January 30th

-Michael Dickel “lymphoma-prostate”

-Kerfe Roig “The Heat Breaks”

-Christine O’Connor

-Marcel Herms “Mix It Up”

Navy

He watches the sky’s soft edge around the earth
as a brush paints familiar strokes done a million times before,
burnished blues, glints of mauves on the ethereal soft palette

All he remembers is her voice, and sensations of her words
worn like skeins of sonnets, woven in striking metaphors,
alphabets crash like waves then recedes gently back to the blue.

Sandcastles built over years; love twisted with turrets of pain
glimpses of their future, a fairy tale writ on the moist sandy beach
washed away in flurries of blue and white as horizon darkens to navy.

-Leela Soma

Nightmare Storms – A Villanelle

In her dark mind towering thunderheads
Better to break than to abuse conform
Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead

No pink dawn breaking to be seen ahead
The sky full of bruised clouds aching to storm
In her dark mind towering thunderheads

Starved, strangled passion bleeding out blood-red
No space for dreams outside the prescribed norm
Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead

Clinging to sanity by a thin thread
Stuck screaming unheard in protective form
In her dark mind towering thunderheads

Trapped in a black vortex of clawing dread
Demons, nightmares and evil spirits swarm
Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead

Shivering cold in a lonely blue bed
Dreaming of being held in embrace warm
In her dark mind towering thunderheads
Sparkling dreams and fragile dreams beaten dead

-©RedCat

Valentine

Beneath kaleidoscoping lights
a couple dances, faces pressed
together in a kiss that makes
one heart of their two heads, one blissful
mouth of their two mouths, as if
morphed by mirror to an asymmetric
face one half hers, one half his,
no space between them.

-Holly York

Responding to KR “The Heat Breaks” and CO30

In autumn chill, leaves flame
against the bluest blue, then
the moon whispers the sky to violet hues,

“Be still,” she calls out to the wind,
but he doesn’t listen, just roars winter in.

I knit a blanket of grey-wooled dreams.
I window-gaze, wrapped up in it,
till I can open the panes wide

to greenery and pink-tipped spring,
and listen to the mockingbird determinedly sing.

-Merril D Smith

Lymphona Prostate – MD30

The solitude of seeing three walls and a ceiling.
Enough structure to numb your feeling.
Stare at the ventilation for hours on end.
Wonder how long this will take to mend.

0.09% of malignancies end up this way.
Why me ? Why today ?
Minutes last hours, so disconcerting
Crash. Bang. Shatter. Here comes catering.

29,Ja,2021 for the thirtieth of.
-Alan Gary Smith, inspired by Paul Brookes and the painter MD

Bios And Links

-Kerfe Roig

A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new.  Her poetry and art have been featured online by Right Hand Pointing, Silver Birch Press, Yellow Chair Review, The song is…, Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, The Light Ekphrastic, Scribe Base, The Zen Space, and The Wild Word, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, Pea River Journal, Fiction International: Fool, Noctua Review, The Raw Art Review, and several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/  (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/

-Christine O’Connor

is an artist working in glass, metal, fibre and paint. Sometimes her work is based on photographs, but more often, she creates in the moment. She loves to play with texture and colour.

Christine O'Connor

-Marcel Herms

is a Dutch visual artist. He is also one of the two men behind the publishing house Petrichor. Freedom is very important in the visual work of Marcel Herms. In his paintings he can express who he really is in complete freedom. Without the social barriers of everyday life.
There is a strong relationship with music. Like music, Herms’ art is about autonomy, freedom, passion, color and rhythm. You can hear the rhythm of the colors, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the raging cry of the pencil, the subtle melody of a collage. The figures in his paintings rotate around you in shock, they are heavily abstracted, making it unclear what they are doing. Sometimes they look like people, monsters, children or animals, or something in between. Sometimes they disappear to be replaced immediately or to take on a different guise. The paintings invite the viewer to join this journey. Free-spirited.

He collaborates with many different authors, poets, visual artists and audio artists from around the world and his work is published by many different publishers.

www.marcelherms.nl

www.uitgeverijpetrichor.nl

=Redcat

RedCat’s love for music and dance sings clearly in The Poet’s Symphony (Raw Earth Ink, 2020). Passion for rhythms and rhymes, syllabic feets and metres. All born out of childhood and adolescence spent reading, singing, dancing and acting.

Her writing spans love, life, mythology, environment, depression and surviving trauma.

Originally from the deep woods, this fiery redhead now makes home in Stockholm, Sweden, where you might normally run into her dancing the night away in one of the city’s techno clubs.

Read more at redcat.wordpress.com

-Merril D Smith

is a historian and poet. She lives in southern New Jersey, where she is inspired by her walks along the Delaware River. She’s the author of several books on history, gender, and sexuality. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale and Sparrow, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fevers of the Mind.

-Godefroy Dronsart

is a writer, teacher, and musician currently residing near Paris. His poetry has appeared in Lunar Poetry, PostBLANK, Paris Lit Up, The Belleville Park Pages, and Twin Pies Literary among others. His first chapbook, “The Manual” (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020), explores the space between poetry, prose, and gamebooks. He has a sweet tooth for all things experimental, modernist, and strange. Follow him on Twitter and his Bandcamp for electronic explorations.

-Joy Fleming

Born in County Down, Joy has studied, mothered and worked in Scotland since 1980. Brief excursions to follow her heart, back to NI mid-1990’s and England for first round Covid-lockdown ’19, Joy is currently back living in Glasgow. Joy’s first poem was accepted as part of the C. S. Lewis themed Poetry Jukebox curation A Deeper Country in Belfast in 2019. This poem, Ricochet was published in The Poets’ Republic Issue 8 Autumn 2020. A love of reading poetry is now accompanied by sporadic writing of poetic lines which spill out as an apparent by-product of processing dark and sorrowful days.   

-Holly York

lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two large, frightening lapdogs. A PhD in French language and literature, she has retired from teaching French to university students, as well as from fierce competition in martial arts and distance running. She has produced the chapbooks Backwards Through the Rekroy Wen, Scapes, and Postcard Poetry 2020. When she isn’t hard at work writing poems in English, she might be found reading them in French to her long-suffering grandchildren, who don’t yet speak French.

-Alan Gary Smith

A Lincolnshire Ludensian living in Grimsby who built up his poetic stance after visiting Doncaster and Mexborough during his real ale and comedic music searches. Surprised to find a recent DNA check leaned heavily towards being a strong mix of Scottish, East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. A sixty year old baldy who loves Julie, astronomy and chocolate; after giving up on football and telly.

-Hilary Otto

is an English poet based in Barcelona. Her work has featured in Popshot, Black Bough Poetry, AIOTB, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and The Blue Nib, among other publications. She received her first Pushcart Prize Nomination and performed at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She tweets at @hilaryotto

-Jim young

 is an old poet living in Mumbles on The Gower. He does most of his writing from his beach hut at Rotherslade – still waiting for the blue plaque

Anjum Wasim Dar was born in Srinagar (Indian Occupied )Kashmir, She is a migrant Pakistani.Educated at
St Anne’s Presentation Convent Rawalpindi she has a Masters degree  in English Literature and  History (
Ancient Indo-Pak  Elective) CPE Cert.of Proficiency in English from Cambridge
UK. , a Diploma in TEFL from AIOU Open Uni. Islamabad Pakistan. She has been writing poems,

 articles and stories since 1980.A published  poet Anjum was awarded  Poet of Merit Bronze Medal in  2000 by ISP International Society of Poets and poetry.com USA .

She has worked as Creative Writer at Channel 7 Adv. Company Islamabad, and as a Teacher Educator for  Fauji Foundation Education Network Inservice Teachers  

Educational Consultant by Profession. 

Author of 3 Adventure Novels (Series) Fiction..