The Smoking Book

Ground Zero

2010-11-06T08:29:00.000-07:00

A ground of heroes
Trying to save those who could not evade the day
A day that will never fade
Many buried under a trouble of rubble
Graves, unmarked graves
Bodies broken and torn beyond recognition
An unthinkable strike came to fruition
The devastation of man made creation
The situation seems bleak has havoc was wreaked
The Twin Towers was a symbol of power
Took years to build knocked down in less than an hour
These buildings etched our skyline
Most took for granted they’d stand the test of time
Workers inside typing, trading, clicking, mailing, faxing, emailing, talking, telephoning, walking, waiting, goofing off, debating, thinking of tonight, that they’d make love tonight or overcome a marital fight
In an instant their lives were gone, gone, gone
Thrown into terror this should’ve been an error
It’s a nightmare instead
This fear
This smoke
Did commercial planes fly into the World Trade Center?
My mind can’t get around it
can’t understand it.
The smoke rises out of the copy room window
Thick black smoke
Smoke to choke
Smoke to kill
A smoke of death
I stare into the distance expecting to see The Towers materialize before my eyes
The words fall out of peoples mouths and rest on my ears
Did you hear! The World Trade Centers fell! They’re gone!
Trying to process
to compute, how many people worked in those buildings, how many kids will not have a mother, a father, a bother, a sister, a boyfriend a girlfriend, a close friend, an enemy, a loved one a spouse
MISSING is the word that is flashed across the TV screen
M I S S I N G
So many missing
Missing in action,
Lost, disappeared into a cloud of dust - just like that - missing
How they’re missing them
Missing them
Hoping wishing
Praying looking
Countless sleepless nights.
“What floor were they on? It’s a phrase
What floor?
How high?
In our minds we imagine
We do the math
How fast could they get down to get out
Breakdowns shout.
The trauma of the tragedy is woven deep in my mind
The trauma of the traumatized as a nation needs therapy
I saw planes crash into buildings people burned alive
We have witnesses to see thousands die.
80 stories high people jump to their deaths
In my dreams I see it again and again

by Dubblex

Bluetry Coming Full Circle I Smell Smoke

2009-10-30T08:55:00.001-07:00

I'm blown away in the smoke of my mind created by the smoke of the eye mind of your mind.

I'm gonna take a sip of that southern smoked cooking, finger lickin' chickin charcoal broiled smoke embers rising from ashes I'll meet you there after I get me some smoked salmon mr brant, I love me some smoke dreams, with perfect seams, flawless rising in silver swirls

Frenetic – full of kinetic poetic madness I arise out of smoke slowly rising flowing from discarded disregarded embers of burned words into mad repetitive self perpetuating silver swirls.

My bluetry emerges at that speak-easy softly lit smoky lounge on the left where the mood is set with red and orange burning embers candle lights giving off smoke rising in silver swirls.

The crowd inhales my words and exhales patchouli oil scent silver swirls of smoke rising.

On a roll – jelly-roll - my bluetry spell has taken its toll, let the good times roll, and forget about sorrows or tomorrow, think about today. I'm too busy, come tomorrow there's a lot more networking to do.

Lost in a series of masquerades, delusions to who I am allusions and illusions - let er rip for old times sake daddy sing me those blues tonight!

Under the magnolia tree I fell skinned my knee, the sky ripped open clouds burst and the street went up in smoke I thought I must’ve toked some real good stuff because next thing I knew whole city was up in smoke and I was with a chartered band going nowhere fast and an open wound read my prayers somewhere those blues those blues were wailing, the trombone feels my blow as my words flow to slow the utterance of my soul, the whole world is up in smoke unless you stop try the tracks we’re on. I’m sorry I gotta move on – all this smoke is getting in the way of my living.

Living aggrieved in poetic frenzy- I give my life away up in smoke going once twice sold, I can’t capitulate capitalize civilize cooperate encapsulate, insulate any more, just let go let the good times roll you can’t always get what you want and if you try sometimes you may just find what you need and so lady smoke had her way with me, she got to me finally in my ever evolution I keep searching for solutions.

I need someone to love, fit me like a glove, turn down that candle now. It’s giving off to much smoke I can’t inhale. I wanna make some love now, play those blues in the background while I put my life on hold, sit here waiting for you to get your shit together and taken aback by constellation of fate I’ll read the emancipation proclamation to see if I understand you. I’m a jew, you know, and they been trying to eliminate jews a long time from the main stream.

Keep us all quiet with our little asses fighting each other to keep our masses down. We stay redundant - reducible to molasses while the conspiracy roars in my ears we keep fighting one other instead of taking their asses down a notch or two.

I’m so blue I can’t breathe. All that smoke – the whole world is up in smoke, not a joke.

Up in smoke.

by Joy Leftow

Leftow says, “Writing is breathing, I need it to survive – it’s my water, my air, my first love.” Leftow’s honesty and openness may astonish you or embarrass you but she promises not to bore you.

http://joyleftowsblog.blogspot.com

Homeopathic

2009-10-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

When my son saw me
light up on a summer’s eve,
he cried, “Dad, you’re going to die!”

Now I sit with a cigar
in the rain, barely kept dry
by the overhang.

I don’t inhale but can feel
how smoke works its way
into the soft meat of my jaw.

My dad smoked Lucky Strikes
and couldn’t ever quit
but died in water, not by fire.

Water surrounds me now,
falls fast, drips
through snarl of branches.

I draw in the smoke,
watch the rim of embers
grin beneath the ash.

Are you in this moist air?
The woods reply with silence
as nicotine surges in my blood.

If I move my hand
a few inches to the left,
drops sizzle on the coals.

I will finish this cigar.
I will put down these words.
I will go to sleep.

Still, waiting for the ash
to fall, your son sits
smoking in the rain.

by Roger Midgett

Roger Midgett has won some awards for his poetry and has been published in journals, anthologies, and store windows. He works as a Mental Health Professional and lives with his family on an island in Puget Sound.

Inhale

2009-09-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Grandfather picked me up
each morning at seven a.m.
His car was filled with smoke. I choked.
A Marlboro protruded from his lips
like a chipped white oar,
then more butts soon held
between two crooked fingers
as he gripped the steering wheel hard
and slowly maneuvered
the old black Ford Falcon
up Anstice Street in Oyster Bay.

His smoke mixed with grey exhaust fumes
from the car and it wasn't far
before I'd have to crack the window
as we drove past Saint Dominic's chapel,
and further up the hill: still the fumes poked
through rusted holes in the car's frame, a toxic inhale,
contracting my brain as grandfather spoke
of his plans for the day; food shopping at the A&P,
TV dinners for the week, a new issue
of National Geographic to peruse.

He muses still over how he looks forward
to a ride to Bayville and a hamburger, well done,
with slice of raw onion at the Pig 'n Whistle.
Then always more smokes, many more in fresh air,
on days at the beach, orange embers blending
with the skyline at sunset, or in the rain
with humid billows surrounding us. He puffs,
then takes swig from his brandy flask,
enough to ease pain in his back, to pick up
some of life's slack, to begin again where,
atmosphere clear, only ashes remain.

by Mary Ryan Garcia

Mary Ryan Garcia is a freelance journalist, poet, and adjunct professor of English at Suffolk Community College in Selden, NY, who is currently earning an MSW at Fordham University in Manhattan. She offers thanks to poet George Held, who helped her to revise this poem.

Apocalypse

2009-09-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

He smiled a carnivorous smile and stuck a lit cigarette between his teeth. "I'm not going to tell you. You'll have to find them yourself." He was trying to be funny but he was never funny when he was trying.

"Just give me a cigarette. You're really pissing me off." She looked away from him. "Really you know, you're not funny."

"Guess the brand name and you win one." He could tell she wasn't amused so he threw her a cigarette from his pocket. "You're no fun sweetie, no fun. When we first met, you weren't like this. You're so neurotic now."

She picked up the cigarette and lit it. It tasted funny and suddenly she no longer wanted it. She could feel the smoke pass down her throat and enter into her lungs. She had been smoking for years but now it disgusted her. She visualized the smoke eating away at her throat, lungs and could almost feel it invading her legs and arms. She smashed out the cigarette and turned to him. "I'm giving up smoking. You should too."

"What's with you? You just begged me for that. If you quit smoking what will we have to talk about? What will we have to do together? We'll have nothing in common – nothing to fight about. You've got to keep smoking or you'll destroy our relationship. You don't want to be a homewrecker, do you?" He was laughing and she, disgusted, walked into the kitchen.

From the kitchen she could still vaguely hear him laughing so she turned on the faucet. The water sounded strong so she stood and listened to it for awhile. It calmed her down so she left it on and rummaged through the refrigerator. She pulled out the container of cole slaw and ate it with the plastic fork that had been left in it.

"What are you doing in there, drowning yourself?"

She turned the water off and her calm melted away as his voice got closer. "Nothing. I'm eating."

"Ah, that's what happens when you quit smoking. You start eating more and you get fat. Honey, are you going to get fat?" He started laughing again and she felt trapped. She turned the faucet back on and continued eating the cole slaw. "Are you alright, sweetheart? You seem a little high strung lately. Why are you running the water?"

She mumbled as she put the cole slaw away and took out the potato salad. "It calms me but you don't. Please go away." He smoked another cigarette and turned off the faucet. He paced for awhile and watched her eat. She sat at the table with her head down and her legs crossed scooping chunks of potato into her mouth. He kept pacing.

The phone rang but neither of them reacted. "Are you going to get that?" She didn't answer. She just stared blankly into the container playing with the potatoes. "What!" he shouted into the phone. "I'll try and get her but I think she might be in a coma." He dropped the phone and as he walked out of the kitchen he looked at her and said, "Your mother."

She got up and turned the faucet back on. Turned it as high as it would go and stood over it feeling the drops jump on to her face. She silently picked up the receiver and cautiously hung it up. "Can't talk now mom," she whispered.

He rushed into the kitchen with his coat on. "I'm going out. I need some air." He hesitated for a minute but she didn't respond so he slammed the door. A minute later he was back. "Do you need anything?" She didn't answer. "More potato salad?" Nothing. So he left again.

The phone rang. She knew it would. The ring sounded desperate so she lifted the receiver.

"Mom?"

"Honey, are you alright? What just happened? Did you hang up on me?"

"Mom, I quit smoking. I decided to this morning. Now I'm trying to get Dan to quit. I don't think he wants to though."

by Regina Walker

Regina Walker is a writer and psychotherapist in NYC. Her work has appeared in a number of print and online journals.

Life and the Movies

2009-08-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

Bogie and Belmondo
Both known for a butt
In their lips, smoke
Curling from corner
Of mouth making them
He-men.

How come when I
Tried it, the smoke
Burned my eyes
And made me gag
So hard the butt
Fell on

My peacoat and burned
A friggin’ hole
In it and my dad
Kicked my ass
For being for being
So dumb?

by George Held

George Held gave up smoking when his doctor said it would inflame his asthma and kill him. Previously, he’d been too stupid to figure that out.

Tobacco in Cuba

2009-08-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

Giant Alice-in-Wonderland
rabbit-ear-leaves
Cuban tobacco plants
low and full
stand one behind the other
orderly and lush
praying hands repeating
ad infinitum into the horizon
neat lines in soft mounds
of dirt, my feet sink into clay
Alongside plants
under a drooping canopy
spider webs wrap over inside
a 1953 Rambler sunk
in silty soil
like Dalí’s rainstorm in a taxi
a desert inside a Rambler
petrified like the people of Pompeii
in the relentless Cuban sun.

by Maria Lisella

Maria Lisella is Program Coordinator for the IAWA readings at the Cornelia St. Café, and is co-editing an anthology based on those readings. She lives in Long Island City and was a finalist in the competition for Poet Laureate of Queens in 2007. A longtime travel writer, she currently edits a national travel trade magazine and is a member of the New York Travel Writers Association.

[Photo Credit: Stillman Rogers]

Death by Sea Bright

2009-08-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

This sunny backyard's a concentration camp for drunks.
Free to dress well, live in clean houses,
free to come and go.
Free to turn themselves into projectiles,
meat to shoe the surgeon's feet.
Free to bear
a 3 lb. boy whose beer-fed brain
forever scrambles words,
(letters jumble and collide.)

Celebrate this boozeless wake.
Move enormous finger joints.
Do not cry for your weeping liver,
say you count your drinks.

Two boxes of ash
strewn by hand in
sand and little Joan
comes back a slash
of mother ash on her
black pants, maybe sister ash,
both politely dead of drink.

Cigarettes drowned in paper cups
outside. Couches strewn with people's mid-day sleep.

by Susan Maurer

Susan Maurer’s By the Blue Light of the Morning Glory was published by Linear Arts, in2, with Mark Sonnenfeld by Marymark Press, and Dream Addict by Backwood Broadsides. Raptor Rhapsody was published in ’07 by Poets Wear Prada, Maerchen in ’08 by Maverick Duck. Raw Poems was published by Gold Wake Press as e-book in '08. Letterpress broadsides were done by Clamshell Press and The Center for Book Arts. Her poetry has been nominated three times for Pushcart.

Visit her home page:
poetswearprada.home.att.net/SusanMaurer.html

"Death by Sea Bright" is from her first full-length collection, perfect dark, available from ungoverable press as a free to read and download e-book: http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/uploads/2/1/2/2/2122174/perfect_dark.pdf

A Precarious Blend

2009-06-28T09:58:00.000-07:00

As my father sits smoking his pipe-
I watch the tendrils curl upward.
I smell the rich tobacco
That reminds me of North Carolina-
Momma’s home state.

He stares into space-
And takes a long draw-
A question mark-
Floats in my direction
Like an apparition.

What will we do now-
Who will take care of us-
Now that Momma is gone?
Who is this man-
That I call Daddy?

The vapor dissipates-
I stare into space, too-
I envision a foggy future-
While he remembers-
A luminous past.

We both have lost something-
But will we find each other?
Another question mark-
Goes up in smoke.

by Beatrice M. Hogg

Beatrice M. Hogg grew up in western Pennsylvania. Her illiterate coal miner father would have considered her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles to be a major waste of time and money.

Bong

2009-06-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

Water bong, they called it.
Under my breath, I practiced
saying bong bong bong
until it sounded natural.
Mike was too busy getting high
to notice that Frankenstein
would have felt more at home
in Jackie’s basement. Her Mom
worked nights. No one would hear us.

No matter. I was fitting in.
So what if I didn’t know
what was in there. Jackie laughed.
Not easy when you’re holding
your breath. She handed me the slender
gurgling goose and I clutched its throat,
inhaling the chimney stink, remembering
to close my eyes just like she did,
sucked yellow air and felt myself
slipping under a tidal wave.

Buckled by the undertow,
seaweed tangling my hair, I made
a wish. I wanted to lift my head
and find myself in another
rumpus room complete with cake,
a song and candles.

Instead, I held my breath harder,
sure this meant lung cancer later
if I lived through this night. When my
bronchial tubes started crackling,
I blew out a smoke signal, opened
my eyes. And there was Mike,
a volunteer fireman, his mouth
covering mine, fingers bugling my back,
Jimmy whooping, Jackie eyes wide.
I don’t think they knew I could be like that.

by Helen Cho

Helen Cho's poems have been published in Field, Spoon River, Indiana Review, River Styx, ACM, and Southeast Review among others. This poem was originally published in Crab Orchard Review. Helen is a full-time Mom of twin girls, serves on the board of the Feminist Majority and the Advisory Board of Ms. Magazine and occasionally writes tv commercials for progressive nonprofit orgs.

Smoke of Radical Aggressiveness

2009-06-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Struggling against the smoke of myself
Suddenly a late afternoon, a spring day
I mystically become my other self,
Or perhaps dialectically my alter ego
Lining my soul and lungs with rebellious smoke,
My stomach lined with the smoke of radical soot
The history of a love hate dynamic
Each time from another illusion of naiveté
But reality is a “public toilet” of subliminal games
I am skeptical that no one knows the true meaning of life
Between the expert compilations and plagiarists
Flanked by the misery of faux-academia and molecular art
Among the merchants of speculative thought
Surrounded by jesters and clowns of popular culture
Between organic life and chemical misery
Amid forgetful atavism and temporary amnesia
Doomed to self-promotion as a style of life
Restlessness of a soul in chains and handcuffs
Take it from this poet in Absurdistan, New York,
Who wants to exchange a poem for a vagina
As if there were some kind of logic to it
In our decorticated world of possessions
I will write my last poem against myself
To bring doubt and skeptical cynicism….
Living in a post-consumerist culture,
Post-dada, post-evolution, Post-everything!
It appears that “everything” does not make too much sense

by Valery Oisteanu

Valery Oisteanu is a poet-artist based in New York, for the past 37 years. He is the author of 10 books of poetry and a book of short fiction. As a performer his style is known as "Jazzoetry."

Visit Oisteanu's website

Dark plumes

2009-06-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Dark plumes of smoke spiral upward on the freeway ahead. The smoke sucks in the light as it fans out, and grows larger with each gasp of my breath. It reminds me of a forest mushroom, dark, dank and foul. And yet, its ascent feels majestic for its so obscures the sky, making the blue it once held seem more like a dream.

Mistaken beauty does that, it pulls you in where you’re not supposed to be like a wizard, a magician, so bewitching, it knows all the tricks. I can’t stop watching the black columns of smoke in my sky. I feel possessive like a jealous lover turned voyeur. But I’m coughing and that drags me momentarily out of my trance. With wheezing breath I call Cal Trans and Highway Patrol using my cell phone and they give me specifications how if it’s an emergency to dial 911 yada, yada or otherwise dial such and such number as the smoke gets thicker and the traffic slows down to a near parking lot and fire engines blare past me. I gulp and press a finger on the number nine and hesitate over the ones, daring, not daring, but daring to finally press down as more fire trucks pass me and the smoke begins to turn from black to white as the traffic crawls ahead and I see a car on fire, which the firemen are hosing down just two blocks from the nuclear power plant. I breathe; I breathe, I’m alive and wait for my heart to slow its beat down. Like a mirage I imagine its red petals’ unfolding in a soft bow as the turn signal in my car clicks, not left, nor right but to heaven for in the now whitish looking smoke I see a door opening up in the sky.

Surely, I’ve died. Maybe the power plant did explode and I only dreamed upon passing to my very own death that the firemen stopped an impending disaster. A reality mistaken…surely it’s possible. But why is the signal in my car still snapping to attention? And what is that floating on heaven’s doors? Angels? No.

Marshmallows as big as clouds and I taste them in my mouth and know I’m in trouble as a voice coming from my cell phone says in newscaster smugness, “The smoke is not from a car fire, but is a mask for nuclear gas as the terrorist intended.”

I gulp and my throat tightens with a sickening taste of acidic sugar. I pry my esophagus open with the toothbrush I’ve always kept in the car and marvel as it melts in my fingers as the dashboard curls in on itself enveloping the steering wheel. The air bag billows forth and adheres to my arms; burning the hairs and smelling like roasted
marshmallows’ on a campfire and suffocating me with its sweetness.

by Julie Ann Shapiro

Julie Ann Shapiro is a freelance writer, a prolific short story author with more than seventy stories published and author of the novel, Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries (Synergebooks.com).

Upstairs

2009-06-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

After walking dejected across town on such a damp, chilly night, longing for some small pleasure, a smoke seemed in order. As luck would have it, the recessed door beside a darkened storefront appeared just up the street. Ducking into the entryway, Charlie Buc leaned against the door, out of the drizzling rain, to light up.

The door immediately swung open revealing only shadows at first, and then as Charlie’s vision adjusted, a woman of large but attractive proportion emerged from the gloom. She approached him, smiling, and as she drew close he noticed her gown was of alligator hide, tanned to a visible softness, and she wore a feathered headdress. Instead of lighting the J, Charlie dropped it into his shirt pocket. “Good evening, Ma’m. I didn’t mean to….”

“You’re late,” she murmured, and took his hand, leading him inside. He followed like wavelets following a swan, without volition. The sound of a sitar wafted softly around them. She led him through a hallway so smoky he had to catch his breath, and then through a curtained doorway and up a narrow flight of stairs. At the top of the stairway she paused and made a motion with her hands, as though to gather the smoke-filled air around Charlie, and then opened a door to an alleyway, outside.

Without understanding why, Charlie bade her good evening and stepped out smiling, one story higher.

by Thomas Hubbard

Because long ago she helped to show him a way out of Midwest factories and into his own life as a teller of stories, Thomas Hubbard began work on a book entitled "Twenty Years With Proud Mary." The work is still in progress, but the current working title is "Fifty two years with Proud Mary." Meanwhile he has gone ahead writing, telling and living his stories.

Thomas Hubbard's website

She is

2009-05-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

caged
a yellow heartbeat
pounding
seepage flooding her lungs-
she reaches for
clear blue air but
the error of a smoke-full world
sticks to her throat
corrupt powder-sugar lingers
on her tongue
forever in that place
where you and I are
trapped in our own waxen bodies
waiting till that heart
browns and rots and fills with
the silence that
comes with no more
beating.

by Raj Spencer

Raj Spencer is a poet's daughter. She has seen the ways of the world, and is graduating high school and Junior College, simultaneously (Summer 2009). Raj likes to string words together when no one is looking.

their dissipation

2009-05-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

the wood burning under the saw, sweet smell
of dreams outside New York
suspending us over Shasta campfires, smoldering
burnt fish vapor and red’s dying whine
his old man cigarette breath
reminding me that this is wrong
old men don’t french kiss children
and smoke isn’t always sweet cigar
cloves of you my love
mary jane frolicks
or hooka in the back of the pick-up truck
sometimes, it is just burnt embers glowing
a history, lives ashen
each second, ending,
desperately holding on
till the last coal dissipates to dust

by LisaAnn LoBasso

You’ll find LisaAnn LoBasso wandering the world, reading poetry in smoky clubs and beyond. LisaAnn has asthma, and prefers, if possible, to avoid all smoke. Books in print: In the Swollen and Oleander Milkshake.

Marianne

2009-05-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

by Stephen Mead

Tribute piece to Marianne Faithfull, part of the series "Swan Songs".

(If you have trouble viewing "Marianne" here please go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeB5lVLyaZY)

Stephen Mead is a smoking poet and artist living in northeastern NY. Creativity reins in the voices in his head. “Drag,” his homage to women icons, a piece combining poetry and art, can be found in his book Selected Works, available through Amazon & Lulu.com.

Cigarette Smokin’ Acronyms

2009-05-25T11:53:00.000-07:00

Blast
Establishment’s
Nonsensical
Support
Of
Nicotine
&
Harmful
Euphorics.
Don’t
Get
Everyone
Started.

Malignant
Asphyxiate
Removes
Life
Before it’s
Okay to
Recover
Oxygen.

Neighborhoods
East and
West
Prefer
Oxygen
Related
Troubles.

Pulmonary
Arrest
Resulting in
Lung
Incapacitation.
Assholes!
Master
Every
Nicotine-related
Trial.

Kuts
Off
Oxygen to
Lungs.

Long
&
Malignant.

Classic
Hedonism.
Everyone
Smoked
These,
Especially
Retro
Fun-lovers.
Illness
Eventually
Led to their
Deaths.

Carcinogens
Asphyxiate
Most
Everyone’s
Lungs.

Satan
Always
Loves
Evil
Material.

Truth has been
Retarded,
Unfortunately.
End now.

by Jason E. Castro

Jason E. Castro won't sell you furniture, start revolutions or sing for Simon Cowell. He's been previously published in the on-line magazine Danse Macabre

Meditation on Three Girls Smoking

2009-05-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

They are my students,
the young, with
the young’s trite pack,

and because they see
themselves, I suppose,
as secret

and sophisticated,
I can watch
from my window.

They’re sixteen,
already puffing too long
to stop,

but in this context,
they tug their elbows
and suck.

I too,
and thought my mother
did not know.

Then one strange day I quit
as if my body said
enough.

Soon they will return
to my classroom
to write

their stale little stories,
the dragging in
to draw out.

by Lois Marie Harrod

Lois Marie Harrod used to smoke cigarettes, but upon learning she was pregnant, began to smoke words, four books, two children and five chapbooks of words, the latest of which, Furniture, was easier to burn than Part of the Deeper Sea.

www.loismarieharrod.com

Where There's Smoke . . .

2009-05-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

There's a Starbucks man
Lips encircling a cigarette
in James Dean demeanor
Suckle love chiseling his cheekbones

And I inhale simultaneously
Sharp and shallow
Unlike him and his lazy draw
two tables away
Unaware of my ill-mannered stare
Of his smoke signals that send
seductive language to like kind

Silent alarms sounding
more than secondhand smoke warnings
Flashbacks of Salem cigarettes
and other stale hungers burn fresh
And the saint of safety
is supplanted by devil-may-care

I wonder whether his hands
are as hazardous
as the come-hither nicotine
Whether the heat rising from my belly
is vicarious or lascivious

Either way I want to cut and run
Coffee half consumed
Leave the cravings commingled
with caffeine in the cup
Instead I stay spellbound
Die-hard held by old conflicts

Caffeine combining with compulsion
And with questions like
Will I outlast his next light-up
Listen to life in long-term whispers
Or will I banish hazards to hell
And burn in the fire of gratification
Its short fuse a live-out-loud
shout of fortitude

by Ellaraine Lockie

"Where There's Smoke..." was previously published in PRESA.

Ellaraine Lockie is a poet who prefers poetry printed on sheets of handmade paper made from the inedible parts of fruits and vegetables using a method she invented and published in her book, The Gourmet Paper Maker, now available in six countries.

Haiku

2009-05-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

byJudi Brannan Armbruster


Smoke filled summer sky
    Oak leaves frame fast fading light
                          Beauty finds its way

by Judi Brannan Armbruster

Judi Brannan Armbruster hopes you vote for medical MJ in your state! She lives north of the infamous Emerald Triangle. Her "girls" are just about ready to go to ground for maximum harvest! If you are not active in what is going on for your state, she asks you to check out 420magazine.com.

Karl, Esther, Mark

2009-05-22T20:59:00.000-07:00

I smoke. I smoke because it’s all I know.
Years ago, ashes began my father—
he had no roots to speak of.
His foster family cared for him well enough
on the farm, the dry summers of central Michigan
cracking to brittle leaf.

The ashtrays in Karl and Esther’s living room
always empty, and emptied;
ash-blue walls,
shelves filled with tasteful, hateful
bric-a-brac.

It was wonderful, my first cigarette—
at college, gin and tonic in the other hand
under the green dorm party light,
I felt like myself as never before,
a new grace descending
as I inhaled the autumnsmoke
of those dried leaves.
Abroad, I studied the exotic labels
on the packs: filigreed lettering,
Mongols on horseback.

All our relations
agree to disagree:
we shrink from each other
in mutual distaste
at the obligatory gatherings,
even as we smile and
extend a papery hand.

Esther does not smoke.
(She merely appears as a puff, a cloud,
wan face and powdery hair,
nervous, thin hands plucking at her
apron, hoping aloud that the pork chops are
not too dry.)
Karl does, with a brandy preferably,
but he prefers that I don’t.
I have to sneak out of the house to do it,
like some shameful act;
my friend hides them for me in her
glove compartment
until I move away.

Now I’m the nomad on horseback,
scattering Karl and Esther’s ashes over London:
they dribble from the end of my
neglected cigarette

by Carol Wierzbicki

From her forthcoming chapbook Top Teen Greatest Hits (Poets Wear Prada, 2009).

Carol Wierzbicki has run poetry series at ABC No Rio and elsewhere in NYC. Her work has been published in Long Shot, The Cafe Review, Public Illumination and Evergreen Review, and the Unbearables anthologies Unbearables (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), and Help Yourself! (2002), published by Autonomedia. She also is an editor of the Unbearables anthology, The Worst Book I Ever Read (Autonomedia). She compiled and edited Stories from the Infirmary (Universal Publishers,1999), an anthology of fiction and poetry on chronic illness. Her book reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and American Book Review.

a dollar a pack at the rez

2009-05-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

in my mother's house
even the once lily lampshades
are nicotine yellow
the delicate lace of doilies past
crocheted, now curled, lung-like
tumorless but strained
smushed under plaster owl lamps
the ash collects in thread webs

my father is on the floor
prone, pillow-propped
chainsmoking and watching Jeopardy
my mother pops corn in the kitchen
I am afghan-wrapped on the
hand me down Marlboro-red couch
the butter scent drifts through
but after eighteen years of
breathing second-hand
I have lost my sense of smell
Heightened due to compensation, I hear
rogue kernels slapping the bowl
refusing to be Redenbachered, proper

mother settles into cushions next to me
I finger the pack of generic Indian cigarettes
Natives, they read, that she tosses to the table
A dollar a pack at the rez, she says
Handful of grease and sacrificed maise
I watch her gray skin puff and exhale
I weighed five pounds when I was born
Cord around my neck, blue but feisty
But it was the seventies, she'd say
And at least she didn't drink.

by Janice Brabaw

Janice Brabaw is author of two books that detail her struggle with depression, borderline personality disorder, and binge eating disorder - And Again: A Memoir of a Life Disordered and a collection of poetry called Universe, Disturbed. She is the editor of The Best of Stain - an anthology of performers from the two series she founded and curates in Brooklyn - Stained Glass Confessional and An Echo, A Stain. Her work has been featured in several lit magazines including Poesis, Violent Femininity - A Journal of Female Poets, The Toronto Quarterly, A Brilliant Record, The Cartier Review, and Ophelia Street.

She is launching a new quarterly literary publication Persephonous Blue. For submission guidelines and to find out more about Janice please visit her website at:
www.janicebrabaw.com

IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO SMOKE (for acapnotics everywhere)

2009-05-21T09:45:00.000-07:00

please go out into the hall.
If you do not want to smoke,
please go out into the
dirty, filthy, smelly, humid
backstairs hall.
If you do not want to smoke
while you work,
please work outside.
Please take 15 minutes
of your 15-minute break
to run down the 15 flights of stairs
to get downstairs
to the dirty, filthy, foul,
smelly, putrid,
air outside.
Please do not stand in front
of the building.
Please stand in the middle
of the oncoming traffic
to better inhale the dirty,
filthy, foul, smelly, putrid,
noxious, wretched, stinking
air outside.
If you do not want to smoke
while you eat,
please eat outside.
Please leave your table and
your wine and your dinner and
your dinner guests and stand
on the sidewalk outside.
Please take your dirty,
filthy, smelly, stinking
dinner guests outside.

If you do not want to smoke,
you can remain locked inside,
hermetically sealed,
happily, legally,
breathing in the odor
of the dirty, filthy, smelly,
putrid, foul, noxious,
wretched, stinking
burning
American
flag.

by Chocolate Waters

Chocolate Waters now eschews the evil weed, but still thinks smokers are treated much worse than the tobacco companies themselves.

Visit her on the web at www.chocolatewaters.com!

Home Is Where . . .

2009-05-21T09:39:00.000-07:00



. . . ever I have felt at home--
in each bedroom, for example,
a slice of time has called my own.

Or else on mountains molded
from molten rock, old
volcanic ash, pumice-stone rains.

       Or strolling a beach, wondering
           (as the waves weave
             their staggered path across
       quivering sands): how much
                     difference there is, really
           between this daily
       drum-beat of surf and
             a tsunami?

Or perhaps in Brooklyn's backyard--
shielded by the shade breeze
that caresses my flesh
on a summer afternoon.

This poem is none of
these places, however.
it is, instead., an unfolded bed--
which is not my bed.

In a room which is not my bedroom--
or hers, even, since the only
bedroom in this apartment
is occupied by sleeping children.

Who did not wake as the volcano
spewed out its molten core
and the tsunami crashed, then
receded, leaving behind only
the rhythm of two drum-beat hearts.

Which recline here, now,
caressed by the late evening
breeze, interlacing with
human fingers that will linger
forever over each other's flesh.

           Unable
                 to remember
          the last time
                  any place
                 in the universe
                felt as home
           as this.

by Steve Bloom

Steve Bloom lives in Brooklyn, NY, and works as a decorative painter and faux finisher. He has been published by Caprice, The Poet’s Pen, Medicinal Purposes and Flutter. Performance venues include the Saturn Series and Bar 13 in NYC and the Traveling Poets Reading Series, Bakersfield, CA.

Visit Bloom on the web at www.stevebloompoetry.net

Autumn Sacrament

2009-05-15T09:54:00.000-07:00

In the street where we lived
Smoke like blue bubbles
Rising from piles
Of run-away leaves
Maples and oaks
Beeches and sycamores
Threw down their burdens
dancing for joy
Down all the sidewalks
Watched the leaves turning
To colors we gathered
and raked every yard
Had its own offering
Ready and waiting for
Fathers to kneel
Squatting before them
With matches in hand
Flames rocketing skyward
Explosions of color
A one-minute offering
So quickly they
Sank into dark
Ashes glowing
Spirits ascending
In great plumes of
Smoke hiding our faces
Erasing the stars.

by Marian Veverka

Marian Veverka has spent her life on the shores of Lake Erie. She has written two novels, unpublished, and lots of small stuff - poems, CNF, shorts stories -some published.

Home on Fire

2009-05-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

On Christmas Eve I unwrapped purple fleece kitty cat pajamas
given to me by your father that were two sizes too big.
As I undressed we laughed about them.
I put them on, danced around, the waist band hugged my top ribs
and we slept until a stranger pounded on our door.
You ran out to see in boxer shorts,
told me about the fire and I stood up,
my head in hazy smoke that stood like clouds on mountaintops.
Our two cats circled my feet, they looked up at me
and I started coughing.
I got to the front yard and saw her home:
a lit up ornament in the darkness. Firetrucks
lined the street, a dizzying array of activity
on a silent night. The smoke poured from windows,
my throat throbbing from poison, we looked
at the smoke stained stone, out of the black
I saw a fireman holding the old woman like a bride.
Through the front door they came
and we all stood surrounded by the blinking signs
of urgency. I looked around and saw neighbors
had planned for the worst: some had brought purses,
a photo album, a little girl from across the street had a wagon,
one doll riding. And I looked at you: t-shirt, boxer shorts,
a corduroy coat and myself, in too big fleece pajamas
and I realized the fire was contained.

by Tasha Cotter

Tasha Cotter is an MFA candidate at Eastern Kentucky University. Her work is forthcoming in Danse Macabre and has appeared in Sojourn, Hanging Loose Press, Leaf Garden Press and elsewhere. Cotter lives in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband and two cats Chloe and Harper.

SMOKE THROUGH A KEYHOLE

2009-05-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

Life is an attic room
Packed with memories,
Old and new, shiny and sharp,
Broken or patched together.
They are piled where they fell,
One atop the other,
Hiding older ones
Beneath the new.

A trunk full of this,
And a case of those,
A few of these spilled across the space.
The bits of ephemera
Collected through a lifetime
That define not only
Where we have been,
But what we have brought back.

Each time we draw in
We pull another memory
Into the attic of our soul
Disturb the dust
Refresh the contact
With what we were
To build
What we are.

Some moments we waste
And others we carve
Our initials on
Tying them to our soul
Chaining them
To ourselves.
Making them ours.

And as we move through
Time’s pathways
To the next beginning,
We leave the room
Empty, a bit at a time,
Smoke through a keyhole.

by Christopher Reilley

Christopher Reilley is a poet, artist, illustrator, father,computer geek and jobseeker from the greater Boston area. He makes his own wine, is a fabulous cook, and can be found with some regularity at slipperyfiction.blogspot.com

Smoke Dream

2009-05-10T17:24:00.000-07:00

The glamorous city I remember
has become a war zone overnight.
Desperate street vendors offer green
specked rice. Black choppers
land in ditches. Sundown, they
slam us into bunkers behind thick
iron doors. We huddle together,

conjuring how it was before:
bright flags everywhere, music
spilling from exotic mouths,
sweet smelling temptation swirling
out open doors. Now it looks like we
may not make it. On a street corner,
a broken man shambles toward

me, fumbling with a cigarette,
unshaven, hair blaring out from
under an American ball cap, clothes
covered with soot and smear. He moves
spastic, demolished by this godless
place, this craven circumstance. Close
enough to touch, I see that he is you.

by Greta Bolger

After decades of impersonating her father, Greta Bolger has finally settled on the womanly side of the tracks, kissing the few willing babies who will kiss her back and coaxing flowers to bloom in thought balloons that arise from the heads of the disillusioned. She practices art in words and pictures as well as in daily life.

If Two By Fire

2009-05-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

The city is burning.
Come flee with me to the hills.
The Greeks have burst
from the belly of their great horse.

This is another poem
about the ruin of our universe.
They'll char the city
make it black and drag
that hag Helen back.

There are lines on her face now,
almost as if the entire war
had been scratched out in flesh.

This is the war of the old,
let Troy burn with a whimper.
Let's go to the hills
and let the dying world, die.

We'll walk together
along river banks, through fields,
grow fat and old and drunken
and recall the night the
burning city kept us weary.

by Adam Tod Leverton

Adam Tod Leverton was born in Canada, but now lives in Poland. His wildly modest ambition is to have a million people read his first chapbook, Broken Wing, a collection of what may be loosely described as 'love' poems. If you like this poem and would like to check out his entire chapbook please contact him by email atleverton at yahoo dot ca for a free pdf version. His work can also be found in Angelic Dynamo, Best Poem, Censored Poets, Claremont Review, Clockwise Cat, Conceit Magazine, Dangling Hook, Decanto, Falling Star, Green Beard, Halfway Down the Stairs, Mississippi Crow, Purdee, Poets Against War, Poet's Ink Review, The National Post, Open Minds Quarterly, Perpetual, The Monsters Next Door, Scar TV Radio, Shine!, Spoken War, Static Movement, Whatever is Pure, Word Slaw, and Ygdrasil. He is the poet in residence at Purdee.

Hello! Hiroshima? Hello? (Los Alamos calling)

2009-05-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

This city of blisters
is so much like my home town
except:
it always rains;
the girls on the street will cry into the arms of the boys
who look in different directions;
everyone speaks a different language
even when the meaning means the same things
because it's their way of listening for something different;
the fish in the restaurants is always very fresh
if not actually alive;
these trees are palm trees, though still ever green, and
so is the moss smearing itself across all the concrete walls.

Except for all these few things,
it's exactly the same as my home town
(also, the keloid scars on the back of the neck of the man on the street car that goes by the river that goes past the house where I live when I live there).

It's a double sunrise day in my hometown and
the mist or the fog or the smoke or whatever it is
comes out of the mountains and
threads itself through the ghosts of trees on its way to lower ground.

by Robert Masterson

Robert Masterson is a writer/teacher living in Westchester County, New York.

Robert Masterson's Blog
website
on twitter

Another Day Without Lin

2009-05-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

I combed cranberries from the vines,
clutched a handful and squeezed and squeezed.
That was her blood, thin, the plasma and the water,
the tendency to all things pink and leaking.
Her face was the color of smoke.
There was the re-entry, the sentience of one's own
bone marrow, the stirring of fish beneath the naval.
I placed two green apples on the windowsill, cores intact.
Pears fell silent as shade. Inside organic persimmons,
I felt a pulse, imagined the threat of neo-plastic shadows
casting towards center. Then I scraped the skin off a fuzzy peach
and dreamt of sunshine turning to California and
California turning to an island surrounded by an ocean
of white semi-sweet waves. Low tide and in remission.
I squirmed into a wooden crate and sealed my self in.
Splinters pierced my thoughts.
I made this promise.
I'd never eat until I was eaten first.

by Kyle Hemmings

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey and wishes he could draw like R. Crumb.

DeathSmokesMe

2009-05-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

Life chased me until the running
Was a numbing race
I ran
-----
And ran
-----
Until a clearing came
I fell to cold hard bedrock(stone)
Silenced by the endless chatter of the living
-------
Death found me as I sat(criss-cross)
Eyes closed smoking the weeds that grew
Upon my grave
And asked
May I?
"My life is pain
The kind that doesn't settle
Comfortably on powdered cheeks or waterproof mascara"
We embrace
Death says:
You know...what pains the most is Living
Not the peaceful letting go...you know

by Peacegirlout aka Rebekka White

Peacegirlout is a Poet
self-discovered
the kind whose
rebellion springs from desperation
and emotional fragility
she's merely kept alive by truths so miniscule
it turns night into day

Meet Me At Giant Wash

2009-05-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

In the Bear's Den Bar on Franklin Avenue
a black mother bear looks down from the countertop
like a spirit through a rotten cloud of smoke,
a room of pickled faces, Ojibwe and Irish,
nearlyas preserved as the beast.
I live just a block away,in a building with the porch falling off.
Summer nights friends and I tiptoeonto the sagging boards,
drink wine and watch the passing trade.
Next to Bear's Den is a laundromat that has burned to the ground,
with a mural on the side of a big white woman
in red pumps and dress, her hair in a kerchief, her lips
as red as brick, pinning up bedsheets to dry
and she is so happy, she is saying Meet Me At Giant Wash.
But she never finishes folding that bedspread
on the side of the building, they haul her rubble
away in trucks, still smoldering, becausea tenant upstairs
lit up and dozed off, and that's how it goes,
one building at a time the neighborhood gets carted away,
and the big black bear, paralyzed, each hair erect
with nicotine dew, rubber lips pulled back to make her look more
ferocious than she is, teeth bared against the wrecking ball,
comes next.

by Mike Finley

Mike Finley remembers what Paul Newman's Luke used to say, "Smokin' 'em up, boss!" He works as a copywriter and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

He can be reached (and read) at http://mfinley.com

A Secret Styvo Goodbye

2009-05-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

You turn up on the doorstep with a crazy smile and a bent daisy
you tell me it’s been a year.
You almost miss the chair.
It’s eight in the morning.

You do an air high five.
And tell me on the top of your voice how great it is to be you.
Then you fall asleep on my bed.
With your pockets still full of stuff.

You pashed my friends
I didn’t mind.
You kept catching taxis when I needed you.
Blowing smoke between your teeth
telling me your night’s out of focus, the bars,
the blue neon lights of the pool table
making everyone look 3am beautiful.

I used to go crazy listening out for the front gate.

You wake up cheerful
but your eyes are telling sad stories.
You read me lyrics from a scratched notebook.
Your soft pack is flat
one squashed secret Styvo left,
that will be it
It’ll be goodbye again.

by EZB

Poet and spoken word performer EZB just toured North America in 2009 following an invitation to perform at Montréal’s Festival Voix d’Amériques.The winner of the 2006 Nimbin Performance Poetry World Cup and multi-Slam champion, EZB featured last year at the Melbourne Writers Festival, the Newcastle Young Writers Festival and at Melbourne’s famed La Mama Theatre. She also toured in a live music and poetry collaboration with Sean M Whelan and the Mime Set to Castlemaine, for the Australian Poetry Festival, and to the Woodford Folk Festival. She has also recently performed at the Melbourne International Arts Festival and the Night Words Festival at the Sydney Opera House, and is a regular performer at Liner Notes, a legendary Melbourne spoken word night dedicated to interpreting a classic album. She toured New Zealand in 2007. She is probably going to put out another book this year.

She blogs at http://atomicladybomb.blogspot.com/.
Visit her a MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/emiliezoeybaker.

A Very Leisurely Cigarette

2009-05-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

I stopped smoking on a Monday
the week before Valentine’s Day
because there was someone
I thought I might like to kiss,
an ex-smoker with a very nice smile
and a penchant for frying fish.
but I got sick of the snow
so I went to Florida instead
where despite a sudden cold snap
it was warmer and friendlier
than New York.
My friend picked me up
and she was smoking a cigarette,
(I think it was my favorite brand)
so I figured I’d smoke along with her
in a companionable sort of way
not to mention that cigarettes
were much cheaper, almost free
when I thought of all the money
I saved by buying them in Florida
so I smoked cigarettes all week long
feeling pretty happy about it
until Valentine’s Day when
Mister Maybe I’ll Kiss Him called
just as I was inhaling
and I remembered
that I had stopped smoking.

It’s hard to admit
even to myself
that I had quit smoking
over one hundred times
which may sound excessive
to some but not to me because
I stopped using drugs every day
for over twenty-one years.

After the phone call
I began to wonder
but couldn’t decide
which in the long run
would bring me more pleasure
the smiling fish fryer
or the reliability
of a pack of Marlboros
always in my pocket
so on the way to the airport
I stuck a nicotine patch
onto my left bicep
just in case I developed a taste
for a fish frying man
but I ripped it off one hour into the flight
and forgot to clap when we safely landed
so focused was I on the vision of myself
smoking contentedly outside Terminal Five.
I caught a ride with an unlicensed driver
and insisted that he pull over
at the closest convenience store
where I bought a pack, ripped it open,
and leaned against his turquoise Buick
leisurely exhaling streams of smoke
as vapid and addictive as the city
to which I had, once again, returned.

by Puma Perl

Puma Perl lives and writes in NYC. Her work has appeared in many print and on-line publications and anthologies. She has been a featured reader in various New York City area venues. Her first chapbook, Belinda and Her Friends, was recently published by Erbacce Press, She is a firm believer in the transformative power of the creative arts and a former degenerate smoker.

To find out more about her new chapbook visit her publisher http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/pumaperl/4531745901.

Viist her on MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/rubymydear916.

Smoking In The Girls' Room

2009-05-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

smokin' in the girls' room with
my fellow "bad girls"
school nurse two doors down the hall

by Faux Maux

Faux Maux is a playwright, actress, ranter, dancer and lover of words. Words can be found at fauxmaux.livejournal.com along with obligatory pictures of her kitties. Fauxmaux.com is her site and she can be found at the other regular online haunts. She has written, performed and produced theater in NYC for 20 years, having a grand old time making Art.

Smoke that dream before I cream you

2009-05-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

A rough month ensues, working on several projects simultaneously, doing publicist work and helping people too.

I’ve got all my own mishigas too sufficient to sort through. A memories life sake, a backache, earache filibuster, Monroe birthday zone, a black hole, don’t know where to go. A vagabond review, a Scarsdale Hebrew cemetery, morsel of dainty tastiness nastiness a black hole of madness no home to go to.

Stuck inside my head, a poet’s world, inspired to drive down dirty get high on some Thai stick, trying to get skinny on the sly, sounds tinny, the words stuck in my eardrums, tum de dum

Exhale poetry with scarlet U2 embolism demolishes dents an entire world out there me capsized in the cave in a mountain dew bats flapping in my head I breathe new scents for a few sense amillia, vanilla will do me fine.

Inhale Exhale, a little cheech and chong, put it in a little pill for me. I want to kill that roach, don’t encroach on my spot, shit I see you got your eyes on a brand new spanking spaldine, bounce da ballie, brand new – higher than that kite you want to make take flight.

Fire your ass off stop sass saw me in half. I wanna make some war in cognito infinito, vagabond report retort a torte of flamingo a golden gal glimmer if I offer you a drizzle of Acapulco gold.

If you only got sensimilla, with nice big blue green buds, a thai joint will bend me fine, ven aqui, pasa lo, share it, … please.

Don’t do me like that. My hand’s open – greed.

Give me some of that weed, I need some time to digest the rest but so far will take I'm not a lawyer. I’m a voyeur, not a destroyer, not part of the choir, I live in a temple excoriate licorice on my breath, a little violet lipstick, blissful Babel bagel babe of a comet a carnal cattle pick up your bustle and hustle along. Mazel Tov!

Damask cilantro, don’t ask, another whiff of that smoke, floating up from all that patchouli incense I use to mask the scent of that hashish oil mixed with opium.

Up in smoke it went, again and again.

Cheech & Chong

2009-05-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

Chrisco Labrenz had this to say about his original creation.
"I had the pleasure of giving the original picture to Tommy Chong in person. That was shall we say....NEATO!!!"

To see larger version, click on picture.

Chris hangs his shingle at a local video shop in Edmonton, Alberta, freelancing while working on Moocowkids, a graphic novel to be released in the near future. Featured online at deviantArt and gracing the recent cover of The Cartier Street Review, Chris has a fanclub at facebook under Chrisco Labrenz.

contact Chris Labrenz

In a vineyard...

2009-05-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

by Tatjana Debeljački

by Tatjana Debeljački

Tatjana Debeljački was born in 1967 in Užice, and still living there. She writes poetry, prose, haiku and aphorisms. Her works have been published in the following papers: Vesti- Užice, Jesenjin- Belgrade, AKT- Valjevo, Latica- Podgorica, Bilten- Novi Sad, Glas Banata- newspapers Debeljački - Kovin. So far she has had four collections of poetry published: A CD-book, A HOUSE MADE OF GLASS, published by ART – Užice; YOURS, published by NARODNA KNJIGA, Belgrade; VULCANO by Haiku Lotos, Valjevo; and the most recent AH-EH-EEH-OH-OOH published by Poeta, Belgrade in 2008. She is a member of Writers Society of Serbia and Serbian Haiku Society.

Visit her blog, Kuća od stakla: http://debeljacki.mojblog.rs/

SMOKIN'

2009-05-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel the urge
to smoke again –
feel the pepper cloud
sear my throat

Force burnt geraniums
through tainted nostrils,
taste the acrid crumbs
upon my tongue

Stain the tender space
where fingers meet
from pink to mustard brown

Waken daily to a wheezing
coughing choking barrage
of lungs deprived of air.

I miss
the glamour of it all.

by Barbara Reiher-Meyers

Barbara Reiher-Meyers is a Long Island, New York poet, board member of the Long Island Poetry Collective. She curates the Long Island poetry calendar for Poetz.com, runs monthly workshops in Ronkonkoma, sends weekly emails of local poetry events, and has edited several volumes of poetry. Sounds Familiar is the title of her first book of poems.

after the reading

2009-05-02T19:20:00.000-07:00

we linger on the sidewalk
cigarettes slip from pockets
stay
way past time to leave,
cling to each other’s words
still lilting, ears longing,
not for touch,
not for light conversation,
but the taste of more,
of something nearly sacred.
lips spill stars, fire, music.
listen to the pulse –
smoke, magma, blood.

by Lori Desrosiers

Lori Desrosiers grew up on the banks of the Hudson River, but now lives somewhere between the world of her poetry and Western Massachusetts. She has a literary journal, an M.F.A. and several fat cats.

www.poetrynewscalendar.com
www.threevanities.blogspot.com
www.loridesrosiers.com
www.naugatuckriverreview.com

On Worship

2009-05-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Hurl laughter
into the face of meaninglessness.
Buy despair
another drink.
Watch doubt collapse.
Watch the burning cigarette
kiss someone else.
Watch as he dangles and flakes.
Watch jealousy spill out of the ashtray.
Watch shame tear off his shirt
and his, to part the sea of men.
Watch sweat on his skin trace
another promise. Watch sweat smear it away.
Give words lips, a throat, tongue –
Where you and I stand the mirror
is a knife. But you kiss me. You silenced me.

by Zhuang Yisa

Zhuang Yisa lives in Singapore. His poetry has been published or forthcoming in Sargasso (Puerto Rico), Yuan Yang (Hong Kong), ditch, (Canada), The Toronto Quarterly, Ganymede, The Salt River Review, and elsewhere. He also reviews for The Substation Magazine, an online arts journal based in Singapore.

Visit his journal, And so it goes... at zhuangyisa.livejournal.com

Tarot Card 0

2009-05-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Fool tries to throw his voice

his efforts seem less than
adequate—his mouth moves,
shapes nouns, forms verbs.

gravity seems reluctant
to follow his commands.

the absence of smoke leaves
him silent, he moves to light
a cigarette.

he strikes the match,
sees words
alive in sulphur.

taking a drag, he listens
for a voice,
untethered.

by Alex Stolis

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis, Mn. He just quit writing poetry.

BRIAR PATCH SMOKE DREAMS

2009-05-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

Smoke dreams to suit your sense of taste, size, and shape
Go to your head like air-cured or oil-cured briar.
It’s enough to make a connoisseur go ape
Drawing, tasting, without inhaling’s a nice way to retire.

Satisfying, relaxing, and a fine aesthetic pleasure
Can be gotten in a variety of sizes, shapes and forms;
Standard or freehand, you could always get higher
On a pipe of Algerian, Corsican, or Grecian briar.

Meershaum’s not bad, but straight grain
Or birdseye can better light my fire.
Simply put your eyes to the test of a true admirer
Or collector. Why spend all that bread on wasteful smokesake?
When fifty, one hundred or two hundred dollar’s money
Enough to make a casual smoker quake.

Try a Dunhill, Viprati, or inexpensive Stanwell,
A soft charring flame or puff; a smoky cloud
To get you that much higher.
Smoky Latakia, Virginia, Burley or Cavendish mixture
Will never make you a liar.
Enjoy an exotic whiff of finely aged leaf;
Your taste buds will never tire.

Coarse cut, ribbon cut, dark rope or mottled flake--
Close your eyes and elevate your palate
To the heights of a mountain lake.
There under the cooling shade of a pine tree you’ll wake
To the aroma of all outdoors--mouth agape.

It’s enough to make a connoisseur go ape.
Smoke dreams to suit your taste, size, or shape,
Straight, cross grain, rusticated, or sandblast--
You can always get higher.
Nothing goes to your head like well-aged briar.

by Allan David Goldschmidt

Time Clock, Allan David Goldschmidt’s third book of poetry will be published by Poets Wear Prada later this year. His previously published collections are Of Sun and Wind and Woodwinds. Allan has been writing poetry for approximately 35 years, drawing for about 30 years, playing western flute since 1977, and Japanese Shakuhachi flute for 13 years. He was Assistant Art Director for Medicinal Purposes under the late Robert Dunn. A four-page spread on Allan’s multi-versatile artistic career was in a local neighborhood newspaper last year.

Visit him online at http://poetswearprada.home.att.net/AllanDavidGoldschmidt.html.

LUCKY STRIKE / MEANS FINE TOBACCO

2009-05-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

She’d forgotten to buy cigarettes for her party.

In those days, a hostess—
even one who didn’t smoke—
stood cigarettes on end in a container
that looked like a miniature silver-plated potbelly stove.

“Run down to Jerry’s for a pack of Lucky Strikes,”
she said to me. I was seven. “I’ll call,” she said,
“and tell him you’re coming.”
In those days, I did anything she asked.

I entered the woods behind our house, a trail
that led to a busy street. In the store,
Jerry handed me the Luckies with a matchbook
and told me to get the hell home fast.

I knew I had danger in my pocket.
Half-way back, I stopped in the woods
and took out my purchase. I read the pack: LS/MFT.
I struck a match to see what striking a match was like.

I wanted to delay going home, wanted to be watched
by unseen eyes in the forest as I struck a match.
I knew my mother was getting worried.
Where are the cigarettes? she was wondering.

In those days, danger promised to be something so fine.

by Anne HardingWoodworth

Anne Harding Woodworth’s most recent book, Spare Parts, A Novella in Verse (Turning Point, 2008), is about a friendship based on NASCAR. Her essays and poetry have appeared in U.S. and Canadian journals, anthologies, and at several sites on-line. She is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Visit her webpages at www.annehardingwoodworth.com

When He Quit Smoking

2009-04-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

He wouldn’t lecture me.

I could see in his eyes—heavy,
finding sleep in reclining chairs
while his younger grandchildren bounced
from plastic covered couch
to carpet—that he heard, and ignored,
plenty of lectures about what the next cigarette would do.

When the doctor put a tube into his lungs,
drained decades of tar,
we all began to understand
the fragility of our family name.

I relished the act of sneaking a Camel
in the backyard where I didn’t know he saw me
crouched in the grass by the stone Virgin Mary,
forgetting that a year ago
his daughters prepared for a life without a father
while gathering in Christ Hospital
to see his olive skin made darker
by the contrasting hospital gown.

Even in the ICU we laughed
as he flirted with a nurse,
pretended that he had too much life to die,
recalled injuries loading plywood
onto a truck, smashing his fingers into
tree roots, maps of the Mediterranean pressed
on his dark face.

And when he had to take oxygen
we treated it like a quirk,
like an odd affectation.
When he got lost driving,
staying gone two days, we panicked
though some of us were convinced
that this was the way he had to die,
re-mapping the streets and neighborhoods
he knew like the Back of the Yards,
Englewood, Pilsen, Little Village,
Midway, Burbank,
Cicero, Central,
the streets that grew from under him
like the ivy back in Bari.

by Vincent Francone

Vincent Francone is a writer of minor note living in Chicago, working at jobs that would make the average person sick. He writes of his city and the wayward folk therein.

Forest Fire

2009-04-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Day after day
smoke shrouds the mountains,
turns the sun to blood.

Up there, flames crown in treetops,
roar down dry ravines to climb
new ridges, scorching undergrowth.

In their wake, still smoking dirt
holds the charred remains
of evergreens, twisted ghosts
rooted in ash.

As I grieve for spruce and fir
crackling in canyons of fire,
I think of funeral pyres
by the Ganges, of mourners
immersed in its ancient waters
while cremation smoke eddies
above them, and the ashes,
oily ashes, flutter down.

by Penny Harter

Reprinted with author's permission from Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth (Sherman Asher Publishers, 1998)

Penny Harter lived in Santa Fe for 11 years. Fires often bloomed on the surrounding mountains. When she drove back to NJ, smoky haze lasted into Kansas. Her most recent book is The Night Marsh.

Visit the Ms. Harter on-line at http://www.2hweb.net

See the publisher's page for her new book at: http://www.wordtechweb.com/harter.html

SMOKELIST

2009-04-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

Smoke is wet grey ascension in a rain-filled sky, sand eddying up from the ocean floor, heat pouring up from our bodies as we join and part again and again, pungent taste of oaky metal, currents of white air dissipating from a grate in the city streets, the dark sluice of betrayal seen for the first time, dense spray of spore from a puffball mushroom, cloudy blush of constellations, ash’s faint sister, crystalline jet-trail through the blue, chimney-weep, fire-sorrow, tendrils unfolding weightlessly, bitterness rising, petroleum’s black ghost, granules of matter fading into ephemera, regret-scent that clings, soundless, all that’s left.

by Lindsay Knisely

Lindsay Knisely lives with her true love by the sea in Santa Cruz, CA. She is a writer and teacher at UC Santa Cruz who is originally from Virginia by way of Ohio and Oregon.

A Cremation

2009-04-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

Fire steals from slow decay the frame
Of one who lets us claim
This small relief:

The words are said, the ashes flown.
What’s left? A weight, a shard of bone
Still sharp as grief.

by J.D. Smith

J.D. Smith has smoked cigars in five countries. His work has appeared in Alimentum, Gastronomica and The Bark among other journals. He is the recipient of a 2007 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA, and has also published one children's book.

Follow his blog at: jdsmithwriter.blogspot.com

Fishbowl

2009-04-28T20:27:00.001-07:00


It was the end of the '70's and everywhere brown:
my Nicholas from Eight is Enough bowl cut;
the worn floor mats in mom's Camaro; Lucifer,
our German Shepherd, when I combed his white fur
cocoa with a box of Nestle Quick;
the chapped leather couch where dad's pals would squeeze
side by side,
   their arms straight up the wall
whenever they'd stop jostling
for their strange tapered cigarettes.
They would suck, smile, pass, suck, smile, pass,
   then blow smoke,
   sometimes in rings to make my eyes light up.

I was often taunted with joints.
Snickering through trickles of beards,
my father's friends would hover tantalizing spliffs
as bait above my fingers
while I'd plead for just one puff.
Dad would size up mom
(at the kitchen sink or making supper).
   Smug, he never heard her objections.
   Instead he'd fetch the Zig-Zag box,
   its tiny orange flap emblazoned
      with the face of some mystical alchemist or gypsy.

From among the maze of dainty interfolded pages,
dad would pluck one thin sheet, craft a joint,
seal the seam with one long lick,
then make me promise not to let it drop.
Uninducted, I would cough, then race
   the bathroom gauntlet, the hallway
   longer than at bedtime,
      my throat on fire,
      the faucet stingy with cold water.

by Jason Steeves

Jason Steeves holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University . He works for the art department at Harvard, then spends his nights playing itsy-bitsy-spider with his triplet daughters and producing a documentary about drugs and poetry.

FIRE IS NOT SACRIFICE

2009-04-28T16:47:00.000-07:00

A large distant field of stubble has been set ablaze
to hold back the wind-driven wildfire
knights in flaming red armor with eyes so hot
they warm the hands they pass over them
hose into the gray smoke, pour oblations
a hill of dark houses leans into the heat
that feeds and quenches

night falls around the airfoils of the fire
blisters on its own breathing skin
the canyon fire is not sacrifice; it is about sacrifice
forfeiture, relinquishment
the ecclesiastical canons we live with, die from

the evacuated fill their cars and trucks
as much as they can in their urgent haste
screech down the roads, scream up their prayers
beg for mercy, damn everything almighty
the red knights retreat to the whoosh
of the slow pulse of helicopter blades
self-consumed
the blaze throws itself back
leaves all offerings unreceived.

by Eileen Malone

Eileen Malone founded and directs the Soul-Making Literary Competition and hosts an interview show on San Francisco Access Channel 29. She previously taught with California Poets in the Schools and local Community Colleges. She lives in the coastal fog of the San Francisco Bay Area and has published her poetry in over 400 literary journals and anthologies.

www.EileenMalone.us

www.SoulMakingContest.us

http://www.redroom.com/author/eileen-malone

http://eileenmalone.blip.tv/

Air

2009-04-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

Ramon's yellow fingernails
speak for his lungs,
his voice shaky as an earthquake.
The cigarette ash falls
from a quivering gray hand,
the oxygen machine thumps
counting the days
like combat Morse code.
Breath struggles out
tight as a sailor's knot.

by Cheryl Caruolo

Cheryl Caruolo is a published author, and teacher of the art of writing and the craft of editing. Her literary work has appeared in a multitude of venues including Reiki News, Thereby Hangs A Tale, Common Thought and Cezzane’s Carrot. Several of her pieces have been national literary contest winners and fine art exhibit contributions.

Visit Ms. Caruolo's website to learn more: http://www.cherylcaruolo.com/

EL COHIBA

2009-04-28T06:15:00.000-07:00

The gusanas were from old Spanish families
Cifuentes, Mendez and Garcia.
They owned the plantations
and the slaves
who grew the tobacco
leaves like magic
in the rich red-sunset soil
of Vulta Abajo.

Leaves laid out on trays
in wall-less sheds
to dry slowly
in the scented air.
Baled and shipped to Havana
and the factoria
where the torcedores roll cigars
on wooden desks.

Old black men with shock white hair
fine-boned, long fingers
coaxing the leaves to curl
and compact into perfect cigars.

Listening to the soft, sweet voices
of the lectors
reading stories - real or imagined-
to make the crafted movement
forever rolling
seem less tedious and more the Art.

Mystery and romance
rolled in their names: Montecristo;
Partagas; Romeo y Julieta
and the fabled Cohiba
exported everywhere as the best.

In '62, Pierre Salinger was sent
by master Jack
to buy every cigar in Cuba
before he imposed the embargo.

But the rich Yankees still come to Habanos
and buy the contraband cigars
place their bids
for the precious humidor
and the autograph of the century.

Exiles and mafiosi in Florida
living lives conditionally
waiting until Castro dies
imagine thieves will be welcomed
exploiters encouraged to return
and crime syndicates will once again
skim the cream.

In their Fidel-free world
they'll make fortunes
profiteering and privatising
the peoples' wealth.

Viva La Revolution !
Viva la lucha !
Venceremos !

by M.L. Emmett

M.L. Emmett comes from Reading, Berkshire, England.
Living in a Victorian cottage in Norwood, South Australia, her ambition to become their first Poet Laureate.
Poodle tragic.

Drag: Joni

2009-04-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

From Selected Works by Stephen Mead

Drag, lips, an inhalation
This lit candle is
Summoning a ritual
Lean closer
With closed lips, breathe
Such membraneous intimacy...
Pores, reponses open:
Hold on, hold on.

by Stephen Mead

Stephen Mead is a smoking poet and artist living in northeastern NY. Creativity reins in the voices in his head. “Drag,” his homage to women icons, a piece combining poetry and art, can be found in his book Selected Works, available through Amazon & Lulu.com.

Pieces

2009-04-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

I

See yourself wrapped in soft paper tissue.
You are prepared to become ash,
to float into the sky in pieces.
Part of you may land in the open trap of a mouth,
rest on tongue, taut,
the only exposed muscle—free and writhing,
or lay in soil, in the shade of a tulip
to be fed upon by the green things
that grow toward the sun, that know no love.

∞

Every time I see a fire,
I know something has died.

II

Open a book and rip each page.
Take The Wild Iris from your white bookshelf.
Smoke “Witchgrass.” Burn the poem
into your soft throat as you inhale,
brand the silk cord of your trachea.
Unfold “Lady Lazarus” and eat it line by line.
Every inner wall must be painted black
with famous words, with words.
Eat until acid fills your mouth, until you cough ink.

∞

Every time I read a poem,
I know something has died.

by Ruth Spalding

Ruth Spalding will be living in Ann Arbor come Summer, editing textbooks, then going to the School of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She hopes to learn to ride a bike.

BURNING POEMS

2009-04-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

“Since Roman times…ash has been recognized as a useful
amendment to the soil…it contains most of the…
essential nutrients...for growth…”—The Master Gardeners (website)

The poet went outside
to get some air. Dense clouds
of ash filled eyes and nose and lungs.
“The poems are on fire,” he said
through tears, “and all the words
are turning into soot. I will go now
and watch them burn.” He turned
his steps to face the conflagration.
Head down, he plowed
against the blowing cloud of ash
till he reached at last the source of smoke,
a great pyre upon which Blake burned bright,
fueled by tongues of flame that lapped at Donne.
The greener poems of Olds and Collins
smoldered red around the edges
while Kerouac and Ginsberg
crackled instantly to flames.
The poet exhaled hard upon the glowing
words and watched as sparks rose in the sky
to fall as ash on fields and flocks and pens. And then
the poet went back home to write again.

by Gretchen Fletcher

One of Gretchen Fletcher's poems, “Two Giant Men in New York,” recently won the Poetry Society of America’s Bright Lights, Big Verse competition, and she was projected on the Jumbotron as she read it in Times Square. She frequently travels to attend poetry readings, awards, and book signings and leads writing workshops for Florida Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress, and her chapbook, That Severed Cord was published by Finishing Line Press.

Incendiary

2009-04-24T19:10:00.000-07:00

I caught your eye across the dim café
where you were sitting with your dark-eyed wife,
together filling up the chipped ashtray—
her butts smeared red, yours long and still alight
with flickering ash. And smoldering in the dark
the brand between my thighs began that slow
burn which only fleeting glances seem to spark.
My lowered eyes and cheeks reflected shuddering glows
of candle flame and blood-stung flush—
your gaze surged toward me. Then as quickly froze,
for she had felt your heat and caught my answering blush.
You took her pretty hand in yours and quickly rose
Then choosing long love over singeing lust
left me, incendiary in the gloom, to self-combust.

by Christina Lovin

Christina Lovin is the author of What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. Widely published, Lovin has been funded by the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council.

Visit the author's websites at http://www.christinalovin.com/

“second hand smoke”

2009-04-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

retorted with husky voice
through puffed streams
of freshly used fumes
“just a rumor” rasping
an aroma of burnt tar
“not proven” as she
pops a breath mint
ahems her phlegm
flips the spent butt after
one last lung filled drag
refreshes her perfume
and reenters the bar
after enjoying a quick
breath of clean fresh air

by Carl Palmer

Carl Palmer, Micro Award and Pushcart Prize nominee, well known at open mikes around the Puget Sound area of the Pacific Northwest, lives in University Place, WA.

removed

2009-04-22T15:13:00.000-07:00


baby you know
i love you more than
warm biscuits and honey butter
i’ll be with you ‘til dirt turns to diamonds

so don’t get bent

when I say that today’s favorite fifteen
counted down while you were out getting diapers
i leaned over the ninth floor railing
smoked a joint beneath the tired winter sun

inhale              hold

come on baby you know
you’re better than black beans with rice and ham
after eight long hours grinding for our room and board
but sometimes a man’s just got to step off and rest

sirens              church bells                brick
pigeon rustles on a ledge below me

you know I need you more
than a heart-shaped red velvet cake and
a big glass of milk but baby you know that what i
wanted was a quarter hour and a tight one

to be somewhere alone

by Jackson Lassiter

This poem has previously appeared on-line in Boiling River Online Poetry Journal.

Jackson Lassiter swears on a stack of hemp paper that he's never ever smoked a joint. Really. Seriously. Oh, believe what you will, then. Whatever; he needs to go out on the balcony now.

Afterwards

2009-04-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

she got up in the shadows
standing smoking
a naked silhouette
with an ember for
an eye
blinking cyclopean fury—
I, drenched in her
lay over the edge
of the bed
watching her upside
down
trying to say what I
may later write
but can’t seem to get
tongue to tip and tap palate
forming only sounds
I nod and watch tumbling
end over end
smelling of god's sweat and cigarettes
wishing I didn’t have eyelids
so I couldn’t blink
and even miss a second of this fall.

by Juventino Manzano

Juventino Manzano has returned to the states after a three and a half year haitus. He completed his Masters degree while working fulltime as an ESL Teacher's Aide at a middle school, and now works as on online intructor for University of Phoenix. When not busy trying to be creative and academic, he plays with his four-year old son and reads as much as time allows.

He has been published in various magazines including Celebrate the Self, Hustler Fantasies, EIDOS, Proper Gander, Bourgeoizine, Last Stop at Union Station, Armageddon Buffet, and Post Amerikan.

Check out Manzano's blog: Epiphany Point

Vulnerability (iii & iv)

2009-04-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

(iii)

A thick haze settled over Donora in late October ’48 as the DHS Dragons took the field. Fans said the game was all but invisible in the smog, that the only way they knew these stout boys had scored a touchdown or recaptured a fumble, was to listen for cheering from the front rows. No one could explain the loss. Donora was famous for tough football players and hearty steel workers, but by the beginning of the next week, funeral homes had run dry of caskets.

Women hid in their homes and locked their children in bathrooms. Men still waited in line to punch in at the Zinc Works, despite the toxic cloud at its shores. The rational commented on headlines that read, “Atmospheric Freak of Nature.” The terrified clutched to their chest the papers that read, “Act of God.”

Local veterans frantically tore through cellars, attics, and closets, searching for old rucks and mildewed gasmasks. They panted and trembled, waiting for the sound of mortars; for the order to come across the trench (over the top, boys!); for blisters in the lungs.

(iv)

In 1952, London accidentally coined the term smog. For two weeks in the first part of December, coal fires burned to keep cold air at bay, and the fumes took residence in the streets and eventually the homes and lives of locals. The price of a warm home was high for some. Days worth of Singin’ in the Rain and High Noon showings were cancelled because of lack of visibility in the theatres. Hopeless romantics wandered the streets, grief-stricken when they discovered that florists had run dry of flowers, that funerals had taken precedence.

It was a bloody inconvenience for those who held tickets to the much sought after production of The Mousetrap. The stage was invisible, the roads even more so. Londoners declined outside hospitals, undetected by nurses who couldn’t even see the ends of their own wards. The daily death toll rose as high as 900.

To everyone’s great relief, Queen Mary was unaffected

by Ed Casey

Ed Casey is a Masters student at UNT. He spent many years working in the private sector, being beaten into a cold, hard state of denial until he returned to school. He lives with his three unruly ferrets, a rabbit, and his fiancee (though they try hard not to live in sin). He is currently working on his first collection of poetry.

catching fire

2009-04-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

strike these poems together like
two flints. sparks will erupt.

hunt and gather small verbs of
debris, for it will catch first.
think like a caveman.
feel the cold and hunger.

pile word twigs together on top.
carry the stick weight of vowels
as they yearn for life.
ugh. ooh. aah.

dowel upon wood, turn the syllables
until they mean something. force
them to mean something. do
not relent.

with sacred delicate breath, blow.
again. blow.
the pulse from your chest, brings
life to meaning.

see how it combusts without
more effort. it knows what to do.

feel the heat rising from words.
let it puncture the cold.
then gather more language
to feed it.

now, rest easy as
you sleep this night.
in the embers, there are meanings.
in the burning, we are known.

by Richard Lighthouse

Richard Lighthouse is a contemporary writer and poet. He holds an M.S. from Stanford University. His work appears in The Penwood Review, West Hills Review, Mudfish, and many other places worldwide.

Richard has several e-books available for sale: The Age of Sound, Cactus Petting, Event Horizon, Evolution of a Poem, and more...

The Garden

2009-04-16T18:13:00.000-07:00

She’s a weed on a street of couples and can’t pass through those chains of held hands. A garden grows along the street – no weeds blemish its perfect landscape. Its fragrance pollutes her mind. She makes a wish for their hands to unclasp, but they don’t. Her cigarette drops and burns her thoughts instead. Her perfect plan disappears in smoke.

by Patricia Carragon

Patricia Carragon is the author of Journey to the Center of My Mind (Rogue Scholars) and is a member of Brevitas. She curates the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets reading series and is the editor of its annual anthology.

Visit Patricia Carragon's website.

MAY 2000

2009-04-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

I sit in a bar looking at a calendar
With Buddha’s eyes painted on it.
The climbing season on Mt. Everest has ended.
In two weeks, eleven ascents
Were made, with three separate climbing teams
Reaching the summit in one day: a new record.
Five hundred empty oxygen tanks
And a thousand pounds of garbage
Was also taken off the mountain;
Another new record, but no body count was made.
The woman sitting next to me is smoking a joint
And asks, “Can sperm get stoned?”
I ask her to come home with me
But she says no and moves to another stool.
The Memorial Day Weekend has started.

by Erik La Prade

Erik La Prade has a B.A and an M.A. from City College. His first book, Things Maps Don't Show, was published in 1995, and his second, Figure Studies, was published in 1999. Some of his poems have appeared in Fish Drum, Night Magazine, The Hat, The Reading Room, The New York Times, and Artist and Influence. He also has articles and interviews in The Brooklyn Rail, Captured: A History of Film and Video On The Lower East Side, and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays.

His chapbook SWATCHES was published by POETS WEAR PRADA in 2008. To find out more about it visit:http://poetswearpradanj.home.att.net/ErikLaPrade.html

Burning House

2009-04-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

The feet of our comrades are swaying
from branches veiled with dust.

Love, listen—love me anyway.
There is no need for words now
only this nectar glazed in our eyes.
This house is burning. Their torches rain
like the fragments of a shattered sun
their white pupils glisten through
the flame’s curved fingers.

Wooden beams sizzling
as the doors of our sanctum erode
curling like the singed edges of a leaf.
The pictures we hung now bursting
into ember blossoms of memory.

As their axes pierce through our paper walls
we expire like this—hands busy
with the faithful task of loving
skin, bodies triumphant in this throne
of arms interlocked—defiant
to the inferno blackening our ankles.

And I promise to preserve you
until my voice is no more than the crackling
of burning bones. I will lick each flame
igniting on your pores and catch
their blazing arrows with my mouth
shouting our names.

When these walls collapse—cascading in streams
of ash and cinder, they will find us here:
smoldered shells of a lifetime’s work
a masterpiece crystallized into obsidian.
They will record these fires leaping
in my eyes, my tongue crumbling
in my lover’s mouth.

by Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong has been published in various journals including North Central Review, The Connecticut River Review, Convergence, Ganymede, the Raving Dove Review, WordRiot, Poetalk, and Barnwood among others. He emigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990 and now resides in NYC. He is also writes and edits for The Viet Nam Literature Project. "Burning House" is the title poem of his new chapbook.

Visit his blogspot: Ocean Vuong: The Momentum of Madness

Payback’s a Bitch

2009-04-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

Smoke chokes. Dante would
invent a new circle
for us, blinded and coughing
from hundreds of fires.

Smoke strangles.
Home feels
less
hospitable,

unnerving—coerced to drive
with dialated
eyes—through the long
obscured valley.
Blotted out—lake,
traffic, and road
almost invisible.

Double misfocus.
Trees loom, ghostly
reminders.
No bird flies.

Where are their refuges?
Do they find shelter
by migration instinct?
How do we honor them

and our perceptions?
How do we,
breathing, choking on painful
errors, navigate?

by Elizabeth I. Riseden

Elizabeth I. Riseden's many addresses in varied places have obscured youth’s clarity. Out of desert sand storms, forest fires' smoke, and living, she has written through many shades of gray. She's also taught others how to write, and address uncertainty.

THE MOUND BUILDERS

2009-04-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

for Daniel Setzer

from one end of the bridge to the other
the charred bodies stacked like wood
smoking as the cinders fell away
and the horse standing under the struts
its head and flanks above deep water
the brown the black of sightless eyes

no wagon could cross unless a man pulled it
for the horses that were still alive
took fright at the dead and shrieked
rearing hooves which seemed to pound
at the rooftops and the clouds
rising from the blasted earth

that night after the bombardment
the city was set ablaze and shadows
of men were seen in the burning windows
and on the far hill beyond the gate
their jagged arms stretched out against the slopes
shrouding the ruby needles of the pines

June 21, 1988

by Eric Basso

From CATAFALQUES, Leaping Dog Press (Aug 1999).

Eric Basso was born in Baltimore in 1947. His work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Central Park, Collages & Bricolages, Fiction International, Exquisite Corpse, and many other publications. His most recent books are Decompositions: Essays on Art & Literature 1973-1989 and Revagations: A Book of Dreams 1966-1974 (Asylum Arts Press). Six Gallery Press published Earthworks, his seventh collection of poems, last year.

From "Smoke, Dust, Fever"

2009-04-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

A 30-foot mushroom-shaped column of smoke
towered in a blue sky while I climbed
and sunbathed on rocks in Yosemite, slim waterfalls
glinting down the cliffs—on my honeymoon.
We knew fire was taking acres of Wowana, but scale
made this a Park Announcement myth
(but for that hulk of smoke and the boas
of snarling orange glimpsed on either side
of the highway in the pre-dawn
as we evacuated, hugging each other,
tasting strangeness and comfort).

by Naomi Thiers

Naomi Thiers lives in Virginia and misses the scale and drama of the west. She has published poetry in many journals. A national park really did catch on fire on her honeymoon.

Mothers Are Funny That Way

2009-04-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

We wonder how it came to this,
smoking our cigarettes hard,
as if that inhale could shrivel the words
we know we'll say, as it does our lungs.

She hasn't seen her girl in three weeks,
thinks she fell in with a gang, drugs. I've had it.
I won't worry about her anymore she asserts,
hand shaking as she takes a drag. Detectives

have been to her home to look around, question.
She says they never asked if there was a father
in the house. Some things are a given. Most detectives
are men. Life is funny that way.

Our lips clasp the filtered ends like their mouths
did nipples long ago, before we understood
what hopeless really meant. My boy called me a bitch
last night. Sometimes I hate him, truly, I tell her,

as I blow smoke rings toward a tall man's balding head.
The rings get larger, circling his neck, tightening,
until his tongue bulges purple and my ex-husband lies dead,
last words forgive me. Imagination is funny that way.

We talk tough, hands on hips, jaws set in a jut. Smoke hangs
in the air between us, like our lies. I see her wet, frantic eyes
through it, and I know she sees mine. We crush butts under pumps
and go back to work, breathing.

by Lori A. Williams

Previously published in Avatar Review.

Lori A. Williams lives in Brooklyn, NY and works at a NYC law firm.

Wild Fire

2009-04-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

She carried the fire in her pockets
and tapped shards of magma
like cigarette ash onto the passing trees.

She was beautiful and courteous
to the other scholars of nature.
She’d make space for the squirrels,
twitching like tweakers, to pass unobstructed;
she’d lift the hedgehogs, doleful as skin-poppers,
over the screeching train tracks.

But her face was dark and mournful
even when she lifted her blazing palms
to rub her leaking eyes,
to caress the hissing trees.

Hair cropped by fire,
they stand black and naked now
damned sentinels wreathed in shame.

She has gone, dragging the sun down
beneath horizon’s brittle crust,
its final cry turning the cloud
into a sprawling bruise, as the
sunlight gently bleeds away
into night’s quilted pockets.

by Steven Nash

Steve Nash should currently be doing research for his Ph.D he is a qualified teacher but despite this earns his keep (sort of) as a musician playing to anyone foolish enough to stay in the bar.

Steven's blog is Starlight to Casual Moths.

Freakchild

2009-04-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

Running in the street
While the house is on fire &

Knowing that I was the one
Who left the oven on &

My grandad is asleep
Or will be until the smoke

Catches him by the throat &
Flings him around the room

Before he melts from
Beating back the flames,

I wonder what’s the deal
With all that noise &

That commotion.
Is the fire truck arrived already? Wow.

by Patrick Chapman

Patrick Chapman is the author of four poetry collections, a book of stories, an award-winning film and an audio play. He lives in Dublin, Ireland. His next poetry collection will appear in 2010.

Visit Patrick Chapman online: www.patrickchapman.net.

Ain't that just like Scarlett O?

2009-04-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

Ain't that just like Scarlett O?

I rise from within
the miasma of me,
and the need for smokes
supersedes the ever burn
to strategize about him.

I splash my face,
grab things new and borrowed,
inspect the violet blur
under my eyes,
dab makeup,
change my mind,
take my mother's shades,
(she doesn't need them,
she hides from the sun
since my dad passed away,
she chases shadows and Papa Chu).

I walk in black and white,
full maned dissident child,
through last night's
Bardot sun dried sheets,
and stand in line,
shifting weight
from leg to leg
ponder on him,
he is no knight
in shining armor,
I'm no princess,
I'm a better rider,
and my horse
is black as the thoughts
of the woman rolling cigars
on her sex rounded thighs.

From the back of the store,
she throws dark glances
sharp as lances,
that speak of unbridled passion
in the belly of a shipwrecked cruiser,
grounded and rusted for years,
and I get the stench,
the rot of my father's
countless affairs.

I lift a cold beer,
wryly toast the sharp eyed wench,
she smiles,
and her smile is gapped
by close encounters with
a grim likeness of love,
and I am unhinged,
bruised by loss
and doorways slammed shut.

Cause this man
can take me or leave me,
often he leaves me,
at times he wants me urgently,
he is intrigued and afraid
of my intense in his face
barefoot debates,
and the way I forget words,
kiss him to distraction,
then run wild
when he doesn't get me,
when he doesn't steady me.

I must get over
his love branding,
he sears me and
I double over in anguish,
I must chase him
to exhaustion,
I have to have him.

I get on with morning,
Tantalus and his torments
are for late nights,
and I wear chase-me jeans,
and I pack smokes,
and swig beer labeled
Victoria all the way home.

Ain't that just like Scarlett O?

by Anna Donovan

Anna Donovan, a Nicaraguan in Texas is a survivor of the Sandinista revolution and has made a life for herself in the US. Donovan has always loved words and languages. AD says, "Writing is the way I align words with my inner compass."

NO SMOKE by Bruce Weber

2009-04-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

"NO SMOKE" by Bruce Weber

by Bruce Weber

Credit: Jackie Sheeler

Bruce Weber is the author of four published books of poetry, including These Poems are Not Pretty (Miami: Palmetto Press, 1992), How the Poem Died (New York: Linear Arts, 1998), Poetic Justice (Icon Press, 2004), and The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot (Venom Press, 2004). His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including in recent issues of Long Shot, Chronogram, Lips, Saint Elizabeth, and A Gathering of the Tribes. His work was also featured in the Downtown Poets Anthology, The Second Word Thursdays Anthology, and, most recently, in the anthology Up is Up, But So Is Down; Downtown Writings, 1978-1992 (New York: New York University, 2006). Bruce has performed regularly in the New York area, both alone and with his group, Bruce Weber's No Chance Ensemble, which incorporates poetry, theatre, music and dance, and has produced the CD Let's Dine Like Jack Johnson Tonight. He is the organizer of SOS: Sunday Open Series at ABC NO RIO, the editor of the broadside Stained Sheets, and the producer of the 15 years running Alternative New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza. Bruce is also Senior Curator, 19th Century Art at the National Academy Museum. His book Paintings of New York, 1800-1950 (San Francisco: Pomegranate Press) appeared in the fall of 2005.

J A M E S - A - D I C K - T I O N by Big Mike

2009-04-04T15:54:00.000-07:00

... It was LOVE , that drove me to Nicotine ... LOVE for a boy.

I was thirteen-years old, JIMMY ROBERTSON, was twelve. Jimmy had a fondness for removing his white "HANES" T-shirt, stuffing it inside the left back pocket of his Bermuda shorts, exposing his pale, pink boy-breasts, with their "silver-dollar" honey-colored nipples, while catching the afternoon's summer sun, and turning his muscular lad's back, to a golden-brown, switching his girlish hips, to-and-fro, as he paraded across the softball diamonds of my Bronx youth. My eyes fixated on the dimples of his sacroiliac, the crease of his gluteus folds, his ass-crack, visible just above, the skewed panty-lines, of his "Fruit-Of-The-Loom" tightie-whities.

"... ROBERTSON!!! You walk like a FUCKIN' - GIRL !!! A FUCKIN' - GIRL, who just wants to be FUCKED!!!"

"... Sit on it, and rotate, SONNY!!!" Jimmy "flipped" Sonny Fitzgibbon, The Finger, coquettishly glancing over his left shoulder, winking a "come-hither" look, at his cat-caller, accentuating his cissy lisp.

"... Sit on it, and rotate, MOTHER - FUCKER!!!"

Jimmy did walk just like a girl, a girl who wanted to be fucked! And I wanted him to be my girlfriend ... and to fuck him! As I stared at his teen buttocks, I was stunned by my first teen erection, pounding in my pants. Socially inept, awkward, I would never have a real girlfriend. But Jimmy, would provide a more than adequate substitute.

"... Hey, BIG MIKE, wanna know a secret?" that obscure object of my desire wanted to take me, into her confidence.

"... SURE!!!"

"... Well, me, and Kevin Trainer, and Kevin Schwartz, got us a clubhouse, up on the grounds of the Kingsbridge Veterans' hospital. You can join our club ... but, there's an initiation rite ... "

(... OOOH!!! I sure hope it involves Sodomy!!!)

"... And, you gotta swear, not to tell anybody what we do, up there--not even your brother. If my mother ever found out what we were doin' up there, she ' d kill me!!!"

(... OOOH , BABY!!! This sounds almost too good to be true!!!)

"... YEAH!!! YEAH!!! I swear!"

"... Okay, Friday night, eight o' clock, meet me on Bailey and Sedgwick Avenue ... "

My lust, could barely contain itself, for the next two days! That Friday, I palmed a purse-sized jar of "VASELINE," from my older sister's pocketbook, in anticipation of the new-found wonders of Pedophilia, which I was soon to be initiated into ...

Jimmy Robertson, Kevin Trainer, and Kevin Schwartz, were all present at the designated rendezvous point, behind the Fordham Hill Apartments. Kevin Trainer, was A "Faggot"; at eleven years old, he was the youngest of this "daisy-chain." Kevin Trainer, was obviously the femme "bottom-boy," for Kevin Schwartz, the Macho-Butch, star-athlete, the "Little-League" fire-ball pitcher. And, Jimmy Robertson, would soon be "MINE"!!! Jimmy the Sodomite leader, took "point," leading us through dirt trails, into the jungle of the Veterans' Hospital grounds.

" ... Watch Out ... !!! The guards patrol these gardens with K-9 attack police-dogs!!!"

( "... H O R R O R S!!! To be surprised mid-breach, by the agents of Justice!!!")

And there, beneath a bower of bent-over brush, brambles, and vines, covered with sheets of corrugated cardboard, and balsa-wood slats, ripped from packing-cases , was the "Club-House Of Iniquity"!!! The place reeked of pederasty, and pre-pubescent sex-games. Jimmy Robertson orchestrated the entire performance.

" ... OKAY !!! We gotta be fair, to the "new-comer." When I count to "THREE," everybody pull theirs' outta their pants!" Jimmy smirked, lasciviously.

" ... OKAY !!! ONE !!! TWO !!! THREE !!! PULL !!! "

OH ! The joys of that one, brief, fleeting Moment of Truth !

Jimmy Robertson, stood there, with a pack of "KOOL MENTHOL 100 ' S ," in his hand, which he stole, from his older sister's purse. Kevin Trainer, had a pack of "KENT III ' S," which he stole from his mother's handbag . Kevin Schwartz , had a pack of un-filtered "CHESTERFIELDS," which he stole from his father's NYC Sanitation Department overalls.

And ME ? I had my " C O C K ," in my hand, pre-lubed, twitching, in pre-orgasmic tension,"and a shit-eating" grin, plastered all over my face!

" ... HEY, B I G M I K E ... ? What are you showing me, your B O N E R , for ... ? "

( ... The little sarcastic " B I T C H " !!!)

One second stop .

" ... U H ? 'cuz I gotta take a 'leak'? YEAH! I gotta piss, so bad, I got me a ... ?
... a 'piss - hard - on' !!!"

" ... Those rose-bushes, back there, are for quick pisses, B I G M I K E !!! We don't want our club-house smellin' like a 'shit-house' !!!"

Kevin Schwartz , eyed me , suspiciously.

" ... Y ' Know, B I G M I K E ... ? I heard Jimmy Sullivan sayin' you wuz ... ?
... " QUEER " ... !!! "

I hurried off, over to the rose-bushes, to expel my foul bodily fluids, and bent my raging, semi-erect member, back inside my "SEARS" brand "jockey-shorts." When I returned to the club-house, the other three boys were smoking like the fiends of Hell.

"... Hey ? B I G M I K E ... You ever smoke, before? Be honest, now, don ' t lie . I bet you never did it."

Jimmy mocked me in his most seductive, feminine voice.

" ... Wanna try it, just this once?"

My will-power, was weakening ...

" ... It's not like you're gonna 'catch' somethin' from me ... like ... Cancer ... "

I could resist no longer! Jimmy slowly removed the stick from between pursed coral-pink lips, his saliva, still glistening on its end, and proffered it to me.

"... You WANT it ... I can see it in your eyes ... take it ... "

He pressed it up against my mouth ... a single thread of spit, still clinging from the filter, connected to his delicate mouth. I was his. He eased it between my trembling lips, thrusting inside, rubbing it against my all too willing tongue.

"... Suck on THIS, for a while, B I G M I K E ... !!!"

I was his, to command, and I sucked, and I sucked, and I sucked for all I was worth, drawing the smoke, deeper, and deeper down into my lugs; the musty taste of the loamy tobacco, accentuated with the piquant tang of menthol , mixed with Jimmy 's own man-juice, as he pressed the cigarette poised, between the graceful fingers of his dainty manicured hand, up against my face.

"... That's right, that's right! That's it, Baby! OH GOD! Open up your throat for more, you Little Nelly BITCH !"

The true addict, remembers the very first time, using a new drug of choice ... and confesses that he was "hooked," that very first time he ever tried it. That invisible line of addiction, crossed from the very start. I was addicted to cigarettes, from that very first experience ... but ... was it the Nicotine? Or, was it Jimmy's bedroom-eyes, that was the "monkey-on-my-back"? I spent that Summer, locked in the bathroom, ruminating over the ramifications of "Greek Love," paperback "PENGUIN CLASSIC" edition of Plato' s "Symposium," in one hand, COCK, in the other, the virtual image of Jimmy Robertson's sweet, sweet tight little bum, dancing in my mind's eye, "whacking-off," furiously, while huffing and puffing on pack, after pack of
"KOOL MENTOL 100 ' S."

[ B A M !!! B A M !!! B A M !!! ]

"... M I C H A E L !!! Stop that! Stop doing "That," inside there !!! You'll go blind !!!"

( "... Too late, too late ... !!! ")

"... You' ll Stunt your growth ... !!!"

( "W H O O P S !!!")

All good things, must eventually come to an end. The "salad-days" of Youth, are over, gone forever.

Jimmy Robertson graduated to "cruising" Van Courtlandt Park Lake, at night, looking
for older men, to support his two carton a week "KOOL MENTOL 100 ' S" habit. At age 17, my father signed me into the United States Coast Guard Boot Camp, as an alternative to drug rehab. There, I was introduced to the ritual of the "smoke break."

"... Smoke 'em, if ya got 'em , boys !!!"

My shipmates would whip out Polaroids of their girlfriends, in bikinis, and sexy, skimpy, revealing lingerie, as they puffed away on their "MARLBOROS." All I had in my wallet was a strip of stark black & white photos, from Woolworth's snapshot booth, of Jimmy Robertson, staring at the lens, working on a "KOOL MENTHOL 100."

I quit "cold-turkey."

by Big Mike

This story, in a slightly different, perhaps little lengthier format, originally appeared in Big Mike's 81 Pounds (Pretty Pollution Press).

BIG MIKE is Bronx-born Emergeny Room RN now residing in Bayside Queens. An unrivaled story teller he reveals just how gritty the underbelly of New York City can get in his critically acclaimed collections of emergency room and childhood recollections 81 Pounds and Sibling Rivalry both from Pretty Pollution Press.

Befriend BigMike Logan on FaceBook at http://http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1007153492

SMOKING by Thaddeus Rutkowski

2009-04-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

I smoked a lot of cigarettes while I was in college. I liked the taste of burning tobacco—it was smooth, fresh and rich. I also liked the bite of tar and the scrape of fumes against my throat. When the nicotine entered my bloodstream, the kick was better than that of caffeine.

Often, I would light a fresh cigarette with the tip of the one I was finishing. I would smoke the new stick down, then light another without a pause.

At night, I liked to walk outside and play with a lit cigarette. I twirled my arm so the glowing end left a trail of sparks in the air. After I finished the cigarette, I flicked the butt into the air so I could watch the sparks arc across the sky.

If I were on a bridge when my cigarette was done, I would flick the butt over the railing and watch the red coal fall through the darkness.

I lived off campus in a house with another student. He was serious about cultivating marijuana. He had a plant growing in a clay pot in our closet. Above the plant, a bare lightbulb always glowed.

He nourished the plant with his own feces. He wanted to show me the manure one time, but I declined to inspect it.

Another time, he explained marijuana horticulture to me. “You want the plant to flower,” he said. “But when you see buds, you have to separate the male flowers from the female ones. You don't want the female blossoms to produce seeds, because you'll end up with a crop of stems and seeds. So you cover the first female flower with a plastic bag. The plant keeps putting out flowers. The flowers are full of pollen, waiting for the male stamens to do their job. But pollination can't happen because you've applied a prophylactic seal. You pinch off the male flowers as soon as you see them. Soon, you have a bush full of sticky buds.”

“How can you tell the female flowers from the male ones?” I asked.

“The males are tiny and spindly,” he said. He pointed to his plant to show what he meant.

His plant, I noticed, had only male flowers.

He broke off a couple of leaves and put them in a pipe bowl. The leaves sputtered when he held a match to them.

I sampled the herb and felt a stinging at the back of my throat . My brain, however, remained unscathed. I stayed on an earthly plane. I didn't see the god of THC.

In the morning, I listened to my roommate smoking his bong. I heard a crackle as he set flame to the powder, a gurgle as he inhaled, and a hiccup as he held his breath. Shortly, I heard a whistle, then a burp, then a scream of ecstasy. “Hoo whee!” he screeched. “That's harsh!”

“What are you, some kind of fiend?” I muttered as I walked out the door.

“Damn straight!” he bawled after me.

*

As soon as I got to class, I lit a cigarette. There were fifteen people in the room, and twelve of them were smoking. The lecture was about poetry, language and thought, with a focus on discourse.

“Language is filled with gaps,” the professor said. “The gaps let in light. We want to arrive at a gap-filled, light-filled discourse.”

When the professor paused, a student spoke up. “We've been talking about a lot of things,” he said. “Semantics, semiotics, hermeneutics, Herman Melville, Herman Hesse, even Herman Munster. But we haven't talked about truth or beauty. Isn't that the purpose of art—to find what's true and beautiful in the world?”

The professor thought for a moment, then said, “Whatever gets you through the night, it's all right. It's all right.”

After class, I walked down a grass slope with one of my classmates. I told her I wanted a cigarette.

“It's not good for you,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It will rot your lungs, then rot your brain.”

As we walked, she pointed to a building we were passing. “I saw a saucer fly over that roof last week,” she said.

“What did it look like?”

“A dish, of course. A silver dish.”

“Who was flying it?”

“A saucer man, from space.”

I looked up at the sky. “Why was he here?” I asked.

“He was coming to get me, but someone spotted him, so he had to leave. He's in orbit now, waiting to come back for me.”

*

I tried to quit smoking by hitting a tennis ball against the wall in my room with a plastic racket. I served the ball so that it flew straight to the wall. It bounced once off the floor on its way back to me.

I had no skill and missed often. But I practiced until I could sustain a volley. I perfected my footwork, my forehand and backhand. I was a demon in my tiny space. I learned to hit the ball dozens of times without missing.

While I was swatting, I wasn't smoking. But when I stopped, I felt a craving. I could either keep hitting the ball, or find a smoke.

I found a leftover cigarette but had no matches. So I went to the student union and asked for a light.

“We don't have matches,” an attendant said.

I saw shelves full of cigarettes behind the counter. “You mean, every place that sells cigarettes around here doesn't give matches? Or this is the only place that doesn't give matches?” I asked.

“We don't have matches here.”

I didn't know why the clerk wouldn't hand me a book of matches. Maybe I looked like a person who would set fire to something if given the opportunity.

*

On my way home, I saw a marijuana bush growing in front of a house. The bush was large—about four feet high—and had many leafy branches. It had obviously been part of someone's private garden of grass.

I grabbed the stem near the ground and uprooted the plant. It was too big to carry, so I held it by its stalk and dragged it behind me. It bounced like a broom as I ran. No one stopped me as I raced home.

*

When my roommate saw the plant I'd stolen, he decided to harvest his own plant. “We're going to have a feast,” he said.

He put a pot of water on the stove and brought the water to a boil. Then he extracted his plant from its dirt bucket and placed the roots in the scalding water.

The plant's twigs and leaves stiffened as sap shot to the tips. The leaves looked perfect, firm and green. Then the boiling water did its work, and they wilted for good.

*

Presently, my roommate and I set our apartment on fire. The flames appeared around a gas pipe while we were sampling our splif.

My first thought was to fetch water, but I didn't run water from a faucet. I grabbed a pot from the stove and threw its contents on the fire. The pot was filled with mud from the harvested marijuana plant.

“Man, are you crazy?” my roommate asked. “That was THC tea! We were going to drink that!"

The flames wavered around the pipe but didn't diminish.

Shortly, firefighters arrived. They told us to leave our apartment. They also evacuated a bar located below our place.

As we stood on the sidewalk with the unhappy drinkers, a reporter from the college radio station interviewed my roommate. I heard my roommate say, “We were cooking, preparing a feast, and things got out of hand.”

The firefighters found a gas valve and shut it off.

Our apartment was undamaged, except for a black carbon patch on a wall and a THC tea stain on the carpet.

*

At night, I heard a hum, like electricity traveling through power lines.

The saucer was beautiful. It looked like a huge snowflake, lit from within. I could see it through my window as it hovered in the night. A beam of light came from the vessel and swept back and forth, as if searching for me. But I wasn't afraid. I knew the saucer had come for my classmate, the one who was waiting to be taken away.

by Thaddeus Rutkoswki

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the novels Tetched (Behler Publications) and Roughhouse (Kaya Press). Both books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award; Tetched was chosen as one of the best books reviewed in 2006 by Chronogram magazine. His stories and poems have been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize.

He teaches fiction writing at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York and has taught at Pace University, the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the Asian American Writers Workshop. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and other papers.

He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.

Visit his website at www.thaddeusrutkowski.com

'strangely', 'incensed' and 'hookah-hoe'

2009-03-26T19:07:00.000-07:00

1.

strangely

sitting sipping mist through a straw
a transparent straw
made almost opaque by water droplets
in suspension passing through
she sat at the open winter window
sitting sipping tactile misty moisture
little sips and little by little
solidity lost her
her outline fading
but the blank pages of a note-book
open on the window-sill
like developing photographs
filled with sharpening print
lines and paragraphs
chapter and verse
gaining definition the more she
turned diaphanous
until as last the open window
was breathing wispy water vapour
over an abandoned novel of suspense
an open book ink still wet
left in limbo
a symbol of transparency

2.

incensed

her eyes closed she stood
before me
behind her
a featureless wall covered in
what looked like scaled skin
bringing out the smoothness
of her own bare skin
covered only in a swirling tattoo
showing a rain-dragon curled
around and around her body
colours shimmered evoking
the impression that her body
was tattooed on that
of a rain-dragon but when
she opened her eyes
I stared into translucent crystal globes
filled with luminescent vapour
smoke where there was fire
her nostrils hinted at flame
she opened her mouth and breathing in
she breathed me in
smoke
to replenish what swirled in her eyes
with my burning desire

3.

hookah-hoe

when I said I needed a hookah
the man running errands misunderstood
and returned leading by the hand
a girl whose black black hair
seemed to rise up from her shoulders
like smoke spat out by a fire
when climbing a hill
her dusky skin too was smokily reminiscent
of surfacing heat
I went without a hookah
but
(proof that those were different days)
we both had a cigarette
afterwards

by Levi Wagenmaker

Levi Wagenmaker (1944 - ) is a retired journalist, living between the Netherlands
and France, with three bitches, two of whom are dogs. Enamoured life-long with languages he writes poetry in English only. His poems have been published on line and in print.

Autumn Without My Father

2009-03-25T14:45:00.000-07:00

Smoke rises
curling toward
the sky and
what’s left
of leaves
twirling,
twirling…

I remember the house
on Williams Street
and my father raking,
scraping the ground,

the only sound
besides the crunch
beneath our shoes
and the apple thud
of love I never got
to say.

by Francine Witte

Francine Witte is a poet, playwright and fiction writer living in NYC. Her poetry chapbook, The Magic in the Streets, was published by Owl Creek Press. Her flash fiction chapbook, The Wind Twirls Everything, was published by MuscleHead Press. By day, she is a high school English teacher.

Vist her online at www.franigirl.com

3AM & Three Hours to Burn a Body

2009-03-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

3AM
Delhi, India

We are coming back to the hotel, full of curries our friends’ servants made. The camber of the moon appears, disappears—a white cutout in the smog. We stop at a streetlight. Out of the smoky night come the children—the brown iris of their eyes like saucers. They have emerged from their roadside tents to knock on the windows of the ambassador car. Our driver, Sharma, says, “So poor … so many so poor,” and the children knock harder and put their hands to their mouths, miming hunger. I am afraid they may break the glass. My friend says she wishes she had a lollipop. Sharma says “Work is worship.” The light turns green, the weak smiles of the children fall, and we leave them behind—ghosts of fog, still miming their hunger. Sharma looks in his rearview mirror asks, “What is it that we can do, Ma’m? What can we do?”

Three Hours to Burn a Body
Varanasi, India

We have come to watch the bodies burn,
our guide shoos away beggars and children,
selling shells of light and orange marigolds—

An offering for Mother Ganga. The murky river
sways with candles, a thousand dawn-lit stars.
The sky’s stars hidden by a canvas of clouds.

Untouchables travel barefoot down sandy stairs,
carrying another gold-clad body on their shoulders.
They chant, and the families follow their dead.

I watch them tend the “eternal flame,” watch
the living to avoid the dead. The guide says,
“This one almost finished,” points to a pyre.

A flame twists from the ghost of an eye.
“Three hours,” he says, “to burn a body.”
Legs hot from flame, ash rains onto my hair.

“Good luck,” he points to the ash, “Very good luck,
indeed…Come,” he leads us to a concrete building.
A creased, toothless woman holds out her hand.

A wrinkled breast sags from the sari. She tucks it back
without apology. The guide tells us, “She needs money
for her pyre. Good karma for you.” We hand her 500 rupees,

She hides it in her sari, lies back onto the straw mat,
the cold concrete floor. The boatman waits. We row
down the river. Dawn prayers echo from a mosque.

A dying cow moans from the river’s bank.
White branches of smoke rise from each black smudge
in the sand, disappear into the white horizon.

Children run above, along the rooftops.
Fires below create hot wind, lifting
colorful kites and children’s laughter to flight.

by Suzanne Roberts

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Shameless, Nothing to You, and Plotting Temporality (forthcoming from Red Hen Press). She teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College in California. Ms. Roberts has never smoked a cigarette, but she has been in enough smoky cities to make up for it.

Visit Suzanne Robert's website

Marijuana Dreams

2009-03-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

With feverish longing
I roll your sensuous
Slender frame
between my fingers.
My mind fogged with
dusky marijuana dreams.
Translucent, veiled thoughts
wrap me in a smoky warmth
I watch the ethereal circle of light
Rings of smoke, their perfect seam
tinged blue, rise flawlessly
and lazily mingle into
the misty night air.
Blue vapors of memory
floating like a song
stir my aching soul.
I make vaporous toys,
creatures of imagination
and watch them rise,
take a shape and break.
like misty waves in the ocean.
Purple threads of maroon
fill my senses
Alleviated,
I’m comfortably numb.

by TIKULI

Tikuli Dogra lives in Delhi. A mother, a poet, a tale teller, a blogger, writing is her passion. She lets her imagination run wild. Completely in love with nature and self, she weaves her dreams into her writings.

Vist the author online at Associated Content. She blogs at tikulicious.wordpress.com; her blog is titled Spinning a Yarn Of Life.

War Games

2009-03-24T17:19:00.000-07:00

Save a bed frame. Touch the voice
on the transistor radio
Lick the sun and the smoke.

Shimmy your hips faster
than the buildings. Make love
to a rocket.

Collect skulls
Save water

Play call and response
with the ambulance. Find a toy
in the rubble.

Swim
around a warship.

Turn on the power generator
for thirty minutes.

Count your bones.

Breathe air.

by Nina Karacosta

Nina Karacosta is an Athenian that resides in New York. An actor and poet, she has been published in Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry.

S.M.O.K.E.

2009-03-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

Love Smoke
Sunrise Smoke
Hunger Smoke
Secret Smoke
Nervous Smoke
Drunk Smoke
Light Smoke
Night Smoke
Friend Smoke
Weed Smoke
Sad Smoke
Sex smoke
Hate smoke
Alone Smoke
Cool Smoke
Stress Smoke
Lost Smoke
Hunger Smoke
Alone Smoke
Only Smoke
Fear Smoke
Joy Smoke
Survival Smoke
Beer Smoke
Tear Smoke
Love Smoke
Crack Smoke
Exhaust Smoke

by Rebekka White

R.S.White lives in Florida where she raises children works in surgery and pursues a degree in Philosophy

Smoke Trails

2009-03-23T21:47:00.000-07:00

trails of smoke
falling into my village
not the trails of angels but of violence
against my family, my neighbors even those I do not get along with
why?
why?
trails of smoke in the sky
run for cover
pray for peace, yes, peace
and maybe quiet...

by Bob koshin Hanson

A Smoker's Tale

2009-03-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a smoker’s story
In this poem, I’ll tell you mine
Of facing the deadly parental fury
When caught committing this crime

Oh joy! Papa caught me with a cigarette in my hand
And slapped my younger brother, it was grand!

It happened many years ago
When I was young, just thirteen
I took to smoking to look macho
It was fun, I would strut and preen

Oh joy! Papa caught me with a cigarette in my hand
And slapped my younger brother, it was grand!

With friends I was strutting near the mall
Smoking, eyeing girls, having a ball
Papa was standing there with his colleague
He glared, and stunned, I stared, oh it was crazy

Oh joy! Papa caught me with a cigarette in my hand
And slapped my younger brother, it was grand!

In an effort to vanish without a trace
I blew a smokescreen – into his face
He turned and walked away in a fume
And I mourned my upcoming doom

Oh joy! Papa caught me with a cigarette in my hand
And slapped my younger brother, it was grand!

That night I sat shamefaced, Papa, he raved
Mom wept, my pesky brother – he laughed
Furiously, Papa turned and slapped him
Yelling, “He’s a loser, don’t you dare join him!”

Oh joy! Papa caught me with a cigarette in my hand
And slapped my younger brother, it was grand!

by Ritu Lalit

Corporate Executive, Mother, Writer, Poet, born in New Delhi, writes everywhere, Ritu Lalit writes to escape the humdrum. Her short stories have been published in the prescribed text books by CBSE for Class XII students.

Visit her blog, Weaving a Web at www.phoenixritu.com

Nightmares and Nicotine

2009-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I sleep alone
I wake up screaming
Pupils dilated in darkness
Eyes opened wide
I battle for control
Slowly, the fear subsides
As noises around me
Once again become familiar.
I light a cigarette
My enemy, my friend
The flame temporarily blinds me
An already full ashtray
Sets upon my stomach
Resting on my grandma's quilt
I watch the ashtray move
Up and down and sideways
Paisley and Gingham pulsing
Replicating my heartbeat
Making me aware I'm breathing.
I hear the smoke
As it leaves me
Deafening in this quiet room...
Tapping, never flicking
Ashes upon ashes they topple
Prosaic hues of gray.
Studying the ashened cherry
My breath giving it life in the darkness
Its radiance warms the room
I think thoughts of nothing.
I hear my neighbor’s car start
My clock glowing digital truths
His retentive habits unfolding
A commuter’s lifestyle
His face remains unknown.
I smile in amusement
At his penchant for punctuality
His engine cuts through morning
As I lay still and listen
He shifts into a life that's his
Leaving me alone, again
to finish my cigarette.

by Adrianne Hurtig

Adrianne Hurtig has decided she's at the "do or die" life stage. She's taken the plunge and has begun to submit writings she's been hacking away at since she learned the alphabet. She's the mother of 8 & 2 step-sons plus the proud grandma of 8. Available for social engagements, cocktail parties and witty conversation!

THE QUICK FIX

2009-03-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

As he drools at her over the
tiny cocktail table
Trying to pretend this is a date
Which it isn't
She briefly excuses herself
Wrapping her coat around her thin bones
To have a cigarette under the canopy
With short sharp puffs
Talking to no one
Meeting no one's eyes
To take the taste of the last one
Out of her mouth
Before the next one arrives

by Chris Savage King

Chris Savage King enjoys her physical existence on a daily basis. Her novel Do What You Want (Pulp 2000) is still available on Amazon.

Vist the author on-line at:
www.xray3.org
www.myspace.com/exraythree

Zaca Blaze

2009-03-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

At the kitchen sink
I scrape burned toast
glaring straight
into the sun.
By 9 a.m. he used
to stare back
able to cook my retina.

But not today
not any day
since flames started
eating Los Padres.

In minutes long enough
for coffee to drip
appears an orange halo
blurring the sun’s edge
eleven days.
Tonight I peel skin
off tomatoes.

Fires reach Diablo Gorge.
I lock windows & doors
shove wet towels
against my threshold.

by Chella Courington

Hula hoop enthusiast and chocoholic, Chella Courington also enjoys sitting on her ass, reading and writing. With poetry and essays in a range of journals, she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and has lived through fire.

Mescal

2009-03-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

stars in a framework:
a Catherine wheel
a match flares light
crystallizes
on the surface
of liquid in
a glass smoke
drifts from a mouth
my mouth in
a circle drinks flame
dies stars circle in
the glass my hand
circles lifts again
I swallow stars
reappear fill the glass
again spin the stars
again

by Gregory Luce

Photo Credit: Naomi Thiers

Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbook Signs of Small Grace (forthcoming from Pudding House), and poems that have appeared in numerous print and online journals. He resides in Washington, DC, works as Production Manager for National Geographic, helps raise two sons, and enjoys a fine cigar nearly every day.

Visit the author at his blog:
enchiladasblog.blogspot.com

11,770

2009-03-20T20:14:00.000-07:00

How many smokes have I burned
since I wrote my first rhyming words
and attempted to call them poetry?

They seem to burn down so quickly
when you get to getting on a roll.

Sitting abandoned...

...on my lips
...between my fingers
...smoldering in forgotten ashtrays
...and burning holes in my clothes

I’d venture to say
hundreds times thousands...
Eleven-thousand-seven-hundred & seventy

I tell ya’
there’s just nothing like it,
sitting back,
flickin’ my generic bic...

scratching my head
and taking a drag while
scratching a word
and taking a drag that’s
scratching the surface
and taking a drag it’s
scratching that itch
and taking a drag

Then I realize
as I squint thru smoky filmed eyes
that I am done writing
right on time with my smoke

and alas
another crappy poem is born
as the crumpled butt dies

crushed
in an overflowing
stolen hotel ashtray

by Johnny Olson

Born and raised in Chicago, lost and found in Dallas, and currently on a swirling journey as an autodidactical painter, poet and writer. Johnny is also the mad editor, webmaster and host of MadSwirl.

Love Story Between Composing

2009-03-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

You reached
out for the days
of waiting, still-live
cigarette butt-ends
on the expectant
ashtray (the smitten
one) that the Urdu
poet of lilting
lines and starry
fantasies puffed
calling at you
with coiling capers:
Pick them up, touch
them to your lips
inhale your breath,
phlegm, desire
in and out quick
before someone’s
footfalls come
running in scrutiny
of what’s smoking
between hearts and
long days of wild-
fire imagination
of love’s ink-stained
heart of Amrita Pritam.

by Nabina Das

Nabina Das lives two lives, shuttling between USA and India. Her short story will appear in a collection of fiction from all around the world (Mirage Books, India). Her poetry was published most recently in The Toronto Quarterly, The Cartier Street Review, and Maintenant 3 (Three Rooms Press), and is forthcoming in Quay, Sheher anthology (Frog Books, India) and Liberated Muse anthology. Formally trained in Indian classical music, she has performed in radio/TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. A journalist for 10-odd years, a nonprofit worker, and a Linguistics masters, Nabina has spent enough time interpreting smoke signals.

Nabina's websites

Nicotine Riddles

2009-03-18T12:30:00.000-07:00

She swaggers across the room, beautiful as Bob Dylan’s voice—
not pleasing to the senses, but searing to the soul.
She knows how to move in second-hand denim.

Her hair descends in scarlet cascades, tracing
the outline of the anime sketched on her t-shirt, a character
with each eyeball curled into the shape of a question mark.

She invites you to dwell on her mysteries, the ones
she can keep you from solving: even now she directs your gaze
to the frames of rimless shades—lenses both black and blank,

empty screens designed to shield you from the movies of her mind,
lurid documentaries on the years she had spent in hell
without once removing her leather jacket.

You watch her sauntering past stone-faced scene-makers,
the thin curve of her lips stopping just short of a smile.
She looks you over with unseen eyes,

regarding you, perhaps, as you had been regarding her:
the only intriguing piece of art on display in this insipid show-room,
this gallery of absurd postures and stunted poses—

this gauntlet of prom queens and party animals.
She continues her approach across the carpeted floor, brandishing
an unlit cigarette in a flourish of pale fingers and painted nails.

Her voice is a whisper, searching for the sound of a name.
She offers nicotine riddles in place of conversation, words
designed to hide their implications in the insinuations of smoke,

shades of meaning illuminated only by fire:
the inflections of light as you strike the match head
and she leans into your flame.

And then you burn.

by Craig Fishbane

Craig Fishbane has been published in the New York Quarterly, Flashquake and Night Train. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008.

Smoke

2009-03-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

Autumn Sunday afternoons
Dimming down towards twilight
Abbott and Costello or the Bowery Boys
Greasy burgers in the fry pan
Cooked with onions candy brown

Wintry Monday afternoons
Staying out of the cold with my mother
Dialing for Dollars and Candlepins for Cash
Starch steam stench of mashed potatoes
Scorched on the surface of the copper bottom pot

Memories that glow in black and white
When life seemed to move so slowly
Now time speeds away and life’s colors blur
And I’m left breathing out its exhaust.

by David Lawton

David Lawton trained at Boston University theatre school. Acted Off-Broadway; Off-Off Broadway playwright; featured vocalist with band Leisure Class. In January 2009 he co-produced Downtown Does Huncke for His Birthday, stories by beat godfather Herbert Huncke

link to author's myspace

Camp Fire Nights

2009-03-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Flames leaping upward
Tongues licking golden
Orange, yellow, red all the
Bright colors always changing
Never still, slowly the tongues
Grow smaller, the colors darken
Deep crimson– a last glow– then ash
Soot. Darkness embraces us.

Everyone stands up, brushes off
The smoke, stamps out the remains, the night
Enclosing us – total darkness but we can
See the stars. We call “Good-night”
Crawl into our tents and sleeping bags
The children listen for coyotes
Fish splash, crickets chirp - we fall asleep.

Do we dream of the first people?
The people whose only light was fire?
People who would freeze if the fire
Went out? How careful they
would have been – always feeding
The flames, storing wood, coal anything
That could burn, give out a spark
Anything that would keep the darkness
Far away.

We strike a match. Paper, sticks, a flash
In the foggy dawn. The battered coffee pot
The one we save for camp outs. Wood
Smoke, coffee, the fishy smell from the
Lake. Quick skinny-dips. Lucky us
The elements at our finger tips- Air
Earth, water, fire. Our playthings.
Our toys.

by Marian Veverka

Marian Veverka has spent her life on the shores of Lake Erie. She has written two novels, unpublished, and lots of small stuff--poems, CNF, short stories--some published.

12 STEPS

2009-03-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

Footfalls scrape on stone stairs,
A double door,
More steps down, metal,
Then, at eye level,
An acrid tangle of smoke,
Hovering, silent,
Over the room.
The sour charcoal smell of ashtrays
Mingles with
Coffee boiled in ancient pots
And fumes
From dollar-a-bag cookies.

By Frank Kelly

Frank Kelly is a poet and dramatist (co-author of Pageant, the Beauty Contest Musical, which has played all over the world, and The Texas Chainsaw Musical) who lives on Long Island.

Vist Frank's pages: www.geocities.com/bockharn/ or www.myspace.com/bockharn or http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=778579127

fane

2009-03-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

murky
beneath a rising
plume

the ladle dips
cloud

lost
in the forest
an o-ring
up

per instruction, the handbook

a giant tree crackles—
bursts

strum the lute

while
the dragon puffs
puffs
puffs

like the wolf

underwater
music
fresh as floating paint

a fiery wisp
whirl
and whoosh
while
withering tender

the bow
bends

an orchestra

and no one
suspects a fire
engine

yet the diving bell

there is
no one as tender
holding her
breath

purse warmth

by Jeff Crouch

Jeff Crouch writes as though he were inventing his world from leftover parts, but he will tell you he makes his own glue.

from the fire

2009-03-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

the fire girls jumped off
a factory roof to escape*
trapped over 100 others 20 years before
my mother, a millinery copyist in
another factory, could smell the smoke
whenever anyone spoke of
someone they knew...

worse than what there couldn’t ever be
anything worse... she said;

words
I walked past thorough
ignorant of the embers

long before
you fleshed out of my fantasy
and after even after

I smelled it awful
like nothing I had ever known
couldn’t get away from,
you knew instinctively, whose lungs
40 years of Pall Mall smoke blackened;

death’s crackling
I couldn’t hear in my mother’s words
or stop hearing now
blocks from where I lived...

...kept seeing that sky, crowded with so many
from so high to fall
my mother couldn’t have imagined

as flame winged
they flew down
90 years ago

how many more would fly
even further down
one at a time
slam into the earth,

couldn’t ever be anything worse...

But I know now
what you did...
there’s no bottom to anything
always

“still a down and
further still to fall and faster than i
thought...” **

twin-souled and yet
10 months before
I had---there was... urned proof,
as you talked me safely out
of lower Manhattan through our life
back to Brooklyn
loved me past mortal flesh

I didn’t even have a clue...

you were already speaking to me
from the fire.

*Triangle Factory Fire on March 25, 1911

**quote from “Liquid Jesuit” by Andrew Gettler

By Linda Lerner

From Ms. Lerner's book, Living In Dangerous Times, Presa Press (2007) , this poem has also appeared in the journal, Black Bear Review.

Linda Lerner is the author of 12 poetry collections, another is forthcoming this Spring, '09, called Something Is Burning In Brooklyn, from Iniquity Press / Vendetta Books. Her poems are published in hundreds of journals--this one, like most of her work comes out of a very personal experience, she hope others will be able to relate to. It seems her best work is drawn from some unhappiness, or in this case, tragic circumstances; the rest feels like practice, warming up for the real poems. Visit Ms. Lerner online at http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/lindalerner

With or Without It

2009-03-13T08:27:00.000-07:00

smoke dances against the breeze tonight
as if a song is playing for him
maybe there is really a song playing tonight
for another soul has his wings
he now mingles with the wind
rides the withered leaf
as he hums his last song, his farewell song

smoke dances against the breeze tonight
as if a song is playing for him
his ashes now buried deep
where all borrowed shells lay
where maggots reside
where all things are memories

smoke dances against the breeze tonight
as if a song is playing just for him
he may be gone
in the crematorium his fragile body burned down
into ashes
but his legacy, the love he gave
will forever live on –
with or without smoke

By Lanie Shanzyra P. Rebancos

A fighter and sometimes a happy-go-lucky girl, Lanie Shanzyra Rebancos have been published in different literary journals and anthologies. She just has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Lanie loves to stay up late and dream wide awake, thinking so many things until her muse kicks in and instructs her to write and write and write.

Lanie's Blog

© 2009

SMOKE DREAM

2009-03-11T13:47:00.001-07:00

Hadi blows off
the charcoal's feathery ash
and fire rekindles in his eyes.
Black down on his upper lip
wispy as the smoke.
He sits cross-legged and barefoot
hunched over the brazier,
another pellet pinched between his fingers.
Beautiful. Dutiful.
He tamps tobacco into
the clay bowl that nests the dream.
Far away. Here.
Then tends the embers placed on top.
The nargile passes from
Samir to Badr
onto Fouad, then me.
Hashish, Hadi hisses
with a winsome smile.
My cock stiffens hard as the pipe stem
dropped onto my lap.
Dorak (it's your turn), reminds my lover
beside me, knee nudging knee.
I don't wipe his spittle off the tip.
Minower (you bring in the light), Hadi whispers.
Inta minower (it's you who does that), I reply,
expelling the cloud
sucked deep down into my chest.
The night will claim me till dawn.
But I am taken otherwise, so must
refuse what is not rightly mine.

Previously published in a slightly different form in A Cautionary Tale (Uphook Press 2008), and Your Infidel Eyes (Poets Wear Prada 2006).

Brant Lyon writes poetry and music, and frequently puts the two together in live performance hosting his Hydrogen Jukebox reading series, or in recordings such as his 'poemusic' CD, Beauty Keeps Laying Its Sharp Knife Against Me (Logochrysalis 2008). His poetry has otherwise appeared in numerous journals and antholgies, and has been aired on radio. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

The Idle Gossip at a Danzig Tram Stop

2009-03-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

It was said, stepping through the wreckage
of last night’s air-raid, that Mr. Meyer
wasn’t taking phone calls this morning.

The widows waiting for their rations
rued that all the troubadours
had been re-assigned to the Eastern Front.

The carefully-catalogued smoke in the distance
wondered if Eros hadn’t been lost somehow,
just shy of the Baltic coast.

The returning amputees, discreetly encamped
outside distant villages, laughed with the Devil
while bells, of what churches still stood, rang.

Siegfried, however, was still appointed Reichsprotektor
of all Rome, even though everyone was terrified
to tell the Fuhrer he was actually only a character

By Adam Henry Carriere

Adam Henry Carriere is a poet, teacher, and broadcaster who has crashed five states, committed radio in three, frolicked in some fifteen countries, and even played on three Navy ships before Rummy got wise. He also edits Danse Macabre.

Clarity in a Fog

2009-03-09T18:06:00.000-07:00

Based on the painting, “The Gare St-Lazare” by Claude Monet, 1877 and the true story about how it was painted

Monet was smoking mad.
The critics had lambasted
his “Sunrise, Impression”
wondering why he painted fog.

It was simple. It was there.

He painted what he saw.
And he saw mist
clearly.

Anything else
would have been a lie
to the eye,

to the reality of light
as it reflected off
the burned-off
change in atmosphere.

He wanted to paint outside,
because outdoors
was waiting for him
like a nude model posing,
impatient to be elsewhere

where light would be different
and difficult as a lover.

He declared to show them
lack of clearness, huffing
and puffing, like a pipe
about to go out
until you draw it in deeper.

His face was red
as a vicious sun
about to melt the surface
of the Themes,
until it boils steam
cabbage.

He marched dramatically
into the train depot,
a man with a purpose,
a man whistling hot
as a tea kettle loosening its hiss.

He was mumbling a mantra,
no one could see anything in it...
He was determined to straighten them,
they want to see things clearly,
even in a fog
ready to show them something
foggier.

He steamed into the depot
Gare Saint-Lazare
announcing himself
as The Painter, Claude Monet.

The head of the western offices
did not want to admit
he had no knowledge about art
and all he knew was schedules, or
switching tracks
like changing pants.

All trains were halted.
They waited, stationary.
Like a man waits for a woman:
impatiently. The smoke was dense
as night in a tunnel.
The smoke was thick from the engines
so you could not see anything
unless you knew it was there.

When his painting were sufficiently soot,
heaving engines of spewing darkness,
he took his 30 complete works
like a conductor collects punched pickets,
as if his journey was completed,

as if his signature smoldering said it all.

By Martin Willitts, Jr.

Martin Willitts, Jr.’s tenth chapbook is The Garden of French Horns (Pudding House Publications, 2008) and his second full length book of poetry is The Hummingbird (March Street Press, 2009). He co-edits www.hotmetalpress.net.

five o'clock shadow

2009-03-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

some nights are
self-extinguishing
like a cigarette
in an ashstray
that burns into perdition
that leaves a quietly deformed
noose that just hangs, waits
waits for me to
make the first move
but I know it all evaporates
just as easily without me
the options ersatz at best
and the city much like morning
a timely matter that could care less
who it breathes to
and john you old fart we
all know you pick your nose and
snooze when we're not looking,
it's always been there
trolleys stuck to the power grid
the sidewalks that go at 7am
arrive back a little later
at 5pm
and I've always been here
with my cigarette
waiting for the hoops
to come apart

By Bernard Alain

Bernard Alain is the principal editor for The Cartier Street Review

see Bernard's blog