Here alone
where the
whiskey bent
Western skyline
looks like
twenty four 
yellow roses 
in a
Symphony 
crystal vase

Americana songwriter and Kansas-City-based storyteller K.W. Peery is the author of eight poetry collections: Tales of a Receding Hairline; Purgatory; Wicked Rhythm; Ozark Howler; Gallatin Gallows; Howler Holler; Bootlegger’s Bluff; Cockpit Chronicles. His work is included in the Vincent Van Gogh Anthology Resurrection of a Sunflower, The Cosmic Lost and Found: An Anthology of Missouri Poets (Spartan Press) & Best of Mad Swirl Anthology 2018 Website: www.kwpeery.com

you walk along with the shadows

and the howling sounds of some

alien animals inside your head;

it doesn’t matter, how hard you try-

to keep your gods by the side

you keep the lights on; there

are hands of life touching your face

telling the most innocent of all stories

you have ever heard. you have

a reason to keep it dumb, you have

a reason to hide behind

the veil of comforting geometries; but

the urge to forget, and wake up

in a different universe through the worm-holes

of over-bearing guilt-

it keeps finding you, like those breadcrumbs

for the skin i once had. 

Sudeep Adhikari is a structural engineer/Lecturer from Kathmandu, Nepal.   His poetry has recently appeared in the venues like Boned, The Magnolia Review and Mojave River Review. His 5th book of poetry “anti-philosophical deep dreams” was released by Pski’s Porch Publishing, New-York, USA in March, 2019.  

Portamento

Bedewed groin at dayspring
corporeal blank call to love.

When you oil the system
be wary of skidding.

Friseur or fitter
will never be in the frame.

When you sulk I wish I were
a crackerjack in zoosemiotics.

Laboratory of lazy lines
some fine ones set in.

Post power they gain weight.
Flab isn’t necessarily cellulite.

Don’t evaluate every accomplishment
summative is freighted with substance.

Memo

Sieves through which I peep into you
are rimmed in desire I can’t decrypt.
Body has its breath, may I be permitted
to soak in your senses. Wolves will  
growl. Let them. With mental agility  
we will erect gated enclaves and
rustle them to a fictional menagerie.

Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three books of poetry.  He is published in more than 25 countries. Recent credits: The Poetry Village, Amethyst Review, Picaroon Poetry, Selcouth Station,Talking Writing, Packingtown Review, Modern Poets Magazine,Poydras Review, Red Savina Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Acknowledgments: ‘Portamento’ was first published in Futures Trading. ‘Memo’ was first published in Ann Arbor Review.

(re)lapse

let me tell you this interlock      is not always strength
but sometimes a downfall      I am mostly borrowed limbs

& digits     today I fix that clasp by letting it fall open      
it is the only way      I am trying not to flinch      it makes

things worse      & I don’t want to show you      how in
these fallow times      I use up every good thing   slow

today      I am easily miss-aligned      mistaking neglect
for erasure      or maybe just plain forgetting      it’s not

purely passive      sometimes it’s a sport      & while I
lack the muscle tone      it needs I’ll make up for it

with exhaustion      today I am not at home      but out
learning to be intimate with stones      learning to be

dangerously compressed      & lousy I carry weight
when I could be a filament burning      delicate coiled

alight     & there are all sorts of judgments to be made
but today      I am seeking to be gluttonous

as this want      this longing
                               to be held not held
                               to breathe but not as you taught me

Blood knot

You’ll mistake it for nothing, then. A moment, in which your arms
were a soft parenthesis, your palm open across my back. You pull me

in like a breath and I let it out slow; how love proved a slow decay,
how he etched himself in the marrow. And how I learned fear before

I learned to hope. Now, while you teach me how a blood knot ties
Jupiter is hanging over Brixton. And we mistake her for a star.

Zelda’s work has been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies including HVTN, The Interpreters House, Popshot, RAUM and Under the Radar. Her first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat, was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015.

1.
Sound 
occurs (weird):
– morsel of fancy:
– breath – dancin’ – 

…
tart…
mind ruse of rue 
behind its back.

but then –
astounding wallop
besets a bit :  
…

“ball ‘n’ band” –   
“sway under the cobweb” –  
…
“fondly” “taken down” to addle long on “lure”.
toll…keen, abrupt. -draws near.

Mouth waltz
veers
to twist
over the curve of the neck

Benign osculation
***
2.
blank whops
an abysmal frantic strays.

bizarre
bevels the strident clamor
– dithers, sips…

…gets tangled thereafter.

sigh –  odious,
an afterthought:

bellow and quack;

flap, flop, clap – slop –
– vain kinkle plop: an unexpected
twitch.

the swish, the tick –
the fly rambles.

-blink`bat – 
throbbing tired,
shift quake 
plonks to shadow:
” twines smoke skew”…
…
– 
tire beep dazzle
/ abash blast:
blue

viscid whiff
tinkling 
inwardly 
phit -phut: 
pant-sigh
loured.

done…

***

Volodymyr Bilyk is a poet from Ukraine who writes in English. So he’s basically from another dimension or Parts Unknown. Long story short: he follows Ezra Pound’s “Make It New” and considers Pink Dairies song “Do It” to be a quite adequate description of his artistic intentions. His latest book “Roadrage” is available here: https://zimzalla.co.uk/049-volodymyr-bilyk-roadrage/

She wanted attention and he needed something from another who had become emotionally detached .

He drank himself into a stupor.
She hurried herself in delusion .
And the other simply played a game .

Two hearts broken together where to damn stubborn so they remained apart.

A overgrown child was unaffected by her reckless destruction .

The truth of two hearts was buried in the rubble of words never spoken .

Adults can be far worse than children.

Playing games at such high stakes .

But within the ashes would always remain the truth.
He loved someone that could not love in return.

And another was simply a excuse she needed to keep everyone away.

But for a moment I saw you there .
And I will be eternally grateful for the view

Three fools lost within a simple game .

John Patrick Robbins is the editor of both The Rye Whiskey Review and Under The Bleachers. His work has been published with Punk Noir Magazine, Mojave River Review, The Rusty Truck, Piker Press , Ariel Chart, The San Pedro River Review , Romingos Porch,  Outlaw Poetry Network, Red Fez, Blognostics, Horror Sleaze Trash.
His work is always unfiltered. 

It read like the back of a 70’s prog rock tour t-shirt,
Purple on black in awkward light,
Complex against tie-dye!
Painful jazz on the eye!
Unnecessary?
Ain’t that what you’re paying for?
This sounds nice,
That sounds nice,
What do you fancy?
I’m going with the Goth Burger.
Another opening night, in an old cobblers!

Jeff Platts, or ‘Jethro’ is an ex miner from Barnsley. He is creator of Barnsley’s Spoken Voices, a community of amateur poets and writers who seek to encourage people to pick up a pen, a piece of paper and perhaps even a microphone. He has produced a CD of his work ‘Harping On’ and is currently working with Barnsley’s Spoken Voices to produce a second compilation of their collective works.

When This Night Has Faded

When this night has faded
The robin will remind us
There is something for which
To sing.

When this night has faded,
Shapes shall resurface slowly
As the sleeping awake
Once more

When this night has faded
This night handed to us
When we squabbled like starlings
On wires

When this night has faded
Those discarded things remain
Our things still there where we
Left them

When this night has faded
You are still a stupid fool
But you see we are all
Fools now.

When this night has faded
We will wonder what to do
We wonder that it can
Be done.

When this night has faded
Cash counted or burnt so that
We begin with ourselves
No less.

When this night has faded
And the woods break their silence
The genderless sun will
Just shine.

On the sparrows chatter
And our naked bodies
When this night at last has
Faded.

Raw Rendezvous

Caged then born
stretched out from the dark
magnetic moon nostalgia
above the brutal earth

Shape of mist when
it touches the sour ground
builds a box into which
we throw our voices down

Richard Daniels is the editor and chief dogsbody at Plastic Brain Press, a small press run by a large Plastic Brain publishing poetry and fiction. They also have a podcast. Richard is the author of Too Dead For Dreaming, a collection of short stories. He often writes poetry on the back of sick bags.

The Stone in the Middle of the Road

To be the stone in the middle of the road
immortalized by Carlos
Drummond de Andrade.

In Rio de Janeiro,
Brasil, circa 1930,
to be the stone
in the middle of the road.

Looking into
his tired eyes and to be
remembered his entire life,
I want to be that stone.

Find My Way to Darkness

At day’s end
I slowly
find my way
to darkness. 

Glimmering
stars, cool air,
flight of thoughts,
drowsy head. 

From my porch
the moon seems
near. I watch
it reign

in the sky. Trees
heave and bend.
Each make noise
in their sleep. 

Breezy night,
twittering,
the fool won’t
go to bed.

Born in Mexico, Luis lives in Southern California, and works in the mental field. His poemsonline and in print, have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, PygmyForest Press, Runcible Spoon, and  Yellow Mama Magazine.

1.

There was a dead deer floating in the river this morning, its haunches all smashed in. It must have been hit by a train and somehow washed downstream. I wanted to wear its skin. I wanted its spirit to possess me but the carcass was bloated and soaking and the putrefication shocked me to passivity. Once again my spiritual aspirations get swallowed up by the death neurosis that births them; still something of the world in me, that fanciful veneer. Maybe I really do miss shampoo. Despite my revulsion, I dragged the carcass through the woods and nailed it to a tree beside the railtrack. Everyone should see the blood and guts hedonism of the machine age. Somehow the sacrifice might get my point across and make us all agile hurdlers of the most obstinate psychological impediments.

2.

Rumour has it there’s a man living feral in the woods. And now the children come to gaze into the trees, looking for the wolf or the bear or the wild stallion. They know me though. I was their neighbour once and perhaps, at best, a fox. Children these days are so uninspired because of the terror their parents crush down on them. That’s the manipulation I left for the woods. When I wake from a restless dream of leaves, I hear them whispering, and they’ll throw a stick or stone and I’ll poke my head out and yawn. They’ll holler and run away thinking they’ve wounded me. Education is a slow dumbing down of something raw and pioneering. A train passes likes a horse and suddenly the sky is clear. Suddenly there’s a space where my life is a little less radical. Suddenly there’s an aeroplane.

3.

Night brings consolations and a kinship with the small, furry creatures. The darkness chatters then drops down a broken well where I found a baby otter last week. Sometimes the only place to go is inside my own head. There are rooms there and an icy bed fitted with prickly, nylon sheets. Despite my poverty, I’m always hospitable. I invite the animals over and we chat and drink wine till it’s time to switch off the lights. There’s a powerful presence in the woods, like animals gathering to pray; a bonfire of devotion; a bus load of tourists. I peek into the crowd and remember the darkness and the fetid, flowing river – how they nourish me. A longing for company reaches my heart from the moon. In the morning, the burrowing badgers keep my feet warm and even my breath is superstitious.

Stephen Nelson is the author of several books of poetry, including Arcturian Punctuation (Xexoxial Press) and Lunar Poems for New Religions (KFS Press). He has exhibited vispo and asemic writing internationally and has appeared in numerous magazines, including Otoliths, 3am, Bones, Posit, and Brave New Word. You can find him online atwww.afterlights-vispo.tumblr.com and www.afterlights.blogspot.com.