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.
Poet
The Kingdom of Chaos Poems by Scott Thomas Outlar
Silver Primroses & Golden Strigiformes Planted by the Curb Carrying your own dead body back to its grave in a dream then happening upon an expired owl stricken & smashed in the street Ominous signs along Five Forks Trickum birth into patterns of indigo & scarlet wildflowers Spirit animals taking a dive before rush hour fevers commence learn to sip from the parched throat of roadkill brunch eating the organs of our own totem Stomach Lining I came to eat the lies you coin and serve them back half bitter across the divide of tables turned I didn’t ask for this evil eye it was forced down my throat from the jump been begging for a bulimic leap ever since Spells of the Stoic Pewter & I will set you (free) here to be made safe by the wizard / window (fly, birdie) black obsidian gray of mind & beard wise & dangerous streaked/laced down the middle balanced of accord (harmony & likewise rhythm) you are the melody of a soft glow Lament of Prey Hello to all the hawks who have yet to have their fill, & the vultures, too, waiting for what’s left over. Spoiled minds & spoiled hearts lead to spoiled guts, but it seems to be that’s what nature intended in this twisted realm of divided time & space. Dog eat dog isn’t even the worst part; it’s flesh unto flesh in the fire. Goodbye to all the dreams that forgot how to conquer, & the visions still yet to crystallize in cancer. Rotten bones & rotten marrow flow in rotten rivers, but that’s the taste acidic blood delivers when signs of sickness flash neon & electric in the night. Tail chase tail isn’t the end of the story; it’s a snake that never sheds the fade to black. Kingdom of Chaos We don’t want your money, just your soul on a silver platter served to order for our warm feast while we spit out your raw famine. We don’t want your respect, just your energy and time, just your mind numbed to the frequency of propagandized pestilence. We don’t want your love, just your heart bled dry as every vein withers in the winter wind while our chalice remains ever full to the point of overflowing. We don’t want your vote, just your faith that such a course of action can actually influence the order in which our puppets dance to a song of chaos upon the public stage. We don’t want your salute, just your obedience, just your hands kept where we can see them while your feet continue marching to the drumbeat of our wars. We don’t want your laws, just your land, just your culture, just your customs, just your heritage, just your traditions snuffed out beneath the global kingdom collectivized at our command.
Scott Thomas Outlar is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He now lives and writes in Frederick, Maryland. His work has been nominated multiple times for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He guest-edited the Hope Anthology of Poetry from CultureCult Press as well as the 2019-2023 Western Voices editions of Setu Mag. He is the author of seven books, including Songs of a Dissident (2015), Abstract Visions of Light (2018), Of Sand and Sugar (2019), and Evermore (2021 – written with co-author Mihaela Melnic). Selections of his poetry have been translated and published in 14 languages. He has been a weekly contributor at Dissident Voice for the past nine years. More about Outlar’s work can be found at 17numa.com
Mapplethorpe, Lethe, via crucis, Poems by Krystle Eilen
Mapplethorpe after Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait, 1980 half youthful, half emaciated, he reflects the epicene and the languishing. his head is all shock and flurry; his mouth a toothless brevity. half Madonna, half Antinous, he reflects a decadent flower both wilting and transcendent. his eyes suggest a having seen, two eternally startled interims. a princely pauper whose aspect reflects that of a parched orchid culled too soon. published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal Lethe i am a winged thing flailing, driven into my bovine body, and back into my savage infant soul. in the beginning, nature conceived another deadweight, and i find myself stillborn. i am forever waiting to open my welkin eyes and outwit the brute. i want the earth wrested from me; i want no longer to acquiesce to the stranglehold of gravity. i am forever looking forward to eclipsing the round seared by fantasy. published in Hive Avenue Literary Journal via crucis i. to behold paradise god must be heaved up,— for to become seraph is to gouge the eye out. ii. always at one remove is to be found divinity, otherwise effaced by twin identity. iii. riven apart by mimetic sparagmos, man is condemned to die on the cross. iv. to shed the serpent’s skin is but to reiterate its meander, for conquest precedes the bind of surrender.
Krystle Eilen is a 22-year-old poet who is currently attending university. Her works have been featured in Dipity Literary Magazine, BlazeVOX, and Hive Avenue Literary Journal, and are soon to be published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and Young Ravens Literary Review. During her spare time, she enjoys reading and making art.
Poetry. Five Sonnets from Richard Vallance
Image: Keats on his Deathbed. Artist Joseph Severn.
I saw a sparrow for Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) I saw a sparrow in the snow, who hovered by a boy nearby; It swayed a little to and fro, small wonders they, small wonder why. The boy, the flautist all alone amidst the misty spruce around where snow was so serenely sown, played tremolo the fairest sound. The little sparrow lingered there, the boy, the flautist of her soul; Iʾll never tell wherever where they warbled to attentive snow. If anyone found a place so rare would there have been anyone there? I found a soldier all too fair for all the fallen in the war in the Ukraine I found a soldier oh so fair, an apparition in the vale; oh there were reasons for despair to see a face so ghastly pale. I listened for the faintest breath, a hint of colour on his lips, but was confronted with a death the setting sun could not eclipse. I lingered there and wept a while; the poppies seemed to mourn him too. I heard a thunder from a mile, where clouds assumed an ashen hew. A wounded straggler passed me by; oh how I feared he too would die! Listen oh listen! Listen oh listen! ... the tanager trills! ... he arrays the blue spruce with feathers as light as gossamer fronds the forest just thrills to veil in his voice lost in the moonlight! However whoever alights on this place may find my tanagerʾs warbled refrains leave en passant over teal leaves the trace of whose emotions? ... whose tremolo strains? Is this the rare moment April declares the seasonʾs rife for my chanson, the song the sunrise with cirrus so silently shares? ... only I, tanager, knew all along. Were I the sole tanager of your desmesne, well, Iʾd be voiced in your glass of champagne! The poetry of KeatsJohn Keats on his death bed, by Joseph Severn For W.T. The poetry of Keats is replete with death: an owl more ominous than a blue moon had hooted sans merci til his final breath, as he passed away in a fitful swoon before the sky was flush with fading blue, before ambrosial roses withered, strewn before the autumn breeze all too wanly blew to the long-lost score of some mournful tune. As if the nightingale could warble love might I implore you if her song recalls as quietly as would a cooing dove our barren prayers before the wailing walls; I too recall my all too cherished friend, who wasted away to an ill-timed end. Huskies Mush! I'll slide my sled from the frozen-in stream towards the lake where snow rolls down me, blind; me sled is all wedged in by me husky team, whose hunger drives em wild with single mind. They lunge, they'll lunge in vain. What? Can't break out. Me lungs could bust with frost I'se just gulped in. Me lips all blue, I'se stiff with icy doubt. Me dogs, all panicked, tangled, yelp chagrin; I grits me teeth, jerk hard the sled, and hear that cursed ice cave! “Come on! Bust loose!”, I yell, “Mush!”, snaps the whip! Aw, we'se gotta break clear! “We'se broken out!” Them huskies dash like hell. Did we break loose? Those snapped up rapids yawn behind us as we vanish, good as gone.
Richard Vallance was a frequent contributor to the earlier issues of Poetry Life & Times, from 2001-2008, where several of his sonnets and rhymed poems appeared, and where he was the resident poetry critic of the Vallance Review, which featured reviews of sonnets and rhymed verse by some of the world’s most famous historical sonneteers and poets.
Richard Vallance has also been featured from time to time in more recent issues of Poetry Life & Times, Poetry Life and Times (artvilla.com), from 2012-2018.
He has also been published in several other international venues, among others: Decanto Poetry Magazine/Anthology (Sara Russell, ed.) – no longer in publication The Deronda Review, Neo/Victorian Cochlea, The Deronda Review – Home, Sonnetto Poesia ISSN 1705-4524 (25 quarterly issues) SEE: Sonnetto poesia. | Bibliothèque et Archives Canada / Library and Archives Canada (worldcat.org)
Richard Vallance is also the Editor of a multilingual anthology of sonnets. The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes = Le Phenix Renaissant de Ses Cendres – Anthology of Sonnets of the Early Third Millennium = Anthologie de Sonnets a: Vallance, Editor-In-Chief Richard: 9781460217016: Books – Amazon.ca
Beyond the Limit & Tyne Cot. Ekphrastic Poems by Jan Theuninck
The Hearthside Poems by Michael R. Burch
Something for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba Something inescapable is lost— lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight, vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars immeasurable and void. Something uncapturable is gone— gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn, scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass and remembrance. Something unforgettable is past— blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less, which finality has swept into a corner ... where it lies in dust and cobwebs and silence. Styx Black waters—deep and dark and still. All men have passed this way, or will. Spring Was Delayed Winter came early: the driving snows, the delicate frosts that crystallize all we forget or refuse to know, all we regret that makes us wise. Spring was delayed: the nubile rose, the tentative sun, the wind’s soft sighs, all we omit or refuse to show, whatever we shield behind guarded eyes. Infinity for Beth Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair? Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach, then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach? Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage? Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too, have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue. Hearthside “When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” — W. B. Yeats For all that we professed of love, we knew this night would come, that we would bend alone to tend wan fires’ dimming bars—the moan of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew an eerie presence on encrusted logs we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves. The books that line these close, familiar shelves loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs, too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park, as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss. I do not know the words for easy bliss and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark, long-unenamored pen and will it: Move. I loved you more than words, so let words prove. Love Has a Southern Flavor Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew, ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout we tilt to basking faces to breathe out the ordinary, and inhale perfume ... Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines, wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves that will not keep their order in the trees, unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ... Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights: the constellations’ dying mysteries, the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ... Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet, as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet. Remembering Not to Call a villanelle permitting mourning, for my mother, Christine Ena Burch The hardest thing of all, after telling her everything, is remembering not to call. Now the phone hanging on the wall will never announce her ring: the hardest thing of all for children, however tall. And the hardest thing this spring will be remembering not to call the one who was everything. That the songbirds will nevermore sing is the hardest thing of all for those who once listened, in thrall, and welcomed the message they bring, since they won’t remember to call. And the hardest thing this fall will be a number with no one to ring. No, the hardest thing of all is remembering not to call. Sunset for my grandfather, George Edwin Hurt Sr. Between the prophecies of morning and twilight’s revelations of wonder, the sky is ripped asunder. The moon lurks in the clouds, waiting, as if to plunder the dusk of its lilac iridescence, and in the bright-tentacled sunset we imagine a presence full of the fury of lost innocence. What we find within strange whorls of drifting flame, brief patterns mauling winds deform and maim, we recognize at once, but cannot name.
Michael R. Burch is an American poet who lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Beth and two incredibly spoiled puppies. He has over 6,000 publications, including poems that have gone viral. His poems, translations, essays, articles, letters, epigrams, jokes and puns have been published by TIME, USA Today, BBC Radio 3, Writer’s Digest–The Year’s Best Writing and hundreds of literary journals. His poetry has been translated into 14 languages, taught in high schools and colleges, and set to music by 23 composers, including two potential operas if the money ever materializes. He also edits www.thehypertexts.com, has served as editor of international poetry and translations for Better Than Starbucks, is on the board of Borderless Journal, an international literary journal, and has judged a number of poetry contests over the years.
Evergreen into Ivory White Poems by Julia Webster
Tread Softly Tread softly for the night is but a prelude to the day And all that lives must die For thus it is as we've heard say So many times before. Before? the end of the beginning Which itself is only spinning to Infinity Divinity is but a name for good thought Transferred into deeds Where one man counts the cost The other's praying for his needs Stop!..A thought Listen!...A bird is singing somewhere in the Universe. Poor thoughts, poor empty thoughts. How can I say ' I love you?' What's in a word? Just frailty. One, two ,three, four, five ,six ,seven All good people go to Heaven But I think otherwise and I'd advise that You do too Wouldn't you advise someone that Hell's by far a better place And that a misplaced feeling of disgrace is relatively unimportant Oughtn't one to think so? No I suppose you wouldn't, couldn't I like to think a little differently Not follow in the crowd , eh? Tread softly, you may say, Have it your way. A devil, black and smoky, Breathing fumes of concentrated orange juice through cold-pudding nostrils What's wrong with that? Don't tell me you don't like him None of that! I suppose you'd paint a better? Fetter him in garlic, would you Could you? Tread softly For the night has come and dying is Out of tune And all the people on the earth are Gazing at the moon For soon her light will out And shouts of anguish then will spill the air And everywhere will be a place too small And anywhere will be the devil's fool And stars will burst and thirst for more good deeds to fill up History And soft bright eyes will dim And then the earth will lose its spin And fighting chaos raging for a decade Will streak the skies with noble deeds And stars will burst and thirst for More good deeds to fill up History And then....only Time Not space but Time Running, walking ,speeding Slowing , Straight, bent, Lent. Time without space And nothing more. A drop of sun upon a leaf Warm rays spraying silver on the seas A fan of light beating colours into flowers And hours upon hours upon hours.. Tread softly....tread softly... Flight of the Dove The tree stands in the lonely field. It is raining in sleep- filled rivers. Do not hate, do not love. beyond hope or caring, sleep or sloth Dreams deride the thing which is Whole world's subside and we, Who think we know what suffering is Cannot abide the murmuring of the dove. We who do not hate, we who do not love. For us the barren fields are soaked in blood. Send up the cry! God is dead! Only beware the fleeing of the dove. Have you seen her? Flashing blue across the river? Did you call out to her? Splash of film over the river. Catching sight of her wings of taut gold Did your heart of a sudden grow old? As she sliced the sun into pale- white ivory stalks By the water's edge, disrupting the moor-hen's song, Belong, belong! belong, Belong! But what are you doing here,old man Fouling the greenways? Mouth of pomegranate, stench of tears gone sour, How could you have tasted the Forbidden fruit At this ungodlike hour? You were cast in too strange a mould A million years of shadow have Trespassed behind your eyes How could you taste the light of your eyes? Rains you heed not, nor the wind's outrage, But poach at ease beside the blood-lit streams Not hating, not loving But tell me, what will you do When she comes, robed in mist? At the first hint of dawn, Will you see her, even in dreams? Will you stay silent as she drops To her pale death in the foam Jagged rock of white mist, Plummeting down through the air's crystal streams Lost to the sunrise Staining the day with new gold As the sun's rivers melt her through Will she touch you? You who are so old? Will you reach out to feel that Warm rush of feathers Blue-green-scarlet-gold? Or are you too old, too old? As the waters reflect back her causeless song Will you trace those pyramids of light Treading sapphire rings into the mud? Ode to a Drug Addict The great scape of Heaven Is tortured with images of Death And the night sky. Owls swoop in the twilight world Where Keats went mad For Beauty 's treacherous eye. Ode to a fool Transfixed by the painting Of some great pig of a man Eating a fly. Tempestuous nights and dawns of Eclipses Fighting the otherwhere and the Why. I Screech at you from the rooftops Over the bridge, driven wild Inside my head Hammer the bed into white sheets Grasp cold on Nothing Outstare the stars to white lead. And running, Hand you the piece of dust From which I fled. Evergreen into Ivory white Evergreen into ivory white The curlew calls The morbid manufacturers of day Attend the passing funeral Of those who decay Slowly with time. The bird rustles in the hedgerow Hear its mating call At close of day the flight of swallows return No matter where. The passing shepherd summons the sheepdog The daffodils burst out in gold My lover's out there in the cold The short mist comes The gap between heaven and earth And all obscurity No greater love than this Will You Grant Me A Short Space For Breath The galleon ship enshrouded in mist White walls surround the drowned sailor Shipwrecked In white water On the turf of dreams The bird flying calls The seamen look up It is not a white albatross It is I turning about Into this white pool The shoreline crinkles into powder Tiny and remote Flying high, the day recedes Into this ivory-white
Julia Webster studied English & Drama at Exeter University then later studied Integrated Health Sciences at Westminster. Her first play written in 1972 entitled “The Object of the Game” was performed at The Little Theatre, Barbican , Plymouth and was likened by the well known Harvey Crane critic of the South West to works by Pinter and Ionesco. She began writing puppet plays for children and performed at various Albion fairs throughout the U.K. and was selected to attend The Children’s Festival in Austria by Arabella Churchill. She also wrote poetry since her teens and has composed many songs for voice guitar, violin and piano accompaniment which have been performed in various venues across the U.K. and also in India. In 1979 she met her teacher Chogyal Namkhai Norbu Rimpoche and has been a student of his and Dzogchen teachings since then. She currently lives in West London with her family and teaches piano and also practices cranio sacral therapy.
Teetering Toward Sattva & Further Poems by Kalpita Pathak
Teetering Toward Sattva My friend’s mother would tell him, I created you and I can destroy you, as though, like Parvati with Ganesh, she had literally made him from a mixture of earth and her perspiration, brought him to life with her breath. Śaivasampradāyaḥ believe Shiva is the creator, preserver, and destroyer of the cosmos. Does that mean mothers are his avatāra and children their miniature multiverses? I wouldn’t know. I’m not a mother. Mine may have been a god to me when I was little (it’s likely she was) but I remember her as my universe. One I destroyed over and over with the choices I made, huddled and weeping and bereft, my days-old sweat a blend of scotch and cigarettes and dirt from the alleys where I crouched for decades. Now those years have passed and so has she. Neither creator nor destroyer, she preserved her dreams for/in me and I live them with her hands, callused, dry-darkened at the knuckles, soft, cool. They wash away the grime so I can live for today. So I can live for us both. So I can live. Anteyesti to Anay Your body burns as your mother weeps her son into a letter. I read it, edges fluttering in the summer wind like wings, like the ashes we scatter in the canyon’s river. She asks why you wanted to melt into memory, fleeting desert snow beneath the sun of our hot grief. And in that brutal light, she begs for rain to swoop down and flood her cracked earth. (… As We Know It) Reset: Kritayuga Begins Again When the apocalypse comes what becomes of the astronaut who floats in the space station and sees the sun as it really is – a silvery white flare, incandescent as fireworks arching over our greening blue Earth?
Kalpita Pathak is an autistic poet, novelist, and advocate with a passion for research and sensory-rich details. Her work tends to explore the perseverance of hope in a sometimes despairing world, with a little dark humor and magic added to the mix. She received the James Michener Fellowship for her MFA in creative writing and has taught at both the college level and in school programs for kids from three to eighteen. She has recently been published in Mediterranean Poetry.