GAS Featured Poet: John Martino

John Martino is a writer, photographer, and educator currently residing in Hong Kong with his life-partner, Xiuli. His debut book of poetry, American Sonnet, a suite of 51 "little songs," was published by Half Inch Press in September 2025. Additional poems can be found at North Dakota Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, Packingtown Review, The Southern Quill, The Bitchin' Kitsch, and J Journal, among others. He is the Executive Editor at Home Planet News (homeplanetnews.com).

Little Pig, Little Pig

Don't mistake the words on the page

for the poem itself. Don't mistake

rage for direct and clear-minded

intent. Whether gunshot or engine

backfire, the letters jump and scatter,

take flight like a murder of crows,

realign as musical notes on an overhead

wire. The page in your hand is blank,

but the poem remains. Try to blow

it down and, like a house built of solid

air, it absorbs and integrates, grows

stronger. Most nights, I'm behind that

house, aiming arrows at the darkness,

guided only by a howling moon. Don't

mistake this for misdirection. In the sure

light of morning, walking and observing,

look at the many new targets heretofore

unknown: brick heart, human wall,

garden vault, bank gnome. You think

you know, but you don't. The biggest,

baddest toe of them all. A lifetime spent

misreading the signs, no matter how far

you roam. Remember: This little piggy went

to market doesn't mean it comes home.

Whitman Sampler

I celebrate my selfie! And play

with it, too. And what I exhume,

you shall exhume. For every atom

bomb belonging to me

as good belongs to you.

Tabulation of all our days

down to a spear of summer grass.

I grow lean and loath under

camera eyes. Watch me scratch

my patched mass.

I sing the body electrified,

hooded, buggered with a broomstick,

tortured by water, the flick

of a Bic. I sing of truth

extracted with a tooth.

I sing of twisted truths buffed to perfection.

I sing "America the Beautiful

Idea / Someday we'll live inside

the IKEA" and point the way

with invisible hands. The heat

sputters and cracks like Pop Rocks.

I leave teeth marks in every sugar-coated

confession, put all the half-eaten

pieces, each wounded dead,

back into the box.

GAS Featured Poet: Frederick Pollack

Frederick is author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

In the Walls

They were in prison under Putin,

then via miracle

came here; are eventually

imprisoned again under Trump,

freed by a larger miracle. That’s when I meet them.

Her English is better than his but she seldom speaks;

her response to camp conditions was

to become a listener. 

Ravaged smile. He, moon-faced, talks readily,

not only about his continuing, death-defying 

activism but a moment in prison when,

at last, he slept. On the verge

of waking he heard, perhaps a fart, perhaps

a curse from a cellmate, a cry

from above, and perceived them not

as sounds from reality but creaks and footfalls

from the corridors behind

this world. Where gods no smarter than we, 

less in fact but immortal, stumble

endlessly forward, sometimes blundering

into our realm where they, by accident,

do mostly ill.

Those Russians are the sort of friends 

I might have had if my life had been more … 

dynamic. I invented them and project 

experiences onto them because

they’re less averse than I to “spiritual” topics,

and because they’re more important.

Blockage

As isolation spreads, the existence of

a spirit world becomes harder and harder

to deny. Some of the living 

are glad their parents are back (and more

connected, for the most part, than before);

some are horrified. And when it’s

kids who return – well, 

of course one’s overjoyed (although 

they’re always in a sense “special needs”).

Welcome for spouses, friends, siblings

depends on the specifics of relationships. 

There’s a return to family, often very extended.

Conservatives especially value it.

One opinion, hard to articulate, is that

what all this reveals is disappointing. 

Whether believed in or not, the afterlife offered

change, perhaps improvement, at least clarity.

Now we learn that everyone 

just wants to come (back) here.

These clouds of dead are merely (though only

hard-right podcasters say it) immigrants …

There’s also the problem 

of ghosts who return to the wrong place.

One showed up at my place.

Seemed slow, insisted I was someone else,

then began to apologize. 

This was early on; I’m afraid I let 

the pressure we were all under show.

Now, years later, I

wander, trying to find 

him or someone who knew him, say I’m sorry.

Belinda's Review of Because of You – Selected Poems by Bilal Al Masri

 

Review: Because of You – Selected Poems by Bilal Al Masri

Translated from Arabic by Dr Anba Jawi MBE and Dr Mohamad Haj Mohamad | Palewell Press, 2024

Bilal Al Masri writes from a country where, as Dr Anba Jawi puts it in her introduction, "human life has no value, and killing is ordinary." Yet Because of You is not a collection defined by despair. It is something stranger and more alive than that — a book perpetually caught between opposites, where tenderness and violence, presence and erasure, the sacred and the nihilistic collide on the same breath.

Al Masri writes out of Lebanon, out of war, out of a reality where beauty and brutality are not opposites but constant companions. What is extraordinary is how this context produces not bitterness but a ferocious, almost mystical aliveness on the page. These poems pulse. They contradict themselves deliberately and brilliantly, stretching language to hold experiences that resist easy expression. "I carry my head with cut off hands" is not merely a striking image — it is an entire worldview compressed into eight words.

The collection moves with remarkable range. The shorter poems are like perfectly cut stones. Absence, Exercise, The Path, Whiteness — each arrives swiftly and leaves a lasting mark. My Mother is one of the most beautiful poems about maternal love you are likely to read anywhere, in any language, casting silence itself as ocean and shelter. The longer, more ambitious pieces — Jasmine rises like bullets, And because of you…, Until you have become a garden — reveal a poet equally at home in expansive, accumulating structures, where meaning builds through repetition and paradox rather than linear argument.

Throughout, Al Masri's use of oxymoron feels not like a literary device but like a genuine mode of perception — the only honest way to describe a world in which jasmine and bullets occupy the same air. He touches Sufism and nihilism almost simultaneously, as Dr Jawi notes in her illuminating introduction, and the tension between transcendence and nothingness gives the whole collection a spiritual electricity that is rare and thrilling.

The translation is a triumph. Dr Anba Jawi and Dr Mohamad Haj Mohamad have preserved the strangeness of these poems rather than domesticating them, which is exactly the right choice. The English sings. It takes real courage and craft to trust a reader with lines this unusual, and the translators have trusted us fully. Dr Jawi's candid introduction about the collaborative process of translation is itself a pleasure to read, offering genuine insight into the difficulties and rewards of carrying poetry across languages.

Because of You is the kind of collection that makes you grateful for the existence of literary translation — the reminder that extraordinary voices are speaking all around the world, waiting only for the bridge of language to reach us. Bilal Al Masri is such a voice.

GAS Featured Poet: Rita S. Spalding

Award-winning poet Rita S. Spalding has been published in 18 Calliope anthologies, National Library of Poetry, AX-POW Magazine, The

Heartland Review, Kentucky Monthly Magazine, Keeping the Flame Alive,

Fallen, Rebirth, The Rye Whiskey Review, Walden’s Poetry and Reviews,

Poet-Tree Magazine, American Poet, Mays Publishing and Kentucky

Humanities. Her books include Abstract Ribbons, What is Beauty, and

The Eighth.

She has been featured in podcasts and the Kentucky Author Celebration, Kentucky Writer Celebration, Insomniacathon, Vagabond Poet National Tour, Endless Horizon, and 2025 Ohio Valley Folkways Symposium. Shegives poetry readings nationally and will be at 2026 Gonzofest in New York City.

Words From the Other Side

i saw you from outside my eye

that first fleeting mist of blackness

at my feet racing across the dust bunnies

not sure of your realness

caught in a nebulous gray mist

or were you just a polished apple

stuck in my mind from long ago

you were here I saw you here

shadow following my body

down the quiet hallway and back

yet when I turned you were gone again

i could swear you tried to talk

today at breakfast you brushed my arm

a finger or hand warmed by blood

you darted into the sinking wrinkles

of a cream swirled coffee mug

i saw you from the inside of my third eye

it was you i know it was you

wavy steam only inches above the floor

my third eye never lies

next time when you try to talk

i will listen closely all those words

that were never spoken

when you walked among us

Mary Lou Because You Asked About My Chickens

you asked about my chickens

they are everywhere

the roosters hens their love and pecks

on icy mornings i chipped away their water

in the darkness of the dawn

into the old weathered walls of the coop

i lifted the feeder bigger than me

and clucked for them to fly from

their roosts to meet the grain

watching the shininess of their wings

bright reds with hidden golds

dark blacks with dazzling blues

the deep red of wattles and combs

strutting flapping accepting me into their flock

my hands softly lifted brown eggs

from hay filled nesting boxes

the eggs were marvels to hold

i kissed each one before placing them

in a flower printed muslin seed sack

draped and tied across my shoulders

it fit like a gown and held them like a mama

like i wished for mama arms to hold me

in summer below the sunflowers and apples

i held rhode island reds to my chest

because they let me smell their feathers

i sat in the dusty dirt with black silkies

who were curious about my toes

i knew what love was when i watched them

come closer to my heart with trust in their struts

i live in the city now in this other lifetime

smelling the fumes of progress and traffic

instead of the sweetness of hay scented by hens

i brought the chickens with me

the roosters and hens are frozen in place

ceramic and steady they still call me theirs

they surround me on shelves from room to room

yesterday you asked why they are with me

i answered because they were my beginnings

feathered reminders of how i learned to love

in the darkness of dawn and light of dusk