Author Archives: Sarah

INVOCATION

What is the function of invocation, what
do we hope to achieve? Grotesque rituals
as a form of ghost dance, dodgy seances
with incoherent messages from the dead,
do not constitute a resurrection machine.

When people listen to themselves what
do they hear? Years of silence, whispers
of brutality and inner selves. Help us
to reconfigure and confuse, to stay alive
and respond to the command interface

you specify. Death is a Möbius strip
of lies and decay, so what keeps you
going now you have abandoned life?
Emails from the living, kind eulogies,
and traces of self-evident decay.

In the beginning we invoke the one,
but now we are struggling to breathe.
What is the function of elucidation,
transformation, the idea of the divine?
Something to cling on to as we die.

© Rupert M Loydell

Rupert Loydell is a writer, editor and abstract artist. His many books of poetry include Dear Mary (Shearsman, 2017) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (Shearsman 2015); and he has edited anthologies such as Yesterday’s Music Today (co-edited with Mike Ferguson, Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2014), and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos (Salt, 2010).

Synecdoche

So much of her voice is in me,
It’s like our family is a real living organism,
Each appendage is one of us,
Me, my wife, my son, and my daughter.

She smiles even when she’s sick.
Ever-courageous, she tumbles through the threshold,
Shoes on the wrong feet, bottle in hand,
A shriek of joy silences the masses.

She asks for more milk to drink than she can handle,
Ever-doubtful, she mistrusts even herself,
But I’ve seen her climb up into her car seat
As if it were her Everest.

I let her fall a little,
So, she practices how to get back up.
I think what people mean when they say to learn to get back up
Is you should learn how to fall first without it breaking you.

Alexander P. Garza is a writer, actor, and educator from Houston, TX. His work can be seen in Nine Muses Poetry(forthcoming), Magnolia Review (forthcoming), Little Rose Magazine (forthcoming), Ariel Chart, Literal Magazine, and Broadway World Houston. He has worked on and offstage at The Alley Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, Main Street Theater, and Mildred’s Umbrella Theatre Company. Visit him on Instagram/Twitter, @alexanderpgarza, and on his website http://www.alexanderpgarza.com.

The Opposite of Stars

1.
Grieving you is terrible work because I don’t know how to do it. Light pours into the room like stale tea between blinds gnawed through by the frustrated cat unable to go outside. There are teeth holes and claw holes in the white, enough holes to be the opposite of stars.

2.
I make mushroom tea, watch the ground volva float then catch in the strainer like silverfish. I force its spine down my throat, wait for the wriggling to start.

3.
Grieving is self-induced ritual, or has become self-induced ritual, after it was natural. Enough years have passed that people don’t want your name on my lips anymore. I imagine what your young body must look like now in the ground. Are you skull and hair? Are you vertebrae and nails? It’s smart to subscribe to religion that describes the soul—what the body becomes, to earth, to bugs, is unbearable and unforgiving.

4.
I chug the hot juice of smaller gods faster, scald the architecture of self, brutalist. Here is the heart made geometric, concrete, an institution. Here is the brain, simple and utilitarian.

5.
Until frogsong croaks in nighttime reverie, masks street traffic, marital arguments, the neighbor’s crated terrier.

6.
I went into this thinking I’d resolve death as if by magic.

7.
Dendrochronology reveres trees. Who above listens to the chatter of teeth?

Alia Hussain Vancrown has published in journals and magazines in print and online. Her poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was selected to participate in Winter Tangerine’s 2018 workshop, Singing Songs Crooning Comets, featuring seminars by Kaveh Akbar and Aricka Foreman. Alia works at the Library of Congress in the Law Division. She currently resides in Maryland. For more, please visit www.aliahussainvancrown.com and Instagram @aliagoestothelibrary.

The Flying Cage

I saw a flying iron cage, yes, the bars
were round as I saw the silhouette and there was an iron
desk in it and a chair of iron to sit on.

All the things were patterned as grills, so
I could see through them from my terrace as the cage flew
high in the sky. The night was dark around

the cage and I had no time to check whether any moon
gave its light anywhere. I had no time,
as I was busy calling my children from downstairs

to come watch that quaint thing with me. No, it was not
magic, the orange glow that showed the cage
to me below came from the fire from under

the balloon that lifted it. No, my children did not
join me to witness the spectacle and to make it complete as,
the man that sat at the desk just opened the door

of the cage
and jumped,
bungee style.

Rajnish Mishra is a poet, writer, translator and blogger born and brought up in Varanasi, India and now in exile from his city. His work originates at the point of intersection between his psyche and his city. He edits PPP Ezine.

Poem for A Viral Video

— After the Icelandic Heyr himna smiður

The song reminds you
it might be possible to endure.
That the sun can go dark,
swallowed by wolves,
eaten by snow, but a melody
burrows or is knit
into the ground like a taproot
might rise to the surface
of throats earth has not
yet imagined, might resurrect
in an echo as trains rumble by
or in some place of transit
between this world and
the next. That whatever
is lost is not lost. That
whatever is kept
keeps its own secret
life, that your body’s
a chamber, a channel,
a mead hall
for music beyond
what you know.

Jen Stewart Fueston lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, most recently Ruminate, Rock & Sling, and The St. Katherine Review. Her poems have twice been finalists for the McCabe poetry prize, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, “Visitations,” was published in 2015, and her second, “Latch,” will be released in early 2019. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania.

Let the Rain Possess Me

Stars fading, a margin of sky clears
as clouds spill from the west.
Miles of blue for a week, warmest winter
on record, but now darkness swells,
shares a remnant of moon with gray dawn.

Black caps tapping at the feeder, chickadees
feint with goldfinches for the best fruit, seed.
The bluebirds never left, January so much
like early April. They just fluff and rustle
in the water, chatter to squirrels who burst
the length of hickory branches, leaves dried
and crackling but still hanging on.

Hanging on to joy, even with storms
moving in. They scrabble and loop the bark —
and the chase is on as drops scatter the yard
then more until silver hazes,  erases me.

KB Ballentine’s fifth collection, Almost Everything,
Almost Nothing, was published in 2017 by Middle Creek Publishing.
Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal,
among others, her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein
Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017).
Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

Quantum Realities

Science gets me
as if it were yesterday
again on the eve of tomorrow.

I grow in my walk at the foot of mountains
gathering the mysteries of physics
mysterious atoms attached to my coat.

Light travels to my soul
I shake with the memory of beginnings
so long ago cold in the explosion of the first instant.

My body floats now
without the substance of mankind
weightless as the mist of nebulae.

The instant will come
when all begins and this day collapses
reality will be at last.

The paradox of destinies revealed
life will blossom at the unlikely second
the flesh burnt to oblivion, to be ever born.

Fabrice Poussin teaches French and English at Shorter University. Author of novels and poetry, his work has appeared in Kestrel, Symposium, The Chimes, Amethyst Review and many other magazines. His photography has been published in The Front Porch Review, the San Pedro River Review as well as other publications.

Middle England

a man and his wife, setting off
around the corner
on the pavement
by the staggered junction,
past the tall hedge toppling
its bounds

press button lights, bike lanes,
blurred cars, buses’ zig-
zag round the narrows
where the pub juts out—

grey trousers, three quarter
charcoal paddy, pink scarf,

perennial
ten minute walk
to catch the bus to town
or journey faraway.

The sky is textured damp
that does not fall but effloresces
in the air

middle age, middle England,
burgeoning
from the tolerant climate
where spiky palms grow
alongside rosemary, roses,
moss,
and ordinary life
runs on without old tragedies
of loss

where, in every village
and small town, churches—
raising funds for roofs,
spires—still mark
the centre

beyond safety barriers,
white lines, regulation,
the skies, the fields
persist, the heights
the green
depths

Tuning In

Grass rough against my cheek,
I lie with ear to the ground
listening for the reverberation
of hoofbeats, soundwaves, footsteps
– the vibrations by which my ancestors
predicted the probable.
But as I tune in
to earth’s faint pulse
I feel a pull of energy
in the beating of my heart.
Deep in the unheard singing
something ancient stirs
and moves me to tears.

Tina Morris has been around for decades, appearing in hundreds of magazines and anthologies, ranging from Children of Albion to Peace News, Tribune and Freedom. Her recent poetry collection Mirrors and Moonshine was published in 2017. Writing as Tina Cryer, her teenage pony novel Horses, Divorces & Hissy Fits was recently published by Forelock Books.