BONE LIGHT

by Alejandro Escudé

What else could you collect with a sphere

Surrounding a star? In the era of artificiality

And commerce, would it be evidence

Of love? Would it leave a heat signature?

I picture an alien sphere—not metallic

As supposed, but translucent, amorphous,

Twinkling an arthritic light, a series of low-

Frequency whistles. Are there ripe stars

Where you are? Rhyming citadels, chariots

Like half-eaten strawberries? Scientists

Take the pulse of time, they inherit questions

And the questions give birth to universes.

But I wonder about such a powerful warmth

And the results of the search. Is energy

Stored in our marrow? The man himself

Said it would be more a collection of objects.

Like a home? Like most journeys, it might

Prove false evidence of wonder. A god

Unwanted. Light reflected off the bus stop

Bench of a galaxy. As of late, life’s become

A chain of human wrist bones, so we must

Look up and dream of a star-engine that’ll

Reveal the fluttering eyelids of another tribe

Mining the fumes of a celestial volcano.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT SPOKE ON DEMOCRACY

by Indran Amirthanayagam

 

The day is coming, and nobody

is turning away. It is coming like

sun rising, like rain about to burst

 

from cloud, and no matter

where you stand on this earth

you will feel the thunder clap,

 

the roar of the volcano

blowing its top, and you will 

be amazed and chastened,

 

and you will hug love beside

you, love in dreams, love

in history. These are end 

 

times, to take stock, 

to remember, to say

thank you, to wash away

 

the fog of amnesia. Clarity.

Piercing. Truth telling, 

standing with families of 

 

the disappeared everywhere. 

These are times of forgiveness, 

of searing light despite 

 

forces of ruin, of sore 

losing, of twisting laws,

of dictatorship. These 

 

are times for the new 

civil contract, not 

guns but mind, 

 

not mockery 

but respect, not 

cult but democrat.

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

LA PALMA

James Schwartz is a poet, writer, slam performer and author of 5 poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America. Twitter: @queeraspoetry

LOOKING FOR GOOD NEWS

by Joan Mazza

Three days of steady rain, power flickers
off and on, pond overflowing. Flooded roads
and mud slides where trees are taken down
for another pipeline. Another school shooting

with ten dead. In Cuba a plane crashes. Over
one hundred dead. Lava ignites houses, cars
in a Hawaii subdivision. The acrid air is ash
and smells like rotten eggs. Bad news

headlines can flip you into a downward spiral.
I’m not prone to depression, not inclined
to expect the worst. The universe seems
eager to test optimists with an overdose

of cruel reality, reminds us we’re getting
old and no one is exempt from diminishment.
For now, I can read the news. Forgive me
for this day of shallowness, for enjoying excess,

the waste of resources on flowers, fancy hats,
buglers and British troops marching in full regalia.
I don’t care how much it costs. We need
a lift, a smile. We need to believe in love

stories, that one woman can defy predictions
of her limits, can become a princess, if not
queen. No one has to give her away. She’s
a grownup, can walk herself down the aisle.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has twice been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, and The Nation.

PASSION SKY

by Martha Landman

This is the incredible moment when a huge volcano erupted in Indonesia sending ash spewing an estimated 12 miles into the sky. The powerful explosion took place at Mount Sangeang Api in the Lesser Sunda Islands - an area that plays host to 129 active volcanoes - and sent a distinctive spaceship-shaped ring of pyroclastic smoke high into the air.  The photographs were taken by professional photographer Sofyan Efendi during a commercial flight from Bali to the fishing town of Labuan Bajo in West Nusa Tenggara province. Scores of farmers who work but do not live on the island were ordered to leave and not return until the volcano has finished erupting, said Muhammad Hendrasto, head of Indonesia's National Volcanology Agency. There are not believed to have been any deaths or injuries as a result of the eruption. Authorities have had Mount Sangiang Api - which means 'Mountain of Spirits' in Balinese - on high alert for almost a year, he told China's Xinhua news agency.  The volcano sits in Indonesia's notorious 'Ring of Fire' - an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. It has 452 volcanoes - 75 per cent of the world's total. --Daily Mail (UK), May 30, 2014

The sky is a passion tower
A vertical breath from the bosom of a fire God
Voluptuous love-plumes bellow like a death sentence
An inferno of justice

Where are the birds, the planes?
Entranced by elemental fury, farmers hover in the shade and
offer incense and a thousand goats to the gods
who enrich their soil

The sky is a love sculpture
Tangled clouds of fairy floss assault the atmosphere
Rivers flow in lava, arisen from the mountain floor —
Tomorrow’s saucers fly —
The sky is passion.


Martha Landman writes in North Queensland, Australia. Her most recent work has appeared in Jellyfish Whispers.

FIREWALL

by Michael Brockley

"The Pequod in the Waves" by Robbie W Hudson. Pencil on paper, 180 x 260cm.

                                                                                                                                                                                 “Viewed through the lens of history, Obama represents a new 21st century politician: the Progressive Firewall.” --Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, November 8, 2012


You are the kind of woman who wears jewel-colored scarves. The kind who photographs abandoned homes and immigrants at crosswalks. On a Whidbey Island beach, you sat beside a man who owns volcanos. At the close of the year the President reread the tragedy of the white whale. In the month his hair turned gray. A walrus tossed its body onto the blond sand. It bellowed while the man who owns the Black Hills admired your photographs of totem poles. The snow clinging to Mount Rainier. The undaunted shadows of Lewis and Clark over the Cascades. Behind your resort patio, a woman in a yellow poncho walked with the fog along a hiker’s path. Her wolfhound barked at the walrus as it lumbered onto a barnacled pier. A Cessna skywrote dusk into the sky. You told the owner of Niagara Falls the President’s favorite comic book hero is Conan the Barbarian. He pretended to be the Cimmerian reiver while crooning “Let’s Stay Together.”  Shadows climbed the volcano in the mountains east of your sunset. You had photographed its trail sign earlier that day.  A caution for a firewall President ascending to the crow’s nest of a landlocked Pequod. “Falling can be dangerous.”


Michael Brockley is a 63-year old school psychologist who has worked in special education in rural northeast Indiana for 25 years. He has poetry publications in Wind, The Windless Orchard, Spitball, The Indiana Review, The Indiannual, The Spoon River Quarterly, The River City Review and The Ball State Literary Forum. Tom Koontz’ Barnwood Press published his chapbook Second Chance in 1990, and Brockley has lately placed work in Indiana publications such as Maize, Country Feedback, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal and Facing Poverty. A video of Brockley reading his “Hollywood’s Poem” which was published in Facing Poverty can be found on YouTube. His poem “When the Woman in the White Sweater Asked at the Cancelled Charles Simic Reading Asked If I Was David Shumate” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Barry Harris of the Tipton Poetry Journal. Recently, Brockley’s poems have appeared in The New Verse News.