VET'S HALLOWEEN

by Linda J. Himot

Image source: Shopsafe

Halloween and all those kids in skeletal black,
glow-in-the-dark green and purple –
no fairy princess pink Mama, please –
roam the streets for candy treats while my neighbor,

secreted behind his kitchen counter – shades drawn,
lights out, hides trembling.  Fears ghouls and worse –
gooks –rise – like ghosts – from steamy jungle floor –
every night – silent, stealthy –  then melt away –

before first light.  Dead bodies left to mark their trail.
He made it back – except his mind – to live alone –
on duty, dusk to dawn.  Forty two years he’s kept watch,
high alert, rifle steel slick with sweat – ready,

mission unchanged – protect his buddies, kill
or be killed.  Sees sallow, shiny, enemy faces creeping
through his front yard swampy grass.  Hears mortar
in the back fire of passing trucks, cruising motorcycles.

Fears he will kill a kid if one should knock.
So takes a double dose of meds, stuffs his ears
with cotton, repeats Hail Mary’s aloud until
the fire horn sounds the end of trick or treat.


After many years as a psychiatrist, Linda J. Himot began writing poetry in 2005.  Her poems have been published in a variety of journals such as The MacGuffin, River Poets, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. 

TRICK OR TREAT

by David Feela

“My my, and what are you supposed to be?”
“A congress people.”
“That’s precious!  And how did you come up with such a cute idea?”
“My daddy told me to say it.”
“Wouldn’t your daddy help you make a costume?”
“He didn’t do nothing.”
“What a wonderful way to inspire creativity!  How old are you?”
“Eight.”
“How funny!  I know members of congress that won’t survive half as long.”
“Why?”
“Well, little one, it’s because they’re like your daddy.”
“Are they fat?”
“I suppose some are, but mostly they’re just lazy.”
“What’s lazy?”
“Lazy means they want candy for doing nothing.”
“I want candy.”
“Of course you do.  Here, take all you can grab with your grubby little hands.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.  Better yet, take the entire bag.  And here’s my wallet, my credit cards, plus the keys to my house and car.  Take it all.”
“Gee, you’re a nice lady.”
“Yeah, now scram!  I’ve got to shut off the lights and pretend I’m a Democrat.”


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

GENTILITY

by The Bangkok Bards 

Saknarin Chinayote & Charles Frederickson

I choose to live gently

Soft touch trusting gut instincts

Mindful sensibilities overflowing tender mercy

Others-oriented wellness deeply felt

Social superiority polite refined manner

Serene calmness soothing anxious mindset

Nothing achieved by harsh force

Shouts yielding to hush-hush ponderings

Gentleness doesn’t imply weakness brute

Strength most potent life force

The art of introspective contemplation

Manifests kindly compassion universal truths

Remember to be gentle toward

Others stern with humble self

Feeling pleased deeds well done

Genuine good-natured smiles wondrous miracles

Humankind evolves with mutual help

From Nature welfare overpowering warfare

Survival of Fittest habitually practiced

Non-threatening manner stabilizing manipulative justice

Resilient when knowingly vulnerable bravely

Facing fears in masked defeat

Pride nurturing plants acting respectfully

Toward creatures objects needing TLC

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

ONE PERFECT DAY

by Rick Gray

I turned the corner of Bleecker and 7th
On my way to another dead end
And there rushed Lou
Shaded, frowning, all bad influence wrapped in black leather

And when he swept passed
Something knifed me somewhere soft
And I found myself fighting
To keep my burning eyes cool and down

Through the iron bars of a New York sewer
From which rose the voice of
His dark angel daring me
To keep walking all the way home

To kiss my mother’s crazy hand
And let it take another wild swing
not for more crying, but to learn to sing back at it,
bad and grinning, through the sting.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.

ON SHATTUCK AVENUE

by Zara Raab

Image source: The Monthly

the old homeless men say nothing
these winter nights in the city.
For months they go without speaking,
instead endlessly wandering
as if the stream of love
had stopped,
leaving only boundless pity.

Arms outspread, “Friend!” we croon to them,
when a word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom.
They can’t turn off too soon
from so grand a gesture,
well meant to reassure––
hot food and warm beds––a future.

Are you ever trapped in logic
as I am—caught as if in amber––
willing to act, but no matter
where you aim, missing your target,
unable to stop
or become someone else,
your need for change urgent?

A kind word said simply would do
so much more to dispel a gloom,
an hour in our human houses
feeling out each of many rooms,
their echoes and uses.
We cannot start too soon.
The shelter we seek is human.


Zara Raab’s latest books are Fracas & Asylum and Rumpelstiltskin, finalist for the Dana Award. Earlier books, Swimming the Eel and The Book of Gretel, evoke the rainy darkness of the remote North Coast. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in Poetry Flash, Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, The Dark Horse, and Poet Lore. She is a contributing editor to the Redwood Coast Review and Poetry Flash.

GUERNICA

by Martin Willitts Jr.

    
    1.

Suddenness is our nature.
Once there was a village;
now there is not.

Once in the Basque Country village
in northern Spain,
love was tuned like a guitar;
now there is no music
ripped hearts of sheet music
no one heard.

Once someone was sleeping
peaceful as grapes waiting for harvest;
then abruptly, without warning,
they were harvested.

Once the houses were quiet;
then they were quieted.

    2.

The men were gone at the time.
The village was mostly women,
and children no bigger than a coin.
There was a building of stored weapons
on the edge of town,
spared during the attack.
This was not about politics,
or who was right, or war.
It was all about intimidation.

All the petty reasons did not apply.
They never do.
The only thing that mattered
was efficiency and expediency.
All that mattered was the quickness,
the shutting of doors,
churning blood passive.

Do not look at the child broken like a doll.
Look at how quickly everything was resolved.
Do not think of it as mean-spirited.
Think of it as progress.
In fact, according to everyone,
do not think of it at all.

Someone says, this does not happen anymore.
I wonder, if they follow the news
or hide their heads in the sand like ostriches.
How self-important and civilized they must feel.

I wonder if they would change their minds
if they were minding their own business
and a drone unexpectedly attacked.

Once there was a village,
a child crossing the street to somewhere,
not doing anything suspicious,
not whistling, not thinking anything terrifying;
then swiftly,
they were not there,
a black smudge,
nothing important,
nothing to write home about.

    3.

All wars are the same war.
No one remembers what caused them;
Collective Forgetfulness.
One minute, someone is eating a sandwich,
the next minute,
someone is killed for eating a sandwich.

All causes of the war are always unexplainable.
Anyone who justifies them
does not remember the pain caused by war.
Collective Disassociation.

Afterwards, the victor gets to write history.
Afterwards, the losers are treated as sore losers.

All dead soldiers are dead regardless of sides.
All wounded make us turn away,
denying we saw anything.
Collective Blindness, Deafness, See-No-Evil.

Someone once challenged me,
if you were in a war you would protect yourself.
I was in a war and I did not protect myself;
I was too busy being a Medic
holding the pieces of bodies,
jigsaw pieces,
wondering what went where.

4.

Someone asked me,
which war I were you in?
Does it matter?
All wars blend into all wars.
All people killed in a war
can look like put through a blender.

Why doesn’t anyone ask me,
what does peace look like?
I have a vision of it.

Instead they want to know,
where were you?
what was the weather like?
They never want to hear,
it was cloudy
with a chance of dying.

Once, there was a village
whose importance was blown up
by bombs
and when they were done
mopping up
nothing remained
permanent.


Martin Willitts, Jr. has had publications in Big City Lit, Rattle, Pebble Lake Review, Hurricane Blues (anthology), Hotmetalpress.net, Haigaonline, Bent Pin, 5th Gear, Slow Trains, Primal Sanities (anthology) and others. He has a print chapbook Falling In and Out of Love (Pudding House Publications, 2005), an online chapbook Farewell--the journey now begins on www.languageandculture.net 2006, in archives), a full length book of poems with his art The Secret Language of the Universe (March Street Press, 2006), print chapbook Lowering Nets of Light (Pudding House Publications, 2007), online chapbook News from the Front, edited a poetry anthology about cancer, Alternatives to Surrender (Plain View Press, 2007), and an online chapbook of haiku with his artwork, Words & Paper.

INNOCENT BYSTANDERS

by Liz Dolan

Michael Landsberry

Lying on the ground of the Nairobi mall
the blood-soaked woman had been lusting
after a pair of Manolo Blahniks in a boutique window,
shards now sparkle in her chest. Are the bits
of skin floating about her dogwood petals?
Al Shabaab took credit. In Mecca
where my cousin studied, the traffic
halted in the circle for beheadings and hand choppings.
I never looked, she said. I stared
out the window to the right
where they say the unlived live. I fancied myself
baling hay in the cool hills of Kilkeel.
In Sparks, Nevada, a twelve-year-old shot
two classmates, killed his teacher who tried to talk
him down. A former marine who survived two tours
in Afghanistan. I smashed a mosquito feasting
on my hand. A bubble of blood spurted out-his or mine?


Liz Dolan’s manuscript, A Secret of Long Life,  nominated for the Robert McGovern Prize will soon be published by Cave Moon Press. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, was published by March Street. A six-time Pushcart nominee and winner of The Best of the Web, she has also won an established artist fellowship in poetry and two honorable mentions in prose from the Delaware Division of the Arts. She recently won The Nassau Prize for prose. She has received fellowships from The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha’s Vineyard. Liz serves on the poetry board of Philadelphia Stories.

THE ECO-DEMON

by Judith Barrington

What kind of beast—wounded or blind—blunders
across dunes, scattering sand with its bleeding limbs
or dives from the sky, fiery breath burning everything
that grows and breathes?

Take a good hard look at the colors of the earth—
even now, much remains behind and beneath
the concrete we’ve poured, the hills shorn of forests,
oceans hilly with trash.

This beast holds back the current of the river
with brute force harnessing the water’s power
to its own greedy strength. Fish slam into the dam
and fall back stunned.

Look at it all while you still can. Resolve
not to feel sorry for the beast’s thick skin
or its red, weeping eye. Step out, alone if you must,
but watch your back.


Judith Barrington has published three poetry collections, most recently Horses and the Human Soul and two chapbooks: Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She was the winner of the 2012 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize (Cork International Poetry Festival) and her memoir, Lifesaving won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She teaches classes and workshops in the USA, England and The Almassera, Spain.

SCHOOL SHOOTING

by Kit  Zak



School Shooting, Washington Post: 10/22/13
garners page three

                         no front page treatment      
          
           a kid wielding a semi-automatic

               middle-school battlefield
                                                                                  common
as  dirt  
                                                                   twelve-year-olds
with PTSD 


                                                                    nightmare’s
undying sun-blot
                                                                   childhood
obliterated
We shrug weary shoulders 

        the politicians’ dead words  
                                                                                   await
the NRA's whitewash


Kit  Zak retired from university teaching and moved to the beach in Delaware, where she has been involved in environmental causes. She  has published most recently in The Broadkill Review, The Blue Collar Review, A Time of Singing, and Avocet. 

NSA

by Katherine Shirley

Image source: ThePeoplesCube.com

Unsanitary, all this brainwashing
Scrubbing of hands, airing of dirty
Laundry on the backs of those
Still wearing the shirt they lost
To a back-room poker game
Stakes insane with the big name
Cloud-filled, court-chilled shame
At subpoenas, clean-killed blame
Class action, press with no reaction
Pointing silent to the constitution’s
Legal traction while the whole world
Waits to see what deals are done
Smart enough to know nobody knew
What spin was spun by Emcee (squared)
Nobody cared when laws were
Lined up to be broken, just a token
For the public face of politics
A man so softly spoken we forget
That there’s a right and wrong
Enshrined in ink to call anon
Protecting those so spied upon
From those who know what’s going on


Katherine Shirley's poems have appeared in Snakeskin; Poems Underwater; the Gold Dust calendar 2012; Soul Vomit;  and her work The Water Way was lock no. 87 on the Rochdale Canal Festival Poetry Trail 2012.  More of Katherine’s poetry may be found on her blog: A world in her own words.

TECHNOPHOBIA

by Howie Good

They say the day is coming –
and pretty soon, too –
when the souls of the dead
will be uploaded to the Google Cloud,
and God, if He even still exists,
will be able to rest,
drenched in dire purple
and reclining on plush snow,
until needed as an excuse
in whatever year of whatever war.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

ALBERT CAMUS INTERVIEWS TED CRUZ

by Judith Terzi

Camus:               Did you become a Tea Party member today
                      or yesterday?

Cruz:                  Je ne sais pas. What difference does it make?
                     Adamant or ablative?
                     Buttonhole or brandish?
       
Camus:              Can I call you Ted?
                     Is the welfare of the people the alibi of tyrants?
           
Cruz:                 Entente or egregious?
                     Filibuster or fricassee?

Camus:              Ted, think about your Caucus. Do you consider
                     suicide as the only escape from the absurdity of
                     politics?

Cruz:                 Golf would be that, Albert. Golf. No question.
                     Herring or hubbub?
                     Infuse. Refuse. Refuse. Accuse. J'accuse! Zola, right?
           
Camus:             Eh bien mon frère, vous connaissez Sisyphe?
                    You know Sisyphus, right?

Cruz:                Oui, oui Albert. I graduated Princeton cum laude.
                    Judicious jab.
                    Kebob kingdom.
           
Camus:             LOL. I don't get the metaphor, Ted.

Cruz:                Mordant mincemeat.       
                    Nefarious narcolepsy.
                    Obama!

Camus:             Mon frère, we should be a rockin' & a rollin',
                    pushin' that boulder up the slope ensemble.
                    Together. Juntos! I didn't write that damn essay
                    to waste time. You've read La Peste, right?
           
Cruz:                Plague!
                    Quite a story if I say so myself.
                    Rats, rats, rats, rats.
                    Socialist rats. Everyone helping each other. So creepy.
           
Camus:             TMI, Ted.
           
Cruz:                United we stand, Albert.
                    Vouloir, c'est pouvoir. Where there's a will,
                    there's a way. Voulez-vous . . . High school French, man.

                         So tell me, Al. Why did the Stranger want a crowd
                    at his execution? Can't remember the weirdo's name.

Camus:             Very strange question from you, mon frère. Surely
                    you get off on les cris de haine, cries of hatred, right?

Cruz:                Wrestle with the wrath like I always say.
                    Xerox the xenophobia. You get my drift.

Camus:             Yak or yodel?
                    Zion or Zen?
                    Zut alors!

Cruz:                Yesterday or today?           


Judith Terzi holds an M.A. in French Literature. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Centrifugal Eye; Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle); Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo); The Raintown Review; and Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes). Her fourth chapbook, Ghazal for a Chambermaid, is forthcoming from Finishing Line. A former high school French teacher, she also taught English and ESL at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

THE STRANGENESS OF PARTS WE DID NOT SEE

by Tricia Knoll

What did we not see when
he bought a simple rope,
at very large box store
   testing hemp for stretch, for breaking point?

and when he took it home and wound it
   around the brass bedpost, then around the newel
   on his stairway and leaned
   back as if water skiing on carpet

or when he showed it to his neighbor
   bragging about what a good rope
   it would be for all kinds of purposes
   at a fair price

and when he scolded the dog for chewing
  the end of it before he wrapped
  that end in duct tape to preserve integrity

then when he climbed the stairs
  to the dusty attic and shook his
  head at the wicker bird cage and
  the gray luggage his mother carried
  for thirty years,  filled with yellow
  linens and birth certificates

and he pushed that all aside,
  and took out the maple stool
  his sister had used for milking
  or said she once used for milking
  he wasn’t sure

and then he hung the noose
   from the debt ceiling, bragging to the dog
   that he could hang him too
   if the mutt didn’t stop nipping heels
   and scratching at the door

and how was it that the first responders
   arrived seconds before he kicked
   that stool out from below his noose?


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet.

WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE OWNED BY

by David Plumb

Slip on the Bible of your dreams
The organ will play and for a few short minutes,
perhaps America can fake attentiveness
between the wafer and the wine, the signs,
the blessings, perhaps a sacred universe,
a digression to quieter times,
of ruthless crucifixions,
promises of renewal, awakening,

While today fades in newsworthy bombs,
the theft of America’s wallet,
change chanted again and again
with working, unemployed Americans,
reaching for something, somewhere
beyond the weekend off, or the howling,
drooling, speculating, electrically magnified news,
wheedling, and gnawing at the remotes,
the hearts, the very strings of the sweet harp
we thought we heard in the clouds.


David Plumb’s latest fiction book is A Slight Change in the Weather. He has worked as a paramedic, a cab driver, a, cook and tour guide. A long time San Francisco writer, he now lives in South Florida .