Journal

My Flat Horizon

–after The Flat Horizon by Wang Chung

And there are minerals and animals
And there are colors and blanks
And there are men and women
And there are rich and poor
And there are minutes and moments
And there is heaven and angels
Earth and men

          There are differences

And birds fly past the horizon
And nests lie in the sky
And they wing back in that
Precious mortality
And there is heaven and angels
Earth and men

          At the horizon’s border

And there is the quick and the dead
And there is the dancers and the sleepers
And there is the word and those outside the word
And there is the words and word
And there is heaven and angels
Earth and men

          That separate

 

Since 1989 Marc Janssen has worked as an ad man, a pitch man, and a salesman. Climbed the corporate ladder and fallen off it. You can find his work haphazardly scattered around the internet and in printed journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Cirque Journal, The Ottawa Arts Review, and Manifest West.

Mother

You were robed, you were
sinking
when I found you on the porch
soft body spilling, spine pressed
against the leg of a weatherproof chair.
Ice cubes dissolving in an empty glass.

You’d done away with language,
unlit cigarette limp
in your lazy mouth,
and your eyes weren’t closed,
and you weren’t ashamed.

 

M. Johnsen has an M.A. in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She has also attended The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Calamus Journal, SiDEKiCK, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Virga Magazine and Mortar Magazine. 

The Real Thing

what’s the real thing
sitting inside
ticking away
waiting to explode
like a makeshift bomb.
clinging to something
that’s disappearing
slowly then fast and final.
hanging on by a hair
peering through the cracks
trying to stay upright
with each two feet
as they press
the shifting earth.
a billion hits
for a cat on a spoon
while the sun and moon
chase each other
around a spinning room.
what’s this mad dance
we’re all invited to.
words are magnifying glasses
that reveal patterns
in the grass
and flickers in your eyes
that suggest what could be.
we’re grasping at things
those things
that a person once said.
she said, there’s a sea in one seed.
he said, we don’t need no coffin,
just a fire.
she said, from destruction comes creation.
he said, even if you wash away the problem
the sauce remains on the pants.
the memory of the stain lives on.
but so do the pools of light
that exist underneath
underground tunnels
and at the edges of the sand.
they are everywhere to find.

Jola Jones is an Australian artist who has been working across different fields in the arts, from poetry and performance, to film and music. In Marrickville, Jones spent 4 years creating a platform for progressive and experimental arts and community. She has also been an ongoing performer and archivist with Kinetic Energy Theatre Company in Sydney. Her latest poems challenge us to consider the question, how do we respond in precarious times? 

UnColor Me

Drain from my flesh the hue of
my ancestors, the tint of the
African sun, the shade of an
old gum tree in the middle of
the savanna, the shadows from
the tall grass as they bend in
the mid-summer breeze over
the river Nile, past the pyramids
desecrated by robbers then by
those seeking their secrets,
hidden for thousands of years
when the tone of my skin did
not matter and I was a queen
on the throne of a Nubian empire,
and not a slave mistress, a maid
nor the angry, black woman
of a color-obsessed society.

Shirley Jones-Luke is a poet and a writer. Ms. Luke lives and works in Boston, Mass. She earned an MFA at Emerson College with an emphasis on memoir and poetry. Shirley has been published in several journals and magazines. In 2016, Ms. Luke was a Poetry Fellow for the Watering Hole Poetry Retreat.

Alexandra David-Neel

She edits her life from a room made dark
against a desert dropping summer sun.
A daring traveling Parisian adventurer,
ultimate princess turning toad with age–
snow drops of white in her hair, tiny fingers
thumb joints osteoarthritis
she corrects proofs at 100, pours whiskey,
pours over what she wrote
scribbles notes directed to the future,
applies for a new passport.
With this amount of macular degeneration,
near, monster of writers’ approaches,
she wears no spectacles.
Her mind teeters between Himalayas,
distant Gobi Desert.  
Running reason through her head for a living,
yet dancing with the youthful world of Cinderella,
she plunges deeper near death into Tibetan mysticism,
trekking across snow covered mountains to Lhasa, Tibet.
Nighttime rest, sleepy face, peeking out that window crack
into the nest, those quiet villages below
tasting a reality beyond her years.

Michael Lee Johnson lived ten years in Canada during the Vietnam era. Today he is a poet, freelance writer, amateur photographer, and small business owner in Itasca, Illinois. Johnson is the Editor-in-chief of the anthology, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze and Editor-in-chief of a second poetry anthology, Dandelion in a Vase of Roses, both of which are available on Amazon.com.

For Breakfast, a Sea Bream

Pieces of the red sea bream I carried in my belly across
A Tuesday gray before the day blinked, surprised.
The vastness of blue, the shocking after.
On my wall God had absolved with this morning: sizzled
Right up. I’d laid it there, in the pan, from the packed ice
It started the day on, in the market.
Its melting water dripped responsibility on my toes.
Now, fish flesh was gummed in my fingernails.
Silver-rose lattice as skin releasing.
Faintly the fin, nerved in the steam of it.
I absorbed these interweaving events as I examined the dark,
Cooked veins. I accepted all would be transformed, at last.

For now, my aunt has electricity again
Where she lives, these days alone, in Puerto Rico.
The neighbors applauded and cried she said.
My friends have given birth again, dear Marissa, old Torben,
And little Amelie. Their lives alight like a scented spyglass
With wet leaves of maple trees breaking free, rustling down
To ones in some mud already grounded from aspens, the high aspens,
Back door on my very childhood.

It was a day of good news,
Astonishing as on the end of my fork was that hot piece of white
Torn from wire for bone, or torn from the sea,
And no nautical chart shuddered so cold underwater as the map it made to me,
Trying to call back those friendly names I’d dreamed as I sat
In bed this morning, with sun shifted between the castle and port
To concentrate copper on the wall, and the bream
Not yet in me.

Matthew A. Jonassaint is from Utah, where he studied film history and has worked with at-risk youth. Locally published, his poetry has also appeared in glitterMOB. He is currently in Spain, working on a series called An American In Cádiz.