Tag: poetry

candlemas – maria berardi

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light

The aspen stand like a cemetery,
upright, gray as ice, bark furred
with white velvet, and their sad
hieroglyphic eyes witness, witness.

The aspen stand straight as the deer
they camouflage, trunks bars
of invisibility. This little stand
is a house of ghosts.

Their twigs stick like fairy-tale fingers.
All their bones are showing,
it is a magic defense. And in each tip,
tight as a heartbeat,

the bud, the knowledge compressed to potency
in each of these desolate soldiers, these angels:
like a sex dream
spring surges in darkness.

sbgs cowskull

Maria Berardi’s work has appeared in local and national magazines and online (13 Magazine, Voca Femina, Mothering, The Opiate, getborn and most recently Twyckenham Notes, Luna Luna, and 8th street publishing guild). Her first collection, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second (a chapbook, or perhaps not, entitled Pagan). She lives in the Front Range foothills west of Denver at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level .

Her process is one of listening for transmissions from the cosmic radio and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge.

She may be reached at mariarazberardi@gmail.com.

she said she dreamt – ace boggess

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hat

She Said She Dreamt

we were prisoners together,
standing to the side
while hard men fought battles,
their arterial spray like trajectories
of missiles on computer maps.

I climbed inside her head into the dream &
sniffed permanent bathroom stench
mixed with faux-bleach & burning tissue-
paper smoke off makeshift cigarettes.

It wasn’t real, but as she told her story,
I heard the desk guard shouting, “Lock down!”
I watched the goon squad roll in,
cans of mace for target practice.

I wonder if in the dream I squeezed her hand,
said, “Hold your breath. Forget,”
or if she knew how lucky she was
to dream herself into a place like that,

whereas I, in my age of atrocities,
spent eighteen hundred nights alone
trying in vain to dream myself back out.

sbgs cowskull

Ace Boggess is author of four books of poetry, most recently I Have
Lost the Art of Dreaming It So (Unsolicited Press, 2018) and Ultra
Deep Field (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). His poetry has appeared in
North Dakota Quarterly, River Styx, cream city review, and American
Literary Review, among others. He received a fellowship from the West
Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West
Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

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teenaged shell – bare ly

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desertLook closely—
part of this poem was written
20-some miles from his home
at a bus-stop in Santa Barbara.

He doesn’t know how
to give voice
to his ambitions,
so he writes half-poems
on napkins
on State Street
and pretends that
stolen toilet paper rolls
are tiny scrolls
and he is a scribe
with nothing to write
but gold.

sbgs cowskull

Bare Ly is the tender gender-fuck your parents never warned you about. They make sad music (Double A Dollar) and host an experimental podcast series called A Soft Mess. 

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you’re really something – bruce mcrae

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railroad

I’m the unpronounceable something
that lives behind the garden wall.
Something that begins with the letter something.
The something from something for nothing.

I’m really something, or I’m something else –
we can debate the various uncertainties.
We can discuss our purpose, divine a plan.
‘A thing unspecified, a thing unknown’,
the dictionary patiently explains.
‘An amount being stated that isn’t exact’.
Like ‘I love you something terrible’.
Could you ever love me in return?

sbgs cowskull

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

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victoria/artemis/insinuated – moira murphy

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00 crow

victoria

I inhale the pungent ambrosia
the brackenwater of
you deathly loins.
The pulse quickens against
bolts of funeral lace
and you will reach the ecstasy
of the trite.

artemis

I massage algae into stone,
Create histories on your chilly face
melt my muscles to shape your flanks
One moment fluid, the next:
sturdy as a ponderosa pine
I change, but you?
Half a million years ago
you yawned.

insinuated

Your words are dust
Swirling into desert storms.
Your words are sand
Itching underfoot.
Your words are weeds
Choking up my roots.
Yet I know that you need me.

Like a fire that ravages,
Clears the forest land.
I destroy all virgin soil
To let you seep in again.

sbgs cowskull

Moira Murphy is a vocalist, pianist, and songwriter who fronts Oryad, a band that marries metal and opera in a trance-inducing ritual.

the haunting // the ghost of esperanza

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00 ghostie

the haunting

BY THE GHOST OF ESPERANZA

How do I write that I love you?  How do I say that I love you in a way that doesn’t want to possess you?  When you laugh and your eyes squint it fills me up.  When you look into me, you make me feel seen and alive.  Like I want to feel everything.  Your touch, your gaze, your compassion to all my energy, makes me feel like warming up the world instead of burning it down.  The way you process the world astounds me.  You make me more loving to myself. You challenge me to be better than my bad habits. You challenge my negativity.  I have never felt more love than when I am around you. I feel free and trusted.  You nurture me in a way I have needed.  When you let me in and let me see you, I am recharged.  And I have asked you for deeper.  And I am also scared of deeper because like you I am clumsy until one of us has to be the gentle one with the steadier touch.  You make me secure even when I fear myself.  You’ve helped me see my magic as the reality it is.  And I don’t think that you see that you are magic.  You give me so much life.  I need security.  I desire security that we can’t always guarantee.  You teach me patience with me.

sbgs cowskull

spirit animal – steve shultz

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spirit animal

She’s fascinated
by birds
I’m captivated
by bones

always optimistic,
she calls me pessimist
but I’m a realist, I say

is it just coincidence?
that she’s drawn
to living things
while I’m humming along
to songs of death

attractive opposites
and all that
but we really are
a perfect pair

I cheer her up
when her eyes turn dark clouds
or I give her space
if that’s what she needs

she makes me laugh
when I refuse to smile
she anchors me
reels me in
when I drift away

Magpies from her youth
Sparrows in the yard
Northern Flicker peck-peck-pecking
Blue Jays hit her heart
but she sees Crows the most

and what do I see?
but dead squirrels
in the street
a bird with broken wing

I used to have a spirit animal
a Coyote
or a Wolf
I saw him under bridges
hidden in tall grass
but I haven’t seen him
in a dozen years
did this beast take flight?
or flower into bones

I see
the plain underbelly
she sees
the decorated wings

if I had to choose one now
I know it’d be an Owl
I’ve heard him at my window
I’ve seen him up on high

sbgs cowskull

Steve Shultz is a poet, mailman, and former journalist from Aurora, CO. His third poetry collection, Pancreatic Care Package, was published in September by West Vine Press. He blogs sporadically at https://fmghost.wordpress.com.

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remembering to dream – linda m. crate

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IMG_3663

standing on the edge of love, i looked in but was always forced out; a false god stood in the temple of my family keeping me away from all those who loved me—i could not break his lies nor could he swallow my truths, and so we stood he and i; two different shades of fire unable to communicate—he misunderstood me, claimed i misunderstood him; people have always whispered that he is good but they didn’t have to kill his ghosts—they didn’t know how my feet trembled in fear of breaking egg shells or how hard it was for me to reclaim all that was lost, didn’t know what it was to be versed in silence so they could know the hymns of peace when they really wanted to war against monsters; they do not know the definition of good—but maybe that’s the point, no one really knows what they are saying, no one really knows; everyone thinks but no one knows until they see the monster how monsterous a monster can be—but i know, and i’ve seen, his fangs; he cannot feign innocence to me—sometimes monsters take the shape of people we love, and sometimes that means we have to kill nightmares so we can remember how to dream.

sbgs cowskull

Linda M. Crate’s poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has five published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press – June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon – January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), and splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018). TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | FACEBOOK

Photo: Steve Shultz

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