Agnes Vojta

I Need a Wrist Strap for my Ice Axe

Wearing a short dress and sandals,

I step into the outfitter,

ice axe in hand,

and ask for a wrist strap.

The questions begin immediately:

What do I want with an ice axe?

Don’t I know that is a dangerous mountain?

A real climb? Wouldn’t I rather

be interested in a nice walk?

My bearded friends

on the other side of the store

watch for a while, amused,

before they amble over to me.

Suddenly, the wrist strap

is no problem at all.

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019). Her poems recently appeared in Red River Review, Minute Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, The Blue Nib, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Former People, Thimble Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. 

Gabriella Garofalo

Listening to comets, aren’t you?
Yet you are deaf, deaf to the voice of riotous angels,
Deaf to the green solitude that heaves at you
While my sad place gathers
A blue ambivalence, or missing lives
Who dreamt of choosing between raw and hard light:
These are sidereal places,
Where fire can’t decrypt your hunger,
Where you can’t give light a nice welcome,
That’s why you need only
A womb insensitive to breathing light,
Here, among your furniture,
And crumpled souls at night who hiss
You won’t come back to the fields,
Nor will you reach the water,
Only exiled limbs hassling with the slant of demise,
The blue light you silence as undeserving
Of your hunger: is it a matter of voices, limbs,
And pewter skies?
Great, so please shape your light in mixed shades,
That will do, and bring me not flowers, nor toys,
As I saw too many at the children’s bedside-
Please bring me seedy cafes where men
Stare at an empty half-light,
Where women all clad in blue go unnoticed
‘Cause blue was the left hand of God
When he made me and no,
I didn’t want all the hours you hurled at me,
Time and demise, as I was dying for a wind, a fire,
A wind to dishevel my hair, to grab from me my souls,
A fire to run wild, and disperse my words
So scary of an ambush, as I was dying for being
A shore waves endlessly strike-
Waves? Of course I mean loving limbs,
Well, cry me a river, waves, limbs, who cares?
By me everything fine:
The dirty blonde who’s got scabs on her legs,
But plays the drums great,
Kharon thriving on hunger and hunted skies,
Who smiles, thanks the fight against words,
Maybe the envy the moon feels for exiled limbs,
When lovers and fathers go radio silence
And you bet she’ll end up without light.


***


Mother? No way,
You knew the names from the womb
And its dark blaze wore you out, danger -
Meanwhile she hobbles along life
Just to look the part,
Among deceits, frayed comets, halls,
Meanwhile strange rumours are going around
‘A wonderful haven for desire’ -
Forget it, not in the right mood for gropes
When she’ll show up: naked and blue,
Just like soul, yes, just like soul,
And see if they care, kids and teens
Locked up in the attic,
The grass cuts and runs,
She knows best, only books walls and trees
Can stalk light, hold her still,
Yet you stay alive, soul, you rise again
Among cars shooting out from Cerberus’ maw -
Got it, ok, the town that cheats and craves
Goes on with a life where scribes bend truth, papers,
Light colours give way to blue, neurotic sounds
Creep over your thirst deep down -
Say no to that ghastly muse
Who always wears mauve -
Well, to be honest, soul, you also wear mauve -
Maybe to get what writers try to say:
That you lost sight of heaven.

Born in Italy some decades ago, Gabriella Garofalo fell in love with the English language at six, started writing poems (in Italian) at six and is the author of “Lo sguardo di Orfeo”; “L’inverno di vetro”; “Di altre stelle polari”; “Blue branches”, “ A Blue Soul”.

Max Heinegg

Lake House Guns

Is it ever only a toy?
Robert Bly in my ears
talking campfire men
who cry handling a sword.

I get pissed at my nephews,
firing Nerf guns, water guns, any
gun—cocking pathologically
until my daughters join the effort,

pinning a hapless cousin
in a bedroom corner. The squad
rains doom, & I think it’s good
for them—girls are better off

not taking shit from anyone.
Let them get hit & hit back,
learn to handle them.
So, I quit bitching about

guns, firing equitably—
no one’s watching them
decide what’s fair play, protest
the other child a coward.

Max Heinegg's poems have appeared locally in Nixes Mate, Pangyrus, and Ibbetson Street Review. He lives in Medford, MA, where he teaches high school English and is the co-founder of Medford Brewing Company.

Simon Perchik

You stir this can before it opens

as the promise a frog makes

when asking for a kiss :the paint

warmer and warmer will become

an afternoon with room for mountains

and breezes close to your shoulder

though that’s not how magic works

–there’s the wave, the hand to hand

spreading out between the silence

and your fingers dressed with gloves

as if it was a burden and the brush

raising your arm the way this wall

needs a color that will dry by itself

leave a trace :a shadow not yet lovesick

no longer its blanket and cure.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. 

Catfish McDaris

Drunken West Milwaukee Blues

Drinking mezcal chewing up the worm
listening to Santana’s Blues For Salvador
the police car shined a spotlight in my van

This Barney Fife looking motherfucker
swaggered up and asks me if I’ve been
drinking, I nod my head and take a swig

“Keep your hands where I can see them
and get out of your car,” I finish the bottle
I get out slowly, he has his pistol pointed

At me, “That’s not nice,” “What did you
say?” I did my magic on him and reached
out and took his gun away, I pointed it

At his chest and said, “How does it feel?”
I gave him some gunslinger tricks, threw
it up in the air, caught it behind my back

I ejected the magazine and unchambered
the round in the barrel, faster than sight, I
put it in his holster and raised my hands.

Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 25 years. He’s recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Yoruba, Tagalog, and Esperanto. Catfish McDaris’ most infamous chapbook is Prying with Jack Micheline and Charles Bukowski. He’s from Albuquerque and Milwaukee

Larry Thacker

What’s on my mind?   

The problem is, you sit in class,

or a boardroom in a high rise office building,

or within some congregation,

say, at a recital or a baptism,

but can’t just sit there.

You observe yourself, as you’ve been taught,

from outside yourself. A witness

to your breathing, visualizing it:

understanding, but not quite understanding,

that most of what you’ve pulled into your lungs

your whole life, isn’t oxygen at all.

And that you’re a fool for thinking

so flippantly for so long

about an exchange so potentially deadly.

That this meticulous mixture

is a wondrous thing hardly considered

moment, to moment, to moment.

And how something very scary, full

of cosmic witchcraft propels your heart muscle

to twitching like a restless fist-sized alien

in a ribbed calcium cage, a body zoo

you transport everywhere you go.

And they wonder why you can’t concentrate.

Larry D. Thacker is a Kentuckian writer, artist, and educator hailing from Johnson City, Tennessee. He lives with his wife, Karin, and their cat, Abraham Lincoln. Larry D. Thacker’s poetry is in over 150 publications including Spillway, Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry South, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The American Journal of Poetry, The Lake, Illuminations Literary Magazine, and Appalachian Heritage. His books include three full poetry collections, Drifting in Awe, Grave Robber Confessional, and Feasts of Evasion, two chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train, as well as the folk history, Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia. His MFA in poetry and fiction is earned from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Visit his website at: www.larrydthacker.com

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

Brief Conversations With Gary In Downtown, Los Angeles 

Thanks for the pancakes.

You should smile more.

You are my heart, Luis,

you are my soul.

What is your name man because

I don’t want to call you Fraser?

You remind me of Fraser.

Hey Luis, what do you know

about Jennifer Aniston?

I saw her driving in a red car.

My stomach is killing me.

I should not have eaten

that Chinese food out of the trash.

It is cold, Luis, aren’t you cold?

There is this guy at the tent

that tried to stab me last week.

Could you get me something to eat?

It’s my birthday Luis.

I have a 25-year-old daughter.

Voices told me that I should jump
off this bridge.

Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, lives in Southern California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His first book of poems, Raw Materials, was published by Pygmy Forest Press. His other poetry books, broadsides, and chapbooks, have been published by Alternating Current Press, Deadbeat Press, Kendra Steiner Editions, New American Imagist, New Polish Beat, Poet's Democracy, and Ten Pages Press (e-book). Blue Collar Review, Trailer Park Quarterly, and Yellow Mama Magazine published some of his recent poems.

Howie Good

Advice for the Perplexed

Wash your sex toys (your unmotorized ones, at any rate) in the top rack of the dishwasher. Next up, put on some music. Have a trick for getting bong water out of the carpet; white wine, ironically, gets out red wine stains. But as of now there’s no proven method to erase false memories and the like. Try to avoid being carried off by a UFO when you can just walk. Make mute despair your default greeting to people you happen to pass on the stairs. And always remember, a wild bull becomes docile if tethered to a fig tree.

Howie Good is the author most recently of What It Is and How to Use It from Grey Book Press and Spooky Action at a Distance from Analog Submission Press. He co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Rob Plath

the mover

i dreamt my mother

was helping me

carry her own coffin
to the cemetery

strangely, she was both inside

& outside of the box

she was so calm
for a while i doubted

she knew who we were

planting in the ground

but after a considerable

amount of steps i was certain

she recognized her own weight

yet it was as if she was the mover

of a piece of furniture

& not her own pallbearer

peaceful as if she were

merely rearranging

a space— perhaps moving

a large cedar chest
for fresh linens
from one room

to the next

Rob Plath is a writer from New York. He is most known for his monster collection  A BELLYFUL OF ANARCHY (epic rites press 2009). His newest collection is MY SOUL IS A BROKEN DOWN VALISE (epic rites press 2019). You can see more of his work at robplath.com

Gary Powell

Corporate Warriors

We are profiles in likeness

in our gray business attire,

splash of color in our ties,

cell phone whining in our ears.

We have important places to be

as we careen through streets

and airports, teleconference

with peers, interface and meet.

We do it for our families, our companies

and our teams, for the false sense of

security that allows us to sleep through

the night. For the sweet suck of the deal.

We queue up at our cubicles, genuflect

and cross ourselves before the throne

of the corporate prophet, awaiting the

news: merger, acquisition, or divestiture.

And in the CEO’s name we pray:

This stock option is my body

Think of me when you eat.

This red ink is my blood

Think of me when you drink.

We are the gray men, the

hollow men, living in a dead

land, a land stuffed with IOUs

and motherfucking lawyers.

We are the in-between, the rut

and rub on the road from desire

to spasm. We are the gut wrench

of the downward trending Dow.

So:

Give us this day our daily bread, man,

and forgive us our debts, although we

will never forgive our debtors. For

shareholder value is the kingdom

and the power and the glory

and the stick with which

we beat the competition

into submission.

Gary V. Powell, a recovering lawyer, is currently a home chef and all-around handy-man. His fiction can be read in many literary journals including the Thomas Wolfe Review, Carvezine, Fiction Southeast, Atticus Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Best New Writing 2015, and Pisgah Review. His first novel, Lucky Bastard, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2012). Two collections of prize-winning and previously-published short stories and flash fiction, Beyond Redemption and Getting Even and Other Stories, were released in 2015 and 2019, respectively.

Brian Rihlmann

Prayer

if there’s a god

I have only one request 

and that is—

grant me eyes

to see in them

what I see

in a old farm truck

rusting in a field

how prisms 

shine through 

shattered glass

how wildflowers

sprout through holes

in the floorboards 

Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada.  He writes free verse poetry, much of it on the confessional side.  He has been published in Blognostics, Yellow Mama, Raven Cage Zine, Synchronized Chaos, Cajun Mutt Press, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others.

Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse by Shawn Pavey, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse
Shawn Pavey
154 pages
Spartan Press
May 30 2019
ISBN-10:1950380343
ISBN-13:978-1950380343
$15
reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Shawn Pavey's book Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse has been on my radar for some time. I travel in or closely observe the outskirts of a lot of different poetry scenes, and one of them is the midwestern ethos of Spartan Press and Stubborn Mule, among some others I am unfamiliar with yet. The poets strike me, in general. as fellow-travelers in the best sense of the word, with varied points of view united under an umbrella of beat poet, confessional poet, Tom Waits or Bukowski-oriented. Some of that can go a long way, if you know what I mean. I am pleased to report that among those fellow-travelers Shawn Pavey is someone well worth paying more attention to.

In his introduction, Mike James rightly--after reading it , how could you not?-- mentions the first quietly strong poem of this long but never meandering collection. "Autobiography" tells us more about the speaker in a few lines than we get in most poems. We know he leads "a quiet life in my place every day," "middle-aged and soft around the middle in the middle of America. where he is "fair to middlin." Note here the narrator as someone who first of all is a poet, a listener to all the things we say to one another in our own complex autobiographies, where the path of admitting everything, bad and good, brings out vulnerability, a necessity for a poet especially.

Speaking of necessities, In the title poem "Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse" Pavey's tips include stocking up on Texas Pete Hot Sauce plus cabbage and carrots for cole slaw, "because you can't descend/ into full-blown goddamned savagery just yet." This very funny poem finishes strong:

Stock up on ten-penny nails
and hundred-dollar bourbon:

nails to fix the shit you know will break
and bourbon to fix the shit you can't.

Get used to drinking hundred-dollar bourbon.

I don't know about you, but when the shit goes down I'm headed for Pavey's fallout shelter. He'll have the good stuff. I'll trade him a couple three banty roosters for a bottle of Maker's Mark. It's the apocalypse after all. I'll go cheap.

I should mention before closing, too, that there are good lines on nearly every page. When mentioning the aftereffects of a lunar eclipse, we get lines that "[fill] a hole in the sky as big as life/as big as all this", or later on in another poem where "seeds of/ prairie grasses crack secret in the loam, yearn for/wildfires of blanketing shoots." You might quibble with breaking the line on 'of' there but the overall impact is solid.

Along with good lines, the poems fairly burst with insight. Some of them are the tried and trusted of poets everywhere, but some snap with ferocity as in "Hollow Point" where the poet repeats "all the hollow points/ hollowing bleeding bodies/these hallowed bodies of the dead." Some linger in the mind, as the aftereffects of a young boy soft-shoeing on a nearly finished sand mandala burst bright for a moment and then fade. All in all, really fine lines in good, often great poems.

This is poetry that wears its influences boldly, without shame, and will reward a patient reader who can dig an earthy poem next to a sentimental poem, meteor showers next to burst mandalas, side by side with prairie wisdoms, all of them parts of a solid collection I'll return to again and again. 4.0 stars.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Two Bottle Caps and a Gas Station Receipt

I reach down into my pocket

thinking twisted blow up dolls

back into balloon animals.

Feeling around for my wallet

that is a no show. 

Just two bottle caps and a gas

station receipt.

I toss the receipt

and finger around the bottle caps

like those Chinese stress balls

that professional assholes swear by.

The heavy melanoma sun over my face.

A rock in my shoe that makes me

walk with a limp I don’t have.

Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage.  His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Live Nude Poems, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.

Doug Holder

We Hold Hands

At dusk

we hold hands.

We hold hands,

with  fading

tarnished rings.

As if some

unexpected storm

could suddenly

separate us forever.

We listen to the muted horn

the hint of some heroin-tainted voice

we clink our cocktails

the house cat

another appendage between us.

And the light grows dimmer

as it always does.

Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA. He has recently collaborated with playwright Lawrence Kessenich on a new play based on a short story he wrote "The Patient." It is going to be published by the Presa Press, and  has had a staged reading at the Playwright's Platform in the Boston area. Holder's poem " Oh Don't She Said, It's Cold" adapted into a song by singer/songwriter Jennifer Matthews, will be preformed by the dance company "text moves" in the fall at various venues in the area. Holder is the arts editor of The Somerville Times, and teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, and Endicott College in Beverly, MA. He holds an MLA in literature from Harvard University. (Photo is a painting by Bridget S. Galway.)

Gawaine Caldwater Ross

Tool Shed

Hard rain rakes the roof of my shed.

It’s autumn, and the wind tosses the blanket

That serves as my door.

I wrap my quilt around me

And stare at the books on the wall.

There’s no electricity, and after dark

I can’t read by candlelight.

I haven’t a stove or a fridge;

I live on oatmeal, cabbage, and scraps of cheese.

I drink rain water, or tea,

If I can get a fire going outdoors.

Today when the storm  rolled in

I stripped and begged to be struck by lightning,

But Zeus was not obliging.

Yesterday in a state of helpless rage

I hammered a boulder into gravel;

It didn’t help my mood.

Two weeks ago I hiked to the coop

And posted a notice that said:

Help! I can’t find a job!

I have no cash, savings, bonds,

Gems, certificates, stocks,

Monies due, property, or anything else.

There’s been no response.

I’ve been homeless before -

This is nearly as bad.

I came here to be with Darla at her invitation,

The cabin is small, so we

Screwed outside in the summer sun,

Green leaves fell from buttocks.

But after only a month she declared

I bored her, and would have to go

Live in the tool shed instead.

I built the house she’s staying in,

But I don’t own it.

She brings back a new guy every week

Including an Italian fascist,

And she is Jewish!

She stated, “Commitment sounds like a jail term.”

Am I really that boring?

My friends say she’s sadistic,

But I love her so much,

I can’t let go of hope.

My Rockland friends want me

To go on the road and sing with them,

But I’d have to leave Darla,

And the band doesn’t pay.

Yo would give me pot to sell,

But I no longer believe in breaking the law.

I watch the rain flood the yard,

According to the news

There’ll be a frost tonight.

I put on extra clothing,

So much, it makes me stiff.

I stare at the ceiling,

Counting the cracks in the old whitewash.

Gawaine Caldwater Ross was born to a military family in Boston.  His family was troubled with alcoholism and schizophrenia. Gawaine spent 10 months in a mental hospital as a teenager and then lived on the streets. Homeless 5 times, and married 3 times, he eventually became a nurse. He has had poems published in various online journals and in a few small publications. He currently lives on a very pretty street in the Back Bay with a cheery little dog named Yayo.

Virginia Chase Sutton

Perfection

We are all beautiful at seventeen,

our flawless skins attached to willing

bones and sinews. Some of us are

waiting for our chance, for someone

to say, let’s make out like a couple

of teenagers, or the stranger with

a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine

he will share though you are underage.

Or the joint passing around the room,

making you happily relaxed in the

front-closing lace bra you are willing

to shed for the unknown, the chance

at real love, not what you left behind

at home, your father missing you,

smoking cigarette after cigarette.

You do not know yet how lovely you are

with soft brown hair and blue eyes

flecked with squiggles. And though

your body is not like the striking grace

of cheerleaders back home, it stuns

with dazzling breasts and big areoles

that men will kiss and love. You will

learn of this loveliness even as you scorn

those who are not worthy. Later, your friends

will grow into their flesh as you grow

away, already ahead, open and waiting,

discovering a taste for a certain sort of man.

He is the one who will hurt you

with his attention/inattention, leaving

you alone some weekends when you

want his body and crazy kisses. What

he suggests you do over and over, though

you have performed for your father

for years. It is all new, this perfection,

a body that happily does as you bid,

no thought or chance of illness, destruction

or loss. Love your gorgeousness.

It will not come again---this purity of spirit,

this holiness, this beam and shine

beacons from your eyes, your eyes.

Virginia Chase Sutton's second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, has been reissued as a free ebook by Doubleback Books. Embellishments is her first book and Of a Transient Nature is her third. Down River is her chapbook. Seven times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, QU, Mom Egg Review, The Laurel Review, and The Comstock Review, among many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. Sutton's poems have won a poetry scholarship to Bread Loaf, the National Poet Hunt, the Allen Ginsberg Award, and the Paumanock Visiting Writer's Award and Reading Series. She has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Writers at Work. Awards include three times from Poets & Writers, Arizona Humanities Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and many others. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Howie Good

Science Can’t Help Us

A monk in a monastery in the remote Northeast Kingdom sits in the lotus position for nine straight hours, which is how long it takes to count all the ways there are to kill a person. Every day about 200,000 people die. The ancient oak that once served as the hanging tree has started muttering to itself, saying things like “Here’s my hat. Go away.” That could be why the seasons now seem to come and go in no particular order. Meanwhile, gunmen from around the world have organized a banquet of vultures. It’s only gravity that keeps us there.

Howie Good is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. His latest poetry collections are I Am Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submission Press, both published in 2018.

Michael McInnis

Michael McInnis lives in Boston and served in the Navy chasing white whales and Soviet submarines. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Chiron Review, Cream City Review, Naugatuck Review, Oxford Magazine, Unlikely Stories and Yellow Chair Review to name a few. His third book, Secret Histories, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press.

Matthew Borczon

Billy

In

the

years

since

you

took

your

own

life

on

angry

nights

I

still

stare

down

stars

and

wonder

if

angels

feet

run

fast

or

fly

in

the

opposite

direction

of

gunfire

and

heartbreak

of

divorce

and

all

the

suicide

children

who

thought

it

was

over

before

it

even

started.

Matthew Borczon is a writer from Erie Pa. He has published 11 books of poetry, the most recent Ghost Highway Blues is available through Alien Buddha Press. He is a navy sailor and a nurse to adults with developmental disabilities. He has four children who joyfully take up all his and his wife's free time.

Jyl Anais

re(member)

I remember

myself piece
by piece.

How
does a woman
forget
she wears perfume
to sleep?

Hold

With both hands

I hold your words

gently

in a cup hidden

in my heart.

Jyl Anais is a poet, visual artist, and forensic medium. Her work appears in Anthony Award nominated Protectors 2: Heroes, Nixes Mate Review, and Asylum Magazine among other publications. Originally from Trinidad, she now lives in the United States where she nurtures orchids and faces the blank page. Soft Out Spoken, her first collection of poetry, will be available this fall. Find her at jylanais.com.

Book Review: Nostalgia and Ruin, by Cameron Mount

Nostalgia and Ruin

70 pages

ISBN: 1365118002

independently published

Publication Date: May 31, 2016

$15/5.38

reviewed by Rusty Barnes

Cameron Mount's Nostalgia and Ruin is a great example of a transitional work. Mount is one half of the duo that runs the pulp magazine Broadswords and Blasters, and I get a sense that this book is very much the work of an excellent writer feeling out interesting ways what will become his permanent subject matter.   

"Spring Break, The Unnamed Key," an example from early in the book, sets up reader expectations and follows through in a satisfying manner.  Simple declarative phrases set off the first half of the poem: "we took;" "we made;"we fished and caught;" we piled;" and so on, followed by simple but rich detail that gives us the feel of what camping on this unnamed key means for the poem's inhabitants, simply going through a day. "It wasn't long/before the drunk/and tobacco high/sent us rolling/through complex thoughts/and left us spinning on our cots/in sleeping bags." The short lines pile up on each other nicely before leveling out in the remainder of the poem and returning to those simple declarative introductory phrases which highlight this deceptively complex poem.

Later, there are poems which succeed or fail depending on how consciously poetic Mount chooses to be. Where simple declaratives rule, the poems succeed. In places like "Mirage," the  normal force of the lines loses focus in favor of sounding like a poem. Clouds turn into rain in this piece and truth drops to the ground, and the "I' of the poem is undone. Well. A very few poems fall into this trap, though, and I believe this is a matter of the poet feeling out how they are going to write their subjects and why.

It doesn't take Mount long to bring back that eye for detail. In "Blossom," another richly detailed poem, the narrator recalls a distracted day of  afterschool suffering. "The color of her thigh,/the pink that blossoms/into my daydreams." and the 'quick bare flash//sufficient for love" focuses the reader too on the narrator's observation in the way of many schoolboy reveries. "I meet her gaze./The way her lips part,/tongue pressed lightly/to curved upper lip. It is/enough to impose after-/school suffering." Again, a poem whose strengths are in the small details.

The last poem I want to mention is "Whiskey, Neat," which takes the drinking poem and turns it inside out. Many people write these poems, and they're generally tiresome because they vary little poet-to-poet. Here, rather than focusing on the drinking and what it means to the narrator of the poem, Mount turns his eye on the liquor itself ("I'd rather have it straight up/but a rain drop slips/into the burnt oak of my glass.") and then to everything that is happening around the drinking scene. "The brisk wind carries echoes of mourning/doves through the goosebump-dappled skin/of my bared chest." Especially note that break on 'mourning' and how it turns the line from ordinary to special, and at the end of the poem, how the poet returns to simple and rich details ("The sun winks/behind a cloud in silent collusion/with the pins and needles/in my left arm."). Finally, the poem ends back where it begins. "I don't mind the rain splashes anymore./They'll just ease the inevitable burn." Both poem and drinking interlude end with the rainwater dappling the drink and easing the burn of both insight and alcohol. Fine stuff.

I suppose I'm outlining an aesthetic in these review pages as much as anything else, but I feel as if Mount's poetry is tailor-made for that. I'm into it, and appreciate these poems very much when they stay in character, meaning when Mount details his poems first and applies poetic force as it comes naturally. Simple declarative sentences first, poetic impact second, meaning paramount. I suspect a poem that doesn't want to communicate. It's lucky for me, for all of us, that Mount communicates exceedingly well in these very successful poems. 4.5 of 5 stars.