Poem

The Magpie Poems by Christian Ward

by

Magpie Season 

The lawn is a chequerboard
this morning – all black and white.
No hint of a bluejay’s marquetry
or the elegant tailoring of a wood 
pigeon nibbling at the elderberries.

The grass sings nursery rhymes,
sunlight filtering through the trees
offers to tell my fortune. The cats
are skulking behind closed curtains,
fearful of these travellers. 

Come tomorrow, they will have moved
on. Their left behind treasures will glint
from the soil beds: a silver ear, 
the curled up shell of a tin can, an emerald 
bead blessing the land with its light.

The Hidden 

Our love was never 
meant to be found.

Our love was supposed 
to be like the first rosehips
of the summer: fat and explosive,
staining the air with unburnt sugar.

Private detectives of owls
were not intended 
to be on our trail.

The moon peering 
with its magnifying glass
shouldn’t have been on the case.

The foxes rummaging 
for the past skeletons
of our failed attempts 
should have been distracted
from the scent.

The rain never had our best 
intentions in mind, 
letting us run through 
while calling the authorities.

We are jailed within 
each other while the ivy
runs free and brilliant,
sparking weeds that hiss
and weep at all hours of the day.

Late Summer

Your name 
drips from the last 
of the rosehips.

It crackles
like leftover fireworks 
on the lawn,

welcomes autumn 
through the blackberries 
offering their wares,

sends messages 
through the blackbirds 
saying I am here, this is my song.

Listen.

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Dust, Free the Verse, Loch Raven Review, Cider Press Review and elsewhere. He won the first 2024 London Independent Story Prize for poetry and the 2024 Maria Edgeworth Festival Poetry Competition.

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Supposition. Poem by Debashish Haar

by 
What if the world began
not with the fiery birth
of stars, nor the silent shift
of oceans on stony shores,
but with the whisper of wings,
the soft breath of a creature
on the verge of being?

What if creation itself
was less a burst of brilliance,
more a slow unfurling
of the hidden and the unseen,
like the opening of a hand
or the gentle turn of a face
towards the light?

Would we then see the world
not as a place of boundaries,
but as a field of whispers,
each breath, each sigh,
a part of the unending story,
the quiet song of what it means
to be alive?

 
 

 
Debashish Haar is a machine learning scientist, who has been published in literary magazines several
times across the globe, including Poetry Life & Times, where he was interviewed twice.
He is currently contending with a severe writer’s block spanning a decade, when he has hardly
produced any publishable content. He is also losing emotional connection with his own work
gradually, and spends more time to edit/tighten his old poems than creating any new content.
 

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Fuse Box 3 Poems from Gerry Fabian

by 
Fuse Box

“Is it
almost
beyond
the moment?”
You ask.

Simple as
your voice
and my eyes
or vice-versa.
I flame to get
through to you.

The words are
electricity to
propel motion.
But there is worry
about the condition
of circuit breakers
It started simple
but now the charge
is more immediate.

Erratic Heat

Several kisses
ago,
I knew
that
this fire
would 
never
really
get beyond
kindling;
still
I 
hold
out
for
the slightest
breeze.

Accepting Derivations

I offer help.
She smiles and shakes her head.
White vinegar and water 
in the broken handle yellow bucket
with some ancient dried-up sponge.
The perspiration causes
tiny strands of silver hair
to stick to her face.
She wipes the faucet and then knobs
then turns her attention to the soap ring.
The concept of a shower
has not reached this farmstead.
Wiping a wisp of hair away,
she turns to the outside of the tub
starting with the farthest claw feet.
She has devised a way to contort
her old limbs to reach impossible places.
I watch in awe and embarrassment.
This is how it is done.  Period.




Bio

R. Gerry Fabian is a published poet from Doylestown, PA.
He has published five books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, 
Wildflower Women as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound.

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Battle for Music. A Poem by Linda Imbler

by 
Battle for Music


Reaching out to those from the past,

old frostbitten treble held fast,

in the unsettling absence of the old ruling class.

Blatant slights composing discourteous tone,

the tempo of time stolen 

and loose ends kept unkempt,

defining an obscure drone as nearly all we can hear.


Reverse ourselves,

soothe the interruption,

fill the secret box with choruses reprised,

replace removed harmonic constraints,

tunefulness no longer forbidden.


Preaching of the hymns  

and cardinal virtues renewed.

Abiding affection of clefs and ledger lines

meant to transform all as consonance,

putting forward what’s most dear to one’s heart,

and seat it with a staff,

enthroned in obvious audio triumph

Linda Imbler is an internationally published poet, an avid reader, classical guitar player, and a practitioner of both Yoga and Tai Chi. In, addition, she helps her husband, a Luthier, build acoustic guitars. She lives in Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A. where she enjoys her 200-gallon saltwater reef tank wherein resides her 24 year old yellow tang. Linda’s poetry collections include eight published paperbacks: Big Questions, Little Sleep First Edition, Big Questions, Little Sleep Second Edition; Lost and Found; Red Is The Sunrise; Bus Lights; Travel Sight; Spica’s Frequency; Doubt and Truth; and A Mad Dance. Soma Publishing has published her four e-book collections, The Sea’s Secret Song; Pairings, a hybrid of short fiction and poetry; That Fifth Element; and Per Quindecim. Examples of Linda’s poetry and a listing of publications can be found at lindaspoetryblog.blogspot.com. Linda has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and six Best Of The Nets.

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Woodmanland. 3 Poems by Peter Mladinic

by

Battle

Rejection’s not the end of the world.
Were there no rejection—
from an editor, from a bank,
from a would be paramour—
there’d be no acceptance, no embrace
in the world of letters,
in life, in love. The sting of hate
quite real. Then there’s indifference—
a feeling of numb like when
you get a shot in your hand
and your hand is numb—
only it’s all in your mind.
The end of the world is like when the man
went out for a pizza and came home
and found his wife dead
on the living room floor; or John
who snapped his briefcase open
and shut before going into class,
and I know Susan remembers that snap
and learned as I did he died in his sleep.
The lump in the breast, the X ray’s
dark spot are signs. The night
our town’s chief of police was out
in the middle of nowhere, not wearing
a seatbelt, spelled the end.
My father at the end battled cancer.
When healthy he bowled strikes,
won games for his team.
Why we always hear of someone’s
battling cancer miffs me.
It’s not like Daniel fighting the lion
in the Bible. Maybe it is.

Tricky

I like you unconditionally
My like for you is a red rose bouquet
an armful of flowers
I’d like to place in your arms

I’d like to pet your horse Tricky
My like for you is a white cloud
in a blue sky
a pond on which ducks glide

unconditional
like that song Night and Day
coming through headphones
I want to know your eyelashes

Have you ever been to the sweetheart
festival in Clovis?
Have you ever said I’m Angela
while shaking hands with a man
with a name tag on his shirt?

You love Tricky, Tricky loves you
Other than that I assume nothing
Do you bowl, drink Diet Coke?
Have you a pen pal in Indiana?

I’m full of questions
I wish they were long-stemmed white
roses

I’d like to know something
about your eyelashes
and if you talk on an iPhone or an android
Your blood-type, social security number and

Where do you see yourself five years
from now don’t concern me
What kind of perfume you wear
I’m more interested in stuff like that

Woodmanland

I want to move to Woodmanland,
there very different from here.
For one, trees. Also cold.
No ice fisher, my embrace the cold days
past, still I want to.
What would a place be like
in the middle of its name man?
Long winters, lots of trees, few people.
A hospital close by? Might not have to look
far to see a moose. I’ve never seen one.
A dirty look from a person’s one thing,
but a moose? Racks
like dishes on roofs for cable, only oval,
shatter ribs in the wild, steeped in snow.

I’d rather see a moose from a bus window,
or the moose sits next to me on the bus.
I name him Roger. We pull into Houlton,
boringly like where I am. Only cleaner.
Roger says, What you don’t see is the high
crime rate.
—But it’s so clean.
He says, Looks can deceive.
Why did you want to leave where you were?
—I liked the name, but now we’re in Houlton.
Have you ever been to Woodmanland?
Yes, he says. Now I’m with you, only,
I’m not real, and you’ve gone nowhere.
Oh, but I have, I think, not saying so,
not wanting to contradict a moose.
 

 
Peter Mladinic has published three books of poems: Lost in Lea, Dressed for Winter, and Falling Awake in Lovington, all with the Lea County Museum Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico. His fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.

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When the Art No Longer Remains. 3 Poems by Ralph Monday

by 
Rome’s Mythic Hills

Among  Rome's mythic hills 
this is what I told you:
The Moon is an old and silver rimmed lover,
blood burned pewter at night prowling
the Colosseum's sands.
Why are Americans so savage?
Look to the wolf nature engendered by Rome,
bird Auguries spun into DNA across a
time never ended. The world did not
become dark. The wolf retired to her lair
and slept while the West went into
supernatural amnesia.
Reason and fancy are strange bedfellows.
Shall you undergo Inquisition? Perhaps
it's been following all of us.
Come now, take my hand. Let us 
stroll through these familiar ruins, Faustina.
Soon the mother of the world will be dead.

Bring Us Soft Graces

If we only could achieve a kind
of grace,
to love and feast as the ancients
did, like gods turning in bed on
Mt. Olympus.

I think we both have long been
(futilely) looking for Plato’s sphere
but we can’t even find half an orange
to piece back together, let alone imagine a
future spoken out in syncopated syllables.
If we could we would incarnate both spirit
and flesh in moments undarkened by
the past pains that others have brought.

But one can never escape those textured
times, for what we were always walks
with us, like shadows cast on a yellowed
photograph.

The body we once had is not the
flesh we now carry, for the cells
replace every seven years. The
mind that we once had has been
tempered with interactions of others
where we listened to their foolish
thoughts.

Abstracted form does hold meaning,
and that is what we have become: a
type of fragmented cubism rendered up
in 1920s Paris.

If only we could embrace soft
graces. If only we could make the
pieces fit a new puzzle. 

Ah, wouldn’t it be pretty to think
so.

When the Art No Longer Remains

Seventeen turned to thirty-five
deep in the troughs of his own tides
he will presently forget the nights and days 
with her, the shared moons from month to
month.

The tales that they created, moments of
ice and fire, of victories on the playing
fields, defeats that were ignored.

Stories can only carry so far, before they
settle into mystery and myth, into buried
layer after layer, where they change,
through the years and move us back to

truck headlights knifing the dark on the
interstate, to going down to the still
waters and drinking, to wash off the
deep sins that can never be winter white.

They weren’t really battles, no
dark ages crusades, merely seasonal
skirmishes that neither knew the meaning
of.

I have seen many autumns with Bradford leaves
blazed and burnt reds, oranges, and yellows,
the ripened pear and apple, leaves burnt
with frost, foliage like some randomly
thrown design, an Arabian carpet thick
with memory, desire.

Is there a Mind producing a Design?
This is a mystery that cannot be
plumbed, only hinted at by art, and
we never had a design, only a random
blueprint made up as we went along.

 
 

 
 
Ralph Monday is Professor of English at RSCC in Harriman, TN. Hundreds of poems published. Books: Al l American Girl and Other Poems, 2014. Empty Houses and American Renditions, 2015. Narcissus the Sorcerer, 2015. Bergman’s Island & Other Poems, 2021, The Book of Appalachia 2023, and a humanities text, 2018. Member Lincoln Memorial University Literary Hall of Fame. Twitter @RalphMonday Poets&Writers https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/ralph_monday

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Transfigured Face. Bilingual Poems from Spanish by Ángel Huerga

by 
(i.)

don’t want		not to go		don’t want
can’t		not be		no
dancing to this blood divides
sequences dreams cloud by cloud
enclosed behind fingers		last night
crossed the pavement on the corner
perplexed to see you again on the screen
as if someone had been silhouetted against the sky
or a bulldozer had piled up all the light of the slowness as it passed through

(i.)

no quiero 			no ir 		no quiero
no puedo 		no estar 	no
bailar en esta sangre divide 
secuencia el sueño nube a nube
enrejado entre dedos			anoche
crucé la acera	justo en la esquina
perplejo al re-mirarte en la pantalla
como si hubiera ido surgiendo alguien en lo alto
o una excavadora hubiera apilado toda la luz de lo lento al pasar 
(ii.)

where you touch is not mine		i just want
you to be an other		willing to explore something new
perhaps what used to be constant 	may explode into shared fire 		
the helipad where we used to get dressed
i just want		the fuel of breath	breath		breath
to flare up

(ii.)

donde tocas no es mío		pretendo	
que seas otro		para algo nuevo que explorar
quizá explosione en incendio común	   lo que solía ser constante
la helisuperficie donde solíamos vestirnos
solo pretendo 		que sea brote
el combustible de respirar	respirar	respirar 
(iii.)

he kept on talking about movies
amenabar		juliette binoche		cary grant
alice in wonderland
[alice’s adventures under ground]
sit down		tie my shoes
he pretended to fly like an airplane 	    with his arms outstretched 
north by northwest
get on your knees 		why are you crying?
did I tell you not to go? 

[I have all your pictures and emails.
And don’t tell me you have no father, ‘cause I know he goes by Arturo and 
he’s a delivery man.
I have all the information needed for the danse macabre to start.
Will you please take off your t-shirt?]

(iii.)

hablaba de cine
amenabar		juliette binoche		cary grant
alicia en el país de las maravillas
[las aventuras de alicia bajo tierra]
siéntate			átame los cordones
imitaba el vuelo de un avión		con los brazos extendidos
con la muerte en los talones
ponte de rodillas			¿por qué lloras?
¿te he dicho yo que no puedes irte?	

[Tengo todas tus fotos y tus correos. 
Y no me digas que no tienes padre porque sé que se llama Arturo y que 
es repartidor de café. 
Tengo toda la información necesaria para que empiece la danse macabre. 
¿Puedes subirte la camiseta?] 
(iv.)
                                                       to the seasoned traveller
                                                       a destination is
                                                       at best
                                                       a rumour

the real issue is 
structure
how to locate the narrative line that allows for a beamline beneath the door
we’re talking about infinite degrees of freedom here
you can rotate it
but
it’ll remain in the same place
do we know the rules? who’s up or down? who’s at the steering wheel?
we can look for (all the) tracks in the carpet
the traces they left we left		a return covenant	       quizá
but
blah blah blah 		blah blah blah
line = broken line
we retrace our steps and nothing is familiar nothing
which crossbars will be forded		by our caesura?

(iv.)
                                                   para el viajero con experiencia
                                                   un destino es 
                                                   en el mejor de los casos
                                                   un mero rumor

en el fondo 
se trata de la estructura
de localizar la línea narrativa que deje la línea de luz bajo la puerta
hablamos con un grado de libertad infinito	aquí
puedes rotarlo una mil veces	
pero
sigue en el mismo sitio mismo
¿sabemos las reglas?	¿quién sube/baja? ¿quién sigue al volante?
podemos buscar (todas) las huellas en la alfombra
huellas que dejen dejemos		un pacto de vuelta		       maybe
pero
bla bla bla 		bla bla bla
línea = línea rota
re-trazamos los pasos	 y nada familiar nada
¿qué travesaños vadeará		nuestra cesura? 
(v.)

helicopter. beach. he was walking alone. sometimes we need just one reason to quit. 
an aim over which the skin can be spread. it was just a breeze. smell of newly purchased salt. 
as if uncovering waves. why create such a stir. walking. crime against public health. 
remote database access. they landed. they escorted him. from both sides. just in case. 
in view of the risk. in the line of duty. 

(v.)

helicóptero. playa. caminaba solo. a veces basta con una razón para huir. 
un objetivo en el que extender la piel. solo era brisa. olor a sal recién comprada. como destapar olas. 
por qué tanto revuelo. caminar. delito contra la salud pública. acceso remoto a todos sus datos. 
aterrizaron. le acompañaron. a ambos lados. por si acaso. por si el peligro. en cumplimiento del deber.  
(vi.)

transfigured face
head and floor separated by a trickle of blood
the gaze walled by an animal silence 

do you believe in life or death?
in life, definitely

both the fall and the body embalmed by the blasting
until the parquet floor pattern is reached

what is it that remains after the last anchoring?

face down he expects something to move
the start of a sob, or a void, or a question
or a delay as abrupt as an ending

(vi.)

se desvive la cara 
un hilo de sangre separa cabeza y suelo
un silencio animal cubre de pared la mirada

¿crees en la vida o en la muerte?
en la vida, por supuesto

la detonación embalsama caída y cuerpo
hasta el patrón del parqué

¿qué permanece en el último anclaje?

bocabajo espera algún movimiento
un principio de llanto o de vacío o de pregunta
o una espera tan simple como un final

Editor’s Note: The latter two poems were performed at the online venue Transforming with Poetry
8/1/21. by the author. See Facebook page.

Ángel Huerga (León, 1971) has collaborated in literary magazines such as Nayagua (Fundación Centro de Poesía José Hierro, nº 33), Solaria, Siete de Siete.net, and Las hojas del foro, as well as in the book of essays Poetas asturianos para el siglo XXI (Ed. Trea, 2009). Currently, he attends the Camaleones en la Azotea poetry workshop in Madrid, Spain, where he is based, and has contributed to the release of the a4rismos cardboard book edition (Fundación Sindical Ateneo 1º de Mayo y Taller de Poesía Camaleones en la Azotea, 2022).

He is a lyricist for Asturian-based band Fantástico Mundo de Mierda (FMM) (https://fantasticomundodemierda.bandcamp.com/), which has released the following albums: New Software (Lloria Discos, 2005), La Furia del Fin (Algamar Producciones, 2013), and La Fortaleza (self-released, 2018).

Additionally, he has contributed to translating into English some sections of the following works: El genio austrohúngaro. Historia social e intelectual (1848-1938), by William M. Johnston (KRK Ediciones, 2009), and “In bello fortis”: la vida del teniente general irlandés Sir William Parker Carrol (1776-1842), by A. Laspra and B. O’Connell (Fundación Gustavo Bueno, 2009).

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I Used to Dream I’d Get So High. 3 Poems by James Croal Jackson

by 
Resort

purple palm 
trees on your tank 
top       pink fingernails
clutching milkshake
you sip sun
drenched    Polaroid 
aiming into brick 
wall     red curtain
in the breeze palm 
trees    sky
behind you
all of the future in front


Wrap Party at Arsenal Bowl

Last time we were in this spot,
we broke glasses. on the real-or-
fake (which is it?) marble table.

In my memory, the entire
room is burgundy. wine-
tinted, but I won't let

go, the conviction
of all that spilled
that night, my

mouth, my heart,
the sticky nature
of the surface

that we had
yet to place
our hands on.


I Used to Dream I’d Get So High

Last night, I dreamt I stood
on a tall stack of books, gathered
with others around a roof

like we were at a dinner party.
When I glanced down– finally,
from the top of my tenuous skyscraper,

I had to brace my shoe against
the house to keep myself
from falling back into reality,

but I did anyway, repeating
to the guests anxiety, 
anxiety, anxiety.

I used to dream I’d get so high,
anything was possible. I entered a tower,
beelined to the elevator, and pushed 

the button to the top. Sometimes 
the platform was already ascending. 
Sometimes the whole structure was. 

When the doors (if they existed) parted,
the view from the sky was so rich,
I had to be dreaming. Deep tree greens.

Eternal ocean blue. I returned
to this view often, but stopped
near the end of my twenties. I was 

itinerant at the time, my life 
still an open road ahead
of me. A million meanings yet

to interpret. Not yet bogged by
a steady job but not quite steadied,
living off the promises of strangers 

and the engine of my Ford Fiesta, 
emitting exhaust into the atmosphere,
accumulating.

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, and The Round. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)

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