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The Cardinal Tree~ By Swati Rawal

3/31/2015

7 Comments

 
Autumn leaves of various hues crunch under my feet
There is a void in my heart that only you can fill
I walk, off the beaten path, trying to erase your memory
Pain clutches at my very core, shattering the stillness
I look around at the autumn splendor, but feel nothing,
Hear nothing, just a vast emptiness echoing your name
Your voice, your presence, only your existence
I have to forget; learn to live without you, but how?
And then I see the cardinal tree, my cardinal tree
The bare branches ablaze with scarlet feathers
And I want to live again, for me.


Author Bio:
I am a dentist by profession. I love the arts and nature. I am an avid photographer. I like to write poetry and short stories, mostly for family and friends. I was born and raised in India and then relocated to Trinidad and Tobago. Currently I live in Memphis, Tennessee with my husband, two boys, and two canine children.

I love bird watching. I have a passion for hummingbirds. I have a backyard with flowers grown exclusively for hummers and butterflies. In summer I spend time photographing different moods of the hummers. Their jewel tones and ability to survive odds fascinate me. I also have a habitat for other birds and it gives me great pleasure to capture their various antics with a zoom lens.

My other hobbies are, traveling, painting, reading, and listening to music. I like Indian classical music but will listen to any genre. Since relocating to Memphis, I listen to the Blues.

7 Comments

The Pink Elephant~ By Nicole Pyles

3/30/2015

0 Comments

 
It's like the circus with clowns
And the flying trapeze.
Except it's only the pink elephant
In the room with you and me.

Pretend you don't see him
He's not part of the show.
I've told him some things
That I don't want you to know.

He's a large animal,
The color of cotton candy
And with the things he could tell you,
You might be afraid of me.

His large ears and large trunk.
stick out, don't you see?
But don't you question him.
He's holding secrets for me.

Let's talk of pleasantries,
Of sunshine and rainbows.
But please let's not talk about,
What the pink elephant knows.

I think you better leave now
I don't mean to be rude.
The only ones in this circus
Is me and the pink elephant in the room.


Author Bio:
Nicole Pyles is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. She's a night owl with an early bird schedule and spends her nights writing stories and her mornings drinking too much coffee. She also blogs and loves reading books about things that go bump in the night.

0 Comments

The Bum’s Lament~ Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

3/26/2015

1 Comment

 
This is the kind of town
where the library security guards goddamn
really care if you nod –
I come here to hide
behind my face, and dream,
so what if I
shut my eyes?
I doze lighter than the most feathery fantasist.
I sleep beneath ceilings of luncheon loaf, and sauces.
I read racing shadows like suckling pigs.
Tables. Chairs. Shelves. Ducks. Porticoes. Ostriches.
I visit stellar palaces
filled with plates of olives
like wreaths for the King of France.
The ferocity of the fantasy, Dickensian;
the vividness of my epiphanies, blood, hope,
lonely, lunatic losses, 
Shakespearian.


Author Bio:
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet living in Santa Fe, NM, and his poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Chiron Review, Pedestal, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Matter Poetry, among other places. He is also a journalist whose articles address race, class, and poverty issues. He likes -- maybe overly ambitiously -- to think he is passably talented as an actor.

1 Comment

Dead Mackerel~ By Virginia Boudreau

3/25/2015

0 Comments

 
Our home was the gathering place
shoes and boots stacked knee deep
in the corner behind the oil stove
mittens just might be found
on the kitchen counter- in July

voices got loud there and everyone
talked at once around the maple
table scarred and pocked with burn
marks a heap of dog-eared car trader

magazines and always, a chipped
crystal ashtray pushed against the wall
under the phone, it’s cord undulating
over a cluttered still life

noise rose to stain slats
of the wood ceiling while some fragrant
stew simmered and formed vapor
on old panes rattling in Yarmouth wind.

Now I have my own house. It’s lovely, really
in an ordered, pristine, perfect kind of way

it’s a place where floral patterned 
seats of balloon backed chairs
coordinate with velvet stripes
on the serpentine settee, the shimmering
damask drapes, delicacy of Limoges 

People usually call before visiting and
kids play in a “playroom” so the
“rest of the house” won’t be
disturbed.

Your new beau will never have to worry
about squashing the dead mackerel
that “Chico” sneaked onto the sofa
when nobody was looking

And, it’s a place
you won’t almost die laughing,
either. 


Author Bio:
Virginia Boudreau lives in a seaside community on the south western tip of Nova Scotia. She works as an itinerant learning disabilities specialist for the local school board. As a member of two local writing groups she has the opportunity to indulge her passion for poetry on a regular basis.

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Aniseed Twists~ By Sid Orange

3/24/2015

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Oozing like clean corn syrup into a hot pan, she bubbled. 
He fed her sentiments thick as glucose.
He stirred a deep flavour within her.
Then he shook anger into that sweetness.
His temper, like food colouring, dropped. She reddened.
He stirred again and tipped her into twenty-one moulds. 
She slowly crystalised, like a prisoner. Then she cooled.
He peeled back the moulds. Peeled these from her.
She was shining, twisted and addictive.
She was like twenty-one hard ideas, children sucked small.


Author Bio:
Sid Orange was a drug addict, thugs, bouncer and conman. He is from London, UK, but now lives in the Cotswolds, UK. He is an autodidact and a feminist - despite his gender.
0 Comments

Soak it In~ By Jessie Swierski 

3/23/2015

0 Comments

 
She sits alone at a table
Solitude is her choice
The others joke around
They laugh and talk
Their work undone

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead

The kids call her weird
She walks and eats alone
When she talks to me
I see a bright and shining star

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead

These days will fly
The years will go by
Soak in all you can
The person you become
Starts with the person you are

Hold your head up
Keep striving and learning
Your future lies straight ahead


Author bio:
Jessie Swierski lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she works as a teacher. She enjoys rooting on the Arizona Diamondbacks, gardening, and spending time with her family. 
0 Comments

Untitled~ By Simon Perchik 

3/19/2015

0 Comments

 
*
You keep the limp, stoop
the way this cane
lets you pretend its wood

can heal, touches down
making contact with the base
though there are no planes 

–what you hear is your leg
dragged, starting up 
and still the sky weighs too much

is filled with twigs breaking off
somewhere between England
and the slow walk home.

*
Without a riverbed you lean
feel your way through this dirt
as if it’s her voice you’re after 

–for a long time, eyes closed
you empty the Earth with your mouth
darkening this built-up moss

sent off for a stone near water
stretching out to smooth the silence
hidden the way innocent bells

were placed along the shore
with no light to take away
or welcome rocks around her body. 

*
Though her finger can’t reach
she’s telling you be quiet
as if there’s a word for it

shaped by a breath from where
the light on her face was lowered 
–shadows know this, let you

lie there, go over the details 
–from the start, her breasts
wanting so much to make a sound

cover the dirt with your mouth
pressing against her, begin
as silence, then nothing. 

*
Side by side as if the moon
carries off those buttons
close together and your coat

dyed black to make it heavier 
–you let it fall, lay there 
–yes, you were in love

sang to birds, to burials
though it’s the moon
coming back and the darkness

it needs to close the ground
that goes on alone
yes, you couldn’t move. 

*
Motionless, on the way out
no longer feels at home
though this single-minded nail

wants the job finished now
wanted a small hole, filled
to silence the song in the picture

in black and white taking her away
holding on –what’s left
will lower the wooden frame

is already caressing the wall
that something happened to
is surrounded by winds and cries

that carry off birds, bent the Earth
and the exhausted nail, by itself
between your fingers and suddenness.


Author Bio:
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere.
0 Comments

The Foreignness of Internal Affairs~ By Sandra Kolankiewicz

3/18/2015

1 Comment

 
How I crave the destruction of free
radicals interfering with my every day, 

with the single and cohort experiences
that make up my average life, nitrous 

oxide exploding my brain cells,

ammonia dictating from the liver, 

kryptopyrroles building up, stealing all

my zinc, devouring my B6 and Omegas.  

Inexplicably, I eat potato chips and
squelch opportunity by interrupting you

or hearing something you cannot. I see

oxidants swarming, cutting the heads off

my antiquities, foes with no believable
leader to expose the better parts of their
 
natures, my flesh with its temporary
spirit clearly not their reason for 

being but excuse enough to camp out,
pretend to be independent from some
 
electron that is everywhere at once while
I, of course, am little but a host.  I can
 
take the modern dilemma except for the
elements that wear you thin and down, 

that only take and nothing give, getting
into everything, even your protected 

best, the lowest of them mute
scavengers, most likely the strongest of
 
all.  They fill the squares, shouting
democracy, divided into ancient 

factions, their different and opposing
slogans not explaining that some parts 

within a system are primary, some
secondary, others inconsequential like 

comparing a beating heart to the texture
of hair, though they are related.  They 

have studied Aristotle and focus not on
the hand nor the body but on the chance

he got even to speak while they were
there.  They have escaped their zeolite
 
walls, stolen all the oranges and grapes,
filled the jars of olive oil with bile.


Author Bio:
I write every morning at 5 a.m.
1 Comment

Soul Searching~ By Niramoy Ganguly

3/17/2015

1 Comment

 
Standing out at the edge of my window
Catch the breeze as I watch the world below
Minions to a cause of our own selfish pride
Wondering who I’d miss when I die.

Do your jobs well, make them happy
That’s what we’re programmed to be
For our great loving family dream
I can never be as happy as I seem

What can I give to you?
When I don’t know what you want me to
What can I say to you?
When I can not feel any of it to
I lay here in pieces, shattered to pieces
Soul Searching my life, so cut me up
Guide my soul to your heart

All this love around, white noise it’s to me
Not the fault of anyone, for I cannot see
Playing this broken heart for so long
I can no longer stand this song

I may be one with a heart of gold
But even gold still remains cold
My life slips away through these holes
Trying to remember what I was told

“To find the melody within the noise
You need to first find your tune”

What am I suppose to do?
When I don’t know how to love you to
Where am I suppose to see?
When I don’t know why we came to be
I lay here in pieces, shattered to pieces
Soul Searching my love, so cut me up
Heal my wounds with your love

It’s been too long since it was sung
A familiar echo has begun
Soul searching through this life of mine
Finding my heart, till the end of time

As the light pierces through the clouds
A forgotten sensation plays it loud
The metamorphous of your love
Begins to melt my frozen heart

What am I suppose to do?
When my heart beats because of you
What am I suppose to say?
When I’ve never felt like this, this way
No more in pieces, no soul shattered pieces
Guide my soul with your love

Soul Searching within me, and I found you


Author Bio:
An engineer by trade who was released from the Indian Army on medical grounds. Had to start his life all over again and forced to let go of a life he always loved.
1 Comment

One Winter Day~ By Gigi Marks

3/16/2015

0 Comments

 
One

To be awake is to be awoken.
The sun is a small disc
that does not heat much
in the cold winter; and the dark
before it recedes has curled
the fox’s tail around him
so that he makes a rounded disc
in the old leaf litter, the woodpile
where he stays hidden in the snow.

Two

To be full of food is to be lazy
for awhile. The mouse’s track
doesn’t call so strongly,
the scent of rabbit doesn’t urge
so deeply in the muscles
that can bound and leap through
snow and run barely leaving
pawprints, small, doglike, following
in a straight line to find its prey,
claws showing, sharp enough--
but now, having eaten, the fox has
the white snow as a blanket to lie on.

Three

To live in the forest, the field
is to see the winter sun
as high as it can be almost
disappear in the great storm,
the white coating trees and dead grasses
and rocks and the rusty red fur
of the fox who walks silently,
more quietly than the fast-falling snow,
to his mate who is already growing
inside her the kits who will be born in spring.

Four

Does it matter if we just drift
into dreaming when there is
so much to explore? The two foxes,
together, run across the field,
and are just about alongside each other
white-tipped tails flashing when they
become one for a moment,
like we all do, for a moment, in a dream.

Five

To be perched on the telephone wires
near dusk like the row of pigeons
is to watch the lowering sun go pink,
flush, set a deep rose glow
on the stretch of sky that is tree-height
at the horizon. And the fox follows
a broken trail in the snow;
she stirs no twig or broken branch; 
she is full of the color of the sunset,
from the tip of her ears to the tip
of her busy tail, and she is black
when the sun goes down.

Six

At night when the unborn kits
move inside the mother fox,
stir against her, they wake her
from the kind of sleep that deepens
in the winter when no one roams
the coldest hour, and there is
no need to guard against him.
When the mother fox sleeps again,
the kits sleep with her. There is
a silent roar in the air, the last cry
and bark of the day, but look,
the fox is still, quiet, doesn’t move at all.


Author Bio:
Gigi Marks lives in Ithaca, New York. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including American Poets Against the War, The Atlanta Review, Best American Poetry, Green Mountains Review, Lilith, North American Poetry Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and others. Her first chapbook, What We Need, was published by Shortline Editions. A second chapbook of her poems, Shelter, was published by Autumn House Press in 2011. Most recently, her collection of poems Close By was published by Silverfish Review Press in Spring 2012. Close By was nominated for the National Books Critic Circle Award in Poetry in 2012. Recent poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry for 2013.
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