WHAT THE METAL HOLDS TOO LONG IS CONSUMED BY FIRE #34
The small, repeatable
actions
that go wrong one time
always snatch
your throat
& divide it up
into a tributary
of failure
that dumps fire
into more fire, spreads
until the harbor
becomes a deep hell.
WHAT THE METAL HOLDS TOO LONG IS CONSUMED BY FIRE #35
Throw the remaining eggs
at the ashes of the silo. Eat
what cooks there. Enjoy
the plenty that is nothing
left to burn. If the house
goes up too, your fingers
will substitute for the silver
that can never be saved.
WHAT THE METAL HOLDS TOO LONG IS CONSUMED BY FIRE #36
Wear the crisping.
Wear it into town.
Pick a bar, rural
superhero, the silo
smoking on your chest
is worth a month
of free Wild Turkey.
Darren C. Demaree
“Darren is a dangerous dreamer, concocting love poems to his home state, and pastorals to his true love. But there’s always something more beneath the surface: sex and violence, villainy, mutilation, uneasy redemption and troubled ecstasy. These poems are pins pressed deep in the disfigured heart of America. They work a dark magic on the reader — they’re unsettling in necessary ways.” Christopher Michel
My poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear in numerous magazines/journals, including the South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Diagram, and the Colorado Review.
I am the author of “As We Refer To Our Bodies” (2013, 8th House), “Temporary Champions” (2014, Main Street Rag), “The Pony Governor” (2015, After the Pause Press), and “Not For Art Nor Prayer” (2015, 8th House). I am the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology.
I am currently living and writing in Columbus, Ohio with my wife and children.
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poet
SWIMMING TO THE MOON. A Poem by Steve De France
Tonight my fingers stiffly stumble across
my keyboard as my mind is repulsed,
as I am frightened of this task, as I am afraid
of the pain of thought., as my spirit fills & trembles
with the mystery in words.
Words that once flashed
in the eyes of the dying,
words that fade into a wet cough,
words brushing past the living
with silken lips as cold as marble,
their frightened gasps merge into darkness.
Ancient images tumble into my mind, I pass the
rough tips of my short fingers across my
damp forehead—very carefully as I
rehearse for my passage to the moon,
knowing all of us will have to make this swim
through skin and blood and memories.
Steve DeFrance is a widely published poet, playwright and essayist both in America and in Great Britain. His work has appeared in literary publications in America, England, Canada, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, India, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry in both 2002 and 2003. Recent publications include The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Mid-American Poetry Review, Ambit, Atlantic, Clean Sheets, Poetrybay, Yellow Mama and The Sun. In England he won a Reader’s Award in Orbis Magazine for his poem “Hawks.” In the United States he won the Josh Samuels’ Annual Poetry Competition (2003) for his poem: “The Man Who Loved Mermaids.” His play THE KILLER had it’s world premier at the GARAGE THEATRE in Long Beach, California (Sept-October 2006). He has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Chapman University for his writing. Most recently his poem “Gregor’s Wings” has been nominated for The Best of The Net by Poetic Diversity. for further poems by Steve De France see www.artvilla.com & www.motherbird.com
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Let me go. A Poem by Robin Wyatt Dunn
Let me go;
I am drawn.
Hereout the maids hinder my suffering;
The maids are buildings, and faces.
The asphalt itself. They seem to care for me;
to prevent my exit from the city’s gravity.
All my wishes are spent on the mornings here;
And even the nights tell me I am growing.
I want to shrink, under the sun,
Away from all this history.
Bio:
Robin Wyatt Dunn lives in Los Angeles.
—
“Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.”
— Frederick Douglass
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Out of Time. A Poem by Soodabeh Saeidnia
Years have passed and that slim cider plant
is now a strong tree
The mesmerizing highway’s been constructed
across the mysterious sea
Wars started and presumed
to be ended soon
My senses have deadened, whereas my body
promoted to defend
I wonder why in this time
I’m not feeling good, I’m not fine
Days have come and nights have gone
without a sign of evolution in our genes
Climate smirks at our greenhouse dreams
Through once in a while, monsoons of disease
cyclones of death
Men are digging the earth at a furious pace
but I’ve always known that there are planets, in which
rains are diamond, snows emerald
Along this ephemeral wasting of time
I’m not feeling good, I’m not fine
The spider web’s connected all the people
Some are trapped like butterflies,
Some are tearing off the net, though cannot fly away
I heard their wings have hurt
and needed a century of rest
Galaxies have been expanding through the Dark Energy
I know that the chance of dropping in a Black Hole
is less than becoming human for some men
We are now safe living in the Milky Way!
But I’m running out of time
I’m not good, I’m not fine
Biography:
Soodabeh Saeidnia lives in NYC but originally is Persian. She got her Pharm D and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy and has worked as a researcher, assistant and associate professor in the Kyoto University (Japan), TUMS (Iran) and University of Saskatchewan (Canada). She is interested in English literature and poetry, and has published a collection of her poems, Words for myself, in Farsi. Her poems have been published (or a head of publishing) in the American magazines and literary journals including Squawk Back, Sisyphus Quarterly, Paradox, TimBookTu, Bobbling of the Irrational, SPINE, American Writers Journal, Tuck Magazine, La Libertad, Tiny Poetry, Indiana Voice Journal, The Pen, 352 degrees and the Great Weather for Media. A number of her poems have been printed in the books Where the Mind Dwells and American Poet by Eber & Wein Publishing as well as Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze by Johnson Publications and Artistic. Her newest book, Street of the Ginkgo Trees is now available online on Amazon.
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Oslo. A Poem by Christie-Luke Jones
A solitary orange for breakfast; she delivers it with her unmistakably virginal smile,
kneels by my bed in thanks.
My body fizzes with polarising urges strong enough to kill us both.
Her apartment is beyond all comprehension; I feel undeserving of its pine-scented
air, the only discordant note in an otherwise harmonious melody.
She dresses in furs and heavy knits.
Her glowing skin and lithe body are untouched by the sweating guilt of midnight
trysts.
A nervous laugh rocks the vast drifts as our paths tentatively entwine across the
blank expanse of canvas.
Our eyes devour in absence of trembling lips.
The inevitability is palpable.
A joyful expression of unspoken lust; her hands scream to be touched.
I debate the drop, survey the cliff edge with a melting restraint.
Hurtling forth; I find myself discussing pickled herring in her father’s slippers.
God-fearing Christians, no doubt afraid of this wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Such a charming sheep, though. I bleat and graze with impeccable timing, convince
even myself.
Neither of us find sleep that night.
Impatience drives me to my annex room, whilst her mind is a dance of plush hearts
and handwritten love letters.
Another 12 hours to keep my mask from slipping.
Christie-Luke Jones is a poet, fiction writer and actor from Oxfordshire, England. Christie-Luke’s writing is strongly influenced by the Gallic blood that courses through his veins, as well as his interest in the more macabre aspects of the human condition. To see more of his work, visit www.christielukejones.com.
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We Darkened Few Laugh With Needle-Sharp Joy. A poem by Joseph Armstead
Laughing
with delight,
we thought we saw
a vision of blood
Turn to wine…
It’s a story told
in silence and pictures,
where everything we say
sounds like the spatter
of falling rain,
the sound of weariness
beating a drumbeat
on old concrete,
And its brittle beauty
makes the cracked
photographs
in our album of memories
dance
while we feel like children
at a tea party
with ghosts, pouring our hearts,
a piece at a time,
into empty porcelain cups.
Our timid smiles
are splintered
breaks
in the face
of a laughing clock.
“See how sharp,”
the timepiece said,
ticking.
A vision of light
at the tunnel’s end
fails to lead us
from the dark,
Saviors and Angel Wars,
Burning bushes
calling out numbers
at an endless game
of celestial Bingo,
And God’s reflection
looks out
from the fruit punch,
laughing from inside
the crystal serving bowl,
We can’t believe in such things,
because we feel like children
at a tea party
with ghosts, pouring our hearts,
a piece at a time,
into empty porcelain
demitasses.
“See how sharp,”
the timepiece said,
ticking.
And we darkened few
laugh with needle-sharp joy.
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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America: The Rave. A Poem by Adam Levon Brown
America
Of the store-bought
pizza dinners
Land of the flies
who scrape the paint
off of barnyard doors
with fingernails of lace
America
Camel cigarette
butts lining the crevices,
reminding us to
take pride in our
death
Land of the trees,
the oceans, and the
snow; covering us like
a whale song sung from
the bleachers of Wrigley field
in ’89
America
Scarface gangsterish
slang aimed at our throats
while revolutionaries paint
their stories on box trains
destined for the great beyond
Land of the stolen coffee bean
with all of its richness fueling
our neurotic skull contents in
the bleak December rains
America
Social injustice in the form
of Television, telling us a tale
as old as time; oppression
as an old, raggedy flag drenched
in the blood of sacrificial lambs
who never got to see the pasture
Land of the bombs, the guns,
and the assault rifle speeches
of sputtering, malignant hatred
America
Chain gang alamode
served with a slice
of adversity in the morning
Land of the Cinematic
bloodbath and violent
pornography with Twilight zone
on repeat
America
Crooked-nosed piety seekers
in rags on the streets who sleep
right outside the doors of the disillusioned youth
who partake in Molly until their ears
scream and their voices listen
Land of the freezing
Home of the Rave.
Adam Levon Brown
Adam Levon Brown is a poet and author residing in Eugene, Oregon. He has one published poetry book out, Musings of a Madman, which is a collection of poems made to enlighten and inspire the reader. Adam attributes his love of poetry to the many great poets he discovered in the school library during his formative years. He enjoys listening to political hip hop music and is a political activist himself.
—
Adam Levon Brown, Featured Writer Editor
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Crocuta crocuta. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop
The Spotted Hyena, aka the Laughing Hyena, both male and female genitals are strikingly similar.
Natural History, Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79) ab uno animali sepulchra erui inquisitione corporum.
It was more Jackals that were prone to digging bodies out of shallow graves and eating them. Robert Graves.White Goddess. The Jackals, sacred to Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, because they fed on corpse like flesh and had mysterious nocturnal habits.
The Hyena is of feline descent.
Hyenas were hermaphrodites, bearing both male and female organs, Aristotle declared in the Historia animalium: “this is untrue.”
Medieval bestiaries drew a moral lesson from the depravity of beasts, excluded from Noah’s ark in 1614, God had only saved the purely bred, Hyenas were reconstituted after the flood through the unnatural union of a dog and cat.
Female hyenas virtually indistinguishable from males, their clitoris enlarged and extended to form an organ of the same size, shape, and position as the male penis, can also be erected.
High foetal androgen levels responsible for male sexual facies in adult female Spotted Hyenas.
An unfair stereotype of Hyenas, in reality fascinating, intelligent even beautiful creatures.
Disney animators sketches for The Lion King, the trio of Hyenas in the Movie reinforce the common stereotype of Hyenas as cowardly, skulking low-lifes.
Ernest Hemingway, Fisi, the Hyena, hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain.
“Hyenas” Movie, an urban legend account of human encounters and attacks by a sub-culture of predatory Cryptohuman Hyenas. Shape-shifting human-like creatures prowl the rural back roads and forests of North America, thought to exist by Cryptozoologists.
Folklore and sightings persist even as mainstream science denies their existence.
Rudyard Kipling, The wise Hyenas come out at eve to take account of our dead,… they know the dead are safer meat than the weakest thing alive… and tug the corpse to light, the pitiful face is shown again, an instant ere they close in.
UK Teaching. Resources TES. Edwin Morgan enters the mind of the Hyena. English National 5 Poetry. He describes its patient, menacing personality: Morgan adopts the persona of a Hyena, I sing and am the slave of darkness, my place is to pick you clean and leave your bones to the wind.
A hunters’ poem from Lesotho, description shifts to the first person singular to give the Hyena’s own words, I growl being a poor body, I am small, I am hunched up like the elephant… Hyena of the Mmankala of Kone-land, a group whose symbol is the Hyena, when it says ngou! it devours even man.
A Yoruba hunting poem the Hyena is regarded as the ultimate scavenger, there being nothing it won’t eat: oral poetry from Africa, Hyena, who is there when the mourner buries the corpse eats fat and bone, scabbard and hide.
Spotted Hyena, strongest jaws in proportion to body size across the entire mammal kingdom, cunning hunting tactics, nocturnal nature, nefarious reputations, frontal cortex of their brains, thought to regulate social intelligence.
The largest of the other three species: Brown, Striped and Aardwolf, Spotted Hyenas are among Africa’s most vocal animals.
Robin Ouzman Hislop, born UK, a reader in philosophy & religions, has travelled extensively throughout his lifetime but now lives in semi- retirement as a TEFL teacher and translator in Spain & the UK.
Robin was editor of the 12 year running on-line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life and Times. In 2013 he joined with Dave Jackson as co-editor at Artvilla.com, where he presently edits Poetry Life & Times, Artvilla.com, Motherbird.com.
He’s been previously published in a variety of international magazines, later publications including Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N. Carolina), The Poetic Bond Volumes (thepoeticbond.com) and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (a recently published international Anthology of Sonnets). His last publication is a volume of collected poems All the Babble of the Souk available at all main online tributaries
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