After García Lorca

A cool breeze – so welcome
after hot days in Andalucía
enters my body, helps
stretch the folded accordian

of my spine. I will look
the rose bush in its face
past all the obsessive gnats,
the bees bumping in orgiastic gratitude.

Why does a sepulcher
of the past haunt me even here?
The art of dying requires
heaps of human skulls

in the same way that the sky
assassinates itself over
and over again, somehow hoping
each time, it will be different.

 

 

Ray Ball grew up in a house full of snakes. She is a history professor, a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet, and an editor at Alaska Women Speak. Her chapbook Tithe of Salt came out with Louisiana Literature Press in the spring of 2019, and she has recent publications in Human/Kind Journal, Rivet, and SWWIM Every Day. You can find her in the classroom, in the archives, or on Twitter @ProfessorBall.

My mind is sharp, and oddly enough,
I can see in all directions at the same time.
People’s mouths move, but there is no sound.
I rather enjoy not having to breathe.
The air seems, well, cleaner somehow.

After all the illness and pain,
I’ve taken a turn for the better,
and I’m doing quite well.

My unblinking eyes are easy on the lenses.
The memory of what is overhead is fading rapidly.
I stroll through my thoughts;
my body chooses to remain still inside this vault.

Being dead is a solitary exercise,
and I do so relish my solitude.

The firmament becomes obscured,
and I repose in state happily ever after.

 

 

Linda Imbler is a Kansas-based Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Linda’s poetry and a listing of publications can be found at lindaspoetryblog.blogspot.com. She’s an avid reader, classical guitar player, and a practitioner of both Yoga and Tai Chi. In addition, she helps her husband, a Luthier, build acoustic guitars.  Linda enjoys her 200-gallon saltwater reef tank. Linda believes that poetry truly adds to the beauty of the world.  Much of this beauty she feels can be found in the night sky and, on warm nights, her telescope serves as inspiration for this belief.

The one with the slender body and easy eyes,
with a face carved from his darling mother,
whom you miss so, her skin resembling lace.

It was his laugh you miss most, him unable to
call out to you in those last moments and you
unable to go to him, hold him, relieve the pain.

You grip grief like a memento on the mantle.
I’ve seen it in your face, dark and gray. I watched
faith collide with events that sometimes befall small

boys, how you battled what came next, defying
the shadow that threatened to devour you without
a bite, reimagining a life in anger, the searing guilt that

no one could know, let alone understand – but you
never wanted understanding and you never wanted
anyone to know. So I sat you down and fed you because

food, I say, as though that is my answer when everything
else fails and you were not interested, but in time began
to pick at the dish I put before you as though you were

playing connect the dots. I asked you to tell me more about
the dream, how realistic it was, how you woke with a scream,
crushed under the weight of how real it seemed, until that scream

curdled the black blood that ran through me, how it poured out
of you, a blood that rent the tree canopy in two, unnerving
everything on land and in the ocean, rattling even the stars.

 

 

Michael Biegner has had poems published in Blooms, Poetry Storehouse, Silver Birch Press, Silkworm, WordPeace, and the Poets To Come anthology, in honor of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday.  His prose poem, “When Walt Whitman Was A Little Girl,” was made into a video short by North Carolina filmmaker Jim Haverkamp, where it has competed at various film festivals around the world and is available for viewing on Vimeo. Michael was a finalist in the 2017 Northampton Arts Council Biennial Call To Artists.

the bees circle the withered roses
they crawl over sterile, sun bleached petals
then on to the leaves

they scrape a substance
from the green surfaces
whatever they can get

they gather what’s left, hoard it
before the cold, before the end
as we do likewise

 

 

Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada.  He writes free verse poetry, much of it on the confessional side.  He has been published in Blognostics, Red Eft Review, Spillwords, Synchronized Chaos, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others.

The sky has all the charm of a double homicide.
The black cloud above my car says to me:
“This will teach you for going out in this rain
with a five dollar umbrella.”

This light is balsamic, not illuminating the road
very well, but it is not dark enough make the
headlights effective. To my left, the storm cloud
curls its finger at me, it beckons repentance.

I drive on. Behind me in the rear-view, car lights
are diamonds against a seasick green horizon, a
green without a splinter of mercy. The wind picks
up and my eyes scan for a funnel.

Off to the east, where the dark has not yet surrounded
the leftover blue of day, thunderheads tickle the
ionosphere, glow angelically. Fat droplets fall, tears,
I believe – of all the sadness of this world gathers

into these mauling storms. The ones that throw-down
baseball-sized hail, crack windshields. Biblical stuff. The
sorrow, it has to go somewhere, I think. Then I comprehend
the punctuation of weather: if this dark-eyed storm is an

exclamation point, then that glowing thunderhead, the one
that stands majestically, resembling the archangel Michael,
replete with a broadsword and thirst for fighting,
that is God’s very own John Hancock.

 

 

Michael Biegner has had poems published in Blooms, Poetry Storehouse, Silver Birch Press, Silkworm, WordPeace, and the Poets To Come anthology, in honor of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday.  His prose poem, “When Walt Whitman Was A Little Girl,” was made into a video short by North Carolina filmmaker Jim Haverkamp, where it has competed at various film festivals around the world and is available for viewing on Vimeo. Michael was a finalist in the 2017 Northampton Arts Council Biennial Call To Artists.

A headless ghost,
its nightly visitations,
clanking chains
announcing midnight
and the witches’ hour,
when demons dance
with your daughters.

A ghost without a head.
Quiet as a black cat,
as a snake, as drowned kittens.
Its message obscured by fear,
yours truly trembling
like a hymn, like a flame
being kissed by the wind.
Like a reed stem
in an Assyrian legend.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,400 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy (Cawing Crow Press); Like As If (Pski’s Porch); Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).