April 2017 Vol. II No. IV
Not your ordinary poetry magazine!
If good coffee (or just the concept of coffee), great books, sharp wit, and great authors excite you, we are for you!
General Poetry Page with Suzanne Robinson
Use links below to connect to other poetry sections
I Had a Meeting with Generals of Absurd
A 14 feet deep ennui. May be 15 or 16.
I don't know. Despair enclosed in a
gothic cathedral, steaming inside an urban ventilator .
How I wish to open your skull
like a fortune cookie; to steal the ores
of horror, encrypted inside like the words of Roman gods.
Time silently moans in quantums of minimal deaths.
The conclave swells in concaves
of heart-attacks in some parallel, perpendicular
or slanted universe.
A void pulsates in a void of a void in a void.
Let it sinks like bass canon, the sounds
of lack projected
on lo-fi grains of a half-awake illumined absurd.
Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/Lecturer from Kathmandu, Nepal. His recent publications were with Red Fez , Kyoto , Your One Phone Call, Jawline Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Yellow Mama, Fauna Quarterly, Beatnik Cowboys, After The Pause, Poetry Pacific, Silver Birch Press and Vox Poetica.
​
IT’S THE COMPANY YOU KEEP
We wait together,
magazine on my lap,
wonder how anyone
could read in this situation.
You’re the only woman there
who isn’t with her mother.
You say, it’s what
happens if you love too much,
whatever that means
You hate men,
you tell me,
and not even for the way
they will not stand by you.
You hate men because they write
these pamphlets in the waiting room,
because you have to use
the bathroom down the hail
as there’s one of them in white overalls,
working on the sink in this one.
You hate men because
the female doctor is sick
and it’s a male who’ll be seeing you.
In deference to my company though,
you mumble “Thanks for being a friend.
Ah friend . . . the third sex.
​
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Schuylkill Valley Journal, Stillwater Review and Big Muddy Review with work upcoming in Louisiana Review, Columbia Review and Spoon River Poetry Review.
And
I sanded our love
page by page,
and poem by poem,
and we’ve moved on
to play new parts or stages.
​
I was scared
because you didn’t
I don’t think you did
—I didn’t?
didn’t want to admit it
I admit it.
Because one day we weren’t
well you were
and I was, or was not,
but pages and pages
of Ulysses on my porch all summer
in hell:
smoking
reading
languishing
hating
loving
nothing
but pages of me, pages of Ulysses,
who I was and who I was not—
and were you too many or not enough?
I know what we were,
and I know now
what I am without you :
what we are now : parallax, or less,
never more than lost thoughts or memories
on passing clouds that span our shores.
​
Maxwell Fabiszewski