Poetry Collection of Bruce McRae

Grass In My Hair

I was arguing

with the scarecrow.

His voice

was like a wall

of sand coming

closer and closer.

He had corn

on his breath

but no mouth

to speak of.

His mind

was a straw stalk

in the wind,

all the colours

of a golden

rainbow, there,

but not there,

even his pinstripes

soil-scented.

And I was saying

to the scarecrow,

“We end,

we begin.”

I was telling him

the true names

of all the dead.

I was asking

a stupid question:

“Where’s the crow

inside my head?”

Which he thought

quite funny,

a perpetual grin

on his dried lips,

his eyes seeing

into the far distance,

a tear forming

in the new silence

that summer, and he

impeccably dressed.

Auspicious

The weather promises to change

from man to animal.

Today’s forecast is absence,

with a chance of longing.

In the east, flying horses

and a scattering of flowers.

From the west, incursions,

barbarous hordes, black ice.

The weather changes its mind,

abandons its principles,

is forced to choose between

darkness and light.

They’re predicting tons

of tons and long cold showers.

They say it might break,

but we’re in for hard spell.

Today’s weather is being

brought to you by sponsors

who’d rather you didn’t

put their names around.

Listener, the sea is rising

up out of its empty shell.

For all its talk of courage,

the wind is turning.

Fragile

The quiet, being taken apart

for easy handling and shipping,

the movers tip-toeing, their breaths

measured, working swiftly, yet

cautious. The quiet being sent

away, moved to another part of

town, in sound-proofed boxes, in

padded crates, in rubber cartons

marked 'Handle With Care'. You

can almost hear it, the way its

weight shifts, the dust being

disturbed, the absurd lengths

that the movers go to not to say

a word, their dark eyes rolling.

This Word Has No Word For It

This word is unpronounceable.

Translated roughly,

it means a bluster of breath.

Spell it as you wish.

This is the first word in words.

It means love

in any language.

And rhymes with nothing.

This is a dirty word.

Nobody knows what it means.

Class, linguistics

is not an exact science.

The word for blood

actually tastes like blood,

a real jaw-breaker

better left unsaid.

And this word will get you killed.

You spit it at your enemies.

Repeat after me:

This is the word for silence.

Cracked Dawn

The day morning failed to arrive,

our chickens listless, the clocks confused,

daisies stunned into silence.

When night was two nights long

by two nights wide by two nights high.

The baker sleeping in.

Padre dreaming of another sun rising

in a mystical realm

of half-dreams and home-baked cookies.

Pa looking for a wooden match

to light ma’s fire.

Dawn, but one blacker than coffee,

yours truly wavering over the sink

while recalling yellow and red.

Remembering what it was like

to see into the far distance.

Light drawing on light.

Daybreak broken.

Evictee

You mean the house inside the house.

You mean the mythmaker’s lodgings,

with its many doors and million windows.

Which is the sea under the mountains

or a thirteen billion year old light ray.

Which is everywhere, like ancient snow.

Oh, but why didn’t you say so?

You mean the house next door to the nothingness,

across the road from the flaming hospital,

by the exploding dancehall.

Where the carbon blobs happily dwell

and midnight barks like a dog.

Where the spectral sailors are knocking.

The house made of bones being broken.

The house of minds snapping.

The house where the World used to live,

until Tragedy stopped by for a while,

until Time spat out its toothpick.

I remember the blinds in the kitchen

coming down hard.

Like a fist on a table

or satellite crashing.

I remember there were walls in the cellar

and an angry lightbulb on all night.

With vast continents

hidden under its floorboards,

Mr. and Mrs. Chemical, long dead now,

rearranging the grassblades,

old toys still in the yard,

bejeweled in the glistening rain,

the roadway passing

filled with the children’s lost voices:

like a skip-rope-rhyme

in my feverish mind.

Into A Bar

A man walks into a bar.

In his head are visions of amber.

A nail is hammered into his hair.

His hat is in splinters.

A man walks into a bar

and the planets change courses.

Slush and slurry head for the exits.

Gravity tugs on his nethers

while he washes his footsteps in beer.

And like the moon, he tips heavily.

A man walks into a bar.

Which isn’t a bar; it’s a temple

to the goddess of work and worry.

His coins are negatively charged.

His heels are sinking.

Then the waitress climbs from her sleeve.

In her eyes is the great outdoors.

In her heart is an alpine avalanche.

The man stares into his beer,

ignoring her curves and entrances,

his thoughts the size of Australia,

his mouth in drought.

In the time that it takes

to open his hand, nothing happens.

Over and over again, nothing happens.

Somewhere, wind in a meadow,

but the man is riddled with blank,

addled by light’s perspectives.

You can hear his life fading in and out.

He’s slowly coming to his senses.

Death Cannot Be Proved

It’s midnight in the janitor’s closet.

February waits at the end of the hall.

Ghost-mice are performing a danse macabre.

Here, at the institution, everything closes.

We never mention the room inside this room,

the dust-defying gravity, the soul of the moon.

We don’t talk about the inevitable silences

or darkness pooling under a door.

We say little or nothing . . .

Established in the year Zed, the institution

is as dull as a morgue or a meeting.

The air scarcely shifts, the files unmoved.

Our business is zero.

Now it’s 4 a.m., and the roaches hold rule:

tiny tyrants throwing terrible tantrums.

Whom the ancients regarded as very old souls.

Whom the gods embraced in their ruin.

The County Fair

My father traveled to the far solitudes.

My father ate religion.

My father was a monkey riding thoroughbreds.

He’d come home years later.

He had a jezebel at every gas station.

He had a fist like a bus.

Often my mother’d leave out cookies and cream.

She’d bundle us under her apron.

She exhausted her plenitudes and riches.

Oh daddy, like an imaginary friend.

Like a candle puffed out at both ends.

Like Cro-Magnon man counting up to ten.

So then mum buried herself.

She took to the high wires and two fridges.

She petted the boarder.

Not much fun for we thirteen kids.

Not much cop with these ciphers and struggling.

And a hell of an example for the wee bairns.

I remember the Xmas tree on fire

and something thrown from a bridge.

I remember the act of forgetting.

That there were questions we could never put to him.

The Cadillac shimmer.

His long black coat and his wicked glare.

And poor ma, with her head out the window.

Poor ma, embroiled with the children,

and her spirit broken.

Chickadee Thinking

In the mind of the chickadee

is a ball of sparks,

a knot of entrails,

the planet’s littlest vacuum.

The chickadee’s mind whistles,

colour fusing to colour.

It smells like beetles’ fears.

It tastes of summer.

Actually, phantoms there

stroll between atoms of moonlight

and lordly Titans gambol

over the seemingly endless vistas.

There are great thoughts,

and these crackle like spruce tinder.

Like soda bubbles, but they weigh tons

and feel barbed to the touch.

Like wind over a hilltop.

Like lines intersecting wires.

Like smoking campfires of the Mongols,

as seen from a blood-red sky.

The Allegory of Man and Love:

We are the Water

By: Angel Luis Padilla

Water, in us,

In nature,

In our emotions,

With relativity to the mind and spirituality,

With the split decision to flow,

Or to crash.

How must we take this poem?

For to fully understand it, we must be one

With the flow of its magic.

Follow this water into the point

Where insanity becomes sane.

It is our love for such things in earth,

And these are my reasons to love you,

Whether you stand ten feet or ten miles

In distance,

We are connected by that common tear drop,

Which mimics the connectedness of the earth’s seven seas.

You truly portray the beauty of innocence

You’re perfect to me

You bring me joy

Hope

Courage

Love

I feel comfortable with you at all times

I can tell you anything, and do anything with you

I’ve told you my hardships

My life circumstances

I’ve expressed myself to you in the purest form of love; my tears,

I’ve done everything I could’ve possibly done to make myself apart of you

To make myself feel free with a person:

YOU.

Everything about you sets me free into a world resembling the kingdom above

Our love is the mere image of gracious tides of an endless ocean,

What is inside us, not just water, but our love,

Which flows through our veins.

It is the tranquility of the mind,

Which takes all shapes or form,

Which sets peace over the horizon sun,

Which sets us stranded into the deep seas,

For together we are our own boat,

To set sail for an endless journey of divine fortitudes.

We flow over, around and through our obstacles,

We are the water,

We are the peace,

We are the twelve gallons of abundant happiness.

We are the water my love,

You and I,

We are the water.

Poetry Collection of Nathaniel S. Rounds

Imitation Salvation

Spiderman comes in a Candy stick

Healing comes in a Methadone bus

Mother comes in a memory

All of it is short-lived

With a bitter aftertaste

That kicks you in the Head

I choose to walk down Artz Street

Watch the self-aware step Into

Micro cars and melt into

Waterfront highway

Your golden necklace with Gifts from the sea

Are a cargo crate away

I just have to lift it With my boom truck

Reach through rusty holes

And feel for promise

But something bites when I grab the prize

Petunia (Red)

It has never been easy to Wear this crazy cry Called

Firestorm

Conceived as a terribly Elegant flower

With a need to break the Vicious circle

Before his slender stem Was broken

And when grower and grown Quarreled

It was not with the Present company

It was with their Particular betrayers

Long dead

Like the past by which They were consumed

For you see

When you outrun the Crying madness

And then become overcome By it

You can only crumple like Old paper

In the cold, wet grass

And pray for it to be Over

And to be punctuated by Silence

Eternal

Valid Mover Voids Marvel

Coyly perverse hogs

Use reverse psychology

To dredge up the ideals

Of your mother and father

And serve them to you as

Photographs of important ritual

To be re-enacted

At tri-quarterly meetings

Of the mind when drenched

With dishwater

And soggy echoes of mod revival

It’s Dad’s pair of shades

Used for avoiding Blindness

From an old sun

Schemes by the Slice

I had to cut up my father Into a hundred pieces of Memory of flesh

The heart that motivated Movement was placed in a Jar

With a disconcerted jury Always present, waiting For the jar to crack

And when it did

They could not stop the Heart from falling out

And from rolling out of The room

To the cool breeze of a Spring afternoon

There were other parts of The puzzle

Hands that dealt the Blows that blinded

And that silenced cries Of protest

Or

Feet that ran to freedom From patriarchal Responsibility

And followed the heart

What I discovered is that The cuts divided flesh But not purpose

And that the ill-Conceived will be made Manifest

Even in a bloodied puzzle Of limbs and stratagems

Bio: Nathaniel S. Rounds was born Nathan Klemperer Pirsch in Bromberg Stadt, Posen, Prussia. He immigrated to WichitaFalls, Texas to research the manufacture of steel taco trucks through its city archives. Taking up cluster ballooning, he flew to Boston, Massachusetts and landed on Mike’s City Diner, where he now washes dishes in exchange for free corned beef hash. 

--

Poetry Collection of Tendai R. Mwanaka

 

The Tunisian revolution.

 

It started with Mohamed Bouziz, gunning an unstoppable bullet with his death. He was 26, married with children. Had a university degree but couldn’t find employment. Had a market place, was a hawker, selling. Had his things confiscated by a woman police. He protested and she slapped him, the humiliation of it all! An Arab woman slapping an Arab man, is unthinkable? He tried to pursue the case with the authorities but they ignored his complaints. He committed suicide by electrocuting himself, the speaking protest, a tidy rhythm. This suicide started humming like winter metal. Tunisia exploded and Bennali was kicked out, creating debate leaf-shaped points across the Arab world....The Arab world: is now a boiling pot... One country after another, each, a long Moor’s hour from unriboning decades of dictatorships.

 

 

The Egyptian revolution

 

 

Young babies, young children, young people out welling, youngling, unwarping. Christians and Muslims taking us to the edge of intention and showing us what lies beyond doubt? Old men down warping, fathers and mothers. The Israeli press called them stray dogs. But the figures kept ballooning. It started with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions... Cairo is bustling; a mass mortality horizon, Alexandria and Monsouri city are swamped. Tahrir, the liberation square is the hub of this monsoon chanting

 

“the nation wants the ouster of the regime.”

 

The day’s song is a lament drawn out like a final breath lost in the stars. Its millions wearing the country’s flag as if the pharaohs have thumped every other country at the CAF African nation’s cup to win it again. Jubilant, passionate, angry... It is a carnival atmosphere. It is a nation raising its bread, the symbol of its suffering and hunger. It is a nation crucifying effigies of its napoleon. It is a nation waving placards written with the fine point of their anger and pain

 

“Mubarak go to hell”

“America butt out”

“Tel Aviv is mourning”

“Mubarak leave-

we want to live.”

 

They name the forms of control, youths screaming for an open road to somewhere. Over 30 years of mis-governance, human rights abuses, curfews..., suffering. It is over 30 years in which America and Israel ruled by robot controlling Mubarak. Giving the top brass of army and security the loot of the 2 billion dollars, American taxpayer’s money: just to protect Israel. Israel would joke

 

”we have one person controlling 80 plus millions of enemies”

 

Now they have to face the 80 plus million enemies across its borders. Israel is a bubbling “spoilt” child, afraid, scared....

 

 

The Libyan war

 

 

Before even the first protest was drawn out, there were the killings for years and years. Gadaffi, the giraffe, that fringed phylactory-bound, son of a prophet has now taken the whole country into ransom, pelting his people with bullets, bombing whole towns into rubble, his needles of bullets pointing eastwards.

 

For many years he had guts and beauty, an intellect that despised the humanist pretensions of the west, its white-skinned predacity. He could smell the corruptions of empires, the annihilations of naked creatures. He was brother man to the revolutions, but now he is now being absorbed by his own medicine, the sulphuric acid melting into him. 

 

Praying for light and air- a darkness approaching he had never sensed before, he has developed a white finger. Now his western fingers, his white friends, are in the war, against him. Such ill-conceived wars are just what they usually need for the roar of that unreasonable action.

 

East is revolutionary, the uprising, the wars for towns, adding to strategic places? NATO( rather the: Not Asked To Overstay, organisation), the de-facto UN of the west, is at its games again, curving their own cake in Libya. They want the ouster of Gadaffi, bombing, as usual, innocent people and towns into rubble or collateral damage, that clever American coinage of terms...

 

Even though I don’t subscribe to NATO’s ulterior motives of invading other countries without a by-your -leave but 41 years under one dictator is far worse than NATO’s games minus those stupid killings. At least NATO won’t stay (overstay) for that long. It told us so! And we are always so stupid to believe?

 

But Gadaffi has to realise as soon as possible that a man who lacks the means to an end is headed towards a shapeless wilderness. That if you are a king, never undresses your minors. He should ask Mubarak, Bennali..? Now the modern pharaoh is bedridden, facing a death penalty, creating beautiful soap for us whilst Bennali enjoys Saudi’s banquets. Too bad!

 

Gadaffi should know that too often self-induced addictions to grand delusions cause a man to plot his own undoing. Ask the British, Soviet Union, Byzantine became Ottoman Turkey, Alexander the fool, and now America…

 

But NATO or Gadaffi answers, both are not the answers to Libya. The revolutionaries (NTC) might be the way to the answer. But, for most of us, the liberty to interpret, to think about it all is frightening. Is this new baby (NTC) a darling or a stranger?

 

The answer is: It should always be about the people….

 

 

The Ivory Coast war

 

Quattara and Gagbgo are the fighting gods. It’s the Ivorian phenomena, again and again. It’s the geometry found in the shape of their living. It happened in year 2000 and now it’s back again. It’s the fate they have always chosen and live in even though they know it could kill them.

 

There is a question I have always wanted to ask. Why are francophone countries always raked by civil wars, and are so poor? Could one point the finger at the French? Remember Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Central African Republic and the list is endless. I am out of line here. After all, its one’s self that constructs the place he inhabits.

 

Abidjan is now littered with corpses rotting, and little kids, kid soldiers are stepping on these corpses as they rush to a killing, diving into this reef of confusion. Grandmothers and mothers oyed and oy-veyed at the little ones playing big soldier mentality in the battle consumed streets.

 

It’s so sick, sick, sick, sick, sick, sick....

 

 

Tendai R. Mwanaka was born in Zimbabwe, in the remote eastern highlands district of Nyanga, in Mapfurira village. Left Nyanga for Chitungwiza city in 1994, and Tendai started exploring writing that year, when Tendai was barely twenty. My first book to be published, Voices from exile, a collection of poetry on Zimbabwe’s political situation and exile in South Africa, by Lapwing publications, Ireland, 2010. KEYS IN THE RIVER: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga, a novel of interlinked stories that deals with life in modern day Zimbabwe was published by Savant books and publications, USA 2012, found here; http://www.savantbooksandpublications.com/9780985250621.php. A book of creative non-fiction pieces, THE BLAME GAME, will be published by Langaa RPCIG( Cameroon 2013), a novel entitled, A DARK ENERGY will be published by Aignos publishing company( USA). Tendai was nominated for the Pushcart twice, 2008, 2010, commended for the Dalro prize 2008, Tendai was nominated and attended Caine African writing workshop, 2012. Published over  250 pieces of short stories, essays, memoirs, poems and visual art in over 150 magazines, journals, and anthologies in the following countries,  the USA , UK , Canada , South Africa, Zimbabwe, India , Mexico, Kenya, Cameroon, Italy , Ghana, Uganda, France , Zambia, Nigeria, Spain , Romania, Cyprus, Australia and New Zealand.

Poetry Collection of Linda Woolven

Winter Strangers

The dirty grey of winter

settles,

laying its slush into storefronts,

as they open their winter doors,

yawning wet ice crystals

into breathy steam.

The bars burp into the night,

clouds of yeast churn

with the snowflakes that settle

in the hair of the regulars

trying to shut out

the cold:

the dark loneliness of December,

on bar stools

with other strangers,

equally starving,

in the death of winter.

Music plays, loudly,

like heavy feet

falling in the snow,

so distant,

thudding,

echoing

of loneliness,

and the emptiness of

drunken conversations.

The blackness of the street

pencils in, like erasable charcoal visions:

all temporary for the night,

where amber bubbles

caress, then bruise

with forgetfulness.

Anxiety/Summer Storm

White caps of madness,

as memory stirs

the shadows

of the deep water:

the black wounded depths,

roll,

running from consciousness,

into huge untreadable

waves.

 

And you are swallowed

into the unbreathable strangle of the past,

suffocating in memories

so painful when they surface.

Anxiety

tries to dog paddle

in the storm.

Sinks,

as your lungs fill

with huge gulps

of desperation—;

howls from the past—;

force breaths of fear,

and crawls with indecision.

You are stillborn

on the waves,

locked in the

nakedness

of your own

fragility.

Cold and shivering,

alone,

in the

lightening,

the thunder.

Childhood Hide and Seek

The smell of

damp wool

and summer wind

hiding with me,

and I am back

to all

those valleys

so long ago.

Little girl

in sandals

runs in the street

lost at play

with the neighbourhood children.

Her insides stilled for a moment

feeling free and happy in the wind.

The count is done

and someone is looking for her

in the twilight

as the stars stare overhead.

Soon the street lamps

will wink, light between the leaves,

and she’ll be called home for the night.

To bed and the darkness within,

where the wind is shut out

and the shadows sometimes

loom into

shapes,

angry,

words raging

in her ears

and her tears

find her pillow

and she lies in

the wet dampness

of her

desperation.

Night Sky

The moon

glances

at the horizon,

slack eyed,

lazy its journey.

Summer’s ripe

on the stalk,

heavy and full on the vine.

Gossamer wings

edged in sliver,

whisper soft things

in the night.

Hush,

hush,

little child goes to bed,

scared of shadows

and the voices in the dark.

The moon

slows to watch,

winks

sparingly

through the blind.

As stars select

their toes for pointing.

So soft on

the stage.

So fairy eyed

and dreamy.

As the child

falls asleep,

sucking the night

sky with his thumb.

Tucked warm

in the night’s embrace

and its midnight layers.

Two Italian Lovers in the New Country

He leaves his socks on,

he is always in a hurry,

puts the blinds down

so it is always dark,

like he can leave

the smell  of oranges

and sunshine outside.

In here, it is serious business.

Like a exercise routine, or morning ritual.

He remembers each of his moves,

going through then

one by one, so thoroughly,

making sure to do each one

as thoroughly and well as he

does everything else,

even with the lights off.

and the sounds of the old country dimmed.

It is his ritual,

I, am his ritual,

and we have been doing it

for over 25 years.

I am an anniversary, an echo,

of the old country:

his peasant girl

in bare feet,

smelling of olives

and the sea.

He finds it

still,

in my recesses

where I keep it:

my gift to him.

It is belonging,

even here, with the rituals so far

removed

from our home.

Two Italian lovers, husband and wife,

finely aged in the

Toronto cask that our

house is with its blinds down

on such days,

fermenting

to a fine wine,

a memory of the old country.

Linda Woolven have published over 75 poems in journals across Canada, the United States and the U.K.. The poems have appeared in Journals like, Descant, Dana Literary Society, Amethyst Review, Write On, Sepia Poetry Magazine, New Mirage Quarterly, The Kaleidocope Review, Canadian Writer's Journal, Pink Chameleon and Fullosia Press. One of my poems received an award from Dana Literary Society. Linda also published a chapbook, called "Life's Little Lessons" a few summers ago that featured 26 poems. 

Linda have also published a short story in Happy, and a story in Characters.