Brian Obiri-Asare

Brian Obiri-Asare is an Australian-based writer.

Variations

responsive to evidence
this
narrow sign
between intrinsic walls
forcibly
the impassable-true
upward and back,
over and again,
to the soul-bright
suture.

there.

re-hearsed, re-invented
the boat grows
free
together.
re-claimed with
a breath’s re-flexed
leaping and lovely
for lively seconds
only

un-heard of
possibilities,
ours.

the openly constitutive
breach,
the natural nothingness, ocean-coloured,
as an other
re-moved
form a self
the point
a lack
mad as love
the eternal occurrence,
we,
proceeded
by dice, thrown
into
emergence, complete.

that.

that ocean colour re-
mains the
horizon.

endured in voluntaristic
midst’s, when tides
flow
frozen in flux
of signification,
when propaganda
signals change of
everything by a minute –

will we miss a boat?

when the day after
tomorrow, abstract, the
day
before, incomprehensible,
inaccessible amalgam of
agitation and sterility
whereby,
a fusion of frenzy
and total rest.

this

visible, audible, nascent thing

there

re-deemed
the vessel, with care
strove procedures

growing, re-building a
together.

Andrea Uptmor

Andrea Uptmor is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Minnesota. Her fiction has been published in the Chicago Reader, Hot Metal Bridge, and The Medulla Review, among others. Her poetry has been published in Stirring and CRAM.

When the Wife Dies

The husband goes
     back to school. He fixes air

carburetors and at night
     he has classes: Russian

history, poetry, ceramics. He learns
     to love the smooth slip of the clay.

During the day the husband bangs

with a hammer his thumb,
     catches an index finger in a hinge and wipes

greasy rags over his elbows. At
     night he reads a book of John Updike

stories. When the moon catches
     the paper spine, the husband turns

his hands beneath the glow, sees
     the calloused pads of his thumb, hard

knuckles. He thinks,
     “I cannot believe these are my hands.”

Janet Butler

Janet Butler relocated to the Bay Area in 2005 after many years in central Italy. She teaches ESL in San Francisco and lives in Alameda with Fulmi, a lovely Spaniel mix she rescued in Italy and brought back with her. Some current or forthcoming publications are Mason’s Road, Assisi, Caduceus, and The Quotable. She was awarded 1st & 2nd place, HM, in the Bay Area Poetry Coalition’s annual contest for 2012. Her most recent chapbook is “Searching for Eden” from Finishing Line Press.

Adam

Sometimes, at night, he almost forgot.
Sky, with it glitter of hard stars, was a comfort.
It pulled him beyond imagination, on journeys
trusting in the hand of God for guidance.

A plump moon, burnish to a clear cold brightness,
soothed him, its barren beauty alien
to the lush greens, ripe fruits and perfect days
behind him.

He heard, again and again, that heavy thud
as the gates closed. Heard confusion rattle and build
as they walked dusty paths that led nowhere,
condemned to life.

Alejandro Escudé

Alejandro Escudé received a masters degree in creative writing from U.C. Davis, where he won the 2003 University of California Poet Laureate Contest. A chapbook entitled Where Else But Here was published by March Street Press, December 2005. A second chapbook, Unknown Physics, was also published by March Street Press in 2007. Among other journals, his poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Rattle, Phoebe, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, as well as in an anthology entitled How to Be This Man, published by Swan Scythe Press. He works as a high school English teacher and is a father of two, a husband, and an avid golfer.

The Country of Poetry

There’s a letting go that happens if one is old enough.
Then one walks the garden, hands clasped behind like Plato
In the nothing hours, reciting a verse from Kings:

Concerning this house which thou art building, if thou
Execute my judgments, and keep all my commandments
To walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee,…

I climbed over branches above dirty, broken toys
With the boys with whom I played soccer in the rainy street
After summer storms in a barrio of Buenos Aires.

Now I stand on a sacred bluff in Malibu by Father Serra.
Below, a chateau, empty white stables, where crows disperse.
A man strolls with two giant dogs beside a cold pool.

Jerrold Yam

Having completed National Service in Singapore, Jerrold Yam will be pursuing undergraduate Law at University College London in September 2012. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Mascara Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Ceriph, Softblow, Symbal, Moving Words 2011: A Poetry Anthology, Singapore Memory Project and The Substation Love Letters Project. His debut book of poetry will be released in early 2012.

 
Bargain
 

After the gamble, still or sparkling, comes breadsticks

rooted in sea salt, alabaster soil, their tendrils

like branches conspiring toward lamplight, they are

going for the same thing, the nourishment

which decides someone else’s failure. A treat—

scanning the menu like a family tree, your eye

sipping columns of carne and pesce to beam

back the worth of your establishment, your illustrious

silver-haired crime. Of course, as any jury

in a court of paper justice, we know the boundaries,

how not to expect devotion aside from the gastronomic, no talk

of simmering in iron cubicles, the week

denied, then consumed in hushed incisions.

How dust claims ownership of every dormant skin,

even knives. When the bill arrives

numbers fill our heads, we each choose one and

exclaim as in an auction, the price of eating together,

your hands bound like rope on the table, satisfied,

the aftermath hauled into harmony, a successful thing,

this is our game, guessing the worth of things to

find every answer lacking.

John Stocks

John Stocks is a widely published and anthologised writer from the UK. Recent credits include an appearance in , ‘Soul Feathers’ a poetry anthology, alongside Maya Angelou, the English poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, Bob Dylan , Len Cohen, Rimbaud and Verlaine. This anthology was the second best selling poetry anthology in the UK in January, is raising money for cancer care, and can be ordered online from Waterstones UK. He also features in ‘This island City’, the first ever poetry anthology of poetry about Portsmouth, also available from Waterstones. In 2012 John will be launching a collaborative novel, ‘Beer, Balls and the Belgian Mafia’, inspired by three of his primary interests.

 

Last Orders

 

This is where the half ghosts gather

Nebulous, intimate with gloom,

Where time dissipates with tender sips

Of solitude or comradeship.

 

This is where bitter men drink mild,

In a hollow space God empties

With coffee spoons, separateness

As poignant as a parting kiss.

 

This is where reflection resides

Gazing into the fireside;

In the eyes of the old miner

Patiently waiting for his shift.

 

This is where last orders are called

On men who have given their all,

Fought their causes, done their duty

Lived, as they were told men must do.

 

On men who have known loyalty

The beauty of great friendship,

And bitter deceit, betrayal

Victory and defeat, in equal measure.

 

This is where tired souls are replenished

And where we come to honour our fathers

To make peace with their dreams and with ours,

With cautious words, much left unsaid.

Gary Glauber

Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and music journalist. His works have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and one was named “A Notable Online Story” by StorySouth’s Million Writers Award panel. He took part in The Frost Place’s conference on teaching poetry. Recent poems are published or forthcoming in The Compass Rose, The Fine Line, Front Porch Review, Kitchen, The Single Hound, Manor House Quarterly, The Ghazal Page, Corium Magazine, Petrichor Review, Forty Ounce Bachelors,The Whistling Fire, Xenith, The Newtowner, Red Poppy Review, Prompt Literary Journal, Sparkbright Magazine, Midwest Literary Magazine, The Legendary, Prompt Literary Magazine, and StepAway Magazine.

Theorem

The perplexed mathematician
is mired in theories, his nights an array
of hypotheses and proofs. He seeks
to rise above this base, aspires to be
more than mean, far beyond average.
Like any other, he wants constants,
a congruent way to ascertain
the difference between two points
or more, a way to translate the graph
into reality, sums as solutions.
His expression belies past inequalities,
playing distant hypotenuse in that
love triangle of yore, protractors as weapons,
bisecting what he had come to believe,
whole numbers once happy as pi
with love’s linear and exponential powers.
Now as he approaches his own midpoint,
dreams of that world of Fibonacci sequences
have faded into some emotional quadratic equation.
With a greatest common factor of zero,
his life lacks logic, a plane extending off the axis,
with tangential points unable to be plotted.
There’s no quotient for this quotidian existence
and he looks toward a heavenly vertex, wondering
which in fact is his guardian angle. Acute seems
far too precious, and right seems so very wrong.
The epiphany lies somewhere between the sum
degrees of complementary and supplementary:
his is obtuse. The angle controls him, lonely as
any prime and seeking adequate expression,
yet he is slow to fathom how the factors
of his long division might never add up at all.