PHOTOGRAPHY BY REGINA WALKER Artist bio: Regina Walker is a psychotherapist living in NYC.
PoéSIE part II
Spiritual Dissension By Philip Venzke Masticating on popcorn, the skeleton helps the blind man dog paddle down vertebrae while wearing blue snowshoes. The albatross pushpins all the first place ribbons onto the bleached out scene. A flyspeck, while waltzing, marries the windowpane. When a broken megaphone switches the traffic light to Go, Beelzebub joins me in a game of blackjack. Fossil fuel writers look on as I blackmail the fiend. The ace of spades dives at will and then cowers in the cape of a ghost blinking sporadically. In exultation, I watch as my name is scratched in black letters upon my wilted back, the ink drying black, glossy, and wet. Author bio: Philip Venzke grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. His poetry is widely published in magazines throughout the U.S. and Europe. His chapbook “Chant to Save the World” was a winner of The James Tate International 2021 Poetry Prize (published July 2022 by SurVision Books, Ireland). His second chapbook of poetry “Rules to Change the World” is being published by Finishing Line Press in 2023.
TWO POEMS BY NATHANIEL S. ROUNDS Midnight Special Wild Bill Cody Held nothing against me He heard my confessions Over very fine whiskey He said Like the Christ In his soft-hearted assertion That a train going West Is best Win or Lose, Live or Die Sarge was tough on us all/ Old Sarge Donald Duck/ One of Merrill's legendary Marauders/ Making history /In the remote jungles of the China-Burma-India Theater/ And here we were now/ A broken recce under the French Foreign Legion/ Searching for garimpeiros mining gold in the thick jungle of French Guinea/ We'd discovered their site/abandoned/in the early morning dawn/ Sarge quacked orders to destroy everything/ We macheted our way through their rough trail/leading to the river/where we were suddenly ambushed/Sarge fired a few rounds from his SVT-40/But was stopped by an arrow to the chest/I held him in one arm/Firing off shots at the miners with the other/old Don squawked and gurbled two words: "Kill me"/ I remembered the deer I'd hit on Nova Scotia highway back in '54/I'd dragged him off the road/And cut his throat/I did the same for Don/He looked up/A weird smile on his face/ Like a hero returning home Author bio: Born in Texas, corrupted in New England and duly chastised and reformed in Nova Scotia, Nathaniel S. Rounds is a Pushcart Prize nominee and colossal pain in the neck. Just awful.
half-ghost inside of full-ghost by Rob Plath sometimes phantoms rise up out of tiny stray crumbs along baseboards or short strands of hairs upon shelves forgotten snippets left behind by the dead & the ghosts grow climbing to the ceiling like curling smoke & spreading out like a cloud where i wait sitting at the center alone & haunted a wraith-in-the-making a trembling half-ghost still much too full of blood & tears Author bio: Contrary to rumors, rob plath is not yet under the jurisdiction of the worms. see more of his work at robplath.com
TWO POEMS BY MARK YOUNG Anabolic Spheroids Walk into a gallery of in-use examples of the reproductive parameters of adult female rats & you can sense a checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths. Cellular metabolism is represented by a simplified model that uses restrictions on free speech to induce terror in the immediate victim. It is posited that the endocrine milieu of lactation develops along asocial & amoral lines to reflect the natural organization of cells far better than 2D cell cultures can. Evidence is lacking on substance abuse outcomes. Kohlrabi & Cooked Lentils The exiles don't seem to care that socks sized for the average gal-sized foot are decreasing due to environmental stressors. Maybe that’s why axolotl kiki crabby crab, flavored with cherry shrimp & nasturtium, is very hot in Korea now, especially among those whom an MBTI assesses
as being introverted. Otherwise, do your space your way & find what you need for your next D.I.Y. project. Do not bother with such minor matters as why can’t horsefield tortoises eat tomatoes? Author bio: Mark Young was born in Aotearoa / New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He is the author of more than sixty books, the most recent of which are with the slow-paced turtle replaced by a fast fish, published by Sandy Press in May 2023, & a free downloadable chapbook of visuals & poems, Mercator Projected, published by Half Day Moon Press in August 2023.
Seven for Alison Ross By Sheila Murphy 1/ There is no counter in clockwise. Chopin fills then stills the higher mind. 2/ Wynton Marsalis performing the Concerto for Trumpet by Humel blends stability and spritz. 3/ Steel precision fuels intent: supple, graceful, free to rove about the earth with sturdy limbs and stems. 4/ Nevada Dandelions frost low atmosphere until Tiny spheres disperse their possibilities. 5/ Butterflies hover and flit above barbed wire. Pure reality versus a base protective flinch. 6/ No claustrophemera today, no woodlings, no primacy-recency to clog the watch. 7/ Go for the hot mustard, the generous peach, the resonance of pure air unfiltered by always open windows.
Pale-pale post-dimorphism blue by Giorgia Pavlidou A warm welcome to our very own, dark blue Odysseus, Sweetheart of the Occident He stares at us with his four aegean-blue eyeballs, the sexy sociopath Toujours at marine-blue night, toujours at hot-humid polar night Four drunken circles, ablaze in turquoise-distance whirling watch-waving toss-turning Digging & piercing for moon-hurt at the other side of a beatnik-blue hill At night, when sacrificial bluebirds burrow under haunted snow
Toujours hot-humid & bi-polar, toujours clinically depressed You’ve dreamed it many times before, Tiresias. Odysseus’ blue eyeballs, digging into your dreamworld burning beaucoup of sexy Calypsos Dancing maniacally at Claremont plaza in Los Angeles, in wild-drunken circles with dark-blue villagers without free-range imagination nor walk-in children horsing along neither with reckless bluebirds chirping through fake-indigo backgrounds or floating on naked wings of sexless smoke Welcome all, here is the swirling, sexy salamander of hot-humid clinical night Drunken Odysseus, as American as an illegal immigrant Sweetheart of the Occident,
He chants blue-eyed mantras on the eternally blond hellfire of Western democracy Clinically addicted Odysseus, He speed-walks on alternative facts while indigo-leprechauns sling their designer-genitals at his barely-blue babyface Odysseus, the US birthing-parent he chirps clinical mantras in old English squeezes sixty curled-up Sanskrit prayers into one long lizard-breath Odysseus, The untouchable-turned-brahmin, parades ur-brahmins lasered-naked at the village square lynches a few emaciated upper-caste dogs en passant Sweetheart of the Occident, dances non-stop the Zeybek Eagle Dance to fight off blue-blue-blue depression
at the other side of a beatnik-blue hill with beaucoup of volition & all night-fish weep acrylic thoughts again Toujours at hot-humid polar night Odysseus, Sad-sad sweetheart of the Occident Toujours bluer than Aegean blue Toujours bluer than non-turquoise Zeybek blue Toujours bluer even than indigo blue yet faded & paler than pale-pale post-dimorphism blue Author bio: Giorgia Pavlidou is an American painter and writer currently living in Greece. Recent publications include Haunted by the Living - Fed by the Dead (Anvil Tongue Books, 2022) and Female Body Retold (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2023)