Bart Solarczyk's Handful of Haiku

I lie when
I drink - 
I’m not drinking






he drinks - 
flowers
bend to rain





more reason to weep
--drunk
without a dog





(for Deanna)


some mornings shimmer golden –
red hair framing flesh
in last night’s dream





eating chips
& writing poems
with salty fingers




our parrot
sweet talks my wife
in another man’s voice






bsolarczyk@comcast.net

John D. Robinson's Tiger-eating Worms, Love in the Prison Exercise Yards, and Calls to Heaven and Hell

TIGERS & WORMS

‘Not even the tigers beat the worms
at the end’
and as we face an unknown, face-
less lethal enemy without
prejudice across the globe,
I have consumed a bottle of
diablo’s chardonnay and
smoked frequent joints, I’ve
swallowed codeine and
diazepam and I step awkwardly
into my back-garden,
wondering how many more
times I’ll have the honour
and pleasure of doing this,
I look toward heaven,
breathe deep of its beauty,
savouring it
like it was the
last time.

THE DAMNED PLACES

Love can be found in
the most damned
places:
in the ravaged souls
of those
whose lives have been
taken by poverty and
disease and
starvation,
in the hell-holes of
addiction, in the
corners and crevices
of the madness of
every day, in the
shadows of sex and
the silhouettes of
regret, in the
hearts of military
conflicts and the
exercise yards of
prisons, in the
hovels of dirty
desperation and
the quietness of
loneliness, in the
voices of protest and
the songs of
disobedience,
in the eyes of the
young, you can see
it, pure and
innocent,
you can find it
in this poem
and its for you.

THE CALL

She told me that
‘I’ve been fucked in heaven,
I’ve been fucked in hell
and I’ve been fucked here’
she gave me a smile that
had been broken and
ignored by most for so
long, for too long:
I smiled back and told
her that I wasn’t going to
fuck-her-over:
‘You know’ she said ‘I
want to believe you’
and I think for that
moment only she did:
‘You call me’ I said
and those were the final
words between us,
face to face: she never did
call and she never will,
maybe I should have
called her but the lines
of heaven and hell are
constantly engaged and I
didn’t have her
personal number.


John D Robinson is a UK poet: hundreds of his poems have appeared online and in print: he has published several chapbooks and 3 full collections: his latest publications are 'Red Dance'  (Uncollected Press  USA) and a poem was included in 'The Ragged Lion Press Journal #2'  UK:

Mark Young Follows Lines Of Crypto-Current Fur Trade, The Rains Down In Africa, And Bruised Sun Tzu Hip Bones

A line from Marguerite Duras

A study of Disney theme
parks indicates that cryptocurrency
has few commonalities
with gold. It's just that the

listener is seduced even though
the storytelling itself is suspect
& it's sometimes hard to understand
what is being said. We've

gravitated toward the fur seal
trade. Illegal but clean — there are
no vacations, but no blockchain
hangups to bring you down.


A line from R.E.M.

Only the shoreline feels
certain. There are surfers
nearby. Today's warm up
sketch is a complex chem-

ical reaction between oxy-
gen & that Toto song
Africa looping endlessly
in the Namib desert. Con-

sider this. Some noise on
an evening contains hot
stoves. Elsewhere it may
just be icebergs colliding.


A line from Ferdinand de Lesseps

My browser does not currently re-
cognize any of the video formats
available. It requires two strong men
to carefully keep it in place until

the spawning season is over. I do
not shut my eyes. Patterns form
behind my eyelids. I try to recall
things I have read, have heard. Sun

Tzu comes to mind. Camp on hard
ground, he said, even if you get
bruises on the sides of your hips. It
will help to improve the reception.


Mark Young's most recent books are a collection of visual pieces, The Comedians, from Stale
Objects de Press, & turning to drones, from Concrete Mist Press.

Brian Rhilmann And The Barbed Wire In The Oak, The Wretched Gap, The Tangerine Sun

ANYTHING BUT THIS

I’d rather be anything
but this oak tree—
a gnarled old thing, half-rotted
nothing but layers of secrets
wrapped in secrets
awaiting the blade
and revelation

years of sickness
years of drought or infestation
carved initials inside hearts
now returned to the soil
barbed wire absorbed
rusty nails embedded in its flesh

deep—a black layer
fire scars concealed yet remembered
and above, last year’s withered leaves
still cling to the branches
and hiss when the wind blows
the dead, once more
speak louder than the living


THE WRETCHED GAP

my earplugs are in
so I don’t hear him
don’t notice as he
sits at the other end
of the long table

until I feel the vibrations
across 8 feet of hardwood—
the pounding of his middle fingers
on the keys
like angry little fists

I stare until he
looks up, then away
continues to pound

he either does
or doesn’t understand
what the look is about

I clench my jaw
against the words
kicking the backs
of my teeth
and try to work
try to finish the poem
I’m writing

a hundred times a day
I’m called to reconcile
what I’d like to do
with what’s socially acceptable
but there’s no reconciling them—

I can only squirm
in this wretched gap
where I live


THE REAL POEM

life is the real poem
but it moves
way too fast
and the nets
of our eyes
are full of holes
and so—
we must
slow...
it...
down.
with words
with lines
like these
lines like photographs
of lightening bolts
of leopards in pursuit
of lovers on a beach somewhere
swathed in the fading light
of a tangerine sun


Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada. He writes free verse poetry, and has been published in The Blue Nib, The American Journal of Poetry, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others. His first poetry collection, “Ordinary Trauma,” (2019) was published by Alien Buddha Press.

Dick Bentley Wades The Vile Serpentine Stalks, Endures The Damp Church Pews, And Bites Down The Gold-Plated Fillings To The Bowels

OUR CRYPT

Nothing will sleep in our basement,
It’s damp as a ditch,
Small flowers break out of boxes stalking
cracks in the concrete.
Buds swayed and slouched,
Dangling from moldy crates,
Drooped down long yellow vile stalks, like serpents.
And what a muster of stinks!
Roots with wet shafts,
muck, green, swollen against slimy planks.
Striving for life:
While the muck keeps gasping.



UNDER THE WEATHER---A FUNERAL

Damp church pews glistened with
grief. Sorrow poured out and rushed freely
from our eyes.
Our pain came
as if from a hidden song in the bible.
We suffered, knelt, pleaded, chanted,
compromised with God while asking
for words of certainty.
We blasphemed, sought assurance, we mourners in black,
full of holy struggle, our hands and faces damp,
from the edges of understanding.



OUR DREAMS ARE BONFIRES

Our dreams are bonfires.
Our words are flames.
When you puncture us, we bleed electromagnetic sparks
When you scrape us, we split and increase
Our mothers molded us from cloud-love
and smiling wisps, but our
songs are upheavals and tempests. Our balm is thunder
like drilling for oil and rattling down through the earth.
When our mothers embraced us, we showered from the sky.
When they left us, we rumbled and turned into
lightning. We are the not sleep our parents gave us.
We are the stories we tell ourselves
And when we close our eyes,
we are the gold-plated fillings inside the mouth
Rattling down to the bowels.


Dick Bentley’s books, Post-Freudian Dreaming, A General Theory of Desire, and All Rise are available on Amazon.  He won the Paris Writers/Paris Review’s International Fiction Award and has published over 280 works of fiction, poetry, and memoir in the US, the UK, France, Canada, and Brazil.  He served on the Board of the Modern Poetry Association and has taught at the University of Massachusetts. Find him online at www.dickbentley.com.

Howie Good's Days Of The Week, The Overflown Stars, And A Trousered Harpy

Week at a Glance

Sunday stitches eyelids shut. Monday
gesticulates with the soggy, chewed-up
end of a cigar. Tuesday loses a crap job
and never finds another near as good.
Wednesday tumbles to the ground dead,
then gets up and dusts off its clothes.
Thursday, when asked, can’t explain it.
Friday isn’t what you’ve been told it is,
a fist-sized muscle. Saturday tries to slip
in the door without the dog going crazy.


Doctrinaire

We’re born, given just a few simple lines to speak,
told in a threatening tone not to fuck them up
or stray from the basic script, then go through life
repeating the same weary lines over and over
while being overflown by stars we forget are there.


Burning Bridges

Let there be no doubt
that our world is a cage.
We are living a life
of shadows, of echoes.
You don't look like you
anymore. I wasn't there
even when I was. I'm
a foolish old man who’s
been drawn into a wild
goose chase by a harpy
in trousers. The trail is cold,
if there ever was one.

Source: Quotes from characters played by Jeff Bridges as found on https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/jeff_bridges


Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Laura Johnson Contemplates The "Stretched Me", The Languages Of Tree Frogs, And The Golden Puddles Beneath The Undergirth

Pendulum 


The afternoon shone window-stripes across       
our den floor. Mama rocked me back and forth. 
“Shhh,” she said, “Shut your eyes.” I didn’t mind. 
My feet stuck out beyond her knees, and   
I tried imagining how I would feel when     
my feet could reach the floor, when I was in 
a long, grown-up body like hers. I was
completely inside and comfortable in
that size me. Would the me that was me stretch 
to fill my body when I grew taller? 
Or would I be somewhere in my shoulders,
chest, and head, and the rest be extra to
rock a little three-year-old, like she rocked me-- 
thought-quieting Mama, measuring time.



Other


The principal walks in
though she never walks in
after school with no
students or lessons to observe.
Sits down. “You know we’re in
the middle of renovations.” 
The long and short? She wants
to give my room to another teacher
who is leaving her room for
renovations.  It will be easier for
that teacher if I teach ESOL in a lab.
I walk the hallway, pushing my
cart of world literature and workbooks.
It’s an empty, almost straight path,
soft earth gives beneath my feet,
I walk through patches of warmth and
shadows, listen to tree frogs all around
speaking their other languages.



Another Instance

(To Denise Levertov)


Your words, banked in
subconscious ether,
fall like rain on the family van as
we drive to the theater.
The street’s golden puddles slosh
against the undergirth.
Knowing there must be a rainbow, I turn,
see it against that one dark corner
you described, and
my daughter asks why I
always gasp at everything.




Laura Johnson is the author of Not Yet, recently released by Kelsay Books and available on Amazon. Her work has appeared in a range of online and print journals and anthologies, including Rasputin, Literary Mama, Time of Singing, Reach of Song (Georgia Poetry Society, 2018) and The New Southern Fugitives. Laura holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University and teaches English/ESOL at Fayette County High School in Georgia.