Tag: Free Verse

Two Poems by Lynn White

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An Alphabetical Error

We had a map,
of course we did!
And the names of the streets
were clearly written
in English.
The names on the streets
were also clearly written
but in Cyrillic Greek,
of course they were!
This was Athens in 1966
and we were struggling
to find the Folk Museum.

Then we had a stroke of luck!
We spied a grand building
with sentries in national dress
standing outside
and we knew we’d found it!
So we went inside
and wandered around for a bit.

It was unusually empty,
the rooms and corridors devoid
of the expected folk exhibits.
A smartly dressed woman
descended the stairs
carrying a file of paper.
We asked her if she had a Guide.
She threw us out!
Of course she did!
The Royal Palace was not open to tourists!

It was to be an unrepeatable incursion.
A few months later the colonels took power
and everything changed
except the alphabet.

“An Alphabetical Error” first appeared in Pure Slush, 25 Miles From Here Anthology.


Where Are They Now?

In 1967, I hitch-hiked to Belgrade.
My friend and I would take an overnight train
to stay with our Albanian friends
in what is now Kosovo.
Until then we had some hours to kill.

The local cafe culture called
and we ate a modest meal,
two great slabs
of the ubiquitous cheese puff pastry
washed down with colas.

We went to the counter to pay
but the Server refused our money.
He pointed to a table where some guys
were enjoying a few beers.
They had already paid, he said.

We were mystified.
They had made no contact with us
and we tried to tell them we could not accept.
They explained that
they wished to thank us
for the help Britain had given in WW2.

Fast forward to 1999
when the right to self-determination was all the rage.
and NATO bombs were falling on Belgrade.
I thought about them a lot back then.
I think of them now
when territorial integrity is all the rage
and the right to self-determination
a forgotten dream.

Yes, I think of them now
when the bombs
fall in Europe
once again.

But I still have my friend in Kosovo.
Sometimes we feel human,
sometimes not.

“Where Are They Now?” first appeared in Topical Poetry.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places, and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy, and reality. She has been nominated for Pushcarts, Best of the Net, and a Rhysling Award. You can find her on her blog or on Facebook.

Two Poems by Marieta Maglas

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Memories

Our love mixes with seaweed,
a sweet memory,
sprinkled with salt. It grows
between the breeze
and the hurricane,
the fruit of an inner struggle.
The green waves crash
in a murmur that
cools the warm and
ancient sand; limits; perception.
New tides of change
cast our minds back;
the courage to exist.
In the space between
ancientness and nowness,
our perfect love is eternal,
a song for a dance,
an invisible one, and
a wave-like movement
on the shores of our hearts.
We can feel our holy angels,
wounded wings,
echoes of a distant cry.
In every salty breath, a prayer
and a promise.
Between freedom and serfdom,
we fathom our dodecahedral geodesic,
spiritual sphere out.
The reality is circumjacent;
contiguous eyesight.
The voice of God becomes an echo
to inhabit the twilight world.


Echoing Shells

Bleeding shadows seemingly run away;
disappear into the blazing sand.
Wet rays hit the skin;
change the meaning
of the colors.
A new song cannot be heard;
It is not born yet.
Waves covering dead shells,
lost steps, and destroyed castles
echo with the inner silence.
Battleships are eaten imperceptibly
by the horizon.
The gales remain to scream
in the blue while bringing
ghosts to the shore.
‘Tis a new time in the old one~
always different.
Nature seems to be the same;
suffering brings peace
in an invisible way~
in this need for love.




Marieta Maglas has been published in The MockingOwl Roost, Lothlorien Journal, Verse-Virtual, Silver Birch Press, Sybaritic Press, Kingfisher Poetry, Oddville Press,  Prolific Press, Dashboard Horus, Coin-Operated Press, Mayari Literature, Synchronized Chaos, Al-Khemia Poetica, PentaCat Press, The Queer Gaze, Phoenix Z Publishing, All Your Poems Magazine, Journal of the Akita International Haiku, and others. Her poems have also appeared in anthologies such as Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler, Nancy Drew Anthology, The Cardinal Anthology Vol. 3, Ain’t no Deadbeats Around Here, and Startled by MUSIC 2023.

Two Poems by Matthew Johnson

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The Neighborhood Rhapsody

Mothers and grandmothers take turns
Looking over the brood, gripping their eyes to the world
That is their neighborhood.
 
Young men whose shifts begin in the evening, or began in the morning,
Bark at each other over feet that may or may not have
Been over the three-point line, and they get dizzy, 
Smack-talking and chasing each other over the perimeter and under the sun.
 
Little girls hopscotch on days-old chalk,
And come round again, joyfully,
And patiently wait for each other’s turn.
 
The rest of the kids, perfecting the method of carelessness,
Open the hydrants, bathing in the waters of the city,
Washing the sweat and sun that coated the skin,
That had left only dust.
 
A million bees zoom on by,
Tilting their heads one way,
And then to the other, looking for flowers.
 
The chatter of old men talking gossip and old athletes they remembered
Is far more interesting than their marathon games of dominoes.
 
When the golden gaze of the sun has faded,
Street meat smoke and spices rub up against the stars,
Perfuming the air with tastes and tenderness,
And the days are so long, that we lose track of the hours…


A Character Analysis of Michael Corleone

Al Pacino as Michael didn’t make it cool to be a gangster; 
Capone, Scarface, and Nino Brown seemed to have a lot more fun
When they were depicted in cinema,
Seeing how far they could push themselves and the world to its limits,
All the while, flaunting death and feeding poison to the neighborhood.
There’s no glamour in the vice in the second Godfather like in other mob movies;
There’s a lot of compromising and negotiating, 
Like discussions between senators.
He’s not cursing. He’s not using drugs. 
He’s not jubilant on jobs and hits well done. 
Shootouts between rival mobs are sexy on the big screen and television;
But for Michael, this Macbeth of Mario Puzo,
The battles are mental burdens and betrayals
And failing marriages, and so they aren’t things
I nor audiences would be inspire to emulate. 
And yet, I can suffer with him, despite it.




Matthew Johnson is the author of the poetry collections, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (New York Quarterly Press), and the chapbook, Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Heavy Feather Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been recognized with several nominations and recognitions, including from the Best of the Net, Grand View University, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Pushcart Prize. He’s the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and poetry editor of The Twin Bill. Learn more at https://www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by Mike Chrisman

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

After the aquarium

I hadn’t known I would want a ceremony
when my big angelfish died
that I raised from a nickel-sized thing
to a silver dollar or greater, but I didn’t
want to toss it in the toilet
like my grandfather’s cigarette butts,
so my ten-year-old daughter and I
bundled up against February
and walked the road a half mile
until the culvert that opens
into a pool almost deep enough
to swim, certainly to snag a brookie
or two as the neighbor boys will,
then down the steep bank six or eight
feet through thigh-deep snow, my daughter
struggling in my path until we stood
at the pool’s edge, where I said some words
about a fish from the tropics gracing
our northern home, then thanked it before
bending down to let it slide
from the plastic bag, surrounded
by warm aquarium water, shiny
onto the icy brook’s surface, where
it spun briefly before catching
current southward, down Avery Brook
to the Deerfield, the wide Connecticut,
into Long Island Sound, the sea…
then father and daughter trudged
home, while the fish receded
into memory. As will we.


View from el parque central

on a wooden bench watching the tourists,
the Mayans, the pigeons navigating
among each other, the concrete
path littered with fallen
jacaranda petals. I’m sitting
to eat my little cup of ice cream
and remembering an ancient time:
summer, Central Illinois, and Zesto
soft-serve, plus three kids
happy with their cones;
a nickel each in ’55 –
cheap even then – and the short trip
home in our Chevy station wagon
perched on a more dangerous bench:
the tailgate lowered, where we ride
backward, our short legs nearly
touching the pavement … and jouncing
slowly across the train tracks –
“Hold on, kids!” to the house,
where our big collie waits
to greet us, his reward the sweet
and soggy cone-bottoms none of us
would have believed might survive
in memory seventy years after the fact.




Mike Chrisman is retired, living in Antigua, Guatemala. He worked for years in the mental health field in rural Western Massachusetts. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at UMass Amherst. Chrisman has three daughters and five grandkids. His poetry book, Little Stories, has an ISBN, and his own translation of the Bible, The Bible: Warts and All  is on Amazon Kindle.

“Last Night” by Matt Wood

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A solar storm hit Earth last night.
I’d seen a headline warning about it,

so I wanted to keep an eye out.
Rare auroras filled the sky

as far south as our neighborhood
as about one billion tons of plasma

collided with the atmosphere at
one million miles per hour only

to be transmuted into the frailest
of colors fluttering like Paganini’s bow

through chromatic scales of stars.
But I forgot to look.

I wish I could say I saw it, but
I went to bed without even glancing

outside. I was thinking of work,
wondering if I’d have time to get

groceries tomorrow, wishing
the weather would change,

listening to the ceiling fan while
falling asleep beside you, who

were surely dreaming something
more amazing than anything

I could have missed.




Matthew Wood lives in Colorado and works as a mechanic. His work is forthcoming in Eunoia Review.

Two Poems by Kelly Terwilliger

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The Album of Horses

The dust jacket is falling apart.
On the front, the horse and her foal,
white and brown, brittle now. And the red painted
panels of a stable wall on the back,
ready to crumble away,
pieces of book dust
horse dust.
You dream of horses— you told me
that’s how you fall asleep at night, and I’m sure
you didn’t imagine how happy this made me,
you showing me how you let go
walking into the green field
where the horses are waiting,
where I imagine them now, resting,
leaning down for a ripped mouthful of grass
or brushing against a companion’s flank.
Slow thoughts. Slow thoughts sliding by
as the wind crosses their backs without even lifting the hairs.
The skin ripples,
twitches under some lazy buzz.
When do you drift off? We never know, do we?
Partway across the field?
Or close enough to feel the animal heat—
already, the slipping away as fleeting
as dream itself.      Palominos,
I read, are not a breed
but a color more gold than gold.


Little Clouds

Turn my pockets out and there’s sand,
there’s always sand, no matter how far I go
from where I began.
But today, there are some clumps
of what had been a scrap of paper, now a wad
of little clouds, all their ink washed away.

This fluff is like something just born,
Before all definition.
I read somewhere that people once believed
bears licked their formless newborns
into being. In their winter caves,
bears shaping tiny bears with their tongues.

The sky is white today, and soft, too soft to write on.
Someone has found a way to write in water
so the writing stays, at least a little.
You need an implement so small
that moving it to trace a shape won’t create
an eddy that carries the word away.
So far, they’ve managed a hovered J, a G, a U
within the dot of an i.

Me, I’ve always liked how words dissolve
in water, dissipate in air.

Walking home, I see a puddle the size of a quarter.
It holds the sky’s reflection,
a milky white eye
on the darkened ground.




Kelly Terwilliger is the author of two collections of poems, A Glimpse of Oranges and Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she works in schools as an oral storyteller and teaches storytelling to children and adults.

Two Poems by Philip A. Lisi

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Order of Operations

First Tuesday of every month for six,
I drive you to the hospital.
You like riding high in my truck,
seeing everything, even as your legs,
skeletal parentheses in denim,
might not make the step up
after this latest round of chemotherapy.

Outside your house, I wait on your porch.
Always prompt, you appear at the door,
corners of your mouth accented with dried saliva,
math textbook tucked tightly under your arm,
the laminate peeling back from the edges,
no pocketbook, no cardigan
draped over your arm.
I suspect you know its precise dimensions
and calculated its weight
in proportion to your featherweight frame.

Inside the treatment room,
Rosen’s Discrete Mathematics Teacher’s Edition
holds your attention.
Perhaps, there is comfort in the familiarity–
brackets, square roots, variables,
old friends to polynomials, a fleeting balm,
one last attempt to solve,
the calculus of cancer.

Last night, on the eve of your final treatment,
I think about how I cried over the same tattered text
and endless algebraic equations,
sitting at your kitchen table, mind wandering,
wishing your oatmeal cookies
would somehow make the numbers make sense.
Now, abstract calculations take your mind away
from the discrete pain of the needle
and the drip that kills as it sustains.


Among the Hemlocks

Among the hemlocks,
on the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack,
a thick-pelted mink scampers
up and over lichen-coated granite
left dry on the banks,
just out of aqueous reach.

I marvel at her slinky deftness,
her effortless, oily movement among the stones,
her back flexing to match the gentle waves,
rippling astride her hop-dive-curl-stretch:
lovely syncopation in walnut brown.
Then, finally, in mid hop-curl,
she is gone.

My father has made it halfway down
the steep stone steps
that lead to the water’s edge.
From there, I take his hand
and help brace his body,
so fragile now I barely feel
its weight against my arm.

I take care he does not misstep—
a fall would surely mean a break,
the final hobbling of an already
failing frame.

Together, we reach level ground and pause.
We talk about the great blue heron
seen from the window early this morning–
how enormous they must be to take up
so much of the pane at a glance—
and at that distance!
I tell him of the wooly mink,
long and sleek and blink-swift.

My father says little—
A manifestation of his condition,
his neurologist tells me.
But I suspect he is thinking
about the mink with envy
as I offer my arm for ascension.




Philip A. Lisi lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he teaches English at his high school alma mater by day and writes poetry and flash fiction by night alongside his family and the ghost of their cantankerous Wichienmaat cat, Sela. His work has appeared in Sparks of Calliope, The Abbey Review, Litbreak Magazine, Rosette Maleficarum, and the Serious Flash Fiction anthology.

“DSM IV 298 or Am I Blue?” by Leslie Lippincott Hidley

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My limbic system’s gone to sleep —
My affect’s flattened by the walrus on my head.
No difference in doing and not-doing.
The world is an ashtray, a splatted spider,

A drudgery of breathing in and breathing out,
Pushing blood through tired veins.
All is uphill.
Only sleep is sweet.

I will talk to you in words of one syllable
So even you can understand.
I will make you feel better.
I will push on your psyche —
Yank it around.

Like I would cheer you out of a broken leg
Or appendicitis.

Plotinus said, “Weather is the celestial form of music.”
I say, “Mood is the neural form of weather.”
I am in the doldrums, stupefied, dull winds droning,
Bleak-brained and dim-lighted.

Look where you’re not looking:
I am the creator of full ashtrays and garbage.
Unmade beds, floors full of wet towels and dirty clothes.
Tables stacked with unpaid bills, coffee cups,
Empty wine glasses, papers.
Ants in the kitchen. Hurt feelings.

I have a gift for disorder.
I make messes.

My tongue is shredded cardboard and junk mail,
Chopped metaphors, and broken shards of soda bottles.
My mind is a kitchen rag.




Leslie Lippincott Hidley has been writing prose and poetry for her own amusement and that of her family and friends and others for most of her 77 years. And one of her ten grandchildren is named Kalliope. She has lived in Walla Walla, Washington; Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, Germany; Upper New York State; Enid, Oklahoma; Montgomery and Prattville, Alabama; Lubbock, Texas; Dover, Delaware; West Palm Beach, Florida; Goose Bay, Labrador; Washington, D.C.; Fairfield, California; Omaha, Nebraska; and now resides in Ojai (Nest-of-the-Moon), California, where she continues to write.

Two Poems by Kiyoshi Hirawa

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The Museum of Modern Matrimony

One out of two marriages becomes a museum,
a sprawling, brawling Guggenheim
where feuding tour guides curate
dueling exhibits.

Art imprecates life
far more than life imprecates art,
so the galleries go up first.
Impressionist portraits of absinthe arguments.
Realism exhibitions on what happened
at the office at night.
Surrealistic landscapes agonizing over
the persistence of memory.

Paleontology thunders in,
with its insufferable, insoluble debates.
Did Matrimonius Rex evolve from the Pregosaur?
Would Divorciraptor hunt in packs?
Was the extinction of F. elicitas gradual or abrupt?
What, if anything, can be extracted
from an A. morous trapped in amber?

Love letters are burned,
but plenty of parchment fills the historical archives.
Declarations of war and independence.
Emancipation proclamations.
Revisionist history divided by B.C. and A.D.
Before Conjugium.
Anno Divortium.

Giant pendulums offer important lessons
on the movement of bodies.
A body in emotion tends to stay in emotion.
Force equals sass times frustration.
For every attraction, there is an equal and opposite distraction.

Rocks remember,
but everyone forgets the geology exhibits.
Eroded sentimentary layers.
Glaciation rates, permafrost expansion.
Continental drift, a few centimeters each year.

And of course,
the gift shop,
just past the “Friends of the Museum” donor wall,
where fieldtrippers buy models
to build at home.


Sleet-slapped (on Dia De Los Muertos)

Disgrace sent me spiraling back
into the single-strand spiderweb of my hometown.
Forty-two relatives
from five generations
were lying in wait.

Past the event horizon
of the cemetery gates,
I metronomed between gravesites.
Contemplated the debris of one century, then another.
Evaded the forty-second marker in Babyland.

No picnics, no pan de la muerta, no champurrado,
only the vomiting of my affliction, my unearned shame,
my words falling on dead ears.

Rising from the constellation of tombstones,
Los Muertos glittered and glowered
and suckerpunched the clouds purple and blue,
unfurling the family’s bruised tapestry:

the emigrations, and the newly arrived
building altars for the newly deceased;
the alkaline soil, and the collapsed family farms;
those who pushed farther west, and the rain that did not;
polio and scarlet fever,
stiff joints and stiff wheelchairs,
and joints that refused to bend, not even to propose;
miscarriages and SIDS deaths,
the children that never were and those that would always be;
the gas leak and house explosion,
the single wall that remained and the family that didn’t;
vehicle collisions, accidental or otherwise,
the forsaken highways and jilted gravel roads;
alcoholism and mental illness,
children raised on steady diets of abuse and suicide;
bitter feuds with relatives abiding two decades of silence,
now stashed two feet apart, headstones faced away from each other.

The rain turned brittle.
November, La abuela más antigua,
sleet-slapped my face and tugged my earlobe,
stage-whispering dirges and elegies.

I waited until my sleeves were soaked,
then wiped clean one hundred and fifty years
of sandstone, granite, and marble.
My laughter blessed the boneyard.




Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet and writer whose work focuses on trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa’s work has been featured most recently in Plainsong Review, Hole in the Head Review, and The Shallot.

Two Poems by James Mulhern

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Honeymoon

She asks me to put bacitracin on her heel.
“Do you see a small cut?”
I nod and rub the ointment against the crack.
Her feet are calloused and rough.
“That feels good.” She sighs.

I see her honeymoon picture on the end table.
My mother and father could be my children.
Waving from the past, bright eyes and lips,
she resembles Elizabeth Taylor in a hat.
Both dressed in fine apparel,
expectant, happy, apprehensive expressions.
“What you looking at?” She glances to the side.
“Oh, that,” she says softly. I rub Aveeno into her feet.
Tilting her head back, she closes her eyes and smiles.

The room darkens. The rain outside taps a pane.
I think of how far these feet have walked,
the tenderness at the bottom of her sole.
Kneeling, I’m thankful to ease one hurt.
Her chest rises and falls, and soon she will sleep.

Someday later, I’ll hold the photograph
and remember this night—
the rain and the darkening eve.
I will see my mother waving to me.
Maybe I will feel the cut of pain, a sigh of love,
or nothing at all.


Session’s End

One day there is no news.
The anchors stare at empty teleprompters,
Eyes wide and twitching, lips quivering,
they look into the camera.

We change channels.
See black screens or people scrambling on sets,
Passing blank papers and whispering.
We do not hear what they say, and we do not care.

We are too tired to move.
Through the living room windows: trees and sky.
The wind blows and birds fly.
Somewhere snow falls and thunder booms.

But not here. There is no weather.
No drama, conflict, or story.
No wars, crimes, or political crises.
No empty talk. No sound and fury.

In a forest, high on a pine,
a wood thrush sings.
Deep in a dark-water cave,
the Emperor angelfish knocks.
A judge’s ruling: session’s end.
Someone shuts a door.




James Mulhern has appeared in literary journals over two hundred and fifty times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a fully paid writing fellowship to Oxford University. A story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize that same year. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his novels were Finalists for the United Kingdom’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2020 for his poetry.