Better Than Starbucks Poetry Unplugged May 2020

Poetry Unplugged

Reflection in Double Glazing

In this place

they trade souls

which some believe

actually exist

and I say

“what sort of creature

is this,

a monster”

to the parallel panes of glass

which pass

an image of the speaker

reflected one against another

against the night

in a series of frames

that stretch into the past

until the task is done.

It is the horror

of the empty glass

with starlight

as a background

and the executioner moon

suspended

above a stretched horizon

extended like a neck,

an apparition

of everything that is cruel.

It is cruel,

this reflection.

Martin Porter lives in Somerset, UK. He has been published in New Zealand, USA, and UK. A Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee, he writes poetry and micro-prose. He was a member of the New Zealand National Flash Fiction Competition committee from 2016–2019.

Fake Blood and Rubber Bats

Out of the subterranean refuge

where the modern lepers

are burning both ends of a roman candle

under the irony of their silver spoons

came the cacophony of laughter

which led me to this Svengali

holding court with his wizened gloom

then this methuselah spoke

with a mouthful of

rueful clarity,

“my immortal fatigue

will gladly usurp your

existential disease,

always dying inside your head

until life leaves you

sleepwalking eternally,”

save for the specters under sheets

the only ghosts I knew

came out on Halloween

if you asked me about the macabre

I’d probably go on about

fake blood and rubber bats,

but after seeing that vampire down below

lamenting about an elusive grave

as if he couldn’t smell

that everyone in his congregation were all on death row.

First published in Terror House Magazine.

Eddie Brophy is a poet and blogger from Massachusetts and has an MA in Poetry. His poems have appeared in several literary magazines. You can visit his blog at: https://eddiebrophywriter.weebly.com.

online dating (2019)

she was so beautiful

I ignored it

when she said

the government had

tortured her

by satellite

while she was in the pen

perhaps I was lonely

so I ignored it

when she said

she thought I was a fed

sent to play her boyfriend

it has ended now

so I don’t need an answer

to which of us

is the magnet

and which is

the fridge door

Luke Kuzmish is a father, husband, software developer, recovering addict, and writer from Erie, Pennsylvania. He has published four chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Hurry Up Wagon, and has also been published in online and print journals.

After Hamlet Died

From the carnage in the court of Denmark

only one man survived.

What became of Horatio?

I suspect he became a bureaucrat

in the service of Fortinbras.

He, after all, knew where the bodies were buried —

or not.

And he was a courtier to his bones.

If Ophelia had lived, they might have

married each other,

as survivors often do,

but she, in his mind,

was covered with sodden lilies.

So he lived for his work

and grew old,

a relic of another age,

dying at last full of honors.

All his life he had nightmares

that saw everything soaked in blood.

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books Asperity Street and Catechism are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine (lightpoetrymagazine.com).

Cursed

The zodiac cursed me,

sewed my mother’s love into a star

and banished it to a galaxy so many light years away

that I will be a memory of a vaseful of ashes

before it ever shines on me.

It should be enough to spin on my own axis,

to spiral around the cosmos following my own light,

so why do I feel I have been plunged into perpetual night?

Christine Liwag Dixon is a writer and musician. She is currently working on her first novel.

The Emptiness that Marks Us

Thousands of years from now, the dead bodies we leave behind

will have turned to lye and eaten their way through the earth. Great caverns

will spread beneath our cemeteries as bodies melt through caskets

as empty and huge as the cathedrals crumbling above ground.

Small creatures will find their way into these caverns, their descendants

slowly becoming blind with each new generation. Pools of water

filled with eyeless fish and newts will spread through the tunnels

perhaps still carrying traces of embalming fluid and lead.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her newest poetry collections include In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), and A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing).