You Me and Forever Love
The moonlight fails the thought prevails to live a lie and yet i spy through the keyhole of my being . Love lies there alone come out I say come out I pray and fill me so I may return your love to thee
art music poetry
The Whittlers Poem by Jackson
He leans forward,
there was a time, sonny
when I saw old men whittling
at the courthouse
sitting there on benches these men
were in overalls and wore
wool hats stained
from the sweat of
days spent in the heat,
in the field,
old grey wool hats
stained with work.
They whittled, these old men
and spat tobacco juice
on the courthouse steps
and sometimes they grabbed
their stubble’d chin
and waved a skinny finger
as they made a point about
“them this”
and “them that”
but mostly it was the weather
and the outlook for the weather
and how they could work no more
and they whittled at the courthouse
and could be seen on Saturday,
our day in town.
I can sometimes see those
old farmers
spitting tobacco juice,
whittling,
and one of them looks
not quite at me but
above,
“Is that your boy?”
by david michael jackson
Janet Kuypers “Crazy” 4/23/17 short story feature
On April 23rd, 2017, people got together at the weekly Austin poetry/comedy/music open mic at Kick Butt: Spoken and Heard, and Janet Kuypers was the feature performance that night, where she chose to perform her short story “Crazy”. (The video playlist below shows not only the 4 videos of the performance in 2017 but also teaser video where Kuypers read portions of the story at open mics around Austin TX to advertise the show, as well as two video sections of the first time she ever performed that show, in Chicago.
[tubepress mode=’playlist’ playlistValue=’PLYa-AZK78_hoiba0zivDI6MdWnvu0eKbi’ ]
Before the show started she also released a chapbook of the short story, and this chapbook “Crazy” is still available online even during her reading, so anyone could (and can) download as the chapbook as a PDF file for free any time.
Six Poems by Allison Grayhurst
Six Poems by Allison Grayhurst
Resolve
Burning in the middle
where the sickness gets in,
and my expression is foiled
by an inaudible aim.
Clouded like a bad fragrance
soaking into the pours, making it hard
to breathe. Hard to breathe in like
a petal crushed into a ball, or like a poem
with no testimony.
But I will not be taken in.
I will forge a path for my energy,
find new neighbours, something
unbroken to hold on to.
Take This!
Greed. Grief.
Screaming in the vacant aftermath
where such a scream contains, then releases
the toxins, separates the truth from the immobilizing
confusion of evil.
A smoke cloud of charred pride.
The lie of worry, the torn pages
of prophecy laid out,
caught by the wind, carried
toward God as this scream is
carried – a boxed burden
waved high
into a dull sky.
Without Soul
I felt the pressure between
my hands, drive through
my cortex and embrace
the tip of my brain with warmth.
It felt like fool’s gold, fake
but still providing glitter.
I felt twisted with unknowing,
degutted of all things I hold sacred.
And that was a coat over my corpse,
pennies placed over my eyes. That was
for me, forging forward
with no significance, with no discernable
regrets.
Rilke
You have given me
a stoic ideal and also
the comfort of knowing of the deepest dreamer’s fragility.
You – in the rain,
running with your rage, disappointment and poverty
until you reached the angels and the animals
who spoke to your uncertain heart and spilled
their clarity into you, into words for you that formed
like a reprieve from the monsters and the
chaos of failure. They held you in their
Sabbath for a moment of prayer, until
thrust again into your anguished wilderness, you sunk
away from joy, leaving behind an imprint of happening –
engrained in the realm of all else that ripples
intangible, eternal.
The Wall I Walk Through
Sophistication underneath
a set of sad droopy eyes.
The bland dream of civilization
slicing my fingers
as though my flesh was a watermelon.
I see no point but the point
of love, and the interaction between two
in love or just loving.
I see that a relationship can only happen
when both parties are giving –
all else is just in process
of passing.
Sculptor
So hard & regal
are the cry of your creations.
A sadness that moves
to be opened:
Stone stuck
movement. Watchers
in the distance
breathing out
your madness.
Old like
love, your roots
have no end. They burrow
with a strength no god
could hinder.
Your hands
outstretched
to the foreign dancer:
shrewd as passion,
life-filled
as the sea.
Some of the places my work has appeared in include Parabola (Alone & Together print issue summer 2012); Elephant Journal; Literary Orphans; Blue Fifth Review; The American Aesthetic; Agave Magazine; JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Drunk Monkeys; Now Then Manchester; South Florida Arts Journal; Gris-Gris; The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry, Storm Cellar, morphrog (sister publication of Frogmore Papers); New Binary Press Anthology; The Brooklyn Voice; Straylight Literary Magazine (print); Chicago Record Magazine, The Milo Review; Foliate Oak Literary Magazine; The Antigonish Review; Dalhousie Review; The New Quarterly; Wascana Review; Poetry Nottingham International; The Cape Rock; Ayris; Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry; The Toronto Quarterly; Fogged Clarity, Boston Poetry Magazine; Decanto; White Wall Review.
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three of her poems have been nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, and she has over 1050 poems published in more than 425 international journals and anthologies. Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995. Since then she has published twelve other books of poetry and seven collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman. Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012. In 2014 her chapbook Surrogate Dharma was published by Kind of a Hurricane Press, Barometric Pressures Author Series. In 2015, her book No Raft – No Ocean was published by Scars Publications. More recently, her book Make the Wind was published in 2016 by Scars Publications. As well, her book Trial and Witness – selected poems, was published in 2016 by Creative Talents Unleashed (CTU Publishing Group). She is a vegan. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
Ryan Quinn Flanagan | Six Poems
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his other half and mounds of snow. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Word Riot, In Between Hangovers, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
Accumulation is Sweeping the Nation
She doesn’t have to pay any rent so she
wastes money elsewhere. Has three shit boxes in the driveway,
only one of them actually starts.
She thinks of them as status symbols
instead of shit boxes in much the same way
a hoarder is wealthy because they have collected
seven rooms of floor-to-ceiling magazines.
But this one, the mouth on her; she’s a real treat:
has a Nile monitor, three dogs, a python, two birds, one cat,
and many goldfish…more symbols of her perceived wealth,
no doubt. Never putting out any garbage. Making $15/hr…a true giant of
finance. Her boyfriends all low functioning and on parole
and cheating on her with other girls that only have one car
and no pythons. She can’t understand it.
They probably throw out their garbage
as well.
Love is a Motherfucker
I spill my beer
on his kitchen floor
on New Year’s Eve
Nerve damage.
An old work injury
from years of menial
labour.
In the next room
his coke dealer lays out a few lines
on a cd case.
Running back into the kitchen
he tells me he loves this woman
my wife works with
on a sex line.
I tell him she entertains
many strange men
one after the
other.
Much unprotected sex.
That syphilis
can be common as
hiccups.
But still
he is not deterred.
This is love,
he is certain.
I give him her beeper
and he leaves
a message.
Global Warming
The vomit was yellow and chunky
and drying
at the foot of a mailbox
and I thought of global warming,
how vomit could not stay wet anymore
and all the blood too, that metallic smell,
the darkened colour it becomes when it coagulates
and the piss of course,
don’t forget the many piss trails
of the city
that are also dry and yellow
but not at all chunky like
the vomit.
Science is fun.
Not the science of highschool science class
but rather the science of myself:
bending over to fart,
trying to send a butterfly
to the moon.
Our Man in Europe
The house is gutted, the fish too,
both house and fish gutted as we all are
our innards strewn over the grass line
left for the flies –
and our man in Europe pulls his hair out
over the markets
THE MARKETS!,
THE BLOODY MARKETS!,
he screams
the rollercoaster of the markets
that mean less than buzzing dung piles
down 136 points in sweaty sporting team absentia
the man or woman in bed beside you
kissing the hangman’s ample neckline
more bad sex than bad driving
folding chairs and folding people
everyone giving it up, going through the motions
it’s deplorable really, the whole shebang…
leaky faucets and leaking bladders
the drywall and the insulation pulled out of the walls
until there is nothing left
not even the heart
everything disembowelled
eviscerated
devastated
shattered
reeling.
Try to Explain Girl on Girl Porn to the Mother
of Your Child
Say popular things
and you will have
many friends.
Say unpopular things
and it gets guilty show trial lonely
very fast.
The boo birds out in numbers.
Try to explain girl on girl porn to the
mother of your child.
Like sitting up in bed
trying to give yourself
head.
No one likes the truth.
Yours
or anyone
else’s.
Why do you think
there are so many lawyers
in the world?
Someone
to explain away
your many shortcomings
when you cannot.
Steeeeeee-rike
A child outside
cries because he has struck out
again.
His father tells him to stop swinging like a girl
while his mother and a few of her drunk friends
sit on the back deck cackling,
booing each time the child
strikes out.
And he hasn’t hit one yet.
It’s been this way for hours.
You think they’d throw the kid a bone
now and then
but what do I know?
I guess he’ll be used to striking out
when he’s older:
with women
with jobs
with expectations,
like all the
rest.