Featured Poet: Paul Stevens

"Paul Stevens was born in UK but lives in Australia. He teaches English Literature, and has published verse and prose in a number of online journals, including Poemeleon, The Centrifugal Eye, CounterPunch, The New Formalist, Shattercolors, Sliptongue, WORM, Snakeskin, The Road Not Taken, Lighten Up, The Argotist, Southern Ocean Review, 14by14 and Contemporary Sonnet, as well as in print. In penance for his many sins he founded and edits The Chimaera Literary Miscellany and The Shit Creek Review. " ~~~ Dendrophilia Eye to eye tracks as the heliotrope, sunlight ripples ticklish on their skin; her touch on his touch, phototactic, sticks. They bathe in energy, their element: sky trickling liquid down bare branches, earth fingering upward through deep roots; buds and foliage spring from manic fingers, hands become the very fruit they reach for: sense, exactly, what sense apprehends. Engrafting difference of sex and soul - stock to scion, trunk to shaggy trunk - they have become a paragon of plants, all-sensitive, to sway, to sway, through tight circadian rhythms: light, then dark, then light. ~~~ Einar's feast The food a shining glory, shafted through by this fierce spear of light from where the roof gave way to nature or the work of men; a mess of offal strikingly arranged across the table in the greater hall; the drumsticks, sinews, torn spine of a fowl ; a tumbled horn, sour beer to drip and splash; a rended loaf; a disembowelled swine , garlands of sweetbreads, kidneys, livers, brains, with tripes and gizzards wound in artful skeins: steaming to charm the spiteful rafter gods who gaze down from their paradise of dust: slice by slice, a flesh feast of pain— and Halfdan, carved, blood-eagled, as the main. ~~~ The Misty Path A walker faded down a misty path. At dawn I left White Emperor City. The pack-ice cracked, the weather turned to steel. I met a traveller from an antique land. I met a pilgrim in the jungle steam, beneath the canopy of jewelled birds where syrup-songs dripped guano cool as bells. Death watches me from the towers of Córdoba. As my soul bent towards the East, I met a lady in the meads, who made sweet moan. I've seen the starry archipelagos; the beast that bears me plods dully on. In Southwark, at the Tabard as I lay, a friend showed me the way to Hell or Heaven: her locks were yellow gold, her looks were free. I met three witches on the heath near Forres. There's a killer nel cammin di nostra vita: his mind is squirming; countless roads diverge. I heard twa corbies making mane; I met a wanderer on Ilkley Moor baht 'at: I have no way, and therefore want no eyes. Twice, gloriously, across the Achéron, I met a pieman, going to the fair, a man upon the stairs who wasn't there, and he hath led me through the watery maze. I walked into Charleroi, to the Green Inn, and met myself returning to myself: hence is it, that I'm carried to the west, late surfer on the last wave to shore. As I came over Windy Gap, I rode the King's Highway, Baby, wandered lonely as a cloud to where there ain't no snow. Who is it who can tell me where I am? A walker faded down a misty path.