Tag: poems

Fog | David Dephy

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Image: Nathan Anderson

Fog

Fog lies low over the land.
Rain drives soft across the fields.
Comatose landscape.

There is nothing immediate we can hope for,
now we have nothing to do but breathe,
until something better shows up.

We are holding each other,
expecting a miracle at dawn,
as if there were no one and nothing to hurt us.

Beginning in mid-May the nights draw in,
our look turns warm and soft,
the fog passes gently over us,

we’d like to ask the fog—
don’t talk to us, our heart’s been broken,
we can’t listen to you, we can’t see you,

but the fog covers us and says:
I never see myself either,
in my own mind I’m invisible,

that’s why you may feel I’m almighty,
you are like birds, your flight
begins and ends in silence,

you will find yourselves in each other only,
silence is garden, among the growing dreams
and precious wishes

you will discover each other again,
everything that will ever be discovered,
already exists in the mist.

David Dephy (he/him) (pronounced as “DAY-vid DE-fee”), is an American award-winning poet and novelist. The founder of Poetry Orchestra, a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee for Brownstone Poets, an author of full-length poetry collection Eastern Star (Adelaide Books, NYC, 2020), and A Double Meaning, also a full-length poetry collection with co-author Joshua Corwin, (Adelaide Books, NYC, 2022).  His poem, “A Sense of Purpose,” is going to the moon in 2024 by The Lunar Codex, NASA, Space X, and Poetry on Brick Street. He is named as Literature Luminary by Bowery Poetry, Stellar Poet by Voices of Poetry, Incomparable Poet by Statorec, Brilliant Grace by Headline Poetry & Press and Extremely Unique Poetic Voice by Cultural Daily. He lives and works in New York City.

I ACKNOWLEDGE MY MOUTH WORM | Aliza Saper

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Image: Sergei Akulich

I ACKNOWLEDGE MY MOUTH WORM

What do I know of my own tongue and the taste of love?
For one thing, I savor the bitterness of envelope glue.
This is love;
and the metal of minor open wounds in the absence of band-aids or tissues,
and the rim of a water glass that has sat reverently on a nightstand for too long.
All the food I eat on a day when I don’t feel like eating,
and toothpaste…look at me, taking care of myself.

What does my tongue know of me, and the soft skin of my inner cheeks?
The spots where anxiety has compelled me to bite.
Blisters.
Blisters are kind of like love.
Too much friction, and evidence to show for it.
How many flavors of Chapstick?
Where sweetnesses and disappointments traverse the landscape.
An ecosystem within an ecosystem.
Mother tongue.
My mother, tongue.

A muscle strong from carrying all the messages that never made it out of me.
Laced with secrets, and receptors of breaths both known and foreign.
A transformer, look!
Slack, and pointy, and soft, flat, and rigid.
Hot dog!
Clover!
Funny faces are love.

My tongue is well versed in survival tactics;
like, how to breathe through smoke,
and how to hold, and hold, and hold tension.
Braving cold summer snow cones and steamy winter teas.
It maintains equilibrium when the rest of the body cannot.

What does my tongue know of travel?
Having trekked roofs, and hollows, and caverns.
Cavities, too.
A paleontologist in its own right,
and a philologist, and a virologist, and a cytologist.
Knowing of more -ologies than a brain might ever be.
Teaching me, and teaching me, and teaching me.
This is love.

For a prisoner of the mouth, my tongue manages to sustain a taste for life.
For love –
and the bitterness of envelope glue,
and the metal of minor open wounds in the absence of band-aids or tissues,
and the rim of a water glass that has sat reverently on a nightstand for too long.
All the food I eat on a day when I don’t feel like eating,
and toothpaste.
Look at me, tasting it all.

Aliza Saper is an original Denverite, and a wearer of many creative hats. She is the winner of the 29th Paul Rice Poetry Broadside Series Contest, and a 2018 National Poetry Slam qualifier. Currently, she is a resident teaching artist specializing in theatre arts integration; fiercely advocating for arts education, and spaces that support it. Her affinity for self expression, and meaning-making has led her to pursue endeavors in storytelling via the visual, literary, and performing arts. Follow her on Instagram: @aliza_lynn.

glad god said i’m allowed to be alive | Tall City

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Image: Aditya Vyas

‘glad god said i’m allowed to be alive’ he said to whomever was listening,
sang a tiny song to praise god and included everyone in the room
buildings across the street bathed his armchair in rainbow neon
the combined aura of different advertisements at different distances
he sang a praise song to combat difficult feelings
the neighbor’s little girl asked him not to die until he got older
he promised not to die until he got older
so when she dies, everyone would be there to meet her in heaven
to walk her to her room

he washed dishes and wondered
if they were still rolling dice down the street,
he wiped down dishes and wondered
if all the stores were open,
he found his armchair was a neon tinted throne
his shadow on the floor held a stairway
he knew if he went down into the shadow stairway
he could keep going down forever
he wanted to go up instead
forever
but there was no staircase in the ceiling, not now
god said it was not his time to go yet
god said he was allowed to stay alive

there were just moths there, studying the lightbulb
there were just moths on the ceiling
with crushes on the lightbulb
he was sure the ceiling wouldn’t open until death
he promised her he wouldn’t die yet
she wanted to die now so she could see grandma
he assured her that grandma would still be there
he told her to live a life, find a man, have kids, grow old
she didn’t listen she was afraid of going outside
when she went to bed there wasn’t any music
just her voice improvising praise songs
to combat difficult feelings
he fell asleep before her

didn’t dream of anything at all
every night is a strange mystery
still he said ‘glad god said i’m allowed to be alive’
when he prayed at church we caught his cheating,
opening his eyes a crack to copy our wishes
opening his eyes a crack to check on his own shadow
to make sure there wasn’t a stairway there
to make sure the trapdoor was closed
so he wouldn’t fall into his shadow
and leave the sanctuary suddenly

the streetcorner crowded
the stores still open
the street goes past the bridge
but there it is just factories and warehouses
nobody there are night except those who don’t know what’s going on
the people who stand around like ghosts and
disappear when you turn your head to look

Tall City (Chris Bullock) was born and got bigger on Long Island, New York. He did a few things then moved to Colorado Springs after trying to study in Paris. He did a few things there too, then moved to Denver, where he went back to school for foreign language. A couple of years on scholarship in China, and he is back in Denver. 

Two Poems | Richard Oyama

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Image: Max Fuchs

Thrift Shops

What you search for is
an approximation—

musk of old clothes,
utensils sans luster,

broken toys,
nicked plates—

disappearance of the new,
markings-down of the faded,

the distressed but
nothing to be done:

a secondhand life
exacts cost

and reduces value yet you’re
still in the hunt,

a fox burrowing among
burial mounds of apparel,

treadless shoes,
non-brand sports gear,

dubious appliances in
a cast-off world.

Green

Luis’s duckbill shadowed
His eyes. That’s how he
Liked it. He was quiet as a shadow.

When I elicited an answer, his mouth
Twisted into a rictus as though
Words were rudely forced.

It was a code not to be violated, how he
Came up, the homies he hung with. He was
A good-looking kid but thin

And slight. I see him in
Pendleton flannel and jeans. He
Merged into a wall like indios around

Garrulous friends, the cholas more
Butch than the boys. Fernando
His Guatemalan buddy

Drove a senior van, a stand-up dad.
Luis straightened up
And flew right one day then

Disappeared to Phoenix the next. Abigail
Called him a child. Luis
Offered to show me his gun tattoo. I

Forget when it was he told me about
The felony arrest over his head
After he pulled a Glock on a U.S. marshal. It

Wasn’t the drogas he dealt that was
The addiction, Luis said. It was the green.

Richard Oyama’s work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues, About Place, Konch, Pirene’s Fountain, Malpais Review, Buddhist Poetry Review and other journals. He has a M.A. in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His first novel in a trilogy, A Riot Goin’ On, is forthcoming.

Hear Me Out | Sam Moe

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Image: Gauravdeep Singh

Hear Me Out

  1. I am pretending to be a god in the bathroom mirror.
    Dim blue Christmas lights blend with a single pale
    yellow bulb, the same dangling light from the stories.
    Atop my head is a puddle of green. I used to have
    better words. You’d give me your hearts and I’d say,
    fire lamb, my love. But that was before, and I’m not
    supposed to adore you.
  1. I want dessert for dinner. I sit on my hands to keep
    my reach from your wrist. Watch out the corner of
    my eye as you slice into a filet whose center is bright
    and fiery as an ember, you can change your heart’s
    shape and I’m lost in daydreams of summers gathering
    seasoning, mint leaves with aphids, I had a thing for
    toffee, held my breath as we walked side-by-side
    through the radish patches.
  1. In the dictionary of flowers, I doodle your initials. You
    haunt the way I hold my pen; you tell me to stop but I
    can’t help myself, I’m not as into the weather as I could
    be, would you save me, or should we toss liking into fire?
  1. Moon tattoo on your thumb, the day in which I pay the
    price, how you care more for jaws and violet roses, you give
    up on my alphabet, there is apple blossom and ash, trumpet
    flower fit for a mouth, bells then shells, I’m doing that thing
    you hate where I offer catchfly snare as answer.
  1. I could try a little more truth if you wanted me to. Corn straw
    cress, the crown imperial, and your father’s fir. Then it’s days,
    flowering reed, iris and sprig, the juniper in jars, Larkspur then
    lavender are you still going to love me when I’m moss?
  1. Know your breathing. I’d sacrifice birds, too. It’s time to ask
    the father how to build the altar. Oranges, split lip from a fall
    off the pew, broke a cherub statue’s arm, I’m forgetting how
    to explain myself, just saying I have a crush because of robes
    and the bucket of ashes, do you think the priest knows our lungs
    do you think he sings when he drives the thin edge of dusk.

Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, “Heart Weeds,” is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, “Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.

A Wakeup Poem | John Grey

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Image: Krisztian Tabori

A Wakeup Poem

With great effort,
I crank open my leaden eyelids.
I open my mouth
at great expense to my jaw muscles.
I yawn,
threaten my upper arms with muscle tear
as I suck in my ration of air.
I lift myself,
first, at the waist,
then I swing my legs around,
cranky and creaking,
like a rusted weathervane.
I haul myself up
to the vertical state,
as wobbly
as some Olympic games wrestler
going for the record.
My knees tremble
but they hold.
Blood picks up speed.
Oxygen fights it way to my brain.
The hardest part of the day
is over.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

reasons for raisins | Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

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Image: Andreas Haslinger

reasons for raisins (6)

tell me you know something
of the love lost on grapes
of skin peeled away
very carefully
and while eating the grapes
skinned and exposed
for what they really are
think of those of us who crave them
who want only to eat them
again
and again
and again
who want only to hold them
to save them for another day
to do the very human
thing and change them
into raisins or wine

reasons for raisins (7)

call it age if you like
or experience or maturity
just as wine matures with age
or call it a step in the cycle
through which all living
things must pass
in order to survive as
humans we believe
in the pleasures of life
this is why we eat grapes
or drink wine
or plant such seeds
and as humans we ultimately
mature so as to provide for
ourselves and the ones we love
this is why we must grow old
so it is also with grapes

reasons for raisins (13)

here are the ones
that got away the ones
so cocksure and cool the ones
who ran so electric
as they slipped under the
stove the refrigerator and the sink
how sad they all seem now
cloistered in the corner dust

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers is a poet, writer, photographer, and publisher. He is the publisher and editor of Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal.

Stay, Illusion! | Liam Max Kelley

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Image: Thought Catalog

Stay, Illusion!

Some purple pile of angels,
stone, by base of worn stairs, watch
eagles adorned with your teacups,
saucers—

and Shakespeare is mistaken
for Jesus going sideways down
the metro escalator.

I’m warmer for your shaking.
My pills hurt swallowing

—the king assumes his photographer
wields rifles and vermin
instead of
red spinning tops—horses too tall
for stars to hold
any meaning beyond
lost beanies and orange wine.

(Somewhere it’s Thanksgiving, so I’ve left
                everyone.)

Maybe an old woman veins out
licorice toffee
to each of her teeth chatting
on the morning train
fortressward, coastalward…
she smiles,
offering to bag me,
and I take the first my fingers find.

Another lady, bald,
offers me four licorice cough drops.
Though one falls from my hand.

Mouth beating black three
—I cross over
the ocean seat. My scarf doubling
a pillow
for wrist splints—the fog
spreading out over the window,
old blood on a warm bandage.

I take back-to-back photos of you
scalpelled behind yesterday’s closed eyes.

Hamlet’s cream puff pulls espresso
with broken glass pain and
our future light, the
question burning—

my napkins parade away towards
a mooring…

You stable that Christmas
rat in your arms—

for one you stand sleeping,
steps broken,
the other your stare
bungees under shadow
of labyrinthine brows,

buried deep
in the casemates
by Holger Danske, the bats, God,
and that penis
gunned down in stone.

You took a bite of my cheese
sandwich at the station—right before
I tossed the timeline ruler.
For a moment I could’ve swore
I’d taken you for a swan
or beached Ophelia,
but I recalled then
this country’s hole is a castle—
words, cannons
—please remember we are in a church.

I vain thanks for a moment

to remind myself
of where the metal ball should be—
then board a top car backwards,
returning home to you…

Liam Max Kelley is a Chilean-American playwright, poet, and teacher. He is a board member and open mic host at Stain’d Arts, an arts non-profit based in Denver, Colorado, and the co-founder of RuddyDuck Theatre Company, a local absurdist theatre group. He writes poetry to avoid making an argument, to highlight life’s horrid ambiguities, and to turn the heads of those he holds dear.

The moon | Steve Anc

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Image: Sven Aeberhard

The moon

She is the peddler at the end of our dreams,
With a beautiful surface.

The dance of the morning,
where gentle sight abides.

The feast of clear color
with smiling song and form.

The sight that sees beyond the sea
And the coming home of the fishes.

The song of the kindly living,
And the coming home of the lovely breeze.

Steve Anc is the son of Ajuzie Nwaorisa, a Nigerian poet. He is a poet with searching knowledge and deep meditation on universal themes, he is quite a modern poet in his adherence to language and his use of metaphor is soul-searching. Anc’s works have been published in Open-door Poetry Magazine, Poetrysoup, Goodlitcompany, Voice From The Void, Our Poetry Archive, I Become The Beast, Fire Magazine

Letitia’s Memories | Sylvia Byrne Pollack

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Image: Keith Chan

Letitia’s Memories

are silent films    slapstick and melodramas
projected onto old white sheets   hung 
inside her skull    If she wants a sound track 
she has to create it herself

Memories blur   and   emulsion molds   
even on precious 35mm Kodachrome slides   
evidence of her family   her childhood   
her dogs   Lassie   and   Bambi

She squirrels letters   photographs   clippings   
opera programs   museum tickets   trip itineraries   
in 8 x11x 4 inch boxes on shelves in her study 
She can’t remember what’s in the boxes   

Who cares what’s in the boxes – 
a memento is not the memory    

Memory requires mind   electrical waves sweeping 
over the cortex   sweeping cobwebs from corners   
swapping one year with another   one face with another   
flux of memory trails through forests of fact and fiction

Memories do not stay stacked neatly in boxes 
but dribble   foam   seep   sublime onto the rug   
into corners   over window sills   flow down 
the clapboards on the side of the house

They trip her up when she goes outside to water 
the garden   Tigers of grief pounce when her back 
is turned    Sudden tears on the anniversary of her 
mother’s death even though it was more than fifty years ago

To look back is to flirt with becoming 
a pillar of salt    but   says Letitia   
with a shrug   it adds needed flavor 
to whatever I’m stewing in today

Sylvia Byrne Pollack, a hard-of-hearing poet and former scientist, has published in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, The Stillwater Review and many others. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she won the 2013 Mason’s Road Literary Award, was a 2019 Jack Straw Writer and a 2021 Mineral School Resident. Her debut full-length collection Risking It was published by Red Mountain Press (2021.) Visit her at www.sylviabyrnepollack.com