Issue #55

J.I. Kleinberg

J.I. Kleinberg’s visual poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide. An artist, poet, freelance writer, and three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg.

Mark DeCarteret

My Muse Sits Out Another Spring

cut and pasting more cat-grins
to that cast I’ve outlasted in the mirror

never hyperventilating over violets
as they sag—tiny wrists in slings,

or reading up on the ancient deer
pissing red on my doorstep,

never sold on those sap-paths you’ve taken
leaves clipped out so artfully then piled on.

Instead, I’ll make posts to that self I can
stomach the most, camera in on,

imagining I’m a mime or a game-player played
by magic gods who continue to dog us.

Outside the power lines are still there
listing things silently like the satellites.

The sun towering over us, of little use.
Clouds peeled-n-slapped on, pals for life.

I mean, it all counts, that’s the thing.
Each noun ringing up every action

And settling into eternity like stuck Christs
along with that museum store grammar

phasing us into the past, ensuring
we’re safe. It all does us so, so good.

From that first of many commas flirting
with death, till that final period

dropping in on us from space.
It kills me to have to write like this.

The usual diet of ironies, tired siren songs.
When verse would once err on

the side of desire, or at the least re-
consider what our elders said, even serve.

My wind chimes diminish, then sound miked.
Across a rock, teens have tagged my name.

I lower myself to the rowing machine.
Attempt to work off yet another apocalypse.

Mark DeCarteret’s 7th book lesser case was just published by Nixes Mate Books. He has poems (soon to be) appearing in Chiron Review #66, Hole in the Head Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Plume Poetry Journal (forthcoming), Saw Palm, Sobotka Literary Magazine and Unbroken.

DB Jonas

The Colossus

Reflections on Jackson Pollock

He stretches out the north over empty space;
He hangs the earth on nothing.
Book of Job, 26:7

When they awaken they’ll discover
bit by bit, I reckon, just what’s been taken
in the missing evidence, the undetected
footprint of a noiseless burglar in the night,
the lingering suspicion of absent edges
and absconded contours, the oddly persistent
rumor of borders breached, and everywhere
a lingering technicolor vomit-stench
of last night’s sour mash and cigarettes.

I’d liked to bring my face up close,
descending from my nauseating altitude,
to contemplate their sparkling depthless deep
and see the empty sky’s reflection shattered
on the shifting peaks and sliding troughs,
upon the edgeless planet’s luminescent seas,
and idly toss the odd insouciant match
to set those oily surfaces aflame.

There still may one day come a day,
a time long after I had stood astride
the webwork of their tangled lives, above
their varicosities, their incandescent plains,
when they’d find words to dimly speak
of that dimension long ago purloined,
what we call Depth, what we call Time,
when rising from their easy chair they’ll step
unfettered through the empty air to solicit
from some ponderous Cyclopedia of Loss
an authorized accounting of my crime.

Tarantula Season

Antares blazes
over the rumbling ditch. Everywhere,
in all the bottoms,
the winy odors of decay. Everywhere,
a general desiccation mimics
the melodies of moisture,
animates the showering sussurations
of the pyromorphic poplars,
and all along the streambed, autumn breezes
              perplex the gnarling cottonwood
              in its huddled covens.

Here in the inky, moonless dark,
under the braided, blazoned heavens,
the villages shelter like cuttlefish,
smoke-screened in their mountain hollows,
as all the tawny battalions
advance upon the land
like unheeded portents of the soil,
              broadly constellated in strict formation,
              disciplined as Hussars on the square.

In serried ranks,
these asterisms of the dust
raise gingerly their felted knees in air,
stepping daintily into a beckoning East,
to accomplish the dutiful Hajj,
to follow unhesitating
              the brilliant ecliptic
              of their lust.

Born in California in 1951, raised in Japan and Mexico, DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. His work appears or is forthcoming in Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Jewish Literary Journal, and The Deronda Review (forthcoming, Issue X).

Michael Spring

into the tiger’s mouth

of course I’ll to continue
sticking my head into the tiger’s mouth

as long as the crowd continues
to cram forward with their tickets

as long as doubt presses them together
as one lump of clay

where I can knead then shape them
into an enormous set of hands

one to hold the tiger’s mouth open
and the other to pull me free

Michael Spring is the author of four poetry books and one children’s book. In 2016 he won a Luso-American Fellowship from DISQUIET International. His poetry books have awarded The Turtle Island Poetry Award, an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and a runner-up for the Paris Book Festival Award.

PH Coleman

January 21

Dark juncos on snow,
huddled around pinecone seeds,
vanish white in flight.

Sun sneaks over pines
while cold clouds shake out the snow.
Who will win today?

Heavy white drapes trees
bending the strongest to ground.
The sun lifts their load.

Amputated limbs:
branches surround stands of birch
with softness broken.

A mustard plow carves
deep drifts, shepherding cars like
strings of fireflies.

Gray wind snuffs out day
and cold embraces the trees.
Winter’s hands hold tight.

Fireworks burst from logs.
The hearth glows as wood is eaten
but the house keeps cold.

PH Coleman has lived in Vermont for years, looking at small things in larger ways. His work (recent examples: 1,2, 3) has been published in Missouri and Vermont, and online. Currently, four of his poems are displayed in an ekphrastic exhibition in Columbia, Missouri, to be published as an anthology later this year.”

Emory D. Jones

HEAVENLY PEACE

(A Gloss on the following lines:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
              Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
              Enshaded in forgetfulness divine….”
—“TO SLEEP” by John Keats)

O soft embalmer of the still midnight
how peacefully we lie beneath your white
and gentle hands. You work your magic now,
we know, with soothing whispers and endow
with strength to take the approaching day’s delight
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.

Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
the eyes too full of beauty to decline
your old companion, the maker of pleasant dreams
who shows each thing much better than it seems
by glaring day. Soft hands, almost divine
shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light.
Within a luscious garden of delight
we find ourselves enfolded in a pure
fragrance of musky rose, a nightly cure
for heartaches we endure to stand upright.
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,

enshaded in forgetfulness divine,
float inward. There our spirits find
a citadel secure from every foe
and we are made a part of the heavenly flow
that gently runs inside the heart sublime
enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who has taught in high school and in community colleges. He has five hundred and eighty-six credits including publication in such journals as Writer’sDigest, Quarterly Review, and Encore. He lives with his wife in Iuka, Mississippi.