O Capricious Heart

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

O capricious heart

Make me the miracle

That in choir of love’s opus knells deeply

Sharp as piercing awe

Like eyes perched in windows of a face

Gleaming with the hymn of sharing candles

Kindled in a liturgical flicker of the other

—Remi’el Ki

Changming Yuan

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

Winterscape: Crow vs Snow

Like billions of dark butterflies

Beating their wings

Against nightmares, rather

Like myriads of

Spirited coal-flakes

Spread from the sky

Of another world

A heavy black snow

Falls, falling, fallen

Down towards the horizon

Of my mind, where a little crow

White as a lost patch

Of autumn fog

Is trying hard to flap, flying

From bough to bough

Zeugmatic America: A Parallel Poem

Every time you stage a play or an election in your own yard

You cannot wait to shake hands with your audiences and their wealth

No matter whether it is the passage of a new bill or an old dilemma

You excel particularly at manipulating public will and private property

With your weeping eyes and hands

You keep waging war and peace far beyond your boundaries

While you kill non-Americans and their hope together

To turn all others and othernesses into biblical dust

More often than not, you selfish intentions prove

Much more destructive than your smart bombs

You invisible fighter jets strike far farther

Than your visible arms of peace effort

You are simply too great for a small criticism

Too super-powerful for a weak opposition

Too democratic for a totalitarian competition

And too single-minded for a double standard

Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman and 4-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to North America. Currently Yuan teaches in Vancouver and has had poetry appearing in over 400 literary publications worldwide, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and RHINO.

studying bare walls

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

His shrinking humiliation blistered in the sun.

You raise your nose at him

but I’ve seen you,

I’ve seen you digging trough the dumpsters,

hissing at spectators as they laugh at your misfortune.

Lean in close and listen to the clicking

of the kitchen clock. Maddening, isn’t it?

All of your mental calculations are letting you

down, aren’t they?

These are nights of love and laughter

followed by days of unapologetic

loneliness.

You stare at the dirty wine glasses

filling your sink as if you’re the only one

who feels empty on a daily basis.

Cliff Weber is 25 years-old and lives in Los Angeles. He has self-published three books, “Matzo Ball Soup” in 2009, “Jack Defeats Ron 100-64” in 2010 and “Remain Frantic” in 2011. His work has appeared in Adbusters, Out of Our, Burning Word, Bartleby Snopes and Young American Poets, among others. Weber is currently in need of a book publisher.

Memory Of Hurricane Hazel, 1954 for J. R. McK

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

Week or so after Hurricane Hazel,

Me, just out of the Navy, no job.

Mac, one year out of Walter Reed.

My dad (looking out for us) Bunch

Of trees down at Curtis Arboretum,

Township needs help cleaning up.

Couple of axes. hatchet, sharpening

stone, file and coffee thermos.

A two-man bucking saw, Mac and me

We waded into tangled branch mess

Hatchet, axes swing, bite, chips fly

Branches slap — sweat stings eyes

Sun, leaves, sawdust everywhere.

Axe blades sticky, saw teeth clogged,

Sap-stiff gloves, blistered hands

Buck-sawing oak, maple, walnut

Sycamore — some we didn’t know.

Logs piled by road for dump truck

We cashed checks, drank beer.

Papers said the storm killed

Thousands, Haiti to Toronto.

Mac died, Halloween Day 2008.

Hit by northbound car on Rte. 611

Happened fast like Hurricane Hazel.

Mac had his troubles; he was lucky

Got out of this life quick-like

Now, nobody’s on saw’s other end.

Fifty-four years done and gone.

George Fleck is a graduate of Temple University, Philadelphia Pa., and a Korean War Veteran. He has been writing poetry for fourteen years. His work has appeared in Commomweath: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Penn State Press 2005, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and online in “Poets Against The War.”

Marija Stajic

January 2012 | back-issues, poetry

#1

He walks

On the road made of nothingness

Paved with bodies of dead wishes

He walks tacitly

Invisibly

I’m pretending to be a Star

On his sky

To be the Sun and the Moon

He walks

Not looking up…

Marija Stajic is a writer and journalist who has been published by The New Yorker and many other online and print publications, and who has published three books of poetry. She has a B.A. in Linguistics from Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis (Serbia) and an M.A. in International Journalism from American University.

Walter Safar

October 2011 | back-issues, poetry

Nameless Grave

Demonic fires blaze in the eye of the stone palace,

and me,

I only stand in the dark beneath the sky

that reaches its invisible hands

out towards scores of nameless graves.

For callous politicians,

they are but nameless graves

upon which no one’s tear fell.

They were silently and swiftly buried into the black soil,

without speeches and tears,

without too many imprints

on the black soil.

(They say that everyone’s life is worth attention,

and that the dark truth is that only death equally appreciates each life)

And while they treacherously, silently and swiftly

dug a new nameless grave,

only death was faithfully listening to the crickets

feverishly spluttering away in the dark

to honor the dead poet.

In the hazy grave lies the poet,

like a shadow of many dreams,

and the raindrop,

brought from the honorable mountain

by the honorable wind,

softly and timidly trembles

on the dead poet’s white face,

like an angel’s tear.

And politicians, tycoons, church pontiffs

are sitting in the golden loges now,

ghastly and faithfully acting:

the righteous, the charitable, the Believers,

crying their copper voices

out into Croatian silence,

like a copper bell,

and the dead poet

now waits for one tear

in a nameless grave.

Memories

I am standing in the street of my childhood,

and the blue April sky

rises above me,

glittering like a dreamy eye.

Down here, the wind is marching

behind my dark memories,

tiredly,

but unfaltering,

like a tiller behind his plow.

Tell me, steady wind:

How shall I escape the screams of the past?

For years you’ve been pushing me to all corners of the world,

as I was your unwanted child.

You know, wind,

that with my restless spirit, I belong more to You

than to myself.

From You, I inherited the yearning

to travel the world and seek:

the Morning in a golden cradle,

the Day in an angel’s embrace,

the Night in a bloody dress,

and midnight in black,

that preys on lust

like death preys on life.

I am standing in the street of my childhood,

next to the same window

from which I used to gaze at you, wind,

during my childhood,

and dream of the day

when I would fly on Your soft, sweet back

to a better world,

far away from poverty;

the flies captured in the spider’s web,

the miserable cries of worms

eternally crawling beneath the feet of soulless masters,

far away from the grass

and the tear-swept flowers.

I am standing next to the window

in the street of my childhood,

as if standing next to a bloody cradle,

and the memories,

my ashamed children,

cry out into this April night

with their silent screams,

reaching their invisible hands

out to me.

And I,

driven by the gales,

I am rolling across the world,

like a raindrop

looking for its grave,

in the cracks of the arid crust

of the betrayed earth.

Walter William Safar was born on August 6th 1958. He is the author of a number of a significant number of prose works and novels, including “Leaden fog”, “Chastity on sale”, “In the falmes of passion”, “The price of life”, “Above the clouds”, “The infernal circle”, “The scream”, “The negotiator”, “Queen Elizabeth II”, as well as a book of poems, titled “The angel and the demon”.