IN THE TUMBLE, BEDSHEETS ROLL A BURN-THROUGH STING. A Poem by Benedict Downing

 
 
 
Vestiges of yesterday,
the touch:
contoured force of weight,
map of the route,
stride at the beach,
cutting out,
a stone figure of the story,
incised epicurean scars,
saltwater on our feet,
second of soaked ooze,
locked
at the moist goo,
to chew
a purple behavior,
drooping
in the swim,
bite the cherry,
pelting ego
to climb within,
necks are
ten feet long,
legs grappled
flapping equation,
answers
for the triangle,
a shade
that stirs,
tied on
webs
of munched ground,
a shrub to care,
stooped
bones
buoy up crack.
 
 
Perpendicular
drawn on spine,
scratched limbs,
soaky meat,
bestowed fat,
sit on a roof,
pile up cubist
entrails,
left lobe,
intestines,
kidneys,
right lobe,
the corpse in view,
burn through
the drawing,
memories of omitted
childhood toys,
the put-together valve,
meat sourced from various donors,
cushioned
construction to press,
three pieces,
not at all a perfect fit,
disparate dimensions,
blamed on size,
pellets and screws
bolt the amalgamated
steel
weighted on each step,
the stride squeezes
our lower ventricle.
 
 
Roots of the walnuts
hanged below,
as support
they rise
watching
inaudibly,
marvel at
the burning ashes
on the casserole,
fired blaze,
trails on the moving picture
strangers
guessing figures,
three blackboards
solve the equation,
place a blindfold to sleep it off.
 
 
Out here,
the ceiling remains
on sketches,
placed to
awaken at the scent,
tie a pendant to hang
the smirched dahlia
on a necklace,
scaled buds on
derma peel,
as the spit skims,
walnuts are slow
to sprout branches,
let us sit across
the chalk design,
out of the inflated chamber.
 
 
A tin cup,
pour the beverage,
comb your hair,
the jagged leather,
ripped wounds,
outside the sewn thread,
our hair may want partings.

 
 
Author bio:
 
Benedict Downing has written fiction, poetry since his adolescence. He joined local community reading circles, workshops, college literary groups, and ventured into his own. Has published fiction and poetry in literary magazines and journals. He is currently working in his second novel.
 
There are two published books written by Mr.Downing. A poetry book “Sidereal Reflux” (2011) and a novel “Epicrisis” (2014).

ISBN-13: 978-1499783056 Sidereal Reflux (Poetry)
ISBN-13: 978-1499774993 Epicrisis (Novel)

www.benedictdowning.com.
 
 
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Life Pictures. A Poem by Ben Nardolilli

 
 
 
His grip sucked the life
from ancient rivers,
whose substance was earth,
the welcome house for all
 
with sores on,
I received your words
without pride, with
the right human veins,
 
the world opened, others
persuaded you,
their eyes criss-crossed, flashed
like rotten anger
 
a salty soul,
witch of an euro-american legend
to our mouths,
a sweating gown
 
deep like the day,
orifices like lyres,
we commuted in the worse
on all their words and pictures

 

 
Ben Nardolilli currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, The 22 Magazine,Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, fwriction, THEMA, Pear Noir, The MinettaReview, and Yes Poetry. He has a chapbook Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, from Folded Word Press. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish a novel. Thanks for reading,
 
 
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Toasting the gods. A Poem by Scott Thomas Outlar

 
 
Little Man-child
trying to play with the Big Boys
pretending to be gods
up on Olympus
 
Careful with the hubris
lest ye fall like Atlantis
with Eve and all her serpents
 
Take a rib and suck it
down to the marrow
trying to find a First Cause
in the belly of the feast
 
It’s the passion of the Beast
welcome to carnage city
bringing the chaos nightly
 
Come dance with Bacchus
who wears the grapevines
on his head as a halo
glowing with the spilt blood
captured in the glass that ever flows

 
 
Scott Thomas Outlar lives a simple life in the suburbs, spending the days flowing and fluxing with the tide of the Tao River, marveling at the intricacies of life’s existential nature, and writing prose-fusion poetry dedicated to the Phoenix Generation. His words have appeared recently in venues such as Siren, Section 8, Midnight Lane Boutique, Dead Snakes, Mad Swirl, and Dissident Voice. His debut chapbook “A Black Wave Cometh” is forthcoming from Dink Press. More of Scott’s writing can be found at 17numa.wordpress.com.
 
 
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A Frog in the Bucket Thickens the Milk. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

 

What rhymes with lust
must, dust rhyme with lust
a wiggle, giggle, wriggle, a curl
stiletto – pain – signal
sign on for normalcy
on the street guys, dolls
 
Day after estrus, more than a scramble
a shambles, at home.
 
After the ball is over
our glorious swan song, seventy years on
is this the end of beginning or the beginning of the end
nightmares are here to help us
what’s the difference between, side show
or, slide show
it’s pointless to argue the point
 
Back to time
there’s no curtains for time
the show must go on.
 
After the ball is over, seventy years on
twenty fifteen
there’s no more winners
homage either to birds or worms
jump through the hoop into gorilla sky
bow down before the great strife
 
Sizzling bite gulp fizzy sprinkle scrumptious
peckish hot tasty pour butty lovely kitchens
frothy bubbly chunky plenty thick bangers
juicy dunk slurp – duh, Wilko

 
Coming soon – Day of the Jelly Baby
after the dust of war
has settled, change must
still we see the day
from star dust to eyes from ancient clay
the smell of lust, spawned in the dust.
 
A frog in the bucket thickens the milk.

 
 
About Author:
Robin Ouzman Hislop Editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal. Poetry Life and Times. Previously edited by Sara Russell who is now Editor of the sister paper li Poetry Lifetimes. In 2013 he joined with Dave Jackson Editor/Admin as Co Editor at Artvilla.com.
 
He now Edits both Facebook Pages PoetryLifeTimes and Artvilla.com as extensions of the Blog Sites at Artvilla.com.
 
He’s been previously published in a variety of international magazines, where recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina,The Poetic Bond Volumes The Poetic Bond and Phoenix Rising from the Ashes a recently published Anthology of Sonnets: Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. Submittals may be sent to robin@artvilla.com or editor@artvilla.com Please refer to our submittal guidelines at either of the sites.

 
 
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Hypatia and the Ruined Serapeum. A Poem by Ian Irvine Hobson

Excerpt from:
Awake in the Chamber of Darkness
(The Egyptian Sequence)

(Inspired by Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora)

Broken statues, torn scrolls,
shattered pottery, piles of ash,
and smoke (gently rising)
in the early morning quiet.

‘The mob have roasted knowledge, 
          silenced the Muses, stamped everything
          with God-infested words!’
mutters Theon.
          ‘And where now, oh father’ she whispers,
          ‘to speak the remnants of our world?’

Hypatia, too bright in the city
for the one God sun of Christ,
watches the skies lighten over Alexandria
          (unreal stillness).
Her Wanderers – Jupiter, Venus and the others -
          smashed or shorn of power,
this dawn, this new day for the writing

Is it here, in the clarity of her grief,
that she begins to see them 
          as if for the first time?
Not ‘circles’ but ‘curves’,
          not Ptolemy but Aristarchus. 

Soon enough the zealots will object
          to her and her knowledge, 
will attempt to erase this philosopher ‘witch’
from history, from discourse, from the dreams
          of troubled men.

They succeed for a time -
they do not succeed -
for the heavens are precise
          and stomach no faulty permutations.

My ‘curving’ planets, my
          celestial musicians,
my elliptoid wanderers
          (future astronomers will discover)
are welded 
          (of course she knows it thus!)
each to each
          in the slow 
orbits 
          of the possible.

 
About the Author
 
Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, fiction writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals – Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (10 editions 2005-2014). He coordinates the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo Kangan Institute (Bendigo & Melbourne, Australia) and has taught in the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine

 
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Windows, Doors, And Walls . An Ekphrastic Poem by Howard Richard Debs

 
 
h.r.debs.windows Photo by H.R. Debs
 
Here looking out the window, drawing back the drapery
to see through the pane, depending on the day,
squinting to view the dazzling light of a new morning
or seeing rain pouring down on the street below.
Sometimes it starts with rain, the day I think about
staring out the window, will I find myself today?
I can stay at the window or go to the door.
 
The door is closed until I open it and walk
out onto the sidewalk, bright with sunlight or
 
wet beneath my feet from the early
morning rain. I stand and scan
all that surrounds
me as I seize the day,
searching for a sign within the
compass of my shadow
on the pavement very far
from a place I can call home.
 
The walls I encounter walking on my way,
they are all around to make me stop
and wonder where next to go while still
seeking a telling sign, the walls
change my course, shift my direction.
 
Along the way doors open to new worlds within
should I enter upon such invitations—
 
and other doors lead to nowhere
and if I dare turn
 
toward a route that
takes me to what
appears ahead
I will find myself
in a place beyond
where I am here now
and given time, I will
meander amid the
windows, doors, and walls h.r.debs Photo by H.R. Debs
there in a place
I can call home.

 
 
hr debs portrail
 
 
Howard Richard Debs received a University of Colorado Poetry Prize at age 19. After spending the past fifty years in the field of communications, with recognitions including a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America, he has recently resumed his literary pursuits, and his latest work appears or is forthcoming in Calliope, Big River Poetry Review, Poetica Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Misfitmagazine, Star 82 Review, Belle Reve Literary Journal, Verse-Virtual, Dialogual, Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, Remarkable Doorways Literary Magazine, Indiana Voice Journal, Blue Bonnet Review, China Grove, Yellow Chair Review, and On Being, among others.
 
His background in photography goes back many years, both creative and technical, and his photography will be found in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. Born and bred in Chicago, he now lives in sunny South Florida with his wife of 50 years Sheila, where they spend considerable time spoiling their four grandchildren. Author listing Poets & Writers Directory https://www.pw.org/content/howard_debs
Author website: http://communicatorsandcommunications.com/muse-ings/

 
 
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Oh, and what do angels do on such occasions? A Poem by Gabriella Garofalo

Oh, and what do angels do on such occasions?
I’d better not know, thank you very much –
A writer told her ‘trust always pays back’,
A doctor told her ‘better an evil mother
than no mother at all’,
A hotshot told her ‘light always smites eclipses’ –
Boy oh boy, don’t they talk
A bunch of crap sometimes? –
Well, dreams come first and she saw
The prophet being shown
An almond branch –
Yes, God, yes, nice job,
Only it was doomed to wilt, right?
You ask me why, you ask me when?
I dunno, maybe at the midnight hour,
And no, I won’t be there,
She can make it without me,
she knows her stuff, doesn’t she,
That sower of lost harvests –
Do they call lovers ‘friends’ nowadays?
Well, light did –
Whenever I lay deep sixed, of course.

2015-07-10-0002

Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Blue branches”.

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Sanctuary. A Poem by Miriam C Jacobs

 

Each of them has his own room, here, his own cardboard pallet,
 
drawer. A mirror above a row of pipes reflects disorder’s emptiness.
 
Ideal Music, the shop next door, has electricity.
 
Sometimes late at night they can get inside, turn on lights, play records.
 
Once in a fit of drunken nostalgia for childhood,
 
for bottomless night and stars, Reggie busted out
 
a window over the enclosed alley between stores,
 
while Goose, weeping in Spanish for the cuts on Reggie’s hands,
 
leaned against the rain-soaked wall eaten with black mold,
 
a man in love. He pisses into empty beer bottles, sets
 
his good boots in a corner, still brushes his teeth. For him, their abandoned beauty
 
shop is World Navel, Jerusalem, their threesome a Sartre play – book
 
she’s never read – and the rooms are drawers. His mother lay him down
 
to sleep in a drawer, he’d told her once.
 
When she was a little girl she imagined a found life in household drawers,
 
their low ceilings, landscapes within them shut. She conquers her fear,
 
now, by opening, emptying. Reggie and Goose make cushions
 
from the contents: shreds of wallpaper, palm- size flecks of lead paint, leaking color bottles,
 
Styrofoam crusted with dried Chinese take-out, clothes or a lone shoe
 
discovered in the streets and carried back. On rainy nights they rip up these beds
 
for toilet paper, or shit out that broken window. Reggie’s vomit
 
stinks and then dries like a jack-less
 
telephone. These are toxins of particularity, poisons within the self.
 
Beyond these walls, it’s a nightmare staying alive, toxins of survival.
 
Goose is next door playing records. Music leaches through the walls:
 
Partridge Family’s Greatest Hits, Jerusalem of Gold.

 
 
 
Jacobs recent head
 
 
MIRIAM C. JACOBS is a alumnus of the University of Chicago and teaches college writing, literature and humanities. Jacobs is the editor of Eyedrum Periodically, the art/literature journal of Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, The East Coast Literary Review, Record Magazine, The Camel Saloon, Bluestem: the Art and Literary Journal of Eastern Illinois University, The King’s English, and Oklahoma Today, among other publications. Her chapbook of poetry, The Naked Prince, was published by Fort!/Da? Books in September 2013.
 
 
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