GAS Featured Poet: Bart Edelman

 Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023.  He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.  His work has been anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others.  He lives in Pasadena, California.

How to Howl

 

Tell yourself it’s normal—

Quite natural, this time of year.

Invite the moon into your bedroom

For a smoke or a tipple;

Perhaps both, if available.

Consecrate the event with a prayer,

And then howl, as required,

Until you reach the welkins.

Think Ginsberg, should you dare.

Put your shoulder to the wheel,

Turning when necessary.

By now, I must imagine,

Your new friend is no stranger.

You can both engage

In any wolfishness you desire—

Reaching a fevered pitch.

At some point, before dawn,

Your throat might give out,

Yet not your desire to wail

A few more exquisite hours.

And the ever mercurial moon?

It’s already summoned home.

But don’t worry, my friend.

You need it no longer.

 

The Wagon

 

On the wagon?

Off the wagon?

And whose wagon is it?

Never quite sure

Where I should be,

This time of night,

When everything’s so still

You can hear your heart

Thumping, beat after beat,

Like a backward kangaroo,

Unable to navigate his way

Out of the front yard.

I suppose I should know

How to stay sober by now.

How to go cold turkey.

But the chicken in me

Won’t ever fess up

To the comical truth:

I have no desire

Living through a life

Without a measly drink.

So there you have it.

Can’t say it ain’t been said.

And the wagon?

Gone, once again.

Café Insomnia

Open all night long

For tethered thoughts,

Twisted carnival dreams,

Racing through mindless chatter—

From sin’s almighty refuge

To dawn’s distant light.

Bring us the sleepless mess

You can’t deliver anywhere else.

Mail without a street address,

Unstamped by man or machine.

Believe me, we aim to please,

Offering one strange brew

After another, perchance,

Until you’ve had enough,

Shaking off the next demon,

Huddled in the corner booth,

Waiting to chat you up.

When departure hour arrives,

Don’t expect a bill;

After all, it’s on the house.

Please come again, soon,

And remember, of course,

We never close.

 

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

 Jason Ryberg 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. 

Tanka

 

 Event Horizon 

 

I’ve heard there is an

event horizon waiting,

quietly, at the

     hollowed-out hearts of typhoons,

     tornados and hurricanes.

 

 

 White Noise 

 

A city full of

transient winds, and a head

     full of birds (with a

     mainline hotshot of all the

     white noise of the universe).

 

 A Few Good Laughs and 

     a Comfortable Grave 

 

In the end, don’t we

all just want a little bit

of dignity and

respect, a few good laughs

     and a comfortable grave?

 

 

 

 Night Mail 

  

He’d told us he’d been

out delivering the late

     night mail of dreams (like

     paper lanterns set adrift

     on the dark river of sleep).

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GAS Featured Poet: Bob McAfee

 Bob McAfee is a retired software consultant who lives with his wife near Boston. He has written nine books of poetry, mostly on Love, Aging, and the Natural World. For the last several years he has hosted a Wednesday night Zoom poetry workshop. Since 2019, he has had 141 poems selected by 57 different publications. Two poems nominated for Best of the Net. His website, www.bobmcafee.com, contains links to all his published poetry.

Quiet Is

the doe hidden in tall grass,

the lion stalking by upwind;

the January bear dreaming of salmon,

his belly anticipating the Spring spawn;

the winds mellowing in the hurricane’s eye,

the seagulls flailing to hold the attic of the sky;

the trees talking at midnight, willows whispering  

prophecies as the moon slides behind the tamarack;

the city settling in after the bars have closed,

the early morning garbage trucks still sleeping;

the tom cat trying to make it home

through suburban coyotes howling in pantomime;

the patrol car parked behind the Piggly Wiggly,

the cop nursing his empty coffee cup;

a man, lying catty-cornered on his king-sized bed,

alone in perfect isolation.

My Mother’s Hair

She lies in a hospice bed, 

her hair spilled out around her head,

longer than I ever remembered, so white 

it looks blue in the afternoon sunlight

pouring through the windows, glistening.

My daughter applies a damp sponge 

to the cracked lips and tongue, 

raises the head so the lush 

hair leaps to the waiting brush,

relates all the day’s events 

in a voice of great intensity,

just in case Mom is listening.

After a while, my grand-daughter, a nurse, 

takes over, expertly pulls and smooths,

every stroke well-practiced and rehearsed;

this is not the first dying woman she has soothed. 

My mother went to the beauty salon each week, 

her hair a sea of lacquered wave and frozen curl,

but now it looks so soft along her cheeks

I could bury my young boy’s face in its carefree swirl.

My great-granddaughter, age four, 

as though death is commonplace,

leans to kiss my mother’s face 

with deep concern.

I lean toward the bed and hear soft singing, a lullaby,

and I resist the urge to cry 

as I await my turn. 

GAS Featured Poet: Alex Johnson

 Dubbed "the Baudelaire of our time" by John Shirley, co-founder of Cyberpunk and lyricist for Blue Oyster Cult, Alex S. Johnson is a longtime friend of such lovely artists as Ellyn Maybe, Iris Berry and Richard Modiano. His books include The Doom Hippies, Bizarrely Departed, Skull Vinyl: Poems 2012-2017 and Songs for Dark Cabaret. Two of his books are archived at Harvard's Widener Library. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family. 

Cuckoo

"The cuckoo is the state bird of most states of mind"-Ellyn Maybe

I really think I've lost it

This time...or have there been

More 

Pileups on the cerebral

101?

Vanished

He vanished, his

Eyes swept clean of 

All standing wars and 

Furniture.

That's some escape pod he's got,

she said.

I nodded.

Ellyn giggled and nodded. Also.

We were still trying to get through

the fast food drive through and

through

&

far from sapping themselves like

very clumsy gangsters in a 

1930s film noir, the explosive

tumult of

Giggles expanded 

Increased

Unto the seventh generation of swine...Hunter Thompson in the eaves, cooing like a creme brulee that thought it was a film by

Jean Luc Goddard. 

Micro-Aggression

Everybody off the bus, and that's an

Order....this means

You and

You and the

Distingrated face-looking

Man with the eyeball clock, smoking 

His own fist.

GAS Featured Poet: John J. Ronan

 

  John J. Ronan is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, a former Ucross Fellow, Bread Loaf Scholar, and Poet Laureate of Gloucester, MA. My book Marrowbone Lane (Backwaters/University of Nebraska, 2010) was a Highly Recommended selection of the Boston Authors Club. That book was followed by Taking the Train of Singularity South from Midtown (Backwaters/University of Nebraska, 2017). A new book, The Idea of Light, appeared in June, 2025. Linda Pastan, once called his work "Very good indeed: original, assured, just a touch sardonic." His poems have appeared in Times Literary Supplement, Main Street Rag,Woven Tale, Thrush, Confrontation, Folio, Threepenny Review, The Recorder, Hollins Critic, New England Review, Southern Poetry Review, Louisville Review, Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, NYQ, et. al.

The Gardener

 

The patio pots, housed for the winter,

Boast crotons, jasmines, ferns,

With here and there a stowaway clover, 

Dandelions, a blade or two of grass –

Accidentals as ever unabashed beside

The cute and coddled, the nursery-purchased.

Left to themselves, our guests will survive

The windless kitchen, the chlorinated rain,

Off-to-school and -work routines,

The vacuum, baking days, Fabreze.

And on Thanksgiving or New Year’s, knots

Of friends and family around the island,

A wine-dark, suburban sea

Debating condos in Florida, the untried

Tesla, tuition, A.I.

With Easter and a last possible frost,

It’s out they go, both proud and rowdy, 

Under the reckless sun, into the varied air.