POETRY: Chuck Von Nordheim – SELF-PORTRAIT #6

Self-Portrait #6

Escape from Sierra
Elementary poses
impossibilities his
ten-year-old brain can’t solve.
Scotty could beam him up
if the Starship Enterprise
orbited his warp-less Earth,
but Gene Roddenberry
shoved whirring teleporters
beyond this fifth-grader’s
Carter time frame, past supermen
power grabs, past nuke exchanges.
So he endures taunts spewed
about his fake Spock ears,
not to mention upside
down insertions into
reeking trashcans and toilets.

Stained clothes washing, aggie
patterned planets beckon him
5pm each weekday on
KCOP 13.

No phasers would he wield
against thugs if he boldly went.
Easing school strife with pale
bursts of quick molecular
evaporation might solve
detergent supply issues—
fewer bullies at large
equaled fewer dunkings
equaled fewer Maytag loads—
but followers of Surak
let logical awareness
frost hot first intentions.
Self-scrutiny reveals this:
his tormentors split his mind
worse than the two-body
bifurcation of Kirk
in the “Enemy Within.”

He hates them. He loves them.
A real Vulcan could meld two
minds and learn what secret words
tamed middle school monsters.

POETRY: FRANK MODICA – GRANDPA’S DEATH WATCH

Grandpa’s Death Watch

Grandma and Grandpa
inhabited their tenement
like two distant countries.
Grandma cooked and
cleaned in the kitchen,

Grandpa lounged in his smoker’s
chair wedged behind
the dining room table. They
slept in separate bedrooms,
framed pictures of Jesus

leaned back to back on the
wall between them. For
fifty years they kneaded
their secrets into loaves
of tall, crusty bread,

hid them behind white
porcelain shaving mugs.
“Charlie was not my first love,”
Grandma whispered to me
as I drove her to the hospital.

POETRY: ROBIN WYATT DUNN – GRIEF RUN

Grief Run

One love
Jah love
Jonestown massacre loving my soul
there is no kool aid but down
and down isn’t real either
underneath my soul
there is a freeway
it is a Los Angeles freeway
heading from Pasadena
down to downtown
and into heaven
where I was born

Heaven is a place in Los Angeles
on fire
with lots of devils
and lots of rock music and pretty girls
where the wave is the universe
blasting your head off like a shotgun
under the roar of fascist music
in my life love and heart
where the grief runs lower than a 60 nanosecond jack
on some car of the future
ripping me into orbit

Visit Robin Wyatt Dun online.

POETRY: F. RICHARD THOMAS – THESE DAYS

These Days

I think its time
to go to the woods again,

away from clash and roar
of politics and war.

Perhaps I could even suffer ticks,
mosquitoes, and black flies,

sit around a campfire,
naked,

forget about obituaries
and my Roth IRA,

drink Pabst Blue Ribbon
and toke weed,

wasted
on what it’s like

to be fearless, careless,
young again,

before the uniforms arrive.

Read a review of Dick’s new poetry collection Once In A Lifetime.

Check out F. Richard Thomas Amazon Author’s page.

POETRY: Mark J. Mitchell – Stranger Dance

Stranger Dance

He watched her back a long time. Her soft sway
kept slow time steadily, his metronome.
Her elastic music measured his day.

Not a dancing creature, his mother would say,
he herked and jerked stiff as a moon
clock. Her soft back was long, a controlled sway

was her weapon of choice. She liked to play
roles: child, temptress, wayward wife whose next home
was elastic as music. All working days

bored her. His hot gaze was modeling clay
her cool hands enjoyed. He lived on his own.
She watched him back. The swift time held soft sway

over each of his steps. Her eyes delayed
his dreaming self and her diva mask loaned
him elastic music. He measured days—

rationing them. He was trying to save
her like coins but knew she’d remain unknown.
He watched her, lost in time, her soft sway
stretched musically through his measured days.

POETRY: David Eves – To Hachijō Island in October

To Hachijō Island in October

We look out at you

split into your full

figure-of-eight shape

and we think

it’ll pour here or it won’t

there’ll be food for us

or we’ll rumble up at

the full-bellied clouds

we’ll find a bed

or we’ll sit up

counting the stars

that float

like candles

upon the Philippine sea

Hachijōjima I

think I’ll halve you

at your waist

and fold your

two peaks into

a ball as warped

and cragged as

the earth itself

then I’ll roll you

back to Tokyo

(pouting, probably

heavy with

smoked grey)

and leave

you soaking

in the harbour, dyeing

the gunmetal water

the dark green

of your many

maybes

POETRY: Abigale Louise LeCavalier – BIONIC JUST THE SAME

Bionic Just The Same

I pulled a nail
out of my head
the other day,
more out of anger
than in a panic,
it’s a real bitch
being bionic.

I’ve taken a knife
to my womanhood
in front of the world,
I know pain
and I have been dead
before.

I know what it’s like being dead.

That scares an audience;
that and being a man-made
Xanax-cyborg.

Mulling around in my afterbirth
looking out of my one good eye,
feeling my way through life tragic,
picking metal shavings from my own vomit.

So melodramatic!
So VERY punk rock!

Eh, the ruminations
of a tired poet,
reality of dinner for one
and horrible coping skills;
it’s made me the woman I am today.

Bionic just the same.

POETRY: Philip Rafferty – FANTOMAS

Fantomas

The baby is crying.
We are all alone.
She is Fantomas
And we don’t
Know what to do.

Last time I was here
They didn’t give me
A paper cap.
But the guard offers us three
And I put them on us.
I feel Napoleonic.

Fantomas is inconsolable.
She wants to face out.
So I carry her
Past the guns and armor.
The Grand Palais was closed again
And so we are here amongst the arms.

You are interested
In how a world war starts.
I never knew you to care before.
History is hard, you say to her.
But what you don’t say is
Because the future is not just ours.

How can cities be taken?
You search with a mother’s concern,
Work to build a cursory understanding of
What to fear in the coming years?
You look for signs as I pace
Rocking the baby to sleep.

POETRY: ANDREW HUBBARD – VISITING THE PIERCE’S

Visiting the Pierce’s

I greet you with a hearty handshake
And a half-hug, your wife
With a decorous peck on the cheek.

We go inside. We’ve been friends
So long I make my own drink.

I and my martini wander the comfortable family room
While you and your wife clash
Dishes and tart words in the kitchen.
There are framed photos from early days to present.
I always start at the same place
The one of your wife on Martha’s Vineyard
With her left hand holding her blond hair out of her face
Laughing, while the cold wind
Turns her nipple to a bright raisin beneath her thin top.

I see that picture in my mind
Almost every night when I go to sleep.

I turn my attention to another picture:
Your first-born, then a toddler in a sailor cap
Now a handsome young man.

Try to turn my attention…
It doesn’t work. Never does.

Once, over wine, on an anniversary date
My wife, who was in a very hostile mood,
Said I married the wrong girl,
Should have married yours.

In a stroke of genius, I said nothing,
But I’ve wondered ever since
What women know, and how they know it.

I drain my martini in a brain-twisting gulp.
And seriously consider another.

Check out Andrew’s second poetry collection The Divining Rod.

POETRY: Anne Britting Oleson – November

November

All day the wind bemoans
its solitary state, the birds
of summer long since fled,
leaves turned from green to red to brown
then stripped away from skeletal trees
to race dryly along the roadside.
In the cold house she wanders
from room to echoing room,
wrapping her arms around herself,
speaking once or twice to hear
a human voice. When she settles
among the shadows with a book,
her eyes stray—to the stopped clock,
the dusty photos. Outside, the sound changes,
and she turns: suddenly, a hailstorm.
The ice clacks against the glass.
The sun shines on, oblivious.

Cacti Fur

a poetry dry ground

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