Category: Poetry

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Poetry

Fires in Los Angeles

Poetry and Photography by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

PUT OUT THE FLAMES: 01:12:2025

Rain is no consolation 
but it is as essential as 
sunshine, even more 
so as the white smoke
and fire flow is what 
your camera spotlights 
for miles. So many dreams 
destroyed. Each helping
hand is in need of rain, a
sea of rain to put out
the flames. Rain is no
consolation but crucial.

WEATHER REPORT: 01:22:2025

Behind the tree
The moon’s reflection 
On a cold Wednesday morning

The fires in the distance
Still burn this winter season
With no rain in sight in the West

Acres burn, homes burn
And back in the South and East
Freezing temperatures and snow

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California, works in Los Angeles in the mental health field, and is the author of Raw Materials (Pygmy Forest Press). His poetry has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Borderless Journal, Escape Into Life, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press. Kendra Steiner Editions has published 8 of his chapbooks.

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Poetry

Warning Archery by Rhys Hughes

Photo Courtesy: Rhys Hughes 
Warning Archery, Bowmen of Gower
please keep to footpath
that orbits the tower
and have a nice bath
after your ten arrows strike the target,
wash off each frown
and glower in a sour juice of flowers.

We don’t want grimy archers
sitting at the table
if they are able to scrub off the mud
that must accumulate
on trousers and boots
when taking root in a meadow next
to a dark slimy lake
and twanging bowstrings like lutes.

The truth is that Fate
likes to make the souls of maids ache
by giving them work
they don’t need, cleaning up
after filthy archers who trample dirt
happily into rugs
and smugly blow
their noses in old flapping tapestries.

Who is hurting?
The targets that look like porcupines
or the domestic staff
toiling in the castle: are they riff-raff
to be treated so badly?
Sadly, the archers don’t care:
just for a dare
they jump on the table, dance while
still able, trample
lumpy puddings
and cakes until they are flattened to
slatternly shadows.

They regard themselves as belonging
to a privileged elite
who by divine right are always neat,
no matter how stained
their attire: I rapidly tire of the pains
the fellows inspire.
Dishevelled like wet dogs made from
old socks, they pulse
and steam from the hearth-fire’s heat
like scheming brains.

Bowmen of Gower,
grim was the day you learned the way
to strap on a quiver
and sew the sky
with arrows one after another, until a
passing raincloud
was stitched too tight for a bright sun
to break through.
What should we do? Lurk in a gloom
forever because
you decided to score points in the air?

It’s not fair on the rest of us.
We serve you cider
and ale while you laugh without fail
at jokes that wrap
anecdotes like cloaks,
keeping score and
spilling while swilling your furious
brews, until we break
the news that you fixed: these rickety
tricks of desire
have pernickety fires at their core.

The whippletree of destiny
distributes the load
unevenly on the backs of our souls
like uncertain rhymes.
Bowmen of Gower,
nobody knows how to encode
your arrows’ marrow:
bones in flight, a skeletal sight
for sword eyes.
Please choose another pastime!

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

Green by Mark Wyatt

Mark Wyatt
                GREEN

Mine is a diminishing language. Once universal, so
healthy and happy, I sang in the forests, had many
specialised terms for aspects of leaf that flutter
or cry in the tiniest wind. I gave oxygen, and not
botany classes, which come late to save ecosystems
now. I do my best to instruct, offering pot-plants
as semi-colons that help you to rest in your homes
but where is the weight of my vocabulary? I'm ever
shrinking, slinking away in Brazil, decapitated by
acid in Northern Germany. I am almost a leprechaun
trying to explain how an emerald isle is different
in feel to planet Uranus. Your mythology gone, how
will you cope with dryads in Greece or the outlaws
of Sherwood Forest, which exists only in verdigris
I wish my world was a young girl sick of chlorosis
as conservationists offer fruit, mowers brush hair

Mark Wyatt lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East. His pattern poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Ambit, Full Bleed, Greyhound Journal, Hyperbolic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Osmosis, P.E.N. New Poetry II (Arts Council/Quartet), Sontag Mag, Typo, and elsewhere.

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Poetry

Eco Poetry by Adriana Rocha

Adriana Rocha 
LORD OF THE FOREST

Lord of the forest,
Home of birds,
Host of leaves,
Strong soldier,
Elder and wiser,
You have lived centuries.
And still noble,
Strong roots,
Gentle arms
That even naked,
In the coldest winters
Remain beautiful;
Air producer,
Silent life,
Please remain strong,
Because I want to use
My words
To celebrate you for 
A thousand years more. 

OCEAN

The blue of ocean
Comes in many tones,
The blue that is captured
By artists and painters
Is different from the blue
Where millions of creatures
Live. It is changing
And we are killing it,
But we can stop.
We can make it happen,
By reducing our trash
And use less devices,
Saving energy and plastic

Adriana Rocha was born in Bolivia. She is a psychologist who has been writing for five years and has been published in three languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese. She believes in the healing power of art, and she has found in it, both a way of expression and reflection.

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Poetry

Tomorrow We Will See

By Owais Farooq

Tomorrow we will see
When my solitude barks
And dances, the gift I’ll give,
To my awaited self.

It’ll be a small bouquet
Of tears stitched with a string,
Wrapped in the world’s eye.

Without your insisting, we will
See the house in which,
Next to memory’s sparrows,
Someday I will die.

Today, inside me the pigeons
Are dying, and I wonder
Who will gather their bones,
For the ultimate doomsday?

Between today’s dying
And tomorrow’s death we will
Watch the grand comedy,
On life’s psychiatric screen.

We will hear the laughter
To claim the evanescent tragedy,
And bury our unblinking,
Eyes in our hands.

Dr. Owais Farooq is an aspiring writer from Kashmir currently based in Delhi. He has done his PhD on the poems of Agha Shahid Ali from the University of Delhi.

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Poetry

Mother Superior’s Pigtails

By Ryan Quinn Flanagan

One pulls at the arm of the slots and waits for luck.
It is much the same after a fine gully washer,
following Mother Superior's pigtails home;
young love starting out: unrequited and misunderstood.
That early schoolyard of cursed land and red rovers,
expeditious tetherball hands in opposition:
Come reed or root, the storm-belly sings!
What an appeasing lightness I find,
by just a simple swift yank of the lamp chain.

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

Poetry by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan

Jyotish Chalil Gopinath
KOEBNER*     
                                                                                  
Obedient scales 
march up my body 
single file, where nails lodge.
 
It is not enough
for deformed skin 
to don the camouflage 
of silvery plaques, memorials.

Lift each up
and discover 
the changed base.
Unrecognisably worn,
undeniably torn, tissue.

Texture 
that has morphed.
Unbecoming, melded.
Little wellsprings spurt red
underneath the forgotten cause.
A scrawled signature of old blood lines.




*The Koebner phenomenon refers to the appearance of skin lesions, usually in linear crops, as a response to injury, in individuals with chronic skin conditions including psoriasis.

Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan is a nephrologist and researcher. The Coppiced House, his first collection of poems, was published by Writers Workshop in 2024. His poems have appeared in Poems India, The Punch Magazine and Poets for Science and are expected in 2025, in Muse India and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

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Poetry

Dual Nature

By Bibhuti Narayan Biswal

De-Broglie coined the concept of material duality,
It explains the existence of material particles in reality.

Duality means wave character and particle character,
Duality matters for the universe for every matter.

Dual nature amalgamated from Thomas Young’s experiments,
August Fresnel’s transverse wave concepts.

Radiation of light shows a dual nature,
Phenomena of diffraction and polarisation owe to light’s wave character.

In light and shadow, every waves and particles secretly play,
Matter's dual nature in visible world, is physics' grand display.

In duality's realm, truth forever swings,
Unfolding secrets of dancing Quantum dots and photon beams.

Duality in the universe works in a spontaneous manner,
When we change the ‘invisible’, then the ‘visible’ changes occur

Duality is the daily reality,
Mass and Energy
Hot and Cold,
Light and Darkness,
Cause and Effect,
Micro and Macro,
Action and Reaction,
Positive and Negative,
Fast and Slow,
Outer and Inner,
Morning and Evening,
Pleasure and Pain,
Sorrow and Happiness,

No matter how living and non-living beings are classified,
Their dual nature will keep everyone in the universe correlated.

Matter's dual nature is just one of nature’s display,
Science shows  duality in everyday and everyway

Bibhuti Narayan Biswal is a passionate science communicator and science lover. He has been working as a school thought leader for two and half decades. He has to his credit three publications in Consilience Journal. He can be reached by email via Bibhuti.nb@gmail.com

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Categories
Poetry

The Sandman’s Song & Pete Rose

By Michael Burch

Spring by Joseph Rubens Powell (1823-1896). From Public Domain
THE SANDMAN’S SONG 

I sing white water,
    birds on the bough,
        bunnies and redwoods
            to sleep ... to sleep ...
I sing, “Wild forests,
    green meadows, blue seas,
        drink deep ...
            drink deep ... drink deep ...”
I whisper, “Bright robins,
    please, be wise,
        and wily weasels, close your eyes ...
            fierce eyes ...”
I bid all the rivers, “Come, seek your beds!”
    I bid all the children, “Off, sleepyheads!”
         then softly shutter their eyes ... 
            eyes ... eyes.
I lullaby, lullaby down the plains,
    echo through mountains
        and moonlit hills ...
            hills ... hills ...
I murmur, “Oh, mothers,
    please don’t rise;
        shadows and stars,
            be still ... be still ... be still.”

And the world sleeps. 


HEY PETE!

(for Pete Rose)

hey pete,
it's baseball season
and the sun ascends the sky,
encouraging a schoolboy’s dreams 
of winter whizzing by;
go out, go out and catch it, 
put it in a jar,
set it on a shelf 
and then 
you'll be a Superstar.
Pete Rose (1941-2024). From Public Domain

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into fourteen languages, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers.

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Categories
Poetry

Gazing at Stars…

Poems by George Freek

From Public Domain
I HEAR A MOCKINGBIRD

Time flows into a nothingness 
that we call eternity,
but like an insidious disease,
time destroys unseen.
Was it for nothing
the Chinese sat beside
their venerable rivers,
studying ancient philosophies,
while gazing at the stars,
the stars which saw the pyramids built,
and empires fall like a house of cards?
Unconcerned, time flows over me,
as it has flowed for centuries.
From the passions of twenty-one
to the sorrows of sixty-three
is a short time
in the history of mankind.
It seems even shorter to me.


AT THE END OF A SHORT LIFE

Coming to its end, the year
is like a snake crawling
into a hole through 
a rain-soaked field.
Years swiftly pass like winds,
as they appear to descend,
unnoticed, from the sky. 
Clouds like trucks roll by 
as if on an invisible assembly line.
Stars explode like cosmic firecrackers,
when they finally die.
Writing a poem for me,
is like climbing a tree.
In the mirror my face is
as ravaged as the Yellow River,
and only a month ago,
I felt like twenty-five,
when my wife was still alive.

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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