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Archive #34
April, 2016


Picture
Sharon Brogan

Poet Sharon Brogan Returns
With Secrets To Tell

                       Secrets

Listen. I will tell you everything. The weather is turning.

Soon it will be time to unroll the Persian rugs and lay
     them

on the polished floors. 

I will hold nothing back. I am brittle, like glass; like
     leaves

of a tree too long without water; a cocoon, untenanted,

exposed to the sun.

This morning I wore a jacket to walk the river path. Two
     crows,

in their black robes, pecked at the body of a thick green
     snake.
My mother was a northerner.

She carried me across thin ice. Many times I slipped
     beneath

the frozen water. I never knew my father. Tomatoes are
     laid

on the kitchen counter,

red bulbs on the maple wood. I prepare the knife: steel
     blade,
sharpening stone. I want to slice to the seedy centers
     without

bruising the skin.

I loved my father. He had perfect, beautiful hands. He
     kept

them manicured and clean. There are reasons you must
     not

touch me. My grandmother

lived with God in her garden. She fed me carrots and
     peas,

she put white lilies by my bed. I am telling you
     everything.

It is cold here.

Birch trees bend in their white sleeves, leaves hissing in
     the wind.

A blade of sun slants down, casting serrated shadows on
     the hard
ground. Are you listening?
 
Do you understand? The dog waits, and waits, at the
     door.
Yesterday, I dropped the Murano vase. It cannot be
​     repaired.
​I cut myself on sharp, thin air.


Read the poetry of Sharon Brogan
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Picture
Rivka Zorea

Poet Rivka Zorea Writes Of
Spring In Her Beloved Alaska

Spring in the Northland

Spring in the North Land
Does not come in a blast of color.
The achromous land is still covered
In a blanket of snow.
The pregnant carpet beneath
Is anxious to breathe the fresh Arctic air.
The profusion of hothouse-derived colors in the city
Of the peony and the chrysanthemum
Are city hues only.
They are there for the tourist, and to decorate
The towns and city of the north.
But, out in the Tundra,
Spring comes on whispers--
A soft musical melody, that sees the end
Of the dance of the Aurora
And welcomes the long day of summer.
This melody is sung by the lichen
And the thick Arctic grasses,
Heard only by the Caribou and the Eskimo.


Read the poetry of Rivka Zorea
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​
Picture
Ramesh Anand

A New Haiku Sequence From Poet
​Ramesh Anand

Spring Again  ☊

spring drizzle
the bipinnate leaves
fold into shyness

          ❧
        rain 
        of cherry blossoms--
        remaining spring

               ❧
                waters of spring
                father backstrokes
                into healthiness

                     ❧
                        lake sunrise
                        a duckling sets off
                        downstream


Enjoy this sequence in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Ramesh Anand
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 of Ramesh Anand
​

Poet Brendan Bonsack Gets To The
Heart Of The Guitar

PictureBrendan Bonsack

​  Guitar

   I place my ear
   Against the body
   Of my first guitar

The way I have seen
Young women sometimes
Press their cheeks
Against the bone-cage
Bellies of horses

The sound in its body
Is different from this angle

Like notes chasing one another
Round wooden corridors
Rattling the radiators
With cups and spoons
And scratching their names
In the banisters

Or sometimes,
At the brushing of my thumb
Across the aged
Dull strings,

Like the rushing of blood
Through rosewood aortas


​Read the poetry of Brendan Bonsack
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Charlie Brice Pens a Tribute To
​A Fellow Poet

PictureCharlie Brice

​  Poem for David Adès

   He dazzled us, this Aussie poet,
   learned our seasons and taught us his.
 
He wrote here monuments to his grace
and graced us with the air he breathed.
 
Our air became his air became our air again.
 
We were dazzled by his words,
his smile, his eyebrows lifted,
curious, filled with wonder
 
at our efforts, our fragments
along the great frozen breath
of poetic time. He opened
 
for us a poetic season that honors
spring,  warms winter, praises
summer, embraces fall. His dazzle,
 
now our lament, cushioned by the breeze
of his words, the swell of his oeuvre.
 
So long, chum. Come back soon. 

[David Adès is an Australian poet who has returned to his native land after a period of time living in Pittsburgh, where he was deeply appreciated by the poets there. David is a VerseWrights poet and you can read his work here.]

Read the poetry of Charlie Brice
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​



Poet Dane Cobain Meets The Friction
Head On

PictureDane Cobain


  Let's Get Incendiary

Your words are strongest when honest,
                    and I never promised silence to begin with;
                    I never promised anything
                    ‘cause I didn’t want to break them.
 
                    Truth is,
                    I fell in love again,
                    only this time it’s personal –
                    I’m not in love with the moonlight
                    like I used to be,
                    and I’m not in love with the music,
                    although it helps.
 
                    My poems force sparks to fly
                    between us,
                    singeing eyebrows
                    and causing serious distress
                    in the eyes of the spies
                    who spread their lies
                    about me,
                    and ironically,
                    I’m now at fault for the truth,
                    but I never asked for their opinion

                    anyway.

Read the poetry of Dane Cobain
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​

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet
Anara Guard To Our Pages

PictureAnara Guard

    Leda

    As he soared toward the open nest,
     (wrapping her in his light white wings
                        as if she were his only child),
                        while he dived to the target’s eye,
                        she saw the wild earth revealed:
                        distant, distinct, real.
 
They flew above forests
heaving with rain,
and she watched the flamingos dance
their naked pink seduction.
 
She saw the deserts,
scraped clean to the bone.
From her swaying, balanced cradle
she saw the acorn blossom into oak,
she knew what the white bull did,
what the shower of gold bought.
 
And she heard the swan’s sole song,
not yet sung.
It sounded like temples falling,
like all women sighing together.
 
Up and over the world they rose
until it was a ball she’d tossed high once
from her father’s garden into the air.
Blue, green, it whirled, and disappeared.


Read the poetry of Anara Guard
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We Warmly Welcome Poet Ramon Loyola
​To VerseWrights

PictureRamon Loyola
 
   Atoms, Hearts

   we are burning particles
    the trillion pins of a flame
 
offsprings of the sun
the gods of lightning
 
colliding, conjoining
we explode like the stars
 
to form black sky
galaxy and endless space
 
that fills up with our atoms
molecules and bursting quarks
 
the way your love fills

the way your heart fulfills


Prelude


his hand sweeps over
scaly, coarse knuckles.
he doesn’t mind, doesn’t care.
 
he touches, provokes,
the sweetening void.
i don’t mind, don’t care.
 
he’s the one holding.

i’m the one falling.

Read the poetry of Ramon Loyola
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​

Picture
Ray Sharp

Poet Ray Sharp Offers Perspective In His Latest Poem

Haibun: The Cranes

Spring! They return, the sandhill cranes, to the fenny fields behind our house and I have to resist the temptation to say our cranes, or even our fields. I imagine their ancestors arriving on a day like today, with patchy snow and the sweet gurgle of running water in the little stream – not our stream – that has snaked across the marshlands to the big, cold lake since long before we moved here and fallowed the old played out potato fields, even before the Anishinaabe-Ojibwe peoples came here to fish and gather wild rice. I imagine that first breeding pair gliding over a young post-glacial world of gravel and swamp and new woodlands, settling on this very field to take their place among the crows and fox and deer mice, first link of a long chain, the way one day leads to the next, the way we, too, have come to be a part of this world, to hatch our young and watch them spread their wings and fly away, and wonder.

like tall feathered men,
cranes walk upright in wet fields
gigging April frogs


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​

We Warmly Welcome Poet Gary Beck To The Pages Of VerseWrights

PictureGary Beck
 
   Privilege

  The last days of summer
  flicker hot and cool
                     hinting of winter.
                     Tickles of flying south
                     make the birds grow new feathers.
                     Leaves begin to fall
                     quickly collected
                     by busy men
                     unwilling to nourish the earth.
                     Homeowners fill their heaters.
                     Even household pets,
                     long subtracted from nature,
                     grow more fur.
                     Pleasures are departing
                     except for the wealthy
                     who sail away
                     and purchase warm weather.​
​


Path of Gain

Renunciation of desire
generates tranquility,
disrupted when demands
become overwhelming
for mindless participation
in the palace of acquisition,
treasures beckoning temptation
brandished by eunuchs of profit
vending seduction, slavery,
enchantment eliminated
in the chambers of wanting.


Read the poetry of Gary Beck
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​

Picture
Clarence Wolfshohl

Clarence Wolfshohl: When A Bagel Was More Than A Bagel


​  Sunday Morning Bagels
                 
Albuquerque, 1967

Laundry was our Sunday morning chore.
Up the street we’d tote our clothes tossed
in twisted compromised positions, box
of Tide, and a book or two for waiting.
During the wash cycle, we read; the dry cycle
was for our Sunday morning bagel and cream cheese.
 
Two doors down from the laundromat
was a diner that served a bagel, sliced,
and a small cup of cream cheese for fifty cents.
Bagels were as rare in the high desert
Southwest as tortillas on Long Island,
and neither of us had ever tasted one
before our first Sunday at the laundromat.
 
Often down to coins, risking pink underwear,
we combined whites and colored garments in one load,
or not dry pieces that could drape over chairs
and curtain rods in our apartment,  to save
a quarter toward the bagels. Sometimes
we shared one bagel, flipping
our last penny for the crunchy top half.
 
They were toasted golden and the cream cheese
melted into the soft dough.  Sometimes
the girl behind the counter gave us a cup
of coffee on the house, and we’d sweeten
the blackness with real sugar, nibble squirrel-
sized bites from the bagel and sip the hot brew,
our eyes twisted together like the garments in our bag.


Read the poetry of Clarence Wolfshohl
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​
Picture
Claudine C. Wargel

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Claudine C. Wargel

Gray

Gray.
Wind whipping.
This sky and world are mean
With cancer.
Is it morning?
Nightfall?
So much the same.
Where is the sun
That warms, cleanses
Grows and heals?
Can I move without it?
Care without it?
Why -
So dark
Unsettled
Cruel.
The trees roar--in dance with an evil mate.
Sun-drop, 
Can nothing grow without you?
My garden will fail.
My will, shrivel - 
Pale 
Transparent
Spineless. 
I recline
Plump my bag of feathers 
Pull up 
The quilts
Of tattered cotton comfort
And sigh 
An impoverished cloud. 


Read the poetry of Claudine C. Wargel
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​
Picture
Marie Anzalone

Poet Marie Anzalone And A
​Poem From The Northern Climes

Hunter's Moon, October 27​

In the North woods tonight, it is rutting season.
The deer have invested their month of gains
preparing for the lean season; the bucks like their does
with a little extra in the rump these weeks.
They trumpet snorts and calls of lust
Across thickets, scrub, grasslands. Loudly.

It is the Hunter’s Moon. Life sustaining fat
and hormones at full peak.
Replication of life for the sake of life;
Expression of love for the sake of love,
The taking of life in love for the sake of forward progress.
And I grew up in the North Woods, of course.

The days grow shorter, parallel to my desire to introvert
I prepare to either migrate or hibernate,
worriedly, watching me put on my own winter stores.
I draw a sweater tight, watch the north for arrivals
of migratory winged things.
I slow, want to spend more time abed. We were never
meant to work these southern breakneck paces
365 days a year. A body long in motion wants to rest.

Or something.
Maybe the only person I want to see, sometimes,
is you.

Something in the way I love you is different.
The moon looks closer now, from where I stand;
there is both more and less urgency to words, thoughts.
I will watch the moonrise tonight. I will measure
the diminishing distance between hearts, minds.

Weigh intentions in acorns, sunflower seeds, and squash.
I will run my hands down my own sides,
In the soft bright glow
Thinking of how to best prepare the house special,
and of hunters, moons, and unattainable needs.
Hoping you, like your northern counterparts,
like your rump a little on the soft side.
Tender, and succulent. And loud.

Read the poetry of Marie Anzalone
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Poet Ana Caballero On Birth,
Infancy And...Time

PictureAna Caballero
        
   Baby

    You are
    A long time
    Coming
 
                      Now
                      All time is
                      Your time
 
                      My time is
                      Yours since
                      Before
 
                      But your
                      Time is
                      Not mine
 
                      It is yours
                      I get to
                      Watch it
 
                      Feel how
                      You are not
                      In me
 
                      But you were
                      There you
                      Grew
 
                      Into a paw
                      Of blood
                      And time
 
                      It felt good
                      To share
                      To receive
 
                      Now I live
                      To give
                      You time

Read the poetry of Ana Caballero
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Poet Caleb Coy Delivers A Modern Myth

PictureCaleb Coy

    
The Boy Who Never Laughed

Was once a little boy
A boy who never laughed
Never did escape no single smirk from him
No waggy-tail puppies
No Sunday paper funnies
No, never did he draw a smile or a sigh for them
When a baby he laughed once
A little reflex, they say
But that was just once and no more did he have
Then he learned to talk
And even learned to walk
And before too long they found he couldn’t laugh
His momma tickled him all over
And she took him to the toy store
Then off to the zoo to see the animals therein
He kissed a girl and she kissed him back
His daddy came home from Iraq
And still they never saw a giggle or a grin
The pictures he drew were all funny
At school he was the laughing stock
And when he told a joke there was laughter in his ears
They took him to a shrink
To see what they would think
They didn’t know why he didn’t ever snicker or sneer
He was made to look at ink blots
He was poked and prodded
He had to answer riddles with a helmet on his head
They brought him in some clowns
From the whole world round
Not a laugh in the morning, not a laugh when off to bed
Scientists came by
And even artists too
And the preacher came by just to play his little role
His words were well rehearsed
He said the boy was cursed
Oh, this here boy was born without a soul
They sold him to the fair
Where he was given a tent
For a nickel the boy with no soul was there to see
He saw a lot of freaks
He met a lot of geeks
And he laughed at those who came to pay the fee
He travelled out West
He travelled to the East
And he laughed and laughed and laughed at all he saw
After time elapsed
He finally collapsed
He laughed so long he up and died from his last guffaw
In Hell he was poked and prodded
They tickled him all over
He met the very men who sent his daddy off to war
The jokes he once told
To the devil were sold
The girl he once kissed married her a total bore
His momma had a daughter
She took her to the zoo
And the flock never again drank from the preacher’s cup
The fair came back to town
Folks gathered all around
And the boy laughed so hard the whole earth swallowed them up


Read the poetry of Caleb Coy
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Poet E. Michael Desilets Serves Up A Slice Of Connie's Life

PictureE. Michael Desilets


​


    Snacking

It was cheap Madeira but Connie loved the smell, the
     moldy
fruit fragrance of her father’s pipe tobacco, and it went
     well
with the cornbread her daughter bought at Whole Foods.
 
She slips her hearing aid
into her apron pocket
and shuts her eyes.
 
She hears the local freight whistle past Mile Post 88,
the dyspeptic theatre organ at the St. George belch
“Over the Rainbow,” the Globe whack the front door,
the teacups smash against the refrigerator.
 
Today’s calls had left her a tad desperate:
a raspy handicapped woman named Jayne
hawking light bulbs.
 
The Arbitron man
reminding her about the radio diary.  She still hadn’t
​     spent
those six sinfully crisp dollar bills he’d sent, but she only
put on NPR to help her sleep.
 
That recorded message
about Propositions 29 and 30.  She did look forward
to voting at Our Mother of Good Counsel Parish Hall,
though sometimes she turned in her ballot unmarked
if she couldn’t find her specs.  She always lit a couple
of votives in the church afterwards.
 
Her sister, goddam her
to everlasting Hell.  It was Nick’s night
to stop by.  She was hoping he’d bring
a case of that $2 champagne.
It would be
something.


Read the poetry of E. Michael Desilets
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​

Poet Richard Levine: Mystery and Misery

PictureRichard Levine

Reaching to the Horizon  ☊

  I hated you Legless Billy,
  and the way your prairie family
  and fiancée looked at me,
 
that flat stillness of the plains
reaching to the horizon from
every window and across
the dining room table, when
I described how you saved my life.
 
We all hated you, Billy,
sitting there in your gleaming
wheelchair and spotted bib.
 
It's only now, in midnight
calls from mid-life that I hear
in your voice how we are
bound to that screaming red flare
lighting all we will never again own.

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​

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet
​Shirani Rajapakse

PictureShirani Rajapakse

  Dream of the Housemaid

   Returning home on a stretcher, a
   plane ride to the desert many
 
months ago gone so wrong. You got much
more than you bargained for with a salary paid
 
in nails. Hard as hell. Forced inside, damming your
veins, piercing bones, rotting, festering. Tears
 
all dried up you came back
in pain. Dreams shattered, leaving them
 
scattered in the sands for scavengers to feast.
The oil merchant’s wife made sure of it. There was
 
something she didn’t like, or maybe he didn’t like
being rejected. Wasn’t used to it. They
 
held you down on a chair in the kitchen
writhing and howling in pain, nails
 
hammered in, one at a time. Your hands,
your feet as you cried out in vain.
 
Stuffed some down your throat until you were too full
of it all. The X-rays back home confirmed,
 
but oh the shame. No one believed. No one.
Your story was good, made the news
 
that night and the next day too. Everyone had
something to say. But no one believed. The press
 
was amused; you made it all up, someone
sniggered. Couldn’t handle the pressure, the agency
 
that sent you grumbled and ignored your plea.
Said you did it for a piece of fame; time in the spotlight.
 
But what a show. You got nothing, nothing. Alone on
a hospital bed swathed in bandages stuffed with
 
medication they stare and talk in whispers as you
recollect the journey to the Middle East, oasis
 
of the poor. You went to make money,
like everyone else in the village, build a house,
 
educate your three children waiting at home
with their grandmother. Your husband
 
a drunkard, he couldn’t keep a job, so you
took over. They had to live. But all you got were
 
nails beaten in like Jesus that day. Yet where’s
your cross? Where are your followers?
 
Money gone, dignity in shreds you yearn to return
as unfulfilled dreams refuse to leave tugging
 
at your heart calling, calling
come finish what you started.

 ​
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​



​


Picture

Lynn White: A Tale Of Height and Light

Picture
Lynn White

​The Lighthouse

I was a little crazy
to buy the old lighthouse.
I knew it at the time.
But I wanted to be somewhere,
somewhere where I could shine,
shine lamps out into the vastness,
shine like a beaming beacon.
And it was so high.
It matched my mood and then some.
Higher than high.
Higher than high.
There was no housewarming.
No one came.
There was no one to come.
So, only I could relish the exposure.
Only I could walk round the top
of the tower and look over the edge
into the dark deep depths.
Only I could see the swimmer,
a mermaid, surely? waving.
Or was she beckoning
as she approached the mooring.
Only I could come spiraling down.
Come down from the heights
to open the door,
to run down the steps
to the mooring.
And then the lamps went out.


Read the poetry of Lynn White
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​

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Author
​and Poet Laurie Kolp
 

PictureLaurie Kolp

   To fall in love again

    figure my spine
     with sylphlike fingers

                         lace each vertebrae
                         side by side

                         weave in and out
                         with quiet breaths

                         until my sudden gasp
                         leads you deep within

                         and bends me back

                         to you.

Why Aging is Geographical


My cuticles are not
what they used to be.
They crust and crack
my thinning skin
into clay.
When I look
at my hands and feet
I see veins popping up
like Blue Ridge Mountains.
This raised topography
tops off my need
for leveled aging.
I’m stuck
at the surface
of decay
while you
zip-line across the sky
away from me.


Read the poetry of Laurie Kolp
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​

Picture
Karla Linn Merrifield

Poet Karla Linn Merrifield Draws On Leonard Cohen For Inspiration

Aubade in Nine Amphibrachs

I ponder dawn, listening, repeating

his koans in amphibrach whispers:
 
            I’m writing
            the troubles--
 
            Your brother
            may be your killer--
 
            into the music
            into the music.
 
In December’s
blue raincoat he arrives.
 
            If my woman
            is sleeping and dreaming,
 
            she is much older
            and nobody’s fool.
 
Humming Aurora’s love song
with the poet, the old monk remembers to chant:
 
            I miss you,
            forgive you your enrapture
 
            glad you took the trouble
            to say your morning prayers in my name.
 
            Sincerely,
            L. Cohen

[
with lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” 1971]

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​

Poet Wayne F. Burke: Fall In Vermont,
​And A Very Long Novel

PictureWayne F. Burke
  North

   drying leaves like
   clenched fists
   holding onto October trees;
   I am coming to the end of
Celine's NORTH
his tragic-clown-chronicle
of post-collabo days when
he, his wife Lilli, his friend
and fellow fascist Le Vig,
and Bebert the cat, fascist
too, fled France and lived
as "Franzosen" in Prussia,
protected by remaining Nazis,
ones not dying in Berlin, 
1944...quite a trip...the good
Doctor Destouches...the 
racist Celine...his apocalyptic
style...the three dots...three
Franzosen...they've kept me
company...800 pages!..me,
alone in Vermont...I'm not
complaining! Not at all...
just a fact...like the leaves...
dying, clinging to the trees
with my fingertips.


[Note: North is an 800 page novel by
Louis-Ferdinand Céline]


Read the poetry of Wayne F. Burke
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​

Picture
Amy Soricelli

We Warmly Welcome Poet Amy Soricelli To VerseWrights

The Bronx/1963

The Bronx is cement.
Loud, lost art-deco lobby/hidden staircase;
overhead planes flying too low down the back of your neck.
The Bronx is a window painted shut.
Stained streets littered-up, bags on the side of the road.
The Bronx is an air-raid drill in the middle of class.
You stand single-file up against the wall
so the bomb, 
when it comes, 
could roll its way down beside you.
You stand clear like a shadow. 
The Bronx is curled under your desk
covering your head from 
theBlacks/theRussians/theCubans/thePuertoRicans.
The Bronx is a music teacher in a dark suit
who hands out pennies at Christmas.
He doesn't date your mother but he should.
The President died in my Bronx classroom
filling up the afternoon
to The Pledge of Allegiance. 
Early dismissal flowing down the rest of the year
like a black cloud. 
The Bronx is a long block with tree names –
bicycles filled with dead air. 
German shepherd dogs – 
their chains rolled tight against bad boy fists.
It is crossed streets- Johnny- pumps high against passing cars
​It is the deep drip of summer. 
The Bronx is needles in apples on Halloween.
Sulky neighbors with sharp fang teeth;
dead pigeons in rainbow-oil puddles
around and around lost, like in a drain.
It is gum stuck to the end of your shoes.
The Bronx is the end of your shoes.


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For Poet Mikels Skele, Summer Is An Indefinite Passage

PictureMikels Skele

​  Summer, then

   Surfing the faint, tireless breeze
   Music from a distant park
                     The last half-hearted song
                     Of the sparrow
                     Fireflies like paper lanterns
                     In a far-away twilight

Long before conditioned air
In the hot, moist summer
Even clocks stopped running,
Too slow to mark
The interminable hours,
The memories, the sweat

Whole eternities passed
In the too long days
Of the too short summers

So entirely gone

There is no stylus so precise
As to record the passage of a soul
From one moment to the next


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​

All New Haiku From Poet
​Arvinder Kaur

PictureArvinder Kaur


​     from Selected Haiku

    farm stream -
    the moon slips across
                         the barbed wire

                              ❊

      rustle of leaves -
      the music of all that lives
      and dies

                              ❊

                     train window -
                     moon from home comes along
                     all the way

                              ❊

      broken bridge - a langur's leap from fog to fog


​
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​

Peter V. Dugan And An Unconventional Valediction

PicturePeter V. Dugan
       
​  Hey, Bobby

  Hey Bobby, you’re overdressed.
  Suit, tie, jacket, and a carnation; 
                        I almost didn’t recognize you
                        without your leather.
 
Do you feel out of place?
 
I see you’re packed and ready to go; 
leather jacket, ratty cut-off, and your cap, 
all folded neatly on the side.
Beer, Jack Daniel’s and cigarettes
right next to you, pictures of your wife,
your kids and your bike, 
all the things you liked, loved and lived for
crammed inside a box.
 
Are you going to miss them?
 
Hey, Bobby, it’s a going away party.
The guys are giving you a toast,
wishing you a safe ride . . .
while, the girls sit crying with your family.
They miss you already; but you remain silent.
I thought you liked parties.
 
How does it feel to be the guest of honor?

Well I have to say good-bye now; 
I wish you could stay longer.
It won’t be the same without you; 
but you chose to live hard and die fast.
I’ll miss you Bobby B.
Do you think there are bikes wherever you’re going?


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Picture
Michael Lee Johnson

Meet One Of Poet Michael Lee
Johnson's Characters

Possum Slim  ☊

105 years old today
Possum Slim finally
gets his GED,
drinks gin,
talks with the dead.
“Strange kind of folks
come around here,
strange ghosts,”
he says, “come
creeping pretty regular.
Just 2 ghosts,
the only women I ever loved,
the only women I ever shot dead.”
Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Michael Lee Johnson

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​

Poet Angele Ellis Returns With Her
Latest Poem

PictureAngele Ellis
 
  Maske Freiheit

   space between skin and surface
    bandage that warms like flesh
                      eyes framed or hooded 
                      mouth a hacked Vendetta grin

strips of newsprint lathered
with flour and water
each layer dried completely
before adding the next
when you are finished 
you can drill it just like wood

he said
I see how you use 
writing
to talk about yourself
without talking about yourself

pages fan the podium
drafts sleet the floor

the grain we go against
the figure in the carpet retreating
the yellow wallpaper read
in a certain slant of light

the headlines of the world


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Poet Doc Burkard And What The News Really Is

PictureDoc Burkard
 
  The Songwriter

   on his deathbed,
   documentary crew turning
each breath to celluloid.
They hand him a harmonica,
play us one of the hits,
just one last time, the producer speaks,
his voice full of gravel and greed.
It's barely recognizable
and one of the boom mics isn't working.

It don't matter anyways;
you couldn't pay me to watch,
Even though, I know we all stop at car crashes
in these United States of America
and this is what we have become.

Is it a poet's job to recite the news?
Tonight at Nine, This is a history of us.

Read the poetry of Doc Burkard
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