Tag: short poems

Three Poems by Betsy Mars

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Gentrification

Upon the brick wall,
a word.
Five quick passes
of the paint roller
and it became
a nasturtium, an assertion,
an asterisk, a footnote.

*

Mexico City

the Matador swings his cape
my eyes at thirteen
looking for an exit

*

Tooth Fish

In the news one gristly story
takes me back to Brazil,
and me, five or six—the first time
I imagined a world of threat –
an eddy of piranhas, all teeth,
beneath dark water, just waiting
for a small girl to dip in a toe.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Betsy’s poems are widely available online and in print, most recently in ONE ART, Calul, Book of Matches, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). Her photos have appeared in various journals, including Spank the Carp and Rattle. Betsy has had two chapbooks published, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-authored with Alan Walowitz. Additionally, through her publishing venture (Kingly Street Press) she released two anthologies, Unsheathed: 24 Contemporary Poets Take Up the Knife and Floored. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Two Poems by Brian Beatty

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Silhouettes

A half dozen hawks
floated in the white sky

above an anonymous
river’s rushing brown floodwaters.

The sun above that scene was blinding,
beating down, drying

the bank’s loose prairie sand into cement.

There I stood like a monument
to tourism, lost in my phone.

Just one dumb picture of the birds’
perfectly choreographed circles

was all I wanted.
But they were already gone.

*

The Yawn

I’m so tired tonight
I worry I might

swallow the world.

*

Brian Beatty is the author of five small press poetry collections and a spoken word album. Beatty’s poems have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Conduit, CutBank, Evergreen Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gulf Coast, Hobart, The Missouri Review, The Moth, ONE ART, The Quarterly, Rattle and The Southern Review.

Dangerous Patterns by Michelle DeRose

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Dangerous Patterns

More snow for Kentucky, deadly
cold in Minnesota. Gusts, chill,
headwinds swirl. Already so many
limbs down, mountains of mud
poised. Most of the forecasters
fired, their maps erased.

*

Professor Emerita of English, Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find some of her most recent publications in The New Verse News, Dunes Review, Peninsula Poets, Midwest Quarterly, miniskirt magazine, and Sparks of Calliope.

Two Haiku by Robert Lowes

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yellow-breasted chat
in my binoculars—
singing for someone else

*

empty basketball court
the sun spots up
at the top of the key

*

Robert Lowes’s second collection of poetry, Shocking the Dark (Kelsay Books), was published earlier this year. His first collection, An Honest Hunger (Resource Publications), came out in 2020. His poems have appeared in journals such as Southern Poetry Review, The New Republic, Modern Haiku, and December. He is a retired journalist who lives with his wife Saundra in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Lowes has been playing the guitar—electric and acoustic—since 2017. He rocks out in a band called Pink Street.

Poems by Aidan Coleman

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Election

Bees polling
every flower.

*

7 Poems

cold morning –
the bus shuddering

In the quiet house
I love my kids
again

hum of traffic
a blotting paper moon

birds chatter
the cat sunning itself
leaves them to it

in the schoolyard
a dozen sons
without my glasses

above neat houses
even the sun bored

*

Aidan Coleman has published three collections of poetry, Avenues & Runways (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005), Asymmetry (Brandl & Schlesinger, 2012), and Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield, 2020).

Two Poems by Martin Vest

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Life Is Tough

          For Patricia

Outside, a late-summer rainstorm
makes a marsh of the block
while the little neighborhood gods,
nine, maybe ten years old,
ride their skateboards
through the flooded streets.
Still wearing the Fall-Risk bracelet
attached at the hospital,
my own half-dead legs make me
more cautious than usual.
I want to yell through the window
and warn those kids
of the thousand dangers that lurk
beneath the surface—
ringworm, E. Coli, the little pebbles
that grab wheels and throw riders.

Convalescing at my mom’s,
it’s strange to be back in this house
where I was raised—
Same distant mountain, same begonias,
this one window-frame of world to inhabit.
Skeletal and aphasic,
I walker my way from bathroom to bed,
the hallway hung with cross-stitched
affirmations cheering me on—
Hope Is All You Need;
Life Is Tough, But So Are You;
Dream Big, Work Hard—
But like hell.
The little wheels
bark to a halt–
The gods fall.
Freezing, they slosh home
to their mothers.

*

Memento

Who could fault you
for losing the way.
For as long as the dead
have risen and walked
the righteous have been
mistaking incisions
for wounds.

*

Martin Vest’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Slipstream, Salamander, The New York Quarterly, Spillway, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the high desert of Eastern Idaho.

Wood Glance by Sally Nacker

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Wood Glance

Clouds thin and part a little—
suddenly, a flash of sun
rinses the darkened wood
like thrush song or a rush
of memory from long ago
and all the new spring green
flourishing things quiver
with the light of a glance.

*

Sally Nacker lives in a small house in the woods of Redding, CT with her husband and two cats. Recent publishing credits include Canary, The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, ONE ART, Third Wednesday, and The Sunlight Press. Kindness in Winter is her newest collection.