Palace of Light / Fierce Wind by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal

Palace of Light

It appears
naked,
moonlight,
round and white,
like milk, like water,
like liquor infused,
not blinding like the sun.
It conjures ghosts 
at midnight 

on the first day
and seventh day
in April. Its body,
a palace of light.
It lives in
the sky
in trembling glow.

Fierce Wind

The fierce wind
sparked my memory

of the night 
I dreamt you left me.

The fierce wind
took all the flowers

away and
the fragile birds were

grounded. Their

wings were not so strong.

The fierce wind
took away the smile

from my face.
I flew away to

the center

of the hurricane.

I dreamt I

died inside of me.

Born in Mexico, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal lives in California and works in Los Angeles, His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, Poppy Road Review, and Unlikely Stories. His latest book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.

Great Salt Lake / Neighbors by Dane Karnick

Great Salt Lake

My stepfather parks
Our family Buick
Past the southern shoreline

To revere those mud flats
Reflecting turquoise
Along unbroken sky

While killdeer chase brine flies
Across the belly
Of lakes come and gone

Their white crystals spread wide
Toward Wasatch Mountains
As we talk about his dad

Drinking in the barn
Through many afternoons
But the words dry up like

Most of our conversations
So we stare at the wind
Raiding nooks and crannies

Over limestone ridges that
Interrupt the saline plains
Constant as human anguish




Neighbors

Some staff say the phantom
Is a congressman who jumped
Out of his fifth-floor office
In the Arctic Hotel
To stay as a resident
From the other side
Of reason fractured
In this gold rush building

Where the elevator goes
To his level empty
From days of his mood swings
Championing the needy
Among billiard rooms
And smoky card tables
He persists in some way
To follow guests around

With his erratic state
Freezing corridors and
Scuffing a path across
The floor that divides
His home from our world
Rooted through his rootless soul
Who fades in and out of
What we think we know

Dane Karnick grew up by the Colorado “Rockies” and has lived in the Seattle area for 30 years. His poetry has appeared in publications like One Art, Umbrella Factory and The Poetry Box.

Art Treasures / Garn Lake by Byron Beynon

Art Treasures  

Into the secret silence of Manod 

quarry they deposited like Hamelin's children 

  

the National's collection of air-conditioned art, 

safeguarded for posterity inside a Welsh cavern 

  

to escape for five years 

the blitz of a city's acid heart. 

  

Impressionism in central Gwynedd, 

Rembrandt next to Ffestiniog's slate, 

  

sculpted to remember, not to be erased, 

the palettes of durable colour, 

  

an exact style entering the darkness 

brightening a craggy mouth in Wales. 

  

  

*During the Second World War paintings from the National Gallery, Londonwere stored in a quarry in Wales for safe keeping until the war was over.

  

  

Garn Lake

  

She is part of the scenery, 

a human face 

that allows the medicine of nature 

to heal mortal pain. 

The experienced mountains 

observe her stillness 

as wildflowers grow 

near her feet. 

The lake’s sheen 

nurtured by time, 

engages the shore, 

recalls a world 

before wounds and pollution 

as the motion of the day's 

illumination renews 

a depth of captured rhythms. 

 

Byron Beynon's work has appeared in Poetry Wales, The London Magazine, The Yellow Nib, The Honest Ulsterman, Worcester Review and the anthology Winter in America (Again) (Carbonation Press). His most recent collection is Where Shadows Stir (The Seventh Quarry Press).

A Paris Exhibition / House at Dusk by Jan Darrow

A Paris Exhibition

I planted flowers today
in my garden.
Nymphaea
from Monet’s Water Lilies.
The blooms
circled a stream of consciousness
altered by the willows and wisteria.
I watched for hours.
Altered blues morphed
into leafy lush and rose reflections.
The blush and shadows
balanced color changing greens.
Glassy hues.
Paint moved
like the summer sun
across the sky.
Irises crowned the edge.
Curved
brush strokes
splashed light.



House at Dusk

upstairs a door is closing
voices evaporate
the heat of the day is gone
outside
spent lilacs burnish color
onto panes of glass
trees spin darkness against the sky
the garden is iridescent
white clusters
of viburnum globes shimmer
in the filtering shadows
the earth shifts
you feel it if you’re silent
and then a gust of wind roars
through the trees
clouds move in but not before the stars
begin to move across the sky
they leave their pallor sails to the wind
while the crisp white moon
is forever moored to the tides

Jan Darrow is a Midwest poet that loves the haunting allure of abandoned spaces. She has been published online/print and has been nominated for Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her book “Autumn Poetry: A Collection for the Season,” (available on Amazon) was recently recommended by Bookstr.

Photographs in Sepia / Climate Chatter by Mitali Chakravarty

Photographs in Sepia

Soft rustles weave nostalgia.
Memories of a shuffled walk,
voices that called with love,
leave imprints of the past.

They remain but shadows
of yesteryears. They never
die or disappear, but linger
as part of an unspoken life.

Photographs in sepia smile,
invoking lives that no longer
breathe. Yet, they persist as
residues of what had been.

The images do not speak
or move. They are not
videos but moments
captured in fading shades.

They waft on a soft breeze,
a faint recall, and yet, stay
a part of our very being.
Stilled, vignettes still sing.

In an unknown future, what will
these remembrances mean?

Climate Chatter 

It’s like summer in March. 

The temperature’s up. 

Near the equator, it rains. 

But now there are no clouds. 

There’s an unrelenting sun 

beating us down and haze… 

When the rain comes, 

storms thunder to bring 

down trees on cars or humans. 

Old trees are cut, replaced by new. 

Lightning strikes split the skies. 

But that is only when it rains. 

Earlier it poured everyday, 

but the trees, they stayed. 

Now, it’s seasonal and, ooh, the haze! 

Old trees near my home,

where orioles roamed, 

are now replaced by saplings. 

I watch the world change 

from my window, silencing 

the television screen. 

Mitali Chakravarty has three books of poems. She has edited two anthologies and has a book of essays. Her poems can be found in Fixator Press, Literary Yard, Daily Star, Medusa’s Kitchen, Dissident Voice among many other sites. Mitali wafts on a cloud where rests borderlessjournal.com.

The First Step is Nothing But Air by Holly Day

How brave must a little bird be
to leap from its nest into the air for the first time
to not just take that first step out onto a branch
but to actually try to fly?

A scientist would tell me that it’s all
just instinct, that your average baby bird
has less fear where heights are concerned
than a baby taking its first upright, unsteady, unaided steps

But I would tell that scientist
that they must not ever have seen
a tiny sparrow, balanced wobbly on a tree branch
noisily squawking in protest at its parents on the ground below
unwilling or unable to join them for most of an afternoon.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in The NoSleep podcast, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.

The Crofter's Daughter / The History Teacher's Tobacco Pouch by Robert Nisbet

The Crofter’s Daughter

The teacher, plump, his jacket sad

with pipe smoke, brings her to the class.

I’d like us to welcome our little Hebridean.

It’s kindly meant. Indeed the class,

eleven years old themselves, are kind enough.

But there are so many, just so many children,

hundreds, a thousand, in that steel town school.

Passing from bell to bell, from week to week,

she likes learning Welsh, likes the crafts, 

but she puzzles over rugby and the steel town’s lust

for such a muddy, heavy game. In Cornaig School,

they’d played rounders, twenty of them. 

And then her mind rushes to the island,

where the white sandy machair spread

down the furlong from their farmyard

to the beach. They had dogs with island names,

Jura, Tobermory. And she’d be milking in the byre

before she went to school. 

                                          Now the steel town

and a couple of years’ unrecognised damnation.

 

 

The History Teacher’s Tobacco Pouch

 

He’d spread a plump tobacco pouch

before him, lunch times, at bridge,

rubbing out the warm brown curls

of Erinmore, letting float a light 

Virginian scent, then tamping,

tamping down, pressing the orange

threads to service in the deep and blackened

bowl of his meerschaum. He liked

breast pocket handkerchiefs, ensigns

of red and purple, tilting oddly

askew by morning break. His nail file

would fire puffs of dust from his

pink, scrubbed nails. Only when the

lunch time bivouac had ended, would

he return to what he knew was always

there: the classroom door, the cruelty. 

 

* Both poems appeared in Roundyhouse in 2012.

Robert Nisbet is from Wales, a former high school English teacher and college creative writing tutor who has been published widely in the USA, where he has four Pushcart Prize nominations, and in Britain, where his collection, In a Small County, has just been published by Seventh Quarry Press.