Two Poems by John D. Robinson

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Just Waiting

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I was waiting for something,

it may have been a bus

but I knew that I had been

waiting all my life,

for something:

‘You asshole’ she screamed

at me for stashing stolen

good in our home:

‘You asshole’ I have heard

many times, as I waited,

alone, as cities crumble and

hungry, desperate children

lay in dusty ghost streets

of forgotten speech,

maybe it was a train I

was waiting for,

or a sign of some kind,

or something,

I don’t know why I’m

waiting,

but that’s what

I’m doing,

right now,

waiting,

I am.

.

Look

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The calendars bares no teeth

and coldness is unwanted

furniture,

the postman brings no summer

and the window frames are

rotting, the doors are hanging

loose and the wind cries mercy:

I drink wine,

quietness is prominent and I’m

told flowers don’t

dream,

that thoughts fall like burnt

rice-paper:

I stay solid, cool,

my footsteps are virginal,

invisibility guides me,

each step

scorched with

you

and

I.

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John D Robinson is a UK based poet: he has published numerous books of poetry: he has also published a novel of fiction and a collection of short stories.

Two Poems by Jianqing Zheng

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Looking Back

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If I

never tilled rice paddies at sunrise,

never handpicked cotton under blue skies,

never dug irrigation canals in winters,

never mucked out stables before dusk,

never smelled purple soybean flowers,

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if leeches

never sucked blood from my shanks, calluses

never formed hard and thick on my palms, the sun

never blistered my back,

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if I

never acquainted myself with local peasants,

never worked with them shoulder to shoulder,

never chatted with them in their shacks,

never witnessed the joy and pain of their life,

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if all this

never was a part of reeducation, I could

never relate grains to drops of sweat and

never imagine the oil lamp as the light of hope.

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Five decades have long gone.

My body has become a rusty plow.

Some nights I dream of tilling at sunrise or

reading in the deep night with a desire

to turn to a new page of life.

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Indebted to Land

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After dusk surges

across the sky,

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the moon appears

over the village,

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full and graceful

like a Tang Dynasty lady

.

pacing in a red robe.

In a while

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It floats up

over the plowed fields,

.

brightens

like limelight,

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and sways

its radiant sleeves

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as if ribbon-dancing

with throws and spirals.

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At this moment

you stand by the furrow

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and let petrichor

enter your body

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and soul—

a way to accept

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a way of life,

a way to balance

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the way of self

through hard times.

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Jianqing Zheng’s poetry collections include A Way of Looking, Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, The Landscape of Mind, Delta Sun, and Delta Notes. He teaches at Mississippi Valley State University where he edits Valley Voices.

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from Decarceration by Charline Lambert, translated from the French by John Taylor

Michael Bollino

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You are a countable solitude.

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You are a light shattered

into beams.

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You are

a barely recognized

fire.

.

*

You want to decarcerate the language from you,

decar—

.

cerate these words from your plexus

and every day

you elucidate a knot.

.

*

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In a single movement

you don’t know if you’re taking part

.

in the pursuit

or

the reiteration.

.

*

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You are full to the brim

with coagulated matter.

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Ever since, you counter

the slow work

of exsanguination.

.

*

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Your great fervor to forget:

too great

this tumor where

can it be cut out, where

are the healthy tissues

.

*

.

Joy and the other

joy you hold out

.

drunk with it,

a latent

blow to the forehead

.

of the sky.

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—from Désincarcération (©Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 2017)

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French originals:

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Tu es une solitude à dénombrer.

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Tu es une lumière éclatée

en faisceaux.

.

Tu es

un feu

à peine reconnu.

.

*

Tu veux désincarcérer le langage de toi,

désincar-

.

cérer ces mots de ton plexus

et chaque jour

tu élucides un nœud.

.

*

.

D’un seul mouvement

tu ne sais si tu en es

.

la poursuite

ou

la réitération.

.

*

.

Tu es une matière coagulée

parvenue à satiété.

.

Depuis tu contres

un lent travail

d’exsanguination.

.

*

.

Ton ardeur à l’oubli trop

grande

.

trop grande

tumeur où découper

où sont les tissus sains

.

*

.

La joie et l’autre

joie que tu tends,

.

de tout ton soûl

latente

frappe à la tempe

.

du ciel.

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Charline Lambert was born in 1989 in Liège, Belgium. She is the author of four books of poetry: Chanvre et lierre (“Hemp and Ivy,” Éditions Le Taillis Pré, 2016), Sous dialyses (“Dialyzing,” Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 2016), Désincarcération (“Decarceration,” Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 2017), and Une salve (“A Salvo,” Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 2020). She is currently finishing her Ph.D. thesis on the relation between poetry and deafness.

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John Taylor’s most recent translations are, from the French, José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes (The MadHat Press) and Philippe Jaccottet’s Ponge, Pastures, Prairies (Black Square Editions), as well as, from the Italian, Franca Mancinelli’s The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose 2008-2021 (The Bitter Oleander Press). His most recent books of poetry are Transizioni, a bilingual volume published in Italy by LYRIKS Editore and illustrated by the Greek artist Alekos Fassianos, and Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press), illustrated by the French artist Caroline François-Rubino. He lives in France.

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Layers of Blankets by Doug Holder

Layers of Blankets

… For my late wife Dianne

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In a dream she came to me.

She had to peel

off layers of blankets.

Hot towels

were wrapped

tightly around

my face.

I could

barely breathe.

She struggled

as she always did

but like

some force of nature

she ripped them

off me

I could feel

the sudden rush

of air

the brush

of her luxuriant hair…

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” I will always

be with you,

I will always be

there… “

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Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. He is a lecturer of creative writing at Endicott College outside of Boston. Holder’s own work has been published in Molecule, Lillipoh, Lips, Constellations and elsewhere. The ” Doug Holder Papers” are at the University at Buffalo Libraries. Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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Testing One by Holly Day

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Testing One

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After the fires died down, and the smoke blew away

the only thing left of the little lizards

and the spiders

a lone jackrabbit

and a burrow owl

were their shadows trapped in a plate of glass

an uneven windowpane of melted desert sand.

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If you could lift this glass out of the desert

cut it into tiles

find some use for it in your house

you could keep their trapped surprise with you always

some memory of a sunny day in the Nevada desert

populated by creatures unaware they were trespassing

on government property.

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Near-End of Day by Martin Willitts Jr.

Near-End of Day

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We arrive at the near-end of a day,

its rush of sundown, a deep current

searching to root in the earth.

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The moon shines on a door,

through extended shadows

like a storm walking into a field.

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We must hurry home

when night tethers to the ground

its last breath of light.

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An owl swerves in the silence,

sharing with an unfortunate field mouse

what he’s learned from the darkness.

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We hear what is taken, what is missing.

On any given day, at any moment,

suddenness happens —

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Something is out of place.

In winter, light goes so far out,

we think it may never come back.

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Martin Willitts Jr, edits the Comstock Review, judges New York State Fair Poetry Contest. Nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2020. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 21 full-length collections including Blue Light Award “The Temporary World.” His new book is “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022).

 

The Daughter Who Tends to Her Mother by John Grey

The Daughter Who Tends to Her Mother   

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I cook her favorite turnip,

boil her tea, butter her toast –

it’s been like this seemingly forever,

just the two of us, from morning to evening –

I would plan my escape

but I have no place to go.

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I soap her slowly, garnish her meals,

massage her shoulders,

lay beside her to listen for breathing.

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I have just touched my own nerve –

all that scrubbing, the attempt to be tender

but with a sour taste in my mouth

of all I am missing out on,

with afternoons in sunlit rooms,

making sure she takes her medicine,

no longer mother and daughter

but two old cow elephants

with sagging breasts, faces drying, wrinkling,

hands rheumatic, our skins so alike

that could easily fold around the one body.

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My burden is that I am the one person she can trust,

not my other sisters with their family rituals,

not my father, buried once again every time she sighs.

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I am the subject of her bad humor,

her fickle taste in friends.

The weather is my fault

as is the temperature of the bathwater,

the severity of her migraines.

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Mostly we sit in silence.

She examines the bruises on her legs.

I will inherit them some day.

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John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, “Leaves On Pages” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Ellipsis, Blueline and International Poetry Review.

Better Than Streaming John Dorroh

Better Than Streaming

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My dreams are everywhere – in the drinking glass

that I keep beside my bed, stuffed in bedroom slippers

somewhere in another room, below the house in the bowels

of the kitchen plumbing. They most often taste like blackberry jam,

fresh and seedy with the perfect amount of acid.

They’re never powered by magic or anything difficult

to calculate. They fit in small spaces but loom large

in my head. Sometimes they make me dance on the dresser

across from my grandma’s bed. Other times they make me

speak French and bake baguettes in the wee hours. I don’t

know their names or where they live or where they belong.

I stick my hands out of a moving car and pluck them

into my blood. I often string them on a clothesline

for everyone to see.

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John Dorroh poems have appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, North Dakota Quarterly, and Selcouth Station. His first chapbook comes out this summer, 2022.

Old Barn by Richard Dinges

Old Barn

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Stripped of corrugated

tin and wood plank

skin, second story

frame long gone

except for one wall,

its open maw that once

devoured bales of hay

leans but refuses

to fall.  The old barn

stands tall among

trees, their bare branches

stencils against barn’s

gray skin, a feeble

giant as stubborn

as those old farmers

who erected it, stood

tall and sweaty and

dirty at its walls

that towered with

their long ago pride.

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Richard Dinges, Jr. lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, one dog, three cats, and three chickens.  Poem, Avalon, Willow Review, Oracle, and Writer’s Block most recently accepted his poems for their publications.

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