Posts

Showing posts from August, 2022

Terry McCarty's poem "Galveston, 1966"

Image
Terry McCarty has been writing poetry in, around (and sometimes about) ,Southern California since 1997. He has been published in anthologies including T he Long Way Home: The Best of the Little Red Books , So Luminous The Wildflowers , 1001 Nights: Twenty Years of Poetry at Coffee Cartel and A Poet is A Poet No Matter How Tall Episode II: Attack of The Poems . Terry’s books include Hollywood Poetry: 2001-2013, and From Obscurity With Love . everything's big when you're small: the Jack Tar Motor Hotel restaurant with the window view onto the swimming pool Stewart Beach where my grandfather and I took a rented float  out onto the waves and I swallowed salt water for the first time  and spit it out fast the apocalyptic argument my older brother had with everyone else in the car because he was forced to vacation with the rest of the family at the age of sixteen instead of seeing his girlfriend back home and, on the beach, my dad pointed to the pillbox installed to protect the isl

Howard Sage's Lost—or Found? at Sea

Image
                                                                                       photo by The Independent Howard Sage’s poetry and prose has been published in Hawaii Pacific Review , Poetry Quarterly , and recently in Dissident Voice . He has contributed several pieces to The New York Times Metropolitan Diary column. He received first prize in the Greenburgh, New York annual poetry competition. His interview with Ralph Ellison is part of the Ellison papers. He hitchhiked from Dublin to Galway, Ireland. I’m Merle—you don’t need to know my so-called “last” or family name. All you need to know is that I’ve had more than enough of sea vistas and lobster traps. And why not? I’ve ensconced myself here for umpteen years, ok, nine of them, and I will leave tomorrow, so I write this note to you; in case you ever find yourself in the same doldrums I’ve endured you, yes you, reader, whatever name you go by, will know what to do: leave.             In all fairness, though, I’ll tell you Be

Interview with Rick Lupert, author of "I am not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii"

Image
      I have not, as many other people have, and with the exception of a weekend in Ventura, and a round trip drive to Sacramento, CA to pick up our newest feline overlord (both done in 2020),  traveled since before the pandemic. The news media is chock full of stories of people behaving badly, especially on planes, and even as we speak, several major airlines continue to cancel hundreds of already booked flights due to an employee shortage.        This of course, along with financial constraints (money comes and goes, more going than coming), are the reasons, for which I personally have put off any travel plans. That doesn’t mean I can’t travel in other ways, including my favorite way; reading books.        I’ve always appreciated Rick Lupert’s travel volumes, from We Put Things in Our Mouths ( © 2009 Ain’t Got No Press), to Hunka Hunka Howdy ( © 2019 Ain’t Got No Press). Lupert, publisher of Poetry Super Highway , a global weekly publication that features poets from around the world

Gareth Roi Jones's poem "The 1000 Ways to San Marco Piazza"

Image
                                                                             Piazza San Marco with the Basilica  (1720) by  Canaletto Gareth Roi Jones is a member of the Dandylion Collective, a small writers' group based in South Australia. In 2014, he co-edited the Friendly Street Poets Anthology 38 The Infinite Dirt ... & again in 2020, titled, simply, Q (you remember the weirdness of that year, you get why) ... as well as judging the Saeta Awards. In 2019, he had two chapbooks published; The Soft Hummus of Shleep & The Loam of Our Dreams ; in 2012, a solo collection,  Gunyah .  The 1000 Ways to San Marco Piazza my love lives in Dorsoduro ; I, in Castello ; & every evening ; she promises to meet me ; in San Marco’s Piazza at sunset ; she says if we find each other there ; our love will last if I were more talented ; I would write a postmodern novel ; telling of the thousand ways ; we never meet ; a short chapter ; a paragraph; even just a line, or single word ; abou

Justo Deletrorre's "Aeon Redux" and "The Tower"

Image
  “I began doing art projects on my first day in preschool, and never stopped. The first art piece I created was a cat of living fire. Later, I found out that being exists in the goetia , has the name Vapula and rules the arts. I was raised, being pulled all over the place, city to city; thus, I consider myself from nowhere. I currently work in a corporate environment, and although "technically", and legally, I can’t be persecuted for being involved in the occult, it’s been my experience that such things do happen with made up reasons.”                                                                         © 2022 Justo Deletrorre © 2022 Justo Deletrorre

Steve Brisendine's poem "New York Which is Not Really New York: Dream I"

Image
                                                                                    Photo © Alan Hainkel Steve Brisendine is a writer, poet, occasional artist, and recovering journalist living and working in Mission, Kansas. He is the author of two collections from Spartan Press: The Words We Do Not Have (2021, nominated for the 2022 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award), and the upcoming Salt Holds No Secret But This (2022). He was a finalist for the 2021 Derick Burleson Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review , Aji , Modern Haiku, and other journals/anthologies. New York Which is Not Really New York: Dream I North of Central Park, the city slopes upward toward Harlem; its streets and sidewalks are empty, and someone has taken down all signs. I wait for someone, knowing and not knowing whom, in the only place which is not closed: a tiled, high-ceilinged lunch counter, where the uniformed counterman silently takes my order. The hamburger is better than passable,

Norman Minnick's poem "New Horizons"

Image
                                                                                       image courtesy of NASA " My previous collections of poetry are To Taste the Water (winner of the First Series Award from Mid-List Press), Folly (Wind Publications), and Advice for a Young Poet, (David Robert Books). I am the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press) and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (Kinchafoonee Creek Press, with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa)." New Horizons The New Horizons space probe is the size  of my parents’ four-poster bed  and is speeding away from the earth  at 31,000 miles per hour.  It is almost out of fuel  and cannot slow down. It has used the gravitational pull of Jupiter to slingshot deeper into space.  Now it has reached Pluto near the edge of our solar system.  It will escape our sun’s pull  and never return.  Many folks my age and older  would agree that time goes by faste