Linda M. Crate- Three Poems

adder

you're the adder
in the grass I must slay
for your poison has
killed many with its mighty
zing; lips of false promises denied
glitter in your greedy eyes
be still and die, venomous snake,
before I crush your head under my heel.

broken castle

oceans of emotion lay buried beneath
the surface and they threaten to overwhelm
and destroy me, but you conjure only the
best moons and stars to pirouette their
light into my life; I had once forgotten
the topography of a smile yet you have
revived the sunshine in my life when I
thought darkness would sweep into
me and drag me  through a riptide you
were there to rescue me a princess locked
in a castle of herself - you broke the
glass of introspection and forced me to
breathe in the reality of the world and
you, and I'm all the better for it.

goblin queen

if you were Jareth
I'd be your goblin queen,
I would kiss away
your anger and hold unto
my owl in a love fiercer
than the talons of a hawk
or the teeth of a bobcat -
you danced your magic
into my life;
you stripped away all
illusions that life was predicatable
or easy, yet through all
the marrow of me you
bit through you left me a
promise of eternity,
and I would be a fool
if I didn't take it -
dance over me your riddles
wash me into you,
pour your love into my hips
and gyrate sense out of meaning,
give me the rainbow
you once promised me,
and let us recolor this world.

John Grochalski- A Poem

between stupidity and jealousy

i always think the worst

of children in this digital age

that they are

lazy, dull, and ignorant

slabs of flesh

but here it is

a saturday morning in april

a stone’s throw

from my thirty-eight birthday

and i’m walking behind some kid

down a dewy spring street

heading to work

with another goddamned hangover

and a pathetic lunch

while in his hands

this kid has

movies, video games

and a worn looking baseball glove

a whole day

clasped to his breast

as he knocks on a neighbor’s door

and is let inside

by someone’s beautiful mother

while i continue

down the drowsy street alone

my mind stuck somewhere

between stupidity and jealousy

my heart like a hangman’s noose

in the stiff, yellow sun.

David Pointer- A Poem

Global Domination Hits a Snag

After the Black Panthers,

Malcolm X, the Weathermen,

and others fought for economic

and social justices it was a

posthumous Martin Luther

King continuously receiving

all the corporate media credit,

as the system moved in with

bulldozers-n-bad money dreams

erecting correctional facilities,

adding SWAT teams turbo,

outsourcing billionaires and

their corrupt fortunes to the

Cayman Islands as the world

wide wage slavery progressed

into the Occupy Zone like Zorro

reincarnated in 99 percent of

of an erect population, and

they were tired of being

shoved off the global

imbalance beams of

high world finance.

Donal Mahoney- A Poem

Boysenberry Eyes Awhirl

A Caseworker's Nightmare

In a corner of the room

scribbles of loose yarn soar,

interweave and dive

like coasters at a carnival.

At dusk rats slither from the drain

and barrel through the room

stirring atom puffs of dust

beneath the paper sprung

tongue out from each wall.

Tails wound tight, the rats

skate their figure eights

between the table legs and swirl.

They pause to supper on salami bits, 

gherkin nodes, crusts of ancient bread.

At dawn, with boysenberry eyes awhirl,

they belly back and leap atop the sink.

Popping sounds announce

the drain has called them home.

-----------------------------------------------------

Donal Mahoney spent two years as a 

caseworker in the Cabrini-Green Housing 

Project in Chicago, circa early 1960s,

with 458 families in two high-rise buildings.

Fantasies like this are the result.

Doug Draime- Two Poems

 Jesus Is Now

sanctifying your rotting thoughts

purifying the vessel of wrong action

&  illusionary desire

which you once called you    

& is a light moving up inside you 

burning to a crisp/ ending the days of

hateful coalition of wayward spirits 

&  pointless thoughts

that assembly of confusion

which devastates the promise

of your faith

In My Dream

 There were 10 literary critics,

all poets, mostly elitist asses, sitting at a long table.

I’m sitting on a lounge chair

drinking a Pepsi in a glass

with ice and lime, and munching

on potato chips.  They’re acting

as judge and jury, debating among

themselves, as to whether

I am any good as a poet.  And I’m

sipping on my Pepsi

trying to remember if I ever wrote

a poem for a collective body of poets?

Yes, I had, I remembered, I’d written several  poems very  

critical the literary establishment.

I lose my train of thought when

a pretty, sexy young lady begins to read one

of my poems (she says).  But it’s not my poem,

it’s one by Steve Richmond, which I’ve read before,

a very good one, so I listen intently and don’t bother

to correct her.  I always wished I’d written that poem.

When she finishes a swishy looking guy

at the far end of

the table gets up and tells her

it’s Richmond’s.  She glares at him, sits down embarrassed

and starts sorting through

hundreds of my poems (and  hopefully a few of Richmond’s). 

Then they all begin arguing and sorting through the stuff.

A guy wearing a Walt Whitman mask

stands up to read a light verse

thing I wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

Most of them snicker at me when

he finishes, and asked me 

what I had to say in my defense. Defense?

(I’m addicted to grocery store brands of

potato chips, and those I was munching on

were a Safeway brand, which are particularly

yummy--so I finished the ones

in my hand and washed them down with a large

gulp of Pepsi)  I smiled and cleared my

throat.  “Look,” I said, “I didn’t choose writing,

writing chose me.  It just comes through me

that’s all.  That poem is the same as the rest

and I kind of like it.”  I said my piece and took

another drink of Pepsi.

“And that’s another thing,” says a 

little guy with glasses, who looks like

a myopic Fidel Castro, “all this nonsense

about poems coming through you, and,

all your Christian tendencies, have no

place in contemporary literature.”

The little guy sits down squinting at me.

I looked around and shrugged, and the sexy lady

who read the Richmond poem catches my eye.

She winks and reaches up to touch a

small gold cross hanging around her neck.

I wink and smile back.  And as I sat there

I remembered a John Berryman poem

in which he says, that Jesus Christ is

the only true literary critic.  So, I tell them

that.  Wow, that really pissed them off!

Robert Demaree- Three Poems

GROCERY SHOPPING, EASTER MORNING

The supermarket is not crowded:

Shoppers up and down the aisles

With a calm seriousness,

Notebooks of coupons, unadvertised specials,

A kind of reverence, the sense that

Perhaps they should be somewhere else.

For some it is like any other Sunday,

With its own rituals:

Young couples in tennis get-ups

Admire their children, make plans.

An older couple ponders produce:

For her it is a day fraught

With memory, a father gone;

For him, one of two days in the year

When those metaphoric readings

Simply will not fly.

YESTERDAY’S SNOW

Midnight: an unexpected snow

Brightens our court at Golden Pines,

Thick whiteness caught in amber streetlight,

Moist cotton balls, fluffy on our small trees

In the clear Piedmont dawn.

It’s beautiful, our neighbors say,

Thinking of other places they have lived.

On my seventieth birthday I drive into town for barbecue,

Listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons,

Their soaring falsetto harmonies

From sorrowful New Jersey towns

Not far from my own,

The undertow of time,

Those unchangeable places of our birth

That took some of us a while to figure out.

At the funeral home, the casket truck,

Up from Mississippi, makes a stop:

The routineness of it.

It is afternoon, sixty degrees,

And, of course, the Carolina snow is gone,

Except for fringes in the roof’s shadow,

And by the curb, graying,

Like other snows I’ve seen.

“Yesterday’s Snow” appeared in Poets’ Touchstone Winter 2009

CLOSING COSTS

Muffled in the rustling of papers,

Sign here, initial there:

We have sold the house:

Fifty years,

Same family, same ’phone number.

Scott and Alice are young;

They will redecorate

With colors I do not need to see.

What follows we choose to call

The next part and not the last.

Alice will have to pick up

The rest of the fallen camellia blooms.

“Closing Costs” appeared in Still Crazy January 2008

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Fathers and Teachers (2007) and Mileposts (2009), both published by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the eastern U.S. He has had over 550 poems published or accepted by 125 periodicals in the U.S., Canada and U.K., including Cold Mountain Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Miller’s Pond, MediaVirus, Bolts of Silk, Louisville Review and Paris/Atlantic, and in four anthologies including the 2008 and 2010 editions of Poet’s Guide to New Hampshire and Celebrating Poets over 70.. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com 

A.J. Huffman- A Poem

A Letter from Hell

I never asked you to save me.

Or build me a castle

made of glass.

And now you expect me

to polish your armor.

On my knees?

I am sorry.

You are mistaken.

You have mistaken

me.

For something else.

A dream maybe.

All floating white and gold.

Just waiting for Mr. Right.

But I never wanted to be a princess.

Never wanted my edges curved

and matched to your own.

I don’t need a knight.

I don’t want a prince.

And horses --

white or not --

are hard on the ass.


A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She has previously published four collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, Cognitive Distortion, and . . . And Other Such Nonsense.  She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review.  Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000191382454 and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222. 

Donal Mahoney- A Poem

Straight in His Caneback Chair

 

      Ireland to America, long ago

 

In this Kerryman’s eyes

big ships sail

and lighthouses flicker

light years away.

He’s 70 today and sits 

tombstone straight

in his caneback chair,

waves at a flake

hanging from his nose,

misses and curses.

It’s his first curse of the day

and he’s ready for anything,

an ancient ram braced for the British

climbing through the mist.

His children, parents themselves now,

sit in his parlor, silent around him.

When they hear his first curse,

they know it’s 20 years earlier

and Father is calling

a meeting of the family.

They shift in their chairs

as his eyes and his words

whiz around the room

like bees liquored up

looking for something to sink into.

Robert Demaree- A Poem

AT THE SYMPHONY

Irritated

Of bladder and by the cello concerto’s

Petty dissonance

I wait in the prostate line

At intermission.

My wife’s dimmed vision

Scans the lobby, seeking mine

Among gray heads

That bob upon a sea of blue blazers.

What is it that draws us here?

Perhaps the aching melancholy

Of a Russian adagio;

More likely the crisp precision,

The tying off of loose ends,

In those short Mozart symphonies

That seem to end so suddenly.

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Fathers and Teachers (2007) and Mileposts (2009), both published by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the eastern U.S. He has had over 550 poems published or accepted by 125 periodicals in the U.S., Canada and U.K., including Cold Mountain Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Miller’s Pond, MediaVirus, Bolts of Silk, Louisville Review and Paris/Atlantic, and in four anthologies including the 2008 and 2010 editions of Poet’s Guide to New Hampshire and Celebrating Poets over 70.. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com 

Doug Draime- Three Poems

Jesus In Wartime

The bodies are piled

like slaughtered and rotting cattle,

in abandoned stockyards.

And each morning before sunrise,

the decision is made

in a business like and calm way

to aim the big guns,

drop the big bombs

to destroy a handful of people

clustered among many thousands.

The military shuck and jive,

to justify these insidious deeds,

as the Leader of The Free World

is on his knees praising Jesus

for the death and mayhem.

This Jesus is diametrically opposed to the one I know

His Jesus is a warmongering imperialist who loves only billionaires

and millionaires and the idoits who worship them.

This Jesus he prays to, appears to love nothing scared, or honorable,

or righteous, or humane.

This Jesus entrenched like cancer by lies and madness.

This Jesus adding to the plies of bodies, as if human life and

Creation mean nothing. 

This Side Of The Mystery Game

Death is the bottomless pit, a ravenous

beast that

gets us all in the

end.

It even got Tolstoy who denied it.

And Dylan Thomas who raged against it.

Even Christ, though they say

he came back for

a visit; bloody as hell,

walking through

walls,

talking to invisible people even

doubting Thomas could see.

Jesus came back hungry

asking for wine and something to eat.

And as he ate a plate of Jewish stir fry

and several glasses of wine,

he started wisecracking about

the lack of sustenance

in the ethers, and demanding

Mary Magdalene’s apostleship,

which pissed off all the Jewish men

and all the Roman men

and all the wannabe men. And they killed

him again

and he walked through the wall back into “death”.

Wasn’t that the point,

that he “died” like the rest of us?

Like the bum, the poet, the mortician,

the politician, like the great Joe Lewis murdered

by the humiliation of Las Vegas, like you

and me, like John Lennon shot down

by his biggest fan, like most of us living ordinary lives,

dying ordinary deaths, 

like everyman and everywoman.

Death is the bottomless pit (and our most deceptive illusion), 

that every human falls into, and is never seen again, at least not

on this side of the mystery game  

John

Starless, moonless, hopeless

night

filled with shadows

of ravaged dreams.

On a platter, a bloody platter

engraved with

cannibal dragons

sits the

magnificent head

of the Baptist.

Salome whirls her incestuous whoredom

around the marble floor.

The music of the dance

floats through the stagnant

and murderous air.

As the lamb of God, a few miles away

lies prone in prayer,

he feels the

ax through

his own

sanctified flesh.

His head 

rolling slowly

from the pallet

of His repose,

like a comet

passing through

the cosmos of dead

and dying stars

This Side Of The Mystery Game first appeared in Cause & Effect Magazine in 2007, and

John first appeared in Ancient Paths around 2004 or 5.