Ozymandias is gone (a poem)

By Roger Owens

Ozymandias
Is gone without a trace,
Like withered blades of grass.
He and his vaunted race
Beneath the lone and level sands
Are fallen, and erased.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens

Goines On: Auto-suggestion

Click image for more vignettes

For several days after Goines and his wife returned home from Minneapolis, Goines had felt as tired first thing in the morning as he had going to bed the night before. He was groggy, his body hurt, he had little energy. He needed to do something to feel sprightly each morning. He decided to try something he had often used before, if not lately – something he called “auto-suggestion.” Before going to sleep, he would imagine things he could be excited about the next day, in the expectation that his mind – his mind/body – would prepare itself accordingly.

All Over the Place: Father

By Michael H. Brownstein











I always thought you would outlive me
Lifting heavy boxes past the age of seventy,
Carrying them fifty feet without rest
As if you were white water riding a crest
Of a wave digging talons into sand—

Goines On: Pregnant with possibility

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: Allusions in this vignette to other Goines vignettes are not acknowledged. My intention is that the vignettes, artfully collected and arranged, might someday be published as a book, a sort of “portrait in a thousand strokes.”]

The sky ahead of Goines was vast and cloudless as he merged onto the freeway to go to an ophthalmology appointment. He felt strong, he felt good, enjoying the sky, the feeling. He felt as though there were many possibilities for him out there in that expanse of world and time, and though he knew he wouldn’t, he wanted to live forever.

A trip, limerick’d

Grand Marais with Grand Mo & Ma

By Geoffrey Dean

When Mo saw the light he declared
As he deeply pondered and stared,
    “Well, I’ll be,
    It’s made in Paris!”
But from brightness his sight was impaired.

Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [1]

The beginning of a tale that might never end

By Ed Rogers

[Editor’s Note: Ed tells me that he “needed to write something, so why not write something that I might never finish? The saga will continue through generations, maybe longer than I will be around to tell it. It could be my farewell song.”
    I hope we will all be around long enough to listen to all of the saga Ed manages to sing.]

Goines On: In the company of poets

By Moristotle

Goines observed that a lot of poetry was appearing on a certain weblog lately, and as he drove along the freeway he became aware that he was composing something himself. His fingers were even tapping out the words on the steering wheel.
    Turning his attention to the words coalescing under his fingers, his excitement mounted and the freeway receded in his awareness. “The weblog was having a run of good luck....”

All Over the Place: Rouba Mas Faz

By Michael H. Brownstein






—He steals, but he gets stuff done

They did not bury his heart separately.
They never found his left foot, only bone.
The funeral director reattached his left arm.

Poetry & Portraits: Hetch Hetchy

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Hetch Hetchy
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on January 11, 2014]

The grasses hissed beneath the oaks that mark
these fields. But now her swimming pool has spread
a net of light up into shadowed bark.
An over-irrigated oak falls dead.

Sandwitchery

Sarah Angst postcard art

An apocryphal history

By Geoffrey Dean










For those who are listening, a tale is in store,
A tale about sandwiches, witches, and more.
One Scholar inquired, when music was done,
How was, after all, the sandwich begun?
I told her sincerely what little I knew,
Of the Sandwich Earl’s haste as his appetite grew.
Her skeptical look and her lack of reply,
Showed me clearly I’d failed to reveal the full why.
If one is impatient, no relief will be found,
For this tale’s neither brief, nor by accur’cy bound:

All Over the Place: Field trip to the zoo

By Michael H. Brownstein








I nurture the wrong people,
gangrene girls with color scars,
small breasts like the yellow cusps of dandelion.

I have broken so many fights
the count is beyond fingers,
beyond toes.

Peace Officer (a poem)

By Felicia Zapata Finnegan

A cup of coffee
A doughnut as he strode
All he had the time for
As he rushed to hit the road

Fiction: Sunlight in a Cave (a graphic short story)

Author in filmgrain

A “captioning” of the Mike Magliano story

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: A text version of this story appeared here on May 15. Bob had intended for some images to be included, but a series of editorial snafus intervened, and they weren’t. Today’s publication is Bob & Moristotle’s collaborative attempt to save the situation “creatively,” not just by adding Bob’s original images, but also by adding many more images and making them primary by arranging the text entirely as captions under them. Let’s see how well – or whether – it worked.]

On Franklin Hill Farm: Under foot (a poem)

By Bettina Sperry

In the fields, the grass, the hills,
I searched and wondered
And looked afar.
A fall, a winter, a quiet spring,

Poet Michael H. Brownstein, welcome!

By Moristotle

With the poem posted below this announcement, Michael H. Brownstein joins our staff and launches a column we call “All Over the Place” because his poetry seems to range the world, speaking at many levels of human experience.