Boiling an egg in a paper bag,
a campfire crusade for the captain’s closure
as a shrunken sky ripples and blurs
like an impure sea as wormy smoke
steals an ancient glow melting
races and faiths – they all dropped their genes
as I suck out the yolk with a straw.
For exercise I cycle to the wind farm,
mother of power stomach of weather
lost on plain and slippery shore of doubt.
Penniless I walk on my head for balance,
check my book for sanity and pleasure
circling about my never empty plate
of last chicken Humpty hardened breakfast.

Starting in Cincinnati, still entrenched in the Midwest, Michael M. Marks was schooled during the cold war/fallout shelter era evolving to anti-Vietnam war college days, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones. The first of the baby-boomers, he is the middle child of five born in a six year span, always fighting to be heard. Currently younger than each of his own five children, he recently celebrated his fifteenth birthday for the forty-eighth time.

This poem is part of a larger work called 28 American Sonnets. Below is Marks’ description of the work:

About 15 of the 28 American Sonnets have been published so far. Two more will be in Issue #1 of Liebamour Magazine.

Lizzie Douglas sang, she did.  She didn’t train out of here on the Chickasaw caboose.  No, a stroke robbed her nursing home pillow in 1973.  A synonym for stroke is brain attack.  “When brain cells die during a stroke, abilities controlled by that area of the brain are lost.  How a stroke patient is affected depends on where the stroke occurs in the brain and how much the brain is damaged.” [1] Lizzie was born in Louisiana and performed for loose change in a Memphis park before the microphone transferred her singing to 78 RPM records.  They say she played guitar like a man, a metaphor for instrumental prowess in a patriarchal society.  Her remains lie in a Baptist church cemetery in Mississippi, birthplace of Tennessee Williams.  A headstone honored Tennessee Williams’ grave right after his burial.  She got hers twenty-three years after her death (she was a Negro, you know), courtesy of Bonnie Raitt. Thank you, Bonnie.

[1]National Stroke Association

Joel Allegretti is the author of two collections, the second of which, “Father Silicon,” was selected by the Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006, along with “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy and “Against the Day” by Thomas Pynchon.

His work has appeared in many US journals, including New York Quarterly, Margie and Rattapallax.  In April, Kean University in New Jersey premiered a song cycle based on his poetry.  The composer, Frank Ezra Levy, was for many years cellist with the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra and has a CD of his symphonic work in the American Classics series on Naxos.

My dead relatives
never show
until I masturbate.
Man mad souls
with layers of none flesh
buffering me from
the ecclesiastic.
I finish and fall back
into their arms
just like in the beginning.
As a species we are giddy,
reliably incredulous.
This is a public restroom,
an emotional venue
so I have to be brief.

Colin James works in energy conservation and is a Brother of the Endemic.

is not my idea of clouds
or three-leaf clovers,
you love meyou love me not
do you know what love is? she says
this schizophrenic girl
who by Thursday calls me Charley-Spare-Some-Change,
with Lapis Lazuli eyes and orange-glazed cakes
from the bakery on Sixth Ave.
who lives above my studio
now sitting cross-legged
in three cloud-scudded dimensions,
speaking inpeacock colors
Breaking the back of a mule, she says. Love is.

The neighbors warned me
not to talk to her on Sundays
Sundays are for perculated boasts
and she’s a purplepiedpreacher, they say
as if it were a schizoid’s neologism.
Add up your thoughtsand do they turn into
loose change?
My roommate is a dog walker she says
with a ripple of a smile a flick of the strawberry-haired head
she walks out my door as if in a Svengalli trance
the flash of her saber-smooth calves
my thoughts drift into the air:
we’ll fuck with our Ray-Bans on.

Three weeks later,
no sign of heror the dog walker
I stare out my window at 10:p.m.
only tethered dogsand logical women in the back of white Jaguars
I wanted to tell herabout this dream
of us walking backward on a tightrope,
Fellini-styled
and falling
falling
not even a crash helmet of daisies.

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey, where he skateboards, falls, and sometimes gets back up.

She believes in stones,
their tales of megalithic glory
told by the silence of the ancients.
At Avebury, spiritual omphalos,
she rushed to greet them,
hugged them like long lost friends.
Warmed by the sun
they breathed, they were alive,
they hugged her back;
Princess of Albion.

Seated in the Devil’s Chair
I watched her, pink hair,
zips and leathers a warrior queen.
Many silver bangles sung
as she danced, wove a spell
through the avenue of stones,
standing waiting for her
for thousands of years.
At last! she has come home;
Princess of Albion.

From the temple’s sanctuary
hand in hand along the ceremonial
avenue across Malborough Downs
to Silbury Hill, and why they were called
the Downs when they lifted her heart so
she couldn’t understand.
Having stepped on Neolithic footprints,
we kissed in a Druid circle of flowers,
this was when her laughter became sunshine
daughter of Mother Goddess;
Princess of Albion.

Born East London but now residing amongst the hedge mumblers of rural Suffolk, P.A.Levy has been published in many magazines, both on line and in print, from ‘A cappella Zoo’ to ‘Zygote In My Coffee’ and many stations in-between. He is also a founding member of the Clueless Collective and can be found loitering on page corners and wearing hoodies at www.cluelesscollective.co.uk.