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 Formal & Rhyming Poetry                              with Vera Ignatowitsch

          Vision

 

I saw you clearly in a dream —

          you had become

Immaculate in that vast stream,

          and dropping from

 

That height, you poured out syllables

          exultant. Why,

I asked, do we return, old woes

          forgotten, sighs

 

Relinquished, yet on waking see

          no brighter world?

Not gone, you said, for clarity

          can still unfurl.

​

 

Jared Carter’s latest collection, The Land Itself, is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia. Carter lives in Indiana.

Anant Chaturdashi

 

Sticks started cracking, and the barn cats scattered:

a late-night stranger. On my property.

Hey, what you want? A feline tenor chattered

the moon was urgent, and a holiday,

urgent, and could he please please bathe his Shri

Shri God Ganesha in my reservoir?

 

Soon as I shrugged and muttered, Well, okay,

a whole family gathered. One, a daughter,

cradled no dolly, no mere avatar,

but him, they clamored, him! Could I not see

the tusks, the trunk, the pudgy little belly?

The god had flown here all the way from Delhi.

 

The whole family waist-deep in the water

took turns immersing him. The moon was full

and satisfied at last. What they possessed

was what possessed them—a reciprocal

devotion. They were home, and I, a guest,

observed, from my own land, their festival.

 

 

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, POETRY, and The Times Literary Supplement.

A Demurral

 

Why keep your senses grounded here,

Or let them have you sharp and clear

 

Who wakened you to numbered days

To yoke you to their futile ways?

 

While tickings winch you nearer toward

Your execution and reward,

 

Why not imbibe—or pick your trip,

Let them ram home the standard script

 

As you, absorbing what you like

Risk transport on a one-way flight;

 

Let our grand architects complain,

Who pull their mighty weight in vain,

 

Only to end as they began,

Fragile freight of a circling hand

 

That flicks the feeble out and in

And each back to his origin.

 

 

Poems by Tom Merrill have recently appeared in two novels as epigraphs. His latest book, Time in Eternity, can be purchased from Ancient Cypress Press.

Ritual Journey to Native America

 

So summer closes. Now we travel north

To Oklahoma, where they found “black gold”

On Uncle’s land. I’m twelve years old, and seated

Behind him, at the back of his red Mustang,

With cousins, singing “99 Beer Bottles,”

To pass time and improve my backwards counting.

 

My cousins laugh, for they are going home

To Indian country, leaving my loved bayous,

Returning to their clan another year.

The hot night wind whips hair into my eyes,

So I’m stung blind by tears — or so I tell them.

Have I brought with me Uncle’s Native dolls?

I can’t recall. The Mustang roughly rocks.

These shocks, as I sit settled at its rear,

Seem de rigueur for such an expedition,

As do the teardrops shed at my “removal.”

 

For years, I shall not understand their joy,

Returning to that tribal territory,

Till Tulsa — like a hideout — is my home,

Where I will find my everlasting love,

And where my half-blood, prized, first son is born,

Where I will feel that bond and that relief

In glimpsing everywhere an agnate face.

 

Familiar names I know and recognize:

Coushatta and the fierce Atakapas—

Although notorious for eating men—

I do not fear. The first beloved eyes

I ever saw in life were Indian.

But Pawnee, Tonkawa, are strange to me

And frightening — whatever they consume.

I shift and ask my cousins to make room.

 

​

Jennifer Reeser is the author of INDIGENOUS, Able Muse Press. Her writings have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, and The Hudson Review. Her work has been anthologized in Everyman’s Library, Poets Translate Poets, and others.

Theosebeia to Zosimus

(spoken by the lifelong pupil of the alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis)

 

I came to learn. That’s all. How close I kept

Your words—How close I copied each report,

How close I gazed into the deep retort

To see smoke turn to sand. Dead ashes wept

Rivers of livid flame. I gave my youth

To you, our Art, trusting your ardent spirit

To light my twist-filled way to Truth. I’d near it

And watch it recede. I’d stepped, blind, toward your Truth

To find it hidden. Each turn revealed a turn.

There was no Way. So long I thought your Word

Could turn the breathless clay in me

To gold. How could I hold my love to be

This base and brazen fraud? The emerald sword

Transfixes us on truth—I came to learn.

 

 

Daniel Galef’s “Imaginary Sonnets” have appeared in Measure, The Lyric, The Copperfield Review, Ars Medica, Volare, and the J Journal, among others. Besides poetry he also writes short stories and plays. Find him on Twitter at @DanielGalef.

Black Holes

 

Remember how we watched as Captain Kirk,

white knuckled on the bridge, tried to get clear

of the black hole, how nothing seemed to work,

so this could be his last final frontier?

Recall the image on the screen? A ring

of throbbing orange licking a dark void?

And how Kirk pulled off one last desperate thing

like ricocheting off an asteroid?

 

Turns out a real black hole looks just the same,

as close as cellphones to communicators.

Now for those fictions fact has yet to claim:

the Tricorder, the Universal Translator,

Tribbles, Klingons, Vulcans, the warp bubble,

Scotty, to beam us up when we're in trouble.

​

​

Anna M. Evans gained her MFA from Bennington College and teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her latest book is Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic.

On this page we publish selections of metrical poetry from our contributors. Submit your blank verse, metrical rhyming poems, villanelles, sonnets, sestinas, pantoums, and other formal poetry to betterthanstarbucks2@gmail. We love both traditional and experimental forms and subjects, and please do submit limericks and lighthearted verse as well!  Vera Ignatowitsch

The Hyper Texts

“some of the best poetry on the web” Vera Ignatowitsch

At Dusk

 

At dusk out on Plum Island, in October,

my friend and I sit on a ridge of sand

that overlooks the sea.

Indulging memory,

a child again, she takes her father’s hand.

When she grows tired, he lifts her to his shoulder.

 

Slowly, now, a darkness fills the hollows.

Splotches of sunset founder in the rills.

Closing her eyes, she sees—

beyond the guava trees

along that inland, homeward path she follows—

La Vega in the shadow of its hills.

 

As for me, I grip the captain’s wheel,

each salt air inhalation like a dram;

my dreams are all about

adventure, setting out—

until I feel myself adrift, off-keel,

and start the long way back to where I am.

 

We brace ourselves as we descend the dune,

caught up in time, itself a kind of tide,

whose whorls and eddies trace

the stories of a place.

Our footprints will get covered over, soon.

For now, they skirt the beachgrass, side by side.

​

 

Alfred Nicol’s most recent collection of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in 2016 by Able Muse Press. He has published two other collections, Elegy for Everyone (2009), and Winter Light, which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award.

White Horse Beach, 6 a.m.

            Plymouth, MA

 

This morning it’s all mine—the sea, the sand,

and lots of things that I don’t understand

but that I feel embracing me:  this air

that rushes to uncomb and salt my hair;

that far horizon, wider than ambition

or ego and insisting on submission

to larger forces; the emerging sun,

already brilliant though it’s just begun

its labors; and these wave-washed little stones

thrown here by mighty tides.  Each pebble owns

its spot, and spares no mercy for bare feet;

with no concern about the forced retreat

ahead, each will assert its sovereignty

for just a little while, not unlike me.

 

 

Jean L. Kreiling is the prize-winning author of two poetry collections: Arts & Letters & Love (2018,) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014).

White Night

 

Minutes. Hours. Darkness pressing

through the window. Not a breeze.

Freight trains at the level crossing

wail and goad my turning, tossing.

Lurid ciphers lengthen, glossing

over time’s hypotheses.

Night attends my second-guessing

days we were not meant to seize.

 

First published in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2013.

 

 

Catherine Chandler is the author of five books of poetry, including The Frangible Hour, winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. Her poetry blog, The Wonderful Boat, is at cathychandler.blogspot.com

Lighthearted Verse

Poetry Reading

 

Her voice a buzzing monotone,

          She first intoned her title,

Her mouth too near the microphone

She said, I think, our souls would moan

With howls like Allen Ginsberg’s own,

And slurred and blurred her dreary drone

          In tedious recital.

 

She gripped the podium on stage,

          Her poem never ending —

And only her decrepit age

Assuaged the next three readers’ rage

As, turning yet another page,

She spent our time as if her wage

          Depended on its spending.

 

As moderator, I did not

         Perceive a lot of choice

As murmurs grew: somebody ought,

No, had, to halt her verbal squat

So toad-like in our garden spot,

And find a way to staunch this rot

         By stoppering her voice.

 

So arms out toward, as I’d been taught,

         The middle of the mass,

I aimed, breathed out, and squeezed, and shot

The leather-lunged and doddering blot

Who’d droned along as if she thought

That once she'd seized the mike she’d got

         Some sort of life-time pass.

 

The general approach of Law,

          And many of its minions,

To shooting someone through the craw

For her inane blah blah blah blah,

However last that last last straw,

Is that it is a fatal flaw

         In not a few opinions.

 

The prosecutor even shed

          A manly tear to show it

Had moved him greatly she was dead:

“Her pure poetic spirit fled

Prosaic Death’s pedestrian tread . . . ”

“Wait, wait — ” the jury foreman said

          “You say she was a poet?”

 

The prosecutor said “Indeed!

          And she was published widely —

I’ll use your question to proceed

To show you.” He began to read.

At length, the foreman knelt to plead:

“Stop reading! We have all agreed!

          We can’t abide this idly!

 

“You’ve put us through this punishment

          And made your case absurder;

We find the shooter innocent

Of any criminal intent —

Indeed, we actively lament

Your silly try to represent

         This noble act as murder.

 

“We hold free speech must know its place

         If it is to continue:

You must not underbid your ace,

Nor doubt the Holy Spirit’s grace,

Nor sing the tune if you’re a bass,

For decency demands you face

          The moral law within you!

 

“But poets who have read too long

          Must all be superceded —

We urge you when you’re in a throng

While poets thus are in the wrong,

To make your protest very strong

And aim to end such ceaseless song

          With shot and shell as he did!”

 

The prosecutor gave a sigh

          And packed away his pleadings,

Then gave me such a look goodbye

It made me think he meant to try

To mutely say, or just imply,

That maybe I’d be wise if I

          No longer read at readings.

​

​

Not much is known about Marcus Bales, except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and his work has not appeared in The New Yorker or Poetry Magazine. His newest book, 51 Poems, from Lawrence Block Productions, is available at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r.

The Fig Tree

 

The fig leaf symbol’s one of History’s greats

As, inter alia,

It hides, discloses and exaggerates

Male genitalia.

The fruit itself suggests the female form —

Dripping with honey

The little hole breaks open, pink and warm . . .

The Bible’s funny.

 

First Published in The Asses of Parnassus.

 

 

Robin Helweg-Larsen is British-born but Bahamian-raised. As Series Editor of Sampson Low’s Potcake Chapbooks he strongly advocates formal verse . . . but surreptitiously writes other poetry as well. Please don’t tell.

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