January 2016 | poetry
It’s curious about the massed communicants,
not the few tied and suited boys, especially,
but the virginally, wedding-gowned girls
in lace and taffeta, prim alabaster angels
now pledged, going steady with the Church.
Are they truly knowledgeable at their age
to know right from wrong and to distinguish
heaven’s wine and manna from fruits of evil?
Mass ends and the newly sated pass
slowly, processing down the aisle;
at least one pre-nun, guided between
beaming parents, head tilted back, eyes
tight shut, hands still clasped in devotion,
is graced by the faith of incomprehension.
by Richard Hartwell
Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing, Rick would rather be still tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.
January 2016 | poetry
Bones of the trees
are showing now,
the terrible light.
Darkness is all
the cold holds, which
shivers out of sight.
The wind carries
on with sadness,
yet leaves no promise.
We hope for more
at summer’s end.
All we have is this.
by Tom Montag
Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013. He is a contributing writer at Verse-Virtual and in 2015 was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and Contemporary American Voices (August). Other poems are found at Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Provo Canyon Review, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere.
January 2016 | poetry
Becoming Aware of the Tide
Just today I feel older
Driving to the vet
Driving 17 miles for a hat I left behind
at a monthly meeting
Listening to a folk-rock album
awash in distracted serenity
Ebbing as soon
as it draws attention
Coleridge Stares at the Sea in Search of Star Ratings
We accept sponges
as they line up along our shores
Hate the sand-
glasses up, lying for the sun
Hate the strain-
bags happy to gulp burn
Melt over mogul diamonds buried
deep enough to require faith
by Mark Danowsky
Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Alba, Cordite, Grey Sparrow, Mobius, Shot Glass Journal, Third Wednesday and other journals. Mark is originally from the Philadelphia area, but currently resides in North-Central West Virginia. He works for a private detective agency and is Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.
January 2016 | poetry
Quietly with sly energy,
it circles a black hole
in this jungled universe.
feral mind feline creeping
pauses in pursuit, too ready
to nap another day away.
Oh this mind like the attic, bearer
of all rejects: artwork, furniture,
broken toys, cobwebs, dust motes
claim stale air.
Emotion is turned off, more a leaky pipe
for some replacement part
now on backorder, while the mind
Remains confused, eschews
uncorked sadness, challenges
action, the what if and what is
as it appears in the present.
The cat’s tail like an antenna picks up
a mouse dead behind the old
sewing machine table, stalks its remains
Through a packed jungle of unwanted
leftovers; none show rhyme nor reason.
Could that mind, more likely instinct
Than feelings lie among that pile
of castoffs already in play
between two large cat paws?
by Lee Landau
This poet writes with raw honesty about family events, those dysfunctional backstories. She shelters emotion from the snowy winters of Minnesota that spark her imagination. She writes about obsessions, both large and small that tumble through her poems. Publications include BlueStockings Magazine at Brown University, Wisconsin Review, Breath and Shadow, Avalon Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Ice Box Journal, Rockhurst Review, Vending Machine Press, The Monarch Review, Else Where Lit.
January 2016 | poetry
Moon jelly in the sea noodle
Shimmer of flying fish morning
Laughs to itself the sky has landed
Along the beach water dripping off its hair
Sometimes the world might
Come in a little ahead of the game
Today it looks like it was going to rain
Airwaves change a seagull into a musket ball
The lovely girl I’m too old & fat for
Sets her halo down
Next to her umbrella
It must get mighty rainy in heaven
& there’s still a star in the sky
A little pinkish around the edges
Gotta change this reality
Hold onto life by its tables & chairs
Typhoon voices too loud to be heard
Words bouncing around in the back of my mind
Rainfall rattles the windowshades
The wind seems laboring
Up a long flight of stairs
A car horn honks my name
The cannonade of an endless heart
A new window has opened
Spider webs are forming
The ceiling is falling
The Eiffel tower in miniature
Infrared balloon bubbling
Between the starfish high
In the mountains
& what only time will tell
The world loves itself in a special way
A man doesn’t have to worry about
The sunlight on how it is. The shadow
Of the door swung its shadow. She kind of
Knew something was going to happen
It was a ruby chandelier shot thru a wineglass
Falling back into empty spaces
Handwriting too indecipherable
To remain undecoded
A book too complicated
To remain unfinished
Bricks ripped away
In the underground restaurant
To make it seem more rustic
There is a solidity
Even in dreams
With its last breath the mountain
Yodels down the ravine
Nothing but rock formations
Shaped like cathedral spires.
by Kurt Cline
Kurt Cline is Associate Professor of English and World Comparative Literature, National Taipei University of Technology. His full-length book of poetry, Voyage the Sun, was published by Boston Poet Press in 2008. Poems and stories have appeared, most recently, in BlazeVOX, Danse Macabre, Shotglass Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, HuesoLoco, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Black Scat, and Clockwise Cat. Scholarly articles have appeared in Anthropology of Consciousness; Concentric, Beatdom Literary Journal; and Comparative Civilizations and Cultures.
January 2016 | poetry
Trying out for the Senior Class Play’s
romantic lead opposite my girl but coming in second
to the ever-popular handsome hunky Everett
then having to watch him romancing her
on-stage from backstage for weeks.
Waiting for my wife in this busy hair salon
with all the clipping, combing, coiffing
and fussing with hair length, color, body . . .
with the incessant small talk all these people wasting
so much time it’s hair for crying out loud!
As a youngster he was an altar boy
carrying the cross or The Holy Book
to the altar, his face stern with religiosity.
Today he’s in the ICU waiting for the doctors
to decide if he should stay there or go to hospice.
by Michael Estabrook
Retired now working around the yard and writing more poems or trying to anyhow. Noticed 2 Cooper’s hawks staked out in our yard or above it I should say explains the disappearing chipmunks.
