INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Lana Bella
Laszlo Slomovits
Amit Parmessur
Elisavietta Ritchie
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Yuan Hongri
Yevgeniya Przhebelskaya
Alex Ferde
Karyn M. Bruce
Rajuish Mishra
Alan Britt
Patrick Ashinze
Shutta Crum
Fahredin Shehu
Paul B. Roth
Helen Gyigya
Aneek Chatterjee
Joanie Freeman
Gale Acuff
Robert Nisbet
Fred Wolven
Sreekanth Kopuri
Michael Lee Johnson
Silvia Scheibli
Richard Gartee
Ali Znaidi
Jennifer Burd
John Grey
Running Cub
Peycho Kanev
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2019
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:
A SUITE OF FIVE POEMS:
1) THE HOWLING PLAINS
She felt something once, tall frame
arranged into parts, bright skin
illumed the dark like heralded light
traveled through what it felt to be
hungered. Here was the heavy coat
of winter rotting away on cedar floor,
damp with longing where her gaze
nursed the howling blur of miles.
Then she was legs turned and cigar
ash touched on the wrists, neat plaits
licked the whiteness of plains into
the soft of her hands, into fingertips
cold and rotten. So she gave laughs to
the river until the whole dense of
her branded with brown flesh turned
yellow, dripping winter's pixie hair
around her long, thin bones. Until
what she feared was already breaths
in her chest, a closet being where
scales falling from spine and city ruins.
2) YOUR CRIME IS/WAS A SILENCE
Your crime was a silence, buttoned into
suit like a grief bone’s version of truth.
But that was you on the dirt road falling
dark wounded psalms, taste of bitter gust,
gusting against ribs out to the rasp of
last train idling. Then how you hurried,
hooded-eyed, discovering the spite come
tumbling back, beating the tracks like
fists into dough, each alloy caked its own
fleeting blaze.
Your crime is a silence, wastes wasting
of what is no longer possible to save.
Now you stand blinking in what’s spare
of your dust, tarred where illusion is cruel
exacting its perfect price. You know then
you’re death’s chill hand, newly-born,
nothing more than a nonsense on another
day, deserving of glimpse to what hides
yearning, the vandal ones where you can
step out into the nest of monsters and fly.
3) VIRTUE SPOILS IN A VALISE
Slim tempestuous legs verbed
whether she'd loved herself
less or more. Virtues picked at
bones flowing into cooing, to
salt her with the brine of ocean
from the white flesh to burn.
She fell and rose, then failed to
try, a frequent chord sagged
the ghosts of particles in tiny
half-life, feeling the resonation
in reverbs and double sharps.
Here, by this tumbleweed under
the overpass, she harnessed
the vandal dark to the weight of
a valise, carved her name out
of exhales before the wrongs
cleaved to the soles of her chest
so thickly she could gasp as
if witnessing a death of mercy.
4) YOUR LOVE, MY DARLING I HAVE LOST
nods to Loudon
Wainwright III's Lost Love
I am splintered, hurling as
late as a vanishing point
reversed —a stopping fall.
My darling you, you buckle
me in, shoveling me out,
dark like whispers lick down
on which your hurt blooms
fists through the still odds
of my name. I'm bedding
under as the augur of clover
weeps from blur to black,
stuttering vibratos up the chest,
to the brain, just to feel me
burn. Where one ending is
a void deep by torment blind,
you move a metallic click
in what the night spares us,
just far from me to take all that
I have loved you, as if in
the empty of a room I’d subvert
the sky and know you I’d lost.
5) SNOWSTORM CARIBOU
How much was silence to
thin rivers leaving marks
on stones, rustling through
cold woods, stunted, torn
and spilling like tiny pearls
of snow caught on sparse
plains. Only the electric
seconds crawled lungfuls
in the snowstorm caribou,
shadows of black sun wore
the bones of every small
living things sought cover
on its flight from the sky
spun half blind. Deeper into
each winter, the caribou
girls burst free from the soil,
birthing hips on the move,
innocence nested in the coin-
less eyes, bedaubed coaxial
sweeps of gravity beneath
tenuous hooves—microscopic
lupines in their rushing blood.
Lana Bella, Nhe, Trang, Vietnam and Hollywood Hills, California