/// Contemporary Art & Poetry Review ///
Images on the floor beneath the door
and I know Daddy’s home.
The television is on,
I put my hands on the door and feel
voices along the wood.
Eyes by the keyhole,
I see Daddy sitting in the chair—
black boots laced, dog tags, keys, and hat placed
on the table next to something I cannot
see. The key blocks my view,
I dare not push it through.
He eats in the chair, he sleeps in the chair
in that room and for years,
he doesn’t know
I am there.
Tawnysha Greene
Like dew on the blades, you
infuse life – gently
surrounding, remaining
still on the
surface -
Nurturing,
touching in -
burning off when it gets too
hot, but always
Reappearing after
evening draws its
mantle of forgetfulness
around us.
Bela Johnson
The mind’s cupboard empties.
Soon, a yeasty warmth
rises until you see
the bread was always done.
Mark Jackley
Mark Jackley is the author of three chapbooks, most recently “Cracks and Slats” from Amsterdam Press. His first full-length collection, “There Will Be Silence While You Wait,” is forthcoming from Plain View Press. He lives in Sterling, VA.
No cacti do needlepoint
among pine, ash and birch.
Winter builds ice sculptures
on the lake. Hands cold
from shoveling, we listen
to Wayne Newton sing of
summer winds.
Ken Pobo
Kenneth Pobo won the 2009 poetry chapbook contest from Main Street Rag for his manuscript Trina and the Sky. In 2008, WordTech Press published his book called Glass Garden.
Come and sit with me in the gnarled
palm of the cypress tree – half a dozen
trunks grown from one root – and I will tell
you my plans. There are those who
walk with caves dragging at their feet;
for them we shall be the flashlights.
For those with masks around their necks
we shall bring the mirrors. Language
as beads on a finite string: like, love, loath,
we carry them with us and hurl them
at the silence, which shrinks and expands
with each death, every tiny birth.
Laughing, you tell me cypresses
cannot grow up here. I am alone, then.
Aaron Kreuter
Soon she moved to Baton Rouge,
where lost souls washed up
from New Orleans, some of whom
perhaps would also greet the day
clutching their ribs, bobbing
tearfully as morning
bled into the bedroom like a slow,
quiet flood of words.
Mark Jackley
We hid amid the swaying fields of sugar cane
when Castro overthrew that fool, Fulgencio,
you in your libidinous red dress that kept
all the men of Plaza Vieja very happy, every day
a procession after the bullfights and the executions;
I think I was dead every morning I was without you,
the statues of the city cold, but I understood them,
at night we drank and danced and then we retired to watch
all the old cars going fast under the trestles,
In the daytime, I worked right near San Cristobal,
trying to write like Hemingway on our old typewriter,
but you cured me for my lack of a reputation,
me, arriving home to find you naked and wet in bed,
leaving me hungry for your soul like a wallet longing
for crisp green bills;
but then change and revolution came!
and we were all happy and afraid as we hid in the fields,
dreaming of the former, hoping for tomorrow,
hiding for a day that turned into the last fifty years;
And now I am old and you have already gone,
nothing to quench my thirst like things used to do,
Jesus! I’m tired of waiting for Cuba to change!
Cuba is both a truth and a fiction, a great story of lust
and of craving,
A country that longs for tomorrow to be like yesterday,
and for yesterday to be like tomorrow. Amen.
Jean-Paul Ferro