New Poetry by James Diaz

My Love For All Things Broken

say      this road        here
but you mean    really   something else
already autumn    is beyond     what you can give
pulses cross       beats      stilled
day     breaks     bones
to be here       means        missing
someplace else      fir       trees
star   dust    how the hand folds
in on itself      say wind but you      really mean
sails stripped bare         subtle disappearances 
don't know        what went missing     or when
the next turn       off the highway     will creep up
and you will bend       that way
forever.


- James Diaz 2017

James Diaz is founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared most recently in Psaltery & Lyre, The Ekphrastic Review, Quail Bell Magazine and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, (for which his poem, The Balance Between Us, was nominated for the Best of the Net.) He is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018.)  He currently resides in upstate New York.  

New Poetry by Abigail George

The packed suitcase

(for Ambronese)

Rapture is the son of Johannesburg.

    The same way that Prague is
    now the adopted hometown
    of my sister. He did not love
    me. In return, I did not love him.
    He took my mother and father’s
    love wherever he went in the
world and everywhere I went I lived

    in a self-imposed exile. People
    could be kind but I only learned
    that later on. In my mid-thirties.
    In other words, when I was grown.
    He dropped me off at the mental
    institution (Tara) on a Monday morning.
    Never even looked at me as if
    I was a real, live person. I was
    a walking experiment-in-the-making.
    ‘Not to be touched or spoken to
if anyone could help it’. I was fresh
    from a weekend spent cooking
    over steaming pots, gossip with a diabetic aunt. Her youngest daughter

    tucked away safely behind a

    mountain and green-lit valleys
    of Swaziland. The other in America.
   They could make the life choice
    of being wives and mothers, (if
    they wanted to). Like a river’s
sublime
    movements, my cousin watches
me
    out of the corner of his eye. For
any

sudden movements, I guess. I learned the hard way.
Heat rising up his neck. I learned the harsh way that

    family could not be kind.
    You can’t sing, so you
    can’t fit and a family that
    can’t sing together can’t
    live together. This tiger
    is not welcome, the other
tigers seem to sing in unison. I’m standing at the door of the church
hall. Waiting.
    Pretending that I’ve been invited to the party.
That I fit in. That I can sing.


- Abigail George 2017

Abigail George is a South African blogger, poet, short story writer, aspirant young adult novelist and playwright. She is the recipient of grants from the National Arts Council, the Centre for the Book and ECPACC. She briefly studied film at the Newtown Film and Television School in Johannesburg. Her poems have been published in various anthologies, numerous times in print in South Africa and online in zines based in Ireland, Turkey, Finland, Australia, India and elsewhere.

New words by Robert Verdon

circle

… in some cases the birds fly upside-down and you can see their eyes shimmering like oil lenses on water. At other times, the goldfish cluster beneath the lily-pads and laugh at you. I have got used to it, unlike the others. I am drawn to magnets but only during sunshowers. It is like being a dowser. We have a Major-General here and an Archbishop. Breath hangs over us, grey, lazy breath. Poinsettias hunt for game. There is a baby under the strawberry bush, telling riddles.

She is sitting on a canvas swing that hangs from a grapegreen bough. The magpies are coloured here too, quince and persimmon. The baby tinkles like birdbath ice. A cat falls on its four feet. There are faces in the windows. A pendulum from a grandfather clock. A hair-spring. A cloud like an old straw hat. And restraints.

From the sun a chandelier dangles. We live in a surfeit of metaphors. Gravy. There is gravy today. We haven’t had gravy since …

She is on a swing, whistling. Vera. Vera. I know that tune … She is holding up the moon, a wet globe of moon that comes apart. Drawers full of washers and twisted pipe-cleaners are spread about her. It is like a picnic. Licorice bootlaces writhe like serpents all round the tree. I am waking up to my dreams. Salt sprinkled into a flame glows green. Soft, fat visitors. Wheelchairs in a distorted circle.

Do we die, here?

The stars in the evening are mauve and helical. A helix is not a spiral. A patch is not a square. A bit is not a jot. A couple is more countable than a few.

The doctors are not nurses.

Time to go, always time to go. Always back to the ward, the weird, wide ward, where they put you to sleep. I know that tune. Last time we had gravy when when when

The birds are stolen. I’m not going in yet. The birds are stolen! They must be returned to their cages! Hands grip my shoulders. I relax. The sun has gone too. They assure me it will return. Tomorrow is another day.

I sleep smiling. I have done it again.

It is the only way you can get them to touch you.

- Robert Verdon 2017

Robert Verdon is a Canberra writer who has published poetry and prose for many years. 

New Poetry by Martin Christmas

Primal Darkness

Skyping Melbourne,
ninety minutes.
Scotty,
‘5,4,3,2, . . .’
he cuts the link.
Then –
blackout.
Then –
lights.
Then –
blackout.

Silence.

The whole suburb –
blackout

Stars blazing.

Silence.

Dark menace.

Someone coughs.

Stars blazing. 

We wait –
for the lights to return.
Each
in their own small
suburban
cave.

Is this what it was like when . . .?


- Martin Christmas 2017


Martin Christmas lives in South Australia; has a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies; and is a poet, photographer, and theatre director. He has been published in several Australian anthologies as well as Red River Review (USA) and VerseWrights (USA). He teaches presentation elements to young poets. His chapbook poetry collection Immediate Reflections was published at the end of 2016.

New Poetry by John Rock

Morning Wind


Vibrating with these brushstrokes of dawn

       in these winged Chicadee voices I’ve courted

            by tying deerfat to the corner of my tent

                  in this savanna of snow

                       the gods walk and fly in great caravans

                                    mask merchants

                         above and below the ground

                                       antler sages

                                       Bluejay measuring space with cacophony

       and fox mothers wrapping their tales and musk

                around children taught to play with the moment

                                         year after year



In their prosperous down

        the Chicadees dive

             and take turns eating as I talk to them

                  wearing sheep hair knitted around my head and body

                           like a house of smoke



Morning wind

        can you blow these selves to earth?

              like leaf after leaf

                   the sky has grown from a silver branch

                           in this snow-rising chant


- John Rock 2017

In love with waterfalls, crows, and ecstatic dance, John Rock lives in New Mexico.  More writings at johnrockpoetry.com

New Poetry by Felix Purat

Worn Herzlicher Coaster

One more beer mark
Upon its cardboard
Body, and

It will begin
Dissipation, the
Room spiraling

Into the maelstrom
From where all thought
First transpired.


- Felix Purat 2017


Felix Purat is a hinternationalist hailing from Berkeley, CA but living in Prague. He has been previously published in Two Thirds North, the Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Salzburg Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Pulsar, Vox Poetica, Allegro Poetry Magazine and Orbis Int’l, among other places. His first collection of poetry, A Drinking Horn of Accumulated Expiries, will soon be released as part of the Poetry Will Be Made For All project, and he has recently completed a second collection, Mews For the Tarpans of the World.

Bluepepper marks the passing of John Ashbery (1927-2017)

New Poetry by James Walton

I’ll lay down with dictionaries
(and you)

When we are too old
for the Crossword
and the swallow comes early
singing for a lost partner

when out of season
the whip bird’s tuning fork
calls the humble circle
out of a lasso’s embrace

sky writing your name
in that opened portal
vowels and consonants
placed inside the circumference

dangling missing letters
we have chanced for canvass
a wily clue you gave me
of secrets no one knows

lexicons hesitantly shelved
the answers between us
teased into definition
out of more solitary lives

then leave all pages open
make a cuneiform mattress
out of every alphabet
graft us to our own calligraphy

the words that seek homes
can pummel for new comfort
rub against us until found
here where our language formed


- James Walton 2017

James Walton is a Gippsland poet published in newspapers, journals and anthologies. Short listed twice for the ACU National Literature Prize, a double prize winner in the MPU International Poetry Prize, and Specially Commended in The Welsh Poetry Competition - his collection ‘The Leviathan’s Apprentice’ was published in 2015.  

Calling all Poets!

In case you hadn't noticed, dear reader, we live in interesting times. Alert but not alarmed is our running credo at Bluepepper, and in line with that policy we are currrently

CALLING ALL POETS

Bluepepper believes that perhaps now more than ever this troubled rock needs the wisdom only poetry can distil, so get out your quills and parchment and submit per the guidelines at the top of the sidebar.