THE ORIGIN OF THE LIE (By Joseph Cavera) I am the Great Liar For years, my words have spread Through every ear Surrounding every thought They have taken their place Among everyday speech No one the wiser They have taken root Growing out through every Branch, stem, and leaf Through all great oaks Rosy ambers and black pines […]
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Ink dries on my skin the way breath does on yours. You have lost the way to this parched strip of land and I have refused the silence required to get to yours. We are stranded, mud stained and moist with moss-green regret, a galaxy of hesitations apart. Bio: Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who […]
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Intrusion Forced entry into caves, mud huts, castles, log cabins, condos, has been a constant, despite best efforts of self defense, violent penetration usually resulting in looting, rape, slaughter, violation of the dwelling, yet more survive in modern times, courtesy of better law and order. Gary Beck/Ignition Point ‘Ignition Point’ is an unpublished poetry collection that looks at […]
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Donald Trump and Mother Teresa Time’s a jet plane when you’re young. You go to school get a good job marry someone nice and have a family if that’s your calling. Then the kids grow up and move out and things start falling apart even if you have a pension and many now won’t. Poor health sneaks in like a submarine and in […]
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Off The Wheel I rallied under the wheel the last the very last I knew my breath wasn’t for living not here where thoughts pave the streets and words ricochet nothing ever leaves us it can if we want to be more of ourselves and less of others to worship love and what’s behind it I place on the […]
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The Complication Slide in Problem #1 since the story’s going too easily, way too well It’s a complication just created around the second act, since the author did not realize the story was so simple A bit of a bad baron dropped in from the sky, as in: Why should she be attracted to him? But it will propel us […]
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Poem By SIMON PERCHIK * So you let the water boil as if you were not yet born and already breathing it can barely make out the bubbles burdened by sunlight the way some ancient sea struggles inside, hangs on to bells –it’s a battered pot, beaten and the dead who still ask why reefs are needed […]
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I stayed late in the street tonight, felt the breeze chill come up, saw the ice sky form, fog-dense. Shirt tail out, I rock back in my boots, scan the silhouette corners for bar room stagger, a skater’s weave. From a rooftop nest, long minutes of a heron’s call are quieted as a diesel Mercedes, a Fat Boy Harley […]
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When I pile up cut tomatoes, red onion, and radishes on top of romaine lettuce, I think of the hands that picked, cleaned, packed, and loaded them on trucks, carried them to cold rooms arranged them on shelves. As I remember stories of my father, a new comer a child-laborer in another era in another country, I say a […]
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Checkpoint Lurching, they bluster – ghouls into the chasm. Fierce lava, blowing, nullifies their fall And dissipates harsh gravity’s concussion, Forces a seething screen of phoenix cowardice, Leaping to swell Into a fresh, mendacious crust, Tripping and throttling the led Into a smear upon pure metamorphic beauty. The skeleton’s jaws yawn apart; A stranded mountaineer was frozen At his prime […]
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