The Suskind Perfume by Kinga Fabó

Now the maestro is rather uninspired
Baptiste procure one like in the olden times
follow her scent   the woman
turns her head   it’s foggy   steal her

smear and wrap her in a sack
let her soak in grease for a time
to preserve her volatility
with her every drop

the grease sucks her in
she cajoles you to follow
the scent on the bodies
of every other women

do you recoil – on all?!
What happens if your yearning
drives you mad
follow her scent

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

(and you, fair scent will evaporate)

(Translated by Gabor G. Gyukics)

Kinga Fabó is a Hungarian poet. Her latest book, a bilingual Indonesian-English poetry collection, Racun/Poison, was published in 2015, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Fabó’s poetry has been included in various international literary magazines like Numéro Cinq as well as in anthologies. Two of her poems, translated by George Szirtes, are forthcoming in Modern Poetry in Translation.

 

A Ten Question Interview With The Artist… Katie Lewington

Why do you write?

If I didn’t write, within a few days I would be grouchy and up at stupid o’clock with insomnia.

What books do you read?

Ha. The best question would be what don’t I read! I review a lot of books for independent authors, Vikings seem to be a popular theme at the moment. I like Ugly Sapling press and Ghost City press. Zooey Ghostly, Steven Storrie, Paul Tristram and Joseph Parker Okay are a few of my favourite writers today. I like an Agatha Christie or Inspector Morse mystery and Stephen King, H.G.Wells and F.Scott.Fitzgerald are my favourite short story writers.
I am usually rereading my childhood favourites, Harry Potter or Alice in Wonderland every other week and literary magazines and websites are the best places for poetry, although I love going to charity shops and picking up old poetry collections, with the most obscure poets. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg I could recite in my sleep.

What inspires you?

Those poetry collections I mentioned in the above question, as do all books I read, for better or worse. I am extremely receptive to anything these days and I am unable to go anywhere without picking up ideas from pretty much thin air to autumn leaves. Music works too and newspaper stories. My poor partner often has the misfortune to have plenty of poems written about him as well.

How did you know you wanted to be a writer and when?

I’m not sure. I’ve always written, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t. I suppose , just to be stubborn, I decided I would be a writer in school and that exasperated my teachers no end. I was a weird kid and being a writer seemed to entail being weird, so I thought that made sense. At that time I was writing awful stories about the depression I was going through and isolation I felt.

How do you deal with rejection?

Depends on my mood. Sometimes it makes me throw my writing folder against the wall but most of the time I just call them editors fools and tell myself I’m a misunderstood genius.

Who are some writers you admire?

The ones that have no confidence in their writing whatsoever but continue to send out their work, publish on a blog or independently publish because their partner has told them that they do have talent and so they hold onto that.

Is writing the only artistic medium you do?

Well, I sing terribly in the shower and doodle hearts over the back of notebooks.

What would be some advice you would give to your younger self?

Don’t listen to anybody. They are all neurotic.

Do you have any advice for other writers?

Don’t listen to anybody else regarding content or formatting. I’ve thrown so much of my work away because it refused to fit into paragraphs and with proper punctuation it lost its uniqueness when I edited. As long as it is readable ish, then it’s fine.
Also learn another skill. There’s not much money in writing and I am useless at pretty much everything else.

What is your writing process?

I don’t think I have one. The more I try to tell myself to sit down and actually work on something, the more likely I am to start writing something new whilst in the pub or cooking breakfast. I tend to just need a first line and then it writes itself. Even if I’m busy doing something else, the muse refuses to wait for me.

Katie Lewington likes to review the books she reads, listen to music, daydream, watch Cary Grant films, help The Pithead Chapel journal and Transcending Shadows review and Punks Write Poems Press sift through their submissions, sniff 50 year old poetry tomes and enjoy the aesthetic display of many literary magazines (She has been published in some of these) Contact her through Twitter @idontwearahat and her blog https://katiecreativewriterblog.wordpress.com

Voices from Charcoal by Matt Duggan

Once our fishing boats were floating saviours for the persecuted
now we build walls from those that we’ve liberated;
In this land of imitating brown shirts
our white cliffs – A strict border layered with red brickwork;
Did they not cut off their own ears awakening a poisonous serpent for oil?
that lay fast asleep inside the Persian sands;
Who resurrected the buried voices from charcoal
those dusting jackboots stomping on the gravestones of our ancestors.
Though we’d fill a whole lake with blood oil
We’d starve our own children leaving them to die on its banks,
no longer do we recognise our enemy
taking sides for the highest and most convenient price.

Did we cut off our ears from empathy?
those holocaust skeletons in white and blue stars
this near gutting of human hope –
where repetitive acts lined like a contemporary night of Kristallnacht .
We have become what we dread – An isolated island
a ghost ship drifting with no sails
our captain unsure of our final destination,
stirring us into unknown waters  towards an economic tsunami.
Our heads held with fingers slated into scalp
tears drop onto canvas like rain drops darkening dead rhino skin,
In this land of imitating brown shirts
Our white cliffs – A strict border layered with red brickwork.

Born Bristol 1971 U.K. Winner of the Erbacce Prize for Poetry 2015 Poems have appeared in The Journal, The High Window, Graffiti, The Sentinel Quarterly, The Seventh Quarry, Prole, Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Crack the Spine, Roundyhouse, Tipton Poetry Journal, Lakeview International Literary Journal, Lunar Poetry Magazine, Harbinger Asylum, Five 2 One, Apogee Magazine, Deep Water Literary Magazine. My prize winning first collection Dystopia 38.10 was published this year by Erbacce Press.

 

Chlamydia & Angina (The Dark Sisters Of Melincourt Falls) by Paul Tristram

On Autumnal & Wintering nights
but only upon Half Moons,
they work the bottom of the footpath.
The thunderous, crashing sound
of Sgwd Rhyd Yr Hesg
in the near background.
Helps to carry their inland Siren’s Song
far and wide down over the Valley.
They be out for tired travellers,
sleepwalkers from the nearby village.
Rabbit hunters & fishermen
who like a little bit on the side.
Karma steps happily into the arena
for the untrustworthy, unfaithful,
the homewreckers & heartbreakers.
And these Wraithlike Creature’s
aim is surgical, Vampiric
and merciless to a fault.
It takes hours up against the mossy rocks
for the tortured body to finally go limp.
At Dawn they find them hanging
from The Bloody Great Oak Tree.
Heart cut out, inserted up into their arse,
bowels rammed down choking throats.
Be careful when you wander too far
away from the warmth of homely hearth.
It’s said; it’s impossible to refuse their eyes,
unless your heart be mostly bright,
for they will not kiss a man of his word.

Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories, sketches and photography published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight; this too may pass, yet. Buy his books ‘Scribblings Of A Madman’ (Lit Fest Press) http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1943170096 ‘Poetry From The Nearest Barstool’ at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326241036 And a split poetry book ‘The Raven And The Vagabond Heart’ with Bethany W Pope at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1326415204 You can also read his poems and stories here! http://paultristram.blogspot.co.uk/

Unnecessary Poem # 427 by William Taylor Jr.

It’s Sunday in North Beach in August
and it feels like it’s always Sunday in North Beach
in August with the big blue sky and everything
pretending that summer isn’t almost gone
and I’m always at a table like this one
with wine or a beer and a
tattered notebook
like a kind of purgatory
or maybe a minor heaven of sorts
and I’m sitting here thinking that if the poets had any sense
they’d shut up every now and then and stop
arguing with the silence
because the silence has been around and seen some things
and will have the final say no matter what
our credentials
and yet here I am with my unnecessary words
because there really is no need to tell you again
about this North Beach sun
and this North Beach sky
and the parade of tourists on Columbus Avenue
all beautiful and badly dressed
or the old men in Chinatown and how they play these instruments
I cannot name but they sound like sad
violins
and how the music is ancient and sorrowfully pretty
and how everything going on like this
like is has for so long
still gives me a feeling of something like hope
though I couldn’t tell you why or what for
but the little pink donut box of my heart
still longs for things I can’t explain
or justify and this keeps me going
when most of me doesn’t want to
and I think that’s a victory
and maybe worth the telling
so for now the silence can sit itself
down and wait until I’m done.

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including The New York Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a collection of short fiction. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award. To Break the Heart of the Sun is his latest collection of poetry. 

 

Our Employer And His Sweetheart by David Spicer

We snickered when viewing him: the fat,
blond scarecrow, crucified in a tweed suit,
a version of our employer, dead butterflies
in his mouth, eels and snakes in his pockets.
The six of us abhorred the man we dubbed
Mr. Connoisseur, our master who feigned
love for the suppers we served him, who
wallowed in our misery. Here he glared,
not an effigy, but dead with my dagger
in his mouth, whiskers drenched
with blood and rain. I squeezed his pudgy
hand balled in a fist: bragging he’d hoist
our bodies and we’d swallow pigeons if he
desired, now he’d be what we wanted.
We swigged big jugs of sherry, toasted
his health with laughter, he who thought money
bypassed our desires. We placed a wreath
of orchids on his soon-to-smolder head,
surrounding him, celebrated in his mansion:
after we repaired the hearth, we burned him,
tossed the black corpse inside the basement
tomb. Then we read letters from his sweetheart
Lily, frolicked in the pool until dawn
and relished her arrival, preparing our
birthday surprise for this unsuspecting soul.

Memphian David Spicer has poems in Yellow Mama, Slim Volume, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He is the author of one collection of poems and four chapbooks.

Chaos Rains by Nicole Surginer

I shiver, chilled to the very core
Terror strips the warmth from my bones
The sky whispers madness through the wind
Where clouds shade portals of hell
And birds are shadow of dragon
Soaring over thorns painted as roses
The tilting world of chaos litters rain
Of infectious maddening
Matter of stinging sulphur
Onto thirsty sands of nothingness
Where oceans of desire once flowed
I  laugh as panic clutches my chest
For fear is the beauty
In the numbness of death

Nicole Surginer is a poet from the small town of Bastrop, Texas. She is inspired to write by her love for nature’s enchantment, a fascination with the power of raw, intense emotion and a desire to create beauty with words. She has been published in Tuck Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Indiana Voice Journal, Sick Lit Magazine, Your One Phone Call and In Between Hangovers, with pending works in the Contemporary Poets Facebook group anthology, “Dandelion in a vase of roses”.

 

Variables Occurring During Unprecedented Rainfall by Wanda Morrow Clevenger

My space is overrun with satellite garbage breeding garbage poetry until I acquiesce the imposition––Barney Fife was a lady-killer off screen, my husband quotes a bio blurb––and never-married John Mahoney had to be a homo since ‘celibate bachelor’ doesn’t exist outside Mayberry, NC, except on The Bachelor delusive reality except blurred Naked and Afraid sucked him in for two seconds while wishing for 1960 pencil necktie promiscuity to make a comeback backed-up by nazi gospels – killer animals – wormhole tutorial and who doesn’t enjoy a good Chauvet Cave spelunk.

My space handcuffed by my husband’s chain smoke, the remote bored to hysteria, on the coffee table he reaches for – opens – reads Joyland in utter silence in two day’s time when never reading my published fiction or the funeral ash poem orphaned on the refrigerator door for months that he said he wanted to read but turns out it was too soon for funeral ash poetry so didn’t read it or any of the others, published or not.

I share space with a farmer.  No gain is made in analyzing variables occurring during two and a half months of unprecedented rainfall.

Wanda Morrow Clevenger is a Carlinville, IL native. Over 369 pieces of her work appear in 132 print and electronic publications. A magazine-type blog updated at her erratic discretion is here: http://wlc- wlcblog.blogspot.com/ She is currently polishing a full-length poetry manuscript.

 

 

Bent Rusty Can Opener by Rob Plath

heat is thick
today
makes you want
to unzip your
flesh from
your frame

walk around
as skeleton

litter box
stinks
even tho
scooped

line of mildew
on lip
of fridge door
is thicker, blacker

toilet tank
beads with sweat
like human brow

here, air is
unconditioned

here, air is
fucking ancient

the cats stretch
out on floor
on their sides
heat forcing them
from typical
circular, sage-like
curled-up position

box fan whirls
hot, sticky air
around

naked king lear
on the cliff
was right
when shakey made
him say that
unaccomodated man
is a fucking
two-legged animal

i feel like a
hot, angry
upright dog

but he also said
later on in play
that if you can say
that life is bad
then it isn’t bad
afterall

i’ve come to conclusion
that i’m bitching now

millions of voiceless
have descended into
a black pit where they
cannot even utter a word

now where go with
this deflated poem?

its paper hooks won’t
fish even one of the
mad mutes
from the dark well

i’m holding
an unpractical thing
in my hands now

like a bent
rusty can opener

like a pissed off
spackler in a bar
told me once

poetry is such
bullshit a lot of
the time

Rob Plath is a 46-yea-old poet from New York. He has over a dozen books out. He is most known for his collection A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY (epic rites press). He lives alone with his cat and stays out of trouble. See more of his work at http://www.robplath.com

 

If We Were Any More East We’d Be Swimming in the Atlantic by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

This is the Wild West,
the man beside me mutters to no one.
We are on bus driving though the state
of Delaware at night.
There are no other seats so I am stuck
with the mutterer.
Spit shining the glass from his window seat
while I pretend to be sleeping
and/or dead in the seat
next to him.
Billy the Kid died in these parts,
the man mutters again nostalgically.
Nudging me for acknowledgement
but this is not my first rodeo.
Mustering a fart for the ages
I let it go.
One of those loud and repetitive Gatling gun offerings
that I’ve been holding in since Buffalo.
That sound as though they are tearing your pants in half
the same way the morgue scalpel opens up
some stiff on the slab.
The stink is overpowering.
The man does not talk anymore.
Now he is stuck with me
for the next 500
miles.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a happily unmarried proud father of none. His work can be found both in print and online. He has an affinity for dragonflies, discount tequila, and all things sarcastic.