by satnrose

F Street, Washington D.C., Harris & Ewing, 1939

–

TO REINVENT THE WHEEL

jacked mugged and rolled every time I think I just can’t get no lower
I found a bottom below the bottom broke broker brokest but still not
yet broken I must go much farther than before even though I thought
you can’t get no further how bad can it be? Fast Eddie done tole me
“even in defeat you can still lose!” just after her pokered the last dime
of my rent money outta me but guess I deserved that guess I got both
the hole and the shovel keep digging till you get to China but living a
good life is more important than writing a good poem having happy is
better than having rich and so I tried to be righteous but my psychotic
break is mine and mine own and mine alone and I refuse to blame my
parents or my school or my fool but I got on the wrong bus and when
I got off it it took years to figure out where I was and how to get back
and when I did they were all gone and it wasn’t where I was at anywho
so now I’m building my own bus from scratch and I had to reinvent the
wheel to make it work it goes round and round someday I’ll get some-
where if I can just get the juice and the traction if not at least my ashes

–

SAHARA

underneath the Saharan dunes are the ruins of ancient canals and at the
mouth of the Nile the silt goes down a full mile till it hits hard bedrock
the Med was once an inland sea of salt a thousand feet below Gibraltar
until the Gates of Hercules cracked open and the falls cascaded before
the memory of history now the sands are creeping cross the boundaries
water dries up in the well cattle fall on the savannah the plains become
a dusty bowl desolation spreading down the grasslands vultures high in
fiery sky oases filled w/ starving children Atlas mournful watching the
world turned upside down the Maasai drinking blood for dinner thicker
every year & nothing lives to hold the rain even if there was rain as the
Suns go by the dunes drifting ever further southward as they’ve done a
little more each day for 10000 years everything turns to dust eventually

–

A DANCE OF SILHOUETTES

she took flight the first chance she could get free as she ran down the
street and turned into the night evaporating while the Harleys revved
up the police were out chasing phantoms the state of the glass opened
and forgotten all ears hearing the shouting and the riots but it was all
calculated for the maximum effect it was a ruse for the truly innocent
and in any case it was a dance of silhouettes finally fading to full white

–

satnrose is a well-known antiquarian bookseller, and formerly a not-so-secret messenger in the innermost depths of Capitol Hill and K Street. He has been published in a number of literary magazines, but since his reincarnation as “satnrose” last year, he has been published in Evergreen Review, Iconoclast, Danse Macabre, Counterexample Poetics, wtf.pwm, Oysters & Chocolate, Apparatus, Gloom Cupboard, Escape into Life, Bring the Ink, Shoots and Vines, Eskimo Pie, Bare Back, Literary Tonic, Clean Sheets, Mad Swirl, Litsnack, Metazen, The November 3rd Club, Stray Branch, The Citron Review, Mastodon Dentist, Full of Crow, Nefarious Ballerina, etc.

by Chris Crittenden

French nuclear weapons test on Mururoa Atoll in 1970

Did I request thee Maker, from Thy clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit Thee
From darkness to promote me?—

Paradise Lost [X.743-5]

driven
by a bomb i never saw,
maybe once in the womb,
yet the force ricochets
off disastrous years,
dogging my memories
no matter how fast
they cry.

no one sees the torpedoes
inside my fists,
aiming to sink what i create;
that my drumbeat is negative,
pulse birthing
a lineage of depth charges.

i am of the few who grasp
that the universe
once fit in a pin head;
i picture the carnage
when galaxies clash,
buzzsawing with blades of planets.

like the Monster,
i curse the one
who promoted me from darkness
then turned away—
some addict, some genius,
some callous freak
who sculpted because he could
and immediately abhorred
it.

—

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by Radek Ozog

Ann Arbor, 2009, Mel Sharlene

ILLUSIONS of stones (collage students bandits)

i see city blocks
buildings red as gum drop
graffiti blocks
fun stops when cops knock
artist
of street story’s
if the red breaks could speak,
downtown Ann arbor !
they would say they haven been
abused
buy deadly, bloody spray
big parking lots near the city dead

crying trees
of tree city , they say ,they’ve been
unfairly cut short.

the poor little trees
get no respected
down on broad ways melting,rotten

dwellings crying,
st Vincent De Paul thrift shop
were , spiritual man once
preformed, spiritual sciences as
signs reed on the planks ,on the bloody

breaks , sciences, speak
to the dead !
at the corner liquor store,
they say ,they once lived…….

—

Radek Ozog is a student at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is a member of the school’s poetry club. Radek has always been interested in creative writing, as well as 3-D Animation, which is his major. Not fearful of any obstacle in his way he wishes to explore different types of art especially creative writing. He originally came from Poland to the United States at a very early age. Radek’s poems have appeared in Twisted Tongue Magazine (issues 15 and 17), Rejection Digest, + in many very rare chapbooks.

by John Grey

Lower East Side, 2004, Moncrief

The Window

Without the window,
there’s no outside,
no tenement across the street,
no traffic below.
No pane of glass
opening up the outside
and it’d be just the two of us
in the early morning
huddled together
under sheets and blankets
in this birdcage sized apartment.
If I couldn’t get up
and see what else there is
I’d think that nothing existed
that wasn’t you.
I watch people going about their business
and soon enough it’s my business.
They look up, down or across at me
and I am in their lives.
You join me
and your eyes too
make their way out into the world.
It’s daylight and we’ll never
be this close, this in love,
this caught up in each other,
ever again.
We’re on the same side of the window
but it’s still between us.

—

John Grey is an Australian-born poet and a U.S. resident since the seventies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alimentum, Big Muddy, Connecticut Review, The Georgetown Review, Kestrel, The Pinch, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere.

by Stephen Jarrell Williams

Pittsburgh, 1940, Jack Delano, Library of Congress

LABORING

Poor men
working
the streets,

their silence
singing
like gods
under a hidden sky.

—

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Flora and Fauna, 2010

“Life can be a complicated journey, and sometimes can have a paradoxical component to it. Art, having an emotional and intellectual dimension, will have an impact on the viewer.”

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