Scream

Karen took care of a baby,
a home health case back in Fremont.
The baby was a living mess.
Off to the worst start you could imagine.
A list of problems longer than her undersized frame.
I think it was a her, I want to say
Jessica like the girl that fell down the well,
but it wasn’t Jessica.
Karen let me hold her.
Be careful, she has a trach, she said.
It looked like that orange spout they sold on
TV you jammed into an orange juice carton.
It kept her thin hopes from pouring out.
Her odds near the same as the Powerball
I remember imagining.
Then she tried to cry.
Nothing.
Like watching a movie
with the sound turned off.
All the annoying babies in churches,
in restaurants, on airplanes; all forgiven.
I hear them all sometimes in my sleep
In a concert of apologies, twisted into a paper bow tie,
bright red, trying to cover her future scar

Steve Christopher was a former airline pilot turned professional songwriter. He owns a small boutique publishing company in Nashville, TN, with over 100 independent and Southern Gospel song cuts to his credit. He wrote and produced 2 music videos that were in medium rotation on Great American Country. He currently is an adjunct writing instructor for Columbia State Community College. He’s married to an amazing woman whom he owes more to than he could ever repay. His most recent poetry credit “Wool” is with 34thParallel, as well as 4 poems in the spring editions of The Más Tequila Review and Paterson Literary Review.

Gift to a Black Sheep

And I asked them
to bore the hole clean and straight,
the circumference of an arm,
directly above where his heart might be.
That I could reach my arm
into the hole in the earth,
make the grand gesture,
thread my fist through frost,
the concrete vault lid, the one
my brother Fred insisted we needed.

Dried floral permeates the grey pinstripe
he looked so good in
not one week prior to his prophetic
bury me in this suit was spoken.

To be fishing through my father’s breast pocket,
to rummage around with unexpected proving-courage.
To feel through his liver,
his lungs, his bladder,
that by now seven years past,
in pithy, chalky, powder-like residue
of a burned branch,
waiting for the slightest anything
to collapse its form.

Until I felt it there…
in the center of what was once his beating heart,
as smooth as a well-worn worry stone,
that I placed against my cheek
still electric, still warm,
wanting it for my own.
Blow the dust off, and clutched,
where I would give it to my brother, Pete.
My father’s approval.
The very thing
he’s waited so long for. So longed for.

Steve Christopher was a former airline pilot turned professional songwriter. He owns a small boutique publishing company in Nashville, TN, with over 100 independent and Southern Gospel song cuts to his credit. He wrote and produced 2 music videos that were in medium rotation on Great American Country. He currently is an adjunct writing instructor for Columbia State Community College. He’s married to an amazing woman whom he owes more to than he could ever repay. His most recent poetry credit “Wool” is with 34thParallel, as well as 4 poems in the spring editions of The Más Tequila Review and Paterson Literary Review.

Sonnet 32

            ​for Gaëtane

Hope is on a branch higher than I can
reach, said the beautiful woman to
the tree. It will fall to you as my leaves
will, the tree said. So the beautiful,
sensitive woman stood and stood, and
the weather eventually grew cold, and the
tree finally shed. She had learned. Now
she lives far away, and the fountains
flow into her pocket, and the cobblestones
ring for her. And in the morning of the
rest of her life, every tree is beautiful
like her; and though she cannot hear it,
planets beyond our solar system sing of
her, and Rome, and of all those that sigh.

Australian poet Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry, with another forthcoming. He has had numerous poems published online and in print. He resides in Townsville. If Michael could have just one wish, he would give the wish away.

Sonnet 4

Troubles? Let the world spin, win heaven and
return it to the landfill; no end to cut
and swallow before things cease to be. The calmest
sky foreshadows the pains of perpetual birth, and
perpetual frailty, and the other end of beginning
sings in the beyond until pain flies; elsewhere
words wait to form, a science four times
more complicated than an animal’s breath, for
two by two they went into the forest and
that forest ever diminishes. I wipe the sky
from the soles of my feet. Into the path of
philosophers and pigs, disingenuously, I throw
pink rose petals. A woman is beside me. Her
centre is the key to my fingerprints, my sky.

Australian poet Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry, with another forthcoming. He has had numerous poems published online and in print. He resides in Townsville. If Michael could have just one wish, he would give the wish away.

Actual Glue

As children; (do you recall?)
we’d try at the glue-caps,
sticking papers together
under the impression they would stick
and now (can you see it?) there isn’t
anything, no caps to twist, no glue to pour,
nothing to make us believe anything
will stick.

Jude Conlee is interested in abnormal things such as human minds and the universe. This sometimes leads to the creation of poems and fiction. Apart from this, Jude plays piano, drinks an awful lot of tea, and tries to make other people’s days more surreal.

Remember Blue Silk?

immense blue Missouri lakes
            embrace Nevada

memorable   /   faded
light blue washing on the line

a party dress
a favourite quilt
a bedroom rug

sun/bathing/days
under rich skies

in contrast
down yesterday’s esplanade

the child’s
snow-chilled mountain

fine-fingered

crayon scribbles

celebrate
in Sanskrit   (sans serif?)

tell innocent tales

of flying kites
on placid school days —
idolise Mark Twain’s Hartford —

a disco-going leather jacket
…and tights

she pins
a mystical kiss
on the wall
in red-stitched
joy

Martha Landman is a South African-born Australian poet who loved reading and writing since a young age. Her profession as a psychologist keeps the pot cooking while she does what she loves. She has published poetry online and offline, and published The Paradoxophies with Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke in 2012. Martha’s second manuscript déjà vu uncentered is in the making.

Sunburnt on the High Seas

            At some point the rain had stopped and the wind had eased.
                        –Ian Townsend

                                                                        S   a
                                                                        U   lone
                                                                        N   sailor at
                                                                        B   rough seas
                                                                        U   a wife, a cat, a
                                                                        R   dog play catch in the
                                                                        N   backyard. A mother cries
                                                                        T   in her sleep.

                                                                        A
                                                                        T

                                                                        S
                                                                        E
                                                                        A

Λ                                                                                                                              Ω
SOS                                                                                                                     SOS
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
angry mid-summer winds shrewdly bustle the sails  The vessel’s
meaning in brutal disarray  A primal swell pelts the sunburnt
face  The masthead vehemently bows towards a cloud-mass
sails blazing zigzag-melodies off-key  Lightning illumina/
tes the horizon  The red sun in the hostile eastern sky
unleashes unspeakable fear in the experienced
sailor longing for a distant arctic shore

Martha Landman is a South African-born Australian poet who loved reading and writing since a young age. Her profession as a psychologist keeps the pot cooking while she does what she loves. She has published poetry online and offline, and published The Paradoxophies with Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke in 2012. Martha’s second manuscript déjà vu uncentered is in the making.