Thanks to Vera West, our Poetry Barista, Malik White, Managing Editor, and PS Conway, Poetry Writer in Residence, for their most excellent curating of poems for this, our fifth April National Poetry Month. And a special thanks for recognizing our support to Ricardo Maldonado of Poets.org.
We had so many poetry submissions we couldn’t publish them all individually, so here is a roundup of all the fine poets that could still be published during NPM. And if you submitted to PS Conway’s NPM 5 contest, we’ll be announcing the three winners shortly. Each will receive an autographed copy of his beautiful book – both in words and art – Echoes Lost In Stars.
Salvatore DiFalco
Lost Among Pines
The pines know where they are,
perfuming the air between them
or exchanging subtle communiqués
in a language only they command.
Stranded among them, would it
behoove us to ask where we are?
Or should we resign ourselves
to the wild, letting our fingernails blacken?
Digging out tubers, roots, and grubs
like soundless beasts, we occupy
ourselves and fill in the emptiness
of the days with our filmy sweat.
We never do find that clearing;
the pines yield nothing but needles.
and we dig and dig till our fingers bleed,
listening for human whispers or rumours of them.
Our Old Shipwrecked Days
Not real enough when you peel away the paint
We enjoyed telling stories about the first meeting.
In a crowded place, many heads in the swirl.
Across the room, a red coat stood out, the girl
in black-rimmed spectacles gawking.
Who knew what was known before the talk
began and it threatened to never end.
Rubbing backs and staring into pints of amber
one could tell the hologram might be real.
Not real enough when you peel away the paint
or the dusty broadloom. No fine wooden floors
to uncover in this half-house, this mud-shed.
All of it sat on misery and liquifying landfill.
And then there were no stories left to tell.
Retelling them led to absent eyes and silences.
Silences continue, a great silence, a hushing.
Nothing need be said again, the unstated thing.
Paradise Lost
What to make of this life
drawn with melted crayons
and the tongue on the frozen
fence telling its own story.
One longs for a ladder with
enough rungs to reach heaven,
that cottony abstraction
tripping the neurotransmitters
that trigger nostalgia.
Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada.
Eric D. Goodman
Percentages
As the polls on the east coast close and
the polls in the Midwest inch closer to the
ends of their lines,
the results are pouring in.
84 percent of voters have a
78 percent chance of getting drunk tonight.
90 percent of voters are feeling
nervous about the outcome, and
20 percent of non-voters couldn’t
care less.
64 percent of party affiliates believe
that this is the most important election
in a generation, but only 20 percent think
their personal lives will change as a result.
59 percent of voters fear the direction the country
will head if the opposing party wins the presidency, and
62 percent don’t really care about governors at all.
32 percent cannot name more than two senators or representatives
from a state besides their own and
10 percent can’t name their own.
27 percent plan to move to Canada, but less
than one percent actually will,
proving that nearly 97 percent of passionate
voters are as good at keeping promises
as their candidates.
Tight Community
We walk the hiking trail, a mass of bodies.
I glance at the other hiker we come across.
They shrink away, horror flashing in their eyes.
I remember a time when we smiled at strangers,
before my individuality was lost
to this collective beast.
I feel a pang of nostalgia for the days
when I owned my thoughts and actions,
could wake to a spontaneous day.
Now we are better. Components
of this greater body,
of this wiser mind.
As I witness our attack on the innocent,
I can’t help but feel detached,
like a not-so-innocent bystander.
Trapped in the throes of assimilation,
we are stronger and solidify survival,
but part of me yearns for that time
when my voice and my will were my own
not cogs in the big wheel
forever assimilated.
Goodman is an author of poetry and novels.
Trista Vallee
And the People Called Out “A City on a Rock”
(in the style of Goya)
Beneath the precipice, bathed in blood
lays machine’s carcass and human failure.
Fire washes their faces.
Earthbound souls call out in desire
for the audience of their lofty counterparts, while
beneath the precipice, bathed in blood.
And those above will never look down from their throne,
their towering walls drown out desperate pleas. They watch as
fire washes their faces.
Those below hiss and spit at their neighbors,
hungry to reach the heavens, to flee from
beneath the precipice, bathed in blood.
The harpies soar above the massacre.
Discordant screams of joy fill the air, while
fire washes their faces.
And oh, the people call out in horror,
Their swords drawn to each other’s throats. And they lay
beneath the precipice, bathed in blood.
Fire washes their faces.
Trista (Soap) Vallee is a creative writing major at Saint Leo
University. She aspires to be a librarian after graduation.
Topper Barnes
Lord Save Us from Stone
It starts up in the mountains by the Buddha
In solid white stone who no one ever comes to
Covered in little white specks of bird shit
That no one ever cleans
To the feet wrinkled like desert floor
Unable to bleed because all the blood
Has gone out of this place, us, these
Pale in the pale white sun
Squinting holi with blind eyes blotted
Out by so many damn years
That it is hard to really care about anything
Anymore
To truly care so that I felt sad
Thought about the way I walked
Or sat or smiled or frowned
Felt that little pinch of of of
If I remember correctly
It was like bad raksi in the gut
The chest smoked up
The dry mouth unable to say what the mind
So clearly read on the pages of brain
To be conscious of all this around
To truly care
Down alleys so narrow the shoulders
Scrap against cement and two cannot
Pass without swallowing a breath
By rivers full of trash and sewage
Where the dogs with swollen cocks
Slowly die in the sun
There is no mask to put on
I have used them all up
They lay shattered in fields
Full of rings and tears
The people are talking loose tongued
Slobbering lips in a place
Where everyone stares at them
With starved little eyes sagging
Without care but full of god-stars
And they say all kinds of things
Like how bad death is and
Broken nails that sting in the sunlight
That is a bad one too
And you know what is worse
A piece of paper that says says says…
It does not say but slits your finger webs
And the worse thing of it all
Is that no one loves me and
There are no more bandages to cover
And one day
I will be nothing and the worms
Will wiggle in triumph over these old
Bones so sad and full of years that
Were wasted talking with words
That proclaimed
Without tongues
Nobody heard
Nobody heard the bones break
Nobody heard the cries in
Empty rooms that were once
So full
Of love and hate and joy and sorrow
Jars of kombucha brewing mushroom-tipped
Jars of nastoyka fizzling with peppers
And blackberries and apples
The rooms have nothing in them now
Except me
I am still here
But I just cannot seem to find a way to care
About myself even
The people talk about art and present
The flies in their drinks and the worms
Crawling around in their guts
How one day we will meet again
And goodbye is not goodbye at all
Syllables scribbled on walls that will
Be covered up with time white and full
Of the void we all share but cannot
Quite say enough about because all
Our words are wasted on other words
I am mute
I am full of sound
I cannot shut the fuck up
Even though I have nothing
To say
It meets in the middle at the cafe where
The coffee is black and sugarless
There are faces on the ground split
Into thousands of little glass pieces
That reflect thousands of pieces
Of me that are all true and false
In there it all makes sense
And I know my lies are truth
Even though the truth makes me gag
At the lime soda with sugar and not salt
Like I asked them to make
We meet in the middle
All of us have no other choice
That little bit of me that used to burn
Like coals on the roadside at dusk
No longer has heat
Our pupils reflect a woman with a bag
Of cement slung around her head
And I think to myself
Well
If she is not crying then I better
get to work
It ends in my bedroom
Alone listening to dogs bark
Thousands upon thousands
Yapping back and forth at each other
With no clear response
Until a bag of trash gets caught in their
Throat and they choke to death
It ends alone
With me myself mine I I I
Lived enough times
It ends with a red face covered in dust
Congested with road and tire
Smiling a frown
Saying nothing
Into the mountains
That echo
Nothing
Back
A Monk Once Told Me
It is easy to be happy
There is no trick at all
You just are
And that is it
I swished a stale swig of beer around in my
Mouth and agreed before lighting a cigarette
Yea, maybe it is that easy
But what about war and duty and ethics and
The children of this earth
Hungry and molested
Dying and sweating in factories
I took a bottle of rice wine from the table
And took a swig
How can I be happy, what gives me the right
When all the sorrow of the world
Pours down faster than I can drink
It is easy to stop worrying
Even easier to be happy
You stop carrying
Then you accept
And then
He took the bottle from me
Pounded it all down in one go
Belched and took the cigarette from my hand
You can drink faster than sorrow grows
This is Topper’s second appearance on Fictional Cafe.
Duane Anderson
The Shrinking Man
They weighed me
at the doctor’s office,
I lost seven pounds.
They measured my height,
I lost an inch.
It matched what else
was going on with my body,
the hair on my head thinning,
the once old faithful penis,
disappearing into the sunset,
muscles fading into a black hole.
My youthfulness, shrinking,
as my age increased in years.
I was slowly dissolving,
ready to go back to my mother’s womb,
a place that no longer existed.
Confirmation
Unconscientiously, I must have
wanted to make sure the knife
I was using was still sharp
as I accidentally cut myself,
but it also told me that I was alive,
and blood still flowed
throughout my body.
Two concerns, fully confirmed,
as I bled out from my thumb.
Time for the rescue squad,
bandages on the way.
The Right Direction
I look over my shoulder,
and what I see
looks somewhat familiar,
wondering if I had been there before
and wanted to return,
or did I want to go there
for the first time in my life?
I look again, and say no,
one happy to move forward.
Onward I go.
Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, NE. He has had poems published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, and several other publications. He is the author of “On the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk,” “Conquer the Mountains,” “Family Portraits,” and “The Life of an Ordinary Man.“
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