Thursday, August 31, 2023

GAS Featured Poet: Saloni Kaul


     Saloni Kaul, author and poet, first published at the age of ten, has stayed in print since on five continents, including eighteen states of the USA. As critic and columnist, Saloni has all of forty-five years years of being published. Saloni Kaul's first volume, a fifty poem collection was published in the USA in 2009. Subsequent volumes include Universal One and Essentials All. 

    She has been published recently in  Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum (contains ongoing Saloni Kaul poetry page), The Penwood Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Blueline (State University of New York), OVI Magazine, Mantis (Stanford University), The Whimperbang Journal, The Imaginate (Rutger's University), Mystical Muse Poetry Magazine, The Charleston Anvil, The Treasure Chest, The Poetry Leaves Anthology and Exhibition, Arteidolia, Quail Bell Magazine, Harbinger Asylum and The Transcendent Zero Press and The Lullwater Review (Emory University of Atlanta). 

    In addition to performing poetry solo, Saloni Kaul collaborates with artists on installations and exhibitions revolving around her own poetry and with musicians and composers on live and recorded performances of poetry set to music.




ON EMBROIDERED SHAWL
 
Most hesitantly, unaffectedly,
In her unworldly-wise artless manner,
Without unnecessary fiddling, beating about the bush,
She spread out generously all her unspoken 
Hitherto closeted thoughts
On a timid line like a shawl,
Soon smoothening the creases uttered rough

With pauses unprepared, irresolute
Naively punctuating taut the unrehearsed speech,
As she spoke uninstructedly yet honestly
As though she may well have been insipidly logging
Far-flung distances wishy-washily
In a logbook most unsentimental,
Toying with their propinquity in contexts distant,

Bringing back and forth those adjoining zones
On the termed timed narrow gauge.
There is always a namby-pamby nearness
In narrow-minded constructed time, in spaces solitary
Where close kinship's liberally concerned
And approximations detailed scarcely count
When the point is minutely driven home.

Flabbergasted, as astounded 
As in a hair-raising encounter,
Skin tingling like nap fibres
Covering tiniest of trees 
Or on a downy fuzzy flannel scrap,
Our newly enlightened listener breathed in and responded 
Directly in this volley of words.



Thursday, August 24, 2023

GAS Featured Artist: Jeff Taylor



Jeff Taylor lives with his wife and kids in Massachusetts where he is a union worker when he isn’t writing poems. Jeff has performed at universities, theaters, festivals, bars, coffee houses, and sidewalks across the east coast and is a member of the 2023 Lizard Lounge Slam Team. You can find his work in recent issues of The Bloodshed Review, BOMBFIRE, Oddball Magazine, Cajun Mutt, The Alien Buddha Get’s A Real Job vol.2, American Graveyard (Read or Green Books), and The New Generation Beats 2023 Anthology.



Tobacco & Hash



Jenn was a professional drunk

got killed by a rookie.



What a crap career is that anyway?



When Jenn & I were in Florida

we paid too much 

for a joint of tobacco and hash



the spliff got too wet to smoke

as we rain danced on the pier

cyclones twisting around us.



She overcame addiction

only to have her life ended

by someone who 

wasn’t there yet.



I like to think 

the woman

who caused the accident

was Jenn’s soulmate



they lived thousands of lives together

through thousands of universes 

weaving the possibilities

of two beings colliding.



The roar of this life 

reduced to the moment 

they floated toward each other

locking eyes before everything went black.



Jenn once told me

she wanted all her friends

to smoke her ashes

so we wouldn’t make 

the same mistakes she did.



What if we all smoked 

our dead friends' ashes?



Would there be an energy transference

reverberating across generations

raising our collective consciousness 

to new levels of possibility?



Would we take on the weight

of each other's lives?




Reduced To Art


I

build

towers

to watch you

ride horses

through our bed



I will

guild frames

for the pictures

of you

painted

on the inside

of my skin


I am raw for you







Thursday, August 10, 2023

GAS Featured Poet: Peter Cashorali

 


"Peter is a queer psychotherapist, previously working in community mental health and HIV/AIDS, now in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles. He is the author of two books, Gay Fairy Tales (HarperSanFranciso 1995) and Gay Folk and Fairy Tales (Faber and Faber, 1997). He has lived through addiction, multiple bereavements and the transitions from youth to midlife and midlife to old age and believes you can too."


Sam

 

Where is this

You find yourself?

In our thoughts,

Wandering

Through long agos,

Rooms of sunlight

Decades dim

Or shocking-sharp

Because last week

But clearly not

What you expected,

Which was heaven

Made of fame,

Or nothing

And its deep embrace.

None of this

Was up to you.

You find yourself

In memory

Though not your own,

A guest, a caller

In the homes

Of who you knew,

Not knowing now

But being known.



Thursday, August 3, 2023

GAS Featured Poet: Stephen House


 
Stephen House has won many awards and nominations as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s had 20 plays produced with many published by Australian Plays Transform. He’s received several international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts, and an Asialink India literature residency. He’s had two chapbooks published by ICOE Press Australia: real and unreal poetry and The Ajoona Guest House monologue. His next book drops soon. He performs his acclaimed monologues widely. Stephen’s play, Johnny Chico has been running in Spain for 4 years. 

 
dawn 
 
it was what i needed 
in my current darkness 
the dawn sunlight
rising behind tree
restoring me lost 
in a fragile ebb
of belief and happy
again waning
 
and so i held on 
with heartfelt gratitude
to the kind morning glow
accepted all 
being offered to me
without question
doubt
sadness or fear
 
when a grey cloud 
drifted into the light
i took that as a message
about obstacles 
how they arise in life
and always will 
so accept them
and not tumble down
 
after a moment 
the cloud 
gave way to sun
and once more 
i relished kind morning 
and saw how fast changes can occur
both to nature
and the human journey


i know Andy Warhol

i know Andy Warhol from his name and story of course but more so from an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum that i went to in 2010 as i was in Chicago and decided to take a bus there to see it and it blew me away entirely and one aspect that did was that so much of me and my younger times felt like a part of the exhibition as the clothes and colors and trends and celebrity photos and feelings surrounding it kept drawing me back to a time before and i know i was not alone in feeling that as i kept seeing other people my age there and became aware of something that was pulling them into the show and i found that many of the people there were still embracing looks and styles from the represented era and i stayed at the exhibition for many hours and noticed that others did also and we smiled at each other and it seemed as if there was a shared experience of culture and the past between all of us 

and recently in 2023 Adelaide i went to an Andy Warhol exhibition and even though this was a different time in another country and a dissimilar exhibition those same feelings from thirteen years ago washed over me and a similar experience with other people there occurred and i knew my reality is my reality and that i know Andy Warhol and myself very well