Peter Marra

circus of nights for a rocket 88

she has a motherly instinct

she has a wonder concerning

the branches that are on fire

she is grasping at black clouds

as a car engine coughs

spits hums

go man go

vibrating - a 4 door super vegas

inside in while

all the way out

she is in love with the dead

she is obsessed with the deaf

she kisses the blind

all the way down

sing a vivid strangulation

chant a way and a cause

the acrobats slowly fondle a trapeze

a stifled moan that she

never feels

a remembrance of

when as a baby she

rejected the breast milk

the poison from the vine

bends away from treason

rusty models increased with thick veins running down

hardtop sedans. she took her to bed and

balanced the sighs in the rearview mirror

fluids coupling in a smoother fuselage

her hands slipped up

she has a motherly instinct

and the wonder about

the branches that are on fire

grasping at black clouds

passed without incident

2 of the mindless with

emotions warring inside

by the drive-in

slinking inside restless skin

shadowed by guilt

we'd been sleeping in the car together for seven years,

fueled by a lust for squirming Chevrolets

she moaned: “you've been keeping me with

some skank on a strange sort of symmetry.

at least one glass tipped basic

bodyshell was open, while he

checked out oldsmobiles”

a bump and grind

across the state line

with a dream of billy jack

tattooed on her

inner thigh

the blood and the

sweat and the

mess

and the memories of the my lai massacre etched

into clouds by tornados

in the fissures of her brain

gun crazy

a

side catatonia

betrays (whisper)

symptoms of a mimic

and the small dreams offered

by antipsychotic medication for a brief

walk in the woods then

to lay down

by the river

trending towards life

a burning

lake

district

burlesque dancers tear the imaging technologies

shredded moans sound concrete then crumble

under my eyelids flickering naked forms clutched

against walls bending – a sometime sweet fever

("why is it so boring," 
"i don't know what to say," 
"well," she starts, "when was the last time you?"
"i really can't remember,"

“i know what is confessed”)

giggling brought her back into a 

frantic style doze while

negative symptoms contribute to

sitting in a car with shades and a gun fondled

cherishing the sound of a telecaster and a twin reverb in the

back seat –

rubbing her legs and

glancing in the rear-view

taking in the

sight of his corpse

starting a decay

of memory

an odor so far away

what was nice once

a popular itch

he promised the nighttime

the pleasure of night town

when he showed her dawn – she blew him away

a burn in her back pocket

his photo in her wallet

("why is it so boring," 
"i don't know what to say," 
"well," she starts, "when was the last time you?"
"i really can't remember,"

“i know what is confessed”)

burnt

burnt

burnt

he had brought an album

to her home once –

parallel lines

poignant

acid

times

burlesque dancers tear the imaging technologies

shredded moans sound concrete then crumble

visions of him ran around retinas

and out in tears

up against the hall naked

he was so cool

cook up/shoot in

kissing by the airport

female visions of him ran around retinas

and out in tears

the desert wind burned

felt so good

Dom Gabrielli

LondonAches

(a love and hate poem)

the body stands as the rampart

it is evening and grey

i rise from slumber

i glance across the murky Thames

the bridges churn with the muck

of invoiced dreams

crossing into slums of unconsciousness

i would be that body if i knew

but i abandoned knowledge

for the clarity of seeing

hence my eyes close

and i breathe away the nonsense

and the arguments

i look to hold your breasts

as the poet once dreamed his muse

i am the first to bring these words

into the bloodstream

into the spunkstream of real love

what killed the poet

brought him back again

in the cave and the cauldron

in the simmering desert mirage

came the voice

i ignored them by writing

one by one

they found their way into the fire

of oblivion

chests of raging words

you were not yet born

i could see you

i could see your father's eyes

the generosity of a moon

to lend you the light

to laugh away the idiocy

your body

my body

the sewers of this world

the shit in posh cars

dismissing the journey

watching the screens

of their incapacities

floating in and out

of programmed orbits

the lines cross

this nocturnal raga

the crash victims in their defiled path

the river poisoned to the cold sea

the dead fish and the laden algae

these lines

writing the material possibility

of challenging the texts

of preposterous goons

with proven spells

your body born into mine

as light into light

as echo into echo

close your eyes

there is too much to see

lay it on a disused canvas

until the welcome of forgetting

graces your orgasms

with the lash of living

the buildings in gridlock

the televisions in overload

the Islamist hysterics belting

and belching grenades

from their fingers

the storms coming and going

neither heard nor felt

in the unsent beginning

nothing ever happened

libraries have always burnt

and the writers in them

have always escaped

the statues and statutes

which hope to teach the world

not to follow them whilst

revering their very bones

in crematoriums of conference

my body your body

the light your light

there is no more day

just shades of grey

lodged in the bottom drawer

of a vagabond existence

i need to get out

as Celine blew a hole

in his own mind

i need to hear the music

of the winds in the olive summits

i need the silver under my tongue

your whispers

your Indian whispers

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh, Paris and New York Universities. He has translated widely including published works by Bataille,  Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. Gabrielli has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which he recently translated into French (Les Corps Paralleles, 2012). Gabrielli travels extensively from his home in Salento, Italy, where he produces extra virgin olive oil.

Gillian Prew

Crossing Autumn Again

 

First autumn    piss rain           and the silver bone of the hill.

October’s bite

and the gold wound. A slow odour limbering

and through the trees a split-grave mist

of gifts and rumours               a loose diamond

boxed in a tumbled hour.

            My stone muscles

with their woollen coats          still as beggars

see no audience. They hush

in this cool room of leaves.     They narrow

to a word. Nothing hears

but the birds                who are not judges.

            My loss

my glittering crust from when I was first knock-kneed. I am

crossing autumn again             one arm sleeved in sadness.

 

The View Repeating

 

I cut my tongue on something good

and find a fist like a small blush bird

flung into one more dew-molested morning.

My eyes whisper like two blue seashells. They whisper

a quiet wedding tune. They ask what family is. I sigh

through my skin, the way the rain falls.          I am alive, I say. I

drag the sun onto a spoon. The light

could have been blood but I am bold with old sunrises. I

imagine the dress I will wear

with its needles and its silver-sewn medicines. I read

from a book of poems about infidelity, about the art of dying. I am ready

for a fit of vows, but the view is the edge of the sea

full of quiet that repeats like a grief.

 

A Conversation Condensed and Expanded

 

 I am more than one melancholy moment;

a drift; a sighting of sea. You washed me

through the night with your tongue

and you caused me a flood. I sleep blue

beside you while my dreams keep company with ghouls

and my dumb eyes open each morning wishing

poems were more than hospitals for my afflictions.

David McLean

waiting

the soil is waiting for our bodies
like a sweaty obligation,

and the trees and grass
are expecting to assume us shortly

like a guilt, like a cloak of memory
and tattered words we dropped

to stand naked before a god
that never was,

to stand for a world
where words were

as if

it is as if the lake and mountain,
the forest and the stars,
as if the animals and the night itself
were screaming

though only you are screaming,
it is as if this nothing here
were being

memories are made

memories are made of this
imperfection, the drip, drip, drip
of the sun on missing roofs

and saviors falling into puerile
abnegation, like babies
denying that there may be games

to play later. memories are made
of scum and some suffering;
there are far too many faces

with skin on them,
there are far too many hearts
beating in dead men

a sound thrashing

and words give one another a sound thrashing
precisely like love does

words and the massy mouth
whence nothing comes,

where nothing does

body and blood

the body and its blood are free
and never to be sacralized again
to the slightest extent -

only in the secular can memory breathe
and night be its rage in us,
loving and loveless;

beyond the hieratic establishment
of holy or profane families
lies freedom and what bodies need,

blood enough to be

nothing ever returns

nothing ever returns
though it seem the same
bloodless indifference;

and the essence of words
is retention, repetition and failure
inevitable;

literature being nothing -
the gross pale ghost
better than the life itself

that it never bothered to live,
that will never return;
words the impotent corpses

of nothings, of missing things

David McLean is from Wales but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there with partner, dog and cats. In addition to six chapbooks, McLean is the author of three full-length poetry collections: CADAVER’S DANCE (Whistling Shade Press, 2008), PUSHING LEMMINGS (Erbacce Press, 2009), and LAUGHING AT FUNERALS (Epic Rites Press, 2010). His first novel HENRIETTA REMEMBERS is coming shortly. More information about David McLean can be found at his blog http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com/

Kyle Hemmings

Cat People #12: Tell-Tale Nights in the Heart of the City

At the club, we’re knee deep in dusk, pockets of post-despair. The D.J. is spinning a remix of Cash’s Ring of Fire. But I and my cat brother, with his genius love of green, have already fallen in. We have codenames: He’s Puma Boy; I’m Lucky Cat. Later, we’ll rip off the straights, air brush tiger insignias on their leather jackets, now ours. Nothing is really ours unless it’s under the skin, like connective tissue, like memories of disco strangers in my bed, my false confessions to them. Was it quick-spit love? All friendly fang and chipped tooth? I use to flatten their tires so they'd remember me. Later, Puma and I will have sex in Soho’s back alleys. The pigeons will drop us condoms. We’ll blush before strangers. The city is a tea cup that leaks us. I need some coffee. Deep, dark, Columbian. On the subway, girls without claws, ones with hollow eyes, stare out of windows. I study the curl and length of their fingernails. Not enough city love, too short, too pale. I need to paint them a green that glows in the dark. Long enough to scratch against the night.

Cat People #13: Noir

I wake up screaming. I can’t remember the exact content, only the gross shadows and the girl falling from the wharf. She was young with a voice that could charm dolphins, kingpins. Was that girl me? I’m bleeding. I always cut myself when I dream. It’s my way of telling myself: Hey, wake up! You’re nowhere in sight. My white Persian with the blue eyes no longer answers to her French name: Jolie fille. The psychiatrist who speaks in shades of monotone, whose eyes scare me like ravens, says It’s all the result of stress. Stop working so many hours he says. But I tell him: There’s a war. There’s a war going on. I suspect that in secret rooms with fly-a-way women, he’s a fascist with heavy necrophilliac eyes. The phone rings. It’s the same man I met yesterday at Frankie’s diner. He said his name was Dana Andrews. He handed me his card. He said tailing people was his specialty and asked whether anyone was giving me a hard time. I watched Frankie sling some hash, yell out to 86 the ham steaks. Now I remember. Dana Andrews was the man in my dream. He pushed me in. I believe he did. Then he swam after me. On the moonlit dock, I was shivering. He held me, kept calling me by my childhood nickname: Bleau. His eyes looked through me. Hooked through me. He had the eyes of my cat.

Cat People #12: Burlesque Cat

I finally did it. Took Mr. Tibbs to the vet and had him put to sleep. It was getting to the point of no return, him, not able to hold anything down, walking in circles at the foot of bed, the constant whine at night, his gutteral directives to get up off my ass. Mr. Tibbs and I were together for some 16 years. On stage, we made a great act. Mr. Tibbs was a schizophrenic cat, a Siamese with deep blue acid eyes, a fawn-colored coat. He'd love to churn out kit-cryptic neologisms. During our stage act, the audience must have thought I was the puppet and Mr. Tibbs was a little man inside a cat. For his burial in my backyard, I dressed in the stage attire of my  comedian persona: bowler hat, neck tie, pinstripe suit and spats. I spent the rest of the afternoon sweeping Mr. Tibbs from under the carpets, the sheets, his hairs clinging to my clothes, the way I once clung to him, as if by static electricity and some invisible threads. 

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poetry and prose: Avenue C, Cat People, and Anime Junkie (Scars Publications), and Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest e-books are You Never Die in Wholes from Good Story Press and The Truth about Onions from Good Samaritan. He lives and writes in New Jersey.

Craig Podmore

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…All Good Children Go To Heaven

 

We dreamt of a dragon fucking us.

Breathing hellfire,

She sang Elvis songs,

I wore a Marilyn Monroe mask whilst

Shooting shadows into stagnant vein

Of a pulpy nothing.

Charlie Manson on the TV;

He is no longer flesh,

No longer a nightmare.

 

I ripped her panties off with a naked blade,

We wrote love letters to death in blood

On the bed sheets;

Eroticised by such absurdity.

Erectile homicide,

35mm orgy abuse for the famous meat –

 

Give birth to revolver.

Shoot. Smile. Bleed. Cry. Fuck. Die.

Her sex kills me like an outlaw

But we love it like Christ.

 

 

Anti-Depressant Cinephile Gunman

 

B-movie dildo abuser,

Snuff superstar intro;

 

Let’s relieve ourselves.

 

Praise the violence on screen,

Denounce the brutalism off-screen.

 

The villain on the camera is perfect.

The gunman, all too human is the error

 

Because we don’t want to be victims.

 

We see the auditorium butchery,

Thus vomiting of the ‘real’ –

Juxtaposed with the embrace of the reel.

 

Target practice – target audience.

 

XXX theatre of wounds,

A sell out crowd

Singing Shakespearean death quotes

In the viscera of celluloid tombs.

 

Such a performance will not be welcomed on a red carpet

But it will make the cover of magazines

Because it’s another screen,

A new fiction – a modern obscene.

 

 

Christopher Barnes

Puppeteer’s Croon

 

Cliqued in the finesse

Of bestowing decrees, I swallow it

Wanting gripe.

Soaked up by long-in-tooth conventions,

Machinations smart-arsing the no-accounts.

 

Righto, you structure by hush-hushes,

Floodlight defects.

Kick off the coming bloodshed.

You made trap-doors alright;

In the sewer try bobbing along.

 

Disorganising Revolution

 

Inconsiderate – your Simian good looks,

Strew in knock-kneed rain.  Convictions

Of ‘tactics’ gist –

Someone’s tackling to string-pull

The Schism.

 

War is a gargled-earth malodour.

Muffled drum.  The matter of daring,

A bare anthropological index.

 

The New Politics Are Dead

Right path whores

With pit-a-pat scowls

Had flesh that made thunder certain.

Sprung, seven senses – they’ll tangle you

In the eye.

 

We’re divided from gallows.

Unreplenished of possessions.

Smuggled banners jolt.

Dishevelled see-saw resistance

Death rattles treading damp steps

Set forward by the living.

 

Christopher Barnes' first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer.  He is a participant writer for http://www.stemistry.com/ and reads at Poetry Scotland's Callendar Poetry Weekends.  He also has art criticism published in Peel and Combustus magazines.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

afterwards


after the hard work of that night
all the laboured hours
slowed to match her slow
harsh respiration
its rhythm almost lulling
unsure if she struggled to breathe
or to stop – as the sun rose
the sound softened
softened
then both were over,  her life
and her death, already
in the past – one hand lifted
in warding off
or welcome


equinox moon


surrounded by a green
diffusion of darkness
heavy as threat
she watches; silver
eye patch
or weathered balloon,
her wrinkled
mercury skin a map
tracking song lines
on my mother’s dead face

Joseph M. Gant

Luster

whiskey sweats at 10am;
it's Tuesday, and I
really shouldn't leave today.
the sheen of the gun,
this light beside the candle—
luster never was our game;
we shine beside the shallow grave:
angry light electric ghouls
deprived of all that mattered.


Requiem

for all the stars I've seen
and all the stars I've since forgotten,
kissed beneath the sky
and parched of all oblivion,
supernova seraphs bled their tears
and fertilized
a joyous field, giving life not theirs
into these springtime memories of lust, synaptic
and forever woven,
now a tapestry since lain
along the pathway leading nowhere but to here.

Chris Guidon

Stabbing

The air was nearly opaque with the heavy heat.
People moving upright everywhere; dizzied, sort
of lost. 
             We found the blood at the back of the pub.
Like excrement.

                              A straight line.
From the pub through the alley to the phone-box by the shops.

Blood like art,
illustrating panic.

                                The fourth dead on the estate that summer.
As with art, each piece has only six seconds to excite
interest 
                 before the viewer moves on
to contemplate the TV, their relationships, searing violence.     
               
           Apparently it was over a ten bag.
                                                                Something to fill the void.

Steve Klepetar

Hold On Tight

This ride may last a few minutes or it may
endure, like nails rusting slowly in a splintery

board, for the rest of your life.  Professors
of motion have climbed down iron ladders

and are working it out.  You can hear them
moaning all night in closets and dens.  Whiskey

glasses clink as mountains of ice pile up,
steaming in amber flow.  Meanwhile your little

car rattles high on the track and your frayed
nerves, those cables of glass and wind, bend

tighter and tighter as your stomach fills
with birds.  Forget mercy.  Only machines live

here, and they won’t negotiate a different ending
now.  No wonder you have eaten shadows

from that plate of rice.  The summit slowly rises
into the deep well of your sight.  Could anyone

be surprised when sharks grow pale in the wan
depths of your eyes?  Screams linger in fiery ash and rain.


The Half-Brother’s Song

I’ve been a black bear stung with hunger, stumbling
through autumn-ravaged yards.  My shadow hangs

between slender pines, scent of water flooding my nose. 
Here comes the moon, my half-brother, drunk again

on light and stars.  His laughter shakes the night, breaking
yellowing leaves as they cling to maple and oak.  See how

they drift in his cold and pallid gleam.  I’ve been a crow
staring out over a browning field, my yellow eyes bright

as little moons.  I’ve been a fish with silver scales
and a frog, pinging passionate songs through rushes

and mud.  When winter returns I will sleep through the slow
pulsing of my turgid blood, half believing the miracles I dream.
 

John Swain

The Inside of a Jar

End of the wilderness

at our cross purpose,

this scabrous city.

The farther fluid fathering sky

let chaotic waters

pressure the stones into law.

And all of the sons became his executioner

and all of the daughters were born widows.

I laid in the place

where the bones were removed

from both the fallen animal and its ground.

The lock of this altar

provided your face with an eye

of blue natron,

I tasted its taste

like the inside of a broken jar

I could not enter

or decipher its meaning.