INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Amit Parmessur
Elisavietta Ritchie
Donal Mahoney
Fahredin Shehu
Richard Kostelanetz
Alex Ferde
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Duane Locke
Chris Lord
Nahshon Cook
Al Ortelani
Shutta Crum
Ajibola Tolase
Silvia Scheibli
Laszlo Slomovits
Emmanuel Samson
Lyn Lifshin
Running Cub
Nikita Parik
Alan Britt
John Grey
Bhisma Upreti
Paul B. Roth
Jennifer Burd
Sunday Michael
Michael H. Brownstein
Burd
Ali Znaidi
Richard Gartee
Kanev Peycho
Fred Wolven
Petraq Risto
Carolyn Elias
Alabi Oyedeji
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2015
Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 47 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
REMEMBRANCE: BLUE FLOWER
Hidden flower, we search for you everywhere.
We’ve heard the
shadows enormous ferns grow to cool this creek’s edge
serenade your beautiful blue face of wrinkled velvet.
Rumors exist your
head clings to a rotting log’s soft wood beside a patch of
sunlight towering sycamores allow to take shape for less than a minute per
day.
We don’t really expect to find you on any sunlit balconies surrounded by Italian phrases unwound from low-cut Dolce & Gabbana gowns.
If we wanted to find
you, we’d first have to search those mountain caves
knowing you exist solely for the darkness that keeps you flowering.
Then should anyone notice you squeezing your way out between a brick wall’s cracked mortar, it’ll be that much easier to explain.
Except, of course, when reports seeing your reflection in a flooded marsh turn out to be no more than just another subjective reflection.
Hidden flower, where are you?
LOST COUNTRY POEM
--After Merton' s
letter to Truman before the criminal outcome of Hiroshima's
and Nagusaki
Apologies, Father, but we’re still not quite ready to stop killing each other.
It’s changed little all these years into adulthood and now living on as old men.
Everything depicts through its actions the feelings we have towards ourselves. No sense even trying on our own.
Giving ourselves such little room to grow, we haven’t the vaguest idea how to treat anyone beyond our own selfish needs.
Why, instead of giving, when nothing’s said, we’d rather remain quiet.
Otherwise, these questions strafing us and leaving such unanswerable scars portrayed by our skin in broad daylight, might just as well keep us locked up behind urban doors forever.
Walking down apartment corridors mired deep in Middle Eastern cooking odors might even convince us that this is to be our newest safeguard, the way ducking under one’s school desk was in the event of a nuclear attack way back when.
Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York