New Poetry by William Doreski

Hell’s Gate Bridge

A trick of moving perspective:

a speedboat expresses its wake

through the red-painted railing

of this black-arch railroad bridge.

The Triborough suspension graces

the river scene but can’t compete

with the massive, flatfooted bulk

of the bridge on which our train

scrawls a stainless holograph.

Manhattan from this distance

looks like fungi on a rotten log.

We’ll get there soon enough,

but let’s remember the speedboat

raving with bright insouciance

rail travel never attempts.

- © William Doreski 2023

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022).  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

 

New Poetry by Jennifer Rodrigues

Someday you will die and strangers will come into your home

They will buy your lace wedding dress,

your polished chess set,

the stained-glass window of a swan flanked by red lilies.

Someday I’ll walk through your home

and look through the piles of

pictures you took of Rainier Beer,

a futuristic hotel lobby from the 1970s,

the portrait of a mother and her

three grown daughters smiling at her.

I will buy your Tibetan rice paper drawing

the one in teal ink of monks rowing a large

wooden boat, temples in the background.

I’ll be the only one to notice the still intact

geode and take it home.

When I walk your hallways, I’ll feel

the energy of your movement, eating

alone in front of the tv surrounded

by family pictures on wood paneling.

I’ll sense how you busied yourself

woodworking in the cluttered garage

as you tried not to be buried by grief

of grown children and passed partners.

I will hear your home’s silence,

imagine your molecules imbedded in the sofa,

touch your lingering in the carpet and walls.

You will be in a corner watching me

take in what I can’t buy.

Your former possessions will be honored in

my possession, until

strangers walk through my home.

- © Jennifer Rodrigues 2023

Jennifer McKeen Rodrigues currently lives on the sacred Powhatan land of Fairfax, VA. She has been published as a poet and/or photographer in The Muleskinner Journal, tinyfrights, Amethyst Review, & The Martello.

 

New Poetry by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

What remains

All that’s left of the fallen—

a fan of feathers in the grip

of warring winds     plumage splayed 

on rain-licked asphalt.

Winter hours bleed

benign shadows—

the swoosh of tyres pulsing amidst

the steady strobe 

of amber     red     green.

A world on wheels thunders

puckering a pool of gems around 

an erased carcass

and water, like a final rite

weaves a weeping wreath—

an afterthought—

dewy diamonds

liquid flowers.

- © Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad 2023

Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian artist and poet. Her works have been published in Cordite Poetry Review, Black Bough Poetry, Eunoia Review, and Bracken Magazine, among others. She was nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize and nine times for the Best of the Net. She lives and works in Lindfield, on traditional Gammeragal land.

New Poetry by George Young

The Wound Dresser

At noon, if you’ll just take a walk in the park, sit

on the green bench by the ale-colored pond and wait

she’ll come to carefully lift

the blowzy bandage off your wound, cauterize

the gaping hole with warm sunlight

and stuff it with soft white gauze from a cloud.

O you’ll limp back to the office feeling better—

but of course the wound is fatal.

- © George Young 2023

George, a retired internal medicine physician living in Boulder,  Colorado, has had two full length collections of poetry published: “Spinoza’s Mouse,” Washington Prize, given by Word Works, and “The Astronomer’s Pearl,” Violet Reed Haas Prize, given by Snake Nation Press.

New Poetry by John Grey

Your Inheritance 

So what of mine should I leave to you?

My clothes? They’re more utile than fashionable.

I could gift you my books but not

the willingness to read them.

And my music collection.

But it’s so 20th century.

To you, music’s not music

unless there’s an internet face to go with it.

Same with my films.

In your mind, black and white is a disease,

the 70’s are ancient history

and movies began with “Iron Man.”

At least, the car might give you

a couple of years of use.

Likewise, the house and furniture

though, when you marry,

your wife could be so aghast

at my interior decorating tastes,

she tosses every table and chair

in the dumpster.

There are the photographs of course.

Some drawer should provide a suitable haven

for where you got your looks,

the one thing of mine not so easily discarded.

The souvenirs you may as well bury with me:

the plastic Eiffel Tower, the Vatican City key-ring,

the Rocky Mountains snow-globe etc?

They’re everywhere I’ve been.

They’re not where you’re going.

- © John Grey 2023

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Washington Square Review and Floyd County Moonshine. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

New Poetry by Peter Mladinic

Children

I’m out of touch with children

but I was a child.

Everything the child sees is big.

To the child people are big, big as trees.

The field is vast, the river wide and deep,

wider, deeper for the child.

You too were once a child, a son.

Why you took your own life is a mystery.

In college you played baseball,

second base, as I see you on the diamond.

When we met you said recovering.

I didn’t see you fall off the wagon.

Five o’clock shadow,

rumpled chinos, blond hair thinning,

the Paradise Lounge, your abyss. 

I call from my side of the river,

as if you could hear.

For the child all is magnified, a twig

on the ground in the woods,

damp earth, mint freshness of leaves,

crisp winter leaves under his or her feet.

In the woods of childhood joy warbles.

The child hears, keener than I.

One morning in a restaurant

you harangued the server about no milk

for your coffee.

I live with trees and rain.

- © Peter Mladinic 2023

Peter Mladinic’s fourth book of poems, Knives on a Table is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA.

 

 

New Poetry by Jen Schneider

Looking for Lost Underpants at Dawn 

cotton briefs whisper

as souls in rubber soles prep

for a coming extinction

Looking for Lost Underpants at Dusk

winds wave Hello as

cotton briefs on laundry lines

dance for empty seats

Closing Time

Dusk moves in as headlights and hankerings

for pasta noodles in butter, corduroy couch

cushions, and Netflix logins move up. Priorities

as peculiar as policies percolate. Eyes blink.

Demand for caffeine sinks. Echoes wink. Now’s

not the time to dance awkward office-made

rhymes. Souls in rubber soles, stitched of

clocks and overhead chimes, seek paths home.

- © Jen Schneider 2023

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. Recent works include A Collection of Recollections, On always Being an Outsider, Invisible Ink, On Habits& Habitats, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups.

New Poetry by J.R. Solonche

Adam's Dream 

First there was this strange sensation.

It felt like a finger running along my ribs.

It was quick, firm, with neither pleasure nor pain.

Then I was lying on my back.

A great tree took root between my legs.

In a moment it grew to its full height,

swaying in the wind.

Then it exploded into a glorious crown of fruit.

An angel of the Lord came with a flaming sword.

The angel of the Lord burned the tree to ashes.

I scooped the ashes up into the cup of my hands.

I rubbed the ashes into the skin of my chest and shoulders.

I rubbed the ashes into the skin of my arms and legs.

I found myself in a new place.

There was not a tree nor a bush nor any green thing.

The earth was red and hard beneath my feet.

But I was not alone in that new place.

Behind me I heard laughter and weeping.

I heard laughter and weeping behind me.

- © J.R. Solonche 2023

Nominated for the National Book Award and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 30 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

New Poetry by Kenneth Pobo

Rainbow Shirt 

I sit in my rainbow shirt. 

A stranger tells me

to burn it.  The bumpy

bus craves the anonymous. 

We’re nobody

to each other. 

He looks at me like

he might puke. 

Well, dude, go ahead. 

The shirt can be washed. 

The rainbow withstands

the storm.

- © Kenneth Pobo 2023

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections.  Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press) and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Cordite, Asheville Literary Review, Grain, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

 

New Poetry by Nina Rubinstein Alonso

Burns Beer and Wine           

They owned Burns Beer and Wine in Inman Square

had an old hippie guy living in the basement

forget his name who took care of plants and

said he preferred them to people 

on the outside wall was a tall mural with the dark

outline of an Arabic notable wearing a fez

like an upside down flower pot signaling

nothing specific while suggesting an alien type 

who seems friendly but you’d best stay alert

there were other buddies whose names 

I’ve blanked on and even that mural faded

later painted over to blandness but

in those days the guys were dealing

pot in the back room with quiet concern

about quality trying to be careful who to

trust next time since that suitcase disappeared 

at the airport no one’s sure what happened

but somehow vanished and was never found.

- ©  Nina Rubinstein Alonso 2023

Nina Rubinstein Alonso’s work appeared in The New Yorker, Wilderness House Literary Review, Sumac, New Boston Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, etc. Her book This Body was published by David Godine Press, her chapbook Riot Wake by Cervena Barva Press, and her story collection Distractions En Route is upcoming from Ibbetson Street.

New Poetry by Yuu Ikeda

Taste

your kiss always tastes like vodka.

i love brandy,

not vodka.

you love vodka,

not brandy.

i love loneliness,

not desire.

you love desire,

not loneliness.

reasons why we kiss.

because i want to feel loneliness.

because you want to feel desire.

- © Yuu Ikeda 2023

Yuu Ikeda (she/they) is a Japan based poet. She loves writing, reading novels, western art, and sugary coffee. She writes poetry on her website. https://poetryandcoffeedays.wordpress.com/. Her latest poetry collection “A Knife She Holds” was published from Newcomer Press. Her Twitter and Instagram : @yuunnnn77

New Poetry by Les Wicks

Escalations

Baking the cake

called awake.

This life not much, but more than bread,

herd the shadows to the shed

for milking & the drench

(those delusions we too are not led).

So we invent, peer out of our trench

write some books, pretend there’ll be recompense.

The sun combs its shattered hair

once so ordered, such permanence

or this we thought seeing only there

that casual endorphin glare.

The ambition of table, of chair

another day to live, much as we dare.

                                                    Tried to believe in numbers

                                                     but they never added up.

- © Les Wicks 2023

Les Wicks has been published across 37 countries in 16 languages. His 15th book of poetry is Time Taken – New & Selected (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). He can be found at leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm

 

New Poetry by Brooks Lindberg

Plowing

The fields stretch ahead.

The fields stretch behind.

If the mule dies,

you become the mule.

And whoever whipped

will whip harder.

They once yoked me with God

but we outgrew the yoke.

I plow alone now

but can turn my head

this way and that.

- © Brooks Lindberg 2023

Brooks Lindberg is a tax attorney living in Washington State in the Pacific Northwest. His poetry has appeared before in Blue Pepper and his poems often appear in The Blotter Magazine. Others appear in Tigershark Magazine, Squawk Back, Wild Violet, and elsewhere. You can find links to his works at brookslindberg.com.

New Poetry by Kitty Jospé

Half a Pearl at Dawn on a Skycanvas Primed Dusky Blue

A few days ago, it was the new moon 

in the old moon’s arms… &

today, it is a perfect semi-circle, 

halved and waiting &

depending on your mood, you might

say, cut-skull shell &

start to paint what might be eclipsed

both in its prime &

worse, as in these days, &

mystère & boule de gomme — 

regardless, remember you have

the option  to create the other half.

- © Kitty Jospé 2023

Kitty, a retired French teacher, active docent, received her MFA in poetry (2009 Pacific University, OR)  Since Feb. 2008, she has been leading workshops  on art and word, and moderates weekly sessions to help people to be more attentive and appreciative readers good poems. Prolific writer, popular reader and workshop leader.

Welcome to 2023.

Bluepepper is once again open to submissions. 

Just read the submission guidelines to the right of your screen and then click on the "Submit" button.