We hear the thunder, the gales,
and we personalize them.
The gods have spoken ..
Storm Freya will make land ..

Two blackbirds larruping song,
from facing hedge and height.
Our rustic Pavarottis,
lyrical, wonderful.

Yet each is holding sway, surely,
marking out his territory?
Is each a property bragger?
Topshop and Trump?

They have built their nests, yes,
raise orange beaks in song
to guard their young. But as far as I know
they have no plans to grow the business.

 

Note for US readers: the British blackbird, unlike my understanding of the American one, is a hugely popular bird, whose wonderful song delights us from April to June each year.

 

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who lives about 30 miles down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. His poems have been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, where he is a regular in SanPedro River Review, Jerry Jazz Musician and Panoply.

―after Andrew Wyeth’s Study for the Bachelor

Try to see what I see. First,
there must be sunlight.
Not just any sunlight,
but the kind that is only seen
pouring over your shoulder.

And it has to be enough
to dry the cloth, specifically,
the single white shirt
hanging on the line
strung across the porch.

And the shirt must hang
upside-down, fixed there
by three clothespins.
It will appear to be tortured,
those two loose arms

giving in to the loneliness
swept in on an afternoon
breeze. The scrollwork
that frames the porch
speaks a soliloquy

of someone who tastes
the bitterness of time,
who licks the crumbs
from his lips. The wash pan
is the only imperative

waiting below the shirt
to catch its gray shadow
and try to make it as white
as the cuffs and the collar,
the buttonholes and seams.

At the other corner,
a twig of philosophy grows
up behind a leaning board.
No. That’s not right.
A twig of forsythia

just touches the light.
You will not see a shadow
loosed from this greenery.
All of its substance,
all of its meaning stays there

in those leaves. And
is that a cat? Or is it
a black smudge with eyes?
Is it a small universe
with two as yet unnamed stars?

I can’t tell you.
You must determine which of these
drab colors are real,
and which are the flotsam and jetsam
of the life before us.

The weeds must be growing
through the slats of the porch,
and they must go to seed
on their weak stems
in the heat of every summer.

A few loose bits of shade hang down
like ripped fabric from the slats.
They must be there
or the rest of the world
would not make sense

I’m sorry. I mean the world
will never make sense.
I’ve been possessed by a strange solitude.
Look further.
Behind the shirt you will see

a demon hiding
where you would imagine
in the brushstrokes of darkness.
He comes to visit
when you least expect.

Give him room.
Let him breathe
the darkness of the air.
Let him pull on
your clean, white shirt.

 

 

David B. Prather studied creative writing at Warren Wilson College.  He studied with Steve Orlen, Agha Shahid Ali, Tony Hoagland, and Joan Aleshire.  His debut collection of poems, We Were Birds, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing.  His work has appeared in several publications, including Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, The American Journal of Poetry, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and many more.

This sunny day
not enough
seeming transparent
flimsy as a paper kite,
it’s a pretense, a hoax;
the sun’s a bright enough joke
to poke through
its evanescent scenery.

Only one child
under the bright sun
plays alone
in the garden;     ​
beyond the garden gate
well lost in the wide world

the playground is empty.

 

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, and a number of other on-line and in-print poetry magazines. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. He has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. Harvey was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.

Do you ever reminisce?
The endearing times we spent together
sitting on a bench in the park
amidst the towering trees
replete with yellowish jacaranda cascading down
Or how we drew figures on the sand
with the tips of our fingers
while wandering along the sea belt

You promised me
caressing my hands
that you would never let go of them
And, one day, you would clasp my arm
and walk with me to the farthest horizon
Thus we dreamt of the dawn of a beautiful day

Yet, it didn’t take that long for you
to fade from my sight
Along with those sketches on the sand
melting away in the harsh waves
that abruptly broke on the shore

And I have no idea,
how incorrigible my heart is
The harder I try to refrain from lingering
The more I find myself immersed
Despite the awareness of the bitter truth,
I keep praying again and again
waiting for that beautiful day to dawn

 

Previously published in Tuck Magazine (October 12, 2015)

 

Indunil Madhusankha is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Decision Sciences at the Faculty of Business of the University of Moratuwa. Even though he is academically involved with the subjects of Mathematics and Statistics, he also pursues a successful career in the field of English language and literature as a budding young researcher, reviewer, poet, and content writer. Basically, he explores the miscellaneous complications of the human existence through his poetry by focusing on the burning issues in contemporary society. Indunil’s works have been featured in many international anthologies, magazines, and journals.

I’ll go quietly means there’s nothing
worth fighting over. Just scrape me up
as you would any thing past its use-by.
Less fuss the better;
I won’t be bitter.

Plant me or burn me. Whatever’s
cheap and quicker. Brief ceremony
if you insist. Less fuss the better.
Please pass the butter. Warm scones
just what a daughter ordered.
Someone up early this morning
but it wasn’t me, thank nature.

A brief message on so-so media,
the local paper: Allan Lake, com-
poser of poems, totally died at half
past rhyme, flat on his assonance,
out of time in challenging times.
World seems about frenetic same.
“Autumn Leaves” by Chet Baker
if you feel you must or theme music
from “Cinema Paradiso.” Less fuss
the better, so flush the banter
in, say, six minutes of weeping.

No gravestone, no precious little urn
but if some body decides to rename a lake
(there’s an idea) or park, I cannot stop them.
The dead are rarely consulted and
then usually by lunatics or scammers.
Just don’t compromise a humble life
with anything too grand like a statue
of ‘the poet’ reading. If forced to choose,
I’d prefer an abstract sculpture with plaque
displaying just one of my brief poems
that one respected critic wrote,
‘brings the creator to account.’
I say, less fuss the better.

 

Originally from Saskatchewan, Allan Lake has lived in Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, Ibiza, Tasmania, Perth and, for now, Melbourne. He has two collections published: Tasmanian Tiger Breaks Silence (1988) and Sand in the Sole (2014). Lake won the Elwood (Aus) Poetry Prize in 2016, Lost Tower Publications (UK) Poetry Competition in 2017, and the Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Festival / The Dan Competition in 2018. Besides Australia, he has been published in Canada, the UK, the USA, Mauritius, India, the West Indies, and Italy.

sorry I didn’t know her. sorry
I couldn’t be sorrier. you
have lost her—lost—you list
a little left & wobble
in necessary drunkenness.

sorry I have no answers
for repair of grief, relief,
release. sorry you weep
or fail, your eyes like those
of granite poses. sorry
not a single flowery line
will right the feeling.

sorry I keep saying sorry—
wax-tongued, penitent—
as if it were a final offer,
as if any, as if negotiation.

now you rise, go on
with morning, mourning,
a day among the living &
the dead. so sorry
you feel each breath so clearly
as if a dagger, as if proof

the equation of life
is unresolved. you
solve for X as all of us
while sorries collect
in a wastebasket of unknowing.

 

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017). His writing appears in Notre Dame Review, Rhino, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, and other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

A whale, his spiraling
tail whacks waves
to white spritz;
slowly he moves and feeds;
plangent down he weaves,
comes up like a gentle reef;
water breaks around
before behind
his glorious weight;
his eyes yard upon yard apart
across his bulk turn and look,
his enormous flippers folding,
opening, abaft his massive head.

Majestic mammal,
fish you will never be.
Like some overgrown living fuselage of flesh
you move your ponderous blood-warm body
through lonely seas;
tropics to the pole
the ghastly cold,
the fostering warmth
make no difference to you.

Your blood, our blood circles,
loops endlessly;
you’re with us in this; your heart
pumping heat and life
against the immortal unforgiving sea.

Waving slow and steady,
your great flukes send you below;
the waters part, down you drive,
shining, disappearing
in the safety of
the dark and bitter sea;
for you the better home,
the deep made bright
by your gentle presence.

 

Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, and a number of other on-line and in-print poetry magazines. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. He has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, N.Y. Harvey was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.

“Amma, when I come the next time,
prepare me some Welithalapa.”
Saying thus you left for work

But all of a sudden like one of your
most remarkable surprises
You came home deposited in a reddish wooden box,
meritoriously adorned with white coloured flowers

I fanned your face with a handkerchief
just to chase the flies away
And caressed your forehead gently
putting some tufts of hair to the top of the head
You were our only son, the greatest treasure of ours

As you were so catching and handsome a young man
and an influential commander in the Army
We had dreamt of a grand wedding ceremony for you
of sublime calibre
with the accompaniment of music
Yet I heard the smoothing rhythm
of neither the violin nor the piano
except the deafening cacophony of brownish iron horses
that they called a respectable gun salute,
and the lachrymose craws of the participants
I can remember,
unlike the others I didn’t weep or whimper
except at the moment the telephone glided from my hand
hearing the very news!

I curse it,
the horrible death messenger

Huge banners of milky white colour
fluttered in the air
On them in plain black letters
inscribed the cliché, “Anichchāwatha Sankhāra.”

Your coffin submerged slowly in to the grave
I exclaimed
clamouring and wriggling to loosen the clasp
that mitigated against my movement,
you could not be in that gloomy pit all alone
Yet the gathering was deaf

They say that now I am going mentally out
I am neither crazy nor violent
But definitely, so should be those war-mongers

Oh, forgive me, my putha, my golden gem,
for not having made Welithalapa for you.

 

Previously published in Synesthesia Literary Journal (July 8, 2016)

 

Indunil Madhusankha is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Decision Sciences at the Faculty of Business of the University of Moratuwa. Even though he is academically involved with the subjects of Mathematics and Statistics, he also pursues a successful career in the field of English language and literature as a budding young researcher, reviewer, poet, and content writer. Basically, he explores the miscellaneous complications of the human existence through his poetry by focusing on the burning issues in contemporary society. Indunil’s works have been featured in many international anthologies, magazines, and journals.