O Sweet Flowery Roses BLOG

Finishing Hammers: OSFR #1 IS NOW LIVE!

2011-07-01T16:43:00.001-07:00

Dear,

O Sweet Flowery Roses presents its first ever dossier: Mixed Martial Arts poetry. It's for reals now at osweetfloweryroses.com!
-Russell

Andrew Lundwall

2010-12-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

Andrew Lundwall lives in NYC. Recent poems have appeared in La Petite Zine, RealPoetik, Action, Yes, Robot Melon, & Tight. He has released three chapbooks, klang, honorable mention, and funtime, a collaboration with Adam Fieled.

From A Saving Place

centipede signal at the skin bursts. the growth white with easter plunged in. a despairing sword in a crocodile. such haunts slant hard bounced checks of confusion. sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these. lightning misconceptions that time whips on.

there is useless fat connecting on. returning in garden beauty. its autopsy smile. a cloudlike spoil of tumultuous buds. imagine this feeling. come blues thrice. glans knot whirlwinds cruelly. elaborate. sanity frowns try to translate. impossible as if any self-despising specimen. lidless nights. the pieces. can only signal. the species. throbbing accumulations. death yellow swings the vomiting corridors of answer. painer brows have stained some watching awful. burden & heat. realize nearer about poses violent. smoking details tread tremulous.

Brian Mornar

2010-12-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

Brian Mornar is the author of Repatterning (Punch Press) and Three American Letters (LRL). He teaches at Columbia College.

AUTOPSY

(for Andrew Lundwall’s A Saving Place)

Your Autopsy

is mine. The voice a many thing.

I’ve a round-about in the old ways of speaking. Acreage & appendage. Sweet, and in the soft vein, but the shores and the body so narrow that what laps in there, your neighbor’s engine.

Sanity has a sound here, a coda your fingers. The air is air. We can say from here. The ‘unreal’ cities older than we think, before founding. In the poem, there must be an ‘external referent,’ as to any crime. What we held onto to so. The fact of we possible, not the possible, but only a thee that make bodies in overhead lights.

At once mourning and joy. But here the pores that are opened after the end rebuilds the stage. Defamiliarization and familiarization simultaneous in the autoptic text-body

The body as it was, as were remembered it, before the loss: in Beloit, Wisconsin, men and women manned the lathe. The loss of our hands and still the scapel. Bestill the chapel and then fled. There are factories by the river. Men and women sit at tables and in aprons assemble plastics. We still play cards and night and think we can steer our lives as if driving, or piloting a lost seat boat. The old hands lore read through acres of sentences. Acreage left ashore. Did we ever flee? Is what we wondered in Wisconsin, though surely we did once.

The autopsy opens. Released into the world. We assumed it would be terrible. And, as a surface, it is. But don’t lament the desertion. Freedom is to be leaned away from.

“Fugitive amusements”

Learn to: Yield the loss to the real. Our bodies eked. If only we could remember how they were growing, and doing so is dead. Unfettered for something else. Gesture does.

That “sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these. Lighting misconceptions that time whips on.” Debasing the gravity of the body. He takes as the object of his work. In childhood, we push past the boundaries in perpetual flight. We know our corpus as that which will be. (When ‘be’ meant ‘air’). And so this is a terrible, the body defined. And the poet, his freedom to perform an autopsy, a window between one body and another:

“…autopsy smile…”

These autoptic bodies of text—these prose poems—do not reach for knowledge as power, knowledge as the naming of the unknown (the body, the first colonial object). They are a venting in the old sense of the word: not reducing, but transferring population from one body of text to another. One’s a lea and one’s a prison. But without flags or names, just plots. Bloodletting. The body of one’s life, how to measure a thing. Such as.

Composition as skin. Composition on skin. Writing unsheathes the body of the text, the first glimmer at the base of the spine. Why constellations.

Surrealism as having-become-mere-habit. We still want to make new, but for the sake of the body, as the poet has here refined it—remembering the word, page, screen, other’s body as we last saw it. That moment ago. Torn from. What warm mass is left human here. Spicer’s dictation but his alcohol the warmth.

As we having done this. As our tenses remain, does static the body. The voice escaped out and took with it the book. Splayed as a preposition, before the(e). Thee to me, you were, before this visible act. Once lost the farm resprings true. But it is real. We know this, having been there our eyes. Labor is a tense. We’ve been between the word here, to labor a sentence, how a row. ‘Tis more more than language.

Labor and summer indolence, a tense, or chore waiting. The agrarians in other shapes persist, this loss yearly. But the poet’s is a world in recovery. To thee. Act is amending.

Louisiana Lightsey

2010-12-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

Louisiana Lightsey is a young poet and translator living in Barcelona,
Spain. Her work has appeared in Capgun, Word For/Word, Muthafucka, and
other places. She doesn't have an MFA. She has a website.
www.louisianalightsey.com

Placenta

/////

Of heaven, rather than field.

I don't know what that means exactly but

it IS what I mean.

After the poetry reading sucked

we went to a bar, THE bar, everyone was there.

I'm pretty sure we spent all his money.

All I remember is the leather nest in front of us,

I rested my heels on the bar bar-stool bar.

The leather nest was full of peanuts.

I said the word penis, over and over again.

Exactly, heaven, rather than pub,

when I met him I had said "wow you look cool!"

Later on, we found the floor and made out,

made up the violent names of our children.

We liked Viola, Sid and Cid.

It was crazy; how I love squid

and you held one

so high above your head.

Heliotropism

/////

Both master and concubine unpetaled the heliotrope.

It was like a long time ago in Asia or wherever they have concubines

so it was ok.

They wanted to ascertain the difference in the hair.

They felt like it was really important.

Do you ever feel that way?

The pollen was virgin and suddenly dyed by the light.

It’s probably by that light that many Nobel Prize Winners

have discovered without hair and with a bald mind

what will be taught to sallow children as cardinal.

Seriously,

if one elder pulls aside the ferns to show and tell the heliotrope

it’s only because long ago he was broken by the light.

Can you even blame him?

When younger, the master had dissected the cardinal,

the concubine bending over and blocking the light,

he was like:

“GET OUT of my light.”

But she wouldn’t move, she wanted to be an alpha female

AND also to see the veins untangling in his scalpel like heliotropes.

She bent so low, to sniff, to touch, to meet the open body with her hair.

Later they came together and opened through their legs fiery cardinals.

I mean THEY FUCKED.

They also shared glances of icy blue,

heated and re-heated the shocks of barreling light

as their minds grew apart and re-netted

like a bird finding at last its final nest

in the hate of the heliotrope.

It Has To Make Something Doesn't It?

/////

Even if it’s gross it passes in the movies.
The super Loenstein.
Even the shift key will accept Judaism eventually.

Even eggplant parmesan has special effects.
Biangular, sensate, super-soft fry particle,
let me love you.

Under the hand you show up soft and saying,
don’t worry, frying is normal,
this will somehow make a super-cute person appear.

Recipeing together makes America happy.
Ingredients support the environment.
Love makes oil, I don't think it gives a fuck.

Tyson Bley

2010-11-30T22:06:00.000-08:00

Tyson Bley was born in 1978 in South Africa and at the age of 30 moved to Germany, where he continues to live semi-reclusively with a malignant Internet addiction. His work has appeared in MyFavoriteBullet, Blazevox, Poets Of The East Village, Clutching At Straws, Disenthralled, and print journals like Smash Cake and Kerouac's Dog. His personal blog is located at
http://soapstain.blogspot.com/

GENE DEFECT ON A TINY PIECE OF FOIL

I moved my new car, angrily, after the 3D printer vomited it out. I didn’t want to be parked next to one of the printer’s other aberrant creations: a selfish pig in an igloo. ‘The way to hell is canned – is a pizza chain oriented along the vector of the glittering dolphin’s thigh,’ the pig told me as I peered in and wondered if it thought either of us was parked in the wrong place. ‘The one who melts first under the skull street lamps is parked in the wrong place.’ I kept the following rude assumption to myself: that it, not I, was parked in the wrong place.

Fragments of Ben Nye rape makeup hit the fan and was karateed by the blades into the form of yet another new breed of worthless sentience: a switchboard operator sunbathing in a straightjacket. Lights blip crazily around him – a dragonfly lightsaber fight jumping on the bed to a banned dancefloor anthem. The weather update deliberately intimidates us with promises of an utopia made of crude materials gorging on fractals. I like the switchboard operator’s worthless handling of the console. To wit: an atom-based stunt based on the ancient technique of the ‘squirm.’

One of the partners in couples therapy was a mechanical fish. The therapist, clad in micro-mesh, assessed the situation from a bunker underneath the maximum security prison where his patients were housed with a periscope jammed nonlethally through the McRib in the hands of the non-mechanical fish partner. The distraught relationship he was trying to remedy was cargo lined in fish oil due to be sent to a Mexican border town the next day, where it would be detonated in a display of highly eclectic, hugely disorientating fireworks to celebrate the opening of a new bridge and the erection of a Morgan Freeman statue, his surgical mask bulging on the hour as the iconic actor burps grenades, to mark the passage of time.

THOUGHT LINKS EYEBROWS

On the top landing, observing the dirty rocket trying to climb the spiral staircase. The cat’s claw’s tristesse, from being away from the balloon milk. Frida Kahlo’s hysteria over the hairy blood vessel on her brow, sweat like leaves covered in urine. Cabbage Patch kids constipate the Menorah. The more of a grotesque consumer the Pope becomes, the more his wing catches fire. None of us are what we really want to be, except the condom. Which isn’t either what it wants to be but thinks it is. Namely bald. To precipitate the mermaid’s flight. A seagull wears its heart on its sleeve, then when not drinking from it puts it down on a sugar coaster. This way Bambi’s earplugs melt, just as condensation gives a loud report. The deafening music my guardian angel listens to while cleaning out my car. A slow-dance with lithium, also found in 7-Up and also quite a sexy mechanical model. So where has my sweater been hiding? Stolen from the school mascot in a Santa Clause pat-down. My Nissan’s shame. Flying when not playing with traffic.

NOW THAT THE AC'S DOWN

The apartment’s AC has to be trained to do the ‘obnoxious sniff,’ to make it a better environment for giant insects. I want to be taught the empty gesture’s sideways movement, to perform it without hesitation. With amped kneecap in robotic hoodie, it used to be such a great co-pilot, but we parted ways. I want to blend reality with elephant lips; through its grill my AC said that’s more harmful than crashing truffles. With acoustic guitar and rose in teeth, it decided to direct the fitness montage of Doctor Octopus in ski boots. I’m lonely now, of course. But today in the personals I saw that the human liver is learning from the whitewash, and needs help taking smarter, more economic cues from jingles stuck in its head. Fright bleaches – that’s what I learned. And that the rescue will pass you by if you’re stuck in airplane porn. And Mars will become one of the caterpillar’s eggs. And sanity’s landing strip will slather fake balm over her wheels – the instant she grows into a piñata whose gramophone heart will be a byproduct of shattered absence. A raider of fake tunes’ heart. My favorite faker.

Sean Burnham

2010-11-28T13:22:00.000-08:00

Sean Burnham is currently a student at the University of Iowa. He enjoys making music, listening to music, reading, and being weird. Writing poetry is new to him, but he's confident he'll figure it out someday. If you happen to see a saxophonist on a street corner whilst meandering through Iowa, it might be him. Or so he hopes.

Crackle and Wail

Solemn

and narrowed

eyes, how could I

be so blind?

There’s a tourniquet

around the day.

He dragged his feet up

those stairs, shuffling

like a bull in a radio.

When he got to

the top, he looked

at me and all

I saw was an IOU before

he threw himself

against the wall again

and again and once

more for good measure.

Bleacht

Rolling the sun back

the yart behint, I leap

t atop

the house to look

(my bett)

She was

gone. I screamt

and rollt out

the sun, thinking

to surprise her. She was

n’t surprised. Always

trying, I surp

rise with her

what she knows.

Flying Fox

Aspen air-

freshener, pine trees cut down

for the sake of smell and why

don’t you plant a forest in your car?

And in fifty years,

maybe someone will

drive your tree

over a bridge and into the bay,

crying and laughing to live

in a tree, to die

in a tree, to fall

and to fly, and why

don’t you plant a forest in the sea?

Patricia Spears Jones

2010-11-23T14:24:00.000-08:00

Born and raised in Arkansas, PATRICIA SPEARS JONES aka Patricia Jones has lived in New York City since the mid-1970s where she has been involved in the city's poetry and theater scenes as poet, editor, anthologist, teacher and former Program Coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and working with Mabou Mines, the internationally acclaimed theater collective which is celebrating its 40th year. Her accolades are almost too numerous to list and range from editing anthologies to playwriting and creating collaborative arts. She is the author of the books Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2006), The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995) and Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and the chapbooks repuestas! (Belladonna, 2007) and Mythologizing Always (Telephone Books, 1981). You can find out more about her on her website http://www.psjones.com/, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Spears_Jones and www.aalbc.com.

k.d. laing sings ‘Hallalujah’ by Leonard Cohen

Sun shimmers, cold Canada is cold.

Leaves are heart shocked

Colors bleeding streets, streams, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Below the 49^th parallel, de spirit is almost broken.

Mendacity. Mendacity. Mendacity.

Corrode ear drums. War corrupts our hearts’ thrum.

Oh and listen to the steadfast hymn singing.

Hear daily declarations of faith.

See sparkly flags

on politicians’ lapels. Funny,

This choir of dignified horrormeisters, each with his or her own

Gift—liar, thief, murderer, pederast, torturer—on display.

No one can make a joke. No one can take a joke.

Mendacity Mendacity Mendacity

Sons, brothers, sisters, mothers

Dead, more than 1000 dead

Below the 49^th parallel days begin with expensive coffee

Days end in bad news.

Heart stunned and dream deprived.

Sun glistens.

Vase

Composition is not easy

You think these flowers just jumped into the vase

Arranged themselves according to size, color, texture

You think making a beautiful home is easy

You think the domestic is about floor plans

And ecologically correct cleaning products

I AM SICK OF THIS DULL HATRED OF THE EVEYDAY

Get yourself something exciting to do,

Investment banking

Or Internet Interface proxy

What?

I don’t know. I just love this vase

And you dropped it BY MISTAKE?

And it’s in pieces

And the floor is dirty

And we can no longer afford this house

Anyway

And GO FUCK YOURSELF

AND YOUR MAMA TOO!

What? You say I sound ghetto, well

Eat this dream and shit it out in New Jersey.

I’ll stop crying when this vase is replaced

And I can sleep in a bed owned free and clear!

Kinder

Walls surround the garden

Inside the illustrated children motion

A paradisal mode

All strawberries and huckleberries

And heavy ivy hiding the treasure

Old people cannot see.

Why are some children allowed this fantasy

And others eat dirt every day?

Is that the way of all possible worlds

The blonde child in the Gap ad

The lovely Eurasian in Ralph Lauren

The Black preppie in crisp linen

On an expansive lawn in Sag Harbor

How will they negotiate their prosperity?

With the people who will take them

Sometimes hence, on the road;

in a board room, off the Internet?

Marigold

Oh luscious girl friend

When last did you take a bath?

Water everywhere and yet you remain

Dusty as a road in Georgia

Or Alabama or Arkansas

You keep away the mosquitoes,

the blue flies, the little bitty things

that bite your neck laughing as only

Insects can laugh.

You’re free of all that—perfume—was

in a former life; so was dancing on bars

and wearing shoes found mostly in bad

80’s porn films.

So how did you find your way here

And are you staying through the season

And will the tomatoes grow better if close by

or just a litter farther away to give the sun more space

to embrace their vines?

Peter Marra

2010-11-20T10:32:00.000-08:00

Peter Marra is a writer who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Among his influences are Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Edgar Allan Poe, Russ Meyer, and Roger Corman.

He has been published in amphibi.us, Yes Poetry, Maintenant 4, Beatnik, Crash, Danse Macabre, Caper Literary Journal, and Clutching At Straws.

He is currently constructing his first collection of poems.

animals clothed

animals clothed in

yesterday’s night sweats

run into the meadow

clothed in concrete

always checking the time

watching and waiting for

something to change

ridden by women

women always laughing

without smiles

lightning rinses out their minds

while the clowns touch each of them

the women greedily

guard their prey

and strangle them

by the telephone poles

(somebody tell them

what went wrong

stop.there’s.blood.everywhere…)

Wayne Mason

2010-11-19T09:32:00.000-08:00

Wayne Mason is a writer, sound artist and factory worker from central Florida. When he grows up he wants to be Kannon. His work has been published throughout small presses and he is author of several chapbooks. The most recent Poet Laureate Of A Dirty Garage is now available from Erbacce Press.

We Reckless Alone

Cheesy factories
Now on to the noise....

Everyone Florida
wrapped in apathetic

Flesh and tired old
infinite gestures

Mmmmrrrrgggghhh
another middle finger

Soft Pink Characters

We are
wallowing
spewing
faceless sad

There it was
in steel toes
of Lakeland
via nothing
but death

Trees grass
purgatory
soft pink
characters
inebriated

Eric Asboe

2010-11-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

Eric Asboe lives and works in Iowa City, IA.

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Aadin Aadin Aadin

Aamisha patel

Aarthi Agarwal Aarthi Agarwal Aarthi Agarwal

Aarti Aarti

Aarti Agarwal Aarti Agarwal

Aarti Chanria

Aarti Chhabria Aarti Chhabria

Aash Shain

Abhinaya Sri

Abhinayashri

Abhinayasri Abhinayasri Abhinayasri

Adhithi

Adid Govitrikar

Aishwarya

Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai

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Akshara Akshara

Akshaya

Akshita

Amisha Patel Amisha Patel Amisha Patel Amisha Patel

Amrita arora Amrita arora Amrita arora

Amrita Rao Amrtia Rao Amrtia Rao

Anjali

Ankitha Ankitha Ankitha

Anu vaishnavi Anu vaishnavi

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Archana Archana Archana

Arti Chabria

Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin

Ayesha Takia Ayesha Takia

Banupriya

Bhavana Bhavana Bhavana Bhavana

Bhoomika

Bhumika Bhumika

Bhuvaneshwari

Bhuvaneswari

Bipasa Basu

Bipasha Basu

Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley

Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi

Deepika padukone

Diya mirza Diya mirza

Ekta khosla

Ektha Khosla Ektha Khosla

Endhiran

Esha Deol

Farzana Farzana Farzana

gadde sindhu

Gajala

Genelia Genelia Genelia Genelia

Gopika

haripriva

Hema Sinha

Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana

Illeana Illeana Illeana

Illeyana

Jyothika

Jyothirmayi

Kajal Agarwal Kajal Agarwal

Kajala

Kajol

Kajole

Kangana Ranaut

kaniha

Kanika

Kareena Kapoor Kareena Kapoor Kareena Kapoor

Katrina Kaif

Kayeri Jha

keerthi

Kim Sharma

Kimmi

Kiran Kiran

Lakshmi Rai

Laksmi rai

Laya

Madhumitha

Malayika Malayika

Mallika Kapoor Mallika Kapoor Mallika Kapoor

Mallika Sherawat

Mamata Mohandas

Mantha

Meena Meena Meena

Meera Jasmine

Monalisa Monalisa

Monica Monica

monika monika

Mumaith Khan Mumaith Khan

Namitha Namitha Namitha Namitha Namitha

Nattamai

Nayyanayar

Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara

Nayanthara

Neha Ahuja

Nikita

Nikitha

Nila

Nisha Kothari Nisha Kothari

Padmapriya Padmapriya Padmapriya Padmapriya

Parvathi Melton

Parvathi Milton

Pooja Pooja

poonam baja

priyamani priyamani priyamani priyamani

Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka

Chopra

rachana

Rachana mourya

rachna mourya

Ramba Ramba

Ramya

Reema Sen Reema Sen Reema Sen Reema Sen

Rekha

Reshma

Riya Sen Riya Sen

Sada Sada Sada Sada

Sameera Reddy

Sandya

Sanghavi Sanghavi

Sania Mirza

Saniamirza

sarawat hani

Shakeela Shakeela

Sherin

Sherlyn Chopra

Shilpa shetty

Shivani Shivani

Shreya Shreya

shriva shriva

Shriva saran

sidu thulani

Silk Smitha

Simran Simran Simran Simran

Sindhu Tolani

sneha sneha sneha sneha sneha

Sona

sonal chouhan

Sonali Bendre

sraddha

Sridavi

Tabu Tabu

Tamanna Tamanna Tamanna Tamanna

Trisha Trisha Trisha

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Aadin Aadin Aadin

Aamisha patel

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Aarti chabbria

Aarti Chanria

Aarti Chhabria Aarti Chhabria

Aash Shain

Abhinaya Sri

Ashinayashri

Abhinayasri Abhinayasri Abhinayasri

Adhithi

Aditi Govitrikar

Aishwarya

Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai Aishwarya Rai

Aishwarya Rai

Akshara Akshara

Akshaya

Akshita

Amisha Patel Amisha Patel Amisha Patel Amisha Patel

Amrita arora Amrita arora Amrita arora

Amrita Rao Amrita Rao Amrita Rao

Anjali

Ankitha Ankitha Ankitha

Anu vaishnavi Anu vaishnavi

Anushka Anushka Anushka Anushka Anushka Anushka Anushka Anushka

Anushka Sharma Anushka Sharma

Archana Archana Archana

Arti Chabria

Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin Asin

Ayesha Takia Ayesha Takia

Banupriya

Bhavana Bhavana Bhavana Bhavana

Bhoomika

Bhumika

Bhuvaneshwari

Bhuvaneswari

Bipasa Basu

Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley Celina Jaitley

Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi Charmi

Deepika padukone

Diya mirza Diya mirza

Ekta khosla

Ektha Khosla Ektha Khosla

Endhiran

Esha Deol

Farzana Farzana Farzana

gadde sindhu

Gajala

Genelia Genelia Genelia Genelia

Gopika

haripriya

Hema Sinha

Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana Ileana

Illeana Illeana Illeana

Illeyana

Jyothika

Jyothirmayi

Kajal Agarwal Kajal Agarwal

Kajala

Kajol

Kajole

Kangana Ranaut

kaniha

Kanika

Kareena Kapoor Kareena Kapoor Kareena Kapoor

Katrina Kaif

Kayeri Jha

keerthi

Kim Sharma

Kimmi

Kiran Kiran

Lakshmi rai

Laya

Madhumitha

Malayika Malayika

Mallika Kapoor Mallika Kapoor Mallika Kapoor

Mallika Sherawat

Mamata Mohandas

Mantha

Meena Meena Meena

Meera Jasmine

Monalisa Monalisa

Monica Monica

monika monika

Mumaith Khan Mumaith Khan

Namitha Namitha Namitha Namitha Namitha

Nattamai

Nayyanayar

Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara Nayanthara

Nayanthara

Neha Ahuja

Nikita

Nikitha

Nila

Nisha Kothari Nisha Kothari

Padmapriya Padmapriya Padmapriya Padmapriya

Parvathi Melton

Parvathi Milton

Pooja Pooja

poonam baja

priyamani priyamani priyamani priyamani

Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka Chopra Priyanka

Chopra

rachana

Rachana mourya

rachna mourya

Ramba Ramba

Ramya

Reema Sen Reema Sen Reema Sen Reema Sen

Rekha

Reshma

Riya Sen Riya Sen

Sada Sada Sada Sada

Sameera Reddy

Sandya

Sanghavi Sanghavi

Sania Mirza

Saniamirza

sarawat hani

Shakeela Shakeela

Sherin

Sherlyn Chopra

Shilpa shetty

Shivani Shivani

Shreya Shreya

shriya shriya

Shriya saran

sidu thulani

Silk Smitha

Simran Simran Simran Simran

Sindhu Tolani

sneha sneha sneha sneha sneha

Sona

sonal chouhan

Sonali Bendre

sraddha

Sridavi Sridavi Sridavi

Sridevi

Tabu Tabu

Tamanna Tamanna Tamanna Tamanna

Trisha Trisha Trisha

Charles Crawford

2010-11-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

Charles Crawford was born in Asia and writes creatively as a student at the University of Iowa. His likes include tap water and debauchery, and he is horrified by bees. He is not allergic to them, just terrified by their presence. One stung him in the ear as a child. Perhaps that is to blame.

The Apple Tree
As a kid I often caught my mother smoking—
Cloves, mostly, sometimes Camels— though one
Time I saw her light a joint beneath the apples
Of her wedding gift from uncle Leo, who said it reflected the soul
Of her marriage to his brother. He told a lie,
Though. Their marriage was never so perfect as that tree. No

Matter, because uncle Leo couldn’t know
That my mother would not always be the smoking
Vixen she was then, or that my father would lie
Sincerely, to me and to contemptible men, more than one
Time, to get away from her too-pure soul,
And her stabbing wit. And he hated her silent fits. But the apples

On uncle Leo’s tree were absolutely perfect; the apples
Belonged in the garden of the Hesperides. I know
They’d have been appreciated there: After all, nymphs are the sole
Purveyors of the truly perfect things, like smoking
A cigarette in a field with your beautiful mother one
Sunday, when the grass is thick and moist where you and she lie.

The first time I caught my father in a lie
Uncle Leo’s tree was barren of Apples.
I asked him “Did you eat the last one?”
He licked his lips and said “No”.
But he didn’t know I’d been smoking
Out by the barn. It was fate that I watched him pick the sole

Fruit from the low branches of our tree. If he ever had a soul
It’s in Hades right now. I remember many things about him; the lye
Burns I got the day he disappeared, how distracted he was, smoking
his stinking cigars. I remember, too, staring at the apples
Of the tree one day listening to him. He didn’t know
That I was on the other phone

While he spoke with the asylum, the same one
That would come for my mother, who’s only flaw was sincerity. Her soul
Would not let her tell the men who came that she was not insane. I know
She did not want to go, but she could not tell a lie.
When they came to carry her away, Aeolus roused the winds. Falling apples
Bruised the men as they led her off: She spent her remaining years smoking

In an asylum on a hill. She nearly hung herself more than once. No one there spoke to her
And she got so lonely. But I will not lie, smoking was not her sole solace.
I brought her apples every day, until the tree died. After that she would see me no more.

Doug MacGowan

2010-11-16T11:24:00.000-08:00

A Chicago native, Doug MacGowan has published history books and magazine articles during his writing career. He currently lives on the San Francisco peninsula with his wife, a dog, and far too many cats.

6.

She falls away from me
shadows and height
into her paradise

We must live walled apart
else she destroy me
and I rake the shards of her past sins over her aging bones

7.

The garden is full
crazy roses, not in a line
daisies turn from dust
among the ivy
among the weeds

Wounds of earth fold to scar over their bounty:
a flag
a ring
a bone

Leaf clusters crowd a path that led somewhere long ago, now ending at the stone wall.
Ungated.

Keith Higginbotham

2010-11-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

Keith Higginbotham's poetry has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Beatnik, Blue & Yellow Dog, Clutching at Straws, Counterexample Poetics, Eratio, Liebamour Magazine, Otoliths, Sawbuck, and trnsfr. His chapbooks are Carrying the Air on a Stick (The Runaway Spoon Press) and Prosaic Suburban Commerical (Eratio Editions). He lives in Columbia, SC.

A Novel About Cities

on cabin buddha pipes streak

anything

here radical limits from nude clean fuzz

in parlors

memorial in about

at town is sleepy street dust bands

spat empty & power

stone

the

deadlines

ecliptic path selves staked large inside

pinpoint sea pullover cold

its

margin a small mirror

shredded

Probable Muted of Still

the hang hangs outside the cuckoo

earthy golden sky

under a thousand brightens above

subversive

gloom away rollers

waving sea toward square

strobes its a tall town

through to autumn’s

houses aging the away

flesh

fireworks,

and libretto fetters

held eyes

substance like still

migratory succulent this invisible

screen has out beak

moon

limbs

through the body

six intimate blows from

the colossal

future

of a muted new

Looks Shade Sky

encores in ordinary

the cinema which lilac red shot;

heat—have white blonde hard of the haired sun in its

night rifle of

number

Sandy Benitez

2010-11-13T15:23:00.000-08:00

Sandy Benitez lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming with her husband and their two children. She is the founder and editor of Flutter Press and Flutter Poetry Journal. Most recently, Sandy's poems have appeared in The Literary Burlesque, Pig in a Poke, Raven Images, and ScrewIowa. She loves Thai food and sightseeing.

New Wave Boy

When we first met,
you were my new wave boy:
baggy pants, Haan Cole slip-ons,
and long bangs swept stylishly
to the side.

I had just learned how to peg
pants, replaced tennis shoes
with flats, and wore vests
because layers were fab
thanks to Boy George.

We were hooked on Depeche Mode,
New Order, Duran Duran, and Wham.
Though you would never admit the latter.
I didn't know George was bi.
Was it that obvious?

Nineteen years later,
the clothes have been replaced
with casual yet comfortable.
A pair of Ipods sit on the kitchen
counter pregnant with the past.
Thinning hair clogs the bathtub
drain next to bottles of Nioxin.

And tucked inside our hearts,
a lovesong stuck in the 1980s.
Repeating itself over and over.

J.D. Nelson

2010-11-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words and sound in his subterranean laboratory. More than 1,000 of his bizarre poems and experimental texts have appeared in many small press and underground publications. His most recent collection of poetry, NOISE DIFFICULTY FLOWER (Argotist Ebooks, 2010), is available as a free download. Visit http://www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His audio experiments (recorded under the name OWL BRAIN ATLAS) are online at http://www.OwlNoise.com. OWL NOISE 0, his album of experimental spoken word, is available as a free download at http://www.mediafire.com/owlnoise. J. D. lives in Colorado, USA.

Von Instant: my FM

good moon in the afternoon
good afternoon to my haiku

cube "A" is underground –

beneath the earth
beneath the stars
beneath the eggs

"A" from type "A"

Exposure 11:15

The scorpion has one eye: the flight path of a word
The scorpion has two eyes: the spirit in the meat
The scorpion has three eyes: our puzzling moon
The scorpion has four eyes: microscopic prisoner
The scorpion has five eyes: another everything
The scorpion has six eyes: the wolf I fed

Palaeooölogy

The petrified trees
have leaked into
this dimension.

I’m feeling around
for eggs in a nest.

three Os in a row

I’m scrambling.

Kyle Muntz

2010-11-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

Kyle Muntz is an Enigmatic Ink writer. From Amazon.com:
Taking place in a kind of "internal space," populated by living ideas, Voices utilizes broken typography within the context of an equally broken narrative to examine an existence in which identity and self have become, themselves, imaginary, but have allowed human thought and feeling to reshape the very nature of perceptual reality. Language is given a new, unfamiliar shape: complete freedom to explore the framework of an intricate semiotic landscape.

Excerpt from Voices

The rain
            came first. First
silence, then the rain, a (taptap) tapping
raindrops
falling quiet in the midnight streets droplets lying
            quiet
on the pavement quietly tires passing over
to smooth out the rain iron
                                    our sins
            into the floorboards
of the city down so low
not even the janitor
            remembers to clean them up
            any
more.

::::::::::::::::::

As if
there were order to this introduction. I could say I met her there but that would undermine the scandalous necessities of sequence. And
yes, I realize I’m rolling myself over, as if I could really make this
journey back in time, but I don’t think the rules apply when you’re alone with gorgeous girls
in
the rain.

::::::::::::::::::

I met
her on the vestibule,
seeing as she was there alone. I have an affinity for strange places, facing outwards onto the night. You could see the stars from there, but it wasn’t a good place to write poetry, though sometimes at noon the sun slanted at strange angles across the tiling, engraving the floor in skewed
congruencies of light, tangled in shadow.
Up above, the moon made faces for her. The emptiness pushed further away, a pressurized dilation, bowing down around the center. Every heart beat for her, every word to say. When it was for her, the world became real poetry, to be worthy, even for a moment. Maybe
she would greet me. A turn of the fingers, bright flicker of straining vibes. I knew she’d heard me, because she had ears, to state things blatantly, to name an attribute of her,
isolate the principles of her
altogether, culminating a pantheon onto herself,
otherworldly beauty
and
blatant rendition (changing space). If there’d
been wind, she might have taken flight. Because
                                    she could soar,
altogether. On the
                                    vestibule,
                        I met
her
                                                there.

Kathy Burkett

2010-11-08T19:15:00.000-08:00

Kathy Burkett lives in Central Florida with her husband and two Dachshunds. She is a high school drop out who eventually earned a B.A. in English. She has published poems in various small press publications in print and online. She makes collages and dolls. She plays kazoo for adoring audiences of odd dolls and stuffed animals. She sleeps, eats, and does other mundane stuff, too. She likes to eat the empty holes in donuts and has begun to lose weight by doing this. She thinks small dogs and sock puppets should take over world governments.

Mad Scientist

“Break!” he yells, hammer crashing, smashing a flashlight. Trying to see where the light comes from by breaking it apart. The mysterious power of stars and the odd coldness of technological progress. Nothing is illuminated just now. Waiting for light to emerge from darkness. The immaculate birth of an angel. Disembodied songs of sonic rainbows. Hum of pure energy. His flesh vibrates with music so loud he fails to hear it. “What am I?” he hollers hurtling a large calculator into his backwards image across the room. He wants to see what he’s made of. His face disintegrates into slivers of glass. His hands bleed ketchup-red, fingering shards of his former face. Human soup stains his fingers. Licking bloody sweaty palms as he drains out of himself. Iron and salt shocking his tongue, bitter cake batter grossly under done. He gets cold, shivering from too much science. He covers himself with unyielding pieces of glass and darkness thrown together into an awkward quilt. His eyeballs roll back into the comfort of his skull, covering their backsides with twin blankets of skin. Too much light. The sun is a big flashlight forcing him to squint. He’s in a field of pink sheep. He’s a contestant on a game show, and he knows all the answers. All of the questions are bad jokes. There’s a silent laugh track in the background.

Vacuuming the Void

Sir Real has the unfortunate task of vacuuming the void on a constant basis. Any small particle that enters the void has to be removed promptly so that the void's emptiness remains unblemished.

Sir Real is a plain looking fellow with no eyes, ears, nose, mouth, or any corporeal form to speak of. Every moment of his existence is spent pushing an invisible vacuum through the void with his nonexistent hand, sucking everything into invisibility. Every page of his diary is blank and completely transparent. He thinks of nothing all day long. It is this singular thought that sustains him.

Sleepwaking

A squirrel wearing a moss wig

disappears through a tiny door

in a towering tree shedding its leaves.

I jump up three branches high,

follow her. Find myself inside

a circular wooden room, portraits of

Bloodhounds carved into its walls.

Bowl of broken glass on a low table

Bed made of matchsticks covered

by a quilt of woven tea leaves.

The squirrel reappears holding

a wooden spatula. “You know

you can’t stay here,” she says,

shooing me away onto a branch

thin as telephone wire. I fall

onto prickly green Astroturf.

My skin stiffens into plastic,

hard, smooth and unbruised. I stand

stiffly and wobble through the door

of a purple doll house, find myself

staring at a toy television that

broadcasts invisible news.

The clock is paralyzed at 10:10.

I don’t know if it’s morning

or night. I can’t see through

these painted windows.

I slide into a waterless tub.

My eyes are wide open,

making sleep impossible.

There is no dreaming like this.

Duane Locke

2010-11-02T12:06:00.000-07:00

Duane Locke lives in Tampa, Florida and has had 6,502 poems published in print magazines and e zines, including Nation, American Poetry Review, and Counter-Example Poetics. His last four books 2009-10 are Yang Chu’s Poems 376pp, Crossing Chaos( Canada--Order: Amazon), Voices from Grave (erbacce, England), Soliloquies from a High Wall Cemetery (Differentia Press) California; A Marble Nude Pauline Borghese with a Marble Apple in her Marble hand, 53pp.Scars publications.

I WANTED TO TALK INTIMATELY WITH
SOMEONE, ANYONE

I imitated an automobile,

I sounded

Like a horn being pressed--a motor

Failing to start,

The squeak and skid

Of a quickly pushed in brake.

I added a spin, as if he car was out of control.

I was standing by a fountain in shopping

Center hallway.

I had an audience.

I had been in the desert so long I had not spoken

To a person in years.

I spoke the old colloquialism I had learned when

In a monastery.

The audience looked bored.

The people began to leave.

All my audience was soon gone. They might have stayed

If I had not tried to communicate.

They might have stayed if I had kept imitating

An automobile.

I BECAME A PLAYER

The chromatic

scene was like a poppy printed

On a translucent plastic

And backlit by a purple light bulb,

This mist curled conjoined with stage floor dust.

The mimesis was deemed “romance,’

Which meant it was a Hellenistic reenactment

Of an Attic myth, Apollo

Trying to get Daphne to comb her

Wild hair into an occasion for a cordial cocktail.

A nun appeared, a strand

Of blond hair slid from black cover hiding her hair

To segment

A slight indentation on her forehead.

She touched

With her green-painted fingernail

That black silk shirt with a white tie

Of a passer-by.

We knew it was a fragmentation

That was dislocation in a world

We were taught was rational

And intelligently ordered.

The mowers carrying boxes

Packed with the beliefs and values

Of the past sixties’ ungenteel generation.

The mowers talked in high diction

About baroque art and the counter reformation.

It ended with a dance.

The mist had risen and thickened

And no one could see what was happening

On the stage, but a critic pontificating from

Ceiling loud speakers informed us--

It was a dance, a minuet,

Bare feet moving according

To regular traditional metrics

To crush grapes.

LIGHT INSIDE A LUMP OF ROSE QUARTZ

A light, shaped

Like a crooked spiral staircase

With some steps lumps,

Other steps look like

Opinions of the wind,

Ascend or descends

According to the mood

Of the perceiver or faith.

The color of light

Is one of the colors

Of the many-colored peach.

This light is the peach color

Of yellow, a mandarin

Chinese pale yellow. This

Lights is so otherworldly

In spite of its orientalism

If it wrote a gospel

It would Gnostic Christian,

Mything pleromas.

It is the light that

Some perceivers

See inside a lump of quartz,

Rose quartz.

This lump of quartz

Was given me by a girl

Who had gold twists for hair,

But who ran away

From being a nurse

In a nursing home

To wear only

Only a white sheet

Stolen from Sears

To pray all day

Worshiping the sun,

To pray all night

Worshiping the reflected

Sun light of the moon

In an unknown part

Of a rain forest.

I now am painting on canvas

The lump of rose quartz,

Dimming the rose to accent

The inner mobile yellowish light

Which when painted

Will be still and false

To be imagined mobile

By the perceiver.

I am painting on a ground

Gessoed white, and

Sprayed with a Duccio gold

That Duccio used to give

The proper background

For the divine.

G. X. Jupitter-Larsen

2010-11-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

GX Jupitter-Larsen is a writer & artist, based in Hollywood, California. He's been active in a number of underground art scenes since the late 1970s including punk rock, mail art, cassette culture, the noise music scene, and zine culture. During the 1990s he was the sound designer Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories. There are three published novels written by Jupitter-Larsen. Raw Red and The Condor was published by Blood Print Press in 1992. Sometimes Never was published in 2009 by Crossing Chaos, and Adventure on The High Seas was published this year by Enigmatic Ink. A book of French translations of his essays and short fiction, entitled Saccages has been published by the Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival and Rip on/off. Vincent Barras, who translated John Cage's Silence into French, wrote one of the book's introductions.

Excerpt from Adventure On The High Seas

Nude and drenched in saliva, she was sliding down the esophagus head first. The blood was rushing to her head. Wave after wave of involuntary peristalsis pushed her towards the stomach. She had been swallowed whole, and with all her panic, wasn’t able to think of anything else.

It didn’t matter that her eyes had been glued shut by all the drool, there was only a damp darkness which, like the inner wall of the esophagus, wrapped tightly around her body. All she could feel were wet rubbery slaps against her skin. She could barely breath. The heart pounding in her ears wasn’t her own.

Suddenly she sensed warmth. She was approaching the stomach. Before she could fully comprehend what was happening, the surrounding muscles, which had clutched her so firmly till now, started to relax. Then, without a sound, she had been spewed into the belly. Plop; then fizz. She splashed into the hollow organ of acids and enzymes.

She still couldn’t really move that much, and the stench was overwhelming. Right away, she started to feel a sharp bite at her legs and buttocks. It was like sitting crunched-over in a bound sack half filled with corrosive slush. The digestive juices were kissing away her flesh, burning away at her muscle tissue. Digestion had begun. It was stinging! It was painful! She wanted to scream, but could only choke on the fumes. She couldn’t make a peep. Between the anguish and her suffocation, she knew her body was being tenderly liquefied.

Before she finally lost consciousness, random impressions pass by her mind: the pussy-willows she used to collect as a small child; her first kiss as an adolescent; oxygen.

Her body had been converted into a soft paste, a dough-like pulp. As she moved passed the duodenum and was received into the small intestine, she was further dissolved by the juices from the pancreas and liver. After all of the nutrients from her body had been absorbed through the intestinal walls, the undigested parts of her were propelled into the colon. There she remained, until she was expelled by a bowel movement.

Life had been too exciting to be fair. Her anatomy had been a meal for some creature from the countryside. The eye sockets of her skull gazed upwards.

What wasn’t then eaten by dung-beetles for food, was subsequently absorbed into the ground for nutrients. Even the dirt was hungry. Heavens to Betsy! On Venus the soggy sun sets in the east, but the sapphire sky that was above us was hemorrhaging with bliss. Formidable disasters, drawn to a few smouldering remnants, were anxiously chewing cud in a gesture of exasperated difficulties. Immediately forestalled, the rust advanced alone the distance between two floods. Measured steps revoked and replaced any impending surprise. The standstill hurried off, toppled closely by silent crumbling underfoot. Vacuum sowed confusion. Ooopsy daisy! Lavish rot from a variety of overlapping and complementary flourishing decays.

John Swain

2010-10-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

John Swain lives in Louisville, Kentucky. His chapbooks, Prominences and Sinking of the Cloth, appeared from Flutter Press and Set Apart Before the World Was Made appeared from Calliope Nerve Media. Full of Crow published his ebook, The Feathered Masks. His work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best of the Web.

Medallion on the Banks

A river of leaves parallels the flowing river
in the changing wind.
I pray someday to fall
like these spirits quicksilver into themselves
and then move effortlessly into one another.
The sun cuts like a medallion on the banks
as the end of journeys continues on the table
of welcome like a woman's givingness.
I scrape the mud caked on my wading boots
and leave myself like a dog on the threshold.

The Body of Water

When the moon subdues its initial conflagration
and silvers the night like another day to harvest,
I silence the bronzed waving fronds I trampled.
The exposed rock shelves ascend like a pyramid
to the wine chalice of a sky lake,
I drank again and again from the body of water.
My life before slept preserved in a wrap of furs,
a red pheasant flushed from where I cut my rib,
then a handful of sand became my only companion.
I burned a queen hibiscus and sage to clean myself
and rowed in a boat of matted reeds and grasses
where the sky emptied its being on hems of azure.

Inheritance

I fear for the unborn
and fear for the wild,
all that has passed between us
will drift away.
And as glass beads fall
from around your neck,
this fear is the extent
of our natural inheritance.

Juliet Cook

2010-10-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

Juliet Cook’s poetry has appeared in a plethora of print and online entities. She is also the editor/publisher of Blood Pudding Press (print) and Thirteen Myna Birds (online). She has had more than ten darkly delicious oodles of poetry chapbooks published; her first full-length poetry book, ‘Horrific Confection’ was published by BlazeVOX in 2008. To find out more about all of the above and other yummy details, feel free to visit www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Unfurling

On & off my brain she/he wants to break
tiny splinters embedded into inner thighs
with a high pitched buzz. Lobbing orchids,
wet dark truffles oozed through funereal fantasyland.
Tentacular lobes unglued, steamy, no longer able to fly.
My parents’ cat kills not only mice but butterflies.

Angioplasty Show

Tiger teeth exhale red angiosperms
like a tattered face mask.
Misshapen corpse vat writhes open
a dark vaudevillian synapse.

Deadly Doll Head Dissection

Doll head fantasyland, fun-filled dollies, licking dollies, slurping dollies, yummy dollies, gummy dollies, genuflecting dollies, dick sucking dollies, doll gags, doll debauchery, a sipping, slipping, discombobulated dolly.

A doll thought she was being drunk sweetly. A doll thought she was softly peeking, but she was peaking like an anorexic doll head turning black. Like a servile ugly duckling with a deviated septum soon to be a cunt doll, an asshole doll, a stinky dolly douche bag, a bitchy doll injection mold disaster. Bleeding doll, broken doll, doll head rape. Shackled doll, spasmed doll, mangled doll, impaled doll, unglued doll legs, smashed doll brain.

Deadly doll head dissection. A dolly crematorium, an almost life less doll. A doll scatterbrained, a doll agitating until it barfs up more awful doll head gobbledygook. A spitting and hacking doll. Spinning, falling and flailing inside the doll vomitorium. A dark doll somnambulating and throwing up.

A doll hurling jerky truffles, a doll unfurling quirky squiggles. A scary doll giggles then explodes like a dollcano. A bloody shimmering doll. A hotly whirring doll. A rising up doll head. A transforming doll brain. A doll biting back until penile balloons hiss then deflate…

Dr. Kane X. Faucher

2010-10-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

Kane X. Faucher is a Canadian author and academic in London, Ontario. His accolades include: Associate Editor: The Semiotic Review of Books, The Poster: Journal of Visual Rhetoric in the Public Sphere, Semiophagy: Journal of Pataphysics and Existential Semiotics, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Autopsia.

Excerpt from "The Vicious Circulation of Dr Catastrope": Book 2

Author’s Prologue

It was by the King’s decree that I continue this tale, and indeed it was he who detained me with his crackling whine and tearful lamentation that the story not be at its conclusion. It was quite embarrassing, actually, and an unkingly attitude to strike this wee and whelpish commoner born of a whore and a carnival barker (whom the Bible commands me to honour, as I do in my own way best befitting God’s humour rather than his spiteful wrath). If it were not for my good spirit and duty to my Country and Crown, I may have faced the gallows had I not complied—so amiss was the King’s state, his noble comportment and great carriage that succors us all brought down to a kind of crestfallen and browbeaten tit-saggery. You may thank the King and his weepy insistence for the continuance of my tale. But I should explain why I was initially intending to break with the chronicle at this point:

It was my intention to end the tale abruptly, just as I must do at the tavern when the little harpy I betrothed so long ago screeches from outside the public house doors loud enough for the whole town to hear, a sonorous voice that can etch glass and cause a man to rip off his ears because of its pure vertiginous Beauty. When my darling Scylla—whom I love with unsinful, devoted reverence, and with whom I conjugate in copulation only for reproduction purposes—sends me out on an errand to fetch a few yards of sausage and a flagon of C-grade bovine fat to fill the larder and the figure of her womanly corpulence, I usually set a spell in the olde tavern, making a kind of segue from the quotidian labours to wag tongues with the lads. It is here we mix tales of courage, bravery, and Man’s eternally invanquishable Spirit in the face of all tribulations – including that fine institution of marriage (God granting, and with a pure faithful heart). When the round is passed a few times, I am called upon to offer up a tale that will give these men hope and further reasons to rejoice in the spirit of Fraternity. Alas, the exquisite spawning-mother of all my precious pupae does usually beckon me from my tale in mid-stride, she being lovingly persistent as only the most glorious of goats one sees in the garden of the Hesperides, or with the constancy of a Homeric potato in the pocket.

Dr. Catastrope is not here resurrected in his due honour, and I recommence the tale I so fiendishly left off with another like soul named Francois. But amidst words of lofty praise and the call for my deification within the canon of Letters, there come the sour note of those gimcrack lollygagging critics whose only gift—as it is granted from the boweline depths of most vicious Hades—is to publicly excoriate me with their idle slanders and barbaric invectives. O the heaped insults against such a fine person that I am! How may I endure their pickled talk, born as it is from the lowest of the barrelhouses in West Manchester or perhaps the unkempt brothels of Upper Brunswick? Of the things that have been imputed to my person, I find these items in the worst of taste:

That I am:

A bagharper

A clodsniffler

A colonoscopic burst

A pus-filled tumorous excrescence

An execrable word flaunter

A verbletter

A loose spigot

A corrupt wine-barrel sheriff

A shiller of hard pitch

A wharfsman of mean disposition

A miser of description

A toilsome narrative voice

An inveterate listmaker

A hackish dwarf

A purveyor of literary emesis

A broken gangplank of Reason

A toppled tower of turpitude

A rainfeverish troll

A snapped wet twig in the kindling

A one-ended bridge

A fimbriated mannerist

A rugmerchant of lies

A mercenary of bad fortune

A diviner of phlegmatic spittoons

A plodding mendicant friar

A crass flytrap hanging from the rafters of alehouses

A double-dealing madcap

A shellfish of human misery

A chamberpot poet

A scat-meter of Man’s lowest watermark

A fabulist

A cinder in the wine

A frog-eyed belly-padder

A mattress-bound dilettante

A sinus-blocked cracker

A sawduster of sausage filling

An all-beef patty

A solicitor of a drain of pale

A cloudy fuller

A woadmaking lettersmith

A walking pox

&c.,

Am I to endure such things? I think not! My chronicle is surely immune to such vicious criticisms by these lean snarling curs. Anyhow...

Is this a disastrous turn I see before me? Methinks I spy... a metaphor! Turn your better cheek before me lest my elegant club find your conceptual backside! Little did you know, you speakers of twin-tongues that Dr. Catastrope is also a verb formation that one can no longer ignore. Bring out your slate boards and copy this out for memory:

Catastrope (ka-ta-strohp):

1. Proper noun of Dr. Catastrope

2. A noun that signifies a disastrous turn, composed of the Greek katastrophein and trope (a turn).

3. Catastropic: Adjective meaning that which pertains to the fricative and post-labial sound that is emitted in a time of distress. Ex.: This musical noise brings me to the point of utter distress, it is so catastropic!

4. To catastrope: infinitive of the verb, catastrope, meaning a desire to strangle people who think they can write tales about children committing suicide. Ex.: If you publish that tasteless shit-for-shit text, I will personally catastrope you! To Catastrope you would be a necessary function of my being!

Verb usage of to catastrope

I catastrope

You catastrope

He / she / it catastropes

We / they catastrope

You (plural-formal) cataspin

Present perfect continuous: catastroping (we were catastroping all weekend until our ears fell off from imagined leprosy).

Past: catastroped. Johnny catastroped his way to ruin.

Adverbial form: How catastropely our lives go, leading forever to that Great Toilet.

Comparative: John is almost as catastropish as Mary.

Implied Superlative: John is the catastropiarch of the group. He is more catastropely catastropish than anyone he knows.

Ebonic form: katasdope, cat-stroke, catapa-tatapope, schizosoap, k-tope, k-topaz bling dang bin phat dawg.

Addendum note: The rumoured second usage of the word as a proper noun denoting an island in the Atlantic measuring three metres square is unsubstantiated, for it would make the man an island. The other use, in biology, is a recent addition. A catastropod is a type of mollusk that dies of ennui due to a porous shell and an internal intolerance to salty water that negatively affects its psyche. It usually reproduces grudgingly.

Now that we have cleared up these nasty grammatical matters, I owe you the continuance of my chronicle in this second book. Anyhow, let us get to it since I must get back to my long neglected beverage to which I must pay flapping lip service rather than to the dry non-distilled likes of you.

Catastropely,

Your Fabulous Narrator.

Tom Bradley

2010-10-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

Tom Bradley's latest books are Bomb Baby (Enigmatic Ink), Even the Dog Won't Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing), Acting Alone: a novel of nuns, neo-Nazis and NORAD (The Drill Press), My Hands Were Clean (Unlikely Books), Calliope's Boy (Black Rainbows Press) and Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), which was named 3:AM Magazine's Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Further curiosity can be indulged at http://tombradley.org.

Excerpt from Bomb Baby, pages 30-31:

In the middle of Hiroshima's Peace Park, standing at full attention among the barbecued cuttlefish booths, is a platoon of male college cheerleaders, Sam’s students. These junior fascists are dressed in WWII-style military uniforms of dark-blue wool. They’re rallied under giant radiating-sun flags and banners emblazoned with reversed and righted swastikas. Their boom-box blares martial music and racist propaganda. A couple of these cheerleaders hold up a big placard which reads, in both Japanese and English--

WE ARE A DIVINE NATION

WITH THE EMPEROR AT OUR CENTER!

One bulldog-like cheerleader screams into a megaphone, "Japan is a tiny rice paddy! America is a treeless peak! Flood control is paramount!"

Everyone is terrified of these fanatical boys--everyone except Sam, of course. He barges through their ranks.

Among the cheerleaders is a thin boy with glasses, who looks frazzled. He is Sam’s most nervous student. Sam shouts at him, "Why aren’t you at home studying your English? It’s a required course, you know!"

The nervous student almost faints from embarrassment. He gobbles some pharmaceutical amphetamines from a little prescription bottle. It looks as though he’s got quite a habit.

Feeling really holy now, Sam prances further into the A-Bomb Golden Anniversary Celebration, heading toward Ground Zero.

Felino A. Soriano

2010-10-24T14:35:00.000-07:00

Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974), is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has authored 38 print and electronic collections of poetry, including “In Praise of Absolute Interpretation” (Desperanto, 2010) and “Realities of Bifocal Translations” (Blue & Yellow Dog Press, 2010). His poems have appeared at Calliope Nerve, Unlikely 2.0, BlazeVOX, Metazen, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He edits & publishes Counterexample Poetics, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing electronic chapbooks of experimental poetry. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to classic and avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His website explains further: www.felinoasoriano.info.

Approbations 740

—after Herbie Hancock’s Driftin’

Relocate, then. Then

recall

positional placement

interpreted finite

elements of fulcrum

shown

pivotal newness. Of air’s

hand-woven documentation

etching now’s malleable spontaneous alterations, here

here

decorated

evidence of a melody’s dissipating negligence.

Approbations 741

—after John Coltrane’s Serenity

angular

moisture

portrays

abstract blurs of succinct representation

curtains of mathematical crows

disavow

fundamental

clarity

disowning proper definitions

reinventing abject focus

leaving

stained glass semblances

glossy against renewed

inclines of

manipulated instance.

Approbations 742

—after McCoy Tyner’s Impressions

Persona

portrait

renege clearness distorted consent

provoking intellectual motive, of resource

participatory dialectic

betwixt camaraderie

and

designated halos

lit-north versions of

constituted logic.

Raymond Neely

2010-10-24T10:28:00.000-07:00

Regional poet Raymond Neely was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia and has always resided in or near to Pipestem. He was educated at Concord College of Athens, West Virginia where he earned a Bachelor of the Arts degree in English composition. His poetry represents the present day poetic mind of thriving Appalachia, scenic Pipestem, and the surrounding areas.

Bouquets

Of wine,

of weddings,

breathe their deep aromas.

Of summer walks down old dirt roads,

of wildflowers,

of roses,

the unfolding trick of a magician's hand,

for dates,

for wives,

of shops,

and homemade,

bouquets.

Of Beauty

There is a single vision of bright light which I had as a child. It is of a girl or woman out on the porch of a white house swinging from one hand around the pillar, swooning slowly from side to side, leaning out over the edge. I was riding in a car and it was summertime. She wore a yellow sundress. It was all of beauty.

I peer closer as I remember and she becomes clearer until I can nearly see her face with bright evening sunlight yellowing the air. I remember that my first feeling of love was about her and her beauty, first love about a girl or woman. Now I see the angel threads of her lemon colored hair for an instant and she's swinging around the pillar.

I know that it was your from pictures of you when you were younger which you showed me. She was you all along. The vision continues, nowadays, and it's still there on the porch of an old white house in Pipestem and you are kissing daisies, showered with petals and dust and pollen and the light of the sun like free vitamins.

Blossoms

The whitest apple blossoms
dapple the foilage of their tree,
lay and hang in the wind amid the leaves,
carouselling with the bumblebees,
the sweet seeping odor of ripe apples,
and the whitest apple blossoms.
Floating our of the mountains hanging
beneath the twirling umbrella of an
apple blossom;
shake a limb and they are like confetti.
They copter downward,
some see-sawing lazily,
falling apple blossoms,
others lolling in the air as they fall,
blossoms.

Travis Macdonald

2010-10-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

Travis Macdonald's first book The O Mission Repo (an erasure of The
9/11 Commission Report) is available from Fact-Simile Editions
(www.fact-simile.com) and his second collection, N7ostradamus, was released
by BlazeVox (www.blazevox.org) in late 2010. Basho's Phonebook, an e-chap of
experimental translations, is available from E-ratio
(www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com). Other work has appeared in print and
online journals worldwide. He is currently in the midst of relocating to
Philadelphia from Santa Fe, NM.

3 excerpts from Sonnet 86

Making their tomb wherein they grew?

Bringing into certain

form, from one state

to another, the nominative plural.

Possessive of people in general,

an excavation

in earth or rock

for the burial of a corpse or

any sepulchral structure

in which, contained,

the nominative plural of people

(in general) came to be

by a gradual process.

Or, by degrees

of accretion; became.

Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write

To occupy a place or position in

past tense, the player called up-

on to perform an act.

That or those be-

longing to him: the principle

of conscious life, the vital principle

animating the body or mediating between

the body and soul with something. At stake

on an attitude that inspires,

animates or pervades. Thought,

feeling and action caused.

To learn by example or experience

with the resultant condition of the composition

of words and characters duly set down.

Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?

In, at or to

a higher place

overhead upstairs in the sky:

a certain particular

pertaining to death.

The degree of inclination

or slope as subject.

Or object as relative,

clause thrust forcibly.

The objective case

of I, incapable

of being

emotionally moved

bereft of sensation, extinguished.

Michael Lee Johnson

2010-10-22T15:51:00.000-07:00

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet from Itasca, Illinois, published in 23 countries.
Website: http://poetryman.mysite.com. His published poetry books available: through his site, Amazon.Com, Borders Books, and Lulu.com. Now on You-Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5WJrjqQ18. Author of, The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom, & From Which Place the Morning Rises.

If You Find No Poem

If you find

no poem on

your doorstep

in the morning,

no paper, no knock on your door,

and your life is poorly edited

but no broken dashes

or injured meter

and you don’t wear white

dresses late in life

embroidered with violet

flowers on the collar;

nor do you have

burials daily

across main street,

and no one whispers

in your ear, Emily Dickinson-

you feel alone-

but not reclusive-

the sand lady

still sleeping in your eyes-

wiping your tears away-

if you find

no poem on

your doorstep-

you know your not

from New England.

I Am Old Frustrated Thought

I am old frustrated thought

I look into my once eagle eyes

and find them dim before my dead mother,

I see through clouded egg whites with days

passing by like fog feathers.

I trip over old experiences and expressions,

try hard to suppress them or revisit them;

I’m a fool in my damn recollections,

not knowing what to keep and what to toss out-

but the dreams flow like white flour and deceive

me till they capture the nightmare of the past images

in a black blanket wrapped up

and wake me before my psychiatrist.

I only see this nut once every three months.

It is at times like these I know not where I walk

or venture. I trip over my piety and spill my coffee cup.

I seek sanctuary in the common place of my nowhere life.

Solid footing is a struggle in the sock of depression

it is here the days pass and the years slip like ice cubes.

Rose Petals in a Dark Room

I walk in a mastery of the night and light

my money changers walk behind me

they are fools like clowns in a shadow of sin,

they’re busy as bees as drunken lovers,

Sodom and Gomorrah before the salt pillar falls.

In a shadow of red rose pedals

drunken lovers walk changing Greek and Roman

currency to Jewish or Tyrian money-

they are fools, all fools, at what they do.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

They are my lovers and my sinners

I can’t sleep at night without them

by my bed or the sea of Galilee.

Fish in cloth nets are my friends and my converts.

I pray in my garden alone; while all the rest

who love beside me sleep behind their innocence.

The rose is a tender thorn compared to my arrest.

and soon crucifixion.

It is here the morning and the night come together,

where the sea and the land part;

where the building crumbles

and I trust not myself to them.

I am but a poet of the ministry,

rose petals in a dark room fall.

Everyone’s life is a conflict.

But mine is mastery of light and night

and I walk behind the footsteps of no one.

Ron Koppelberger

2010-10-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ron Koppelberger is aspiring to become established as a poet and a short story writer. He has written 91 books of poetry over the past several years and 16 novels; He has been submitting work for the past year and is thrilled by acceptance. He is always looking for an audience and has published 248 poems and 65 short stories in a variety of periodicals, including The Storyteller, Ceremony, Write On!!! (Poetry Magazette), Freshly Baked Fiction and Necrology Shorts, recently won the People’s Choice Award for poetry in The Storyteller for a poem titled Secret Sash and is a member of The American Poet’s Society as well as The Isles Poetry Association.

Desert Vision

Making journeys of distant sand and

Embryonic hold, a galloping desert vision

In velvet manes and chapped saddle sought.

By the dry gulp of ancient sips in dust and

Tender tears, the desolate rider borne by the same

Breath of quest and cause, by the need

For western horizons and

Desert blooms.

Carnivals in Rust

Unshaken by the wheels of revolving metal and quaky rainbow

Light, a thrill in thrall and a scream of joyous

Event, by popcorn scents and greasy gears

In shifting conspiracy with the clang and clamor

Of childhood dreams, of clowns in Vaseline and paint, by the

Light of crescent moons and sodium lamps, by sooth and

The wonders of drama, the realm of carnies and

Ponies in galloping dusty row, by cotton candy cheeks

And carnivals in rust.

"My World" (by the author, October 2010)

Like O Sweet Flowery Roses? Help design O Sweet Flowery Roses.

2010-10-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

OSFR has been reborn, but we're not done yet. Our background is the old logo tiled, but it's time for changes across the board. Are you good with graphic design or good ol' fashioned drawing? Send us your images. We may very well have a new background.

-Russell

A.J. Kaufmann

2010-10-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

A.J. Kaufmann is a young Polish poet, songwriter and traveler, the author of "Siva in Rags" (KSE, 2008), "Pilgrims & Indians" (Deadbeat Press, 2008), "Broke Nuptial Minds" (Virgogray Press, 2009), "Vagabond Vacancy" (KSE, 2010) and other poetry chapbooks. A.J. blogs at http://kaballahfreighttrain.wordpress.com and is currently recording his debut solo CD, "Second Hand Man".

PEPSI EARTH

horizontal fragments of adventure
sour milk
urged blue
wood-and-fabric millions
distant harmonicas
somebody’s art
backroom
change, the fragile seed of space
sister of substance
brightening capsule
concessions the rare
simple vapor
moments
re-breathing omission and breeze
the planet grows boots
on little couples
tinted iconic
gasping the molecular night
dryly nuclear Moon
junk Pepsi Earth

HITCHHIKE THE STARS

soft fluorescent
space-fitness
on truck, clothes, much stuff
sentient over repainted
patches
wistful, in hope
you’re there, here…
I’ll be a watch… the cat light
talk waved
keep diving
ground-to-orbit-joint
absence, eyes, thoughts -
including me -
we hitchhike the stars

SKY BRAIN

Silent swarming decay
of concrete resonant
skulls
haze-covered cones
of tingling radios
markers above
the white
ageing
temple
hooked to a blank
pale-green
tumbled horizon
in vegetation
of neon shaped fingers
merciful hands
like bristled candles
reach towards the pretty concealed
black fliers safe and sky in mind
recovered 60’s agendas, antennae whispering
Allen’s litanies skyward
fleshless jewels of darted chill
beat poems found
in black living narrows

John Gray

2010-10-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

DRY .

Snails crawl across the path,

slicking the earth as they go.

A spider hangs from its web

like a jewel of dew.

The last of the rain

makes up my mind for me.

I will venture on.

The clouds will break.

The sun will towel me.

The birds fly back to life.

The bugs emerge.

The chill of my skin

takes comfort in crow caw,

dragonfly hum.

The rain is water

off a pond's back.

Fish leap and hang the consequence

A great blue heron

listens in on its next meal.

The drizzle clears

but trees continue to sprinkle.

A leaf cup of rain

tips all over me.

The oak has been waiting

for just such an opportunity.

I laugh at myself.

The heart is first to dry.

HEART SAIL

Tonight, I navigate the ocean of sleep,

my heart as sails.

Cross the surface of the dark,

I glide between the sheets, the love,

the buoyant mattress, the belief.

A good wind of forty years behind,

and an open sea of dreams ahead,

why shouldn’t I take my vaunted place

atop that creamy blue horizon.

Distance, time, fold under my fabled rudder.

I go where the good night takes me.

I wake and here I am.

BIRD CALL

It's always been this way.

Blue jays squawk at 5 a.m.

Song sparrows live up to their name

with a burst of sudden six o'clock trilling.

A solitary chickadee skews the melody

with its chirpy downward scale.

A titmouse sounds its "peter peter",

calling for a mate

or the sun.

It's all for my benefit I believe.

Better that than a jarring clock radio,

or the boisterous shake

from the household's morning bully.

My life is lived

at the behest of birds.

My eyes open with their permission.

My body unravels on their sweet say-so.

My head clears, note for note.

OSFR = back

2010-06-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

Bonus thanks to Google Images for providing this e-gem. Internet to English dictionary: your = you're.

It's been a long time; OSFR will be posting like crazy again!
Remember: 3 poems, an author photo, and a bio.

-Russell Jaffe

Featured Poet; Sydney Foos

2010-02-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

"My name is Sydney Foos, I'm a student at Bard College from Los Angeles. I came across your site recently and immediately wanted to be a part of it. I've been writing my whole life, and would love to share my work with you and your readers. Included are a few of my pieces, I hope you enjoy them."

Colorful Nonsense

Sometimes I forget to breathe
forget to keep the blues and reds coursing through
hughes I wish I knew better
maybe life then wouldn't be so granted a taken for
maybe then we could live like were supposed to
with every pint and ounce and drop meaning everything
who knows what we would do if we were a little more alive

And so with every breath and step and quake I will take from you and pull from you all that can be extracted from the sorry shivers that come to me in the middle of the night that say go and stay and need him and leave him and drive yourself mad with worship for what could should will not never be
Snake the sap from within him but never show him his holes. Dive and dwell in the divine highs that his hide provides remember to keep him near but never never never let down those life size walls that dictate his draw to you
Puncture the power that you both provide pile on the crackling curtains that peak at just enough and hide all the rest
Rest on your haunches and follow your hunches that there is more to hunt at in each others hearts
It's haunting how hurtful our happy can be
Forever a fool to forgotten four letter words
Shoulda coulda woulda shoulda stayed on that dilapidated deathbed for another day with my doubts

A few words

f not for ourselves then what are we?
How does a person get so far away from what they are?
Look at that girl with her eyes glazed over with mystery
you'll see what she shows you
you can be hers but you'll never call her mine
She lets you think you've captured her
But at the last moment you'll realize she never gave herself away
What is she looking for and its nothing and everything at the same time
you'll tear yourself apart looking for her
and never realize there's nothing to find

I'll come alive tomorrow she said
and again the next day and the day after that
I'll stop rotting as soon as this next one is done
with this carcass that's left of me
Celibacy she said

What is it that makes us turn on ourselves?
That makes us crawl so deep into the craters of our own pores.
Who are we to eat ourselves alive?
For all that we are how can we hate what we see so much?
I'd rather die than watch myself walk away.

I would hurt me if I were you.

What is it about these men looking at me and then not looking at me and then looking again and have you ever seen so much ugly in a room full of beautiful? Now they all look but instead no one sees.

OSFR Classic Revised and Revisted: Pal O' Me Heart by Barry Frauman

2009-12-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

PAL O’ ME HEART

A non-plagiarizing tribute to the novel AT SWIM, TWO BOYS by Jamie O’Neill

Arthur and Gavin, boys nearing manhood,

soon to fight for Irish freedom,

Easter Rebellion of 1916,

rising to expel the British:

Arthur slim under thick auburn mop

he shakes from his hazel eyes,

tossing his head to meet the world,

shyly biting his lower lip

at certain special pleasures:

honors in school for Latin,

reading of heroes in ancient times,

watching a sea storm:

Over gray water the waves peak white,

echoing lightning above.

A lad from a Catholic home,

he used to bind his hands with the rosary

not to fetch himself,

bottling his lust into fever

till his father and brother heard his moans

and said "Don’t struggle,

you can’t sell sweets in the shop lying sick."

Arthur’s reluctant to act his passion

for muscular black-haired anti-Church Gavin,

laboring son of the poorest folk,

who donned a kilt with him at school band,

curly black hair on his legs, dark eyes,

daring and quick, a sudden sharp grin,

who’s been with a man but it’s Arthur he’s loved

since the auburn lad struck in like thunder

to stave class bullies off Gavin the new boy,

soon to die wounded in Arthur’s arms;

but now, alone with each other,

(word’s gone out of Rebellion delayed)

an Easter morning sunny and cool,

they swim the sea near Dublin,

their bodies only as nature created –

"Dare your pope to say it’s wrong" –

clothes hidden dry on shore meanwhile.

They’ll carry them up the hill of new grass

but throw them aside to race about,

members bouncing and leaping, Gavin ahead.

At last out of breath, they drop to the land.

Alongside each other, on their fronts,

what work they’ll do in free Ireland,

Gavin a postman, Arthur a teacher,

living together of course;

enemy boys in school they fought:

"When O’Connor sneered at our so together

I saw your fist come out same as mine,

you’re the man for me, Arthur McNally – "

"And Gavin, we decked him, Monahan too;

and thanks to the priests, they’ll keep away."

"Why God made priests, you muddy red mop-head,

also for tickling us on the sly – "

"And who’s to stop them? tell me now."

"If any – " "You’ll be first to hear."

Now Gavin turns on his right to face Arthur,

nudging his pal to lie on his left.

The amorous narrow of Gavin’s black eyes,

his full red lips tucked in, beckon Arthur;

but when Gavin’s fingers walk up his friend’s thigh

to fondle his desire,

Arthur protests, and he lets go.

"A kiss at least?" "Ah Gavin, one day....

Please touch me face and tell me you love me."

"Arthur, I love you," and tenders his palm

on the cheek and brow of his auburn mate,

mussing and smoothing his hair.

"I love you meself, Gavin McCall.

Bit nervous about today I was,

bit nervous where it would lead,

and now I feel brought down to rest."

"Well Arthur, come to me arms, sleep so."

His drowsy lad he softly cradles,

gazing the water to lull his passion.

Naked they lie, alone on hill-meadow.

Soon Arthur awakens: "If we might stay."

They speak of Ireland’s liberty battle.

When dressed, Gavin sports a green uniform:

Will he take Arthur to see his commander

in time for them to march side by side,

comrades-in-arms?

"Like that we’ll be most together, Gavin,

lover-soldiers of ancient Thebes."

At first these words dislike dark Gavin,

silently fearing the fight, who’ll die like a man:

"You’ll join me in battle?

Arthur McNally, you danger yourself,

I’ll bate you blue-black, or wreck meself tryin’....

A teacher of Latin you want to be?

then keep in school, prepare so –"

"Gavin McCall, I’m grand at shootin’,

I’ll come where you – "

"Laddie, no tears, I’ll write you me place,"

an arm round the mop-head’s milkwhite shoulders....

Sea and hill, the quiet around,

invite them to taste a last day of peace.

Sweet hunger stirs in the freshening breeze.

His deepest desires tenderly roused,

held warm and tight by his black-haired Gavin –

will such a moment be theirs again? –

Arthur who’s never, now turns his back

and solemnly offers himself to his friend,

who gently warns it may hurt.

"Now think to kiss me before you come in."

"Glory be!" shouts Gavin; and when he does enter,

the pain to hazel-eyed Arthur is brief,

allayed by the taste and touch of his man.

"Are you fine so? It’s your time in me,"

but Arthur says wait, let me hold this feeling.

Gavin’s full lips now stretched in a grin,

Arthur openmouthed in delight,

they surge with love, groins pressed together,

limbs wide, hands locked,

their eyes all afire, another kiss panting

pal o’ me heart evermore.

editor's notes: This poem was originally published in August of 2008; Poet Barry Frauman has revised it and here it is, re-presented and represented in its intended entirety.
-Russell

December report: many shades of many greys

2009-12-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

Hi Flowery Fans,

This is Russell. I haven't updated OSFR in a while, and here's some explaination to that:

1.) Side project: Good Hurts. It's a hot sauce review website. It's a different kind of fun than OSFR in that it's 100% in my own control and up to me to update, work on, et. al. As long as there is hot sauce and I have a camera, Good Hurts lives. No need to prod or seek out submissions. Check it out, why don'ch'a? ? ?Stay spicy.

2.) I'm actually going to be teaching a course I've designed, Frontiers of Poetry, here in Iowa. It's mostly about emerging internet poetry and communities, with looks at more experimental contemporary stuff. If you'd like your site or poems included in the couse syllabus (it's 5 weeks long, but fierce!), go ahead and email me.

3.) Attention spans may wane, but OSFR is unbreakable. Keep submitting! Enjoy!

-Happy Holidays
-RUSSELL

Featured Poet: John Grey

2009-12-09T09:11:00.000-08:00

"I have been published recently in the Georgetown Review, The Pinch, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal. with work upcoming in Poetry East and Big Muddy."

IN MY CAR

The commercial tells me that it’s all here and

I’m beginning to believe it. Its plush leather

seats, its acres of leg room...I could live in

this car. I can turn the key and the world

rumbles on all side of me. I can switch on the

headlamps and it’s a light like a god’s light.

And there’s the radio...any song, any style,

any volume with just a few flicks of the

wrist. And it doesn’t matter that I’m alone.

With my hands on the wheel, I’m all I need.

It doesn’t take another soul to tell me

I can get from here to there just by pointing

this thing. I don’t have to hear “turn to the

right, to the left” or “slow down” or “stop.”

It’s almost unconscious the way I get where

I’m going and I like that. And even better,

the driving there is usually the destination.

You can’t beat it. Wherever I am can’t be better.

I’m in a car and I’m cruising. You sure can’t

be in your own body this good.

HA HA

I have the laughter sickness.

Humor in family

so insert tubes in me,

weigh my belly down with pills.

So many yuks at work,

please, the needle quick.

Without rescue,

I may never take

a damn thing serious again.

Sex is absurdity

in desperate need of operating table

Cut my heart out.

It won’t stop chuckling.

Decontaminate my brain...

left, right and funny side.

Lasers to the eye,

probes down the mouth,

or I might even crack up

over death.

My own included.

So come on,

put me back on the machine.

Life, I think you call it.

MY HOSPITAL REQUESTS

Snap of twig on the trail.

Get me that would you.

Fern hollow

when the breeze is blowing.

I’d swap that

for any two of these chocolates.

Your breath is on my list,

the manna of bedside manner.

Lean over and kiss me.

I promise my germs will stay put.

And I’d love that hardy root

that juts out from the cliff,

one hand reach from the summit.

Reading matter?

I’d love to read the inscription

at the top of the water tower.

You only brought yourself?

Then how about touch.

That’s what I miss most just lying here.

A soothing hand on my forehead.

And fingers tangled in mine

like spiders trying to mate.

Sure nurses being me pills.

But pills don’t bring me nurses.

What's up with O Sweet Flowery Roses?

2009-11-01T20:18:00.000-08:00

After running this site for nearly 2 solid years, I wanted to let you all know what's going on with it. No, it isn't closing. However, at this point, OSFR has hit a slow point.
I've shifted focus to another site--Good Hurts, a hot sauce review blog. OSFR is dedicated to poets and poetry; sharing ideas and voices; cultivating emerging poetics. However, Good Hurts is something I have full control over. I don't have to ask for submissions, deal with annoying blogger cut-and-paste formatting issues, etc.
This is NOT the end of O Sweet Flowery Roses, but just my explanation for the slowdown. I'll be teaching some poetry courses in Iowa in Spring 2010, and be rest assured that more solid stuff will be showing up here.
You keep submitting, I'll keep posting. Feel free to check out Good Hurts, especially if you like hot sauce!

-Russell

Featured Poet: Raymond Neely

2009-11-01T14:18:00.001-08:00

Whose Daughter

Whose daughter was found after

she had eaten a rose,

who worried and called poison control.

Whose daughter I can see with a

guilty petal stuck to her lower lip

while she held the briery stem,

a petal still clinging, and petals

floating down like feathers from a

cat's mouth, her burping, blurting out petals

like bubbles.

Whose daughter told me about riding

cows and whose daughter I could

imagine riding a slow walking

cow, lolling drearily upon the

back of a black and white

milk cow along the open hillside

of her farm, with clouds like sheep,

so alive that they buzzed as they lingered.

Whose daughter loves God and

is a reminder of his way,

whose daughter married a good man.

Featured Poet: Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

2009-09-30T18:18:00.001-07:00

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal works in the mental health field, writes
poetry and short stories. He lives in
Los Angeles County. His latest chapbook, Overcome, was published by Kendra
Steiner Editions, and it is a
collaborative effort with photographer, Cynthia Etheridge.

WITHOUT TELEVISION

The news of another murder on television,
or the news of crooks getting away scot-free
makes me long for the days I watched cartoons.

In those days there were fewer murders.
I could do without television.
I would just stare at mirrors instead.
I would watch myself at noontime
eating an apple. In the evening
I would change the mirrors to another room.

I do not need television.
Maybe without it there would be fewer murders.
Perhaps there would be more.
I think I would read a book instead.

I could turn on the radio
and listen to the untalented musicians
on the popular music stations.
I would complain about what happened to

good music. A mirror would break.
I would long for the days of TV.
The news of murders and crooks would return.
In the evening I would lock all my doors.

THE SOFT EVENING

In the soft evening
we sing without sound
and carve our hearts
and dig out the pumpkin seeds.

Broken of heart we eat
of what is left of it
and descend into the abyss.

THE MOON’S DISEASE

On this night the moon
is not easy to look at.
Its light fills my nose
with a pungent scent.

My lips turn blue and
cold. The distant moon infects
me with a sadness
I cannot escape.

I pace aimlessly
in the black night with the
devils of the soul
whispering to me

to give up my soul to
them for a night of joy.
I become moist with
sweat and defend my

sick heart with silence.
More awake than ever I
keep my soul hostage.
It is all I have.

Unlike my heart, my
soul is intact.
Still I shiver from the
moon’s disease as I

walk in confusion like
a lost child. When I cry out
it is my soul, which
reverberates on

this night, where the moon
is an eyesore. It
fills me with sadness.
I cannot escape.

Featured Poet: William Stoneberger

2009-09-29T20:41:00.003-07:00

The Mirror

Sometime the mirror is my mother.

Her hair,

going toward gray,

graces my head.

Her eyes,

owl-wise and ancient,

emerge behind my own.

I recognize their regrets,

harbor their hopes like heirloom treasures.

Sometimes the mirror is my father.

His expression,

almost evil,

possesses my mouth.

His attitude,

all-mighty and apathetic,

is my only legacy.

I bear its terrible weight,

feel its fangs sink into my spine.

Sometimes the mirror is my mask.

Its stare,

blank alabaster,

terrorizes my mind.

Its features,

frozen and unfeeling,

refuse my reflection.

I give nothing away,

shut my heart in a lead-lined vault.

Sometimes the mirror is my self.

My face,

sagging slightly,

shows my years.

My mind,

contemplative and nostalgic,

imagines another life.

I dream "me" out of existence,

someone else stares back.

An Artist Confesses

I have been a thief,

robbing life from the night

stealing its essence

inhaling all its offerings

like the cigarettes

I stole from my father

and snuck into dark corners

to smoke.

I have swiped the moon's power

and used it

to weave a web,

ensnarling strangers

in that lacy seduction

- lust and lunacy.

I have taken the colors

of certain eyes

that offered their glances to me,

flashing like strobes

across bar rooms and lanes of traffic,

holding them up toward the light

like crystal prisms.

I have been a burglar,

breaking into the best of dreams

convincing them to belong to me

conning them into keeping me company

recreating them in my own image,

chiseling away.

The Little Man

L (ove)

onliness lingers

in the little bed

in the little room

in the little house.

The little man

( moan & groan )

( regret) is in deep

down

in a drown of a river

of rolling rage.

He hums his heart

a dirge

lowdown dirty (dog) blues

& blacks

& grays (shadows)

( ghosts).

Winter within

the reach his

( arthritic ) fingers

he feels the grip

tighten ( his throat )

constricting.

D (espair)

arkens

into circles under

his eyes (blind)

and he keeps the depression

tucked in a cr (amp)

anny

tight twisted

little torture.

The little man

in the little house

all alone trapped

( tears ) in the temptation

to put an end to it all.

There's nothing little

about his pain ( massive )

large in l (ove)

oneliness.

OSFR is back in business

2009-09-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

Please send poems, reviews, et. al. to osfrblog@gmail.com We're back! Seriously. -Russell

Featured Poet: James Dye

2009-09-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

James Jason Dye is a 26-year-old college student from Dubuque Iowa. He is a new writer whose poetry can be found on various publications such as Ampersand, Dogzplot, Poor Mojo’s Almanac, The Clockwise Cat, Aphelion, Calliope Nerve and Public Republic. He can be reached at jamesjdye@hotmail.com or check out his blog at http://jamesjdye.blogspot.com. You can also download his free poetry e-book at www.poemhunter.com

The Rose Again
The rose again above the mountain goes up the valley down. The wind lifts it off the ground its gravity pulling back around.

Ambush arose from its seat. A pillar of smoke arose in defeat.

The sun bowed down again.

The Fate of Night and Day
Darkness boasts the night. The Sun is down. Evening settles in.

The thickness blackens. Heavy is the weight. The gloom stagnates. The mass curdles.
Twilight congeals. It consumes the whole world. In the morning Dawn mourns.

OSFR is back!

2009-08-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

Howdy readers...or is it vapid space where readers once flourished, drank from the oases, and and stored poetry in their humps? Anyway, I, Russell Jaffe, editor supreme #1, would like to sincerely apologize to everyone for the long hiatus. I have a close family (on both sides) and both of my grandfathers died this summer within 2 weeks of one another. All the death and family was sad, invigorating, somewhat inspirational, but emotionally tolling. I also moved to Iowa City, and we all know how easy and fun moving is. Anyway, we are back on full-on now. Look for some new post soon, and please submit your own work! Thank you, Russell

Summer Hiatus

2009-07-21T09:11:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's true; we are on a summer hiatus. If you have submitted poems since then, please be patient till August. OSFR will return more flowery then ever then!

Featured Poet: H.E. Mantel

2009-06-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

H.E. Mantel is an Aquarius male, Poet/Writer/Editor, published in Print and Online, including Ascent Aspirations, Shampoo, The Apocalypse, A Hero's Journey Anthology, Poetry By Moonlight Anthology, World Artist Network Magazine, Poetic Spit, Poetry Soup (Awarded), Retort Magazine, Lit-Up Magazine, Poetry Of Food Anthology, Wordgathering, Poetry Flyer, Doors Anthology (I & II), The Plebian Rag, Bare Back Magazine, Apocalypse, Gloom Cupboard; awaiting the publication of his Poetry collections, "Bananas' On The Moon...A Collection Of Revisionist Haiku" & "Sophistigates: A New Book Of New Poetry"; musician-vocalist, an avid reader, athlete, and devotee of Holistic Health through Vegan lifestyle, Ecology and his Writing to Help Our Earth to Heal. He resides in Florida.

- THE SEASON! - Ahh, the mid-Summer of kiln'd heat, elongest days & starred-nights firm for the race to the Pen- nant... behind the dogdays in right-field to - Aha! Mr. October up to bat... Oh, The Season Upon, upon - oossshoouussssh!... Majorhockeyhoops? Nah! but the ONE turns Jung males to pizza-breathing smoke-alarms, husbands to hops-swillin' house-plants, & females to Mascots! - "TUMI OR NOT TUMI?" - ...No, It was not my time to jaunt & jump about the Morld with You, to glowering-green-glows of Ischia, the privileges of Mackinac, "...our Paris, Ilsa!"... Ornamented ataud & calefacted incinerators merely better-funded!, to a last- notice of proteaned hoar, the dearth of silk... So, it was to be Goa, or Delhi "curry-in-a-hurry" not, and the touts & shouts as We passed... You in those shoes, toeing-up with heel asway like a silent, ticking-pendulum, Me, watching... Allowing sole specialnesses, but a few to my inti-mated Life, why there was You insinuate... E'er Yours-sporadic, tho' an extravagance of Soul!, like incipient Sinatra, or the piano of Jarrett! But, No, it was not your time to jump & jaunt-about with Me, but for You, like a junkie afeared of needles, to be going, & mine to Write... of It, plecking-off the pilpuls from My blanket, & You to replacing contoured batteries and for Now... perhaps as recent as tomorrows' accident. - AQUARIUM AGE - Grottoed to the wall, fluorescence afloat 4 wide 2 high 1 deep, an ichthyologysm pouted angel smiles in & out of model caves, wile winding, threading faux drifting forward & back fins, treading like diaphanous lingerie with nowhere to go the smalls hide in tropical incarpceration from striped black mollies' embattled spece & speckled zebras in checkered futures where none is welcomed save C.F. Muddypuppy, Jr. swabbing below O O O... too bubbling unnaturally! eyes silverblue dart, in confine grouper aggress downturn at the mouth of hovel graveled & pretty pebbled this school for alienation childfish innocence gone of sweet, ingenue faces gone to 2 by 4 by 1 pool tropicalla not deep enough! Vestibule "Jake" chirrups to his mirror & circus clips in grey-white plumearray & orange jole festooned canarycrown unfurled-furled talons & beak that just won't speak but a plaintive, training whistle in the day, night uncuttle hungry for more than scup seedlings! All whilst gaelic, loden lizards thankfully...scamper. H.e.m. 5.13.MMix. (For J.I.K.)

Featured Poet: Peter Magliocco

2009-06-08T10:29:00.000-07:00

"Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has poetry at THE SMOKING POET, THE BEAT, A HUDSON VIEW POETRY DIGEST, HEELTAP, OPIUM POETRY and elsewhere ... His new novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America (www.publishamerica.com). He was Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2008."

Crucifix In A Lucky's Shopping Cart

Somehow Ruddy the transient devised

an eclectic priesthood for himself

from his collection of discarded reliquaries.

Old bibles, incense pots, rosaries,

necklace crosses, Madonna & Child prints,

& of course several broken crucifixes,

all stashed in the shopping cart pushed

daily through North Las Vegas streets.

"I shall attack the homeless sinners!"

Ruddy declared to himself, usually

his only listener of many street sermons.

Occasionally a lost tourist (trapped

at some noisy traffic corner) had to endure

Ruddy's flapping, righteous tongue.

For these inflictions of spiritual advice

the transient demanded fast cash donations,

& encouraged the giver to select something

from the busted cart of holy paraphernalia,

blessed by Ruddy "& not by any Kraut Pope

far from the golden calf casinos of Sin City!"

Ruddy's reverberant laugh usually followed

with mouth agape featuring his missing teeth.

A horrible sight, designed to fuel repentance,

or to release halitosis as cruel benediction

for any reluctant disciple about to run off

before seeing Ruddy wave a crimson cross,

like vampire killers do with pointed stakes

about to pierce hearts of undead losers.

Lost Cherries Riff

"You don't need a bartender --

all you need's a liquor store,"

the Lost Cherries Inn whore Mimi

told her transient friend late

one nite. They sat drinking

outside her room by the pool.

"All you need's more income,"

Ruddy the transient mused drinking

while Mimi, primed but not plastered,

routinely finished off another Pabst,

nonchalantly hurling the empty streetwards.

Both burped & chuckled simultaneously.

Scalding summer nights were made for fat-chewing

& bitching about the woes of hustling in Vegas.

Cursing his friend, Ruddy retrieved the beer can

& added it to his shopping cart's aluminum stash,

chiding Mimi for being pregnant, yet still working

while her common law husband was out partying.

"Don't get on my Lem's case," Mimi wheezed

through her acrid cigarette's smoke cloud

the red-faced transient nearly choked on.

"You ol' sod, Rud, my man's a boss poppa --

a bastard, yes, but he takes care of my kids,

even when like now I can only give blow jobs, OK?"

Ruddy snarled back a gap-toothed rejoinder

indicating profound disapproval, then

he began hopping about on gimpy legs,

doing his little trademark chicken dance.

In her perennial hustler's mini-skirt outfit

(sex-stained & funky from ill-assorted smells)

Mimi would soon "take her albino ass," as she put it,

over to the neighboring Strip & wait for

some luxury auto she'd perform in, e-z cash

falling like celestial leaves into her lap

& making the blood strum on her ol' man's guitar,

till the low background music for their lives

softly counter-

pointed whatever

hard john's sex

burst into

the cool heavens

of her

mouth.

The Cold, The Hard, & The Beautiful Ugly

"the cold cunt taking in

the dick of death." So

what else is new? You've heard this

type of prosy chatter before, beyond subliminal

messages that have become blunt force

trauma of the mercantile brain. Something

superceding & kicking the ass of background

whisperings in our muzak lives

Rock & Roll desensitized into cool regions

where it's hip to be distanced from outmoded

humanity-in-a-handbasket, to be tossed

over the proverbial cliff in the name of

no-beauty, no-truth.

the downtown homeless boys

never heard of Keats, but they know

porn of ages when it's singing to their deaf ear

& other dysfunctional organs

their

sad lives

left them.

Featured Poet: Alfonso Colasuonno

2009-06-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Alfonso is a friend who has read at OSFR I and has some new poems he'd like to share. Please enjoy!

QUICK PLUG: While I am on the subject of enjoyment, I recommend suckas who gots to know check out Juliet Cook's 13 Myna Birds. Really interesting design and format of rotating poems; many imagistic, expository, and confessional...all really damn good.

Alfonso Colasuonno is a 25 year old writer based out of Brooklyn, New York. He is a former New York City secondary school teacher. He graduated Beloit College with a BA in Creative Writing. This is his second submission to O Sweet Flowery Roses and has also been a performer at an O Sweet Flowery Roses-sponsored event.

MANIFESTO

Regarding your “poetry” -

It is not complex enough

Nor is it obscure enough

To catch even a faint glimpse of my eye.

The beauty of poetry

Is that it leaves the proletariat

Completely baffled as to what you mean.

Your writing is as obvious

As the cumshot

At the end of a porno.

You hit people over the head

With your arcing stream of ideas.

That is not poetry.

Maybe it is spoken word.

It doesn't have the staccato

The rhythm

The je ne sais quoi

Of poetry.

I have never heard

Something as complementary of my work.

No, this is not poetry

That you learn in classrooms

Or from going to readings

And it never aimed to be.

A visceral reaction

A laugh

A cringe

A masturbation break

This is what I aim for

Not bored applause

Like you aim for.

BAD EDUCATION

I live a life of multiplicities

Responsible for the future of this country

A New York City schoolteacher.

Gutterpunk? (On weekends?)

My preferred mode of dress is a ratty t-shirt

With a picture of Exene Cervenka

And a pair of jeans with holes at the kneecaps

And Eurotrash written in black marker on the pant leg

Like a wrestler's iconography on his tights

Signaling to all parties

A false delusion.

Yet, still, I wear the suit and tie

Monday through Friday

8 to 4

I suck Joel Klein’s cock.

I do it by the book.

How do I react inside those four walls? Student comes in blazed

Out of his mind.

Reminds me of someone quite familiar

And how false it is to say - “get yourself together” When having a few drinks later in the day

Crack up at the thought.

I think back to same student and wonder:

Am I really getting that old and yawn-mouthed

That a student needs to show up high to enjoy my class? And then I realize he is not enjoying my class at all

But the company of his comrade in the next seat.

Question: Did I ever do that? No. I stifled my laughter.

I respected my teachers.

I tell myself these lies

Until they become truths.

Am I doing a good job?

Can I say what I want to say? No!

The trick to education is knowing one golden rule

Your teachers are full of shit.

A trip to the principal’s office

And a great big unsatisfactory on my teaching record.

I’ve lost control:

Classroom

Self

Severance pay

Big fat j

On the dole

Back to bumming

Reading Bukowski

Drinking heavily

In short, a rubber room existence. There is no such thing as fate.

American Spirit

You have a high pitched voice

An anxious tremor

Resonating to the stratosphere

As if your lungs were never consumed with internal clouds of mist

Sucked in like steamboats in vile vortices

Smoke from a thousand fags

Ashes staining your fingernails yellow

Disguised under press-on nails

And teeth off white

Remedied by Crest white strips

And brushing at least three times a day

In painstaking circular motion

And time permitting, vertically and horizontally, as well.

But you still have a smoker's cough

And your perfume doesn't hide

The smell of countless nicotine cravings.

Featured Poet: Dr. Kane X. Faucher

2009-06-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

After coming across his work on Felino Soriano's Counterexample Poetics (which is really fantastic, by the way), I had to ask Dr. Kane X. Faucher to submit some poems to OSFR. In a gushy lil' letter, I told him how I thought his stuff was really exemplory of current directions in poetry, media, and collage art(s). Please enjoy! Dr. Kane X. Faucher FIMS/MIT Instructor, The University of Western Ontario. Freelance Writer, Scene Magazine. Co-editor: The Raging Face, The Drill Press, Sorrowland Press Interview Editor: Ditch Poetry Proctor: IELTS (British Council) - Author of Urdoxa (2004) Codex Obscura (2005) Fort & Da (2006), Calqueform, Astrozoica, De Incunabliad (2007). Jonkil Dies, Tales Pinned on a Complete Ass: Travel to Romania (2009) The Vicious Circulation of Dr Catastrope (2009) -

Gueule

(a slav-ish raillery in no parts)

--…trouvez…

--…amusant mais…

--…voyons…

--…tellement / camoufle…

--…fond…

--…vendre!...

--…mort…(.)

Scandallion standala y catapostrophe.

Bas alt relief belie goncourtier

\?--:…rue the infinite gimmegimmick a la

Moi-toi

NRF(I)NRF(II) dire la roches-elle dans un

Et Gaston IIieme dans deux 1953.

Ecrirez-pas babelogue

Insta instro insitu insu introck.

Ref fer ere frere ren enc yclo clochard hark arkhe.

Logoglissade/Wordgliding

(a fenceless optical zone)

Depistillated sermonizing wavebreak,

Immense pillar of talking flesh

& the great sewer of existence underlorded

Papal cyborgs &

How God subcontracted Adam to name things.

I walk / unkempt millennium garden / public works project

Failure / empty beer bottle by bathtub / she and bubble /

Abducted from Oshawa / portable office relocate @ bar /

New fonts derivative / syncategoreme / portfolio construction

Professionalization anti-seminar / non-marketability aspects of

Doctorate.\ move to Vancouver \ organizations strategies \

Collaborate with and learn from here \ midstroke.--

Mauditerre

The future threatens

to make us seem quaint and ridiculous.

while the applause

has died away well before we arrived.

Mode juste today,

critical gaffe tomorrow.

We who write now will be subject

to cruel normalization

and barbaric standardization,

lost somewhere in a canon

the young are forced begrudgingly to honour

The political choices we make today may feel right.

Tomorrow will judge us harshly

and we will be condemned.

The future is like that: and it has the luxury

of history and consequence -

we should have known better becomes our epitaph.

The future will consign us to haunt the earth

spurned devils and the mark of Cain.

Our actions, once laudable, become burdens

as death renders us mute and indefensible.

ProblemZ

2009-05-28T08:16:00.001-07:00

Yes, being an internet journal has it's high points. For one, you get to use a "z" instead of an "s" without feeling shame down to your bones. Also, I get to instantly publish poems for any and all to read at any point. I've heard a lot of people (myself included, in the past) go on and on about the importance of print poetry journals, but for what OSFR is, it could only really function on a website at this point. But there are some low points, too. Blooger sucks. Yes, I said it. Though I am not good with computers and will have to do major research and work to figure out how to start a new website with all the previous posts included. The main issue I have now is with commenting...apparently people are having a hard time doing it. Not sure what to tell you...it seems to work fine if you have gmail (or any sort of google account). Formatting has been a problem for me as well. Not sure why, but the blog has seemed to become self-aware and decided that it dislikes formatting poems correctly. While I constantly try to get it to say its name backwards to make it vanish into another dimension, I still have to work hard to get it to correctly format poems with kooky fonts or wacky line/stanza breaks. Be aware that formatting can sometimes be hard; bear with me. Anyway, keep submitting, and if you're in Chicago, by golly sign up to read! -Russell

Featured Poet: Peycho Kanev

2009-05-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

"Peycho Kanev is 28 years old. He loves to listen to sad music while he drinks slowly his beer. His work has been published in Word Riot, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Cemetery, Nerve Cowboy, The Chiron Review, The Guild of Outsider Writers, Spoken War, Side of Grits, Southern Ocean Review and many others. He loves to put the word down and not talking on the cell phone for days. He is nominated for Pushcart Award. He lives in Chicago. Alone." scream in the afternoon the sun is high again and it looks to me like an enemy, outside in the hot street an old lady stands by the curb under the shadow of a tree and she looks like my mama and she looks like your mama I ask my self where my luck is. it has ran away like a river of sweat in this hot summer afternoon and the old woman is gone and the sun is about to set as I wait as I shiver thru the endless day and thru all the wasted loves I fell asleep again and this poem become silent for ever. the beast the beast is so lonely… and the beast and the prey are looking for each other- to become their blood mutual. the blood of the prey is vulture into the veins of the beast, doomed for loneliness. and happy blood- with desperate and sorrowfully passion the recluse possesses it. the love of the beast is all in red. for N. confession you are sun light sun light walking around you just don’t know how good you are you play with my seriousness make me laugh when you comb your hair all the gods come down from the mountain and watch you are the woman than all the women should have been it doesn’t matter how you turn your body or what you say it is perfect diamond perfect cut perfect glow and when you get the blues I got the blues because I don’t want you to get the blues in all my life I have never said to another woman that I love her now I say it to you and I know that I will carry you always in me inside outside at my fingertips at the edge of my brain and in the center in the center of what I am of what remains.

Re-featured poet: Barry Frauman

2009-05-26T15:44:00.000-07:00

Happy belated Memorial Day from the (Russell, oft-involved Becky, friends) staff of O Sweet Flowery Roses! Please find more poems from Barry Frauman below. No, we are not hard up for submissions quite yet, but Barry is the first poet signed up for the Super Duper Blowout Chicago Reading (date, time, et. al: TBA)!

Let me know if'n your down to read and I'll put you up on the list!

MEMORIAL DAY

I dreamt of you Tony in morning twilight,

that you were admitted to hospital care

not sick, not well,

that I was your room-mate,

not ill at all.

You wore silk pajamas, white, I think,

your hair thick and dark, a few strands of gray.

Your body flourished, exciting and strong,

I ached to sex you.

Instead we unpacked, each one for the other,

together, happy.

We talked long and warmly about... can’t recall,

more friendship of love than in stormy life-days,

the tension of AIDS.

TWO LOVES

he first of my heart is quiet, certain

and serene as all the Buddhas.

When I err, when for a fraction of a second

I am not quite honest, the motion of his eyes,

their change of light, point back the truth to me

with no less love than in our perfect harmony.

He is my soul.

* * * * *

My other love maintains there is no soul

there is no God

there is no human life

outside the robot masses of our time

stampeding all his words into my brain;

yet deep within, his fury seeks affection:

At a crowded café, not too gay,

he cornered me with a hug;

and then one night, good-bye at his door,

he beamed when I kissed his beautiful face.

* * * * *

The eyes of my soul are in white white skin

under jetblack hair.

He is young-tree slender and elastic,

shoulders open and embracing

even when his arms are down.

The breeze nestles in his thick black thatch,

dreaming of eternal June, and he has

the soul of a tree in young manhood,

sometimes playful, more often stilled

in the half-smile of serene growing.

* * * * *

He calls himself fat, that's a laugh,

short wiry devil-dark mustache,

eyes of gray lightning.

* * * * *

Hello to you! Yes to you!

From all my soul to all my soul I call.

You are the tree in whose branches I nestle,

the lightning will not strike.

Your faults are like a summer shower,

soon to dry away.

* * * * *

Leaping to your feet? still fast asleep?

Thinking of you, wondering how you are,

I wake up late and slowly Sunday morning,

glasses on the table from last evening

stilled into the memories of fun.

Now silent, mostly empty, they'll sit out

the hour or two until I get to them.

Ever think of weekends you were here?

We've showered music breakfast yes or no,

it doesn't matter all that much,

we've had our sexy talky turbulence.

I won’t approach your nakedness now,

tempting though it is,

but will instead anticipate a lingering good-bye.

What are your plans?

* * * * *

The greatest number of people,

whose kin are family-tree,

would not understand my joy in you,

beloved keeper of our light.

I have small knowledge of your prior years,

I did not see the steps you took

to form the inner workings of your life,

a discipline so perfect and serene,

that you should be a beacon to us all..

You grow and thrive around a core of stillness,

a happy silent purity

toward which my restless spirit stretches endlessly..

You never come to me to lay confusion,

but work a trouble through then hail me

to share your joy in hard-won resolution.

* * * * *

Ten A.M. Sunday thunderhissing discoblitz

you shut the door against the din so we can talk

your rage boils up at years of sexual repression

your lightning strikes the wordhouse you have built

as shelter from the storms you generate.

I lash past your downpouring sentences

to bring my love to your intelligence

and turn your storming elements to sunforce.

Burning tired your head falls to my shoulder

still you say you do not feel love

it must be no right now, maybe not forever,

but firmly for this time you back away.

* * * * *

You let me rant about the world's nonsense,

then you embrace me.

* * * * *

Better this way you say in the labyrinth

of bar-and-bath nightmerchant anonymity.

Better this way than learning in the hurt

of amorous friendship somehow gone awry.

* * * * *

Remember the time you stayed during the week?

I’m sure it was December snowy rainy

muddy morning grumbling down to work.

The sidewalks were in slush,

we made the bus-stop walking in the street.

The night before I’d lain down at your side,

though I still mourned the parting of another.

As we were trudging slave-like in the grayness

toward the dreary obligations of the day,

I felt my guilt glide up into my throat.

With gentle indirection you forgave.

Your compassion that sad day gave birth

to the sweet closeness all our own

that keeps us free of all the cushioned traps

the gray Decembering world sets

to ground the flight of those who love.

* * * * *

You say, "I’ve never felt... whatever it is,

but that's alright, I live from day to day.

If somehow I could change, that would be nice,

but I don't count on anyone, OK?"

* * * * *

In front of your house good-night, I’ll call you soon.

Our hug is long and strong,

and always with the imprint of your face,

you touch me in my quiet tender place.

Featured Poet: Felino Soriano

2009-05-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

This is Felino Soriano's second submission, but everyone should check out Counterexample Poetics for unfiltered astonishment. Editor's note: Happy birthday to me! Felino Soriano (California) is a case manager working with developmentally and physically disabled adults. He is the editor of the online journal, Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, which focuses on International interpretations of experimental, philosophical, post-postmodern, and avant-garde poetry, art, and photography. He is the author of five chapbooks and e-books, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008) Feeling Through Mirages (Shadow Archer Press, 2008) and Calling Toward Clarity (Chippens Press, 2009), and also has a mini-chapbook forthcoming from Wheelhouse Magazine. The internal collocation of philosophical studies with classic and avant-garde jazz explains his poetic stimulation. Website: www.felinosoriano.com Painters’ Exhalations 118 —after Bridget Riley’s Edge of Light Light needn’t sky born, or shape create happenstance below, soil level or other cliché developed notion decided on a shelf of predetermination. Birds sketch a clawing scratch vertical road from sky elsewhere leading to twig architecture, feeding opportunity, as light illuminates in constant etching into echoes dissipating only as dusk hands begin the painting of exaggerated gray. Painters’ Exhalations 119 —after Aleksandr Grigor'evich Tyshler’s The Wedding Somewhat deciphered by the citizens whose cataract emotion matches eros amid walkers during night purchasing intimacy through paycheck deposits for affection laced with uncertainty and thought’s edges protruding the forehead’s soft tissue. Here the ceremony unfolded structure capitalizing on sun’s open hand throws italicizing vows and intertwining reading of scripture. Hands exchange third finger symbols casting aside absence for platinum platitude, though the spectrum of smiles erases the monotony of the specialized moment. Painters’ Exhalations 120 —after Mark Cesark’s Grey Area This is language. Two hands held in fisted reality hiding bodies of truth or fiction behind the overused back of trickery asking choice of relevance above interpretational guesses. Human claws at dichotomies. Splaying too far from routine brush blends anxiety into parallel thinking of the body-normality excusing nervousness from the eyes’ visual safety. Many want sharpened edges of black or white. Maze circles segregated or introduced into factual tongues speaking newness— the area of vellum’s spectrum wide wingspan creating inability to travel emotionless away from supported measures the mind ambulates in complete control. Painters’ Exhalations 121 —after José Bedia’s Isla Bonita Impressionist interpretation of a woman’s unworn, strapless, high-heeled stiletto. Stilled away from walking’s many efforts providing a layered rendition beautiful faced woman interrogated by wind’s rhythmic, ugly hands. Trees border the silhouette metaphor walking tired among forest resting near water’s diamond recreation. If man resides here soon the heel will wear, become a broken semblance of identity prior to the overbearing bludgeon of self -righteous motives. Painters’ Exhalations 122 —after Thanet Awsinsiri’s Under the Shade We proclaim protection. Said by the promise of illusion. The protected is not alphabetic dissertations elaborating the body’s many functions. The body bare is at its unpeeled genesis actuating ensuing movement if desire overwhelms stagnant curses tattooing the limbs of extravagant reason. Where wind and walls simultaneously converse.

OSFR is finally prepared to tweet you

2009-05-09T08:05:00.001-07:00

http://twitter.com/OSFR

O SWEET FLOWERY ROSES CHICAGO SUMMER INVASION

2009-05-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

Gird your loins and plug up any and all available orifices, because this news will undoubtedly blow you away, out, and all around:

O Sweet Flowery Roses will be holding its third blowout reading in Chicago this July!

While plans are still being worked out, if you are interested in reading and live in the Chicagoland area, please email me (Russell) and let me know. The reading will most likely take place near the end of July!

Hope to hear from you all,

Russell Jaffe

osfrblog@gmail.com

Featured Poet: Mike Berger, PhD

2009-05-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Your mother would be happy to know that OSFR has some return poets coming up- Barry Frauman and Felino Soriano! Enjoy this mother's day weekend and please keep checking back for more poet(ry, ics). Today's poet is Mike Berger, PhD!

"I am 72 years old. I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years. I am now fully retired. I have authored two books of short stories. I have published in numerous professional journals. I have freelanced for more than 20 years. My humor pieces Clyde and Goliath, Good Grief Columbus, and If Noah Built the Ark Today have won awards. I am now writing poetry full-time. I have many pursuits which include sculpting, painting, gardening and baking bread. My forcaccia is to die for."

BUBBLE BATH

I wondered whether it was like

to take a bubble bath. Born in

the depression, we were too poor

for such frivolous things.

I was too macho for such wussy

things when I was in my teens.

I wouldn't get caught dead in the bath

with 1 million bubbles while I was going

to college.

I didn't have time after I graduated

to indulge in such a frivolity. It was

a quick shower and off to the grind.

Now I'm retired and my wife works.

At last I have my chance. I started

the water and poured in a bottle

of a bubble bath.

Bubbles fill the tub and overflowed

obscuring the bathroom floor. Soon

the stuff was up to my knees. I

struggled to find the tap to turn the

water off.

As I stand here looking at the mass;

I ask what do you do with 1 million bubbles?

I'm thinking I should have waited a little longer

and taking them back after I was dead.

GREEN THUMB

The neighbors yard was a menace.

He never cut the grass. The rosebushes

had died from lack of care and the ivy

on this side of the house were now

stringy brown.

I never saw him go to work. I wondered

what he did. His friends would come at

all hours and played rancorous music

just above a threshold of pain.

They were all rough looking with long hair

and a variety of beards. The women who

must have been easy they had mattresses

strapped to their backs.

In the middle of the night I was awakened

by a thunderous crash. The street outside

what is lined with cars and two police

Van's.

I understand my neighbor has a green

some. The cops haul them all away

along with forty weed plants.

FLAMING GORGE

Twisting Baroque art

etched into vermillion

cliffs It sings a Bach melody.

A dark blue river

provides a foil, highlighting

the mazes of scars

carved deep into

rock.

Brilliant red strata

undulate.

A dizzy labyrinth

Touches streaked red sky.

Sunrays painting specters on

canyon walls as

they chase fickle shadows.

Lonely sagebrush clings.

Deep shadows reigns

where sun light hides.

Robert Walton: Bio and (awesome) author photo

2009-05-02T09:14:00.001-07:00

Yeah, you're going to want to click on this picture. Remember, readers: send along a bio and three poems whenever you submit! I taught at San Lorenzo Middle School in King City, California for thirty-six years before retiring in June of 2006. Phyllis, my wife of 37 years, and I still reside in King City. We have two sons – Jeremy, thirty-one and Jon, twenty-six. I am a life-long rock-climber and mountaineer. I've made numerous ascents in the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite. Three of my short stories about climbing were published in the Sierra Club's Ascent. Others appeared in "High" magazine, "Loose Scree" and in "The Climbing Art". I converted a story named "Three's a Crowd" into a radio play and it was broadcast on KUSF on November 22nd, 2006. It was later broadcast several more times on PBS. Much of my poetry reflects my time in the mountains. A few of my poems have been published in journals and on websites.

Triple threat: Call for submissions, Applewood Revue event, Robert Walton poem

2009-05-01T17:52:00.000-07:00

Why, you should hop on the wild ride and submit poems to O Sweet Flowery Roses. Yes, event time is upon us once again. Sean Lyman Frasier + Michael Gorman's Applewood Revue is a-rollin' into Brooklyn on its steam-powered go-matic contraption. The last one of these I went to absolutely brought the house down; it was the kind of magical event that makes people migrate to legendary New York City. The folk songs were fun and uplifting, the poetry was poignient, and the music of the band Go Cat Go was nothing short of a metaphysical feeling wherein the waters of the mind's most beutiful creek flowed between the hard tin camping vessels for water (which doubled as drums) all within the confines of Flushnik Studios. I strongly urge anyone in the NYC area to truck/boat/plane it out for this one. The details: Flusnik Studios 698 Flushing Ave Brooklyn NYC 7:30 PM doors open and FREE food served (Editor's note: the food is really amazing. Do not do like your humble editor and gorp down 9 lbs of pizza before a party with delicious homemade pasta and fresh baked bread) 8:00 PM performances begin Free Entry, Free Food, Cheap Drinks (You may BYOB) Spoken word performers: Susan Brennan, Niall Connolly, Liz Afton, Ed Malone, and Sean Lyman Frasier Musicians: Alexa Woodward, Jo Williamson, Bern and the Brights, and Michael Gorman Robert Walton didn't send anything but this poem, which I think is befitting of the revival-stylings of the upcoming Applewood Revue performance. Poem by Robert Walton: Above Parker Lake Snowmelt waterfall Bursting bright, Crystal tresses flung Across ebon cliffs - Impatient girl With all of time To brush your hair But none to spare This morning.

Featured Poet: Holly Day

2009-04-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

"There’s an awful lot of pressure involved in sending out poetry during National Poetry Month. Perhaps it’s because I assume that thousands and thousands more poets are sending out their writing this month more than any other month, and the thought of that level of competition frankly scares the crap out of me. Writing is a competitive enough sport as it is, and I’m not a particularly competitive person."

-While Holly Day did not send in a formal bio or photo, I found her cover letter worthy of attaching as a reflection of April being "National Poetry Month."

I'm not much for competitive sports, anyway. Enjoy her poems! -Russell

I Hold Your Big Fat Heart In My Hands

Extinguish the joy in my heart, my head, tonight

I open my body to you like a dependant cripple

Supine, sublime, sometimes I wonder what we’re doing here, and

Then I realize how little I actually want to know the

Truth. Your hands push against me like rough, angry starfish

Press my starlight thoughts of you in between pages of Hitler

Some leather-bound book filled with piles of crushed leaves. In

Time, I just know we could become friends, the emotional cripple

The raging lunatic. I chose to be the weaker of the two of us, and

It has nothing to do with you, not really. The

Closest thing I’ve come to love like this is this, tidepool starfish

Wrestling for pieces of meat, so slow like Hitler

Decomposing beneath heaps of garbage and dirt. You let me in

Last night, and just because I let you touch me then doesn’t mean I have to tonight.

And even though we’ve settled into this domesticity, there will always be the

Images I have of you, unflattering. Hitler hands starfish out against me, touch my backside--

If I let you in again tonight

Will you cripple me further still?

I Deny You

all this talk of reconciliation

and all I see is the back of your head

how I want so bad to pick up a hammer

and smack it into the small round

bald spot growing there.

I can feel the fire balling up

in my middle, billowing out

until I can touch it with my palms

how easy it would be to take

this boulder of tangible anger

smash it down on you

make you flat and small.

I’d Help, But I’m Not Really Here

she says, do nothing

and I’ll make it all right

be quiet and no one will know.

I am a statute in her shadow, I am

a monument to quiet, she will fix everything and

I have no need to move.

she says, say nothing

tell no one, you didn’t see

she says, go back to sleep, I’ll be back

in the morning

I am a monument to shadows, to quiet

So still I don’t even look like Alive

I am a statute of I didn’t see

these memories of dying even as they are born

And the DJANGO Award winner is...CAROLINE O'CONNOR THOMAS for her poem "Apples and Water"

2009-04-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

Apples and Water outside your window, a tree is blooming. white paper flowers that will brown, like the spot where you bit the apple- leaving a trail of juice on my thumb and other knuckles. you remind me of someone i've never met before, i think as i suck the water clean from my fingers and feel a sudden shame for even this private show of affection. From Caroline O'Connor Thomas: This poem is about yielding to restriction or moderation; you could find the temptation pulling from that act of letting go, in the narrators sudden complete disregard for personal limits. I'm excited that Apples and Water was chosen by Russell Jaffe and Sean Lyman Fraiser to be the winner of the DJANGO award. I can't think of anything more lovely than knowing that I've written something that others can appreciate. It's appropriate to say I feel dazzlingly jewel'd and naturally glorious! From guest judge Sean Lyman Frasier: First, thank you Russell for allowing me to dissect the poems that voluntarily settled beneath the kiss of my literary blade, and thank you courageous artists who tackled this contest with sophistication and barbarity, in equal measure. The winning poem, Caroline O'Connor Thomas' "Apples and Water," struck me as a poem that earns its brevity, the way that an epic must earn its enormous scope. I felt voyeuristic, like the words (written in invisible ink) were supposed to vanish before I found them. To me, the delicious guilt of the poem revolves around the idea of wanting more but not feeling entitled to more. While the action of the poem may be a single act of disobedience, a decision to indulge rather than ignore, this temptation will change the body and mind, much like the flowers and apple change hue and brown with time. A rare fifty second portrait that breathes long after it's enjoyed. The poem, beyond its elegance, addresses the theme with concealed desires that squeeze through as whispers, and it was a pleasure to hear those. From Russell Jaffe: It was a real joy to hold this contest, and I think it's really important to say that while we had a winner, every poem we received was a little treasure to read and explore; in searching through the troves of poetry to find the one that would ultimately win the jewelry prize, we found ourselves happily lost in the founding principles of O Sweet Flowery Roses: sharing, enjoying, and participating in poetry. Thanks to all who read and submitted, and thanks for supporting this journal.

Featured Poet: Larry Jaffe

2009-04-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

It's true that the dastardly O Sweet Flowery Roses poetry journal asks for three poems, a brief bio, and a picture. Constraints be damned...Mr. Larry Jaffe (no relation to myself, though his name is the same as my grandfather's) sent a thick phalanx of poetry, which surrounded his massive bio. So why take the O Sweet Flowery word for it? His bio is here; Mr. Jaffe is quite the prolific poet and general artsmith.

ODE TO GALLANTRY

Aesthetic waves crash

forming tender beauty

a radiant inspiration

redefines destiny

Riding strong

a spirit emerges

– She is her own Galahad

A ripped cape

in flight

– Escaping captivity

Tears shimmer

in sudden joy

obstacles of life

conquered

– An empire created

Leaving her mark

in the universe

–The mirror gasps.

HEMORRHAGING

The Earth bleeds

we stand around

hands in pockets

some shout retaliation

some scream futility

still the earth bleeds

We proclaim peace

accuse each other

march and protest

hold hands for inner warmth

love one another with venom

still the earth bleeds

We kill songs with rocks

torture memories

plead sides

and wonder

why the Earth

still bleeds

– Some never learn to hate

Peace is not a tourniquet

Peace is a new Earth.

LAYERS

I unfold

destiny

diminished

I unfold

precious wings

arc into flight

I unfold

twirling

through space

I unfold

music triumphs

in endless beat

I unfold

– I fly

Featured Poet: Thomas "Kaysen" Fraker

2009-04-21T11:10:00.001-07:00

NEWS: The winner of the DJANGO Award will be announced by the end of this week (April 20-26) POETRY: Kaysen sent but one poem with no bio. In lieu of the very long featured poetry que, I thought I would put this one up for today. "I'm 18 years old and 5'10, 280 lbs. My name's Thomas Fraker but i prefer to be called Kaysen. I've been writing for years and honestly dislike most of my work. Others say its good, but i like few of my own poems. Hopeful you will like the one I've picked to submit."

~Untitled~

The vampire in the alley

the monster under your bed

the shadow in your closet

the demon in your nightmares

The thought that shakes you at night

the form that haunts your dreams

violates your body

with a laugh that chills your soul

Your heart will race

your mind will scream

your soul will squirm

but your body won't move

Frozen in fear

staring at your nightmare

born into reality

RUN!

Running

from something that only you can see

everyone laughing as you run by

not knowing what’s really chasing you

They will know

when your mangled body

found in the alley

is left with

No heart

no mind

and worst of all

no soul

So run

faster

harder

like nothing else matters

Cause if it catches you

nothing else will

it will all be over

nothing left but flesh and blood

Unable to love others

unable to think for yourself

and worse

emptiness