View Issue vol. 13, no. 8
ISSN 2369-6516 (Print)
ISSN 2369-6524 (Online)
Scroll down to read all poems, or select the poem title to go directly to that poem. Select the author’s name to view a short biography (if supplied) and all poems by that author.
David Du – While the needle’s shooting
Harry Garrison – Silk Screen Sylvia
Scott Lynch – Georges in New Minas
Catherine A. MacKenzie – Words Too Few
Mike McFetridge – Good-bye September
Cormac Newman – Where does a mind go?
Cathie Panteluk – Hard Bodied Mistress
Nathaniel S. Rounds – Wood on Wet
Tabitha White – the old mariner’s lullaby
Surrender
Poem by AMD
I feel queer, Ma said,
I can’t describe it any other way.
Her heart attacked her that night,
the emergency doctor dismissed
it as mere indigestion. Her heart
disagreed and tried again.
Is it queer I feel today, Ma,
now at the age you turned to ash,
now I retrospect a wasted life
rife with failure? A fake career,
lamented love, and how many
readers must remind me
I am not a poet, not a writer,
before I concede? I want to be
like my aunt on her death bed,
her last words I had a wonderful
life, as I memorize them now
like a poem written by a real poet.
Words Too Few
Poem by Catherine A. MacKenzie
I share with you too much of me,
You drag me down until I see
There is nothing left,
My mind and soul bereft
Of life and meaning within
My dead body and skin,
And all I have given to you
Is gone with words too few
From you to me,
And that is all I see.
Where does a mind go?
Poem by Cormac Newman
A throat thick with sandpaper
Laboured legs bounce, sore.
Mucus rests, yellow cement
A nose bricked up, walled off.
Where does a mind go
when a body is stuck in quicksand?
Does it float like a soft breeze
Enjoying an airy brush with earth?
Or does it peer downward,
Horror gluing its eyes to ground
Watching muck swallow
Its dear loyal friend?
Brain rinsed with cough syrup
Sweaty palms cry out
It’s just turned ten thirty five
Where does a mind go?
Georges in New Minas
Poem by Scott Lynch
watching Georges
curious for elucidation
nary a wrinkle but
shrunken by age
hair sacrificed to his gods
gripping firmly
to his world view
estranged of family
in his lumberjack plaid jacket
cap rakishly donned replete with smile
still fire in those perceptive eyes
still proud of Edmundston
and his coureur des bois roots
insistent in all things
convinced of himself
near his van home
and it’s solitary seat
bonhomme
accusations? not his purview
89 years his own
self made
independent
women and children
having fallen
like leaves from
his life
as he stares resolutely
at his mortality
Wood on Wet
Poem by Nathaniel S. Rounds
Log fell into watercolor rapids
The splash unnoticed
By seeing eye dog star men
But the vibrant wash was captured
On spools of film
Which in kind were trapped
In handheld cameras
Each one
A chattering cyclops
A Murder of Crows
Poem by Mark Ryan
A murder of crows follows me around,
down paths and along the river’s edge –
a sorrowful orchestra of sound,
echoing off hemlock cathedrals.
Where fire waltzed and burned,
now cackling invitations ring aloud –
here where spirits have yearned,
for the silent whisper of oak.
A murder of crows graces my presence,
penning love letters in autumn’s fall –
damning poetry of half-cocked pheasants,
and the beating of Morse code.
They petition ills under a hunter moon,
sing a chorus of winter’s passage –
where once life stood to bloom,
now the rouge of decay.
A murder of crows steeped in the grove,
blanketed by a trespassing gloom –
stage windowsill theatrics against a flickering stove,
leaving their haunt upon my home.
Silk Screen Sylvia
Poem by Harry Garrison
Here’s Sylvia Plath,
with plump strawberry jam lips,
repetitiously.
Here’s Andy Warhol,
postage printed by nations,
with first day covers.
Why I Wrote This Poem
Andy Warhol created multicolored silk screen paintings, often different color ones of the same subject side by side, most famously, I believe, Marilyn Monroe. Is not Sylvia Plath as iconic as Marilyn Monroe? Particularly the photo where she is looking into the camera and her lips look plump. Sylvia deserves the same treatment as Marilyn Monroe. Imagine Andy Warhol was so famous that foreign countries put his art on their postage stamps. It’s just a fanciful notion.
Love Wins
Haiku by David Mac Eachern
Time showing results
Having passed the person test
Performance to bear
Spotless
Poem by Ben LeBlanc
There are moments
right? The sun rises, it rises
where no sun rises.
They push, like children
at cold autumn pools
shivering dark behind
pale masks of sky
and the clusters dripping
scarlet teeth in thin faces
of trees, like cruise-ships
swallowing and fixing
and reswallowing
their backwash, bailing buckets
into buckets, like these moldered
rotten molars pulled back
through toe holds. Each
second is round really and not
the second; your tale
feeds the snake
and nothing really breaks, or is
broken, just refurbished
and hidden and sewn
back into the nothing
where nothing is really
at stake, or alone.
Good-bye September
Poem by Mike McFetridge
Good-bye September, Hello October,
As days still shorter get;
It will become much colder before it’s all over;
We ain’t seen nothing yet!
I’ll miss my days sitting on this old verandah
Wiling away my time;
But the call of the wood stove gets much grander,
A warm fire and a cold glass of wine.
While the thoughts of cold winds and shoveling snow
Are enough to pale the soul;
The changing seasons make for reasons
To value each day like gold.
Hard Bodied Mistress
Poem by Cathie Panteluk
Arms around me once so filled with passion
no longer flame with desire
You have deserted me for her,
she always wins,
That shapely female with curves only
imagined by you,
Where now I swim in a sea of black and
blue sorrow you embrace her hard body,
Mine soft with the ages of children,
too little exercise, of croneness,
Excessive in your wantonness —
An amber beauty whose liquid heat
tempts and seduces
You relish in the seductive pain,
Knowing it will give you sweet release
into a place of not caring.
Road Trip
Haiku by Tim Covell
On the drive I play
Phantom of the Opera
Fleeing from my ghosts
In view, a motel
Nicer than my apartment
Living well tonight
Construction ahead
On the next trip, a smooth ride
The road gets better.
While the needle’s shooting
Poem by David Du
While the needle’s shooting
The body as if an unbalanced boat is
Drifting at sea,
The wave almost turning over the boat
Breath almost being asphyxia.
While the needle’s shooting
The soul’s as if a horse rides in the sky
An unknown light surrounds the soul
Life being almost shucked.
While the needle’s shooting
I suddenly understand how birth and death
Is like a door: we all easily enter
But the colors will be totally different.
Why I Wrote This Poem
Because this was my experience! In April I went to Emergency, and they shot me with the wrong needle, and then I felt a special feeling, so I wrote this poem to record this special experience. Also, I indicated people’s life or Karma can be changed in an accident.
Color
Poem by Lorie Morris
What color, are you wearing?
What color, means something to you?
What color, makes you happy?
What color, scares you?
What color, do you see?
Sara Visits
Poem by Gordon Young
Sara comes by each day.
To help her pass the time away.
And so they sit,
In a fathomless pit,
Palliating their pain,
Unable to restrain
Thinking, hearing … speaking the name,
While somewhere in the vast expanse of sea
It floats or sinks … ceasing to be.
By marriage … or by common vein
Each holds the other in a tenuous claim.
But there is no stone to which grief can moor
Save those that rattle on the shore.
Sara came by today.
To help her pass the time away.
Fall
Haiku by Marilyn Challis
Yellow leaf falling,
Oak shedding stunning garment,
New life for leaf waits.
Hush!
Poem by Rod Stewart
The very last
November oak leaves rustle
Like bat wing shadows, shivering,
Either in a prayer of multitude,
Or murmured applause,
Perhaps, as our dreams do,
Dangling from the neural sinews
Of our nocturne within.
Beneath the wink
Of a lone last star
Among the velvet clouded ocean,
When my night is shared with you
Whether near or far,
My thoughts listen deeply
For the delicious delight
Of your silken whispers,
For the promised possibility,
That I or we, might imagine,
And concur, that we are kindred company,
Heartbeat by heartbeat,
Soul breath by soul breath,
In tender tenuous touch,
As those dancing leaves,
Within a night within.
the old mariner’s lullaby
Poem by Tabitha White
There’s no sleep for the weary, in
favour of casting their lines into solitude
gentle hymns mark the day
these sailors lost their lives
a gospel just for two
Open Heart Forgery 