New Poetry by Felix Purat

Passing Through Semmering

I finally see difference,
The landscape art of olde
From Habsburg fief to Habsburg land
Huge white houses dotting
The peaks of conquered bergs

The more weight is placed
The more forests lean over
Ready to fall into the chasm
Of uninteresting Eigentlich
Secluded via labyrinths of tunnels

A single shack to the south
Links axon to axon: 
Rundown and abandoned, 
Shining like a copper penny
Upon the sun's ascension. 


- © Felix Purat 2020

Felix Purat hails from Berkeley, CA but lives in the Czech Republic. He is the author of five micro-chapbooks (courtesy of Origami Poems Project) and has had many poems published. Links to these poems can be found here: beyondnorcal.wordpress.com/publications

New Poetry by Sandra Williams

People Tell Me Things

People tell me things
I listen, I see and remember
Not lost to me—
A casual thought, a memory, a mood
a moment shared—
spoken or in gaze or gesture

I fill in the blanks with imperfect truths
from shards of stories
that “never finish what they have to say”

I create composite effigies-- 
patterns, themes, tales
of grief and gallantry,
magical thinking and illusions,
doubt and faith, sorrow and despair
kindness and grace
love and loss

Do I betray a trust 
   elevate to myth
     redeem a transgression?

People tell me things and I write
- © Sandra Williams 2020

Sandra Williams taught World Literature, and Writing for over twenty-five years at both the university and high school levels. She has written poetry and essays, and has published articles in New View magazine UK. She is author of Moss on Stone: a historical novella, based on the diary of the young Susannah Norwood Torrey, a mid-nineteenth century Rockport, Massachusetts woman and Time and Tide: a collection of tales. She lives in Rockport, MA with her artist husband Robert; both are inspired by its beauty and its community of creativity. She facilitates poetry workshops, was co-chair for the Dogtown Writers Festival: Finding Words in Place (September 2019) and a member of the Board of Directors, all at the Gloucester Writers Center (www.gloucesterwriters.org) in Gloucester, MA.

New Poetry by Jean Bohuslav

careful  

as soon as my mouth opened
i knew it wouldn’t end up pretty
like a slow crash about to happen
a dream with no brakes heading towards a swamp

my personal flippant statement
was like a razor blade smoothie to the doc
old friends would have laughed 
with years of experience behind them
the young doctor only saw change
a cool sea breeze turning tornado

a memory test followed which incorporated script
i did write the cat flew over the fence 
but quickly told her i know cats don’t fly

explanations had often been too much effort
teetering on the edge of chalk and cheese
 it did cross my mind to say
i’m an artist who dallies in poetry
we’re a little flowery with words at times 

my normal certainly wasn’t her basket of fish
she might understand one day
i laughed in bed that night
could have flown an aircraft through
her rectangled state of mouth
as my sharing blasted her rigid

i’ll have to go back another time 
to have the blood pressure checked
to tell her how my back might have been dislocated
as I my husband shifted me across the bed

on second thoughts
that might give rise to an unholy investigation 
too much information
just keep it simple
sweet

by the way
the theory of being allergic to husbands
eventuating in hives if cooped up too long together
may be plausible
the manner in which it is delivered can be the problem


- © Jean Bohuslav 2020

Jean Bohuslav enjoys the company of writers on the Surf Coast of Torquay Victoria Australia. She continues to progress at times due to the written word in more ways than expected.

Goodbye Marie by Wayne H. W Wolfson

Bluepepper is happy to announce the release of the latest short story collection by long term contributor and loyal supporter, the Californian poet and writer Wayne H. W Wolfson. Click on the link below to snavel your copy.

Goodbye Marie

New Poetry by Michael Keshigian

Synergist

All day
I’ve listened to the song
of a single cardinal

ripple stillness
just outside my office window.  
An opera in red tux

his throat is a spring
stretching an aria
through the cluttered house

of sound, awakening memories
of events since past.
The timbre enlivens my heart.

 










I can almost touch
what once was
as it floats between

song and wind. An inflection 
so crisp, that I’m convinced
the cardinal sings for more

than to merely texture
the commotion. His tune
incites another gift.

He performs daily,
tireless and without hoarseness,
to make sad hearts flutter.


- © Michael Keshigian 2020

Michael Keshigian’s fourteenth poetry collection, What To Do With Intangibles, was released January, 2020 by Cyberwit.net. He has been widely published in numerous national and international journals, recently including Sierra Nevada Review, Oyez Review, Muddy River Review, Edison Review, Pudding Magazine, and has appeared as feature writer in over twenty publications with 7 Pushcart Prize and 2 Best Of The Net nominations. (michaelkeshigian.com)

New Poetry by David Ades

As for Serendipity…

In the grand scheme of things
despite whatever notions we cling to

there is no grand scheme of things:

just randomness and chance,
accidents of history and birth

determining poverty or posterity

violence or calm, danger or safety,
and what we can make of them

if given any chance at all

as millions of hidden cogs
grind each of us slowly forward

to whatever indifferent future awaits us.


- © David Ades 2020

David Adès is the author of Mapping the World, the chapbook Only the Questions Are Eternal and most recently Afloat in Light (https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/afloat-in-light). In association with Mascara Literary Review, David is a recipient of the 2020 Don Bank Writing Residence together with Michelle Cahill, Debbie Lim and Michelle Hamadache

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New Poetry by Abigail George

The Rival With The Bette Davis Eyes

She’s in love. He stays over. She tells me she doesn’t have
any friends, but she has Dominic. She tells me she’s lonely,
but she’s climate change. Once you were like home, like any
sanctuary and I was safe as houses in a tsunami and then
you were gone. You wanted to live. You wanted to fall, and
you did. You did. You won’t be showing up here at my door
anymore, daughter, sister, stranger to her homeland, to her
tribe, her country, her people. I don’t believe in the sun, don’t
believe in our love like I did before, and we never talk and
when we do it is always about you, I exist too but you don’t
see me as the sea, or the thin red line through the mountain
of bone that makes up our anatomy. The man makes me so
happy. The happiest that I have ever been. He makes me want
to stand on the steps with my imperfect heart in my hand. I
want a daughter that looks like us. I want a son with his eyes.
I am tired of this sin. It is not prizewinning. I am tired of this
skin. It is not driftwood. I am tired of this sea. Tired of watching
the waves that remind me how much I could take. How limited
I am now. And I count the ways that this man loves me. He’s
become my world. The wonderland requiem of pain is just
pain beginning to lose its lustre like daylight. It is like an omen
gathering dust on the ash heap somewhere. Everyone knows
loneliness. And we have all felt amazing chemistry deep within
our goals and plans and interests. I don’t feel as if I am falling
apart anymore. I feel whole. I see the outsider for who they are.
Loneliness is just a game. Solitude is when we sabotage the
illusion of life that we see. Futility stands there ultra-composed,
telling me that there’s no going around despair and hardship
when it is all that I have ever known. I don’t know if I will die
young. I am nocturnal anyway. The man sleeps. I don’t sleep.
The man eats. I don’t eat. The man seems genuinely happy and
I am always in the pursuit of it, having known the lack of it for
so long. The flowers are shy of the sun, of the planets, of the tides,
the currency of the sea. I have to get used to you, one random
person said, but he was an important random person. You’re too
forward, said another who threw his hands up in the complex air
and walked away from me. The man is the sun. He knows all.


- © Abigail George 2020

South African Abigail George has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize ("Wash Away My Sins"), and Best of the Net award ("Secrets"). She is a blogger, editor, filmmaker, playwright, poet, essayist, chapbook, novelist, novella, grant, and short story writer. She briefly studied film at NFTS (Newtown Film and Television School) in Johannesburg. She was educated in Port Elizabeth, and Swaziland. Her latest book is "The Scholarship Girl: Life Writing". She is the poetry editor of African Writer, and an editor at Mwanaka Media and Publishing. She writes op-ed pieces for local newspapers, and is a columnist for a national travel magazine. She has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2020, "Of Smoke

and Bloom" (Mwanaka Media and Publishing), and "Anatomy of Melancholy" (Praxis).