The fleeting
winsomeness
of good advice
not taken,
but considered,
leaving a taste on the
back of the tongue
like stately wine
too arid for
untutored palates
suffused with
sweeter vintages.
Kathryn Lasseter is a retired college professor who, after many years, has recently returned to writing poetry. Her poems have appeared in Heimat Review and are forthcoming in BarBar and Stone Poetry Quarterly.
The tingle of getting sipped
to the last drop
is not for every beverage.
Strewing one’s story
to the final straw is not for all.
Over-the-top affirmations
aren’t harpoons of hostility
but words hurled without a hitch.
If you feel good dubbing feelings
to dockets, you must do so.
I will abide by the business
of loving you.
Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. He has been published in over thirty countries. In December 2022, he edited Dreich Planet #1 for Hybriddreich, Scotland. In 2023, he won the First Prize in a Poetry Competition by the prestigious National Defence Academy, Pune. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an intriguing poet (including collaged visual poems) and critic. Her Selected Poems can’t help but feel centred around, perhaps grounded by, her Drafts project: 114 (+) cantos which rework, or ‘fold’, 19 poems six times over, riffing and refining, tangenting away from and interrogating the texts themselves and the author’s processes and poetical understanding. The sequence is both a challenge to and a critical deconstruction of some of the very male modernist long poems of sequences such as Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus project; and the long poem is also the subject of a recent critical volume.
There are under a 100 pages of poetry preceding Drafts in this Selected Poems, mostly fragmented lyrics, perhaps most akin to the work of, say, Rae Armantrout. The last line of the very first poem included here, 1970’s ‘A Poem to Myself’, acts as a kind of manifesto…
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Letting you go
I wrap you in the Sweet sad soft Buds of my love A short goodbye hug Clumsy tender embrace Started too late Finished too soon I catch the dagger-bright flash Of your final smile Before I walk off My world darkening fast My cracked heart dripping A maroon trail Of aborted memories Tracing my path To hollowness Remembrance Saturday I lay dead, imaginary Flowers On the grave of your Memory Slowly trace The stone cold letters Of your tombstone With a middle finger That I will keep raised A little while longer Just for you B F Jones is French and lives in the UK. She has flash fiction and poetry in various UK and US online magazines. Her poetry chapbook, Last Orders, and collection, Panic Attack, will both be published by Close To The Bone late 2021. https://punknoirmagazine.wordpress.com/2021/02/28/insomnia-by-bf-jones/A Fevers of the Mind Quick-9 Interview with…
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Author Bio:
Amrita Valan is a writer, and a mommy to 2 teenagers. She loves observing their antics, and those of human nature and Mother nature, collecting rocks, stories and memories. Her published books are Arrivederci Fifty Poems, of love and loss, and In Between Pauses, a collection of 17 low brow vignettes/ slices of life tales.
Pandemic I Last Day of 2020 December snorts, grunts, Thirty first, the last day, Two years of global pandemic, On the streets, silent orisons Under Paget moon. Cold wind wrangles, Insides mangled Rain laden sleet Pitted trenches, Sleek oil caped roads Obsidian reptile, Lone motorbike, Headlights flicker, In hair spray rain. Pins and needles Dappled diamond paned. Quarantine broods. Quarantined moods. The heart races on Cavalletti course. Lower the bar and I shall cease to bother, Jump the threshold. Of wind-battened door. On the floor, bare Feet, glide indoors Afraid to…
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Bio: M.S. Evans is a poet and photographer currently living in Butte, Montana. Her debut collection, Nights on the Line, was released by BlackBoughPoetry in 2022.
Evans’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Ice Floe Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, Green Ink Poetry, and Cape Magazine.
Instagram: @seanettleink
Hi-Line Towns
We pass small towns, far apart; worn wood beads on a sparse string. Signs along tracks announce names, Time to hide. Children spot us. I wave so they’ll know, you can leave this way, someday. Even girls. Upturned Fresh eviction, personal possessions spill out the gate; a hernia. Children’s toys form a burial mound beside an upturned sofa. I mumble prayers of protection. New Jersey 1 AM, stifling heat. Wedged on a bed between my grandmother and her portable TV. My voice, thin as vase-water. Here’s, loose river rock. We hefted words smooth skipping stones. The TV made…
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The Wombwell Rainbow 