Joseph Farley


No Bravado


just tell it like it is
in single breath lines
without exaggeration
or pats to the ego

each language has
its own rhythm:
waltz, minuet.
jitterbug, tango.

let it flow!
let it flow!
a calm mountain stream
turning torrent below.

electric
cloud patter
across dark sky

Nathan Neely



Hear, New Here


If not sleeping sometimes dreaming, it’s the cat’s double tapping of a paw.
Thwacking open a vision into a fat TV still on lull.

That same awakeness wondering: where am I really…where I am.

A here for now being myself.

Then later a someotherthing.

A something else a different someone.

Like light changing actually constantly throughout the day, me.

So Sunday with football switched flatbread foods.

Fanfare.

Monday.

Yesterday nostalgialogy to suit up for this weak week.

Work wins over for a day-times-five. Sloughing off the Zimmerman, Robert. How
it will have to be now.

To say:

The networks are all down by some other hand. Endless banter and demanding
headperson says: do now what will be sillily asked now and probably forgotten not
later.

This all leading into wedingly windnessed dayness here all sudden wednessdays
and customer tripouts.

Cigarette scratch covering the keyboards of confusing technologies to the lagging.

To the madness of seen unknowing segueing into the self unknowing of strangeness
religion life stuff.

People whom younger than our mothers face-crease into a vein of humanity that has
devolved into something that brings us into sadness. Wanting. Thirst

Thursdays. There before the dawn of a short-term new beginning. Or just the typical
new birth.

These Thursday night buttons at my fingertips press like silly putty or landmines.
They are here now. Welcomed. Frying
the things within the scalp. Just there.

Friday it makes us think of sun and fish and chimpanzees on rampage.

Music comes more fluidly. An unclogged i.v. threading uncomfortable. bending over
our past and putting it to it and forgetting until it matters.

She’s pulled off so many times. Many times of putting to it and forgetting both she
and not really i. sat her this day. Shat I at the same time.

Saturday. What do I have to say? What say do I have?

M.P. Powers



A Strangely Isolated Place

Feeling like an open nerve ending
touched by a slight breeze
(or slighted by a touched breeze)...
I am trying to spell out
all the underlying forces at work
in me. The sonic dump
of my grumbling mind, your voice
inside, like trembling petals
of an ancient garden.
You brought me great
jewels yesterday, and the stinging rain.
The faces of fat flowers
that bloomed so
vividly. Was I not sincere
enough? Or were you too true?
Or maybe it was the air
between us,
full of static light and great distances.
The colors streaming
so brightly from your flaming
heart to mine. The colors
of a beautiful sunrise on a beautiful drive
home - rose, lavender, crimson,
scarlet -
all, quickly dying into blue.