Two Poems by Dawnell Harrison

Hemlock-headed

You poison everything

You touch like a

Hemlock-headed witch.

The night thickens and

Laments as the twined

Noise in the tar-colored

Night rides down
From the twisted oak

Trees.

I cannot hold your

Wretched hands.

I cannot trust that which

Is demonic.

I ride the waves of the

Moon’s light alone down

To the earth’s floor.
I must be an island.



Glisten

The stars glisten in the indigo sky
as the moon shows its bald luminescent

face in the cold hours of the night.
I wait for you in our icy bed to come

and melt the frost away.
I cling to my heart -

my soul lingers like a child wanting
some candy.

Dawnell Harrision has been published in over 100 magazines and journals including The Endicott Review, The Journal, Fowl Feathered Review, The Bitchin' Kitsch, Vox Poetica, The Tower Journal, Queen's Quarterly, and many others.

A Poem by Sharon Fedor

Perigee

You amble out,
celestial glob,
put on your pitted
smirky face,

And yet they kiss,
they laugh and touch,
they ramble on
in easy pace,

You practice more,
you snarl, bare teeth,
and wobble wide
a Western stance,

But they are loathe
to back away,
they find you still
at every chance,

They love you so,
they seek you out,
but you will not
stay dim, undaunted

You grow wild
in size and glow,
and then, aghast,
they tremble, haunted.

Sharon Fedor spends her days engaging students officially designated as fascinating and unique. She nudges them toward calm competence and creative expression. She promotes the joy of discovery. When she is not teaching, you may find her conjuring images of her own for her first collection of poetry, or walking her dog, Inga, amid the horses of Tree Tops Park in Davie, Florida, where she lives with her husband, Michael, and texts her daughter, Chloe Noelle, student of violin, in NYC.

A Poem by Valentina Cano

Reminders

The moon is red tonight
and I’m not sure why,
The color weaves like feathers,
softly stroking the chalky surface.
It reminds me of you.
Not strange.
Everything does.
Even red feathers
dancing across a rock
that has never seen
them, you, or me.

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, A Narrow Fellow, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, Spark Anthology, Awaken Consciousness Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, Avalon Literary Review, Caduceus,White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize.You can find her here: http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com

A Poem by Rhonda Parrish

The Day After

Sunbeams feel cold,

white as a naked fluorescent bulb,
hard as concrete,
and as unfeeling.
They ravage the shadows
as I did your trust
throw each scratch
she carved into my flesh
into stark relief.
Silent testimony to last night's betrayal.

Despite being a fantastic procrastinator, Rhonda Parrish manages to find time to run Niteblade Magazine, edit anthologies and write. Most (but not all) of her work falls into the speculative end of the genre spectrum but she isn't a big fan of labels. She also maintains a blog at http://www.rhondaparrish.com and loves sushi.

A Poem by Seamas Carraher

AUTUMN IN GHETTOES

for caoilfhionn costello

She absolves her human being with this dance.

She throws it at me like a net.
"This is a reason for winter," she says,
"unlike your politics."
i choke her easiness with another question.
She walks away and drowns in whatever
you call it.
i feel this cold and this hard on a dirty
bus returning from Dublin.
i empty the house with it and its remains.
It is still Autumn.
And there is no one listening.
It is still Autumn and we could be drunk
but it would be someone else.
She forges my emotion and dedicates it to
children.
They have starved sensibly in this feeling.
It is both Irish and Imperial.
A product of famine.
i have stopped trying to feed the ones
i have inherited.
My life is dull in its eternal moments.
Much like the cold that accuses the dole queue.
My life tells me i am not here, not really.
That i have suffered in a continual birth of
others.
They cannot be me, nor themselves,
now not even Autumn.
There is too much and too little significance.
Still, here in the middle things change.
i tell her the leaves will grow again.
i tell her this cloud could pass.
And these murderous walls rot.
But she will feed these children irrespective
of whether they are ours or not.
And here:
(where we have been rounded and beaten
here where we call this animal oppression
freedom!
and these myths truth! and this mirror reality!)
here...
she feeds them, unanswering.
i. can. not. ever. understand this.
It is like a collision among the tools.
In this way i put my burning tongue in her heart.
Such an Internationale!

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He writes on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present. http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/

Two Poems by J.K. Durick

How It Works

Your carefully selected words

Stumble, misspoken
Become what she expected
What she thought you’d say.
Words can do that so easily
Intention disappears
Frame of reference slips
And now she can sit smugly
Back readying her attack
On what she heard you say.
Explaining it, reviewing it
Parsing out what you said
Will do nothing now
That it has become history
Part of that transcript
An unchangeable part of
What he said and she said
What you said and she heard.
Words can dig holes, can fly free
Can jump the tracks, run away
Can stand alone, wear disguises
Can scratch, can cut deep, and
Words can seal a fate – like now.

Playing at It
 

It isn’t a game after all, a lob just over the net

To his or her non-existent backhand, fifteen-love.
 

It isn’t a game after all, horses at the old hoop,

Jump shots, set shots, hooks till someone misses.
 

It isn’t a game after all, ten pins down the alley,

Strikes and spares, in the gutter and over the line.
 

It isn’t a game after all, with pawns and rooks

Protecting the queen and the king’s last move.
 

It isn’t a game after all, just one live bullet in six,

A spin, then to the temple, then pull the trigger,
 

And after all that, it wasn’t a game after all.


 

J. K. Durick is a writing teacher at the Community College of Vermont and an online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Literary Juice, Jellyfish Whispers, Third Wednesday, and Common Ground Review.

A Poem by M.J. Iuppa

When There’s Nothing Left To Say

After days of travel & talk, I

looked in my rearview mirror & saw
winter inside my eyes– blue-black hues–

texture of clouds, taking forever

to cross the sky. Ground fog rose
in my chest & settled in my throat.

I could no longer sing along, pretending

that I was going to wake to a day
unlike any other . . .

M.J.Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. For the past eight years, she and her husband Peter Tonery have been committed to food sustainability. She has numerous publications (poetry, fiction, nonfiction and plays) in national and international journals as well as two full length poetry collections Night Traveler (Foothills, 2003) and Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collection, 2010) and five chapbooks; her latest prose chapbook Between Worlds is forthcoming from Foothills. She served as the poetry adviser (2007-2012) for the New York Foundation for the Arts, and since 1986, has worked as a teaching artist in the schools, K-12 for a variety of agencies (RCSD, BOCES 2, Young Audiences, Genesee Valley BOCES, Project U.N.I.Q.U.E. and V.I.T.A.L. Writers & Books, and others) Currently she is Writer-in-Residence and Director of Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College.