GAS Featured Poet and Musician: Neil Flory

     Neil Flory is the author of mudtrombones knotted in the spill (Arteidolia Press, 2023).  Nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize by swifts & slows, Flory’s poetry has also appeared in various other journals such as Superpresent, Sleet, shufPoetry, Down in the Dirt, and Fleas on the Dog.  Flory is also a composer of experimental music and a pianist whose enthusiasm for improvisation in live recital settings knows no bounds.  He lives among the wooded hills and lakeshores of Western New York State with his wife, published poet and fiction writer Elaine Flory, and their three hyperactive cats.

  

Light

 

Paradox/miracle of afternoon light through bare branches

 

Hope/death of Hope, like trying to cross the raging river on 

a thin cracking log barely stretched from bank to crumbling 

bank

 

Here we are in the midst of it, but we can’t harmonize 

an intimation

 

My single shadow interwoven with the countless forest-shadows,

another constant from the ancients (I notice them every day despite

our cheap technology, ever erroneously exalted, popular myths of its 

distinctions flashing vivid high definition across screens the 

size of continents)

 

And each found himself in his own subterranean tunnel.

Dim lamps every fifteen feet or so, significant gaps in their 

coverage. Leading to who knows where.  The belly of the 

mountain stretches on, our path until discovering a fabled shaft 

of light instantly the spark shift as even the thought brings it all 

blazing back, the leafless giants, twining myriads of shadow-dances, 

cool spring air on the back of the neck and blessed steep resistance 

of the hill again immersed, in this midst.

 

And finally what does it matter if yes, it soars too far above 

our understanding’s reach? Perhaps that was never our true 

harmony in this at all, stagnant mirage shining instead to 

futile long distraction in divergent heat.  

 

No, we won’t turn.

Step again now, in all trust; there won’t be another crack.

All you need now is to focus forward and balance, in fullest experience

we can harness of all resounding fact of every woven shadow rendering

in vivid sharp relief the miracle (yes, paradox unforgotten) of afternoon 

light the size/scope/life of warmth of this whole open 

vibrant world

 

Neil Flory · apparitions of deep memory (recorded live)

GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry,

six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,

notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be

(loosely) construed as a novel, and countless

love letters, never sent. He is currently an artist-in-

residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted

P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an

editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection

of poems is “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).” 

He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster

named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe,

and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the

Gasconade River, where there are also many strange

and wonderful woodland critters. 

 

 

Van Gogh Stars

 

 

Out here, the sky is

alive and swirling with Van

     Gogh stars and the wind

     is an orchestra of tree

     frogs, cicadas, and crickets.

 

 

A Small Rabble of Sweat Bees (Sleight Redux)

 

 

It’s just a bird singing through an open window, and a

woman closing the door to a dream of a lone tree on a

hill with just a single leaf on it (the tree, I mean), and

opening another one to a bowl of peaches, apples,

nectarines and clusters of grapes, just sitting in the sun,

on a wooden table (like one of those old paintings of

some rich lord or lady’s spread, back in the day, but maybe

also featuring, there, a few fish and some game hens,

recently caught that very morning, no doubt) crawling

with what looks to be a small rabble of sweat bees.

The fruit, I mean.