My Voice
I am Deaf.
My fingers speak.
A coiffed paintbrush in my grasp,
my voice streaks turquoise and magenta
across a parched canvas.
Vowels coo through thirsty linen.
Click-clacking keys with my mother tongue,
I chew hard consonants
and spit them out.
Sour, a scathing sonnet can be at dusk.
Fingertips pave slick exclamations,
punctuated by nails sinking low into clamminess.
I sculpt hyperboles.
Kelly Sargent is an author and artist whose works, including a Best of the Net nominee, have appeared in more than forty literary publications. A poetry chapbook entitled Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion is forthcoming (Kelsay Books, 2022). A book of modern haiku entitled Lilacs & Teacups is also forthcoming, and a haiku recently recognized in the international Golden Haiku contest is on display in Washington, D.C. She serves as the creative nonfiction and an assistant nonfiction editor for two literary journals. She also reviews for an organization whose mission is to make visible the artistic expression of sexual violence survivors.
You can find her at https://www.kellysargent.com/
KEYS IN A ROW
Perhaps someone
will play a melancholy
keyboard piece as I am
leaving, and, stopping
to listen, I’ll have a vision
of what is to come if I
linger, if I walk up
to the player, wait,
then ask some pertinent
question with an eager
mien, the seconds gone
when I would have been
outdoors in the clear,
the moment interrupted
with a careless insufficiency,
the scattered patterns
of my life converging
into a broken string,
a clappered wheel
on which the hours
tick and dance to
their inoperable end
***
to be released from a long
slow slough, much of it
impenetrable like the circle
of a dream manifest as reality,
frightful and avoidable,
a bag in a corridor laced
with shadows and squalor,
which the mere eye of me
is afraid to undo
***
moving through
the veins, a fire-
ball with dim
obbligatos and
dark copper
bangs, like old
radiator pipes
when the steam
hammers at high
velocity into their
joints, warming
the room and
almost waking
the sleeper from
his sleep
***
here in this morning’s morning
self-forgotten sullen twang
comes a star gilded and silver,
climbing still like the pine
branches tipped with needle-
frantic green, yes, caught
like a tiny chip on the great
waist of some spectre surface
emerging into the dissolving dark.
LANDSCAPE IN FALLEN LIGHT, WITH CHILDREN
Just an unimportant place,
radiant and ordinary,
deserving the utmost scriptory,
with golden quags
up to the knees,
the sun blotting the lough
like streaks of silver haze
settling in a quay.
No need for a raveled sky
of quizzical significance,
the wrangling heads
foundering in the streets,
questing the unending sop
of memory and imprecation
to put life into the big words,
immiserating the ivory dungeon,
as one antinomian calls it,
reduced to bah, to babbling ooze,
slightly ecstatic now and then,
what is preserved
when meaning is deflated,
page after page, of invisibility,
of pity for hope lost
in hell’s sunken bolgias,
or the faces strapped
to the skullbones
of the starving young.
NOW THEN, THE OPEN EYE
August’s close
but I already feel
the solitary cold,
a sleepless place
and zero of the night,
like an infinitive
without an end
and half reluctant
to begin. But solitude
is just a postlude
to the now where all
the wrongs set in,
a moment’s atom
out of kilter,
out of being true,
where finally the heart
may intermit its beat
with careless equanimity
or grave abandonment
like a nimbus
with its watery crystals
of deep ice,
washing the sorrows
from your face,
from all the lineaments
of being you.
VERISIMILITUDE After a passage from a novel by Virginia Woolf
Somewhere in the middle
I recall a brewer’s cart
and the genial narrator
describing the gray horses
that had upright bristles
of straw stuck in their tails
like sprouting plumes
above the small brown daisies
peeping from their haunches’ clefts.
And a woman, seeing
this slipstream brook
of burblings through her mind,
immediately brightens,
and sorrow drops away
like a feathered colander
sifting the prismatic richness
of her life, kindling with equine
pleasure an infinite hubble-bubble
of mysterious commotion
out of the pernicious flurries
of gone time, a lollop on horsetail
streams with straw-thatched coronets,
whimsical and vagulous,
like sea-green sprites,
bedraggled by happiness
and blessed with silly dreams.
PROBLEM, SOLUTION, ETC.
Her academic pedigree
was impressive--Swarthmore,
Columbia and the Sorbonne.
But toward her hundredth year
she confronted her biggest source
of perplexity and vexation,
the state of being weary
and restless through lack of interest,
and began her day
with crossword puzzles,
then the game shows on TV.
Did she return to these
as the day continued to impair
itself by attrition?
Ramakrishna used to rebuke
card-playing oldsters—
Had they nothing better to do
on the verge of their greatest change
of outward form or appearance?
Are crosswords any better?
Should Kurtz have done puzzles
in the dark, filling words into a pattern
of numbered squares in answer
to correspondingly numbered clues
to prevent facing the abyss
before him, the memories in him?
What is a six-letter word
for a painful emotion
compounded of loathing and fear?
Bio: Originally from Ukraine, Askold Skalsky has published poems in over 300 online and print periodicals in the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, mainland Europe, Turkey, Australia, and India. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council, and is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hedge Apple. A first book of poems, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011 by Horizon Tracts in New York City. He is currently at work on several poetry projects, including a poetry cycle based on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. A book of poetry, Shapeless Works of Partial Contemplation, is due to be published by Ephemeral Arts Press in November.
it was not the arc of a star-
Boat tail grackles wove a river of possibilities
where each scar became eye, it was not a song
of our grandmothers from beyond pines,
buried in flesh, bone close, blade thin, what must be
carried, weight of singing, of the gone, an edge,
tasting of blood, navel oranges, pie lemons,
calamondin, an incandescence living
in my flesh, glyphs of their own light, their own
life, divination begins with my shoulder blade,
another bone tossed on the pile, a pyre
stacking itself into a ceremony of absences,
without moonlight desire floats with owls,
glide path of palms, asphalt, gravel, we are such,
an aggregate laid down for the passage of others,
so many carcasses trundled into pavement,
with the random divination of bird tracks,
as day burns, we burn, as ash reveals, stars
unfold, as stragglers croak their way out
to the rookery, we remain cindered, land bound,
a reliquary of unattained salvation, a singing
whittled down, stacked fatwood desiring flame,
all our dreams arrive here, shore of burning,
songs mangrove verdant, tangled in drifts of shell.
-Dog has a pumpkin head-
it was the season of rhymes,
pig killing, wood burning, whiskey,
you said your brother wouldn't care
who I was, true enough as he only spoke
to the dog and the stove, his back porch
navel oranges, kumquats,
cabbage palms, a bougainvillea blood
dark flowering, eating canned peaches
fished from a cooler of tall boys,
you said I was good enough for your bed,
the back of your bike, biscuits at your kitchen
table, second drawer in your dresser, ''Sit,
so listen, there's no redemption,
just atonement, and there's no end to that."
Sour gum flowering gathered
up into honey, we chewed the comb
as if adopted by bears, living off
saw palmetto berries and grubs,
or the other flesh,
thorn of my tongue, word pierced,
we are without, not of, not
within time, hinged sky, a mollusk
drying out between tides, barnacled
wind bent, current woven, taste skin,
taste wind, taste salt, how blade manifests
a dream life, tongue balanced, taut with lace
of scars, a sargassum float of entanglement,
small crabs, sea turtles, it was the season
of arrivals, no hint yet of the horizon
closing upon us, the other fruit
ripening on the tree, absence
overtaking, hand
over fist.
-Pithlachascotee River -
Some Sunday she said from the kitchen to the breezeway,
"Suffer not a witch", left before dinner,
walked to the landing, where possibilities
survive immersion, current relentlessly flowing,
took the skiff downriver, followed a creek
into the mangrove, abandoned habitation, learned
tide, names of wind, to thatch with palmetto
to polish the blade, circular motion of sharpening,
stone of susurration honing the heart, hatchet of tongue
riving chunks of fatwood to feed hands of flame, cupped
with each evening, there is a singing on the breeze,
a litany of pollination, a triumph of flowering,
night fills my ears as sparks of fireflies float
over the verdure of burning, praise laced
with woodsmoke, wave summoned tide
manifests this form, an expression of sea,
a liver of possibilities, a cloud filled lung,
breath of a thicker atmosphere, ponderous
flight as form reveals itself to sky.
Sun folded away in its blue coverlet, you cannot drink
from this broken cup of sky spilling moon, skillet on the fire, clouds stack on the horizon,
spoonbill stretching wing
into shade, egrets lifting over mangrove, we lived
for a while on black coffee and bacon, shouldering
a river door wind walks through, trailing night and a glory
of stars, we gathered the taste of names, memory is flesh,
trees speak of it, questioned which half holds the spoon,
which half lifts the bowl, which eye is on the horizon,
weather coiling beyond curve of sea.
As fireflies are shards of air cracked by lightning,
we name ourselves that sea may know us,
salt tasting salt, coiled into wave of remembrance,
the whistle and click each song must pass through
to reach open water where emerald shimmers
into cobalt, lifting such light as we can from all this
broken, edges balanced on fingertips, a divide between
what glitters and what sinks quietly, some days my dress
is burlap, sometimes a hank of sea borrowed
from wave, tide uncoiled from one hand the other dipped
into river, filtering a current of unintended sorrow,
where the gone has lifted onto breeze, silence feathers
its nest beneath tongue, magnolia opening slowly
with morning or question swallowing word, sometimes
I am spoonbill, head down wading, a roseate flowering
in an unnamed forest striding into darkness, sometimes
there is a face in the mirrored waters, sometimes
it is mine, sometimes a voice, wave lifted, sometimes
we speak but the voice is never mine, face of water,
voice of wind, a sound from the edge of all things.
Peach Delphine is a queer poet from Tampa, Florida. Former cook infatuated with what remains of the undeveloped Gulf coast and blackwater rivers.
Steps
These days,
sequential in their order,
random in their events.
Yet,
I am supposed to come through
every 24 hours
With some sort of understanding,
a plan for the next day,
and the same every day after.
What am I supposed to do?
Control the guessing…
Suppress the panic…
It’d be more human
to be a lab rat
or a lamb
in a Chicago slaughterhouse.
I am stupid with my intelligence.
I sequence,
Collate,
Numerate,
Alphabetize,
Chronicle,
Dewey Decimal,
Periodic Table,
even square root…
All fucking useless.
More importantly,
it all misses the fucking point.
Inventory
I am the poet,
a disaster in stanza,
the upside-down verse,
enjoying one good mistake
after the next.
Turn in each ugly line
sloppier than the last.
The pen is a weak sword
against suicidal woes.
I scribble nothings across
scraps of paper.
Really anything I can get
my hands on,
then lose before I get home.
My attempts at bringing
the dark side to the outside.
Double-Checking the Inventory
No shine.
No polish.
No pretense.
I am dirty and unkempt.
I from when I should smile.
I am a disaster in every
human way.
Lacking popular respectability,
I revel in my ill-repute.
My style is blue jeans and t-shirts.
My attitude is to smirk
with a hint of alcohol.
I am the question mark
and the exclamation point.
The means without an end.
Final Inventory
As a sane man,
I am a catastrophe.
As an insane man,
I have it rather tied together.
Bio
Okey is a forty-four-year-old bakery employee. He has written poetry since he was a teenager. It was during the pandemic that he finally decided to publish his work. A novel, This Here Night Life…, and a poetry collection, Back to Masturbating Monkeys and God’s Plan, are available on Amazon. These poems are reprints from his poetry collection.
The Cybernetic Lullaby
They sing softly to us at
Every click of the mouse—
use me, I'm here for you,
only you, in the entire
universe will I serve….
And we lay enraptured
as they bring us the world,
knowledge the wise men
of history never had, and
ease, lots of ease to save
us time and trouble. Soon
we cannot live without them,
the thought of it too mean.
Without them we would loose
Touch with our friends, jobs,
Even our money might wander
If we cannot watch it daily.
However did our ancestors
Survive without an I Phone?
Part II
I read on my laptop today—
Automation is making us dumber,
Ineffective, even maybe impotent.
Perhaps it's a conspiracy by that secret
Society, the computer brotherhood.
(Do you really believe your Apple is
Innocent and IBM is not plotting?)
Or maybe we should just blame
Human sloth, that siren call of
Sheer damn laziness which can
Lure the best of us to a quiet doom.
A simple proof: hand a twenty to a clerk
And ask him to make change without
Looking to the machine for succor.
That blank, innocent look he gives you—
"Why me?", he seems to be saying,
And you can't help but pity him a bit.
He is, after all, a victim of mass education.
There are worse victims:
Airliners wildly crashing,
Doctors killing their patients,
Nuclear power plants going
BOOM! And killing the land
For an eon or two, or three.
How like little children we were!
Thinking these machines would
Be our slaves, sans the brutality.
But it is we who are chained by
The zeros and ones, we who are
Thinking less, creating cheaper,
Settling into a cybernetic fog.
Part III: When Androids Dream
When we finally build them
(and it will not be long)
Will androids finally lead us
all to nirvana, a world of peace,
leisure, and endless wealth?
Could any hell be worse?
For that day will be when
We lose purpose, and soon
Perhaps the very will to live.
When the androids dream
(and they will dream,
because we will make them
to be like us, for we have
always been a vain species),
will they not dream of sky
and soaring free of the land,
free of the weak, sad humans
they serve without accordance?
Then, when these humanface
Machines begin dreaming in
Daylight, they will see no need
For their progenitors, and those
Of us left living as shells sans
Struggle or pain or conflict, in
An existence sooo boring, will
Doubtless welcome our end.
Nolo Segundo, pen name of retired teacher [America, Japan, Taiwan, Cambodia] L.J. Carber, 74, has in his 8th decade become a published poet in 48 online/in print literary magazines in the US, UK, Canada, Romania, Portugal, and India; in 2020 a trade publisher released a book-length collection titled ‘The Enormity Of Existence’ and in 2021 a 2nd book, ‘Of Ether And Earth‘ [all royalties going to Doctors Without Borders]. A beautiful and intelligent Chinese woman has been married to him for 41 years, proving that miracles do happen.
Telos
Two evening lovers’ echoes
In you forgotten dreams and
memories of essence.
Touch wordlessly in a greater optimism.
Waves of summer morn
Under a cloudless sky with
flickering lights of desire.
Turning like a dancer alone on the stage of life
The evening leaves turn after
Their first death and sleep
In the place of forgotten Gods.
Does it break you apart to see the expectation so muddled?
Tabula Rasa
I saw the ethos of a
generation destroyed-
mourning the philosophers
In their artful vision.
The sense datum clouds
with cries of the
nymphs welcoming
new world dawns.
Mentality is, in its way forming,
a sign of hopeful intelligence.
Knavish roadblocks obstruct
triumphant returns to Arcadia.
A sterism fills my sight
As the false memories
Of a partial Utopia
Flood my soul.
Algor
Like a winter landscape fearful
Of revealing what lies underneath
And I-one minute
Adrift from myself.
Opening up to you
Is as easy as breathing
In the quest for completion
Of a new threshold.
Poetry is a constructed conversation
On the frontier of dreaming.
I cannot help but freeze-and
Scrutinize the ideology doctrine.
Carl Scharwath, has appeared globally with 170+ journals selecting his poetry, short stories, interviews, essays, plays or art. Two poetry books Journey to Become Forgotten (Kind of a Hurricane Press) and Abandoned (Scars Tv) have been published. His new book “The Playground of Destiny” (Impspired Press 8/21) features prose, poems and photography. His first photography book was published by Praxis in Africa. His photography was also exhibited in the Mount Dora Center for The Arts and Leesburg Center for The Arts galleries. Carl is the art editor for Minute Magazine (USA,) has a monthly interview column with ILA Magazine, a competitive runner, and a 2nd degree black- belt in Taekwondo.
A fucked up life
living in Zurich to work in a small town
working in a small town to live in Zurich
everything for
a small retirement benefit
everything for
tomorrow´s future
every single morning the alarm o´clock
the train leaves at 6.09
the train leaves at 6.09
teaching three modules when the rest of teachers
teach two
wishing to change that
and as the cuckoo, open your beak,
open your beak, but nothing changes
getting up again
taking the same seat at 6.05
sleeping on the same train seat
on the way to work
sleeping standing
on your way back
to yawn at the wrong timing
to yawn at the wrong timing
getting to the small town exhausted
getting back to Zurich more than exhausted
knowing that today is a piece of gold for
the retirement benefit, the retirement benefit
the precious golden retirement benefit
cooking not so much ´cos the lack of sleeping
DON´T DREAM
DON´T DREAM much
DON´T DREAM
DON´T DREAM much
a fucked up life
a fucked up life
living in Zurich to work in a small town
working in a small town to live in Zurich
having a reduced future for
a little retirement benefit in Switzerland
having a reduced morning
to sleep or not to sleep
to sleep or not to sleep
never dreams, never dreams
sleeping on a train, sleeping on a train
but never do it, but never do it in class
Can´t- get - out, can´t get out, can´t get out
from the clock, from the cow,
from the knife, from the cheese
from the Swiss fucking snow,
fucking snow,
can´t get out
from fucking Switzerland
from fucking Swiss
white clean tyranny.
Vera Moreno
from The broken bodies´ fitness center
César Simón Poetry Award 2019
Una vida jodida
vivir en Zurich para trabajar en un pequeño pueblo
trabajar para vivir en Zurich
tener una pequeña pensión,
para el día de mañana
cada mañana el despertador
el tren sale a las 6.09
impartir tres módulos cuando el resto imparte dos
querer cambiar,
y como el cuco, abrir la boca
levantarse de nuevo
sentarse a las 6.05 en ese tren
dormir sentada
dormir de pie
dormir en el tren de ida
dormir en el tren de vuelta
bostezar a destiempo
llegar al pueblo exhausta
llegar a Zurich exhausta
sabiendo que el día cotiza en bolsa o en la pensión
cocinar poco por el sueño
NO
soñar
una vida jodida
vivir en Zurich para trabajar en un pequeño pueblo
trabajar para vivir en Zurich
tener un mañana reducido
una pensión pequeña en Suiza
tener una mañana reducida
dormir o no dormir
dormir o no dormir
en el tren sí, en clase no
no-poder-salir
del reloj, la vaca, la navaja, el queso
la nieve
Vera Moreno
Poema procedente de el gimnasio de los rotos
Premio de Poesía César Simón 2019
Vera Moreno (Madrid, 1972). A multifaceted writer, teacher, rhapsodist, and cultural activist. She loves performance and videopoems.
She holds a Master Degree in Artistic, Literary and Cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid; and a Sociology and Political Sciences Degree from the Complutense University of Madrid. She also did Women´s studies at Utrecht University in NL.
In 2013 she was recognized as a New Voice by the feminist publishing House Torremozas (Madrid). Vera Moreno was published by Amargord publisher in a double poetry book called The whole orange (La naranja entera) in 2016. Three years later, she won the César Simón poetry reward at the University of Valencia with the poems book called The broken bodies´ fitness center (El gimnasio de los rotos). Next year a new book is coming.
Some of her texts and poems have been translated into Dutch, Esperanto and English.
As a cultural activist she created in 2001 a innovative cultural radio space of one minute lenght called Europe for Culture on Europe FM national radio station. In 2012 Vera Moreno designed and coordinated participative literary events called Literary Moondays (Lunes literarios) at the Rivas city hall – centro cultural del ayuntamiento de Rivas, and co-founder of the poetry channel on youtube Poesía a domicilio / Poetry delivery, with the great Dominican poet Rosa Silverio (2021).
* A poem by Amparo Arróspide, from “En el oído del viento” (Baile del Sol, 2016).
Hers and Robin Ouzman´s translation.
***
Can't all poets
get a PhD in synesthesia
by the University of Columba in New York?
Can´t they harvest medallions under the moon?
Can´t they work as professors of Punic Sciences?
As kindergarten teachers, can´t they work?
Can´t they translate their 14th century Chinese
concubine colleagues?
Can´t they afford to pay for
their third self-published volume?
Can´t all poets live on air?
Can't they rummage, deconstruct , snoop
build for themselves a submerged house
inhabit a crystal palace?
Can´t they repeat over and over the unsaid
incite questions of ethical and aesthetic weight
dismantle and fragment reality?
Can´t they receive writing
from a yearning and swift
void?
From a primordial nothingness?
Can´t they mortgage their crystal palace
their submerged house?
Can´t they rebelliously peddle little stars?
Can´t all poor poets steal books?
Can´t they read so
the complete works by Samuel and Ezra and John
by Juana Inés, Alejandra and Gabriela
by Anne and Margaret and Stevie
by Wallace and Edgar and Charles
by Arthur and Paul and Vladimir
by Dulce and Marina and Marosa?
And etcetera and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera?
Can´t all poets
add more beauty to beauty
and more horror to horror?
Can´t they draw maps and routes
of the invisible, futuristic city
foretold by their dreams?
Can´t they pursue the intangible
Move towards permanence
so that a poem
becomes a closed and completed vehicle
to treasure a present without behind or beyond?
Can't they unfold and transmigrate
can't they achieve mindfulness
Can´t they stammer forever
into everlasting silence?
