July 2018 Vol. III No. VII
Not your ordinary poetry magazine!
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Free Verse Poetry Page with Suzanne Robinson
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They say the journey is everything
for Nathan Brown
For Texas poets who drive
four to ten hours
to reach a town of any size
and are expected to read
crack jokes
and sell books on arrival;
it’s more about the drinks
at the hotel bar.
As well as driving
to next reading
wearing two pairs of sunglasses
hoping no conservative decides
it’s time for culture or
target practice.
Or stopping in Waco
for double shot expresso
chewing aspirins
and resisting urge
to strangle the Flo
who wants you
to have a Blessed Day!
Poems about being gay
words flow across
my skin like hot breath thoughts
make me hunger for touch and sight
they want me to feel their pain
these poets
but I cannot because
I am not gay
I cannot go to their parties
their trysts and I am left out
of a love that burns hotter
than the possible retribution
I struggle to translate the need
burning to my own life
they are afraid
alive and I am jealous
When I’m alone
I want you to take my clothes
off, slowly, on a Cornish cliff
waves of grasses
no moon
tonight, but now it’s noon
and your mouth finds mine
fragile blue sky
sunlight breakable & thin
shooting glassy shards
through closed eyelids
the gulls become quiet
in reverence and heat
is no competition, butterflies
tickle my breasts & you
match ocean’s rhythm
such a beautiful time
to share, if I ever
get to meet you
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Michelle Hartman's third book, Lost Journal of my Second Trip to Purgatory, is a poetic treatment of child abuse and the effects it has on adult living. She is the editor of Red River Review.
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By The Tap Root
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Dawn leaks like a curtain crack.
A depthless gray shadows
the house in the flatland.
My sisters and I keep
out of the way.
Love stacks in packing crates.
Stubs of cold candle wicks
line the kitchen window ledge.
The frosty grass crunches
under the boot soles
of the moving men.
The compost pile holds
each frozen weed yanked
by the tap root
from last summer’s soil.
Headed south the car traces the scar
of highway for hours
across the pale prairie snow.
My sisters bicker, then sleep.
I remember dandelions,
watching their feathery teeth
scatter like last spring’s promises
lost in the wild heath.
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George R. Kramer finds that the shadows of late middle age add a different depth to the world that he perceives, and tries to offer that altered perception in his recent works.
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WHEN HORSES SPOKE
In ancient times
horses could speak:
Genghis Khan’s cavalry
recited poetry
horse to rider all
the way across Asia
stabbing into Europe
like a flowering sword.
At Troy, confused
by a wooden statue
that would not talk
Aeneas’ mount
nudged him out the gate
while Cassandra
spoke of equine
blood and betrayal.
Hannibal’s army
defeated by whispered
conversations overheard
between horses
and elephants
starving along the way
as they crossed
over the Alps.
The last horse
to speak, Caligula’s
consul, Incitatus,
slept in marble stalls
eating oats flecked
with gold until
he lost the power
of speech, falling
asleep for the last
time in the emperor’s arms.
Centuries later
at Little Big Horn
Crazy Horse’s pinto
could read his thoughts
charging through bullets
and arrows to Custer’s side
riding through dust
and sky into one mind
weeping when at last
all he heard was quiet.
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MICHAEL MINASSIAN is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017).
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Peeling
A hall of doors.
No.
Just the frames one behind the other,
spreading, making tracks, multiplying
seeding off, when I look too close.
A wide labyrinth
curving, enfolding
—fanning out.
Shells of skin, shells of soul.
Waiting. Left.
The stakes of choices and chance.
The lost treasures and the lurking fear
of pain
—which might escape, push
or deform.
Shells of air.
So many cast-off clothes, bits of life.
Pieces broken like candy to split and be consumed
by _____.
You can put your own word there, it doesn’t matter.
There is a price for Substance.
She claws
—out of the shell.
There is always a shell
discarded like so much sand.
Layers. Layers.
Every door another layer.
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Ana Hahs is an English major at San Jose State University in California. She uses poetry as a tool to explore her own emotions but she does not believe that the reader’s interpretation should be limited to her original intent.
I'll take whatever i can
a bright december day
and i'm still getting old
still alone in a way
i doubt anyone can fix
but i slept better than usual
and the light
is mellow like ripe peaches
smooth like naked flesh
and it may just be
the interplay of sun and xanax
but the dogs are chasing something
somewhere far from me
and the snakes are in the thickets
fat and shiny, asleep.
i don't care what they ate.
futility as hard as my fist against your teeth in full passion of momentum
the moment you
see them all sitting at
the family table
you think of dust
and cans and
things arranged in shelves.
casually eats a piece of fruit,
the gesture speaking of
drownings and
suffocation
like jewels harassing
a once unencumbered neck.
her daughters, barely
conscious at 3 and 4,
hang on to the adults
with their stares,
as if trying to extract
some kind of secret magic.
the husband stands behind her
hand on shoulder
starched
moustached
Apollonian
as cool as gargoyle slab,
proposing a toast.
the ghosts are gone elsewhere.
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J.C. Mari resides in Florida. His first poetry collection is "The sun sets like faces fade rise before you pass out", published by Lost Alphabet Books.
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Virga
Through metamorphoses I'll serve
my worst aversion. In my dream
you'll ask if that's an ocelot and I'll say,
That's an ocelot to ask,
and, Down in front,
and, La la I can't hear you,
as my mother's in the way.
And one day everyone who has
a mother wants a hula hoop
the next day no one does –
by no one I mean Alvin, cartoon chipmunk,
and by no one I mean sweets are for the sweet
and handed candy I say, Don't mind if I do.
I See You and I Raise You
It's survival of the least fit now –
reality, exaggerate your faults!
When I am on the fractal frontier
of propriety, a golden calf
is in my absence cast,
at last the center of my mass.
The foot that gets too far in front of me
will blindly find the ice and slide.
As complicated as connection is,
remorse does not preclude recidivism
but by definition paves its way
and condemnation is forgiveness is permission.
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Heikki Huotari is a retired math professor, the recipient of the Gambling the Aisle chapbook prize and the author of the collection, Fractal Idyll, which appeared in early 2018.
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Reflections on Beowulf
We swore she was of the race of Cain.
Wyrd is, and will always be, God’s equal in the universe,
Professor George proclaimed.
But for now, I am the master of your fate.
Fail this class and you draft dodgers, pacifists
and dumb asses will pack your duffels for Vietnam!
Poor Whitey Joe, who misspelled Hrathgar, grand mogul
of the Mead-hall and mid-term ten-pointer,
was blown neatly in half west of Saigon.
Wendell Lee, who mistook “tatters of food” for “taters,”
the Irish kind he ate with beans in West Virginia,
lost both legs in Da Nang and went mad with Agent Orange.
I, who stayed up all night until my brain was a Scandinavian
stew of moors and moats, dragons, bards and kings—
Old English verbs dripping off my chin like Unferth’s hot ale—
got Dr. George’s only “A.”
Now, for the life of me, I can’t recall just who the hell Wyrd was,
or how Beowulf fared in the fenlands.
But I remember Wendell Lee, scrubbing toilets in the men’s dorm,
thinking about his girl in Boone County;
and Whitey Joe, who wept when Bobby Kennedy died,
locked in his room with Bob Dylan.
And how we put a name to the nameless beast
the bard called “Grendel’s Mother.”
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An earlier version of “Reflections on Beowulf” was published in Sow’s Ear Poetry Review in 2008.
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Gayle Compton’s poems and short stories have appeared most recently in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Main Street Rag, Tipton Poetry Review, and The Blue Mountain Review. Gayle lives in Pike County, Kentucky, home of hillbillies and internecine feuding.
My Grandpa’s Cognac Chair
There are indents for every
part of him to fit in
the right armrest’s hollow deeper
with pen marks and cinders
of cuban cigars
smudged into the skin of it
I retrace the rubber-soled scratches
in his ottoman
where he found his last bit of
energy to sigh into
the chair’s pattern
after a long day by the sea
I thumb the spaces in the leather
rose-stained chasms left
from the breath of him dropping down
as red slopped from his glass
the wrinkles by
his eyes or in the leather
I do not know which are deeper
Brittney Rangel lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.