GAS Featured Poet: Michael Lee Johnson

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet of high acclaim, with his work published in 46 countries or republics. He is also a song lyricist with several published poetry books. His talent has been recognized with 7 Pushcart Prize nominations and 7 Best of the Net nominations. He has over 653 published poems. His 330-plus YouTube poetry videos are a testament to his skill and dedication. He is a proud member of the Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/. His poems have been translated into several foreign languages. Awards/Contests: International Award of Excellence "Citta' Del Galateo-Antonio De Ferrariis" XI Edition 2024 Milan, Italy-Poetry. Poem, Michael Lee Johnson, "If I Were Young Again." 

 

In My Will

 

In my will, there will be a pinball machine.

A renovated jukebox from American Pickers,

a cable TV show. For the taverns, bars, 

and basements of fun seekers for those

who long to be free and ferocious.

I no longer fear death.

Empty vodka bottle by my bed.

A dusty Bible underlined

Jesus’ messages 

in red.

GAS Featured Poet: Ivan Pozzoni

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2018, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Here the Austrians are more severe than the Bourbons, Cherchez the troika. et The Invective Disease with Limina Mentis,Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L'Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica; he is, or has been, creator of the series Esprit (Limina Mentis), Nidaba (Gilgamesh Edizioni) and Fuzzy (deComporre). It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), with a millier of movements, and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and figures à plusieurs reprized in the great international literature review of Gradiva. His verses are translated into French, English and Spanish. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology).

 

THE BALLAD OF PEGGY AND PEDRO

The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials 

of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair, 

teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love, 

to love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.

Peggy you were drunk, normal mood, 

in the slums along the bed of the Tiber 

and alcohol, on August evenings, doesn't warm you up, 

clouding every sense in annihilating dreams, 

transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the back 

on armour dissolved by the summer heat.

Lying on the edges of the bridge's ledges, 

among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,

you opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro, 

your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void, 

drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.

Pedro wasn't drunk, a day's journey away, 

you weren't drunk, abnormal state of mind, 

in the slums along the bed of the Tiber, 

or in the empty parties of Milan's movida, 

with the intention of explaining to dogs and tramps 

a curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.

Mounted on the edge of the bridge, 

in the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils, 

you jumped, in the same trajectory of love, 

along the same fatal path as your Peggy,

landing on the cement at the same instant.

The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,

will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the world 

centred on the astonishing idea 

that love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.

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. 

 

 

 The Slippery Slope

of Infinite Regression

Those far-off and fleeting buzzards 

of indeterminate feeling,

pyrning and gyring on the horizon,

those flittering moths of thought 

recently seen accumulating, at the oddest times,

on the shimmering quicksilver edge

of your mind’s magnificent fish-eye lens...

they’ve been rapidly devolving

into dubious notions and bizarre insecurities

concerning the teleological motions

of moth’s wings and the polar ice-caps of Mars

(and their collusion and subsequent influence

over your own precarious place

in the grand schemata

of people, places and things)...

And what about that sweet, young thing, there,

givin’ you the cheerleader sneer

from across the bar?

What is that, exactly, that she’s beaming out,

so radiantly? Loathing? Pity?

Some subtle shade of pathos, at best?

Or that grizzled, hoary Ahab

of a character shootin’ you the stink-eye

from the back window of a passing bus ...

Maybe it all adds up to nothing much,

but, something both all-knowing

and faintly unwholesome was

most definitely transmitted in the brief,

teleo-scopic instant of that

thousand-yard stare.

And those little clickity-clicks

and distant kettle whistles

and whispering phantoms of white noise

you’d swear, sometimes, just like

billowing clouds of gnats and other no-see-ems

(hosting the reincarnated souls

of grievous sinners, no doubt)

always mucking up your receptions

and transmissions.

What could their involvement be

in all of this and to what possible purpose

and degree?

Sabotage?

Subterfuge?

Hostile take-over?

Zen masters, fortune cookies

and bar-stool philosophers,

street-sweepers, antique dealers

and the capricious daughters

of Mexican generals, alike,

will tell you, 

it is precisely at these moments 

that one must immediately 

pull the rip-cord and nullify all contracts 

and pre-arrangements 

with the world,

let loose the horses,

release the hounds,

and set free the birds of primeval light

that have languished too long in their cages,

but, most importantly,

one must stalk and chase and feed,

voraciously, upon the hot, dripping, 

still-beating hearts

of wide open spaces.

GAS Featured Poet: Peter Cashorali

 "Peter Cashorali is a queer therapist formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles."

Cleaning My Mother’s Apartment

 

Cleaning the apartment out,

Chairs and tables gone to friends,

What no one wanted taken to

The Goodwill a few blocks away.

But so much that had no use.

A drawer filled with rubber bands

And those colored plastic tabs

Used for closing bags of bread

In case one broke, just in case,

Used and smoothed out Reynolds wrap,

Almost empty jars of spices,

Ballpoint pens from other decades,

Archive of old electric bills,

Crossword puzzles, Gothic novels,

In the closet wire hangers,

Clothes addressing long-gone fashions,

Beneath the bed and its pillow

Crumpled Kleenex, clumps of dust,

In the bathroom medicines

For illnesses already cured—

Everything into the dumpster,

Bits of stuff that had outlasted

The one who made her sense from them,

Who had tended these resources,

Knowing that someday, someday.

Christmas Dinner

 

That Christmas morning I was up

at 5:30 to start cooking.

I made that cake I always made,

dates steeped in a little brandy,

grated nutmeg, best vanilla,

and while it was in the oven

waxed the table, set the silver,

toasted pine nuts for the green beans,

apple bacon, piloncillo,

fresh thyme and such costly beef

for the daube, to which I added

stout to make it extra rich.

One o’clock we sat to dinner.

He could only lift a spoonful,

asked could he lie down again.

The daube was so deeply bitter

it was like descending stairs

chiseled in a granite quarry.

Every dish was alkaline.

If I’d known it was our last,

better we’d sat on the floor

with a piece of bread and salt

and watched the sunlight cross the room.

But no way I could have known,

No way faced the obvious.