Three Poems by A.J. Huffman

Showers & Flowers

Shock the mountains

purple.  Today

the sky started to cry,

but the desert only smiled.  Its reply:

a bloom, one hundred-year gestation,

a baby

to brighten the day.

Unplanted Seeds

sit, stagnant and rotting

in pouches labeled appropriately.  Irrelevant

bits of beginnings

wait for foraging fingers to pick

patches of earth, a burial site primed for rebirth. 

No such touch comes.

Shells shrivel, grow old.  With disuse

comes a death before death, a hanging

rack, a package yellowing in the sun.

Quarry

The scar was bigger than the sky

and twice as stunning,

changing in the light,

shining in the shadow.

This thin necklace of silvered

links stands to name this creation:

Of Another’s Hand.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com.  She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com.

A Poem by Craig W. Steele

Green Cathedral

A stroll through any forest becomes a
pilgrimage through a green cathedral:
Massive trunks rise like bark-plastered columns
in a living nave; spreading boughs form
groin vaults and fan vaults floating overhead.
And sometimes the din of a boisterous spring rain
assumes the susurrations of fervent prayer,
awakening soft echoes nestled among the branches.

Before long, baptismal blessings cascade
from ecclesiastical elites, leach
through the common clergy and soak
the shadowed penitents within the understory,
a fate accepted in sodden silence.
After the divine deluge comes a
feeling of renewal, waiting
for the drip-drying to end.

Craig W. Steele resides in the countryside of northwestern Pennsylvania, near Lake Erie.  When not writing, he's a professor of biology at Edinboro University.  In his quest to become a widely-published unknown poet, his poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, literary journals and magazines, most recently in The Lyric, Mused:  The BellaOnline Literary Review, and Wolf Willow Journal, among others, and he continues to write monthly poetry as "The Writer's Poet for Extra Innings online.

Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Portrait of the Tune Off Her Beauty

Oh I hear a rhapsody of gulls
In mourning endlessly swelling
As they lament he who was lured to a reef
Like human drift wood
This creature lost in a sea of bitterness
His lust for the sea woman
Long was unfulfilled
And his shimmering departure
Teemed with lingering farewells
But all was forgotten in the laughing ocean
Like a haunting vision that has been displaced
Spawned by silken dreaming moments
As strangely silent as a coral reef.



Winged Rapture

In a place of seagulls in the sunshine
I became undone by a delicious
Burnt to a crisp remade woman
Almost dreamlike in her red lipped software programs
While I linger like an unintelligible Batmobile
In the Bit O HOney and gumball tulips
On the sea floor of a Les Paul guitar
Until I was bitten by a radioactive teddy bear
After which we ate a sequined and feathered
Casino buffet breakfast of Beatle songs
On the sun dappled red planet Mars
That our two hearts had brought into being
And one in which I have never wandered
Far from not even in my dreaming.



Only a Few Lines Long

Sea life is cresting on waves
That speak a peculiar language
Near where the sleeping seedlings
Echo frail and pale as the unmoored bones
Of a mysterious green carnival vanish
Into a spoonful of fade away
With all the rhythm of
A merry-go-round as it wails and sways
And which only now exists in my memories of other days.




For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.  

Two Poems by Rick Mitchell

Pre-trembling

The water waves in easily this
     evening, seethes back over the
pebbled shore.  Children sleep in
     the screened porch, breathing
pale moonlight that blues the cabin.

On the diving rock near the moored
     boat, they sit watching rippled
blackness where minnows skitter like
     flat rocks across the surface.  After
her cheek brushes his and she leaves,
     he wonders why anyone else should
visit him now.

He hears the hot water for the
    shower, leans back, sees her shirt
slip off, fall below the window ledge.
     A piece of driftwood clacks against
the boat while across the lake, soundless
     lightening scores an indigo sky.

Lesson

Had to see them saw the clothesline

tree, elm whose flirting shadows

the land knew long before

even thoughts of a farm house.

And when it fell, he squeezed tight his

five year old eyes as the ground trembled

and nothing beneath his feet

felt solid ever again.

Rick Mitchell is a lifelong resident of New York State; except for the four years he lived in Reno and attended the University of Nevada.  His poems have recently appeared in The Camel Saloon, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Skylark, and The Cimarron Review, Chiron Review Press published Speaking of Seed and Night, his first book of poetry and Aldrich Press published Before Every Other Fall in 2014.

A Poem by Sheikha A.

Dogma

Another day of captivity
as light takes over darkness,
a shrewd sun taunts the day
unfurling with leisure,
somnambulating languorously
around a thinning moon;

the day is a different blush,
there is a hint of sapphire
in the amber-red, coiled
onto a night that wasn't
meant to end;

the air lingers too, in serenade,
while the sun wills the moon
to fade out, in postulant peace
without casualty.

Another day of calamity,
the light has de-hued the night,
ushering birds out of their nests
to seek their grain;

they may travel far on wings
navigated by wakefulness,
but in their hearts, the moon
keeps a fire alight
where the sapphire burns
its pyre of memories--
a blue smoke
of unmelodic melancholy.

Sheikha A. hails from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates and is the author of a short poetry collection titled Spaced (Hammer and Anvil Books, 2013) available on kindle.  Her work appears in over 40 literary magazines such as Red Fez, The Muse, Ygdrasil, A New Ulster, Pyrokinection, Mad Swirl, ken*again to name a few and several anthologies as well.  She has work upcoming in The Stray Branch.

Three Poems by Don Thompson

Dry Creeks

It's been too long.  It's too late.
The dry creeks have lost their way
out of the mountains.

And when it finally rains,
they'll have to start over, reinterpret
the blurred lay of the land

and accept, reluctantly,
that one hundred years or more
in the old bed,
so familiar and reassuring,
count for nothing.



Dead Palm

No one gave it permission
to take root here, solitary
between the bank of a dry ditch
and an unplowed field
miles from any other palm trees.

But unruly seeds do wander,
opposed to prevailing winds
or snug in a bird's gullet,
willing to end up anywhere far--
unlike stay-at-home apples

This palm, never flourishing,
nevertheless added a foot per year,
too stout to wrap your arms around
at twenty.  Then withered,
done in by the drought.

Without fronds, it stands
as its own obelisk.
Even a palm tree needs rain:  A taste
now and then is enough,
but not no rain at all--ever.



This Stone

This stone rests easily in my hand,
a perfect fit, flickering
with mineral light
like the abandoned outpost of a star
that burned out eons ago.
It's still warm.  Imagine
all the time and trouble
it has taken to weather,
to wear down to what it is now.
And yet this stone has changed less
in a thousand years
than you and I do every day.

Don Thompson has been publishing poetry since the early sixties with several books and chapbooks in this century.  Back Roads won the 2008 Sunken Garden Prize.  Recent releases:  Keeping an Eye on the Stones, prose poems from Kattywompus Press; Local Color, a book-length narrative poem from Aldrich Books; Keeping the Secrets from Flutter Press.  Another selection of prose poems, Nietzsche Wept (Finishing Line Press) is due in late October.  An LA Times profile, "Planted in the San Joaquin," remains available online.  Much more at his website:  San Joaquin Ink (www.don-e-thompson[dot]com).

A Poem from Kevin Hibshman

A Fantasy for Late Spring

Sinew aglow like verdant leaves.
I am content to allow insects to slide upon my slippery skin.
My mind is open as a field that stretches endlessly as I hold the Earth again.

Kevin M. Hibshman has been an active poet with work appearing in numerous journals and magazines since 1990.  He edited his own poetry magazine, FEARLESS, for sixteen years.  A new book is scheduled for release sometime during the fall of 2015.  Kevin received a BA in Liberal Arts from Union Institute and University/Vermont College in 2006.