Christopher Barnes-

Countdown

Electrode is to calf

As megapixel is to eye,

A painstaking transformer.

Purple-mould injuries bludgeon the head

-          Always this demonstrative shot.

The footsteps of your legend

Is ruinous.  Fuse-blowing vital chunks,

Alternating current hurled hangmen

Into regenerated undertakings.

Crackle goes an extra life.

(From The Electric Chair Poems)

Date

White Coats enlightened us.

Extremities give rise to energy

(A charged switch

Stung yours).

A botch, by tears.

Cut-short.  No lovebird deliberates

Your cage in its pupil.  His Nikon, winceless,

Impotent to unsettle

Your lost-sleep eyes.

Even-tempered,

Cadaverousness engrossed that thick head

Into a knockabout bruise.

(From The Electric Chair Poems)

Christopher Barnes' first collection LOVEBITES is published by Chanticleer Press.  He is a participant for www.stemistry.com and has just had an art review published by Peels Magazine, UK

Sam Ledger-

Sealings
A voice becomes hoarse from swallowing gravel in efforts to scour an abrasive taste of words. I do not wish to write of you anymore, for I am tired of living in the shadowy glacial chill of a corpse.

Mourners should have left you to scolding June air. Where feasting infants beating wings could have gorged sustenance from your spleen. Or become intoxicated on your swollen liver. Or worse. No one needs a lesson in patriarchal biology.

My utterance transcends unto this,
a state of silence. You inhabit a pill box casket of ash and littered bone, nameless through expressions of a faceless man. Fingers have beaten stakes of refusal. Of disinclination to acknowledge billowing gusts of air wasted in your efforts to enrapture my soul between your cupped hands.

Love is loveless when defiantly taken and I will, if I must, steal back time and body and blood
 

Sugar Skull & Death Masks
I never cared to lay in sunlight, alone and exposed to rays. Never crept above deck but to bathe in violet light of the moon. He walked forward in his death mask as I held my sugar skull in symbolism of matrimony. Fingers fall to mastectomy scars wrapped beneath mottled rags. Their removal never did serve the purpose intended. I am still, standing, delinquent, muted by  a singular stitch in my lips.

Roses &  velvet & lace knitted together by seventeen pairs of hands and sixteen pairs of eyes. Veils dipped in reddening dye. Eyes hidden by puckered skin, drying since removed from its head.

Heathen voices call out mockingly as we waltz along our dusty aisle. I had been agile in my youth, now stiff with lethargy and melancholia. Vocality stifled in a malformed vocal box. I have not sung aloud in the catacombs when walking alone since I was a child. I have not walked alone since a sun set upon a distant shore. Our witnesses remain static, impaled where they stand, evidencing two shadows merging under a bitter testament.

Until death shall part us
To dishonour and obey

Two corpses laid shrouded in their marble sarcophagus. Silent but for hushed sounds of laboured breathing. I am birthing his fantasy under a weight of virginal lace and taffeta. Wrapped in tissue paper a list of lies I told...

I love you.

Mourners do not weep amongst themselves, fall to knees begging the Almighty for why.  He, He lays next to me, stoic, solid, clasping a frail hand in his. Faithful. To keep safe, to keep silent. The blind are leading the blinded. My lips have turned blue and the sex of humanity leaks from my mouth.

Stigma did not manifest as I imagined.  In spite of my bringing my own nails and handing him the hammer. Sweet kisses touched my eyelids and words stung as sung in baritone vibrations. There is no salvation for sinners
Nor penance. Not redemption.

I say Revelations lied, he laughs steadily. Deafening tone echoing mockingly from stone walls and lid. An airtight grave does not whistle with wind, rain may not seep into my bones, but I sense a sentiment of suffocation setting in. He smiles again and says something I cannot hear. His teeth are missing, his teeth are missing as the last note of morning passages is played on a piano. Low notes drifting down or up or across, I have lost a sense of space and time move back and sideways and from itself.

Michelle Reale-

Aurora Sets the House on Fire

 

But first, because it mocks her, she kills the fat fly over and over again.  It’s wings leave an iridescent smear on the French vanilla colored wall. It pleases her to no end. Outside the sound of a basketball hitting the cement at eerily slow intervals threatens to lull her to sleep, while she stands. She snaps back to attention and remembers how she once read about a serial killer’s mother who never left home without her big scrapbook, as if your life can be held together with some glue and some tape, something she may have to resort to in the near future. It’s curious details like this that spur her on.  And the questions. She’d like to know how she can stop raking at bloated desire with her bloody claws.   Anybody? The avenue is full of other people’s trash and she is up to her ankles in the different stories they tell all on the same day. Listening went out of fashion years ago.   There are rivers that flow with molten wax, but in the end, the heat, the burning and the light it gives will have to be enough.  Even pleasure has a life span and she’s lived long enough to know, that it is usually a short one. 

 

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian on faculty at Arcadia University in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is the author of four chapbooks and her work has appeared in various anthologies.  She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She blogs on social justice, immigration and migration in the Sicilian context atwww.sempresicilia.wordpress.com 

Serena Wilcox-

Orphanage
 
An extinguished flame form clouds
their incandescent stands
become a human storm
 
In a cold room
 
at the base of a window
particles of dust adored in gold
morph into children
sleeping under a sheet of their own breath
 
planted in rows like young trees
in a foreign land where rain is regulated by seasons
 
(Note: First published in Desk Rage Poet April 2012 (E-Pub))
 

There Were Two Trees
 
There were two trees in a garden
Whose limbs were densely woven
Like cobwebs soaked in liquid foam
 
Separate secrets revealed
At the threshold of a lie
 
Leaves from both trees trembled
Impotent buds fell

Fragmented

Mortal

Mute nonetheless
 
 

Serena Wilcox  is the author of Sacred Parodies. (Ziggurat Books
International) She is poetry editor for Leaf Garden Press. She has
literary work published  in Ann Arbor Review, BlazeVox, Word Riot,
and many other publications. She was recently nominated for Dancz Best
of the Web 2011.

Aad de Gids-

la princesse de kathmandu ou de shigatze
 

being tibetan or tibetanoid is almost on the road to titaniumnization.

enlightenment with an outerwordly glimmer,the quartzes of the

mountains directly as cotissue infracerebralous thoughtinterference

to enlighten the interference of repetitive words,construing thoughts

against the grain,la princesse de shigatze lost her thoughts to love

and the altitudinous soft psychosis to affirm the alpine flowers and

bric-à-brac roads downward or,upward,here or,there.wearing her

ten ton weighing yak woolen cape with the regality of heights endless

deverence or,” developing reverence for divergent intelligence”,to

tip tap on her wooden mules up or,down those flatstone stairs to heaven

and brightest brightest lightblue tibetan uninterferenced skies,the blue

of death and love,and as she also likes it,the mauve of the rhododendron

flowers himalayan richesse,reverential transparent mauve with spots

for the queens bumblebees with blackglama fur coats flying in the stiff

cold tibetan nepalese air,bhutan,sikkim,ladakh,this eye of the world

elevated to greater hights and culminating in mount kailash,the kang

rinpoche feng,the holy mountain around which counter-clockwise the

autochtone people of tibet the bön,and clockwise the jains,tibetan ~

and other buddhists and hindus circumference it,all its 45 kms,to acquire

immediate zumhimmelfahren. ’la princesse tam tam de paris’, la princesse de kathmandu ou de shigatze is wearing nothing but the finest dessous,under her rough and ready outerwear,silken fineries and lace boxeurs des dames. the yurts are as cold as they are warm. tzizu sleeps dressed.

aaddegids54y.nursehomosexualphilosopherdadaistoutrageousnessistdutch

Dom Gabrielli-

Pasolini Rex

there is no wine left

there are no laughs

as the storm descends

with cold under its torrential arm

there is no idiom left

to dispel this hell

there are no films to eject

the instant into rhetoric

there is no being no meaning

no oscillation of heart and pen

there is no desert

dead the sand

there is no sea

blank the tides

there are no hearts

blood clotted the image

the genocide porn of the mind

the mutilation of desire

youth abandoned to the bare bone

from the Roman hill where you were murdered

gathered one last time to the halt of living

to the knife edge

what cuts is no longer

the hesitant kiss

does not attract its believer

the incomplete poem

has lost its ink

it dries in a vain desert for recycled criminals

who laugh as they decapitate intellectuals

where the mafia do what they can to complete the opera

with all their complacent apologists

all their faussaire filmmakers

they found an empty road

they turned off the cameras

drove their money into elegant malls and banks

whoever they saw soon blind

listeners losing ears to fictional gunshot

drowned in millions of joyful pills

dawn has not

since you died

love has rarely

since your assassination

retreat again

into the simple hole of scream

i did not cry i could not

because your words were by my side

i put them into fists

i saw the menagerie they called politics

i wrote from nowhere

for no reason

i wrote a poem

into your poem

i wrote a poem to hear you

sing a poem

to my poem

poems once you sang

i never heard twice

but i should have

the desert had grown

the mafia slang creeping across ivy coloured borders

dialects many dying in the candlelight eve

no one to stoop down and write their resurrection

there will be no tomorrow

no more light

just the willing to raise a body

from a premature grave

to hold a penis as day becomes night

to write what is left of words

across a scroll of broken dreams

you can laugh at anything

you can destroy everything sacred

you can ignore every book written or sung

to the point of losing even the prick

of your heartbeat

down a stray strolling drunk alley

into a fight to the death

with black gloves and white teeth

which emissary likened you to a god

which million of drunken dollars killed a prophet

sing to me now

i have listened

longer than most

long enough

to play this dead Italian music

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He 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. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.

Dom Gabrielli-

After Pasolini's Medea

  

there would have been delight once

in the scattered body of the victim

whose blood was smeared upon the grain and the pod

on the black and brown surfaces of the earth

his handsome face and hand his testicles

carried in a frenzy to unknown summit

so he was just a smile

at the executioner

his destiny a broken neck in spring

as the crowds gathered to scatter his axed members

the camera's deliberate shaking

like the smile a man sends to another

in the hiatus between jagged stills

the beauty of any wholeness is just colour

is just a body just a face a pair of eyes or legs

deep valleys and mediterranean rocks

burning in the power of almighty indifference

what then is a world without gods

what then is a world without sacrifice

the god that hid in an enigma

the god of a premonition the god of a smile

which ushered you to make love

as life depended upon it

to assassinate your rival

in the same wild act of love

gods were never benevolent entities

you could never talk to them

they admonished as they killed

they ordered the scatterings of innocent men's blood

they raped and pillaged for jealousy

they were the intolerable and the unjust

the hero is not himself

he is just the feelings he has

spontaneously between one sentence and another

between the orders of a fool

and the hideous spittle of a monster

just a conduit

between one god's game and another's fury

the dialectic of his insignificance

playing in fields of the unknown

the movement between one god's penetrating finger

and the amussis of judgement

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He 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. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery. Gabrielli's books are here:
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/search?searchTerm=dom+gabrielli&search=search. His own whereabouts on an axis between language and nowhere.

Petra Whiteley-

Little Night Music

I.

Blackness is

my light, inside my mouth

worms of music crawl, heavy

as my darkest bone; the bone's bitten side

bears a mirror in which no other appears. In

there a body grows and folds into itself. I think

it is mine. My eyes are refusing to hear. My ears

no longer see this music that smooths me out as pebbles,

soothes my darkest reactions into the muteness of  seas

as their green thinning waters wait

                                          (s)nakedly.

                               I become a feeling

of stigmatised silver.

II.

When God took me I was milk,

when he sung me I was its perfect whiteness.

Somehow my crucial pieces became a clock inside

His head.

A fly scraping His skull.

III.

In the rain I touch

the edgeless-ness. A rhythm of lies

passes deathly

between my body and me. I believe

this - !

my body, a heretic of my pain. My fingers,

crippled and crushed, collaborators off target.

And that slippery war

                                  a heritage. Constant

and permanent.

IV.

My body,

               annihilated and silenced,

slipping dead through its own pulse. And my eyes,

always turned towards the same point(lessness)

The Sound Shrouding Teresa

Far too often I find my hands working;

there are too many discarded statues around here,

air and dust. I throw Teresa against the wall,

that weird doll inside my chest falls,

her no body against the off-white muteness of plaster echoes

just as it was when I've finished

with being a girl, and threw my dolls against the wall.

If I had a knife I'd have called them all after Marie Antoinette.

There was nothing behind their smile and those mouths,

they lied about Golem song-words and the skin of God.

Only out of the black moments of sex and that terrible longing for death,

I have brought something back to breath. A slow sound in ebony warmth

of old violin cracking inside my freezing fingers. And for the statues

I arrange lilies on the razor's edge.

  Melody Of Darkness

My body is not the one walking down the street
               it's the cold mass on the table in the mortuary
                   it's the black bird pecking on its own wings mid-flight
                         it's the Christmas fish in her last bath
                            the other side corner of a cemetery
                              

                          (only dogs remember it)
                                                                             a
                                           burning painting on an empty white wall


I would rather if it were music drifting from the doors
            through the windows,             through grey and heavy air   
                     (not song-sheets, rain-pissed in the gutter)
                             a yellow flower wind-torn in a mountain's spring
                                   (not a speck in its dying tomb-water)
                                       or even its cold biting river      frightfully alive
                                           as the darkest wood violins
                                              (my grandmother's forest; its fragrance of
                                                     shimmering scary-beautiful - no world -  lostness)

      or just a thought -
                 a thought dissolving in a cup of coffee in its white delicacy
                   (in blueberry china touching an antique table in
                           forgotten house with history stashed in its dust -
                                           handkerchief in a pocket, in dog-eared photo, corner-smile - ancestral)

                               but lingering on
                                       (visible) melody of darkness
                                                        lined  in memory of fingers (touchable)  sonata  of a lived-in skin.

Petra Whiteley was born in Czech Republic, but England has been her home since 1993. Whiteley’s poetry collection 'The Nomad’s Trail' (Ettric Forest Press) was published in 2008, a chapbook 'The Moulding of Seers' (Shadow Archer Press) in 2009 and ‘Exhibition Of Defined Moments’ (erbacce-press) in 2011 with 'The Liquid Metropolis' out recently. Her children’s book Watchmaker’s Quartet And The Shattered Pendulum describing a surrealistic adventure has been released on Kindle in 2011. Her prose, poetry and articles have been published widely in webzines and in print. She reviews CDs and interviews bands/musicians on regular basis for the Reflections Of Darkness.

Craig Podmore-

Do you see?

Such lunacy, fires of cleansing, babies mauled by experience of human error, man behind barbed wire – such lunacy, can you see? He is I, he is you, however, his freedom raped by the lunacy. I don’t understand the barbarism to be quite honest. How does one man order another to be subjugated because of one’s apparent difference? Piss tested prejudice, disgraced, appalled by such buggery of man.

 

It is not an eclipse but the blood on your iris.

Do you see?

 

I saw all of this when I was child. No, I did not see, I just assumed that the casual malevolence was just the norm. So I shrugged my shoulders and continued playing games.

Neil Ellman-

Winter Windows 

(after the painting by Jane Frank)

1

At the edges rime

cold-to-the-touch

slipping through the cracks

bitter shadows

gray-squealing witchery

cold words

hanging in the air

like stars

dripping icycles.

2

It is the last day

of the twelfth month

of a shivering year

street lights sparkling

disquieting psalms

frore on bitten skin

on shaking bones

alone.

3

She traces a word

on glass

again

an illusion

a name

frosting over

as if

it had never been.

The Bat

(after the painting by Hans Hofmann)

It listens

for its echoes

in a cave

waits for

the feeding hour

to terrify

the moon

suck wind

and blood from sky

reasoning

with its maw

and gut while

clicking songs

of hunger

on the wing.

Neil Ellman lives and writes in New Jersey (USA).  He has published numerous poems, many of them ekphrastic, in print and online journals throughout the world.  He is particularly attracted to surreal images and has published separate chapbooks devoted to the works of Dalí and Miró.

David Mac-

Trickle

The black tar trickle,

brown river snaking,

down

through a

tinfoil valley,

crinkled silver,

the smoke curling

up.

‘Darling, slow down.

flow between

bones.

Hot gloom,

sweet smile.

Don’t say a word.’

And outside

the sun was dropping,

melting

down into the

earth with

shame. I

swallowed and watched.

I didn’t want to miss

this.

The shadows were coming,

creeping through

the walls,

eating and

stabbing

everything.

I cut myself with the knife

again and again but the

blade

wasn’t sharp enough.

And outside one bird flew off,

spooked by something,

and all the rest

scattered.

Thorns 

I clocked the girl as she passed me.

she smiled and looked down.

my cock stirred and saw her.

I smiled back.

I had never smiled before and it

felt strange.

But the guys around the pool table

all swivelled their mean heads to me.

They looked like ancient gargoyles

with twisted snarls,

faces like ripped thorns.

I went to the bar and slurped a pint,

my back to them,

the cocaine throbbing in my head:

a frenzy behind the eyes.

I hoped they’d hurt me tonight.

I longed for the taste of blood.

The Burning 

The junky had a

cross tattoo

on her neck.

Her eyes were like

sharp nettles and her

limbs like

drooping leaves.

Her mouth was full of

fish eyes.

She walked in and he

sorted her out.

She shook and fidgeted,

her body alive and

squirming as if

something that refused to

stay down

wriggled for survival

just under the

surface of her skin.

She paced and I

watched her,

writing her down.

She trembled and

her shadow trembled,

it rattled across

the wall,

looking for something,

we were all

looking for something.

But she had it bad,

her insides knocking,

and burning more

than we’d

ever know.

Sarah Crewe-

because bathtime will solve everything

stop checking mail.
your two-faced heart will
break. plunge in the deep

no sign of scales,
tail astray. no
panacea or

daryl hannah locks.
scouse medusa. thoughts
wander. deja-vu

favoured place of prayer
assuage guilt. give thanks.
speak to the dead. you

always hear them
laugh. absurdity
of naked hello.

stripped bare. heat rising.
the wrong kind of paint.
who and what i am

distinctly unsure
if a shaved pussy
will solve anything

diktat

because I love JJB dirty
little basslines. Anthony Kiedis
LA cock-rock and call Bukowski

the man. sapphic porn played out by straight
actresses. having doors opened for
the curves to stumble into street

because I have no record of a
man chatting shit on a cellphone whilst
piercing the veins in my left hand

no explanation for entire hand
highly invasive six weeks post birth
vulnerable. tearful. fit to break.

because I am not branded in name
or mortgage. and fail to fathom
how these words spell out independence

find post-feminism utterly
repulsive. I choose class over clit
and I love pink. red in peroxide.

set your pyre alight with Chuck’s  books
and hear me laughing. you can’t drown
me – i’ll float. the river, she loves me.

night fishing

window open and sleeping topless her
thoughts wander, wondering
if she turned sand to glass by
blinking, would she catch a poem

Sarah Crewe is 30 and from the Port of Liverpool. She has a chapbook forthcoming with Erbacce Press. Her work has appeared at Red Fez, The Camel Saloon, Erbacce, Streetcake, Sunfish and 3:AM. She likes sea air, strong drinks and cheap dresses.

Lynn Alexander-

Prologue To Mariamne

adherence. the appearance of design

without a name, known

still they live

In actions involving other agents, 

In the series of incidents,

I have seen

their seven deaths

progression. in the stretch

to lateral magnitude

Hers is an accomplished catharsis

whose brink is distant

as in

the casting off of rib

adhesions. these

apart to the box

where she is bone

immaculate

Rapt Venation
 
These insects bring invectives to our leaves
underneath, they grasp the green
attached to rapt venation

There, we drip to them
rising in their legs
we are brought to bold opprobrium
then,
once pulp, when we were rendered lush
we are at once, detritus
in the dead reticulate
 mesh, we end
and none can eat the sun