Featured poets this month
include (randomly mentioned): Bryon D. Howell, Mitchel
Montagna; Evelyn Roxburgh; Andres
Fisher; Carol Shaw; Jeffrey
Woodward; Melissa Halidy and Gary
Beck.
Remember,
every poem in
this section participates in PLT first Readers'
Poll, where you may
choose your favourite one by vote. The only rule is for Featured Poets
not
to vote for their own poems.
 Bryon D. Howell has been writing poetry for many years. In that time, his work has appeared in over 400 in-print and online poetry magazines. His goal is to one day be a "working poet," whatever that means. His inspiration? Shakespeare. These particular pieces are random selections of Mr. Howell's poetry. Some of them were written years ago. Some are as new as two months old. |
BRYON D. HOWELLBOTTOM DRAWER POETRY
I started writing sonnets, all of love;
to lovers I once had, some never weres;
I put my craft at risk, got pushed and shoved…
‘twas not the genre which today endures.
I don't believe in tossing any
art ...
I saved the poems, still have them today;
love this, love that; "Why did you break my
heart?"
Somebody told me, "Just throw them away!"
Though I may never send those sonnets out…
it’s truly nice to look back and reflect;
They may not be what publishing’s about…
but maybe I’ll find someone they’ll affect.
Discarding them forever seems absurd…
I’ll save them for the groupies should they
herd.
A RELENTLESS SPIDER
A selfish man who acted on a thought ...
did not survive his action's aftermath;
in such a web of madness he was caught ...
so he could not escape the spider's wrath.
A venom was injected and it set ...
inside this man who acted on a whim;
it filled his soul with anguish and regret ...
the spider got the very best of him.
And though the man tried hard to get away ...
the spider grabbed him holding on so tight;
it's for this reason we must fill our day ...
with good intentions that are fair and right.
Oh yes, this spider has a name ...
but me, I just prefer to call him, "Shame."
THE SWITCH
I've switched addiction from the drugs and
booze ...
you'll never guess what I am drawn to now;
it seems I always find something to use ...
and if it's fun, I'll wear it out somehow.
Some people like to gamble, that's not me ...
some spends all kinds of money on new threads;
it isn't chatting or pornography ...
it isn't jumping into stranger's beds.
I do not see the danger in my crutch ...
but it's been called a fix nevertheless;
it isn't eating ice cream, not so much ...
why keep you in suspense, you'll never guess.
This fascination takes up all my time ...
can you imagine? I'm obsessed with rhyme!
PARANOID
They tell me that I'm scared and paranoid ...
I'm not but they discuss this when I leave;
when I put on my phones to hear my Floyd ...
I'm unaware of what they might achieve.
They say I'm nuts, but I'm just sad and blue
...
my lover's gone and I'm just down and out;
so what I'm high, my heart is broke in two ...
don't they have something else to talk about?
They say I write about my suicide ...
that doesn't mean I want to end it all;
my sweet love life's the only thing that's
died ...
I wish they'd hush so I can build my wall.
I've voiced by views but this is far from
fixed ...
these folks who talk about me don't exist.
©
All poems by
their author, 2007. |
 Mitchel Montagna is a public relations manager for a telecommunications company. He has also been a special education teacher and a radio journalist. He writes poetry and fiction between press releases. His poetry has been published in PEEKS & valleys, INLET and 'Scapes. His fiction has been recognized in contests sponsored by Writer's Digest and ByLine Magazine. |
MITCHEL MONTAGNALabor DayA veil of sun shimmered on the lake; a grove of pines blurred in its wake. Skinny girls teased with burnt-cork eyes, smoking Camels and getting high. Glare lifted like fog; the heat bloomed, like a spreading fire through the afternoon. Bleary-eyed dads came off their chairs; they staggered down to the sunburned square. Crushed by drink, they stomped and cried their dirty oaths at the steaming sky. The girls felt glee; they felt their best. They disrobed to show their mothers' breasts - splendid and raw - for the dazzled men, that pitiless day at summer's end.
|
 I attended a course for Creative Writing and now have a Masters Degree. I write in many genres and have been successful in having much of my work published. Regarding poetry, I have won first prize in a competition, Hope Beyond Tears, read my poetry on BBC Thames Valley and have had a poem published in Writers’ Forum. I have had many single poems published, even a poem in French and English, published in a French Newspaper entitled Parlez Vous Franglais. I have self published a book of children’s poetry and it is on sale in Australia, New Zealand and England and appears on Amazon. I was asked to write a poem about food with sexual overtones and as you will see Cornucopia of Love fits the bill. I don’t write depressing poetry and my poetry is either uplifting or humorous, apart from the one and only Farewell My Love which won first prize in an anthology entitled Hope Beyond Tears.
Evelyn Roxburgh Evelyn
Roxburgh MA., |
EVELYN ROXBURGHWantom KissesCornucopia of LoveWith languid lips full sated And gorged and guzzled ruthlessly Till rapture was abated Once more the cornucopia Conceived with constant ardour Disgorged its fruits of fantasy And satisfied her hunger Billows of RaptureLike dust devils dancing on waves Sends salt-laden whispers of sirens Seductively oozing from caves I throw off the clothes that confine me Entranced by the cold seething froth And savour the joy and elation Released by the bone chilling broth I scan the distant horizon And aim for the wild frothy plume Then soar in the sky on the crest of a wave And dive in a shower of spume I float on my back in the moonbeams And gaze at the star spangled night I’m rocked in billows of rapture And cradled in breakers of white Enthralled by the power of the ocean Tears silently spill from my eyes And my heart sings with joy to the heavens When the swell sweeps me up to the skies I see away in the distance A ship with a Jolly Jack Tar He’s watching the marvels above him While steering a course by a star Timeless CirclesWinterWeeping crystal spearsMelting shards of frozen light Winters lace drifting
Baby Scaramouch HyperboleI thought I heard them planningTo choose a name for me Like Rover, Chuck or Marigold I even heard Sweet Pea Quite frankly I’d be happy To throw names in the ring Like Scaramouch, Hyperbole Or San Yo Pearly King I really like Symposium Or Sachmo Polybret But I don’t know what sex I am Its not decided yet Perhaps I’ll take it easy While this floating feeling lingers I’ll think about the speed of light And whether fish have fingers What’s that? I feel an ebb and flow Like waves upon the sea And what’s that awful screaming noise? Oh God in heaven, its me
All poems by Evelyn Roxburgh, 2007. |
top of page
 Andrés Fisher was born in 1963 in Washington DC from Chilean parents. At a very early age he moved to Viña del Mar, Chile, where he was raised and got a MD in 1988. There he started writing poetry and published his first book, Ocularmente Avido (Ed Vertiente) as well as got involved in the student movement against the dictatorship. In 1990 he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he got a PhD in Sociology in 1997 with a thesis that criticizes the restrictive laws on drugs, published in 2003. He formed part of Delta Nueve, collective that combines poetry with graphic arts and did exhibitions and presentations He got involved in Madrid’s poetry circles and published the booklet Estados y Extremos (Archcione, 1994), the book Composiciones, Escenas y Estructuras (Delta Nueve, 1997) and the book Hielo (Ed. Germanía, 2000) that was awarded with the Poetry Prize Gabriel Celaya. He has published in magazines and journals from Europe and North and South and his poetry is included in the anthologies Pasar la Página, La Voz y la Escritura and Estruendomudo. Since beginnings of 2004 he’s back in the USA where teaches at the Departments of Foreign Languages & Literatures and Sociology of Appalachian State University, Boone, NC as well as teaching creative writing courses in poetry in Fuentetaja, Madrid. He’s got a new poetry book almost finished, Relación, and a Book of Haiku. Previously published at PLT: Andres Fisher: Haikus |
ANDRES FISHER
|
top of page
 I am a Wife and Mother of 3 teenagers. This is my first submission to a poetry e-zine publication and I am thrilled to be in the process of putting my work out there. I am a blogger so many of these poems can be found on my blog, A Revision. I also enjoyed the interaction and feedback of being a part of the BlueLine Poetry forum for awhile. However the bulk of my poetry can be found in several notebooks in a trunk in my bedroom. |
|
 Melissa had always known she had a passion for writing, but first took responsibility for her family. Having just returned to college a year ago, she is in the process of pursuing her dream with a major in journalism. Living in Florida with her husband and two young sons, she has found the life that she has waited for and is living happily with her family and pets. She writes from her heart, taking bits and pieces of those who have touched her and the memories that she has made molding them to make them unique to her |
Melissa Halidy"Weeping Willow"Spun from willow limbs I draped, caressing puddles of mud with tender weepings where femininity was molded with soft clay and shaking hands – I wasn’t perfect, gnarled fingers crippled with age the tide always washed away the sediment; as if I were the water lapping and dying for thirst. Days changed, seasonal aptitudes forged at odds, storm fronts screaming desperate to be heard against the pallor of newly sprung blossoms - It was chaotic silence weighed with the harshness of nature, pulsating rain beating like the heart of a weathered woman – The wrinkles of pretty were left in the bark of the tree, twisted limbs telling history in ringed stumps became sitting stones for the weary; I became the willow, aged and fed from the earth of a mother’s womb. "a seedling"gnarled within the wildflower, we grew a seedling nurtured beneath rugged terrain knee deep in mud - [like every pitfall climbed, fallen, fell, triumphed beneath gale force winds] weathered in sepia, our limbs intertwined curving against roughened bark building tree houses in hundred year old relations – *with skinned knees we laughed against mulched land feeding ourselves from the leaves.* "between giggles and grime"pretty was for pink bows and giggles but i scrapped the dirt from under acrylic nails painted with clear promise – there was still woman beneath the breasts no matter how tightly i bound them. so i would sit legs spread watching dainty with knees clenched and limbs crossed like induced crucifixions – the box was always triangular to me, no short skirts or skimpy tops with cleavage to look down; i washed my hands on bleached knees and ragged hems, laughing at the fingerprints i left on my ass as i wiped today’s muck off. but it was my fingernails, always painted a clear polish encrusted with the grime of my tomboy ways – i was still a giggle inside. "elephant"there were stairs, wooden and scarred like my knee; short legs, freckled like the rain on the whistling window i tried to find the way up, knowing warmth came - but it was lost as screeching voices desperate for warm bosoms fell on deaf ears, he called me an elephant without any humor. "Second Skins"I cut bits of fabric,random photos from overpriced magazines and scraps of garbage left on overcrowded tables trying to glue covers over imperfections giving character to mask hideous burns or dimpled flesh – I wanted to be conscious of the markings; my body a canvas in stone ancient grounds to tell stories about humanity but instead my eyes were colored in black like read in newspapers where second sections go missing. I wasn’t a Michelangelo, Picasso loved the abundance of form covered with abstract art in jagged shapes. All poems by Melissa Halidy, 2007. |
 Jeffrey Woodward resides in Detroit. His poems and articles appear widely in periodicals in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia including, most recently, Acumen (England), Blue Unicorn, International Poetry Review, Poem, Re: Arts & Letters, The Christian Century, Galley Sail Review, The Hypertexts, Lines Review (Scotland), The Lyric, Envoi (Wales), Plains Poetry Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Studio (Australia), Haiku Scotland, New Hope International (England) and many others. His selected poems will appear in 2007. |
Jeffrey WoodwardThree PoemsAmia Calva
This, only known survivor of
a family, Amiidae, whose
lineage is
traced back one hundred
million years,
is little appreciated,
being neither a delicacy where
the fresh-catch blackboard menu
regales the
gourmand, nor sporting fashion
among anglers whose hooks happen
to snag the occasional and
brutish specimen. So curious,
so hardy and
stalwart, so anachronistic,
that at bankside a stick
or stone is the not
uncommon welcome it meets,
this subaqueous
specter, the biologists agree,
inclines, when captive, to gluttony
and in its natural habitat
--shallow backwater or bay --
is the able
voracious bogey for
the amphibious or piscatory neighbor.
The oblong olive back and
sides, cream-colored belly, orange-haloed
black-spotted
squarish tail, blunt armored skull
and the long sinuous dorsal
fin look odd in conjunction.
But when a scaled
marvel with a
lung, albeit primitive,
may gulp air and live
not hours but days, although
kept from the water,
is it not
churlish to doubt
the virtues of cypress trout,
dogfish, speckled cat, mudfish, bowfin,
grinnell, scaled ling? Fair
aliases, all,
for the stark original
who’d not be a fossil.
But lawyer, last and decidedly
least explicable of nicknames?
This betrays, somewhat, the quaint malice
of Time’s numbered and superstitious
who’d make of it much
bad luck, for what
deposition of
innocence might such see
in this unfathomed, pugnacious oddity?
___________________________________________________________
Daguerrotype, Mount Holyoke
Seminary, Circa
1847
|
Gary
Beck’s poetry
has appeared in dozens of literary
magazines. His recent
fiction has been published in
numerous literary magazines.
His plays and
translations of Moliere,
Aristophanes, and Sophocles
have been produced
Off-Broadway.
GARY BECK
6 poems from 'Songs of a Clerk'
City Speck
Old man of Greely Square
trapped in dirt and madness,
you raved strange words
of green leaves with many eyes,
and of what profit is a man and woman.
You stopped before me
staring me through drunken fumes,
drooling mouth accusing me,
twitching hands begging pity,
until I fled to office shame.
All afternoon I heard the well-fed voices,
the bright dresses
stuffed with breasts and thighs,
the dark suits
of hairless legs and paunches,
and thought of you all day,
until near home
the sound of children’s laughter
quite erased you.
Office Procedure
Bent over our desks
racing to our doom
the work piles high.
Peeking through the fog
the boss smiles down,
sadistic as god
peeking at Adam.
“Good morning, sir....Hem, hem.
We’re real busy this morning.
Think we’ll get some help?
Oh, no. We can handle it....
I just meant....
We will, sir.”
Obsequious betrayer,
feeble enemy,
my tongue.
Egalité
The strange after-work daze
in the flood haste of city men,
answering the hearth call of evening
to the wife of love,
the children of consolation.
Does anyone return to this?
I am adrift
on this alien subway,
alone, rocking, dozing.
Do the rocking, dozing people
at whom I stare
and who stare at me
feel the same?
Is this dreamer of empires
everyone?
Revenge
I am the eternal clerk
posting his doomsday figures,
the last figment
of dreary imagining.
Hidden by my carbon face,
a lurking dream
steals the morning minutes
of my employers time.
Treadmill
Home the huskless workers go,
buried in the evening journals,
sitting row on row in subways.
Only the iron wheel’s cry
enters their silent shell,
grey, drained, soporific,
fancying the peace of home,
but knowing with a piteous dread
tomorrow comes today again.
Anticipation
Toil dreamer, toil.
Today machines run
hot and fast,
served by aging fingers.
Tired old Dave,
consumptive,
shows yellow-specked photographs:
“I wanted to be someone,
have my own house in The Bronx.
But look at me now,
weak heart, ailing wife,
soon too old.
The machine needs nimble fingers.
What will I do then?
Where are the things
I used to dream about?
Soon I lay me down to sleep,
no memories to keep me company,
in an eternity of idleness.”