Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 6, 2017
Cover Art: Photograph (Juan de Fuca) by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
January 6, 2017
Cover Art: Photograph (Juan de Fuca) by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, BC, on Vancouver Island. His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Rocksalt, An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, and in Tesseracts 18. He has published six collections of poetry and is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. His most recent collection, After All the Scissor Work is Done was published by Leaf Press in 2016.
Three Senryu
new menu -
we debate
the future
the customs queue
shuffles forward -
conga line
automatic doors
stuck open
he’s always talking
Joanna M. Weston: Married; has one cat, multiple spiders, 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, May 2016.
Her eBooks found at her blog: http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/
Rebirth
In the mountains, stillness;
“After Goethe” by Robert Haas
I come to this place to find
the depth of wonderment
I have lost in ordinary life.
The pine scented earth
gives up its light
and my bruises fall away.
I am once again whole.
My toes inhale the raspy air
and I move like a mountain spring
coming back to its source.
Now I can open and bloom
and spread out into the dusk,
where Lupines and Indian Paintbrush
carpet the scree.
Slashes of purple throated
Fireweed snatch at my breath.
Night begins to fall
and everything silent
holds me.
Jude Neale and Bonnie Nish
A Falling Apart
We did not realize it was so near
“Here” by Alice Major
Dark comes at night,
a death, a falling apart.
I never realized
when you were done.
Couldn't imagine
the walk into cold waters
that crisp morning.
The geese arced and cried
across the sky,
as if they knew about pain
and the keen desire
to rise above it all.
But what drops
from the heavens
pushes us
further to the edge.
You questioned all
that sat in your lap
as real.
On that cool morning
a quarter of a century later,
the dark still comes at night.
Your death, my falling,
the loss of my best friend.
The cold waters
that swallowed you,
left me chilled to the bone.
Jude Neale and Bonnie Nish
Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken-word performer and mentor. She publishes frequently in journals, anthologies and e-zines. In international competitions, she has been shortlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), the International Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (UK), the Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize (UK), the Wenlock International Poetry Prize (UK), and Editor's Choice, Hurricane Press (US). She was published in A Kind of Hurricane’s Best of 2014 Anthology and was highly commended for the Sentinel Quarterly International Poetry Prize (UK) and highly commended in the competition for the anthology published by Carers International (UK).
In Canada, Jude placed second in short story and poetry competitions run by the Royal City Literary Arts Society. Her collection Only the Fallen Can See was longlisted in 2012 for the Canadian ReLit Award and the Pat Lowther Award for a poetry collection by a female writer. Jude was shortlisted in the prestigious 2014 Pandora’s Literary Collective Poetry Competition, achieved honourable mention in the Royal City Short Story Competition and was shortlisted three times for the Magpie Poetry Award.
A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (Leaf Press, 2014), Jude Neale’s third book, was shortlisted for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, (best poetry collection by a Canadian woman) given by the League of Canadian Poets. Two of its poems were nominated for the coveted Pushcart Prize (US) by two different publishers.
One of the poems from her latest collection, Splendid in its Silence, was among thirty-three chosen by Sir Andrew Motion for the Guernsey Literary Prize (UK,) to be displayed for a year on public transit in the Channel Islands. Jude was invited to read at the Guernsey Literary Festival last fall.
Jude’s latest book, Splendid in its Silence, has recently won the SPM international book award in the UK.and will be published April in London.
[email protected]
www.judeneale,ca
Bonnie Nish is Executive Director of Pandora’s Collective Outreach Society. Bonnie has been widely published worldwide in such places as The Ottawa Arts Review, The Danforth Review, Haunted Waters Press, Illness Crisis & Loss Journal Volume 24 and The Blue Print Review. She has won prizes for her writing and work has been performed to both music and dance all over North America including at the Palace of the Legion of Honours in San Francisco. Bonnie’s first book of poetry ‘Love and Bones’ was released by Karma Press in 2013. Bonnie has a Masters in Arts Education from Simon Fraser University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Language and Literacy Education at UBC. Her new book “Concussion and Mild TBI: Not Just Another Headline” an anthology of concussion-related stories, was published by Lash and Associates in August 2016. Bonnie has conducted writing and expressive arts workshops for over 20 years across North America. Learn more about Bonnie's expressive therapy work here. See her personal site here: www.bonnienish.ca
Bonnie Nish MA Arts Education
Executive Director
Pandora's Collective
www.pandorascollective.com
https://sites.google.com/site/summerdreamsfest/
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 13, 2017
Cover Art: Kiss of the Surrogate by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
January 13, 2017
Cover Art: Kiss of the Surrogate by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
The Poet Spiel, also known as Tom Taylor, is an internationally published artist and author who has been making art for seven decades.Visit his 5 page website for more of his poetry and art: [email protected]
I Take You Peeled
The apple that Eve threw away has landed
on my nightstand, next to your cigarettes
and the condom you keep
promising to use. My fig leaf
is tattered, stuck on the lamp. Switch
me places. I want to be the one thrown
out of this make-shift garden.
The clean up is always a bitch.
A.J. Huffman has published thirteen full-length poetry collections, thirteen solo poetry chapbooks and one joint poetry chapbook through various small presses. Her most recent releases, The Pyre On Which Tomorrow Burns (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink), A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press), and Familiar Illusions (Flutter Press) are now available from their respective publishers. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2600 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, The Bookends Review, Bone Orchard, Corvus Review, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. www.kindofahurricanepress.com.
Rejection
It’s not that I’m not tempted,
she said
and I don’t want to offend you.
She took my hand briefly,
to show no offence
was intended,
then let it go.
I held on to hers
as she explained.
Then we walked in silence
for quite a long way
enveloped in the dark night.
Hand in hand.
Quiet footsteps
that didn’t break the silence.
She looked up at me and smiled.
I smiled back.
Or was I the first to smile
and she smiled back?
I don’t remember.
It doesn’t matter,
but we still don’t remember.
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. Her poem 'A Rose For Gaza' was shortlisted for the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition 2014. This and many other poems, have been published in recent anthologies including - Stacey Savage’s We Are Poetry, an Anthology of Love poems; Community Arts Ink’s Reclaiming Our Voices; Vagabond Press’s, The Border Crossed Us; Degenerates - Voices For Peace, Civilized Beasts and Vagabonds: Anthology of the Mad Ones from Weasel Press; Alice In Wonderland by Silver Birch Press, and many rather excellent on line and print journals.
Still Searching
73 years old last April
and still searching
Where is the mother
who loves and praises
who sees me
apart from herself
and is proud to be
my mother?
Where is the father
who sees beyond his depression
the worth of his daughter
how much she loves him
how much she blames herself
for not being able to make him laugh?
I write poems
seeking an audience
that died before I was born.
II
73 years old last April
and still searching
still asking strangers to do
what my genetic humans couldn’t
and curiously relieved
when they also fail
only now beginning to
trust inner conversations
trust in- and out-breath
trust Buddha energy
to swaddle and protect
to love the poet and her poems
even when the page is blank.
Judy Shepps Battle has been writing poems long before she became a psychotherapist and sociology professor at Rutgers University. Widely published both in the USA and abroad during the Sixties and Seventies, she deferred publishing to concentrate on career and family. Fortunately her muse was tenacious and she continued to write during the next four decades filling a file cabinet with scrawled and typewritten poems that are now being organized into chapbooks and individual submissions. The material submitted for publication represents her return to active participation in the writing community. She can't think of a better way to spend her retirement. Her poems have been accepted in a variety of publications including Ascent Aspirations; Barnwood Press; Battered Suitcase; Caper Literary Journal; Epiphany Magazine; Joyful; Message in a Bottle Poetry Magazine; Raleigh Review; Rusty Truck; and Short, Fast and Deadly.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 20, 2017
Cover Art: Earworm by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
January 20, 2017
Cover Art: Earworm by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
The Poet Spiel, also known as Tom Taylor, is an internationally published artist and author who has been making art for seven decades.Visit his 5 page website for more of his poetry and art: [email protected]
Florence, Italy: 1966
Heaven lashes out at Hell in roses
as their bellies swell, release perfume--
No chaining down of hanging fuchsias
settled in their baskets made of wire & grass,
since no one thinks to steal them.
Their tongues, their drooping curls, belong.
Neighbors bring hot noodle soup
to someone ill & suffering.
Garden eyes invite a theme of peace.
I smell fresh garlic, gingerroot in locks of hair.
Villas molded side by side do not require a fence.
Robert Frost was wrong.
Wet socks pinned to clotheslines
of a tree branch dry—because--
a gentle breeze is cupping them.
Pigeons squabble over bread cubes
tossed on cobblestones.
That’s it for gang wars in this dreamy place.
You leave me on a bench outside an antique shop.
Dally ’round the dusty treasures,
make friends with rusted clocks, sense
solid brass is hiding under coats of paint.
I’m outside in lemon sunlight,
parked upon a wooden bench.
No one kidnaps children here.
In some boutique, just doors away,
women have no tug-of-wars
for blouses on a clearance rack.
I never see a cop, not once.
No buses and no diesel fumes.
Sweet orange sunsets in a place
where churches do not lock
their doors at night
live inside my diary.
It’s here, between soft-spoken lips
of poppy bowls, I wish to die.
Janet Buck is a seven-time Pushcart Nominee & the author of four full-length collections of poetry. Buck's most recent work is featured in The Birmingham Arts Journal, Antiphon, Offcourse, PoetryBay, Poetrysuperhighway, Abramelin, The Writing Disorder, Misfit Magazine, Lavender Wolves, River Babble, The Danforth Review & other journals worldwide. Her latest print collection of verse, Dirty Laundry, is currently available at all fine bookstores. Buck’s debut novel, Samantha Stone: A Novel of Mystery, Memoir & Romance, was released courtesy of Vine Leaves Press in September, 2016. Janet lives & writes in Southern Oregon—just hours away from Crater Lake, one of the seven wonders of the world. For links, announcements, and interviews with Janet, visit her new website: www.janetibuck.com
Agronomics
Bacteria resistance, resisting the antibiotics in
your yogurt, your cured meats, your charcuterie;
politics in the grains of the modified variety
with bought and sold seeds morphing agro eco
society.
Monoculture crops wreaking
havoc while Bangladeshis sip tea steeped in
disdain.
Protein sources a source of mean manufactured
celluloid dreamscape nightmares with pigs piled
high and chickens with empty voids
where beaks should be.
The gluten in the grains indigestible,
symptomatic of the
farming revolution, the pre-industrial revolution,
hastening the post-apocalyptic
greyscales of soil-depleted grassless quakes.
Rail thin she grows a red tomato on a vine and
laughs at the
ease with which it grows, the simplicity,
what a mockery;
just chloroplasts and cellulose and
glucose and nothing more.
Lindsay Clayton Day is a writer living in Toronto with an undergraduate degree in political science and English. She also has a diploma in Creative Writing from Humber College. Some of mher fiction and poetry has been published in The Danforth Review, The Dalhousie Review and Battleaxe Press.
Too Much With Us
Long after Wordsworth lay down in his grave,
gave up his world to the worms and moist earth
for an eternal lament, the world is no longer with us.
Nature has been sold to the pipeline
as though the Christ will hang from his cross
even when earth falls into its fiery core.
Too many innocent burned at the stake
tortured in schools, broken in factories
where the economy is managed by hyenas
using whips and lies.
We are not the world any more but talking ants
stripping leaves, melting ice with fire
turning the verdant forests into desert.
Janet Vickers has published two books of poems - Impermanence (2012) and Infinite Power 2016) both by Ekstasis. She has been living on Gabriola since 2010 with her husband Tony.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
January 27, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
January 27, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Used To
Remember how bison roamed behind a fence
when we’d drive out to the Valley?
Wild West confined but still surviving.
They’re gone. Tutorials on dreams, your
years behind a desk. The man in
rubber boots pitched hay to his bison
who in the wild nature of beasts
kept escaping their fences as we kept sheep
always looking for greener pastures.
Hunger competes with woven-wire,
imagination with paycheck.
The bison man used to play jazz guitar
and croon at clubs and the steamer-
bar until it switched to rock. Like you
used to sing ragtime-cowboy to the moon.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems are included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara Univ) and Villanelles (Everyman's Library). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Ghosts
The backyard railroad tracks
and the coal piles of Ohio
die in 1943.
The guilty running
through the wheatfield
and the evening
tomato feasts die
in 1952. The passionate
fistfights pass away hard.
Brenda Laupton and Eugene
die with them.
Patty and Bobby Proctor
and the first touch of
girl's knee takes over along
with the wrestling matches
on the grass. They die in
1955. The last episode
of local fame dies in 1958.
The modern algebra book
dies in 1960. The final
argument about the evils of
behaviorism dies in 1962.
The Frieden calculator
dies in 1965. Barbara C
and the Upper West Side
turns to dust.
A recklessness,
grows out of canned tuna
in 1964. The bean loaf is invented.
Birth borealists the sky.
Special spaghetti sauce,
the dart of dodge all
flow like a great
cold lake over the flames
until she flickers.
The great north dies
after the century passes.
How long will
the forest last? It's
already November.
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.
Every Hero Falls
I would creep away,
toes digging into cold sand
at the edge of slate seas,
while winter froths
the sweet of life away.
All days are filtered through flawed memory,
like the stab of sunlight on an aging oak tree
where once we stood like champions,
toes braced for the steel spear point
that chastens dreams.
Even the guitar case stands empty
while the troubadour lies stricken,
a steel spear point in his heart
where once plans shone like sunlight
on the oak tree of youth,
empty guitar case
fading light
piercing spear
upturned toes
we all fall like expired stars
into the soundless abyss.
Katherine L. Gordon is a rural Ontario poet,
publisher, author, editor, judge and reviewer.
She is an award winning writer whose works have been published
internationally, translated into several languages.
Her latest book Landscapes, poems from the seasons of
Ontario’s soul, Cyclamens and Swords Press, was reviewed in Canadian Stories
summer edition 2016, a collaboration with James Deahl.
Remember how bison roamed behind a fence
when we’d drive out to the Valley?
Wild West confined but still surviving.
They’re gone. Tutorials on dreams, your
years behind a desk. The man in
rubber boots pitched hay to his bison
who in the wild nature of beasts
kept escaping their fences as we kept sheep
always looking for greener pastures.
Hunger competes with woven-wire,
imagination with paycheck.
The bison man used to play jazz guitar
and croon at clubs and the steamer-
bar until it switched to rock. Like you
used to sing ragtime-cowboy to the moon.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems are included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara Univ) and Villanelles (Everyman's Library). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Ghosts
The backyard railroad tracks
and the coal piles of Ohio
die in 1943.
The guilty running
through the wheatfield
and the evening
tomato feasts die
in 1952. The passionate
fistfights pass away hard.
Brenda Laupton and Eugene
die with them.
Patty and Bobby Proctor
and the first touch of
girl's knee takes over along
with the wrestling matches
on the grass. They die in
1955. The last episode
of local fame dies in 1958.
The modern algebra book
dies in 1960. The final
argument about the evils of
behaviorism dies in 1962.
The Frieden calculator
dies in 1965. Barbara C
and the Upper West Side
turns to dust.
A recklessness,
grows out of canned tuna
in 1964. The bean loaf is invented.
Birth borealists the sky.
Special spaghetti sauce,
the dart of dodge all
flow like a great
cold lake over the flames
until she flickers.
The great north dies
after the century passes.
How long will
the forest last? It's
already November.
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.
Every Hero Falls
I would creep away,
toes digging into cold sand
at the edge of slate seas,
while winter froths
the sweet of life away.
All days are filtered through flawed memory,
like the stab of sunlight on an aging oak tree
where once we stood like champions,
toes braced for the steel spear point
that chastens dreams.
Even the guitar case stands empty
while the troubadour lies stricken,
a steel spear point in his heart
where once plans shone like sunlight
on the oak tree of youth,
empty guitar case
fading light
piercing spear
upturned toes
we all fall like expired stars
into the soundless abyss.
Katherine L. Gordon is a rural Ontario poet,
publisher, author, editor, judge and reviewer.
She is an award winning writer whose works have been published
internationally, translated into several languages.
Her latest book Landscapes, poems from the seasons of
Ontario’s soul, Cyclamens and Swords Press, was reviewed in Canadian Stories
summer edition 2016, a collaboration with James Deahl.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 3, 2017
Cover Art: Reverence by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations
Friday's Poems
February 3, 2017
Cover Art: Reverence by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to ascentaspirations
Circumvention
She envies my lush lawn.
It’s always a woman.
The weeds she smokes
contain carcinogens
that frighten even her.
She steamrolls my breasts
till she can slide me under a door,
forgetting our commonalities.
Flat lined, I have no pulse,
only a voice that will forgive her
for my sanity, not hers.
My mercy is an oil of chrism
that leaves her body verdant and full.
Rhonda Melanson got her start in poetry when she was an education student at Queen’s University in Kingston. She was in the Artist In The Community Education program, and it was there that she became introduced to poetry. She is currently the Sarnia Branch manager for the Ontario Poetry Society, and is a founding member of the local poetry group AfterHours Poets. Over the years, she has been published in several print and online magazines, including The Boxcar Poetry Review, Quill’s, Lummax, Philadelphia Poets and the Windsor Review. In 2011, she published a chapbook called Gracenotes with Beret Days Press, and currently, she is featured in the Encompass IV anthology, a publication from Beret Days Press and The Ontario Poetry Society.
Lovely Limelight
My absence from school
with banged-up knee
gave Mother no choice
but to drag me along
to afternoon tea
with Mrs. Galbraithe.
I soon wolfed down
a goodly share
of ladyfingers;
ladyfriend talk
droned on
interminably
--until I heard my name.
My ears sharpened
like a cat’s.
Mark my words, Gladys
I’ve seen Norma on that bike
standing on its seat
going downhill
--she’ll end up crippled.
Neighborly concern
and maternal alarm
made my day.
Norma West Linder is a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, and WITS(Writers International Through Sarnia). Author of 6 novels, 14 collections of poetry, memoir of Manitoulin Island, two children’s books, a biography of Pauline McGibbon, and short stories, published internationally and aired over CBC. For 24 years she taught English at Lambton College in Sarnia. Linder wrote a column for The Observer for seven years. Her latest poetry collection, Two Paths through the Seasons, with James Deahl, was published in Israel. The Pastel Planet, a children’s book, was recently released by Hidden Brook Press. Linder’s poem Valediction was set to music by composer Jeffrey Ryan and performed at a Tafelmusik concert in Toronto in February of 2016.TallStuff, a novel, was published by Hidden Brook Press in the Fall of 2016.
New Lives
A piece of trash
A woman
Thrown out the door
Thrown out of the house
Lies in the street
Walks the streets
By itself
Alone
Forgotten
Abandoned
It's original use unremembered.
No longer loved by one who did.
A recycler
A man
Finds the trash
Finds the woman
Turns it into something beautiful
Turns her head back toward affection
Something people want to look at
Makes her feel special
Something magnificent and beautiful
Someone lovely and cherished.
Who would've thought
Not so surprising
That one piece of trash
One woman, one man
Could bring so much pleasure
Could bring each other so much pleasure
To so many.
As they proclaim their love to the world.
Linda Imbler is the author of the chapbook “Lost and Found.” She was most recently published in BlogNostics. Other poems were published by deadsnakes.blogspot.com, behappyzone.com, bluepepper.blogspot.com, buckoffmag.com, Fine Flu Journal, Bunbury Magazine and Broad River Review Literary Magazine. Linda’s short stories have appeared in Fear of Monkeys and Danse Macabre. This writer, yoga practitioner, and classical guitar player resides in Wichita, Kansas.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 10, 2017
Cover Art: Structured by Kobina Wright
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
February 10, 2017
Cover Art: Structured by Kobina Wright
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Kobina Wright am a California native with a BA in journalism from California State University, Fullerton. Her literary and art works appeared in such publications as: The Bicycle Review; Blackberry: A Literary Magazine; Boxcar Poetry Review; Burning Word Literary Journal; The Fiction Week Literary Review; The Missing Slate; Orion headless; The Passionate Transitory; SNReview; Subliminal Interiors; Torrid Literature Journal and Wilderness House Literary Review.
The Hangover 11/9/16
woke up to sunshine blind
stumbled robot to French press
not a nightmare
reality show elected
bookish folks are weeping
feeling humans are weeping
gay queer trans family weeping
good thing my tubes are tied
I’m so sorry young women they will
take all that we fought for
women weep one hand over mouth
one hand covering the entry to our womb
people of color are planning
marching fists raised
born in this
struggle will continue to rise
up hold one another
strong
tight
do not let me fall
school bus bullies are in control
they feel our bodies belong to them
I speed through quiet streets
sad at work I meet red eyes
shaking heads
hate is stronger than love
celebrity is all that matters
rage wins anger rules
all my friends say
what do we tell the children
Dear world:
we’re sorry
we know that climate change is real that borders are bullshit
that we are immigrants and can do nothing but
extend our beaten hands to the sick the hungry
the poor we
are tired
we are homeless
we are those kids picked on
by bullies the red faced white boys so full of venom
we wonder what they’ll strip us of
lifetimes fought and died for women
and black folks Latinos who fled war and famine
built lives and families the salt of the earth
make tacos and papusas on my block
make rice and dumplings
I want to hug them close
I’m eating oatmeal the sun is shining
like it shined in Nazi Germany
it shined on Tutsis and Hutus
it is shining on the rubble
in Aleppo and Mozul
I have no answers
only fear
only sorrow
and this sun shifting softly through
the tree out back
Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra is a two-time Pushcart nominee and Literary Death Match winner. She has published online and in many print magazines, such as Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, Chiron Review, Stone Boat Review, and Great Weather For Media. A full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless was released to good review from Manic D Press May 2014. In the past year she authored Bad Sandy (Lucky Bastard Press), Pearl Tongue (Be About It Press), The Water Wars (Pedestrian Poets Series), On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press), and most recently Armadillo Heart (Paper Press) with MK Chavez.
Nightfall at Ghost Ranch, NM
Shadows deepen in the mesas’ folds,
lengthen east of a row of cottonwood.
The Pedernal* and companion mountains
turn ash gray at dusk.
Time for night to settle.
Darkness is not permanent.
The Pedernal will be among the first
to greet the sun.
*The Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped extinct volcano south of Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, NM. It was made famous by artist Georgia O’Keefe’s numerous paintings and sketches.
Previously published in miller's pond, January 2017, Winter Issue
Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;
Interdisciplinary Seminar facilitator, American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center (AIDPC)/Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Promotion Sciences, College of Public Health, OUHSC, Oklahoma City OK; Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Organizational Change, University of Missouri, Columbia
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology
Shuttering Radio Shack
Like a dying carcass in an electronics jungle, Radio Shack lumbers, exposed to all the elements of economic uplift and decline. Since corporate giants swallowed up their peers, it lies there with finances in arrears. And its body’s an open sesame
to avaricious shoppers. An invading army of consumer ants starts picking on its cut-rate inventory till the shelving supporting it starts slanting forward. Its armature begins protruding through the merchandise like meatless bones. Stop motion photography could not have done a better job displaying the swiftness of its decomposition. Today I see the shelves are bare. Their bones stare back at me with a spare, metallic glare. The musculature that bore so much inventory bears witness to the Shack’s once bristling business. I see nothing on the store’s painted concrete plain but skeletal remains, and a gaping note of closure on its door.
Frank De Canio was born & bred in New Jersey, but works in New York. He loves music of all kinds, from Bach to Dory Previn, Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 17, 2017
Cover Art: Emergence by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
February 17, 2017
Cover Art: Emergence by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Out of Eden
I span my wife's hips with my hands
when she returns from our garden;
like a farmer contemplating his soil;
its width, depth and richness; surely
when man and wife were thrown
out of Eden, God hid a little of the land
of Paradise in Eve's heart and body.
Julian O'Dea is a retired government scientist who began writing poetry a few years ago. He has had haiku and other poems published in a range of online and paper journals. He lives in Canberra, Australia. His main interest is in lyrical poetry.
Coming Back
No sign upon your ten white
steps, mica-specked, nor on the fossil
rock beside them; nothing
written on the bell that, ringing,
should have brought you to me.
No omen in your invitation—days ago,
the flowered card—and so
through door-glass curved
with age, I watch you, stunned:
your bird-arms rise stiff as if
with cold, in what could be a wave.
You’re brittle in your leather
chair, your red chair. Your stick arms--
so brown and dry beneath
your off-the-shoulder dress, so brave--
rise again, embrace me, erase our years
of silence. Embracing me as if as usual,
here at the end of them.
Your legs—careful, like herons
walking, stalking the pools
of your pain. Your bird’s beak
nose, sharp enough now to shatter
the egg of the end of your life and hatch
you out somewhere far
beyond my reach.
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, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the 2016 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition.
She has also published three books under her own imprint, DaysEye Press and Studios. To read more, please visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey 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
Disappointment
The pathways to the malls are crumbling,
few climb the steps to the temple
turmoil, rising water, sudden rain,
Lear stumbles on the heath
while others not nourished
watch the skies.
We creep about the earth
beetles foraging in disappointment.
Celebrities have shed their scripts,
bad actors are making speeches,
in the streets where only those who can’t
adapt are listening, shaking fists,
carrying signs, crude and full of blame.
Clouds continue. The sun rises in the east,
boils down into the sea at night.
All the stars have shifted,
slight movement, but nothing’s changed.
We continue with our weeping,
but still walk toward the crumbling
entranceways of commerce, and search
for words to form a prayer to gods we trusted once.
David Fraser is a poet, and spoken-word performer, who lives in Nanoose Bay. His poetry has appeared in Rocksalt, (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and Tesseracts 18. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, 2016.
I span my wife's hips with my hands
when she returns from our garden;
like a farmer contemplating his soil;
its width, depth and richness; surely
when man and wife were thrown
out of Eden, God hid a little of the land
of Paradise in Eve's heart and body.
Julian O'Dea is a retired government scientist who began writing poetry a few years ago. He has had haiku and other poems published in a range of online and paper journals. He lives in Canberra, Australia. His main interest is in lyrical poetry.
Coming Back
No sign upon your ten white
steps, mica-specked, nor on the fossil
rock beside them; nothing
written on the bell that, ringing,
should have brought you to me.
No omen in your invitation—days ago,
the flowered card—and so
through door-glass curved
with age, I watch you, stunned:
your bird-arms rise stiff as if
with cold, in what could be a wave.
You’re brittle in your leather
chair, your red chair. Your stick arms--
so brown and dry beneath
your off-the-shoulder dress, so brave--
rise again, embrace me, erase our years
of silence. Embracing me as if as usual,
here at the end of them.
Your legs—careful, like herons
walking, stalking the pools
of your pain. Your bird’s beak
nose, sharp enough now to shatter
the egg of the end of your life and hatch
you out somewhere far
beyond my reach.
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, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the 2016 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition.
She has also published three books under her own imprint, DaysEye Press and Studios. To read more, please visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey 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
Disappointment
The pathways to the malls are crumbling,
few climb the steps to the temple
turmoil, rising water, sudden rain,
Lear stumbles on the heath
while others not nourished
watch the skies.
We creep about the earth
beetles foraging in disappointment.
Celebrities have shed their scripts,
bad actors are making speeches,
in the streets where only those who can’t
adapt are listening, shaking fists,
carrying signs, crude and full of blame.
Clouds continue. The sun rises in the east,
boils down into the sea at night.
All the stars have shifted,
slight movement, but nothing’s changed.
We continue with our weeping,
but still walk toward the crumbling
entranceways of commerce, and search
for words to form a prayer to gods we trusted once.
David Fraser is a poet, and spoken-word performer, who lives in Nanoose Bay. His poetry has appeared in Rocksalt, (Mother Tongue Press), Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press), Walk Myself Home (Caitlin Press) and Tesseracts 18. His most recent collection is After All the Scissor Work is Done, Leaf Press, 2016.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
February 24, 2017
Cover Art: Body Cadence by Mori McCrae
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
February 24, 2017
Cover Art: Body Cadence by Mori McCrae
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Mori McCrae is a student of poetry and of drawing and painting. It is difficult to say which takes precedence, for her work centers on the borderland between poetry and visual art. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, 1986. She is anticipating the release of her first chapbook of poetry entitled Shelf Life, which will be launched in the spring of 2017, published by Grey Borders. She is a founding member of the Jordan Art Gallery, which showcases Fine Art and Craft from the Niagara Region, where she lives.
A Dog’s Home
live in my heart and pay no rent
- Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
Cordy settles into her temporary corner
between storefront and the fierce north wind,
between her master’s backpack and strangers’
feet pacing without watching the plebeian
sidewalk. There goes a well-rounded – no, fattish
terrier so exquisitely groomed, you know it has
a home with roof and walls. It growls in passing.
It could learn manners from a homeless mutt.
What’s home? Shakespeare would have a word
for it. Her master converses with Cordy
in Shakespeare as they walk the moor of this
stranger-city, on their way to the next spot
of green – the growing, giving grass
a dog likes to roll in. Not shattered green like
glass in the gutter, or parched green of a dollar
bill. Her master’s getting old. Lear, he’s
called, as it rhymes with near and here, a sound
of welcome. Soon the two of them
will be on their feet again, into the bright
unknown, a gleam as of the moon in transit.
Cordy is her master’s home.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems are included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara Univ) and Villanelles (Everyman's Library). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Dressed for Success
I remember having my pussy grabbed
coming from a party my skirt was short
but my arms interlocked with friends
in a wall of merriment
he reached up and grabbed anyway
before we beat him with his own radio
this is for our daughters
who we send out to the concrete of The Mission
The Fruitvale The Financial District
the inner cities now suburbs
suburbs now ghettos
invisible from golden towers
silky white faces packed into the belly of The Town
when asked who was from here only one replied
all else transplants
what are we running from
the pussy grabbers are everywhere
80 percent of posts refer to anxiety
this Indigenous People’s day
the hate so palpable
redder than red face red states
there are scary clown warnings on the news
the scariest clown of all threatens
on all channels zero
what a time to carry your pussy like an ax
to mother like a polar bear
in this endangered fall
come hurricane season
come storm of my eye
I come swinging baseball bat
a pussy bow at my neck
a knock-off
Gucci sweater to hide
my naked rage inside.
Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra is a two-time Pushcart nominee and Literary Death Match winner. She has published online and in many print magazines, such as Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, Chiron Review, Stone Boat Review, and Great Weather For Media. A full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless was released to good review from Manic D Press May 2014. In the past year she authored Bad Sandy (Lucky Bastard Press), Pearl Tongue (Be About It Press), The Water Wars (Pedestrian Poets Series), On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press), and most recently Armadillo Heart (Paper Press) with MK Chavez.
Filling In
In the high New Mexico desert
stand plateaux, buttes, and pinnacles;
between them,
vast canyons and valleys –
all that remain of what were once
thick layers of stone,
and at their summit, an inland sea.
Erosion is time’s final judgment
upon the upward thrust
of invisible plates.
Even mountains are mortal.
I view this void from the long valley below;
I can almost feel the slow, indomitable
attrition of stone by ice, snow, rain, and wind.
As if by magic, my eyes fill in what history has erased.
If only for a moment, I reverse time.
Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;
Interdisciplinary Seminar facilitator, American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center (AIDPC)/Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Promotion Sciences, College of Public Health, OUHSC, Oklahoma City OK; Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Organizational Change, University of Missouri, Columbia
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology
He is author of nine books and chapbooks of poetry,
the most recent of which is Light and Shadow (2016)
http://www.doodleandpeck.com/product-page/light-and-shadow).
live in my heart and pay no rent
- Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
Cordy settles into her temporary corner
between storefront and the fierce north wind,
between her master’s backpack and strangers’
feet pacing without watching the plebeian
sidewalk. There goes a well-rounded – no, fattish
terrier so exquisitely groomed, you know it has
a home with roof and walls. It growls in passing.
It could learn manners from a homeless mutt.
What’s home? Shakespeare would have a word
for it. Her master converses with Cordy
in Shakespeare as they walk the moor of this
stranger-city, on their way to the next spot
of green – the growing, giving grass
a dog likes to roll in. Not shattered green like
glass in the gutter, or parched green of a dollar
bill. Her master’s getting old. Lear, he’s
called, as it rhymes with near and here, a sound
of welcome. Soon the two of them
will be on their feet again, into the bright
unknown, a gleam as of the moon in transit.
Cordy is her master’s home.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poems are included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara Univ) and Villanelles (Everyman's Library). Her latest book is Uplift (Cold River Press, 2016).
Dressed for Success
I remember having my pussy grabbed
coming from a party my skirt was short
but my arms interlocked with friends
in a wall of merriment
he reached up and grabbed anyway
before we beat him with his own radio
this is for our daughters
who we send out to the concrete of The Mission
The Fruitvale The Financial District
the inner cities now suburbs
suburbs now ghettos
invisible from golden towers
silky white faces packed into the belly of The Town
when asked who was from here only one replied
all else transplants
what are we running from
the pussy grabbers are everywhere
80 percent of posts refer to anxiety
this Indigenous People’s day
the hate so palpable
redder than red face red states
there are scary clown warnings on the news
the scariest clown of all threatens
on all channels zero
what a time to carry your pussy like an ax
to mother like a polar bear
in this endangered fall
come hurricane season
come storm of my eye
I come swinging baseball bat
a pussy bow at my neck
a knock-off
Gucci sweater to hide
my naked rage inside.
Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra is a two-time Pushcart nominee and Literary Death Match winner. She has published online and in many print magazines, such as Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, Chiron Review, Stone Boat Review, and Great Weather For Media. A full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless was released to good review from Manic D Press May 2014. In the past year she authored Bad Sandy (Lucky Bastard Press), Pearl Tongue (Be About It Press), The Water Wars (Pedestrian Poets Series), On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press), and most recently Armadillo Heart (Paper Press) with MK Chavez.
Filling In
In the high New Mexico desert
stand plateaux, buttes, and pinnacles;
between them,
vast canyons and valleys –
all that remain of what were once
thick layers of stone,
and at their summit, an inland sea.
Erosion is time’s final judgment
upon the upward thrust
of invisible plates.
Even mountains are mortal.
I view this void from the long valley below;
I can almost feel the slow, indomitable
attrition of stone by ice, snow, rain, and wind.
As if by magic, my eyes fill in what history has erased.
If only for a moment, I reverse time.
Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;
Interdisciplinary Seminar facilitator, American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center (AIDPC)/Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Promotion Sciences, College of Public Health, OUHSC, Oklahoma City OK; Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Organizational Change, University of Missouri, Columbia
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology
He is author of nine books and chapbooks of poetry,
the most recent of which is Light and Shadow (2016)
http://www.doodleandpeck.com/product-page/light-and-shadow).
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 3, 2017
Cover Art: Beauty Rest by Mori McCrae
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
March 3, 2017
Cover Art: Beauty Rest by Mori McCrae
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Mori McCrae is a student of poetry and of drawing and painting. It is difficult to say which takes precedence, for her work centers on the borderland between poetry and visual art. She is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, 1986. She is anticipating the release of her first chapbook of poetry entitled Shelf Life, which will be launched in the spring of 2017, published by Grey Borders. She is a founding member of the Jordan Art Gallery, which showcases Fine Art and Craft from the Niagara Region, where she lives.
Taking The Poor Kids To The Zoo (Thailand)
Ripped blue ribbons in your imperfect hair
“Yak bai doo chanee!” I want to see the gibbons
I’ll race you to the top of the steps
The big kid has skin lesions all over his arms
He exaggerates fatigue and says he can’t go on
I lie and tell them the gibbons are a minute away
And think about what I was told in the morning
A third of these kids have HIV
But they don’t know that, yet
Some of them flinch when I hustle them along
Orphans, I’m told, children of no one, junkies, the dead
But when they find a slope of dry grass
They ask me to take their old knapsacks
Cindy, Barbie, Hello Kitty, ruthlessly bruised and dirty
There’s some kind of functionality, in a banking, for sliding
I hope it’s not too much of a rarity
I can’t help but pity them
The world functions, in moments, I guess
Above the grass slopes there are penguins
The big kid follows me in
Looking at a woolly mammoth he asks, “Is that real?”
“Yes,” I tell him
He looks at me suspiciously
I’ve lost half the kids
“Yak bai doo chanee!!” says the girl, smiling wonderfully
The gibbons, I say, must have gone home for Christmas
They are aware now I am as lost as them
But they go along with me, pretending
“How did they get home?” they ask
“The gibbons have boarded a plane.”
They purse their lips, and shake their heads like grown-ups
And for a moment I’d forgotten about the HIV, the ripped blue ribbons, lesions
Or that I was told to be concerned about bleeding
Or that everything they carried or wore was knackered and dirty
Or that the future in some schools is a much more formidable enemy
The gibbons had gone home for Christmas
End of story
James Austin Farrell is UK-born a fiction writer and journalist living in Asia.
Between Orders
You need to understand
how something unremarkable can happen…
A bar room filled with happy heads,
their mouths unhinged with laughter
and talk of the town.
It’s a soft night in a far county,
a fine funk in the air.
At one table women are toying with emotion.
Let us call these women fishers of men;
men jabbering about sports and war and motors.
And behind the bar is Dan, a man with a face
like a shotgun about to go off accidentally.
“How ‘bout those such and suches.”
a voice sounds out over the hubbub.
“We’ll never see their like again.”
another voice calls back in response,
before it’s lost like a leaf in autumnal waters.
And just then, or so the legend goes,
the front door of this fine establishment blows open.
But only the keenest seem to notice,
the world rocking in the coddled night.
Only the sharpest wits take any comfort
in the presence of the unnecessary.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a Pushcart nominee with over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), all also available via Amazon. His video-and-music poems can be viewed on YouTube’s ‘BruceMcRaePoetry’, or the Facebook page for ‘Thee Caretakers’.
Heading Home
Farewell to day. The heat layered
high through dawn, spreading wideover
spaces where long shadows formedbeyond
ancient obstacles burdened intoplace.
Night….finally moved in.
People casually scattered. Stars opened
their windows onto a blacksky. The desert
diner closed up; its neon’ssplizzed out a last
drizzle of sparked light.
A warm migrant breeze slipped overthe road.
Coolness followed, pressing ontothe sand and
weeds and anything occupying space.
The car’s engine shuddered and thengroaned
into labor breathing. A cylinder war under the hood
struggled to maintain life.
A cloud of dust rose from the caras I tossed a
bottle at the last road sign.
Roger Singer
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 10, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
March 10, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Paleo-Visitor
As a confirmed summer renter,
I find a model in
the Paleo-Indian,
who (as far as we know)
may also have been
a seasonal visitor.
He, too, lived off the land
--big mammals, though--
and he did not, of course,
own house or acreage.
In the Augusta State Museum,
you can see meat caches,
Maine’s first buildings in stone.
The P-I also left tips of spears
and the occasional musk-ox bone.
No one knows why, but after some time
almost all the big animals disappeared.
I’ve seasoned here, too,
for two decades now,
searching out summer houses
--wood ones, yes, but built on stone--
with a bit of land, two stories,
and, preferably, a view.
When one rental passes,
I hunt for another.
I own nothing in Maine,
preferring to leave that
to the various classes
of what I loosely call
“inhabitants” --I want a better word.
By Labor Day I’ve left behind
some bags of sorted trash
and a last bit of seed for the birds.
I've also spent a fair amount of cash.
Before the P-I, by the way,
no one knows who lived here.
As I drive the island roads,
some people smile, wave “Hello.”
Others look bullets through my heart.
The latter, hunters, perhaps, might remember,
(though I claim no right or strong belief)
that well before their people came,
the dates and names not always clear,
no more than are the definitions
--native, local, renter, lawyer,
summer resident, Indian chief--
there were others here, and, before those,
as far as scholars can keep track,
other others, going back and back
twelve thousand years or so.
to ...no one knows.
Previously published in Ascent Aspirations, 2011
--Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (2013)
Ron Singer’s (www.ronsinger.net) seventh book, a collection of Maine poems, Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (2013) won an award and was nominated for a Pushcart. His eighth, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (2015) can be found in about 100 libraries across the U.S., Canada, and beyond. His ninth, and most recent, is a double memoir, Betty & Estelle/A Voice for My Grandmother (2016).
Criminal Erasures
20th century authors,
inspired and led by nature’s rhythms.
knew what lines their typesetters
changed, or what excess
punctuation was added
or which sentence of painstakingly crafted
words melted off the waxed plate causing
another disaster at the printers.
21st century scribblers
their ears deaf from raucous noise,
jammed iPod cords in ears
to lead them into civic traffic
where whole stories are condensed
in smashed skulls,
not family lore
connecting generations
of multiplying families.
Now in ‘wireless-ME society‘
with mega-ever growing disconnections,
we all suffer loss
as both writer and reader causalities.
Bernice Lever from “Small Acts” Black Moss Press, 2016
Bernice Lever, who has read her poems on 5 continents, has her 10th poetry book , “Small Acts”, with Black Moss Press, fall 2016. A retired college English teacher and freelance editor, she lives on Bowen Island, BC. Canada. www.colourofwords.com Bernice, whose 1st book was “Yet Woman I Am”, HBP, 1979, ‘gets high on words!’. Also she has won many awards and prizes, but is proudest to be a Peace Poet.
The Land Of Bureaucrats (or how to sell mouthwash)
i dreamt there was a ferry heading to america
and all there was was a drunk tug boat captain
with a lit skyline where i was denied entry...
there was a murder weapon and false witnesses
there were drag queens and flamboyant lounge singers in sequins
returning home exhausted after an evening on the beat
a thief carrying my set of world book encyclopedias
and little black book of women who refused to return my messages
an old dusty mannequin who plays piano in the window on orchard
returning home down the cobblestone of palm readers
bailbondsmen and religious artifacts...
there was a hollering madwoman with a purse all full of stray cats
and her claim to fame that she used to once be miss coney island
and if i asked her to marry her i'd be allowed to become a citizen
there was a glider circling overhead with a banner which read--
"drink schlitz beer!"
old solemn and sincere shirtless men with staticy transistors stuck to ears
and an endless boardwalk of gigolos, strumpets, blind men and stray dogs
an adorable little black boy eagerly probing and
asking curious questions at the dynamite stand
golden tenement prison castles silhouetted in shadows
and the closer you got to them the less familiar but more exotic
with stray scents of formaldehyde, orange rind, and pork fried rice
this is where the saints and organized crime come to die
a bike rack all filled with those old time schwinn bicycles
with banana seats and gleaming harley davidson handlebars
and a young girl trying to seduce me with her skinned knees
tomboy imagination which involved bullying and charming subjugation
a little further on i could see the customs agent nodding out on heroin
and felt like a new man...
Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
eleven 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, "A Different Sort Of Distance"
(Skive Magazine Press) "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)
"The American Book of the Dead" (Red Dashboard Press)
As a confirmed summer renter,
I find a model in
the Paleo-Indian,
who (as far as we know)
may also have been
a seasonal visitor.
He, too, lived off the land
--big mammals, though--
and he did not, of course,
own house or acreage.
In the Augusta State Museum,
you can see meat caches,
Maine’s first buildings in stone.
The P-I also left tips of spears
and the occasional musk-ox bone.
No one knows why, but after some time
almost all the big animals disappeared.
I’ve seasoned here, too,
for two decades now,
searching out summer houses
--wood ones, yes, but built on stone--
with a bit of land, two stories,
and, preferably, a view.
When one rental passes,
I hunt for another.
I own nothing in Maine,
preferring to leave that
to the various classes
of what I loosely call
“inhabitants” --I want a better word.
By Labor Day I’ve left behind
some bags of sorted trash
and a last bit of seed for the birds.
I've also spent a fair amount of cash.
Before the P-I, by the way,
no one knows who lived here.
As I drive the island roads,
some people smile, wave “Hello.”
Others look bullets through my heart.
The latter, hunters, perhaps, might remember,
(though I claim no right or strong belief)
that well before their people came,
the dates and names not always clear,
no more than are the definitions
--native, local, renter, lawyer,
summer resident, Indian chief--
there were others here, and, before those,
as far as scholars can keep track,
other others, going back and back
twelve thousand years or so.
to ...no one knows.
Previously published in Ascent Aspirations, 2011
--Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (2013)
Ron Singer’s (www.ronsinger.net) seventh book, a collection of Maine poems, Look to Mountains, Look to Sea (2013) won an award and was nominated for a Pushcart. His eighth, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (2015) can be found in about 100 libraries across the U.S., Canada, and beyond. His ninth, and most recent, is a double memoir, Betty & Estelle/A Voice for My Grandmother (2016).
Criminal Erasures
20th century authors,
inspired and led by nature’s rhythms.
knew what lines their typesetters
changed, or what excess
punctuation was added
or which sentence of painstakingly crafted
words melted off the waxed plate causing
another disaster at the printers.
21st century scribblers
their ears deaf from raucous noise,
jammed iPod cords in ears
to lead them into civic traffic
where whole stories are condensed
in smashed skulls,
not family lore
connecting generations
of multiplying families.
Now in ‘wireless-ME society‘
with mega-ever growing disconnections,
we all suffer loss
as both writer and reader causalities.
Bernice Lever from “Small Acts” Black Moss Press, 2016
Bernice Lever, who has read her poems on 5 continents, has her 10th poetry book , “Small Acts”, with Black Moss Press, fall 2016. A retired college English teacher and freelance editor, she lives on Bowen Island, BC. Canada. www.colourofwords.com Bernice, whose 1st book was “Yet Woman I Am”, HBP, 1979, ‘gets high on words!’. Also she has won many awards and prizes, but is proudest to be a Peace Poet.
The Land Of Bureaucrats (or how to sell mouthwash)
i dreamt there was a ferry heading to america
and all there was was a drunk tug boat captain
with a lit skyline where i was denied entry...
there was a murder weapon and false witnesses
there were drag queens and flamboyant lounge singers in sequins
returning home exhausted after an evening on the beat
a thief carrying my set of world book encyclopedias
and little black book of women who refused to return my messages
an old dusty mannequin who plays piano in the window on orchard
returning home down the cobblestone of palm readers
bailbondsmen and religious artifacts...
there was a hollering madwoman with a purse all full of stray cats
and her claim to fame that she used to once be miss coney island
and if i asked her to marry her i'd be allowed to become a citizen
there was a glider circling overhead with a banner which read--
"drink schlitz beer!"
old solemn and sincere shirtless men with staticy transistors stuck to ears
and an endless boardwalk of gigolos, strumpets, blind men and stray dogs
an adorable little black boy eagerly probing and
asking curious questions at the dynamite stand
golden tenement prison castles silhouetted in shadows
and the closer you got to them the less familiar but more exotic
with stray scents of formaldehyde, orange rind, and pork fried rice
this is where the saints and organized crime come to die
a bike rack all filled with those old time schwinn bicycles
with banana seats and gleaming harley davidson handlebars
and a young girl trying to seduce me with her skinned knees
tomboy imagination which involved bullying and charming subjugation
a little further on i could see the customs agent nodding out on heroin
and felt like a new man...
Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
eleven 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, "A Different Sort Of Distance"
(Skive Magazine Press) "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)
"The American Book of the Dead" (Red Dashboard Press)
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 17, 2017
Cover Art: Apocalypse by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
March 17, 2017
Cover Art: Apocalypse by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Once We Were
I conjure the ancestors
from the furry-faced
curious-eyed
recently tail-less
to the fair- visaged, large-brained
gifted and endowed peoples
who rule all far-flung arcs
of a round and shrinking world,
now at the end of our predominance---
air, land and water more hostile than before.
We left oceans, trees and caves,
rampaged and ransacked,
justified the spoil with new versions of god,
forgetting veneration of the feminine force of nature,
the fertile and nourishing,
now demeaned, suppressed.
Because we arrogantly turn from lessons of harmony
we are doomed to disappear,
supplanted by robotic versions
of our once promising yet vulnerable human being.
Katherine L. Gordon is a rural Ontario poet,
publisher, author, editor, judge and reviewer.
She is an award winning writer whose works have been published
internationally, translated into several languages.
Her latest book Landscapes, poems from the seasons of
Ontario’s soul, Cyclamens and Swords Press, was reviewed in Canadian Stories
summer edition 2016, a collaboration with James Deahl.
Ozymandias
left debris on desert sand
wife still looks for him
winds lift whorls of dust
phantom buffalo herds graze
vanished prairie sea
Sue Littleton: A Texan, Sue Littleton lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has published 18 books of poetry, 12 of them bilingual. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and literary magazines on-line, as well as printed anthologies in the U.S., Canada, Australia, England, and other countries. Her bilingual epic poem Corn Woman, now in 3rd edition, the history of corn in the Americas, has received critical acclaim.
Rain
digs into the
crotch of
trees the
house a
cold boat
My baby gone
pasted to a
hill in
Colorado I
said I
didn't
need him,
a lie I
only use
it and the
rain the way it
beats a
code to get here,
to say oh
please love
hurry
Lyn Lifshin: New books include Knife Edge & Absinthe: the Tango poems; For the Roses, poems for Joni Mitchell, All The Poets Who Touched Me; A Girl Goes Into The Woods; Malala, Tangled as the Alphabet: The Istanbul Poems. : Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle; Malala and Femina Eterna: Enheduanna, Scheherazade and Nefertiti; Stained Glass, Maple Leaves. web site:www.lynlifshin.com
coming soon Degas’ Little Dancer , The Silk Road, Winter Poems and an update to my Gale Research Series LIPS, BLUES, BLUE LIPS:ON THE OUTSIDE, and aliveasaloadedgun
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 24, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
March 24, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
The Mute
Words aren’t friends to her.
Her ears are full of their noise.
Warily she talks.
Jacynthe — A Quadille
Silent childhood
Rarely speaking
Late Blooming Child?
Remediate Missing Cognitive Foundations — Racial Discrimination
I love you
Thank you
Pardon me, what did you say?
Tai Kwon Do — she speaks
with her movement just like the others.
Blackbelt first degree — Yippee!
Maybe there is hope.
Laurie Geschke is an advocate for her daughter with a diagnosis of mutism. The first poem expresses the poet's recent revelation that mutism is not a choice, nor is it something one overcomes. The second poem covers the first 21 years of that daughter's life in 44 words, of which seven are words that her daughter used correctly during a six year period in her teens. These poems were written as an exercise in expression for a Memoir-writing workshop
Laurie Geschke: I wasn't born a warrior --- but I had a child
who needed me to become one. So I did.
Now I will always be a warrior.
Outside
Branch to wire
ponderosa to willow
bush and bramble, JOY
feathered in brilliant speckles
zip lines on rounded wings
acrobatic, upside down, JOY
whizzes, whirrs, rapidly fires
swoops and forages
beak first, JOY
lands, grasps the world
with strong feet.
Sandra Lynxleg is currently home recovering, resting, and looking out her kitchen window. She's a published poet and amateur painter; you can visit her webpage: www.sandralynnlynxleg.ca
Burning at Both Ends
They say that like it’s a bad thing,
like that double flame ain’t just the best
you’d ever want, and you not knowing anyway
whether you’re gonna last longer
with only one end lit — you’ll maybe
get hit by a bus before you can even vote,
and they’ll pry that half-a-candle
from your rigored fingers.
It ain’t like your kid
or your brother
or your dog
can use what’s left, and that’s a fact.
And they say it like there’s only one
handed out, ever, right along with your first diaper
and that’s it, the box and the matches
snatched away forever and that may be so,
it may be so.
But I say it ain’t a bad thing.
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, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; The Sand Hill Review, California Poetry Quarterly, Caesura and Red Wheelbarrow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. She won first prize and an Honorable Mention in the Sonnet category of the 2016 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest, and first prize in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the same competition.
She has also published three books under her own imprint, DaysEye Press and Studios. To read more, please visit https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey
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
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
March 31, 2017
Cover Art: My Dance by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
March 31, 2017
Cover Art: My Dance by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Hunger
And it’s like this: everyone’s hungry for something.
Go to the river. You’ll see what I mean.
Gulls fight, geese grab, duck’s heads plunge deep and hold.
The heron – such a long sharp curve, reaching.
It’s summer. Blond heat wants to squeeze you dry
as surely as that woman you remember from a bar. Once.
Elbow grease is a forgotten phrase. Tell your grandkid to
put some elbow grease into it and the look you’ll get is priceless.
But what’s gone is not lost.
A man stands thigh deep in an uncertain current
wades out into the ink black air
plays his line tenderly. Listens with his whole body.
Lesley Strutt is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, and blogger living in Merrickville, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in anthologies, e-zines, as well as journals such as Prairie Fire, Ottawater, The Literary Review, Bywords, and the Canadian Woman Studies Journal. Her chapbook Small as Butterflies won the 2015 Tree Chapbook prize. She sits on the National Council of the League of Canadian Poets and she is a member of PEN Canada. Her first full-length collection of poems, Window Ledge, will be published by Inanna Publications in 2019.
Scar Love
Let me love you
my way:
skin on skin,
scar
on
scar
Charly Wilde (pen name for Ralitsa Gencheva) is a young poet from Bulgaria, who has gratuated and worked in the field of Finance for large international companies for seven years until she took a rest from the corporate world and focused on writing, which is her true passion. She just turned 30 and decided that this is the point she starts following her dreams!
She says she doesn't believe in people with no sins and in love without madness. She believes that the beauty of the words can awaken the dead souls and savage the living ones.
She|Her|Me
She is
She can
She does
She is owned by no man
The devil uses her
A temptress in the night
But God lives through her
She is full of grace and light
She is wild
Don’t attempt to tame her
Her feral side will show
A side that few wish to know
She is the calm of the wind
She is warmth of ice and snow
She has control of fire
She is as contained as water’s flow
Do not tell her what to think
Her mind is her own
She controls it with strength and emotions
She knows all to be known
Her fingers can be gentle
They can throw fury and fire
Her heart can be open and pure
Or it can be contained with barbwire
You think you know her
Think you can understand
Yet she exposes just the tip of the iceberg
Her heart has the depth of sinking sand
She is kindness
She is pure
She is rage
She is obscure
In her red core she creates miracles
Her green gives love which she protects
Indigo sees what others can not
Violet creates and has vast aspects
She comes from the earth
She lives by the moon
Her roots dig deep in rich soil
Her branches reach up and bloom
She is
She can
She does
She is owned by no man.
Susan Lee Koert: This poem explores the complexity of the feminine form. Susan is a mother, wife and survivor of domestic abuse. Heer poem celebrates her recovery and self-awareness as well as the understanding of femininity. She has only recently decided to publish her poems. Her poetry has been a tool for recovery and discovery of self. She hopes to bring encouragement through the art of words.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 7, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
April 7, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Postcards From The Northern Plains
Out here in america
they show over the news
at 7 “the children's shooting club”
& a proud 7 year old
with rifle & camouflage
while just over his shoulder
in the back of a pickup
that poor dead deer
with its eyes
glazed over
gazing up
to the heavens
& such beaming parents
taking his photo
while my son’s best friend
mother who believes in the cause
drives 72 hours straight
from vermont to north dakota
stops over once for shelter & support
to sleep over in chicago
& by the next day
bleary-eyed makes it
to the campgrounds
of cherokee country
getting chased like that deer
through the prairie trampling
the shivering cold november
rivers protesting the oil lines
being put down beneath
sacred indian ground
(“and the beat goes on”)
with the very brave sheriffs
spraying mase
& wooden pellets
at them as interestingly
like no footage
from iraq or afghanistan
this never makes the news and wash
off their wounds at the indian casinos
2 blushing blondes
(beauty salon style)
without a care in the world
go back & forth
over the local news with giggles
& inside jokes about the weather
hx has a tendency
to repeat itself
but who the hell would know
or for that matter even care?
No Translation
They all got blown away in that bar
in that smoky pool hall in Sleepy Hollow
that night
of believe it or not karaoking
as everything had grinded
to a sudden halt
those moments of slow-motion
of emotional loss
lost & found & lost once more
his girlfriend stunned
as if belting one directly to the gods
never knew he had had it in him
& where it came from
like discovering some long-lost psalm
from some martyr on his deathbed
who had been silenced
& abandoned & alienated
his whole existence
misinterpreted
by the wrong people
by the mobs & the masses
& was the real hero
& saved them
singing the refrain
to that gorgeous Meatloaf song–
“I want you, I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you”
& was the first time
when they had shuffled home
through the shadows
in the deep darkness
right before the dawn
where they all just shut the fuck up
& there was absolutely no small talk
but pure reflection & silence
& could hear everything thawing
in the miraculous mellifluous season
the pell-mell melt-off of snow
flowing through the gutters
the flapping of nightbirds
even the river
& that chorus of radiant
redemptive foghorns
& knew after that performance
awestruck
at a loss for words
which had moved everyone to tears
nothing would ever be the same again.
Joseph Reich is a social worker who lives with his wife and
eleven 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, "A Different Sort Of Distance"
(Skive Magazine Press) "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)
"The American Book of the Dead" (Red Dashboard Press)
Video Poems.
I Ain't Got Nothin Gainst Fairies
Neo Genesis: Day 6, Near Midnight
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B83aDjYJtxFBMUhCZTQwNEt5Q00
Louie Crew Clay
Pain Can be Your Friend
Pain can be your friend
when other senses die.
When laughter mutes itself
on children’s faces round,
when only tears inform
you of your lover’s pain,
then let the throbbing joint
insist, the old wound
ache again, arthritic knuckle
inadvertent jammed
against the cupboard door
suck breath in searing gasps.
Oh yes, raw pain confirms
a consciousness when eyesight
tunnels down and hearing
rustles off and taste evaporates.
When there is no heat
to passion, and the cold
cannot be thwarted,
then let the body’s hurts
deflect awhile, despair.
Pain will be your friend
until the last.
Derek Peach has been a teacher and traveler for almost 50 years and has recorded those experiences in poetry and prose along the way. He continues to experiment with verse in his retirement in Victoria and has published four books of poetry.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 14, 2017
Cover Art: Great Synagogue, Rome by Helen Bar-Lev
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
April 14, 2017
Cover Art: Great Synagogue, Rome by Helen Bar-Lev
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Also a Full Moon
Here in Spain
there is also a full moon
and the hotel
celebrates our exodus
from the holyland
five long days ago
with dishes of calamari
and other sea fruit delicacies;
flamenco dancing
is an after-dinner delight
The full moon and I
eye each other,
he chastises me –
what you doing here
when you should be home
in your Jerusalem
and not in Spanish exile –
don’t you realize
how difficult it was
for the Lord to get you
out of Egypt,
that it was not easy
to move the earth
and the heavens,
to part waters,
and you in your gratitude
flee to Spain,
from which you were forced to exodus
five centuries ago,
to which your kin
were forbidden to return
by rabbinical proclamation,
and this whole land
screams it,
its history
repeats its stupidity
ad infinitum,
and to this country you come
for the convenience
of ignoring
the commemoration
of that other evil exodus
from Egypt
five centuries
plus three thousand
years ago,
before the fact of Jesus
entered any
contemporary imagination,
before Queen Isabella
raped the Americas,
expelled you Jews?
You know this,
every molecule of you senses it
it has entered your blood stream,
your collective Jewish memory,
it explodes your emotions,
pellets your conscience
and here you thought
you would find
a peaceful vacation,
in this nation alien?
Go home!
says the full moon,
soon,
I say,
soon…
© 4.2006 Helen Bar-Lev
(published in A Poet's Haggadah, 2008)
Don't Look Back
A strange sentiment had arisen,
wherein
if you weren't the victim of something,
you were nothing
And
foremost among those who were something
by that idea's reckoning
were those who were the descendants,
usually generations removed,
of victims of historical injustice
(as though
every ethnicity hadn't at one time
been victimizer, not victim;
as though
the race itself hadn't wiped out
other species of humans
But
one wasn't supposed to look back that far;
it could confuse things)
And so
they proposed to have their ancestors' victimhood
first acknowledged publicly,
then
financially compensated for,
and
they succeeded in both those goals
But
once those goals were accomplished,
their victimhood was not to be mentioned again
And thus,
though
the records of such events would remain,
the fact of their existence was
s
l
o
w
l
y
erased from the collective memory
Michael Ceraolo: . . . 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.
Momma Does Milk
Momma does nine months
of indigestion and awkwardness,
and massive breast enlargement.
Momma does milk.
Momma does the housework and laundry
despite enlarging horizontally and develops
the mid trimester’s bloom of pregnancy with
big boobs, momma does milk.
Momma gives up her job,
loses her place in the hierarchy of business
CEO’s while maintaining her family’s needs.
Yes, Momma does milk.
Momma does hard labour for 12 hours
plus ‘crowning ‘ for 30 prolonged minutes,
then a tear into her rectum with sutures.
Ouch, momma does milk.
Momma does sitz baths and heat lamp
twice a day – with slow healing and constipation.
Cracked nipples above, sore bottom below.
Oui, momma does milk.
Momma does the blues on day five.
While baby sucks, momma drinks ounces of melancholy
with sore stitches and a colicky baby boy.
Sadly, momma does milk.
Momma is awake all night, hubby sleeps
but gets the twins to school on time. The kitchen is
a mess and the laundry piles up. With her
hair untidy, momma does milk.
Mommy does sex at six weeks.
Yucky mommy! Mini pills or an
I.U.D. Does mommy have a choice?
And momma does milk
Mommy dresses for a party and
leaks all over her nursing bra and silk shawl.
Breast pumps fill overflowing bottle,
yet momma does milk.
It’s a year now of motherhood and infancy,
Things are back to normal. The twins
are in grade two. Super mom gives in again
to her baby Viking... momma does milk.
Sterling Haynes
[email protected]
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
April 21, 2017
Cover Art: From Allen Forrest's German Expressionism Revisited Series
Previously Published Cover Image: The Missing Slate Summer 2016
http://themissingslate.com
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
April 21, 2017
Cover Art: From Allen Forrest's German Expressionism Revisited Series
Previously Published Cover Image: The Missing Slate Summer 2016
http://themissingslate.com
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Allen Forrest: Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. Allen studied acting in the Columbia Pictures Talent Program in Los Angeles and digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production.) He currently works in the Vancouver, Canada, as a graphic artist and painter. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation's permanent art collection. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.
Cover Art--
http://art-grafiken.blogspot.ca/2014/06/art-on-cover.html
Art between the covers--
http://art-grafiken.blogspot.ca/2014/04/art-between-covers.html
Commissions--
http://art-grafiken.blogspot.ca/2014/04/art-commissions.html
Artist Interviews/Articles
http://art-grafiken.blogspot.ca/2014/12/artist-interviews-and-articles.html
Wonderland
How odd you look, Madame Olga,
with that ridiculous turban
wrapped around your graying head
and that careless slash of red lipstick
that does absolutely nothing for you
(unless you're channeling Lucille Ball)
The truth is we're both stuck here, Madame Olga,
in this tiny, seedy parlor
with its peeling floral wallpaper and
dim lighting from a feeble lamp
Do you find me strange too, Madame Olga,
the lonely widow waiting nervously for you to speak,
waiting for you to tell me about a
tall, dark, handsome stranger
coming into my life,
someone residing in an unnamed wonderland,
a savior eager to share his vast fortune
with me?
You ask me to come back tomorrow
after I clean out my savings account
and pawn my QVC jewelry collection
It will be then when you plan to
take my money and regale me
with prayers, chants, incantations,
when you attempt to dazzle and divert me
and make my money vanish
like the proverbial rabbit
in an old-time magic show
But I have to question your fading psychic power
You seem not to know intuitively
that your creation of my mythical lover
and his nonexistent wonderland
is headed for extinction
once the hidden wire I'm wearing
performs its own inimitable
trick
Vernon Waring's third e-chapbook will be published in July on Poetry Repairs' website. The 24-poem collection is titled "The Universe Tilts and Other Poems"; five of the poems originally appeared in Ascent Aspirations Magazine. Since 2011 eight of Waring's stories and poems have been commended by the New Millennium Writings Awards Competition judges. Four of his poems have won prizes in the Winning Writers' contests. A former newspaper reporter and public relations consultant, he resides in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
Don't Look Back (Reprise)
And,
at the same time,
the descendants of the most recent victimizers,
and
those who in the idiom of the time
looked like the victimizers
were said to be the recipients of 'privilege'
(Definition of Privilege
-something you have that I don't
frequently paired with
Definition of Merit
-something I have that you don't)
And
the definitions were demonstrated daily
Michael Ceraolo: . . . 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.
night boats
rowing our night boats
toward the threshold
of an awakening
each stroke of the oars
immersed in forgiveness
perspectives
“I still remember,” I tell her,
“haven’t forgotten when you
threw a glass of milk at me”
She sniffs and responds,
“!t was a just little bit at
the bottom of the glass
and it was sour, anyway.”
Ayaz Daryl Nielsen, veteran, hospice nurse, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs) lives in Longmont, Colorado, USA. Editor of bear creek haiku (26+ years/135+ 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
April 28, 2017
Cover Art: Apple Core by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
April 28, 2017
Cover Art: Apple Core by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
More Than a Feeling
Before the collective memory had been erased
the feelings and beliefs
about the damage done
by studying the past
finally reached a point
where those so affected
were driven to action;
thus
the passage of the ADDA
the
Anti-
Defamation of the
Dead
Act
Peace of Mind
And after ADDA had been enacted,
and
allowing a few years for its full effects to be felt,
the nation slept like a baby
Michael Ceraolo: . . . 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.
Gluten Free Poem
This poem is guaranteed gluten-free
with absolutely no cross-contamination
no unwanted verbiage or cant
to spoil its remarkable health benefits
It can be consumed or ruminated on
with absolute impunity
No worries about bloating, flatulence
or other unmentionable side effects
Despite its lack of glutinous proteins
it will not crumble or fall apart
congealed through the cohesive
muscularity of metaphor
A gluten free poem, in fact
strengthens the brain-gut connection
much more effectively
than crossword puzzles or chess
With this comestible there’s
no need to ponder the question,
“To glutinize or not to glutinize”
since poetry transcends and includes the flesh
Though not yet having caught on in France
(due to the French’s irrepressible pride
in their croissants and farine de blé-baguettes)
such poems will soon be available everywhere
This one, however, is the first
of its kind, original delectation--
something its author needn’t announce
since it speaks so persuasively for itself
Susan McCaslin has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Painter, Poet, Mountain: After Cézanne (Quattro Books, 2016). Previous volumes include The Disarmed Heart (The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014) and Demeter Goes Skydiving (University of Alberta Press, 2011). The latter was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award) in 2012. Susan has written a memoir, Into the Mystic: My Years with Olga (Inanna Publications, 2014). She lives 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.
For Johnny.
Silence filled the valley,
A small bird bowed its head.
“Tweet a message far and wide,
alas, our John is dead.”
Twenty lizards formed a guard,
Resplendent in the sun,
An egret looked down from afar,
“Our friend has had his run.”
A Kookaburra screeched on high,
Its song became a thrum,
Joined by crickets one by one,
They played their valley drum.
Cymbals played with tiny feet,
as ants began their tune.
Hi-hats now forever quiet
The bass drum left the room.
The snare, the tom tom,
sighed with grief, paradiddle tears.
This one, that one, this one, that,
became his charioteers.
To guide him on his final walk,
Through eucalypt and briar.
To take him gently to his lake,
his frogs had made a pyre.
He sat at rest among his friends,
To watch the fire burn.
“At rest at last,” he thought. “at last,
I’ve no need for concern."
A night owl stood on guard close by.
its hoot was barely heard.
We’ve precious John here with us now.
Not a creature stirred.
Janice Konstantinidis: I immigrated to the United States twelve years ago, a late life sea change you could say. I live in the Central Coast of California with my husband and two dogs. I have been writing poetry since I was a child. I enjoy writing flash fiction and prose.
Recently my friend John passed away in Australia. He was a gifted drummer who contributed so much to the Australian music industry.
He lived a relatively reclusive life in his later years. He owned an 88-acre property inland and quite isolated. He taught drums and spent his time with wild life. His property was declared a wild life sanctuary.
Here is my dedication poem.
Kind regards,
Janice Konstantinidis
President SLO NightWriters
www.slonightwriters.org
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
May 5, 2017
Cover Art: A Forest Treasure by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
May 5, 2017
Cover Art: A Forest Treasure by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Choosing the Right Colour For Your Car
When I decided to buy a new car
I was offered a choice between
banker's blue
accountant-green
parish brown
or mid-life-crisis red.
"There's no use trying to sell me
beige or grey,
neutral roads are not my scene," I said.
"Perhaps madam, you'd consider
public service white."
"No, too annihilating for my taste."
He tried to engage my interest
in a car the colour of pin-up flesh.
Then there was one
in limited edition coffin-black
and Van Gogh-yellow
to attract a fright.
Perhaps I'll just stick to the car I've got,
which has a sun bleached roof
and panels of an indiscernible colour
forged from too much dirt and rain
and fluctuations in temperature.
Jayne Fenton Keane is a writer, performer and experience designer who experiments with literary forms, collaborations and interdisciplinary research. Her portfolio includes doctorates, books, websites, animations, radio plays, theatre plays, academic papers and performances. She has created and managed local, national and international events, festivals and quest experiences.
Nymphs
Sometimes
I write poems about
Wine and other essential
Molehills of Life at
4 AM when
Bacchus is still awake
Conniving in
Sheer revelry at the
Mere notion he invented
Satyrs and other
Preternatural nymphs.
Speaking of nymphs, I relish the whim that at
4:10 AM or thereabouts, if I rush outside into the
Oozing black syrup I might brush against one,
Intentionally.
Jeff Troyer has written poems and other musings in between travelling paths less taken, leading adventure tours and teaching English and the Humanities from Monterrey, Mexico to Nansha, China. Thanks to the written word, he has been able to exult the good times and survive the perilous. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, an Oriental touch has wended its way into many of his writings.
In Train
While we wait
we may as well
watch
as blind tracks roll;
there’s nothing much left
to fidget with,
a glimpse
of citrus light,
frayed strands, paths
of meagre direction,
a darkling
acid undergrowth.
If we had simply
a bright bloom,
geranium,
mindfulness,
a mandala, to trace
then brush away its ritual sands.
If we had paper
like handcraft
Indian paper
and ink in a well,
its sharp aroma
hinting at scripts.
If...
but now,
a stripped-back waiting
with nil accompaniment,
breath in panting mode,
intemperate,
landscapes flat, dried out,
our eyelids gritty,
eyes straining to discern
a glancing lake,
a swarth of Kelly green,
the old soft rain,
or,
eager people smiling,
marching,
indigenous advocates
of dawn,
making a break for it.
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 12, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
May 12, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Also a Full Moon
Here in Spain
there is also a full moon
and the hotel
celebrates our exodus
from the holyland
five long days ago
with dishes of calamari
and other sea fruit delicacies;
flamenco dancing
is an after-dinner delight
The full moon and I
eye each other,
he chastises me –
what you doing here
when you should be home
in your Jerusalem
and not in Spanish exile –
don’t you realize
how difficult it was
for the Lord to get you
out of Egypt,
that it was not easy
to move the earth
and the heavens,
to part waters,
and you in your gratitude
flee to Spain,
from which you were forced to exodus
five centuries ago,
to which your kin
were forbidden to return
by rabbinical proclamation,
and this whole land
screams it,
its history
repeats its stupidity
ad infinitum,
and to this country you come
for the convenience
of ignoring
the commemoration
of that other evil exodus
from Egypt
five centuries
plus three thousand
years ago,
before the fact of Jesus
entered any
contemporary imagination,
before Queen Isabella
raped the Americas,
expelled you Jews?
You know this,
every molecule of you senses it
it has entered your blood stream,
your collective Jewish memory,
it explodes your emotions,
pellets your conscience
and here you thought
you would find
a peaceful vacation,
in this nation alien?
Go home!
says the full moon,
soon,
I say,
soon…
Helen Bar-Lev was born in New York in 1942. www.helenbarlev.com She holds a B.A. in Anthropology, has lived in Israel for 46 years and has held nearly 100 exhibitions of her landscape paintings, 33 of which were one-woman shows. Her poems and artwork have appeared in numerous online and print anthologies. Six poetry collections, all illustrated by Helen. She is the Amy Kitchener senior poet laureate, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2013 and is the recipient of the Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art 2016. Helen is Assistant to the President of Voices Israel. She lives in Metulla, Israel.
© 4.2006 Helen Bar-Lev
(published in A Poet's Haggadah, 2008)
Dandelions
pepper my front lawn
bright sun-kisses, they drive
neighbours to distraction
in the warm, robin-chirrupped air
these accidents of quick germination
sink stubborn roots
wily survivors, they lay claim
to vast homesteads
of my life
they are a stoical folk accustomed
to hardship, enduring the worst
our fickle climate might offer
but wear plumage of the finest sort
a brief courtship with breeze
brings lift-off
t y
s a s
c c
e
ecstatic flight
Alison Lohans: My primary track record as a writer consists of books for young people and teens, with 26 titles to my credit published by various Canadian and international publishers. Poetry, however, is one of my other loves: in addition to my chapbook Tunings (B-) Print Editions, 2005), I've published quite a few poems over the years, most recently in Transition. Some of my books, poems, and short stories have won awards, and many more have made it to the finalist stage both here in Canada and internationally.
Battle of the Sexes
This mousy girl prefers a donnybrook
when dealing with a fellow’s passing glance.
But though her predilection be to dance
around her adversary’s furtive look,
perceiving how he won’t fight by the book,
she’s more inclined to bank on happenstance.
He certifies he’s not primed for romance
by brushing off the jabbing that he took
from her. But I can see how fast she’s tied
him up with her antagonizing eyes,
as he attempts to sit beside her on
the bus. As he relaxes, opened wide
and totally defenseless, she will rise
and change her seat in lieu of using brawn.
Frank De Canio was born & bred in New Jersey, work in New York. I love music of all kinds, from Bach to Dory Previn, Amy Beach to Amy Winehouse, World Music, Latin, opera. Shakespeare is my consolation, writing my hobby. I like Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
May 19, 2017
Cover Art: Painting for The Other Stories, from the Greater Vancouver, BC series by Allen Forrest
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
May 19, 2017
Cover Art: Painting for The Other Stories, from the Greater Vancouver, BC series by Allen Forrest
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Allen Forrest: Born in Canada and bred in the U.S., Allen Forrest has worked in many mediums: computer graphics, theater, digital music, film, video, drawing and painting. Allen studied acting in the Columbia Pictures Talent Program in Los Angeles and digital media in art and design at Bellevue College (receiving degrees in Web Multimedia Authoring and Digital Video Production.) He currently works in the Vancouver, Canada, as a graphic artist and painter. He is the winner of the Leslie Jacoby Honor for Art at San Jose State University's Reed Magazine and his Bel Red painting series is part of the Bellevue College Foundation's permanent art collection. Forrest's expressive drawing and painting style is a mix of avant-garde expressionism and post-Impressionist elements reminiscent of van Gogh, creating emotion on canvas.
The Next Step
In the end decided
to become a hippy in a slaver’s town
smoke those trees
dig that mine that
isn’t mine or yours anymore.
We have sold everything.
One could get rich
& pay for health insurance.
Seriously considered, like
a guitar solo, but hungry for the peace.
I learnt to bow at university, then
took an online course on how to forget.
In a lifetime the only real silence
was found at the goods yard night shift, 1976, right
after loading the beer, someone else’s January drinks.
We weren’t paid enough for words.
Admit I have subsequently sought
to accumulate a name...
it is an intemperance that tastes like soil.
Invested in the beach, got cancers.
The waves are wearing curlers.
Business Confidence has started begging in the streets.
Don’t trust the faith of those who’ve failed to falter.
There is so much love & caring
but a tight focus, our fences taught us
everything we need. My “brothers”
are coming off their meds
& my “sisters” are just working, Shangri-la.
Some arty bitch gabbles about wings
when I just want to cry. Hallelujah.
I’d trade in my body if I could, imposed
dance-steps as the vote flops. This narrow world
is a runnel. We gurgle our irrelevance.
Reality, nasty thing,
is built like barbeques. Like a defence.
We go back to study more plating etiquettes
at an overdue extinction.
Les Wicks Over 40 years Wicks has performed at festivals, schools, prison etc. Published in over 350 different magazines, anthologies & newspapers across 24 countries in 12 languages. Conducts workshops & runs Meuse Press which focuses on poetry outreach projects like poetry on buses & poetry published on the surface of a river. His 13th book of poetry is Getting By Not Fitting In (Island, 2016).
[email protected]
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
Going to the Catholic School
once a year, bundled in wool
pea coats and snow pants,
mufflers dotted with ice crystals
tightly around our faces so the
incense we were sure would be
too thick to breathe in wouldn’t
make us sneeze. Under our
snow pants, soft corduroy jeans
and our thickest gloves, covered
mittens: we had heard about
rulers smashing bones and skin,
that patent leather shoes were
forbidden. Something about the
stained glass light on the pale
nuns with enormous crosses
and rosaries kept us huddled and
close, walking with only side-
long glances at the Jesus with
bleeding chest, as scary as The
Thing where Jessica, whose
father was a minister, shrieked
when the blob filled the screen.
We didn’t know why the Catholic
girls couldn’t come to our school
but would come later, in high
school. Or why everything
had a smell we never smelled
anywhere else, wondered how
we’d ever catch up in Latin when
we had to. The dark haired girls
with their dangling faces of
Mary they kissed before a ball
game and tests seemed as exotic
as what was hidden under their
white confirmation dresses,
flesh later we heard would writhe
and twist and do the wild thing
since it would be ok once
they confessed
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
Milieu
Spring evening
remembers yin-
coal locks of hair
lit up by yang.
Birds heave and haul the sky
inch by inch behind their backs.
Kushal Poddar is editor of the online magazine ‘Words Surfacing’ He authored ‘The Circus Came To My Island’ (Spare Change Press, Ohio), “A Place For Your Ghost Animals” (Ripple Effect Publishing, Colorado Springs), “Understanding The Neighborhood” (BRP, Australia), “Scratches Within (Florida, USA)” and “Kleptomaniac’s Book of Unoriginal Poems(co-authored)”
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
May 26, 2017
Cover Art: Inspiration by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
May 26, 2017
Cover Art: Inspiration by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Santa Elena
Great walls of stone
rust-colored rock
painted with shadows
carved by the chisel of
the Rio Grande
the long snake river
with walls so high
one can barely see the sun
the sky squeezed out of sight
this is our bedrock earth
bared before our eyes
where water
sculptures stone
where even hard rock
can be sawed and honed
if given enough time
We only float
mere sticks
caught in ripples
carried effortlessly along
through corridors of grandeur
what is our significance
against this land of endless time
where wind and water
work in ageless art
making their mark
upon these cliffs
of Santa Elena
canyon of the wild
canyon of dreams
so it is
so may it ever be.
David Knape is a retired sales manager. He started writing poetry only when he retired.
He has no degrees or things to brag about. He writes of common things.
He writes daily, as part of his routine, and as a crucial part of his life.
For David poetry is as important as an arm or a leg, or...a heart.
Without it, there would be no David.
In War Memorial Park
The ash trees
are dying in
War Memorial Park
The city crew
systematically dismantles one
limb by limb
and it’s gone
The stoic cenotaph soldier
looks out
as the truck lumbers
the pieces away
The soldier
now more visible
to passersby
Names engraved
on the granite structure
he stands atop
WWI; WWII; Korea
limb by limb
men gone
Michael Ugulini is a full-time freelance writer living with his wife in the Niagara Region of Ontario, Canada. He does business writing by day and creative writing by night.
He has poems published by the Wilderness House Literary Review, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine (University of Arkansas -Monticello), Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, Ancient Paths Literary Magazine, De La Mancha, and the New Writer (UK).
His most recent short story, “The Cardinals of Avery Street”, was published by the Baltimore Review.
A Bit of Flotsam Adrift on a Roiling Sea
high dudgeon --
buried in an eternal Cimmerian night
door's slammed and behind it rests, he
abandoned, tattered, a tatterdemalion-limp-rag doll
strapped to the waves on a bit of flotsam
afloat, riding a dusky sea, he
on the other side
a howling, baying wolf and a ravenous cougar, he
outside,
his Sun, casts a brilliant orange hue
breaths its cold heat, she
while below
Lear howls at some unseen crater on a gibbous moon
his tattered clothing adrift like terns catching husky, drafty winds,
cruel sister roars black reminders of the river Styx
where a morose oarsman paddles his bark afloat silently, on a glassine sea,
the paddle barely scars the inky waters, he
travels to an
exhumation
exhalation
exhortation
exculpation
the bark carrying his pale corpse eyeless, unquantifiable
his milky eyes stare back at the distressless beast, oarsman to nowhere, he
and it,
scull through barbed wire surrounding him adrift, he
and the dark exhortations
reflect glimmers of hoary-frost speech, she
a cadenced drumbeat roll
adumbrations, penumbra of plaintive barbs
fishooked, reel him in
and he flounders at the bottom of the bark
a gaffed fish condemned to asphyxiate in an airless world, she
dispassionate calumny of his own making
the horizon a flattened el, arced riverfall
for a barrel worker’s contrivance doomed to tumble helter-skelter
over the falls and drown him at the bottom in its turgid waters, she
well of sadness
grips him in a vise grip of no parting
plaintive screams never to make it to the surface, him
the oarsman erases the bubbles of his last breaths.
by Sy Roth
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 2, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
June 2, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Boom
...boom...
...bo0m...
...boOm...
...frum the bottom...
...i started...
...so it is only n0thing that onE can say to mE...
...a product of how i grew up...
...the newest slavery...
...people see em trying hard...
...when they attempt to play with mE...
...i bring mE pipes out...
...from the gutter...
...topin pro’s...
...never shuttered...
...trimmed in bold...
...nu butter pray for mE...
...all i know is this is funny...
...u i gotta have it...
...was front line at court...
...took mE shot...
...pulled it up...
...cocked it back...
...to fly free...
...these boring thoughts...
...getting bad...
...im getting mad...
...as a piper...
...been through it...
...then i know...
...u feel it...
...u witnessed the struggle from the realest...
...they were trying to lock mE down...
...but they created a monster...
...while they sipping on em...
...little bit pick mE up...
...they say they...
...like to play...
...so when the whistle puffs...
...i will always...
...call their bluff...
...life...
...bless mE soul...
...g0d...
...bless mE mold...
...nothing less than the best...
...and the rest is old...
...dont play chess...
...i...
...lock & load...
...tag somE foes...
...then ill send em homE...
...i put the peddle to the medal hit the gas then im g0ne...
...watching from the white board...
...they tell mE the world is yours...
...let em know...
...i just scored...
...words from the sp@ce man...
...please never let em see your hand...
...in the end...
...i bet they will understand...
...they cant stop...
...what they can not feel...
...standing here is only mE...
...yeah...
...so i feel da pain...
...tell 'em...
...what's mE...
...N@mE...
Tezz
The Psychic’s Daughter
Before we left the old country, so-called,
Mom's tits were on the evening news.
She was bathing in the sea
--the Mediterranean.
Old folks were reading the paper,
while kids screamed and ran around.
When we came to New York,
she worked as a cleaning lady,
polishing brass, scrubbing floors,
making enough to keep us
in bad food and cold remedies.
Then, some uncle set her up
in a store window, luring
people in to have their fortunes told.
She’s been doing that for years now,
perpetrating petty scams,
messing with old people's pensions.
We eat decent cuts of meat
and frequently buy linoleum.
My mother is a soft-core whore,
aging in the window of a store.
I, myself, am in high school now,
just another kid, pretty much,
long and giddy, at Math not bad.
The other day, this uncle -- same--
(skin coldly moist as worm or such)
leaned across the kitchen table
and ran his hand along my arm.
The floor creaked beneath his chair
--it may have said my name.
The steam came over from his tea.
I think this "uncle" is my dad.
—previously published in Word Riot, 2007
Poetry by Ron Singer (www.ronsinger.net) has appeared in many publications. His eighth book, Uhuru Revisited: Interviews with Pro-Democracy Leaders (2015) is available in about a hundred libraries in the U.S., and beyond. His ninth, Betty & Estelle/A Voice for My Grandmother (July 2016), is a double family memoir; his tenth, Geistmann in Africa (2017), is a combination thriller/travelogue.
Chicken Fricassee and Concrete
Milky foamy afternoon
two sleepy dawns
the walls of a pram
a voice, was it?
A street, scabbed knees.
Not wearing long pants
maybe dresses; but running.
Not keeping mouth open, close it!
Chicken fricassee and concrete.
Fields of wheat with
angry farmers.
The smell of pencils.
Hands and dance.
Cold moving away.
The United States.
The World.
The United States.
The state. The neighorhood.
With every passing day
one setting sun and night.
The house.
The room.
The bed.
The closed eyes.
Don Schaeffer has published a dozen books of poetry and a number of photographic poetry essays on YouTube. He has been an habitue of the on-line poetry forum scene for as long as it existed. After 40 years of living in Winnipeg, he moved to Long Island, N.Y. to live with an old friend after his life changed.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 9, 2017
Cover Art
Alabama Hills, California looking west at the High Sierrras. by William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
June 9, 2017
Cover Art
Alabama Hills, California looking west at the High Sierrras. by William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
William C. Crawford is a writer & photographer based in North Carolina.
Why I Will Never Watch Another Soccer Game
Yesterday I bought seven potted red cyclamen for the balcony –
silken petals red as blood –
new-spilled blood – and I remember
when it happened, my son's birthday,
April 17th.
The photo has caught the moment
when several young men at the football game
who support the opposing team
lift his body into the air and holding him horizontal,
facing us, push him protesting and struggling
over the pipe rail of the stadium
and gleefully let him drop
onto the stairs below.
The fall from that height is deadly.
Someone steals his fancy sports shoes – they were new,
his father tells us later–
as he lies, broken and bleeding,
on the cement steps.
He dies of head injuries two days later in hospital.
Just a friendly soccer game with the fan clubs
jostling and insulting each other,
except this time they lost control or never had control
and publicly, openly flaunt imagined invincibility,
competitive anger,
play into mob action and kill someone their own age
in front of a camera in the hands of a news photographer.
It is there for the world to see – newspapers, TV.
The murderers (“Who, us? We were just horsing around!”)
turn themselves in
and we all wait (indefinitely?)
to see what will happen next.
Sue Littleton
ARGENTINA- SOCCER VIOLENCE
Instigator of Argentine soccer fan's murder turns himself in
17 de Abril de 2017
Ampliar
Buenos Aires, Apr 17 (efe-epa).- The suspected instigator of the murder of an Argentine soccer fan, who died after being beaten and thrown down the side of the stadium at a match last Saturday, turned himself in to the law on Monday.
Police confirmed to EFE that Oscar Gomez, nicknamed "Sapito," turned up Monday afternoon at Cordoba province police headquarters and admitted having incited a number of fans to give Emanuel Balbo a thrashing.
Balbo died in hospital Monday after spending several days in critical condition.
As can be seen in the pictures aired on local television, Balbo, 22, was brutally beaten and thrown from the stands onto a stairway into Mario Alberto Kempes Stadium by fans of the local team, Belgrano, which was playing against its top rival, Talleres of Cordoba.
Raul Balbo, father of the victim, confirmed Monday the death of the young man and said that during the Cordoba classic, Emanuel by chance found himself in the stands next to Gomez, accused four years ago of running over and killing another boy of the Balbo family, who was 14 at the time.
"Instead of (Gomez) defending himself, he incited all his pals at the game to attack my son. They started hitting him and did what they did to him. Gomez called on all his friends and said, 'Throw him overboard, he's a Talleres fan!' They ran up and in the end they threw him over the side," Raul Balbo said in an interview on Channel 3.
For her part, the prosecutor in the case, Liliana Sanchez, confirmed that the father's account of what happened is under investigation and that four people have been taken into custody - one of them a minor - charged with aggravated homicide.
The four have now been joined by the suspected instigator of the fatal aggression.
Imprimir noticia Volver a "Hispanic World"
The Archipelago
How could I wish to vanish
when this sky
is such a flawless blue?
I crack from loneliness,
clutch this elephant
I hold against my will.
I need you
my bones whisper,
but you are broken winged,
missing.
The force and the heft
of rosy need
fills my iron bound body
with the splash of liminal light.
This deadly cloak I wear
seeps purple into my marrow.
I wretch on the point
where our sorrow
separates us,
becomes us.
Now I will only wear black,
the colour of spent heat.
Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer and mentor. Jude 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), and the Carers International Poetry Prize (UK).
Jude's last book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (leaf press), was a finalist for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, eight of its poems were shortlisted for the Magpie Award, Judged by George McWhirter, Vancouver's first Poet Laureate and two of its poems were nominated for the coveted Pushcart Prize (US) by two different publishers.
One of Jude's poems from her forthcoming manuscript, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate to ride with thirty three 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 in April.
Gypsy Cartography
Yes, my life a map
tracing rivers and prairies
with the poems of Lorca.
A life feeding off the night songs
of gypsies.
I own a large house
inhabited by five sisters,
a blood moon illuminating
the patio, streets loaded with
wars I prefer to forget.
The days of my life made
flamenco and duende,
cartography without guns glued
to my head.
Sergio A. Ortiz is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. 2nd place in the 2016 Ramón Ataz Annual Poetry Competition sponsored by Alaire publishing house. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in FRIGG, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Bitterzeot Magazine. He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 16, 2017
Cover Art by William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
June 16, 2017
Cover Art by William C. Crawford
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
William C. Crawford is a writer & photographer based in North Carolina.
Dumping Dogs
She lives on the coast of California
with her two dogs and one husband
she prefers the dogs
over the husband
but cannot figure out how
to get rid of the him
you cannot dump a husband
on the side of the road
like a dog
there are legalities
and attorneys fees
to consider as well
and so she lives with him
on the coast of California
and writes about him
in crime novels
where he is always the victim
found with traces of poison in his system
as to her
she can't get him out of her system
she actually did dump him once
but like a dog
he still found his way back home.
David Knape is a retired sales manager. He started writing poetry only when he retired.
He has no degrees or things to brag about. He writes of common things.
He writes daily, as part of his routine, and as a crucial part of his life.
For David poetry is as important as an arm or a leg, or...a heart.
Without it, there would be no David.
Cleveland Haiku #451
Uneasy co-existence---
three young deer, lost,
crossing a busy street
Cleveland Haiku #453
Offseason---
grass grows back
on the sledding hill
Cleveland Haiku #454
Creekside cliffs---
a library of rock
for those who can read such
Michael Ceraolo is a 59-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet with a long list of credits he won't bore you with. After recently competing in a haiku contest sponsored by a local arts organization, he was inspired to start writing more Cleveland Haiku after not having written any for a dozen years.
Science Says Reincarnation's Not a Punishment
If you get
turned into an animal
next time around, you
don't have to worry.
You won't have tv and
you won't drive, but
you'll have family
and friends and fresh air.
Your life may be shorter
but time will be different.
Don Schaeffer has published a dozen books of poetry and a number of photographic poetry essays on YouTube. He has been an habitue of the on-line poetry forum scene for as long as it existed. After 40 years of living in Winnipeg, he moved to Long Island, N.Y. to live with an old friend after his life changed.
She lives on the coast of California
with her two dogs and one husband
she prefers the dogs
over the husband
but cannot figure out how
to get rid of the him
you cannot dump a husband
on the side of the road
like a dog
there are legalities
and attorneys fees
to consider as well
and so she lives with him
on the coast of California
and writes about him
in crime novels
where he is always the victim
found with traces of poison in his system
as to her
she can't get him out of her system
she actually did dump him once
but like a dog
he still found his way back home.
David Knape is a retired sales manager. He started writing poetry only when he retired.
He has no degrees or things to brag about. He writes of common things.
He writes daily, as part of his routine, and as a crucial part of his life.
For David poetry is as important as an arm or a leg, or...a heart.
Without it, there would be no David.
Cleveland Haiku #451
Uneasy co-existence---
three young deer, lost,
crossing a busy street
Cleveland Haiku #453
Offseason---
grass grows back
on the sledding hill
Cleveland Haiku #454
Creekside cliffs---
a library of rock
for those who can read such
Michael Ceraolo is a 59-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet with a long list of credits he won't bore you with. After recently competing in a haiku contest sponsored by a local arts organization, he was inspired to start writing more Cleveland Haiku after not having written any for a dozen years.
Science Says Reincarnation's Not a Punishment
If you get
turned into an animal
next time around, you
don't have to worry.
You won't have tv and
you won't drive, but
you'll have family
and friends and fresh air.
Your life may be shorter
but time will be different.
Don Schaeffer has published a dozen books of poetry and a number of photographic poetry essays on YouTube. He has been an habitue of the on-line poetry forum scene for as long as it existed. After 40 years of living in Winnipeg, he moved to Long Island, N.Y. to live with an old friend after his life changed.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 23, 2017
Cover Art: Exercise In Blues by Margaret Karmazin
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
June 23, 2017
Cover Art: Exercise In Blues by Margaret Karmazin
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Freudian Slips
Occasionally, as you hang wall paper OCD smooth,
eyeball laptop screen to see which odds will blink first,
back pain strain with electric saw to fell light thieving trees,
previous women’s names slip out and slap me.
And I begin to realise that despite your initial Bryan Adam’s
declaration, which I accepted like winning a major prize,
you have always mistaken depth for difference.
The biker blonde exciting lust, the little girl lost invoking a
shinning knight, the younger stunner turning your head…
So I bet initially you said that to all us girls.
As living together brings your round
from my first entrance Ker-pow!
that temporarily knocked out memories of exs,
I now compare with nail quick smart my USP worth
against the model, the teacher, the nurse,
scab pick my ranking amongst them.
Behind I think, the name that slips out most
from your subconscious like a photo hidden in a wallet.
The sweet one, who never went off with a better offer,
who brought you trout as a treat for tea,
who fell for you long after the flash cash had dried up.
But middle aged disappointments are soon shrugged off.
And I catch your knife glint irritation as your own name
frequently competes with that of my gay BF
with whom you share a first consonant and vowel.
Our friendship’s alchemy creating 20 years
‘things just happen to us’ laughter,
with no past’s distance between us , rather the 500 miles
to Manchester , shrunk by Facebook , texts, Skype.
Fiona Sinclair is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle . Her sixth collection of poems will be published by Lapwing Press later this year.
The Last Place On Earth
You can take me when
I can no longer walk or eat
or remember
then take me to that dreary
last place on earth
where you have a room
but no privacy
and a roommate that is half-nuts
and babbles nonsense all day
where there are screams in the night
and all manner of horrible sounds
coming from rooms with no doors
where you cannot function as your self
where they have to bath you
and feed you
and give you drugs to sedate
where they roll you around in a wheelchair
and make you sit in the lobby
with a magazine on your lap
where they give you one small bed and one small table
to hold what's left of your once proud life
where they feed you mush in bowls
with a plastic spoon
and give you powdered eggs and stale toast
and coffee that tastes like water
the last stop on the train of life
before you get off
the last damn place to ever be
for where else on this crazy earth
can a human being be treated
in such an inhumane way
the last place on earth you would
want to be caught living-
or dead.
David Knape is a retired sales manager. He started writing poetry only when he retired.
He has no degrees or things to brag about. He writes of common things.
He writes daily, as part of his routine, and as a crucial part of his life.
For David poetry is as important as an arm or a leg, or...a heart.
Without it, there would be no David.
Sometimes
Sometimes my young
son lies beside me on
this old bed and we say
nothing but stare upward
like sailors wrecked on
a tiny island and tired
of sighing at the wind.
Julian O'Dea is an Australian poet who lives in Canberra, the nation's capital. He writes haiku and lyrical poetry. He is semi-retired.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
June 30, 2017
Cover Art: By
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
June 30, 2017
Cover Art: By
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
William C. Crawford is a writer & photographer based in North Carolina.
Dawn on the Lake Washington Shipping Canal
Knotting pink laces over the mud-stained lips
of my tennis shoes, I run the numbers:
Thirty assaults on the canal each year.
Roughly one rape every other week.
So I count the bodies I pass before sunrise
—eleven men smoking on docks
with wisps curling like lips into a leer
and some women—and I take comfort
in the knowledge that I am more likely
to be raped in the warmth of my bed,
than on the cold pavement
by the shipping canal.
And as the rain drips over my vigilance
I wonder why everyone was so surprised
that my boyfriend asked before each kiss,
filed notices in advance and waited
for the bureaucracy of my body
to push papers and push back boundaries
to allow him access to the secrets of my lips.
I wonder why those raised eyebrows
and reticent fingertips were envied
instead of expected
and why I still felt the need
to run.
Sarah Pruis is a student at Seattle Pacific University where she works as the copy editor of The Falcon, an independent student newspaper. When Pruis is not correcting others, she’s usually off in the mountains. And, despite her orienteering training, she’s rarely on the trail.
Walking Wakamatsu
Screak of ice off windshield. In spite of the morning news on immigration, I’m off to Wakamatsu to walk with poets seeking words. From the parking lot, we scatter like refugees in a new world America. Some seek the gravesite of the Japanese girl who pined for her native land; buried on the western hill. Others set out solitary for lake and woods.
under scattered oaks
new grass writes atop winter –
nature’s palimpsest
*
Wakamatsu, first Japanese colony on this continent – silkworms and tea plants, humans so foreign to the miners who came for gold. Japanese fleeing homeland war – samurai and workers uprooted to our rough dry foothills. My Elsa's ancestors left wars of changing borders and official languages as the Rhein keeps flowing mountain to sea.
Small frogs stir the edges
ever-widening rings on water, on
air, the egret flies.
*
In leafless oak woods
I happen on a stranger-
poet face to face.
Where did your people come from,
seeking their new words for peace?
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).
Reincarnation (V2)
Next life I will be a little higher on the pecking order.
No longer a dishwasher at the House of Pancakes,
or Ricky's All Day Grill, or Sunday night small dog thief.
I will evolve into the Prince of Bullfrogs, crickets don't bother,
swamp flies don't bother me-I eat them. Alligators I avoid.
I urinate on lily pads mate across borders, continents at will.
Someone else from India can wash my dishes locally for me.
Forward all complaints to that religious office of Indian affairs.
Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. He is a Canadian and USA citizen. Today he is a poet, editor, publisher, freelance writer, amateur photographer, small business owner in Itasca, Illinois. He has been published in more than 930 small press magazines in 33 different countries or republics, and he edits 10 poetry sites. Author's website http://poetryman.mysite.com/. Michael is the author of The Lost American: From Exile to Freedom (136 page book) ISBN: 978-0-595-46091-5, several chapbooks of poetry, including From Which Place the Morning Rises and Challenge of Night and Day, and Chicago Poems. He also has over 133 poetry videos on YouTube as of 2015: https://www.youtube.com/user/poetrymanusa/videos Michael Lee Johnson, Itasca, IL nominated for 2 Pushcart Prize awards for poetry 2015 & Best of the Net 2016. Visit his Facebook Poetry Group and joinhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/807679459328998/ He is also the editor/publisher of anthology, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1530456762 A second poetry anthology, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses, Editor Michael Lee Johnson, is now available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1545352089
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 7, 2017
Cover Art: Warren by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
July 7, 2017
Cover Art: Warren by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Hiking Deception Pass
If I turn as a flower to the sun
and face the path behind me,
halting for a breath
that does not hiss--
If I let sweat roll down
the culvert of my spine
from under the blue band
of my sports bra, let it roll exposed
and glistening in the light,
luminous as that dew
dripping from leaf to leaf
above us—If I do so,
then you will see my red red face
or my white white back webbed
with stretch marks.
And I will feel the sun shine
on my skin and the wind enter
my lungs, but I will also feel
ashamed.
Ashamed of the meadows
that are my unshaven legs
and the snowcapped slope
that is my stomach,
of the gasps that see me to the summit
and of my own bodied reminder
of the wild.
So I do not stop and turn
or pull the fabric from my flesh.
Because I, too, am a wilderness,
but not the type you wish to see.
Sarah Pruis is a student at Seattle Pacific University where she works as the copy editor of The Falcon, an independent student newspaper. When Pruis is not correcting others, she’s usually off in the mountains. And, despite her orienteering training, she’s rarely on the trail.
Prudent Advice
Scotty, it’s just ten, and the wedding
isn’t until four, so lay off the Yukon Jack
or you’re liable to mistake the minister
for a priest and try to bum a light off of him
and piss in the flower pot under the carport
at the hotel, the stream in full view
of the debarking guests then drag down a maid of honor
in your leaden stupor and two hundred pounds
and be hauled off to pass out in a rented room
upstairs, upon awakening to return to the dance
floor, lose five-hundred bucks, lacerate your
palm on a complimentary champagne flute
and bleed all over the upholstery in a charitable
friend’s truck
make it home alright
So go on, Scotty, drink up Saturday brunch;
you’ll live to tell the tale or whatever shards
and splinters have embedded themselves
in your grasp.
John Zedolik: For thirteen years John taught English and Latin in a privates school. Eventually, he wrote a dissertation that focused on the pragmatic comedy of the Canterbury Tales, thereby completing his Ph.D. in English. Currently he is an adjunct instructor at various universities in and around Pittsburgh, PA, USA. However, he has had many jobs in his life including archaeological field assistant, obituary writer, and television-screen-factory worker, which—he hopes—have contributed in positive ways to his writing. John has had poems published in such journals as The Alembic, Aries, The Chaffin Journal, Common GroundReview, The Journal (UK), Pulsar Poetry Webzine (UK), Third Wednesday, U.S. 1 Worksheets, and in thePittsburgh Post-Gazette. He also has numerous poems forthcoming this year. John's iPhone is now his primary poetry notebook, and he hopes his use of technology in regard to this ancient art form continues to be fruitful.
Mesas and Mountains, Ghost Ranch, NM
Steep mesas and wide mountains
reckon time in measures
my rushed days cannot fathom.
Geologic clichés,
redeemed by awe,
temper claims of
triumph’s duration –
all vanity
faces extinction.
In mesas and mountains
I did not find eternity,
but what I found
was time enough.
Howard F. Stein, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Oklahoma City, OK USA;
Interdisciplinary Seminar facilitator, American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center (AIDPC)/Adjunct Professor, Department of Health Promotion Sciences, College of Public Health, OUHSC, Oklahoma City OK; Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Organizational Change, University of Missouri, Columbia
Poet Laureate, High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 14, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
July 14, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
The Ancients
It’s my last day with the old giants. In mourning I hike the lost trails, sniffing the aroma of the bark, that cinnamon of the forest . Under tepees of wood in a membrane of shadows, I stalk the earth, its mammal traces, its elusive tracks, to sit on a fallen log where spiders macramé, moss sloping to my knees unaware of invisibles within, grubbing in their tunnel. A lizard taps my foot, responding, I muse to its touch, my thoughts like Indian visions. And when daylight mushrooms into night, and an owl hoots from cedar, I still sit with a lizard on my shoe . Huddled with the ancients of the woods.
Mario Vitale was born in Bristol , Ct Has developed a skill for writing poetry in the free verse form. has been featured on Hubpages.com, Starlitecafe.com & Poetry soup. Vitale lives with his elderly mother Ann Soulier in Wolcott, Ct. Currently has written well over 1,000 poems & 2 short story's toward credit platform. Vitale has taken the poetic world by storm being featured on Google, Yahoo & MSN. Looks up to contemporaries in the poetry industry such as John Ashbery & Major Jackson. Has been a favorite featured poet reader at Barnes & Noble in Waterbury, Ct. Also featured on such sites as Poetry soup, Writer's café & Neo Poet.
The Hummies of ‘08
They come in May, most years anyway.
Five or six at the hanging well;
Fast food, in, out, flit around
Like men working on highwires
But hoist invisible
As they stand in air and dip their needles,
Bobbing, pausing, almost meditating,
Before making off in flight
Sometimes in pairs
Chasing whether love or war.
And all summer they feed and feed
Enough nectar for trip to Mexico
What a passel this time around,
Pure swarms, no way to count them,
Two feeders, then three, and still crowded,
Month's bag of sugar now weekly
Like a hoard of dive bombers
Wings causing whir as they swoop or retreat
And pure riot of impatience with refilling the glass.
Like DeMurier's vicious birds in miniature.
Ah, but could this summer last and last
Roy Haymond, Jr.: Retired teacher living in rural enclave. writes and plays tenor sax.
Night Bird
I ask for nothing
of this land
that has given me everything
I loved and hated its men
found my Adam he fled with a bodybuilder
as soon as I gained weight
I sought God
and in his place found knowledge
I discovered a home in my body
and since then
moved from place to place
without desires
this is my way
my destiny does not depend on luck
I am the night bird
foretelling death in its song
Sergio A. Ortiz is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. 2nd place in the 2016 Ramón Ataz Annual Poetry Competition sponsored by Alaire publishing house. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in FRIGG, Tipton Poetry Journal, Drunk Monkeys, and Bitterzeot Magazine. He is currently working on his first full-length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 21, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
July 21, 2017
Cover Art: by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Hippie Girl
whose sundress twirls like
a windmill in the dawn
whose long hair is a
friend to birds
whose body smells like
patchouli, incense and weed
whose eyes open and close
like a kaleidescope
whose bracelets play a
song of her
whose voice is the speech of
hummingbirds
whose torn jeans are her flag
whose sandaled feet are her
political statement
whose love is a poem in
the way she lives
Erren Geraud Kelly is a Pushcart nominated poet from Los Angeles. He has been writing for 25 years and has over 150 publications in print and online in such publications as Hiram Poetry Review, Mudfish, Poetry Magazine(online), Ceremony, Cactus Heart, Similar Peaks, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Salzburg and other publications. His most recent publication is in Black Heart Literary Journal; He has also been published in anthologies such as Fertile Ground, and Beyond The Frontier. His work can also be seen on Youtube under the " Gallery Cabaret," links.
He is also the author of Disturbing The Peace published by Night Ballet Press and the chapbook, The Rah Rah Girl Forthcoming from Barometric Press
The Frontier
it is as if I strangely sit between unfoldment and the
pit turn the heart and bend the lip of ageless silent
sun and trees of passing pageants aimed to please
the garish and the blinded throng from heaven sent in
hellish garb of bodies blown from end to who
have no goal but to amend raise sails and forward
step by step into the gaping jaws of death whose
heat and dust is lust to men who search for pleasure
here and call the flush of genius to stand before the
whirling throng of those who would be gods and dirt
where chance stands up and stares at passing
shows on empty streets and fields laid bare by
greedy hands heaped up on aimless needs
this play is not what you have made but is the
evening’s splendid ray that fall on ruins old and new
on tower street and avenue where tired feet that
cannot stay fall on and on monotony and pave the
way to gluttony
Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon's directing career ranges from pop videos, commercials to TV broadcast. His documentary The Colours of Infinity has been transmitted in over 50 territories. Nigel recently completed his first feature film Remember a Day. He has published four books: Introducing Fractals in 2009 and The Colours of Infinity in 2010. His first novel the comic thriller Nothing and Everywhere published in 2012. In 2014 Eventispress published Life is Just... and The Keeper of the Faith in 2017.
Poem - Apropos of nothing really...
You
say that
an ode shall
bode well. You say.
You say the muse must be
told that she should leave. This
will leave many things unsaid - sad.
May she tarry a while so we can savor,
her joy of life, of flower and bird, peace and
love of life. We will gather her pieces of life
and connect them in our baskets,
until they are overflowing with love
of each other and joy of nature.
She can pass to other souls
who have need of wonder
But she must return
to replenish
until we
rejoice.
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 she was a child. She enjoys writing flash fiction and prose.
She has a Bachelor of Arts degree, a degree in English Literature and a Graduate Diploma in Education.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
July 28, 2017
Cover Art: Short Story With Hoes by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
July 28, 2017
Cover Art: Short Story With Hoes by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
The Poet Spiel, also known as Tom Taylor, is an internationally published artist and author who has been making art for seven decades.Visit his 5 page website for more of his poetry and art: [email protected]
Coffeehouse Poem # 165
A girl in glasses
And high heels
Smiles at me
Her walk is bliss
And a hallelujah
On a Sunday
morning
Erren Geraud Kelly's work has appeared in dozens of publications in print and online, throughout, the united states, canada and europe. Erren's work is currently featured in the anthologies, " the soul's bright home," and " black lives have always mattered," from 2 leaf. Kelly recieved his b.a. in english--creative writing from louisiana state university in baton rouge. Erren lives in los angeles...
Casey at the Bat (Intentional Walk)
The outlook wasn't rosy for the Mudville nine that day,
trailing by two runs with only one inning left to play
When Cooney was quickly put out, and Barrows' fate the same,
existential despair fell upon the fans at the game
But Flynn and Blake would not stay down on the mat,
and the tying runs were on base in nothing flat
And the fans chanted "Hey, take a look at that
We have a chance now with Casey at the bat"
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the poets get to write,
and bands are playing everywhere deep, deep into the night
There won't be any drama as we come to the end of the poem:
the pitcher waved an intentional walk as Casey stepped to home
“Inspired by recently re-reading Casey at the Bat, Michael Ceraolo has been working on a new project, first re-writing the poem in a number of different forms, and now re-writing it with different strategies used; this is one of those poems.
Michael Ceraolo was inspired by a recent re-reading of Casey at the Bat to write a number of different versions of the poem. This is one of those poems.
Restless is the Heart of an Exile
This little town holds
a contained and fragile charm
where my elsewhere-birthed spirit
learns to survive.
My sustaining friends candle it into home
though shadows shimmer in curtained corners.
The land of ancestors buried in hard-won sacred soil
calls out to my waiting bones...
I am forbidden to answer,
grieve for my moment to come
when alien soil covers restless remains
and spirit hovers between
the world that barely embraces me
and the pulsing claim of blood and ligament,
heart, spirit and tribal ties
that scream for my absorption
back into fiery particles that stoked my entity.
Wine cannot placate, bread of other fields seldom satisfies,
a communion I must re-learn.
Katherine L. Gordon
for Trump exiles from America.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 4, 2017
Cover Art: Cast Not A Shadow by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
August 4, 2017
Cover Art: Cast Not A Shadow by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
The Poet Spiel, also known as Tom Taylor, is an internationally published artist and author who has been making art for seven decades.Visit his 5 page website for more of his poetry and art: [email protected]
Sex and Dearth
When I was young I could be among rocks
Their mystery was solid
Forming a hidden creation story
In the beginning, everything was
In the midsection, indifferent
Now she is revealed.
Her solidity just another surface.
Oh to be among rocks again.
Andrew Nightingale: "This poem is about science too. As language becomes more scientific, it undermines our things, like rocks, turns them into particles, etc. What sort of life doesn't even allow dwelling with rocks? Andrew Nightingale is Ph.D. student at Mahidol University, Thailand. He lives in Bangkok with his wife and daughter. His blog: www.questionsarepower.org.
Raining From Heaven
The birds congregate on 694 and 61 every morning
to let go of old resentments and figure out their next
major move. Routes are plotted in advance like tours
of duty. These are the birds that don’t fly south but
weather the storms of a barbaric Minnesota winter.
These are the birds that snitch on the albino squirrel who
empties the feeders on the entire block of Edmund Avenue
while the birds resume congregating and dreaming of seedlings
raining from heaven.
Suzanne Nielsen grew up in St. Paul's East Side, a working class community,the setting for most of her short stories. She writes poetry,fiction, essays, screenplays and memoir. She teaches writing at Metropolitan State University and her work has appeared in various literary magazines internationally in all-of-the-above genres. In addition to
teaching, Suzanne is a wife and mother, a doctoral student at HamlineUniversity, as well as the owner of two dogs. Viewher monthly column, Cool Dead People at www.doubledarepress.com
[email protected]
Distinguished
I know this stretch of beach
unrolls for miles in pre-dawn darkness,
like washed linoleum; flat, wet, black as night
and I can barely see to wink, to touch the hand in front of me,
then, it happens; sunrise lets its pink out
piping all the edges I couldn’t see
where waves had softly punched the sand
then staggered back, and ocean pooled
in platters over night
to serve the bare brown foot
of no one special
Mori McCrae has lived on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario all her life. She grew up in Port Credit, and then studied Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. She graduated with Honours in 1986, relocating to Grimsby, and finally St. Catharine’s, where she began to write poetry. She lives in a house nicknamed ‘The Hobbit’ with her husband and her two dogs.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 11, 2017
Cover Art: Last Angel Sings by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
August 11, 2017
Cover Art: Last Angel Sings by The Poet Spiel
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
The Poet Spiel, also known as Tom Taylor, is an internationally published artist and author who has been making art for seven decades.Visit his 5 page website for more of his poetry and art: [email protected]
Thanatos
Every morning Death comes
whistling through the wards
with his bright coat and
careless charm.
Wide-eyed nurses pant
along behind him like
groupies.
He is getting quite friendly
with some of the patients:
stops to talk, knows their names:
he never fails to find the cure
in the end.
Julian O'Dea is an Australian poet who lives in Canberra, the nation's capital. He mainly writes lyrical poetry. He is semi-retired.
The Did and The Done
He enjoyed getting the “did” “done”.
The things on his list of do’s crossed
off and “done”. Layers of lists
folded neatly and stacked in the
“did” pile near where he sat
as was pleased to be “done”.
There was a “done” sign on his finished works
and a “did” sign for those tasks being
considered, yet unfinished.
He was “done” with friends, travel and
hobbies. He had attempted the social life
but labored his way out of things he said
he “did”, even though nothing got “done”.
And people were equally “done” with the
person he was, not caring at all about
what he had “done” when compared to
his lack of anything he ever “did”.
Roger Singer
Escapees
My dog and cat ran away
They’d been conspiring
waiting until winter
so they could cross the frozen lake
knowing I can’t stand cold
and distrust
the thickness of ice
Both of them were calico
so they had a lot in common
despite their difference in species
They told each other that they lived
in a post-species world
and were thus reassured
It was a lonely morning when I awoke
and padded into the cold living room
to find them gone
I knew right away what had happened
as I did when my wife left me
even before I found the note
nailed to the black walnut cutting board
I’d given her one Xmas
It was beautiful
dark and severe
like her
but she showed no enthusiasm for it
My dog and cat agreed with her:
I could be an insensitive, condescending bastard
They’ve only been gone a couple of days
but I’ve already forgotten their names
There are more dogs and cats in the pound
They see me coming and shrink away
They can tell the kind of man I am
not abusive
but capable of sucking all the joy out of a room--
that’s what my wife told me
That’s what the pained woofs meant
the sour meows
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.
Thanks so much for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.
Best Regards,
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois
[email protected], 646-853-4272 2410 Lamar St., Edgewater, CO 80214
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 18, 2017
Cover Art: By Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
August 18, 2017
Cover Art: By Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Overseers
The corn cringes
beneath the turbines’ furious gaze
When they were Monsanto
genetically modified seeds
they thought they were agriculture’s
WASP bluebloods
who could never be maligned
but in the fields
they grow under
the bladed overseers’ cold stares
Their impulse to flourish
is now equal to their impulse to wither
Eros and Thanatos with tassles
For their part, the turbines feel constrained by the soft breeze
they want a hurricane
They want to spin
in a steroid wind
The fields of corn irritate them
all those redundant rows
the dull sameness of the world beneath them
The windmills pray for a field-consuming fire
thousands of acres of blackened
crop
a fire to generate a stiff
howling wind
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois has had over twelve-hundred of his poems and fictions appear in literary magazines in the U.S. and abroad. He has been nominated for numerous prizes. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work as a clinical psychologist in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and Nook, or as a print edition. To see more of his work, google Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois. He lives in Denver.
Thanks so much for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.
Best Regards,
Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois
[email protected], 646-853-4272 2410 Lamar St., Edgewater, CO 80214
"Either/Nor, Neither/Or"
Waters run deep; never shallow.
Judas, too, was a lover In between breaths,
A facade for what is broken and irreconcilable.
What shall I owe?
For me, there is no other; I have nothing left,
Waters run deep; never shallow.
Architect of God creating a vision that is pliable,
Judas, too, was a lover; A merge beyond the flesh,
A facade for what is broken and irreconcilable.
The dangers of letting your soul play with shadows,
For me, there is no other; worlds collide and enmeshed,
Waters run deep; never shallow.
Find a sunset possessing a beauty unjustifiable,
Judas, too, was a lover; exalted above the rest,
A facade for what is broken and irreconcilable.
For me, there is no other as desirable,
Judas, too, was a lover in between breaths,
Waters run deep; never shallow.
A facade for what is broken and irreconcilable.
(Writer's Note: Camouflaging the heavens that burn bright. The secrets, they all come to light. Reverie, In all of her glory. Beauty will not be marginalized or allowed to ignore me. Her hidden nature; complex and admirable. A facade for what is broken and irreconcilable. There exists no such thing as "anonymity". Neither in this, nor losing yourself in union with god with just one kiss.)
Name: Priscilla Good Bear (Illuminate Steele)
Bio: Writer, lover, fighter, winner, loser, dreamer.
http://www.shemayrunwithwolves.org/biography.html
Benediction of Irrelevance
everyone said she was so pretty
her glorious curls,
her dove soft skin shimmering in sunlight
eyes, a beautiful green glassy pond
stature a skyscraper scintillation
a tall glass of white wine
her countenance to imbibe
the perfect woman
a life to covet
other ladies lauded her
wanted to be her best friend
men flinched at her beauty
and compelling interment of their love
within the folds of her flirtation
as she walked through her
mansion of lies
she carried with her
the shattered mirror
of a heart full
of contradiction.
Jacob Erin-Cilberto, originally from Bronx, NY, now resides in Carbondale, Illinois. erin-cilberto has been writing and publishing poetry since 1970. He currently teaches at John A. Logan and Shawnee Community colleges in Southern Illinois.
His work has appeared in numerous small magazines and journals including: Café Review, Skyline Magazine, Hudson View, Wind Journal, Torrid Literature and others. erin-cilberto also writes reviews of poetry books for Chiron Review, Skyline Review, Birchbrook Press and others. He has reviewed books by B.Z Niditch, Michael Miller, Barry Wallenstein, Marcus Rome, musician Tom MacLear and others. Erin-cilberto’s latest book Rewrites and Second Chances is now available through Water Forest Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. His previous four books an Abstract Waltz, Used Lanterns, Intersection Blues as well as demolitions and reconstructions are also available through Water Forest Press Barnes, Noble.com and Amazon.com as well as Goodreads. erin-cilberto has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry in 2006-2007-2008 and again in 2010. He has taught poetry workshops for Heartland Writers Guild, Southern Illinois Writers Guild and Union County Writers Guild.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
August 25, 2017
Photo Art: Triple Peak, Vancouver Island by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
August 25, 2017
Photo Art: Triple Peak, Vancouver Island by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
Reckoning Time, Ghost Ranch, NM
Everything
here sprawls –
mesas, buttes, desert valleys,
cottonwood roots, sky;
They tell the same story
of reckoning time:
luminescent canyons
that glow in a low sun;
high desert
that was once a sea.
In this place
intrepid life grows
where it can
and asks for little
in return.
Space is parable,
mask of sprawling time.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Craneflies
Life can pull me into its pain,
and suffering — but today,
the ephemeral cranefly captures me
Savoring the morning sunlight,
it drifts on air currents
in full extension of its delicate beauty,
or wobbles, from side to side,
feet dangling effortlessly
Movements well up
inside of me, like tiny spirals
filling in a sketch
of my limbs and core
until I too dance in the moment
A cranefly lives but a few days
on the air in which it sails
a seasonal delicacy
for quick birds and patient spiders
In avoiding predators, its final resting place
may be a piece of twine, or a window screen
where it shrivels in ethereal silence
Looking at its fragile remains,
like a wisp of hair caught in the moment,
attached to anything that receives it,
I’m no longer drawn
into what may have been,
but see what is
Shirley Radcliff Bruton - poet - performance artist - choreographer. Shirley’s poetry is included in Tales From a Rocky Coast, Volume One. She is currently working on Volume Two with Friday Night Writers’ Group, and a Chapbook of her poetry and performances. Her poetry/performance art has been presented in California and New York City, where she lived for nine years while working for the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation. Shirley lives with her husband, two cats, roaming deer, flying, bathing and nesting birds, and other creatures who wander above and below ground. She also teaches 55+ yoga classes and can be reached at [email protected] and on Facebook. Her website is shirleyradcliffbruton.kritiquekritics.com
A Poem for a Great Therapist
For the hard work that you do
And lending a helping hand
For the listening ear
You will always be a dear
Therapist.
Kelly A. Sullivan
www.kellyasullivanphotography.weebly.com
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 1, 2017
Photo Art: A Nevada Landscape by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
September 1, 2017
Photo Art: A Nevada Landscape by Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Escape From Aleppo
The young family group is small –
Two children, a husband, a veiled wife;
wary-eyed, they walk forward toward the camera,
behind them glimpses of ruins and devastation.
The shriek of falling bombs,
the thunder as they strike --
the staccato rifle shots, the occasional shouts
must echo around them,
that --- or the dreadful silence
that promises danger.
On the husband’s right shoulder
a half-grown tabby cat with a white vest
perches gravely, front paws relaxed,
ears pricked.
The youthful father is hopefully guiding them all to safety,
The family pet has not been forgotten,
abandoned to starve in shivering terror.
The children are the innocents, the victims,
they come first --
and yet it is good to see compassion for the small pet
who has been a part of that ruined family home
all her short life..
The little cat will not remain behind,
confused, frightened, hungry.
She will be with her family, whose love is brave enough
to share their destiny with her.
Sue Littleton, born in Abilene, Texas, now lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She began writing poetry at age sixteen. Her poems have been published in various anthologies and on-line literary magazines. John Horvath of Poetry Repairs is preparing an issue dedicated to Sue’s poetry. Over the years Sue became fascinated with history and refers to herself as an “investigative poet,” as many of her poems have historical references which are carefully researched. Her bilingual epic poem, Corn Woman, Mujer Maíz, is the history of corn, which at the same time is the history of the great civilizations of the Americas, before and after the Conquest. Her book The Ranch on the Pecos River is dedicated to the history of her maternal grandparents’ sheep ranch in Southwest Texas. She has 18 self-published books.
Trailer Park Elegy
To see our marbled planet from space,
you’d never guess the tiny dramas,
the human family in masquerade: polished
Sunday shoes, starched dress, a boy-sized suit.
Backstage, we six immigrants awaiting our cues
never broke silence. We still don’t
but him!
His last three yakkety years he spilled
the beans. Oh, the beans, the split--
open jar exploding the permissible
thickness of peanut butter
on a slice of toast; the Father and Son
of the Holy Trinity teaming up
with Maple Leafs’ Johnny Bower as Goalie Host.
My brother played our dour lives for laughs,
parodied Dad’s This is what we do.
Cozied up to religious feeling then
stoned with punchlines. When he was
a kid, it was the wise crack
delivered under his breath. His death-
defying human freefalls
in the face of Because I said so.
Whenever he dropped little depth-charges
I reverted to being an anxious child. Had to
remind myself he was not twelve, but fifty--
my brother talking, telling, saying who he was.
Cornelia Hoogland is professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario. She writes and lives on Hornby Island, B.C.
Cornelia Hoogland’s seventh book, “Trailer Park Elegy,” is forthcoming with Harbour in September, 2017. “Woods Wolf Girl” (Wolsak and Wynn), was a finalist for the Relit 2011 National Poetry Award. “Sea Level” was short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards. Cornelia has served on international and national literary boards, was the founder and artistic director of Poetry London, and most recently, of Poetry Hornby Island, the B.C. Gulf island where she lives. www.corneliahoogland.com
Trailer Park Elegy, forthcoming September, 2017, with Harbour Publishing.
Sea Level (Baseline Press, 2013) finalist for the 2012 CBC Literary Nonfiction awards
Woods Wolf Girl (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011) 2012 finalist Relit Best Book of Canadian Poetry
Crow (Black Moss Press, 2011) 2012 long list Relit Best Book of Canadian Poetry
Website www.corneliahoogland.com
Twitter @CHoogland
never settled down
always on the move
multi-lingual
in the languages
of loneliness
——--
twilight’s last zephyr
so foolhardy, pigheaded,
whipping as if stir-crazy
through our family picnic
completely unapologetic
——--
Judith
in this city where
one can barely turn around
how did I find you?
Ayaz Daryl Nielsen, veteran, hospice nurse, ex-roughneck (as on oil rigs)
lives in Longmont, Colorado, USA. Editor of bear creek haiku (26+ years/135+ 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
September 8, 2017
Photo Art: Ossified Galleries by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
September 8, 2017
Photo Art: Ossified Galleries by David Fraser
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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 Death of Instinct
Nobody's
beautiful anymore.
I found out
every body feels
about the same.
So what's all
the fuss about reality?
.
The theme of life
is the return. It's
the brief arc of a butterfly,
fluttering not quite high enough,
then coming back. It's like
a passage of Beethovan
with its final note
dying on the string.
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.
There Is Nothing Burning
There is nothing burning but wind
in my lungs, raucous song of jays
bursting through oaks.
But everything smolders, yellow
leaves piling up in the yard, clouds
smeared against sky, voices everywhere
on fire, choking in an atmosphere of flame.
And now my hands burn and my eyes,
which stare into the distant smoke.
Headlines leap into flame.
The sea rises and fish swim in puddles
in the streets. Roads are clogged
and bridges sag under the weight of cars.
At least a trillion galaxies rush away
from one another, the space between
them vast and empty and cold.
Someone sends an email; someone leaves
a message in the sand. The river fills with noise.
Someone hurls curses at the Nobel Prize.
Bombs hit a city, villages burn, breakfast burns,
everything is on fire everywhere.
All night sirens wail their Doppler cries.
Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work has appeared worldwide in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Chiron, Deep Water, Expound, Muddy River Poetry, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including four in 2016). New collections include A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), Family Reunion (Big Table Publishing), and “How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps).
Bugs in Jars
I cannot capture fireworks in a photo–
this season my thighs and sides lie fallow.
The sparking distorts to charcoal,
bulked under whetted pencil tips.
I’m trying to channel the colour yellow,
but catching potted soil shades
between my fingers.
A low flying bird vacations in July
with a heart made of apple skin.
I can catch bugs in a jar,
bellowing silken bones,
but I cannot go to seed, alone.
Amy LeBlanc has recently completed an honours BA in English Literature and creative writing at the University of Calgary where she is Editor-in-Chief of NōD Magazine. Her work has appeared in magazines such as (Parenthetical), Untethered, and Petal Journal, and she received second place in the 2016 Blodwyn Memorial Prize for fiction. Amy also has work forthcoming in theWhite Wall Review and Canthius. She hopes to pursue a career in fiction and poetry, and has recently completed her first novella. She will begin a Bachelor of Education in the fall and plans to complete her MA in English Literature.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 15, 2017
Cover Art: Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
September 15, 2017
Cover Art: Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
Void, Ghost Ranch, NM
A deep, wide canyon stretches
between tall mesas and mountains;
in its space sky begins;
sometimes, it bestows comforting stillness;
other times, fierce storms
assault the valley without warning.
Imagination fills in
what erosion took away.
Sandstone buttes and spires
preserve geology’s memory.
This place is not empty –
in its basin time dwells
and never leaves.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Nap
Child of mine
for time to stall
we’d have no use
for spells,
for heat waves
in upstairs rooms,
for ceiling fans that rock
around the clock,
where yellow roses
hang their heads
en mass as if to pray.
Look in,
where baby sleeps
in summer's stupor
tousled hair new-penny copper
moist and darker on the neck,
to watch the tiny mouth
lip-sync a phantom nipple.
For, pick-me-up arms
outstretched, a diaper
dipper full of pee and talcum
the elixir you call joy
even now, as you did then
when you crossed the room
to pick him up and sit him on your hip
and eased the lowered blind
up, from where the sun stood
at the bottom of his emerald room
you’d never gotten round to painting
pink or blue, thank goodness cause
that's where he cast his colour, that
without this spell, you'd lose him
Mori McCrae is a Fine Art Graduate of the Ontario College of Art¨ Drawing and
Painting¨1982-1986. She has lived and worked in Niagara for the past 21 years¨ developingstrong ties to the region and the artistic community. She is a member of the Niagara ArtistCentre, a founding member of the Jordan Art Gallery and a member of the Canadian AuthorsAssociation.
Walking Down Freemont Street At 7 A.M.
on this cold February morning… the gray
floor looks deader than the corpse
of the moon… only me and
a Japanese tourist walk between
the pathetic blinking lights
of washed out casinos…
a beggar in a power wheelchair looks
like a bundle of rags with a rattling cup…
a crippled pigeon scrabbles
sideways
across the gray floor,
limping like all the
sadness
in the history of the universe…
Norman J. Olson
http://poetrywriting.org/Sketchbook6-3MayJun2011/Sketchbook_6-3_MayJune_2011_Norman_J_Olson_A_Desperate_Darkness_Some_Thoughts_on_Las_Vegas.htm
http://www.poetryrepairs.com/v13/110.html
http://www.lulu.com/us/en/shop/norman-j-olson/forty-four-image-poems/paperback/product-22968292.html
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
September 22, 2017
Cover Art: Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
September 22, 2017
Cover Art: Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
When This We Feel
Our strength giving away
when love is undermined,
diluted like a ghost is from its human counterpart –
diluted yolk of a backbone
striving.
When battling the heat of dullness rising
When battling the waters that cry
for the breath of a sinking dream.
And spheres crack wide
laying exposed the true, the awful intent
of footsteps travelled . . .
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 1100 poems published in over 430 international journals. She has sixteen published books of poetry, seven collections and nine chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
Note To Editor
Note to editor
do not feel bad that you have to deny
publishing to struggling poet's
with short discreet messages
saying SORRY, BUT...
your poems DO NOT MEET our literary standards
after all who do they think they are
they do not have a god-given right
to be published
their judgement is clouded to say the least
their mothers think they are terrific poets
never mind that their hearts will be broken
and their lives destroyed
you have a business to run
the fact that you cannot see greatness
when it's staring you in the face
is not your problem
too bad for them
good for you.
d.knape has been writing poetry since there was nothing else to do in retirement.
He can't play golf, He can't build anything, and he can't afford to go on cruises.
His wife wanted him out of her way, so he goes off and writes poetry in the spare room.
Other than trips to Walmart, it is his only activity.
Describing Art To A Blind Man
Under the gargoyle I guide you
through the green door, into the co-op art
gallery, shutting out merry chatter of two pre-
teen girls headed for the Bell Tower.
I’ve wanted to show you Michael’s art. Portraits
of Indians – what tribe? – each with spirit-
guide above his head, gazing unseeing, seeing.
Wolf, buffalo, eagle. Forget failed history,
government policies; tribes and endangered
species. A man – his life inscribed on his face –
with eagle in flight above his head.
A full moon connects them. I remind you,
wildlife biologist – ancient birdman,
when you still could see – that night at Union
Valley, camped alone, prescribed distance
across the lake from a protected Bald Eagle nest.
Strock, you utter, sudden, guttural,
drawing out the vowel and final consonants.
Raptor scream. Behind your dead eyes,
image of eagle rising at dawn to hunt the lake.
Surprised fisherman in his boat
as the great bird hovered – infinitesimal
countdown – then the eagle dropped;
lifted, fish in its talons.
Unseeing, seeing you remember.
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
September 29, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
September 29, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
I Hear America Texting
I hear America texting
her constant tap tapping
from sea to shining sea
every street and highway
all atwitter
men and women
on the way to work
behind the wheel
sending their messages
of love and nonsense
crashing into guard rails
rear ending each other
still typing away
on tiny keyboards
their small thoughts of the day
emoji emotions
miles of pings
responding with happy faces
merrily they roll along
on their new gadgets
speaking of lost causes
lost language
less eye to eye
it's a brave new world
driving while texting
our evolution
from climbing trees and artful cursive
to blanking screens
held precariously beside steering wheels
thumbs numb from texting.
we know less than before.
d.knape has been writing poetry since there was nothing else to do in retirement.
He can't play golf, He can't build anything, and he can't afford to go on cruises.
His wife wanted him out of her way, so he goes off and writes poetry in the spare room.
Other than trips to Walmart, it is his only activity.
Old Dogs and the River
forks of the undammed Cosumnes
We hiked Leek Spring Valley
but never found the North Fork headwaters,
our dogs running ahead of us through dog-high
hellebore, and fetching sticks
from the pond. Remember old Piper, how
she swam and swam, her ripples spreading in all
directions.
Then we’d load up, wet dogs and all,
and follow Iron Mountain down the long ridge –
river somewhere below us, out of sight –
and home, another ridge between forks
of the Cosumnes.
Remember the hike down to Rocky Bar
and up the other side in a driving winter rain;
then back again – just to see
where dirt track and river met
and parted.
We were as wet as our dogs, and a lot colder.
And when our well quit,
mid-summer, remember how we waded out
in the Middle Fork above the bridge
and let free water wash us cool and clear.
Scouting ahead, our dogs splashed river-angels.
Dogs always running ahead
of us, before, too soon, they disappear.
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).
Sovereignty in the Mesas, Ghost Ranch, NM
The lord of the mesa reigns*
The lord of the mesa remembers*
The lord of the mesa reveals*
Metaphors of sovereignty
dwell in mesas like spirits,
emanate from mute stone –
tell of sandstone’s long dynasty,
dominion’s ruddy glow
at sunrise and sunset.
Enthroned in majesty,
mesas crown the long valley
beneath their steep faces –
time’s serene nobility
embedded in rock.
*Adapted from the tri-partite Hebrew liturgy for Rosh Hashanah Malchuyoth, Zichronoth, and Shofaroth.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 6, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
October 6, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Early Warning
for Coppa Hembo, chief of the Hill Nisenan
No phone calls – no phones
to warn the other villages, to summon help.
Invaders – slave traders crossing the river
on horseback, up through the brush
to steal children old men young women.
No allowance for age or skill at basket-making.
Domiciles of the richest white men
had no phones. News was the weekly paper,
word of mouth
or rock.
Imponderable, how one boulder
in a canyon, the least pasture outcrop
sent messages no eyes could read.
Underground Morse
across miles. Talking-rocks, singing-stones
speechless choreography of cloud.
The people gathered from every village,
trooped down canyon to drive out invaders
who trade in stealth.
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).
Grown in Alberta
In Michigan
they will point to a spot
on the palm of their right
hand
when you ask
where are you from?
For Michiganders
my hand is my simulacrum
for substitute belonging.
First came the hand
then the map
then the hand again
The map’s handsome substitute.
But first-first came the cold
and then the mitten:
the map’s handsome substitute.
On the Canadian prairies
the cold is your constant contender
the cold is always first-first.
Once I dreamed of an empty grain elevator
sheathed in brittle ice.
I wanted to get inside
but each time I chipped
at its door, I felt an enervating
pang in the hollow of my abdomen.
I wanted to get outside
but each time I chipped at its door, I saw a glinting
mirrored surface magnifying my actions.
Everything went cold
my breath
undusted diamonds suspended before me.
A landscape was hinted in its spaces.
I would have placed my hand up against it,
the curl of my fingers
settling along the foothills,
but at times like these you can’t help thinking about
those prototype fools in stories
baring the substitute cold to their tongues,
the very wording of my verisimilitude belonging.
But, Canada, you would not believe
how often a Michigander
never asked me
where are you from?
Bertrand Bickersteth has been published in FreeFall, Kola: a Black Literary Magazine, and the anthology, Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and often writes about black history in Western Canada.
Atonement
When you leave,
an exhalation,
a whisper,
a sigh,
moves through me.
Fills the space you emptied
with your parting.
This small grief dwindles
when I remember how
your eyes leaped
that moment
I showed myself to you -
when most of me
was hidden.
I have often seen
your departure as treachery
binding you close to me
as black river rock does gravel.
But tonight I hold you gently.
Allow you to breath
for yourself.
I take away the chains
so patiently wrought
from my need,
to tie you up,
hold you down.
This mad fierceness
has settled Into the hush
of an empty room,
still redolent
with the scent of you.
Jude Neale is a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer and mentor. Jude 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), and the Carers International Poetry Prize (UK).
Jude's last book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (leaf press), was a finalist for the 2015 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, eight of its poems were shortlisted for the Magpie Award, Judged by George McWhirter, Vancouver's first Poet Laureate and two of its poems were nominated for the coveted Pushcart Prize (US) by two different publishers.
One of Jude's poems from her forthcoming manuscript, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate to ride with thirty three 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 in April.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 13, 2017
Cover Art: Nature's Story by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
October 13, 2017
Cover Art: Nature's Story by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Because its Season is Short
Growing up in the city
I never looked at nature.
Now, when I look at fields,
I see.
Our eyes are fuller with the failure
of the past brimming in our sight.
Ignorance, lassitude, indifference
now all look
iridescent, variegated,
teeming
like the bloom
on that Heuchera Obsidian
Coral Bell. Black flower. Swollen
with color
because its season
is short.
And it knows
it will never
be a bloom again.
Bertrand Bickersteth has been published in FreeFall, Kola: a Black Literary Magazine, and the anthology, Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. He lives in Calgary, teaches at Olds College, and often writes about black history in Western Canada.
Inanimate, but not Dead, Ghost Ranch, NM
Inanimate mesas,
buttes, and spires,
stories and storytellers
in stone –
lack lungs, larynx,
vocal cords, tongue, and mouth,
but still give voice
to mute rock formations.
This is the epic
Homer would have told if he
had been made of sandstone,
siltstone, mudstone, quartz,
and cooled lava flow.
Sagas of life
sealed in the silent rock
of ruddy escarpments
that glow at sunset.
Inanimate rocks
are not dead;
they never cease
to tell their stories.
Listen now –
they are speaking.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected].
1. good guys
it had nothing to do
with who or what he was doing it to
so easy just to like it
young and drunk with no thought behind it
a physical response, like breathing
pumping as she melted into the ceiling
and when it was over, pretended to be sleeping.
the next day, a ready explanation,
who remembers, when we were so wasted?
while she suffered the looks and whispers
the repeating echo of a lowering zipper,
blue black bruises in places only she could see
no, no in her head, a whistling calliope,
but what really erupted the maddening clutches
of vengeance like something from an old movie
was how adamantly defensive he would be
without saying a word, it would never occur
to someone like him he was at all in the wrong
because she had wanted it all along,
her slurred speech a song pushing him along,
no hand in her suffering, owing nothing for her wondering --
was it something she said, did, wore, was, is, will ever, has ever,
and will she always remember?
he walks on by,
satisfied at never having told a lie,
sure, certain, forever and ever,
he was really such a good guy
2. intimate partner…
this is where the fallen women go
in a darkness that can be felt
everything I see tells me so
under mattresses and crime shows
the clink of a loosening belt
this is where the fallen women go
tongues quick, apologies hollow,
the whole world a slick bible belt
everything I see tells me so
a desperation inchoate
but tightening fast like a belt
this is where the fallen women go
the ’victim’ on their chests aglow
bundled veins popping under belts
everything I see tells me so
and the men shouting with gusto
in a darkness that can be felt
this is where the fallen women go
everything we see tells us so
3. statutory (englyn)
all the little girls running, flash, bang, pop,
little girls drop, still buzzing,
and god, the sound is stunning
Kate LaDew is a graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a BA in Studio Art. She resides in Graham, NC with her cats, Charlie Chaplin and Janis Joplin.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
October 20, 2017
Cover Art: Distorted Glass by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
October 20, 2017
Cover Art: Distorted Glass by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Time in Half-Light
In the wind-dance, tree-dance, cloud-dance
of half-light,
flickers between sun-face, cloud veil, reveal
patterns of two worlds where I gaze amazed,
sense-conflicted which to choose:
the glisten of enticing shadows
the glare of too much to admit, accept.
I like the nuance of half-truth, half dream
as light revives old caves, old haunts
and elf-horns sound along the rising cliffs.
My spirit dark with compromise,
alight with angel flight,
becomes that equinox ballet
where in a day it plunges out of light
into the slow decay of dwindling time.
Katherine L. Gordon
death of the sun,
eclipsed – a melancholy moon
orb’s of framed light
Sterling Haynes is a retired MD in his 89th year and writer of poetry and zany stories. Many of pieces have been published by Rogers publishing, Okanagan Life, North of 50, the BC Medical Journal, The Harvard Medical Alumni Journal, New Quarterly etc. His First book published, Bloody Practice was a BC best seller. Sterling is working of his 4th book of poems and stories.
Flood
In her fingers, shreds
shreds of bleached blue
linen in her fingernails,
hands clenched about
her dead mother’s
body tightly. It still wore
the shadow of her
face
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
October 27, 2017
Cover Art: Euphony by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
October 27, 2017
Cover Art: Euphony by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Monday
Always in a hurry
to spoil your
weekend
Monday
morning
bursts in
like a
home
invasion
thug
brandishing
6 AM
as a
stropped
razor
to your
still
unshaven
face.
Ed Higgins’ poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Uut Poetry,Tattoo Highway, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Blue Print Review, among others. His wife and he live on a small organic farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals, including an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. He is also Asst. Fiction Editor for Ireland-based Brilliant Flash Fiction.
Eros, the Larger Meaning
It wasn't just sex.
We both understood that
from the start.
We recognized each other--
what we needed, what we each
had to give.
More than just an exchange
it was alchemy.
To shrink it all down
to explain it away
as base instinct
is not the whole truth--
the truth about finding
the missing key that unlocked for me
the other half of myself.
All the same, that desire was vital--
both of us thirsty
the physical and spiritual longing
all of a piece.
Twenty-eight years later
riding the motorcycle
my thumbs hooked in his belt loops,
my breasts pressed
against the warm wall of his back...
We didn't know, then
he'd be gone in a matter of weeks.
Now that his body is reduced
to ashes in a jar
it isn't the words that return.
It is touch I conjure
that energy exchange
real as sunlight on my skin.
The part the body remembers
this is the part
I get to keep
forever.
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, with Garbo, her Siamese cross. Her partner, George Murray--love of her life and subject of this poem--died of leukemia in 2014.
Grandeur, Ghost Ranch, NM
High buttes, deep canyons,
endless valleys –
land and sky
more immense than
my delusions of grandeur
could surpass.
Canyons too vast
to fill with my-self.
Awe rescued me;
to feel dwarfed,
a gift of grace.
What this teacher taught me –
that space is a parable of time,
that solid rock is illusion,
that matter is fluid,
that particle is but
an instant of wave.
Grandeur is the call;
gratitude is the response.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 3, 2017
Cover Art: Euphony by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
November 3, 2017
Cover Art: Euphony by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Some Houston Storm Poems
Storm
It’s Houston,
and a storm’s a coming.
I go across the street
for
not batteries, not ice,
but to buy a quart of milk
for my cookie stash.
Being Inside
Rain is falling on my prison,
on this my own house.
I do not want to leave,
but so contrary,
do not want to stay there,
surrounded by clouded wishes
and watered fears.
The Flood
There was rain.
Filling the street.
Water creeping up the walk.
Soon invading the house.
A world of water outside.
Rain obscuring vision.
Nowhere to put your foot.
Nowhere to drive your car.
Dismay there in the rain.
Rising with the water.
Then the awakening of hope.
Rescue boat appearing in the dawn.
Dennis Herrell lives in a 1920’s bungalow in the old historic Heights of Houston, Texas. He writes both serious and humorous poems about his life in this civilized society. (Poking fun at himself is almost a full-time job.) He especially likes to look at the small things in everyday life that make us (him) so individual and vulnerable. About 500 poems published in various magazines since July, 2000.
Some Houston related storm poems
I
Motion
The small, white petals
run about on the ground
in the wind like children
in a playground, with no
mind for me: and if I
were gone next year,
the playing would go on.
II
Wraith
Her soul goes at night
between the branches
through empty spaces
down to the cold creek
and tries to warm itself
in moonlight and cheer
itself by the thin water
under a sky with no star
to share.
Julian O'Dea is an Australian poet who lives in Canberra, the nation's capital. He mainly writes lyrical poetry. He is semi-retired.
Cleveland Haiku #33
A dog shits on the beach---
his human handler
buries it with his foot
Cleveland Haiku #38
Driftwood sails into port,
sailing under the flag
of discarded towels
Cleveland Haiku #39
The geese walked away from the beach---
souvenirs of their stay
remain
Michael Ceraolo is a 59-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet with a long list of credits he won't bore you with at this time, though he can't guarantee he won't do so in the future."
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 10, 2017
Cover Art: The Beginning by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
November 10, 2017
Cover Art: The Beginning by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Sirena
she is a song of a thousand
prayers
whose walk rocks with the
sway of the sea
she is poetry in a blues
wail
as she turns into a
thousand doves
and she enchants sailors
with a song like
rain
her poetry is a
light
spreading a wing over
the puget
sound
Erren Kelly
Progression
Cancel everything, take
appointments down. Now
the essence of tomorrow
has grown a film, blurred
as old mirror on glue, brown
backing. Now we wait,
watching the glug rise and stew
along the promontory, knowing
this chaos would arrive, strapped
into paralyzing wet suits,
measuring sleight of hand,
hopes of avoidance,
whimpering regret, muttering
inconsequentials.
Yet, loves gather, swarming
with a late care,
children are held. Brave science
practices, new pathways are mapped.
Miracle lights flare on the horizon,
and kindness works wonders.
It might be something,
binding together earth’s flesh,
spirit, vision, a turning.
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.
Lycanthropy
The moon waxes and night falls, as does his mood.
The transition begins with the first sip of moonshine,
the gentle nature of her snuggle bunny transforms,
it devolves quickly from subtle to noisy.
Words now have teeth,
spoken from behind fangs that bite with brutish nips.
His howling and growling
snarling, roaring beast emerges,
he beats his chest and pounces.
Claws as hands, once gentle,
twist arms and hair and her gut.
Emotions bounce off walls and she follows.
Confusion reigns and the animal stink
of both prey and predator grows stronger,
as she learns to fear the rising of the moon
and the raising of the bottle.
Linda Imbler is the author of the published poetry collection “Big Questions, Little Sleep.” She has had her poetry accepted in numerous journals. Information about her creative process and a current list of all published sites can be found at lindaspoetryblog.blogspot.com. This writer lives in Wichita, Kansas.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 17, 2017
Cover Art: Hiccups by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
November 17, 2017
Cover Art: Hiccups by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Stillness, Ghost Ranch, NM
A sea of silence –
between the mesas,
down the long valley,
upward to the stars.
Stillness, a Presence
whose Voice I can hear,
gives reassurance
I am not alone.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Sometimes
love
is seen
in 45 minute
increments
hand to hand
thick glass
between
you.
Sometimes
love
is spoken
through broken
telephones
your whole heart
an orange sweat suit
on the other side.
Cassandra Dallett is out here trying to function. She has been published online and in many print magazines. Cassandra reads often around the San Francisco Bay Area, she hosts the monthly writing workshop OnTwoSix, and the quarterly reading series Moon Drop Productions. Her first full-length book of poetry Wet Reckless (Manic D Press) was released in 2014. In 2015, she authored five chapbooks one of them, On Sunday, A Finch (Nomadic Press) was nominated for a California Book Award, and someday hopefully in the not too distant future, look for her full-length collection Collapse (Nomadic Press)
Decastich for the Young
Night train hurtles west, back
in time to roots young
and innocent. Words of wisdom
to the young: trim your nails
out the window when stopped
at a station, admire the spires
of Cologne Cathedral in the morning light.
But don’t climb ladders
while even slightly drunk, not even
up to a bunkbed, not at home …
or on a train.
Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana and now lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. She teaches piano, writes poetry and enjoys photography. Her photos and poems have won awards both in North America and overseas and have been published in chapbooks and in both print and online anthologies. In 2017 she won a fellowship and attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
November 24, 2017
Cover Art: Interconnected by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
November 24, 2017
Cover Art: Interconnected by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Tribute
(in memoriam Muhammad Ali, d. 2016)
Setting truth free is letting bees
out of the hive. It stings. It shakes
things up, as if all the poppies
in a field were to pop at once.
But truth wrapped in darkness is no gift,
and we give what we like to receive.
Welcome to the rest of your life.
Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana and now lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. She teaches piano, writes poetry and enjoys photography. Her photos and poems have won awards both in North America and overseas and have been published in chapbooks and in both print and online anthologies. In 2017 she won a fellowship and attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
Old House
Old house in need of paint, I see there was a time
when the rose that grows on yonder wall had little need to pine.
Prune by youthful fingers, that trimmed the thorny stalks
and later plucked the fragrant buds which flavored evening talks.
And more I see as I walk by, an old man – aged and bent,
who does his best to chop the weeds that suffocate the scent.
Old house you are a shadow and I squint my eye to see
more clearly how it used to be, when you thought youth was free.
Perhaps it’s just as well old house, you cannot really feel
the gnarling thorns of age that are so very real.
You see, old house, your mistress lives – for want of better word.
And the effort made to draw each breath is often left unheard.
Wrapped nicely in a blanket, people say: “You’re well,
oh yes my dear – you’re looking fine”. They don’t perceive your hell.
A little sigh, a vacant glance, no one really knows,
carried on a summer breeze, the memory of your rose.
The corner shop still bustles on, it doesn’t show its age
it seems to be a catalyst, which precipitates a stage,
For the changing of realities that give a different view,
to the once so pretty garden and the hands that now touch few.
Sixty years is just a breath, to those in retrospect,
and so, it is to those alone who sit and recollect.
A happy bride of twenty did plant a climbing rose,
and now she’s just turned eighty – I’m glad she ‘comes and goes’.
I have seen in yonder rose, the shadow of your past,
and I must use my time of youth for something that will last.
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 she was a child. She enjoys writing flash fiction and prose.
She has a Bachelor of Arts degree, a degree in English Literature and a Graduate Diploma in Education.
Grandeur, Ghost Ranch, NM
High buttes, deep canyons,
endless valleys –
land and sky
more immense than
my delusions of grandeur
could surpass.
Canyons too vast
to fill with my-self.
Awe rescued me;
to feel dwarfed,
a gift of grace.
What this teacher taught me –
that space is a parable of time,
that solid rock is illusion,
that matter is fluid,
that particle is but
an instant of wave.
Grandeur is the call;
gratitude is the response.
Howard F. Stein, an organizational, applied, psychoanalytic, medical anthropologist, psychohistorian, organizational consultant, and 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 facilitated meetings of the American Indian Diabetes Prevention Center. He is author of thirty books, of which nine are of poetry. The Second Edition ofListening Deeply, published by the University of Missouri Press, was released in spring 2017. His most recent poetry book, Light and Shadow, was published in late 2016 by Doodle and Peck Publishing, Yukon, OK (https://www.doodleandpeck.com/adult) He can be reached at [email protected]
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 1, 2017
Cover Art: Eden's Choice by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
December 1, 2017
Cover Art: Eden's Choice by Patricia Carroll
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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.
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.
Remember When
Remember when the handyman guy who used to work with our neighbour
and broke a step on our deck when he dragged his lawnmower over it--
that guy—remember he used to wake me at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.
when he started up his badass truck and drove away
after he left the house across the street where he was having an affair
with the woman who rented the basement … . Wait, you say, he was
having an affair? Well, of course he was. Why else would he leave
her place every night at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.? Then, of course,
it became too obvious so she moved out, and he never worked
with our neighbour again, and her child now rides the same bus as … .
You say, How do you remember all this stuff?
I just do. And why can’t you remember useful things
like where you’ve put … ? I can’t.
I remember every fact that isn’t important, like the shirt
I wore when I watched a lightning storm, and what I wore
when you saw me just outside the courtyard (because I had made it
and it was my favorite summer dress), and what we ate
on a certain occasion, and what the weather was, and the smell
of places and the colors of things and that for awhile, night or day,
I always nursed the baby when the digital clock said 11:11.
I was always a writer. I just didn’t know it.
Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana and now lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. She teaches piano, writes poetry and enjoys photography. Her photos and poems have won awards both in North America and overseas and have been published in chapbooks and in both print and online anthologies. In 2017 she won a fellowship and attended the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
Wrong-Way Wake-Up
A drizzly mist shines the old leaves with slick
and glisten, they do not demur at all
to the dizzy drizzle or to its toll
on all they stand for, that stand there for them,
standing tall, rooting in hardscrabble soil.
(And what about you, how do you see it?)
It’s enough to make me hug my pillow
and let it let out its feathery yes.
Peter Specker: TWIXT is the mononym-onym of poet Peter Specker; he has had poetry published in Margie, The Indiana Review, Amelia, California State Quarterly, Emry’s Journal, RE:AL, Pegasus, First Class, Pot-pourri, Art Times, The Iconoclast, Epicenter, Subtropics, Quest, Confrontation, Writers’ Journal, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, The Prairie Journal(Can), Stand (UK), Tulane Review and so many others. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
On The Frontline*
“…at the same time, war is war...”
-- Secretary of Defense General James Mattes, 19Oct17
Repatriated remains slid off the plane’s conveyor belt,
imagine what it would be like to be trained for war
then imagine that yesterday’s engineers or pharmacists
are now novices doing door to door combat.
ISIS comes with men who love
death and their guns as much as you love life.
A suicide jihadi child asks, Will I see this video when in Heaven?
as Iraqi army snipers shoot themselves with their mobiles.
I photo the 44 or 46 I've killed: may such actions please God.
He's The One Who Made Us Happy died -- Amjad's wife was newly pregnant.
People are like leaves on a tree. When dried out they fall to the ground.
When I go home I try to block out the war but it changes you.
Double tap -- second missile hit -- my Rukia ravaged.
Rain washes seas of trash into the river where families drink cholera.
Six an hour kids pass from preventable causes.
We have these dreams...
Wet-behind-the-ears Stanford professor back in ’76,
a veteran become medical student named Jorge Madeira
wouldn't talk to me about Special Forces in Viet Nam
-- except the word, Revenge.
*after Frontline - Mosul/ Yemen, PBS 18Oct17
Gerard Sarnat’s been nominated for Pushcarts. Gerry’s authored four collections: HOMELESS CHRONICLES (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016) which included work published in Gargoyle, Lowestoft, American Journal of Poetry, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review,Tishman Review plus was featured in New Verse News, Edify, Songs of Eretz, Avocet, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway, Bywords and Floor Plan. Radius, Foliate Oak, Dark Run, Scarlet Leaf, Good Men Project, Anti-Heroin Chic, Winamop, Aois, Poetry Circle, Tipton Review, Creative Truth, Harbor Village, KYSO, Rumblefish and Ordinary Madness’ debut feature sets of new poems. Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, KADDISH FOR THE COUNTRY, for distribution as a pamphlet in Seattle on Inauguration Day 2017 as well as the next morning as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. In May “Amber Of Memory” was the single poem chosen for Gerry s 50th college reunion symposium on Bob Dylan; the Harvard Advocate accepted a second plus Oberlin, Brown, Columbia etc. in and outside the US accepted concurrent pieces. In August Failed Haiku presented his work first among over a hundred contributors. Later in 2017 Beautiful Loser’s main spread will be Sarnat’s poetry accompanied by an interview. 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 of healthcare organizations and Stanford Medical School professor. Married since 1969, he has three children, four grandkids.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 8, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
December 8, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
Sewing Lessons
I seize a blue thread
hanging from starred rafters
where mice slip through
layers of brocaded space
to catch rain in thimbles
then repair old sheets
selvedged sides to middle
black-clad aunts command
and pay for neat stitches
where feet have torn
nightmares to worn shreds
day after night
before I walk four miles
uphill to sew houses
one behind the other
between orchards and crows
whose raucous voices
cast embroidery over the past
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/
Dream House
So in came the carpenters,
plumbers and electricians.
Their charge was to make paradise livable.
They were followed by the carpet layers.
And the painting crew.
Then came tile and linoleum
and a heating system so discreet
you'd never know what was warming you.
Furniture appeared as if by magic.
Mementos found their way
to the mantle above the fireplace.
Food filled the kitchen cupboards.
Clothing did likewise with dressers and closets,
closed all drawers and doors behind them.
Books lined the shelves.
A stereo system rose up among
stacks of CD's.
A flat screen TV looked longingly
at the remote that sat on a
shiny brown coffee table.
And the bed was springy,
the mattress and the pillows soft.
All was complete
except for us.
I was working third shift at the bank.
You were driving back from Charlotte.
We had yet to meet.
The dream seemed real enough
despite how little
it had to go on.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Tau, Studio One and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Examined Life Journal and Midwest Quarterly.
Hush
Hush now little one
this is a secret we shall keep
amongst the stars gentle glare
here where you and I can be alone
and I can share the truth that you deserve.
Mother has always been proud
no matter your stature or your skill. But mother
will always be saddened by her inability to heal
what was life's cruel joke upon your life. Yet mother
never wants to see you use this as an excuse
to never try to be what mother knows you can be.
For you are her rainbow, her prism of jubilation
that can never be taken. So dream well of our times
together, and that of your friends. For when daybreaks
I will do all I can to make them in to a reality
so your dream will never end.
Isaac Jones lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and is an inspiring poet, and sometimes parody writer for a site called Deviant Art. He has been published five times by Feeling of the Heart, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 15, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
December 15, 2017
Cover Art: Norman J. Olson
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
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: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.normanjolson.com
Email: [email protected]
The Height Of Cold
this glacial sheet of stars
a wedge of rime on the sky
where tossed paper napkins
and a footprint coin snow
pigeons lost in hoar-frost
are speared by fallen icicles
an apron of milk splits
the gelid end of solstice
in a river of ice-floes
among shards of arctic moons
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/
Land Lady
The rooster crows so she won't have to.
Already up and staring in the mirror,
once-nacreous skin is now the color of cow hide.
Her lashes, pale gray, are redundant doorways to her vacant eyes.
Hands the texture of old patties,
lips like candy licked dry,
here is a woman who can behead a turkey
as if it were her father trying to put his hands on her again.
She'd love to see him, rushing about,
neck flicking blood in all directions.
That's her dad's faded picture on the dresser.
His flailing headless body would bring about her first smile in years.
There's a monster behind the photograph's boyish smile.
She keeps it there are a warning.
His farm is hers to run these days.
She drinks coffee, eats toast, in her tiny kitchen
The sun's already dazzling and white.
There's a list of chores to be done
and only the one who can do them.
She'll bake in the heat.
Sweat will age her even more.
No matter. She looks like the land. She smells of it too.
But she makes a living at what
people said she never could.
She's paid for it in the mirror.
And it never will set right with her heart.
But, long ago, she made her mind up.
And she never made up her looks again.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in the Tau, Studio One and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Leading Edge, Examined Life Journal and Midwest Quarterly.
Failure
Sometimes they say "Failure is not an option."
and to be honest they are right. Like the rain
it is an occurrence, a tragedy, and a blessing.
No one wants to fail, but it happens. With the
odds in your favor it just happens. When success
seems assured it happens. And when life has turned
against you it happens. But with each failure, every
setback the green of our resolve grows stronger
healthier, like the fields that await the coming rain.
So let not the regression of dreams be blamed on
your failures and short comings, but on your own
inability or your unwillingness to grow.
Isaac Jones lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and is an inspiring poet, and sometimes parody writer for a site called Deviant Art. He has been published five times by Feeling of the Heart, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 22, 2017
Cover Art: Pitigliano "Little Jerusalem", Tuscany, Italy – 2016 pencil with ink by Helen Bar-Lev
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
December 22, 2017
Cover Art: Pitigliano "Little Jerusalem", Tuscany, Italy – 2016 pencil with ink by Helen Bar-Lev
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Helen Bar-Lev, artist, poet
www.helenbarlev.com
Assistant to the President, Voices Israel
www.voicesisrael.com
Israeli representative, Immagine& Poesiahttps://immaginepoesia.jimdo.com/
Senior Poet laureate, Amy Kitchener Foundation
Recipient Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art
Dusk on the Eve of the Equinox
This year the birds have surprised us
with their early arrival
the storks in August instead of September,
the pelicans in September, not November,
the swifts swooped and dipped in exuberance
just as the squills shot out of the ground
pointing skywards, look…
roadrunners scuttled to and fro
clouds bellowed and blackened
three days ago the first rains refreshed the land,
and continue still
Where the houses end
and the road into the forest begins
a puddle has formed, widening each day
to the proportions of a pond;
only a small strip of pavement permits passage
for those who possess neither wing nor fin
Now, equinox evening,
the rain has washed away summer’s dust
from purple grape and orange clementine,
children play in rain-soaked grass
squills sway in wet unison
and the sun sends sparkles
through the newly-formed pond
while the wind wishes it to ripple
Nights lengthen
jackets and blankets
emerge from closets
And autumn happens
Helen Bar-Lev, artist, poet
www.helenbarlev.com
Assistant to the President, Voices Israel
www.voicesisrael.com
Israeli representative, Immagine& Poesiahttps://immaginepoesia.jimdo.com/
Senior Poet laureate, Amy Kitchener Foundation
Recipient Homer European Medal for Poetry and Art
6 A.M.
morning yawns
stretches across the woods
flexes long fingers
down a length of road
peers over the hill
through my open window
and sets six alarms
into shrill chorus
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/
My Birthday
I'm still walking barefooted
in the grass
I can smell Autumn
in it today--
the wet
under my foot callouses
warns me
of sharp blades
The Bedroom
Sheer curtains billow
carrying sweet smells
of lilac from the bush
Casement window
wide open
like a mouth
waiting, waiting waiting
Cocktail Peanuts
I sit here
pop cheap nuts
salty
boiled like the south
a cheap date
compared to your pecans
Mel Sarnese writes poetry and short fiction near Toronto, Canada. Wife and mother of three, she has published in numerous journals at home and abroad.
Ascent Aspirations Magazine
Friday's Poems
December 29, 2017
Cover Art: "Holding It Together" by Carla Stein
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Friday's Poems
December 29, 2017
Cover Art: "Holding It Together" by Carla Stein
Friday's Poems will be published weekly. Submissions are now open.
Send your work to [email protected]
Carla Stein:
Currently residing in Nanaimo, B.C., Carla Stein, grew up in a family of creative individuals and was exposed to both viewing and making art at an early age. She was deeply influenced and nurtured by many hours spent playing and learning among the museums and public art displays of Chicago, Illinois. After immigrating to Canada in 1975, Carla achieved a fine arts diploma from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Her career path has involved teaching art to children and adults as both recreation and therapy. She is also fascinated by the images words evoke, and finds her poetic endeavors often cross fertilize her visual conceptions.
Stein works primarily in a variety of two dimensional water-based media, including acrylics, watercolors, and inks. Her subjects are often focused on the common perception of the natural world as holding less value than the human-made environment. Stein incorporates the use of translucent glazes with impressionist sensibilities and surrealist imagery encouraging viewers to challenge their unquestioned conceptions of how we relate to our environment.
An active member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, Carla also holds membership and exhibits at the Waterfront Gallery in Ladysmith, and with the Cowichan Valley Arts Council. She has been juried into numerous exhibitions and shows including Arts on the Avenue, Coast Collective and the Ladysmith Fine Arts Show as well as having shown in galleries in Victoria and Vancouver.
Currently residing in Nanaimo, B.C., Carla Stein, grew up in a family of creative individuals and was exposed to both viewing and making art at an early age. She was deeply influenced and nurtured by many hours spent playing and learning among the museums and public art displays of Chicago, Illinois. After immigrating to Canada in 1975, Carla achieved a fine arts diploma from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. Her career path has involved teaching art to children and adults as both recreation and therapy. She is also fascinated by the images words evoke, and finds her poetic endeavors often cross fertilize her visual conceptions.
Stein works primarily in a variety of two dimensional water-based media, including acrylics, watercolors, and inks. Her subjects are often focused on the common perception of the natural world as holding less value than the human-made environment. Stein incorporates the use of translucent glazes with impressionist sensibilities and surrealist imagery encouraging viewers to challenge their unquestioned conceptions of how we relate to our environment.
An active member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, Carla also holds membership and exhibits at the Waterfront Gallery in Ladysmith, and with the Cowichan Valley Arts Council. She has been juried into numerous exhibitions and shows including Arts on the Avenue, Coast Collective and the Ladysmith Fine Arts Show as well as having shown in galleries in Victoria and Vancouver.
Waiting
On the pier we waited for empty boats,
all of us clustered together
on the wooden boards.
The lake spread out before us,
brown water lapping at the shore.
Mosquitos whined at our ears.
We were hungry, and our eyes
burned as we watched the darkening sky.
There were pennies on our eyes,
taste of metal on our tongues.
Not one of us could see the end.
We were waiting for rain,
waiting in the heat for the end of time.
We were waiting for songs, and murmurs
and voices wailing dirges in the wind.
Steve Klepetar lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His work has appeared worldwide in such journals as Boston Literary Magazine, Chiron, Deep Water, Expound, Muddy River Poetry, Red River Review, Snakeskin, Voices Israel, Ygdrasil, and many others. Several of his poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize (including four in 2016). New collections include A Landscape in Hell (Flutter Press), Family Reunion (Big Table Publishing), and “How Fascism Comes to America (Locofo Chaps).
A Mild Erotic Fantasy
while riding the bus, contemplating
the tanned nape of the neck of the
young man in front of me—thick
black hair above a shaven band
of black bristles above smooth
brown skin, the back of a small
silver stud in each neat ear lobe.
Imagine the tip of my tongue
touching the warm muscled
centre just above his collar.
Imagine
the sensation; imagine
the scandal, that lascivious
old woman assaulting
a mortified young man.
She should be charged
(shouldn’t she?) she wouldn’t be
—too much ridicule to
go around
Imagine
his skin tasting like honey
—papayas, peaches--
fine hairs like apricot fuzz
tickling my fancy, and
virtually satisfied,
I get off,
smiling.
Elizabeth Rhett Woods has published six books of poetry, most recently, Woman Walking: Selected Poems (Ekstasis Editions, 2009), and four novels, the latest being Coyote—A Tale of Unexpected Consequences (Ekstasis Editions, 2011) Her radio plays and poetry have been broadcast on CBC Radio. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
www.elizabethrhettwoods.ca
One Hundred Percent Milkshake
Gotta stumble on a place that serves ’em right,
like those old dairies in small towns,
places where they still delivered milk,
and it’s the milkmaids of yesterday,
pure like the clean teats their soft hands pulled,
from cows that roamed on grass outdoors,
gave birth every two years, and lived
five times as long as they do now.
A milkshake’s gotta be one hundred percent
made of milk, not some plastic filler shake
from fast-food counters with names we know,
and there’s gotta be that extra in the aluminum
container beading up a frosty line, tempting you
way past full, once your glass is drained.
A hundred percent and you--
too young to know the difference--
sitting on a red upholstered stool,
swivelling round and round,
sucking on your straw,
just in the moment of a milkshake,
the tops of the girl’s young breasts
dragging your quickening heart
away from childhood and down
the long dusty, boulder-broken road.
Previously published in the collection, After All The Scissor Work Is Done, Leaf Press 2015
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.