Better Than Starbucks Poetry Magazine Free Verse June 2017

General Poetry Page with Suzanne Robinson

Use links below to connect to other poetry sections

Walk

Against lights, on either side

traffic honking

at the midway, the meridian,

that too bright on gray

double yellow,

my mind in some dream state,

hungering,

& the traffic, the street a feast

many horns, much whizzing traffic,

a symphony carnival, my heart

some place else, perhaps with you

& the cat close to your nose for a kiss,

you two on the carpet rolling

bolts beyond

the hospital, that reel of Jose dying,

his lover’s eyes as sirens, a hearse

in my blood, yet I breathe in, blink,

think of you & the cat & reach

just like Jose

some other safe side.

Preparations

Here is the page of the sky——

grey to white before the V of geese.

It turns by several flocks at once,

banners of dots going southward.

Eyes follow as if reading sentences,

the hieroglyphics of directions,

& as the sun sets there is dragon-orange

with bloody Vermilion in these cumulus

wisps of clouds.

Now here is how the holy season

merges its silk——

Deliverance in the horizons'

calendar between the living

& the dead.

It is thin as breath,

that dimension of spirits,

& we sing of our harvests' stock

in the gardens being put to bed.

A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. amazon release is an art-text hybrid, "According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made)", a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial. In 2014 he began a webpage to gather links of his poetry being published in such zines as Great Works, Unlikely Stories, Quill & Parchment, etc., in one place: Poetry on the Line, Stephen Mead

Uncertainty

Suspended dust, Brownian-like,
it doesn’t make much sense.

How it must
in random flight evolve to intelligence.

Infinity of space,
dark matter’s loom, parallel universes arising.

Yet light erased, forever doomed upon event horizons.

Life codified,
nucleic acids
define just who we are.

Do we die,
firm to flaccid
and recycle through the stars?

Where are we?
There’s confusion
and undefined dimensions.

Perhaps we’ll see

parallel illusions
through wormhole extensions.

Man’s capacity
remains primitive,
yet still we cast conjecture.

The veracity
is that we’re limited
until some future lecture.

But is it time
or is it space
that fills the cavity?

The missing sign,
the saving grace
may simply be gravity.

We may find we’ve disturbed our fleeting reality.

As defined
by Heisenberg,
there’s always uncertainty.

Dr. James Nichols a physician and father of five children. James started writing as a form of therapy for the stressors of life and career. At 52, this Texan wants to live to see the day he can write more than work.

Gratitude

I wished for a single dew, but you

Have given me a whole morning

I wished for a little cloud, but you

Have given me a boundless sky

I wished for a petal, but you

Have given me an entire season

I wished for a small tree, but you

Have given me a range of mountains

So I have stopped making wishes

Just to feel grateful to you and all

Yuan Changming, nine-time Pushcart and one-time Best of Net nominee, published monographs on translation before moving out of China. Currently, Yuan edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include Best of Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1309 others.

LIBRARY VISIT

I appear inside

the library,

rain is falling on me,

but the books are dry,

their covers captivate me;

my reflection

filters through them,

paging me to lives of others;

no fleshly ones inside,

till Monday nine a.m.

My vision

of this cosy, bookish space

fades away,

windows washed with rain.

So resumes my walking

in the gardens,

regathering the colours,

patterns, textures,

scents and voices

of a life long lived in books;

then drawn again,

I peer inside

the library.

Mark Marusic lives and writes in Australia.

"Cappuccino Escape”

As icy breezes blow off indifferent waves,

The biting chill of the hour

Rivals the hollow chill deep inside.

Watching rhythmic ripples under a moonless midnight sky,

I remember . . . once alone, I’m now lonely,

One pair of feet shuffling

Against loose gravel, soft with rain,

Once an assertion of independence,

Now a vexing echo of a void.

Too stubborn to cry,

Too tired to scheme,

I turn my tender eyes towards inviting lamps,

Resolved to seek sweet solace

In anonymous smiles

And steamy, creamy foam.

Adrian Slonaker works as a copywriter and copyeditor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He has a master's degree in interdisciplinary humanities from California State University - Dominguez Hills. His interests include vegetarian cooking, the Russian language, Victorian horror fiction, wrestling, and 1960s pop music.

CFO

The winter vegetable

of a man sits without

expression behind his

burl wood desk in what

he calls a “Spartan”

office, sizing people

up through eyelids

squinted as tightly

together as the halves

of walnut shells, one

hand near a photograph

of his trophy family,

the other on “The Art

of War,” using the

inquisitor’s trick of

maintaining silence

in order to wring a

confession (or in this

case, a greeting) from

the person opposite

to him.

Kyle Heger, former managing editor of Communication World magazine, lives in Albany, CA. His writing has won a number of awards and been published in 44 publications, including Blue Collar Review, Nerve Cowboy and U.S. 1 Worksheets.