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.

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.

—

Street Addict

castration cuts his hope,
the hard-on untouched,
as the pieces windmill through bad days,
shred into fingers
stripping purses from old ladies.

his eyeballs on a carousel,
going round the head,
one the lion, the other prey.
he jibbers while sight devours itself,
sobs like the gazelle’s throat being torn.

someone juiced his balls
and squeezed the fury into his veins.
he knows what it’s like
to have nerves revolt, collapse,
become pitchforks and torches,

he the frankenstein.

the drug kills and pulls him back.
half way.
he smashes windows, yanks drawers.
screeches at car alarms, asks,
“how much for my darkness?”

it never was about Satan,
despite a mother in a church in a bib.
more about loneliness. he was always a tool,
never heard only used.
and so he’ll use.

—

Number Cruncher

swallowing a burn
of treacherous words, the last of them
mouthwash-slain,
he sallies with a grimace,
finding his cubic treadwheel,

and his computer proliferates,
screen thick with dogears,
numbers
that stab reality with petty gusto,
ceaselessly carving.

he knows the equations
are sociopaths. he knows.
even the physics of water in his shower
reminds him of remorseless teeth.

only god could say
when his life went statistical red;
and why his passions,
which once soared,
depreciate.

—

Chris Crittenden lives part-time in Los Angeles and the rest in a remote spruce forest, where moose can get menacing during the rut. He teaches environmental philosophy for the University of Maine. Before that, he worked on a suicide hotline for 13 years. As the hunter-gatherer lifestyle winds down after a million year run, his poems tend to focus on the new human wilds. Some recent acceptances are from: Vox Humana, Brink Magazine, Portland Review and Barnwood. He blogs as the mordant avatar Owl Who Laughs.

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.

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.

Pittsburgh, 1940, Jack Delano, Library of Congress

LABORING

Poor men
working
the streets,

their silence
singing
like gods
under a hidden sky.

—

STREET NURSE

Let me
sleep all night
in your fold
of blankets

feeling your
breath above me
keeping
away death

juice
running down my hip
never dreaming
you’d squeeze so hard.

—

Stephen Jarrell Williams loves to write, listen to his music, and dance late into the night. He was born in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. His parents are native Texans. He has lived most of his life in California. His poetry has appeared in Aoife’s Kiss, Aphelion, Blue Collar Review, The Broome Review, Camroc Press Review, Censored Poets, Chronogram Magazine, Deuce Coupe, Fissure Magazine, Freefall, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Hawaii Review, Heroin Love Songs, Hungur, Is This Reality, Kalkion, Liquid Imagination, Mad Swirl, Metazen, Mirror Dance, Neonbeam, Nerve Cowboy, Nomad’s Choir, POEM, Poesia, Posey, protestpoems.org, Purpose, REAL, Rusty Truck, Scifaikuest, Sex And Murder, Shoots And Vines, Tales from the Moonlit Path, Thieves Jargon, Zygote In My Coffee, and others.

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.”

Primavera, 2010

“I like to think of myself as a neo-romantic revealing and depicting both the good and bad sides of life within each work of art. My main influences come from the Mannerist, Pop-art, and Pre-Rafaelite art movements.”

Diana after the Hunt, 2009

“Having grown up in another generation, I have seen the ever-evolving transformation that comes as society adapts to new technology and social changes, and how those things affect each other, and how those things affect the way we relate to our fellow human beings.”

Venus, Cupid, Bacchus, and Ceres, 2009

“So many of our societal myths and beliefs come from our pop culture and our mass media, which I feel comes from us and is reflected back, affecting social relations. Hopefully, as the viewer sees my work, they will see the ironies of their own life reflected back to them.”

The Dance of Terpsichore, 2009

“Born in 1948, I spent my childhood in the “safer” suburbs of Long Island. Relocated to Buffalo to attend college, and I received my undergraduate and masters at the State University College at Buffalo. I stayed in Buffalo, and taught art to inner-city students for thirty-three years. I also taught other teachers how to use art in their curriculum at the Teachers Center.”

Theater of Life, 2008

“After retiring, I have decided to return to my artist’s tools and medium, and start creating. Even though I’m older now, I feel it’s never too late to start expressing and producing.”

To see more of Salvatore Scrivo‘s artwork, please visit his website at www.salvatorescrivo.com.