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:
THE DESCENT
There has to be better
than what I am inside of me. After scraping clean all the clogged
openings in my body with the lowered fork buckets of backhoes, the
splintering bristles of city street cleaners, the whipsaw spin of a
plumber's snake, I've come to see how time crushes the heart of a lover the
same way a soda cracker's cellophane wrapper’s outside remains intact while
its inside becomes a sealed shamble of crumbs. Looking down at my footsteps
as they take on water and sink deeper up to my knees, I wonder how much
longer it'll be before the planet completely covers me over. How long to
collect around me the shadows of maple leaves as they drop the perpetual
mosaic of their reflections underwater toward whose bottom my own shadow
never stops sinking.
ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
Maybe it's okay
how little I learned
from my grade school teachers
who kept
all those forced conversions
wartime internments
and off-the-record massacres
out of our textbooks
knowing
what was never taught
would keep me at bay
until there was nothing
I could do or say
about how disappointed
I felt knowing
I'd made the mistake
of allowing them
to out-number my emotions
and grade me
as though I was nothing more
than unteachable
BRIEF DEPARTURE
Come back
to this world more
unknown
than when you left it
Come back
to the names
of the missing ones
newspaper obituaries
botch
Come back
to those invisible lives
the glowing edges
dragged by hot tail-pipes
well after midnight
spark across macadam
Come back
to those who survive
their own absence
without ever knowing
they’re gone
Come back
to the emptiness
that the scattered feathers
a red-tailed hawk
leaves of its prey
cover as though sacred
Come back
without ever having left
without ever having
been here before
SOUGHT PORTRAIT
Develop the urge
to carve
a hole in the sky
Not one
you can crawl into
and reach
the darkness of space
or some other
planet's moons
but rather one
within a thick gray
cloud hovering
its green rain shower
above Van Gogh yellow
fields of Earth’s
blue rebirth below
Paul B. Roth, Fayetteville, New York