Tag: Poetry

M.P. Powers: “A Room Forever”

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A Room Forever     

Lying in an almost palpable silence,
the only thing he can hear is the blood
pulsing softly round his ears and the thin
noise that roused him from his sleep,

a noise like a lever-shaped door handle
turning, or an overturned automobile
on a pre-dawn highway, its wheels
spinning like silk. He rolls over on his side,

faces the empty wall. He can almost hear
the furniture breathing. He can almost feel
ghosts passing through him. He’s been
awake in this room for years, for years,

his mind charged with electricity,
something inside him reaching out of him
every night, anxious to become a sleeping lion,
a tree on a mountainside, a falling leaf.

He lay there listening as the coral-pink

light of dawn bleeds through
the underside of the curtains.

 

 

About the Author: M.P. Powers lives with one foot in Berlin, Germany, and the other in South Florida, where he rents out construction equipment. He is the editor of 11 Mag Berlin, and has been published recently in Red Fez, Chiron Review, Slipstream, Neuro Logical and others. His blog can be found here: https://mppowers.wordpress.com/ 

 

Image Credit: William H. Mumler “Unidentified man with a long beard seated with three “spirits” (1862) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Jason Baldinger: “Kings Bridge Armory May 6 1919”

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Kings Bridge Armory May 6 1919

we were so bloody tired
we could barely conjure emotion
the soldiers would pass
silver trays, ashen faces
we were machines
spooning food
little talk

visions of the dead
reflect in their eyes
light of their souls
barely strobe
perhaps this is all
perhaps this is all that’s left

he wasn’t gone
little more light
if only a little
the look on his face
maybe a crumbled smile

a red rose in the button
of his pocket. I, shocked
alive for a moment
some color in drab time
very possible I blush
suddenly exposed
suddenly acutely aware
of feeling once again
as if I forgot
we were human
for a second

this still life

my eyes drawn to color
his voice recognizes, gaunt
they were showered
in roses yesterday
everyone in the village
wanted to kiss
the heroes of the 77th
who were they to argue

I didn’t see his hands
until now, the rose
materialized there
slight of hand
magic of an actual smile
eyes shaking
he passed it to me

 

About the Author: Jason Baldinger is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and  former Writer in Residence at Osage Arts Community. He has multiple books available including the chapbook Blind Into Leaving (Analog Submission Press) as well as the forthcoming Afterlife is a Hangover (Stubborn Mule Press) & A Threadbare Universe (Kung Fu Treachery). His work has been published widely in print journals and online. You can listen to him read his work on Bandcamp and on lps by the bands Theremonster and The Gotobeds.

 

 

More Poetry by Jason Baldinger:

This Ghostly Ambience

It was a Golden Time

Beauty is a Rare Thing

Paul Jones: “Something Wonderful”

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Something Wonderful

“Let me mention something wonderful,”
she said, “Bats eat darkness.”

“I see them shadowing the streetlight,”
I said, “diving to feed.
Like hungry fish in a small light pool,
they leap out of darkness
as if breaking the water’s surface,
as if, for a moment,
that alien world, that other, was their home.
Bats feed as darkness breaks.”

“No, bats break into darkness to feed.
Light warns them ‘you can’t stay!’
Think fireflies at the end of the day.
Their lights shine bats away.”

“But aren’t those lights a begging to breed?
Not just a sign of bitter taste?”

“As with passion, they say ‘Come here’
and ‘Keep apart’ for now.”

“Right now, bats break the darkness to feed.
Fireflies flash to breed.”

“Each rules their own kingdom—darkness
makes a boundary to break.
Some dive, some flash to mark the edge.
To transgress is to bless
the penumbra, the lie of difference.
Don’t we rise from earth?
Isn’t our time soaring in this life
a flash, a hope for love?
We see the lures, but know we must
be feed by darkness and
are born in a taste the bitter light,
The sweet then bitter light.”

 

 

About the Author: Paul Jones has published poetry in many journals including Poetry, 2 River View, Red Fez, River Heron Review as well as in cookbooks, in travel anthologies, in a collection about passion (What Matters?), in a collection about love (…and love…), and in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 – Present (from Scribner). Recently, he was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Web Awards. His chapbook is What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common.

A manuscript of his poems crashed on the moon’s surface April 11, 2019 as part of Arch Mission’s Lunar Library delivered by SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.

Image Credit: Illustration from Natural history of the animal kingdom for the use of young people Brighton :E. & J.B. Young and Co.,1889. Public domain image courtesy of The Biodiversity Heritage Library

Brian Rihlmann: “And I Call Myself A Poet”

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And I Call Myself A Poet

if you have a lot of online friends,
eventually you reach a point
where every day, it seems
someone’s waiting on results—
a biopsy or blood test
a mammogram
a nasal swab
while someone else
receives them
and yet another dies
mothers, fathers
sometimes teenagers
sometimes younger

and those left behind
show us all their red, raw,
angry, sad amputation scars
as we scramble for the right words
but there’s nothing there—
no right words
nothing but cliches
teary-eyed emoticons
and pixilated hearts

I stare at this carnage
a confused and helpless child
my fingertips hover
above the pale glow
of this flat earth screen
like a rescue helicopter
without a rope

 

 

About the Author: Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada. He writes free verse poetry, and has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag and others. His latest poetry collection, “Night At My Throat” (2020) was published by Pony One Dog Press.

 

More By Brian Rihlmann:

The Whole Point of the Game

Unknown Soldiers

Certainty

 

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Crescent City Driftwood” (2020)

Troy Schoultz: “The Art of Manliness”

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The Art of Manliness

I never plunged a sledgehammer into drywall, never
Tore apart a motor with scarred, blackened hands.
I never slit a slain buck from throat to balls, the steaming guts
Spilling onto November snowfall, antlers mounted on a cabin wall.
What I learned about manhood at an early age was rage,
Voices that startled like early morning thunder from the garage,
The basement work area. Dad and grandpa unleashing
Their inherited frustration. The wrong socket, a dropped screwdriver,
The flashlight’s beam aimed at the wrong side of the engine compartment.
You cry too easy, be a man, toughen up, be more like your cousin…
Rage poisoned us when you taught me. Maybe
That’s why I pounded down my first beer at eleven, refused
To vomit up the swallowed chewing tobacco, tried working
The night shift in suicide factories. I needed to understand what “tough” was.

Alcohol stopped working for me, so I took a walk away.
Two last rites in three years. Dad, grandfather,
Ancestral ghosts one and all,
Have you ever come this close to death before fifty?
Am I tough enough for you now? Am I worthy of throwing tools
In fits of anger in a way that only makes sense to you?
God forgive me
And bless the sons I never had.

 

 

About the Author: Troy Schoultz’s poems, stories, and reviews have appeared in Seattle Review, Rattle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Word Riot, Fish Drum, The Great American Poetry Show, Steel Toe Review, Midwestern Gothic and many others since 1997.  He’s the author of two chapbooks and two full length collections: A Field of Bonfires Sings (Wolf Angel Press, 1999) and Good Friday (Tamafyr Mountain Poetry 2005), Biographies of Runaway Dogs (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press 2016), and No More Quiet Entrances (Luchador Press 2020).

 

Image Credit: John Vachon “Abandoned casket factory, Dubuque, Iowa” (1940) The Library of Congress

Scott Silsbe: “I Wish I Hadn’t”

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I Wish I Hadn’t

I hear it in the quieter moments of the night.
When all of the sirens have been put to bed
and there aren’t any smoke detectors chirping
out my window and the world’s still in its quiet
self-isolation. I hear it when the silent faces in
the darkness approach or else stare at me from
a distance, though even in the dark and without
my glasses on, I can still tell they are staring.
I can still tell that they are out there. Though
maybe they’re not there. Maybe I’m hearing
things again. But I believe that it’s something.
Something I can’t ignore. A noise. A voice.
And I think that it’s telling me to move on.

 

 

About the Author: Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Pittsburgh. His poems have been collected in three books—Unattended Fire, The River Underneath the City, and Muskrat Friday Dinner. He is also an assistant editor at Low Ghost Press.

 

More By Scott Silsbe:

Double Downriver

Reading Rich Gegick’s Greasy Handshakes at Neighbors Tavern in Jeannette, Pennsylvania

 

Image Credit: Odilon Redon “Apparition” Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

M.J. Arcangelini: “An Elephant in Every Room”

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An Elephant in Every Room

Different elephants in every room,
occasionally trumpeting to each other with
full throated roars, solicitous quiet plaints.
Swatting metaphoric flies with their tails.
Trunks like alien beings searching for water,
for straw; tusks snagging on the furniture.

I squeeze past them when moving from
room to room, making myself
smaller to avoid direct contact.
I gather their droppings for the
compost pile with a coal shovel,
wondering who keeps feeding them.

There is no one here with whom
to avoid talking about them.
So I creep around by myself,
taking any excuse to go outside.
Hoping that someday Tarzan will yodel
from a nearby tree and lead them all away.

 

 

About the Author: M.J. (Michael Joseph) Arcangelini was born 1952 in western Pennsylvania. He has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in a lot of little magazines, online journals, & over a dozen anthologies.  He is the author of five collections, the most recent of which is “A Quiet Ghost,” Luchador Press 2020. Arcangelini has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He can be reached at poetbear@sonic.net

 

More by M.J. Arcangelini:

A Few Random Thoughts

Ten Movies

 

Image Credit: John Margolies “Papa Joe’s Fireworks pink elephant, Route 17, Hardeeville, South Carolina” (2004) The Library of Congress

John Grey: “An April Wet”

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An April Wet

April makes a cold call.
The sun is not involved.
Drizzle on the birds’ backs
and flowers opening unwillingly.
The roof repeats something it heard
spoken back in February.
Trees spread their soppy boughs
with nothing to show for it.
The woman at the window
watches grass grow just enough
to make it worth the maggots while.
Her husband appreciates the nothingness
for what it is,
an incessant, slow breakup of the clouds,
a dimming of the view from anywhere.
On a flight of stairs,
the children fight over the next raindrop.
The baby leans out of its hunger
to bawl enough to wake the dead.
It works.
April is gray and rotting.

 

 

 

About the Author: John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Soundings East, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.

 

More By John Grey:

Maud

Downsizing

Move On

 

Image Credit: Claude Monet “Landscape at Giverny” (1887) Public Domain

Sue Blaustein: The Fifty-Year Anniversaries are Almost Over

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1968, ‘69
2018, ‘19:
The Fifty-Year Anniversaries are Almost Over

 

On the back porch
at sunrise,
I hold my toaster oven
over the rail. I
pop the bottom
tray, brush crumbs
onto the grass
then stay
to listen to crickets.
To their uninterrupted
    chirping,
then to chirp-imitating
beeps, as the kneeling floor
of the #15 bus
is lowered to the curb
on Holton Street.

    My tiny portion –
        my due –
    of the brunt of your war
    has been arriving.
    Ramifications traveling
    in steady waves,
    rolling in for fifty years
    and more
    come faster now.

It’s only fit
that I kneel like the bus
to meet them.

 

About the Author: Sue Blaustein is the author of “In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector”. Her publication credits and bio can be found at www.sueblaustein.com. Sue retired from the Milwaukee Health Department in 2016, and is an active volunteer. She blogs for ExFabula (“Connecting Milwaukee Through Real Stories”), serves as an interviewer/writer for the “My Life My Story” program at the Zablocki VA Medical Center, and chases insects at the Milwaukee Urban Ecology Center.

 

More by Sue Blaustein:

A Song for Harvest Spiders

A Song for Noise

The Old Ways

 

Image Credit: Chase Dimock “Sunset at Grover Beach” (2020)

Tim Peeler: “Scrap Dog 27”

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Scrap Dog 27

When a nearly 79 year old man
Dies with a .26 blood alcohol level,
The angels of the old country
Swoop down to carry him high
Above the fir trees and the hills
Over the mini-mansions
And the condo riddled ski slopes
Past the eagle nests
And caves full of wintering bears.
Having sparred with indifferent
Doctors, callous insurance providers,
Having shed abandonment
And heartlessness,
Having opted for vodka
To wrestle misdiagnosis,
Looking one more time
Across the cabin deck
Into the darkness
Where the angels
Dangled their legs
From the roof of the sky.

 

About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.

 

More By Tim Peeler:

Modernist Hay Making

Paramnesia 2

Ballers 2, the Star’s Monologue 3

 

Image Credit: Carleton Watkins “Solar Eclipse” (1889) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.