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Why page through your wrinkles? . . .

It's late but what is time? . . .

and here comes the morning up the garden path

to help with turning the soil

for the excited plants . . .

And the songbirds . . .

Go ahead . . . Go in . . . Can you imagine? . . .

Yes, things will come into play,

I suppose, and, yes, one day

the ashes will pass Go . . .

But now you're here . . . filling with wonder . . .

Green tea! . . . Don't forget the green tea . . .

It will help you clear the hurdles

with happiness . . . and hilarity

for your glorious head . . .

Deborah  Turbeville

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You're in a parking lot fingering your phone

directing the play by play by play

the fridge pissing off neighbors with its barking

then this mad cow parks in a handicap spot

Don't have a cow, dude! . . .

Really? . . . I mean REALLY? . . .

The subterfuged world never at a loss for

That's how we do it . . . by the witless . . .

Sputtering with malcontent you take a breather

then, a tearful delivery, a tearful moment

at the whiteboard with a invalid proof

for mathematicians-a-go-go . . .

the bartender gaslighting the hammered

who humble back to their hovel

to be set upon by octopi or octopodes

in the watery world of the socked and soaked . . .

I want to hold your hand? . . . I don't think so! . . .

The world as experienced . . . in all its flatness is so . . . 

Yesterday,

all my troubles seemed so far away . . .

Glass's koyaanisqatsi (Hey, look, a q without a u!)

You enter the world of metal detectors where

fixed income instruments or bonds

follow just intonation

allowing you to nix diversification

and preserve the (High School) Principal

who is poised to flop into bed

with the School Nurse on paid leave . . .

Ba Ba Bond . . . James Bond . . .

Perhaps you should appeal to happenstance

especially after factoring everything down

to the list of pall bearers still In the Still of the Night . . .

It's time once again to head out

to the dollar store for a ramification

or a conciliation . . . or a pontification . . . or a Jorge . . .

Of course you knew him . . . he was one of many

on your to-do list . . . after deconstructing

the ins and outs of the allegorical Lord of the Flies:

Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it's . . . us? . . .

Come down from there . . . to the slots in the casino

where the real is really real

and you'll be as broke and as fit as a broken fiddle . . .

Par excellence the auteur! . . .

I had heard that you had been hobbled by the last stanza

but hey you can always deposit your ashes

in a local tributary and watch them

float downstream as we assemble according

to the directions scribbled with a foreign tongue (ouch!) . . .

Deborah Turbeville

Screen Dump 615

Tooling along a coastal road on a café racer

bells whistles lace-up leathers

you speak in tongues to pick-up gamers gaming the small diamond

in view of a creek that runs through the woods

on its way to the river . . . the magic and mystery

of your roadhouse expertise

tipping tampered scales

back when coupes were the rage

and radio stations - the few - had to be dialed in

by turning a dial . . .

There was something about the static - the radio static -

that made you want to engage interior monologues -

iron clad center stage wordless soliloquies - with you

toggling obscurantism

and stepping up to the plate with a full count

mimicking the black and white colorways of radio silence . . .

You seek salvation - fresh and focused - behind Razer glasses

tweaking the list of odysseyites docked for cleaning the roundabout

imagining a four-score and 20 return

on a tracking device that breaks free of the dream

you obsess over with a randomness

whose silhouettes clutter the performance space

with overtures that beg for smoke and mirrors . . .

This will have to do, yes? . . .
This apparition of sliding into decrepitude

as if your time capsule of an apartment belly-flops the water

shredding the pages of your future perfect waking life . . .

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Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos?

          - Virginia Woolf

You're taking notes on the straight and narrow

as the detritus of a life

crashes the weight of a wake . . .

Act One Scene One:

We search for younger days:

riding a balloon-tire bicycle through the streets

and into fields of dreams

appropriating clichés with reckless abandon . . .

Each day up and out and into the fray

following the yellow brick road

into . . . and beyond . . . the Great Beyond . . .

Masks of pandemics mask stimulus checks . . .

You balk at the thought of yet another move

to quell the restlessness while off script

odysseyites bleed the shoot in a New York minute . . .

Leila Fores

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No, it's not a dress rehearsal, despite your appealing restlessness . . .

The joy of encryption . . . of scrambling the known

as if Tolstoy's spell-check informs your excitement . . .

You enter the painting

and you're on a road . . . waking in the middle of someone's dream . . .

Snow dots the breakdown lane . . .

          How did you get here? . . .

          How did I get where? . . .

          Here, in this backwater backstory . . .

Your coffee mug dusted for prints . . .

The clock texting like crazy . . .

Your queue is flustered and needs a break . . .

Review the fine print if you doubt the algorithm . . .

Odysseyites have grown bored of Marvel Comics;

they're tweaking the turn of events

mounting arguments against the escape hatch in the limelight

of the final scene for all its worth . . .

You're using an online random number generator to pick lines

hoping the answer will pop out of the mishmash . . .

The surface tension with its stuff of days

swings open the doors to a museum of off-color fields

giving you time to recast the worthwhile . . .

Laura Zalenga

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Camo'd savages launch incomprehensible assaults . . .

The nighttime sky ablaze  . . .

Your apprehension . . . wild . . . .

The past's lessons . . . trampled

Where to go?. . .

as threats from identity thieves pierce your consciousness . . .

You try to keep the plates spinning without knowing the when or why

of machines of annihilation . . .

Foot-traffic chokes the passing lane . . . 

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You follow the lead's decent into raw ambition

to test your stick-to-itiveness . . .

memories of odysseyites piggyback . . .

The play-by-play . . . hyperreal . . . surreal

as if staged in a black box theater

by actors retooling the script on short notice

under a drone's jaundiced eye . . .

The director-cum-auteur, yes? . . .

Intransigents upstage the takeaway

with bolded scribbles on yellow legal pads

as the conceit fractures

with sleepovers and makeovers and takeovers

within walking distance of the spot marked X

while you rehearse the missing pages

with temps who couldn't care less . . .

Leila Fores

My poem, Cataloguing the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, was a finalist from among 735 entries in the 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase International Poetry Contest. Bravo to the other poets, & many thanks to curator Bob Sharkey & his team for a super event!

Cataloging the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Bernini saw it in three-dimensions -
head thrown back, eyes half-closed, lips parted.
Tons of marble floating.

Cataloging the ecstasy of Saint Teresa
you cross over
and find yourself in a choral group

performing Arvo Pärt’s The Peace.
This is good. This is really good.
The puzzle at the foot of your bed?

You try to recall the connection.
The mystery of happiness without remorse
or something like that. You’re not sure.

Here’s how it’s done, the caped magician told you
after your eighth birthday party.
Misdirection. Misdirection.

Saint Teresa in Ecstasy by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini

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Why spend this late hour worrying?

The sink drains and you are among the ancients . . .

You are the ancients

headed for the disaster of the unknown . . .

On the road, hands cupped

you find a box filled with moments

of astonishing pleasure . . .

You crack open a can of words . . .

It's not too late

despite the chagrin

on the faces of your stubbed hammertoes . . .

Forget them . . .

The sink finally drains and you breathe in deeply . . .

This day of blueberry jam

of busy bird feeders

sharpened pencils

stoked fire

rescue cats curled in sleep

is here . . . is now

the Jeep warming despite the cold

the trip down the mountain

for ingredients to make grandmother's goulash . . .

It will be OK . . .

There's nothing but a memory

to lay down a dry fly

onto the roiling surface

for a maybe . . . 

a moment of astonishing pleasure maybe . . .

catch and release . . . catch and release . . .

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          from then and now

A slew-footed nomad in the checkout line

at the grocery store

just in from a grand plié

lays out lines from Wuthering Heights

or something or other

from one of the sisters Brontë

catapulting you with some sort of Trojan Horse 

into the heather moorlands

with odysseyites who for whatever reason are candying

the ins and outs of pulling U-ies

in front of the camera

grandstanding the last vestiges of roundabouts . . .

Then the illusion . . . and footsteps . . .

You follow them out the door

into a cloud bank from both sides

taking you back to a still life . . .

The teller serializes the ups and downs

of this and that for no apparent reason . . .

The inevitable does not disappoint . . .

You lose yourself in what was lost

reminiscing the unlined and untamed

channeling the shadow in the mirror . . .

falling through the window

into a landscape of porcelains

smuggled centuries ago by traders along the Silk Road . . .

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Why bother the nontrivial effort to traverse text? . . .

The rom-com abandoned in a shopping cart snowstorm

with footnotes on nonergodic literature

where your only responsibilities

are eye movement and the turning of pages . . .

You continue . . . reading . . .

Iterations abound . . . and are important, yes? . . .

Taking it down a notch

much to the surprise of graveyard shift hackers . . .

the gate opens to a railroad flat

where one summer morning

you tried out various yoga positions

from a book you had found under the seat of a rental . . .

That was enough to feed odysseyites

around a fire pit later that evening

shepherding secondhand embarrassment

for the perfect balance between carefulness and carelessness . . .

Wendy Bevan

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Trying to come up with the most legible story line

to make it all make sense

the Cartesian coordinates for the remains of our days

pages from a flipbook

stuck to the ceiling of a makeshift hut

in a remote area of consciousness . . .

An idea of who you are and what you will be . . .

How now the edited endgame? . . .

As if you have become a blustery winter wind

a tetchy iconoclast

waiting in lines increasingly bottlenecked

shelves orphaned

cranking the engine of false starts

in a monochromatic world

amenable to dropdown menus of altered egos . . .

Then of course there's the perfunctorily

fact-checking name-checking holding forth

as if crossing the River Styx in a kayak . . .

You emerge from the underworld of basements

the protocols of mimes

struggling to voice an objection

to the end-all be-all of all

with a weary sense of satisfying

a tiresome poetic-novelistic balance . . .

The augmentations should be refreshed post-haste . . .

You assume the polar opposite

the driver's seat awaits your strategy

always a welcomed if exasperating experience . . .

Birds of a feather fail . . .

The nonesuch among us are less and less

a gasp of survival

as the climate zooms in

with countless PSAs ignored by the polloi

who immerse themselves in screens

covered in gabardine for the sake of nothing . . .

We have run out of Blue Books

with which to memorialize the streams of consciousness

tricking through the wastelands of now

the idea howled out of the room had it been suggested by 

first-person shooters captured on camera at checkout . . .

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Images of war bully your sleep . . .

The ubiquity of tragedy

of not knowing what's coming

the blur of sadness . . .

above and below

a different kind of sorrow

a different kind of disbelief . . .

You view a world in thrall of bloat

segueing between bouts

of then and now

then and now . . .

the digressive components of grief 

appropriated from rejection slips . . .

Why think otherwise? . . .

Chris Abani