The Prose Poems of EM Schorb

by

AT HEART, SPEED

At heart, speed is about being where you are going sooner than you can get there, and putting it all behind you. As you race forward to get where you are going, much is dropping behind, falling away from your frontal interest, as it were. If you were as fast as an atom, say, you could probably spin back and pick up some of what you have left behind and so take it with you as you propel forward, wherever that is now—for we have thoroughly muddled the issue in having gone back to pick up what was left behind because in having gone back we have made back forward, forward back. At heart, speed is an attempt to avoid as much as possible until we get to something we may or may not have in mind and stop there, but of course as we arrive there we find that we have just left and are now on our way to something that resembles in its lack of interest to us all that we have attempted to leave behind, so, in a sense, we are going backward, or, we should be going backward, toward what we wanted to get to in the first place. At heart, speed is our heart beating and speeding its beat until it has run out of beats. At heart, then, speed is our heart excitedly beating a trail to its end.

THE MURDER OF GARCIA LORCA
No es sueño la vida.
¡Alerta! ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta!

I tug the strings of my fear, my bad puppet, Diablo, and tap him about this space, my first and last stage, last props, last lights, behind and in front of my painted screen. See, I pull up a leg and he hops, hops, hops! Who are you, Diablo? Herr Hitler, con permiso. Then hop, Hitler, hop! Garcia will be dead when I do this jig under the Arc de Triomphe. Not amusing, Diablo. Be something else. I want light and color! Then look at my gypsy dress, all layered, laced, ribboned, and brocaded—scarlet, gold, and green. Feel the wide wind of my rich fan. Hear my diamonded castanets! When did you put that on? An instant ago, behind the screen, when you were talking. But now I’ll be Franco and rise against the Republic. Another ugly joke! But in an instant, true! Just let me don this uniform. I love good fun, but this is wicked. Night must fall, Federico, even if it frightens you. Diablo, I command you, take off that uniform, with its golden shoulder-mops and scrambled eggs and salads. I wish I could drop the reins of your dark horse. Who am I now? Wait, I recognize you. You’re a man from my hometown, a granadino. Your name is. . . Diablo! Yes, and I am jealous of your genius. I call you out! I name you Red! Red, red, red! I am a poet. I hate politics. Nevertheless, I charge you, Federico Garcia Lorca, with crimes against the state . . . of my ego. And what now? Bang, bang, you’re dead! Am I dead, Diablo? In an unmarked grave! Is it dark, Federico? No darker than this dark century, Diablo.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF A MUSE

A muse has responsibilities, too. She owes her worker a few but important debts of honor. If a muse is going to come to an artist, thinker, dancer, or whatever, she owes it to that worker to stay until the job is done, not desert at the first opportunity. She owes him, who has been loyal to her, her loyalty. She owes it to him not to play such tricks as muses are known to play, i.e., not to inspire him with false inspiration, so that his work is false; and she owes it to him to give of herself freely and not to tease him with half measures. Muses are notoriously whimsical, and they must be brought to book on this account. It is high time that they grew up, that they realized they are playing games with someone’s life, for an artist’s work is his or her life. Muses should be answerable to somebody. They should be compelled to file reports on the progress of their workers at least once a year. Has he taken you up on your offer of an epic? Has she recruited enough dancers for the show? Questions such as these should be posed. Also, have you offered an epic lately? Have you found the requisite number of dancers? Responsibility for the ultimate work must be shared, and shame to the muse who refuses to share. I am calling in all that you owe me, O Muse, a lifetime of suffering in your name.

BADA-BING BONES

A stripper stripped down to her skin, then began to remove her skin by means of a zipper up the back and two more down the backs of the legs. Then she began to remove the muscles, unhooking them from the joints, like springs, and laying them out on the stage. What throbbing music! An old man in the front row fainted. A doctor in the back row called Stop! But the stripper proceeded to strip down to the bone, so that all that was left on the stage was a dancing skeleton. Somebody said it was a trick. But her skull-face called back, Dig it, boys—this is the real thing! Then the stripper snapped some bones out, one of her thighbones, one of her arm bones. A collar bone flew into the air to the sound of a drumroll. She picked up the collar bone, broke it, and shook some marrow from it. Then she called, That’s it for tonight, boys. And as the curtains swooped down and closed, she was heard by the audience to order the attendants backstage to gather up her things. Hurry, she was overheard to say, I’ve got a heavy date.

THE ORBITING X

Hallelujah! saw X twenty-two thousand five-hundred miles off blue Earth, heavenly luminous body, nebulous, long-tailed, fiery Cross, cross Heaven like a comet, airless incandescent meteor-Messiah, whirling Aether, leagues-arcing rainbow-halo of lights, sprites, rolling, rolled into one long-suffering, fragmented Star, returning & returning. The ecumenical others, crew of All Faiths, bound out for the dead red planet, Mars, doubters, saw the Un-identifiable Flying Object, too, but cautioned: a star-cluster, an optical illusion, looking really more like a scimitar, caduceus, fylfot, The Wisdom Tree, a whirling glowing Saucer! Hallelujah! he cried at the infinite night. The links of stars, like bars, crossed everywhere . . . and beyond them, galactic webs, far glittering spiders climbing space. In this vastness, this immensity of lights, his soul seemed unmeterable, or an impertinence imprisoned in endlessness. The others kept bitten-tongued silence in face of this—this what? Vision? Hallucination? Madness? What should they bear witness to? It was too late to abort Mission Mars, too late to turn back. The dead red planet loomed ahead.

Biography

E. M. Schorb attended New York University, where he fell in with a group of actors and became a professional actor. During this time, he attended several top-ranking drama schools, which led to industrial films and eventually into sales and business. He has remained in business on and off ever since, but started writing poetry when he was a teenager and has never stopped. His collection, Time and Fevers, was a 2007 recipient of an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing and also won the “Writer’s Digest” Award for Self-Published Books in Poetry. An earlier collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press. Other collections include Reflections in a Doubtful I, The Ideologues, The Journey, Manhattan Spleen: Prose Poems, 50 Poems, and The Poor Boy and Other Poems.

Schorb’s work has appeared widely in such journals as The Yale Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chicago Review, The Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, and The Hudson Review.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2000, his novel, Paradise Square, was the winner of the Grand Prize for fiction from the International eBook Award Foundation, and later, A Portable Chaos won the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction in 2004.

Schorb has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the North Carolina Arts Council; grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Carnegie Fund, Robert Rauschenberg & Change, Inc. (for drawings), and The Dramatists Guild, among others. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America.

PRIZE-WINNING BOOKS
BY E.M. SCHORB
Books available at Amazon.com
_______________________________________

Dates and Dreams, Writer’s Digest International Self-
Published Book Award for Poetry, First Prize

Paradise Square, International eBook Award
Foundation, Grand Prize, Fiction, Frankfurt Book Fair

A Portable Chaos, The Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction,
First Prize

Murderer’s Day, Verna Emery Poetry Prize, Purdue
University Press

Time and Fevers, The Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry
and Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book
Award for Poetry, each First Prize
 
visit www.emschorb.com.

 

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5 sonnets from the poetry of R.W.Haynes

by 
1]

The Knife and the Retreat

One awaits the knife, not that that
Is all that dramatic, cathartic, or just.
But anticipation can miss surprise in the dust
And there it pops up, wagging its hat.
And that’s the great crisis right then, of course,
That jolt of suddenly being unprepared
To cope with emotion one had never cared
To consider might land with unexpected force.
“I’d rather be a Stoic,” old Wordsworth might say,
His teeth clamping down on his old corncob pipe,
“Than be clotheslined to whimper and to gripe
While my sweet fantasies evaporate away.”
Now retreat and recover, live, do not die.
Be that imagined hermit, lonely by the Wye.


2]

The Cliffside Stroll

Her sonnets struggled along the cliffside path,
Shells and flowers tracking her aimless way,
As a dark spirit followed in shadows of the day,
And blue jays whispered, choking back their wrath.
But the bright sun vanquished in the blue sky,
And earthquakes held themselves in control
As she nibbled wafers and prayed for his soul
A little, and watched the hungry seagulls fly.
Below her, breakers gnashed at the rock,
And old prayers ascended upward as mere mist,
And memory quietly reft how they’d been
One sweet time, never to come again,
Since they’d looked at each other and kissed.
But now the jays can resume their clamor
And earthquakes swing their devastating hammer.


3]

Barks

So there is madness in exaggeration
And some cold, bold sanity, too.
Get unexcited by unthinking silence
Till the dogs start barking madly at you.
They know, these dogs, what’s in your mind.
They hear everything, and they’re not blind.
They smell all the aromas of violence
And long for the bite of imagination.
It is the bark of time that philosophy
Avoids waking us with to keep us free
From madness and unleashed disorientation,
One kind of wisdom, our mortal enemy.


4]

Last Conversation

Do we mix admiration and regret
For prudence managed half-heroically?
For half-blind pleasure felt half-painfully?
Ha ha, no paradise has come here yet,
Nor has a fatal drama played for us
With gestures, shouts, soliloquies,
Devastating recognitions—no, none of these
Has come, no, no bother, no fuss.
One turns away, right, when warning lights
Blink in the guts, and one’s breathtaking act
Of false control works to distract
Destructive impulse as it wildly fights.
And, O you craven philosophic Judas,
You let the grinning Fates come burn and loot us.


5]

The Quicksa-a-a-and of Laughter

One cannot keep writing sonnets.
			Tennessee Williams

The double-Debbie’s dud dude did
What he could and whenever he could
And sped sometimes up to no damn good,
And they all laughed hard wherever they hid,
Laughing like lobsters with haha like crows,
In musical moonlight uttering chuckles and snorts
And torrents of turbulent hilarious sports
In musical starlight until the sun rose.
“The operation of masks,” he nervously spoke,
“Is best done by women, whose all-wily wits
Confound men’s arguments and logical fits
Like music the mad game of mirror and smoke.
Get away, Cassandra!” he shrieked in agony.
“All right, brother—have you no faith in me?”

R. W. Haynes, Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, has published poetry in many journals in the United States and in other countries. As an academic scholar, he specializes in British Renaissance literature, and he has also taught extensively in such areas as medieval thought, Southern literature, classical poetry, and writing. Since 1992, he has offered regular graduate and undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, as well as seminars in Ibsen, Chaucer, Spenser, rhetoric, and other topics. In 2004, Haynes met Texas playwright/screenwriter Horton Foote and has since become a leading scholar of that author’s remarkable oeuvre, publishing a book on Foote’s plays in 2010 and editing a collection of essays on his works in 2016. Haynes also writes plays and fiction. In 2016, he received the SCMLA Poetry Award ($500) at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference In 2019, two collections of his poetry were published, Laredo Light (Cyberwit) and Let the Whales Escape (Finishing Line Press). His Latest collected works are Heidegger Looks at the Moon (Finishing Line Press 2022 ) The Deadly Shadow of the Wall (finishing Line Press 2023)

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Press. Excerpts from Seasons in the Sun. Winter’s Breath 3 Poems by Annest Gwilym

by 
Days like this to be read as honey

For the child I never had

    
I would give you:
the honeydrip of low sun on the horizon;
a cold that sugar-coats mountain tops,
collides cells and atoms;
all the tree-lined hours of your dreams;
a moonsuck and sunstruck
clock stuck at youth;
four seasons in a day.

In my witchery I would
line up jars of bright starshine
on your windowsill;
conjure Caravaggio days, 
raining pomegranate seeds;
trap it all in amber.

And if you ever lived, 
you could live it too.


First published in the PK Project Quixotic Travellers, December 2018.
Also published in Caught in the Net, November 2019.


In the Immensity of Night


    
Things with invisible hands
unlatch the doors unseen

Creep on silent feet
around my floating bed

Tap their long, strong nails
on my wooden headboard

Whisper poetry in my sleep
which evaporates at dawn

A crinkle of leaves gathers
at the base of the bed

While the sea laps at my front door
lost and miles from home

Baby crabs with tiny pincers
knock, want to enter

The herons are watching
as gulls tear candy-floss clouds

Outside is dangerous, static-filled
inside is better

I pull the duvet under my chin
I think I’ll stay here


Winter’s Breath


    
Winter’s breath is snow-dust prophecy,
humus and moss-scented ache 
of leaf mould from autumn on the floor.

Under the cold, clear fire of stars
its wind corrugates the sea’s iron
in the silent meadows of the night.

Winter’s woods are antlered, dark,
fox-sharp, full of long, wolfish shadows
that follow you home.

Its eye is pale, glaucous; air salted 
with frost, whose sharp proboscis 
probes every crack and crevice.

Winter is a black and white country.
The old know this: it strips flesh
from trees, flowers, bones.

Click on Image to view large:

https://carreg-gwalch.cymru/seasons-in-the-sun-3008-p.asp

Annest Gwilym is the author of three books of poetry. Surfacing (2018) and What the Owl Taught Me (2020), were both published by Lapwing Publications. What the Owl Taught Me was Poetry Kit’s Book of the Month in June 2020 and one of North of Oxford’s summer reading recommendations in 2020. Annest has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, both online and in print, and placed in several writing competitions, winning one. She was the editor of the webzine Nine Muses Poetry from 2018-2020. She was a nominee for Best of the Net 2021. Her third book of poetry – Seasons in the Sun – was published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch in September 2023 and was Poetry Kit’s Book of the Month in November 2023 as well as being one of their Christmas reading recommendations. She has been nominated for the Wales Book of the Year Award 2024/Gwobr Llyfr y Flwyddyn 2024. Seasons in the Sun is available from Amazon and other places. It is also available from all bookshops in Wales.

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They Say He Was a Carpenter | Poem

by

They say He was a carpenter.
I can only say,
I have known carpenters.
They don’t seemed to have been trained.
They seem to have always known boards
and decks
and floors
and walls
and square, always square
like a flag their square
like Plato’s perfect order,
Shakespeare’s law,
their square.
I wonder if He was on a roof
hoisting rafters without a shirt
driving ancient nails into ancient boards,
glistening in the summer sun,
smiling at the ladies
with the work of His hands.
My friend the carpenter has given me a deck,
a porch
to watch His birds
take joy in building nests.

by David Michael Jackson
First Published as Carpenter Poem Artvilla.com.

For deck builders in Murfreesboro, Tn try  ZZConstruction

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When the Messiah Comes poems from Aieka by Daniela Ema Aguinsky Translated from Spanish by Amparo Arróspide & Robin Ouzman Hislop

by 

i.

La foto de mi abuela el día de su casamiento

Sé que no lo deseabas
pero lo hiciste.
El buen chico judío asignado
no resultó
tan buen chico.

Pasé tu edad
no me casé con el mío.
Lo deje ir lejos
una noche de luna
en la terraza
tomó mi mano y dijo

no me gustan las chicas
con las uñas pintadas.

Las mías
eran rojas
y dejaban marcas
en las paredes de su intestino.

A veces recuerdo al goy
de la fábrica de máquinas de coser
gritaba tu nombre
en la cueva privada de su boca.

Alegre
soprano de interiores
fósforo
en una caja húmeda
durante un corte de luz

vos empezás a irte
yo recién estoy llegando. 

i.

The photo of my grandmother on her wedding day

I know you didn't want to
but you still did.
The assigned good Jewish boy
did not turn out to be
such a good boy.

I am past your age
I didn't marry mine.
I let him get away
a moonlit night
on the terrace
he took my hand and said

I don't like girls
with painted nails.

Mine
were red
and left marks
on the walls of his intestine.

Sometimes I remember the goi*
from the sewing machine factory
he screamed your name
in the private cave of his mouth.

Cheerful
indoor soprano
a match
in a wet match box
when there is a fuse

you begin to depart
I'm just arriving.


* Goi (non Jewish boy)

ii.

Palimpsesto

Me tiré ácido
me raspé la piel
y me escribí encima.

Abajo quedaron huellas
los textos que no llegaron
al canon de mi existencia.

Que vengan los cabalistas
los estudiantes de Talmud
voy a desplegarme sobre la mesa,
una escritura sagrada.

Desnúdenme con cuidado
rastreen los indicios
discutan el estado original
de esta mujer borrada.

ii.

Palimpsest

I threw acid on myself
scraped my skin
and wrote on it.

Traces were left below
the texts that did not make it
to the canon of my existence.

Let the Cabalists come
students of the Talmud
I'm going to spread myself on a table,
a sacred script

Undress me with care
track the signs
discuss the original state
of this erased woman.

iii.

Las copas están hechas para romperse

Lo sé
desde que mi abuela guardaba la vajilla
de su abuela, en un aparador especial
que nunca se abría
por lo delicadas que eran
esas copitas verdes de tallos finos como lirios
capacidad mínima, brillantes.

Nada ameritaba
perturbarlas
de su estado decorativo
los nietos no le habíamos dado
una jupá, un compromiso, un nacimiento.
No le habíamos dado nada.

Pero mi abuela sabía mejor que nadie
que las copas
están hechas
para romperse:

van a quebrarse
mientras lavás los platos
o estallar contra el piso cuando levantás la mesa
un día que estás sobrepasada
o se le van a caer a tu nieta, dentro de veinte años,
cuando se mude sola a su primer departamento.

Van a resistir
como las personas viejas resisten
hasta quebrarse
un día cualquiera de sol.

iii.

GLASSWARE  ARE  MADE TO BE BROKEN

I know
since my grandmother put away the crockery
of her grandmother, in a special sideboard
she never opened
because of how delicate they were
those little green glasses with thin stems like lilies
bright in miniature capacity 

Nothing was worth
disturbing them
from their ornamental state     
grandchildren hadn´t give her
a chuppah*, an engagement, a birth. 
We hadn't given her anything.

But my grandmother knew better than anyone
that glassware
are made to be broken

they are going to break
while you wash the dishes
or explode on the floor when you ´re clearing the table
stressed out
or your granddaughter will drop them in twenty years´ time
when she moves into her first apartment alone.

They will resist
as old people resist
until breaking
any sunny day.

* chuppah: a Jewish wedding

iv.

                Cuando venga el Mesías van a curarse todos los enfermos
                     pero el tonto va a seguir siendo tonto.
                      Refrán Idish

Cuando venga el Mesías

y reconstruyan el Tercer Templo
no quiero estar arriba
mirando a los hombres rezar
en círculos que cantan y bailan
mientras mujeres charlan
y chicos gritan.

Cuando venga el Mesías
no quiero estar arriba
con el humo de los sacrificios
abajo los sacerdotes entran
y salen como amantes
pronunciando
el nombre sagrado.

Cuando venga el Mesías
y todos retornemos a la tierra
quiero estar en la tierra de este mundo.

iv.

                   When the Messiah comes, all the sick will be cured.
                        but the fool will remain a fool.
                         Yiddish saying

When the Messiah comes

and they rebuild the Third Temple
I don't want to be above
watching men pray
in circles singing and dancing
while women chat
and children shout

When the Messiah comes
I don't want to be above
with the smoke of sacrifices
the priests entering below
and exiting like lovers
pronouncing
the sacred name.

When the Messiah comes
and we all return to earth
I want to be on the earth of this world.

v.

Teléfono fijo

Mis papás me dieron un teléfono fijo
la línea está incluída dijeron
tenelo por las dudas
y quedó en el piso

cuando suena, rara vez
sé que son ellos
(nadie más tiene el número)
me siento en el sillón
espero tres tonos y atiendo

a veces una noticia terrible otras
una invitación para almorzar
lo único fijo este teléfono.

v.

Landline

My parents gave me a landline
the line is paid for they said
keep it just in case
and it stayed on  the floor

when it rings, rarely
I know it's them
(no one else has its number)
I sit on the couch
I wait three rings and answer

sometimes terrible news other times
an invitation for lunch

The only fixed thing this phone.

Daniela Ema Aguinsky (Buenos Aires, 1993) is a writer and filmmaker based in Argentina. She Directed the shorts Virtual Guard, Hurricane Berta, 7 Tinder Dates, and several others. She published Amante japonés, Aieka (2023) and Terapia con animales (2022) in Argentina, Mexico and Spain, book that won The National Poetry Prize Storni in 2021. She is also the spanish translator to the California based poet Ellen Bass; Todos los platos del menú (Gog & Magog, 2021). Twitter: laglu Instagram: laglus

 
 
Amparo Arróspide (born in Buenos Aires) is an M.Phil. by the University of Salford. As well as poems, short stories and articles on literature and films in anthologies and international magazines, she has published five poetry collections: Presencia en el Misterio, Mosaicos bajo la hiedra, Alucinación en dos actos y algunos poemas, Pañuelos de usar y tirar and En el oído del viento. The latter is part of a trilogy together with Jacuzzi and Hormigas en diaspora, which are in the course of being published. In 2010 she acted as a co-editor of webzine Poetry Life Times, where many of her translations of Spanish poems have appeared, she has translated authors such as Margaret Atwood, Stevie Smith and James Stephens into Spanish, and others such as Guadalupe Grande, Ángel Minaya, Francisca Aguirre, Carmen Crespo, Javier Díaz Gil into English. She takes part in poetry festivals, recently Centro de Poesía José Hierro (Getafe).
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times ; at Artvilla.com
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

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A Quicksilver Trilling (Inspired by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan) A Poem by David L O’Nan

by 
A Quicksilver Trilling 
(Inspired by Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan)

Once upon a time we met the platinum blonde, with a letter in hand and a brown Loro Piana handbag.
She was quiet and frantic at the same time (the obstacles of running from beautiful to damnit!)
You popped the bubbles in the hot flames,
in flamenco streets with bleeding trains 
that lead you, from the whistles to the cheating rainfalls.

Now, she’s as quiet as the storm swept flower.
Now, she’s an atomic bomb in the heart of desire.
She’s as damaged as the ignorant meal to the fiery belly of a carnivore.
Meeting the vagrants are as easy as meeting you she’d laugh to herself.
Maybe, she’s just a little deaf when the city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.
A little blind when the joy begins to fade from a celebration to just a thronging. 

So, you missed the thrills of the small crowd now.
That city took your bravery and your crown.
It’s hard to be superficial in your walk.
The thrills of a million helicopters circling down.
Your heartbeats, a quilted bundle of wires.
In the Hollywood hideaways the public does watch with pinkies up in a permanent smirking 
shadow.
Hurry up to snap a picture of her durable nucleus falling apart.
Behind the bars, to the many alcohols and elixirs falling straight down the cold rocks.
Her beautiful monuments showing the crackles now,
and the drinking of the sweet fruit tree has become a little thick in the dust cloud social ball.
Maybe she’s just a little deaf when this city shakes in a quicksilver trilling.

Maybe, she’s a little thirsty when the water is sealed from the dams to her  willing lips.
This blessing is just a disguised curse when she’s dressed up for another Judy Garland downward
spiral. 
I’m starting to rethink this shadow looking at his shoes, playing little Mr. Socialite and wearing a
Poor man’s Bruno Maglis blues.
I’m standing here holding your golden cup catching the feathers of your golden goose,
and a shriveled-up ticket to the sacrifices you make at Tiffanys.
My culture lies behind the ropes holding the inside of my head.
To play lover and not to play dead.
So you can play elegant and hip for the artsy coffee shops.
They can spell your name in the drink and your heart melts, and you finally feel like a somebody.
So you tip the baristas and joke about the rats.
They don’t know art, don’t have MFA’s and haven’t been bought their gardens to thrive.
I just watch the fakeness leave your timid hazel eyes. 
And you try to adjust in the restroom and cry, I hear you in there weeping like a saturnine 
coyote.

There are a couple of genuine fools, 
Walking around pretending to be the rules of cool.
They folded under the pressures of rebellion, but they are beginning to wonder my darling.
They are wondering exactly how many canvases you have put your brush to.
Since you tell them all you’re so smart and like a branch.
I’m just this poetic clown stuck with oversized t-shirts and a smile of a stripped screw.
Don’t worry he’ll pay for this free meal at this simpering Italian restaurant.
Then he’ll be on his way back to the job of being a wonderful muse when the art professors 
aren’t calling you.
Never to share a true linen of a sunrise together. Tell me exactly what art is when you don’t 
Know the art that is a natural weather.
Oh, perhaps. Just perhaps, she’s a little deaf when the city shakes and is shrilling.
A little more quicksilver trilling.

The sunrise is a little overbearing. I can’t see the canvas from the golden glare I’m wearing.
Operation, a colorful tornado on a disco floor. We’ve got weak legs dancing.
Drunk and the quick pills are mixing.  And you’re a drunk and grinding against the pistons.
More strangers trying to keep from pissing. They want to call you up for a night of your 
skin glistening and introduce you to a hypodermic waterbed.
You forgot me behind the trees. A little dirty when you have to sit and plead.
You have nothing you really need, but everything you want is in the halos of that river.

Well, those birds wake up a little earlier than you. And they seem sick without the worms to 
chew.  There isn’t a masterpiece for them to view.
You went right into the darkness with your colors and your strength. 
Frail bones fail frail forests.  Simple supernatural spells bring crumbles to a magic mountain,
The journeys are hard to walk when the valleys and the lakes are droughts for the scrawny to 
swim in.
Maybe she’s a little deaf when the animals stopped howling.
The wind is full of heat and rain is even melting. Around the curves the body is sealing.
The city is shaking to a quicksilver trilling.

From the windows, we used to see the clarity of the glass.
Now it’s a little oily and hell is seen through the overcast.
It’s a holocaust, razor sharp raindrops with teeth that bite, just like a brand new disease.
The queen must hide from the flee. Our humanity isn’t built anymore on heartbeats.
Sometimes humanity is built from cardboard signs. Hold a little higher and ask for a prayer.
Ask for a shave of cool air to save you from a Tinseltown cataclysm.
So what does the wonder girl do? When she goes from pretender to blue to the shrew?
Does she realize her hair wasn’t always so cute?
Does she realize the geniuses are all crooks?
Does she feel the jazzy palm trees have always been a little plastic and fake?

Much like the hypnotized starlets in the platinum blonde destruction game.
Oh, maybe she’s a little deaf from the chess game that keeps yelling checkmate!
Maybe she’s been blinded by the hysterical cut-throat authority waifs.
Maybe, she’s just part of this jealousy, a vanish haze they thrown on you to make you a product.
A little pill sick and when the city keeps shaking.
Tiny slits of cracks in this quicksilver trilling.
Now, she’s as naked as a blurry mirror. 
Now, she’s feeling as pitiful as a stuttering preacher.
Now, her art is less of a picture that hangs above bountiful nouveau vanity mirrors.
Her art is the magnetism that pulls the moon through her evening veins.
Her art is when the clouds move in and pulls the curtains of stars over her delicate frame.
Maybe she grew tired of her ears constantly ringing.
Loud masochisms and feminine leeches luring and lingering.

A city shook to pieces in a quicksilver trilling.

 
 
 

 
 
 
Bio:
David L O’Nan is a poet, short story writer, prose & lyricist, an editor living in Southern Indiana. He is founder and lead editor for Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Art & Music. He has edited & curated anthologies under Fevers of the Mind (7 volumes) since 2019 in addition to anthologies inspired by and dedicated to Leonard Cohen (Avalanches in Poetry & Before I Turn Into Gold), Bob Dylan (Hard Rain Poetry: Forever Dylan), Joni Mitchell (The Blue Motel Rooms Poetry & Art) Tom Waits (The Whiskey Mule Diner), The Poetica Sisterhood of Sylvia & Anne (poetry & art inspired by Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton), On the Highways with Many Miles…to Go! (poetry & art inspired by Jack Kerouac, Townes Van Zandt, Miles Davis, Langston Hughes, etc), Waltzin’ Through Rusty Cages (inspired by Elliott Smith & Chris Cornell), The website is
 
www.feversofthemind.com
 
He also has solo works “The Famous Poetry Outlaws are Painting Walls and Whispers” “The Cartoon Diaries”, “New Disease Streets”, “Our Fears in Tunnels”, “Taking Pictures in the Dark”, “Bending Rivers: A Collection”,”Lost Reflections” (micropoems), “Before the Bridges Fell” (2022), & “Cursed Houses” (2022) his work can be found in several litmags and books.
Twitter/X is @davidLONan1 and for Fevers of the Mind is @feversof and Facebook is the
Fevers of the Mind Poetry, Arts & Music Group.

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The Gypsy Sea Poems by Sterling Warner

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Gypsy Sea

Sunrise: necks stretched out like hungry clams
lurch for the Ibuprofen emperor 
whose numb fingers wave loners to café chairs—
rivet them to sticky alligator seats, bottom sides 
textured with chewing gum madness; daydreams
pull life’s canopy over sand and foam,  
seasick tides lick each empowered undertow
sheer bag luck burlesques diffident efforts, 
tête-à-tête conversations revealing 
epiphany-like promises through opaque glass.

Nightfall: along the coastline, bonfires blaze
bodies gather, mouths breathe desire, minds re-imagine; 
moving between cosmic and material worlds,  
cleaving mustard greens like an armful of roses,  
a gypsy mystic dances like a whirling dervish
toe-ring magic fractures limestone bones   
unbrushed by feet for millennia 
bangle bracelets and silver cymbals rouse
ever vigilant, sleepy-eyed centurions
stand guard over her Technicolor Roma.

Sun-up: astronomical dawn signals nocturnal closure,
dancing legs and burning feet cease
rhythmically rocking shellfish strongholds;
dense auburn moss calmly spreads its way south  
wraps a tranquil riverbed in nature’s sheath
guides an Arabesque estuary toward a
salt water fiord, lateral moraine, where
nourished sediment dwellers burrow home
high tides pull ashes, bathe shorelines 
littered with seaweed, driftwood, memories.

Grace
For G. M.

Grace leaned against parked cars 
at midnight, full crow moon rays bathing 
her body in luminescent grandeur. 
Poised. Seductive. Her touch extended
over an embankment like sprouting 
foxtail seeds resemble ballerinas that float
on the breeze and hook into dog paws 

Fragile. Elastic. Insubstantial. Like bubbles 
blown from hoops that burst unpredictably, 
Grace’s rainbow brow sought barn owl benedictions
waved goodbye to the summer solstice
welcomed the autumnal equinox—a September song
that harvested her deeply planted thoughts 
and sowed them in fields of winter wheat.

Wind passed through cedar branches, eclipsed 
Grace’s mantra of green card foreboding 
added frivolity and enhanced shorter days
and nights both waiting for December
to push back twilight’s rays—scatter them
in the upper atmosphere—brighten evening skies 
warm Dawn’s fingers on the rising sun’s heels.  

Wistful Lulamaes
For Audrey Hepburn

Tiffany windows display silver platters 
reflect morning light like vintage mirrors 
as pedestrians hide behind Oliver Goldsmith sunglasses,
dressed to the nines like Holly Golightly
pose then study its Manhattan showcase framed 
by granite walls on Fifth Avenue & 57th Street.

Disguised as stylish escorts, men and women peer
through double-pane glass, appreciate excess & exotica 
in equal measure, ponder fleeting holographic images 
of John the Baptist’s head etched sterling trays
murmuring silent prophecies, portend gentle greatness 
& Big Apple panache for life beyond Sodom’s avenging angels. 

Truman Capote’s phantom emerges from Central Park shadows 
wears a white suit & hat, moves forward like a garden snail, 
maintains a two-block buffer, his high-pitched voice mingling 
with car horns & cabbies where rainbows end announces 
breakfast availability to Broadway street singers, Soho artists, 
moon river enthusiasts, New York tourists, huckleberry friends.

Magyar Sleeves

“The Colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”
 									—Claude Debussy

Grooming themselves 
    like cats, bat pups clutch 
    onto their perch upside down, 
    loosen artistic digits  
    emerge from slumber 
    in hollow trees, cave mouths, 
    attic eves & rocky crevices.
From inverted roosts, 
    they drop into flight mode 
    as membrane covered forelimbs 
    navigate ultrasonic waves 
    & echolocation identify 
    evening canvases to paint 
    with wings like a brush & palette.
Moonlight colonies undercover 
    zig-zag through mist & gnat clouds,
    rising from depths of stone lined wells,
    leave watercolor portraits 
    during witching hours
    as children trick or treat 
    wearing bat capes & cowls.

 
 
 
 
An award-winning author, poet, and educator, Sterling Warner’s works have appeared in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including Danse Macabre, Poetry Life and Times, Ekphrastic Review, and Sparks of Calliope. Warner’s collections of poetry include Rags and Feathers, Without Wheels, ShadowCat, Edges, Memento Mori: A Chapbook Redux, Serpent’s Tooth, Flytraps, and Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction 2019-2022—as well as Masques: Flash Fiction & Short Stories. Currently, Warner writes, participates in “virtual” poetry readings, and enjoys retirement in Washington.
 

 
https://www.amazon.com/Cracks of Light: Pandemic Poetry & Fiction

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Afterlife. A Poem by Debashish Haar

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Debashish is a machine learning scientist, who has been published in literary magazines several
times across the globe, including Poetry Life & Times, where he was interviewed twice.
He is currently contending with a severe writer’s block spanning a decade, when he has hardly
produced any publishable content. He is also losing emotional connection with his own work
gradually, and spends more time to edit/tighten his old poems than creating any new content.
 

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