Poem by Bob Bradshaw

In China

In China in the nineteenth century

a woman wrapped her daughter's

chest tightly with rolls

of cloth.

My daughter is eleven.

She wears a "training" bra.

What is she training for?

We watch TV together

and everywhere dresses

drop like towels in a sauna.

Young women pant in bedrooms

like fires whipped

by high winds.

What is she thinking?

I switch channels but everywhere

young couples wrestle and moan

as if absorbing

hard, quick punches.

Are these the role models

for my daughter?

Soon she could be dating.

I can imagine the young man

standing in our doorway,

his bribe of CDs

waiting in his father's borrowed

car. His polite manner

won't fool me. I know.

I've been there.

Bob lives in California, where he dreams of retiring to a hammock. Forthcoming work of his will appear in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in November 2009. New work will also be published soon at Writers Connect in Singapore. Recent poetry of his can be found at Halfway Down the Stairs, Chantarelle's Notebook, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, The Rose and Thorn and Orange Room Review.

A Fabulous Online Collection by Howard Good

Recently released by Blue Hour Press, My Heart Draws a Rough Map, by Howard Good, is an online collection of prose poems. With a cool layout and artwork, the work is easy to access and enjoy. And, as each piece is written in a way that only Howie can write, accessing it is necessary and enjoying it is a given.

Take a look.

Poem by John Riley

One Story Above the Boy in an Old Car

Near dusk today a car backfired beneath

my office, where the traffic creeps

east to west into a stoplight queue, waking me

from my working slumber. Its engine shuddered

and loped; with each out-of-sync crankshaft turn

new smoke swelled from below

the rust-red car. Behind my locked window

I watched a boy around four, maybe five, kneel

on the car's backseat, press his nose

against his window glass. Entranced

by the blue smoke, his eyes tilted up, rolled down,

as though he alone had the power to pull

into existence the ragged clouds beyond

his grasp. The smoke dispersed out of his sight,

above his head. Lost in his new power

to drag vapor into being and fling it toward the sky,

he could not see that the orange sky

spread across the city roofs was slowly

being squeezed into gray—below

the engine will whine, sputter to life.

The queue will break up, the old car

will catch the light.

previously published in Frame Lines Magazine

John Riley lives in North Carolina, where he works in educational publishing. His fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Falling Star, SmokeLong Quarterly, Willows Wept Review, Loch Raven Review, Hardboiled, The Centrifugal Eye, Frame Lines, The Houston Literary Review, San Pedro River Review and Hobble Creek Review.

Chaperons of a Lost Poet, by John Vick

http://www.blazevox.org/bk-jv.htm

In CHAPERONS OF A LOST POET, John Vick has created an extraordinary long poem, and become part of a great tradition of American writers who have chosen to examine heritage, gender, hunger, desire, intense self-doubt, and history. Early in the poem, Vick sets these words into a list: "get into the deep blue valley void of nothing matters..." As readers, we feel the pull towards that void, as the narrator struggles to discern and honor self and his own choices against the majority culture. But this poet does not get lost, and never gives into the "void of nothing matters". This long poem is evidence of that. With remarkable syntactical strategies that never feel forced, Vick makes a whole world visible, he makes a whole world matter to his readers. There's great sorrow in these pages, hard-won wisdom, laughter, too, and a remarkable self-portrait emerges.
-Deborah Keenan, author of Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected.

This book by John Vick is fearless.
-Valerie Fox, author of The Rorschach Factory, and Bundles of Letters, Including A., V., and Epsilon, with Arlene Ang.

Review at Press 1.
http://www.leafscape.org/press1/v3n2/terry-review.html

Poem by Larry D. Thomas

Of Peach and Powder Blue

A widow and long retired teacher of art,

she spends her evenings barefoot on the beach.

With each step, she leaves a print of lavender.

Resting her weight on her thin left leg,

she draws broad arcs in the sand

with the ball of her right foot,

some of peach, some of powder blue.

Her right thumb and forefinger are tattooed,

indelible sunsets from years of grasping

the chalklike crayons of pastels.

The very beach on which she stands

is chalklike, a quiet place where,

smearing itself gorgeously away

in the nacreous majesty of dusk, sweeps

the softly crumbling crayon of her body.

Larry D. Thomas moved from West Texas to Houston at the age of twenty to complete his college education, and graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 with a BA degree in English literature. In 1998, he retired from a career in adult criminal justice, the last fifteen years of which he served as a branch director for the Harris County Adult Probation Department (Houston). Since his retirement, he has been employed as a full-time poet. His first collection of poetry, The Lighthouse Keeper, was published by Timberline Press in late 2000, approximately three years after his retirement, and was selected by the Small Press Review as a “pick-of-the-issue” (May/June 2001). He has since that time published six additional collections of poems which have received several prestigious prizes and awards. More information: larrydthomas.com.

Poem by Linda Leedy Schneider

Oak Leaves

A friend is dying

...................................I

I am Alyssum, the last flower alive in this planter.

It's November for God's sake, and here I am small

pure like baby's breath or bridal lace.

I bloom among the blighted.

Geranium's flare of fuchsia

is now black and curled into itself

like an infant pulls in his legs

to remember the sea.

Daisy’s only eye is closed.

She holds her seeds close.

This is Michigan- ripped by glaciers

and soothed by the subsequent sea.

Great Lakes wash over wounds, mastodon bones,

Petosky stones. Sleeping Bear Dune keeps watch,

but Lake Michigan steals sand

with every wave and sends back snow

to kill November flowers.

White on white, I will succumb.

November, the trees empty except for the oak

that hangs on to its dead,

carries them- brown, broken, afraid to let go.

...................................II

My left eye hurts, waters, clouds this page.

I have sliced onions to make stock.

Soup- what else can I do when words wither,

and she hangs on brittle, crumpled,

as afraid as the Oak leaves?

Published in The Pedestal Magazine, December, 2008.

LINDA LEEDY SCHNEIDER is a poetry and writing mentor, psychotherapist in private practice and Workshop Director for The International Women's Writing Guild. Her work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most of the writers Linda has mentored have been published as well.

New Book by Poet Howie Good Now Available

Lovesick, a new poetry collection by Howie Good, has been released by The Poetry Press and is available on Amazon. Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including Police and Questions (2008) from Right Hand Pointing, Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks, The Torturer's Horse (2009) from Recycled Karma Press, and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology. Lovesick is his first full-length book of poetry.