Above Hukte Ajaw’s court where the air stinks
of rotting flesh and rubber, darkest night of the year,
the sky is potent with cold.
Our astronomers fix the time of sacrifice,
time for the judge’s sharp whistles, the slam
as the ball, stuffed with the brains of the dead,
ricochets against sloping stone.
Once through the ring is all there is.
You’ve practiced your whole life for this loser’s joke –
costumed, absurdly masked, belt packed
with home-spun rags. Childless, you ape pregnancy,
waddling wide-legged, teasing your tongue
in the scent of sausages and fried maize, challenging
to laughter the chit-chat of families with no son or daughter
in the center, prattle of people with nothing,
in this moment, to lose. The regent is planted
on his dais, legs firm and upright like two pillars.
His flags wilt on the arms behind him
in the only world that matters, the only world
you know. And when his minions have cut
your heart from your body, the steam of it rising
in the mythic air as they pass it from mouth to mouth,
when your skull has rolled down the chiseled steps,
the crowd cheered and scuttled to their dim hovels, turned on television,
the forest stretches its vines to cover those who loved you,
who carved your name on a rock.
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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poet
Shine on Me. A Poem by Judy Moskowitz.
I’m a reactionary woman
Wearing it in my jiggle
Hidden in the cleavage of my past
Misunderstood flow
Not recognized as 925 Sterling
If you’d shine on me just a little
I would never have to lower my eyes
Shrink inside
I’d climb a high wire with perfect balance
If you’d shine on me just a little
I’d read all the classics
Becoming my own intellectual property
Play Stravinsky
Sing Nesum Dorma
If you’d shine on my just a little
I’d never need
A polishing cloth
Judy started playing piano at the age of three, and studied at the Julliard School Of Music in New York City, her native city.
She became a jazz pianist and continues to play jazz. Now residing in Florida, she started writing poetry three years ago, and has been published in the Moonlight Dreamers Of The Yellow Haze anthology by Michael Lee Johnson, Thepoetcommunity, Whispersinthewind, Indiana Voice Journal. Poetry runs deep in her veins along with Music.
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POEM ON MY 33rd BIRTHDAY. A Poem by Robin Marchesi
When you look back on the pages,
Of some half completed book,
When you contemplate,
Its twist and change,
And the age its teller took.
To unravel countless cases,
To weave a central theme,
To bewitch you with its reverie,
To sniff its inner dream
And to wrap you up in a wisdom
That you don’t quite understand.
It’s not a lot to read half a book
And contemplate its style.
For the story is half woven,
The tale has made its due,
Like a life that’s found a meaning
You know what you’re going through.
And you lean your head out forward,
To taste what you’ve to come,
But the words already written
Chapter verse and song.
And you’ve ploughed a furrow on your brow,
You’ve planted a seed that points a way,
For you’ve heard it now,
Spoken clear,
In that first half of living
Such an inner sense beginning.
When you look back on the pages
Of a half completed book
When you contemplate its twists and change
And the age its teller took.
Robin Marchesi, born in 1951, began writing in his teens, much to the consternation of his mother, the sister of Eric Hobsbawm, the historian.
In 1992 Cosmic Books published his first book entitled “A B C Quest”.
In 1996 March Hare Press published “Kyoto Garden” and in 1999 “My Heart is As…”
ClockTowerBooks published his Poetic Novella, “A Small Journal of Heroin Addiction”, digitally, in 2000.
Charta Books published his latest work entitled “Poet of the Building Site”, about his time working with Barry Flanagan the Sculptor of Hares, in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
He is presently working on an upcoming novel entitled “A Story Made of Stone.”
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Figuring it out still. A Poem by Goirick Brahmachari
1.
May be, you just wanted me to see some white horses
flying over the silver mountain, on that fateful night,
at old hill, when the moon was heavy
melting onto the yellow mustard, and those apple trees
tasted white like corpse.
May be, you wanted me to accompany you to the seas
for us, to get drowned, in sand, in liquids.
Or, may be, you just wanted to get high
to call upon the winds, and the winter
of these hills,
onto your fingers
at your will.
2.
I will wear
a blue, ribbed mask
over the dead sky
for you to hike
across the river
And gather stories,
monsters and pebbles,
on yak wool nights,
when the cold outside
cuts your skin
and the fire
tastes empty.
Yes, I will try
to sing to the river,
of rivers I have loved
for you to hike
on cold moon nights
as you kill your lovers
one by one
as the tide runs high.
3.
The day wears dusk all over its face and I try
to be at peace with a spooky mask
I wear,
to disappear, as the world around counts.
All I can hear now
is a burning sound
of this reality, we force ourselves
to believe in,
to justify this existence.
4.
Like flickering leaves of pines at dusk
I die out your imagination, your memory
and sarcasm; I rejoice every death,
every word you utter to clean me out of your memory,
rejoice this destruction, your frail attempts at sanitising
your belief, as you write symphonies with your lies that
spread white wings of hate over our eyes
safely, with your cold, watery fingers.
Blood, you cannot staple,
for the beat cannot be stopped,
and the bridges, we agree to burn,
in songs you do not listen,
blindfolds us,
leaves us satisfied.
Let us breathe in
Let us breathe in
this death.
5.
Sleep
if you come now,
I will rest my body, my faith
rest my anger and the smirks
I face, as I learn and unlearn.
I have unlearned you all from my memory.
Now I learn from liquid notes that do not speak.
For sleep will concur our imagination without dreams.
Sleep
if you come now,
I will rest my lungs and my kidneys
I will rest my worries, my cravings
my ignorance, my visions of love and un-loving,
my solitude, my songs,
pain, rain, insane desires to eat up this existence.
Sleep
you must come now,
for my body aches
for my faith tumbles
my reason leaks through the drains
Sleep, will you show me a new day?
Goirick Brahmachari lives in New Delhi, India. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His poems have appeared in various Indian and international magazines.
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Miriam C Jacobs Reviews All the Babble of the Souk.
Poet Robin Ouzman Hislop’s first full-length collection, All the Babble of the Souk, is appropriately titled. With a remarkably consistent ear for the market’s noise, for “[t]he broken lights of the bazaar/spangled] with glistening promise/in the eyes of the dusky beggar …” (Laminations in Lacquer ) Hislop’s poems, many of them cinematic-style montages of sounds and images, show us the metaphoric souk of the world, on the beach or in the street, its glitter, its sadness, its ragtag glory:
“pets, flower pots framed captive in a moment
outside the house of the painter, a robot
in chains with an alms bowl” (“Departures”)
These impressions are not confined to the scenic. Individuals, too, flash like rich arcades:
“there is not time enough to love
before the tram whisks her away
a creature of the costume of the moment
in a parade of parts.” (“In the fish-eye window”)
So marked is Hislop’s interest in the external world, readers may long for a glimpse of the speaker. It comes rarely. There are one or two musings on the phenomenon and surprise of feeling oneself age, the odd disjointing of it, but otherwise these poems proclaim their perhaps unique impersonality. In “Laminations in Lacquer” we sight what is, perhaps, the poet, but in third person, one who rises, observes, and then folds in at last with the “throng”:
“Below the rift of its eye
the sealed beak that will open
gleams on the lee …
in a room that roams without corners
he must rise with a chalice of blood for lips of shades
where the vertigo edge of the flower distills the dish
together with the quantities of immeasurable throng
on watery groves billowing with ivy bowers
sprung over hidden lairs of concealed hoards.
Night begins and the dogs draw nigh
scavenging for scraps
yapping at the walker’s naked ankles
in the dust of unknown alleys.”
Among other reoccurring themes – shadows, mirrors, the moon – is Hislop’s interest in physics. In a variety of contexts he reflects on time and infinity, the imagination-daunting galaxies, quantum theory and space:
“Man cannot live on myth alone
he shall earn his soil somehow, between
the Big Bang, the Big Slam ….”
One admirable quality in this work is that souk places us firmly in the precariousness of the current moment in history. These poems are exactly right for the age, and who we are now, those of us born 1945-1960, with our particular view of past and present, our grasp of the sciences and technologies that have overtaken the known world in our lifetimes.
“The world is a patchwork quilt,” Hislop concludes in “Lucky hat day,”
‘stitched up to the hilt its seams/which we quarter in our dreams
on which our edifice is built …”
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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I sing a streetcar serendipity. A Poem by Marie Marshall
I sing a streetcar serendipity,
pralines and beignets, king cakes and pears,
a chicken pot pie from The Pie Lady,
mango, banana, Mr. Okra’s wares.
I sing of the sweet Sweet Street Symphony,
of improvised signage by Dr. Bob,
the half-folded fan of the Marigny,
be nice or get yourself a new paint-job.
I sing Jackson, I sing Congo and Pops,
jazz, blues, Dixieland, or gospel menu,
the iPhones of the rookie female cops,
the Quarter and the Faubourg; I sing you
the Gutter Punk’s hat where a quarter drops,
the boys, the girls, the creoles and the whites,
the seedy bars, the dance that never stops,
the lost blue of days, the yellow of nights.
Bio – Marie Marshall (3rd person)
MM is a middle-aged Anglo-Scottish author, poet, and editor, who says little about herself, preferring to let her writing speak. She has had three novels published, two of which are for the young adult / older children readerships. Both of her collections of poetry are currently in publication. Naked in the Sea (2010) in its 2nd imprint, is available in e-book form direct from publishers P’kaboo and in Kindle version on Amazon; the 1st imprint may still be available in print, if you enquire at Masque Publishing of Littlehampton. I am not a fish, nominated for the 2013 T S Eliot Prize, may be bought direct from publishers Oversteps Books. Marie has had well over two hundred poems published in magazines, anthologies, etc., but has not submitted anything since 2013. The most unusual places in which her poetry has appeared are on the wall of a café in Wales, pinned to trees in Scottish woodland, and etched into an African drum in New Orleans Museum of Art.
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French Poet Flies Continental. A Poem by R.W. Haynes
Of course the body wants to stay alive
And generate survivors unto the end of days,
Mused Baudelaire, his bladder somewhat awry,
Yet this old testament will not suffice.
“Water,” he growled to the flight attendant who
Hovered with false benevolence in the aisle,
And his sister gladly poured him half a glass,
Wishing it were warmer, but it’s always hot in Hell,
And he turned back to the window and beheld
Green England extend its southwestern leg.
And the new testament, brethren, why are we now
To subsist on hope, on charity and faith,
Unless, mon Dieu, they are inevitable?
“I refuse to get the joke,” he told himself,
“And I also refuse to decline the prize.”
Diana of the drinks-cart completed her cycle
And stood again nearby, one eyebrow raised.
“I thirst,” he said, and the airplane was no more.
(originally published in Tertulia, 2009)
* Editors Choice for National Poetry Day at Poetry Life & Times 21/03/16
R. W. Haynes has taught literature at Texas A&M International University since 1992. His recent interests include the early British sonnet, and he is completing a second book on the Texas playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (1916-2009). In his poetry, Haynes seeks to celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without sounding any more dissonant notes than he has to. In fiction, he works toward grasping that part of the past which made its mark on his generation. He enjoys teaching drama, especially the Greeks, Ibsen, and Shakespeare, and he devoutly hopes for a stunning literary Renaissance in South Texas.
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Silent Obscurity. A Poem by Adam Levon Brown
I feel like I’m fading; into silent obscurity.
Shadows play tricks on the wall.
I look up to the sky
for answers to my life.
Am I even here anymore?
Or have I faded to beyond the reaches
of a human hand’s grasp?
All memory escapes me –
As I look to collect myself
on the canvass that is my life
I must be painted somewhere in the grand scheme,
I am thinking to myself.
Why can’t I find myself?
I seem to be faded away;
like a dried leaf that blows in the autumn winds.
I will work with what is left of me
and try to love you
the way I’ve loved in the past;
Just know that I’m not the same person I once was.
Passion has left me
and I seem to be fading into-
Silent Obscurity.
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.
My Author Page: www.ctupublishinggroup.com/adam-levon-brown-.html
My Facebook Author Page: www.facebook.com/AuthorAdamBrown
My Twitter Account: twitter.com/adamlevonbrown
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