INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Bilall Maliqi
Duane Locke
Eddie Awusi
Silvia Scheibli
Amit Parmessur
Lyn Lifshin
Juan Hongi
Shutta Crum
Peycho Kanev
Fahredin Shehu
Lana Bella
Laszlo Slomovits
Abdulrahman M Abu- yaman
Elisavietta Ritchie
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Keith Moul
Aneek Chatterjee
Tom Evans
Robert Nisbet
Paul B. Roth
Alex Ferde
Alan Britt
Ali Znaidi
Running Cub
John Grey
Jennifer Burd
Fred Wolven
Helen Gyigya
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2018
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 51 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
ONE IF BY SEA
Dearest world, I am sundered in
the dawning grey, fluting air
after the Shearwaters' flights.
Making ceremony of the dark,
I rock me through the rough
and tumbled floor, where tales
of sunken ships pitch up from
hinterland of the wider world.
One if by sea, I air-bruise into
waves with lungful of sand on
some faraway beach, foam-agog
with 68.65 mph wind worth of
chills. Off the margin and into
vast, I hunger more for the black
walled in glass, rise and fall as
confits of the seer and peppery
seen casting off from the sunrise
on the ford, as I myself go reef
to ochre fowls, pearl-button shirt
nerves wet to the salt-set down.
from LETTERS
Something else salved you into tracts
of sleep, draped in vernix to that of
a suckling babe. Like an engine idling
on the fjord, you pulsed fontanelles
with sheer slopes of breaths drawing
water, where ghost ships mapped
the night sea in serpentine gold. Yet
one lay list on its side, caught half-
way out with bright yellow stern as if
the tides softened less by the bank
enough to refuse the tinny sparks of
the world’s synapse. In tremulous
wind, you reached the shore hauled
from flock of birds like a benzene ring
pitched skeletal off a peninsula. But
as always, you can’t be no kinder than
yourself here, when the hooves of
this country washing into ribs for what
jarred of a lost child’s calls out to sea,
little ghost voice baptized in your tears
of ancient waters.
DIVOTS AND PORES
The water is wide, spreading of luteous seeds
beneath a paper moon. My boat wrings from
me of thirst plaguing lilts in cottonmouth gin,
alighting with divots and pores. So carefully
now, I rest me down and become skyline, eyes
fare in fierce moonlight wistful of melancholia
from dark water, like the sad of night clinging
to a murky sense of something lost. But I can't
sleep, in this way, I am the plainsong pressing
cool lips to luna moths, falling sideways down
till I've sought for warmth. And there in the mid-
most of alkali steam and warm sheets, I gift me
the word paradise, set me haltingly for the flit
of starlings at my lotus form, until I stop looking
for that girl who climbs her own spine into sea.
MALAISE TRAVELED ON ICY TRACK
Malaise enchanted in the cast
of winter depth, soft-bridged on
a wrought-iron fence. Tonight,
I tucked into silver ruins where
starlings flew through cerulean
wind, plumage weaved of fluted
white, pulling back the blooms
of ink. A floating island of alkali
distilled on me like a body cored
back the arthritic hips, wearing
the bridle path in trims and frills
on slippery glass, to that gentle
reminiscence of sky pulling cold,
trembling harmonics down slurry
grate, iced, silent, ghostly as jaws
of pennies broke along the under-
sides of snowmelt, teasing me with
season’s traitor kiss, over and over
in bleached bones of lace and ice.
DEAR OPHELIA
She crawled corners, soothed
down the stairs of clover's sting
as code for love. She was old
perfume interred on the sulk of
that floor, the laze set into dark
what was once her entire sun.
A time idler’s lament, hers was
an avid of missing life like
a thought solute, tied to a line
of scent. A fleck, a flicker, siren
blinked to those little beings
that lay beyond her, she sensed
the downpour of earth on sill,
muted by walls of leaves. Dear
Ophelia, how she was gossamer
and forlorn as first frost felled
through starlit glass, thirsting to
loom across hurt at her throat.
Did she know, each time she slid
blackly into the space between
living and terror, she’d die in
the narrowing of the hour, with
the same light that once delivered
a bright yellow bird to her sky.
Lana Bella, Nhe, Trang, Vietnam and Hollywood Hills, California