To Barney Rosset
Spill green beer onto the ground
From a glass with a clover on it
Talking to Astrid about your Irish mother
Happy St Patrick’s Day Barney!
I cannot believe you are gone
Gone but not forgotten
The phosphorescence of your voice
On the corner of Grove Street
Where Grove Press started
The shadows of Miller and Becket
They come to me in a dream
Barney in his couch, in his chair at Veselka
Lost in the maze of books at the Strand
Books that created resistance in Bucharest
Ionesco, in the Evergreen review, devoured by the underground
Translating Gregory Corso into Romanian
I cannot believe Barney is gone
Astrid replies, “neither can I, only at night…”
A giant painting on the wall with assemblages
Sits lonely in the darkness waiting for you
Your spirit is all around us nocturnally, eternally.
Valery Oisteanu was born in Russia (1943) and educated in Romania and France. He is the author of 10 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays. For the past 11 years he has been a columnist for NY Arts Magazine and an art critic for Brooklyn Rail and Artnet. He is also a contributing writer for French, Spanish, Canadian & Romanian art and literary magazines: La Page Blanche, Dart International, Art, Viata Romaneasca, Romania Literara, Altitudini, et al.
Klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz) is a poet, songwriter and occasional freelance journalist, who has lived in San Francisco for thirty years. His most recent collection of poems is This Drawn & Quartered Moon (Anvil Press, 2013.) He also writes songs with Chuck Prophet.
A long corridor
is lit with candles
in all kinds of jars
of different sizes,
different colors.
*
Young men and women
wearing nothing but white paint
sit in a circle
while a couple
in the center
wrestle dances.
*
Going further,
some actors are letting
their facial and body hair
grow back for a film.
One celebrity shows off
his furry ass.
*
Teaching: I ask
how many people
have spoken to someone
who was actually listening?
I ask them to remember what it was like.
Elaine Equi teaches creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts programs at City College of New York and The New School. Widely published, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. Coffee House Press has published many of her books; in 2007 they published Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems.
I placed my hands on her breasts,
but she was too busy watching
The Bride of Frankenstein to notice.
But during the commercial she said,
“If we made love now we won’t know how
the picture ends.” “I saw it already,”
I said. “I’ll tell you how it ends.”
“When did you see it?” she said. “About
three years ago,” I said. “Then you probably
don’t remember it too well,” she said.
“I do,” I said. “It’s all coming back to me.”
Hal Sirowitz is the co-winner of the NoirCon 2012 Poetry Contest. He is best known for his book, Mother Said. His eleventh book of poetry, Stray Cat Blues, was released at the end of 2012. Hal has work in anthologies edited by Billy Collins and Garrison Keillor. He was once the opening act for the rock band, They Might Be Giants, and has appeared on television in PBS’s The United States of Poetry. For many years Sirowitz was the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York.
Sure, take the hospital and make a condo
Luxury spinoff FUBU* movement
Track your tears on the typhoon index
Cry me a river, bitches, and get up in arms
I see you where you live hero decay alarms
America printed on a mirage
Strife grifters on the runway strafed
Momma said the thrifty thrive
Vigilant is visible, make your sign
99% AND WON’T LIE DOWN
Strike force under spring fire
The Shins are playing tonite
Let this poem bite the hand of darkness
Spokes of the sun spinning backwards
*For Us, By Us
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright has read in many New York City venues including the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, the Bowery Poetry Club and A Gathering of the Tribes. He is also an impresario (regularly booking events at La Mama), musician, artist, critic and eco-activist. A long time publisher, he ran Hard Press and then produced Cover Magazine from 1987 until 2001. His collection of sonnets, Triple Crown, has just been published by Spuyten Duyvil Press. Currently, he publishes Live Mag!
Whence came the boab rooted in religious rust
twisted Outback landmark a comatose crucifix
impaled on the nihilist horizon a few felty bulbs
Christmas, dangling off limbs myriad, deciduous
trunk bottle-bloated botanical elephantiasis?
Aboriginals answer with a dreamtime dream: god
rejected the hellish trees angrily speared them,
tops first, into the earth
where ripped up rhizomes,
splayed like Yazuka fingers,
gorgonian (Google it)
fry, as branches
under the dry
infinite
ocean
sky.
Nick D’Annunzio Jones is a writer in South Florida. He received his MFA from the University of California at Riverside. He has taught at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and at Lynn University, in Boca Raton, FL. Currently, he is studying Soto Zen Buddhism, works as a hospice caregiver and volunteers with the PEN prison-writing program. His non-fiction and criticism has appeared in Salon, Details, Popular Culture and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in Gargoyle.
Call the owners of health food bars
The low cholesterol ones, and bid them whip
Lactose-free curds for concupiscent herds
Of cougars, dreaming of that size six dress!
Let such wenches dawdle with boy toys
(Spring flowers—promising loose capers).
“This negligee makes me look fat!” they blurt.
The only empress is the empress of yogurt.
Take from the transgressor of meal,
Packing the Brie-ass globs, that seat
On which she loitered man tails once
And lipo-suck it. Botox her furrowed face.
If bionic cheeks protrude, they come
To show how old she is and numb.
Let a 40-watt light-bulb ease the hurt.
The only empress is the empress of yogurt.
David Alpaugh’s work has appeared in literary journals that include Able Muse, English Literary History, Exquisite Corpse, The Formalist, Free Lunch, Light, Modern Drama, Mudlark, Poetry, Rattle, Twentieth Century Literature, Wisconsin Review, and Zyzyvva. His first poetry collection, Counterpoint, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. His collection Heavy Lifting was published by Alehouse Press in 2007. He was the publisher of the Carquinez Poetry Review and has been featured at many venues in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is now a monthly contributor to SCENE4 Media and Arts Magazine.
There is a silence here that makes the heart hemorrhage,
a silence clouded with the deafening cacophony of necromancy.
As the gaze of the drowsing stars, the slumbering moon
kiss my fleeting blind face,
as the first lips of breath lacerate my lungs
(what a bloodied dawn wreathed with cock symphonies!)
I am drowned in a dilemma
of either staring back and becoming slave
to the beckoning hysteria of the heaven of the womb
or embracing fate, thus being possessed by necrophilia,
for in this citadel, everywhere you turn
is the sexy magnetism of graves…
There is a silence here that fosters stillbirth
although in the presence of this throng
there are only the age lopsided foursome of you
exiled from earth
and left to rot to your bones.
Father, where are you?
Mother
are you the one
who has slain metamorphosis
of herself
though in the siege and sway of:
the dissector of disease
coins grown to be gripped only when lucre
the twelve baskets of hunger, the ravisher of thirst
the ceaseless coma of fear, the divorce of a morning…?
And you still slew metamorphosis
of yourself
even becoming cosmic greener
heaving with hope, lightening with love
a statue for the Heavens…?
Father, where are you?
You these messiahs of devils, creators
of disease, gods
of rudderlessness, curse
of generations, ogres
of my homeland, draper
of this sore, inventor
of this secondly but eternal
chasm on my family, assassins
of my pageantry birth,
I love you all!
Stephen Buoro is a very promising Nigerian poet. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: The Good Shepherd Magazine, Sun Revue, Poemhunter, Wasafiri, Able Muse and an anthology by Latin Heritage Foundation.
POETS NOTE: I was born in the early 90’s in my hometown, Ososo, South-South Nigeria. At the time, houses were used as cemeteries to bury dead family members for cultural reasons. I was born at a time of political unrest in Nigeria, in my great grandfather’s residence, a single-storey building which contained the remains of past generations of my family. My three elder siblings were with my mother while my father was away in the North.
send me to the town’s
bruised core
to the late-night girls
caught out by the early sun
an implosion of grace
and the last owl tunnels home
the first magnolia opens
let me find
alternative routes lived-in dioramas
souls dyed in red iridescence
fag-ends attached to the mouths of brothers and sisters
like a born prodigal I walk
through kaleidoscopic patterns
that bedazzle paths
that keep halving quartering
curled up in my hand a message
stains and smells
won’t rub off
persons unknown read to me
amputations of sagas washed up on a beach
Iain Britton, well-known New Zealand poet has published widely in such magazines as Agenda, Stand, The Reader, Warwick Review, The Wolf Magazine, Nthposition, Blackbox Manifold, The Tower Journal, Scythe Literary Journal, Leafe Press, Horizon Review, The Literateur, Reconfigurations, Harvard Review, BlazeVOX, Drunken Boat, Zoland Poetry, Upstairs at Duroc, Jacket and the International Exchange for Poetic Invention, Moloch Journal, Anything, Anymore, Anywhere, and The Black Herald Press and Pool – a US poetry journal. Oystercatcher Press (UK) published his third poetry collection in 2009, Kilmog Press (NZ) his fourth in 2010. The Red Ceilings Press (UK) published his ebook 10 Poems in 2012.