Tag: Poetry

Two Poems by Allen Lee Ireland

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

Lighthouse Murder

She offered light that was as boldly bright
As evening star or satellite.
But now she’s ancient, dusky, hollow-eyed,
A piece of local history
Preserved by some society.

To one who’d grown up in her scope,
Who’d given up on life and hope,
She seemed as purposeless as he.
They’d lost their lights concurrently….

It was a cold, bleak sea.
He stood beneath his eyeless friend
And heard her voice upon the keening wind:
“I might have saved a ship or two
From wrecking on a bar or bank,
But I could not save you….
I lit the night, the world. Now look at me:
I can’t do anything but be.”

“Goodbye,” he said, then sank
And lay down in the darkness of the sea.


Tableau

A green leaf and a brown leaf, side by side,
On an old oak we walked together past,
The walk I sensed somehow would be our last,
In early autumn, just before you died.
The two leaves seemed the perfect metaphor
That day, for what we were: a grey-haired lady
Who stooped a bit and was approaching 80,
Beside her son (I’d just turned 44).
Your cheeks were flushed as you were laughing, talking,
And pointing out the wonders that you saw:
The mist, the leaves. Your joy made me withdraw.
I drooped and dragged, I was so tired from walking….
I see us now, amid the autumn scene,
Myself the dead brown leaf, and you the green.




Allen Lee Ireland‘s poetry has appeared in The Road Not Taken, The Lyric, Red Planet Magazine, and Button Eye Review.  He is currently working on his third book of poetry. His previous collections include Loners and Mothers and Dark and Light Verse.

Two Poems by Jean Biegun

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

Opus Pause

I sense my pages turn before I see
the message written there for me to read.
My short sight yearns for ageless reverie.

The light is dim, I lie, and glance briefly
to grab more time to dance with my own lead.
As pages turn too fast, I fail to see

when false steps trip and send me to my knees.
Remorse and wisdom both I fail to heed.
My short sight clings to ageless reverie.

The birthstone days, each anniversary
push hard to bring discernment to my need.
The decades quickly turn, and now I see

frail bones, hair falling: loss the enemy.
This half cup teases hands that end palsied,
a heart that churns for ageless reverie.

Yet still I sing without finding a key
and pass the book for other eyes to read.
I sense more pages turn but all I see
are sightings learned in ageless reverie.


Bonnie and the Great Depression

She had a mind for hairpin turns and sighed 
when Clyde’s first thrill-ride spun them out of town.  
The road ahead sped far and free and wide. 
 
Their ways veered fast. Hot cash, quick gin supplied 
his fuel while her dim wishful heart cooled down. 
She paid a mind to hairpin turns and tried 
 
to hold the ring (her compromise) but shied 
when nightmares crashed the merry-go-round. 
Their road ahead sped fast, not free, not wide. 
 
The cycle held and straight roads were denied 
and breath: his flat line track just looped around. 
Now hard against the hairpin turns, she tried 
 
to navigate for steady, sober rides. 
His reckoning dead-set, he swerved and frowned. 
Feel how this road leads far and free, he lied. 
 
[An intervening verse—Reader’s aside: 
Hey Bonnie, quit careening off that clown! 
The road hog’s lost…and something else has died.] 
 
She stepped clear then and let the years collide 
and burn as Clyde drove to his next ghost town. 
She thanked her Reader and then turned and sighed: 
the road ahead stretched far and free and wide.




Jean Biegun, retired special education teacher, lives in California after a lifetime in the Midwest. Poems have appeared in many publications including Amethyst Review, Mobius: The Poetry Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, Soul-Lit, Eastern Iowa Review, World Haiku Review, Door is a Jar and Gyroscope Review. Her chapbook Hitchhikers to Eden will be published by Kelsay Books in 2022.

“One for the Road” by Heather Dubrow

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

My sister always cleaned every drawer
within an inch of its life,
sorting the assorted, folding the laundered.
And hiding flasks beneath the scented sweaters
in case someone caught the scent on her breath
and cleaned out all her bottles.
The only AA she knew was American Airlines,
whose drinks carts came around too seldom
for her thirsts.

Yes, Robert Frost, two roads diverged in a wood
and I won the smoother, lighter path—
looking just like my sister.
looking away from my sister.

As a teenager, I called her “sister-child”
even though she was older
and couldn’t or wouldn’t say why
the only time she asked.

We both inherited the family gene
for housekeeping:
Mine kept the family home
serene and vetted,
she kept within her secreted house.
As adults, we lived in separate wings
and separate solar systems.
She locked her drawers shut, her life shuttered.
And I—forgive me, Eleanor, if you ever can—
strode by all your rooms and cellars so quickly,
and kept all my own doors fastened tight.




Heather Dubrow is the author of Forms and Hollows, Lost and Found Departments, and two chapbooks. The journals where her poetry has previously appeared include Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and the Yale Review. Two of her poems have been set to music and performed. Director of Fordham’s Poets Out Loud reading series 2009-2020, she holds the John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination there and has also taught at Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“My Lost City” by Diana Raab

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment
(After “Oh My Lost City” by Pablo Naruda)

New York, the place of my birth,
Still hear Streisand’s words of glory—
the city that never sleeps,
even for me as a teen
who slept under stars
with sexy boyfriends and cars.

Each Sunday visited
Rockefeller Center
where dad taught ice skating
they called him Mr. Mark—
unable to pronounce his long last name—
Marquise—invented after immigration
from some French ancestors
which is maybe why I love croissants, espresso,

chestnuts and steamy nuts from street vendors.
I left before I could drive,
but now want to revisit my roots, especially
with dad gone and the city changed faces
more times than I can count.

Queens was my place, Cunningham Park
where hippies puffed joints and concerts
permeated lively words with numbered streets
and houses in rows like soldiers, only colors
setting them apart, one hundred and seventy-third street—
oh the pink shingles dad pained when I was born
to match his pink impala—
the kid mother never wanted, but dad cherished.

She planted a cherry blossom tree
in keeping with theme,
her green thumb also holding the reins of her
favorite four-legged equine partner,
always more important than me.
She’s still there, waiting to die
but never dying to live
I only wish her well— planted
in the city I used to call my own.




Diana Raab, Ph.D., is an award-winning memoirist, poet, blogger, speaker, author of 10 books, and contributor to numerous journals and anthologies. Her two latest books are Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life and Writing for Bliss: A Companion Journal. Her poetry chapbook, An Imaginary Affair, is forthcoming in July 2022 with Finishing Line Press. She blogs for Psychology Today, Thrive Global, Sixty and Me, Good Men Project, and The Wisdom Daily, and is a frequent guest blogger for various other sites.

“your skepticism” by Victor Pambuccian

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

when I told you
the unique being
that’s you
is the only one
who could have moved
the mountain
tired in its bone marrow
of the same sunrises and sunsets
you smiled
in disbelief
for you think
we’re only
pretexts
for some cosmic
puppet theatre
that there are
523 women
alive now
who could have had
the same effect
that I could never
comprehend your uniqueness
but only perceive
a set of traits
that even though
I’ve lived
countless lives
and have
never before prayed
without pause
for another being’s
blissful existence
in a landscape devoid of trees
the belfries never lie
in times of the distress
of oceans bereft of beaches
that there are
universal laws
for which no
language can ever
be invented
that prevent
the badger from singing
for a crow
that gates cannot
contain an inner space
that meetings cannot
be but pre-ordained
between the thirsty
and the involuntarily hungry
who will have nothing
to tell each other
except excuses for
having stepped on each other’s toes
that the first step
in a long journey
is never a probability
that seeing does
not need a seen
even if emptiness
is less appealing
on weekdays
that the only valid excuse
for love
is silence




Victor Pambuccian is a professor of mathematics at Arizona State University. His poetry translations, from Romanian, French, and German, have appeared in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, International Poetry Review, Pleiades, and Black Sun Lit. A bilingual anthology of Rumanian avant-garde poetry, with his translations, for which he received a 2017 NEA Translation grant, was published in 2018 as Something is still present and isn’t, of what’s gone. Aracne editrice, Rome. He was the guest editor of the Fall 2011 issue of International Poetry Review. His poems have appeared in Communion, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Panoplyzine, Lucky Jefferson, O:JA&L, Poetica Review, Apricity Magazine, Detour Ahead, The Elevation Review, The Dillydoun Review, Red Ogre Review, Pure Slush, and Havik: The Las Positas Journal of Arts and Literature.

Two Poems by Matthew James Friday

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Fishing for Poems

I was asked, what is poetry like?

I thought, it’s like fishing.

You set up your intentions
on the bank of the page
and cast off into the current

of images and ideas.
then wait
                for inspiration
to nibble your bait, sink
the float and the poem bites.

Now the struggle begins:

wrestling with imagery,
trying to land the language
on the bank of verses.

Out of the water plops
the first draft. Disappointingly
underdeveloped.

Poets never exaggerate the catch.
A poem is always ‘this’ big,
often smaller, a tiddler

in the powerful play,
but still something to contribute
to Whitman’s waters.


Always Hoping To Write a Great Poem

Often the keyboard is sterile. I stare
out of the window and watch the trees.

Maybe something no one has ever said about trees.

Forget the clouds, too obvious.
The blue sky, yawn.

Birds bouncing around, little Buddha’s
not having to worry about creation.

I hear the song of a hundred ghostly ideas
ganging up behind me, giggling.

I sense the almost complete emptiness
inside every atom. Ideas like electronics
zip around, all potential, waves of hope.

I feel the bonding of a basic shape.

But as I write, it wriggles and flitters
out of my mind. I grab, but it is gone.

Just the scent and shadow,
a fear I will never know the elements
to turn leaden words into gold.




Matthew James Friday is a British-born writer and teacher. He has been published in numerous international journals, including The Dillydoun Review, Lunch Ticket, The Oregon English Journal and Shot Glass Journal. The micro-chapbooks All the Ways to Love, The Residents, Waters of Oregon and The Words Unsaid were published by the Origami Poems Project (USA).  Matthew is a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominated poet.

Two Poems by Tad Tuleja

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2023 Best of the Net Nominee

Stout Heart

“Real men don’t cry,” he heard them say when he
Was six, and the boy, fallen, took it straight
To heart, wanting to please and not to be
Mistaken for a girl. And so his fate
Was sealed. He made a garden in his heart
Where every sadness blossomed into stone.
He shrouded it behind an oak rampart
And when he fell he went to it alone.
Impassively he watered it with tears
Invisible. This pantomime of strength
Became his shield. In vanquishing his fears
He exiled tenderness so that at length
He found himself the sovereign of a land
Where even silent grief was contraband.


Cloudbreak

A lone beam of sunlight, javelin straight,
Breaks from a cloud to irradiate our garden.
The paraphernalia of work are suddenly luminous.
Wheelbarrow, rake, gloves for a moment aglow
While a trowel, eater of soil, flings back a flash,
Blinding me like I’ve been punched by a
Phosphorus fist. Watching the beam emerge
From the riven cloud, I recall Victorian tableaux
Like the finger of God steadying Jacob’s ladder
Or comforting Jesus in Gethsemane as Peter
Denies him. Was it such a beam that made Paul
Stumble or augured a victory for Christ at the
Milvian Bridge? Things that drop from the sky
Suggest origins wondrous. In this garden, though,
I see only tools: wheelbarrow, rake, gloves,
That specular trowel. Things of the brilliant earth,
Pointing only to themselves. But in the sweep
Of the visible, wondrous enough.




Tad Tuleja is a Texas-based folklorist and songwriter with interests in the Hollywood Western, honor cultures, and the mythology of violence. He has edited anthologies on vernacular traditions and military culture and received a Puffin Foundation grant for his song cycle “Skein of Arms.” He has a weekly podcast and performs songs under the musical alias Skip Yarrow.

“Anima” by Edward Lees

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

I was coming home from work,
this time from Amsterdam
where I presented all day.
Now late at night it’s the last leg – a train.
Suited, tired, and 50,
I am irrelevant to the girls
that sit across from me,
sharing ear buds
and as they select tracks,
dark quays elevate East London lights
that move with the minutes,
making a pop-up stage
for their dissonant voices
and the brash half-dance
of the one on the right
who magnifies the resonance she feels
until she can’t contain it
and her fingers trace
a sonic landscape in space
that she exudes
while prim passengers steal looks.
The girls know, but that does not drive
the show,
no – they were doing this in the fishbowl
of an empty carriage
when it first arrived,
greater then in their solitude
before being diminished
by an audience,
like an allegory for something we
grasp a-priori.
Is life simpler than work makes it?
To groove in forgotten places
could be enough
and through trivial rebellions
enlarge ourselves
by flaunting how we self-define,
imbuing the darkness
with the briefest shine.




Edward Lees is an American who lives in London. He has been writing poems for many years, but has only recently started to share them. During the day he works to help the environment.

Two Poems by M. Brooke Wiese

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Cormorants Prepare for the End Times

A bullfrog harrumphs somewhere in the tall
grass along the edge of the reservoir.
A cormorant is fishing for his midday
meal; he stays under a long time

looking for plunder. When he pops up,
unsuccessful, he shrugs it off – a flash
of feet and he’s gone again. His wet feathers
iridesce in the sunlight like an abalone shell.

Up on a corner of North Pump House,
a mated pair of sleek cormorants puff
their chests and spread their wings to dry,
facing into the sun. The day is hazy,

the air is thick from the fires out West,
burning up the land from the Pacific
to the Mississippi. The birds flutter
their throats against the heat, a neat

trick to cool off in this man-made sauna,
a strategy never needed this far
north before, but we are in another
war, this time with the avifauna.

Last night, the moon rose luminous
above the reservoir, the color of
tangerines, a photo-op for social
media, unsettling all the same. Relief

is promised today, when sudden thunderstorms
will unleash monsoon rains, giant hail,
and wind shear strong enough to blow a house
down, and clear away the smoky air.


Memento Mori

In my kitchen, musing on Cézanne’s Still Life with Skull (1898)

Apples, oranges and pears fill the bowl,
bananas and grapes spill over its lip;
the footed bowl is cinnabar, jewel-
like against the black walnut tabletop
burnished by a hundred years of eating.
It is an uneventful scene, and ours
is a modest home. Life is fleeting.
Many days I hear Charon’s oars
thunk against the oarlocks as he slowly
rows dead souls across the River Styx,
their mouth-coins his recompense. Such folly
to think I can escape with either promises or tricks
when even luscious fruit, if forgotten,
shrivels, molders, leaks, and grows rotten.




M. Brooke Wiese’s work has appeared in numerous publications, most recently in The Raintown Review, Poem, and The Orchards. Her poems have also been published in Sparks of Calliope, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, and Grand Street, and her chapbook, At the Edge of The World, was published by The Ledge Press in 1998. After a very long hiatus, she has again been writing furiously. She has worked in education and nonprofit social services.

Two Poems by Daniel Howard

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 2 Comments

II.

My lively passion’s death do I desire,
For if I cannot make its wildness tame,
I fear to be consumed within its flame,
And perish of my inner heat and fire;
For if she hates or loves me, both are dire:
Her hate my heart would much defile and shame,
Or if she said “I love” before my name,
I’d lose my life, when hers I would acquire;
Therefore I try steadfastly to resist
From looking longingly within her eye,
But even when I see her not nearby,
In each and every thought she does persist;
Thus I am like the fish who bit the bait,
Whose struggle cannot but secure his fate.


III.

If all the flesh and bone of which I’m wrought
Did not detain me on the earth I stand,
But let me reach beyond my outstretched hand
And fly away as if I were but thought;
No more the miles I’d mourn, now come to nought,
That kept us parted like the sky from land,
For I could summon you on my command,
Or think on where you are, and there be brought;
But flesh and bone I am; and though my mind
Can paint your pretty portrait in my brain,
Its pleasant mem’ry brings but present pain,
Such that I wish my inner eye were blind;
But if nor flesh nor thought will let me see
My love, then I would rather nothing be.




Daniel Joseph Howard studied law in his native Ireland before taking his MA in philosophy at King’s College London. He currently works in the European Commission.