FFR

Fowl Feathered Review was the disorderly quarterly published on a consistently
sporadic basis by Fowlpox Press: This is the final petal of that much-maligned
flower. Collage work and back cover by Pâris Paté. Front cover and interior
paintings are by Betty Aberlin. Editors: Babka and Virgil Kay. ISSN: 1929-7238.
Erratum, typos and electrical fires: Harvey Nagila. Published with financial
assistance from the Ecum Secum Literary Arts Brain Trust. Omnia vincit
amor.--Virgil

The World Is Too Much With Us

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late

and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a
sordid boon!



Poetry BY Gregg Dotoli

Come on Dream

crash through that dome
deep into dream space
where dreams march in peace
on roads of star
in the land
of Nottsofar

Come on Dream
any road will do

Dream it’s a land
governed by doves
and crystal loves

platinum sun rays
bless the days

Come on Dream
We’ve some traveling to do

As Ivy to Rock

like red paint
to the old barn
closer to you I am
as stars to night
and ivy to rock
closer to you i am
when or where
I’m forever there
closer to you i am

Oak Blight and Thanatos :Part I Oak

streetwise Robin-hood knew
the harder the wood
the straighter the arrow

Biota Oak/Gift. : waxing

shade
furniture
clog
energy
ant-path
library
dreamspawner
gym
umbrella salve
sweet peaceful canopy

geothantos/trojan :waning

beetle and climate
extinct
foul bug beast
pollution grey smile
goat gloats at
human as sophisticate
human as astral idiot
human as ephemeral

A Sense of Scent

opening my window
eyeing the dark garden
exhaling slowly
rainy night scents
sweet and summer
quiet and earthy
wake the thought
I'm in free
I'm in be

Gregg Dotoli is an International Poet with poems published in over 15 countries. He lives in
Nutley, NJ and is enjoying life.

MARIO LOPRETE
Curriculum Artis

Mario Loprete ,Catanzaro 1968
Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti , Catanzaro.

Address: Via Magenta 31, 88100 CATANZARO.

Tel. 0961-781257, cell. 3404741434 e-mail [email protected] .

I live in a world that I shape at my liking, throughout a virtual pictorial and sculptural movement, transferring my experiences,
photographing reality throughout my filters, refined from years of research and experimentation. Painting for me is the first love.
An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to send a
message to transmit my message, it’s the basis of my painting. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting. That
voluptuous and sensual lover that gives me different emotions, that touches prohibited cords…The new series of works in concrete
is the one that is giving me more personal and professional satisfaction. How was it born? It was the result of an important
investigation of my work, the research of that “quid” that i felt was missing. Looking at my work in the past ten years I understood
that there was the semantics and semiotics in my visual speech, but the right support to valorize the message was not there.

The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a military story, made into
amphitheatres, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it’s a synonym of modernity.
Everywhere you go, there’s the immolation of modern man in there. From Sidney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, the
reinforced cement is present and consequently support for the expression of the “writers” is present. The successive passage was
obvious for me. If man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban into galleries
and museums? It was the winning step to the continuous evolutionary process of my work in that aforementioned “quid”, and that
is what is making me show in prestigious places and is making me be requested from important collectors. When the painting has
completely dried, I brush it in such a way that not only unites every color and shade, but it also gives to the art work the shine and
lucidity like that of the posters we all have on our walls.

For my Concrete Sculptures I use my personal clothing. Throughout an artistic process, in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I
turn the viewer of the artwork into a type of post-modern archeologist who studies my work as if they were urban artifacts. In the
past few years, I freed myself from all work relationships with galleries that I collaborated with. I think that my work has reached
the maturity to be coveted and represented by an important gallery and I would like to use your art project in order that my
worth be known to those who see this in my project.
Links:







Poetry by
Steve Denehan

Eight Floors Up
1.
The view from here is nothing special
the sun is not setting
nor rising, in fact
there is no sun at all in this stone sky
where does the sun go on these days?
I watch the world pass by
beneath my dangling feet
I feel the breeze on my back
soft caresses, gentle urging
I imagine myself as that man below
his hat cocked slightly to one side
he has panache
I never could wear a hat
so many cars seeping along like molasses
if the city were a heart it would have stopped
I try to send a message through the damp air
begging each driver to prise their hands
from their steering wheels
from their own throats
begging them to unlock their seat belts
to lift their feet from accelerators, from brakes
to open their doors
to choose a direction and to walk
and keep walking
until their lungs burn and their soles blister
I am a gargoyle made of electricity and heartbeats
perched on the edge of this building
about to fall
or to fly

they do not see me
they do not look up
2.
I didn’t hear her on the stairs last night
or tiptoeing behind me
long after bedtime
I sensed her presence over my shoulder
and whispered her name
she ran to me then
arms out and diamonds pouring from her eyes
I took her and she lay upon my chest
I hoped my heart might calm her
as my words could not
we sat there until her breathing slowed
we hummed the same song
low and slow and swayed together, still, nearly still
she told me that she missed the olden days
she missed the olden days already
she told me that she didn’t want things to change
we hummed again, her legs dangling in the silence
I told her that change is the wind
always there, sometimes wild
sometimes warm and kind
I told her that it might blow us over
now and then
but that’s okay
more silence
an easy silence, warm and kind
she asked then, in the hush
if we might buy a kite someday
I said yes

Voice
I love those nights when
sleep seems far away
I ask you questions
just to hear your voice
my lullaby
in that darkness
you cannot see
the ships that sail across my eyes

A Poem That Might Be About Death
I know that I am here
sometimes all too well
I find loose change
and safety
behind the couch
I bathe in emptiness
enjoying the feeling of my fists clenching
joyously
Silence tells me whispered secrets
her lips brushing my ear
bringing me ecstatic goose bumps
memories of myself hide in swelling shadows
while I claw at light
that seems warmer and brighter now
and sometimes, I leave music play
in empty rooms

Magic Trick
Two years later
two years after my body
had said no more
I stepped onto a pitch once again
I no longer walked on the balls of my feet
I no longer felt that burst within
the springs now rusted and unyielding
the first strike of the ball
disappointingly foreign
yet
there were echoes
whispers in the basement
I sat deep and waited
for the game to come to me
and it did
it came as a scream in the wind
it came as flood in the desert
I stood firm
firm as these joints would allow
some of the players were my own age
leaning into the avalanche
with me
some were 25 years younger
full of bad habits
habits that I had corrected
when it was just too late
if I could put my head on their body
if I could take their body for mine
my touch was still there
hiding, almost embarrassed
I could still see a pass
I still had eyes in the back of my head
my one magic trick

but my feet, once lightning
now moved through treacle
my swerve, predictable
my feints, mechanical
what grace I might have had
long since ash
I warred with sleep that night
and woke amazed
at my betrayal of myself
my ankle, my hip, my knee, my back
traitors
but my trusted heart
stood with me
as I stood up
and stepped, creaking
into another life

Steve Denehan lives in Kildare, Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin. Recent publication
credits include The Irish Times, Better Than Starbucks, Fowl Feathered Review, The Blue Nib, The
Opiate, Sky Island Journal, Evening Street Review, The Folded Word, Ink In Thirds, Crack The
Spine, The Cape Rock, Visions International and Third Wednesday. He has been nominated for The
Pushcart Prize and his chapbook, "Of Thunder, Pearls and Birdsong" is available from Fowlpox
Press.

POETRY & PAINTINGS BY BETTY ABERLIN

1. DECEMBER '92

Photographs of photographers photographing
soldiers entering Somalia as though it were
a Harlem High School, frisking the wizened teens
& posing as the dying children drift away
in the paparazzi lightning.

Then it's back to the talkshows,
the National Enquirer, the sitcom star
with the multimillion-dollar gems
& the slim hope of the in vitro kid.

The storm watch, combat vet doing pushups
middle of Avenue of the Americas,
invasions & mercy in the same amphibious landings,
making good on the incomplete in the Gulf,
the oil slick spilling, the cries of the
women raped in the name of troop morale,
the Christmas celebrity windows at Barney's,
war toys & the capitalist system, stirring
the Jew/Black schism just before the Chanukah
candles light up, slam-dunking the old year
in high-tops the homeboys kill for, yeah,
dressed to kill...
adjusting the touch-control on an old Royal
in the time of computers, life as you lived it
stripped of another veil, the eclipse of the
full moon in Gemini, twins you go off in
both directions at once, in the prison do schtick
for the captive audience, handing out the
fortune cookies with the scripture inside

& the rosaries they try to hang themselves with,
going down for the paper before the snowstorm hits,
seeing the sign saying Churstmas, Merry Churstmas,
realizing The Cheese Stands Alone
is once more your motto, making the waiter
serve the madman, saying, "I know him",
as if that were possible.

2. Three dabbling ducks at dawn, a dawn so pink

they stay quite close, swim, dip and drink.
I watch them with binoculars, thrilled to see
the ripples of their doings come to me.

There - husband, wife and larger drake.
The husband keeps this male away a bit
although the three dissolve the pond side
earthly trees into the cursive dreamlike
rickrack moving version of themselves,
bare as calligraphy upon the dimming of the sky.

I tuck the doomsday headlines under twigs
and breathe as softly as I can in prayer
the morning fire will not alert them/cause
their flight: while they are here, aswim
in holy wakes and rippling woods,
my God is watching over this mad world
at war, us all, duck peace unfurled
upon November pond. Three ducks apart
console the beat-up drum that is my heart.

3. High in the Upper Twenties

Sunrise, yes and moonrise, yes -
no signs of setting but the warring world;
the pond half-frozen and half-not.
Planning to go back to the store
where you bought but did not bag
the old talcum tin with the picture of
a woman ice-skating alone.
Where is the man to say, "Don't be afraid"?
The ice is so frozen it will hold your weight,
the skates hang on a hook above the stairs.
What if they fit your feet?
You'd be a ballerina in a music box,
turning, turning in the tune above
the snow print mirror of the frozen half,
under the half-moon with its frozen tide;
and to the east, the mountain spring
which feeds the pond, the water-half, cold,
flowing into the narrow path
just between cold water and thin ice
where she must go.

4. Each blueberry proclaims the grace of God,
each one a universe, from star to stem
miraculous in dark blue nebula,
the tiny stars of David fill with milk
from nearby cows and feed my soul!

I reroute now a tiny caterpillar who
made such a meal upon an apple leaf
he grew, and finally I gave the leaf
to spare the fledgling tree;
but hiding in the shade of earthware pot
the creature moves away from this gnawed green.
From precipice of deck-board he can see
it is no longer leaf connected to its tree.

Can a wee being, soon to be a butterfly,
sup on a dying green? It dries up in the August sun,
as he begins to shelter underneath.
The sun and galaxies of rainbow diamonds
blind in the water of my noonday glass!

So press me in the pages of these books,
the truths and memories of our precious seers
are all around us, tiny, vast -
the clear perfection of God's heaven shines.
Even when in fear and cities these seem dry -
we may, time being, find cool comfort
in the wing shadow of this red dragonfly.

5. IDES OF MARCH

I wrote my sister "circumcise your younger son
so in the locker room he'll look like everyone"
(unlike his elder brother - sliced by all save mohl's knife -
who won't be having sex or children in this life).
I watch the aphids on the stalk of Jacob's Ladder,
and, thinking of these nephews, I grow sadder.
The first sits on the toilet, groomed by a ravenous aide
with painted, two-inch nails. She claims him, is well-paid,
and knows just how to stoke the war
his anguished divorced parents fight: she's havoc's whore.
He can do nothing on his own but drool and shine.
She has no life but his: he's her goldmine.
The second has by now a caustic wit,
self-medicates with booze and pot, and does his bit.
He will say anything you want; your wishes his desires,
just in his secret heart he's lighting forest fires!

Betty Aberlin, native New Yorker, actor in musical theater, comedy revues, children's
television & Kevin Smith films, published The White Page Poems, responses to
George MacDonald's 1880 Diary of an Old Soul in 2008 (Zossima Press). Studied
creative writing at Bennington College with Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov.
There she was accidentally put off poetry by a comment she took literally - "Cousin
Betty you will never be a poet" - not knowing her teacher was quoting Dryden's
response to Jonathan Swift. So much for higher education. Currently working on a
one-act play & feeding the wild birds in a small town upstate, she is grateful and
honored to be included in this wonderful art work.

“…realist where it counts, fluid. A dance. Still lives complimentary to
cubism but more spirited, not a nihilist monochromatic dump on the
romantic. I see Romare Bearden bopping to Matisse, to Braque and
baque. The pallet of Carolyn Wyeth in there. I discern O'Keefe but you're
not a thief. These are references I make to describe what I see. Like
describing water when seeing for the first time….”
--Virgil Kay, in a letter to the artist, 2019.





















9 THESES; CONCLUDING THOUGHTS OF A SPECIAL ED DROPOUT

Virgil Kay, Editor

“You must be in tune with the times and prepared to break with tradition.”
--James Agee

1. The middle-aged rooster to Rabble Entity, the chosen lady and her children: After a
sleepless night in January and thereafter being cowed into writing a letter of contrition by
inexplicable forces identifiable only by their frightful anomaly against this black-on-gray
Rothko landscape, witnessed from the driver’s seat of this car-as-synod situated in a
Walmart parking lot in a Catholic college town, I await the fulfillment of the meteorologist’s
vision of an angry storm fomenting hale, rain, whiteout conditions, obliviating the road home
through Stalin’s revision of the mundane.

2. Philosopher Martin Buber said:

“When people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that
surges between them.”

This echoes the words recorded by a certain tax collector named Matthew, also known as
Levi:

“For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

The nearly two thousand years that divide the writers is of no account. What matters here is
the acknowledgement of togetherness both in mind and motive.

3. This gathering was the seed planted within the garden of what became Fowlpox (the
variant spelling of Fowl Pox) Press, named after a poultry disease to avoid any other press
assuming or having assumed this name. There was a disorderly order to the whole enterprise,
which was devout in not taking money, accepting writers on the basis of their work rather
than their provenance, and allowing for a peaceful cohabitation of individuals from many
walks of life.

4. In the background, I fought to keep my family alive, working third shift jobs, cutting and
splitting my own wood for which I had bartered a van, fighting bees from the commercial
blueberry fields behind my house as they set up their hives in the walls of my 1850’s,
balloon frame house, joined by birds and their nests and one rat. We negotiated the removal
of the bees, the birds variously fell from the nest into the recesses of the wall, and my wife
killed the rat with a mallet. We then fled to the city, and each building was marred by many
wonderful things: faulty wiring, prompting emergency fire exits, thus descending 26 stories
of staircase to the front lobby with three children under the age of seven, many times; mice,
so many mice; drilling through concrete directly below us at all hours, for many hours; one
hundred drunk students fleeing the police but forgetting how to exit our hallway; more faulty
wiring, leaking roofs, scaffolding, and a superintendent who wrote menacing letters to our
immigrant neighbors. In the meantime, the blueberry baron devised to have our house
condemned and demolished (without any proper permits or paperwork from the county of
any kind), my mother died from cancer and I almost died of the same some four months after
her demise. I then returned to work, and to Fowlpox Press, which has always been worked at
a few hours of a night or morning.

5. Enough was enough. We joined a small congregation in a tiny village two and a half hours
from the city, and I obtained work an hour and twenty-four minutes from home. It took a
month before we had internet so I could continue this small press with its beautifully eclectic
contributors.

6. There were other benefits to running this press as I did. In keeping it small, I could give
each writer individualized attention--a term they threw around for “special” students like
myself before they discovered attention deficit. In truth, all people merit individual attention,
and in many ways are truly special. There was also the pleasure of having writers interact
with a rooster-as-editor, and at one time, I wrote into a contract that the author was
published on the condition that he at no time had imitated Carol Channing while he
showered.

7. The world has changed dramatically since this press was started. We have suffered or
witnessed the escalation of infestations of bullying powers that be, poor victims of such
powers who flee in desperation, and our own search for safer ground. We are,as it were,
sharing caves.

8. The question then becomes, Now that I have tired from these outside forces, should I
continue in the same way? Should I continue to publish magazines and small books? The fact
is that I cannot. I depend too much on the stronger minds of others now, the sharper eyes of
yet others, and I have no spare hours. These few hours that you and I shared are indeed
precious, and unfortunately unsustainable. While I can tentatively plan a few small,
unscheduled books of some sort, under my own name, written in longhand on my lunch hour,
I have to tend to poor health, growing children, and project a promise over that dimming,
winter landscape, a sort of living painting of fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, young
and old, all in good health, not running, not fighting, not falling into the deep recesses of a
cold world, enjoying better weather, and indeed, that electric moment that comes from truly
gathering.

9. I will not and must not recant these words to you, as it would neither be safe nor right to
go against conscience, to paraphrase Martin Luther. I offer to you my light, some laughter,
and my deepest, unshakable affection. Shalom.
--Virgil Kay

Afterward: While turning these concluding words into a final draft, the lights flickered, went off for a passing second, then
returned. Immediately after inserting the final draft of these nine theses, and having the good sense to save the document, a
power outage affected our home and that of over nine hundred people in
neighboring towns for thirteen hours.
It was unsettling, and thus,
an apt conclusion.