New Poetry by Donal Mahoney

Mostly Basie with a Little Bach

Whenever I see a new woman, I know 

I should look at her hair and her eyes and her smile  

before I decide if she's worth the small talk

and the dinner later 

and whatever else she may require 

before she becomes taffy, 

pliant and smiling. 

But that never works for me.

Whenever I see a new woman, 

what matters to me is never 

her hair or her eyes or her smile;

what matters to me is her saunter 

as I stroll behind her.

If her moon comes over the mountain

and loops in languor, left to right, 

and then loops back again,

primed for another revolution, then

I introduce myself immediately

no matter where we are, 

in the stairwell or on the street

and that's when I see for the first time

her hair and her eyes and her smile  

but they are never a distraction since

I'm lost in the music of her saunter.

Years ago, tall and loping Carol Ann

took a train to Chicago, 

found a job and then one summer day 

walked ahead of me on Michigan Avenue 

while I surveyed her universe amid 

the cabs screeching, horns beeping, 

a driver's middle finger rising. 

Suddenly she turned and said hello 

and we shook hands and I saw her smile 

dart like a minnow and then disappear 

as she frowned and asked   

why was I walking behind her. 

I told her I was on my way to the noon Mass

at Holy Name Cathedral and she was welcome 

to come along. The sermon wouldn't be much, 

I said, but the coffee and bagels afterward 

would be plentiful, enough to cover lunch.

And Jesus Christ Himself would be there.

She didn't believe me, not at all, 

and she hasn't believed me since. 

That was thirty years ago and now

her smile is still a minnow

darting here and there but now 

it's more important than her saunter 

which is still a symphony, 

mostly Basie with a little Bach.

And I no longer traipse Michigan Avenue 

as I did years ago looking for new moons 

swirling in my universe. Instead, 

I take my lunch in a little bag 

on a long train from the suburbs

and I marvel at one fact:

It's been thirty years since I first heard 

the music in her saunter

and Carol Ann and I are 

still together, praise the Lord. 

Who can believe it? Not I. 

Carol Ann says she knew 

the ending from the start. 

Lord, Almighty. Fancy that.

- Donal Mahoney 2014

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney 

has had poetry and fiction published in The Galway Review, Revival, ROPES and other publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. 

Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com/

New Poetry by Vladimir Swirynsky

11:15 AM GREEN THEATER

- for Barbara

Her name is Elizabeth Bishop,
bare footed and tipsy toe hanging
a picture on the wall, afternoon
peaking with the wrap-around-drama
of heavy drinking.
Half finished poem
in the typewriter reaches
out for the moon, for Lota
Lota de Macedo Soares.

I find myself with a tear in my eye,
the Cleveland International Film
Festival ushering me to love’s
doorstep, a hundred paces from
the House of Blues.

I needed this, the profane energy
of the Portuguese Romance language,
a chance encounter, the stop-motion
of happiness that keeps betraying me.

You—
lover of stone steps, the painter
of beauty, give me the empty hours
of mood indigo, the things the heart
has forgotten, the shoestring
of a sunset.


- Vladimir Swirynsky 2014


 Vladimir Swirynsky survived school and went on to serve and survive in Vietnam. In time he got married, but unfortunately, they didn’t live happily ever after. The marriage died, but a poet was born.

New Poetry by James Walton

Pax Romanus (I, II, III)

Spare us, the Conquered

I

The fascist weeds the garden
Such love in pulling out,
Care granted to save the soil and replenish
With self made compost of previous remains.
They should have known his bitter truth
Of all he did for them unrequited;
In gentle torture he weeps for his people,
And how the day goes down so normally
As the lorries remove without haste
The handiwork so finely crafted,
To bring in bloom again
The preferred order of lines.

II

The comrades have been in a good paddock
How they strut their fat nonsense,
Believe the message is about them
So polished now and commentators
On everything thing they know and don’t.
Credit cards of bosses in hand
Wheel and deal with the best of them,
Stroke the impatient flank
Believe the stories they tell
With such ferocious plausibility,
Saddle the old chargers
Taunt the capitalists with rust
Shake the state with the workers’ flag.

III

Death squads have no imagination
The graffiti has only one colour,
A backwash where the pockmarks
Are the dots we link with rainbows
Made from the tears of all lovers
Children mother father brother sister.
The old city glistens in this rain
Painted with our crayons,
Ground out each night with the latest news
Who is missing who will fight.
So  many colours stain our fingers
They make us face the wall now,
Not knowing  never seeing that hope
Is streaming incandescently
From the streetlamps in our hands.


- James Walton 2014

Lives and works in the Strzelecki Mountains in South Gippsland and has had work published in a number of anthologies and journals, and the Age newspaper.

New Poetry by Jeremy Page

Measuring Happiness

I suppose it would be possible
with enough scans, syringes,
charts and such, to say
with some certainty, ‘This is,
on the favoured scale, how
happy you are: seventy two.’

Not bad. Of course, not like IQ –
one expects less (fluctuations, too).
How one feels, recorded quarterly
and plotted. In five years
we could look back at our lives
like a seismograph:

compare notes, print and frame
certificates, give medals to those
nearest the top, the most improved.
‘Keep it up son,’ we’d say.

‘What improvement!’ ‘What growth!’
Like biro markings of height 

in a door frame. Yet, as we age
I suppose the medals, the certificates
would, like pens long out of ink,
be put in a drawer somewhere:
lost and forgotten about.

One can only get so tall.

- Jeremy Page 2014

Born in New Zealand in 1988, Sydney-based poet Jeremy Page has just completed a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. He was first published last year in the Australian anthology Stoned Crows, and with his study complete (for now) he is currently in the process of collecting and editing work for further publication attempts.

New Poetry by Robbie Coburn

self-portrait

greyed morning a nightmare of waking into sobered light

the chilled palm still formed on the glass 

dry skin settles into the gale air without radiance

after blacked sleep  surges of wind disturb the senses

delusion  sets into consciousness   propels 

further obscurities   as the eye adjusts

    to be a poet is to live with ghosts

leaving the house  think of  misjudged breath 

fleeting in the lengths of unfamiliar bodies

and the night  no different wiped in its unresolved law

run through the miles of road   cars carried cityward 

grounded in the country dirt spread beneath brick as cinder

     in the centre of this thought continues   nausea lasting days

even this   passes time before the game

 will realise itself.

- Robbie Coburn 2014

robbie coburn was born in June 1994 in Melbourne and lives in the rural district of Woodstock, Victoria. 

His first book-length collection of poetry 'Rain Season' (Picaro Press) was published in 2013. He is well into a second collection, titled 'the other flesh'. 

A chapbook, 'Before Bone and Viscera' is forthcoming from Rochford Street Press in 2014.

New Poetry by Colin Dodds

The Urgent Center Expands

The urgent center expands,
takes the newspaper as its skin.

As it went in history,
so ran the NFC wildcard game.
The religiopolitical Saints
overran the astrological Rams.

Aside from that, the story was familiar and unchanged.

The linemen were terrifying,
though easily persuaded, hulks.

The receivers were handy
with the razor and the getaway.

The running backs went straight home
and would be foremen someday.

And the quarterback was the driven patrician
with nothing but an immense promise
and an immense burden for a life.


- Colin Dodds 2014

Colin Dodds grew up in Massachusetts and completed his education in New York City. He’s the author of several novels, including WINDFALL and The Last Bad Job, which the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.” Dodds’ screenplay, Refreshment, was named a semi-finalist in the 2010 American Zoetrope Contest. His poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife Samantha. You can find more of his work at thecolindodds.com.

New Poetry by Michele Seminara

Pièce de Shakespeare 

Come, sheathe your dagger definitions —
the Father, Word, and Holy Breath,  
the swan of Avon, has returned to die.

Lord of language, auric egg, 
he lies laid out in stiffness —
bronzelidded in the secondbest bed, 
lips twisted by Venus into prayer,
coffined thoughts embalmed in a spice 
of words which rise like crooked smoke 
up to the nostrils of God.

Why even his errors are portals to discovery!
Following his lean unlovely lines
through spaces smaller than red globules of blood
we creepycrawl after his buttocks 
meeting robbers, ghosts, old men, young men, 
wives, widows, brothers-in-love;
the molecules all changing, the I becoming other,
the unquiet father reborn in the son —
but always, always, as we walk through him
we are walking into ourselves.

* A found poem sourced from chapter 9 of James Joyce’s Ulysses

- Michele Seminara 2014

New Poetry by Joseph Robert

Winter’s Clotting

Licking at the chary red hard candy

Of a liquid nitrogen cauterized wrist

I see you settle on your haunches to lap at it

In a wide open parking lot, dreary and grey slushy

Sweating, nervous and convincing myself

By moaning at uncaring passersby that it’s

Really rather quite charming in a way that is

Rather too excruciating to describe:

I hacked the hand off with my replica samurai sword

But that simply makes you worship the invalid

More and more

Snowflakes melt on your upturned brow

Lick like a momma cat, Sick Kitten,

A shudder amid big explosions of empty

I go and I come, time travelling again and again

To the solstice 

- Joseph Robert 2014

Joseph Robert's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Decanto, Unlikely Stories, Dead Snakes, Mistress Quickly's Bed, The Commonline Journal, Pyrokinection, Mudjob, The Journal, Spinozablue, Black Mirror, Message in a Bottle, Eunoia Review, Inclement and the Insert Coin Here anthology. His poetry chapbook with wife Leilanie Stewart has been reviewed at Sabotage. 

New Poetry by Bruce McRae

It Touches Us

Tragedy lurks behind a buttercup.

It throws its voice down in the dust,

circling anti-clockwise on its insect-legs,

scribbling ambush in your diary,

singing like a window breaking.

Tragedy travels badly.

To be kissed by this abomination

is much like suffering frostbite.

Already the hours are missing.

Already there's a knife in the bed.

Mockery is its prime art,

its playground an earthen cellar,

its school hall a cold bath.

How many centuries has it looked up

at the stars from its well-bottom?

Beyond faith, luck, trust,

and God and love . . .

In the eyes of animals.

In the book of the soul.

In a time without time.

And you, with your soft hands,

safe house and niceties;

tragedy loves you best of all.

Already you're outwitted,

and the buttercup mourned.

- Bruce McRae 2014

Pushcart-nominee Bruce McRae is a Canadian musician with over 800 publications, including Poetry.com and The North American Review. His first book, ‘The So-Called Sonnets’ is available from the Silenced Press website or via Amazon books. To hear his music and view more poems visit his website: www.bpmcrae.com, or ‘TheBruceMcRaeChannel’ on Youtube.

New Poetry by JD DeHart

Cling

the way the small one clings

you can tell she is a biter

with rows and rows of teeth

belied by the sweet expression

she gnaws the tender hand

of mother, will one day

break away, like all children do,

barely call, certainly not write

(who writes any more?)

arranging her own fragmented

adulthood from whatever scraps

she can find around a local bar

- JD DeHart

JD's writing has appeared in Eye On Life Magazine and Eunoia Review, among other publications.