.
So far from what she has ever known, my girl grows limp.
Her wailing slackens to a light slumber,
interspersed with gasps and shudders that remember
her former torment.  Slowly she surrenders to the quiet--
like another young soul who raged his way to rest.

Read the poetry of Matthew Quinn
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Poet Debbie Strange's Artistry Continues To Delight

Debbie Strange

                ​Tanka/Tanshi ​               

silver-zippered river
binding earth's frayed edges
to ocean
we paddle among sea wolves
singing the salted sky

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VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet/Playwright George Freek

George Freek

    The Dead (After Mei Yao Chen)

    As leaves fall from the trees,
     a sultry breeze weakens
with the dying sun.
From where does it come?
A crow hovers over my head,
searching for carrion bones.
I walk the lake shore alone.
I walk like a man made of stone.
If she were alive, my wife
would walk by my side.
My thoughts are disconnected.
They scatter in the wind,
like grains of sand.
The leaves fall at my feet.
And tonight they
will deepen when I sleep.


The Frozen Darkness (After Tu Fu)

In the twilight, an icy rain
is like silken needles.
Finally, snow starts piling up,
and I’m unable to sleep.
My bed is cold.
All night ice cracks
on the roof and in the eaves.
Wind tosses the last
of November’s leaves.
All birds have departed.
I reach for the light,
but can no longer write.
My poems no longer bite.
Who reads poetry today?
Young men with
unreal dreams and old
fools like me,
with nothing left to say.

Read the poetry of George Freek
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Reka Jellema's Latest Poem Is Wistful, Sad...Intriguing 

Photo art by Reka Jellema

Reka Jellema

  
  I Cover You With Ferns

  Have you never tried to hold ferns
  feathery ferns 
  overgrown ferns
  ferns rippling

have you not
thrown yourself on the ground
to study the underside of ferns
veiny leafy ferns
ferns waving

do you not see now
how inadequate
our grope for words,
picture undulating
tongues tipping
toward the verdant

do you not know
how deficient
this fumbling
when once-fleshed
girls, boys
sleep under beds
of ferns
  
how futile
to reach for ferns
to know fern-ness
to wonder what Plato
would have said or Aristotle
about the nature
of ferns
    
a keen green
keening
in sun stains
ferns en masse
a jungle of ferns

all over your body 
ferns
O little boy 
your voice
never quieted
it rasps on
and I cover you with ferns

Read the poetry of Reka Jellema
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Two Poems, Two Windows, Two Poets

Ramesh Dohan

​A Portrait

What scene would I want to be framed in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to   .....ponder
about all that goes on outside my window.

Read the poetry of Ramesh Dohan
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Jacqueline Czel

  




Bedhead

My thoughts
are disheveled
this morning,
knotted and
twisted,
lint littered,
a little wild as
as the constellation
quilted blanket
of night is
slowly lifted
by long slender
fingers of light,
the warm hand
in the window,  
beckons
as I bid my
fading dreams,
with a lover's
long parting,
a goodnight.

Read the poetry of Jacqueline Czel
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​

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L.L. Barkat Shares Two Short, Sensual Lyrics

L.L. Barkat

 
 On Belleview Avenue

  Serpentine tree.
  Japanese, I suspect,
  as in split maple, as in
it takes a hundred years
to snake these arms to such breadth; anyway, it seems everything
must have been leading to this juncture--
droughts, floods, springs coming
too late 
and winters 
too early, everything conspired towards this:
snow, like white butterflies, laid
over old curves, dead leaves, intersections,
now ready to soft wing
the empty night.


Replenish

Remind me, would you,
to buy more of the Peach Momotaro,
with its images of waterfalls, lichen-toned
terraces, waves of mountains imprinted
with dots, little white flowers, and mist.
When I drink it, and the steam enters me,
I think of you and the water feels as if
it’s pouring over the mountains.

Read the poetry of L.L. Barkat
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Ali Znaidi Has A Wakeup Cawl For You

Ali Znaidi

 
 Crow Blues

 The crow lands on a bare bough
 of the tree of your obsolete childhood.
 The leaves rush to cover up this nakedness.

On your way home
it’s mandatory to smile back
to the Janus-faced people.

The crow is tak­ing over the
center and the edges of the bare bough. 

Who knows what secrets
they conceal in their smiles.

The crow spreads
its wings against the tree, cawing at last.

I think 
your ears yearn for jazz.

And now, 
your dejection returns, a certain urge 
for panacea telling you: 
stop talking on your mobile phone
& listen to the caws!

Read the poetry of Ali Znaidi
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Poet Lucy Logsdon Entertains
The Inevitable

Lucy Logsdon

  
   Mirror, Mirror

   If you had to reflect princesses 
   all day long, you'd get tired, too.
   Go ahead, they simper, tell me
I'm the fairest, the grandest,
the prize.  Always, I whisper,
you wash in the looks of men,
towel dry with the leftovers.
That prince never stood a chance.
Valiant, Magnificent, Harry, Handsome, 
Dick; all the same. I get weary.  My words, 
never enough.  These girls want more.  
Silvered reflection, shadowed truths.  
I cast their beauty back at them---
their breasts, lips, hips, cheeks still plump 
as the orchard's freshest peach.  
Later comes the drying out, the collapse.  
Wrinkles, sags, erasure.  
And then, dear girls,  
nothing will save you.  No mud tinctures, 
pharmacy grade ointments, holy water, snake oil,
botox or filler will stop the desiccation.  
Then you’ll break me into thirteen jagged pieces, 
but each shard will still tell a tale:  once upon a time,
this princess was beauty, now she is revelation.  
Am I the wickedest?  Look into my tarnished eyes.  
I was you; I paid the price.  Every girl has to.
The-it-can't-happen becomes the-happened,
age's impossible black shoe squarely on one’s foot.
Here, on the other side, we become something 
different, crone-shaped and powerful.  The blue skies
no longer thrill us, we want storms descending.  
Winter's cold winds, the loss of permanence--
oh, we plan to sing and dance in the subtraction.
With each loss we grow, until finally, we are nothing, 
and everything—the sum at the end, 
the sheet covered mirror.

Read the poetry of Lucy Logsdon
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Emily Strauss

  Magenta Curves ☊

   How do we write about the silence 
    that falls after we stop 
following a road, and instead watch 
the sunset wash over cold mountain 
defiles where snow clings 
on the dry rocky cliffs 
above a desert basin, 
a sinuous curve of magenta?

There are no words 
in the collected shadows
the rising blackness 
covers our thoughts— 
we can't write of ghosts 
in a journal of invisible pages.

Instead we sleep with the stars
in nights winter-cracked
lie huddled on stiff grasses 
and bare earth long enough 
to feel the absence of dreams.

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Emily Strauss With A question...
And An Answer

Polly Robinson: Imagination From All Directions

Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
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Polly Robinson

  The Journey

   Riding from far North they came
   through snow and sleet and sheeting rain.
                       Ice formed behind them, frosted, cracked
red dragon scales, in parts, looked blacked.
On wings sheer clipped, their fire breath quenched,
onward, moving South, they went.

Flying ahead of the sunset West:
werewolves; sprites in fiery vests;
pixies pointing ears to learn
where coal black jackdaws crash and burn.
There is no place to hide.

Then from the sunrise in the East
the faerie queen on bounding beast
the size of which sees grown elves weep.
They hear her voice so light (though deep)
control the slavering ride.

Inch by inch from the dry drought South
carrying dead sheep in its mouth
the Kraken, skin scabbed, wracked and ripped
scouts for the havering hare who nips
at the frail fingers of sylvan wamblers.

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For R.H. Mustard, A Vacation ends, but not the rumination

R.H. Mustard

   Voices

   The wind is up tonight,
    our patio chimes
singing their lonely song,
announcing another season
in a refrain
I've heard before.
As we slide into fall,
faint voices drift in
from the pool:
Labor Day visitors,
here now the heat
has broken,
speaking in the dark.
They'll awaken
in a strange bed,
unsure of where they are,
how they got here.
I will lose them
in sleep, and tomorrow
they will be gone forever,
on their way back home,
wondering why they came,
at all.

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Ramesh Anand's Latest is a Tanka Sequence

Ramesh Anand

  
Overspill: A Tanka              Sequence  ☊

   with my child
                      on my shoulder, i walk
                      in the long rain
                      carrying the heaviness
                      of shattered dreams

                     *

how long
can a robin hold its song
in autumn
my late father's words
stirring my soul

                     *

how much rain
can a little cloud hold
the overspill
of resentment
her only identity

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Hear this work in the PoetryAloud area
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Paul Mortimer's Paean To An Anonymous Painter

Paul Mortimer

 To an Unknown Artist

  Light is yours to command.
  You will use this energy,
a magician
casting burning into shadows
where it scatters black into fearful places
leaving it to tread lightly across
mercurial paths. Opening furnace doors
you allow molten photons to pour
across canvas
shaping and reshaping into colours
that cling to your eyes. 

With brush and sight
you weave patterns
pulled from nebulae
that have been created
by a sorcery above thinking
until 

paint
and mind
and flames
and vision
flare
and die.

You sit spent in dark, head on chest
your name locked in the brush
that hangs limp in your hand.

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We Warmly Welcome Poet Karla Linn Merrifield To VerseWrights

Karla Linn Merrifield

   Bang

   No wonder you checked out 
   of the regional medical center,
   the nomenclature finally wore
   your old brain to a numb.
 
You sure as heck weren’t going to fight
no hospitalese disease no more.
You could swallow FALL RISK stamped
on a cartoon-yellow wristband,
 
but NDD-2 Mechanical Soft Diet?
No way, José.  Mechanical?
Think pureed. Think strained.
Think baby-food-Pablum. Bleah.
 
(At least Mech-Soft Entrée is spelled correctly.)
The sterile scene is suffocatingly abbreviating:
MRI, CT, BP, CCs…
Don’t expect a doc on his/her rounds;
 
he/she’s a hospitalist now.
Say lumbar puncture because 
spinal tap is too Frankensteinian.
I like to imagine it was
 
the LPNs, RNs, and NPs
who shorted you right out,
a few final pains at the ass end,
right before your last word.

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Richard Biddle Finds Much To Be Seen In A Drop Of Water

Richard Biddle

   Transparency

   Rain that wept from the gutter last night
   has slowed to a glycerin drip.
 
Now it comes, one clear tear at a time.
 
A perfect lens capturing a whole world
inside its micro-mirror, split second drop.
 
And just for a moment, I too am within its
pear-shaped prism.
 
And just for a moment, I too am clearly
seeing what isn't there. 

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Two New Shorter Poems From Poet
Marie Anzalone

Marie Anzalone

  
  Lighthouse

   Do you remember?
   I seem to recall a triple
                     sunrise somewhere
with you. We lit a fire on
the shores of a past tense.
Who could have known,
then, about lighthouses
that shine beacons across
the entirety of galaxies;
the pre and post memories
of human belonging?


Honest at Night

At 3 am, my thoughts inevitably
turn to you. Something happens
in moonlight. Dark heat rises like
steam from pavement, and I am
feasting upon a diminishing bowl
of false propriety. A woman dying
of thirst, presented a well of 30
feet, and a rope of 25. At these
moments, the only restraint may
be measurable distance between
houses. Were you here, I would
demonstrate what eternity meant
when it told the night: prepare to
be devoured in pieces, so that the
whole comes to life, birthed in its
own searing audacity, covered
with the fluids of its first arrival.

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New Haiku From The Pen Of 
Angelee Deodhar

Angelee Deodhar

 from Selected Haiku

  zen garden-
  the clack of wooden clogs
  on wet flagstones

                         *

pre dawn stillness
red brown leaves 
in the birdbath

                         *

                    monsoon-
                    a lone paper boat spins
                    into rain song

                        *

soundless evenings-
a dwindling pool of frogs
this summer

Read the poetry of Angelee Deodhar
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Eleanor Swanson and Romance Under
The Stars

Eleanor Swanson

    The Astronomy Book

I took the astronomy book from the         shelf--
the one I bought on our first anniversary
to teach my husband the stars.
Light rolled off the slick pages.
The gray italic print of formulas
galactic dust impressed there.
I thumbed through suns and solar
systems, remembering the point
of my search: some star I wanted
to pluck out of the book to bring
on darkness and the glitter of the moon, 
further spreading the farmer’s brash
white floodlights over the rutted fields.
Outside together, I follow your arm,
raised toward the sky, pointing out,
a star, as you tell your colorful story
of its discovery, and how it must
have winked out millennia ago.
You sent shivers up my spine
as I thought of interstellar dust
and matter adrift.  You school me--
from hottest to coldest, the seven main
groups of stellar spectra—OBAFGKI.
Oh be a fine girl, kiss me.  
And I did, standing under
the faint light of millions of stars.

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David Thornbrugh: The Night Shift
Shows The Way

David Thornbrugh

  Finding Heart

  Part of the art
  inside the bamboo cage
was to be still
and find your partner’s heartbeat.
Yours hammered like a bird’s wing
against my fingertips
at first touch.
But when you looked for mine,
there was nothing there to find.
Part of the art
is knowing how to look,
how to hook two fingers
just so between the bones
beneath the flesh.
“Like this,” I said,
and guided your fingers in,
the way I learned to do
taking vitals on the night shift.
And there I was,
alive, again,
beneath your touch.

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Bethany W Pope Shares Her Latest Poem

Bethany W Pope

  Machete

   My father ran, fleet, through the forest
   surrounding the base near Manila. He was
   carrying me. I was at rest
on his sweaty shoulders. He swerved past mangoes blessed
with fruit that could kill me with swelling and pus.
My father ran, fleet, through the forest,
trying to beat his bloody past
into the moist path. The iconoclast of memory was
carrying me. I was at rest
while he remembered the man whose machete cast
shards of light on exposed bone and red, wet glass.
My father ran, fleet, through the forest,
breathing hard. The Naval police came slowly, lost
in contemplation of the same TV show that was
carrying me. I was at rest
while he clutched the trembling murderer to his breast,
trying to calm him with prayers and soft tenor susurrus.
My father ran, fleet, through the forest, 
carrying me. I was at rest.

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​

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Two Short poems from Carl Scharwath

Carl Scharwath

   Empty Surrender

   I surrendered a memory
   of an altered
   me.
Long ago,
an essence filled
my writing.
Now I have gone
adrift.
The echo of words
never born.
Invisible reflections,
white paper
can they form again?
In blurred shapes
of her and
forgotten youth.


Chimera

The sun cambered
through the haze
upon a lonely sentinel.
Speechless propaganda,
begotten sexless rapture,
as the days
begin and end
with the phantasm
of uninvited ghosts.

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Scott Thomas Outlar: On the Bukowski Express

Scott Thomas Outlar

  90 Day Ride

  Take a breath

  170 mph
                     for three months straight
since Bukowski
set my mind on fire

Transformed me
from a writer
into a poet
with a flame
in my belly

Set me on a path
with only one direction – 
straight ahead
razor edge
zeroed-in

Ready for success
or annihilation
whichever comes first

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Jocelyn Mosman's Newest poem comes from the Edge

Jocelyn Mosman

Neurosis

I am dark matter, white noise.
I can’t fall asleep
in midnight’s unrelenting
stillness.
 
The quiet makes
everyone and everything outside
disappear and
I feel alone.
 
I don’t know how to be alone
without losing my self.
Anxiety sets in
like mist.
 
I evade shadows,
lose focus as the sun
rises and
sets.
 
Some days,
I can’t keep up.
I need to breathe
but I can’t.
 
I am trapped
on this blue planet,
silently spinning
through space.
 
The world I was born into was
a muted scream made audible
in the emergency exit
of my mother’s belly.
 
I have made 20 revolutions
around a sun
I cannot control,
            a cycling of
 
waves, planets, bicycles, periods,
This noisy rhythm is dull
against my
heartbeat. 
 
The compression of blood
in and out of ventricles
in and out of veins,
            out of me:
 
like the ocean
washing the beach
after footprints litter
its pristine shoreline;
 
like the final squeeze
of catsup before it reaches
its sputtering and anticlimactic
finish;
 
like you
sighing, begging me
to stop being
so neurotic.
 
Each year, a twister
that sweeps me off my feet
day after day,  but I always find
my way home.
 
I don’t know where home is,
not anymore,
but being here with you
seems right.
 
The snow is silent as dots
falling from the darkness
of the heavens
onto spindly trees
 
The world is quiet here,
except the wind
on the window pane,
            and you beside me.
 
You hold my hand,
our body heat colliding
in the darkness and
            I can’t let go.

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