Category: Poetry

“How far the tree bends”: An Original Poem by Celia Lawren

Kill it! the children scream. A nightmare of black swirling shadows converge on the tree. They burn, hack, dismember limbs as high as they can reach, finally feeling tall. Torment is harder work than they imagine. Before darkness recedes, they run home, kids after all. With a great shudder, the tree heaves its leaves. Its…
New Poem by Holly Day: “Exhibit 421”

The heat given off by a nuclear bomb is so hot that it can bake a shadow into concrete, so that even when the person standing there, screaming, is gone, that last shadow of them standing there, screaming, can last forever and ever on the surface of a building, the way glazed tiles have lasted…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “One Thousand Ways to Die in a Cemetery” by Matt Zambito

Um, minus nine hundred ninety-nine?Zombies. Those total assholescrawling out of graves think love isthe taste of brains when the living alive knowit’s the art of a heart’s squeeze and releaseand appetite to please and be pleased.Reanimated monsters might munchthose pumping suckers, too. Oddimaginations have said as much, thoughflicks, tomes, and silly shows aboutthe pulsing deceased…
Four Cloud Visuals by Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, multimedia artist, and the author of 36 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel, Yiddish for Pirates, was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award (in fiction and in French translation), and won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Nothing…
New Flavor Town USA Poetry: “Eating Bugs” by J. Alan Nelson

They left me in the longleaf pines of Sam Houstonwith a paper sack of baloney, bread, three apples.In other years they would’ve been taken away in cuffs for abandonment. I ate it all by noon the first day. By the second morning the hunger had teeth.I watched Boy Scouts from the underbrush,their foil packets of…
Original Poem by Robert Frede Kenter: “Emergency Room (Triage)”

MD Predatory gestures encounter & shadow nothingness, curtain eye wear in pulse of organized logic. Bodies stripped of clothing reduce me to a system, structures, procedures. Anomie, anonymous, anatomic, a suggestive catalogue of science, entropic categorization of catatonic, predatory logic, a logos of systems, where humor is encountered. Brigands of Horror We have rooms to…
Poetry for Side A: “A Branch Where Things Went Terribly Wrong” by Salvatore Difalco

I am not a single person moving through a single story.I am a multiplicity, a sprawling bush of eventssprouting new branches. This version of me tooka left turn at the intersection. Another version tooka right turn. That version avoided the catastrophethat greeted this version shortly after makingthe ill-fated left turn. I had wanted to turn…
“Ode to Howard”: Four Poetic Cloudforms by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Translated by James M. Kopf)

When the godhead, Camarupa, noble and high,flickers through the air, heavy and spry,gathers the folds of the veil, only them to toss,to enjoy the change of shapes, their loss,now gaze upon them, firm, and, as a dream away,astonished, do not trust the eyes, for they betray. Now the slight move of a power its own,develops…
Three Flavor Town USA Poems by Joseph Verhelle

The micro-economics of a (really big) caramel apple A student gave me a caramel applefor Christmas, it was plumpand made by her grandmotherwith love. I was eating it in my classroomwith the doors closed,hovering over a trash canlike a rat. I didn’t pack anything else for lunchand the law of diminishing returnsdeclared that soon, the…