poetry

On a Night like Ovid.Poem.Constance Rowell Mastores.Sonnet

by

 

Every night he slipped the story on

like a second self, like a silk chemise his wife

once wore, like sepals overlapped around a bud,

like new bark on green skin, like a boy

in love with flowers— so naturally did it fit.

In the morning, the dream unraveled. It unspooled

and ran like water. His mind could not retrieve one pebble.

 …..…

The sun blew over him. He felt a chill.

Like a re-run of a classic. Someone had sold out,

was being hunted down, was running through the streets

of an old city, hopping a tram in the nick

of time, traveling backward, changing into something

more comfortable—the body of a girl, who fled

into the same irresistible sorrow, night after night.

 

 

Constance Rowell Mastores (1938— ) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley. She has graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkeley. She is a classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice. She and her husband, Kent “Nick” Mastores, live in Oakland, California. On her own poetry, she has this to say, “Rarely do I set out to write a 14 liner. Over the years, however, I have noticed that the poems I write that do result in 14 liners are preceded by a flow of sound— and sometimes a slight tingling in my fingers. The next stage is a fusion of emotion and idea set to some sort of rhythmical pattern. The words themselves may be born of depression; or of a keen observation of something in nature that has deeply moved me. In all cases, when I realize that I have resolved what I have to say in fourteen lines, I am incredibly happy.” Constance’s poetry appears in Paws & Tales, an anthology of poetry about animals, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, a book of selected poems, to be published by Blue Light Press in 2013; and in journals such as The Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Chronicles, The Comstock Review, Correspondences, The Deronda Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Lyric, The Magnolia Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rattapallax and Visions International.

 

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from: Richard Vallance, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

 

 

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. 30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: http://vallance22.hpage.com/ for further information.

***

robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com

 

 

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Sea Song of the Crazy Poet.Poem.Sonnet.Sondra Ball(Deceased2010)

by

 

It’s been a long time since I wrote a song.

I used to write beside the bay at night.

The music made me feel much less alone.

Night shadows forced a lashing, screaming fright.

Music was comforting. I’d sit and write

Until the sun wove light forms on the sea.

Then dawn would bind the shadows. I was free.

At last my music grew completely clear.

Then shadows shattered every pitch and rhyme.

They scream and dance. No note can stop my fear.

My loneliness grows with the measured time.

The shades are odorous. They smell like brine

The sea has tossed with rotting fish and shell,

Or like dead music, a stillborn dream or tale.

 

Sondra Ball (deceased March 17 2010) touched the lives of many with her passion, spirituality, intuition, outspokenness, and love. Born in Kentucky to migrant workers, an active Quaker and child of the Creek Nation, Sondra was passionate about race relations as well as the environment. An accomplished and passionate poet and writer, Sondra published the online poetry journal, Autumn Leaves, where she took great pleasure in encouraging new voices, especially among children and Native Americans. Sondra has been published many times in several anthologies, E-zines, journals and sites, such as Canadian Zen Haiku canadien ISSN 1705-4508, Matrifocus, Poetry of the Desert ISBN 0974197548, Spirits in Peace (see Richard Doiron) and Sonnetto Poesia.

 

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

 

 

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.

 

http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 

 

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Conformal Mapping.Poem.Sonnet.Vera Rich(1936-2009)

by

 

 

I cannot come to you without a sleep,

And travelling through sleep, I cannot know

If through one firm continuum I go.

Night is an involution which may keep

 Strange secrets, map our plane from sphere to sphere,

 And though we travel post-stage, can we swear

 Nights in strange inns preserve invariant “there”

 And “thither”? One brief day embeds our “near”.

 So, meeting, can we claim a mundane path

 Maps me to you in spatial translation?

 Rise with the dawn – however swift we run,

 Time draws its radius around each hearth,

 And hence we meet, sped by night’s transformation

 Where children dream gold lands beyond the sun.

 

***

Vera Rich(1936-2009)

Educated at St Hilda’s College, Oxford and at Bedford College, London, Vera Rich, a respected science journalist and a tireless campaigner for human rights, was a fine poet. Her wits were quick, her memory prodigious and she had a wonderful sense of humour.

During the 1960’s she had three books of her own poems published, and founded the poetry magazine, Manifold. This ran with some success for 28 issues before publication was suspended in 1968, when Vera became Eastern European correspondent for the science magazine, Nature.

Once asked to translate some Ukrainian poems, she learned the language to do so. For the next three decades, she travelled extensively in eastern Europe, becoming the foremost translator of both Ukrainian and Belarusian poetry into English. She reported on the activities of dissident Soviet scientists, the Chernobyl disaster, psychiatric abuse and AIDS in the Soviet Union. Her anthology of Belarusian poetry, Like Water, Like Fire, published by UNESCO, was subsequently withdrawn under pressure from the Soviet Union.

Manifold, which she revived in 1998, regularly published foreign-language poetry with parallel text in Engtlish and, occasionally. foreign poetry untranslated. In 2006 Vera travelled to the Ukraine to receive the Ivan Franko Award for her 40 years service to the translation of Ukrainian poetry. While on a visit to the Ivan Franko Homestead she gave an emotional reading of Shevchenko’s poem “Testament”. On her next visit in 2007, she wore her medal, the Order of Princess Olha, which had been presented to her at the Ukrainian Embassy in London. Vera could fairly be described as a Ukrainian patriot, an unusual distinction for an Englishwoman.

In 2006 Vera underwent treatment for breast cancer. But she always insisted her illness was an inconvenient obstacle to her work. On 18 December 2009, her doctor advised her to go into hospital, but even then Vera gave priority to her translations. On 20 December, 2009, she died peacefully in her bed. She will be greatly missed, not least for her kindness and the support she gave to so many. Alan Flowers (UK)

 ***

This sonnet and bibliography is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 

 

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Winter Departure.Poem. Sonnet.Trina Gayon

by

 

The early light reflects the short gray hairs

among the brown, and still he’s just a boy

of twenty-five, who rises slowly, turns

to stare down at the bed where she coils

asleep, the dreamless sleep that only comes

on nights when he has filled her up with rain.

He brought it with him out of Dublin slums,

to blanket California hills in gray

soft shrouds. He waits for gold to turn to green.

He lingers over tea and toast until

he’s read the Times. Packing his bag to leave;

he has no ties to things that keep her still

 beneath their weight ― a job, this house, her car.

 It’s almost Christmas, and Ireland’s not so far.

 ***

Trina Gaynon is a graduate of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of San Francisco. She currently volunteers in Los Angeles with WriteGirl, providing workshops and mentors for young women in high school who are interested in writing, and works with a literacy program in her community. Recently, her poems have appeared in Natural Bridge, Runes, 26, Southeast Review and the anthology Bombshells: War Stories and Poems by Women on the Homefront and Yemassee. She says, “My deeply divided personality moves back and forth between writing sonnets, a way of exploring what I have to say, and more experimental work, a way of exploding into what I need to say.”

This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:

Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA

300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.

30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. http://vallance22.hpage.com/

 

 

 



 


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The Wife of Pain.Poem.Sonnet.Becca Menon
		

			 by  		

					

			
			

				
 


***


I’ve learned deceptiveness since he moved in: 


How to distract him from a brutal rage or try


To trick his jealous need for all of my


Attention — yet defend him when I grin


Contentedly for loved-ones who suspect


 His secret violence; to take the blame


 For something that I’ve done or some neglect


 That sets him off, and hide the sticky shame


 I feel for letting him destroy my life.


 And while it never stops confounding me


 To realize that it’s true I am his wife,


 There’s one thing that I face with honesty:


 Because it was by illness we were wed,


 This demon, Pain, will always share my bed.


 ***


Becca Menon (1958― ) of New York City writes formal, often narrative poetry that makes use of both received and nonce forms. Her verse novel A Girl and Her Gods (2008) led poet Katha Pollitt to declare “No poet I know of writes anything like this ― Becca dances to a tune of her own Panpipes, and the reader follows, entranced,” while Herb Leibowitz, Editor of Parnassus, wrote that her “language is supple and nuanced {and} her sleight-of-hand as a story-teller keeps the reader from worry about what technical devices she uses;…” Poet Mark Rudman, editor of Pequod, noted that her poetry is “playful, philosophical, and subversive.” Also a translator and prize-winning author of nonsense, Becca has works appearing in numerous print and on-line journals, both nationally and internationally. To learn more, please visit BeccaBooks.com


***


This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from:


 Richard Vallance, editor-in-chief. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA


300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian.


30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. 




 Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information. 


http://vallance22.hpage.com/


 


 


 


 


 


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Coming to Terms. Sonnet. Poem. Catherine Chandler
		

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***


I set aside my white smocked cotton blouse,


 my pants with the elastic belly panel.


The only music in the empty house


strains from a distant country western channel.


My breasts are weeping. I’ve been given leave –


a week in which to heal and convalesce.


I peel away the ceiling stars; unweave


the year I’d entered on your christening dress.


 I rearrange my premises – perverse


assumptions! – gather unripe figs; throw out


 the bloodied bedclothes; scour the universe


 in search of you. And God. And go about


 my business as my crooked smile displays


 the artful look of ordinary days.


 


***


Catherine Chandler


Catherine Chandler (1950 ― ), an American-born Canadian poet, teacher and translator and graduate of McGill University, is winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award 2010, and nominee for six Pushcart Prizes, the Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2013 Poets’ Prize. She is the author of five books of poetry, the latest, Glad and Sorry Seasons, forthcoming from Biblioasis Press. Her poems, translations, essays, reviews, interviews and podcasts have been widely published in print and online books, journals and anthologies, including The Alabama Literary Review, Orbis, Quadrant, Iambs and Trochees, Measure, Able Muse, Raintown Review, Sonnetto Poesia and The Centrifugal Eye. Catherine writes sonnets because it is her way of trying, as she writes in her sonnet “Sonnet Love”, “to modulate unmanageable grief”. Her website, The Wonderful Boat, welcomes visitors at cathychandler.blogspot.com


“Coming to Terms” by Catherine Chandler, is the winner of the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. It now appears in The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. 


Some 300 sonnets and ghazals in English, French, Spanish,German and Farsi―publish at Friesen Press. Canada 2014. ISBN: Hard-cover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 eBook: 978-1-4602-1702-3. Available at Amazon & Barnes & Noble




 We urge readers of these sonnets in Poetry Life & Times  from The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes = Le Phénix renaissant deses cendes to visit the site http://vallance22.hpage.com/


 Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: vallance22@gmx.com for further information.


 


 


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The Glue That Holds Us to the Canvas. A Poem by Jim Dunlap.
		

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moi(1)


                                                     Jim Dunlap Author




***


Like sparks trailing  


 from a million, billion fireflies,


 a single thought  


 limns a trillion suns.


 


 From the first small bonfire


 flickering across four million years,


 whose light imprints itself  


 upon the canvas backdrop


 of a feckless, barely cohesive Infinity,


 the matter of man, no more than


 the past, transmogrifies the future —


 denies the import of “real” or “black”


 or any other type of matter.


 


 Yet existing, it defines the local locus


 Of now and when and how and then.


 


 The freezing cold of space  


 burns like energy  


 backfiring on itself.


 Somewhere,  


 celestial lightshows


 flare across parsecs  


 of near emptiness.


 


 Liquid oxygen fuels  


 the laboring lungs


 of multitudes,  


 singing out the music of the spheres,


 maestros of a trillion symphonies,


 platelets in the lifeblood of the Universe.


 


 Like a Coriolis wave that imprints itself


 upon a formless sandstorm,


 a thought burns itself  


 into the very fabric


 of Eternity,  


 opens like  


 a budding flower,


 and initiates  


 its own realities.


 


*** 

Jim Dunlap’s poetry has been published extensively in print and online in the United States, England, France, India, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand. His work has appeared in over 90 publications, including Potpourri, Candelabrum, Mobius, Poems Niedernasse, and the Paris/Atlantic. He was the co-editor of Sonnetto Poesia and is currently a Content Admin for Poetry Life & Times. www.facebook.com/PoetryLifeTimes  He is also the chief proofreader for the On Viewless Wings Anthologies, published out of Queensland, Australia. In the past, he was a resident poet on Poetry Life & Times and the newsletter editor for seven years with the Des Moines Area Writers’ Network.



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Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (38-42) Poem. Christopher Barnes
		

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Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (38)


 


One frame inheriting another…


Blood on marble and white roses.


Stand-alone vampire crystallizes into a statue.


The nearest pall-bearer sucks air. Crushed urn.


 


 Froth overruns chapelry pews


Through a hinge-wrecked door –


 An ephemeral embodiment.


 


Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (39)


 


 Take No. 7


 In rubescent lamé pyjamas.


 Sabrina Roper’s is a skin-deep part,


 Moulding exposed nerves


 In the screening room.  


 A moon-buffed kiss on hand.


 His Satanic Majesty simpers.


Runaway violin a bedlamite tango…


Chimps neighing over the sobs of men…


 


Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (40)


 


 The picture palace reviews


 May get off-the-beam


 About the overacting.


 Hold the focus,


 Instantaneous sunrise behind a shot –


 Costumes: the fantasia keeps time


 With a hue and cry.


 The limelit alehouse at dead of night.


 Our Stunt Co-ordinater isn’t exasperated


 By bee swarms in gusts,


 Nor the beg-hard grimace


 On Manola Dean’s hauled up face.


 


 Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (41)


 


 Fuzz on Bevan’s palms


 Flaunted as the transom’s pegged.


 Simon, the Boom Operator, tips to the left.


 Cut to…billboard puffing the movie show ‘Nosferatu’.


 


 Camera 6 whirls to Sabrina Roper


 In the ruck of a bee-keepers net.


 A schnauzer piddles in floorboards.


 


 The relinquished rocking chair teeters


 Indicating tea, sandwiches


 And a twist-ragged Script Conference.


 


Filming ‘Blood Shot Silk’ – Deleted Scene (42)


 


 Smoke machine on a brae…


 A hog spews on moss.


 Effervescence in dirty sky.


 Disfigured colour sergeant gains time,


 Pulls out a smooth-bore.


 Snigger, incandescent flash.


 The dream is taking flesh.


 Drumroll on soundtrack – mental note.


 The regular steps of the fait accompli


 May be fair-weather, deleted.


 


 


 Christopher Barnes, UK. Some bio details…


 


In 1998 I won a Northern Arts writers award.  In July 200 I read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology ‘Titles Are Bitches’.  Christmas 2001 I debuted at Newcastle’s famous Morden Tower doing a reading of my poems.  Each year I read for Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and I partake in workshops.  2005 saw the publication of my collection LOVEBITES published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh.


On Saturday 16Th August 2003 I read at the Edinburgh Festival as a Per Verse poet at LGBT Centre, Broughton St.


 I also have a BBC web-page www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/gay.2004/05/section_28.shtml and http://www.bbc.co.uk/tyne/videonation/stories/gay_history.shtml (if first site does not work click on SECTION 28 on second site.


Christmas 2001 The Northern Cultural Skills Partnership sponsored me to be mentored by Andy Croft in conjunction with New Writing North.  I   made a radio programme for Web FM community radio about my writing group.  October-November 2005, I entered a poem/visual image into the art exhibition The Art Cafe Project, his piece Post-Mark was shown in Betty’s Newcastle.  This event was sponsored by Pride On The Tyne.  I made a digital film with artists Kate Sweeney and Julie Ballands at a film making workshop called Out Of The Picture which was shown at the festival party for Proudwords, it contains my poem The Old Heave-Ho.  I worked on a collaborative art and literature project called How Gay Are Your Genes, facilitated by Lisa Mathews (poet) which exhibited at The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, including a film piece by the artist Predrag Pajdic in which I read my poem On Brenkley St.  The event was funded by The Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Institute, Bio-science Centre at Newcastle’s Centre for Life.  I was involved in the Five Arts Cities poetry postcard event which exhibited at The Seven Stories children’s literature building.  In May I had 2006 a solo art/poetry exhibition at The People’s Theatre why not take a look at their website http://ptag.org.uk/whats_on/gallery/recent_exhbitions.htm 


The South Bank Centre in London recorded my poem “The Holiday I Never Had”; I can be heard reading it on www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=18456 


REVIEWS: I have written poetry reviews for Poetry Scotland and Jacket Magazine and in August 2007 I made a film called ‘A Blank Screen, 60 seconds, 1 shot’ for Queerbeats Festival at The Star & Shadow Cinema Newcastle, reviewing a poem…see www.myspace.com/queerbeatsfestival  On September 4 2010, I read at the Callander Poetry Weekend hosted by Poetry Scotland.  I have also written Art Criticism for Peel and Combustus Magazines.


 


 


 


 


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