Friday's Poems 2018

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 5, 2018
Cover Art: "Clinking Chains by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Patricia Carroll:
As an abstract expressionist painter Patricia plays with paint, making marks and then responding to those marks through a combination of spontaneous and thoughtful conversations with the work. These conversations, affected by personal and archetypal experiences, occur consciously and subconsciously. A successful painting emerges from this happy struggle.

Saviour

We believe
God (extraterrestrials)
will arrive in a Flaming Chariot (UFO)
and save us.
It's matter of faith.

We believe
evidence to support this tenet
is promoted (denied) by theologians (the government)
to pacify the population.
It's a matter of control.

Possessing omnipotence (superior technology)
He (they) will appear at precisely the right moment,
resolve all conflicts, eliminate pain, poverty, pollution
and Climate Change,
establish 'Heaven on Earth' (Utopia)
just as He (The United Galactic Federation)
ordained.
It's a matter of power.

We believe
this will happen (has to happen)
soon.
Because we cannot (will never)
clean up this mess
all by ourselves.
It's a matter of fact.

K.V. Skene’s work has appeared in Canadian, U.K., U.S., Irish, Indian, Australian and Austrian magazines. Her publications include Love in the (Irrational) Imperfect, Hidden Brook Press, 2006 (Canada) You Can Almost Hear Their Voices, Indigo Dreams Publishing (UK) and Under Aristotle Bridge, 2015 courtesy of Finishing Line Press (USA).

Abyss

The winds sing the squid dark sea.
They sing of nuclear submarines.
And fibre optic cables blinking at
sperm whales.
They sing of minerals lying around
in the abyss where the fish look
like a sick child's drawings.
And of boiling waters at vents
where the ocean floor cracks
apart and discharges, watched
by brave submersibles with lights
that blind deep sea eyes.
(Those creatures must believe
they are visited by a destroying
angel.)

Julian O'Dea is an Australian poet who lives in Canberra, the nation's capital. He has been writing poetry for a few years, since retiring as a government scientist.

overview described
familiar skills and purpose
basic compassion

—--

this day passes
somewhere nearby
someone practicing on
an out-of-tune piano
trying to get it right
accompanied by a
novice tuba player and
other such small things
cluttering a warm
Spring afternoon

—--

melancholy dog
waiting in the open shed
his people at work

Ayaz Daryl Nielsen, veteran, hospice nurse, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs) lives in Longmont, Colorado, USA. Editor of bear creek haiku (26+ years/140+ issues) with poetry published worldwide (and deeply appreciated), he also is online at: bear creek haiku poetry, poems and info

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 12, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Norman J. Olson, born 1948, is a small press poet and artist who lives in Maplewood, Minnesota USA. Since publishing his first poem in 1984 after many years of regular submission and rejection, he has published hundreds of poems and artworks in the literary press in 15 countries and all over the USA.
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: normanjolson@hotmail.com

Redacted, What’s left, Some Added

What’s left?
Mountains, mist, fog, smoke,
weather—rain and sun,
earth jewels,
daylight’s winter face,
leaves and flowers
beneath a sky-fall road
less traveled.

What’s left?
An infant’s arms
around your pilgrim waist?
Religion?
Love?

David Fraser, 2017
(Response to “Hold The Mist” by Andrew Brown)

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, Vancouver Island. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016. Recently April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

The Up-Pull Of Spring

Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind.
                                                Mason Cooley

and it‘s god’s great absence/
presence that compels us to pray, that
and the up-pull of spring,

and our children and our children’s
children –
                        their tiny fingernails.

Each morning we are someone new, someone
incomplete, a thought, a heart-
beat

in the still-wintry dark
we wait

K.V. Skene’s work has appeared in Canadian, U.K., U.S., Irish, Indian, Australian and Austrian magazines. Her publications include Love in the (Irrational) Imperfect, Hidden Brook Press, 2006 (Canada) You Can Almost Hear Their Voices, Indigo Dreams Publishing (UK) and Under Aristotle Bridge, 2015 courtesy of Finishing Line Press (USA).

Questions

the manuscript is porous
like a lost child i entered.

since you so wisely left untellables alone
and i have often been an untellable
and alone,
i fear my origins long for their own annihilation
and i believe my mother’s death
was a matricide
though not literally.

we always pity the perishing

you never told half
and I can see why
for when art cracked the world’s veneer
and i glimpsed that darkness
hypnotic and perilous
we signalled our betrayals.

do questions fill or create voids?

the patio was covered by wet leaves
you sat and typed on the cedar chair
while I fed the squirrels.
one bit you when you offered it food;
this, you see, is the problem
the one who is always bitten
affronts my sense of justice,
so i rambled on about banalities
while the ghosts of dead mother and aunt,
foreign and unknowable,
haunted the recesses of our discourse
arsenals of words
to stitch with

i too possess that unquenchable clatter in the bones.
are you alive all or in part or are you a question?
interrogativity
after all these years,
(only five or six but feels longer)
i constructed reasons for your reasons
new questions for your question

Monika Lee is author of gravity loves the body (2008), skin to skin (with Shelly Harder, 2016) and slender threads (2004). She has published poems in Canadian Literature, vallum: contemporary poetry, Scrivener Creative Review, Windsor Review, Dalhousie Review, The Nashwaak Review, Harpweaver, A Room of One’s Own, Event, Atlantis, The Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review, Ariel, Quills, Qwerty, Ascent, and The Windsor Review. Her play, “The Petting Zoo,” was performed as part of the Playwrights Cabaret at the McManus Theatre in London, Ontario. Also the writer of Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (1999) and essays on Shelley, nineteenth-century literature, Canadian literature, and creative writing, she is a professor in the English Department at Brescia University College in London, Ontario.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 19, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca
Last week's Friday's poems are included this week as well, since we were late last week.

Three Layers of Night, Ghost Ranch, NM
for Layne Kalbfleisch

Below – a cold, blustery night
on a high desert that was once a sea.

Above – stars float like fish
in the steady rotation of the sky-bowl.

Beyond – violent interstellar winds
swirl hot gasses in the birthplace of stars,
and old white dwarfs explode into oblivion.

Three layers,
a single mind.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

howard-stein@ouhsc.edu

Almost Good Enough To Begin With

There are few things more dishonourable than misleading the young.
                                              Thomas Sowell

And now we find ourselves at the end of our beginning and
this isn’t what our parents promised, isn’t
what our teachers taught, isn’t
what our mentors meant, isn’t
what our ginormous student loans bought and paid for, isn’t
our 21st century you-can-have-it-all lifestyle:
            the high-entry-level position, the bonuses,
the promotions, the penthouse, the hot partner,
the travel, the yacht, the private jet,
the ever-bellowing bull market …
(almost good enough to begin with)
isn’t demographically distributed, isn’t
government guaranteed, isn’t
working …

K.V. Skene’s work has appeared in Canadian, U.K., U.S., Irish, Indian, Australian and Austrian magazines. Her publications include Love in the (Irrational) Imperfect, Hidden Brook Press, 2006 (Canada) You Can Almost Hear Their Voices, Indigo Dreams Publishing (UK) and Under Aristotle Bridge, 2015 courtesy of Finishing Line Press (USA).

On The Metro, To The First Ballet Class In Weeks

not in the zone like
someone trying to write
after weeks, too  burned
out. The train slides
past two onyx. Today
should be as cool and clear
as the teal pond, green air
new as a baby’s skin or
under the goose like
Mother Ginger, cozy under
what’s warm, pale yellow
and goslings cuddle

Lyn Lifshin has published over 130 books and chapbooks including 3 from Black Sparrow Press: Cold Comfort, Before It's Light and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me. Before Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle, Lifshin published her prize winning book about the short lived beautiful race horse Ruffian, The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and  Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness.  Recent books include Ballroom, All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True, Especially The Lies, Light At the End: The Jesus Poems, Katrina, Mirrors, Persphone, Lost In The Fog,  Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems . NYQ books published A Girl Goes into The Woods. Also just out: For the Roses poems after Joni Mitchell and Hitchcock Hotel from Danse Macabre. Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle.  And Tangled as the Alphabet,-- The Istanbul Poems from NightBallet Press Just released as well  Malala,   the dvd of Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass. The Marilyn Poems was just released from Rubber Boots Press. An update to her Gale Research Autobiography is out: Lips, Blues, Blue Lace: On The Outside. Also just out is a dvd of the documentary film about her: Lyn Lifshin: Not Made Of Glass. Just out: Femme Eterna and Moving Through Stained Glass: the Maple Poems. Forthcoming: Degas Little Dancer and Winter Poems from Kind of a Hurricane Press, Paintings and Poems, from Tangerine press (just out) and The Silk Road from Night Ballet, alivelikealoadedgun from Transcendent Zero Press Just Out and forthcoming Refugees

Her web:www.lynlifshin.com

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 26, 2018
Cover Art: Pinwheel by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca
Last week's Friday's poems are included this week as well, since we were late last week.

two haiku

throat duets in
inuktituk - blasts – blizzards – winds
howling in dissonance

aurora borealis casts
long shadows from inuksuks
onto past spirits

Sterling Haynes

Aeons, Ghost Ranch, NM

I come here every time
to imagine the unimaginable –
steep mesas and deep canyons,
a history book in rock
two hundred million years old –
and I dare to stand unafraid
on sacred ground.
Wonder teaches me
I belong in this place –
I do not disappear into insignificance,
but bear witness to
a scale where
unimaginable becomes possibility,
and I can hold aeons
in the embrace of mere mind.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

A Rusty Band

Horns resembling trains burning
night tracks and a snare drum
sounding like a thousand cats
across garbage lids brush
the cymbals while the bass man
finds his fingers chasing the
the mouse on the strings
feeding the ears listening and
sloppy dancers as the golden
trumpet breaks half notes into
quarters and gingham shirts
feel the sweat and magnolia
perfume competes with cigarette
smoke all under lights related
to the sun while the saxophone
answers all the questions about
the brass and the origins of jazz.

Dr. Roger G. Singer has been in private practice for 38 years in upstate New York. He has four children, Abigail, Caleb, Andrew and Philip and five grandchildren. Dr. Singer has served on multiple committees for the American Chiropractic Association, lecturing at colleges in the United States, Canada and Australia, and has authored over fifty articles for his profession and served as a medical technician during the Vietnam era.
Dr. Singer has had over 890 poems published on the internet, magazines and in books and is a Pushcart Award Nominee. Some of the magazines that have accepted his poems for publication are: Westward Quarterly, Jerry Jazz, SP Quill, Avocet, Underground Voices, Outlaw Poetry, Literary Fever, Dance of my Hands, Language & Culture, The Stray Branch, Tipton Poetry Journal and Indigo Rising.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 2, 2018
Cover Art: Albanese Meats and Poultry by P.W. Bridgman
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

P.W. Bridgman writes short fiction and poetry from Vancouver, Canada. His work has been published in The Honest Ulsterman, The Glasgow Review of Books, Ars Medica, The Moth Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Litro UK, Litro NY, Praxis, pif MAGAZINE, Grain, Ascent Aspirations, The Antigonish Review, The New Orphic Review, Easy Street, London Grip, A New Ulster, Section 8 Magazine, The Mulberry Fork Review, Aerodrome and other literary periodicals and e-zines. You may learn more about P.W. Bridgman by visiting his website at www.pwbridgman.ca.

Meat, Bread And Open Mic: Soho, 2013

So, since I’m this high my ma’d send me to get veal
at Albanese Meat and Poultry on Elizabeth Street.
Since I’m this high. You look like a nice lady.

The veal was so beautiful. Pink and sweet and tender.
The way she did those chops.   And her fettine.  Porca miseria!
So, I’m telling you, Albanese Meat and Poultry,
around the corner. You don’t want to get your veal anywhere else.
I’d get my veal there, if I could. It’s still up there,
on Elizabeth Street.

This is my neighbourhood. I was born five blocks away.
You look like a nice lady. You’re not from here, are you?
I used to pick up ciabatta and bastone at the Vesuvio Bakery.
That’s on Prince, a few blocks up, just before Thompson.
My ma sent me there too. Two for a quarter, forty years ago.

I was a cute little patatino then. Beautiful black curls.
“Ricciolino,” they called me. Hard to believe, eh lady?
Now I hang out at the library and mostly eat out of dumpsters.

You look like a nice lady. I can tell we both need a drink and a bite.
Can we go for a drink? At Milady’s Bar? Genovese’s joint?
It’s close to the Vesuvio.

I want to tell you the story of my life. You might want to hear it.
It’s a dive bar, lady. Genovese’s house red goes for four bucks,
a bowl of pasta for six. I can tell we both need a drink.
I hear they make a nice conchiglie farcie. You spot me tonight.
I’ll cover you next week. Ha! What about it?
Will you come with me to Milady’s for some wine and a bite?
Not tonight? Did I tell you I write poetry? Did I tell you that?

I’m gonna write you a poem, lady. I’m not just yer ordinary bum.
You’ll see. You come back here in a week. Meet me at this corner at five.
You think I’m toying with you. Well. Meet me here.   I’ll give you your poem
and prove you wrong. Maybe we’ll go to Milady’s then.

Lady, I’m gonna be wearing a clean white shirt. You’ll be able
to see me from a mile away. I’m gonna shave. I’m gonna have
a poem in my pocket, a sestina. It’ll be more hopeful than Larkin.
Less laced-up than Hopkins. More pretentious than Stevens.
I practically live in the Jefferson Market Library.

I’m Michaele. “Open Mic” for short. I’m famous around here, or I should be.
Don’t be late, lady.

P.W. Bridgman writes short fiction and poetry from Vancouver, Canada. His work has been published in The Honest Ulsterman, The Glasgow Review of Books, Ars Medica, The Moth Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Litro UK, Litro NY, Praxis, pif MAGAZINE, Grain, Ascent Aspirations, The Antigonish Review, The New Orphic Review, Easy Street, London Grip, A New Ulster, Section 8 Magazine, The Mulberry Fork Review, Aerodrome and other literary periodicals and e-zines. You may learn more about P.W. Bridgman by visiting his website at www.pwbridgman.ca.

Hey Joe
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?

Jimi’s in a purple patchouli haze. He wants to kiss the sky,
decked in turquoise, silver, all afro, Technicolor, velvet pants.
I’m gettin’ chills from his gypsy eye so there’s
no talkin’, no complications, not a mention of the drugs.

We’re in the kitchen makin’ muffins.
I’ve put in my hours of bakin’ time and I’m teachin’ Jimi
how to scoop and drop, left-handed,
sweet feelin’ from his fingers
slopped mixture landin’ in those muffin cups,
and he’s experienced, in a trance
hammerin’ on to muffins, pullin’ off,
with syncopated pickin’ patterns
like guitars on fire, that spangled banner,
napalm from a distant war,

and Jimi’s doin’ voodoo and the muffins
with rocket slides, licks and riffs, all chaotic fuzz,
are risin’ on the counter all by themselves,
and I say, “Step away from the kitchen, Jimi. Please.
The hour is gettin’ late.
The hour is late.

I’ll get my strat, all I want to do
is bend some strings with you.”

Previously published in the January 2018 Issue of Subterranean Blue Poetry

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, Vancouver Island. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016. Recently April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

Liquid, Ghost Ranch, NM

High desert valley
surrounded by rock –
siltstone, sandstone,
mudstone, limestone,
making mountains, mesas,
buttes, spires,
that all look permanent –
are they not exactly
as I saw them last year
and ten years before?

These citadels of stone
are tricksters to the eye;
to geologic time’s
deposits and erosions,
all rock is flow.
Solid is illusion;
these rocks are liquid –
as is time.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

Friday's Poems
February 9, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Arctic Vortex Aftermath

There are no gods in the wilderness,
only wolves remain scavenging
in the four corners of the savage winds,
angels are made of black iron,
refrain from kissing their frozen feet.
In the tangle of crushed trees
a flurry of fur and tails:
monkeys are returning.

Katherine L. Gordon  is a rural Ontario writer devoted to
the promotion of Canadian Literature. Many of her books, chap books
and anthology collections, essays and reviews, have international
recognition as part of a growing Canadian contribution to world culture.
Working with fine contemporaries is her inspiration. Her latest collection:
Piping at the End of Days, reflects this creatively invigorating collaboration.

Shopping Trip

Friday night at dusk, we pull in to Tesco’s car park
to buy ‘proper’ pop -corn for cinema.
Encounter scene like trailer Ken Loach film;
blue double decker, property some enterprising
farmer, has just pulled in, its sole purpose rounding up
migrant workers from farm to farm, driving them into town for supplies.
They tumble off the bus, swarm across car park towards supermarket.
I shake my head at farmers reverting to labour relations
that should be consigned to sepia photos.

In truth, these workers wrangle waiting lists to arrive in
our village early spring. Glimpsed in fields and orchards,
engaged on work that elderly aunt states
requires hard graft and expertise.
Put up in dilapidated caravans and statics,
planted behind farm out buildings.
Encountered occasionally in post office
causing pursed lips atmosphere, as they
crowd the counter fathoming how to wire money home.

Now they make sport out sprinting to the cash point ,
then scatter amongst aisles where abundant shelves
try to goblin market seduce, canny Tesco even stocking home comforts.
I expect to see pay day blow out bags full,
but they are thriftily saving to fund
house, business, college in own country,
so, exit bearing maximum two bag essentials.
October, they stuff vans with electrical goods, clothes …
haggled for at local boot fairs, head home.

Fiona Sinclair

Intimate Immensity, Ghost Ranch, NM   HF Stein   after Gaston Bachelard and Lesley Poling-Kempes

(“ . . . a sense of shelter and exposure, enclosure and expansion. . . . . universal and personal, dangerous and comforting, temporal and transcendent.”  (Lesley Poling-Kempes. 2005.  Ghost Ranch.  Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. P. 4.)

So much space, this emptiness
of high desert between mesas,
vastness I could dissolve in.
I take little comfort in the
radiance of the Milky Way,
when I no longer know where I am,
or the path to where I thought
I was going –
terror so close of kin to awe.
I am lost in this emptiness,
and despair of ever again
being found.

So much space, this emptiness,
enclosed by tall mesas
across a wide wilderness.
My soul sprawls here,
held in the arms
of these ancient stones.
Beneath a riot of stars,
I take comfort in an expanse
too vast for my imagination
to wrap itself around –
as if being lost is a kind of
being found.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 16, 2018
Cover Art: Sun Dogs by Don Schaeffer
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Don Schaeffer has previously published a dozen volumes of poetry, his first in 1996, not counting the experiments with self publishing under the name "Enthalpy Press." He spent a lot of his young adult life hawking books and learning the meaning of vanity. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and has been translated into Chinese for distribution abroad. Don is a habitue of the poetry forum network and has received first prize in the Interboard competition.

I Tried To Explain To Her

I tried to explain to her
that it was the pollution
that made sunsets so beautiful

but she spoke louder
and over me

I stood
ignoring her
and looked
at that sunset

It humbled me

Paul Liddy

Routines

He ate oatmeal.

Exercised by critically considering the labored movements
of thirty-five runners ruining the view of his front window.
Shaved. Showered. Shampooed. Deodorized.

Worked on a rather rigid poem to restructure it
into an essay with some interesting sidebar
tangents better suited to prose explorations.

Had lunch.

Deleted two tangents that were wandering
in directions even more unexciting than unnecessary.

Took a nap. Restless and unfulfilled because of other tangents
willfully charging off into directions unknown.
Washed six pair of socks and enough jockey shorts.

Ate supper preceded and followed by a smooth boxed wine.

Watched one hour of wrestling to explore his dark side.
Then
followed tangents.

Dennis Herrell’s work life began as a teacher, then a sporting goods wholesaler,
a gift/card wholesaler, and finally an antique dealer. He is now retired. In the year
2000, he started seriously submitting his poetry, with about 500 poems published
in various U.S, Canada, British, Austria, Australian magazines, plus three poetry books.

How All Of Life Springs From The Mud Of The Schoolyard

you know, sometimes i think the most meaning in my life
came when i wrote joey reich on the top right corner
of the composition paper with the thin blue lines
in elementary school, 1970, today will be sunny

Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
twelve year old son in the high-up mountains of Vermont...

He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals
both here and abroad, been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize,
and his books in poetry and cultural studies include, "If I Told You To Jump
Off The Brooklyn Bridge" (Flutter Press) "Pain Diary: Working Methadone
& The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half" (Brick Road Poetry Press)
"Drugstore Sushi" (Thunderclap Press) "The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians"
(Fomite Press) "The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end
of the world" (Fomite Press) "The Hole That Runs Through Utopia" (Fomite Press)
"Connecting The Dots To Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural Hx Of America" (Fomite
Press) "Taking The Fifth And Running With It: a psychological guide for the hard of
hearing and blind" (Broadstone Books) "Scenes From The Dynamite Stand" (Bedlam
Press) "The Hospitality Business" (Valeveil Press) "The Rituals Of Mummification"
(Sagging Meniscus Press) "Magritte's Missing Murals: Insomniac Episodes" (Sagging
Meniscus Press) "How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential
Essays, A Play, And Other Poems" (Hog Press) "The American Book Of The Dead"
(XI Dracunis Books) "A Psychological Hx Of Charles Atlas" (Old Angry Man Press)

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 23, 2018
Cover Art: Disused Sailboat by Don Schaeffer
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Columbian Peeks

It's gotten so goddamn lonely these days but maybe not
as don't necessarily know if I would call this lonesome
while in a strange way, finally coming to terms with the
reality of the solitary elements of my existence, and found
myself just recently falling in love and enraptured with this
classical piece over the radio I was listening to when making
my morning coffee, but just couldn't get the name of the composer
or the piece and thought I had heard something like Russian composer
or some catch phrase, like "in front of a glacier" and wrote and developed
a nice rapport and exchange with the manager of the classical radio
station who was a real fine lady (who I imagined was like a single
mother who lived in a log cabin at the base of the mountain and
somehow I might save her) and went out of her way to try and
find and track it down and told me they hadn't had any Russian
composers or anything to do with glaciers over the last couple
of days, which placated me by the simple and spare image
and concreteness of it all, or that she even went out of her way
to get back to me and then thought and reflected what if I inquired
and probed to see if she could try and figure out and identify the
score perhaps by giving her the exact window of time it played
somewhere between 7:25 and 7:30 that Tuesday morning which
in many ways ironically just seemed to contain and narrow it all
down, and somehow breaking down that exact surreal moment
like the exact minutia and details of my everyday life and told me
she couldn't that way because in fact it was a national program,
but did give me the link for that date and that morning and wished
me all the best in trying to get to the bottom of the mystery, and
thanked her profusely for all her efforts and strangely enough
it turned out of course obviously just like everything else to be
Beethoven and Mozart I believe younger versions, but damn gotta
find those exact keen pristine notes which moved me so profoundly
somewhere between 7:25 and 7:30 Tuesday morning when I was
making my Columbian Peeks taking those first and final sips.

Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
twelve year old son in the high-up mountains of Vermont...

He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals
both here and abroad, been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize,
and his books in poetry and cultural studies include, "If I Told You To Jump
Off The Brooklyn Bridge" (Flutter Press) "Pain Diary: Working Methadone
& The Life & Times Of The Man Sawed In Half" (Brick Road Poetry Press)
"Drugstore Sushi" (Thunderclap Press) "The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians"
(Fomite Press) "The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end
of the world" (Fomite Press) "The Hole That Runs Through Utopia" (Fomite Press)
"Connecting The Dots To Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural Hx Of America" (Fomite
Press) "Taking The Fifth And Running With It: a psychological guide for the hard of
hearing and blind" (Broadstone Books) "Scenes From The Dynamite Stand" (Bedlam
Press) "The Hospitality Business" (Valeveil Press) "The Rituals Of Mummification"
(Sagging Meniscus Press) "Magritte's Missing Murals: Insomniac Episodes" (Sagging
Meniscus Press) "How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential
Essays, A Play, And Other Poems" (Hog Press) "The American Book Of The Dead"
(XI Dracunis Books) "A Psychological Hx Of Charles Atlas" (Old Angry Man Press)

Black Pond

By dark mountains I have come to rest,
where stars still sprinkle across velvet sky.
To the east, the city pulses, and then
the rising sea. The birds have gone.
Their silence echoes in the empty trees.
I am making my way down to you, past
the black pond ringed with reeds, beyond
pines and spiky birch scratching at air.
Your name lingers like wine on my tongue.
I have carved its letters onto the flesh
of my arm, and stitched them to my coat.
Past hope I have hiked, dreaming of you.
I have made a song to win the boatman to my side.

Steve Klepetar has recently relocated to the Berkshires in Massachusetts after 37 years in Minnesota. Klepetar’s work has appeared worldwide, and several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including three in 2017). Klepetar is the author of thirteen poetry collections and chapbooks, the most recent of which include Family Reunion (Big Table), A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps) and Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps).

The De-Greening of America
three excerpts from an environmental history poem

"tires,
like diamonds,
are forever"

And so
billions of discarded tires
formed mountains around the country
And they may indeed last forever,
at least on the human scale,
except
for those hit by lightning strikes
or deliberately set on fire,
there
to burn for days,
months,
even up to a year or more,
because
officials deemed that putting out the fire
would pollute even more
than letting it burn

And with the West no longer Wild for humans,
the so-called scientific managers said
it must be so for certain animals also:

"Large predatory mammals
destructive to livestock and game
no longer have a place
in our advancing civilization"

And so
coyotes
wolves
bears
bobcats
lynxes
mountain lions
were killed by the tens of thousands in a short time

But because some animals were killed,
others flourished,
causing
a different set of 'problems',
another example
of The Law of Unintended Consequences

So that the so-called Cold War didn't turn hot,
using the madness of M.A.D.,
the government detonated,
above ground,
126 atomic bombs in a 12-year period
One year alone almost 5,000 sheep
were poisoned to death by the radiation,
and
radiation turned others into science-fiction mutants
with no ears,
with no tails,
with
hears on the outside of the body
(no word on whether any were born
with no heads,
or
with more than one head)

And there were no official statistics
on the damage done to people
living downwind of the test;
the agency considered them
"a low-use segment of the population"

Michael Ceraolo is a 59-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few shorter-length books published, and has a second full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 2, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Ella se fue, se fue

I asked my girlfriend to leave the house.
She took the things I had given her.
She took the things she had given to me.
She was always very fussy.
What was mine was ours
(and what was hers, hers).
When I came home that night, there was no light.
She had taken all of the bulbs.
So I turned Buddhist after that breakup.
Next time nobody will have anything to take.

TS Hidalgo (45) holds a BBA (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), a MBA (IE Business School), a MA in Creative Writing (Hotel Kafka) and a Certificate in Management and the Arts (New York University). His works have been published in magazines in the USA, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Germany, UK, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, India and Australia, and he has been the winner of prizes like the Criaturas feroces (Editorial Destino) in short story and a finalist at Festival Eñe in the novel category. He has currently developed his career in finance and stock-market.

Enough

My play has been happy, a comedy, maybe
a centurion approaching a century.
The last scene changes, the third act
rewritten to include walkers, implants,
titanium joints, stents, shuffling and wonkiness.

The play grows darker, lights dim,
dizziness, flashes of brilliance, slow breaths
gulps, coughs, burps, flames flicker.
Do led lights last forever? Will I accept
the darkness, on stage?
Has it been enough?

Will I make 90? the last curtain call.
Maybe, perhaps - I hope not.
Will the lights go out on time,
then I’ll be on cue.

Sterling Haynes was a practicing MD until age 70 when he started writing more stories, haiku and poetry. He had a stroke at first: his brain became re-arranged and he became more creative. Sterling’s right foot is still weak but literature and writing are a big part of his life 20 years later. His right brain has now become dominant and he writes most days for anthologies, magazines, newspapers and journals. Sterling is working on a collection of stories and poetry – his fourth book entitled “Rumours in My Brain – tales and poems by a frontier doctor.”

Lives Passed

After all the times I looked away
as my dog led me through the homeless woods
and someone at a camp-stove looked up,
waved at me, and smiled –

after all the times I looked away
and felt lucky
but guilty because I had a home –

in another life, I come in thrift-store hand-
me-downs, still escorted by my dog
who goes up to each person she’s known
in passing, tail wagging,

and she licks each hand
as if she knows them all by name
and scent,

the people who lived in natural places
without title or key but simply
lived, and waved at strangers and their
dogs, and smiled.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 9, 2018
Cover Art: Alex Nodopaka
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Alex Nodopaka originated in 1940, Kyiv, Ukraine. Speaks San Franciscan, Parisian, Kievan & Muscovite. Mumbles in English & sings in tongues after Vodka. He propounds having studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Casablanca, Morocco. Presently full time author, visual artist in the USA but considers his past irrelevant as he seeks new reincarnations.

To Our Son

We’ll give you the gift of love.
Every day we’ll show you that
we love you, accept you and treasure you.
We’ll hold you, play with you and talk with you.
We’ll teach you that love is the greatest,
most powerful force in the world.
We’ll teach you that life has problems
and problems have solutions.
We’ll teach you to let love guide you
and you’ll never be lost.
We’ll give you wisdom so you’ll know
you have a special power-
the power to be yourself;
the only one who can give the world what you have.
Life is a journey.
There will be rivers to cross,
mountains to climb,
and oceans to sail.
For your trip
We’ll give you a back pack full of love
and open arms when you return home.

Lili Sinclaire lives on the Central Coast of California and has been writing for over 30 years. Three of her books will be coming out this summer: two self helps books and a novel.

Paraphrasing Purdy

To the many poets
good, or bad,
or indifferent
who have been,
are now,
or will be,
I am grateful.

The bug that bit those
took a chunk out of me,
thus infecting us all
with this habit,
or craft,
or art,
or whatever it is.

I've experienced euphoria
when,
upon completing a good poem,
I wonder how it came to be.

Even at the worst of times,
writing poems has been
joyous and rewarding.

All of us
are indebted
to everyone else
who writes
with enthusiasm for the craft.

I have enjoyed
being alive,
of being ashamed,
and being proud
of making mistakes,
and of stumbling onward
for answers where
no questions have been asked.

As past and future converge,
and my body says,
“Slow down, you silly bugger.”
my impatience lingers;
for there are still
important things ahead,
and poems to write.

I know that
if I was floating
in the middle
of all the beer
I’ve drunk,
I'd never be able to see the shore.

Graham Ducker is a retired Principal, Primary Methods Supervisor, and Kindergarten teacher. His book, Don't Wake the Teacher, was published in 2004. A poetry book, Observations of Heart and Mind, was published in 2006. Two primary picture books -The Elephant That Wanted to Join the Circus, and Why Pigs Have Curly Tails - were published in 2011. www.grahamducker.com

Am I a Racist?

Suppose I had said
No dreadlocks, dead heads
No begging bowls, no huddled masses
Yearning to be anything,
But especially not to be Americans,
Then am I a racist?

Suppose I had said no women less than 9’s,
No ladies past their primes, none less
Than B’s or larger than C’s
And preferences given to blue-eyed blonds
With great tans and hourglass figures,
Then am I a sexist?

Suppose I had said no Jews, no Buddhists,
No Catholics, no Zoroastrians and of course,
To state the obvious--- no Muslims,
No mentally defectives, no gypsies, no homos
No transgendered folks, no communists,
Then am I a Nazi?

Suppose I had said
No gray hair, wrinkles or age spots
Sagging breasts, double chins, beer bellies
No canes or any assistive devices like
Hearing aids, walkers or canes
Then am I an ageist?

Suppose what I have said is very very bad,
An impeachable offense in fact, so sad.
No worries. I will grant myself
Permanent sanctuary at the terrific
Mar A Lago Club which of course
Has none of those folks as members.

Judith Amber is a free-lance writer living on California’s Central Coast. She writes on topics including food and wine, the environment, politics, travel, and the arts. She also writes creative non-fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in the San Luis Obispo Tribune (annual poetry contest and essay), Tolosa Press (creative non-fiction and short story), Transitions Abroad (online), The Oregonian, Oregon Coast Magazine, The New Times (San Luis Obispo) and the literary journals Talus and Scree and Fishtrap Anthology. She is a regular columnist on sustainability in the wine industry for the quarterly publication Edible San Luis Obispo. In 2017, she won second place in Arts Obispo’s Ingrid Reti Literary Awards for a personal essay.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 16, 2018
Cover Art: Alex Nodopaka
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

She Will

Tell me I can't, then I will.
Build your barrier with shame fear or coercion Watch me break down that wall.
Might of a warrior conjured from your doubt Predators be warned
Write about a woman scorned Read the wrath of women scarred.

We Can. We Will. We Surge.

I resolve.

She Will.

R Read is a marketing consultant, writer, and new member to SLO Night Writers, having moved to SLO from Ann Arbor, MI in 2015. Her writings over the years consisted of magazine articles, press releases and technical jargon. She recently published She Too, a raw and poignant look at the current culture of drugs, sexual assault, and young adult suicide on college campuses.

Round Two

you think that was pain
whispers the universe
you ain't seen nothin' yet
I imagine myself leaning backwards
on the ropes of a boxing ring
and whisper back
give me what ya got
maybe it's you
that ain't seen nothin' yet

Elizabeth Crocket: Samples of Elizabeth's writing can be found on her website, ElizabethCrocket.com Her first of three women's fiction novels, "A Path to the Lake", is due for release soon.

Cross My Heart

1963, in a smoky, maroon-leather
San Francisco club, I first heard
a band play sexy, raucous rock and roll

Guitar chords plucked my heart,
The drummer twitched my shoulders,
a gravel-voiced bass swung my hips

I tore off my long white gloves,
kicked off my burgundy pumps,
and let the music fill my pores

It led me, encompassed me
penetrated . . . . Following the beat
instead of a man, I danced alone

Cross my heart
and hope to die the same way,
dancing

* * *

August, we took our canes
to hike over rough terrain
to a retirement party in the hills

Son-in-law, daughter, retired?
their friends, retired? Grandkid buying a home?
Suddenly, I felt really old . . . .

Until the band played raucous Irish rock and roll,
blasting those hills, Begorrah!
I grabbed my cane

jumped onto that red fabric floor
let the music penetrate . . .
and danced alone

Cross my heart
and hope to die the same way,
dancing

Evelyn Cole, MA, MFA, writes novels because they are exciting and challenging. She writes poetry because she can't help it whenever life delights or breaks her heart, and she attends critique groups in both genres. An advocate of sound and sense, her poems are easy to understand. She taught English in high school and college for 23 years and served six years as a K-12 mentor teacher. Her website for novels, poetry, and an astrological, philosophical cooking blog sub-titled: How to Feed Your Friends Instead of your Frenzy can be found at http://www.evelyn-cole.com

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 23, 2018
Cover Art: Alex Nodopaka
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Quick Change

the day I left the hospital
I packed my suitcase
stuffing it full
with pieces of my life
I couldn't have
or do anymore
that wouldn't be able
to go home with me
when I got behind closed doors
I took each thing out
put it away
and learned to live
without it

Elizabeth Crocket: Samples of Elizabeth's writing can be found on her website, ElizabethCrocket.com Her first of three women's fiction novels, "A Path to the Lake", is due for release soon.

Seeking Eternity, Ghost Ranch, NM

I came here to find
the peace of eternity
in mesas’ massive cliffs,
in mountains’ evening shadows,
in valleys’ scruffy fields,
and in a boundless sky.
I found instead
deep canyons carved by water,
stone statues sculpted
by ice’s thaw and freeze.
The might of strata formation
played against a counterpoint of erosion.
I came here seeking eternity;
instead I found relentless time.
I found my peace in paradox:
that in the vanishing
lies the exaltation.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

Rainforest in Russet

In the silence
between
breaths,

my truth rises.

I fall into the space
where the forest

captures
light.

Is this the question
or the answer?

To trust this journey of closure?

A new opening repertoire -

I dig for you
in the shadows

of dying
grey matter

to find a slip,

a morsel
of foggy memory.

How we set up your chessboard
the night we met.

Photographed the pieces

in their complicity
to be seen as art.

The queens,

their own fashion statement
balanced in the spotlight.

The horses rode across
the checkered landscape,

free of battle
scars or fear.

Configurations
came and went.

We both knew the game
transcended competition,

our strategy
a decades long
tango of connection.

We played until
slivers of dawn

shone

onto an empty stage.

Now at the threshold
of rainforest in russet,

ash into earth,
to whatever is or isn’t,

I am released.

Jude Neale and Cynthia Sharp

Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer and mentor. She publishes frequently in journals, anthologies, and e-zines. She was shortlisted, highly commended and finalist for many international competitions including: The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), The International Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (U.K),The Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize (UK), The Wenlock International Poetry Competition (UK) and the Carers International Poetry Prize (UK).

Jude has written six books.

Her book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (leaf press), was a finalist for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award,five of its poems were shortlisted for The Magpie Award, judged by George McWhirter, Vancouver's first Poet Laureate and three of its poems were nominated for the coveted Pushcart Prize (US) by three different publishers.

One of Jude's poems from her recent book, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate to ride with other winners around the Channel Islands on public transit for a year. Jude was a featured reader at the Guernsey International Literary festival.

This book was recently a SPM Prize winner and was published in the UK last April.
Some of these poems can be heard on Jude’s collaborative (viola/spoken word) EP, Places Beyond.

Jude's forthcoming book, A Blooming, will be published in London the spring of 2018 and her collaborative collection, Cantata in Two Voices, with Bonnie Nish will be published by Ekstasis Editions in the fall.

Cynthia Sharp thrives on interdisciplinary collaboration and peace education. She’s been published and broadcast internationally in journals such as CV2, untethered, Toasted Cheese & Poetry Quarterly and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Best of the Net Anthology. She enjoys being a board member and Vancouver regional rep for the Federation of BC Writers.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 30, 2018
Cover Art: Alex Nodopaka
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

I Got up

Teez

Another Day

One snoozing dog snores
a little as a car whispers
past ... the other sits
on a small pile of clothes
... his strong little chest
falling and rising ...
a bird outside repeats
itself like a boy learning
to whistle ... the puppy
sighs and turns onto
his back ... a cooler morning
in summer nestles down.

Later the day turns warm
and outside there is the
snapping of grasshoppers
in the tall, dry grass.
The trees speak with
the wind and shadows
move in the parched park.

Julian O'Dea lives in Canberra, Australia. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in zoology and archaeology and worked in government on policy, in fisheries management, and in regulatory toxicology. He has also written film criticism and book reviews. In recent years he has had a variety of poetry, including haiku, published online and in print.

If I Could Just Understand

if I could just understand
what the prairie grass whispers
to the wind, to the wind and
to the sun, to the sun and
to the rain, to the rain,
and to me, to me!

Ayaz Daryl Nielsen, veteran, hospice nurse, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs) lives in Longmont, Colorado, USA. Editor of bear creek haiku(30+ years/140+ issues) with poetry published worldwide (and deeply appreciated), he also is online at: https://bearcreekhaiku.blogspot.com

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 6, 2018
Cover Art: Ting Pan
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Ting Pan is an illustrator from Los Angles, She loves fantasy and fiction and nonfiction theme illustrations. She uses all kinds of elements is to show her fantastic worlds. Please check her personal website.
www.tingpanart.com

The Boarding House

My brain is a boarding house—Christian Scientist,
existentialist, atheist, Freudian, Jew, New Ager,
and the Buddhist all have rooms.

At Sunday school, the Christian Scientist said
daily life was an illusion. By knowing
the Truth, I would dwell in a divine world.

In high school, I met the existentialist. Wanting
to be viewed as intellectual, I brought him home
and name-dropped Camus, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

The atheist demanded space, moved in,
told me to stop kidding myself and face facts:
We live. We die.

When I went for therapy, the Freudian settled
in my cellar—he interpreted dreams, uncovered fears,
and recorded each resistance to his insights.

I invited the Jew to take a room. We listened to
klezmer, made matzo ball soup for Passover,
and shared how we were still enslaved.

The New Ager knocked. I turned her away
until she said I could co-create my reality
and promote peace and enlightenment.

The Buddhist startled me with the reality
of impermanence and suffering—I must
change my karma or come back as a caterpillar.

At a boarding house dinner, the atheist argues
with the New Ager, the Freudian declares, God is
just an exalted father, the Jew recites a blessing,

the Buddhist calls for silence, the existentialist laughs,
and the Christian Scientist says, I’m not here.
I pass the potatoes and we eat.

(from I Got What I Came For, Penciled In, 2017)

Jeanie Greensfelder wrote Biting the Apple (2012), Marriage and Other Leaps of Faith (2015), and I Got What I Came For (2017). She’s had poems published at American Life in Poetry, and Writers’ Almanac; in anthologies: Paris, Etc., Pushing the Envelope: Epistolary Poems, To Unsnare Time’s Warp, and Corners of the Mouth; and in journals: Miramar, Thema, Askew, Kaleidoscope, Persimmon Tree, Riptide, Solo Novo, Falling Star, If&When Jeanie serves as the current San Luis Obispo County Poet Laureate. Learn more at jeaniegreensfelder.com

Hey Joe
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand?

Jimi’s in a purple patchouli haze. He wants to kiss the sky,
decked in turquoise, silver, all afro, Technicolor, velvet pants.
I’m gettin’ chills from his gypsy eye so there’s
no talkin’, no complications, not a mention of the drugs.

We’re in the kitchen makin’ muffins.
I’ve put in my hours of bakin’ time and I’m teachin’ Jimi
how to scoop and drop, left-handed,
sweet feelin’ from his fingers
slopped mixture landin’ in those muffin cups,
and he’s experienced, in a trance
hammerin’ on to muffins, pullin’ off,
with syncopated pickin’ patterns
like guitars on fire, that spangled banner,
napalm from a distant war,

and Jimi’s doin’ voodoo and the muffins
with rocket slides, licks and riffs, all chaotic fuzz,
are risin’ on the counter all by themselves,
and I say, “Step away from the kitchen, Jimi. Please.
The hour is gettin’ late.
The hour is late.

I’ll get my strat, all I want to do
is bend some strings with you.”

Previously published in Subterranean Blue Poetry January 2018 Issue (Volume VI, Issue I). www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com.

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, Vancouver Island. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016. Recently April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

If You Think Of Death

If you think of death, think of it as an old friend
one who would do anything for you
even give you the sheet off his bed
to cover your bleached white bones
as you lie like a shipwreck on the sand.

When you think of death, think of it as a city you love
a place of squares with sidewalk cafes
serving dark coffee in porcelain cups--
think of how you sat there one afternoon
with paper in front of you and wrote this poem.

If you think of death, think of it as a bus stop
on a country road. There is a small shelter,
only a roof over a green bench
its paint worn as you sit and wait in the sun
for the bus to arrive and take you away.

When you think that death may have touched
your shoulder, try not to shudder;
or if death kisses you, do not turn the other cheek--
there may be a message intended for your ears alone
so try to make out every word:

because in each friendship there is loss
because all cities contain streets you’ve not walked down
because no matter how long the wait, a bus will come
because a caress felt is never an unkindness
because a word from death equals all the novels you’ve read.

So if you think of death as dust, also think of it as blood
beating in an underground heart
think of that terrible, beautiful moment
when you were a child and you realized
that death was possible.

Andrew Brown is a retired teacher and active writer and actor living in Qualicum Beach, B.C. He has been published in several literary journals in Canada and the U.S. and has published two books through Gravity Press in Vancouver: Crow’s First Word (2007) and The Stone Inside A Man’s Heart (2013). He is currently at work on his third volume of poetry and micro fiction, titled Share The Road. Andrew enjoys reading and performing his poetry at a variety of local venues.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 13, 2018
Cover Art: Ting Pan
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Broken Toy

While cleaning
out the drawers

I find
a broken
toy

lying next to
a picture of me
and my sister.

Smiling, we are
five and seven
and not yet broken.

Joseph Spinelli was born and raised in Long Island, New York. His poetry has appeared in Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Vox Poetica, and Haiku Universe. He is currently putting together his first collection fo poetry "Drink More Water" which will be available this spring.

Color Wheel

peach tan desert sand                          my color figment walked away
burnt orange copper beaver                too much seed
café con leche swarthy                        he let us drops fight each other
ruddy weather’s never fair                  for a bit of his sun

kin made kindling                                times I’ve been burned
family first into the fire                      learning to forge mettle
charring substrate                                from ores found in my skin
little twigs the apellido*                     making rebar from my hair

*Spanish for surname;

Mimi Gonzalez-Barillas (emerging Noemi Rose) is a romantic feminist who aims to battle the cynicism of this too human world through a poem or a punchline.  She's a seasoned comedian who's traveled the world to make audiences laugh including US troops, national Prides, Womyn's music festivals and cruises. Throughout her years on the road, poems emerged among the jokes in her journals and now offers itself as Dream B. She is a candidate for an MFA from Mills College in May 2018. Mimi feels she’s earned a bonus degree and offers her eternal gratitude for all she’s learned from the brilliant and beautiful Oakland
literary community.

At the Circus

My mother took me to the circus,
where we saw clowns pile out
of a tiny car and a woman with dyed
blond hair and long legs ride
bareback on a beautiful white horse.

First she sat, then rose to stand
on its broad back, before slipping
down along its flank, just above
those powerful, pounding hooves.

When she somersaulted onto its neck,
we gasped, and I could feel my mother
looking closely at my small face,
that mirror spinning in darkness.

No doubt she was looking for wonder
and joy. She may have seen those,
but also something dark and strange:

a pair of eyes burning through the veil
that covers our lives, buries them
beneath an illusion of soft and gentle air.

Steve Klepetar has recently relocated to the Berkshires in Massachusetts after 36 years in Minnesota. His work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including three in 2017. Recent collections include A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps), and Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps).

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 20, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Paper Cuts

                        I want to collage a face like my own
start first with the eyes

                                                                        two magazines
                                                                        before I find brown

on a Latina

                        Should I cut across her hair
                        or make an incision across her forehead
the page winces back

                        She’s suffered enough to make it into glossy
                        I need brown eyes

                                                                        dominance doesn’t pay
this time
again

                        can’t cut her face
                        instead I pare carefully around her curls

                                                                        save her
                                                                        place her in my tableau
watching my every move

Mimi Gonzalez-Barillas (emerging Noemi Rose) is a romantic feminist who aims to battle the cynicism of this too human world through a poem or a punchline.  She's a seasoned comedian who's traveled the world to make audiences laugh including US troops, national Prides, Womyn's music festivals and cruises. Throughout her years on the road, poems emerged among the jokes in her journals and now offers itself as Dream B. She is a candidate for an MFA from Mills College in May 2018. Mimi feels she’s earned a bonus degree and offers her eternal gratitude for all she’s learned from the brilliant and beautiful Oakland
literary community.

Roma

When they were Gypsies the Roma
had romance on their side
with their fingers on the strings
of lightning violins
and the flash of an earring
in the dark. When they dressed

in good luck and sold fortunes,
wandered the back lanes
and camped
where moonlight could not find them,
slept on coals
and made rings of the smoke
from their fires

they were fate, they were the dreams
other people were afraid
to dream. Now they have become

their new name by which
they are a disease, they are
contagious, they are not worth
issuing passports for, there is
no cure for them, not even
the potions the Gypsies brewed
could make them disappear.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and The Bitter Oleander Press published Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.

Daughter of Dragonflies

To bless them,
as they haunt the day lillies,
is bleaching the white
of the sun.
In this bed, born
to hunters,
dazzle the blue,
dry these wings.
In flight, what they taught --
silence in June,
from fence to field.
The grass never stood so well
and good, tall with snakes,
or spiders,
or such blood quest.
Such blood, free of veins,
for the color of this flight.

Meg Smith is a poet, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, Mass. Her poetry has appeared or has been accepted to The Cafe Review, Pudding, The Offering, Astropoetica, Star*Line, Illumen, and more. She is a former board member of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! and produces the Edgar Allan Poe Show, dedicated to Poe's presence in Lowell. She has recently published a second poetry book, Dear Deepest Ghost, available through Amazon.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 27, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Cleveland Haiku #501

Garbage day---
human scavengers
hunt for treasure

Cleveland Haiku #502

December---
some leaves stubbornly
stay on the trees

Cleveland Haiku #503

Annual amnesia---
people forget how to drive
in the first snow

Cleveland Haiku #504

January thaw--
rain
on my birthday

Cleveland Haiku #505

In the backyard---
a deer's hoofprints
in the snow

Michael Ceraolo s a 60-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had two full-length books, Euclid Creek (Deep Cleveland Press) and 500 Cleveland Haiku (Writing Knights Press), published, as well as several shorter-length publications. He also has a third full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press."

Stick It


         Do not trust your instinct. Swallow that poison quickly, passionately.
         Swallow that pride. Choke silently on your lies. Inhale whole chunks
         of anger. In moments of crisis, better to bite large whatever truth you
         believe in.

Gary Pierluigi has worked in Social Services while continuing to write. Since first being published in Quills, he has been published in numerous poetry journals, including CV2, Quarterly, On Spec, Filling Station, The Dalhousie Review, The Nashwaak Review, and Grain. He was short listed for the CBC 2006 Literary Awards in the poetry category, a finalist    in the Lit Pop Awards and received an honorable mention in The Ontario Poetry Society’s “Open Heart” Contest. His first poetry book,* “Over the Edge”, has been published by Serengeti Press. He is currently completing his first novel.


Magnitude 6.4

Sections of the Suhua Highway
gone, office blocks tipped, unsafe,
angular, scrunching low down
almost to sidewalks, fear stalking.
But it’s ok, it’s happened
in Taiwan. Long way. Different.
Not here. Sorry for them.
Go for coffee, get the day done.
Tomorrow will be somewhere
else, foreign, alien, not here,
nowhere even near, watch
the news tonight, pictures,
hope no children are buried,
stay unscathed, change nothing.

Linda Stevenson’s Chapbook The Tipping Point published by Blank Rune Press in 2015 contributes to current ecopoetics in Australia and the Asia Pacific region.  Her poetry delves into the relationships between our planet’s dilemmas, our personal lives, and the issues that we attempt to confront and resolve.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
May 4, 2018
Cover Art: Janice Konstantinidis
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Janice Konstantinidis immigrated to the United States twelve years ago, a late life sea change you could say. She lives in the Central Coast of California with her husband and two dogs. She has been writing poetry since I was a child. I enjoy writing flash fiction and prose. Here is one of her stick drawings.

The Fraudulent Lawyer

Raphael is good company, –
he knows all my acquaintances
and shows me his 'selfies' with them.
One of those acquaintances
gave him my telephone number
and introduced him to me
with a rather urgent request:
Raphael has been stranded
in Lebanon for four years,
thanks to a fraudulent lawyer
who had been instrumental in
his deportation from Cyprus,
where he had a thriving business
in pest control – shows credentials.
He also shows me a large list
of donors supporting his stay
and raising the legal costs
of his repatriation.
They have raised enough money
but for the last three hundred Dollars
which would enable him to be
on the next flight to Cyprus.
He assures me he would return
the sum, as soon as he settles there.
I happily give him three hundred
feeling good for my benevolence.
A few months pass and I hear that
he still languishes and collects
'the critical few hundred Dollars'
from a new list of donors
in Lebanon and abroad!

Boghos Artinian is a Lebanese Armenian physician who has been practicing in Beirut since 1975, after spending 5 years in Saudi Arabia and Two years in the UK (Edinburgh and Lymington Hospital ) He is a graduate of the American University of Beirut in 1968 and MRCP (UK) 1973. He started writing poetry as a hobby since the early nineteen eighties. He has more than a hundred and fifty poems on websites and literary and medical journals. He also writes scientific essays like 'The Custody of Genomes' , 'The Cognitive Capacity of the Human Brain' , and ' Wait for Extraterrestrial Echoes'

New Feet
An old growth spruce creaks and falls.
A new hemlock sapling sprouts
from its wormy decay.

Old men
loose their hair first
then their mind
even after they've passed

I will carry them the rest of the way
atop the young souls of new feet.

--
Eric R. Kosarot is a writer, musician and painter. Eric also gardens and works at the Farmers co-op in Everett, WA. He has written several articles advocating ecological restoration. He wrote a story about a bike co-operative called "The Hub" and he recently wrote an article about companion planting and chicken tractors for the co-op newspaper.

After the Starfish Are Gone

Farewell to glorious purple arms
(And burnt orange, yellow, crimson).
Farewell to crabs, anemones, tight-lipped mussels.

Still waves, though acidic, will roll in
Sands spit, blow holes blow
And children with pails and shovels
Will build castles of sand.

When is a forest not a forest?
When millions have died of drought,
Beetles, fragmentation.
When pine trees and junipers have gone
The way of the dodo soon to be joined
By panda, panther, polar bear.
Another question: if 66 million trees fall
And there is no one to bear witness,
Are they really gone?

But palm trees may thrive in northern tropics
And perhaps tall saguaro cacti will replace
Towering redwoods and douglas firs,
Parrots occupy woods where owls once flew.

And yet.
For us who remember, a void, an absence,
.Is Earth, bereft of half its species,
Still our planet, our home?

* On learning that in the next half century, 50% of all species alive today could be extinct and that 66 million trees in California forests are dead or dying

Judith Amber is a free-lance writer living on California’s Central Coast. Her article topics include food and wine, the environment, politics, travel, and the arts. She also writes creative non-fiction, satire/humor and poetry. Her work has been published in the San Luis Obispo Tribune (annual poetry contest and essay), Tolosa Press (creative non-fiction and short story), Transitions Abroad (online), The Oregonian, Oregon Coast Magazine, The New Times (San Luis Obispo) and the literary magazines Talus and Scree, Points In Case (online); Jewish Currents and Fishtrap Anthology

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
May 25, 2018
Cover Art: Ting Pan
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Portrait Of Myself In Cut-Off Blue Jeans
Pretending To Be Happy As A Boy By The Lake

"I'm just trying to do my jigsaw puzzle 'til it rains anymore" -The Stones

I

I have decided
I want to live
in that perfectly
clean pristine
home with that
vacuum cleaner
saleswoman who
always looks like
a fresh mint and
is always happy
and always
has a grin
and when
I miss
behave
folds me
up and
puts me
under the bed
back to my
natural habitat
with the monster
and nightmares
the never
ending
tickertape
consistently
going at the
bottom of
the screen
for corn
& wheat
& soybeans

II

(I never understood the point of
spring cleaning, just another
one of those superstitions)

III

O the long, insane, endless winter’s finally over
& the blessed beaming rivers at last swollen
& flowing to their holy destinations

awaking my spirit & returning
me to the source of my imagination

Birds appear like magic from their
secret hideaways as if they’d never left

IV

Connie, the redhead
in that motel
in Maine

V.

No one has the right to be mean but still will
firemen stand on top of the hill

(firemen stand on top of the hill
firemen stand on top of the hill)

blues gawn
boo-dah...

Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
thirteen year old son in the high-up mountains of Vermont...

He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals
both here and abroad, been nominated seven times for The Pushcart Prize,
and his books in poetry and cultural studies include, "If I Told You To Jump
Off The Brooklyn Bridge" (Flutter Press) "A Different Sort Of Distance"
(Skive Magazine Press) "Pain Diary: Working Methadone & The Life
& Times Of The Man Sawed In Half" (Brick Road Poetry Press)
"Drugstore Sushi" (Thunderclap Press) "The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians"
(Fomite Press) "The Housing Market: a comfortable place to jump off the end
of the world" (Fomite Press) "The Hole That Runs Through Utopia" (Fomite Press)
"Connecting The Dots To Shangrila: A Postmodern Cultural Hx Of America" (Fomite
Press) "Taking The Fifth And Running With It: a psychological guide for the hard of
hearing and blind" (Broadstone Books) "The Rituals Of Mummification" (Sagging Meniscus
Press) "Magritte's Missing Murals: Insomniac Episodes" (Sagging Meniscus Press) "How To
Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other
Poems" (Hog Press) "The American Book Of The Dead" (Xi Draconis Books)
"American Existentialism" (Tuba Press)

Logging the Vale of Memry

You do not know a thing is lost until you can’t find it.
You did not know a thing was lost until you do find it.

The mind brims with items but some fail to surface.
Some pop up later and some perhaps sometime else.

We form as functions that fold and grow;
crests curl in chaos as time crashes home.

We know where we want to go but trails fail in moss.
We flail in a void to move a cloud to touch a thought.

Off and on the olden return looming and illuminating.
We reminisce, wondering if we can re-summon them.

The idea keeper hides in water under the forest
thinking he must leave some record of thought.

I observe events I judge perhaps to stir and preserve.
Old growth logs on cold lake bottoms is why I write.

J.S. MacLean has been writing poetry since the early 70s with two collections Molasses Smothered Lemon Slices and Infinite Oarsmen for One available on Amazon. Around 140 poems of his are published in journals and magazines in Canada, USA, UK, France, Israel, India, Thailand, and Australia. He enjoys the outdoors, and indoors too. In 2007 he won THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt in Poetry (1st Prize). He spends August at the beach with his wife Grace. He strives for the lyrical and hopes for the accidental.

Botany Lesson

In her upturned collar,
she showed him the sepals
below the flower;
and see, the flower head
sits on the slender stem
so delicately, she said;
and blushing, told him
that in his hands it might
bloom hot crimson.

Julian O'Dea lives in Canberra, Australia. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University in zoology and archaeology and worked in government on policy, in fisheries management, and in regulatory toxicology. He has also written film criticism and book reviews. In recent years he has had a variety of poetry, including haiku, published online and in print.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 1, 2018
Cover Art: William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

William C. Crawford is a writer & photographer based in Winston-Salem, NC. He was a combat photojournalist in Vietnam. He has published extensively in various formats including fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, book reviews, and essays. His new book is highlighted elsewhere on this site. He had a parallel career as a social worker and community organizer. There, he wrote biting editorials on behalf of the powerless such as abused children, the frail elderly, and victims of enforced state sterilizations. He is known as Crawdaddy to his Yellow Lab, Scout.

Afterward

you remove your shoes and the day
spreads out ahead of you, curiously
unfilled by myriad joggers in hoodies
and earbuds, the strollers, small dogs
on leashes. A neap tide pulls lightly
at your heels.

Later you say “yes” to tod mun
at the Thai place beside
the esplanade. This evening is cool
and empty around the edges.

Tomorrow will be soon enough
to give his clothes away.

Diane Lee Moomey has lived and wandered around the US and Canada, and now dips her gardener’s hands in California dirt. A regular reader at San Francisco Bay Area poetry venues, Diane has published prose and poetry, most recently in Mezzo Cammin, The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. In 2016, she won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition.

Diane is also a watercolorist and collage artist, an experience that both seeds and is seeded by, her poetic imagery. To view her artwork, please visit www.dianeleemoomeyart.com

dianeleemoomey@gmail.com

The Colorado Plateau: Q. & A.

Just to get this out of the way,
what are some popular cliches
about the Plateau today?
High-desert beauty, breathtaking vistas,
a place that inspires multiple visits.

Can you describe it scientifically?
A physiographic region, or province,
of the Intermontane Plateau.

Would you pinpoint its exact location?
It straddles the so-called “four corners”:
Utah, Arizona, New Mexico,
and, eponymously, Colorado.

Some striking physical features?
Mesas, canyons, meanders, pinnacles,
Ponderosas, basins, quaking Aspens,
fossils, gorges, badlands, buttes and spires.

Isn’t there something special about the air?
If you’ve been there, you’d remember the air.
The Sierra Mountains, west of the Plateau,
block moisture coming off the Pacific,
holding rainfall to ten inches a year,
so, of course, the air is very dry.
Thin, as well, since the elevation’s high,
in places reaching eleven-thousand feet.

Has the air quality declined in recent years?
Polluted, ninety percent of the time,
the culprits, smog, and power plants, coal-fired.
At Mohave Power Station, a plume
arches into the sky, blighting the blue.

Thank you. Anything more you’d care to say?
What nature makes, man should not throw away.

Note:
The Mojave Power Station is currently shut down:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohave_Power_Station

Other Sources:
geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/parks/.../coloplat.h...
www.britannica.com/place/Colorado-Plateau
http://www.nature.nps.gov/geology/education/foos/plateau.pdf
www.hcn.org/issues/56/1748
http://arizonaexperience.org/land/colorado-plateau

Ron Singer’s poetry has appeared, e.g., in alba, Anemone Sidecar, Avatar Review, Borderlands, The Brooklyn Rail, Cake, Ducts, Evergreen Review, Grey Sparrow, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Strong Verse, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Windsor Review, and Word Riot. He is also the author of ten books. For details, please visit: www.ronsinger.net.

Love of Bottles

I love the shape of bottles,
How the light so easily slips around and through
the glass
Like invisible hands massaging an illusion.
Sand and heat temporarily transfixed in time,
Capturing beauty
In a fragile mortality…..

Once our lives were transparent to each other,
As we trapped the light, striving to be pure, to be free,
As if this was the ultimate purpose of life,
A destination in itself….
love shaping and forming us,
light transforming our moments into one flicker of lucidity…..

I remember the bottles gleaming in the sun,
I remember every one…..

Joyce Collier-Petit is a writer /poet sculpting pictures and insights with words and descriptions of moments. Previously published in various publications: N. B. Sunday Advertiser, Northern Light, Globe and Mail, Our Canada, Ontario Poetry Society.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 8, 2018
Cover Art: William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Once During the Drought,

that long
drought, during one of those
late post-daybreak dreams you swear
are what you’re waking into, I heard
a dripping from the upstairs
deck onto my own—a pattering of drops
sliding between the planks to fall
onto fuchsia and sedum, the hollow
echo of drops as they hit the downspouts
debouching onto paths below--

and through my half-closed eyes
the light seemed dull enough for that.
So I believed in the power of the rain dance
I’d done the day before and lay there,
not engaging

in the reality of bright sun on the decking,
the upstairs neighbors taking
their showers.

Diane Lee Moomey has lived and wandered around the US and Canada, and now dips her gardener’s hands in California dirt. A regular reader at San Francisco Bay Area poetry venues, Diane has published prose and poetry, most recently in Mezzo Cammin, The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. In 2016, she won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition.

Diane is also a watercolorist and collage artist, an experience that both seeds and is seeded by, her poetic imagery. To view her artwork, please visit www.dianeleemoomeyart.com

dianeleemoomey@gmail.com

Cultivated Time

land wears thin on cultivated time
abandoned farm houses sag; top soil drifts
rain barrels leak, life dribbles away

Rose Willow’s work appears in Spring, Transition, The Society, Portal, Horticulture, Saskatchewan History Magazine, and VIU’s Incline. Rose has a degree in History from the University of Waterloo, and is working on a second degree, Creative Writing, at Vancouver Island University. She lives on beautiful Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada.

Caribou Crossing

It's still warm, he mutters, slipping a cautious
knife under muscle, tendon, nerves,
Slow incision exposing the hunter's prize,
his first real kill.

In the morning mist, the animal's memory
disperses swiftly, absorbed
By land, and rock, and winter: stony witnesses
to the ghost of the creature,

Erased by the bullet, and a sea storm of red.

FJ Doucet’s work has previously been published in several print and online sources, including Red Bird Chapbooks, Hamilton Arts and Letters, and The Saving Banister, with work forthcoming in The Lyric and Grey Borders magazines. She loves to travel and has lived on three continents, but some of her most treasured memories include time spent living in an Inuit settlement in Nunavik, Northern Quebec, a setting which inspired this poem.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 15, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Empty Hands

Did I hear you say that your hands
are empty, that once a string of pearls
dripped from your fingers, but now
only shadows play on your palms?
I hope I didn’t misunderstand.
My hearing has become so bad
that voices seem like aural shadows
flitting between trees. You make a sign
though, holding your empty hands
to me, though lately they were filled
with rain. I saw you shiver
as you carried ice in your hands.
I saw them redden with cold.
I watched you climb the hill
behind our house, passing birch
and pine. I listened as frogs sang out
in their many voices, and the sun
dipped lower in the sky.
Your hands were full of rainbows.
Crows looked on, their golden eyes
betraying nothing, cold in their hollow skulls.

Steve Klepetar has recently relocated to the Berkshires in Massachusetts after 36 years in Minnesota. His work has received several nominations for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, including three in 2017. Recent collections include A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps), and Why Glass Shatters (One Sentence Chaps).

Retirement

Some days
I do minimum
what I do is
just piddly

Other days
I don't even
do that
I do diddly.

Backlog

If you're
backlogged

reduce
your stress

do nothing
more

do something
less.

David Knape is retired. He is also tired.
He compensates by writing poetry.
It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to him.
He loves to write and writes everyday.
He then sends poems out for people's review.
Few are impressed. Even fewer amused.
Hence his works are seldom published,
except here.

Coffeehouse Poem # 282

The woman with the titanium
Leg waves at me from
Across the room, but
I dont really notice a
Prosthetic leg at all
It is long and sleek
" A souvenir from desert storm"
She jokes

It reminds me of a missile
When she walks, she cuts
A path like blade runner
She told me she ran a
Marathon on her bullet leg
And i am dumbfounded
Though, she laughs like a
Song, when she admits
Sometimes, she is clumsy
When she's dancing

Erren Kelly recieved his B.A. in English-Creative Writing from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He also loves to read and to travel, having visited 45 states and Canada and Europe. The themes in his writings vary, but he has always had a soft spot for subjects and people who are not in the mainstream. But he never limits myself to anything. He always tries to keep an open mind.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 22, 2018
Cover Art: Keening by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

On His Leaving Home

this son walked into another conversation
left the house voice trailing through hedges
to enter a discussion I couldn’t hear
I watched his wind-ruffled hair
pass the gate and knew our exchanges
grown from half words to full dictionaries
would be occasional but on the phone

Joanna M. Weston. Married; has one cat, multiple spiders, raccoons,
a herd of deer, and two derelict hen-houses. Her middle-reader, ‘Frame
and The McGuire', published by Tradewind Books 2015; and poetry,
‘A Bedroom of Searchlights’, published by Inanna Publications, 2016.
Other books listed at her blog:  http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/

Alley Walk

A block behind the street where
mannequins in glamorous winter garb
simper warm in storefront windows –

in a cubby battered from alley bedrock
my dog showed me what passed
last night for a mattress – bag of old

clothes serving as a bed, as all things
in this human world must find
their nouns, their names and titles.

Rusty grate for an open fire; it got
cold last night, here in community
with feral cats and tree-of-heaven –

known in this town as pest and weed.
The alley’s a place of making do.
Who slept in this one-night hostel

hewed from rock? Our morning walk –
when each discovery is
by grace transformed in bell-ringer

wind and the wash of dawn.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles(Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift(Cold River Press, 2016).

Didn’t know I was starving until I tasted you

Three snowy days makes delicious crunch
beneath our boots, lovely and soft
piled on roofs and corners
of mullioned windows, icing
on gingerbread houses.
A bright sun
finally remembers his job
glistens off cottages lavishly
painted pie-case colors:
     lemon here, hint of strawberry
         glimpse of pistachio
               with sudden splash of peach cobbler.
The street glitters
     sunlight nearly blinding.
It seems we are
walking between gumdrops
to a chocolate inn where russet stone
has turned mahogany.
It’s doors open in welcome.
Giggle through sign-in, we rush
to snowy sheets
     the past
          another country now.
The present
     is finding candy sweets
          with hands and lips,
a fast pouring nectar
of discovery and bliss.
Our future filled
with insatiable appetites.

Michelle Hartman’s latest book is, The Lost Journal of My Second Trip to Purgatory, from Old Seventy Creek Press. The first poetic look at child abuse and its effects on adult life. Along with her poetry books, Irony and Irreverence and Disenchanted and Disgruntled, from Lamar University Press, Lost Journal is available on Amazon. She is the editor of Red River Review. Hartman holds a BS degree in political Science, Pre-Law from Texas Wesleyan University and a Paralegal cert. from Tarrant County College.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 29, 2018
Cover Art: Keening by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016 which has been short listed for the 2107 ReLit Awards for poetry. Also in April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

Elegy For A Search Dog

Wind is a blade that scythes the sky

and that dog was first to run out
catching fragments of news up a swale

up canyon, from the far valley
then leading me on trail – off any trail but

wise to the wind

track a man might wander, lost.
How the sky sieves through underbrush

and swirls in a pool with light
glazed ice-brilliant, so many colors

of scent.

That dog would range
below the campanile hill, up

scree slopes above timberline
where a westerly wings over the crest.

Who follows the wind

will disappear in a gust or a long exhaling
always finding the way to go.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles(Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift(Cold River Press, 2016).

Anastasia

Supping from my Starbucks sippy cup
watching the boys go by in their hoodies
and the girls in their tights
while night dissolves slowly
and the Who who should know
sing about teenage wastelands.
We are lucky to grow old.
We are grateful for every hard-earned January.

I forget my computer,
chew my fingers till they bleed
so unsteady am I
without my Wi-Fi.

This is supposed to be escape.
The women walk the shores of Anastasia.
They are not young – like me.
They are not pretty – like me.
They are not thin – like me.
They are free in this cold cove.
The wind is a lover’s caress,
the sun caramel iced down for serving.

They scavenge for treasures,
nothing fancy, nothing deep,
nothing they will give away.
The odd-colored shell, broken sand dollar,
a pelican feather, any trinket
they can keep to remember the day
because today they know
they are smart and beautiful
and the wrinkles on their skin
came from a million smiles
and the pounds from gatherings
and the knowledge from blessed years,
and it’s too damn cold to wear Spandex anyway!

Wendy Thornton is a freelance writer and editor who’s been published in Riverteeth, Epiphany, MacGuffin and many other literary journals and books. Her latest book of essays, Sounding the Depths, was published in May 2018. Her mystery, Bear Trapped: In a Trashy Hollywood Novel, was published in 2015. Her memoir, Dear Oprah: How I Beat Cancer and Learned to Love Daytime TV, was published in July 2013. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has been Editor’s Pick on Salon.com multiple times, and started the Writers Alliance (www.writersalliance.org). Her work has appeared in England, Ireland, Australia and India.


Terms Of Service Agreement

This Terms of Service Agreement describes your rights and responsibilities.
You have no rights and We have no responsibilities.
Please do not read this document carefully because
we made it complex for the explicit purpose of confusing you.
The term “you” as used herein refers to all individuals dumb enough to sign on.
The maker of this site does not accept any responsibility.
We will blame YOU should anything go wrong.
You may think you know what you are getting into
but boy have you got a surprise coming.
We did not ask you to sign up. You volunteered.
You thought you could get away without reading the agreement but
now you are in deep doo doo, especially since you checked
the box that said you Agree and Understand.
That was unfortunate.
We have you now
we are in control
We know you were in a hurry, but...
You should have read the small print.
You should have had an attorney present.
You should have known it was fishy to begin with.
Now you are basically Screwed
You will need a doctor to surgically remove
this Terms of Service Agreement.

David Knape is retired. He is also tired.
He compensates by writing poetry.
It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to him.
He loves to write and writes everyday.
He then sends poems out for people's review.
Few are impressed. Even fewer amused.
Hence his works are seldom published,
except here.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 6, 2018
Cover Art: "Succulents on Mt. Arrowsmith" David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Ja Sam

Baked limestone fragments and fragrant
Pine needles, a ring of torsos silhouetted
Against aquamarine glare. Tanned bodies
Soak in Adriatic tears, waterplay belies horrors
Of the recent past. Where are you from?
A clumsy question. In response
incantations summoning the dead:
Vukovar, Sarajevo, Travnik, Mostar.
Paradise is named Jerusalem no more.

Tiny waifs present bright drawings
Of charming cottages afire and mothers
Lying below soldiers with guns.
I praise their skill and ask
Is this your home? They nod
Unabashed and smiling, with an inner
Faith that might never have been.
And their triumphant existence
Becomes my private jubilation.

Ivan presses blanket cotton
Into my palm, a cross of knots
Stolen from insufficient warmth.
Two hundred and seventy-one days
He whispers. The relentless torture
Is not what he remembers. His army green
Concentration camp souvenir lies frail
In my limp hand, and the creases
On his face smile.

A crowd mills on burnished steps
Of Dalmatian marble. There is no room
In the church yet they stay.
Drawn by salt water and torn by duty,
I follow Ivan into the throng
and over the threshold where babbling voices
Are silenced by a man in vestments.
I don’t dare look at the disc he holds aloft,
But I see it. It is reflected
In Ivan’s eyes. They are no longer dull.
He shouldn’t be alive and I shouldn’t
Be here, but he is and I am.
Ja sam, I murmur, I am.

Darkness is dispelled, and numbness
Warms in sunlight unseen. Momentary
Amnesia takes hold. The war
On everyone’s lips ceases to exist.
Children giggle, widows envision
Reunion with veterans whose limbs and
Dreams are long gone, and nothing
Matters except that we are
Conscious and breathing.

Mishka Gora is a writer and historian based in Tasmania, with particular interest in conscience, war, and international justice. She is the author of Fragments of War, a novel-memoir about her experiences as a humanitarian aid worker in the former Yugoslavia, and Wellspring, an epic fantasy chronicle. Ja Sam is her first foray into poetry.

Self Ease

A calm’s settled in.
A field of cloud clover like a soft-green blanket
For us long-distance runners to peer at.
It wraps itself around an old soul shivering
When the clock has taken his time from him.
The world looked at with jaundiced eyes
Stealing what he had anticipated.

Where once a quivering heart beat,
Replaced by a bevy of horned beasts.
He’s the drummer who came to a sad party of iPhone texters
Who preferred selfi-ing to listening to his staccato beat
Instead of the sweating encumbrances of living.

It is the calm,
A red-spotted eye in the storm,
A blinking presage without benefit of caring
For what the landscape will look like in the end.

Is the obverse preferable?
Would the legs kicking aimlessly in a barrel before the plucking,
Blood draining in a kashrut ceremony
Be preferable to the mad uncalibrated dashing about to the bloodied finish line?

They sit at their tables mesmerized by the images and its inanities.
They sit at their park benches engrossed in the sublime disconnect
Of the technicolor nature around them.
They walk on streets oblivious to the other walkers
And rate their walking prowess with so many thumbs up
In huzzahs of the numbers of steps they have taken,
Or pockmark their pages with emoji-unhappy faces
Until their world craters with mounds of reactivity
Falling Into so many barrels-full of simulations, artifice and artificialities
Substitutes for intelligence.

The Roomba picks up its stray leaves of dust collected from their sedentary
Cohabitation with their sofas and hides in their filtered light.
Lifeless rays of light sneak furtively into their space.

The beast is out and the legs of the chickens have stopped pedaling
And the calm brings an ordered sadness to the legacy of the self ease
That drifts in on a wind that sighs expectorated last breaths.

Sy Roth

The Conservation of Matter

Consider the disappearing moose.
Years ago, when we first rented this house,
my wife and I watched a cow and her calf
trundle across the lawn below the porch,
the site of our morning coffee rite.
Over the years, moose sightings persisted,
always droll, if seldom so picturesque.

But, now, these charismatic mega-fauna
--moose, I mean-- seem scarcer than hens’ teeth,
the cause, a massive drainage of blood
by winter tics fleeing climate change.
When the flesh of a moose that wastes and dies
sustains a myriad of tics and flies,
has the biomass been re-stabilized?

The other day, again on the porch,
in the midst of the morning coffee rite,
a white moth vanished from my field of sight.
Hovering for a moment above the boards,
it gave way to the jagged silhouette
of a burn mark, or moth-shaped knot hole.
Matter conserved, at least in metaphor.

Coming closer to bone, for eons now,
Science has known that a decomposing corpse
maintains the balance of the ecosphere.
These days, before Death turns up at the door,
many of us choose to be cremated.
Alive, we save nada y pues nada, *
but, once we’re dust, conservation kicks in.

Humans, moose, waste and die; moths transmogrify.
The conservation of matter applies.

“nothing, and more nothing” –Spanish

Ron Singer’s poetry has appeared, e.g., in alba, Anemone Sidecar, Avatar Review, Borderlands, The Brooklyn Rail, Cake, Ducts, Evergreen Review, Grey Sparrow, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Strong Verse, Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Windsor Review, and Word Riot. He is also the author of ten books. For details, please visit: www.ronsinger.net.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 13, 2018
Cover Art: "Mt. Arrowsmith" David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

“Prayer for the Dying/
A Darker Shade of Heaven”

There is no beginning,
Nor an ending in this life,
Only depths so deep,
It bends auras and seperates light,

These eyes...
behold the shadow of eternity,
A darker shade of heaven,
The belief in abandon & singularity,
Open for the vultures and the sun.
I never recognized my own footsteps because it was you who always carried me,

When midnight falls upon dark water,
Its reflection can deceive us,
She's not the type to lie down beside the angels looking for a savior like Jesus,

To love you...
like the dying love life,
What nourishes me also destroys me,
When I run into the light,

Like a dying child that has learned to sing,
And transforms ravens into beautiful things,
I exhale my breath in the end,
And fall in love with the world all over again,

Blackholes in your chest explode like supernovas,
Capricorn climbing mountains looking for Jehovah,

I see no reason to debate with a fate that is quantum,
Or the fear in losing our souls to the angels & demons that want them.

These eyes behold the shadow of eternity,
Open for the vultures & the sun,

There is no beginning,
Nor an ending in this life,
Only depths so deep,
It bends auras and seperates light,

To love you...
like the dying love life,
What nourishes me also destroys me,
When I run into the light,

Priscilla GoodBear or Illuminate Steele (her stage and performing name) was born in Portland, Oregon and is a unique and intelligent singer, songwriter, producer and activist who is an enrolled first nation member of Three Affiliated Tribes: The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation,which is located on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota. Illuminate started out as a local DJ and promoter performing and promoting events in her hometown of Portland and throughout Washington DC's metro club circuit.

Illusions, Ghost Ranch, NM

In the high desert valley between mesas,
immensity is fulfillment;
emptiness is illusion.
Desolation is the wrong metaphor
for the story this place tells.
Space is parable for time,
which is here in abundance.

Absence is failure to notice.
This vastness is not barren;
its gorges are thick with history –
hundreds of millions of years
designed this space, once
a tropical inland sea teeming
with dinosaurs and ferns.

Close our eyes;
our vision will improve.
Imagination sees
what eyes cannot behold.
Inner space fills the void
in the chasm between cliffs.
What is absent from sight,
memory can restore
to the Piedra Lumbre Basin*
in the dwelling-places between
mesas and buttes and spires.

Howard F. Stein
*http://towlola.com/piedra-lumbre/ Accessed 12 June 2018

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Cleveland Haiku #533

Dry summer---
sand dunes
on the infield

Cleveland Haiku #534

First ball field---
now the city's
service garage

Cleveland Haiku #535

Playing ball
in the street---
successfully dodging cars

Cleveland Haiku #536

Game in a parking lot---
we climb the building
to retrieve homers

Cleveland Haiku #537

Empty ball field---
no games nowadays
unsanctioned by adults

Michael Ceraolo's second full-length book, 500 Cleveland Haiku, was published recently by Writing Knights Press.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 20, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Good Evening Arizona

Every day at four-thirty
the list of our crimes begins
as the anchor says, Good evening
Arizona, and then
tells us what we’ve done

while the temperatures were rising:
a shooting on the west side,
a robbery to the north,
and arson at a factory
where the rubber is still burning
its way into our lungs.
Let’s break now

and then hear about the diet
just in time for those days
beside the pool. But first,
this just in from the parking lot

where an altercation
left one of us dead
and one on the run.
Who among us
is the victim, unidentified,

and who is in the truck,
racing on adrenaline
as sunlight melts the view before us.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. Arizona's landscapes and wildlife have become interestingly important to him and a significant part of his poetry. Meanwhile, he retains an appetite for reading Eugenio Montale, W.S. Merwin, Tomas Tranströmer, and many other, often less celebrated, poets.

Late For Work

At six a.m. a man tailgates
my car, squeals onto the main road,
hunches over the wheel,
swerves into traffic openings,
goes through a light
floors the gas to get
around a bus, speeds up
between lights until he comes
to the Expressway and enters
a wall of traffic slowly moving west.

Adam Fisher

You, sea are our boat

you, sea are our roots
sustenance of home
holding beginning and end

together we grieve through salt
your changing nature; where coral reefs

multiplicities of species in danger –
hawksbill turtle, stellar sea lion, blue humpback whale
only four of two thousand, two hundred and seventy
species who are endangered or threatened

in this precious web of life
soul needs you as plankton live
within your fluid body

You, sea are our boat.

Celeste Snowber, PhD is a dancer, poet, writer and educator who is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She has written over 50 publications in the area of embodiment and arts-based research and her books include Embodied Prayer and Landscapes of Aesthetic Education. Her book, Embodied Inquiry: Writing, living and being through the body and a collection of poetry, Wild Tourist were both released in 2016. Her newest book of poetry is Blue Waiting co-authored with Sean Wiebe. She can be found at www.celestesnowber.com.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 27, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Two Dollars

A man in his only shirt
drifts across the post office parking lot
dragging his shadow behind him.
As each car stops
at the drive-by drop
he stoops to say

he doesn’t have the strength
to make it four miles south
for the charity meals.
The whites of his eyes
like two drops of water

glisten on his face.
As we listen
to Sunday’s radio news
of bombs and rice
falling on Afghanistan
he runs a finger down
an imaginary map
until he reaches the food bank

but his feet can’t follow
his mind. The war is farther away from him
than from anyone else.
He dies a little
as we watch. All it takes

is two dollars
to bring him back to life.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. Arizona's landscapes and wildlife have become interestingly important to him and a significant part of his poetry. Meanwhile, he retains an appetite for reading Eugenio Montale, W.S. Merwin, Tomas Tranströmer, and many other, often less celebrated, poets.

Orphan Train

I. First Read This (Part of an 1893 ad in a Tecumseh Nebraska. newspaper shown in The Orphan Train By Andrea Warren, The Washington Post, 1998,)
Homes are wanted for the following children: 8 BOYS: Ages, 10, 6, and 4 years; English parents, blondes. Very promising, 2 years old, blonde, fine looking, healthy, American; has had his foot straightened. Walks now O.K. Six years old, dark hair and yes, good looking and intelligent, American. 10 BABES: Boys and girls from one month to three months. One boy baby, has fine head and face, black eyes and hair, fat and pretty; three months old.

II. Now Let’s Tell Something of the 200,000 in 1853-1929

So talk about the rail tracks, the long line
of carriages, the train, the Orphan Train,
not one train, but up to 300 children
riding east to west like cattle,
to Texas, Kansas, North Dakota, Nebraska,
farm country, farms where help was needed,
children used, sometimes adopted.

Tell how these orphans – the homeless,
the very poor, immigrants –
from Germany, Lebanon, Russia
(some not able to find parents
who’d come before),
were herded onto a train in New York,
dropped off across all the states.

Mark how they presented best behavior
to entice new owners –
these sprigs of life spruced up,
taught manners, poems, songs
to show off when they lined up
small to tall at a station,
or sat in church chair rows.

You know they were flung
like woodchips, or rough-hewn dice,
station by station,
year by year,
to homes, to farm barns,
to be beaten or loved,
some bitter and sure blood
in their veins was really bad,
some lucky with music lessons,

Lavinia Kumar is an immigrant twice over, and her husband once, so they are very tuned to opportunities and problems this adventure involves. Her books are The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid Life (2017), & The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Chapbooks are Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications, 2016) and Rivers of Saris (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in several US and UK publications.

Immediacy and Memory, Ghost Ranch, NM

Juniper and mesquite,
Deep canyons and sandstone cliffs,
The Chama River and Piedra Lumbre Valley,
Embraced by a forever sky –
My companions and kin,
As close to me as I am to myself,
Until I must leave for
Ordinary place, ordinary time,
Vowing to return,
But uncertain I can keep
My promise.

How to transform
Presence into memory,
One, however vivid,
That must still leave the badlands behind?
Remembering takes over for immediacy,
And will have to suffice,
Though it can never
Soothe the sting of absence.
I had never thought to grieve
Old rock and dead tree
And hardscrabble land
That would grant me new life,
If only I could return.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 3, 2018
Cover Art: "Juan de Fuca Kelp" David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Voices

One man speaks to the empty seat
beside him on the bus,
telling it the LAPD is to blame
and if he ever gets his hands on the bitch
who left him
we can only guess
what will remain of her.
One man walks along the street

stabbing the air
with his finger while he shouts
at an absence,
implicating the government
while a fire ripples underneath the skin
on his face. Each day from ten to twelve

one man sits tearing paper
into flakes while he addresses the sunlight
over the state of affairs
before he embraces his cardboard box
and slow dances it away.
One man in the park

reads a litany of numbers; one man
in a parking lot
preaches with his dirty hands
showing where the nails were hammered in;
and one man

wanders endlessly
with his voice on replay,
contained by the bubble
he pulls behind him on  a string.

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. Arizona’s landscapes and wildlife have become increasingly important to him and a significant part of his poetry. Meanwhile, he retains an appetite for reading Eugenio Montale, W. S. Merwin, Tomas Tranströmer and many other, often less celebrated, poets.

South Carolina Auction
            The Sumter Banner, February 27, 1850

First Monday on March next,
highest bidder, pay cash
three hundred acres of land,
one negro, property Mr Graham

            My children were left across the ocean
            I pray to Roog that even in this land
            my soul will find my tribe at my end.

One horse, asset Mr. Barwiek
one horse-mill, from Mr. McLeod
one lot and buildings thereon
three negroes, property Mr. Barwiek

            We’d carved a hare as family totem
            and prayed long to our village pangool
            before they brought us to this auction.

One negro sold, twelve hundred
One horse sold, fifty going gone
Two negroes sold, four years credit
Two negroes, one mule, estate sale

            Roog’s sign was near the hemlock and black snake.
            It’s natural it will stay around that tree
            because souls are immortal – they never flee.

Lavinia Kumar is an immigrant twice over, and her husband once, so they are very tuned to opportunities and problems this adventure involves. Her books are The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid Life (2017), & The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Chapbooks are Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications, 2016) and Rivers of Saris (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in several US and UK publications.

Dog Drum Dance
(for reXFiles, a starving dog who came to me)
The dog’s heartbeat
Becomes a drum
As we gather our selves together.
    Dancing the dog
    Dancing the doom away
He comes to me,
Starved and scared,
Shivering and sacred.
    Let us dance, o dog
    O my beloved
We dance away the fear.
We dance away the worry
Thick as matted fur upon our backs.
We cradle then encircle
Become lovers entangled
    O my dog dancing under the moon
    Of American cheese and macaroon.
Oh my dog who bites even me.
We dance
Hungry dog and lonely human
We dance
Until each of us
Is finally fully fed.

Ali MacDonald was born in Alabama but lives in New York and has been lost in the Adirondacks. She has a degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been published in some small magazines, Long Island Quarterly, Baltimore Review, Street Magazine, and others. She is a Vietnam-Era Veteran.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 10, 2018
Cover Art: "Sand Worms" David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

They Were People
Lesbos, Greece

He will not say who he is, walks past tall marble
monuments personalized with birth and death dates,
names, fond messages, a few with fresh flowers.
He visits each week, sees only the molehill
graves near rubbish in the far corner.
Today he counts 1 through 29
small flat stones that tell a little story – boat
sinking-date, Afghan 3, or 7, or just Number 11, or 6 –
child, man, woman. Those no-one knows,
or wants to know. Except kin left behind,
or kin they were to meet.

His phone rings – a call for photos of a grave,
the face of the dead. He emails, does not tell
the burial was without prayers, without
the head facing Mecca. He does not tell
that when this corner is filled, stones
and bodies are removed, bones desecrated.
He cannot say it is made ready
for new drownings
on the ninety-minute sea crossing.
He cannot not tell these families
their people might never have existed.

Though buried in the cradle of man.

Lavinia Kumar is an immigrant twice over, and her husband once, so they are very tuned to opportunities and problems this adventure involves. Her books are The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid Life (2017), & The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015). Chapbooks are Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications, 2016) and Rivers of Saris (Main Street Rag, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in several US and UK publications.

Shadow in Flight

A crow takes flight
in an impossibility of physics
trying to shake darkness from its feathers
light beckons upward
enclosed in quanta
How can you tell carbon from carbon?
Or the difference between a crackle
and the wind?
How can you speak to something that’s only its shadow?

Neil Garvie is a member of Victoria Writers’ Society and Comox Valley Writers’ Society; and has a book of poems entitled Silence Craves a Voice due Autumn 2018 with Poplar Publishing.

Time Lines

Time touches you
in intimate places,
more like an inquisitor
than a lover.

Katherine L. Gordon is a poet, publisher, judge, literary critic
and reviewer. Her focus is always on the promotion of
Canadian writers, now making an impact on world culture.
Her newest book “Caution: Deep Water” will appear this fall.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 17, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

A Round of Crow

Let us from loins of father crow
and fruit who mother
lays us

Since tended egg
we crack the dome
which then they set to
raise us

They work to feed
by stealing crops
while cows in pasture
graze thus

We learn to watch
and watch to eat
our nature too
obeys us

But soon enough
our father’s squawk
out of the nest he
waves us

Which lead to us
same fruit and loins
another round
replays us.

Neil Garvie is a member of Victoria Writers’ Society and Comox Valley Writers’ Society; and has a book of poems entitled Silence Craves a Voice due Autumn 2018 with Poplar Publishing.

About Leaving our Mutual Heritage in the Wrong Hands

The hands I speak of are smooth
like the slippery voices
of the bodies they dangle from.
The hands I speak of grasp,
character lines stray on their palms,
confused between self and other,
unsure concerning destiny;
their fingers go to fist too readily,
thumbs askew and tucked in
like cowards do it, hiding intention.
Have I said enough? pointing
with my own forefinger,
sure as I endure here
that we’ve taken ill care
of all our fortune, signatures
scrawled on invalid wills,
our testaments paid out to thieves.

Linda Stevenson is a Melbourne,Australia, poet and painter; the content of her poems is primarily world environment, issues of equity in race and society, and treatment of refugees. Her latest collection is a Chapbook “The Tipping Point”, published in 2015, containing powerful activist ecopoems. Her work is also currently published in local and international literary journals and special interest magazines.

Spilling the Names

to a crow the divine is a crow
to a dog, a dog, to you perhaps a dandelion

spilling its gold on the grass
The real, in and not in the names

bearing so much weight
warring over them, futile; still we war

not yet having walked our dreams into presence

Susan McCaslin is a BC poet who has published fifteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna, 2017). Her Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011) was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Poetry Book Prize) and first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award. Susan resides in Fort Langley, British Columbia where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River. www.susanmccaslin.ca

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 24, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Superbowl

I did notice how spectacular our home is,
barely birthed as I was from one of its tangles,
soaking still in delicious.
I saw it, flagged as delirious,
destination superbowl, all its corners
swept and prepped for inclusion,
heard it humming, musos fitting
their own notes between stupendous
and all its valleys alight, ferns deft,
hills in love. How it burned. In the best way.
From inside out. Conflagration supreme.
So I breathed it firstly, so gladdened.
What about you? As fierce rain spewed
for your eruption, how glad were you ...

Linda Stevenson is a Melbourne,Australia, poet and painter; the content of her poems is primarily world environment, issues of equity in race and society, and treatment of refugees. Her latest collection is a Chapbook “The Tipping Point”, published in 2015, containing powerful activist ecopoems. Her work is also currently published in local and international literary journals and special interest magazines.

Out of a Blue Diamond Flame

words fall

“tell
yourself
a story
about yourself

where
I
is saying
thanks”

my own voice speaking?
yet calmer
softer
clearer

I puzzle over
grammar
the shift
from second to first person

was the voice saying
“create a story
about yourself
where
your I
is so one
with what is
that gratitude flowers?

why say so much?

The tone
not admonitory
rather
a call

come
come home

Susan McCaslin is a BC poet who has published fifteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Into the Open: Poems New and Selected (Inanna, 2017). Her Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011) was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Poetry Book Prize) and first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award. Susan resides in Fort Langley, British Columbia where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River. www.susanmccaslin.ca

Corfu

My head throbs just behind my eye,
a wash of red and shadow.
It was my fault.
Drinking The Retsina in the bar
overlooking the azure ribbed sea.
I had forgotten that transformation
Is transitive so I said yes to more.
The feeling of soaring away from my body
tricked me to believing in flight.
The bouzouki and sun and impossible sky
all conspired to one more round of toasts.
And I laughed at the waiter
who pulled me up
to mark the beats
with my outstretched arms
and shuffle of dusty feet.
Circular celebration and sweat
trickled between my breasts.
I was lifted by the heat
and that sweetness
of momentary perfection,
just before I passed out,
skirt still dancing
in the breeze.

Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer and mentor. She publishes frequently in journals, anthologies, and e-zines. She was shortlisted, highly commended and finalist for many international competitions including: The Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), The International Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (U.K),The Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize (UK), The Wenlock International Poetry Competition (UK) and the Carers International Poetry Prize (UK).

Jude has written six books.

Her book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (leaf press), was a finalist for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award,five of its poems were shortlisted for The Magpie Award, judged by George McWhirter, Vancouver's first Poet Laureate and three of its poems were nominated for the coveted Pushcart Prize (US) by three different publishers.

One of Jude's poems from her recent book, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate to ride with other winners around the Channel Islands on public transit for a year. Jude was a featured reader at the Guernsey International Literary festival.

This book was recently a SPM Prize winner and was published in the UK last April.
Some of these poems can be heard on Jude’s collaborative (viola/spoken word) EP, Places Beyond.

Jude's forthcoming book, A Blooming, will be published in London the spring of 2018 and her collaborative collection, Cantata in Two Voices, with Bonnie Nish will be published by Ekstasis Editions in the fall.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 31, 2018
Cover Art: David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Injured Shadow (V3)

In nakedness of life moves
this male shadow worn out dark clothes,
ill fitted in distress, holes in his socks, stretches,
shows up in your small neighborhood,
embarrassed,
walks pastime naked with a limb
in open landscape space-
damn those worn out black stockings.
He bends down prays for dawn, bright sun.

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois. Mr. Johnson published in more than 1037 publications, his poems have appeared in 37 countries, he edits, publishes 10 different poetry sites. Michael Lee Johnson, Itasca, IL, nominated for 2 Pushcart Prize awards for poetry 2015/1 Best of the Net 2016/and 2 Best of the Net 2017. He also has 167 poetry videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos. He is the editor-in-chief of the anthology, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1530456762 and editor-in-chief of a second poetry anthology, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses which is available here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1545352089. Michael is also editor-in-chief of Warriors with Wings: the Best in Contemporary Poetry, a smaller anthology available now: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1722130717

The Lake

Nobody built this lake
that sits
frowning
0n the plain,
fenced by forest,
virginal until
The 1980s.
We can feel
the cold depth
0f her even from
the log lodge
which tries
to warm the park.
It's the romance
of dread that
draws us from our
homes to bring
the beer
and laugh here
among the echos.

Don Schaeffer still considers himself a social scientist. He studies the human condition using the insights poetry provides.

Hoard

The goldfinch are back.
Their heads flame
with the bearing of gold,
back and forth from the sun
to the red red earth.

They keep the secrets
of their nesting places,
where the nightingale,
thorn at his throat,
drips on their sleeping heads.

The puddling feet of gulls
remember only the wet rocks
and the cold cold sea,
their porcelain bodies
always crying out.

But I have a gilded apple-tree
charmed with rubies.
Every day I count them
and look for more treasure
in free-fall from the sky.

Gerard Rochford lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He writes about human relationships, wildlife and politics “Perhaps they are all one.” Collections include: Of Love and Water, Koo Press/Malfranteaux Concepts - 2011, a collaboration with Canadian artist David Ladmore. CAIRN - poems for the Isle of Lewis, Malfranteaux Concepts - 2016. DNA - poems for a family. Malfranteaux Concepts - 2018. He has poems in the following anthologies: Erotica. Ascent Aspirations. Canada - 2008 and Planet Earth - 2013 Leaf Press, Canada.
Gerard’s poem “My Father’s Hand” was in Best 20 Scottish Poems of 2006, chosen by Janice Galloway for the Scottish Poetry Library. (gerardrochford@btinternet.com)

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 7, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Autumn Journey

The geese are moving again;
calling to one another and to me.
They draw their marks upon a slate sky,
and a chill wind tells me they’re right to go.

They neither hurry nor linger,
travel to a steady beating,
a sure knowing, of gentler tables of land.

Even in the darkness I hear them.
They nudge my sleep like a seduction,
unsettle my dreams.

From frantic summer feeding
they are packed for the journey
with fat and muscle;
they rise from the earth like a revolution.

Eight thousand miles!
And when they’re half-way there,
with neither memory nor precise desire,
still they are driven, by sex and food,
and faithfulness to their created heart,
which tells them pleasure relished comes again.
This is the faith of the Autumn journey.

Gerard Rochford lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He writes about human relationships, wildlife and politics “Perhaps they are all one.” Collections include: Of Love and Water, Koo Press/Malfranteaux Concepts - 2011, a collaboration with Canadian artist David Ladmore. CAIRN - poems for the Isle of Lewis, Malfranteaux Concepts - 2016. DNA - poems for a family. Malfranteaux Concepts - 2018. He has poems in the following anthologies: Erotica. Ascent Aspirations. Canada - 2008 and Planet Earth - 2013 Leaf Press, Canada.
Gerard’s poem “My Father’s Hand” was in Best 20 Scottish Poems of 2006, chosen by Janice Galloway for the Scottish Poetry Library. (gerardrochford@btinternet.com)

Lists

1

Does silence know herself
in a darkened room
in the gong’s tone
in breath
in a sanctuary
in crushing wind
in cedar planks?

It starts with a question
a minute and a half of music
taking that first step
a quiet morning
amongst spruce trees
thunderous clouds or
the flakes of a snowstorm.

Trauma is insidious
a lingering aftermath
that ambles in for invisibility
yet I could cope with nothing
deciding that something
had been stolen long ago.

2

That winter I helped my mother
when the birch trees stood quiet
and the crows disappeared
it was so cold frost formed in marrow
yet something in her existed outside of time
like at the hospital they tapped her soul
like a tree for maple syrup.

You were born two months early
she said, but I want you to know
like all of us, your back is against a wall.

At first I was afraid and then I think
how could that have been?

Maxine Cowan is a visual artist and designer who will tackle anything creative on the assumption if she can design one thing, possibly she can design in a completely different genre. She hits and misses on that but she maintains her confidence. Her deepest passions are in art, design, architecture and writing, and in anything frankly? Minimalism.

Widen Your Wings

Widen your wings
and take to the sky.
The savage storms
come from the east side.

You are weary
and gentle. You need
to get steady
for great distances.

Go seaward in
the serene night. Fly
and be free to
a place of safety.

Walk on the sand.
Feel your hair brushed by
the soft air breezes.

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. He was born in Mexicoand lives in Southern California. His poetry books have been published by Pygmy Forest Press, Poet's Democracy, Kendra Steiner Editions, Deadbeat Press, Ten Pages Press, Alternating Current Press, and New Polish Beat.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 14, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Neighborhood Convenience Store, USA, 2018

“Bottom Feeders,”

        What an old friend
        In the medical field
        Calls them.

“They don’t eat healthy.”
“They don’t live right.”
“Most of them are obese,”
“A time bomb for bad disease.”

Always They, Them –
Blacks, Hispanics, even many whites.

Called “neighborhood convenience stores”
To make them sound homey, part of “us,”
Strategically located for people
Who mostly have neither cars nor pickup trucks,
Nor nearby city buses;
Only legs and feet to walk miles;
If they are lucky, a few relatives in town who might
Sometimes give them rides;
At best old bicycles
With baskets on their handle bars.

They walk at all hours of day and night,
On sidewalks and in the streets,
Both arms hanging to their sides,
Carrying bulging paper and plastic bags
Filled with soda pop and beer,
Hot dogs and bologna,
Laundry soap and toilet paper,
Boxes from shelves and freezers
Stacked with foods steeped in
Sugars, fats, salt, and starches –
Little or no fresh fruit or vegetables
To be found here –
Maybe a few overly ripe,
overpriced, bananas from a basket
on the cash register counter.

This place offers what they can afford,
With little money or Food Stamps
Issued once a month.
Supermarkets lie
Far beyond their bodies’ reach;
Most of these emporia of plenty
Have moved away,
Found it too expensive to stay.

Destitute folk on the margins
Trudge to run-down apartment buildings
And ramshackle shared rent-houses,
All within “walking distance”
Of the convenience store.

Neighborhood store patrons
Are mostly shadow people
Who come and go,
Hardly noticed by the traffic
That passes them by –

Faceless marks,
Good for profit,
And little more.

Author of Light and Shadow (poetry): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult
Listening Deeply (Second Edition): https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0
The Dysfunctional Workplace (with Seth Allcorn): same url as above, amazon.com

Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;

What Really Matters

the colors of hydrangeas.
body language.
moonrise.
drinking enough water.
moss on a massive gray stone alongside a hiking trail.
the sound the screen door at my childhood home made as it closed.
stop signs.
the freckle on his right thumb.
tree branches dancing in the wind.
rhythm.
the bucolic blue drawings on my grandmother's dishes.
listening skills.
heartfelt laughter.
avocados.

Laurajean Zaino is a mom and a yoga teacher, but her first love was the written word. She has an MFA in poetry and can’t help but find beauty everywhere. Early poems were mostly about love and nature, but lately things have reflected her spiritual study, giving way toward the great beyond. Her first manuscript is entitled “Release & Hold.” Find her on Facebook and Instagram as YogaAndAllIsWell.

To Name The Place

Before dawn we took a little dirt road
that contours off Ice House Road.
A couple of cabins hugged the edge
of canyon, far above South Fork
with its snowmelt rapids grabbing at
the cliffs, eroding them away.
My topo map showed Fresh Pond
just across the raging river
and downstream from Short Place
which I never heard of
and may not exist anymore.

This is just to orient myself,
called out of sleep
to search for someone who left
one footprint and even her name behind.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and served as El Dorado County’s inaugural poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 21, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

War Or Feast

This Maidu cooking basket woven
of willow twigs and tule roots, and love –
it must have taken love to craft
such a beauty. The curves of bowl, pattern
of a rising arch over clouds and ripple-rings.
The long work of fingers weaving earth’s
wild hair, at peace with our land.
Peace that is a family circled for a meal.
I wonder when it was made.
Before the militia rode against Indians
in Gold Rush times? Long before
this morning’s endless TV commentaries
on coming together or walling apart.
How could this basket hold a thought of war?

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and served as El Dorado County’s inaugural poet laureate (2016-2018). She’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).

Apricity

After five cold nights
and a clouded morning
the sun is bright.
My son whistles by
my right ear and birds
by my left. And a woman
walks by with ankles
like music.

Julian O'Dea is a retired government scientist and part-time carer. He
began writing and publishing poetry a few years ago. He lives in
Canberra, Australia.

It's Murder Out There

Foul humour and without a pistol but if I had one
this would be the day, this bustling cafe the place.
News of the latest American or Afghan massacre
does nothing but heighten my enthusiasm.
Mad cow sitting at next table, blabbedy-blabbing
on phone in that mosquito voice while overly-
tattooed, expressionless, Cro-Magnon boyfriend
hasn't uttered a syllable. I assume he hasn't yet
discovered language but has discovered picking
at his scabby tattooed arm in a focussed way.
Compulsive chatterbox also has a tick which
she accompanies with a squeak, used to elicit
agreement amidst the flood of her words.
She has a bag with the word BAG on it because
she's so random, cutting edgy, supermodelly.
And sideways baseball cap is just so . . .
Slowly, I pull out my somewhere-in-memory
urine pistol and prepare to squirt Her Loudness but –
picture this – as 'phoney' continues to blab
and I release the safety, boyfiend reaches over,
lovingly pushes a lock of hair from her forehead
and cracks a humanish smile. He adores her!
I slip piss-loaded pistol back into invisible holster,
will likely chuck it into an imagined river,
post shooting myself in the forehead before
returning home, murderous urge exorcised.

Originally from Saskatchewan, Allan Lake has lived in Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, Ibiza/Spain, Tasmania, now calls Melbourne home & retreats to Sicily often.
He has published two collections; Tasmanian Tiger Breaks Silence (1988) ; Sand in the Sole (2014) plus a chapbook, Grandparents: Portraits of Strain (1994).
Lake won Elwood(Aus) Poetry Prize 2015 & 2016, Lost Tower Publications(UK) Poetry Comp 2017 and Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Festival/The Dan Competition 2018.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 28, 2018
Cover Art: The Poet Spiel aka Tom Taylor
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

The Poet Spiel aka Tom Taylor
American artist/author, b.1941-, Frequently focusing on the confinement of being human, this diverse artist has created visual and verbal imagery which has been exhibited coast-to-coast and in Zambia. His work has been published internationally. His most recent book: REVEALING SELF in Pictures and Words. www.thepoetspiel.name

Something to Hold and Feed

I reach deep down
for poetry, for the telling
metaphor, the just line
but I am empty, dry
an abandoned well
a creekbed during drought
or water trapped as ice.

Snow falls outside the window.
From downstairs, sound
warped by floor--
my son's rap music--
expresses young male angst
I can't relate to.

I long for a springtime
of the imagination
mind thawed
warm and meandering
through a meadow
bright with flowers of thought.

Some kind of opening is needed
an expansion
a letting go, a kind of orgasm
or birth-giving
some small creation
alive and warm and wet
against my belly's flesh.
Something to hold and feed.

Lately, I have dreamt twice
of a baby--
not my real-life son, or daughter, or grandchild--
a stranger baby,
yet, in the dream, familiar--
soft hair fair as lamb's wool.
He seems to belong to me
but only in the dream.

Anne Miles has, over the years, had work published in Quarry, Canadian Woman Studies, Room of Ones Own, People’s Poetry Letter, The Fed Anthology and other publications. She was the runner up in the 1997/98 People’s Poem contest and she won first prize in poetry for the 2003 White Rock and Surrey Writers’ Club Cecelia Lamont Literary Contest. Anne lives in Gibsons, on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast where she reads her work at all the open mics she can find.

Identity Theft

Someone tried to steal
my identity
strange things
started happening
but when they found out
who I really was
they gave my identity back
apparently
they did not want
to be associated
with someone
like me.

David Knape is retired. He is also tired.
He compensates by writing poetry.
It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to him.
He loves to write and writes everyday.
He then sends poems out for people's review.
Few are impressed. Even fewer amused.
Hence his works are seldom published,
except here.

Domicile

I looked at her and at
the grassy plain over
which the plover came
and went and swooped
time and time again
as fierce and enduring
as the wind or the spirit
of human generation;
her nest was somewhere
about, no doubt, as was
ours, and we made our
way back home.

Julian O'Dea is a retired government scientist and part-time carer. He began writing and publishing poetry a few years ago. He lives in Canberra, Australia.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 5 and 12, 2018
Lat Week and This Week
Cover Art: The Poet Spiel aka Tom Taylor
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

October 5, 2018

A Dying Matter

cast my ashes
on agitated water

where my enemy
cannot surround them

where my best friend
cannot long to wake them

The Poet Spiel aka Tom Taylor
American artist/author, b.1941-, Frequently focusing on the confinement of being human, this diverse artist has created visual and verbal imagery which has been exhibited coast-to-coast and in Zambia. His work has been published internationally. His most recent book: REVEALING SELF in Pictures and Words. www.thepoetspiel.name

A Colour

It’s a colour like heavy breathing
when it’s stuck in your chest and
remember when you screamed —
it’s like that.

It’s rage and frustration, it’s like
banging your head against
a tree trunk.

It sounds like Taiko drums
ten of them banging all at once or
like hard rock at high volume, bouncing
off the walls.

It’s like being in a cave
cold and damp or like thunder and
a downpour that soaks you
to the bone.

It’s ninety-nine percent humidity --
there is no air and worst of all, it tastes
like mud.

You know how your cat feels, right?
It’s like that only much larger.

Her coat is smooth, her skin taut
her muscles ripple beneath your fingertips
and she’ll be a tad high strung because
she likes to move --

it’s highly unlikely
she’ll begin to purr.

Maxine Cowan is a visual artist and retired designer passionate about all things creative. She’s a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design and holds graduate degrees in gerontology and architecture.

CPR Haiku

I work to compress jewels
-- little worlds
that breathe every once in a while.

Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards, and authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published by Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Virginia Commonwealth, Johns Hopkins and in Gargoyle, American Journal of Poetry (Margie), Main Street Rag, MiPOesias, New Delta Review, Brooklyn Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Voices Israel, Blue Mountain Review,Tishman Review, Suisun Valley Review, Burningwood Review, Fiction Southeast, Junto, Heartwood, Tiferet, Foliate Oak, Parhelion, Bonsai plus featured in New Verse News, Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords, Floor Plan, Good-Man-Project, Anti-Heroin-Chic, Poetry Circle, Fiction Southeast, Walt Whitman Tribute Anthology and Tipton Review. “Amber of Memory” was the single poem chosen for my 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. For Huffington Post/other reviews, readings, publications, interviews; visit GerardSarnat.com. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor. Married for a half century, Gerry has three kids/ four grandkids so far.

gerardsarnat.com

October 12, 2018

Here are a few poems written about dogs. The first one from my childhood, the others about Jamie, the border collie we helped to become a real dog.

The Dog

I didn’t even choose his name. Didn’t choose his breed, but we went with the milk truck my dad borrowed from Silverwood’s Dairy over night, so we could go across town where the puppies were and I picked the shy one in the back because he was so much like me, even though I was disappointed with all of them since they were beagles and were barking all the time, but I also thought no one else would choose him if I didn’t choose.

I didn’t go in the car when they’d decided to put him down because the last straw was he’d bit my mother who’d fed him all his life. Wasn’t asked. Wasn’t consulted although I was probably fifteen at the time and he was no longer or maybe never was the dog I wanted, now I think about it, just the dog they got because I was an only child, troubled, hard to deal with, head-strong they used to say, but a boy who’d saved the worms when digging in the garden and was horrified when the pest animals were killed—garter snakes, limp across the shovel’s blade, starlings, necks twisted in a fist, bat’s crushed against a white-washed wall, and this dog maybe had a good life overall until the incident, so I am glad I didn’t go when he was taken, or I might have said, “You know he died the day you beat him with the kitchen chair. He died that day, you know, and I’ll remember that.

David Fraser

For Jamie #1

I think him as a pup
confined to a ten-foot run,
food-focused, starving, but he had spirit,
locked up inside of him, until he was
nursed back to weight, but still reserved,
hadn’t learned at three-years old
to wag his tail, but I remember
that day on the hike in the woods,
walking slowly off leash beside us,
like he’d been taught for show dog in the ring,
and how he’d taken off full gallop and
after a hundred yards something clicked inside
his brain and then he ran twice as fast as if he’d
released this spirit, a late-blooming rocket in his soul.

He never lost that, mornings all happiness to be alive,
even to the end, my sweet, sweet gentle boy.

David Fraser

For Jamie #2

I don’t want
to see him
go down
that darkest
part of the road.

David Fraser

Once We All Slept That Untroubled Sleep

In his last days
the old dog pants
through his dreams,
no longer that small animal snuggled
among his brothers, sisters,
his mother’s warm milk murmuring
in his nostrils as he sleeps that timeless sleep.

In his last moments
I hold the soft fur I’d ruffled every day,
and feel him drift into the calm
to which we all, one day, will go.

David Fraser

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016 which has been short listed for the 2107 ReLit Awards for poetry. Also in April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 19, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Natural Disaster

Acts of G-d, Natural Disasters,
Names we give to devastation
We contend is out of human hands –
Hurricanes (typhoons), tornadoes,
Earthquakes, floods –
The culprit: Father G-d and Mother Nature.

Rising oceans, warmer seas,
Melting polar ice, methane release
From thawing permafrost –
All created in part by
Burning fossil fuels at such a heat
That we require even more of it
To sustain our expansive ways –
The culprit: ourselves,
No gratitude, no remorse,
Only more mining and
Fracking and drilling.

How unnatural, these natural disasters?
How G-d’s acts are so much like our own?
The earth remembers –
Our myths and words
May kill us all.
We are the fathers and mothers
We defy.

Howard F. Stein, an applied, psychoanalytic, medical, and organizational anthropologist, and organizational consultant as well as poet, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA, where he taught for nearly 35 years. From 2012-2017 he was group facilitator for the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center, in Oklahoma City. He is author, co-author, or editor of 32 books, of which ten are poetry books or chapbooks. His most recent poetry books are: Centre and Circumference (2018)  https://www.amazon.com/Howard-F.-Stein/e/B001HCZ62C/ref=ntt_dp_epwpk_0; and Light and Shadow (second edition, 2018): https://doodleandpeck.com/adult His cat, Luke, keeps him company and somewhat grounded in reality. He can be reached at howard-stein@ouhsc.edu

Stray

One time on a trip
my dad stopped at a convenience store
(we called them ice houses back then)
to get some drinks and gas
and there was a dog running around loose
looking for scraps and attention
I was just a kid
along for the ride but
I got to playing with that dog
and petting it and talking to it
It was such a friendly dog
When it came time to go
I begged my dad to let me keep that dog
Believe it or not, he said Yes
(I think mom may have influenced the decision)
And so...I opened the car door
and in hopped the dog
I was so happy to have that old stray dog
I named him Sandy because of his color
he was wild and untrained
and slobbered all over everything
but there was such joy in that dog
he had found a home
and he became a true friend to me
the best friend a boy could ever have.

David Knape is retired. He is also tired.
He compensates by writing poetry.
It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to him.
He loves to write and writes everyday.
He then sends poems out for people's review.
Few are impressed. Even fewer amused.
Hence his works are seldom published,
except here.

Don't Buy Jobs

There has always been endless inventiveness
in the ways people have devised to cheat workers
In the early twentieth century one of the ways
to defraud migrant lumber and agricultural workers
was for an 'employment' agency to charge a fee
for placing the worker in a specific job,
often hundreds of miles away, to which
the worker also had to pay his transportation cost
The agency had already made a deal
with the foreman on the faraway job
to split the fees involved, and further agreed
the foreman would fire the worker after a few days
(the best-case scenario; the worst case
was that sometimes the job didn't exist),
necessitating a replacement from the agency:
"one man going to a job,
one man on the job, and
one man leaving the job"

The Wobblies decided to fight this practice,
and began to speak out against it
on the streets of Spokane, Washington
Thousands traveled to the city
to get arrested for free-speech and labor rights,
clogging the local 'justice' system,
often being brutally treated as prisoners
Eventually the city surrendered:
repealing the unconstitutional law,
releasing all Wobbly prisoners,
revoking the licenses of nineteen 'employment' agencies,
even forcing those agencies to repay at least
some of the money they had cheated workers out of

Michael Ceraolo is a 59-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had one full-length book (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press) and a few shorter-length books published, and has a second full-length book, Euclid Creek Book Two, forthcoming from unbound content press.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 26, 2018
Cover Art: Don Schaeffer
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

A Cameo

            High in the sky
                        over trees long bereft
                                    of leaves

            a small formation
                        of geese, so sure
                                    of their destination

            in the increasing chill
                                    of deep autumn.

Antoinette Voûte Roeder has a Master’s degree in music and finds music, both its lyricism and pauses, in poetry. She facilitates retreat days and workshops in writing and poetry and is passionate about the plight of the earth. Her latest poetry volume is called The Space Between, available from the author.

The Humor Condition

My humor
never goes away
despite time
or maturity

it is a long-term condition
to which I am afflicted
some would say I am addicted
I cannot break the habit

it has never subsided
in fact seems to have grown worse
with age

the condition requires
constant monitoring
my wife being the one
who monitors

she says there is no hope
of recovery
that the condition will last
until I die or
until I am shot

whichever comes first
her call.

David Knape is retired. He is also tired.  He compensates by writing poetry. It is the most wonderful thing that has happened to him. He loves to write and writes everyday.  He then sends poems out for people's review. Few are impressed. Even fewer amused.
Hence his works are seldom published, except here.

Hell Realm

Sometimes
I’ll play God
with her.
Not play
exactly.
Her empty eyes
are fish
swimming
in opposite directions.

Hands washed clean,
I load a dropper
with two memories,
one for each eye.

She is busy
trying to mend
a torn stocking
with her bare hands.

She walks through me.
I am nothing.
A stumble of air.
I give her a shove.

Robert Hirschfield’s poems have appeared in Salamander, Descant, Tablet,
Grasslimb, Pamplemousse and other publications.
bobbyhirschfield@gmail.com

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 2, 2018
Cover Art: Don Schaeffer
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Because

Because the sun slants low
            geese gather, crows mob

Because frost crusts the roof
            early mornings bless the dark

Because yellow leaves shout down the green
            peaches give way to apples

Because quiet follows
            hectic summer

I love fall.

Antoinette Voute Roeder has a Master's Degree in music and finds music, both its lyricism and pauses, in poetry. She facilitates retreat days and workshops in writing and poetry and is passionate about the plight of the earth. Her latest poetry volume is called The Space Between, available from the author.

Daybreak, and the End of Rain

The sun opens another page
in the same old book—this morning,
a love story all about the garden--
a spider’s dew-strung necklace
drooping between fence posts,
bumblebees fussing over my daisies
and your chrysanthemums,
tabby cat under the porch, too dozy
to disturb a robin’s ablutions
in the slow puddle leaking
from our rusty watering-can,
and your hat just where you left it
last evening when the rain began
and the two of us ran, laughing,
hand-in-hand, inside.

Pat Smekal loves her home by the sea, along with family, friends, pelicans, avocados and words. Her poetry has won a number of prizes and has been published, over the past fifteen years, in more than sixty anthologies, chapbooks and periodicals. Pat, a.k.a. “Jazz,” frequently reads her work at events on Vancouver Island and beyond.

Conversation with Buddha

He does not pray as he sits beside the Buddha
covered in vines, the cedar log his seat.
He asks questions why last year’s doe
lies wasted on the road, or
the neighbour’s dog so abused has gone,
a mystery as he no longer hears
its midnight howls. He asks
why there is a bounty on the wolves,
their long bodies lying still and stretched
in a pick-up bed. He wants the bullfrog
not to intimidate and eat
the lesser frogs who call the pond their home,
He doesn’t pray but wishes for all creatures
to have a life not full of fear,
not fraught with suffering but Buddha
smiles back, stony-faced and he is left
to work it all out
by himself.

Previously published in the collection, Paper Boats.

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016 which has been short listed for the 2107 ReLit Awards for poetry. Also in April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 9, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Queensland

This moment is for
the fragrance of frangipani,
the promise of papaya hanging high
in tight clusters,
for long-fingered pandanus
clutching at cliffs
and beach sand sifted squeaky-fine,
for honeyeaters suckled on bottle-brush
and the call of whipbirds
lashing bushland,
for goannas that rustle
under bracken and lantana,
and especially,
especially
this moment is for the magpie and his mate,
whose marvellous throats
pour torrents of warbles
all over my Queensland morning.


Submitted to Beaded Purse Poetry Contest, Nov 2010

Pat Smekal loves her home by the sea, along with family, friends, pelicans, avocados and words. Her poetry has won a number of prizes and has been published, over the past fifteen years, in more than sixty anthologies, chapbooks and periodicals. Pat, a.k.a. “Jazz,” frequently reads her work at events on Vancouver Island and beyond.

The Last Act

The shouting crowd choking
in glowing LED necklaces, sticky cotton
candy fingers buried in patriotic-colored pillows
waiting
wondering
that sends me smack-dab center of a 3-ring circus.
Poodles to my right jump hurdles, perform handstands;
to my left a balancing genius in blue-black tux
holds his chin accountable for a dozen
dinner plates
far away
swaying
to faltered applause, sugar-coated grade-school screams
as I sway the trapeze.
No net.
It’s the draw
of the fall.

I could slip, trip, slap the concrete while sawdust coats me.
I could
shed my sequins
my threadbare tights
up the ante
but not like a fall.
Is this a replay in real time?
I welcome the freedom from routine.
Deliver what only children admit to,
why sticky fingers
crave the circus.
Mistakes
a gruesome end.
I am shoveled onto a gurney
sad poodle eyes follow my exit
the show goes on.
Give them
what they came for, leaving screaming
to the swing swaying
until it’s lowered
and a man climbs into the cannon
center ring.

Suzanne Nielsen writes and teaches writing in the twin cities of Minnesota.

Shapings

The shape of air
sea gulls lifting
a steaming of a soup
in brittle china
cold
unknowing

I am made of words
& blood
walking along the quai
of seas distant to
myself

as though a flame
extinguished

And so

Anna your poems
of stillness
transparent
as a scrim
shadowless

we the lovers
weren’t we lovers
there
just there

above the gray Parisian
streets, our single window
narrowing the sunlight

and we two
our divided selves
our beings
hollowed out
to begin
the poems
of flight
of
distance

a stepping out of
a density
palpable obscure

into a necessary
absence

our poems become
slender wands,

a reaching into
without
touching,

the seas we
imagined
of more
than water.

Doug Bolling’s poems have appeared in Posit, Water-Stone Review,
Convergence, Poetry Pacific, The Missing Slate (with interview), and
Isthmus among many others. His poetry has received Best of the Net and
Pushcart nominations and several awards, recently the Mathiasen Award
For his poem “Body and Soul” published at the University of Arizona.
He lives in the environs of Chicago and is working on a collection.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 16, 2018
Cover Art: Skagit Delta by Eric Robert Kosarot
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Eric Robert Kosarot lives in Everett, Washington USA but prefers the bio-regional homeland called Cascadia.
The sweeping views of the Western Cascades and river estuaries from the monadnock islands of Skagit county have always awed me.

Waking By Numbers

I’ve a corner
to keep all the shambles

stabled so to speak.

They know
all the angles

how to leak,

or flow backwards
like mercury

off a tongue.

If you see them
don’t ask for directions.

They follow

a long string
dipped in honey,

a solo way home.

An algorithm of travel
fob watch ticking

ignoring digital silence.

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He was a librarian, a farm labourer, a cattle breeder, and mostly a public sector union official. His books include The Leviathan's Apprentice 2015, and Walking Through Fences 2018. He did not write between 1970 and 2013, and resigned from an elected position in 2014, so he could write again.

True Spring

Hoverflies and the warm
smell of wattle hang in
the air under our pergola;
wattlebirds bully and
scrape on the aluminium
roof for scraps of food;
fruitflies scout the compost bin.
Nature clatters on.
Heat fills this upstairs
room and I turn on the fan;
it feels like angels' wings
on the way back to Eden.

Julian O'Dea is currently doing some consulting in toxicology and minding his son. He began writing and publishing poetry a few years ago. He lives in Canberra, Australia.

Another Road Trip to the Corner Store

Old man walks stooped over his dusty shoes.
Ahead of him, a matted-tufted dog
trots, all nose and morning-wagging tail.

The man plods, reluctant with each step.
His dog is spring, blue sky, present.

It’s a long journey, like taking a toddler
to the corner store, how each step
brings surprise, a pause, a breath,
daffodil that wasn’t there just weeks ago
when the snowfall iced the steps
and neither man nor dog got out the door.

Another road trip to the corner store.
This old man has watched them many dogs ago.

David Fraser is a poet, spoken-word performer, publisher and editor. He lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, Vancouver Island, Canada. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and recently Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, April 2016 which has been short listed for the 2107 ReLit Awards for poetry. Also in April 2017 David received the Federation of BC Writers Honorary Ambassador of the Year Award.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 23, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Summer Has Its Reasons

A koala walked beside me
while I mowed
stopped when I stopped
looked over and slothed along
when I started again

Two black snakes ahead of me
doing it hard
uphill in the driveway
the gravel clinging
their red bellies dusty

Three eagles counting uplifts
tracked me to the dry creek
played keepings off with magpies
I was singing Guantanamera
when the deer sprang

Four horses came Rapunzel manes
a skylark of herded intensity
back kicked against the day
threw heads to say Look Out
snickered me the hints of change

The ants a scurry in Farsi
spelled what they could remember
of the days before tallied landings
bark falling the cast net of trees
freckles infertile seeds

The skies all opening
an upheld portage of locks
gypsy barges in a silhouette
a symphony of continents
the two-finger whistle

I could never do

James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He was a librarian, a farm labourer, a cattle breeder, and mostly a public sector union official. His books include The Leviathan's Apprentice 2015, and Walking Through Fences 2018. He did not write between 1970 and 2013, and resigned from an elected position in 2014, so he could write again.

Aftermath

Let loose, the demiurge
wrote the night in black
ink, and then the gnarled
laws that grew like
weeds below the Tree
of Knowledge;
Adam turned like gnostic
Dinanukht, half-man,
half-book; trying to read
himself and puzzle out
the new laws; now that he
had to fence in beasts
and grow sullen grain.

Julian O'Dea is currently doing some consulting in toxicology and minding his son. He began writing and publishing poetry a few years ago. He lives in Canberra, Australia.

Existential

I fear
and the wind
comes fresh at my face
carrying the salt
from the beaches of Africa.
This is the true
earth, growling at me
the probability of death.
I am not numb
when I fear
as I am when I celebrate.

Don Schaeffer has previously published a dozen volumes of poetry, his first in 1996, not counting the experiments with self publishing under the name "Enthalpy Press." He spent a lot of his young adult life hawking books and learning the meaning of vanity. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals and has been translated into Chinese for distribution abroad. Don is a habitue of the poetry forum network and has received first prize in the Interboard competition.

Don Shaeffer’s book is entitled Until I Got to New York. It is a book about fate from the perspective of afterwards. It covers 13 years of his personal history: things he saw, learned, and suffered through. He worked on the telephone, interrupting the dinners of innocent families who just wanted to be left alone. He waited for buses in the dark and cold. He took care of beloved people who couldn't stand-up any more and beloved people who were so full of vomit they decided to die. It's not a novel. Its 478 pages of poetic observation and theory-making. It's him. It's the models in his mind.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 30, 2018
Cover Art: Maxine Cowan
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Maxine Cowan is a visual artist and designer who will tackle anything creative on the assumption if she can design one thing, possibly she can design in a completely different genre. She hits and misses on that but she maintains her confidence. Her deepest passions are in art, design, architecture and writing, and in anything frankly? Minimalism.

Retired

Why would I want a gold watch?
Busy little smithies, little stonecutters inside
Fitting me for a choke chain or new collar… .

I’m nobody’s dog! I’ve slipped the leash!
Got itchy feet and an easy lope … .
New aromas commingle on the breeze.

Chase yer own stick, Jack! The sun
shimmers, fairly rolls off my shoulders.
I can play with that ball whenever I want now.

Richard Stevenson has been writing for a while now (31 books), and retired back in 2015 after a thirty-year gig teaching English and Creative Writing, Business Communication, and Technical Writing at Lethbridge College. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and edited Prism International back in 1983-84. Most recent books are Rock, Scissors, Paper: The Clifford Olson Murders, (a long poem sequence from Dreaming Big Publications, 2016, USA) and A Gaggle of Geese, (a haikai poetry collection from Alba Publishing, 2017, UK).

8 Track Tape Remembers...

My grandparents were the
First people in the
Neighborhood
To own a color t .v.
It was a combination
TV/Stereo console
And did Grandmother
Read the 91st Psalm
Like Mom did
Every night Uncle Cleo was
In Vietnam?

Aunt Flora Mae' mushroom
Cloud afro was
The sign of the times
My father always drove a Chevy
Truck and worked
For a living
Schoolhouse Rock and Saturday Morning cartoons
Taught me a lot about
The world
Sunday dinners ended with
Mogen David wine
And Great Grandmother
Rosie was always standing
close by
With a cigarette and a can of
Beer in hand
120 pounds soaking wet
A step away from death
She lived to be 95

My Grandparents always made
Me read to people
Daddy gave me a
typewriter
Mama took me to the
Library
Sis gave me a journal one
Year for Xmas, and yet,
Family and friends
Are the biggest dream killers
Around
Sunday nights were always
Wild kingdom and Wonderful World Of Disney
Years later, I asked my niece,
Marissa if she'd ever consider
Being a writer, she said
"No"
I don't blame her
Being a poet is like having a
Virus in your body
But I don' t want a cure
If god didn’t want me
To write
He shouldn’t have made me
A poet
I’m in this win or lose

Erren Geraud Kelly is a Two-Time Pushcart nominated poet from Boston. He has been writing for 28 years and has over 300 publications in print and online in such publications as Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine(online), Ceremony, Cacti Fur, Bitterzoet, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg and other publications. His most recent publication was in Black Heart Literary Journal; He has also been published in anthologies such as Fertile Ground, and Beyond The Frontier. His work can also been seen on Youtube under the " Gallery Cabaret," links. He is also the author of the book, Disturbing The Peace, on Night Ballet Press

The Words

They come from Walla Walla and Falls Church,
from Bristol and Bombay --
anyplace where people know what it means
to be people.

They come from happy fields and wanton valleys,
from sun-deprived caverns and boastful mountains --
anywhere a hobo can hobble
in silver-lined slippers.

They bob among the beer cans
on the River Withywindle,
as it flows through Barrow Downs,
black waves edged with white.

They come in silence,
broken by sighs or screams,
where the marigolds wilt,
grateful or obsequious, along Idlywood Lane.

Oh, how they dance
across the tongue of Mrs. Throckmorton
as she calls her dying children home
How they ruffle their little wings.

Paul Brucker was active in the Washington, DC, poetry scene in the early 1980s, He put a lid on poetry writing to go to Northwestern University's graduate advertising program in a questionable move to earn a decent income. Nevertheless, he succumbed to writing poetry again.

He has been published in many magazines, including somewhat recent appearances in Ink Well, Poydras Review, Ray’s Road Review, The New Plains Journal and the anthology Pagan’s Muse: Words of Ritual, Invocation and Inspiration.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 7, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Losing Battle

A window is closing between us.
Once in a while we fight to keep it open--
there is a small gust of fresh air
we feel it all the way up on our faces.
It garners a smile.

Mori McCrae was born in Toronto in 1961. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art (Drawing and Painting) in 1986.
For the last 23 years, she has lived and worked as an artist in the Niagara Region. She is a founding member of the Jordan Art Gallery (2001) where she currently exhibits her work.
In 2011 she was awarded an artists residency at the Cill Rialaig Artist Residency in Ireland. There she expanded her visual art practice to explore the liminal shift between image and word. Her poetry developed through support from the Canadian Authors Association and through self directed study at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. She has published two books of poetry, Shelf Life in 2016 and Passersby in 2017, both with Grey Borders Books.

Desert Moon

There’s a shadow in the desert;
secrets under the sand and a moon
encouraging worship.
Winds from a distance,
unwanted and cold.
Creature side tracks scatter to
survive.
Everything that breathes must
be strong; life is the gold of
survival.
A forbidden land. Wide boundaries.
No fences. Safety is unknown.
Water escapes the lost. Crying
surrenders all hope. Silence prompts
fear.
At night deep, vengeance covers the
path of escape.

Dr. Roger Singer has been in private practice for 38 years in upstate New York. He has four children, Abigail, Caleb, Andrew and Philip and six grandchildren. Dr. Singer has served on multiple committees for the American Chiropractic Association, lecturing at colleges in the United States, Canada and Australia, and has authored over fifty articles for his profession and served as a medical technician during the Vietnam era.

Dr. Singer has over 950 poems published on the internet, magazines and in books and is a Pushcart Award Nominee. Some of the magazines that have accepted his poems for publication are:  Westward Quarterly, Jerry Jazz, SP Quill, Avocet, Underground Voices, Outlaw Poetry, Literary Fever, Dance of my Hands, Language & Culture, The Stray Branch, Tipton Poetry Journal and Indigo Rising, Down in the Dirt, Fullosia Press, Orbis, Penwood Review, Subtle Tea, Ambassador Poetry Award, Massachusetts State Poetry Society, Louisiana State Poetry Society Award.

Euthanasia

I can't put my dog to sleep
for I am as old as he;
and despite our handicaps
he also wants to live like me.

Boghos L. Artinian

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 14, 2018
Cover Art: Winnipeg Sky by Don Schaeffer
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

Donkey

When I got on the train
the man was talking
and I knew he would still be talking
when I got off in fifty minutes.
He
was mostly talking about Bob.
"Yea he is okay but you know".
He said in a way that only people who are used to talking, talk.

He is still talking now
perhaps he never stops as long as he has someone to listen.
My mother would say
he could talk the legs off a donkey.
This guy could talk the legs off of thousands.
As I thought about this I took another look at him
a pictured him in a field
talking to a donkey with others behind
and a big pile of donkey's legs all piled up
He got off a Clapham junction
still talking
and once again I could see him in that field.

Marc Carver: “Some days I have no idea why I write or even leave the house and just now and again I see something and I have to put pen to paper.”

13 Sips of Irish Whiskey

Two days, seven inches, so
the old soldier and I stayed inside,
counting thundercracks and Wagner,
reading Bulgarian verse twice over,
his Russian rusty, loosened from years
unused, booze, having no one who
understood his schisms. I asked
only if we had another bottle,
if the rain might end. He said his
father came to this country, worked as a
milkman, bough this land after years of
tacky uniforms, rickety trucks. When he ac-
quired the deed, he toasted the trees using Gaelic.

Nicole Yurcaba, a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist, teaches at Bridgewater College where she also serves as the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival’s Assistant Director. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Lindenwood Review, Chariton Review, Junto Magazine, Artemis, Still: The Journal, and many other online and print venues.

Icebergs

Why does it seem that what is not, is?

Like believing in a narcissistic

that the image they present is real
when nope, it’s probably not

they’re more like icebergs
conning us into believing
that the hint of what we see
is all there is when what slumbers
by the ton, beneath the surface
deep and dark, visible only to
a passing shrimp that actually
does see what’s real—a black mass
blocking light and life, so

be careful

with what seems white, light
innocent, gently floating by, when
it could sink you into believing
that what you see

is all there is.

Maxine Cowan is a visual artist and designer who will tackle anything creative on the assumption if she can design one thing, possibly she can design in a completely different genre. She hits and misses on that but she maintains her confidence. Her deepest passions are in art, design, architecture and writing, and in anything frankly? Minimalism.

Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 21, 2018
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations@shaw.ca

13 Words Your Girlfriend Says When She’s Placed a Hex on Your Ex

My
            grandmother

                        said
once the

            words

are                   uttered

            the consequences

cannot

            be
                        undone.

Nicole Yurcaba, a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist, teaches at Bridgewater College where she also serves as the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival’s Assistant Director. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Lindenwood Review, Chariton Review, Junto Magazine, Artemis, Still: The Journal, and many other online and print venues.

And because they slept in, my friends--

                                      artists, musicians, old boys
with instruments whittled from boughs, they sleep in,

they do,
naturally as animals-- foxes chipmunks squirrels-- burrowing in,
deep down

                     under wings of conifers, not far from brooks, womb like they do
hibernate     in this place, home, name it,
                           Paradise, (their personal Elysium Valhalla, Avalon)

               you see my neighbor says, with that  lost child look on his face
in the library parking lot, today

you see, he says, about the fires,

they were artists, musicians, retired,
                     like me, and though we are about two hours away…

they were artists, musicians, retired, like me

I tried phoning them, you know
         and the smoke,   it's so hard to breathe even here
about two hours south

and the not

                        the not knowing, and

how the golden-red leaves, swirl, spin, and the not knowing

how to wrap one’s head around how

do you, how they
                  may not have

gotten out, or maybe tried, hunched over steering

wheels round
the image, imagine         with or without

wives, animals, instruments, their

       eyes set on the horizon as if  a miracle
as if a certainly

A certainty, oh imagine them blinded by fire

carrying their instruments
       shielded there, tucked angel like

               between elbow and waist,  cradled
fiddle     mandoln      oboe

just made guitar in its canvas case stretched out across a lap, pieta-like;
                               oh imagine and driving out, they were , or they are

sacred now, all of them, imagine…..sublime.

Leonore Wilson has taught creative writing for more than twenty years at Bay Area colleges and universities. She is on the MFA Board at St Mary's College in Moraga, California. She has two poetry books out (Western Solstice and Tremendum, Augustum). She is a wilderness rancher and environmentalist hoping to save her acreage for future generations.

Affirmations Your Former Girlfriend Gives Your Current Girlfriend

Bitch.

Bitch,
you’re
nothing
but
the melodramatic
wrist-slasher
you were
at
17.

Nicole Yurcaba, a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist, teaches at Bridgewater College where she also serves as the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival’s Assistant Director. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Lindenwood Review, Chariton Review, Junto Magazine, Artemis, Still: The Journal, and many other online and print venues.

Seeing My Granddaughter in The Wizard of Oz

Which is the better heaven
Dorothy thinks: above the rainbow
where the colors are bright
and friendships form among allied
strangers who judge you by a smile,
or the darker earth
of aunties?
.
When I hear the song
I cry, swept into the sky
where bluebirds go
and experienced, with her,
in miracles and death.
.
I live here in Kansas.
The intensity of wishes
stings my heart.

Don Schaeffer still considers himself a social scientist. He studies the human condition using the insights poetry provides.

5TH ANNUAL HAZELWOOD WRITERS’ FESTIVAL
Hazelwood Herb Farm, Nanaimo, August 2014--other poets / review / event
with appreciation to Ruth Hill, who helped fill in some blanks

Naomi Beth Wakan tells of being a twin, less special
lists   what she learned in childhood--
includes, she was   special

M. C. Warrior
(Mark, owns Hazelwood with Barbara, their daughters)
reads work poems;
read in San Francisco—with Tom Wayman, Kate Braid
the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union;
tells of a dream   of a green waiting room

Pat Smekal speaks of the passion of pen on paper
in “Paso Doble”;
of grief—the hole, finally, in a black sock   in “Mending”;
takes us to her home town, in Finland—her youth

Tina Biello reads
In the Bone Cracks of the Walls from Leaf Press
in her melodious Italian accent
tells of Casacalenda   the village doors   seeds, weeds
bids us   keep the dialect alive…

Bob Carson (feature) from California, speaks of
a casket   a cold workplace; quotes old friends;
his poem “Retake the City” was in a collection with Mark Twain;
a San Francisco Waterfront Writer
he shared a book with Wayman, Braid

Mary Ann Moore flaunts orange--
writes of red and yellow gerberas, lime green ankle socks;
reads from her Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press)--
how disorganized neighbours inspired her to play
at ironing   as pretend children waited   one by one
for pressed shirts

Ruth Hill, with a water theme
observes the upside of schizophrenia;
takes us on her young family’s off-the-grid, seven-year sail
from Horseshoe Bay   to Alaska   on a sixteen-foot boat;
saw rain’s kimono sleeves   on birch branches

Andrew Brown (who hosted our event) dances with Delores;
dreams of a stream near his bedroom;
reads from his first book--Crow’s First Word

Kim Clark explains her love of    CHAP books; reads from
Middle Child of Summer—31 Poems for August (Leaf Press)

Chelsea Comeau has bird poems--
“The Poet as Heron”, great blue…patron saint of patience;
“Virginia Woolf as Cormorant”;
how, if ribs were broken differently, Eve might have had wings…

Chris Hancock Donaldson offers list poems:
“Forget” and of forgiveness   and of her father…

Judy Mayhew boasts of bees, with all five senses--
heavy-loaded drones “thump” at the door;
gives us one voice—that of the boy
from the less successful family

Madeleine Nattrass, in her chapbook Ma
(who did so much with nothing, and lived to 105)
shows us the value   of clichés…

David Fraser (feature) and Pat (Jazz) Smekal
share poetic memories   of grandmothers;
David speaks of watching    and not watching   young women;
from Paper Boats        offers American sentences (17 syllables)
and short meditations

Diane Bestwick reads from her novel   of life in China--
a second baby in a one-child regime--
And a Bird Sang…bright red on pink

Ursula Vaira shares her emotional reaction
to a recent nameless disaster;
her conversation   with a granddaughter
while waiting for her arrival (birth?)

Grace Stephens graces us   with the day’s shortest poem

Ann Graham Walker reads from her reclaimed novel--
with a language   of not having language

Linda Thompson concluded with “Shoulds”--
collected notes for a bride…



Franci Louann has received awards for her poetry and for her volunteerism in this area. Franci had poems in Dorothy Livesay’s last anthology, Woman’s Eye, 12 BC Poets (Air). She was “Fran Workman” at the time. In 2010, Lipstick Press published Franci’s Beach Cardiology.

Also in 2010, Franci co-founded Poetic Justice in New Westminster. This has morphed into “Poets Corner”, now meeting monthly in Vancouver. Currently Franci is finishing a manuscript with the working title Argentina: Poesia.