Sunday Drive

by Miranda Stone

The leaden sky, pregnant with rain
makes our heads throb, as though we have
barometers inside our skulls.
The car’s lowered windows offer no relief
from air thick as a pot of lukewarm soup.

We are lost. We have driven past
the same clapboard house three times.
The German Shepherd in the yard
barrels toward us, tail wagging
as it chases our car down the dirt road.

Cruel words are barbs resting on our tongues.
The brutal heat forces them from our mouths.
You’re selfish.
You make me sick.
I can’t stand the sight of you.
I don’t love you anymore.

We make another circle. The German Shepherd
no longer gives chase, for we’re old friends now.
Above us, the sky splits open. Fat drops strike
the windshield like small stones.
We leave the windows down, preferring the storm
to the silence between us, weighted heavy
with words as yet unsaid.

brook once was moonrise

 by Michelle Villanueva

gears trip the slightest shine fans say
chopping this air bold with difference
when will too strained colors prevail
sleet spreads its tattered sheen around you

chipping visions from my windshield
reminds me you played when these last stars
sang through the masses relevant hymns
and the firmament whispered your eyes
ever love this rain streaked monument

piles of aluminum cans reveal
capillaries bright with polishing
the office staff busily tells them
management may never know my plans
fields white with care beckon just beyond

overtime leaves me thirsty with schemes
seeing your kitchen light thrills me
you bring me outside the water you know
excitedly we chase sky petals

afterward settled beer awaits us
together we could scale these girders
as though whirlwinds were not our home

The Dodo’s Gone To Sleep

by Amit Parmessur

Each step up the staircase and each heartbeat brings
me closer to you, like a black magnet.
The only good I can do in this city’s emptiness
is to anticipate your squawk;
remember, when the sun sets, we’ll borrow wings
and fly into the night full of fast clouds.
Strumming my sitar I’ll watch over
your yellow feet, green beak and curly feathers,
with you preening in Wonderland.

Reaching the rooftop I meet only a ghost
as your name means fool. With each memory
of you I shed a cold tear. I go down.
The nuts in my hand, the seeds in my pockets
I wish to see you in my room and
fool the whole world, cracking jokes with you,
rolling on the ecstatic floor.
But the butterfly clock on the wall
whispers to me that you’ve gone to sleep
early today with the dogs and monkeys.

A Memory

by Douglas Polk

fedoras sweaty,
black and gray,
hereford sold in the ring below,
farmer cattle,
more pet than livestock,
auctioned off,
while the wife and kids in the general store downtown,
trying on school clothes for the upcoming year

In the Open

by James Babbs

I ordered the chicken fingers
with a side of onion rings
because I like them
better than the fries
early on a Wednesday
on my way back home and
I see the madman’s reflection
there in the window
before I go and sit down
the disheveled madman
who keeps following me around
and no matter where I am
I always find him
out there in the open
moving around in the light
reminding me the whole time
of somebody else and
some days
he looks old and tired
some days
he looks as if
he has nowhere left to go
the disheveled madman
like he’s waiting for something
I hear him laughing
every time I turn my head

A Grand Buffet

by Donal Mahoney

Maury's wife frets
about growing old
withering up

and sagging so
it's up to Maury
to let her know

every day she's
a grand buffet
that he can't wait

to see and sample.
Her appetizers are
enticing, entrees

perfectly prepared.
At his age though,
Maury has to pause.

He knows now
this will mean
a long nap later.

Maybe It Would Have Been A Homer

by g emil reutter

The continuous spasms run the circuit board of my
nervous system, and I have no one to
blame but myself. Yet in this room, a prison for three
days I hear life all around me. The horns of the commuter
trains on the hour and the mighty blasts from the freight
diesels switching racks at Newtown Junction pulling
hundreds of cars three time a day.

And there is young mother yelling on the sidewalk under
my window, I wish she would lose her voice. The old ladies
talk on the stoop, their murmuring puts me to sleep as the
sounds of passerby’s and cars fill the air.

As dusk falls, just a few days past solstice, I think of all those
summers past and baseball. Now in my 56th year I know I can
never go back and never again feel that great joy of when a
ball pops off a bat, lands where you wanted it to. Maybe it
would have been a homer.

See Me Love You/You Know Who You Are

by Amy Soricelli

Blue is still blue when it is buried deep in the colored shells on the shore;
the midnight sky peeks its colored stone stars across your sandy toes.
I would take you to the beach in a cloud.
Blue is still blue when the lucky loopy sounds of your stringy guitar plays hard against
the backdoor slips of your last kiss me you said....
I could raise your head to the end of the sky you would see me peeking up from down.
I could not carry the colored weight of the world in my single hand.
There are too many colors of love.
But blue is still the blue of your eyes.

Evening Refrain

by Kindra McDonald

The crunch of a beer can,
change jingling as he paws his pockets,
paces off the rooms
wearing holes through his cape-cod
cage, singing George Thorogood
with a thick tongue,
dragging his foot, limp
and bloody where
he tried to chew himself free.

nihil humanum a me alienum puto

by John Grochalski

this is a disney bar now
or it looks like one out of a disney movie

there are more televisions in the joint
then there are people

the people look like cartoons at last
blonde and tanned and without an ounce of fat

i don’t recognize the beers on tap
and the ones that i do are too rich for my blood

i can’t believe that i used to drink here
back when they broke the windows and the toilet never worked
and fights broke out as a matter of course on friday night

now there are fake fireplaces in the wall
and a beer garden out back

there is soccer playing on each and every television
and a digital jukebox playing pop on low

one of the blondes asks me what team i’m rooting for
and i respond, whatever teams ends this game the quickest

that ends the conversation

the chinese still come in here
hocking their bootleg dvds of the worst america
has to offer the world of cinematic art

back then the old guys used to pause from their drinks
to scan the movies and make conversation with the bootleggers

now no one says a thing to them
they watch soccer and have the bartender
pour them another expensive beer while they check their cell phones

more blonde and tan people shout from outside
because the beer garden has a television too

when the chinese bootlegger leaves
the three blondes drinking three red drinks with citrus fruit
all look at each other like they smelled a fart
the one says to the other two
oh my god, that’s like the third time
they’ve been in here today

like, get a life, one of the other ones says

they go back to watching the soccer match
almost two hours of dutch and costa rican men
running up and down the pitch and there’s still no score

they all look the same anyway, one of the blondes says

but who? i wonder are they talking about

the chinese
the sweating soccer players
themselves
or the rest of us.

Troubles

by Robert Nisbet

The bomb went off in the barracks
just after noon. She was desperate, hunting news,
ringing, ringing, holding on. Set off for home
(it was nearer the barracks anyway)
and at Cardiff Gate the evening papers
told of the bomb, people at the tables talked of it,
but the bomb was lost between a bent politician
and a singer’s pretty boobs, and she rang
and rang again, to the last coin, drove on,
fifty miles again, to a nearly-empty Pont Abraham
where the waitress was suddenly kind
and she poured it all out, just as suddenly,
My son is there, and the girl cried with her
(what sort of emotional girl was that?) and said
You can ring from here, out the back, they won’t know,

and her son was safe and she could only sob,
helplessly, in a caretaker’s room,
with the brushes and the buckets and the bleach,
because her son was safe and there was somebody too
who had helped her, with her arm round her,
to pull out of a racing current,
fetch up on a safe, dry bank.

ONE CURE ONLY

by Burgess Needle

At dawn, no matter his mood, one cure only
for his fractured soul, Bach’s violin Concerto No. 1
        with A Minor chords lapping wall to wall
        against religious law.
He wrapped the black leather strap
       around his middle finger and left arm
       ah, his tefillin received upon bar mitzvah.
Placed the phylactery two fist-width from the tip of his nose
       murmuring inside all the while
       blessed art thou who sanctified us with
      His commandments and has commanded us
                   to lay tefillin
He’d kept his own brittle shellac recording
         of Menuhin and Enesco with tracks laid
        down by Aufgenommen in the ‘30s.
Resonating as he considered  the black box on his head
        symbolized his mind and thoughts
        just as the arm straps represented
                 his actions and deeds.
Exhale in joy before the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris
       prepare for the world of numbers, he thought
       prepare for the world of goyim in my disguise
Acknowledge light peering through the blinds
      he thought of his son-to-be and what he would show him
      as the Concerto’s Andante wended its own quiet way
      within an elegant framework that sheltered
               and threatened its existence
As his own life felt dread every new day
               the sun’s blessing and the night’s threat
               time for work time for life
                           time to kiss his wife goodbye.

Tales Of The Mysterious Warrant Dodger

by Paul Tristram

The banging upon the front door started again
for the third time on this otherwise peaceful day.
Then they traipsed heavily up the creaking stairs
with big boots and started knocking and shouting
at the door of Room 5, situated right next to mine.
“Anthony David Michaels we have an outstanding
warrant that we need to speak to you about.
Open up the door or we will have to break it down!”
stated someone with a voice of aggressive authority.
“Aye, if that warrant permitted you to do so
that door would already be down, so seeing as it ain’t,
if either the door, frame or lock is accidently damaged
due to your persistent enthusiasm for your job
it will be you paying for it mate, so bare that in mind,
you ain’t even proper Old Bill your just ‘PCSO’s!”
explained-via shouting-someone clued up on law
from the attic room which I always thought was empty?
I leapt off my rented bed and ran to my rented window
which was slightly open and saw him from next door
dangle and swing from the windowsill across-that way,
let go and fall 3ft down onto the garden dividing wall.
Sprint along it nearly to the lane at the far end
but upon hearing footsteps…backtrack halfway
with the balance of a gymnast and jump into the next
garden with a soft thud, then proceed to scale
and monkey every boundary wall and fence
of every garden right up to the end of the street
where he then disappeared as quickly as teenage
virginity at a Resolven council estate house party.
With the excitement now at an end, I lay back down
thinking to myself  ‘screw that for a game of soldiers,
I would rather just pay the fine and have done with it.’

It’s my time to sit with old men

by Michael Mark

I have a violent urge to piss on the young.

I need a session with the wrinkled.
That stalwart crowd dozing
on scarred benches and lawn chairs.

Bald and taking on all cancers.

Youth’s neon vitality and untrained
hopefulness is so frustrating.
Too sweet, ech!
Nothing like the hard-earned optimism
from the decayed breath of a busted up geezer.
“It will work out, one way or the other” is rooted in God’s truth!
As opposed to the antiseptic helium, “It’s all good, man.”

These young people’s lack of perspective -
of what is in the dirt, what makes them -
sucks the past right out of me.

I hate them not for their sun-shining muscles
or their liquid grace.
It’s the way they don’t see -
the blind guy who walks all over
the neighborhood, singing, has better vision.

I want to listen to the creaks and gasps
of worn down bones
and study stubborn bruises that have taken over
entire legs and backs and spread under
skin so thin you can see through
to the honesty.

What’s left to say? Nothing.
The old ones heard it all.
But if you want to talk, they’ll try.
And if they can’t pick up your mumbles
they say “speak up” or “talk slower,”
or make up what you said
which is smarter than what
you said.

What’s with these kids walking around with
those headsets in their ears –
missing every piece of the lyrical poetry
in the litany of ailments and utter failure of
too expensive medications, and near lethal
misdiagnoses?

Youth stinks because it has no stink.
It’s odorless as 3 dollar bottled water.
Smells are important – look how dogs know each other.
We are animals and the old farts on the benches
who never have known floss
live their dying animal nature every day.

If they need me to peel back their bandages
to report on post-surgery progress,
I will be their witness.
I will see them the way they are,
the shape they are in -
to Hell with weepy nostalgia.
I’ll tell ‘em, “This is how it is kiddo.”
And they’ll put their skeleton hands on my face
and tell me I’m a good boy, not the best,
because their Harold, their Alex, their Shlomo is the best.

These young people are not even people.
A person has to go through more anguish
than a driver’s test to matter.
In my opinion, they should not be counted in a census -
not as a full human being,
a tad-person, ok.

They may, if they work very hard,
very, very hard and get up after being knocked down
a couple million times,
they may get their turn at being old.
But age is not a given.
It is struggled for.
With will, cunning, flexibility and drunk luck.

They say motherhood is the hardest job –
it may be the most important.
But hardest belongs to the old ones.
Bending over holds incalculable consequences,
rising and falling with each vertebra compressed
by every decade, every year and every fall, real or imagined.

And there’s no way around it -
you got to bend.
Are you not going to pick up that nickel
on the sidewalk?
You have no choice.
And when pain, falling, being forgotten,
steps up in front of an old man
he must summon his guts and take down a breath,
much as he can get in his leaky lungs,
and fight, damn it, fight his own failing body and gravity,
and the knowledge that this could be it, over, final.

But it’s five cents.
And it wasn’t that long ago
that would buy dinner for his family.

That’s why I’m going to where “I remember” outnumbers “I will.”
Where poorly healing scars tell more vivid truths than tattoos
and hearts are more tender and bigger –
due to disease and loving more.

These are people who respect a stop sign.
And they speak at a pace where you can wander
around in their stories,
while they take regular pauses to relocate their train of thought.

These are not victims – they’re warriors
who time could not beat.
Dazed from living.
Determined to get more of whatever
there is to get.
After a nice nap.

Ok, I’m done now.
Zipped up.
Hands washed with soap.
Just like my old man taught me.

One Night in SpainInspired by "You Hated Spain" by Ted Hughes from “Birthday Letters”

by Marilyn Braendeholm

I was caught by the darkness of Spain
where deep shadows of breeze frightened
us from entering too far. You
thought it was tapas and wine but my Spain
was cool alleys and curtain confessionals where
my northern acclimate prowled like hunger. I
can’t recall despising heat so much. I felt
at war with it. To think I wear thick socks at home.
We ate late to avoid the heat. Everyone did. The
flies circled our heads, hyaenas blood-raw
and biting at our legs. You insisted on light
to see the food on your plate, and the waiter, he
lit a match to a snubbed candle that floated oiled
in cloudy liquid. That fluid, whatever it was, anchovy
oil perhaps, drew the flies so close we saw their faces.
Their sooty eyes begging us to feast, the
wave of our hands to no effect, as rhythms north african
further developed the swelter of heat. A ladder of black
oiled smoke funnelled from the candle, its edges
tempting us into a kiss across the table. Where to,
we asked, where next when everything
about this place frightened
me and you.

plastic transcendence

by John Grochalski

walking suicides stumble down
new utrecht avenue
with summer school backpacks
smacking off of the back of their knees
these drug slouch kids
doing the visine twist
with their open, slobbering mouths
before nine o’clock in the morning
while every other teen is still in bed
having glorious sex balls of the mind
there is usually a pack of boys
and their one token girlfriend
who’s too loud for the time of day
they extoll the virtues of the weed
as they pass it around standing menacingly
in front of the homes of the foreign or old
these marijuana zombies laughing at the wind
getting stoned before the opening salvo
of remedial math or english
trying to duck the cops who roam these streets
in circles, like rabid dogs chasing after their own tails
sweet aromatic dullards of brooklyn
caught in the shade of their forever high school
who have yet to connect their failures with behavior
too young
too young to understand the ramifications
the ones who will be here all summer and the next
toke after toke after toke
before taking their show of shows into the autumn
up all the way through graduation
in a hail of magic
of plastic transcendence
making a lovely haze
of the fragile and coming future

RUNNING ON EMPTY

by Marc Carver

I push the accelerator down in the car
but there is something wedged underneath
it is one of last night's beer cans.
Eventually I manage to kick it out of the way.
There are also empty beer bottles in the back.
The only time I enjoy driving is when I am drinking.
I thought about tidying up the car a bit
but then wrote it off
after all
it is not my car
and it is nearly out of gas

Floating a Reunion Plan

by Todd Mercer

Dusty Springfield singing Son of a Preacher Man
inside the clock radio, between queens
in a two-queen special at the Ramada.
The day began with idol-smashing, smoothed
to ritual, to sacraments. It sweetened.
She said Let’s come back
after ten years. Future talk
is healthy for you. Clean up
whatever you’re predisposed to
muck-up repeatedly. Stop
serial stupidity. Don’t rip
head-boards from their moorings
out of enthusiasm. The desk clerk,
that jaded atheist, will smirk
and add sixty-nine bucks and tax
to the MasterCard. Before they split
he over-tips the maid. It’s justice
for the muss left. Dusty wraps the song,
the one that makes this woman
in the future wonder
what became of a pastor’s son, the one
who reached her, here.

Listening to CNN, August 8, 2014

by Patricia Williams

 

Look from the mountain top,

gaze east

at the blush in the sky

glowing brilliant,

color unmatched.

 

Look closely.

Tongues of red

reaching into the blue 

― rawness, inflammation ―

no gloried, climbing sun

on the horizon.

 

The East is burning,

burning, burning ―

gnashing terrible teeth,

rolling terrible eyes;

 

When November passes

and everything fades,

there’s always

hope in afterlife.

Lines

by Joe Brennand

one wave
on one wave
rolls on the shore

THE FUCK-IT LIST

by Robert E. Petras

Fuck it—I won’t do it
I said to my little pop tart
Responding to her request
To go inside the Amish Quilt Hall of Fame,
Nor will I go shopping at Tiffany’s with you
Nor watch Oprah live—ever.

You have your bucket list;
I have my fuck-it list.

I will never hold your purse
While you go to the restroom.
I will never go to the Piggsy-Wiggsy
For you to buy Tampons.
I will never ask for directions
Even if lost inside the world’s largest shopping mall.
I will never get a manicure,
Pedicure, Peter Pan cure.
And I will never say I’m sorry,
Unless, of course, it leads to make-up sex.
Then I’m sorry, sorry, oh so sorry.

i can't go back

by Linda M. Crate

ingrid michaelson
plays
on the radio
while i pace the apartment
like a wild animal
i am caged
yearning for freedom
and yet
it is inappropriate for me to
go outside
only in my underwear
braless
i would be arrested for indecent exposure,
but somehow
it's okay for the grossly obese man
with his five hundred pound
hairy pot belly
to sit out in his underwear
on a hot summer's
day;
i don't understand how that's not the same
his boobs are probably
bigger than mine—
life isn't fair, they say, but somehow
that excuse never worked
for me;
i'm sick of all the hypocrisy of
everything
just want to be a child again
when dandelions
danced their visions over me and trees
laughed in the breeze
so sweetly,
and i dreamed without
fear of falling—
where i wasn't caged in all this want
and desire
with conundrums on my tongue
simply ran outside
played in the weeds, spoke to faeries
and waved to mermaids
in their blue green lagoons
oh!
how we all wish to grow older as a child,
but we don't realize how good
we had it
until it's gone.

Sunflowers

by Donal Mahoney

No one has to teach a field
of sunflowers how to worship.
Before dawn in high summer

their necks are bent
in silent prayer like monks.
But as the sun comes up

sunflowers rise as well.
At noon they adore the sun
the way monks in pews

adore the Host at elevation.
Listen and you may hear
sunflowers sing Alleluia!

Tonight my wife fucks Bruce Springsteen

by Michael Mark

I hope there's a soft summer rain falling
when the Boss gets on top of her.

And earlier, when he picks her up outside our house,
I hope he’s got his sleek machine.

I hope they pull over to some roadside bar and
have a few beers and

Bruce recites some Jersey to her.

He takes out his worn, torn leather book
that's formed to his rock hard ass and
coughs a boyish, proud laugh,
as he leans over the carved up
table to whisper lyrics he hasn't shared
with any E-Street Band member. Not Landau
or Patti.

He dances her by the pool table
and presses her into the shadows and
finds a tender spot and
sighs how every night he prays to Clarence.

She bites his lip, sucks on it, kisses his neck
and tells him she knows Clarence hears him.

Then they ride slow along the river
to the edge of town,
and take a stab at romance.

She deserves it.
She's been a good companion
for over 34 years,
from Queens to Boston to California
2 kids, 4 jobs, surgeries.

Behind the locked door,
I hope she feels comfortable
enough to keep the lights on,
to study him taking off his shirt, the bones of his back,
then his boots and his jeans.

I hope there's refusal and then surrender.
Then thunder.

She will walk back into our house
in morning’s light, down the hallway,
to dress for work.

She will know what’s flesh
and what’s fantasy.

IN THE FLOOD

by John Grey

The river overflows.
Streets are hopeless.
Town planners leave for higher grounds.
Families resume life in their attics.

I prefer to be the one man wading
from the park gazebo
to the bench outside the hardware store.

My father was always well prepared for floods.
He said, even when it’s dry,
the ground we stand on is nothing
but floating cars and carcasses.
Keep your head above water
and don’t touch anything electric,
and you’ll get by.

I’ve always heeded his advice.
Up until now,
all that’s been missing
are the circumstances.

NOWHERE

by Marc Carver

It is all here
here in nowhere
where nobody truly lives
just a day
then another
just a beer
then another
sweetness of whisky
a chance of a lay
some food on a table
anybody's table
the freer the better
yes it is all here
here in nowhere

The Great GreenTree Mortgage Oscillation

by Todd Mercer

Nikki from GreenTree
called again and again called to say
the same as yesterday, the same
as she’ll say tomorrow.
It means nothing, it’s a tidal
oscillation for telephones,
back and back and gone and gone
a daily metronome
the calls that say
we’ll take your home
and pay your mortgage,
deadbeat,
the note that you’ve
always paid.

Nikki from GreenTree
speaks but her ears don’t receive.
She offers a way out, a settlement
that shape-shifts if you
dare to touch it,
it rolls out leaving you
in a hold loop
on mud flats,
it evaporates.

Nikki from GreenTree
rings in around Elevenses,
always has and always will,
impervious to facts or satire,
to your answers,
to your perfect record
of sustained and timely payments.

You just missed her
but she’ll be back
every morning every morning,
machine with a human voice
with a deal that’s not a deal,
with a reason that defies Reason.
She says, pay your note.

A LETTER FROM THE AMERICAN DISSIDENT

To Suzanne Nossel, PEN America Executive Director:

Well, I doubt you’ll respond.  After all, what could you possibly write in your defense… of apathy and bourgeois elitism?  Hopefully, you’ve not become so high and mighty that you won’t even be able to focus on anything this lowly plebe has to write here… hopefully.  Thus, I simply continue this dialogue de sourds.   

Currently, I’m sketching the next front cover of The American Dissident, #28, which will feature Frank Bidart, you, and other literary elitists (Quinn et al) involved in your Literary Awards (the images of you on Google portray a NY West Side elitist cocktail-party socialite… how odd for the jefa of PEN America!)

Regarding the awards, you state:   “The PEN Literary Awards bring together writers, editors, and members of the literary community to celebrate the ultimate fruit of free expression: great literature.”  But what about those writers and editors NOT of the “literary community,” as you term the closed community of mostly established-order academics and their poet/writer acolytes.  How to become a member of that community? Well, the response is obvious:  play the game of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil PC-expression-only. The “ultimate fruit of free expression,” as you term it, is certainly not academically-approved, promoted, and designated “great literature.”  The “ultimate fruit” is rather literature scorned by the elites because it dares criticize the elites.   Far more often than not, “great literature” as you term it, is a subjective—not an objective—term.  Far more often than not, that so-called “great literature” is innocuous, hardly at all threatening to the power structure, which designates it “great.”  You seem quite confused pairing “free expression” with so-called “great literature.” 

Have you read The Oak and the Calf?  If you haven’t, do so!  But one would certainly expect that you have read it, considering your position.  In any case, if you recall, Solzhenitsyn’s book depicts the literary scene under the Stalinist dictatorship.  Sadly, that scene is a mirror of today’s literary scene in America.  Of course, Americans are rarely arrested for writing (three cops showed up to escort me out of the library one week after my published writing, but I was not arrested).  Instead, they are ostracized into oblivion, that is, if the established order feels offended by the writing. 

Why does PEN America not focus on that?  Why does it not support the few American writers who dare criticize the academics and writers who control the literary scene in America, including the pompous chancellors of the Academy of American Poets (Bidart et al) and the one-percenters of the Poetry Foundation?  The answer of course is that PEN has become an integral part of that scene.  In essence, the scorners of free expression (academics and literati) have infiltrated and taken control of PEN America… unless, of course, it was always thus.  In essence, if that were not true, why would your publication, PEN America Journal, not even respond to, let alone publish, the highly caustic article I wrote on PEN and submitted to it (See http://www.globalfreepress.org/sections/free-speech/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration). The following is a pertinent quote from The Oak and the Calf to back the above contention: 

“The shrill, vainglorious literature of the establishment—with its dozen fat magazines, its two literary newspapers, its innumerable anthologies, its novels between hard covers, its collected works, its annual prizes, its adaptations for radio of impossibly tedious originals—I had once and for all recognized as unreal, and I did not waste my time or exasperate myself by trying to keep up with it.  I knew without looking that there could be nothing of merit in all this.  Not because no talent could emerge there—no doubt it sometimes did, but there it perished too.  For it was a barren field, that which they sowed.  I knew that in such a field nothing could grow to maturity.  When they first came to literature they had, all of them—the social novelists, the bombastic playwrights, the civic poets, and needless to say the journalists and critics—joined in an undertaking never, whatever the subject, whatever the issue, to mention the essential truth, the truth that leaps to the eye within no help from literature.  This solemn pledge to abstain from truth was called socialist realism.  Even writers of love poems, even those lyric poets who had sought sanctuary in nature or in elegant romanticism, were all fatally flawed because they dared not touch the important truths.” 

Finally, unlike your journal, The American Dissident will publish the harshest criticism received because it really does believe in free expression… and vigorous debate, democracy‘s cornerstones. 

Sincerely,
G. Tod Slone, PhD (Universite de Nantes, FR) aka P. Maudit,
Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
www.theamericandissident.org
wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com

The Weavers of Ansari

by Melissa Dickson

Already there’s a breeze and something colder
in it. The boys wild as these woods, too young
to think of the long decay. On the air, voices
remote as the sun, our solar powered radio:
election fraud, poverty, threats, car bombs
at the weaver's polls. We’re miles from the road,
a half-mile from water and an enchantment
of river cane thick with insects. The rustle
of gear, a fireside night—thin steaks turned
once, asparagus, honeyed tea, one block each
of pocket-softened Hersheys, all shuttled
over granite, through scissoring switchbacks,
under emerald bursts of saplings. We listen
past dusk as the radio fails taking with it
the weavers and their silk rugs—
unimagined, colorless as thinning smoke—
taut on silent looms.

Kore

by Quinn Collard

Gathering daisies and violets when you wrapped your arms around me,
A fissure in the earth swallowing us both.
You gave me six pomegranate seeds,
And, desperate for sustenance, I took them.
Now until the stars plummet to their deaths
I must always come back to you,
The souls of the lost swirling around me,
The sun a forgotten dream.

Ornament

by Amy Soricelli

The plastic in the tree has survived two winters - maybe three.
Swaying deep into the Bronx breeze flapping its synthetic wings like a flag.
I stare it down like a rare flower - point its edges
towards the sun.
From my high Bronx window I see it dancing back and forth; its claws
bent hard into the knobby branches; angry crusty leafless trees shadow
straight against the glass.
The hardest pressed face couldn't get passed it.
The plastic in the trees has made it through the summer fire crackers.
Each burst of light landing on its bleak side sliding its elbows up for comfort -
resting long black eyes against the random flashing smoke of celebration.
It dances that swallowed holey movement that comes with
the broken, the defeated; the things that land in trees.

Prawn Tide

by Mercedes Webb-Pullman

As the sun came up, frost
dusted dunes and tussocks
then disappeared. Behind the breakers
white vapour floated, veiling
the hills haunch-hunkered
by the water, some bush-clad,
some naked.

The moon set pink
last night; now red prawns flow
and writhe in lines along the tide mark
in a plague of plenty. Birds
wallow in the shallows, too glutted to fly
but for one seagull Narcissus-skimming
above his wet sand reflection,
mirrored wingtips touching
for eternity.

Bones of driftwood litter the beach,
jade waves pummel the shore,
tweak its fabric flat along the flanks,
twitch at wrinkles, finger ripples
like the witch at Gretel’s ribs.

The men set to mending nets -
no bait will catch a sated fish today

Undocumented Zombies

by Donal Mahoney

The nice thing about being dead
is you no longer care if the doctor
mucked up your diagnosis and the

pharmacist gave you the wrong pills.
You're cozy now in a comfy casket
six feet below all the carnage

in the world, without a worry, when
a mastodon tsunami rolls over your
peaceful cemetery and uproots

thousands of caskets, tossing them
high in the sky and forcing you
and all the other zombies to float.

You discover no port will take
undocumented zombies.
You have no papers, after all;

you can't prove who you were or are
so you and the other zombies float
for God knows how long since

God may not believe in zombies.
This is a rupture not a rapture.
And while you float, your lawyer

meets with your relatives who
no longer weep about your passing.
They smile as he reads your will.

They plan on taking a family cruise
with the proceeds from your estate.
They'll dine on lobster and steak,

lay waste continuous buffets while
you and the other zombies float
further out, unable to find a port

where citizens will bury the likes of you.
Property values will drop, they shout.
They can't drop their signs and let you in.

Not An Oyster

by Bill Jansen

Passive oyster who art has put into a shell,
sanctified be thy dream, thy bread sticks come,
thy flesh be light, thy bed of lettuce clean
and fresh upon thy plate, in this still life
by some anonymous realist, possibly French.
Thy meaning remain stubbornly obscure
to us on earth as we are to those in heaven.
May the tides of light that enter this room
(somewhere a toilet drains) be always blue.
Black fingernails of night not open you.
Weary maids keep you straightened on wall.
No vandal ignore thy do not disturb aura.
And lead us not into cheap hotel temptations,
as we contemplate thy calculus of illusion.
O let us taste thy template of reality,
thy cracking paint and immortality.
Or maybe not, because on looking closer
I see that you are a cabbage, not an oyster,
bruised by thy fall from the earthy Paris sky.

Free Palestine March Atlanta, Georgia August 2, 2014