(for Juana ‘La Loca’ of Aragon and Castile)
It was gossip taught me to love him first.
My ladies, how they whispered and they laughed:
behind pale, slender fingers, their tongues would tattle
to press that unlooked for suit inflaming it to burn
forge-bright against my dull and listless days.
By smoking lamps I would study or stitch
until, at last, most sweetly cast adrift,
I would laze on my back as the ocean lulled
and I wondered at the wheeling stars.
Lacking oars and a sextant, I surrendered my ark
to the currents and the pull of the tide
only to wake in the morning, landed high and dry,
with the tracks of salt tears on my cheeks,
a rosary upon my lips and an absence
like a pain between my thighs.
Abigail Elizabeth Ottley Wyatt writes poetry and short fiction from her home in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Formerly a teacher of English, she left the teaching profession in order to concentrate on her own writing and, since 2008, she has been fortunate enough to have been published in more than a hundred magazines, journals and anthologies all over the world. She is the author of ‘Old Soldiers, Old Bones and Other Stories’ and ‘Moths in a Jar’. Until recently she was co-editor of the online poetry journal Poetry 24. http://abiwyatt.wix.com/abigail-wyatt
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A.K.A. A Poem by Bekah Steimel
You’re embedded in my thoughts
like a needle in a junkie
shooting up with the memory
of last time
craving the consumption
of next time
fixated on the fix
otherwise known as your smile
otherwise known as my new favorite drug
Bekah Steimel is a poet aspiring to be a better poet. She lives in St. Louis and can be found online at bekahsteimel.com and followed @BekahSteimel.
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The Table By The Window. A Poem by Gary McKenzie
She had a baked potato
With roasted veg
And humus.
The knife and fork remained on the table
She held a tissue instead
Both her face and hands were tight
With emotion and anger.
He had the same thing to eat
All his face gave away was the fact he would rather be anywhere else
But there.
Christmas music filled the room; the rain battered the world outside.
Her plate was still full
As his got smaller
Bite by bite.
‘It is just so very hard this time of year’
Through potato and carrot
He told her
That everything would be okay
Then a drink of coke
Before asking why she was crying.
‘I’m emotional today, that’s all’
The steam had stopped rising on from her plate
His was now clean.
‘I want to feel special, like how I thought we were going to be in the beginning’
He scrunched up the tissue
After wiping what was left of his dinner
From his mouth,
He said
It is, it will be.
Dean Martin told everyone
That the fire was slowly dying.
Gary McKenzie is a 36 year old living and Studying English at Stirling University in Scotland.
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Changing Wind. A Poem by Steve Klepetar
Across this continent of snow I hear
my mother’s voice, faint and distant, scratching
against my door:
-
“cold” she murmurs, “chilly
for New York, and the wind, oh the wind…”
changing wind and swirling snow, eidolon
rising from the dark
in Saint Cloud air still as glass and
cold, ten below in useless morning sun, knife
blade breaths and bony
fingers of oak, we are strung
across trees, hanging in branches, festive
and fat as hens in red coats and blue, our fog
breath tinsel thin around faces blurry with tears
oh mother, where have you left your throat,
that shofar of flesh? Whose name do you sing
when stars linger, arrowheads of ice in winter sky?
Steve Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Deep Water, Expound, The Muse: India, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for \Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2015). Recent collections include Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press, 2013) and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein (Kind of a Hurricane Press).
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Lost my Love at the Louvre. A Poem by Mark Antony Rossi
Locked in this sea of oil paint and perfume
I danced with a girl in front of Mona Lisa
We laughed and made the guard smile
And agreed to dine at a street cafe
But that kiss
As much as it teased our hard bodies
And tempted our mortal souls
Became a fragment vanished
In the pieces scattered that fateful night
When amoral monsters made
A restaurant into a cemetery.
Mark Antony Rossi’s poetry, criticism, fiction and photography have appeared in The Antigonish Review, Another Chicago Review, Bareback Magazine, Black Heart Review, Collages & Bricolages, Death Throes, Ethical Spectacle, Gravel, Flash Fiction, Japanophile, On The Rusk, Purple Patch, Scrivener Creative Review, Sentiment Literary Journal, The Sacrificial ,Wild Quarterly and Yellow Chair Review.
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Disregard. A Poem by Gary Beck.
Dreams of falling
from perilous heights
snap us awake
just before impact.
Dreams of pursuit
by malevolent hordes,
snap us awake
just before capture.
Unconscious activity
denies nature’s mandate
for refreshing rest,
designed to prepare us
for demanding tomorrows.
The Remission of Order’ explores the search for stability in this confusing life, in which so many of us want security, but fail in our efforts to achieve a satisfactory existence, my next collection that I’ll seek to publish.
Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and as an art dealer when he couldn’t make a living in theater. He has 11 published chapbooks. His poetry collections include: Days of Destruction (Skive Press), Expectations (Rogue Scholars Press). Dawn in Cities, Assault on Nature, Songs of a Clerk, Civilized Ways, Displays (Winter Goose Publishing). Perceptions, Fault Lines and Tremors will be published by Winter Goose Publishing. Conditioned Response (Nazar Look). Blossoms of Decay will be published by Nazar Look. Resonance will be published by Dreaming Big Press. His novels include: Extreme Change (Cogwheel Press) Acts of Defiance (Artema Press). Flawed Connections (Black Rose Writing). His short story collection, A Glimpse of Youth (Sweatshoppe Publications). His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off Broadway. His poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He currently lives in New York City.
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Roof Tops. A Poem by Ananya S Guha
Roof tops are mad
rattling, whispering
groaning. They love noise
that is piquant.
They love silences of time.
Their lunacy is immeasurable
and then they chortle.
No, they are not humorous
their bland movements
are to be taken seriously.
And when rains pound heavily (on them)
they raise voices in chorus.
Sometimes birds, rabbits, dogs and monkeys climb
on to them in parasitical delight
when night’s heaviness weighs on silences.
Roof tops then articulate movements
of steady sound. Rat- a- tat. Sounds
that impinge dreams, hallucinations.
Ghosts walk on them.
As a child roof tops hurtled into sleep.
Still harangue.
Ananya S Guha has been born and brought up in Shillong, India and works in India’s National Open University, the Indira Gandhi National Open University. His poems in English have been published world wide. He also writes for newspapers and magazines/ web zines on matters ranging from society and politics to education. He holds a doctoral degree on the novels of William Golding. He edits the poetry column of The Thumb Print Magazine, and has published seven collections of poetry.
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Lost. A Poem by Akpa Arinzechukwu
Over there on the map,
Is it not Lagos?
Finely a city baptised in wonders
But my wife says
All that glitters can take away your life.
When I left for the city,
My wife knew I would not come back
Home again as her man;
She knew I would become
A strange man in her life soon,
And surely,
Strange a man I became
And our lives changed,
Not for good
And not for bad either.
I went to the city
And my life was taken away:
In the city,
I lost my fatherhood, husbandhood and lovehood
And I became nothinghood
Because I was busy going after wind.
Over there on the map,
Is it not Lagos?
Finely a city baptised in wonders
But my wife says
All that glitters can take away your life.
Akpa Arinzechukwu is a Nigerian born poet, environmental activist, blogger and tutor. His works have appeared or will feature on Fundza, Visual Verse, Eastlit, Poetry Pacific and elsewhere. He is currently working on his collection of poetry.
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