Category: Poetry

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Poetry

Census of Centaurs

By Rhys Hughes


Because a strict bureaucratic state
wanted to know
how many mythological creatures
still existed,
wistful and wise,
on a certain island in the sea
in a state of nature raw,
they sent an inspector named Hector
to find out for sure.

He bypassed temples, skipped the shrines,
rode the northern railway lines,
determined to dispatch his duty
upon the Isle of Tutti Frutti.
He crossed the strait, hummed a tune,
walked into the afternoon.

Past empty huts and dusty trees,
defying heat with tropic breeze,
and near a mysterious ruined fort,
just tumbled stones, he sat to rest,
as evening slipped into the west.

Then in the dark, a thrumming sound!
One hundred hooves upon the ground
or so he counted with his ear
until the silver moon shone clear
and he was able to see with startled eyes
a truly Ancient Greek surprise.

Standing on the long-parched land
were creatures wondrous and grand,
a herd of centaurs, noble beasts,
with coconut shells in every hand!
 
Clip-clop! clip-clop! clip-clop!
Those hard halves were bashed
as if hooves at high speed dashed
over the packed sand of the shore.

One declared, “Don’t be scared,
our intentions are mild enough.
If centaur statistics start to drop,
your government will never stop
harassing the imaginary past
and stripping the myths away.”

Hector listened with attention
as the centaur eased the tension
with kind and musical words,
the sweetest he had ever heard:

“The paperwork demands a throng
of healthy centaurs to make it wrong
for developers to invade our island
and spoil the pristine beauty
of the fabled Tutti Frutti,
and so we double what is real
with melodramatic, sonic zeal.
Fifty centaurs with coconut shells
sound one hundred strong.”

Hector smiled to hear the plot,
a simple multiplication of trots.
“But why reveal to me the joke?”
he asked, because he couldn’t see
his value to the centaur folk.

The centaur smiled, calm and tame:
“Because you are here. Write a report
that will help us to defend our home,
a paper in which the truth can hide.
For unless you fiddle the figures
the bureaucrats will push us aside.”

The herd dispersed into the night,
a magnificent but deceptive sight,
and hurrying back to his home,
Hector planned to construct a spell
of deception for this noble cause,
forever charmed by moonlit swells,
and centaurs playing coconut shells.
From Public Domain

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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Poetry

Poetry by Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy
I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself



Never tell yourself that the megarich
aren’t like you and me.
Billionaires are just ordinary people
who throw away
their electric toothbrushes
every night.

Believe it or not,
genetically speaking,
you have more in common with an oligarch
than with an aardvark
or a sea turtle
or a red-collared lorikeet.

I know this is bitter news,
but that’s what news is—
an acrid, tacky sap
that sticks together the days.
Whoever invented knowledge
was on some sort of sick power trip.

The point is
we all throb with worry
about something.
We all hum on common frequencies
of dread and guilt
and superficial decency.

It’s worth bearing this in mind
next time you read about 
some cute little plutocrats
who will be ensconced safely,
post apocalypse,
in a secret alpine bolthole:

remember the commandment
to love them
as you
track down
their bunkers
and overrun them.

 
How a Year Ends


A year is a road
that ends at the sea
in an afterthought of a town,
just a few weatherbeaten houses,
some indifferent trees,
a small picnic area,
and a one-eyed cat
wandering around proprietorially.
You drove here
because it is here.

The sky is orange and purple,
like a burning vineyard.
And you put your foot down
and plunge off the road.
You drive through the spinifex,
down the shifting dune slope,
across the tide line,
and into the surf,
gunning it into the waves.

The footwell fills up,
the seawater pours in,
the engine is flooding,
the cabin is all foam and confusion,
you’re losing consciousness,
you’re losing consciousness,
and you wake up
parked at the kerb
where you started last year,
soaking wet.

(These poems have been excerpted from Sick Power Trip )

Erik Kennedy is a poet, critic, editor, and performer in Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand. His three books are There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and Sick Power Trip (2025), all with Te Herenga Waka University. His first and third books were shortlisted for best book of poetry in New Zealand’s national book awards, the Ockhams. He also co-edited an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific called No Other Place to Stand (Auckland University Press, 2022).

You can read Erik Kennedy’s interview by clicking here.

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Poetry

Dragonfly 2 by Ihlwha Choi

Poetry and translation from Korean by Ihlwha Choi

From Public Domain 

DRAGONFLY 2

A dragonfly
is flying before a spider’s web.

It is in danger,
like a child playing beside a puddle.

“Hey! Hey! Watch out!”
I cry out in alarm,

but the dragonfly pays no attention.
Perhaps dragonflies have no ears.


hlwha Choi is a South Korean poet. He has published multiple poetry collections, such as Until the Time When Our Love will Flourish, The Color of Time, His Song and The Last Rehearsal.

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Poetry

Monsoon Afternoons

By Aardhra Chandran

MONSOON AFTERNOONS

The first heavy drops hit the dry clay tiles,
smacking a cracked blue plastic bucket left out in the yard.
Mud splatters the hem of an old lungi.
Under the veranda, the concrete stays dry and cool.

An old brass vessel catches the steady leak from the eaves,
clinking a slow, uneven rhythm into the small room 
where the fluorescent tube flickers and dies.

A neighbour drops off a bundle of jackfruit chips wrapped in newspaper,
asking when your train leaves, her voice loud against the sudden thunder.
The wet ink bleeds old headlines across her thumb like a bruise.

The smoke of a green mosquito coil rises from a tin plate,
making our eyes smart in the sudden dark.

We sit on the woven mat, measuring the exact inch of cold air
left between our shoulders against the red oxide wall,
waiting for the sky to clear so you can step out,
leaving three flattened stalks of straw unravelling where you sat.

Aardhra Chandran is a poet and postgraduate student from Kerala, India. Her work has appeared in Active Muse, Eunoia Review and anthologies, exploring everyday life and quiet emotional spaces.

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Poetry

Two Poems by Anne Whitehouse

Mersa Matruh (Egypt)
Cleopatra’s Beach
CLEOPATRA AT MERSA MATRUH


So many shades of blue
existing together
in a sea of clear water
rippling over a beach
of fine white sand. 

A massive rock rose
out of the sea, 
hollowed by the slow 
grind of erosion
into three natural rooms.

In one, a sunken pool
emptied and filled
as the tide ebbed and flowed.

It was here, to her capital,
Mersa Matruh, that Cleopatra 
retreated with Antony 
after the disaster at Actium,
knowing she’d be blamed for the defeat.

All day she bathed in the limpid pool
or sat in the sheltered cool.
She gazed up at the strange shapes
of the water-and-wind-worn rocks,
bright in the blaze of morning,
violet gray in the dimming light.

 
AFTER THE APOCALYPSE


Back then they thought
that if the human race was doomed,  
at least they’d be preserving 
an archive of earthly sounds
on a gold-plated record
aboard the Voyager spacecraft,
like a message in a bottle
tossed into outer space
for extraterrestrials to discover
on the far shores of the universe
on a happier planet than ours,
these last traces of our lives:
beatings of a heart, 
soft mwah of a mother’s kiss,
sounds of wind, crashing surf 
and falling rain,
footsteps and laughter,
the cry of a chimpanzee,
Bach’s harmonies
and Mozart’s melodies
and Chuck Berry singing
“Johnny B. Goode:”
Go go go Johnny go—
unfaded echoes
of our lost existence.

Anne Whitehouse’s poems A Flexible Object Bends to a Quickening Flow. Strawberry Fields.were published last year in Borderless Journal.

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Poetry

Blue and White Nautical Pattern

By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

From Public Domain 
BLUE AND WHITE NAUTICAL PATTERN 

The morning light arrives sudden as a chambermaid
upon my door, knocks lightly begging intrusion, twin straps 
of twisted suspenders coiled around an elevated hook,
and across the floor a carpet to warm the feet in curled gesture,
swearing by its blue and white nautical pattern that 
makes you think of the sea when you are nowhere near
the sequestering salt, the old-time fisherman at their cages
and manning the boning stations at the end of the pier.

I am balled up under covers many miles away, smacking mouth
of dehydration, quizzical morning breath and prying fingers gingerly
pulling sleep from the corners of early eyes.  When I roll over,
a veritable avalanche of: skin, bone, cartilage tumble with me –
and yes, muscle even though the newly awakened untensed  
loosey-goosy can hardly feel it, that charmless escape of such things
before I am again fossil-still; the womb of the mattress carrying my 
thoughtless weight.  Between sleep and wake – magician and mime. 
A slack-jawed float of apparitional silences.
From Public Domain

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.  

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Poetry

Stars Like Lost Children: Poems by George Freek

THROUGH A NARROW LENS                                    

The stars wander in the sky,
like lost children,
not sure where to go,
as time flows like water,
not to the sea, but to infinity.
That has nothing to do with me.
I inch my way towards death,
like a blind mole.
I wonder if I’m observed
by God for his pleasure,
the way I find pleasure,
observing animals in nature.
Or else no God is there.
But I don’t think God
worries too much about me.
I’m part of this universe,
an insignificant part,
that will soon vanish,
and thinking of that 
is what ends my brief reverie.


THE MOON IN HER NATURE

Swallows rise in the air,
circling here and there
drifting off to somewhere.
I don’t know where,
and then they disappear,
like things that were never here.
Falling onto the dying leaves,
rain whispers a sad song.
Do leaves sigh before they die?
But no. They’re only leaves,
as the moon is only a stone,
and it can give
neither hope nor mercy.
It’s only there for its beauty.
When I gaze at it,
on a thoughtful night,
it’s not even capable
of returning that look to me,
so if I were wise,
I would simply let it be.

ME AND MY CAT 

My cat crouches in tulips,
watching a robin eye a worm,
but as a wind comes up,
as fast as a tuba blast,
my cat loses his chance.
A starling steals the worm,
and so the robin 
gets nothing in his turn.
My cat turns away
with disconsolate eyes.
He suddenly senses
what it means to grow old.
As the night arrives
in creaking shoes,
I stare at my garden,
full of dying flowers,
and crumbling stones.
That is where my aging cat
finds the comfort of repose.
From Public Domain

George Freek’s poetry has recently appeared in The Ottawa Arts Review, Acumen, The Lake, The Whimsical Poet, Triggerfish and Torrid Literature.

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Poetry

Confessions by SR Inciardi

CONFESSIONS
 
The pages are dotted by camouflaged confessions 
in black ink like blackened darkness, 
past the reaches of quieted streetlamps 
and the empty calls from birds in the moment, 
yet oddly settling the mind, flipped through 
with snippets of light caught in each instant—
past tense becoming present language 
combining with softer music, air exhaled 
with each turned page, and when each page settles, 
it’s as if a leaf floating to rest, its jagged edges 
smoothed to finish a dream or relive a past—
as if reading what’s written 
could now speak to the rest of my life. 
But once a certain word count is passed, 
there’s so little it can do, reading about who I was then 
and in a second, gone-on to now 
often with empty hands: moments I’d take back, 
the light I thought I saw yet remains unseen, 
the whitened pages of nothing left, 
the aches in the lost print, the fear 
of what will be replayed or come next     
isolated     exhausted     but curiously jumping ahead 
in the light in another early morning.

From Public Domain

SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. SR Inciardi’s poetry has appeared in in various online and print magazines including Green Ink Poetry, Harrow House Journal, Front Porch Review, Grey-Sparrow Journal, Borderless Journal, Written Tales among others. He was a contributor to Green Ink Poetry for their publication on Kennings: Equinox Collections: Autumn released on Amazon in October 2024. SR Inciardi currently has two books of poetry on Amazon that speak to loss and navigating grief. 

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Poetry

Look Not for Me in the Sunlit Paths

By Snehaprava Das

From Public Domain 
LOOK NOT FOR ME IN THE SUNLIT PATHS

Look not for me in the sunlit path.
Look for me
In a honey-hued forest
Where I gather the pieces of my soul 
Fallen apart under clouds 
Hanging from an ash-painted  sky,
Where the chill flutters and flits 
On the dead wings of a  butterfly.

Look not for me in the 
Glimmering morning meadow
But by the crumpled ribbon 
Of a  starlit  river
That has lost its way to the sea,
Where the wind like a wayward spirit 
Whispers to the tired trees.

 I do not move in  the sunlit path
Circling the castle coated in ancient clime,
I saunter along its crooked corridors 
Where the echo of a strangled melody
Settles firm on the walls of old time.


Look not for me by a pleasant door 
Opening to the sunlit lane,
I am a misbegotten shadow,
Waiting to crawl into the purple twilight 
On the cracked window pane.
From Public Domain

Snehaprava Das is an academic, translator and writer. She has multiple translations, three collections of stories and five anthologies of poetry to her credit. She has been published in Indian Literature, Oxford University Press, Speaking Tiger, Penguin and Black Eagle Books.

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Poetry

Love – That’s a Poet’s Beat…

Poetry by John Grey

Florida Scrubland. From Public Domain 
REGARDING THE POETS  

So the poets saved the word “love”
for themselves. 
They had no other choice.
Who’s better prepared to work with it?

Lawyers? Firemen? 
They have their own argot –
contracts and ladders. 
But love? 
In poetry, 
it’s as common as the letter “e’.

There’s nothing formal in its usage.
It’s raw.  
It’s emotion, pure and feral,
the kind that howls at the moon, 
that kisses and claws, 
that burns in the belly 
and hisses in the bones.

Besides, love was being neglected.
So the poets stepped in. 
Cops were too busy. 
Truckers had other roads to travel. 
But love -- that’s a poet’s beat. 
And they walk it daily.


A BOY AND A PEBBLE 

A gold vault of ragwort in bloom,
speckles the quivering pond 
with heart-shaped shadows of leaves.

Sky snoops through treetops.
Its pale blue reflection
makes surface contact 
where it can.

Young enough to despise stillness,
I toss a pebble,
disrupt the bright water.

Dragonflies disperse.
Tiny fish schools 
swim to safety
in all directions.

A disturbed snapping turtle 
rises up, like a splash in reverse,
through the calm eye
of outward rippling rings.

(I was an instigator then.
Now I am a caretaker.)

IN FLORIDA SCRUBLAND

twisted trunks of saw palmettos
don’t know vertical from horizontal
wilted look
to the fronds and flowers
but stubborn roots

dwarf oaks
barely a man’s height
with leaves dry and wrinkled
as a farmer’s face

prickly pear cactus
paddles of spiked green
gripping together
in parched soil

a scrub-jay pecks
a skink slithers 
here and there
in search of beetle larvae

patches of sand
in dense thicket
like the last stand
of an ancient desert 

looks like 
nothing should live or grow here

but never doubt living things



REGARDING THE HEAD

I marvel at heads, 
what’s inside the skull,
under the cheeks, 
crammed within the jaw.

And there’s the ubiquitous nose 
of course, some more ubiquitous
than others.
And the ears, those worthless wings.

When I look at faces,
I’m supposed to think 
beauty or ugly 
or something in between.
But anatomy and physiognomy 
are more my fields.
Forehead to jaw, 
it’s all about symmetry.

And having a head
has got me thinking.
Not bad for a mere
carry-case for bones.


John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Midnight Mind, Novus and Abbey. His latest books, Bittersweet, Subject Matters and Between Two Fires, are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in the MacGuffin, Touchstone and Willow Review.

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