One Poem - Ben Nardolilli

No New Wave

“Cycling across a wilderness of snow”
-    J. Grunthaner


In search of an active walking life,
He goes alight much too often,
Breath? He takes it with the sunrise,
Among the still, orchidaceous
Chrome of cars waiting for commuters.

Not everything demands an interview,
Though the voices of curious objects
Conduct their wet questions to him
With the greatest ease and fashion,
Birds want to know the most about him.

All he can offer is a metallic reference,
And try to be a hero to the apartments
By removing litter and clippings
From the sidewalks without compensation,
Voices of floating girls are his pay.
 --

Ben Nardolilli is a twenty five year old writer currently living in Arlington, Virginia. A chapbook, Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, has been published by Folded Word Press. He maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish his first novel.

Two Poems - Felino A. Soriano

Recollections 34

|skipping rocks|

hand as sling

motional rubberized benefit of stretch:

decline-link or

                                    plane of hope the lever functions reverse;

forrad, foray of play

filled speed of spilling vase

                                                finger-thumb union

birth of the silken gem, skin

of spatial specks                      lit by rhythm release

: skid, scope of patterned rise descend

                        rise again

decomposing existence within liquid tomb of coalesced

                                                                        mirages

Recollections 36

|Saturday, a|

Resolution of sewing shadow, patterned gaffe

fixated hem

                                    distinguishing whole from the

                                    meander of shortened prophecies

                                    stable, un

—stable paradox romanticizing self as enough beyond 24 obsessions

staving what starves among portions’ entranced focal

numerals

                                                            staged finality, end of week’s posit of

                        explicated

unravels.

--

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974) is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review.  Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to various idioms of jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences.  For information, including his 45 print and electronic collections of poetry, over 2,800 published poems, interviews, and editorships, please visit his website: www.felinoasoriano.info.

One Poem - Connor Stratman

Facsimile I

i.

First it was history

then seismic

fingers in the ground

Now it’s electric books

and knitted clubs

How to posit a moment

and hold it still

or spit it like

our geography now determined

by spots of inky breath

Now what:

I don’t know

(nor act as knower)

The breath of godly love

            is speck of black

            stains

wrecked world of women

my other

            your disappearance

contained in cups

of cheapened water

            in the corresponding

                        holes of the sky

revise your meaning, please

ii.

film-firm surface

and insecured hands

I forget

to wonder

malicious steadiness

of

in-betweens

iii.

it’s your litany

that gets repeated

then thrown out

folded/crumpled

and wiped by the judge

The wince of begging:

acknowledged ownership

of the small scrap pile

they get something

done

like us luck struck

drawers of hall            ways

iv.

in the good minutes

after sunrise

wilted names lock

            on the walls

and call everything

something else

 --

Connor Stratman is a writer currently living in Chicago. His work has appeared in journals such as The Toronto Quarterly, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, ditch, Leaf Garden, Pinstripe Fedora, Otoliths, Counterexample Poetics, Scythe, and Little Episodes, among others. He edits the online poetry journal The Balloon. He is the author of a chapbook, invisible entrances (erbacce-press, 2010) and a full-length book of poems, An Early Scratch (erbacce, 2011).

A selection of poetry by Andrew McMillan

BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play Idea #3: a glockenspiel indicates a train

A psychiatrist’s office

Patient:                problem?            I want to tell stories        but I never know

     how to round things up you know            how to give someone

                             a perfectly circular tale they can spin around their hips

                             for an afternoon              take the other day for example:

                             in a carriage between London and Manchester a man

                             got into a fight with the conductor           the conductor had a face

                             like a dilapidated barn and he was trying to make the man pay

                             full fare because he hadn’t bought his ticket on the station

                             the man said he hadn’t had chance        he’d been rushing          his wife

                             was in hospital ‘cos she’d slipped down the stairs

                             he had to get back to see her and didn’t he understand              

                             and couldn’t he let him off just once?  the conductor said he was

                             just following orders and the man replied that that’s what they’d said

                             at Nuremburg and the conductor snatched his money and stormed off

                             and the man with the wife with a sprained ankle and a broken arm

                             was left contemplating the thin orange slice of meat that was his ticket               

     And isn’t that a perfect place to end?       I suppose it would be  

     but why was there a button missing from the man’s coat? 

     and where did the exhausted metaphor of the train

                             sleep that night?  and what does the conductor smell like 

                             first thing in the morning? 

cityscape

backslash of corrugated roof      single cheek

of light across the broad chest of city

the potholed avenue the moon has been reduced to

landscape

hills        dawn crowning to the east

planes beat their wings

against the moon’s dull bulb

seascape

the bells of night’s train ring out

the sea is a half-learnt song         the sea is unsingable

the moon’s mute conduction

BBC Radio Four Afternoon Play Idea #29               rent boy in a small town dreams of the big city

truth      I want out           to fade

like an unfashionable pronunciation

it started with the recurring dream

of a car journey                                there was opera

there was a possibility of rain

and other times I was an over thumbed

button                  dropping              rolling through

this oneplatformsinglestraightline of a town

until I’d wake to find myself in someone else’s

morning                 window                city  

where the sky is scraped away to pure light

and you can't hear yourself scream for the breathing

--

Andrew McMillan was born in 1988. These poems are taken from his second pamphlet, the moon is a supporting player, due to be published by Red Squirrel Press in October 2011. A first pamphlet, every salt advance, was published in 2009 and is still available from Red Squirrel. Andrew has been Poet-in-Residence for Off the Page and the Regional Youth Theatre Festival; writer-in-residence for the Watershed Landscape Project and Apprentice Poet-in-Residence for the Ilkley Literature Festival. In 2010 he was commissioned by IMove, the cultural olympiad body for Yorkshire, to produce a new sequence of work. He is featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets.

Two Poems - Howie Good

HISTORY IS SILENT

I stand all day on a corner of the avenue of ghosts.

You never know who the assassin might be.

The family I used to visit no longer exists.

A man wearing a Spanish cloak just like mine

wonders when it’s going to happen to him.

Maybe the rain answers, maybe not.

STRANDED

I study my reflection in the window of the butcher. The trains that leave the city empty return empty as well. Does the sound of sobbing mean what I think it does? People who were born here exchange knowing glances. Tomorrow’s paper may carry news of a terrible accident. For now, it’s night and raining, and somewhere lovers are blowing smoke rings into the dark.

-

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections LovesickHeart With a Dirty Windshield (Press Americana, 2009), (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).