GAS Featured Poet: Kushal Poddar

 

An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited a magazine - Words Surfacing, authored seven volumes including The Circus Came To My Island, A Place For Your Ghost Animals, Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems and Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel. His works have been translated in ten languages. 

Find and follow him at amazon.com/author/kushalpoddar_thepoet

Author Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/KushalTheWriter/

Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe

Dining Beneath A Saint

The saint bears her sadness;
she doesn't care a hoot if you glorify it
as a crown, probably of rose-thorns.

In the photograph she looks at something
below your eye-level; you murmur grace and eat;
summer tastebuds always find brine in everything.

The saint estivates in the air and breeze; melancholy's
lazedom dines on these long nights. Sometimes,
you want to follow the eyes of the saint and see
if she stares at the space where your heart should've bloomed
like a gardening gone wrong, like the boy alive within
spat some arbitrary seeds and fell asleep for years to come.

GAS Featured Poet: Cheryl Snell

Cheryl Snell’s poetry collections include chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, Pudding House, and Moira Books. Her work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies. Her most recent collection is called Geometries (Moria Books) and her latest novel, Kalpavriksha. She lives with her husband, a mathematical engineer, in Maryland. Her 2021 credits include poems in Autumn Sky Daily, Eunoia Review, Clementine Unbound, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, One Art, and Words & Whispers.

Dry Spell

 

Then the rains came.  

She swallowed hard,

and on the way down

the water was everything

blue swells and whitecaps

are not: not fists of diamonds

where bubble plumes persist,

nor rippling limbs tossing up fish;

and by the time she had become

a river, fish leapt from her, boats

lined her shores, fishers reared back

to cast their trawling nets over
the new world she had made so wet. 

 

Gravity

 

We may have dark matter all wrong.

When I read this I wanted to turn off

all the lights in the house. We know
the world through our metaphors

and some truths cannot be seen directly. 
Observations on bending the light,

the way we have of looking at a star
set inside a halo of galaxies we trust

 

not to fly apart, does not tarnish the star’s

brilliance through time and distance.

 

It taunts us for our disbelief─ but look at it
still up there, still glowing.

 

The Tao of Folding

       And after dinner, the maid puts the family away like linens. She creases each member along their wrinkles and angles, edges and curves. The children are folded like origami birds for good luck and sweet dreams, and the parents are stacked one on top of the other tissue thin double thickness. The grandmother is long and narrow and must be rolled, yellow stains turned inward like shame. 
          As time wears on, the shelves in the linen closet give more to the family than a just place to sleep—they are a refuge, a hideaway, a vacation home. The ledges groan with time and from the children’s growing, so it is more and more difficult for the maid to get them up in the morning. She grows old with the effort.
           She must admit now that she does a less efficient job when she tucks them in at night: the children want to be folded into origami computers, and that’s only the beginning. The parents are forever slipping their own neat stack of selves to tangle up in each other. There is slippage and mismatching and nothing remains where it was. This makes it hard for the maid to separate the parents in the morning. As for the grandmother, she has her own problems. She has curled into a stiff ball that cannot be straightened out and refolded, for fear of breakage.  I’m set in my ways, can’t you tell? she says.
            The maid comes to believe she could never leave this family, her family, and get another job, especially since she’s so bad at this one. But a sense of time unfolding pulls at her, and one night, after she’s tucked her people in, she slams the closet door on them and locks it; she opens it again almost immediately, like a last word snatched back. She quickly spreads out a large blanket and wraps the stunned family in it, knotting the corners, east to west, north to south. She slings the bundle over her shoulder. She calls it the past and drags it with her into the future. (first published in Melancholy Hyperbole)

FATA MORGANA by Joel Chace, reviewed by Hex'm Jai

 

Fata Morgana:  noun a mirage.

More precisely, a complex form of superior mirage whose etymology derives from Morgana Le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress/illusionist.

Fata Morgana:  A recent book authored by Joel Chace and published by Unlikely Books.

So, my bibliophiles, let’s discuss an ancient concept.  A concept that is, at the very least, as old as our sentient sapien brains.  A concept that is the philosophical basis for most of the world’s religions.  A concept that is continuously imparted through our communication whether spoken or through symbols.  A concept so ingrained into the human psyche that is the very basis of meaning!!!!

The primary operation of this concept is contrast and comparison: Black/White, Light/Dark, Night/Day, Sun/Moon, Male/Female, Down/Up, Negative/Positive, Everything/Nothing; Blue or Red, Round or Square,etc.

Through this operation we are provided meaning, or so goes the theory.

The Dyad.

D=AB or AB = D

Why discuss this?  What could this possibly have to do with Fata Morgana?  Well, let’s address that right now.

In Fata Morgana Mr. Chace provides us a slim potent tome that is much greater than the sum of its parts on multiple levels.   First, though only a total of 81 pages, this packs a powerful poetic punch with the meaning of the individual pieces and their overall cohesion far exceeding expectations.  Second, we are given a flawless execution in experimental form that comes off with the polished shine of an expert and delivers the overall experience through its implementation.

 

The content of this book is provided by 2 voices, the Dyad.  I do not refer to this as a dichotomy as that would imply diametrically opposed voices relying solely on contrast alone, and though certainly the case in some pieces it is not the defining trait of the relationship of these voices.  More often, the play between these voices is complimentary or they work in tandem, one supporting the other.  Voice A provides us the straightforward poetic narrative that is clear, concise and tangible and in itself well executed.  Voice B (Italicized) on the other is more fluid, sometimes dropping crumbs of wisdom in fortune cookie fashion, sometimes historical foot note or sometimes providing that subconscious lens of perspective.

The third Voice.  Voice D.  The voice of Fata Morgana.  

Though both Voices A and B are by themselves coherent and cohesive the genius of this book lies in spaces in between.  It is in this in between space that Voice D resides.  The tension of Voices A and B, like poles or magnets, is what creates this space and therefore gives Voice D access to the reader and the reader access to Voice D.  Here is the Meta-Voice of Meaning, The Fata Morgana.

Fata Morgana is available at Amazon and published via Unlikely Books.

Fata Morgana

Unlikely Books

Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, and Golden Handcuff s Review. Most recent collections include Scorpions, from Unlikely Books, Humors, from Paloma Press, and Threnodies, from Moria Books.

MANYTHING BY Dan Raphael, reviewed by Hex'm Jai

Dan Raphael, a la Dr. Moreau or Dr. Frankenstein, has brought life to a creature of many facets (It’s Alive! ALIVE!!!!)! Through dense verse that is riddled with detail we are given wolves with a taste for quarter pounders and cashiers (A Wolf Walks into a McDonald’s), caustic visual symphonies derived from living (Living Downtown) and translucent sonic Kaiju summoned from the trans dimensional musical arts/sciences as perfected by Jimi Hendrix (If Jimi Hadn’t Died So Young).

Dan has expertly employed various poetic tools to bring this beast to life: Stream of consciousness, sensual synesthesia, prose poem – free verse hybrid forms and even fractal geometry (So Many Swift Fingers)! All of these and more culminating to create this beatific monster who certainly possesses traces of Beat and Dada DNA.  Disjointed!?!  One would think, but Dan has been artful in his fusion of elements.  It is through these techniques, slices of life, observations, critiques and musings that Manything has become an omnibus for existence.

So, now that many of us free to travel and explore, don’t go alone.  Whether you’re going pool side, park side, beach side, mountainside, East side, West side, on the road, on the bus, on the train, on a plane or just on the couch bring a friend.  Manything could be your trusty travel companion full of pocket dimensions!

Available at Amazon via Unlikely Books:

So Many Swift Fingers 

obscurity is not a virtue where alternative islands & lakes 

harness the monster curves of watershed trees, 

fudge-flake dragons sweep up the fractal hills 

curdling whey streams like the blazing sky effect of an agglutinated universe 

cuts diamonds into stars whose cloudy wake defines intermittent turbulence. 

jets flying through mammalian brain folds percolating clusters 

tame gargantuan knots while sponges & foam split snowflake halls 

into the very substance of our flesh, the lungs bronchial trees 

spread apollonian nets & osculating soap where pragmatic chance, 

from recursive to random, ferments sponge coastlines airport strips & tribology 

in brownian emotion conceives a cup on the devil’s terrace, 

a birth process of unforced clustering & cirraform fi laments in predisturbed lakes. 

the invariant translation of river’s failure to run straight, avoid polygons 

& discontinue prices as lexicographic trees take the temperature of discourse 

into a curdled effective dimension

><><><><

we go past the immeasurable to what language can barely 

de-obscure enough to distort through the door in my belly 

as i build the stamina to run my intestinal track, 

a personal best between meals without galoshes 

keeps me from sneaking up on angel-headed hipsters worshipping the visible woman, 

knowing which neurons to fondle & which to numb with cold drink. 

64 doorbells with legible names i recognize none of: my ancestors were thrown off ellis island & could only swim down, where the garbage was so dilute, the fi sh so plentiful you could read by their 

fluorescent eggs 

clouding my antigravity hair like radioactive mosquitoes too generous to die without 

fallout.

as i open the bottle a bone pops, a radius becomes a hemline 

exposing the green palouse of my multiple thighs. 

                                                                                          dinner was half an hour from here, 

we’d drained the biodiesel to make a hundred pounds of french fried curios— 

whatever we could catch, whatever wasn’t thick with feathers or excuses. 

the darkest hour is just before my pancreas’s naps, sending hundreds of photon-sized 

pigeons 

to every antenna too lazy to change frequencies. 

                                                                                         i put half a lake in this balloon 

><><><><

when i begin to taste the mass of stars, the many times more i can’t see, 

                                                            their potential solar & eco systems, 

my skin wants to separate into blazing molecules deaf to gravity, 

my bones with nothing to hold together but nowhere else to go. 

the beginnings of rivers escape from me, & the beginnings of radio stations, 

with every transmission we apart, as these cliff ’s pasts effects the echo— 

                                                                                               loudest 1st, susurrant infections. 

the holographic landscapes inside each flea from all she’s consumed & copied. 

i get an unmarked jar from the basement & eat whatever’s in it, 

sky full of woven, cloud shadows falling like sanskrit birds i’ll never see again 

folding their wings into their bellies before their thousand messengers disperse 

                                       (Many of the words and phrases in the 1st section come from Mandelbrot’s 

                                       The Fractal Geometry of Nature)

 

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, schooled at Cornell University, Bowling Green State University, and Western Washington University, Dan Raphael’s been active in the Northwest for 4 decades as poet, performer, publisher and reading host. He is the author of 20 other published poetry collections, including Everyone in This Movie Gets Paid (Last Word Press, Olympia, Washington), The State I’m In (nine muses books, Winston, Oregon), and Impulse & Warp: The Selected 20th Century Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon, La Grande, Oregon). Dan lives in Portland with his wife Melba and over 400 plant varieties. Retired after 33 years working for the Oregon DMV, he spends non-poetry time practicing electric bass and tai chi, brewing and drinking beer, and every Wednesday he writes and records a current events poem for the KBOO Evening News.

GAS Featured Poet: Kevin M. Hibshman

Kevin M. Hibshman has had his poetry, prose, reviews and collages published around the world, most recently in Punk Noir Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review, Piker Press, The Crossroads, Drinkers Only, 1870, Synchronized Chaos, Yellow Mama, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Literary Yard, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Medusa's Kitchen. He has edited his own poetry journal, FEARLESS for the past thirty years. He has authored sixteen chapbooks, including Incessant Shining (2011, Alternating Current Press).He received a BA in Liberal Arts from Union University/Vermont College in 2016. A new book, Just Another Small Town Story will be available from Whiskey City Press in 2021.

trees through the fog

i feel it

a faint tremor

your calling

stirring in my heart chambers

dreamscape of rising mist

roused gently from falling

into soft sleep by a sudden stillness as

something brushes across my cheek

wind cushioning the collapse of reason

i throw open the door in mild distress

anticipation

a hint of dread

finds me running wet

through sodden leaves 

you had promised that you would find me

i cannot see any form yet when i pause

i can hear you breathe

rippling

like water

like mystery imparting a glow

to the fog between the trees

Meteor Shower

It was in the meteor shower that night.

The skies were bright with objects ablaze.

I had such wonderful dreams.

Little alien things whirling and whizzing by.

Ah, youth!

You saw it, too!

I asked you to believe.

They wanted me to.

Mirror universe.

Flexible dimensions.

One swirling, sophisticated, holographic spasm?

It was in the music.

Precise and patterned.

A signal.

A Wake-up call.

I sang it as we swept drunkenly down the halls to sleep.

It has followed me through the years.

Calls to me now:

“Love the mystery even if it turns out to be merely an illusion.”

There are no limits to the imagination.

In the realm of infinite possibilities,

There can be no finite conclusions.

The Thing That Keeps Me From You

Is it politics?

Is it preference?

Is it the pigment of our skin?

Is it science?

Is it religion?

Is it some antiquated concept of grace and sin?

Is it fact?

Is it fiction?

Is it just more inane bullshit?

Someone's uninformed opinion?

Is it language?

Is it geography?

I'd like to believe it is only conquerable distance

GAS Featured Poet: Thomas Graves

Thomas Graves was born in Hawaii and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, attending the Dalton School. He has a Masters in English from Iowa. He adapted and wrote music for Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" for The Childrens Theater at Tufts University. He read his poems at a poetry festival in Romania in 2016. His book Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism was published in 2021. He is the editor of Blog Scarriet. 

THE FISH

As a boy I learned to accept the fishes’ death.
On fishing trips with my grandfather I silently hoped the fish
Would live.  After a long drive from the lake,

When the trunk was opened,
The pickerels would still be breathing,
Their gills quivering in the murderous air.
I sensed my grandfather’s indifference;
My sorrow brooded without sound on my lips.

The pity I felt
for the fish who solemnly lazed in streams,
Inscrutable monsters who lived in the flood!
My pity moved against me like a flood,
Weakening everything but memory,
Death disguised in dreams,
Dreams of dream lakes, peering within.

Fishing in dreams, fish
Of strange dimensions, the writhing
Of colors hidden partially by the dark.

Before I learned to fish, when sex
Was only something disguised in dreams,
I dreamed of two creatures,
One fat, one long, fighting to the death
In a wooden container of water, barely large enough to hold them.

I founded my religion in a pond.
You could see a boy hunched over on summer days
Salamanders hiding in the slime.

I feared for the safety of worms
We used for bait.  Fish devoured worms, and so I felt
Less pity for fish, and then less pity for all.

I stood frozen once, when I saw a minnow
In the mouth of a snake.

Does anyone know what anything is just before it happens?
I remember feeling sex for the first time.
Poetry hinted at sex; sounds of words
Saying what was underlying, 

Here’s the brook, the forest, the hungry trout,
The dream of sex which is not sex,
The hungry sweetness of desire,
The sunlight, the mist, the mad-life child.

You returned from the woods with your books,
You brought your books back; poetry failed you;
Poetry in books was too full of silences.

Sex, the adolescent feeling sex,
Suddenly coming for the first time
While just lying on the bedroom floor, alone;
You live with it, marry it,
It keeps you company,
And poetry, lying before you in piled books,
Becomes your companion too.

If we could get back
To the dream of sex which is not sex,
The meadow, the arms, the face,
The whispers, the explanations, mother, father,
Brother, sister, the conquering, the sand,
The water, the coughing, the poetry;
The light just above you as you look up;
You’re a fish, swimming towards him,
The boy in the boat with his grandfather;
He is listening to his grandfather tell a joke;

You will interrupt, you will startle the line;
You will be pulled up on the boat;
You will die; you will die, slowly,
And the boy will no longer know what to think.
But the idea was to die for him.
The idea was to save his life.

LONGFELLOW PARK

That summer we were devoted to baseball
And counted dexterity highest of all things.
Under high trees we learned what we could do on our feet
With the wiffle ball---make it soar or run and with its curve
Baffle both the left handed and the right handed batter.

Our umpire was the venerable Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
On Brattle Street in Cambridge,  Longfellow's house stands,
Between it and the Charles River, Longfellow Park;
A dozen stone steps on either side descending to the river
Frame a monument fifteen feet high, featuring the bust

Of Longfellow, with his fictions carved in low-relief
On the wall behind him; the base on which his bust sits
Is a pedestal forming a strike zone perfect in width,
The wall a fine back-stop to the field of play, formed by
A three foot stone wall enclosing the infield, lamposts

Perfect foul poles just beyond the short wall's two corners;
Three stone steps opposite the statue twenty feet away
Lead to the grass outfield and a curved path: homerun.
Two is all that's needed; one bats, one pitches.
Singles need to clear the three foot stone wall,

Doubles are any hit which hits an outfield tree on the fly,
Triples those hits which on a fly strike the distant path,
Homeruns those which clear the path, sixty feet away.
Home is the vertical area behind the batter,
Under Henry's beard.  He watched the called balls and strikes

We threw against his pedestal all summer.  My fastball
Was okay, but then I changed speeds---she'd lunge at the ball
Before its anticipated arrival; that was the change-up,
My best pitch.  She threw hard and learned a spot
Where I just couldn't hit it and threw it there all day;

She shut me out once; we'd play nine innings
And we took it seriously.  We fell in love with the game;
We hated to stop when tourists came by to peek at Henry,
Or when it rained, or grew dark, or when lovers
Were there ahead of us, sighing in our perfect field.

THE GIRL AQUARIUM by Jen Campbell, reviewed by Ren Powell

Reading this collection, I began to question the definition of surrealism. The leaping images in Jen Campbell's poems in The Girl Aquarium seem at times more playfully associative than Freudian. These poems make the wild, imaginative connections of childhood’s make-believe worlds. Though at times they allude to a darker kind of fairy tale than any I've ever read. 

Reading through once, for the individual poems, the collection compels me to read again to find all of the details of the narrative, to understand and fully embrace the brokenness and the strength of these girls with equal appreciation.

The collection includes free verse, "formal" verse like list poems and prose poems, and Campbell is a master of utilising internal rhymes and assonance when referencing fairy tales.

From The Doll Hospital: 

My mother claimed I had changeling feet
dancing in dirt water         pulling a ragged doll
through fairy rings when she summoned me home for tea.

I cup my palms. 

Little fishling.
I wonder if we should roll her hair like starfish.
Watch it flicker the colour of raspberry-plum. 

We hum, take turns.                  Pirouette
her little body so her organs align like marbled planets. 

While five of Campbell’s poems are so rooted in the culture of Northern England they are written in dialect, they hit close to home for this reader. The freak shows and sides shows that conjure up Coney Island and the stained, canvas tents at county fairs across the American heartland. The Girl Aquarium isn’t difficult to imagine: 

At half-term the aquarium is at its busiest.
They hire street vendors to come inside and hand out beer.
Candy floss for the kids whose parents don’t care.
The corridors heave with barbecue.
Too damp to strike a match. […]

In the feeding room: girls with extra limbs.
They scuttle into corners, pretend they’re shy.
In the sunroom: girls with beetle eyes.
Iris headbands blinding
at all the mobile phones.

Hashtag girls.
Hashtag half-girls.
Hashtag nothing you’ve ever seen before in your tiny little life. 

A teenage boy bangs the window, gives them the finger.

This collection conjures up the all too familiar atmospheres of xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny… 

From What the Bearded Lady Told Me:

That between her legs is volcanic.
That men are terrified.
That she loves how terrified they are.
That she likes the sea.

And zoanthropy. Here is a world-full of woman forced into a half-creature existence. From The Woman’s Private Looking Glass: 

Take the physician’s advice. 

Forget imagination and do not look straight at the moon.
Up there devil-girls cradle silver eggs. They slide
from roller coaster innards, trickle tales
of the greats. 

Leda, Lilith, Sirin — all owl-chested women. 

 And do not peer into the sea; for there salted-tadpoles twist around your organs and turn your body into stone. 

This collection was so painful to read, so familiar and so fantastical that I sit back and wonder now how I ever negotiated—much less survived—being a girl. But there is more here. The poetry is infused with the poet’s personal experience with very real physical disabilities. This knowledge forces the reader to interrogate the poems further. The reader has to question the limitations of empathy with regard to experience, has to explore the boundaries between metaphor and metonymy—and even the literal. 

These poems left room for me to find myself within the pages. But then they also pulled me out of myself entirely, which is what great poetry does. 

Jen Campbell

JEN CAMPBELL grew up in the northeast of England, and graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in English Literature. She is an established writer of children books and short stores, but The Girl Aquarium is her first poetry collection, published by BloodAxe books in 2019. She has a YouTube channel where she talks about (not surprisingly) fairytales and disfigurement. Her website is jen-campbell.co.uk. Her book is available through Bloodaxe and Amazon.