Category: Poetry

“A Girl Left Behind” by Madlynn Haber

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A crow’s feather lands on the path I walk
calling for me to write about my father,
to play with pain, poking an old wound,
watching it bleed, again.

That wound oozes a sticky sweet sadness.
He was my lonely soul’s romantic calling.
I am tears and clenched fists.

On nights when the moon is covered
by translucent clouds, I remember
his leaving in a yellow taxi.

I weep for the girl I was.
The one left behind.

 

 

Madlynn Haber lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Her work has been published in the anthology Letters to Fathers from Daughters, in Anchor Magazine, Exit 13 Magazine and on websites including: A Gathering of the Tribes, The Voices Project, The Jewish Writing Project, Quail Bell Magazine, Mused Literary Review, Hevria, Right Hand Pointing, Mothers Always Write, Mum Life Stories, Random Sample, and Club Plum Literary Journal. You can view her work at www.madlynnwrites.com

“The Geography of Age” by Maurice O’Sullivan

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

We age with grit and sometimes grace.
As time and wisdom forge our face,
We rest assured that it will show
A life well lived on earth’s plateau.
But when I see the mirror’s truth,
That lost geography of youth,
With East and West now shifting South,
And tighter lines around my mouth,
A Northern pole of thinning hair—
Recalling Prufrock’s unasked dare—
I know that image staring back
Cannot be me. No, not that wrack.
No topographical relief
Can shake my firmly held belief
That no tectonic shift that vast
Could so unterraform my past.

I know my zenith lies ahead
Beyond those fault zones I now dread.
Perhaps some glowing distant star
Will offer me an avatar.
My molecules transmogrified,
My mind now free to be my guide,
I’ll soar, defying time and space,
My ashes resting in their vase.

 

Maurice O’Sullivan, a former teamster, jail guard and pub owner, is an award-winning teacher, editor, columnist, and film maker who lives in Orlando, Florida. His most recent book, Have You Not Hard of Floryda, is a survey of 300 years of Florida’s colonial literature.

“The Unwashed Monologue” by Joel Schueler

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You can relax.
This isn’t another poem
about love. Nor of pursuits
for that end, nor is it about loveless
endings.

Okay
that’s a lie.
Actually it is.
Should I part ways
with concealed knowledge
of the planets or a faraway star
and send them on their way
to the cochleae of sweet ears
you possess to impress
you with my secret life
as an unfledged amateur scientist,
then arouse your mind
by filling it
with scientific questions of the day?
Should I tell you
of my recent infrequent exercise
that may have slightly toned
a hidden body beneath baggy clothes?
Do you seek out truth
on your own or do you require a nudge?
How much do you really want the truth at all
if all it serves to do
is make us both worse off.
Have you been fooled by many men before
who have put up a brilliant front
in their own concealment of
behavioural nasties and hapless insecurities.
If so, did you like them anyway?
Did you like that they had lied
so desperate for your kiss?
Would you have preferred they had
told their truth
all along
getting them nowhere,
somewhere,
anywhere but here,
listening to my monologue.

There is no resolution;
no happy ending to this poem.
I just want your truth
can you help with mine?

I thought about ending the poem there,
I probably normally would,
but some force kept me on.

I don’t know where this poem is going anymore.
To tell you the truth
I never really did.
I will not ask you to help with it.
Just do me this honour, if you will:
to ask to watch you in your element
would seem too clichéd (this is a poem remember,
or at any rate that is how it has dressed today.)

‘I thought you said it was a monologue,’ you say.
I told you I was
never much good
at this business
of telling the truth,
and you cannot interrupt me,
this is a monologue.

Instead what I ask of you
is to show me where your work finds you
or to take me on a trip to a passionate pastime
of yours
where
learning
I will watch;
help me
help me.

 

first appeared in Blognostics

 

 

Joel Schueler has published works in over ten countries in over forty publications including Pennsylvania Literary Journal & The Brasilia Review. From London, he has a BA (Hons) in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. https://www.joelschueler.com

“Amor Vincit Omnia” by Terence Culleton

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The wind is much too high not to remind
the shutters of their winter’s worth of speech,
which they revive today as if to find
the one conclusion they all failed to reach
in their crude chatter-clash against the siding
throughout the tedious months. Who’d listen now
as logic yields to bird-song? Such confiding
relies on atmospherics anyhow.
Against the sudden flowers red and blue
it seems a cavil. Winter’s nihilism,
compelling to the eye, turns hardly true
when May converts the eye to solipsism,
that kind cradle-rock of prayer and song
that can’t be, by its own light, ever wrong.

 

 

Terence Culleton is a former Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate, a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of First Honorable Mention in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Traditional Sonnet Contest. Terence has published two collections of formally crafted narrative and lyric poems, A Communion of Saints (2011) and Eternal Life (2015), both with Anaphora Literary Press. Poems from his forthcoming collection of sonnets, A Tree and Gone (FutureCycle Press), have recently appeared in Antiphon, The Lyric, The Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, The Road Not Taken (including Feature Poem), Blue Unicorn Review, and Raintown Review. 

“Sparks” by Stephen Kingsnorth

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

So many, why, start verse with I ?
Experience may be known to me,
give reason further to explore,
but campanologist in tower,
climb ivory, or ring a bell?

Do words speak, franca, as streets find?
For some the ABBA rhyme appeals –
as final Mamma Mia note,
the winner takes all, breathless throat,
fast dying strain, ghost harmony.

Some schemes, with weighed abandon, blank –
but does the metric measure dance,
sway words enhance sung melody?
Do vowels yawn, evoke a wow,
while consonants consent or bite?

Though prompted, observed image, phrase,
the sparks of Calliope spray,
and winding ways, yet hidden paths
lead unplanned course on stranger tracks.
By writing on the wall, theme changed.

Are letters so tight tracked in space,
the deficit in meaning spent?
Or parables entice, unknowns
inviting wrestle, struggle, squirms?
Does wisdom pose print erotemes?

 

 

Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church, has had over 150 pieces published by online poetry sites, including Sparks of Calliope, printed journals and anthologies. https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/

“The Candy Seller” by Satyananda Sarangi

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Twenty one summers later, I found him again,
Traces of familiarity bloomed; one brought
Me a glimpse of children savouring candy floss,
Others drew me close to informal songs I sought
To learn from his classic collection often thought
As plain; each composition in itself a train
Of emotions halted by ear-shattering clangs
Of the school bell. A broad, triumphant smile across
His sun-kissed face, his clothes without the slightest stain
Betrayed his customers; and an every-day loss
Became the price of kindness, selling free of cost
In exchange of happy, bubbling faces around.
And his neatly-crafted songs, untouched by the pangs
Of hunger, of meagre livelihood, of years lost
In spreading a wave of benevolent love, still sound
The same, merrier than all words I’ve ever crossed.

 

 

Satyananda Sarangi is a young civil servant by profession. A graduate in electrical engineering from IGIT Sarang, his works have been featured in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, Page & Spine, Glass: Facets of Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, The GreenSilk Journal and elsewhere. Currently, he resides in Odisha, India.

“On the Beach at Abbotts Lagoon” by David Rosenthal

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Point Reyes, California

Waking up, remembering where I am,
I try to get my bearings as I stand.

The brown pelicans shadow broken waves,
while snowy plovers dart along the strand.

Staring out at a fraction of an ocean,
glancing down at a million grains of sand,

I let my eyes adjust to what’s around me,
and shake the nap I’d only halfway planned.


originally appeared in The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things (White Violet Press, 2013)




David Rosenthal lives in Berkeley, California, and works as a teacher and instructional coach in the Oakland Unified School District. His poems and translations have appeared in Rattle, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Birmingham Poetry Review, Measure, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and many other print and online journals. He has been a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. His collection, The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things, was released by Kelsay Books in 2013.

“Balsam Bed” by Charles Weld

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To retrigger vigor, my father would break an inch
or two of new growth from a balsam fir, pinch
then roll the needles between his fingers, and holding
this poultice to his nose, breathe in. And when spending
the night in a lean-to, he’d send us out to bring
him armfuls of boughs which he would overlap, needle
end over stick end, row by row, head to toe, like shingle
until the balsam bed had depth and spring
equal to the lean-to’s hard, plank flooring. Hemlock scent
is dry, rising high into the sinuses with a slight burn.
Balsam spirits penetrate, cool as fragrant liniment.
We settled quickly to rest in those needled nests,
not feeling out of place like strangers or guests,
but protected from danger—safe beyond concern.

 

 

Charles Weld has appeared in many literary magazines: Snakeskin, Southern Poetry Review, The Evansville Review, Worcester Review, Tampa Review, CT Review, Friends Journal, Vita Brevis, Better Than Starbucks, etc. Pudding House published a chapbook of his poems, Country I Would Settle In, in 2004. Kattywompus Press published another chapbook, Who Cooks For You? in 2012. His poems were included in FootHills Publishing’s anthology Birdsong in 2017. A retired mental health counselor/administrator now working part-time in an agency treating youth, Charles lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

“Speculation” by Craig Dobson

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The whole view grows
in winter’s sunlit vinegar –
hauled up by a blue false sky
behind which, like tombstones,
the stars are waiting.
When I met you, I was similar –
nothing to stand in nothing’s way
under my own false future.
Why you wore spring’s patience,
only you remember.
Turning from the brazen scape,
I see the ice in shadows.
Too old now for our old conjecture,
still some of it, like sunlight, lingers –
like frost will, too, in dark spring corners.

 

 

Craig Dobson has had poems and short fiction published in Agenda, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Interpreter’s House, Better than Starbucks, Magma, New Welsh Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Lighten Up Online, North, The Rialto, Southword, Stand, Poetry Daily Website, and Neon. He has work forthcoming in THINK, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Dark Horse. He’s working towards his first collection of poetry. He lives in the UK.

“Those Boys are History Now” by Robert Nisbet

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I’ll sing a blues for those two boys,
cycling through their time and place,
a south-west corner of a small island,
thirteen years on from a continent’s vast war.
A tall road, summer-sweet with tarmac,
climbing from a seaside village,
from rock pool to hedgerow, tyre hum –
and the dates, the hopes, that Friday next,
the girls with pony-tails.
They are history now, those boys,
and we might search for them,
the names, the boys, the sentiments,
stacked up in family photos, newspapers,
exam results and names of teams,
postcards from Paris, microfilm.
(Praise, praise, to the stackers and recorders).
Sometimes they seem to fade, that scene, the people,
yet still they haunt that recollected tarmacked road,
evoking, evoking.

 

 

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who once read for an American President, when ex-President and poet Jimmy Carter was guest of honour at the opening of the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in 1995. Nisbet is a Pushcart Prize nominee for “Cultivation” (Sparks of Calliope, 2019).