Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.
Online Poetry & Art
Jim Zola is a poet and photographer living in North Carolina.
What a wonder is the crab:
She molts when her skeleton becomes a cell
and lets seaweed abandon it on cemetery sands.
Then, soft with freedom, she mates.
Her lover projecting himself inside her
while she is still capricious
before reality locks her back
into the shell of self protection.
Laura DiNovis is student to a craft she will never fully understand. She will also never fully understand how to write bios.
–-after Valery Mann
Why rush the kitchen window every morning|
to bang your tender head upon the glass,
like a yoyo on an invisible string?
Experts declare: “protecting territory.”
That interloper in the glass has got to go,
and you’re just the soldier to do it,
a troop of one, your life’s quixotic business.
I’ve plastered the window with green post-it notes,
tried closing the shade, but you simply choose
another window.
I admire your persistence,
wonder at futility
see how you’re like me.
One day, I find your body beneath the window,
neck broken, twitching forever stilled,
subdued enough for a watercolorist.
Wrapped in plain, brown stripes,
from a family too abundant to be rare.
One of a long, undistinguished series
showing what can happen when you chase away
the one who looks like you, charging forward
instead of stepping back,
the fallibility of instinct.
Along with your mussed, lumpy chest, your
cunning beak, and your already desiccating carcass,
your feet are what will stick with me:
curved, wiry, offered to the morning sky.
Katherine Edgren’s book The Grain Beneath the Gloss, (Finishing Line Press), is now available. She also has two chapbooks: Long Division and Transports. Her poems have appeared in Christian Science Monitor, Birmingham Poetry Review and Barbaric Yawp. She is a retired social worker, living in Dexter, Michigan.
“The Journey of Time”
Judith Sander‘s “The Journey of Time” was inspired by a poem “What Journey Now” by Terri Thomas. Mixed media collage using papers, oil pastels, pencil and acrylic paint. 18”H x 24”W. The collection of objects from her travels manages to fill the room with emotions.
Go on, then.
Seek that which remains
rhetorical, without retort,
dismissive hand-wave
by narrow-eyed prophet,
self-fulfill, produce tomes
chockfull of minced word,
wield fountain tip as daggered
butterfly meant for jugular
and bleed out. With regards,
make your mark, feign high art
in gaudy formation of book,
embossed, leather-bound,
a loud sigil of floweriness.
Trick about, then vanish
into smoke screen- nothing
to see here. Schooled gentleman,
yes, manchild hanger-on,
coin flip today’s: To be.
Lock eye with dusked muse
to be forgotten when the birds
whisper in trees you will never
know the names of.
Your pseudo-Zen,
thatched hat sensibility-
ebbs abject horror,
eludes doomed femme
fatale imaginings,
saves embattled horse
who’d taken arrows
on some scorched field.
The mirror’s intervention,
that follows;
my, my,
you’ve seen better days.
What’s not so well known, and rarely told,
is how Orpheus hesitated when his beloved
Eurydice walked as a shadow behind
and, as you know, cast his eye back to see
his dearest depart back to Hades, though—
and this is where it gets interesting—
he knew she had yet to make it across
the threshold to reclaim her role as boss.
During their walk toward the upper-world
he wondered if she was worth all the fuss.
Having been busy so long on the lyre
writing weepies that got to the Gods
had made his fame an inevitability.
What would her return do to his infamy?
Might the film deal fall through were he to cease
being the sad widower, the poet-genius?
And then he thought of her, the way she woke,
her morning breath and unmade face,
the clothes scattered throughout their home,
the tube of toothpaste incorrectly squeezed,
the ghastly things she made in the kitchen—
So he thought maybe it might be best
to leave her to eternal rest.
Their good times were had. Now he had to think
of how he’d live out the remainder of his days
dodging Maenads, Zeus’s fury, beastly assassins
bent on keeping him quiet, but the Muses
took care of it—they kept him around
so that he might continue to sing his laments
and charm the next generation of poets.
Vincent Francone’s work has appeared in Spectrum, Rhino, New City, The Oklahoma Review, and other web and print journals. He won 1st place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition and his memoir, Like a Dog, was published in 2015. Visit his website www.vincentfrancone.
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