Contemplation

You confuse me,
weaving webs of the most intricate threads.
Magic lingers upon them
like dewdrops,
like teardrops that fall
like waterfalls,
unchecked and unguarded,
beating against your doors.
I beg you to let me in and 
show me the fire I saw burning faintly in your eyes. 
Or was I mistaken?
Was it not a secret shared with me 
but a mere chance encounter
of eyes you failed to disguise in time;
and the glimpse I stole
was not you baring your soul,
but instead, an accident you have since worked to rectify. 
In which case,
forgive me for having crossed the line you drew between us.
Let us return to distant gazes
and graze upon our fields of thought;
alone in our togetherness,
comfortable in the silence of never knowing, 
and never needing to know. 


Amina Bhatti, 
Nottingham, UK. 
(abhatti1994@yahoo.com ) 

Age-Strife

“Disgracing the National stage,” is how 
the critics-cum-sages deemed the disas-
ter. Who reads the Business Post anyhow?
The morning after the death of pizzazz.
Irrational heartrace- an unwelcome
rerun- ti-titi-tum- fourteen hours straight, 
no sign of abate, owed to eleven
everlasting seconds of silence. Age-
ing in an instant my opening-night-
hopeful face, painful pinpricks of sweat, snot,
skinburst bubblewraps, belying freeze-dried 
tongue and Gobi desert gob. Which. Will. Not. 
Speak. 
Somewhere- a line striving for utterance,
dying to fulfill its function. Someplace-
smothered, submerged in subconscious quicksands,
absent, abstract, somehow lost in face-space. 
Is it something I can ever trace? I
remember thinking. A line crafted by 
most skillful hands, from where brains abound, and
are enwrapped in feels. Lost in Translations…
Meanwhile, unimpressed and restless, gawking hawkeyed, the overpaying theatre attendees. Vulturine in the stalls. Envulturing in the circle… 

Cue tumbleweeds through dust filled wind
Cue stage-manager half-truthfully excusing ‘technical malfunction’
Cue career-killing bad reviews
Queue never again the paying public to see me
Cue trapdoor opening, me swallowed whole, emblazing my soul in the gallows below
Cue… queue… ‘What’s my CUE!?’ 



In those eleven eternal seconds: a flashpause of serenity. 
A memory. An episodic apparition…

Summer. I’m a footy-mad kid, and truck-driving dad surprises us. A visit. 
Caterpillaring kerbside up the Cul de Sac- armed with spirited 
tales of slanted people with limpy accents- dad and his manly monster mobile.
I dive out in front, a new ref’-conning trick, a self-trip, but concealed.
Hoodwinking whistleblowers is the name of the game. But on that day,
seeing father’s face displaying the pain I feign, two insights I gained:
That he loved me at that age, and all’ the world’s a stage.

I should've been a truck-driver

Bar Reward
London, 
UK

Eternal Memory

Eyes met 

tears wept

tasted lips

felt hips

golden ring

guilt brings

a memory 

for eternity.


Susan O'Reilly

Wed the White Ceiling

I often imagine the white ceiling swallows me.
I melt into its whiteness, pure immaculate surface,
melting inside it would also mean spreading my blood
and all my organs onto the snow-like painted area,
large square unstained above the bed, the sofa, the settee,
the floor boards on which I often lay, day-dreaming,
anticipating other nightmares to come, to form, to be grown,
more to escape from or jump over to feel within the norms.

I attend the absorption and all my body stretches until it blows out
and a blood red patch as large as I would end if I crashed from
the top floor of the world highest building ever formed
splatters, morphes, moves and moulders into an inconceivable
mirror reflecting the worst imaginable thoughts stacked from the beginning of my life.

Walter Ruhlmann,
France

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits mgversion2>datura and runs mgv2>publishing. His latest collections are Maore published by Lapwing Publications, UK, 2013, Carmine Carnival published by Lazarus Media, USA, 2013 and The Loss through Flutter Press, USA, 2014. Coming up in 2014, Crossing Puddles through Robocup Press, and Twelve Times Thirteen through Kind of a Hurricane Press.

His blog http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/ 

Motivational Image

A cartoon image rendering
a small stick figure straining
forward, attempting resurrection
reaching for the end post
bound by a rubber band, labeled
Destructive Self Views
I see us, our disease, gradual
convalescence, the disguise 
we so often wear in public
We have accepted our fate
and so are resigned to the bird
pecking at our Promethean side
We are the tiny scrambling toon
waving thin-line arms
not looking viewers in the eye.

JD DeHart

DeHart is a writer and teacher from Tennessee. 
His blog is spinrockreader.blogspot.com

After the Fact

A minister's son married
a deacon's daughter
after a long courtship.

It was difficult at times
doing everything right
but the young couple 

saved themselves
for the wedding night
when the groom 

sat on the bed 
and watched his bride 
carefully undress,

finally removing
the bra he never
knew was padded.

Donal Mahoney
donalmahoney@charter.net
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has had poems published Ancient Heart Magazine and other publications in the United State, Europe, Asia and Africa. 

Woman Descending in Park

She produces a pint of cheap gin. 
Contemplates it. Finishes it. 
And waits as noting is illuminated. 
Not the pain in breathing, 
or the lovers that aren’t. 
Only the expanding silence
of being alone fills her mind. 

In failing tenebrous light
she tosses her empty bottle
and then, in unsteady contemptuous gait, 
she flounces
past a couple of burnt-out freaks
from the seventies, 
hunkering
in the falling shadows, 
snorting coke, and talking
about the meaning of poverty. 
She swings past them 
ranging into the blank and
widening night. 
There she sashays past parkmen, 
sitting like gravestones: 
aging, grained and pebbled fingers
dancing deadly 
on mahogany canes;
eyes
harnessed
only
on the bucking of the sea. 

by Steve de France