We are all Van Gogh

I am the hairshirt you refuse to wear,
where did you put my left ear?

I don’t really need to know. Truth is
we all have an asymmetrical face.

You’re all those visits from icy mummies
I vainly waited for on Sunday afternoon.

Has it turned to amber in a jewel box?
Which of your lovers will throw it out

or will it be the maid who ripped you off
and lived it up back in Puerto Rico?

Here all the one-earred mutants pretend
some important person heard them,

so why then do they slosh in bloody shoes
to party with wary strangers, and why

inquire endlessly about that sinister ear
knowing how little we want to hear?

This is the world of bandaged Van Goghs
running out of sunflowers and starry nights.

Djelloul Marbrook is the author of two poetry books, Far from Algiers(2008, Kent State University Press, winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry) and Brushstrokes and Glances (2010, Deerbrook Editions); and four books of fiction: Guest Boy(2012, Mira Publishing House CLC, Leeds, UK), Saraceno (2012, Bliss Plot Press), Artemisia’s Wolf (2011, Prakash Books, India), and Alice Miller’s Room (1999, OnlineOriginals.com, UK). His poems have been published by American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Orbis (UK), From the Fishouse, Oberon, The Same, Reed, Fledgling Rag, Daylight Burglary, among others. His fiction publishers include Orbis (UK) and Potomac Review. He maintains a lively blog and facebook presence. A retired newspaper editor and Navy veteran, he lives in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn.

A Lonely Sea Of Memories

fighting a genetic history of mental disease

Fear, my omnipotent ocean
Beautiful dark blue vastness
Of all the soon to be forgotten
Turned to non-cohesive, memories
To remember like a cool ice drink of
Water under the hot Texas summer
Refreshing, restoring, rebooting
My past, when I was younger
Diligently working the south Texas fields
With my Mexican parents, my brothers
My father, rewarding us with a cold, water something
For a job well sweated, loads of fresh onions
To be delivered to the sea of food markets
As my secret unveils, losing mental capacities
As everyone with family history knew it would happen
Learning to accept it like my mother, my grandmother
I shall clutch Don Quixote cast upon a lonely sea
Hoping at best to be enjoyed, maybe even understood
As a man on his last voyage from that which eludes him

Juan Manuel Perez is the author of Another Menudo Sunday (2007), O’ Dark Heaven: A Response To Suzette Haden Elgin’s Definition Of Horror (2009), WUI: Written Under The Influence Of Trinidad Sanchez, Jr. (2011), and six poetry chapbooks. Juan is the 2011-2012 Poet Laureate for the San Antonio Poets’ Association. He has also been a featured reader at many poetry venues around the state of Texas and beyond. His work has appeared in descant, Elegant Rage, San Antonio Express-News, Arts United San Antonio Magazine, La Bloga, New Texas, Concho River Review, The Langdon Review Of The Arts In Texas, The Rhysling Anthology, The Mayo Review, many other publications.

Due to the length of the piece please click Here to read Swimming Under My Father.

Michael O’Keefe is an actor,as well as an author. Perhaps best known for his role as Fred on Roseanne, he has also appeared on such iconic television shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Outer Limits, The Waltons, M*A*S*H, Law & Order and countless others. Michael has also appeared in several films including Caddyshack, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Hot Chick, and Michael Clayton to name a few. O’Keefe holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. His book also titled Swimming From Under My Father is available now. For more information please see http://www.michaelokeefe.com/

White House East Room, February 5, 1862 Ball (Source: Library of Congress).

The President, in a new swallowtail
coat, and Mary, wearing a white silk dress
inscribed with hundreds of black flowers, hailed
their invited guests: diplomats, judges,
Senators, Cabinet members — ushered
along by attendants in mulberry
-colored outfits, which matched the crockery
(Solferino). In the background was heard
the United States Marine Band: its new
piece, “The Mary Lincoln Polka.” Midnight
came, and the doors to the dining room flew
open, revealing a weird, dreamlike sight:
piles of duck, ham, turkey — in the center,
a model of Fort Sumter made of sugar.

Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in Phoenicia, New York with his wife Violet Snow and a few quiet mice. His most recent palindrome is Snack computer ebb beret up mock cans.

(Editor’s note for more on February 5, 1862 please see: http://thecivilwarproject.com/2012/02/05/150-years-ago-wednesday-february-5-1862/

Let’s Get Lost

Global Positioning System says
We always know your coordinates
But better than that
We have no need to know where you are
Because you do the job for us
Inner surveillance
Self-tracking mechanism
Fail-safe and worry-free

But I say
Let’s get lost
Drop our personas and disappear
For the longest lost weekend on record
Lasting the rest of our lives
Let’s say goodbye
To those tired old eyes in the mirror
Like a clueless guest
They’ve overstayed their welcome
Let’s say goodbye
To hustling back and forth
Between point A and point B
Believing we don’t deserve better
Let’s say goodbye
To same-as-yesterday jobs
Airtight families
Trance-inducing television
To the news we’ve all heard
A thousand times before
Let’s say goodbye
To cascading boredom

Boredom which guarantees
That even if we get rowdy
Even if we get loaded
Even if we get high
And leap out of rockets
Onto the far side of the moon
Even if we change our names
And re-enter the game
Plastic surgery
A fake passport
It’s never enough

Instead, the best medicine
In fact, the only medicine
Drop the whole thing
Don’t look back
We’ll drown our wristwatches
Enter a virginal landscape
No idea what time it is
No idea where we’re headed
Cruising the blissful unknown
Safe in each other’s company
Not caring who we are
Like grown-up versions
Of the children we once were
The children who were stolen from us

Michael Brownstein is the author of three novels, Country Cousins, Self-Reliance, and The Touch,as well as nine volumes of poetry. His most recent book is World on Fire, a take-down of corporate globalization and impassioned call for consciousness change.

City of Angels

In the distance, the L.A. skyline is a cluster-fuck of high-rise building; an industrial Goliath that obscures my need for a slice of blue heaven.
Whenever I walk her dystopian streets, it’s impossible to believe that angels reside within the hollow halls of greed, and more improbable to
imagine a host of winged seraphs rubbing elbows and offering solace to poor unfortunate souls trapped in meat cages, concealed beneath bridges and within the shadows of door frames, desperate for a sign of light, a moment of grace.

copyright 2012 Marie Lecrivain

Marie Lecrivain is a writer, editor, and photographer who resides in Los Angeles. She is the editor/publisher of poeticdiversity: the litzine of
Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in various online/print journals, including Haibun Today, Heavy Hands Ink, Illumen, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and others. Her short story collection, Bitchess (copyright 2011 Sybaritic Press), is available through Amazon.com and smashwords.com.

It’s Complicated

Grandpa loved gambling more than Grandma, so just before he completely frittered away the family fortune, she threw him out. He always wanted to be an actor so he moved to LA and starred in a number of porn movies. Of course, I didn’t know him but I do know that Grandma had a “friend” long before Grandpa frittered, and it could be that Grandpa’s frittering drove Grandma to it or vice versa. Dad and Mom met in a bar, had us real fast and before Mom could spit out her first love child, Dad was loving every woman at work, every woman everywhere he went. He blames our love misfortunes on his loving so much. Way down the line, Mom fell in love with a co-worker and told Dad right when they were in bed making love that she was in love with somebody else, but no, she hadn’t done it with him, not yet but pretty damn close, and Dad says he went all soft and couldn’t love properly since then. A while later after he’d moved into a weird hippie kind of attic apartment with absolutely no furniture except a mattress on the floor and an ashtray, he met one of the great loves of his life. It wasn’t six months later that he told her he had loved another lady or two while he was loving her. He actually got down on his knees and confessed, and she stroked his head and never trusted him again. This went on for years. Meanwhile my oldest sister who was in utero when Daddy was doing all his first loving fell in love with heroin. Now that was an expensive love. Her bf who she lived with helped her pay for it by sending her out to love lots of guys who needed quick loving. Then he od. When Mom and Daddy found out, they were devastated, since Mom was living with the man she fell in love with while she was living with Daddy and this man was an alcoholic in AA and 20 years younger. And wow did he make a fuss about sister’s love habits. Soon Mom and Daddy packed sister off to a treatment center several hours away where she met a lot of very loving girls who had similar loves. But she didn’t love any of them. She did love a boy who there, only she was strongly advised not to because it might not be real love but just their both trying to recover from the same love. When she got out, she got a job at a talent agency, because she too wanted to be an actor like Grandpa, and met a guy who was the son of a famous actor who had an ongoing role in a top TV series. And wow, he loved her and she loved him and they went to a lot of parties in very hip after hours bars and met a lot of lovely people. She was so happy with this love. But one day she passed out at dinner and confessed to Daddy and Mom that she was loving heroin again. And so they had this big family meeting where Mom’s guy, being so well versed in loving alcohol, said he thought that sister’s guy must be helping her love heroin.
 Meanwhile, Daddy kept on loving one of the loves of his life, telling the friend who’d introduced them, well, how many great loves does a man get, he can count them on one hand or less. And the man who introduced them agreed as he’d only been able to count two on one hand and even that, he thought to himself was stretching it.
 Do you count deep crushes, he asked Daddy. Daddy didn’t think so. Sister wound up in another center, this time in Arizona, so far from home and her beloved boyfriend. As if southern Arizona wasn’t close to another country where in one day a person could get some love there. And you will never guess what happened to a cousin whose wedding Daddy’s love and us sisters dressed to the nines for because cousin was wearing a $10,000 strapless Vera Wang. Cousin began to love not eating. Not like any of us loved eating. I mean, we loved food but we didn’t love what it did. Anyway, we all loved being together, except Mom wasn’t invited. Mom’s guy said that after so many years of love and marriage if she didn’t qualify for a black-tie event thrown by Daddy’s family, well, then they’d just rent some videos, smoke some weed, and figgettaboutit. Daddy’s love loved him and we never did understand what was going on there but sister wasn’t in love with her, not that that would sway Daddy from loving her and other ladies. She finally got sick, so sick she couldn’t say anything about Daddy’s others and that’s when he said, Let’s get married, except he said it with half a heart and she heard it like he said it. So they broke up. And he was extra loving with us and she was extra loving with her loves but we could all see right through it. In a few months, a girl from work moved right in to Daddy’s apartment, not the hippie digs, but another, decent place he’d moved into some time, I can’t remember when. The girl knew full well that Daddy was still in love with another woman and that they talked a lot on the phone. How are you, he would say to his real love? And she would say, devastated. And you? He would say, same, except I have a girl here whose clothes are in the same closet where you hung yours. Oh, his real love would say. Why did you let her? Daddy was always quick on the draw and said, well, she makes me coffee in the morning. His real love said, but I did that too. And Daddy would say, yes, I know. There’d be a long pause and finally he’d say, she knows I’m in love with you. Meanwhile my family kept up its love life, no matter what. Mom and her AA love bought a house together. But a short time later, he told her he didn’t love her. Mom fell into hell what with having to pay the mortgage on her own. We couldn’t help her, no, we were in debt ourselves even though Grandma, you remember her from early on in my story, had made sure we grandbabies got our college educations paid for. We loved hard and that cost. Don’t you know that?
Mom didn’t and she got a real surprise. One day her former love broke into their house while she was at work. He took everything that anybody would love and give money for, except the dog. He took the pearls grandma had loved and left for one of us, he took Mom’s wedding rings, he took the stereo, how dumb can you get. Then he disappeared. Mom didn’t love that she had to sell the house and move. Then she lost her job and Daddy felt so bad that he announced to Mom that the mother of his daughters shouldn’t have to worry about where she lived and even though the settlement he gave her during the divorce let her buy the house and support her love, he wound up sending her checks every month so she could live in an apartment.
 Have I mentioned my other sister? She only loved one guy before she loved her husband and they got pregnant before they got married which is no big deal and they were so in love. Everybody loved her more than anyone else in my family because she is so smart and loving and almost has a PhD and is pregnant again and her husband moved out for a while since she convinced him to join a day treatment program, and they both had other lovers, she started first, but says the baby’s his and she’s so lovesick from her and her other lover deciding that it would never work and suffering and all right in front of her husband, her child, and her enormous stomach in which her next baby is living until she sees fit to come out and everyone already loves her especially my Dad who loves girls better than boys which can be ascertained from my previous descriptions. He’d die just die if a man he plays sports with would ever, and even though he’s old he’s still very handsome and lots of men hit on him and the rest kind of make fun of him like the friend who introduced him to one of his great loves way back, cause he’s been through a couple subsequent loves with younger women, most notably one near my age who came from a very religious family but loved to wear high heels and pancake make up and lace bustiers and she drove him crazy especially when he promised to love only her but wound up going to a whore house in Costa Rica from which she caught a disease he didn’t know he’d contracted and she never trusted him again and as part of loving him she tormented him by breaking up with him every few weeks sort of punishing him for all the love crimes he’d committed with all the other great loves of his life.
 Mom, she lives alone now, she’s never loved again.

Gloria Frym’s most recent books are Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Any Time Now (Little Red Leaves, 2010). She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry. A previous collection, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award. She teaches writing & literature at California College of the Arts.

Prayer to Ganesha

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
we beseech you to remove the obstacle
Global Warming-denying Republicans have been
to doing anything about Global Warming.

Ganesha a nobler image of the sacred Elephant
than the desecrated image of the Elephant
usurped by a certain political party.

Haven’t elephants been abused enough—
from carnivorous cavemen spearing mastodons
to elephants abused by sadistic mahouts?
from the Roman Circus
to the Barnum & Bailey Circus?

1903: Thomas Edison stages and films on Coney Island
his highly publicized electrocution of Topsy the Elephant
in order to demonstrate alleged dangers of Nikola Tesla’s
alternating current, which, if it posed any danger at all,
it was to Edison’s own competing direct current.
America had used electrocution as capital punishment
since 1890, the year of Wounded Knee.
It took 13 years to get around to an elephant.

Elephants, along with whales dolphins humans,
among the most intelligent beings on the planet.
Elephants renowned for mourning their dead.
The fabled Elephant Graveyard, though,
is only a Tarzan fantasy. No elephants
were present to mourn poor Topsy.
Ah, how the elephants in zoos around the world
would mourn if they knew the remaining elephants
in the wild are so few and so near extinction!

They say elephants never forget. Yet the Repubs forgot
what got us into Vietnam, so went ahead and got us into Iraq.
Or maybe Cheney and Rumsfeld remembered all too well
and used allegations of WMDs as their counterpart to
a fabricated “Bay of Tonkin Incident.”
And now the stampede of Repub attack ads
trampling the minds of America
amid their favorite TV shows!
The berserk rogue Republican fake elephant gives
gentle peace-loving real elephants a bad name!

And now Madison Ave. would have us believe
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
is caused by an elephant sitting on your chest!
A species that killed countless elephants for their tusks
during the heyday of ivory greed and
big-game hunters merrily decimating
the African continent’s teeming wildlife
shouldn’t be blaming elephants for COPD.
The editorial cartoon Republican elephant,
not a real Asian or African elephant,
is sitting on the chest of America.
Yea, the rightwing Global Warming deniers
are sitting on the chest of the planet!

O Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles,
help us remove the obstacles
to saving the world before it’s too late!

Jeff Poniewaz taught “Literature of Ecological Vision” via UW-Milwaukee between 1989 and 2009. His 1986 poem book Dolphin Leaping in the Milky Way won a “Discovery Award” from PEN, the international writers organization. Allen Ginsberg praised it for its “impassioned prescient ecological Whitmanesque/Thoreauvian verve and wit.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Jeff’s epic “September 11, 2001” (an abridged version of which appeared in Van Gogh’s Ear and two major 9/11 anthologies) the “best poem I’ve seen on 9/11.” His last name’s pronounced POE-nYEAH-VAHSH and is Polish for “Because.”

Jeff Poniewaz, Allen Ginsberg, and Antler

That Old-Time Religion
for Allen Ginsberg

What would happen if we surrendered silence,
filled the negative space with song? All of us,
voices joined singing, “Glory, Glory Hallelujah”?
    Or, “Imagine There’s No Heaven”?
     Or, “Oops, I Did It Again”?

We sit in polite pews,
embarrassed by our warbling voices;
passively consuming
   the catechism of song.

We, who listen silently to radios,
who fail to dance in kitchens.
We, whose album covers gather ornamental dust,

What prayers for us
   whose sin is silence?
What prayers for us
   who use heartbreak as furnishing?

                  When I was young I clothed myself
                   in violence and poverty,
                   and my voice grew hoarse,
                  fading wheeze in the night

This business of salvation
   has never happened in stillness.
This has always been a parable
   of pilgrimage and transformation.

1927: Hoagy Carmichael quits his law practice
and moves to California to play piano,
plucking melodies from the night to save his soul;

1929: Eleanora Fagan brings her heartbreak
to a Harlem stage, turns the violence of her youth
to song, reinvents herself as Billie Holiday.

1931: Young Robert Johnson,
who can play harmonica but not guitar,
makes a deal at the crossroads, but not with The Devil

                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   has calcified to stone.
                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   fails to pick up a guitar.

What if every voice, on every street, in every country
joined together in one nameless song?
   Surely that would replicate
   the horns that shattered Jericho’s walls.

                  And the somewhere the boy I was
                retreats further and further into silence
                   And somewhere the boy I was
                   vanishes into masonry.

What is The Devil, but what remains
   when pieces of us vanish into night;
that bitter twitch when “Rehab” plays;
   Mark David Chapman’s cooling gun?

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                  fails to disturb the universe.

How are those voices anything but Holy,
those melodies that fill a chasm?
Lena Horne and Elliott Smith,
Richie Valens and MCA

— amen —

all inflections
in a voice that starts in silence
and explodes in a Bang,
in a Word,
in life.

All of them cracks
in the Jericho
between us all.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
               inherits his uncle’s old Stones and Cream albums,
                  devours them in a binge.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                snags his mother’s copy of “Double Fantasy”
               and doesn’t fast-forward through the Yoko Ono songs.

                  And somewhere the boy I was
                 slams his body in the heat of a pit
                  and finds a strange salvation.

So why is it that
when we raise the lights
and talk plainly of God,
none of us are happy?

Victor D. Infante is a poet, editor and journalist living in Worcester. He is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have been published in numerous periodicals, including The Collagist, Pearl, Chiron Review and The Nervous Breakdown.

The Unseen

The marble is veined – he says –
Like human skin. It comes from Carrara,
A mountain in Italy. I’ve heard it is pure white,
Like snow in the Alps,
Its side wide open, a curtain of alabaster.

You cut it into even slices
One – two – three –inch thick, whatever you need.
The slices are symmetrical. The veins,
The patterns repeat from one slice to the next.
The marble block opens up like the wings
Of the butterfly . . . smooth, elegant, pristine…

He stops, looks up. The marble mountain –
Too far away from the concertina wire
Splayed over the top of the jail fence.
Symmetrical, patterned,
Its long spikes shine above each locked gate,
Cement block wall.

An artist’s work – he says –
Look, they labored so hard
To place the metal spikes perfectly even,

So close together, you cannot grasp it
With your bare hands…

His fingers move gently
Caressing the marble he remembers
In the stagnant air behind bars –
The butterfly wings of freedom.

© 2012 by Maja Trochimczyk

Maja Trochimczyk is a Californian poet, scholar, translator, photographer, and non-profit director from Poland. She studied musicology at the University of Warsaw, Poland (M.A. 1986) and sound engineering at the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw (M.A. 1987). In 1988 she emigrated to Canada and in 1994 she earned her Ph.D. in musicology from McGill University in Montreal. After a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1994-1996), Dr. Trochimczyk joined the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music as Director of the Polish Music Center (1996-2004). She also received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2001-2002). Since 2004, Dr. Trochimczyk has continued her research and music history activities as an independent scholar while becoming active as a poet and publisher, as well as working as a development director for healthcare and human service organizations in Los Angeles. She is Senior Director of Planning at Phoenix House in California. She serves as Board member and Officer for the Polish American Historical Association and as President of Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club in Los Angeles. For the years 2010-2012, Dr. Trochimczyk was elected the Sixth Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga, California.