POTENTIAL

by Helga Kidder


In this age of robots and instant gratification,
thank God, I still sadden at a golf ball
sized skull discovered gardening,
shudder at an immature serpent
caught in the rake among dried leaves.
It is easily coaxed between rocks in
this blackberry winter and mist rain
roses repay with profusion -- a transition
that lifts the mind off the ground, nose
closer to home and potato soup inside.

My mother's day bouquet blooms yellow
in a white basket like new age religion --
for a little while -- current TV shows,
the wilder the better, a step backward.
As long as we can stumble or limp or hop
on one foot forward, as long as our eyes
see promise on the horizon, a light ahead --
the way the early hominid, Orrorin Tugenensis,
must have whose bones found in Kenya
confirmed hip and upper leg had begun
adapting to walking upright.


Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills. She received a BA from the University of Tennessee and an MFA from Vermont College. Her poems have appeared in Snake Nation Review, Louisville Review, Southern Indiana Review among many others.
______________________________________________________

ONE ERA ENDS; ANOTHER CONTINUES

by Russell Libby


Twelve different gas stations along my drive home,
Only one below $4 a gallon, one last day,
And there's a huge snapping turtle,
Head up, mouth open,
Later two box turtles scratching in the roadside sand.
On this last day of cheap gas,
The eons-old biological clock keeps time by the sun.


Russell Libby writes from Three Sisters Farm in Mount Vernon, Maine. His book Balance: A Late Pastoral was published by Blackberry Press in 2007.
____________________________________________

DUBY@ RE-T@LKS HIS TUFF T@LK

by Bill Costley


Taking back his having said "bring it on”
Dubya retalks his talkin’ for the re-cord:

“That was kind of tough talk, you know,
that sent the wrong signal to people. I learnt
some lessons about expressin’ myself, maybe
in a little more sophisticated manner –

you know, not 'wanted dead or alive,'
that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the
world
it was misinterpreted, & so I learnt from that."


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.
____________________________________________

LAWS OF RELATIVITY

by Gerard Sarnat


Sit
breathe
empty out all gravity.
Pure white light down the center.
Sauna, hot tub, fur family forest home.
Organic blueberry granola skimmed milk breakfast.
..Oh my god what to choose among Hindu Varanasi on
the holiest Ganges or Bodhgaya where the Buddha was
enlightened under the Bodhi Tree or my namesake Sarnath
where he gave his first sermon in the Deer Park; I always
wanted to be in the Himalayas' low stress zone, Dharamsala
with the Dalai Lama's exiled refugees - a quick trip up north?

Down to cold rainy asphalt homeless center parking lot corner
where hypertensive diabetic tobacco-hacking single men stand
around under high pressures of real life's mixed blessings.
Yesterday okay (sort of), today not so much, on the edge.
Day old discarded trans-fatty charity baked goods.
Rats gather amid psychotropic noncompliance.
Two doctors' appointments blown:
-- got rolled late last night
now catch as catch can
everything's stolen
one ankle broken
bum two smokes
dentures lost
police fight
meds gone
drenched
stoned
alone

until
a uniformed SamTrans lady
came over to guide the blind man
with cane in red Stanford hat and jacket
and blackout sun glasses to the train held
it seems for him -- yes, held just for him!
While he slowly crosses the drizzly tracks darkly
she whispers, "Don't worry, Sir, don't feel no pressure."


Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, MyFavoriteBullet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SlowTrains, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.
______________________________________________________

FOREIGNERS

by David Chorlton


Where are you from? You always have to ask.
It hurts not to know. The accent won’t let you rest.
Anyone can tell a foreigner by listening. The other country
is buried in every word. You can ask in a tentative voice
pretending to be curious as if it really doesn’t matter
you’d just like to know. Or you can emphasise the you
to be offensive because you’re not a foreigner. You’re home.
You belong. Do you like it here? You ask that too.
You only want one answer and if you get another
you’re upset. You’re insulted. How insulted
depends on the degree of foreignness. Some foreigners
look like you. They come in small groups. Singles.
Married couples. Others come in multiples. They insist
on shipping in their culture and unloading it
in neighbourhoods that look as if they’d seceded.
When you say foreigners these are the ones you mean
because the others are invisible. One foreigner doesn’t disturb you. One alone doesn’t take a lot of space. A country of one
can be easily invaded. You’ve invaded foreigners. Bombed them.
You know which side you’re on. But you don’t always know
which side foreigners are on. Maybe
they don’t have a side. Is neutral a nationality? Is it immoral?
Can they be arrested for taking no side but their own? You stop asking the foreigners who look like each other where they’re from
because you feel alone when you’re around them. You feel
like a foreigner. You need the company of someone
who speaks with the same accent as you do. Someone of your
culture. Someone who understands you. The mirror image
of your soul. Or you’d settle for anyone who asks you where
you’re from so you could say you’re from here you believe
in God you don’t want to stop torturing foreigners you
just don’t want to talk about it your family has roots here
like crabgrass your ancestors won this country they
were foreigners then nobody thought to ask them
where they came from.


David Chorlton's interests include birds, sport (specifically European football) as a means to understand society, very old music, and the passage of people between cultures. Origami Condom published his online chapbook Dry Heat and another new group of poems is available as Border Sky at www.davidchorlton.mysite.com.
______________________________________________________

CAN'T STOP THE RAIN

Burma, June 2008


by Barbara A. Taylor


in paddy fields
the splintered hulls
of capsized boats

floating bodies
in the debris

one cup of rice
and rainwater
keeps them alive

manna from abroad
sacks of grains, wheat, corn
guarded in vaults

in famine and flood
the right to eat

can’t stop the rain--
from selfish soldiers
a diet of frogs


Barbara A. Taylor’s haiku and short form poems have appeared on Sketchbook, Shamrock, Stylus, Lynx, Simply Haiku, Three Lights Gallery, Tiny Words, Kokako, Eucalypt, Moonset, Contemporary Haibun, Modern English Tanka, and others, including recent anthologies, Landfall and Atlas Poetica. Her diverse poems with audio are at http://batsword.tripod.com/.
____________________________________________

DID I EVER TELL YOU WHAT I -- NOT MY FATHER, BUT I -- DID IN THE WAR?

by Steve Hellyard Swartz

I loved my father
The warrior
I loved my father, the sailor, the aviator
I loved that my father was big and strong, my
Father
Who had been to war
My father who never saw the arrow
Shot from my bow
Never saw it coming
Until it hit him in the back
My father who laid on the floor
The arrow in his hands, the arrow now somehow, magically, piercing his front
My father who cried when I came out from behind my painted tree
My father who cried: You got me!
You got me good
As he tickled me and kissed me and messed up my hair
Later
Much later
When we fought about Vietnam
And I no longer would accompany him to stand on Central Avenue to watch the marchers in the Veterans’ Day Parade
With their little capes and smaller waves
When I stood in the bar
And saw him out there, singing God Bless America
With his hand over his heart
And said to my friend John
My father’s as bad as Westmoreland, Johnson, all of them
With blood on their hands
Later
Much later that day
When my father and I fought at the kitchen table
And I muttered under my breath that he was a bastard
He brought out the arrow
The one that I’d long since forgotten
The one that he’d held against his heart
The one that had laid him out on the floor
When I was probably no more than four
The one that he laid on the table
Which is now in my heart
Sharp as the kiss
From his lips
Before he walked out the door


Steve Hellyard Swartz's poetry has appeared in New Verse News, Best Poem, The Kennesaw Review, and Haggard and Halloo. He has won Honorable Mention in The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards and The Mary C. Mohr Poetry Awards. In 2008, his poetry will appear in The Paterson Review and The Southern Indiana Review. In 1990, his film "Never Leave Nevada", opened in Dramatic Competition in the U.S. Sundance Film Festival.

____________________________________________

CALL IT WHAT YOU LIKE

by Becky Harblin


Steps away from mud,
always it is close,
we have never traveled far
from our birthing ooze.
As bees, and bats, and comets crash
into the seen and unseen wires,
we wrestle with the tombs
of words and deeds,
and a few of us reach out
amongst the weeds and rubble
into the havoc of the everyday,
looking for the everyman
from China to Baghdad.
But mostly we cough,
and spit, and sit
in our castles carved
from other’s bones.


Becky Harblin is a sculptor who works in concrete and soapstone and also writes daily haiku and senryu. Each morning starts with these meditative 'in-the-moment' poems. Becky lives on a farm with sheep in upstate New York. After years of working in Manhattan she moved to the more pastoral setting and found new inspirations and new challenges. Her poetry has been published on New Verse News, and North Country Literary Journal. You may also view her poems at her Web site.

BRANDING

by Jamie Wong


Can't tell the difference
between the peace symbol
and the hood ornament of a Mercedes anymore,
unless I really focus

Monet's Waterlilies
float for free
on handbags and mugs
all over the city

T.S. Eliot's Burnt out ends of smoky days
was poetry,
until a woman
dressed up as a cat
screeched it in a song about her Memories

For flocks of girls
God's sky is a shade
of Tiffany blue,
Eternity an asset
of Calvin Klein

Even our soldiers' flag-draped coffins,
glowing in the fluorescent light
of an air hangar,
begin to look like Pepsi cans
in the refrigerator
of a 7-11
at night


Jamie Wong, a 2008 PEN Fellow in poetry, currently studies with Donna Hilbert.
____________________________________________

AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY

by Howie Good


I am not really here nor
will I be,

but nonetheless

a bum arrives out of
the thin rain

pushing a shopping cart
jammed with abandoned treasures,

old newspapers, false idols,
the pale, upturned faces of empties,

and when I lay down
in the afternoon,

suffering from an unspecified
heartache,

I can feel through the floor
of all fifty states

the sobbing of an orphan engine.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of four poetry chapbooks, Death of the Frog Prince (2004) and Heartland (2007) from FootHills Publishing, Strangers & Angels (2007) from Scintillating Publications, and the forthcoming The News at 11 from Right Hand Pointing.
____________________________________________

UNI-T42

PoeArtry by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Barack to the Future imperfect
     Tense burrowing through loose earthworm
          Infested soil dirt thrown up
               Mined molehills aerating fresh breath

Hillary running around in tandem
     Nonstop drive bloodlet veins bypass
          Rosy flushed seconding windswept change
               Halo glow diminishing invincible aura

Dreamscape ticket McCain in buttinshi
     VIPers spewing forked tongue venom
          Malice in DCeption slithering sidewinders
               Rattlesnakes shedding tarnished glisten scales


The dynamic duo of always toptimistic upstARTs, Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote edit AvantGardeTimes.com, an eclectic cosmopolitan poeartry quarterly EZine. Check out Dr. Chazz’s No Holds Bard website: PoetryArtCombo.com, and Saknarin’s new Glad Thaidings exhibition: http://www.poeartrygallery.th.gs/.

__________________________

THE WAITING

by Dale Goodson


this can’t be good
can it

cars sitting dumb as cows
drivers fretting over gauges
the sun beating down
the wind racing
the fellas in D.C. clutching at their office keys
digging in
and calling for more
mud
to fortify the walls

isn’t that a bad thing
isn’t that wrong

this waiting

aren’t the cliffs crumbling
the birds leaving
isn’t it time to burden America
with the future
shouldn’t there be a riot
or at least an angry mob

what about spontaneous combustion
would that do it
would that be a reason for sweeping and effective change

seems like it should be
seems like that would be a good reason to put it in gear
hop the divider
-go from red to green
on the bastards

George Romero would


Dale Goodson is a writer from Seattle currently living in New York City.
________________________________________

THE FALL

by Alan Catlin


Reading Camus
in pretrial jury

selection room/
court

the book about
a man with no

moral center
no values

changing his
story depending

upon the witnesses
this judge/penitent

unredeemable as
the guilty & the dead

our case: murder
one


Alan Catlin's latest chapbook is a long poem, Thou Shalt Not Kill, an updating of Rexroth's seminal poem of the same name. Whereas Rexroth riffs on the abuses of the Eisenhower adminstration, the update observes abuses of power in the current administration with particular attention to the cynical, criminal behavior towards the Katrina hurricane victims. More than one year later, the victims are not forgotten. No matter how many candles the Bushes light, the appalling lack of humanity and the blatant hypocrisy of the folks in charge is as apparent as the disenfranchised, the homeless, and the poverty stricken people of the Gulf states.
____________________________________________

THE ROAD KILL CLICHÉ

by Daniel Wilcox


Zoning through the silent darkness
Up highway 101
In the misty fog of holy day night--
Thunk!

A brown-doe-jumped impact,
Four-hoofed collision
On my hood to the left and over,
So I jerk my Sienna to the right
Shaken by the unexpected encounter,
Wondering whether I dare pull
To the far-side shoulder,
Worried for the helpless deer
But cognizant too of traffic on my tail,
The all too humans ever arear.

Speak of the common place,
The normal and often,
The accidental roadkill cliché
Of carcassed any death flesh,

But still visioning her broken body
A vivid image like a sacred ornament
Out in front of our endless road rage
For our human—no accidental--
Slaughter of innocent bystanders
In the unspeakable millions,
(Speak of the devil!)
Always for God and Country
And oh so good and kin
Of human blood and bone,

'Injust' another and another corpse
To heave onto the refuse
Re-hearsed wagon of centuries,
Every physical's eventual fate
On CNN at six before seven;
Incomplete numbers of
The premature endless burials
Far from Heaven;
Please yell against
This other place.


Daniel Wilcox earned his B.A. in Creative Writing from Cal State University, Long Beach. He is a 'see' rover--former activist, teacher, and wanderer--from Montana to the Middle East, leaving a vapor trail of poetic debris. His writing has appeared in various journals including The Centrifugal Eye, The Recusant, The November 3rd Club, Tipton Poetry Journal and Erbacce. A short story based on his time in the Middle East was published in the September 2007 issue of The Danforth Review. Currently, Daniel is working on a novel and a poetry collection. He lives on the central coast of California with his mysterious wife and youngest son.
______________________________________________________