Brian Builta

Things No War Can Touch


I hear it badly,
birdsong tirritirriti,
a fickle machinery.

Someone pops a top
as the sun rises
glorious and indifferent.

Something round is afoot,
despite derring-do and what-not
it will arrive.

Amid cricket chatter
you and your corpuscles
blunder along.

Then there’s the sheer fluid beauty
after being stuck,
of having come through

yet again.

Brian Builta divides his time between a bedroom and a kitchen in Arlington, Texas. His poetry has been published most recently in yolk, Delta Poetry Review and Innisfree Poetry Journal. He is frequently overdramatic and is currently experiencing a dark night of the soul. He is the author of A Thursday in June and more of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

Stay Home

I should stay home more often
that way I would know my destination.
I believe the bathroom mirror
would make a fine photographer.

The fragrance of my perfume

is all for show for the woman I love.
Work makes me feel like taking a day off.

I brush my teeth with garlic

to keep the vampires away
at night. If I had more time to live,

I would forget so many things.

I never know which way I am going.

Born in Mexico, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poetry, poetry books, and poetry chapbooks have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Homestead Review, In The Grove, Kendra Steiner Editions, Live Nude Poems, Poet’s Democracy, Propaganda Press, Pygmy Forest Press, and Unlikely Stories. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press.

Jake Sheff

 Blackguarding Merles
 
You mock a dahlia’s faith in rain
And March’s hieratic pain
In Wotan’s one good eye. I show
The only serious dog I know
 
The absence of a final task. 
(His bark becomes so plateresque.) 
Jocasta’s hardship melts the snow…
The only serious dog I know
 
Is on precocious wisdom’s trail.
Your apperception tugs his tail.
For Tiresias, you set aglow
The only serious dog I know. 

Jake Sheff is a pediatrician and US Air Force veteran. He’s published a full-length collection of formal poetry, “A Kiss to Betray the Universe” (White Violet Press), along with three chapbooks: “Looting Versailles” (Alabaster Leaves Publishing), “The Rites of Tires” (SurVision) and “The Seagull’s First One Hundred Seguidillas” (Alien Buddha Press).

Kenneth Pobo

HI DEATH

It may come to me like a
telegram, only a few words,
terse, impossible to ignore. Or
it may be seductive, wooing me
(are people wooed anymore?)
and knowing how my flesh
is weak, I’ll give in. Maybe
it will come like a plane’s shadow
over our house. It only takes
a second. My grandfather died
that way, crossing a street. It may
come like that picture of Jesus
knocking on our heart’s door,
half god, half salesman. I can
choose to not be home—or can I?

One day I may welcome it,
however it comes,
body, spirit, used up, ready to leave,
holding a blanket before

letting it go.

Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of thirty-three chapbooks and fifteen full-length collections.  Recent boo ks include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press) and It Gets Dark So Soon Now (Broken Tribe Press).  His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.