New Poetry by Michael Lee Johnson

Flower Girl 

(Tears in Your Eyes)

Poems are hard to create
they live, then die, walk alone in tears,
resurrect in family mausoleums.
They walk with you alone in ghostly patterns,
memories they deliver feeling unexpectedly
through the open windows of strangers.
Silk roses lie in a potted bowl
memories seven days before Mother’s Day.
Soak those tears, patience is the poetry of love.
Plant your memories, your seeds, your passion,
once a year, maybe twice.
Jesus knows we all need more
then a vase filled with silk flowers,
poems on paper from a poet sacred,
the mystery, the love of a caretaker-
multicolored silk flowers in a basket
handed out by the flower girl


- © Michael Lee Johnson 2020

Michael Lee Johnson lived 10 years in Canada during the Vietnam era and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.  Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, DuPage County, Illinois.  

New Poetry by Shannon Cuthbert

In Colorado 

Mountains looked like movie sets
And you floated in a salt pool
That felt like forever
Till your tiny cuts stung.
Driving was senseless
When everything around 
Was cut out of paper.
Dramatic red cliffs 
With edges so jagged
They peeled back your eyes.
Pit stop in a tiny town,
All wild-haired tourists 
And an antique train.
It took you through mines
Where you saw your black heart
Refracted 
Through stones.
Left a piece of yourself there,
A lump of coal
To haunt the earth
On your behalf.
Pausing on your way back home.
Taking tea in 
An empty store,
With cakes cut lacy,
Layered rose,
Garden amidst a cropless land.


- © Shannon Cuthbert 2020

Shannon Cuthbert is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn. Her poems have appeared in Gingerbread House, Chronogram, and Enchanted Conversation, among others. Her work is forthcoming in The Writers' Cafe Magazine, Call Me [Brackets], Liquid Imagination, and The Orchards Poetry Journal.    

New Poetry by Jonathan Beale

Avenue of the Baobabs

My wish is to stay always like this, living quietly in a corner of nature - Claude Monet

In this, Aureolin realm,
Seen something Biblical 
Those amazing yet totally unbelievable
Beings – their fingers tickling
The feet of some god or other 
so vast they have become unassuming

the glib predicable sunrises I knew
Seemed strangely inferior, yet no less beautiful
Some blind believe they should be destroyed
Killing the tree of life 
While waiting for the sun’s final vortex
swansong of jonquil, Mikado yellow,
gamboge, saffron, Naples yellow,
harvest gold & Aureolin – it is their very DNA.
Someone told me, in a bar.

After it rains its reflection seems to touch
every soul. Once seen they never forget.
These monuments to individuality 
And take their place in dusty shoes,
Just a memory of what will never be again.

- © Jonathan Beale 2020

Jonathan Beale has had numerous poems published in over sixty journals including Danse Macabre, Bluepepper, Mad Swirl, Ygdrasil, Red Wolf Editions, Sheepshead Review, Poetry 24, Penwood Review, et al.  He is also published in two anthologies ‘Drowning’ and ‘The Poet as Sociopath’ (Scar publications).  And one to be published ‘Do not be afraid’ a small anthology dedicated to Seamus Heaney. His first book of poetry The Destinations of Raxiera (Hammer and Anvil) in November 2015. He lives in Surrey U.K.  

New Poetry by Michael Ceraolo

Cap Anson

Growing up in the town my dad founded,
we kids tormented the so-called friendly Indians
Later, I didn't want to play against
the Walker brothers, Fowler, Stovey
or any others of that race,
though I was forced to once or twice
I didn't even want Irish players on my teams
if there was any alternative
And I was far from alone in this;
I didn't have the power to ban them,
though I did have some influence
because I was the greatest player of the age
as well as a highly successful manager
Would I have felt and done the same
had I grown up in a different time and place?
Even after all this time,
I can honestly say I don't know,
though I wouldn't bet against it


Charley Radbourn

I loved base ball even if it wasn't respectable,
and after the season I had in '84
I earned both money and respect
I loved Carrie even though society said
she was a woman who didn't deserve love:
her first husband, she, and I
all died of the same social disease;
who contracted it first and passed it on
is unknowable now, and doesn't matter
You love who and what you love,
and I loved and still love
base ball and Carrie, without apology

Byrd Lynn

Comiskey slandered me as unpatriotic
because I went to a shipyard
to work and play ball during the war,
just as he slandered Jackson and Williams,
but that doesn't justify what they did
Joe and Lefty were my friends,
but don't let any of the Black Sox bs you:
that wasn't a one-time lapse in judgment;
they were up to their necks in it
All during the '20 season they watched the scoreboard
to see what Cleveland was doing,
and if Cleveland was losing or had lost,
they did something to make sure we lost too
My career ended after the '20 season;
I sometimes wonder if that was because
of guilt by association


- © Michael Ceraolo 2020

Michael Ceraolo is a 62-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had two full-length books (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press; 500 Cleveland Haiku, from Writing Knights Press) and has two more full-length books (Euclid Creek Book Two, from unbound content press; Lawyers, Guns, and Money, from Writing Knights Press) in the publication pipeline.

(Editor's note: the above three poems are from the "Dugout Anthology", a Spoon River Anthology for baseball.)

New Poetry by Jason Ryberg

Storm a’ Comin’

There’s a blanket of black wool
that’s been pulled over the city

(over this little nameless hole in the prairie).

There’s squadrons of orn’ry flies
buzzin’ about and stingin’ and the faded, 
ringin’ reports of car horns, here and there.

There’s pages of splayed-open books
on auto repair and Common Missouri
Wildflowers whipping and flipping
in a nervous Missouri wind.

There’s cats and dogs
conspicuously ducking for cover
and birds takin’ the last bus out of town.

There’s a heavy incandescent density to things
like the boiler-rooms of all the world
are just about      to blow 
and everybody, everywhere
secretly seems to know it
and even though it’s only 4PM,
the only light to speak of
is the ghosted-out fluorescent resin
of oxide lamps just now ghostin’ in.

And over across town,
on the far side of the train yards, 
right next door to Big Maybelle’s Beauty Emporium,
there’s two old boys sittin’ on the front porch
of a boarding house, 
hootin’ at all the sweet, young things 
as they come and go,

sippin’ on their whiskey drinks 
real, real slow 

in sweetly calibrated synchronization
with the melting of the ice cubes.

Their bones are ancient humming architectures
of radio towers and tuning forks.

Their pop-bottle bi-focals peer deep into the future.

One of them leans over a little
and says to the other,

Storm a comin.’ 

Yup. 


- © Jason Ryberg 2020

Jason Ryberg is the author of thirteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Standing at the Intersection of Critical Mass and Event Horizon (Luchador Press, 2019). He lives part-time in Salina, KS with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River. 

New Poetry by Joanna M. Weston

Arriving Home

the man comes
up the hill
dragging miles
and his shadow
behind him

he has Ireland
in his suitcase
ruined castles
massive cathedrals
hospital visits
family members
and a camera
to hold them all


- © Joanna M. Weston 2020

Joanna is married, has multiple spiders, raccoons, a herd of deer, and two derelict hen-houses. Her middle-reader, ‘Frame and The McGuire', was published by Tradewind Books 2015; and a poetry collection,  ‘A Bedroom of Searchlights’, was published by Inanna Publications, 2016. Other books listed at her blog: http://www.1960willowtree.wordpress.com/

New Poetry by James Walton

The I Know a Dead Mountaineer Society, Concedes

The cherry wood honour roll burns air gasping for lettering
a toast for scalers who bathed at the source of the Ganges
just so they could divine is Atman Brahman an answer 

reaching for those beads of months without footing
while Bach parades Air on a G String amid foothills
of ever decreasing amplitude the gold lettering returning

to a powder best left for oxygen yet spent here by prayers
and the ridge line so cold in pre-Winter life of dormant forest 
where a cross of ash is all still present of the weather boards

the wind battered in a calling for membership the entrance 
a question for admittance as the linseed dried of once such lustre
out of a foolish need to tame the replies of seeking pilgrims

who scattered to corners an eternal child’s marble bag leaching
found a way to climb unaided to the nearest heady outcrop
where no direction gains a bearing except for the next one


- © James Walton 2020

James Walton is published in many newspapers, anthologies, and journals. He is the author of four collections of poetry. He can also be found at: https://jameswalton.poetry.blog

New Poetry by William G. Davies Jr.

First Love

The new shadows arrive
like a schoolyard
full of children 
jostling, exuberant 
to blanket the new grass
so that the way
your hair is combed
and her lips unresolved
to mere words
float solely
on some rift
of springtime
and the gala
of being,
to which
you've been invited.


When The Bard Came Home

A red tulip,
perhaps the closest rendition
of Shakespeare’s cheeks
was unabashedly struck
from the ground.
I placed it on the Bier
of my hand
and proceeded solemnly
into the house
where I arranged it
in a jar of water
and set it on the windowsill
from whence it became
this beautiful sonnet
above a sink
full of dirty dishes.


From a Screen Porch

A slender limb
opens it’s pink billfold
to a warm cashier
whose necklace
of dandelions
and emerald eyes
speaks of the rain to come,
that revered teacher
who lives far off
in the woods.


- © William G. Davies Jr. 2020

William had a slim volume published by Prolific Press in 2015, titled: "Before There Were Bones".

New Poetry by Robert Nisbet

Some Small Night Music 

Walking the evening and the street,
you will glimpse odd, sudden edges
of life’s back-parlour narratives.
Two girls, just caught, just 
in their may-time’s bloom, between 
the bawdy confusion yet to come
and the slow, grinning wish to bike
the length of the street. These two
holler their happiness from yard
to pavement. A boy, just six maybe,
strops his sister, stamps on a tin.
A cat slinks through a hedge.
Suppers sit. In some houses there will
be sex tonight, some of it good,
as there will be hurt and anger. 
Night composes its music from
the irrevocably intimate.
This is love, a street’s love, unrefined.


- © Robert Nisbet 2020

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who very much enjoys the current US poetry scene. He has been published in magazines like San Pedro River Review, Panoply and Main Street Rag. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

New Poetry by Sean West

Out at Me

You take me out at high
noon to the flat pools of Moffat
beach where rocks yawn

like warm honeycombs
or wasp’s nests smacked
from rafters with a broom

I pluck black and white
sea critters from pools, blow
coolly on puckered lips 

of their shells to see pink
sherbet claws flitter out
delicate as eyelashes 

Such curious eyes staring
out at me

You tell me not to hold
him above water for long
or he’ll dry up and die 

I put him back, find instead
a snapped fishing line nearby
with an iridescent lure tied

to the end. It looks like
a wide-eyed sardine poking 
out a grappling hook tongue

Such a furious eye tearing
into me.


- © Sean West 2020

In 2019, Sean was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in StylusLit, Stilts Journal, and Baby Teeth Journal, among others. He lives in Brisbane and you can find him at www.callmemariah.com. 

New Prose Poetry by Howie Good

Repairing the World

Like in a riot, police were shooting rubber bullets. I was rushed by strangers to the hospital. It was dark, stifling, and dingy. The doctor cut my feet open and put pennies in the incisions before sewing them back up and wrapping them in bandages. We were both crying. The moment had the reverence of a flag-burning ceremony, which is performed when a flag is too ragged to fly. Later at home I looked down and saw the bandages were bloody. My mother said, "I just need to grab a lab coat and one egg and I can fix this.”

The Walking Dead

Thinking about escaping across closed borders, I dug a hole outside. It was hard work. I pulled out bricks, barbed wire, glass bottles and jars, and old cans as I dug deeper. When my mind drifted too far into sadness, I stopped. Everything moves slowly now. I’m learning to be stingy with supplies. On the table is a bunch of flowers I found in the trash. This may be a good time to catch up on The Walking Dead, but I stand at the window that looks out on the yard. Somehow, just standing there feels like a hopeful gesture.

Sunday Blues

A lot of people feel depressed on Sundays, starting about 4 in the afternoon. I’m different. I feel depressed on most days, and it doesn’t matter what time it is. A grief without any obvious source has pursued me my whole life, a claw-like hand that will abruptly fall on my shoulder. Sometimes the hand can get too heavy to shake off. Overnight a woman who jumped from the old railroad bridge was pulled from the river still alive. The water seems particularly agitated now, sounding like it’s muttering, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” over and over.

- © Howie Good 2020

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections. 

New Poetry by Mark Danowsky

In spite of horror movies

I pick up the man from Novie’s
bar on the other side of town

So drunk he put in the wrong address―
says when we get there he’ll show me

At the house, the shadow of a small dog
jumps against the front door’s frosted glass pane

I put on the car’s flashers―
a metronome breaking the dark 

The shimmering lake water
is not visible from the car 

I follow the man behind the house
leaving the driver’s side door ajar 


- © Mark Danowsky 2020

Mark Danowsky is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). He is also the author of Nightfall and Becoming aware of the tide, microchaps published by Origami Poems Project. His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, The New Verse News, North Dakota Quarterly, Peacock Journal, Right Hand Pointing, Shot Glass Journal, and elsewhere. He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.    

New Poetry by Paul Tanner

closed an hour ago

and there’s still 6 pallets of stock left to do
before we’re allowed to go home. 

I step outside for a smoke.
and this guy comes up to me and he says: you not open?
I tell him: no
and he says: oh come on, just let me in to get a few things?

now I could explain that our legal trading hours are over
and that there’s no money in the tills,
that we are not insured to have people besides staff in now,
that I’d be fined and fired for letting him in, and so on 
but look, we closed an hour ago
and there’s 6 pallets left
and I suspect he knows all this anyway
and is just bored and lonely
so I just tell him: no

oh, do you know what? he says. I’ll be making a complaint about you! 
he marches off
and when he gets to the road, he turns 
and walks backwards across it, yelling:
I’M GONNA MAKE A COMPLAINT! MARK MY WORDS, I’M GONNA –
a car swerves around him, horn blaring –
he stands there in the road waving his fist at the car 

then turns to face me again: 
THAT’S YOUR FAULT, THAT IS! BE SEEING YOU IN COURT! 

and my peaceful well-earned break?
it’s nearly over.


- © Paul Tanner 2020

Paul Tanner's novel, “Jobseeker”, is available now at Amazon. His latest collection, “Shop Talk: Poems for Shop Workers”, was published by Penniless Press in 2019. 

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).