Coco

The Survivalist 

They tell me that I am a Miracle of life! 

Part of medical history at age two! 

They carved a big C –

From beneath my toddler chin, 

to behind my rose petal size left ear.

My tracheotomy a mynute nick back then.

Now it’s the size of a quarter, 

but people often say – 

they don’t even notice it.

Until I mention it that is….

My life expectancy was 5

I can’t imagine my mother’s grief,

my father’s rage, 

the innocence of my eyes 

drinking in their trauma.

After 5 hit they gave me the gift 

of 4 more years!

My stiches had long since healed 

and yet I was still coming apart

from the inside out.

Age 9 I stood with a lighter in hand

I decided with all the trauma I had faced;

rape, molestation, surgery after surgery.

If this was what life was –

then I didn’t want one. 

You can see the shift in my eyes,

from age 8 to 9.

Like a burnt-out candle.

A vignette is very fitting 

to the dark shadow that lurches over me.

Baffled at how I made it past 9,

the doctors give me 9 more years!

Holidays with aggressors –

Birthdays spent with pedophiles.

A practiced stage worthy smile upon my face.

If I am a miracle of anything at this point –

then I am the miracle of survival… 

Reflections

I used to tell people I was Frankenstein’s Daughter

he was the only person I could ever relate to.

The scars that traced my neck, 

and the misunderstood demeanor. 

How no one speaks our language –

grunts and disengaged looks from a hallowed spirit. 

They don’t understand our triggers,

nor do they care how hot our inner fire burns.

Just after we were created doctors cried out; 

“It’s a miracle!”

They never said what kind,

nor did they tell us we were just an experiment. 

As I look in the mirror its hard to see a miracle 

when all the world sees is a monster.

 

Emil Schultz

Experiment

in the 8th grade

Spawned by the miracle of yearning

at a time when boys and girls learn to play,

together in an awkward dance of attraction

seeking acceptance through inspired antics.

 

No longer the dreaded source of cooties

nor an unknown alien from a distant galaxy

but the sublime object of wanting and desire.

driven by those unknown hormones, which

promote strange displays of aberrant behavior

resembling the primitive mating dances

of some exotic strange animal.

 

Our gender opposites now occupy

our every thought and action

in an attempt to attract just one.

 

The ultimate trick of chemistry. 

Mira N Mataric

A Walk with Shakespeare 

Place one foot in front of the other.

Then repeat one, two, three, four,

and so on. Look up at the balcony

and hope for a miracle smiling at them.

 

Two looking down Adam and Eve

I will die when I see you are dead.

My head goes too and become two.

I can only be Shakespeare’s wife.

We both accept the dreaded strife.

We win and he is killed, by his best friend.

We live to punish others in a world of chaos.

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired

Being a Bard is very hard.

 

It was bad spending all my time in bed,

with my head in a whirl of turmoil and chaos.

You, in your place and space,

lived time with smile on your face.

Meanwhile I suffer sick with a tick

next to my head laying in my bed.

With a fake smile in my face

As you are in your space.

 

Truly a messed-up case

killed our love affair because none said yes.

True, it could have been much better.

The lady judge with a smirk on her face

when she said Stop, it is done.

We left.

 

No one seemed care or dared to say nay.

Not my secretary Fay nor her husband,

the director, messed up the entire affair.

Only because I no longer care.

 

The world is not fair,

neither air nor the earth,

would be. It is not mine

for I lost key to office and home.

The tome of biography is lost.

For the cost nobody cares.

All the wares I will pay,

for I dare not say no!

 

Writing exercise

I am supposed to think of something, that

must contain words miracle or experiment.

 

Don always asks for the impossible,

sits back with a big mirthful smile

making us scratch our poor, dreamy, brains

expecting a continuous flow of beautiful poetry

like from a mountain brook, stream or river,

into many ideas, as vast as the seas and oceans.

 

Finally, I can only write as fast and short

As whatever pops into my mind which

could eventually become a real poem.

All the time I am thinking time keeps flying

like a soaring bird or airplane and I am

scrambling as fast as I can to compose

something coherent to read.

Oops I am out of time.

 

Gary Jacobelly

signs of displacement

fresh baby wire g

un machine p

iano fear a

nxiety

desire grind 

restless fuckyearning

 dirt calm-dirt

the

all to what and why 

we breathe and die 

because

the great

generation pallbearer

comes now into being

as we

trade Birth for Death and Dy

ing

 not special death

he becomes spirit who v

omits care forth 

as cobras enamored of higher escapes

she shops and buys sensible sh

oes—the dedicated brand has proposed a style t

hat feels now attached

a feeling of use

 to everything

there is a thin Fluffing to the en

tire body 

has faded in push p

art of your brain t

his Body puddle my daily out-filled with s

kin alerts 

afresh, alive

in our perfect little surgeries

inside our heads

the

situation the 

not spider for to passion toys

 spiders living on their own spiders

because skin 

uses less electricity

actual m

eat, only snake

whose unknown h

and burns down a cigarette

 to fingers 

only to tell

that

your Rioting tigers 

may not go where you point them 

awaiting miracles and s

aints that never come

until

 amen

spinning on driftwood tells you more

The bed sleeps beneath you and awakes in the morning

A dog lying in the window warns the sun

Your coffee takes a long sip of you

he car drives you (back) to work

Your job works you(r head) into hours

Driving without a car is a required torture 

Asshole rioters heal you

You darken the night

Spinning driftwood so quickly 

Tells you more

All colors and dawn

Desperate for miracle

etiology

watching too many people die

for only to care

and know miracles

passing

this is not the grey-haired dawn

this is not the white-bearded sun

this is not the end

the Jesus of hate comes

to

ground 

abrading the fuck

into

all fuck

when misery is a miracle 

certain dark miracles

tell us

we’re all pigs in heaven’s style 

it makes you fuck into

your shoes

of cancer and habit

into a ghost that laughs and

into the crowd of 

people saying jump 

when the building says no

things fill my head

arranged astride

some

song-grease

climate-grief

said I was green

and selfish while

she is such 

a scrawny girl

short as she is thin

with buck teeth and a lazy eye

and warts along her chin

but

she'll toss a man like a rock

when she's gnawing on his...

and while we watch

we watch so many of us

die

for only care

and know

we are learning 

we are such fragile miracles

so many of us

 die 

for lack

of thought and loving

for lack

of any small thing left

in the perfect autopsies 

for lack

of the most common place miracles 

for lack

of actual meat miracles 

other than admit

our wronged sight and self-righteous slaughter

and we

being the fragile experiments of our own

choices we are 

we are such filthy miracles

Jessica Lea

A Day Without Miracles

 

No tumbling first steps

            or graduations

No creative sparks

            or revelations

 

No changing leaves

            or flowers bloom

No shooting stars

            or glow of moon

 

No snowflakes fall

            from up above

No falling in

            or out of love

 

No recovery

            or end to pain

No laughing crying

            or desert rain

 

No rescues

            or lasting peace

No birdsong

            or blessed release

 

No incredible births

or merciful deaths

No sunrise

or sunset

 

No more pretend

our experiment

comes to an end.

R A Ruadh

At first I thought

At first I thought it was a miracle.

The fact she was born at all,

after so many tiny intimations and suggestions of life

had come to nothing.

She wasn’t much of a sleeper though,

or at least not when I needed to be.

If the CIA wanted to perfect sleep deprivation torture

they could skip the experiments.

We had it down to an art.

At first I thought it was a miracle.

Her bio-dad left,

or at least was escorted out by the cops,

and I believed life could begin again.

At first I thought it was a miracle.

How far power and perversion can go.

She and I became an experiment

or at least what ten years, eleven custody cases, appeals,

the Supreme Courts of two countries established

as jurisprudence taught to this day in law schools.

At first I thought it was a miracle.

We still have PTSD eighteen years later.

Somehow we find our lives.

She has children now, my grandchildren.

The experiments are different

(though the sleep deprivation training helps).

Every time they smile, learn a word, sing a song,

exclaim with wonder that the latest mud pie experiment worked,

and read along with me in their favourite books

I know it was a miracle.

Camera Obscura

Word by word

Thought by thought

She splinters into fragments

Her world is a kaleidescope

In constant motion

Sometimes taunting her pen

With dancing reflections

Just beyond her mind’s fingertips

Every sentence of every day

Is an experiment

Capturing moats and phrases of life as it floats by

For her

For him

For us

All our love is not enough glue

To match together the

Shattered     scattered   

    Pieces

            Of her

        Mind

But it allows for glimmering moments

Of connections and clarity

And the occasional miracle

Nitric oxide is a colorless gas with the formula NO. Nitric oxide is a free radical, i.e., it has an unpaired electron, which is sometimes denoted by a dot in its chemical formula.

Nitric oxide

Forty-seven years later

I still remember your eyes slithering and crawling

up and down my body

as I stood there in the chemistry lab

Your privileged football captain sneer

snaked past the corners of your mouth

and on up your face to your cold eyes

while my friend stood beside you

Her idea to get me a date for the prom

had prompted you to make an person inspection

a prize opportunity

for a sophomore science nerd like me

Without looking away from

from your proposed prom possession

and deeply bored with the entire procedure

you asked my friend not me

So do I get her for the night

or do I get her for a steady

You get don’t get her at all

I replied

while carefully not crushing

the test tubes in my hands

Turning back to my experiment

I heard you choke with shock

as my friend swallowed her laughter

caught between disgust and good manners

I became something of a hero

for snubbing your lewd entitlement so easily

although truth to tell

I just didn’t feel any chemistry

Forty-seven years later

I still remember your eyes slithering and crawling

up and down my body

and the satisfying sound of your ego shattering on the floor

Charles Harmon

Santa's Miracle Experiment

“Twas the month before Christmas and Santa was getting nervous.

He and his dwarves were running out of ideas for new toy inventions

and the toy companies had the same complaint. Then a brainstorm!

Why not ask the customers what they really want and for their ideas?

So, the word went out to schools and teachers and kids around the world

of Santa’s wonderful miracle experiment! Invent something!!!

In Edinburgh young Al learned from his dad, a teacher of the deaf, and

got the idea to invent a “hearing aid” to help those who were hard of hearing.

Years later after moving to America he got the chance, and after fiddling

with wires, magnets, batteries and such he invented a gadget to help his deaf

students hear better. Why not lengthen the wires and strengthen the batteries

and speak with someone in the next room? The next house, the next city,

back home in Scotland? And so, the telephone was born!

Maria Sklodowska, daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, was

inspired by her parents with a love for science. However, women were not

allowed to attend university there in those days, and so she moved to Paris

where her work won two Nobel prizes, one in chemistry, another in physics.

To this day she is the only person to have won two Nobels in science. Her

discovery of the element Radium helped treat cancer and save lives.

Scrawny young Elon grew up in South Africa but was bullied as a child,

taking refuge in computers and dreams of inventions and travel to Mars.

After emigrating to America, he began inventing all sorts of things,

including electric cars named for his hero, Nikola Tesla, another eccentric

genius (and poet!) from Serbia who came to New York and created dozens

of new toys, including radio, although Marconi patented that first. 

Betty Nesmith Graham was such a bad typist she was in danger of being fired.

So, she invented Liquid Paper to save her job, then developed it into a 

multi-million-dollar company, creating jobs for thousands. She gave half her wealth

to charity and half to her son, Mike Nesmith, who then dropped out of his band,

The Monkees. Guess she was a real “Daydream Believer” 

Americans have invented more stuff in three hundred years than China in three thousand, 

and now Chinese immigrants come here for the freedom and the

opportunity to invent things, win Nobel prizes, and form startup businesses.

As do folks from all over the world. The difference is that in the past your

inventions, produce, money, land, and life itself belonged to the emperor, the

king, the local warlord or dictator or robber baron. The State. 

But now we get to keep at least part for ourselves. Creating more jobs and opportunities for all.

Unless we go back to the past where the government owns and controls everything, 

including our minds. Killing creativity and Freedom.

So let’s help Santa create new toys and invention with your miracle experiments! 

Get to work, invent something, write a poem, a song.

Get creative, get procreative, have a baby! Heck yeah, have two or three!

Teach our children well or the world will go to hell!

 

Radomir Vojtech Luza

Voices

I am so tired of trying

Tired of dying

This experiment in

Room 22B

Does not see me

Will not be

Midnight covers these four walls

Like black stalls

And I hear old men leaking

Grandmothers weeping

The gentle shrieking

Everything means nothing

Here at Grand Valley Healthcare Center

In Van Nuys, CA

One roommate is a lunatic

The other driving himself insane

Voices here

Voices there

Voices everywhere

The sound of rules 

Meant to be broken

Hardly spoken

Mornings spent flying

Afternoons sighing

Wheelchairs dotting hallways

The paralyzed and sick looking for May

Like a holiday

But settling for gray

Miracle in the Valley

Christmas comes

For the 58th time

In my life this year

And Covid is here

Omicron drinking beer

Santa Claus showing fear

Even Rudolph not so dear

But I could care less

Even though I am a mess

I am walking

Be it only two hundred yards

From bed 22B to

The physical therapy tree

Here at Grand Valley Healthcare Center

In Van Nuys, CA

With brace, boot, shoe and walker

I shimmy and shake

Anything but a fake

Giving myself a chance

In this deep, dark and dank lake

Only I stop and eat cake

Like an official flake

Yet no one can take away

My progress or my dreams

I will not allow either

To slip through the seams

Or go to terrible extremes

This experiment on paper

Costing reams

Forward steaming

On no one else leaning

Putting only on greens

Forgotten by the obscene and mean

On this Gibraltar

For the serene 

Patricia Murphy

Miracles

It's the miracle of Christmas.

When  I go to the bank to make a withdrawal

To pay Radomir's bills and I can't because I've 

Already made too many and the bank

Won't let me.  

Then the next week a check for over the

Amount I need appears suddenly in

Radomir's mailbox. 

It's a miracle.

Make no mistake, we still need money for 

rent and living expenses in 2022.

When I answer a phone call and

It's from someone I haven't talked

To in six months.   

It's a miracle.

I haven't seen but heard from staff

At Grand Valley Healthcare Center meetings that Radomir

Whom doctor's said would never 

Walk again a year ago, and now 

He is walking doing physical therapy 

Three times a week for ten to fifteen minutes. 

It's a miracle. 

When after calling Paramedics on November 27, 2020

And seeing Radomir going alone to 

Henry Mayo Hospital in Valencia, California, and 

The nurse telling me on the phone 

He has a Sepsis infection 

And is going to die, and then his being 

Totally healed from Sepsis.   

It's a miracle.

When I pray that serious ailments 

I've recently been diagnosed with,

And hopefully they disappear 

Without any surgery.

It's a miracle.

When I get a part in a major

Motion picture after going on 

Audition after audition and hear 

From my agent: "They want 

You Patricia.  You've booked it. 

You've got this!"  

It's a miracle.

Experiment

The experiment of Christmas. 

Experimenting with new ideas and life itself. 

Experiencing new adventures mostly on my own. 

Living one day at a time. 

Spending time with loved ones. 

Visiting my fiance four to five times a week. 

Going with him to every Doctor's appointment

Sometimes six in one week.  

Having conversations with myself 

To keep my sanity. 

Being grateful for the experiment of love.

Life is an experiment. 

Marianne Szlyk

Callie At the Miracle of Science

At The Miracle of Science,
the bartender mixes
a fizzy green cocktail.
Callie sips from the beaker,
but it’s the punning name of the drink,
not its taste,
that makes her wince.

Is ketchup a vegetable in this world?

The blonde in the House of Pain t-shirt,
the one who may say “warsh” for wash,
the one with a calico tattoo,
she grimaces.
She wants a bacon martini,
not spiked diet soda.
She wants to jump around.
She wants shamrocks and shenanigans.
She wants.
She yawns.
This joke has gone on too long.

 

Originally published in Aberration Labyrinth, Sept. 2012 

Jeffry Michael Jensen

Experimenting with Something Miraculous

 

I’m going for no singed fingers this time around.

Can anyone hope for better?

The neighbor girl still sticks her tongue out at me

whenever I walk by wearing my tinfoil trousers.

One day, she may see the light and join me.

I can’t worry about that now.

There is so much to juggle in these shadowy times.

As they say, when trouble troubles me I trouble trouble.

I don’t really know what that means in a metaphysical sense,

but I’ve always kept my squirt gun close at hand

and my buffed-up shoes pointed in a direction of a big day of judgment.

I figure that all the peculiar punishment promised

in the threads of inspirational poetry will come at ground level.

Someone has been at the corner fetching all the Angels’ whispers.

A ukulele God comes down from the mountaintop with a whistle in his guts.

I found trauma sewn inside the lining of my dad’s smoking jacket.

We all took shots at the public piñata growing on the steps of the library.

Classmates stumble over the boredom that bears down on real genius.

Miracles are said to have voluptuous centers.

I need to graze in the arms of all the shiny miracles that have

muscled their way into the hemisphere that brings comfort to pilgrims.

Standing without a disappearing clemency toward my spiritual burden,

I am flush with a dozen doses of male bravado at the ready.

Going unapologetic, I push experimenting like a celestial pilgrim

and take control of the unsurmountable in the clear light of a rapturous day. 

Lori Wall-Holloway

Dark Cloud

In prayer with others

a picture comes

of a dark cloud

hovering above

 

Small Christmas lights 

appear blinking softly 

as they break 

through darkness

They carry miracles 

of love and illuminate 

hope forcing fog 

to dissipate as a bright 

light shines forth

I sense women around 

me were radiances

reflected in my mind

pushing back against

the encroachment of evil

Through the Eyes of a Child

“It’s a miracle! 

It’s a miracle!”

my youngest grand-

daughter repeated

with enthusiasm

while she and her sister 

decorated my condo

for Christmas

Special ornaments placed

on my tree sparked creativity

and the girls embellished

the fireplace with an overflow

to other areas of my home

When I asked Faith 

the reason 

for her exclamation 

she explained it was because 

they were able to fix up

my place for the holidays

unlike the year before

when we had to isolate

due to the pandemic

Sharon M Wiliams

When the Ice Cream is Low 

When the ice cream is low and there's not a lot, a lot

Not a word I like to use

When there's not a lot for the both of us

I buy a new carton

I tell myself it's to make you smile/remind you of home

I tell myself it's a starter for our gay, gay conversation

And to revel like children in our playful excess

What a wonderful afternoon—in my mind

 

I walk a mile of city streets to the grocery store

Dig through the cold freezer

Stand in line behind the woman with only three items

But needs cigarettes, hard liquor and has a checkbook

There’s water crawling on my upper lip

Underneath that God-forsaken mask

I remember my spirituality and correct myself

God-given—God-given mask

Too many thoughts

 

Please don't put that ridiculously long receipt

In the bag on top of the ice cream

This is not an experiment

Paper, ink and water are gross. I have long nails.

He doesn't read my mind, tells me to have a nice day

And calls me by the wrong name

I'm not wearing a watch and I don’t have a bomb

But I hear ticking, ticking, ticking

 

I have to jog, sprint, run home

Not to serve you chocolate soup and paper mâché

When I tell you about my day, I will use imagery. I am a good host.

I will say, the ringlets curling over the tip of my ear were slightly damp

And I had a few drops of perspiration over my barely braised brow

I won't tell you I should have taken the car

That the walk didn't make me any younger or a better host

I won't tell you the polyester and cotton blend athletic wear

Must have forgotten the cotton

I would have died—

If it wasn't for that one tree-lined street

I won't tell you I was angry again at the ridiculously long receipt

But this time for drinking my water

 

I won't tell you how one scoop in our bowls would have been enough

Unpublished Manuscript Dark Days Light

Victory

Scattered wisdom unites/sealing the cracks of doubt

Look high/jet streams of greatness dancing in the air

Baby elephants splashing/stumbling with joy/a mud haven

Learning how to swing their illustrious trunks

Human hearts, liquid pools

When love boomerangs from the womb

 

Stepping through the open door to happiness

Our birthright from the nest

Children called to wander/search/delve deep

Lay on mother earth

Human soul—to rich soil, a simple smile

Squirrels pause, weeds retreat

Babies’ eyes reflect the insight of water

The miracle of tears

 

Coming to know the highest self

A triumph beyond any teaching

Braving the diagnosis

Being the nonconformist

Thriving in spite of/because of

The wounded self

Say I love you first—

Then, say nothing else

 

Put the closet—in a closet

Drop it off a cliff

Stand nude

Carry the last mile

A wide lens with a pinhole view

Start and finish lines are the same

 

Now rest,

As seeds in the ground burrowed to the earth’s core

A pink translucent snailfish, still

At the bottom of the sea/exquisite anointed hands

Gracing a bowed cheek—

Rest

Unpublished Manuscript Dark Days Light

Mark A. Fisher

Sijo (Attempt #6)

run down laboratory

         for back alley experiments

where observers find their own facts

         amidst cognitive bias

some peer reviewed research

         published by Google robots

marvel

there is a rhythm to kick-the-can

skittering down empty streets

alternately competing and helping

always advancing together

skittering down empty streets

in a kind of darkness

always advancing together

simply walking her home

in a kind of darkness

discovering something new

simply walking her home

beneath streetlight moons

discovering something new

another little miracle

beneath streetlight moons

life’s ups and downs

another little miracle

alternately competing and helping

life’s ups and downs

there is a rhythm to kick-the-can

Alicia Viguer-Espert

Mare Nostrum

 

How to find the thread uniting everything:

Pottery, donkeys, artichokes, refugees

Who play the violin, are doctors, or poets,

Feel pain on dry land and underwater?

I watched them pushed by a hot Sirocco, *

A maritime caravan without fixed destination

Searching the direction of the wind, the coast,

Nursing thirsty children on the lap of the sea.

                             

                              *****

They resemble the ancient drama held in Ithaca.

War drives men away from home, darkens wives

Eyelids, until the champion returns exhausted,

His archery skills miraculously untouched after

Twenty years of fighting political enemies. Hungry

For his Penelope, he squints at the sky for signs

Of Athena’s protection or any new god

Influential enough to save all Telemachus.

                             

                              *****

Like yesterday, for some, memories hang

Abandoned on olive tree branches, burned houses,

A headless doll by the sill. Still, thick strokes of blue

Painting the horizon and its fishermen’s boats

Persist in my mind as my every day companions,

My life-line. Tuna, fished for centuries mindfully,

Are now butchered for the benefit of plutocracy

Dressed on the outfit of Japanese palates.

 

                              *****

You have the eyes of a sear, she said,

Reading an uncertain future on my palm,

Glancing at invisible sunken ships, oars

Disintegrated, amphoras still holding Garum *

From Málaga, the favorite of the Republic.

She disappeared under fistfuls of tight stars,

In a patera * filled with two hundred souls

And a lamenting oud. * Still, laughter,

The best medicine, echoes across waves.

                             

                              *****

Little has changed, same alluring beaches

Beneath Icarus view, more drowned descents,

Same seizing of exiles, the new gladiators.

Similar feet border the coast collecting

Goose barnacles, treasures to eat or sell,

Wares sing out loud in ancient tongues.

Still, I yearn to see Ibiza from the Montgó, *

Climb Ÿabal al-Tãrik * to salute African brothers.

 

                              *****

I walk to the shore which brought me my first

Two languages, to remember who I am,

At what ceremony I got my scales, the chestnut eyes

Same to a woman who kissed my cheeks in Ephesus,

Hair equal to sea-urchins hidden underneath rocks,

Skin octopus-soft, like the one curled around my leg

When I was ten, its tentacles a million suction cups

Each one as afraid as I was. 

 

                              *****

From Algeciras to Istanbul lives nurtured by the same

Liquid color dance to music from a guitar called “home.”   

It’s not just history, but the Temple where we received    

The Meter to measure the purity of light, from the density

Of honey to the unpolluted transparency of cellophane,

The thousand shades of this ethereal pigment, this gift

Of presence always changing ever vibrant, this sea

Reveals my people in the threads engraved in its surf.

 

                              *****

 

First Published by Odyssey.pm  (May 2021)

  

Sirocco: African wind which blows through Europe.

Garum: Fish sauce favored by ancient Romans.

Patera: Flat boat for hunting ducks, used by migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.

Oud: Arabic string musical instrument, precursor of the lute.

Montgó: Mountain by the sea in Denia, (Greek Hemoroskopium) from where one can see Ibiza.

Ÿabal al-Tãrik: Gibraltar, Mountain of Tãrik in Arabic = the general leading the conquest of Spain on 711.

Desolation 

                              To Jo, a friend like no other

The nuts I’m eating turn to hot molasses

can’t be spit out, nor can be swallow. 

Her sister describes frailty, sinking decline,

bird songs get out of tune, orchid petals

in transparent coats, -a fading premonition,-

drop over the gelid marble counter 

gradually, in this slow-moving film.

My hands twist in surprising shapes, grab

another cloud of tissues, rub my red nose.

Thinking, a luxury my brain can’t afford,

though one could consider this the best time

with reality exposed, life peeking from inside

seams in a flowery summer dress, a zipper

closing and leaving the lining in the dark. 

I’ve been awake waiting, hand on my heart, 

but not hiding, braving the freezing waters 

of conversation at moments of confusion, 

held her hand, reassuring I’m not sure of 

what, perhaps the miracle of love being 

the essential substance in the universe.

Kindness leaving, desolation will remain 

mixed with her love.

Tish Eastman

Sit Back Down and Listen

women need to brave the recoil 

of men who leave the room 

when the talk turns to female troubles

of men who prefer female anatomy 

to be naked prepubescent virtual enhanced 

divorced from childbirth and 

Blood

the word strikes fear when it drains from a woman 

but fervor when it drains into the soil of a battlefield   

you can’t win a medal unless you shed some

 

Blood

guts and glory they shout

watching carnage recreated on television

while keeping their appetite for snacks intact

but a man is a coward when it comes to 

Blood

where tampons are needed and we ask him 

to pick up a box if he’s going to costco 

for motor oil and snacks anyway  

but that cart with tampons between bags of cheetos  

is a public admission he allowed his woman

to talk about

Blood

 

and didn’t leave the room

so man caves are less about sports and beer 

and more about taboos and fear

of women who know that

between sex and birth 

and fetuses 

men never want spoken of again 

women learn that the uterus can break 

the monthly cycles 

of fill and flush  

can speed up to weekly 

then daily  

and the flow that a tampon once contained 

gushes free to drench clothes and car seats

and fill a toilet with horrors of

Blood

that can only be stopped 

by draining the body of almost half  so 

Blood

pressure drops and clots form

until their weight matches a cow’s liver

and gravity tears them 

from the uterine wall then the

Blood 

is free to flow again

and men are free 

to leave the room that a woman 

is trapped in alone 

with her consciousness dimming 

praying she won’t die that night

even though after all this

Blood

Loss

 

after all her men 

have left the room

for all her years

she may have wanted to

So sit back down and listen

Experiments

A dozen newly hatched toads 

were impossible for an eight year old to resist.  

I captured them in a mason jar, 

the lid carefully punched with holes.

I left the jar in the shade of the porch

when my mother called me to lunch. 

The ‘slimy things’ weren’t allowed inside

so it could not have been my fault.

One half hour of shifting summer sun

caused a heat holocaust in my glass world.

My wards were lifeless casualties 

that I cried about for years.

That summer my brother trapped a mouse in a jar 

and rolled it down the grade 

of the empty pool—despite my pleadings— 

to see if it would go mad.  

He went on to do graduate work in biology, 

with no moral dilemmas or qualms

about lives spent trapped in glass tanks,

or cut short, preserved in jars.  

I studied psychology, which, when done well, 

doesn’t need a shelf of brains.

But I warn you I feel more compassion 

for innocent species than man.

There is a trace of scientific detachment 

lurking in my genes.  

I may punch holes in your cranium 

to release vaporous self-delusion.

My verbal scalpel may slice cerebral cross-sections

so I can count each ring of truth.  

The bubble that seals you from jarring reality

may get rolled down a hard, steep slope

to see if it makes you sane. 

Et Tu, Enterococcus

Over millennia, we charted an entangled course

of mutual survival and evolutionary symbiosis,

challenging each other to grow ever stronger

through times of war and detente.

Admittedly ours was the initial betrayal,

when a first glimpse through a microscope lens

revealed you, completely populating our fluid cosmos,

moving without limbs, multiplying without marriage.

But since we erroneously claimed these bodies as ours,

we vowed to eradicate your kind 

with merciless warheads given gladiator names 

like Cipro, Ceclor, and  Suprax.

We blasted swathes of destruction in terrorist acts

with complete disregard to the consequences 

of catastrophic casualties in micro-factories

to workers, maintenance crews, and security guards,

now proven essential for our mutual survival.

Bacteria will kill us all, one day,

or so I think waiting in the pharmacy line 

for the newest antibiotic that may obliterate 

or make invincible this warrior race

raging through my waterways.

Alan Walowitz

Comfort and Joy

The solstice, as predicted: chill wind; bitter sun;

the temperature falling like a glove

belies all the talk of the world dying of the heat.

Most will make it to the far side of winter,

no matter what the Mayans might claim:

the world soon coming to an end.

Compared to their workaday miracles these Mayan ladies perform--

toileting my mother, changing her, putting on lipstick--

it hardly matters the brutality that went on

atop Chichen Itza, solstice so long ago.

 

Joy to the World and all is forgiven,

we hear from the desperate, the sick-at-heart,

but what’s all such idle saying worth?

A song pitched too high, even for the cherubim?

A so-called virgin birth--the agony without

the earlier pleasure that might serve to redeem?

It’ll be cold enough in the grave with or without,

but how about we try a winter coat?

 

I know my mother is tired of all this incessant being.

When she taps her tongue to her palate just so,

gets the neurons to fire in proper sequence,

and those stubborn synapses to bridge,

she tells me, No good! No good!

Maybe the Mayans are keeping it

too hot in here, too much like the Yucatan:

I start to think, in desperation, it might be cooler underground.

Es la vida, one of the señoras tells me

when I cry from this cold thought I now regret thinking.

Que lastima, niño!--she pities me

my weakness, my child-like honesty,

but offers no substitute, no shoulder to cry upon,

no lap to cradle me my wounds.

 

original version first appeared in The Ekphrastic Review

 

Christmas at the Yoga Retreat

No holly, no lights, only the tree outside, lonely, unadorned,

but come to full term with the help of some higher power

which saved it from man’s need to turn trees into monuments

to whomever he turns when life is at low ebb.

For a moment now, it’s decorated with a winter bird or two,

and some orphan-snow in the crotch of a branch,

but we’re just a few days the other side of the solstice,

and the mothership, this creaky scow of ours, seems to be stuck on a sandbar

as it tries to right itself and chug a new path through the multiverse.

Now we can’t see much through the growing dark,

though those who study  the calendar assure us there’s some hope ahead--

and it just so happens:  Should we chuck it all  for the sake of meditation?

becomes the very subject of tonight’s meditation.

Our leader tells us, This is the last full moon there’ll be on Christmas . . .

and then, looking around at our mostly aging crew

formed in an expectant circle, blurts this accidental truth:  . . . in some of our lifetimes. 

The way our days insist on crashing so predictably to their end 

seldom gets spoken in Canyon Ranch or Parrot Cay, those tonier joints

where more room will soon be needed for advanced yoga poses

by the young and lithe Brahmin--and where we tell ourselves

we have no intention of spending the last few shekels of our bounty,

much less the frankincense and myrrh, left from our previous incarnations,

we keep stashed, against bad tidings, in our underwear drawer.

 

originally appeared in Exactly Like Love published by Osedax Press

Denise Dumars

The Age of Miracles

My mother told me

that the age of miracles

was in the past.

So when we put up the manger scene

I placed all my toy animals within it:

the rhino and the tiger,

the brontosaurus and the T-rex.

After all, in an age of miracles

the sloth will lie down

with the piranha, and maybe

there was a St. George

who killed a dragon, and

that’s why you don’t see them

much anymore. Arthur Conan Doyle

believed in fairies; Mary Todd Lincoln

had seances in the White House.

I want to see a miracle:

I was pretty sure we had ghosts,

but it was just raccoons. I had a spate

of missing time while in New Orleans,

but I think it was the absinthe.

I told my students

that I hoped they’d meet

a space alien in their lifetime;

it won’t happen in mine.

We will need a miracle

to survive what’s coming now,

and I’m rather glad

I won’t be here to not see it

when it doesn’t come.

Experiments--It’s What We Do

We do we do we do.

Repeatable results we got ‘em

yes we do! Now on to you:

Magnificat fo sho it’s true

repeatable they are, but

what has been repeated shows

the truth of who we are.

Psychic abilities..yeah...

the experiments came true.

The data, the data, the data—

yeah, we got that right on cue!

But it’s not what they want us to,

so rather that accept the facts,

they said the whole SCIENTIFIC METHOD

must just be cracked!

So rather than enjoy the truth

they want to throw away the means

to seek it. But we know it’s true—

we’re psychic, me and you!

(Inspired by a study at Cornell Univ. that showed evidence of psychic abilities in participants.)

Chalat Rajaram

The Miracle

The tree appeared sad, for just a bit.

The leaf then asked, What’s wrong you?

The fruit knew something didn’t fit,

The roots, they always knew what to do.

The birds on the branches felt comforted,

Generations had too, before them.

On the sweet ripe fruit, they nibbled.

Tweeting, chirping from branch to stem.

As his skin brushed past, touch remembered long ago.

The joy experienced, amidst buzzing of the bees.

The bushes, vines, also felt a deep glow;

Reflected deep, in their memories.

The mind, weaving threads of the story.

Changes, aging, as the leaves fall.

Happiness and the sense of Glory,

The Miracle, of the One in all.

 

Jackie Chou

Home Remedies

like extra-strength Bayer

can treat various maladies

without a trip to the doctor

With extra-strength Bayer

there’s no need for a syringe

or a trip to the doctor

which always makes me cringe

There’s no need for a syringe

to make medical experiments

Needles make me cringe

more than the worst ailments

To make medical experiments

like witchcraft, alchemy

more than the worst ailments

are one’s fear and anxiety

Like witchcraft, alchemy

can treat various maladies

Can one’s fear and anxiety

be eased by home remedies 

Joe Grieco

Bell

How time’s been told for centuries

How weddings are applauded

How we are called to prayer

How we become more widely human

I’m crazy for a giant bell

How it can swell hearts big

And spill the resonance in all of us

Ringing, peel, knell

Such suchness in the tower

Take hold this rope

Pull hard the tail 

Let heaven know this miracle new year

We made it

We’re here

 

Scott C Kaestner

It

It’s where the train went off the tracks meets the sun rising over the horizon.

It’s somewhere. It’s nowhere.

It’s a miracle. It’s a nightmare.

It’s found at both ends of a rainbow and at the fork in the road.

It’s a mirage. It’s a reflection.

It’s a heart beating in the ether and in the void.

It’s an opportunity. It’s a curse.

It is what it always is, it’s life, it’s the here and now, all the possibility therein. 

Lynn White

How To Float

They told me a stone would never float.

I didn’t believe them

so I threw it carefully on to the water.

It stayed there

on the surface,

a miracle!

So I threw another carefully to land on top

and then another

and another.

Now a stack of stones was floating 

on the water.

They told me a stone would never hang in the air.

I didn’t believe them

so I threw it carefully upwards.

It stayed there

in the air,

a miracle! 

So I threw another to land underneath

and then another

and another.

Now a stack of stones was hanging

in the air

casting its shadow on the water.

Believe in the miracles you can make.

Don’t believe what they tell you.

Cast a long shadow.

Beyond Our Control

Beneath the surface of the night

the daylight is hiding.

I saw it disappear

as the sun sank 

beneath 

the straight line of the horizon.

It’s still there somewhere,

hiding here 

but showing itself

shining roundly 

somewhere else

in a different place,

a different hemisphere.

That’s how it works

this day and night business

that’s in control,

that tells the flowers 

when to close up their petals

and the animals to sleep

and dream.

Every day

it happens,

a shining

sinking

miracle

hiding

beyond our control.

Alchemy

Still they try to find it,

the secret of eternal youth,

the women with their heavy made-up masks,

the men with their toupees,

the nip and tuckers, 

the stretchers and smoothers.

Like the alchemists of old searching

for the secret of turning base metal to gold,

they’re searching,

searching,

searching,

endlessly searching

magic and science

as they get older

and older

still.

And still 

the fountain of youth eludes them.

And all the alchemists are dead.

First published in Free Verse Revolution, Issue I: Hebe (the fountain of youth)

Shih-Fang Wang

Bring Back Happiness

In time like this when all is bleak

We need something to look forward to

Let’s do a miracle experiment 

To bring back happiness

Try to tear down the fortress 

Where fear hides 

Don't let it impedes

The entrance for hope

Demolish the formidable wall 

That protects frustration and      

Blocks our forward-looking vision 

Trash that cowardness as 

It readily surrenders to ill fate

And thwarts our confidence

Let’s revive our courage

Recover positive perspective

Follow sage’s motto

Stand tall, be a fighter

With strong willpower

Strip away dark clouds 

Shutting out sunlight

Restore the bright future 

Assuring a stronghold for happiness 

Miracle Experiment 

In my idling mind

Muse serendipitously alights

I cling to its wings

Let it take me for a flight

Over the tree tops

I see far and wide

Riding on wind

I tousle tree leaves

Stir up dust into haze

Chase butterflies

Follow bees to hives

Wandering in fantasy land 

I let genie hold my hand

Inspiration guide my pen

Jotting down whatever

Words imparted to me

Novel ideas beyond my imagination

Spurt out from fount of inspiration

 

I need not to engineer anything hard

Just sail along with the current

Let it take me to places 

Full of wonders and surprises

I never dreamed about  

Dazedly, I am lifted to a new height 

My feelings are sharper, perceptions keener

Quick thoughts heavenly bestowed  

Allow me to improvise poems like

Do little miracle experiments

Miracle or Experiment

A new life, tender and soft

Is a miracle bestowed by Heaven

Soon it is turned into  

A living experiment of itself

The duration, long or short

Path, smooth or bumpy

Seemingly are preordained 

Fairness is not a rule 

In this life experiment

We are geared with  

Free will and volition to 

Conduct our own experiment

Each step we engage 

Impacts the outcome

At times an unseen hand 

Meddles in our course

Forcing us to deviate from

The favorable pathway

Who is the interjector?

Still the creator of life?

Yet our courage allows us to 

Create miracles against all odds

Dean Okamura

Imperishable cities

Italo Calvino writes of 

Invisible Cities, 

composed of 

citizens, 

who 

settled in places, 

who were so similar 

that Calvino could name 

their city, describe 

their unique quarter, 

their hopes, 

their aspirations, 

their beliefs, and 

their desires. 

As the pages flash before me, 

I take flight out of my mind, 

where verbs blur into nouns, 

spaces become fog, 

paper transforms translucent, 

disappears at horizons, and 

rises over the expanding seas. 

A rush pushes me far 

deeper into the confines of my seat, 

then lifts us into the clouds. 

In that rarified air, Calvino’s spell 

transports me to a city 

of nubile girls who marry, 

of parents who exchange goods — 

bergamot, sturgeon roe, 

astrolabes, amethysts — 

which reveal everything you wish 

about this city in the past, present, and future. 

The book retreats 

as I touch down. 

I arrived here in my first youth, 

passed a Phoenix, who flew beyond 

children, parents, grandparents, 

through ash-filled clouds of memory. 

It’s all there, 

and all nowhere, 

curated in libraries who forgot 

their names and lives. 

I open the archives, 

re-visit the past, 

where we preserve respect 

for our ancestors. 

A prison once held us 

in the desert.

The barracks are gone, but 

scars spilled into blood. 

We ran from prison and settled 

in cities with foreign names, 

cities that reveal everything in 

the past, present, and future. 

Places closed 

become open. 

Screaming children mature 

into great-great-grandparents. 

This city overrun with 

diverse organic desires, 

broad ripples of reflections, 

stirred by claws on our toes. 

When the water becomes still, 

the present intertwines with the past 

till you rise with a phoenix and 

we embrace. 

Written during United Airlines flight from Los Angeles, California, to Phoenix, Arizona, November 29, 2021, with a stopover in the City of Dorothea which appears in Italo Calvino’s experimental novel Imaginary Cities. 

"A prison," from 1942 to 1945, Gila River Relocation Center, Arizona. Canal Camp, Okamura Family 40313, Block 4-7-D.

Poetic Abstraction

IT would be     A   miracle 

               IF I wrote     A   poem 

          THAT was     Something 

                                   MORE than     Another 

               HAPPY Experiment. 

The woman snores

The woman snores in her bed 

because they gave her 

strong anxiety medications. 

They say she hit the helpers 

in the bathroom, shouting 

Don’t touch me. 

Leave me alone. 

I do not need your help. 

I can clean myself. 

They said she wandered 

the halls at night 

entering each room. 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

they over-prescribed medications?

She must have been lost in 

the six-person assisted living home, 

looking for her new bed. 

But no wandering now. 

The evening sedative 

makes her sleep. 

In fact, she is asleep for most 

daylight hours. Stuck in 

a fog of endless forgetfulness. 

Friends, family, interests, 

everyone lost in that marvelous mind, 

locked behind shuttered eyelids. 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

they cast her into the shadow lands? 

You greet her. 

Your eyes do not meet. 

Years of politeness 

trained her to respond, 

Yes, or Okay, 

or appear to chuckle. 

Then she goes back to sleep 

and snores and snores 

like her dead husband. 

The eyelid blinds 

crack open as if to peek 

at a traveling sales agent. 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

there was conscious life? 

They told me not to pray 

for someone to die 

to spare them the pain. 

They say we don’t know 

what she experiences. So, 

we cannot decide. 

There are always miracles. 

There are always new cures. 

Do not give up hope. 

Yet, one can lose faith — 

assuming they believed once — 

with too many unanswered prayers. 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

we have no words—no prayers? 

A maple leaf dangles 

in the autumn wind, 

sunshine on red faces. 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

they linger in stillness? 

Perhaps for that brief contact, 

they snore while they sleep? 

Hedy Habra

Under the Waterfall 

It all began on a Summer solstice dawn: the sun disappeared in a fiery sky of molten marigolds and blood flowers tainting misty waterfalls all the way to the swan cove. And the startled swans wandered around mounds of featherless flesh lying pell-mell, sleeping forms with sparse down crowning their heads, a burnt umber field of sepia limbs sprouting from broken shells, their strange, acrid smell, terrified them: flapping their immaculate wings, they kept bathing in the purifying waters, came back to the inert bodies in maddened circles biting their own tails amidst the dormant newborns: had they heard of Andersen’s tales they’d wonder why they were all cursed at once with ugly little ducklings, unaware they were witnessing the origin of the human race. 

First published by Diode

From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2019)

 

The Way a Flock of Birds Improvises

    To Rosemary

She marks the calendar every day 

now, believes we should live life 

as a miracle.  

No one notices the difference

in her chest.

She reminds me, smiling,

"You once said

I was flat as an ironing board."

I wonder if we should live love 

as a miracle, 

when your lover slips into a coat of mail 

of indifference, 

when his eyes only reflect an inward vision,

when your heartbeat espouses his,

the way healthy people 

grow unaware

of their own pulse.

Then take every moment, 

imperfect as it seems, 

its dissonant echo,

transforming it into a score        

the way a flock of birds improvises,

over barbed wires.

First published by Live Encounters

Phoenicians Once Sailed From These Shores

Fishermen, shoulders bent, 

set sail daily, 

carrying baits, 

oil lamps, a loaf of bread.

Theirs a biblical patience, 

taking them farther 

every day, 

muscles tight, foreheads furrowing,

awaiting for the secular miracle, 

their nets deployed 

in an ancestral garb, 

flutters as a dancer's veil 

enveloping the dense,

sterile Mediterranean waters,

scooping algae, residues, dead fish, 

fugitive ripples.

They return home empty-handed,

later every time,

at dawn or dusk,

eyelids lowered,

disappearing under thick eyebrows, 

their flattened nets 

heavy with absence. 

First published by Live Encounters

From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)

CaLokie

Another Feel Good Christmas Miracle Play

Loki: For our annual feel good Christmas miracle play we have on my right, Okie, a

cowboy from Oklahoma, who claims he’s the real Jesus and on my left, Cal, a

democratic socialist from California. who says he’s JESUS CHRIST—SUPERSTAR!

Okie: Hey, man! I’m a capitalist, not a goddamned commie! Remember my parable of

the talents in Matthew 25:14-30 where I praised the two servants who by smart

investment doubled the money given to them by their master and condemned the lazy

individual who made no investments and thus made no profit from his grant.

Cal: Give me a fucking break! What kind of capitalist tells one of the ruling class to sell

everything he owns, and give all the money he made from that sale to the poor as I did

in Mark 10:21.

Loki: So. Jesus on my left, where were you born?

Cal: I was born in Nazareth where my old man, Joseph, worked as a carpenter. I lived

in that boondocks my whole life until John the Baptizer dunked me in the Jordan River.

Loki: Jesus on my right, where were you born?

Okie: Well Fake Jesus may have been born in Nazareth but I was born on a cold

winter!s night in O little town of Bethlehem where I was wrapped in swaddling clothes,

and laid in a manger because there was no room for me in the inn. There!s no book in

the Bible which says Jesus was born in Nazareth. Furthermore, the third person of the

trinity, the Holy Spirit, impregnated my mom and so I had no human father. Joseph was

my stepdad. He moved back to Nazareth after my virgin birth.

Cal: Wait a minute! If I was born of a virgin why didn!t Paul, who wrote his first epistle

about 20 years after I was crucified, mention anything about it? If my virgin birth is such

a big deal why do only Matthew and Luke among all the New Testament books say any

thing about it?

Okie: Well, the virgin birth of me was probably common knowledge among all those

other biblical authors so nobody really had to say anything about it.

Loki: But Jesus on my right, there!s no star over Bethlehem nor the visit of the Magi in

Luke and no baby lying in a manger nor choir of angels singing from the skies in

Matthew. How do you explain this apparent contradiction?

Okie: As a war on Christmas by secular humanists like you and Fake Jesus who want

everybody to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. Apparently you guys

forget that me, the real Jesus, is the reason for the season.

Cal: Hey, man, show a little sensitivity! What if the person you’re talking to happens to

be a Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or even an atheist?

Okie: It doesn’t matter. There’s no other way of salvation except through me. Like I

said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father,

but by me.”

Cal: That wasn’t me who said those words. They were written in Greek by some

narrow minded author in the late first or early second century who attributed them to

Aramaic speaking me.

Okie: The most beautiful words I ever said, are recorded in the Gospel of John but

since you are the fake Jesus, you of course wouldn’t appreciate them.

Cal: Does the gospel of John sound at all like the way I talked in Mark, Matthew and

Luke? I never said anything like you had to believe I was the virgin born son of God

before you could get right with God. What I did say in Matthew 25:40 was “whatever

you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do for me.”

Therefore when you feed the hungry you feed me. When you give water to the thirsty

to drink, you’re giving me water. When you welcome strangers, you welcome me.

When you clothe the needy, you cloth me. When you care for the sick, you care for

me. When you visit those in prison you visit me.”

Loki: Curious. The gospel of Matthew mentions the virgin birth but it’s not part of the

early Christian creed as stated in Matthew 25:31-46. On the other hand when John

1:14 says, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” there is no mention that

this incarnation happened through the virgin birth. So what difference does it really

make whether the real Jesus was born of a virgin in Bethlehem or a Nazareth

peasant? What Christmas is about, I believe, is best expressed by Howard Thurman

from a Christmas homily--

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with

their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken, 

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among people,

To make music in the heart.”

Cal: I couldn!t agree more. Thank you, Sister Loki. Merry Christmas, Brother Okie.

Okie: Amen, sister Loki. Happy Holidays, Brother Cal.

Loki: God bless us everyone.