November 2018 Vol. III No. IX
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!
Note: drop downs from the menu below sometimes take a few seconds to load.
We have a new publishing schedule!
Regular Features Pages
​
​Free Verse with Suzanne Robinson
Haiku with Kevin McLaughlin
Formal & Rhyming Poetry with Vera Ignatowitsch
Poetry Translations with Michael R. Burch
International Poetry with Michael R. Burch
African Poetry with Michael R. Burch
Sentimental Poetry with Anthony Watkins
​Prose and Form Poetry with Anthony Watkins
Fiction
More Fiction!
Better Than Fiction! (creative non-fiction)
The Interview
Interviewee Poems
Featured Poems​
Publisher’s Choice:
Formal Poetry
​
Even As We Seize the Day
A broken clock is
a photo of the moment
its hands stopped moving.
We light our cob pipes
on the recliners, our lips
shriveled like mummies.
Behind steady smoke,
faces look like clock faces.
We try not to breathe.
But the smoke dissolves.
Somewhere, a parking meter
dings. Anubis stirs.
Ravens flap their wings
awkwardly to float in place,
but the wind just laughs.
An afternoon chill
pierces our fleece-lined loafers.
We die a little.
Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Amarillo Bay, Prelude, Measure, and elsewhere.
​
Editor’ s Choice:
Free Verse Poetry
​
Hollow Rings
The sky bruises slowly
Blues slipping into violets, slashes of red
purpling on to a stain of pink
Before the sun,
at first a pretty little light trick
involving a folded penny
then a thumbnail
chewed off to drift on,
slinks off
finally just another rain dog’s hidden tail scamper
leaving me, the flea, squinting & lost,
in its ritual dusk bleed.
No. I don’t pay ‘em any mind
(when they say “it’s always darkest right before the dawn”)
Let me be
the darksome judge
the stygian evaluator
These eyes, despite the red rims,
kaleidoscopic spiderwebs of busted veins
& hollow rings,
can still see,
even
through the tears.
A.S. Coomer is a writer and musician. His novels include Rush’s Deal, The Fetishists, Shining the Light, and The Devil’s Gospel. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a “record label” for poetry. He coedits Cocklebur Press. He likes tacos. A lot.
​
​
Editor’s Choice:
International Poetry
​
Freedom
Against a dark-hued
Threatening sky’s
Shrieking winds
Flies a stormy petrel,
Flapping her tiny wings
Dominated by the elements
Yet,
Soaring
Over the
Sea,
A striking
Kinetic image
Of pure
Aerial
Freedom.
Sunil Sharma is a Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor, and author with nineteen published books: six collections of poetry; two of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel; eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism; plus one joint poetry collection.
The Interview
with Rae Armantrout
by Suzanne Robinson and Anthony Watkins
Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, etc. Her books have appeared in Spanish, French, Italian, and German editions. She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She currently lives in the Seattle area.
SR: How do you decide when to write? Do you set aside time every day or is it more spontaneous?
RA: I allow myself time almost every morning to jot in my notebook or to work on poems that are already underway, but I don’t force it if nothing comes. I will make notes during the day too, wherever I happen to be. I start writing whenever something nags at me, puzzles me. I write towards discovering what that feeling is and where it comes from.
SR: Do you outline your poems?
RA: Not at all. I feel like if I already knew where a poem was going, I wouldn’t bother to write it. I really see writing as a way of thinking in real time. Parts of poems come to me at different times in different circumstances. My process involves deciding what goes with what — but I can’t do that until I have the pieces, the “what.”
We have a new publication schedule.
Better Than Starbucks will now be published bi-monthly (every two months).