Afterlife (a sonnet)

By Eric Meub

On visiting your native town, we walk

The streets you used to walk before we met.

We talk about the sights. But as you talk,

And as you smile, I can’t help see regret.

Some memory transfixes every spot:

Old dreams, perhaps, of what would gladden you

In years to come. The years have come: I’m not

The future you were looking forward to.

How brave you are—to walk with me, yet bear
Such disappointment, such surprising grief
That, just this once, you can’t humanely share
With me, the one who usually brings relief.

My fault: I thought that you’d enjoy the week.
You take my hand and press it to your cheek.

Copyright © 2023 by Eric Meub Eric Meub is a California poet & architect.

All Over the Place: “A Witness to Your Life” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

A Witness to Your Life

She is wife to the husband,

Keeper of memoirs he will never write,

The exposed and the secret-sharer.

Even with life so small, unkempt,

Littered with rude manners and perfumed breath.

Later, if he saved the drowning boy

Or pulled the soldier out of the burning building

Or calmed the man full of slurs and bad skin,

It will only be that ordinary people

Often do extraordinary things.

All Over the Place: “Eight Breaks in the Glaze....” from The..Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Eight Breaks in the 

Glaze or If We Ate
Superstition for Supper

1.

I see exact replication in everyone, every tree,

      every landscape, every valley,
      in every thick mountain crag.

Birds know how to hate that way too.

All Over the Place: “Home” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Home

Potholed with devil sores.
He learned to tolerate them,
And now this: straight aways

Huge with speed bumps like blemishes.

“Everything is big there,”
They told him. “Be careful.”
And America was big. Big streets.
Big cereal boxes. Big windows.

Highways and Byways: The Fertile Crescent (another Farewell to Moristotle & Co.)

By Maik Strosahl

Artesia dips her
wooden bucket
deep into his soul.

Once more
to the well for water,
once more
from creation’s spring.

Haiku ofFarewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Michael H. Brownstein

Moristotle lives
in the glory of its words,
its garden of poems.

Copyright © 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein

All Over the Place: “Tunes” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Tunes

George walked the way he whistled. “That’s just the way I walk,” he said. No one had said anything about the way George walked. Everyone knew he was low key, off key, Ellison’s invisible man without Thurber’s Walter Mitty imagination. He married Sue two years later. She talked like a slide guitar and had the shape of an unrepentant electric bass. Together they learned the Nigerian kora, a quiet instrument, and had two children who did everything in the correct key.

Highways and Byways: The Finale& Farewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Maik Strosahl

I wanted to go out with a bang, but was struggling for a big idea until an old family friend posted a photo of Twelve Apostles or Walking Iris flowers blooming. What a joyful explosion of color!

Photo by Mary Wingard Crain

    I hope you enjoy this final burst and I will see you around this big, bright, beautiful world!

Formality (a sonnetFarewell to Moristotle & Co.)

By Eric Meub

For Morris Dean












 
 
 
 
Formality

Elizabethans and Romantics taught
Us that the sonnet needs a plot to tend,
A garden walled-off from the world, where thought
May blossom for a lady—or a friend.

Highways and Byways: Salsa Dancer

By Maik Strosahl

In younger days
he poured in a shot of Cuervo,
stirred it into the
peppers, onion and tomato—
booze and a salad he joked
as he chugged from a jar
chewing chunks,
enjoying the burn
as he jumped
on out to the dance floor,
sharing his heat with the ladies.

Limerick of Farewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Michael H. Brownstein

There is a blogger named Mo

Who engaged intelligent Joe.

    His writers could write—

    So witty and bright—

We’re sad to see our Mo go!

Copyright © 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

All Over the Place: “The Set of Her Body” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

The Set of Her Body

I look at the set of her body, the style of range, the linoleum on the patio, the robin’s nest in the eave of the front porch, the wino sipping whiskey out of a glass bottle in a paper bag on the front stoop. She is afraid to go outside until he leaves. I go outside and sit next to him.

Farewell to Moristotle & Co.

James T. Carney & Mo Dean
Yale, June 1964

By James T. Carney




Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of print
Before him only wordless seas.
Moristotle said: “Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone.
Brave Reader, speak, what shall I say?”
“Why, say, Blog on! Blog on! And on!”

Highways and Byways: Radar Love

By Maik Strosahl

Sometimes I wonder
at the storms that hit
without warning.

Sometimes,
popcorn rises from
green fields,
invisible to the Doppler,
building into a shelf,
unpredicted,
missed by the
10 o’clock report,
weather on the 6’s,
the farmer at the grocery
who smells tempests brewing.

All Over the Place: “Water and a Lack of Wire” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Water and a
Lack of Wire

Stress lines are not the stretch marks of love

the way a man is more notable from the outside

as if chicken wire can drill barbs into skin,

bring the power of anger against the scrotum,

Bibliophile (a sonnet)

By Eric Meub

I like it when you’re looking into Pope:

His was an age of rhymed enlightenments.

The Essays and Epistles give me hope

We’ll make a couplet of our common sense.

Lord Byron, though, would have your lover drawn

More like a rugged, weather-beaten Giaour.

And really, did they ever get it on,

Or was it only talk? Give me an hour.

In and out of pout (a limerick)

Detail of a sketch by
Bev Johnson (2016)

By Moristotle

That little girl is often in a pout,
No one can figure what it’s all about;
    One moment she’s jocose,
    The next she is morose.
Just wait, you’ll see her lower lip push out.

Copyright © 2023 by Moristotle

Highways and Byways: The Aging of Water

By Maik Strosahl

    Inspired by a photograph from
    Heather Cox Richardson’s
    Letters from an American
    (July 9, 2023)

The Aging of Water

This mirror still flows,
this glass still reflects,
but it has become
clouded with murk,
rippled with time and gravity,
wrinkled to the sky and
to my bespectacled eyes.

All Over the Place: “The Laurel Tree—Because....” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

The Laurel Tree—
Because Daphne Prayed
to the Gods for Help
When Apollo Wouldn't
Take No for an Answer

This is how magic works against us—

how being in hell is not always necessarily a bad thing—

how the odor from the man sitting nearby decomposes oxygen—

how the feral cat bites the hand that feeds it—

how newspaper headlines promise to lie

and skin sickness spreads into leaves of hair—

sorrow bends tears into strings of bark—

a minute slaves into an hour, the lecturer going on and on,

an hour becoming a day, a day a week, the pen out of ink,

the pencil lead broken, a time to sleep, a time to stretch,

a heart stone, the grain in laminate, rings of tile,

the number of seats in one row, the moon, the sun,

the moon, the sun, the moon, the sun, the moon,

clouds, rain, snow, frost, the moon, the sun, the moon,

the sun and the man at the lectern still speaking

clears his throat finally, swallows an imaginary wind,

begins to sing—the sweat of swamp, the swamp of musk,

a triage of lips/tongue/throat: an eczema of wood.

Copyright © 2013, 2023 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.

Boldt Words & Images: Sawdust (a poem and its back story)

By Bob Boldt

Not much talk in my father’s shop.
I stood for hours watching him work
helping where I could. 
I remember how it felt when my sweat
caught the ticklish maple dust,
in Tinley Park, Illinois, 1947.