Month: August 2015

A Frog in the Bucket Thickens the Milk. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

by

 

What rhymes with lust
must, dust rhyme with lust
a wiggle, giggle, wriggle, a curl
stiletto – pain – signal
sign on for normalcy
on the street guys, dolls
 
Day after estrus, more than a scramble
a shambles, at home.
 
After the ball is over
our glorious swan song, seventy years on
is this the end of beginning or the beginning of the end
nightmares are here to help us
what’s the difference between, side show
or, slide show
it’s pointless to argue the point
 
Back to time
there’s no curtains for time
the show must go on.
 
After the ball is over, seventy years on
twenty fifteen
there’s no more winners
homage either to birds or worms
jump through the hoop into gorilla sky
bow down before the great strife
 
Sizzling bite gulp fizzy sprinkle scrumptious
peckish hot tasty pour butty lovely kitchens
frothy bubbly chunky plenty thick bangers
juicy dunk slurp – duh, Wilko
 
Coming soon – Day of the Jelly Baby
after the dust of war
has settled, change must
still we see the day
from star dust to eyes from ancient clay
the smell of lust, spawned in the dust.
 
A frog in the bucket thickens the milk.
 
 
About Author:
Robin Ouzman Hislop Editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal. Poetry Life and Times. Previously edited by Sara Russell who is now Editor of the sister paper li Poetry Lifetimes. In 2013 he joined with Dave Jackson Editor/Admin as Co Editor at Artvilla.com.
 
He now Edits both Facebook Pages PoetryLifeTimes and Artvilla.com as extensions of the Blog Sites at Artvilla.com.
 
He’s been previously published in a variety of international magazines, where recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina,The Poetic Bond Volumes The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes a recently published Anthology of Sonnets: Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. Submittals may be sent to robin@artvilla.com or editor@artvilla.com Please refer to our submittal guidelines at either of the sites.

 
 
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Hypatia and the Ruined Serapeum. A Poem by Ian Irvine Hobson

by 
Excerpt from:
Awake in the Chamber of Darkness
(The Egyptian Sequence)

(Inspired by Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora)

Broken statues, torn scrolls,
shattered pottery, piles of ash,
and smoke (gently rising)
in the early morning quiet.

‘The mob have roasted knowledge, 
          silenced the Muses, stamped everything
          with God-infested words!’
mutters Theon.
          ‘And where now, oh father’ she whispers,
          ‘to speak the remnants of our world?’

Hypatia, too bright in the city
for the one God sun of Christ,
watches the skies lighten over Alexandria
          (unreal stillness).
Her Wanderers – Jupiter, Venus and the others -
          smashed or shorn of power,
this dawn, this new day for the writing

Is it here, in the clarity of her grief,
that she begins to see them 
          as if for the first time?
Not ‘circles’ but ‘curves’,
          not Ptolemy but Aristarchus. 

Soon enough the zealots will object
          to her and her knowledge, 
will attempt to erase this philosopher ‘witch’
from history, from discourse, from the dreams
          of troubled men.

They succeed for a time -
they do not succeed -
for the heavens are precise
          and stomach no faulty permutations.

My ‘curving’ planets, my
          celestial musicians,
my elliptoid wanderers
          (future astronomers will discover)
are welded 
          (of course she knows it thus!)
each to each
          in the slow 
orbits 
          of the possible.

 
About the Author
 
Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, fiction writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals – Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (10 editions 2005-2014). He coordinates the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo Kangan Institute (Bendigo & Melbourne, Australia) and has taught in the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine
 
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Windows, Doors, And Walls . An Ekphrastic Poem by Howard Richard Debs

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h.r.debs.windows Photo by H.R. Debs
 
Here looking out the window, drawing back the drapery
to see through the pane, depending on the day,
squinting to view the dazzling light of a new morning
or seeing rain pouring down on the street below.
Sometimes it starts with rain, the day I think about
staring out the window, will I find myself today?
I can stay at the window or go to the door.
 
The door is closed until I open it and walk
out onto the sidewalk, bright with sunlight or
 
wet beneath my feet from the early
morning rain. I stand and scan
all that surrounds
me as I seize the day,
searching for a sign within the
compass of my shadow
on the pavement very far
from a place I can call home.
 
The walls I encounter walking on my way,
they are all around to make me stop
and wonder where next to go while still
seeking a telling sign, the walls
change my course, shift my direction.
 
Along the way doors open to new worlds within
should I enter upon such invitations—
 
and other doors lead to nowhere
and if I dare turn
 
toward a route that
takes me to what
appears ahead
I will find myself
in a place beyond
where I am here now
and given time, I will
meander amid the
windows, doors, and walls h.r.debs Photo by H.R. Debs
there in a place
I can call home.
 
 
hr debs portrail
 
 
Howard Richard Debs received a University of Colorado Poetry Prize at age 19. After spending the past fifty years in the field of communications, with recognitions including a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America, he has recently resumed his literary pursuits, and his latest work appears or is forthcoming in Calliope, Big River Poetry Review, Poetica Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Misfitmagazine, Star 82 Review, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Verse-Virtual, Dialogual, Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, Remarkable Doorways Literary Magazine, Indiana Voice Journal, Blue Bonnet Review, China Grove, Yellow Chair Review, and On Being, among others.
 
His background in photography goes back many years, both creative and technical, and his photography will be found in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. Born and bred in Chicago, he now lives in sunny South Florida with his wife of 50 years Sheila, where they spend considerable time spoiling their four grandchildren. Author listing Poets & Writers Directory https://www.pw.org/content/howard_debs
Author website: http://communicatorsandcommunications.com/muse-ings/
 
 
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Oh, and what do angels do on such occasions? A Poem by Gabriella Garofalo

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Oh, and what do angels do on such occasions?
I’d better not know, thank you very much –
A writer told her ‘trust always pays back’,
A doctor told her ‘better an evil mother
than no mother at all’,
A hotshot told her ‘light always smites eclipses’ –
Boy oh boy, don’t they talk
A bunch of crap sometimes? –
Well, dreams come first and she saw
The prophet being shown
An almond branch –
Yes, God, yes, nice job,
Only it was doomed to wilt, right?
You ask me why, you ask me when?
I dunno, maybe at the midnight hour,
And no, I won’t be there,
She can make it without me,
she knows her stuff, doesn’t she,
That sower of lost harvests –
Do they call lovers ‘friends’ nowadays?
Well, light did –
Whenever I lay deep sixed, of course.

2015-07-10-0002

Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Blue branches”.

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Sanctuary. A Poem by Miriam C Jacobs

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Each of them has his own room, here, his own cardboard pallet,
 
drawer. A mirror above a row of pipes reflects disorder’s emptiness.
 
Ideal Music, the shop next door, has electricity.
 
Sometimes late at night they can get inside, turn on lights, play records.
 
Once in a fit of drunken nostalgia for childhood,
 
for bottomless night and stars, Reggie busted out
 
a window over the enclosed alley between stores,
 
while Goose, weeping in Spanish for the cuts on Reggie’s hands,
 
leaned against the rain-soaked wall eaten with black mold,
 
a man in love. He pisses into empty beer bottles, sets
 
his good boots in a corner, still brushes his teeth. For him, their abandoned beauty
 
shop is World Navel, Jerusalem, their threesome a Sartre play – book
 
she’s never read – and the rooms are drawers. His mother lay him down
 
to sleep in a drawer, he’d told her once.
 
When she was a little girl she imagined a found life in household drawers,
 
their low ceilings, landscapes within them shut. She conquers her fear,
 
now, by opening, emptying. Reggie and Goose make cushions
 
from the contents: shreds of wallpaper, palm- size flecks of lead paint, leaking color bottles,
 
Styrofoam crusted with dried Chinese take-out, clothes or a lone shoe
 
discovered in the streets and carried back. On rainy nights they rip up these beds
 
for toilet paper, or shit out that broken window. Reggie’s vomit
 
stinks and then dries like a jack-less
 
telephone. These are toxins of particularity, poisons within the self.
 
Beyond these walls, it’s a nightmare staying alive, toxins of survival.
 
Goose is next door playing records. Music leaches through the walls:
 
Partridge Family’s Greatest Hits, Jerusalem of Gold.
 
 
 
Jacobs recent head
 
 
MIRIAM C. JACOBS is a alumnus of the University of Chicago and teaches college writing, literature and humanities. Jacobs is the editor of Eyedrum Periodically, the art/literature journal of Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, The East Coast Literary Review, Record Magazine, The Camel Saloon, Bluestem: the Art and Literary Journal of Eastern Illinois University, The King’s English, and Oklahoma Today, among other publications. Her chapbook of poetry, The Naked Prince, was published by Fort!/Da? Books in September 2013.
 
 
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Interstate Moments. A Poem by David Chorlton

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IMG_20150730_171639500

 
#1
A roadrunner has climbed the concrete slope
from roadside weeds to where it meets
the bridge’s horizontal, and he stops
with his beak directed
at the angle in which a patch of sky
illuminates his profile.
 
#2
The yellow and the white lines meet
straight ahead at perspective’s
farthest point, where blue mountains divide
Earth from the storms
about to break in Heaven.
 
#3
Along the rails that run beside
the interstate, an eastbound freight train
leaves daylight behind it
as clouds churn into the sky
with red lightning inside them.
 
#4
A nighthawk’s wing
above the traffic flow
slides between the day
and a night of endless
taillights.
 
 
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David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. Arizona’s landscapes and wildlife have become increasingly important to him and a significant part of his poetry. His Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press appeared in 2014. The shadow side of Vienna provides the core of The Taste of Fog, a work of fiction published by Rain Mountain Press. And the poem follows
http://www.davidchorlton.mysite.com/
 
 
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MACHINUS ROFOCALE. A Poem by Joseph Armstead

by

 
 
Tinny, brittle music wafts like cigar smoke

    from out the open doors to a dingy bar,

where the leather-coated Machine Men speak

    through plastic masks in rough whispers.

 
Today, the lemon sun above the amber fog of industrial haze will not shine —
 
And my Dream of You asphyxiates, ink-smudged and soiled, sinking into a bed of clouds…
 
 
i. The Exquisite Concatenation of Elastic Chaos
 
The victims march single file from the set
of a televised Game Show
where Time and Mind are manipulated
by strange mathematics and arcane
sorcery
as the Automaton Master of Ceremonies explains
to these departing, blank-eyed contestants,
the Rules of Engagement for their commercial gain.
 
It’s all white noise
filtered
through a sound mixing board
by a synesthesiac
madman.
 
There is a sense of Order beneath
the overly-regimented
facile architecture
presented with unearned fanfare
to a comatose viewing audience.
 
Seeing this past the sutures
that have sewn its eyes shut,
Chaos is weary, but nonetheless amused.
 
The march of the disenfranchised penguins goes the wrong way.
 
Something bad is happening.
 
 
ii. A Spectrum of Contradictions in Deepest Black
 
No one is supposed to talk about it.
No one is supposed to know about it.
The secret is not kept hidden.
 
Maybe it is best that way.
Maybe transparency is best.
Maybe we need to know
that which we do not
want to know,
even though we have
subconsciously
suspected it
all along.
 
The Truth does not set you free.
 
It invades you like a virus,
invading, unwelcome and infectious,
and our expectations
darken and curl at the edges,
like smouldering paper as it burns.
It battles with our natural defenses,
revealing our immuno-deficiencies,
spotlighting weaknesses
in the Body Politic.
 
Chaos is weary, but nonetheless amused.
 
Something bad is happening.
 
 
iii. The Collapse of Zazen Structure During Fractured Fission
 
It is a quiet night in Shadow-Town.
The echoes of Industrial Authority
have begun to fade like the hush
of a far distant surf upon
the debris-strewn shore.
 
You are in my vision,
a focus of painful ecstasy,
the rupturing of heavy nuclei
under the relentless, streaming
assault
of acrimonious proto-atomic
catalysts,
a rain of beauty and tragedy and fury,
 
… a dream …
 
accompanied by the sound of murmured prayers
spoken in an empty, unhallowed hall of mirrors
 
A consecrated Mass
that dares not be spoken
too loud, lest the potency
of its message
be lost
past the dark, open maw
and down the deep gullet,
of a bird of carrion prey.
 
I can see the blossoming
delicacy
of your growing decay,
an alien viral corruption.
Seeing this past the sutures
that have sewn its eyes shut,
Truth does not reveal itself.
 
Maybe it is best that way.
 
The leather-coated Machine Men
are pallbearers
of my Dream Of You.
 
Chaos is amused, but nonetheless bitter.
 
Something bad is happening.
 
 
 
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BIO

Joseph Armstead is a suspense-thriller and horror author living in the United States’ San Francisco Bay Area. Author of a dozen short stories and ten novels, his poetry has been published in a wide range of online journals, webzines and print magazines. A mathematician, Futurist and computer technologist, Mr. Armstead’s poetry often defies easy description, but frequently includes neo-classical imagery, surrealist viewpoints and post-modern themes.
 
 
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Cogitation of a Soul…A Poem by Anca Mihaela

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Your Look concaves my retina…
Truth… dripped from my Eye!…
Each moment is moisturized
by fractured fractals.
 
Engaged in your disengagement
in this residual stillness,
my past Self… still spins
inside an alabaster universe…
 
Choice?… just an illusion
in these phosphene empyrean dreams,
the place… where your Name
shines in parallaxes!…
 
I know… Now… Your words
cannot satisfy my thoughts.
I am left here…
reflecting thousand times
your feathered images…
 
Logarithmic mirrors watch me
how I climb my own
bibliography of a Wish!…
 
 
Anca Mihaela Bruma - Image
 
Anka Mihaela Cogitation of a Soul
 
Anca Mihaela Bruma – Short Bio
 
My name is Anca Mihaela Bruma, I am Romanian living in Dubai/UAE. My love for poetry started when I was just 9 years old, when I registered myself to some creative poetry writing group. It was a turning point for me as I started to discover the mysteries of the written word and its impact on the readers. Since that early age, I have always viewed writing poetry as the perfect medium which is able to depict profound unfathomable complexities of someone’s life or life itself, to render into words that which is unsayable, that ineffable, which can be truly deeper than the language itself. Through my writings, as well years of readings, I always looked to seek something beyond that which was apparent to others! I was fascinated to see how different aspects of truth were transfigured by different emotions, how experiences were poetized. I pursued seeing beauty expressed in all forms of art, not just poetry; creating a “thirst” within me to explore more and more for the knowledge of the mystery beneath and beyond it, as a symbol of something greater and higher with its own power to immortalize the expressions over the years.
 
Facebook: Anca-Mihaela
 
website as artist: http://marmoset16.wix.com/ancabruma
 
 
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