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.

David W. Landrum’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Right Hand Pointing, The Shit Creek Review, Small Brushes, and The Blind Man’s Rainbow. He edits the on-line poetry journal, Lucid Rhythms.

David W. Landrum’s poem “When” will be in issue #1 of Liebamour Magazine.

[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.

Neil Ellman has been published in numerous online journals and has two chapbooks, both dealing with ekphrastic poetry, forthcoming. Two more of his poems will be in Issue #1 of Liebamour Magazine.

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

Based in San Francisco, Joel Cretan has been using computers to create outlandish designs since he was four and Macpaint was five. His work tends toward high color saturation and solid shapes, but the more unifying theme is the method, not the result. His main interest is the relative ease of creating fantastically detailed and colorful forms afforded by technology. Illustrator, cell phone cameras, Crayola crayons and the venerable Macpaint 1.5 remain his primary tools.

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.

Donald L. Pesavento was raised in Chicago, instilled with mysticism, nurturing an innate sense of the wondrous. The poetry reveals a predilection for the surreal, embellished with lush lyricism, emboldened by sensual symbolism. Literary influences have been a cosmopolitan mix of myriad voices, including Quasimodo, Aleixandre, Alighieri, Vallejo, Lorca, Neruda, Paz, Breton, Supervielle, Eluard, Seferis, Yeats, Eliot, Shelly, Coleridge, and Rilke. Recent poems reside in Underground Voices, Whispers from The Unseen, Danse Macabre, Troubadour 21, The Literary Bohemian, and Think Journal.

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.

A notebook’s wideness, lined wideness,
interpretational whitened wideness
holder of functioning hands

poetic disparity:the small of things
objects coinciding with blind’s Braille
necessity, holds

against an eye’s taught openness:
reveal !

upon opening a light’s ribcage
illuminating the beating function
of life’s

fortunate conceptions.

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California), is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has authored 17 collections of poetry, including “Altered Aesthetics” (ungovernable press, 2009), and “Construed Implications” (erbacce-press, 2009). His poems have appeared at Calliope Nerve, Full of Crow, BlazeVOX, Metazen, Heavy Bear, and elsewhere. He edits & publishes Counterexample Poetics, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. He is also a contributing editor for Sugar Mule, and consulting editor for Post: A Journal of Thought and Feeling. Philosophical studies collocated with his love of classic and avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His website explains further.

More of Felino’s work will be featured in Issue #1 of Liebamour Magazine.