Saturday, June 6, 2009

Issue #2



Three Poems by Peycho Kanev


Ready to go at dawn

I will die before my time
between the ashes of my past
and the pain of tomorrow,
dreaming nightmares about
scarecrows and ravens
I will grope about for some words
to whisper to my wife,
I will search for the truth
down there,
among the fires and the souls
forgotten
and if there is nothing,
if there is nothing
you may join me for the rest
of the eternity,
of all that was true and
pure.


Nightmares at midnight

Nightmares at midnight circling in my head,
they are durable; their power - is my heart,
like they somehow know about my inner child

am I afraid to rise at dawn with the ravens and
the scarecrows from my dreams – no! I say, not
now, let me be, again, the sun is my enemy for
ever and ever-the moon is improbable tediously
and my child likes to lay and play among the stars

there are no nightmares like my lurid dreams,
showing me their ugly faces drowning within,
keep the pace, the beat of the heart is tranquil

some of them will come tomorrow again and
will try to hunt my thoughts from the abyss-
yes! I say, let them have me, grasp me –
in their gentle arms, they have nothing on me,
neither my blood nor tears like their own,

like their own, drowning in the deep dark
where the crosses don’t know the difference
between me and myself.


Farewell, fools

Old bench,
on which I’ve carved my heart!
so long ago –
forgotten!

I say goodbye autumn leaves,
I say goodbye to the rocks and the stones,

bending in the dirt,
picking up the rose
and toss it back into the empty grave
where it belongs

thank you for all the pain
thank you for the missed moments,
come fly with me, my friend –
let’s fly away below the ground
and believe me –
nobody will miss us

empty time
I don’t want anything from you
just let me be,
dreaming,
like I do-
all my life.


Biography Note:

Peycho Kanev is 28 years old from Chicago. He loves to listen to sad music while slowly drinking his beer. His work has been published in Welter, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Cemetery, Nerve Cowboy, The Chiron Review, The Guild of Outsider Writers, Mad Swirl, Side of Grits, Southern Ocean Review and many others. Peycho would rather write for days then talk on a cell phone. He has also been nominated for Pushcart Award.


Urban Clearway
Andrew Taylor

Road narrows, lines of stone houses rack towards the foot
of the hill. Flashing shop signs advertise wares.

Low cloud, creeps in from the valley, carrying the scent of
history and the hills. Fly in formation

to land in the grounds of West Bretton. Feather coating lawns,
singly inspected. The house watches on.

Motorway hums, one mile from Exit 38. Neon hanging among
the trees. Sculpture scattered hidden from view.

Lodge respite. A place to renew with newspapers, sanity and
scalding coffee.


Biography Note:

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection comes from Sunnyoutside Press. He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics.


Two Flashes by Doug Mathewson


Missing Person Not Reported

In our family everybody was a comedian, even when we prayed we told God a joke and hoped he liked it enough to listen to the rest.
A few times I asked my Mother where my Grandfather was. Why have I never met him? Poised atop my Grandmother’s piano was an old black and white photo of him. There stood a young man with a crazy grin holding his upturned Panama hat full to the brim with fire-crackers. But when I asked my mother about him the questions made her angry. Angry and sad.
She snapped back, “he’s a ventriloquist on the radio, his work keeps him away”, she hit me when I asked what time and station.
Years later when I was in college some Great Aunt I never heard of contacted us with sad news; my Grandfather had died of cancer in Phoenix.
He’d been living out there she said since this release from prison some years earlier having served out his full sentence on Federal mail-fraud charges.
Too bad, I thought as the pieces now fell into place, wish I could have heard him tell the story of what happened, probably would have been pretty funny.


Tupelo Regressions

So in this dream me and Elvis Presley are about eight or nine years old, drinking big glasses of cold milk at his Mom’s kitchen table.
We’re telling each other about our past lives, all of them we can remember anyway going way back.
Every single life of mine had me as one kind or another of dirt farmer, just digging Polish potatoes, picking Alabama cotton, pulling weeds under the Mexican melons, and I don’t even know the name of what I was growing when I was Chinese!
Elvis had this funny look on his face, eyes half closed and mouth half smiling, but was all serious business when he told how he remembered every single one of his amazing lives.
He told me about driving a golden chariot pulled by six jet-black horses, he told me about fighting with a sword in The Crusades, he told me about being a merman with a long beard and tail, he even told me some darn fool story about being the first man to walk on the moon.
All I could do was sit there in my ‘Leave it To Beaver’ striped shirt, swinging my legs back and forth drinking my milk while I thought: “Elvis surely is the King, king of the bullshitters that is!




Biography Note:

Doug Mathewson writes, edits, time travels, and dreams from his home in eastern Connecticut. His ongoing relationship with reality has become increasingly strained in recent years. Most recently his work has appeared in The Boston Literary Magazine, Battered Suitcase, Cezzane’s Carrot, Door Knobs & Body Paint, e-Muse, Full of Crow, Poor Mojo’s Almanac (k), riverbabble, Six Sentences, and Tuesday Shorts. He invites readers to visit his current project “True stories from imaginary lives” located at www.little2say.org/.


Sick As a Dog
Howie Good

When we woke up in the morning,
the dog was there as usual,

but it couldn’t stand.
Every time it tried,

its back legs gave out.
“Gravity isn’t your friend,” my heart said.

I lifted the dog from the floor.
She went to call the vet.

Later that day, I was reading Kant
at the kitchen table.

She kept talking about the dog
and breaking my concentration.

I noticed the creases in her neck,
folds of skin that didn’t used to be there,

knife marks, rope burns.


Biography Note:

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including Police and Questions from Right Hand Pointing (2008), Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks, The Torturer’s Horse (2009) from Recycled Karma Press, and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology.


A Painter's Muse
Zubyre Parvez

Overlooking nothing
Looking over everything
I would appreciate you with a painter's eye
A stroke, hairbrush, and an embrace
I guess you were my muse
Filling canvases of my youth
The subject matter of songs
In touch with the facts of life we were aloof
The sun encircled by the prayer beads
The system of planets we see
Through a telescope
Together we peer
My test tubes combust and explode
In my lab I compose
Our chemistry no one
Quite knows, a mystery unfolds.


Biography Note:

Zubyre Parvez is a poet hailing from Newham, London. He is interested in British-Asian culture, citing Benjamin Zephaniah, and hip hop lyricism as his inspiration. He is a practitioner of Falun Gong qigong arts, and dedicated to the human rights in China, working to stop the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China by the Chinese Communist Party.

1 comment: