Monthly Archives: October 2016

Uneasy

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Thomas Zimmerman

But who wants easy? Nothing to rub up
against. No rub, as Hamlet says. The dweeb.
Me? I prefer that haunted husband/witch,
Macbeth. That cracked vaudevillian, Lear. The pines
out back, now lightning-lit like Baudelaire’s lines,
still whisper grim absurdities, the ditch
along a path I know, which ends at Zeeb
and Jackson here, but fellow fools say, “Yup,
we know that crossroads well. It’s First and Main,
it’s Freud and Beckett. Being. Nothingness.”
I should have studied math, imagined fact
that comforts like a mother’s pulse, the stain
of milk that seeps warm through her blouse. Unless
that mother is Death, her ovaries intact.

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.

Visit his website!

Advertisement

With Paper and Brush

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Thomas Zimmerman

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train
to Cry” is on the stereo, my wife
is gone, a stout’s half-drunk in front of me,
the dogs are faking sleep (just waiting for
a treat), and I am channeling the dead.
That is, the images won’t come. I’m not
in love with television. Internet’s
a bore. A jazzman said to play until
you’re safe. My father flickers just beyond
the lamplight, whispers faint and hoarse: To put
a penny on the track? Forget the flag
and flowers on his grave? To lend out books
and discs but not expect them back? They’re gifts.
And louder now: To paint. Not wait too long.

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.

Visit his website!

Apostrophe to Rene

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Rodney Richards

You wrote in Meditations

you are a human of substance

So am I Rene, and I am so

And I think, Rene,

and even if I didn’t

I may be human form also

containing more

than just a wandering thought

My components like

yours, body including all twelve systems

and Soul system as you pointed out

interwoven like Persian tapestry

yet unique

First the Rational Soul

or Mind and its powers:

Imagination

Thought

Comprehension

Memory and

Common Faculty

that unites and unties all our others

The five most cited or ten or twenty-one

senses of the body like

Sight, and Hearing and Touch and Smell

and the like

inseparably linked in living beings

Each intertwined with the Lodestones

of our Hearts,

the Seats of Power

and Energy unlimited

for the whole to partake

The Heart feeling,

touching,

thinking,

smelling

et al

The commonest faculty

of life itself

It’s motive power

But It is not a power

to be objectified

and sung about or sung to

or eulogized

No, No, much, much more

Its beat beats all the rest

A City of thrumming in and of Thyself

The god within

perhaps with capital G

Alive and thriving

inter-spliced

interwoven

intertwined

as streets and avenues

laid upon a barescape

And He has said

“I hath chosen from the whole world

the Cities of men’s hearts”

Rodney Richards lives with his wife in a rancher in the “very center of the Great State of New Jersey”.

He loves writing, and is the author of the memoir Episodes (ABLiA Media), available from Amazon.

America’s Pastime

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Thomas Zimmerman

I drank a half-gallon of beer
at the Cubs game today. Home
team won with three in the ninth.
Ninety degrees, great seats,
high and in the shade, along
the third-base line. Booty-
song on the radio there: I’m all
about that bass. Fair enough.
Is the anima erupting, as my friend
William insists? Is global warming
our fault? Is suffering ever
earned? Imponderables. Don’t get
too damned wise. The beer was strong,
the shade was cool, and I had three
people I love sitting with me.
I watched my niece’s purse and diet
coke while she looked for the women’s room.

Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012.

Visit his website!

Girtywocky

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Rodney Richards

‘A parody of namesake L. Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”.’

Twas thrilling and the slimy toads
Did fly and flutter twixt reddened moons
All flimsy t’were the borey troves
As house rats drank swirling hot frappes

“Compare Its slithery mocks my girl!
The teeth that tear, the nails that scratch!
Compare the hard-shelled snake, and run,
The furious Candy Catcher’s rump!”

Took young Hobbit’s Sting in hand;
Aforetime’s awesome Smaug he fought
Cloaked in gold doubloons and jewels
Under molderin’ domes of castle rocks

And deep in scoffish laughs it schemes
Comes ill-famed Girt with hearts of stone
Crawls sniffing in the ash-filled groves
And chortles fearness as it grows.

Not once, but thrice our hero douses Its fires
As flames of apathy surround her Shire
And girl of cockiness thrusts and parries
Til monstrous face of love’s hurts tires

Sting of titanium “Zings!” and “Zangs!”
Through Girt’s thickset spiteful grooves
Til died of daughter’s poems desirous
And withered unto death, not bemoaned

Her father asks of kilk and kin
“Didst thou see my girl of elfish skin?
Enter my home and breaths now thin
O fab’jous Moons and Suns at highest!

“For Unnamed hurts and killers dead
Slain by love’s kind darts of lead
Thrust thrice ensconced throughout
Its gruesome dual-pronged head”

Rodney Richards lives with his wife in a rancher in the “very center of the Great State of New Jersey”.

He loves writing, and is the author of the memoir Episodes (ABLiA Media), available from Amazon.

Strawberry Daiquiris and a Hot Summer Night

Posted on by under Short Stories and Creative Non-fiction

A short story by Ed Higgins

A hot summer night walks into a bar and orders a drink. A frozen strawberry daiquiri with lots of crushed ice, she says. She brings with her the slightly fragrant scent of roses from outside, and a dusky, green hint of the ripening cornfield across the highway. A large, neglected rosebush outside in a half-whiskey barrel sits to the left of the green, padded vinyl door. Its leaves brittle, desiccated petals falling from wilted blooms, stark thorns you could make a halo for Jesus with. Sitting at the bar with her strawberry daiquiri, the hot summer night’s hair is limp and disheveled from the evening’s muggy air. The bartender knows her kind. She’s hot but likely poor material for a pick-up. She may be good for a couple of drinks. Another strawberry daiquiri? he asks, picking up the twenty she has left on the bar. His interest is piqued and the place isn’t particularly busy since the air conditioning broke down a couple of days ago. He’s played hell trying to get a service technician out here to fix the damn thing with all the heat-wave breakdowns apparently going around. The hot summer night is plain vanilla but not unattractive. She has a slight bead of sweat along her upper lip and the dark hair at her temples is clearly damp. Warm night out there, he says, trying a subtle approach. Sorry about the air conditioning, been out for a couple of days now. But she doesn’t care about the lost air conditioning. The hot summer night knows that even in the midst of a long, stultifying summer, rain earlier in the day leaving its mugginess, the corn harvest beginning soon—we are all nonetheless ineluctably approaching death’s long winter. She smiles, letting the bartender continue hitting on her. The hot summer night is serious enough without ever yielding to it. She orders a second strawberry daiquiri.

Edward Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including Monkeybicycle, Tattoo Highway, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Blue Print Review, among others. Higgins and his wife live on a small farm in Yamhill, Oregon, raising a menagerie of animals including an alpaca named Machu-Picchu.

Higgins is the assistant fiction editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction, an Ireland-based flash journal.

Funny Bone

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Kenneth P. Gurney

Everything has a funny bone.
Sorry my last joke missed yours.

You should laugh at my tie,
or, better, laugh at my lack of a tie.

I give you permission to laugh at me when I am employed.
And to laugh all the harder when I am employed and wearing a tie.

I will laugh at you when you wear your turquoise jewelry
and black shirt, with its black buttons and high collar.

Not because turquoise or your black shirt is funny,
but because you never wear your turquoise with any other color.

We should laugh at the forbidden together.
Even if you think the word ta-Boo should elicit a scream.

I remember laughing as a white cop punched Ed in the face.
My laugh jerked the cop’s head toward me,

so he drop Ed to the ground and walk over to my face
and splatter shouted, “You find something funny in this?”

Which I did not, but the cop left Ed alone and the scene
shortly after I wiped my face dry on my shirt tails.

Unintentionally, I banged my funny bone on a Hurricane Ridge rock
which must have been its exposed funny bone

because I felt the low rumble through the mountain,
so similar, but deeper, than my elbow-rubbing, laughing moan.

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his beloved Dianne. In his spare time he practices being an elk on the flanks of the Sandia Mountains. In Dianne’s spare time, he does whatever chores she places on the chores list for him to accomplish. His latest collection of poems is Stump Speech. (CreateSpace IPP, 2015.) Peruse his website.

Any Chill Wind

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Kenneth P. Gurney

You could say we were unsure
of the ground beneath our feet.

An unfamiliar god snores
six feet under the green surface.

In the frozen reaches of a sorrow trail
snow angels are invisible under the midday sun.

The old world scrapes at the icy ground
to awaken the sleeping god

to ask it politely to crush our foreign ideas
and to scrap our wood and stone buildings.

The old world wraps itself in a pale blanket
and trudges the survival path

to locate a warm place where their mysteries
are as plain as dandelions among short green grasses.

We envelop all doubts with strings of sand
rubbed from our waking eyes.

We discover a lake with a reputation for renewal
of those spirits whose feet touch the bottom

which is the place where the buried god’s navel
rises and lowers with each subterranean breath.

It is not a deep lake—it collects all the water
that breaks from mothers just before giving birth.

The old world dances and speaks in tongues
and the coyote howls at our moon brightened skin.

We check among our repossessions
and find histories withheld from conquered peoples

and the old world wraps itself in them
as if they were a new, brightly colored blanket

that invalidates any chill wind.

Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico with his beloved Dianne. In his spare time he practices being an elk on the flanks of the Sandia Mountains. In Dianne’s spare time, he does whatever chores she places on the chores list for him to accomplish. His latest collection of poems is Stump Speech. (CreateSpace IPP, 2015.) Peruse his website.

Public and Private Moments

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by William Doreski

Am I allowed to taste the rain?
On Commonwealth the English elms
heave up last year’s birds’ nests
and drop twigs on snooping dogs.
My first architectural walk
in years leads past the statue
of Sam Morison, who greets me
with his placid sailor’s hello,
enunciated in clear blue tones
that evoke the sea horizon
complete with a distant squall.

As I trundle past he waves one
heavy bronze arm and gestures
at the Public Garden where squirrels
frisk among tourists for snacks.
Despite the light rain a mob
surrounds the equestrian
George Washington riding
toward the edge of eternity
where his dental work will flourish
in the finest shades of ivory.

Am I allowed to taste the rain
that you planned on keeping
for yourself? I got out early,
drove seventy miles before dawn,
leaving you to tend the garden
by yourself. Mr. Morison
knew I was coming. Tea with him
years ago on Brimmer Street lingers
with a smell of old brown leather.

Traffic snores down Arlington.
I walk to the corner and cross,
and passing through the iron gate
and circling Washington’s pedestal
and rambling along the duck pond
I sneak a couple of tastes of rain
and let it nourish and inspire me
with evolutionary notions
of which only you would approve.

William Doreski’s work has appeared in various online and print journals and in several collections, most recently The Suburbs of Atlantis. (AA Press, 2013.)

An Agitation of Silence

Posted on by under Poetry

A poem by Richard King Perkins II

It hasn’t rained for weeks.
The color arcs have faded

and the factories have gone quiet.

Wednesday night,
black rag shadows drag the ground

moth-eaten, licentious.

The chartreuse blades of day have dulled
into yellow needles and frostweed.

The void of eastern Texas.

No sound carries off the misplaced cobblestone.
A young woman stares out the window

of a mint-green home.

I’m walking across a yard
of fallen sheaves and inflorescence.

An agitation of silence is all she’ll ever know.

Richard King Perkins II is a state-sponsored advocate for residents in long-term care facilities. He lives in Crystal Lake, Illinois, United States with his wife, Vickie, and daughter, Sage.