Poets and Artists (O&S, September 2009)

O&S VOLUME 2 ISSUE 6 2009
Self
Portrait
Issue
Jason John
Stephen Wright
Jarrett Min Davis
Denise Duhamel
Jennifer Wildermuth
Richard J. Frost
Billy Collins
Alyssa Monks
Bob Hicok
Steven DaLuz
Rauan Klassnik
Ron Androla
William Stobb
David Lehman
and more …
CON
poets and artists
on the
cover 96 Jason
John
5 Stephen Wright
6 Adam Fieled
7 Jarrett Min Davis
8 Denise Duhamel
9 Billy Collins
10 Marcus Slease
11 Alison Jardine
12 Joseph P. Wood
14 Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Publisher / E.I.C. 15 Luisa A. Igloria
DIDI MENENDEZ 16 Alyssa Monks
Creative Director 18 Andrew Demcak
I. M. BESS
20 Sally Hanreck
21 Matthew Hittinger
22 Kent Leatham
23 Francois Chartier
24 Ellen McGrath Smith
25 Ming Holden
Copyright reverts back
to contributors upon 26 Bob Hicok
publication. O&S:
PoetsandArtists.com 28 Jason Joyce
requests first publisher
rights of poems 29 Coleen Shin
published in future reprints
of books, anthologies, 30 Brian Walters
website publications,
podcasts, radio, etc. 31 Juliet Cook
The full issue is available 34 Kathy Kubik
for viewing online from
the Poets and Artists 35 Steven DaLuz
website.
36 Larry W. Lawrence
Print copies available at
www.amazon.com. 37 Linda Benninghoff
For submission guidelines 38 Jon Damaschke
and further information,
please stop by 40 Elaine Kahn
www.poetsandartists.com
42 Jordan Stempleman
TENTS
43 R Jay Slais 76 Ernie Wormwood
44 James Belflower 77 Jeremy Baum
45 Nina Bennett 78 Jeff Filipski
46 Terry Lucas 80 David Lehman
47 Suzanne Savickas 82 Renée Zepeda
48 Cheryl Snell 83 Leigh Wells
49 Dan Murano 84 Nanette Rayman Rivera
50 Grace Cavalieri 85 Cedar Lee
51 Norman Mallory 86 Grady Harp
52 Mia 87 Patrice Erickson
53 Paul Siegell 88 ChiaNi Hsu
54 Peggy Eldridge-Love 89 Annie Finch
55 Pris Campbell 90 Pauline Aubey
56 Michelle McEwen 91 Barbara Jane Reyes
57 Rauan Klassnik 92 Sarah Zambiasi
58 Oscar Bermeo 93 Kate Wyer
59 Nydia Rojas 94 April Carter Grant
60 Ed Marion 95 Belinda Subraman
61 Ron Androla 98 John Walz
62 Paul Squires 99 Jeremy Hughes
63 Peter Ciccariello 100 Calli Whittall
64 Dave Lordan 101 Emma Trelles
65 Janelle McKain 102 Barbra Nightingale
66 Nick Piombino 103 Didi Menendez
67 Janet Snell 104 Marcus Kwame Anderson
68 William Stobb 105 Melissa McEwen
69 Jennifer Wildermuth 106 Ruben Belloso
70 Fábio Baroli 107 Howard Camner
71 Luc Simonic 108 Tara M.M. Larkin
72 John Korn 109 Angelique Price
73 Craig Hawkins 110 Diana Adams
74 Stephen Russell 111 Luke Meinzen
75 Richard J. Frost 112 Joze Hicks
Stephen Wright
Self Profile oil on canvas 66” X 33” Mouth oil on canvas 66” X 33”
poetsandartists.com 5
Adam Fieled
Enter the Dragon

This is what I amount to:
a connoisseur of cultural
capital, a sweet tooth for
crazy-assed girls living in
wood-floored bedrooms
without shades on their
lamps, a Derrida-reading
Doctor that plays along
with Cream records, I’m
the dragon, born in a snow-
storm in New York, 1976.
A sudden blow: that’s how
sweet joy befalls me, why
I’m dragon-like: lean, green.
Scorpio Rising
My apartment is stark:
four hundred books on
a big Ikea shelf, guitars
(a Strat and an acoustic),
a computer, manuscripts
scattered on a desk, plus
a fridge with whiskey,
eggs, pasta, Brita water,
little else. I am into the
travel light thing, because
my mind is heavy: text-
lust! Imperatives come
into me with fish-hooks—
I dare not resist. Text!
Child of the Moon

Neptune’s Trident: an emblem
I use to channel spirits. I walk
with legends, converse, move
in preordained rhythm to music
made by heavenly bodies. I was
born to be shuttled through the
Milky Way in my sleep, to have
waking hours be dreams, to
plunge beyond time’s parameters
into mystic parallelogram places.
When I die I’ll leave no traces.
6 poetsandartists.com
Shipwrecked oil on linen 32” X 28”
Jarrett Min Davis
Denise Duhamel
I never thought of myself as “the blond” or even “a blond,”

Self- until a young man working his way up
to asking me for a date says, My ex is jealous of the blond
I keep talking about. At first, I think he means someone else,
Portrait in someone other than me. A third woman in the equation.
Then he says, My friends want to know why I keep bringing up
the blond divorcée. I have only recently grasped the fact
Hydrogen that I am a divorcée, the gentle accent over the first “e”
like a hand coming down to pat me on the shoulder,
to tell me things will be OK. I don’t have to be ostracized,
Peroxide like the divorced moms I knew as a child. I’m a cougar now,
accepted and absorbed by the mainstream,
even though I haven’t had plastic surgery, even though
my bank account isn’t exactly purring. I get this, sort of,
but I still don’t feel like a blond—a blonde
with or without the extra “e” on the end. In fact,
I dyed my hair red for over ten years, until I moved to Florida
where it was too hard to keep up, my frizz turning orange in the sun.
So I went back to being blond, but not “a blond” or “the blond.”
I insisted on Jodie-Foster-ash-blond, not Pamela-Anderson-platinum,
the first choice of the hairdresser who was sure
I could pull off. I grew up with dumb blond jokes
and one of my big fears was looking stupid. Another big fear,
looking smart. I had the highest IQ in 7th grade—
the teacher announced this fact to the class
after we took some standardized test. Great, I thought,
now I’ll never get a date. So I tried to act dumb,
then smart again, then I thought that what I really wanted
was to blend in, but that can’t be true—
because then why would I have dyed my hair bright red?
It was an experiment for an article I was writing
for an alternative weekly in New York,
to see if people reacted to redheads differently,
which, I found, they did. Women were less likely to cut
in front of me in line, men less likely to whistle.
I held onto my power in a Clairol box as long as I could.
But now I have a lot of gray hair. To tell you the truth,
it’s easier to be blond because the gray blends in,
just the way I’ve always wanted to blend in
and not. The magazine folded, so my article was never printed.
Glamour ran a similar story shortly thereafter,
blonds on staff becoming redheads and brunettes, reporting pretty
much the same results I’d found. Now I’m middle-aged,
with a middle-age spread. Even though I’m “a blond,”
it’s false advertising. There’s a lot of silver in my hair,
I tell my potential suitor. He says he doesn’t care, reminding me
that I am a cougar which makes him a cub. I catch us
in the mirror—my lines, my loose skin, a wrinkle
in my skirt, his big arms and pressed shirt. I’m nervous
and talking too much, about my doomed
article on redheads for which I was paid a kill fee,
a term I have to explain. He’s relieved
I’m not a murderer. When I ask him if he knows
what a cub reporter is, he squints. I’m 47, I blurt.
He says, Oh, never mind then, you crazy old lady.
Why would I want to go out with you?
Then I begin to roar, the big laugh of a blond cougar.
Billy Collins
Instructions to the Artist

I wish my head to appear perfectly round
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,
please trace the circle with a dinner plate
rather than a button or dime.
My face should be painted with

an ant-like sense of detail;
pretend you are executing a street map
of Rome and that all the citizens
can lift thirty times their own weight.
The result should be a strained

but self-satisfied expression,
as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.
The body is no great matter;

just draw some straight lines
with a pencil and ruler.
I will not be around to hear the voice
of posterity calling me Stickman.
The background I leave up to you

but if there is to be a house,
lines of smoke rising from the chimney
should be mandatory.
Never be ashamed of kindergarten—
it is the alphabet’s only temple.
Also, have several kangaroos grazing

and hopping around in the distance,
an allusion to my world travels.
Some final recommendations:

I should like to appear hatless.
Kindly limit your palette to a single
primary color, any one but red or blue.
Sign the painting on my upper lip
so your name will always be my mustache.
First appeared in Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh, 1991)
Marcus Slease
Self Portrait 1
you you chameleon
your greatest fear
is offending
you grow your
blond mop you you
shave your blond mop
you run you run
across the world
sapless figtree
ashy graze of the eye
you you boy
far from home
a great horse
is waiting
your castle is the
mythopoetic
cabbage
Self Portrait 2
I’m the golden butter
I live to flatter
I live live towards
the border
yeah
Self Portrait 3
I go outside
tonight and locusts
grace my mind I go
outside I go outside
to see the sea to find
my mind to look to look
for the new all ways
to look always
to look for the new
the new shoes the new
toadstool the new
allergy is the new
excuse the new winter
the new paradise the mew
is the news the you the you
is where to look for the new
the you is the new home
Alison Jardine
Self Portrait After Midnight oil on canvas 24” X 30”
Joseph P. Wood
My Biography
grand as Lagos mine
disaster, cruel like Beijing
prison cells, starts & stutters
in my father’s unshaven
ghost, his one night white
Russian, slurred sentiment
upon hearing Brady caught
Reagan’s bullet, son, the stars
are pointless, ditto the planets,
I turned for my mother but
she was the street, the dive-
bombing snow, El’ hurdling
darkness I wished to sip,
narcotic snore, greyhound-
like twitching, in my dream
I became my dream
electrified with a bugle, soldiers’
hard-ons flown half-mast,
thesauruses where Purple
Hearts were pinned, it’s a lie
to claim there are 30 words
for glory, 28 which I know
will never cross my lips
when the funeral car
stops, the sun daggers
its burn, the dead man’s
collar like a dog-eared page
I did not fold nor write.
Joseph P. Wood
Definitions of Son
I am your rope bridge. I am your chasm. I the eyes your daughters
magpie. I the optic scraps. The unfurled copper wire. The falling beams,
the gutted house. I’m the shoebox of yard. The brown, brown Augustine
grass. The pollen fleets, the kudzu clinging. And cling I do. Implode I do.
Stomp my larynx, offer it catlike. I philander, I rumor. I undermine
neighbors. Declaw their infants, chicken pox cats. I sandbag the snow. I
bring you the Styx. I call it a spring, freshen-up your highball. I’m a thick
thread of droll. A brain verging collapse. Three day stubble, a mealy-
mouthed suitcase. Let us take a bus. Let us be the bus. I shall lead you
by hand. I shall name you sweet duckling.
Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Invisible in Me
—Disculpe señor, dónde está el reclamo de equipaje?
—Over there, carousel three.
Because the language I spoke did not match my features,

he answered me in English, his words falling into the well
filled with a lifetime of Tú eres Latina? Why do you speak Spanish?
He can’t know about my grandmother’s trip from Caracas
to New York, where she married my grandfather,
remaining here a transplanted orquídea. He can’t know
about my cravings for arepas, plátanos maduros, yuca, aguacate,
y batidos de parchita y mango. Nor has he seen the faces
of my grandmother and her three sisters painted
on the ceiling of the Panteón, home of Simón Bolívar’s tomb,
El Libertador, muses immortalized for centuries to come.
At my college in Ohio, I sang lead in a salsa band, Gringo Centrál,
the only one able to sing quimbaracumbaracumbaquimbamba
without messing up once, but he can’t know about that.
Nor about my love for Mary, the corazón sagrado, and the painting
of Santa Lucía over my childhood bed at the hacienda, the one
with her eyes on a plate, following eyes that kept me awake,␣
afraid. He answered me in English, not knowing any
of these things because they are invisible in me.
I walked away thinking, If your ears can’t hear what your eyes
don’t see, then I’ve got nothing to say to you in any language.
Luisa A. Igloria
Magnolia
He said, Do not forget me,
which can’t be the anagram of
Regret me. Another summer:

buds of the magnolia push heady scent
into the sun. Their creamy damask
has begun to slide— straps of a cocktail dress
worn past dusk, into dishabille.

They spend it all, until all that remains
is softly leathered: a purse with
counters of loose change, the phosphored
heads of matchsticks they struck,
that flared all the way down the avenue.
Alyssa
Monks
Vaseline II
oil on linen
64” X 86”
Andrew Demcak
Abalone Cove
I see his surfboard scritch-scratched by sand.
Damp bolts of kelp furled,
the hues of lead.
Urchin beds improved after day’s calm.

Mussel-shelled,
soft plink of buoy bells.
Tidal boy gouges an under-carpet of coastline.

Slash of an anxious fin felt,
spattered by the waves’ perfumed crests.
Cock tip salt-white, etched,

a slick turret.
My first sex, spread-eagle on a tern’s nest.
Mirror at Forty
My other self, his face rising roughly shaved,
blood pink, towards mine.
A hooked fish mouth,

some terrible haul brought toughly up.
Still important each morning.

I took measurements.
Truthfulness, that exact little god.

The thin lines, flesh defining stranded pores.
Where is that young man I’d find,

day into day, like a full moon drifting these lands?
He was not as cruel as I am.
Andrew Demcak
Oedipus
Night opens over the street like a wound.
His mouth is wet.
Spring crickets count off in the blackness.

He whispers and gets in bed.
A phone ringing somewhere is answered.

The house groans and settles down on its back.
His swollen feet poke out beneath the quilt.

I read his rose scars like riddles.
Tonight he’ll enter me like a blind man,

as if I were his mother, and he could love her.
Sally Hanreck
20 poetsandartists.com Recovery oil on canvas 70cm X 45cm

Matthew Hittinger
Sketch and Pentimento

Put a pen in my hand and I will sketch
out the terms : before words found me my guise
was pigment, colored pencil pastel yes
acrylic and wood block my canvas name
M D H three letters like two eighth notes
stems connected by a beam but that map
tracks a different theme where the staff maps

clef time and key, ledger and measure sketched
by line and space, rests like periods notes
like words and this time signature disguise
seems to stray from where I started. Erase
then and start again. I was a clown. No
one recognized me that Halloween not

even if I had used a semaphore
to telegraph “last kid standing” my name
forgotten, classmates “who’s missing?” sketchy
unable to realize through the disguise.
And if that moment of triumph denotes
love of deception it also connotes

my long standing fear of the red ball nose
and rainbow wig, white face and masked eyed guise
when real skin is hidden, hermaphrodite
face. And yet I love a good drag queen sketch
lip synch and banter but does that erase
or lace a boy too shy to state his name?

These facts are gone replaced by odd footnotes
like you will never catch me in Skechers
or skinny jeans; if you ever did yes
I’d disavow blame my evil twin map
the points my doppelgänger did disguise
to be a spy, a master of disguise

to hide the final claim made to my name.
It’s all terra incognito unmapped
dream to be a cartographer endnote
letters all rearranged I might never
add that wit or just might threaten wit etched
on my final guise stone or urn last note
to preserve the nature-erased name. Yes
a map. But as for treasure? Come and sketch.
Kent Leatham
Because it’s the fourth of July I sleep

Patriotism, late then finish reading “The Sun Also Rises”
after which I masturbate to prove that despite
or, Let the my empathy with Jake Barnes I’m no castrato
although I would like to be an expatriate except
Children I’m lazy and love living in California too much
even with the Governator and earthquakes
Boogie and wildfires every summer and the cost of living

which reminds me I need to buy groceries but instead
I watch Rob Reiner’s “The American President”
where Michael Douglas and Annette Bening reveal
that love can conquer anything including credibility
so I follow it with the true story of “Boys Don’t Cry”
but that’s too heavy so I go buy groceries after all
since the co-op down the street is open all day
because Americans still believe the pursuit of happiness
is a right which means we should be able to buy
beer and hot-dogs any day of the year, even
if that requires making the local teenagers
and immigrants work on holidays, but I guess
the idea is to give them something to look
forward to by way of better jobs where they
won’t have to work on holidays, and anyway
I’m not buying beer and hot-dogs I’m buying
sushi and soda which I eat and drink while listening
to Leonard Cohen and Neil Young and that
David Bowie song “I’m Afraid of Americans”
which was beefed up by Trent Reznor to make
Bowie sound tough to a new generation that
wouldn’t be as inclined to idolize a sexually
ambiguous Martian even if he was the nazz and had
that ridiculous codpiece in Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth”
and condemned Willem Dafoe to death in Scorsese’s
“The Last Temptation of Christ” and played
the Elephant Man on Broadway because in America
anyone can do whatever they want if they
are famous and don’t get caught using ethnic slurs
or prepubescent girls or tax breaks, but hey
one shouldn’t criticize one’s country even jokingly
at least not on a holiday when they let you sleep in.
for Peter Jay Shippy

Francois Chartier
Self Portrait acrylic on canvas 58” X 58”
Ellen McGrath Smith
The phone didn’t know anyone
Self-Portrait in the building, abandoned as it was —
the building — its ligaments
languid, laconic.
at Forty-Six The phone didn’t know any sausages
uncooked and linked as
depicted in comics to
distract the watchdog —
holy mac! and KAPOW! In swings
a policeman like an echo.
Still the phone made its sound,

a kind of spell in which
the ears get taller (like
a dog’s do): hence, the need to
pick it up and say a little
something.
We would walk up Bigway Avenue

and, each time we passed
the payphone, stick a thumb into
the Coin Return.
One day, it came out
covered in Cheez-Whiz.
The payphones so autistic

on the sides of those
abandoned buildings.
How will those fixed locations
flag us down today, when
Plexiglas is nothing but
a lung wiped clean of oxygen,
a sausage casing holding the idea
of meat? Now, the cochlea roll
inside the pockets,
in the bag, or in some cases,
what they call a skin
for I-phones. What a phone
might do is called a tone
now, tony gadgets knowing lobes
and tongues. The size
of an Adam’s apple
(in some cases, even smaller).
I wish phones stood still

like they used to,
like houses of god,
like tombstones,
antimacassars,
and two-toed sloths.
What is that moaning
against the wood table?
Whose cattle are
lowing, whose new
baby wakes? You say
it’s your phone that’s on
vibrate. I say it’s
the place where your
stomach used to growl.
Ming Holden
origin
On my way to yoga, white-flower smell
stopped me. Man’s bright
eyes crinkled across street
at me in question. In thrumming room
where high bell of
neighbor’s basketball rang
through foam mats, movements
to open hearts. Inside the
body I tend to leave
in thought a sage-ridden
endoskeleton of seared grass.
Wide-skied wide-
streeted between stomach
and collarbone. Line of cottonwoods
past which I sped over and
over learning to ride bike knocked
between hipbones and ribcage, disturbing
womb. After class: threaded long aching
evening through to grungy
city room, but in suspended
hour of breath: traced inward to why green
leaves afford not. Where I
was born same open land. Where I
was born leaves been dry for weeks. Where I
was born breaks apart to shrapnel,
reassembles in
blooming shape. Thorns
around heart own
bones, splintered.
Bob Hicok
self-portrait of a self-portrait
you=eve
poets want to be painters. painters
want to be musicians. musicians
want breakfast at the oddest times.
i have painted myself

out of the picture:
i am the japanese maple
holding the hand of the woman
holding the diamond parasol
holding sunlight hostage
in the upper right corner of everything
that has happened so far.
we had been trying to characterize our love.
our love is going to spain and running

with the peonies.
our love is a futures contract for soy.
our love is a six year old

who knows the satellites of jupiter. io. ganymede.
then she heard the rustling of my leaves,

saw a robin land on my abundance,
stood within my shade, the dawn
of a new erogenous zone, and did not ask,
where have you gone, but asked, how long
have you been a forest inside?
this is what i see

when i don’t look in the mirror: art.
Bob Hicok
when i look in the mirror,

i see a chin the size
of other people’s scurvy moods
on monday when their lives
haven’t changed, half- and shit colored moons
under my eyes, see a cold regard
of my cold regard, as if
i am an atom bomb given consciousness,
who thinks, what of it:
since there is a beginning,
there has to be an end,
and doesn’t the mushroom cloud
remind the imagination
of itself?
you asked
if i’ve ever thought of painting myself
and i have thought
of painting myself green
from head to toe.
green tongue, green penis, green knees, green eyes, green hope,
orange fingernails.
for contrast.
so when i touch you, you feel, for once, that pumpkins

love you, that citrus
has your clitoris’ back, so to speak,
so to sway, so to live brightly
at the heart of it all.
Jason Joyce
Whatever Happened to TGIF on ABC?

I’ve
(played with famous bands, met and dined with notable people, helped
the guy who played Bogy Lowenstein in 10 Things I Hate About You write
a new joke, had sex with friends, regretted it, pushed away long time
friends, regretted it, signed autographs, developed arthritis, saw
justification for higher education, worried too much, overanalyzed,
underestimated, rushed, slept in, stayed the straight edge, caught the
Twitter bug, been honest with strangers, lied to close kin, started a half-
sleeve, wanted to see other countries, filmed skits with Hollywood eyes,
written songs I’m proud of, played shows to ten kids, read important
books, played shows to six hundred kids, lost friends to girls, lost my
religion, discovered amazing bands, text-text-texted, grown closer to best
friends, been ran over by a golf cart, threw many many concerts, stepped
on toes, worn sandals every day for a month, been guest-listed, wanted a
girlfriend, let my body language speak too loudly, scored six goals in a
lacrosse game, been an asshole, watched horrible b-movies, laughed
until I peed just a little, made mistakes, made amends, caught my
roommate having phone sex, weighed my options, kissed on the first
date, led someone on, had a drug dealer buy me a cheeseburger at 2
a.m. at McDonalds on the rough side of Nashville, started eating more
salad, been hit on by girls…and guys, decided to pass out whenever my
blood is drawn, thought I knew what was best for people, been front row
for this roller coaster called confidence, worn high heels, let secrets slip,
held standards, hands and grudges, saw the ocean for the first time, had
doubts, held out, wasted peoples time, pissed off the homeless, taken
satisfaction in proving others wrong, played jokes on strangers, rushed,
waited, obsessed over plans, lacked self-control, thrown a couch off a
balcony, slept on the floor of an airport, stared at the stars, shopped
shopped shopped, convinced a lot of people that Patrick Ewing and Will
Smith died, watched friends marry too young, gotten excited by the small
things, figured out why divorce rates are so high, threw mousetraps at
two cast members of Whose Line Is It Anyway, took a girl with multi-
colored hair and eyes done up like circus tent stripes on the perfect first
date, been the target of an ex’s drunk dialing, wanted to hunt ghosts,
started pursuing this silly dream of being a writer)
started living this past year.

Who the hell do you think you are?
Coleen Shin
The Photo
staring into the little pink camera
arm’s length away
channel Veronica Lake
for posterity, a come on
into me, into my gaze
one last time, before I waste
take it, shop it, the blue circles
under my eyes
the brown splotch
high on my cheek, airbrush
the fatigue and the change
the odd little dot, a blemish
that wasn’t there yesterday
the leach of encroaching age.
I want you to remember me
what I am going to say
I am not afraid to die
not afraid of the slow demise
I have lived with the disease
of remorse, of guilt
of wonder brought on
by altered chemical states
I have prayed to random entities
to absolve me of pain
prayed like a child does
before sleep, with absolute faith
prayed wailing like a mother
her child excised from the womb
bled out on the table
while surgeons shook their heads
left the room
the photo, one moment
clear eyed
a woman who made mistakes
made pie, made hay
made strange music
made a mess of things
made love in a graveyard
under the stoned angel
his heavy feathered wings
Brian Walters
Inside Brian Walters is Nothing

But foam. But frog spawn. But spit and
fine-spun froth, utterly useless, tasteless
and fat free. But crappy Halloween candy
unwrapped and stuffed with needles
or razors or broken glass. But plastic forks
with broken tines. But bullet-holes,
piss in gas tanks and un-detonated land
mines rusting inside the sandbox
where retarded children go to die.
Inside Brian Walters is nothing but the cat
shit inside the sandbox. Nothing
but the worm inside the bird inside the cat.
Before that, nothing but the worm’s stomach
he dissected once in high school,
pinning it to some Styrofoam tray.
Nothing but a migraine right now
exploding behind his eye. An abandoned
library in that part of campus where no one
goes to learn or even shirk off learning
anymore. Jerk off. Inside Brian Walters
everything is so long dead that not even
moss will grow in its corpse’s rotting muck.
No lichen around its headless
stump for decaying pigeons to roost on.
No moldy leftovers left in the fridge.
Jerk off inside Brian Walters. Spill your
juice and spray your seed all over
everywhere, still nothing will grow.
Big, bright swaths of nothing as far as
the eye can see. Nothing here or there
sprouts in row after jagged row like poppies
in the fields of Afghanistan. Like fish,
floating along the Florida coastline, dead
and bloated, that desperate seagulls eat
then fall from the sky. Inside Brian Walters
is nothing but an old tape recorder
full of previously recorded messages
playing whatever you want him to say.
Of course you’ve heard this all before.
Name one new thing he’ll ever be able to tell you.
Juliet Cook
Self Portrait as Stuffed Pepper

Precocious green glowing outside, gutted inside.
Like an alien on a plate, posing as an edible self
portrait. I just might be designed for consumption.
I might be a messy quick fix, stowing secretly
a choking hazard in the midst of flapping lips.
Before you take off my flabbergasted flapper lid
and inspect for saucy or seedy trickery; see what I am
cooking in here, what I’ve been stewing secretly…
Do you call it dressing or do you call it stuffing?
Do you call it lovemaking or do you call it fucking?
Do you call it sexy dissection or ugly striptease or
silly slits picking at food when they should simply eat
or be eaten? At least I’m good with spicing.
At least I’m good at knifing my own wicked witch.
My bestial female flow, posing as your seasoned spill.
Juliet Cook
Self Portrait as Queer Cane Toad

This isn’t sugar cane. This isn’t sweet.
Semi-comatose in the deep freeze,
I won’t be eaten. I won’t even be
licked for my mind-
altering properties. This isn’t savory.
I’m a wart-covered invasive species.
I’m a poison-glanded obstacle,
just waiting for you to catch me
like some seeping disease.
Not like a gingerbread girl at all;
that was just a silly tease. Lumping
myself in with sugar cube edibility;
falsifying my true identity as akin
to the fairy tale anomaly, but no princess
will kiss me unless she is oddly drawn
to bufotoxic bisexual bestiality.
Juliet Cook
Self Portrait as a Slab on a Slab

I’m a little slice of pound cake in a little coffin,
served with a little container of half & half.
Where will you pour the creamer?
I’m a cut off braid with silver threads,
served on a silver platter. Split ends
unloose themselves from multiple strands.
I’m a slab on a slab, a plait on a plate,
a poorly shorn lamb on the lam.
I’m sweet, heavy, deathly, hairy.
I’m shaved, heaving, dripping, dirty
with my ruffled bloomers torn off
at the stems. So throw me in. Fast forward
my declension. Will I thrash or gulp?
Will I sink or float? Will I suck it all up
like a sugary sea sponge with teeth?
Kathy Kubik
Poem inspired by the George Ella Lyons poem, “Where I’m From”.
Where I’m From

I am from jello molds,
from crochet needles
and my grandmother’s hair.
I am from the peach tree in our backyard
(leaves rattled like layers of cellophane
over rummaged plastic tableware.)
I am from the Redwoods,
whose rough edges I curved my bones around,
not minding the splinters.
I am from flapjacks and forget-me-nots,

from Michael and Nancy.
I’m from the fools and the alcoholics.
I am from eat all your cereal before leaving the table,
and I’ll tell you about maxi pads when you’re older.
I am from Irish Catholic, going to church and then

sneaking out after communion.
I am from Chicago, France, Ireland, Denmark and Germany.
I am from my great grandfather Christian Nielsen
who courted Alice Dungan and sung the lyrics to Alice Bluegown – until then, she dismissed him.
Afterward, a family grown.
I am from the great uncle with frilly collars
to the ancestors that fought in the Civil War
to my father who fought in Viet Nam
to my husband who fought in Desert Storm.
I am from heavy gilded frames hanging from trees,

from genealogy lines of pictures,
from voices unheard
except when the house echoes and the ghosts come out.
Steven DaLuz
Self Portrait 0509 conte, black gesso on mylar 22” x 18” poetsandartists.com 35
Larry W. Lawrence
The Bedtime Story

Laying on the top bunk,
sister a year younger,sleeping below,
but they weren’t asleep that night.
Mom’s in the living room,
the TV is blaring, she’s chatting
over a cup of coffee, a slice of angel food cake.
It seemed that she liked him, this new man.

The kids weren’t tired and stayed awake,
Clowning, giggling, laughing
like four and five year olds always do.
An hour or so passed,
Mom yells and threatens to make them fall asleep!
The brother and sister laugh, joke some more,
Ignoring the final warning.
The man storms in the room, in a torrent of rage,
spanks both of the children soundly
and the mother stands by,
watching, with a smug look of satisfaction.
“You’ll never marry my mother, I won’t let you!”

is what the boy said choking on snot and slobber.
The children cried themselves to sleep
as they would for the next ten or twelve years.
And they call each other on the phone, decades later
remembering the days and nights, but forgetting more.
Linda Benninghoff
Sun Washed
The place where we meet is always sun washed
straight through the room. The cat Buttons plays
in the window. We eat squash, mashed
potatoes and chicken--before the day’s
light goes out the window and the squiggly moon
comes up. I used to want to see zebras and gazelles.
Now I can only see the space out my window, hear the loon
but feel no joy for the loon or the red spring azalea.
You tell me you still feel joy but you are dying?
How do you reconcile the two? If the fish shine
in the afternoon sea then there must be light lying
over them--if you feel joy then mustn’t that be a lifeline
for you? We thumb through capabilities,
remember, and hang onto what seems possible.
Jon Damaschke
Struggling with a Beast

digital
20” x 30”
Elaine Kahn
Field
At night you watched the city river round
its sooty sloping ledge.
Oh, if the world would only break apart.

If you would break apart--
Come out, come out.
Remember the order of everything there is.

There is a braid growing out of your mouth.
The birds are sinking. You turn away. Your hair

is in your mouth and now the birds have sunk.
The spool of the horizon breaks apart.
Now in a wide, wet field. You’re in a field

with no perimeter. The bluegraygreen,
the everycolor. You are kneeling in
the everycolor, a point within a field.
Your crinoline hangs from a dark magnolia branch.
You’re such a let down with your skirt off and

now everybody knows. You hide your eyes
in your long translucent braid of hair.
Do not forget the sky has other zones.*

Is that a promise--If it was held up to
the light would it wilt to gossamer?
Oh, how difficult it has been to be--

To be kneeling in a field without an edge,
Nearly there.
*
Elaine Kahn
Fields unlock. Fields overlap and do not end.

Your skirt is hanging from your plaited gape.
You’re such a let down, can’t you break apart.
Remember how the city swayed against

its verge. Remember how the city bent.
The sky unspools. Undone.

The field is glowing. If you’re crying while
your hair grows out, then it’s a story.
When finally your braid has left your mouth

you start to sing.
Remember to be brave.
You thread your braid into the slipping sky.

It lifts you up. The field may have no end
but you can float above it. Isn’t it
a pleasure.
Come out.
You break into a million shining points

of light. A million shining points into
the everycolor.
Now you have no end.
Now you are everycolor. Bluegraygreen.
*Quote from the Barbara Guest poem, Imagined Rooms
Jordan Stempleman
Self Portrait photo booth/digitized spray-paint 6” x 6”
R Jay Slais
Happenstance
After the emergence, a held breath
until whatsound on acoustic gland flesh,
tremble of fern leaf like a flight feather wisp
hastens the formation of tough-skin layers

until desensitized, the barkwood surrounds.
The rings are not circular, though some say
they are, more like a three month sap squeeze

then settle for a year gone by in waves.
Theology of the splurge, to high on land for sun
and the rains that fell yearn for nothing but escape.
Finally well rooted, with thick arms along the dirt
into the black depths, soon shadow vegetables and verdure
until the ice storm fall, pruning of great branches that will rattle
an acre on impact. Await the taking by beetles and birds,
the ones who carry all the tiny pieces of my mud to rust.
James Belflower
A Black Volkswagen Beetle

Passes.
A massive Weimaraner barks out its passenger window.
The driver stares.
The noise must be deafening in that petite shell.
I remember thinking extensively about voice. As I write this I am muffled

by a chattering of two finches on the concrete to my right. Must voice
resemble a wing, a petite shell? Another one has come from across the
street and two more have dived on them. What a strange sound, wing
against wing, a rustle of corn leaves.
A rustle of corn leaves. Though this sounds convincing, I can’t recall

having heard corn leaves rub. What I recall is their texture. Judging by
this, corn leaves would make, if imagined rubbed across each other, a
very similar rasp to the impact of bird wings.
The first time I heard a bird fall. This may have been one of the first.
Each day this dog barks. It makes me think it is falling into a crevasse
its mouth slowly fills up.
Nina Bennett
Liner Notes
First time I heard the Beatles
was family night, Ed Sullivan on a black and white TV with my parents,
sister, brother.
First time I heard Pet Sounds

was in the middle of a neighborhood Monopoly game during a summer
thunderstorm. I landed on Nancy’s railroad empire and lost all my money.
First time I heard Light My Fire

was on a transistor radio in my bedroom. I stayed awake all night
waiting for the deejay to play it again.
First time I heard Live For Today

you and I were pressed thigh to thigh as we danced at Roxanne’s birthday party.
First time I heard the seductive bass line of Brown Eyed Girl
we were making out in your parents’ basement, pretending to play ping pong.
First time I heard Fountain of Sorrow

I was nursing my newborn son, wondering who was listening to
Jackson Browne with you.
First time I heard Shake It Up

was in a rundown disco in Warminster where my girlfriend and I went to dance
when we were bored. The cinnamon glaze on her hair glowed purple under the
lights.
First time I heard In Your Wildest Dreams

was on the car radio on my way to work. I had to pull over
because I was shaking so hard I popped the clutch.
First time I heard Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

was in the trauma center in Seattle where my sister died.
First time I heard Wild Angels

was on a cassette mix tape you made me. I hit replay until the tape broke.
First time I heard Traveling Soldier

was in your car on a Friday night, as we drove down Delaware Avenue. I was
glad it was dark so you wouldn’t see my tears.
Terry Lucas
In This Room
There is a long-playing record turning on the turntable. For some time,
the speakers have been faithfully amplifying the scratches residing behind Art
or Miles or Freddie—who knows which?—with a metronomic ticking,
the needle bumping up against the label’s edge, sending the tone arm veering
back across the smooth gap, like a saxophonist swaying on stage, or a drunk
driving a black-iced road on a new moon night, searching for the centerline—
but these are just thoughts in the mind. From another room
there might be the moaning of lovers over the hiss of knees caressing satin sheets.
And who is to say which is more holy? The music or the static
electricity? The arm holding the needle in the groove of the vinyl,
legs rising and falling, out of time, the moonlight flushing the dry flesh
of curled leaves blowing across the road that has tangled itself in the hills
like a necklace in my mother’s long hair fanned out on my father’s pillow.
And what am I but the valley between them? A watershed of snowmelt
and shade. A cry from one far peak to another, an avalanche of sound
echoing between the walls of yet another room,
where the index finger of a trembling hand is lowering the stylus
aiming the needle for the edge of a black vinyl record.
Suzanne Savickas
Blurred
The reflection in the mirror always blurred. She
remained unclear.
Signature in ten variations, attempting to recreate herself. She
avoided her own structure. Continually changed her own name. Modeled
herself after no one. The longer the heel, the shorter she felt. Ran her
fingers through the ground she fell square onto. Impatient with her world,
she wrote a new one.
Cheryl Snell
Sound
Gran turned to God when tempted
to murder her faithless husband,
who came home rolled in a rug.
She tried to save Mother’s soul
in case there was something in the genes,
but Daddy walked in out of the Alberta winter
in his red pompadour and Navy uniform.
The only time he brought his hands together
was to play trumpet for Mother’s torch songs.
I knew all the standards by the time
I could walk, but I never learned a single hymn
until Daddy shipped out.
For years, Gran hurled Scripture through the air
like retribution. Mother pounded it back,
and my life became a staff of running
notes and syncopated rhythms. If only I’d known
how deep silence could be, I might have stayed
a little longer.
Dan Murano
Polaroid Spectra instant photos above: Self Portrait In Triplicate With Clay Sun below: Lucy & Me
Grace Cavalieri
DUCKS Assignations
For years now I look out Uncertain language
the same shining window making its way into my life
from Mrs. Gherardi’s walked me backward to sound,
sewing circle to the stir of the cradle.
when I was four.
The faint moon
The large clear view alone and content then,
overlooking as if it were mine to give,
a water of shadows carried me into the future before
shows three yellow ducks crossing the threshold to leaving.
at peace
without a worry of their own, I am happy to have known you,
not too hot, not too cold, and, although tortured by affection,
perfect lives I am ready to go back into time,
buoyant
soft creatures gratefully flailing against the
complete on a float made bright lights beckoning, and starring
for their pleasure, my dark lucky sky.
How I stayed
while the women in the other room
laughed and talked,
how the center of a rose
opened in me
I do not close,
I kneel close to the glass,
Over and over I see them

shifting water under their feet
without fear,
I still see them
reflected
on the day my mother was happy.
Norman Mallory
Self Portrait in Painting Hat egg tempera on gesso panel 20” x 16”
Mia
Race
This—just because—wasn’t going to be easy.
Four times I changed the title and back again
to what the poem called for the first time.
But what did the poem know about my mother’s
favorite Waterford crystal bowl? That I dropped it
out of my eight-year old hands and watched it
shatter into a thousand nightmares in slow motion,
my past self dividing to catch the phantom pieces
only to be cut by the sharp edges of her mouth.
What had
started out with the wind and the weight of the moon
upon one’s will veered off into an apology for the color
of my skin. Race, as a crime, not a crutch and the sins
of my father who learned to speak Korean softly to women,
but not to my mother. The time I caught her beating
her fists against his chest, the piercing animal screams,
I sprung out from the shadows to save him. Her arm,
like a ballast hurled my seven-year old body across the room.
But that wasn’t the time I cracked open my head and saw
pinpricks of light gather like so many fireflies. The midnight
train ride to the hospital, tucked in the mountains, I lay
blooming into a Red Poppy on my father’s t-shirt.
What is a child but a thing to blame? The mistake of it all

is to assume that she can be unmended. The day of the race
in question, she was four, nearly fiveand a boy threw rocks
at her because she had dared to cross his path. The very sight
of her enraged him as if she were an earth grub to be squashed.
Three days he had tormented her as she ran through the alley
into the streets. When she saw no sign of him, she made a dash—
he jumped out of the doorway and she saw nothing but the
sky open up in front of her, the gentle slope of a hill under her
sprung feet, blood singing in her ears, and the wind, her second skin.
The face of the boy, when she whipped around, was no larger
than a peeved mouse. She couldn’t help herself. She stuck out
her tongue and chortled the rest of the way home.
Paul Siegell
Tiger Bridge to Giant

Serpent in Space
Your core: Galactic activity. Blood to blog about.
How ’bout 05:11:51 a.m. on 12.21.2012? Sound good?
A cuckoo skill, absorbed in experiments of out-of-sight seeing.

Tiger heat. A boom shakka lakka spirit beacon, ticket-stub’d.
Waiting for my tentmates to wake, wondering why I thought
packing Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno’s Slamming Open the Door

to Bonnaroo was a good idea, I overheard a Scott Medosis go to
a Scott B. Davis, “Got anything crispy to listen to?”
Vivid bridge, flower skull, tiger bid. They’re giving a polygraph

to the hieroglyphs today. Brahkuna matata.
All on a fresh head,
Scottie B. goes, “It looks like you’ve got poison ivy in your eyes.”
And then a bazillion-

piece puzzle of the Milky Way
became a fan of realizing that even thinking about applying
for a job at the apocalypse
is
what wrecks the rocket ship.
Peggy Eldridge-Love
Me, Currently
In winter
I will lean into the window and let puffs
of breath cloud the pane and give me
the power to write my name
on the world as I see it.
I will love
the time spent with me, arms encircling
so that I can give myself
quick little hugs
of reassurance.
There will be, close at hand,

the comforter, the knitted wrap, the
fuzzy shoes, and the stoke
to stir the fire that has burned
down to embers inside.
Summer lingers
while I wait for winter,
taunting me with its knowledge
of my fear of lush rippling green
turning to brown
dying straw.
Autumn will,
no doubt, rush to and fro
unwilling to make the commitment
I need
not to fret.
In winter
I will move with the grace
of one January born
without apology for loving
best the feel of ice
pelting down my neck,

touching me with authority,
reminding me
promises sometime do come back
in Spring.
Pris Campbell
Rites of Passage
I step through my mirror,
become Alice — sometimes Cinderella.
I eat cookies, grow, shine
my slippers, kiss the prince.
Here in Aliceland, no-one pokes fun
at my floppy hats, protest signs,
long hippie skirts held together by daisies.
Nobody tells me the Sixties have passed
or that I’m obsolete—Martin and Bobby are dead.
They never say Hair’s last song has been sung
or Lucy in the Sky has long been in rehab.
Nobody mentions the feds
tracking my poems about sexual
revolutions, getting their rocks off
in the pale green light
of monitors that never blink.
Bluebird
The fallen Bluebird of Happiness caws,
folds its molting wings around my house,
my prison, this cell of karmic perdition.
Mother’s china serves up scenes

of Last Suppers, eaten and gone.
Grandmother’s sideboard moans
family stories to a glass angel
standing guard on my windowsill. She
sparks back the passing lights of cars
careless enough to venture this ruptured street.
The Filipino couple next door argue

until dawn ignites the sky with its breath.
They think redemption can later be found
in a bottle of Christ’s Blood Shed For Them
or in a quick fuck on a mattress, spine
bent like a weeping cross.
I become Moses crossing the Red Sea,

Frodo, grasping the golden ring, Ulysses,
self-blinded in order to stay the way, but
in my cockiness, I stumble
against my dear angel, too late
to catch her, already tumbling
against that greedy Bluebird’s beak.
Michelle McEwen
How Else To Explain It

In a past life, I must have been a woman
blues singer— one of hoarse-&-harsh voice
gotten by the cigarettes Boy Piano turned me on to

the first night. Me, up on stage, when I should have been
sleepin. Up there, wide-mouthed & slim, singing for

my late rent, singing for the money spent, singing for
my open-mouthed babies, singing for the ladies

with men gone to find work up north, promising to send
money home. How else to explain it, then, in this life,

these bags under my eyes I’ve had since birth— these toiler bags,
these vagabond bags, these midnight singer bags? How else

to explain it, then, in this life, this voice – rough raw – meant more for
a smooth-tongued womanizer?
Rauan Klassnik
Self-Portrait (1)
White strips of gold pulsing. A room filled with it. Curtains drawn.
Doors closed. And death—its breath. Down on me. Thorned
in fat stone pulps. A man bites down on his fist. Not like a
star, or God—trees swept out to the sea. And the sea like
ashes. Egrets rise up. Drops of blood. Elephants. All of them.
Curled up. In the dirt, gasping.
Self-Portrait (2)
Reptile hunger. In frozen rubble. Suns twitching. I prayed a
woman would save me. And she has. The way cocaine turns you
into mist. Or just plain old loneliness. Veins of black-gold crystal.
Cracked shadows. Bent rebar. Love: sunsets soft and warm.
Swarmed—On their backs—Crippled—Gleaming. Everything’s
exactly what I wanted.
Self-Portrait (3)
Everything’s dripping. Filled with light. Exploding. Ashes. I
miss my body. Swept up into violence. Saints. And pigeons.
Burned down the sea. Twitching. Swelled up. Into us. Collapsed.
A thin grey sword. Along the boardwalk—the palm trees wave.
They raged in my cunt—spiders’ teeth—shivering silver. They
leapt up. Dragged us down. Cold mists of piss.
Oscar Bermeo
A Bodega on
Anywhere Avenue
After Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”
You got me straight trippin’ tonight, Pedro Pietri, as I strut down the block
under the El with a headache self-conscious checking out the lights of the
#4 train. In my deep jones, and fiendin’ for images, I hit up the 24/7
bodega, bummin’ for a loose poema!
¡Que guava y que gusto! The whole fam shoppin’ late-night! Aisles full of
señores! Doñas in the platanos, shorties in the yucca!—¿y tu, Mikey
Piñero, what were you doin’ down by the mangoes?
Caught you out there, Miguel Algarín, viejo manganson, pokin’ among the
hot dogs in the fridge and scopin’ the superette boys. I heard you grillin’
them hard: Who killed the chuletas? What price gineos? Are you my Boo?
I stroll in and out of the brilliant shelves of Goya cans trailing you, and
trailed in my imagination by the store rent-a-cop. Easin’ down the tight
rows together buggin’ out and scarfin’ down coco bread, munchin’every
frozen icee, and doin’ the dip past the cashier.
Where we headin’, Pedro Pietri? The last downtown express will be here
any minute. Which way does your fedora point tonight? (I touch your
suitcase and dream of our viaje in the bodega and feel tan pendejo.) Will
we wander to the break of dawn through the streets? The lampposts add
shadow on shadow, lights off in the apartments; we’ll both be ass out if
keep goin’ on like this. Will we troop while ruminatin’ on the forgotten
America of dreams past abandoned cars in alleyways, home to our
makeshift shack?
Ah, dear Reverendo, gran poeta, maestro de locura y verso, why is

Ameríca still the America of Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, and Manuel
who died waiting, who lived waiting, and who were born again to still
keep waiting? How long must we stand by the busy tarmac of JFK and
watch the planes bring more dreamers into the waiting dark waters of the
East River?
Nydia Rojas
Spring Rain
Morning. The rain like a glass mirage
covers the horizon where dawn
is still imprecise light in waiting.
Waiting. I place another bet

against the weather.
Today I bet you I’ll plant those overgrown

sunflowers seedlings by the south side
of the garden. I’ll work the compact ground,
add peat moss and top soil, then I’ll place them
gently in the loose soil, hope the roots
go exploring deeper, deeper.
The raindrops touch the ground, sip down

through the hidden web of roots- maps
I will not know how to read, how to follow.
I wonder. Sometimes an easy journey requiring
no movement or digging on my part.
Most times only requiring the simple act
of spreading the pine mulch around the trunks
of the evergreen or the crab apple.
How deep into the ground do these roots go?
The raindrops quicken and pelt the ground-
no pity, no easing off, no respite in between.
The saturated ground with which I’m left
as necessary as the dry soil I’ll be able
to dig, to alter with the nutrients
the new seedlings will need.
Morning. The rain continues. Judging

by the fierceness with which it falls
on the ground and how continuously
the raindrops follow each other
it will be raining all day long.
All day long raindrops falling, exploring, building

Earth underground. The rain steadily falling
as if saying these maps are not for you to alter.
These maps you leave where you found them,
undisturbed.
Ed Marion
As written by the Academy of Art

University, San Francisco, CA
Developing her passion for fine art
In the Studio oil on board 14” x 11”

as a child in Wisconsin, Jennifer
Wildermuth naturally gravitates
towards to the human figure in her
absorbing oil paintings. Elaboration
on the representational nature of her
work, Wildermuth describes her
aesthetic as “Impressions of a
fleeting moment or idea, then
captured, analyzed, and returned
back into the chain of time.”
Currently represented by the
renowned Horizon Fine Art Gallery
in Jackson, WY, Wildermut
Ron Androla
55 Confession #3
55 tomahawks No jet has ever flown so low
55 glances from Over our house, steering for
A 360 degree The Erie International Airport
55 second spin Maybe 5 miles away. This jet
55 senses of self Is way too low, it growls
55 progressively Across my roof & maybe blows
Lowering bottles of The trees to lean northwest,
Absinthe xylophonic Pulled by the object’s magnitude.
Oxygenation 55 I’m startled, writing in my upstairs
Bulldog protons leap over Room, writing confessions,
55 holes in a dead face Which are self portrait poems;
55 xylophone opium poppies I’m instinctually ducking. Hell
55 levels to a smile Right it’s not right,
Where the crack of
Black Space Dark & maybe, without hearing a
Matter leaks Crash, I hear the hollow roar
55 sunburst beams Echo of the crash: city trains,
55 world-perfect moments Midnight traffic, perceptible
Ago 55 pterodactyl Radioactivity Geiger counter
Time Rockslide, troops
Warps 55 bones Inside, armed for
55 stomach-lining djembe drums Battle. Their viola moans crescendo
55 yesterdays yes existence Before chopped silence &
55 algebra tomorrows fail This hiss, this electric hiss,
Equation after equation This existential hiss,
Exactly after beat 55 This viper, vapor hiss,
This steamy hiss of aftermath.
Paul Squires
Degrees of Resolution
(camera 7)
1. silhouette shadow puppets, noh,
lips move when reading
japanese wine (obvious segue-sake)
negative definitions as in this is not
without what this is
2. pointless syllable casting as in what

if this silver bubble s’next to this
3. consistently demonstrates a need for

obvious self-reference as in whispers and intuition
and the crackle of dry leaves
4. why the orchid?

being so far from surreal,
almost licentiously obvious
especially in hindsight
5. one persistent and constant apology

(just take it for granted, immediately,
on any occasion that I offend, it will
save us both a lot of time)
6. revolution? why not?
7. self-portrait (with whiskey and cigarette)
Peter Ciccariello
Breathe
This muffled cognition
These slick asphalt roads
The circuitous hum of electric motors
Temperature, always temperature
Heartbeat, breathe in breathe out
Breathe in breathe out

Sheaves of newspaper
Tumble and slap the street
A cool wind from the coast
Promises, promises, promises
Here, inside where I live

The newsprint is unreadable
The road impassable
The rain incessant, dubiously
Striking the next possibility into awareness
Breathe in breathe out

Outside where I live
One step follows another
One reason becomes the next reason
Breathe out breathe in
This rain, carried here by gods with buckets

Dissolving icons
obscuring metaphors
Revealing the black bird in the branches
Darkening the shadows
In the corners of the room
Dave Lordan
After the party

Don’t ask me when night ends and the morning begins
Don’t ask me for a light
Don’t ask me for a cigarette
Don’t ask me my name
how old I am
or who I know in Galway
Don’t ask me anything
the tunnel I claw through afternoon
is caving in
around me
A few hours ago I was beautiful
just one among many
wrapped in a towel
neck high in bubbles
hot water flowed through me
my locks swam
my mouth danced
I understood so many tongues
I passed so much warmth around
and so many loved me...
Luis,
Solomon,
Emad,
Michelle,
Lisa,
Yuri....
Now I look like I’ve been pulped
and shallow buried in a roadside wood
My gruesome face is like a warning
a dark boreen might shout from the shadows
at a driver turning off a motorway
My brow is full of tiny holes
My tongue is a wormeaten sponge
My lips stink
My cheeks have a bloom of algae
My eyes bob in jaundiced sacs
Through platforms rushing by in the rain
Fat little boys are pointing me out and laughing
and I can’t read
and I don’t speak anything
and I don’t know why
I am alone on this train
or why it keeps speeding
the opposite way
to the train heading home
I got on.
Janelle McKain
The Mystery of Me graphite drawing 8” X 10” poetsandartists.com 65

Nick Piombino
The Current Assignment

“Not words of solace, but the solace of words.”
Ray DiPalma
As a writer, when I’m not writing I tend to feel guilty. I am ending this.
Again—I’ve put an end to feeling guilty—to feeling not good enough. This is
mostly about feeling competitive, about worrying about what other people
think, about feeling like a loser. There is much excitement to be felt about
the possibility of change.
Always an impalpable time when it is unclear what the elements are or how
they are interrelating. Vague hunches.
Writing is something that comes and goes but time is always there. As with
anything else, the writer needs to be able to say—of writing—I’d prefer not
to. There is always the current assignment.
Perhaps my optimism was borne out of youth—out of the idea of a limitless

horizon. As I got older, had some illnesses, witnessed tragedy after tragedy,
experienced death again and again, I realized that the surface aspects of
this stance had been lifted out from under me. But my essential optimism
has remained unchanged. What to base it on? As a psychoanalyst I would
bring it to my work—but gradually I have realized that this feeling was never
rational or practical or based on anything realistic or actual. It derived from
the love of books, words, ideas and thought and human discussion. At the
moment of contemplating this, I find my hopefulness to be boundless. I
need not conform to someone else’s idea of how I might employ these
feelings. Must I compose allegories and stories? Must I be abstract and
emblematic? Must I derive my raison d’être as a writer from a given theory,
or from theory at all? Must I create mindscapes or conform to the latest
literary movement? Part of me says yes, but that optimistic part of me says
NO WAY. Go your own way—the literalist manifesto.
I am a crazy optimist. Every piece of bad luck proves me wrong. My poet

friends might wonder what has happened to me and shake their heads. This
guy has gone off the deep end, or better yet, has retreated to the shallow
end of the pool. He is not mysterious anymore.
Janet Snell
Self Portrait with Blue Lips oil on canvas 30” X 32” poetsandartists.com 67
William Stobb
I Try to Think
“A thing there was that mattered.”
Virginia Woolf
Packed sand, branches, nettles, shoreline.

One surprise at the Moscow station:
humans crumpled in fluorescent sleep. Afraid
at customs I’d never understand
sent to Siberia but she stopped yelling
let me through to Fish Fabrique
where one old Russian hippie kept his
John Lennon peace and love shrine.
There. Then. What could I have been thinking?
A question I’ve asked when memory heaves
back another city’s abutments.
Most of the time nuclear war.
From 1980 when Jason Robards got dropped
by that Kansas blast until 2002
when the nuclear part was just the tip
to bust the bunker which I always thought of
as a golf not a gulf word. I dreamed
of Osama Bin Laden’s mountain lair—
lighted tennis courts under granite tonnage
his high toss under high voltage
the perfect C-pose of his heavy serve
in white robes. I took another viewing
of Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
Obsessive traits run in families.
After a fight but before major security
we went to the airport, watched jets
leap the ravine into cumulus
clouds with sculptural properties—
I thought of invisible pressures
roughing up cabins-full of married people.
I wondered how they taught Sunday school
in those basement rooms knowing
wildness in every moment’s
eighty-six religions. For a while
deserts only seemed good for war. Then I lived
in one and found it good for Frisbee.
For a while it seemed
I’d never share a sensible word with my father.
Then he said he might’ve murdered the whole committee
if they’d sent him back to China.
Ruins compressed in geological strata.
This intersection of county roads
after consecutive untended millennia.
A squirrel got trapped in my friend’s parents’ cabin
and died chewing at a window frame.
Glacial runoff, pristine, refreshing.
A child’s sparkly sandal drifting down.
Jennifer Wildermuth
Shipwrecked 2009 oil on linen 32 x 28
Short Biographical note: Jarrett Min Davis was

born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted by
American parents. His paintings explores issues
of identity and the collisions of culture between
East and West. His current work is a revisionist
history of the nautical voyages Admiral Yi of
Korea.
Blinds oil on canvas 16” X 20”
My Website is www.jarrettmindavis.com
Fábio Baroli
Self Portrait oil on canvas 60cm x 48cm

Luc Simonic
THE DEAD LEFT IN ME

I’ve been beautiful enough to die -
several times over, ain’t no different
than blood unresurrected,

and just like that blood,
I’m an idiomatic sigh; tall, white,

dry brown wisps that fade away;
absolutely “Quids in” - bagging

blue plums. But wait, there’s more,
behind the mirrored glass luxury

of the fifty sixth floor, my stamen-eyed
priestess spies the bard -

the bars of gold tucked safely below
the tons of coal traveling slow

the long iron road from northeast
Wyoming to southern Colorado.
Once, I made the most humbling
tofu flan - it spelled my name for me

and I grew a falsetto smile
like a lyre begging for heat.

A lyre begging for heat, and we
are no different from one another.

We are shaking hands in the penthouse
donning feudal cloaks while perspiring

like shark bait. We coil in wait.
We hardly see a word for five

hundred years. We can’t even read,
much less decipher the simplest message.

We screw ourselves through to delirium,
you and I, bodies to die; pictures

on a refrigerator for a few years.
John Korn
false teeth sunday night

like dentures the wind
I take my little heart out is a dark blue soul tonight
and put it in a glass feeling the brick walls
on the night table of my second floor apartment
and sleep the way a blind man feels a face
on one side it is making the sky
of a big bed above this into an ocean
I drop blue tablets there are caverns in the night clouds
into the water it seems as though one could float up into this
and it fizzles
into the cockles and my wind chimes
of my arteries yes
a baby’s fist they bring a voice to this ghost
my heart heartbreak
soft and pink but I must say
grabs at the glow of a I’ve never felt so good
dim white light bulb being this heartbroken
in the yellow shade I hope it stays broken
I flick it off it is like a vase
and lie in the dark that split
and now the flowers
have grown up the walls
laying on the couch

I slip my hand down the front
of my pants
now I am a sexual being
I must do this at least
three times a day
but tonight
it is lovely
and not mechanical
I imagine
those wind chimes
unhooking
from the their
metal loops
and sailing into
the sea air
SELF PORTRAIT CHARCOAL ON PAPER 30” X 40”
Craig Hawkins
Stephen Russell
Hit Parade
A beer can hit the hood
of a pickup as “Smoke On The Water”
belched from the eight track Billy Right
had installed in his new Dodge Dart.

My sister wouldn’t budge. My mother balled
her right hand. “I didn’t raise a slut.”
Sarah, my sister, was not a whore.

My mother slapped my sister.
Several more ... wounds,
a grave large enough

for each curse clenched into fist.
“Not in my house.” My mother’s voice,
the smell of burnt bacon

filled the kitchen with dark clouds.
A neighbor’s mutt yelped. I walked
past my mom, my sister, into my bedroom

where I grabbed my headphones
and the latest Jethro Tull. Dishes crashed
into walls. Sarah screamed, “Don’t.”

Older people were always fighting.
I strummed along on acoustic as Ian Anderson sung
the 1971 billboard hit “Aqualung.”
Self Portrait acrylic on masonite 11” x 14””
Richard J. Frost
Ernie Wormwood
Fountain Pen ␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣␣
I am a poet who writes with a fountain pen

(doesn’t make me Shakespeare or Keats)
from which the ink flows sensuously
(doesn’t make me Hari or Monroe)
lending substance and salt to a life
(doesn’t make me Lot’s wife or anyone’s)
lived only in my imagination.
(but Barrie wishes he had known me).
The pen has grooves near the tip

that exactly fit my first three fingers,
making each script a grasp of pleasure,
a miraculous yes of writing.
I think of it not as a fountain pen,
but as the penis of the man I adore
and whom I loved under many moons.
Stop here if you do not want the sad ending.

How I resisted the typewriter and the computer.
How the man I adored loves another and worse
still, writes poems about it, they are everywhere.
How fortunate that I am yet a woman
who prefers to do the job with her hand.
Each day I rise, I grasp another pen, I write again.
Translation ballpoint pen and prismacolor marker on bristol 9” x 12” Jeremy Baum
Jeff Filipski
tweaked perception of a
disturbed serenity
sugar rush plant life walk like mindless tourist through sunlit brain.
china white boiling in spoon. the boogie man delights the dead.
rubber boot societies within echo finger cordial manners..
sucked like wind through rotting tunnels.
a woodpecker sips water from a stagnant pool near a busy street as angular clouds scratch skies like broken glass...
suffocate orgasm rules are smitten.
by hanged outstretched soul like gutted fowl in Chinese kitchen.
blankly stare half smile erectile grin Cheshire catlike and satisfied.
bang the gong of agog.
mania leaks from my head like a dripping sore. poison is relative. take it. or leave it.
no difference.
puddles of clear thought splashed at tiny feet
mottled by heresy. personal or otherwise.
shredded by logic denial.
the same old story
teased by the ordinary if the ordinary fails to feed
for the extraordinary there remains no recourse
darkened ghosts of memory.
gently entwined and slippery with lust. constant oscillations. penetrations.
erotic dream sequence pokes musky fingers into sleeping folds .
makes weapon of midnight tension.
a rude wet wake up of rhinoceros horn impaling supple flesh of laughing day.
The moment a wandering prurient force left less satisfied
wrung out like cloth.
inside like outside, but hardly breathing.
Jeff Filipski
Self Portrait mixed media 8” X 11”
David Lehman
from Adventures of Lehman
A sampling of today’s headlines:

“City Bracing for Lehman’s Demise”: The New York Sun
“Should You Dump Lehman Or Is It Too Late?” CNBC
“Lehman’s Assurances Ring Hollow”: The New York Times
“For Lehman Employees, the Collapse is Persona”: The New York Times
“Lehman’s Long Weekend”: US News and World Report
“Lehman’s Worst Gamble Ever”: Motley Fool
What a day, Lehman said, rolling out of bed. The Sun reported that the whole city was
bracing for his demise. “Commercial real estate may take hit.” Lehman resisted the impulse to
tell the Sun guy that when the Sun goes down, which is inevitable, the city will probably not go
into mourning and property values will almost certainly remain unaffected.
Both CNBC and the Times were looking into Lehman’s personal life. Goddamn
journalists. The stock jock on the TV was saying it was already too late to “dump” him. Like any
jilted lover he tried to take some consolation from the idea that his girl friend, Hannah Barbaro,
might not break up with him, or might at least postpone the dreaded phone call, if CNBC had it
right. The Times devoted several headlines to Lehman. “Lehman’s Assurances Ring Hollow,” on
the front page of the business section, undercut the promises he had made to Hannah on the
previous day. “I can change,” he had said. “I will change. You’ll see. In ten years the Lehman
family is going to be completely legitimate.”
The adjacent article on the same page announced that “For Lehman Employees. The
Collapse Is Personal.” He thus stood accused of violating the oldest rule in the book. Everyone
knows that it is fatal to mix “personal” and “business.” And yet, according to US News and
World Report, Lehman was going to take a “long weekend.” Well, why not? Wouldn’t you?
“Lehman Shares Slide,” said Reuters, and it took Lehman a moment to realize that
“Shares” in that headline was not a verb but a noun. Or was it both? Was the wire service
insinuating that Lehman’s famous generosity amounted to sharing his fall from grace, his swift
decline down the slippery slope? There was, he had to admit, some truth to the thought. Just
yesterday he had taken up an hour of Glen’s time on the phone complaining about Hannah and
her sisters, whom she had enlisted in the struggle with Lehman.
Reuters also gave readers a timeline on the Lehman family. Henry Lehman, who came to
this country from Germany, set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1844. His brothers Manny
and Mayer joined him six years later. The brothers established a private investment firm in 1929,
perhaps not in retrospect the best year to have initiated such an enterprise. But “Lehman’s
Worst Gamble Ever,” according to the Motley Fool, may not have occurred then, or even a year
ago, when the firm that bore his name had record revenues and earnings per share and yet did
nothing to avert a calamity that it should have foreseen.
In Lehman’s mind, the worst gamble is still to come and has to do with his choice of
partners to the dance. His record here doesn’t inspire confidence. In a marriage arranged by the
matchmakers at American Express, Lehman wed Libby Shearson back in 1984 and let her talk
him into changing his name. Only with their divorce in 1994 did Lehman become Lehman again.
If autonomy remains the goal, Lehman had better proceed cautiously in the next few days when
choosing among seemingly reluctant suitors proposing a merger of convenience.
Jack of Diamonds watercolor 9” x 12”
David Lehman
Renée Zepeda
In This World Together

My sister once called what I do
in my poems pedestrian
so I thought about that a while
then I decided to go on
walking. My arms
tend to stray at first sin
but eventually ribbon
like Picasso’s portrait.
Here’s my portrait:
the poet propels the poem
by using charm, coming clean
she likes some things’ mystery,
spontaneous, on the spot
like jazz. Abstraction is
my sister’s raven hair
and my stance is one of admiration.
In “Jackson Pollock at the Tate”
you should have seen her
painting her own anger.
Why is she ascending?
She performs; she keeps
circulating. Objects in motion
tend to stay in motion.
I didn’t, but I did
stop, and I died a little.
The poem doesn’t die, it
lapses into melancholy, but I
can bring it back with a shot of something
maybe something freaky
like a memory of speed
riding a Munich train, my sister and I
riding a Munich train
“watching colors changing,”
my sister, cold and bitter,
thin as a rail, and me,
cold and sweet, thinking
of a machine made out of words
racing by, in the air,
so high, so
high—
Leigh Wells
Self Portrait. Atlantic City. MAMIYA 7II 14” x 12.5”
Nanette Rayman Rivera
m butterfly lock
Rene Gallimard’s on a hydrant in Union Square and I’m sick.
Artists and vendors cut stems and paintings with machetes.
Mosquitoes bevy my belle. A- Donna comes to my mind.
In poverty and de-synchroni-city there’s nothing but predators
and mothers. But in Boston Donna my friend forgot me
like the weedy garter belt that is life
releasing her stockings each night, casting off
what’s unbearable, shaping herself in her own obi.
And in Boston mothers not woman enough to hold a woman

like a daughter: In New York I will fight the yearning
in hands made for rain and sex that purées
the sediment and lets me bring up hoar
from my frost. Because the girl I am
walks through homeless over water,
my feet too gilled to ever feel again
what’s above me. The day Jeremy Irons
caught me by the Futon store with a bottle
of pills, I let his lashes butterfly over my face
with their unknowing tips, a secret
Donna would die for—my mother would kill
me for—a swallowing of circumstance,
a hand into hand where I wanted to devour him
completely—taste of lotus and cherry
cigarettes, his mouth tasting of water, a no
going back afterlife mouth.
It isn’t the way he swims in my eyes

but that his hand grips mine and is grace
like the sunstreak across Fourteenth Street—
that he’s a haze, like rain against an aqueduct,
and my heart might disable,
withering down to the peach pit spring of persecution.
Hand against hand, two people grip
the parallel lives of the body’s penitentiary, the lines
of the locks sudden death and the crux
of the key is the cry of awareness—where the obsessive
sun illumines what we are not.
Cedar Lee
Joyful Moment acrylic on canvas 12” X 16”
Grady Harp
Self Portrait #3
Memories rattle inside time’s And why review, critique
can and tumble out hold up for exam the art of
on the lawn especially creators, others who prospect
in summer especially in ideas or illusions or allusions or
the hour when light dips even dare to brush color
behind the edge of the yard on monotone images, why,
and trees and what’s left of when instead I hide in retrospect
the barn at the end of the or wordify the intangibles, the
dirt driveway, gifts talent has blossomed in
a bangle of moment their hands their thoughts their
held loosely by evening more alive lives?
breezes until the stars stop Time
being shy to the has pushed me back in
gloaming. Little lights of spectator stance, at distance from
blinking fireflies pull the page, the canvas, the glowing
the space between the lawn’s matrix where lies the magic
dewy covering and the and in older eyes and
ink that is night hiding behind worn about heart,
a waning white moon and fearing ultimate impotency
into worn pages of yesterday or other bridges of desire,
tales. And in all of that I view/review/critique/
there is no grandpa left time and sidelines,
and no crickets and no signed.
prairie parades, charades
or even shards of a boy’s
life or beginnings of one
that could hold tenderly and
say it was okay that
I never became an artist.
Patrice Erickson
Artist’s Self-Portrait oil on linen 10” X 8” poetsandartists.com 87

ChiaNi Hsu
Greenwind photoshop with tablet

Annie Finch
Song of the Sorry Side

On the sorry, sorry side of the world
is an opening that hides the girl
who is closing up her heart.
She has fallen down a winding curve

to the place where solid seas are torn
and the continents are lost in stone
that obtrudes upon their rest.
When the lava reaches to the girl

burrowing around inside the world,
solid places in the ocean floor
fill the spaces she was looking for,
and the lava slowly rides the sea

till it reaches to her heart.
An opening has gone.

A rising has begun.
Pauline Aubey
Self Portrait pastel pencils A4 (8.26”x11.69”)

Barbara Jane Reyes
Tocaya
Madre, ¿por qué cuando se corre una estrella o luce un relámpago se dice:
Santa Bárbara bendita,

que en el cielo estás escrita
con papel y agua bendita?
—Federico García Lorca, La Casa de Bernarda Alba
patron saint of lightning bolts
you, of sharpened tongue
maiden of thunder and war
guard us against malediction
beautiful girl, mártir, astig
poeta, rebel, tattooed daughter
our lady of gunpowder
our lady of bullets
our lady of men deep in the earth
sweet anise star, bold pomegranate
saint of machete, two spirit bull
Sarah Zambiasi
Self-Portrait : Sarah-Bernadette oil on canvas 50cm x 75cm

Kate Wyer
Mitochondria
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0
Inside a body of loud brine, my mouth without teeth.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2
I must use mouth, fingers, feet to see where the body stops. Compress me, show me.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2>L3
I meet a body. He shows me where I do not end. I learn about an angry virgin. I learn I am
bad. My tongue retreats down my swollen throat.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2>L3>N
I write letters to God. I am in love with poinsettias. I take the Son on my tongue and say
thank you for entering my heart and body.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2>L3>N>R
Inside my body dogs are barking. I prefer liquid that has passed through peat. I prefer
Fathers that are living to Fathers that are dead. I prefer falling.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2>L3>N>R>U
My body fills up with other bodies. I filter water into chambers to sink toward the floor.
Ancestral line: “Eve” >L1/L0>L2>L3>N>R>U>U5
I always swim alone.
April Carter Grant
Self Portrait pencil, ballpoint pen, marker, acrylic, acrylic ink

Belinda Subraman
What It’s Like

The way plants turn yellow and limp
Flowers faint to the ground
Or trees so brittle their limbs
Break off in wind
The way anything that danced

Now lies still
The way the hand resists a pen

And the need to speak lessens
The way the dying

Grasp towards air
Eyes fixed upward
There is no practice for life ending

The closer ones gets the less one conveys
How can we know?
“Ready to go”
is relative
to imagination.
Jason
John
Self Portrai
oil on board
16” X 20”
John Walz
J. Walz hi res scan of collage printed on canvas 37” X 42”
Jeremy Hughes
I
am a
standing stone
some folk think walks at night
to kill the rooks and stoats
they find crushed on the roads next day.
The sun picks me up in the morning and puts me down in the evening
without a sound, unlike the hundred men
who prised me up, inch by inch, their timbers snapping like bones
till I slid into the hole they had dug.
The stones of the field are no relations.
I used to wonder at the beaten silver river’s sound
between the trees clutching to its bank,
close to me now, its pebbled engine buppling in its bed.
Waters sense their way beneath me
to places rivers merely dream.
One man painted me as a bear, gone
save for teeth and claws experts says map the constellations;
a woman was burnt against me
for saying her baby born as still as stone was mine;
a mob thrashed me with rakes and wooden mallets
until my dumb intransigence made their arms ache and throb:
their crops had failed.
Consider me now. I am impermeable.
Even the frost cannot compete with my kernel:
it is as cold as the coins a Civil War soldier buried at my foot
when lightning silhouetted me against the clouds’ chiaroscuro,
though the memory of the sun’s first heat is latent
as a lover’s back once pressed against me.
Cows’ tongues lizard my fissures.
I am the cornerstone of an academic reputation.
Aerial archaeology reveals I am the hub of a wheel
with stones that spoke to near horizons.
Time-lapse photography dials me around the field.
I court the moon that casts me half in this world and half in another.
I am intimate with rain the sheep and lichens shun in my lee,
an island adrift in swells of grass which break against me.
Calli Whittall
Jeremy Hughes lives in the market town

of Abergavenny, which is situated on the
border of Wales and England. He has
published two pamphlets: “breathing for
all my birds” and “The Woman
Opposite”.

she is a work-in-progress mixed media on canvas 30” X 30”
Emma Trelles
Autorretrato Quintina
A mind needs a place to set its teeth, and grace
arrives in fixing the toilet, in water
smoothing the pre-dawn fears of possible
cysts, faulty seatbelts, the radio loop
of reasons I’m needed and belong nowhere.
Here is a mirror without Las Meninas, and nowhere

does light soften brow and wrist to the grays
cherished by Velázquez. Here is a needle’s loop
for a mouth. Here is a sheet of water
rising behind the iris, here, the possible
a mottled gold. My skin is a plausible

way of counting miles, the tender nowhere
route of veins, the tongue floating in water
carried since birth. My hands have the grace
to wield a wrench, to pull a chain loop
free from its knots and trace the oval loop

a portrait might make if the impossible
appeared: a king’s room brushed with grace,
light, royal lace and a leisure nowhere
near the bathroom echo of iron and water.
In this lull between doing and dreaming, water

owns shadow and animal rust, water loops
music around the heads of all who are nowhere
in the path of sleep. Draw closer. It is possible
to love the trouble in this face, to surrender.
Barbra Nightingale
Aging Disgracefully
Picture this: a red rain
on green grass running
to purple lakes,
a purple sky.
The clouds spell out

“When I grow old
I shall wear purple”
till your eyes turn red
then blue, then purple.
Little did you know

that phrase would burrow?
Look at your legs, the soft
fleshy bulge just behind the knees.
Notice the spider webs—
in a certain light, bluish-
red at the center, purple at the ends.
The blue veins in your hands

merge with the raw red skin
casting a purplish glow—
held near a light, they’re luminous,
almost transparent.
Sit, rest, take in a sunset,

bathe your feet in the sea
and do not notice
how the clouds, stippled rose
resemble your toes,
the edges all gone purple.
There is nothing you can do against

the march of purple: it will make its way;
so, instead of fighting, revel,
wear all the purple you can get.
After all, it matches just about everything.
I Am The Walrus oil on gessoed canvas 36” x 24” Didi Menendez
Marcus Kwame Anderson
104 poetsandartists.com Blues Portrait acrylic on paper 9” x 12”

Melissa McEwen
Thirty-Four
I don’t know where I’m going, but I still need
a lift— stuck out thumb & hiked skirt, I’m so far from
where my mother was at this age. No ring

on my finger, just the one on my hitchhiking thumb. No work
uniform, I want to live

in my swimsuit all summer long
with firecracker
& cherry bomb love.
Sermonizing signs
tacked on trees along the highway:
Jesus Saves
But I can’t save a dime.
Ruben Belloso
Autorretrato pastel on paper 50cm x 70cm

Howard Camner
The Celebrated Mr. C

I hated the fame
the money
the women
the clap
the book signings
I hated it all
the weasel manager
the sniveling agent
the tours
the bad jokes
the rancid coffee
so I locked myself away for three months

in a New York hole
and did nothing
but watch old reruns of “Leave it to Beaver”
I expected to die in my twenties

to find fast fame, make a bundle, and take a good long nap
I expected to die in my twenties
but, as usual, I didn’t live up to my expectations
and must now suffer accordingly
Tara M.M. Larkin
She Loved Her Mother

When Rose got her nipples pierced
At seventeen, I went ballistic
Screaming who would do such a thing
To you, my baby, girlchild barely
Womanized, now marred, I did believe.
Meekly then she replied and revealed
The nature of the perps name
Scary Shari from Morgan Hell, Mom...
Frightening enough. Might she have wild

Presto eyes and Celt lips covering
Missing or perhaps decayed dentition
Foul smelling like chicken fat left
For the ravens and magpies?
Rump like a twisted heavensward
Tortoise, magnificent ,shell-like
Shelf-like, chintz covered rear?
Entrance to her lair webbed with

Expired flies; too early for roaches!
Ash and trash can sour. I would confront her.
She of the ersatz arts and dirty needles.
Prince Albert and Marilyn Monroe her
Tarted up companions of note. Maybe
A mustache; beard, even. Bleachcoif or jericurl,
Vomit and pomegranate under her nails?
Yet there she was wise eyed

With a soft smile, sleeve of tats
Fit, young, smoking cloves
Legs dangling smoothly across
Space and time between us, yellow
Leather pumps, her gentle instep skin
Logo command: Love Your Mother
What had I been afraid of?
Invisible Presence prismacolor and sharpie on heavyweight watercolor paper 24” x 30” Angelique Price
Diana Adams
Self Portrait
as a Box of Gulls
Begat in an airport staring north,
gulls small as a plum unfeather
as a woman without shoes in thin dress
leaves through ice-aluminum sky.
Wing points wilt, eyes dawn-soft

close from not knowing. Walls clutter up
up with brain caught snapshots. A crawlspace
is kicked out of the snow shut container,
to aroused blue space with glitters

of water. A boat of silver fish
is feasible, salt spray to purl virgin air,
top-notch flocks, hypotheses of sand.
Luke Meinzen
Tall tales
My grandfather said children of God when he meant family.
We all said Midwestern when we meant virtuous.
My parents said German when they meant tall and stubborn.
My grandmother said Jewish, Greek, and royalty when she meant
dark eyebrows, unmanageable hair, and prow-like noses.
My father said she was difficult when he meant bi-polar.
My mother said middle child when she meant I was difficult.
They both said young when they meant agnostic.
I said socialist when I meant bored in high school.
My father said the influence of liberal professors
when he meant well-intentioned but wrong.
I said young progressive when I meant anything but old and conservative.
I started saying ethnic enclave when I meant German-American.
My grandfather said independent when he meant traveling together.
I agreed because traveling meant expatriate, which, I thought, meant independent.
My first lover said independent when she meant inaccessible.
I didn’t say anything. When I said I was leaving, she didn’t say anything.
Another lover said emotionally retarded, and she may have meant it,
so I said I love you until I learned what it meant.
My older brother said it’s been a while when he meant unfamiliar to begin with.
I said we should catch up someday when I meant I doubt I’ll be back.
My younger brother started saying white guilt when he meant privilege guilt.
I said I’m proud of you when I meant I’m proud you speak my language.
My parents said we’re proud of you when they meant we don’t speak your language.
I said I speak the language when I meant I’m happier elsewhere.
My younger brother said I don’t understand why you don’t get along better with our
parents. They said joyless. I said grown up. We all meant distant.
When I said homecoming, none of us knew what I meant,
but I mean to tell them, when I see them, that I love them
and saying it will be the beginning of meaning what we say.
Joze Hicks
Above acrylics on paper 30cm x 30cm
CONTRIBUTOR
NOTES …
Diana Adams
Diana Adams is an Alberta, Canada based writer with work published in a variety of
journals. Her second book of poetry Theaters of the Tongue was recently published
by BlazeVOX Books.
Marcus Kwame Anderson
Marcus Kwame Anderson is an artist who lives in upstate NY with his lovely and
talented wife and beautiful baby daughter. He believes that the arts can be a
powerful vehicle for change and his work often contains social commentary.
www.marcuskwame.com
Ron Androla
Ron Androla lives in Erie, PA with his wife Ann. He wishes he was not 55 years old.
He posts poems and other tidbits at pressurepress.ning.com
Pauline Aubey
Pauline Aubey is a French self-taught portrait artist. She developed a very early
interest in drawing people, but had to wait until 2006 to draw on a regular basis. She
started with celebrity portraits before choosing to draw more personal works with a
more specific mood. Attracted by opposite feelings, her main goal is to depict
beauty in a strange unexpected way. Her works are displayed on her online gallery:
www.paulineaubey.deviantart.com
Fábio Baroli
Fabio Baroli earned a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of Brasília,
Brazil in 2009. Since 1999 Baroli works extensively with several artistic languages.
Nowadays he is focusing on oil painting as his main media. Some of his paints can
be views at www.flickr.com/photos/fabiobaroli
Jeremy Baum
Jeremy Baum lives in Pittsburgh and has done illustrations for For Love of Armadillo
by Didi Menendez, Television Farm by John Korn, and Mind Fields: Adventures in
Purgatory by Jeremy Baum. Check out his online gallery at
www.madbaumer37.deviantart.com or email him at madbaumer37@hotmail.com.
James Belflower
James Belflower is the author of Commuter, (Instance Press) and And Also a
Fountain, (NeOpepper Press) a collaborative echap with Anne Heide and J. Michael
Martinez. He curates PotLatchpoetry.org, a website dedicated to the gifting and
exchange of poetry resources. www.potlatchpoetry.org
Ruben Belloso
Rubén Belloso Adorna is currently finishing his degree at the University of Fine Arts
in Seville. At the present, he is focusing almost exclusively on portraits in pastel, a
technique he has been perfecting for the past five years. “For me, every portrait has
a story to tell.” benbe.deviantart.com
Nina Bennett
Nina Bennett is the author of Forgotten Tears A Grandmother’s Journey Through
Grief. In 2006, she was chosen by the poet laureate of Delaware to participate in a
writers’ retreat sponsored by the Delaware Division of the Arts.
www.booklocker.com/books/2081.html
Linda Benninghoff
Linda Benninghoff has been published in Agenda and Ocho, among others. She is
currently Assistant Poetry Editor at Women Writers womenwriters.net.
Oscar Bermeo
Oscar Bermeo was born in Ecuador, raised in the Bronx, and now makes his home
in Oakland, CA, with his wife, poet Barbara Jane Reyes. He is the author of the
poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest and Heaven Below.
www.oscarbermeo.com
Howard Camner
Howard Camner is the author of 16 poetry books. He was named “Best Poet of
2007” in the New Times “Best of Miami” readers poll issue. His autobiography
Turbulence at 67 Inches was recently released. He lives in Miami with his wife and
children. members.authorsguild.net/hcamner
Pris Campbell
Pris Campbell composes her poetry three and a half miles from the ocean in
Southeast Florida. Her new book, Sea Trails, will be released by Lummox Press,
2009. www.poeticinspire.com
Grace Cavalieri
Grace Cavalieri’s latest book of poetry is Anna Nicole: Poems, 2008 (Goss
183::Casa Menendez.). She produces/hosts “The Poet and the Poem from the
Library of Congress” for public radio. www.gracecavalieri.com
Francois Chartier
Francois Chartier has much respect for portrait artists, but prefers to paint objects.
While working on his “Pop Culture Icons” series, he wanted to find a way to create
a self portrait. He had a nice antique frame that he wanted to use in one of his
paintings and found a photograph of himself at one year old. Surrounding it with
objects that have special meaning to him, it became his “humble essay to a self
portrait.”
Peter Ciccariello
Peter Ciccariello is currently writing, thinking, and growing things in an old farm
house in a small town in Connecticut. All bets are off.
poemsfromprovidence.blogspot.com
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is the author of eight books of poetry including Ballistics, The Trouble
with Poetry and Other Poems, Picnic, Lightning, Sailing Alone Around the Room and
Questions About Angels, which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National
Poetry Series. Collins’ poetry has appeared in a variety of periodicals and in
numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the editor of Poetry 180 and
a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” He is a distinguished professor of English
at Lehman College. He served as the United States Poet Laureate for 2001-2003
and as New York State Poet Laureate 2004-2006.
Juliet Cook
Juliet Cook’s poetry, editing, and publishing projects can be viewed by visiting
her website: julietcook.weebly.com
Steven DaLuz
Steven DaLuz is a San Antonio-based artist who paints both figurative work and
landscape-referential abstractions. He was recently selected for the 2009 Florence
Biennale in Italy, and a small sampling of his work can be found at
www.stevendaluz.com
Jon Damaschke
Jon Damaschke’s work has been showcased in Italy and museums & galleries in
Wisconsin and Michigan. His art evolves concurrently with the digital art movement,
while reflecting the artists and movements that have influenced him. Evident in his work
is the Surrealism of Salvador Dali and the Impressionism of Claude Monet. Despite these
influences, Jon brings a unique sublimity to his art through his intuitive use of line and
color to suggest movement and convey emotion. Currently, Jon resides in Chicago,
Illinois. jondamaschke.com
Jarrett Min Davis
Jarrett Min Davis was born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted by American parents. His
paintings explore issues of identity and the collisions of culture between East and West.
His current work is a revisionist history of the nautical voyages Admiral Yi of Korea.
www.jarrettmindavis.com
Andrew Demcak
Andrew Demcak is a poet and a librarian in Oakland, CA. When he’s not busy working
on his new novel, he spends most of his time communicating with the dead via sock
puppets and sending love letters to Edward Norton.
Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel’s most recent poetry title is Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2009). She is an associate professor at Florida International University in Miami.
Peggy Eldridge-Love
Peggy Eldridge-Love is a poet, playwright, novelist and artist living in middle-America.
She is an eternal optimist. Sometimes.
Patrice Erickson
Patrice Erickson is a realist artist based in Michigan who specializes in painting fine art
portraits and landscapes in oils using time honored methods that go back to the
Renaissance. Images of her commissioned portraits as well as landscapes of wild fields
and rural pastures are visible at www.patriceerickson.com
Adam Fieled
Adam Fieled is a poet, musician, and critic. He is finishing his PhD at Temple University
in Philadelphia.
Jeff Filipski
Jeff Filipski lives with his wife and daughter in the heavenly throes of small town Florida
waiting patiently for the muse.
Annie Finch
Annie Finch is author or editor of fifteen books of poetry, translation, and criticism, most
recently Calendars. She is director of Stonecoast, the low-residency MFA program of
the University of Southern Maine. www.usm.maine.edu/~afinch
Richard J. Frost
Richard J. Frost graduated from Otis/Parsons Art Institute 1990. He lives in Los Angeles
where he shows his work and would gladly do commissions.
April Carter Grant
Raised in rural Illinois and now based in Los Angeles, April Carter Grant is a designer,
illustrator, and marketing consultant who helps new businesses launch. When time
allows, she photographs, writes, and composes music. www.sugarsock.com
Sally Hanreck
Sally Hanreck is a self taught artist born in Sydney, raised in Spain, schooled in England
from age 11, and now living in Melbourne. She took up painting in 2006, aged 32. She is
drawn towards painting as a means to communicate complex, often overwhelming
emotion.
Grady Harp
Grady Harp is a practicing surgeon while retaining his involvement in all aspects of the
arts. He is a gallerist, a published poet, a guest lecturer on music, and his critical
writings appear in museum catalogues, as Forewords for novels and art books, and he is
a regular Reviewer for multiple Internet sites as well as O&S Poets and Artists.
Craig Hawkins
Craig Hawkins makes his home in George and has lived in the South all his life. He likes
to collect moments of revelation. He takes these personal, local moments and record
them through meditative compositions, high contrast, and expressive mark making with
the hope of expressing them as having applicable qualities. craighawkinsart.com
Joze Hicks
Joze Hicks, born in the north of Scotland in 1991 has recently completed his education
at Thurso High School. This year he is due to start his BA(hons) in Art and Design at
Edinburgh College of Art with the ambition to specialize in painting after the first year. An
emerging talent, Joze’s work travels though a wide spectrum of styles and media to
produce some interesting and beautiful results. To date, Joze’s work has been shown in
the Scottish Parliament and also at Lyth Arts Centre.
Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok’s new book, Words for Empty and Words for Full, will be out from Pitt
in 2010.
Matthew Hittinger
Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip, winner of the 2006 Spire
Press Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009) and Platos de
Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). He lives and works in New York City.
www.matthewhittinger.com
Ming Holden
Ming Holden grew up on a zebra farm, went to hippie commune schools, co-founded
the Brown Literary Review, and spent her year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Mongolia
working with writers. She likes pesto pasta.
ChiaNi Hsu
ChiaNi creates beautiful masterpieces traditionally with paint as well as with the use of
modern tools such as a computer and mouse, resulting in a breathtaking final product
nearly indistinguishable from traditional oils or acrylics. In ChiaNi’s most recent body of
work, the Mask Collection, each piece elicits an emotion which is hauntingly familiar.
This is ChiaNi’s intent, to express what’s real and true in humanity. The artist hopes each
print will touch every individual who sees this collection. www.chiani.com.
Jeremy Hughes
Jeremy Hughes lives in the market town of Abergavenny, which is situated on the
border of Wales and England. He has published two pamphlets: breathing for all my
birds and The Woman Opposite.
Luisa A. Igloria
Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize,
University of Notre Dame Press), Trill & Mordent (WordTech Editions, 2005) and eight
other books. Originally from Baguio City, she is currently Director of the MFA Creative
Writing Program at Old Dominion University. www.luisaigloria.com
Alison Jardine
Alison Jardine is a prize-winning British artist, now living in Dallas. Exploring mood and
sensation, Alison’s paintings immerse the viewer in the artist’s distinctive experience of
the subject, whether landscapes or people, in unconventional, colorful and
emotive compositions. alisonjardine.com
Jason Joyce
Jason Joyce recently graduated from the University of Wyoming and is pursuing a career
in event and entertainment management. He plays bass in the band Save My Hero and
is working on his first full-length collection of poetry. jasonrjoyce.blogspot.com
Jason John
Jason John is a painter who specializes in Psychological Realism. Recently Jason has
received second place in the Art Kudos International Juried Exhibition and has received
an Honorable Mention at the Target Gallery’s ‘In the Flesh II’ juried exhibition at the
Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA. www.thebroadstreetstudio.com
Elaine Kahn
Elaine Kahn is currently working towards an MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’
Workshop where she has studied with Cole Swenson, Mary Jo Bang, Jim Galvin, and
Mark Levine. She has two chapbooks out Radiant Bottle Caps (Glasseye Books, 2008)
and Convinced By the End Of It (Big Baby Books, 2009), a split with Canadian poet
Valerie Webber which was recently featured in Arthur Magazine. Some of my poems can
be read at shampoopoetry.com and at moisttowelette.blogsport.com
Rauan Klassnik
Rauan Klassnik has a book of prose poems, Holy Land (Black Ocean, 2008). One
chapbook, Ringing, released Feb. 2009, and a second, Dreaming, is due out shortly.
Rauan blogs at rauanklassnik.blogspot.com
John Korn
John Korn is a poet and artist living in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. He’s been published in a
few places online as well as in print and his book Television Farm is currently available at
createspace.com and amazon.com
Kathy Kubik
Kathy Kubik is the author of four poetry chapbooks. When she is not writing poems,
short stories, or working on a novel or two, she is spending time with her true loves:
daughters Lucy and Marlo and her husband Jim.
Tara M.M. Larkin
T.M.M. Larkin writes and lives on California’s central coast, where she finds that the fog
acts like foxglove on her stenciled four-chambered rib cage, filling the holes with damp,
maudlin magic.
Larry W. Lawrence
Larry Lawrence graduated from Rutgers University where he studied Playwriting, before
obtaining a Masters Degree from Kean University. He teaches technology to children
grades K-5. He has been writing poems for many years now and still likes “a place
called school.”More of his work can be found at crownedwithlaurels.blogspot.com
Kent Leatham
Kent Leatham is a California poet currently relocated to Pittsburgh, PA. His work is
forthcoming on a bookshelf near you.
Cedar Lee
Cedar Lee is currently represented by several art galleries and her work is in private
collections throughout the world. She operates her art studio from her home in
Maryland, where she paints majestic trees, colorful, symbolic flowers and cosmic
universe art.
David Lehman
David Lehman’s new books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs
(Nextbook / Schocken) and a book of poems, Yeshiva Boys (Scribner), both published
in fall 2009. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in
New York City.
Dave Lordan
Dave Lordan is 34 and currently lives in Mantova, Italy. His first collection of Poems The
Boy In The Ring (Salmon Poetry 2007) won the 2005 The Patrick Kavanagh Award in
manuscript and 2008 Rupert and Eithne Strong award for best first collection by an Irish
Writer.
Terry Lucas
Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Terry’s work has been published in several online
and print journals. He received his poetry MFA from New England College in 2008, and
is an assistant editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal.
thewideningspell.blogspot.com
Melissa McEwen
Melissa McEwen lives and writes in Bloomfield, Connecticut; although, right now, she’s
looking for a change of scenery and a change of pace.
Michelle McEwen
Michelle McEwen is a writer living in central Connecticut. She has had poems published
in Best New Poets 2007, O&S, and online at UmbrellaJournal.com. When she isn’t
writing, she’s busy doing something poetry related on
www.theblacktelephone.blogspot.com
Janelle McKain
Janelle McKain is a surreal pencil artist. She is Dept Chair and high school art instructor
at Millard South High School in Omaha, NE.
beinart.org/artists/janelle-mckain/gallery/drawings/
Marie-Elizabeth Mali
Marie-Elizabeth Mali received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a co-curator
for louderARTS: the Reading Series in New York City. www.floweringlotus.com
Norman Mallory
N.C. Mallory was born in Oregon and taught in colleges and universities in the west until
2000. His work has appeared in and on the covers of many publications and he has
exhibited in galleries for over thirty years. www.flickr.com/photos/augustusswift
Ed Marion
After studying life drawing at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union, Ed Marion
went on to life as a New York City litigator for 20 years. Ed is now a full-time cityscape
and portrait painter living and working in Ithaca, New York. Links to his portrait and self-
portrait work can be found at www.edmarion.com
Luke Meinzen
Luke Meinzen occasionally works as an exchange program administrator, English
teacher, grant writer, and dissenting voice. He more rarely writes poetry, essays, and
long letters to friends. As such, his writing may be found, once, in Gourmet and on the
walls of his friends’ homes. He is coming to the end of three years in Mongolia and is
taking suggestions about where to go next.
Didi Menendez
Didi Menendez used to play the piano, tennis, guitar, take pretty pictures of debutants,
brides, babies, live in Alaska, wear her hair cropped short as if it were a porcupine
sticking out of her head. Now she does this and has finally let her hair grow long again.
Mia
Mia is the editor of Tryst. She has recently published a poem in Quiet Mountain Essays.
She has work forthcoming in Slant Poetry.
Alyssa Monks
Alyssa Monks lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by DFN Gallery
in New York, Sarah Bain Gallery in California, and David Klein Gallery in Michigan. Look
for upcoming solo shows at www.alyssamonks.com
Dan Murano
Dan Murano is a photo editor by trade and a photographer by passion. His latest book
of photography, A Solitary Moment, is available at Blurb.com.
Barbra Nightingale
Barbra Nightingale’s newest book, Geometry of Dreams just came out in May, 2009 and
is available at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. com. Her poems have appeared in many
anthologies and journals. She teaches literature and poetry at Broward College, near
Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Nick Piombino
Nick Piombino’s Contradicta with collages by Toni Simon will be published soon by
Green Integer. He is the editor of OCHO 14 and OCHO 21. Nick Piombino’s blog is fait
accompli nickpiombino.blogspot.com
Angelique Price
Angelique Price is a fine artist and a tattoo artist. She has an arsenal of markers, paint
and ink to create all of her two dimensional friends.
Barbara Jane Reyes
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003), Poeta en San
Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), and Diwata (BOA Editions, 2010). She blogs regularly at
bjanepr.wordpress.com
Nanette Rayman Rivera
Nanette Rayman Rivera, three-time Pushcart nominee, is the author of the new poetry
collection, shana linda ~ pretty pretty, published by Scattered Light Publications.
Nydia Rojas
Nydia Rojas likes to garden and go for long walks. She often finds inspiration in
nature. Her work has appeared, among many others, in The Wisconsin Academy
Review, Madison Magazine, Mom Writes and Palabra.
Stephen Russell
Stephen Russell lives in Washington, D.C., and walks dogs for a living. He encourages
the dogs to growl at pedestrians.
Suzanne Savickas
Suzanne Savickas obtained her MFA from Naropa University. She is founder and editor
of Le Pink-Elephant Press and co-editor of the press’s new subsidiary, A Trunk of
Delirium.
Coleen Shin
Coleen Shin writes, paints and practices the art of self delusion in a large house full of
dust and echo on a wooded hill in Texas. A chronic pain survivor, her art reflects the
process of taking hold of it via pen and paint, pulling it out and making it her bitch.
pressurepress.ning.com
Paul Siegell
Paul Siegell is the author of jambandbootleg (A-Head, 2009), Poemergency Room
(Otoliths Books, 2008) and the e-chap JAM> (ungovernable press, 2008). Kindly hit up
more of his work at ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL paulsiegell.blogspot.com
Luc Simonic
Luc Simonic is an Anglo-American Poet, among other things. He was born and resides
in Colorado with his family.
R Jay Slais
R Jay Slais makes his living as an engineer and inventor while bleeding a lifeblood of
poetry some of which can be read at Barnwood International Poetry Mag, Cause &
Effect, Hanging Moss Journal, Mipoesias, Pedestal Magazine, and The Rose & Thorn.
Marcus Slease
Marcus Slease is the author of Godzenie and co-author of This is the Motherfucking
Remix with Brian Howe. You can check out his multimedia projects, personal musings
and poetry in progress at www.marcusslease.blogspot.com
Ellen McGrath Smith
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches literature and writing at the University of Pittsburgh. A
2007 recipient of an Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship, she has published
work in Kestrel, 5 a.m., Diner, and other journals, and is Reviews Editor for Sentence: A
Journal of Prose Poetics.
Cheryl Snell
Cheryl Snell is a classical pianist and the author of nine books of poetry and fiction.
shivasarms.blogspot.com
Janet Snell
Janet Snell is a painter from Akron, Ohio. She graduated from MICA, and is the author of
Flytrap (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and other books of art and words.
snellsisters.blogspot.com
Paul Squires
Paul Squires is a slow large moving Australian who has been writing poetry for nearly
thirty years. His work has appeared in obscure literary journals all over the world and he
believes that poetry is the cornerstone of civilization.
Jordan Stempleman
Jordan Stempleman is the author of six collections of poetry. He lives in Kansas City,
Missouri and teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute.
William Stobb
William Stobb is the author of Nervous Systems (Penguin 2007). He is co-editor of
poetry for O&S (poetsandartists.com) and host of “Hard to Say” on miPOradio. He lives
in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Belinda Subraman
Belinda Subraman is a writer, multi-media artist and Registered Nurse. Her main
website is belindasubraman.com
Emma Trelles
Emma Trelles is the author of Little Spells, a chapbook of poems published by
GOSS::183 press. She is an arts and culture writer and a regular contributor to
The Best American Poetry blog.
Brian Walters
Brian Walters is currently completing his PhD in Classics at UCLA where he is working
on a translation of Lucan’s poetic epic Civil War and writing on the interrelations of
violence and metaphor in Latin literature. His poetry has recently appeared in Barnwood
online and the UC magazine MATCHBOX.
John Walz
John Walz is a photographer and collage artist living in Waterville, Ohio. He makes a
living as a documentary photographer specializing in Weddings, and as a college
instructor teaching photography. His photo work can be seen at
www.JohnWalzPhoto.com and his collage work can be seen on his Face Book page.
Leigh Wells
Leigh Wells is a bluegrass born photographer and writer living in Bx. In the recent past,
her work has appeared in Fifth Wednesday, Spinning Jenny, and Gourmet.
www.photoleighflet.com
Calli Whittall
Calli Whittall is an upstate, New York artist. Her work involves transformational themes
and attempts to depict the emotions involved within the process of transforming ones
self, ideas, and life. Visit her website at: www.soulreflectionsinart.com
Jennifer Wildermuth
Developing her passion for fine art as a child in Wisconsin, Jennifer Wildermuth naturally
gravitates towards to the human figure in her absorbing oil paintings. The renowned
Horizon Fine Art Gallery in Jackson, WY, currently represents her.
www.wildermuthart.com
Joseph P. Wood
Joseph P. Wood is the author of the forthcoming I & We (CustomWords), A Severing
(Cinematheque Press), Urgency (Cannibal Books), Travel Writing (Scantily Clad Press),
and In What I Have Done & What I Have Failed to Do (Elixir Press). He edits Slash Pine
Press and coordinates the Slash Pine Poetry Festival.
www.slashpinepress.blogspot.com
Ernie Wormwood
Ernie Wormwood is a poet and transformative mediator in Leonardtown, Maryland. She
has poems forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine and the Ars Poetica Anthology.
Stephen Wright
Stephen Wright’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in several important
private collections. He lives and works in Los Angeles. stephenwrightart.com
Kate Wyer
Kate Wyer lives in Baltimore with her husband and two dogs. She works as a mental
health interviewer for the public health care system.
Sarah Zambiasi
Sarah Zambiasi is a self taught visual artist living in Australia. She paints/illustrates and
creates soft sculptures. artworkbysarah.blogspot.com
Renée Zepeda
Renée Zepeda is a poet and teacher who also edits The Pulchritudinous Review, an
experimental literary magazine available for purchasing. For more information contact:
ReneeZepeda@gmail.com
excerpt from:
self-portrait of a self-portrait
by Bob Hicok
when i look in the mirror,

i see a chin the size
of other people’s scurvy moods
on monday when their lives
haven’t changed, half- and shit colored moons
under my eyes, see a cold regard
of my cold regard, as if
i am an atom bomb given consciousness,
who thinks, what of it:
since there is a beginning,
there has to be an end,
and doesn’t the mushroom cloud
remind the imagination
of itself?

Poets and Artists (O&amp;S, September 2009)

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Poets and Artists (O&amp;S, September 2009)

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O&S VOLUME 2 ISSUE 6 2009

Enter the Dragon

Child of the Moon

I never thought of myself as “the blond” or even “a blond,”

Instructions to the Artist

My face should be painted with

The result should be a strained

The body is no great matter;

The background I leave up to you

Also, have several kangaroos grazing

Some final recommendations:

First appeared in Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh, 1991)

Self Portrait After Midnight oil on canvas 24” X 30”

Because the language I spoke did not match my features,

which can’t be the anagram of

Regret me. Another summer:

into the sun. Their creamy damask

has begun to slide— straps of a cocktail dress

worn past dusk, into dishabille.

is softly leathered: a purse with

counters of loose change, the phosphored

heads of matchsticks they struck,

that flared all the way down the avenue.

Urchin beds improved after day’s calm.

Tidal boy gouges an under-carpet of coastline.

Cock tip salt-white, etched,

A hooked fish mouth,

Still important each morning.

Truthfulness, that exact little god.

Where is that young man I’d find,

He was not as cruel as I am.

Spring crickets count off in the blackness.

A phone ringing somewhere is answered.

His swollen feet poke out beneath the quilt.

Tonight he’ll enter me like a blind man,

20 poetsandartists.com Recovery oil on canvas 70cm X 45cm

Sketch and Pentimento

tracks a different theme where the staff maps

one recognized me that Halloween not

love of deception it also connotes

or lace a boy too shy to state his name?

to be a spy, a master of disguise

Because it’s the fourth of July I sleep

Boogie and wildfires every summer and the cost of living

for Peter Jay Shippy

Self Portrait acrylic on canvas 58” X 58”

Still the phone made its sound,

We would walk up Bigway Avenue

The payphones so autistic

I wish phones stood still

i have painted myself

we had been trying to characterize our love.

our love is going to spain and running

our love is a futures contract for soy.

our love is a six year old

then she heard the rustling of my leaves,

this is what i see

when i look in the mirror,

so when i touch you, you feel, for once, that pumpkins

Whatever Happened to TGIF on ABC?

started living this past year.

Inside Brian Walters is Nothing

Self Portrait as Stuffed Pepper

Like an alien on a plate, posing as an edible self

Poets and Artists (O&S, September 2009)

Poets and Artists (O&S, September 2009)