Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Results for the 2014 Editor's Choice Contest are in!!!


And the Winner is . . .

Scavenger Hunt by Donna Barkman


2nd place goes to . . .

Visitation Tuesday by Denise Weuve


3rd place goes to . . .

Mathematics by Christopher Hivner


This year we had three Honorable Mentions.  They are . . .

The Traffic in Old Ladies by Mary Newell
this small rain by Alexis Rhone Fancher
Signs of the Apolcalypse by Terri Simon


To read the winning poems and to see the complete list of finalists go to Kind of a Hurricane's Editor's Choice Contest Site:  http://editorschoiceaward.blogspot.com/ 

Friday, February 27, 2015

A Poem by Sy Roth


Lost is a Curve Beyond

Orange strips of cirrus,
Wispy thinning hair scrims
A hazy background shroud on their stage.

A no-exit street
Dead end of morning ablutions
Where late summer winds are stilled
And ground heat dissipates
Cooled by their snail-like terpsichorean sashaying,
Butterfly shutters in their world.

She holds his Member's Only jacket
Slung over her arm.
His pant legs curled four times
To reveal whitish-yellow skin
On hairless legs.
And she watches him, two steps behind
In the hush of the morning
An oranged halo of her white hair,
Runes above her.

Her passage, whistling soft,
A fleeting tranquility of a morn
In a dead end Ending.

A lamppost offers him a plie greeting
And he bends interminably to her comic opera
Until buttocks want to rest on his heels
But refuse the invitation.
And as interminably, he rises
Genuflects to the morn
And motions her to move on with him.

Beyond the gate
On the other side,
He achingly dawdles in a decades march
To save his day, and
She follows behind
Member's Only jacket
Swings awkwardly in their silence.

The cirrus clouds
Are blown into cumulus marshmallows
And the hushed street
Loses them in curve beyond.



Sy Roth comes riding in and then canters out.  Oftentimes, head is bowed by reality; other times, he proud to have said something noteworthy.  Retired after forty-two years as teacher/school administrator, he now resides in Mount Sinai, far from Moses and the tablets.  This has led him to find words for solace.  He spends his time writing and playing his guitar.  He has published in Visceral Uterus, Amulet, BlogNostics, Every Day Poets, Barefoot Review, Haggard and Halloo, Misfits Miscellany, Larks Fiction Magazine, Danse Macabre, Bitchin' Kitsch, Bong is Bard, Humber Pie, Poetry Super Highway, Penwood Review, Masque Publications, Foliate Oak, Miller's Pond Poetry, The Artistic Muse, Word Riot, Samizdat Literary Journal, Right Hand Pointing, The Screech Owl, Epiphany, Red Poppy Review, Big River, Poehemians, Nostrovia Poetry's Milk and Honey, Siren, Palimpset, Dead Snakes, Euphemism, Humanimalz Literary Journal, Ascent Aspirations, Fowl Feathered Review, Vayavya, Wilderness House Journal, Aberration Labyrinth, Mind[less] Muse, Em Dash and Kerouac's Dog.



Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Two Poems by Ken L. Jones


A Road Map Made of Fish Hooks

A litany of black-eyed Susan's
Bound in Moroccan began to bloom
Odd little summer had begun at last
After a winter that was a start stop feast
Until my cerebral cortex became a bass fiddle
Which as someone bowed it gave me very little peace
And all that ever saved me were her lips
Which were like an old Ernest Hemingway novel
As they opened like a flower
And drained me of my pride and power.


Canned Orange Slices and Yellow Eight-Track Leaves

Her voice is now nothing but a bit of trivia to me
As I listen to the ocean waves forget their words
While I wait for the melodies of approaching sleep
As darkness falls with all the poetry of Buddy Holly
And I go gentle into the cornfields once again
Where seeds and quartz grin like a painting of the reefs
Of my hotel room where after all these decades
I forgive the darkness of her angelic face.



For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.  

Monday, February 23, 2015

A Poem by Scott Thomas Outlar


Some Aren’t Poisonous
 
 
This was the station where she left us,
orbiting now somewhere in the parallel,
gone adrift in search of nothing
in that pretty little head of hers.
But we all knew it wouldn’t last forever
so cancel your charges down to the last consumer.
Not open on Sundays in this dried out husk of a town.
A bounty has been placed on the head of three men;
five cents, ten cents, maybe a quarter-
If you drag them home alive
somehow.
If you don’t damage all that’s left
inside.
Before and After pictures shake the leaves
during a Dirty Autumn Amber Breeze,
casting dust away in smog-filled proportions.
Hasn’t been cleared up just yet.
Hasn’t been made right by now
so it probably never will be.
Basking in tomorrows that never come-
just another today, one by one.
Repetitiously chasing home your rhythm
as the drum beats faster in my tick tock visions.
Hearts explode in critical mass, organs produce a festering plague;
it doesn’t have to be that way;
it never was supposed to cave.
Stalactite cavernous regions of death,
buried deep in her sacred sarcophagus,
are still praying to the sun or Sol;
still prompting the players to join in the ancient festivities;
still moving the pawns with the piper;
still confusing the snake with the viper.
 
 
 
Scott Thomas Outlar lives as simply as possible, spending his days sleeping, eating, reading, researching, taking meditative walks, gazing at stars, pondering existential quandaries, listening to music, drinking copious amounts of wine, and writing prose-fusion poetry dedicated to the Phoenix Generation.  His work has appeared in various venues via magazines, journals and websites, including Dissident Voice, Dead Snakes, Jellyfish Whispers, The Kitchen Poet, Aphelion, Strike-the-Root, and Ascent Aspirations.  Scott can be reached at 17Numa@gmail.com.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Two Poems by Stefanie Bennett


Preponderance

     "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,
     Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed"

                                   -- L. Cohen & S. Robinson

He said, 'I lend you love'
Which meant - "Lease," -
The aftertaste
Of lips
Dispersed
On spent tourmaline.

The attache of indifference
Doesn't come
To terms
With chancery -
Doesn't see
The meteor fall

Or how she aggregates
The delicate
Architecture of a leaf . . .



The Numbers

It wasn't perfect, we did not
Go down
In flames
Or fly
The cerebral kite
On shores
Less foreign.

Drifting, interfused
With twists
Of fallibility,
And Gitanes
Tasting like
                Mediocre
Corn syrup - we

Read Ferlinghetti's
City Lights,
Caught
The last bus
Back
To 'specifics'
That didn't add up

And an end that
Never was.



Stefanie Bennett has published eighteen books of poetry and poems online; Boston Poetry, The New Verse News, Poetry24, and others.  Of mixed ancestry (Italian/Irish/Paugussett-Shawnee) she was born in Townsville, Qld, Australia in 1945.  Stafanie's new poetry title "The Vanishing" is due at year's end from Walleah Press.



Sunday, February 15, 2015

A Poem by Ken Seide


Taxonomy of Breakups
 
Did you see the breakup coming?
How were the two of you before the breakup?
Who broke up with whom?
Are you in touch after the breakup?
Are you over the breakup?
 
1.
You didn’t see it coming, especially because
she was swooning and said so.
She was kind and committed
soon before the breakup.
(She took you to the doctor,
took you home with her,
put you to sleep in her bed.)
Then she broke up.
She said that you could ask her why,
but only on the phone,
she didn’t email about such things.
But you were out of questions by then.
You miss her and
the breakup hurts.
 
2.
You saw it coming, but only looking back, because
she had been so loving.
(She sang to you in bed,
she left her seat at dinner to sit on your lap.)
She had complained only once before.
The breakup was her doing.
She sent a friendly email months later,
but you didn’t want to be her friend.
You miss her and it hurts,
presumably forever.
 
3.
You saw it coming from the night you met
(which was also the night you first kissed,
that warm November night,
when you rolled down her car window, played the radio loud,
danced in the parking lot, and laughed at the police cruiser gliding by).
Her only virtue, it turned out,
was charisma.
Her erratic acts finally forced you to flee.
You told her that the farewell was final,
because you couldn’t get over her if you knew, if you hoped,
that she would contact you again, next month or years from now.
She hasn’t contacted you,
but you’re still not over her.
 
4.
You knew that breaking up was possible, because
you both kept threatening to do it.
Things began joyously
(on your first date, you read each other poetry,
you gave her a necklace you had made
from a Noah’s Ark charm),
then degenerated.
You unleashed fears in each other, like dogs bounding up from the cellar.
The breakup was mutual; so was the regret.
You told her that you would erase her messages without reading them.
She still sends emails and texts,
which you erase without reading.
You miss her and it hurts.
 
 
 
 
Ken Seide is the pen name of a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, USA. His love and post-love poems have appeared in New Vilna Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, SN Review, Soul-Lit, and elsewhere. His flash fiction appeared in Storm Cycle 2013.
 

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Three Poems by Daniel von der Embse


Requests
 
Play for me please
something from memory,
known by heart, yet imagined
for the first time as if
the wound were fresh
 
Play for me a song broken,
a melody left open, tossed
onto the side of the road
waiting for the next one
 
Please play it slow and
loud, and torture the music
so that every dropped note
is heard like shattered glass
each one felt against the skin
 
And when you are done
pick up the notes and set them
by the door to play again when
the next one comes, the same request
as if the wound were fresh
 

Roller coaster
 
Words drink too much,
turn the conversation
into broken glass –
brittle, bloody
 
Some careless thing
gets held onto,
an act once shaken off,
Becomes unforgiveable
 
Eventually
the riding up and down
becomes too much
and we resolve there’s no use,
 
That’s when tears come,
feeling that unhappy together
is more bearable
than miserable apart
 
We have learned
how to make room
for each other
on the roller coaster,
 
to keep our places,
hold onto our seats,
so that we might learn
to love the ride
 
 

As when you were here
 
In the house I keep
to remind me of you,
I wait for your return
to bring life back into the room
 
Your hair never cleaned
from the sink or your scent
lost from the bed, everything suspended
since you went away
 
On the table, the linens
brought back from Italy
soften the hardness of miles traveled
before we rested here
 
The front door kept unlocked
for you to enter without a knock,
nothing that could delay you
from rushing back to me
 
The creak of the hinges pitched
exactly as when you were here,
nothing changed
but the counting of the years
 
 



Daniel von der Embse was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, educated in Catholic schools, and graduated from Ashland University with a B.A. degree in Theatre. He began writing poetry after a four-decade career as a copywriter for advertising agencies in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. His poems appear The Missing Slate, Across The Margin, Harpoon Review, Decanto, Poetry Pacific, and Poetry Quarterly.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

A Poem by Richard Schnap


Alpha and Omega

She remembered her first kiss
A newly planted white rose
Opening its petals to the dawn

And her first night of love
The sun climbing over the sea
Its waves washing over her heart

And her first goodbye for now
The moon waning in the sky
Hidden till its next incarnation

But she never expected the end
An evil wind stripping the trees
Turning them all into skeletons



Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.




Thursday, February 5, 2015

A Poem by Ken L. Jones


A Bottle of Swans

Her long hair was like ivy vines creeping down a crumbling cliff
Towards a vacant lot so remote it can't be reached easily anymore
Where amongst rusting hulks of abandoned autos and tumbleweeds so thick
One can occasionally see a horned toad scurrying about upon business so obscure
That we can only guess at the extent of it
And yet in this place of decomposition and oxidation on the prowl
I find that my soul is finally externalized and that there was somewhere
Where I had always and truly belonged after all
So even if she no longer needs me and has moved on to other dreams
At least I'm left a sovereign here in this realm of rot and weeds





For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.