Seclusion Principle

July 2019 | poetry

We live within a universe so vast

we never will perceive its full extent.

 

Because there are horizons that are past

the span light can speed in the firmament,

parts of the cosmos will be forever

beyond possible communication.

 

As fast as light, we’ll still reach them never,

for they have greater acceleration.

 

We here who are within it

can’t exceed light’s pace in space,

such efforts will be vexed.

Our universe grows faster than light-speed,

so isolates one portion from the next.

 

We cannot know that,

there,

physical laws apply or

that effect

 

 

 

still follows cause.

 

James Ph. Kotsybar

Chosen for special recognition by NASA, James Ph. Kotsybar is the first poet to be published to another planet. His haiku currently orbits Mars aboard the MAVEN spacecraft, appears in the mission log of The Hubble Space Telescope, and was featured at NASA’s Centaur Art Challenge at IngenuityFest, Ohio. Last Summer, he performed his poetry before an international audience of scientists, journalists and actual Troubadours in their founding city of Toulouse, France, at the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF2018) by invitation and has been invited back to ESOF2020 to be held in Trieste, Italy. Most recently he has had poems published in The Bubble, Askew, The Society of Classical Poets, LUMMOX Press, Sixfold, Mason’s Road, Encore and Scifaikuest, and has received honors from The State Poetry Society of Michigan and the Balticon 48 Poetry Competition. He especially enjoys science poetry, because of its extended shelf-life.

After the Hunt

July 2019 | poetry

They were men, their faces half shadowed
from flickering firelight,
I was a boy on soft ground, two old hounds
between me and the rocked ring of the pit.
Leonard would holler and a glorious sound would come from his red fiddle,
but I imagined it was the forest’s song
and my eyes would close from exhaustion and the weight of dreams.

I would warm my hands on the belly of the Bluetick,
his eyes never quite shut, always watching while resting,

ready for the chase.
“David, you ain’t sleepin’, are ya?”
Hot chocolate and pipe smoke,
the smell of coonhound and
blood.

Two old Fords with round hoods stood darkly
at our backs, facing home
where morning would pass slowly
into day
where faults and cold rain

ceased.

David Magill

David Magill, born in Kansas City, Missouri, moved to Minnesota as a young boy and grew up on a hobby farm in Afton. He has been married to his wife, Patti, for 23 years. His work has recently been published in Metonym,The Esthetic Apostle, Cagibi, Swimming with Elephants, Dreamers, Wanderlust, Sky Island Journal, and Rock & Sling. He has also been nominated for a Pushcart prize in poetry for 2019.

Martha Nance

July 2019 | visual art

Red Sky at Night

 

Martha Nance

Martha Nance is a physician who has discovered the fountains outside her office, and the infinite variety of colors and ideas and textures contained with its waters as the camera captures a moment of sunlight. She refers to the resulting photographic art as “waterwords”.

The Only True Outsider

July 2019 | fiction

Miriam, sandwich? The man waves one. You want?

She doesn’t. Miriam expects him to see that she is busy, and doesn’t want. She is talking to my wife. My wife is looking out the window. I know the look on her face, having to be polite.

We are polite on holiday. We don’t take drugs, on holiday. It’s like we want time out from our bad habits, but the reason is that we don’t risk bringing drugs with us on cross-border trains – only in our heads, a last glorious ingestion in the station toilets. We also don’t risk buying drugs on holiday. Our experience of this has led to a crushing disappointment in our fellow men, loss of money, and, once, loss of blood (mine). I’m not a fighter, and in any case we are too old to squabble with strangers over the price or the alleged purity, or lack of it, of various powders. So we are more polite to strangers, but more edgy if they overstep the boundaries.

It’s us and them in the minibus. As it was early in the morning, and we were bleary-eyed, that wasn’t apparent when we boarded. It was only on the road that they revealed themselves as a group, and, as collateral, us as outsiders.

Gradually, they shout merrily at one another. It is a small minibus. They extract sandwiches from Tupperware, examine them, and pass them around. It is a confined space. We are hungover. The sandwiches contain salami with a discernible garlic content. There is coleslaw. I know because, in the act of being passed, some of it, reverting to liquid in the heat, drops on my bare knee. I examine it. My instinct is mean, to wipe it on the nearest garment belonging to one of the group, but instead I use the underside of the seat.

Miriam talks to my wife about where we are going on our sightseeing mission. She finally refuses the sandwich, which stops the man we suppose is her husband from offering it. Instead, he says, well don’t ask me later for one, and adds endless variations of this warning.

Miriam’s older relatives, and those of the whole group, and those of my wife, went to where we are going, some of them leaving it, luckily, to tell the world about it. This leaves me as the only true outsider. The minibus driver delivers us to Auschwitz, the museum on the site of the notorious Nazi death camp. In the snack bar there, Miriam buys a Snickers, with me behind her in the line, dehydrated and in search of fizzy water. I say to her, you should have had the sandwich, and she snorts and nods and grimaces and says, yah – who knew, right? She rejoins the group, my wife holding on to my sleeve to make sure we let them get far enough away to be out of earshot, to be miserable on our own terms, and in silence.

Nick Sweeney

Nick Sweeney’s stories are scattered around the web and in print. Laikonik Express, his novel about friendship, Poland, and getting the train for the hell of it, is out with UK independent publisher Unthank Books. His 20K-word ‘novelette’ The Exploding Elephant was published by Bards and Sages in 2016. He is a freelance writer and musician, and lives on the English coast

Unfiltered

July 2019 | poetry

Photo p.193

The Great White Way looking north,

February 21, 1964.

 

The smoke hangs over the street

drifting north from Times Square

where the Camel sign reigns

and the man exhales and exhales

 

the unfiltered cigarette. My father

burned through three packs a day.

Butts would float on top of urine

in the toilet, evidence that he could piss

 

and smoke simultaneously. I remember

the unending stream. Here the billboard looms

over Hector’s, a cafeteria, one of many

scattered across Manhattan.

 

Feb 21 1964, a year my father was alive.

It must have been late when this photo was shot

given the lack of traffic. Two dim headlights

in the foreground. Shadows head downtown.

 

A record store lights up the lower

right corner, but it’s that rhythmic

smoke, the steady beat of the lungs,

that uninterrupted puff of a man in a cap,

 

a postman, a policeman, Everyman who sends

a plume into the air like a wish, a halo

reimagined over and over. It just killed

everyone who saw it, even my father.

 

 

Paul Lieber

 “Interrupted by the Sea,” Paul’s second collection of poetry was published this year. (What Books Press) His first collection, “Chemical Tendencies,”(Tebot Bach) was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest. He also received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Paul produces and hosts “Why Poetry” on Pacifica radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. Guests have included Poet Laureates, National Book Award Winners and many known and lesser-known poets. Paul’s poems have appeared in The Moth, N.Y. Quarterly, Patterson Review, Askew, Poemeleon, Alimentum, and many other journals and anthologies. He has taught creative writing in poetry, short stories and playwriting at Loyola Marymount University and facilitates the poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque, the oldest literary institute in Los Angeles. Paul works as an actor and has performed on and off-Broadway and in numerous films and TV shows. paullieber.com