Before you give yourself to a man, you must make some decisions.
You must decide if you wish to give yourself to only one, or many.
I wanted to get married once, and so I write this to you now.
If you give yourself over to marriage,
you must be ready to hate yourself afterwards.
You must be ready to walk away from bright lights.
You must be ready to live with bats and spiders crawling across your soul.
If you marry, be prepared.
The closet door will close on you, and you can never return without
consequences.
Before you give yourself to a man, you must make some decisions.
You must decide if it is for love or for beauty.
I wanted a loving man once, and so I write this to you now.
If you give yourself over to love,
you must be ready to hurt yourself afterwards.
You must be ready to walk away from beautiful lines and bunches.
You must be ready to live with soil and filth crawling across your skin.
If you love, be prepared.
The bedroom door will close on you, and you can never return without
disfigurement.
Before you give yourself to a man, you must make some decisions.
You must decide if it is for sex or succor.
I wanted to be comforted once, and so I write this to you now.
If you give yourself over to comfort, you must be ready to kill yourself
afterwards. You must be ready to walk away from hope and wishes.
You must be ready to live with come and blood crawling across your psyche.
If you seek comfort, be prepared.
The gates of Heaven will close on you, and you will never return without
loathing.
After you give yourself to a man, don’t come crying to me.
I told you what it was all worth, and the choices to be made.
I have no advice save this.
Leave off and make your way, because you are a woman.
Leave off and make your way, because you have beauty,
and that is all.
Leave off and make your way because I am your mother,
and I can say this to you.
I can say this to you because I love you.
I can say this to you because I hate you.
I can say this to you because I was there before.
I’ve been there all before. Don’t question me.
Don’t ask me what you should do. I don’t know.
I told you what I did. I told you what I didn’t.
After you give yourself to a man, don’t come laughing to me.
I told you what it was all worth, and what it all wasn’t.
I have no advice save this.
Leave off and make your way, because you are a girl.
Leave off and make your way because you have faith,
and that is all.
Leave off and make your way because you are my daughter,
and you must say this to me.
You can say this to me because you love me.
You can say this to me because you hate me.
You can say this to me because you will be there soon.
You will come to it soon. Don’t tell me.
Don’t tell me what you will do. I can’t know.
I must not know what you do. Do not tell me what you didn’t.
I cannot know.
I’m a writer with a mission. I currently work as a veterinary technician but my aspirations live between the covers of a novel. I use my work, especially my poetry and art, to crusade against domestic violence, an awful edge of society that I’ve cut myself with. Although I’ve been published before in small school magazines, this is the first true outlet I’ve found for my poetry. My artwork is visible through Enfuse Magazine. You may contact me at ofthefey@yahoo.com .
PINK’S NOT MY COLOR
By Janine Margiotta
The empty lot next door grew
Rhododendrons of auspicious
coloring, mixed-breeding
our gardener said. We hoped
the builders wouldn't
pluck them out like a splinter.
By lunch, the raw earth
bled like a botched surgery,
incisions too deep in the
marked pine trees of death.
The morning after
we went to the burdening lot
where our privacy had been
beaten down. No more shrubs,
no trees where secured birds came
to drink and eat from our garden.
We poured martinis and
walked along new foundation.
Discarded carapaces of megalithic
insect’s internal suicide noted.
This was worse
than any forest fire:
a pile of plywood painted pink
I'm a native of New York who had moved to California for eight years and ventured to Oregon. In my spare time I can be found leaning over jetty rocks to find the best fishing spots and catching anything that won’t pull me in. I enjoy the ocean. I find that a lot of my writing veers to the jocularity side but I have written in many styles. When it comes to my animals I enjoy serving as part of 'the staff'. I have a collection of tarantulas that keep me smiling with their feats. This spring I created my first garden, after… several tries. On warm summer days, I like to share a chocolate sundae with my cat Basho on the grass admiring flowers, eyeing bugs, fighting over who gets to lick the spoon.
My first poetry book called “One Hundred Black Birds” has just been released and I am very excited. I am also a member of California Federation of Chaparral Poets. I have been published by Small Brushes, Haz Mat Review, Parnassus Literary Journal, Mindprints, Song of the San Joaquin, Quercus Review, and Pegasus Review, to name a few. All absolutely wonderful magazines.
Kathleen Bracher is a freelance writer, living as a missionary helper in Germany. She has always loved reading, writing short stories, and poetry. She has a passion for the written word and for her Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. View her online blog.
To be the one at which all antagonism is directed.
You dismiss the kiss, granted to you at birth from the muse,
That assured the concerto in your heart will be endless.
So you take the hostility of the pretentious instead-
Not out of the pureness of all motives,
But because it marks you as chosen.
You must be preferred, by the tall and lean,
To be the idol at which they burn their offerings of abhorrence;
Lifted up to you in the crudest of baskets
And placed on the podium of your unbreakable buoyancy.
Nay, it seems their first crop of repugnance is still not enough.
You must have something more,
A grotesque abomination to balance the beauty in your melodies.
Thus you seek it out yourself.
Searching amongst those you distinguish as having fire for words
And shadows for souls.
You make masters out of the unworthy
And when those you've chosen
To give your beauty and smiles;
Find you wanting,
Rejection looms on the sunset
And you rest easy, saying "It is done-
My fate fulfilled; I am worthless."
I hope that you enjoy the passion that I put into my poems. As a young writer (17 years old) the views and experiences I write about are fresh and meaningful and that translates into my work.
PROGNOSIS
By G.A. Scheinoha
Lay the past under the microscope of the present.
Examine each memory as if it's merely another
flyspeck specimen on the slide. Pick it apart minute
by mundane, fibrous membrane minute. Did you
really expect these vastly mutated amoebic days
to point towards some hitherto unknown strain
that spun off into an unforeseeable, unassailably
diseased future? A blighted place where perfection
isn't in the peach and the farthest removed
southern reaches only turn our footsteps north
again.
G.A. Scheinoha has had a wide range of interests, chess, collecting beer cans, professional wrestling, listening to squeals (police calls on scanners), jazz and learning more about his ethnic heritage (Czech and German) since he was a young man. But writing is the one constant in his life, what he always returns to.
When not working a day job as a vacuum packer in warehouse, he looks after an aged parent and in the late hours, pursues a third, more public life as an author of prose poems, plays, short stories, columns and verse.
He has had work published in newspapers, newsletters and magazines in the United States, Canada, England and Australia. His most recent accomplishment is becoming an e-poet, with poems and stories appearing on such websites as CHILDREN, CHURCHES & DADDIES, DOWN IN THE DIRT, LONG STORY SHORT and 3 CUP MORNING.
FALLEN STARS
By G.A. Scheinoha
Two comets burned
across the sky,
you were one,
the other, I
and the gas
which fueled
our brief flight
was the
scorching
tail
of a
lie.
THE PLOUGHMAN
By Anne Elizabeth Connors
Prejudice is the ploughman
who cuts his furrows deep
and, as his father did before him,
follows the horse and treads the same path
setting seeds for tomorrow's war.
Each row leads to nowhere
but he plants his field, just the same,
with a blighted crop of destruction
to feed innocent children around the world.
Hatred, in its purest form,
churns to the surface on the blade of intolerance...
leaving lands played out...laid to waste
in the wake of the ploughman.
The legacy is plain to see
in old eyes set in the faces of children.
Futures lost, withered in the drought of poverty
and starvation of spirit.
Centuries of mother's tears
salt the earth across worlds and ages...
where only the media keeps the tally.
Let the earth lie fallow in truce
and the world stand still in retrospect.
Plant crops of tolerance everywhere
and harvest peace, plenty for all, to carry us through
the hard cold frost of winter politicians.
Tend and nurture peace, as if it were our only child,
lest it be devoured by locusts of discontent.
Let the ploughman pasture...and never return
to the fields of his father.
From Leicester, England, I am a British and U.S. citizen. Residing in Colorado, I write poetry, short stories, lyrics and am in the process of marketing my first novel.
BOBBING FOR APPLES
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Orbs duck and dip
beneath the surface
and up again.
Desire and wisdom here,
within my reach,
red and green,
slippery bright,
now gone away
like unpenciled thought.
------
Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, a chapbook of nostalgic and personal poetry, published by www.finishinglinepress.com and named Top Ten Best Reads of 2005 by The Compulsive Reader. She is also the award winning author of THIS IS THE PLACE, HARKENING and THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T.
LAB RAT
By Clifford K. Watkins, Jr.
surrounded by a tunnel of hands
how much sorrow can you stand
who'll remember me
a sample in a tube of infinity
maybe we're god's plan
the lab rat is man
watch him rise
beneath a collage of eyes
we're all paranoid
time flies and devours space
are we a void
stray shavings of the erased
remnants of a lost race
the products of our own buffoonery
is there a better place
who knows
am I rambling
of course it shows
the devil made me do it
I'm descending below
we're the dregs
a mouth full of excrement
heathens vomiting into a revival tent
we can dry up and blow away in the wind
some won't even be memories in the end
Clifford K. Watkins, Jr., is a thirty-two-year old writer/lyricist originally from High Point, North Carolina. He's been published by Underground Window, Ygdrasil, Prism Quarterly, Seeker Magazine, Poetic Voices, Poetry Stop, Poet's Haven, Muscadine Lines, Oracular Tree, Cynic Magazine, Winamop, Wildchild Publishing, Endzville, and Infinite Glass. He currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida.
David Fraser 2005
At the Canadian Open
Like royalty they march
from tee box down
into the valley hidden
in the dip of land,
emerge
in pomp and colour,
splendor, standard-bearers
marching in procession up
the fairway,
the smooth rolled pampered grass road,
their fans
behind the ropes,
these golfers stroll the walk of kings
locked within their thoughts
the tension of focus,
their circumstance
this grand illusion.
They scrutinize the position of the ball,
tidy up the turf around it,
like cleaning house
oblivious to the bushy gray-tailed squirrel
gathering pine cones
scurrying back and forth
in starts and stops
across this wide dangerous channel.
The crowds, the television cameras,
the distain for long rough,
the competition,
the plus and minus figures on the board
are only minor obstacles for him;
these manicured games,
artificial landscapes,
mere illusions,
part of his laughing thoughts
his drive to store his winter food
his approach to life.
For him there are no birdies,
bogies, pars,
just pine cones stuffed into a hole,
the safety of the woods
the late summer
pickings while they're good.
David Fraser lives in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. He is the founder and editor of Ascent Aspirations Magazine, www.ascentaspirations.ca, since 1997. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in 28 journals including Three Candles, Regina Weese, Ardent, and Ygdrasil. He has published a collection of his poetry Going to the Well (2004) David is currently the BC Federation of Writers Regional Director for The Islands Region.
GLOBAL FIRE
By David Fraser
This earth shifts,
walls groan
foundations tumble flat
where simply, entire mountainsides
slide like rivers, burying the dead,
where water shifts and curls
an arcing hammer toward the shore,
where the sun burnt sea, its hot and heavy breath
swirls within a vortex wind,
its wrath to whip the rain,
peel up the works of man,
fling the all consumed across the uprooted soil.
Greed abounds in pumping out this global fire,
this heat and waste of centuries of appetite.
There seems no substitute
until our social grief
wakes up the smoldering aching in our chests
demands responses from
the sleeping brokers slippery with their power.
The helicopters do everything they can,
pull bodies from the water,
drop food and aid, evacuate
crushed, crying babies
coming forward in their mother's arms.
This is all response, not action
that overrides the lust to rape the land,
to cling to lifestyles pillaged from the poor,
not action, but reaction
out of some systemic empathy expected
from a moral code.
We need to immerse ourselves in a deeper shade of green,
spread the wealth more thinly across the planet's skin,
wait more patiently without it all
for the many scars to heal.
GARDEN SCULPTURE
By Patricia Wellingham-Jones
The spiders have captured
the dragonfly, swathed
his copper wings
in white silks,
smothered his metal
flight over pink geraniums,
cream-edged ivy
in an effort
to tether the air-borne
to earth.
Former psychology researcher, writer, editor, lecturer Patricia Wellingham-Jones has most recently been published in Rattlesnake Review, Möbius, The Pedestal Magazine, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Edgz, Ibbetson Street Press, HazMat Review. Her poems and articles are frequently seen in Long Story Short. She won the 2003 Reuben Rose International Poetry Prize (Israel) and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
The widow of any age doesn’t need to chase after boys
They chase her money – and her
The elder watches girls chase after boys
who are chasing after them
END OF WINTER
By Luz DelaMar
Last nite a light
blanket of snow fell
We awoke this morning
to a blazingly beautiful day
all that white dust on the trees
the sun melting the snow on our roof.
it melted fast, pouring off,
Pattering like rain
The sound penetrated my sleep first
An unlikely song from the distant past
when my eye opened to sunlight
flooding the bedroom
i had to get up
What a beautiful world!
I crashed open the windows,
fast opened to the light-filled air
That smelled like Spring now.
A brand-new scent for me,
coming from a life in the desert,
but so unmistakable.
Out, into the day,
into the woods
feet melting winter away
that perfume came wafting thru the trees
to the pond, where we breathed thanks
heads up, filling our light-hunger
like wolves, nose to the sky, jaws ajar
There - just out of the lodge, a sleepy beaver
huddled by the hole in the ice and snow,
slow and blinking.
It must have been pulled up from its winter slumbers
by that scent.
A little later, beaver came out again
and retrieved the saplings
i had cut and carried down
there by the pond, laid down
a present
happy spring
Luz DelaMar has lived in the desert, the swamps, the mountains and the forests of North America. She takes a lot of naps. Contact Luz at: luzdelamar@hotmail.com.
UNCERTAIN SEASON
By Floriana Hall
When weeping cherry bushes
in white crowning blooms
Spring is on its way.
When sturdy hosta haste
and suddenly zoom
Spring is on its way.
When intermittent rain and chill is weather story,
dark clouds loom
Spring is on its way.
When bright sun comes out to shine in glory
warming the room
Spring is on its way.
When hot pink azalea spread their pretty petals,
take away gloom
Spring is on its way.
When irises burst into effervescent settle,
gardens colorful costume
Spring is on its way.
When lilacs flourish pale purple hue
wafting fragrant perfume
Spring is on its way.
When tea roses open buds in morning dew,
spring mushrooms --
Suddenly it's summer.
Floriana Hall - Author of four inspirational books, SMALL CHANGE, DADDY WAS A BAD BOY, THE SANDS OF RHYME, and OUT OF THE ORDINARY Short Stories; at least 500 poems published in U.S., England, and India, winner of many poetry prizes. She edited and published The Poet's Nook's two previous books, THROUGH OUR EYES, Poems of Beautiful Northeast Ohio, and POET'S NOOK POTPOURRI, and is in the process of publishing another poetry book, titled TOUCHING THE HEARTS OF GENERATIONS, and another nonfiction book, HEARTS ON THE MEND. WHO'S WHO IN INTERNATIONAL POETRY, WHO'S WHO IN US AUTHORS, EDITORS, AND POETS, MARQUIS WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA.
FORSYTHIA FOR CYNTHIA
By Floriana Hall
The overwhelming pleasure I feel
Beholding yellow forsythia shrubs on a hill,
Golden bell clusters of varied thickness and length
Decorating landscapes, like sweet hyacinth;
The overwhelming treasures I see
As forsythia envisions our daughter to me,
Cynthia, who spreads joy in our lives each day,
Forsythia, spring's renewal, a special way.
No artist portrays the beauty abound
When forsythia, daffodils, tulips surround,
'Tis an overwhelming spreading arch scene --
Cynthia pictured standing somewhere between
An exquisite array of nature's most brilliant display,
The sweetest of all, our most fragrant bouquet.
(Second Prize, Book-Season's Greetings – England)
OLD WOMAN PLAYS PIANO
by Lucille Gang Shulklapper
Old Woman Plays Piano
in her daughter’s living room of muted
tones. It was her piano.
Her mother’s candelabra tinkles as it shakes
its gold-edged glass. Never broken. Once
the music cried for her. The piano bench tilts.
She leans forward, kneads its velvet tufts,
rings its bald spots picked at by fingers
unable to reach octaves; practicing
scales from a book, still in the bench. She
inhales the lemon oil she rubbed into the
wood and grasps the dishtowel soaked
with the thinness of milk
to whiten the ivory. An upright piano. Cornered.
The old woman curves her wrists and raises her
hands as though to strike the broken keys.
She waits for the music.
(First appeared in What You Cannot Have, Flarestack Publishing Co.)
My poetry and fiction appear in journals, anthologies,and three chapbooks. Living up to traditional expectations led to work as a salesperson, model, realtor, teacher, and curriculum coordinator throughout schooling, marriage,
Russell lives in Brooklyn, New York. His poems have been published on paper by: The American Dissident; The Blind Man’s Rainbow; The Lyric; The Barbaric Yawp; the International Journal of Erotica; and Wicked Hollow. Another poem will appear in the fall (2005) at N.O.L.A. Spleen.
On-line, his poetry can be found at:
Quintessence-encouraginggreatwriting; ken*again; SpillwayReview; Erotica Readers and Writers; EdificeWrecked; GirlsWithInsurance; ThievesJargon; SalomeMagazine; LauraHird; MadHattersReview; and DropDeadDublin. Additional poems will appear in Sept. at SouthernHum, JustusRoux and OpiumMagazine; and sometime in the fall at PlumBiscuit (a journal of the New York Writers Guild); at 3 a.m.; and at Zygote in my Coffee.
Russell completed his first novel, Trompe-l’oeil, in September of 2004 and his second, Girl from Baku, in June of 2005. Both are going through agents faster than a greyhound goes through giblets.
This previous poem was supposed to appear in last month’s issue, but I goofed. Yes, I admit it—throw your pies at me! Lemon merange or chocolate mousse, please. Sue Scott, poetry editor
EPILOGUE TO A SPLENDID LOVE AFFAIR
By Russell Bittner
Why should I call our bed sanctum sanctorum,
if ‘holy’ is a handle I abhor –
while you, who’d say that dogs fight with decorum,
think love is just another word for war?
How clearly I still see you in the trenches,
your lips now mock-pubescent with the gore
of lads laid neatly out upon the benches,
whose youth would put to shame a bugle corps.
If here I sit, long after battle, wreathing
our armistice in ribbons on the floor,
it’s only to observe your measured breathing,
as you spread out for another paramour.
But trust me, doll: I’m anything but eager
to watch you take the pulse of one more score
of boys whose private parts you’d now beleaguer –
just tufts of cotton candy to a whore.
And lastly, keep in mind that tricks cost double
when forced to see the light of day at four –
an hour at which your bed would bounce like rubble,
before the jolt of procreation;
