Charles Pierre | The Red Fox

The Red Fox

 

 

At dusk, in the leafless woods,

where the path drops off

to the harbor’s frozen mouth,

silence seizes me.

 

My eyes, scanning the patches

of muted brown and lavender,

catch the only flash of color

amid the diminished acres.

 

A small streak of fire

hunches and watches me,

then skitters off a bit

to hunch and watch again,

 

and I, stiff with cold,

as still as the dormant

life surrounding me,

in winter’s thinnest light,

 

surrender to the heat

of this odd living hearth —

my throat thawed

against the frigid air.

 

 

This poem originally appeared in the author's poetry collection, Father of Water (2008).

 

 

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Charles Pierre was born in New York City in 1945 and raised in Centerport, New York. He studied at the University of Virginia and worked as a copywriter in Manhattan, where he has lived since 1973. Mr. Pierre is the author of five poetry collections: Green Vistas, Father of Water, Brief Intervals of Harmony, Coastal Moments, and Circle of Time.

John J. Trause | Red

Red                                  Color? Red Orange Green Yellow

San Antonio, as one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, was also experiencing a high rate of homelessness, crime, and degradation, belying the tranquility and ostentation of the tourist trade along the River Walk, a clear separation between the haves and have-nots in close proximity, the former ignoring the latter and the latter trying to gain the attention of the former. Late-stage capitalism was still wreaking havoc in American cities, and San Antonio was not immune. Outside the hotel along the River Walk where my sister, my three-year-old nephew, and I were staying, the bright red sun beat down oppressively, even early one Sunday morning as we strolled the short walk to St. Mary’s Church, a block or two away. As we approached the façade of the church, we saw, there, lounging on the steps, a homeless woman, one of scores of victims of rampant capitalism and social neglect. This poor woman, plump from poor diet, and with brightly but poorly dyed red hair (ketchup as hair dye, and not just a vegetable, as in the Reagan years) was calling out and gesturing to us from a distance while combing her greasy, colored coif. Getting closer, I realized that she, knowing that we were headed to the entrance of the oblivious church, was trying to get my attention and not that of my sister and nephew: “Mister, mister, your fly is open.”

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John J. Trause, Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of six books of poetry, including Why Sing? (Sensitive Skin Press, 2017) and Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007; rev. ed. 2014), and one of parody, Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, prose, and artwork appear internationally in many journals and anthologies. Marymark Press has published Trause’s visual poetry and art as broadsides. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, New Jersey, and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series.

Thaddeus Rutkowski | Red Sky at Morning

RED SKY AT MORNING

I consider myself lucky

that I don’t have to take warning

on the mornings when, at sunrise,

the high clouds turn pink,

then deepen to red,

covering half the sky.

 

I’m not a sailor,

worried about the weather,

expecting the red clouds to turn

to dark gray clouds that let loose

a flood of rainwater,

tossing my ship at sea.

 

I am just a person looking out my window,

well, not constantly looking,

because that would be boring —

just looking at the sky —

but now and then checking

as the reddening registers in my mind.

______________________________

Photo Credit: Jackie Sheeler

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, most recently Tricks of Light, a poetry collection from Fair Weather for Media. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

David Huberman | Nighttime Rainbow

Nighttime Rainbow

The night hung thick over the waterfront like dark gray octopus ink. Flying above, even Nosferatu could not penetrate the gloom with his x-ray optics, swooping downwards through the heavens, piercing the oceanic air.

His high-pitched hearing, unique to his kind, detected prey below. Descending almost to the murky saltwater surface, he lashed out lightning quick, and the quarry was caught. The Beast did not struggle. Sometimes the shock alone did them in.

The first bite was always the best. Sinking his teeth into his game, he was shocked to taste so much salt in the blood. What was this being? Was it true what they said? Had Homo sapiens gotten so much heavier due to their bad eating habits?

Never had the night been as shadowy as it was this evening. Witnessing the longest lunar eclipse in a millennium, his curiosity had piqued beyond belief. Flaming like a red-orange meteorite, he landed on a nearby dirty white lighthouse, still grasping his kill. The lights revolved to reveal a large amount of violet blood!

Before he could react, a powerful force had punched him almost through the roof. As the pale alabaster vampire's pallid-yellow eyes took one last look at the living entity that he had caught, his victim had come back to life. Somehow it appeared familiar, somewhere between a humanoid and a giant green lizard. And the Creature from the Black Lagoon plunged them both back under the deep blue sea.

______________________________

David Huberman has had work published in Evergreen Review, A Gathering of Tribes, Long Shot, Lungful, Icon, Make Room for Dada, Best of Panic, the anthology The Jewish History of the Lower East Side, The Unbearables, Prometheus, Rant, Pink Pages, and Public Illumination, among many others. He has performed in three plays at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club and also appears as a lead actor in the movie Trail of Blood, 1995, archived in the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) database. Follow this link: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/517247/Trail-of-Blood/. He reads his work all over New York City and now to a worldwide audience on Zoom.

A recently published short story “Vampires of Pattaya Beach,” a fictional, horror, avant-garde account, can be seen in the selective story anthology 2016–2018 issue of Sensitive Skin.

GA Gardner | Captive

CAPTIVE
 Mixed media collage painting on paper
Artist: GA Gardner
Created: 2019 
Courtesy: www.Gartsy.com

______________________________

GA Gardner is the founding artist of Gartsy.com. His mixed media collage paintings have been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the USA, Asia and the Caribbean, including the James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Paterson Museum, New Jersey; Nanjing College of Art, China; Corridor Gallery, New York; Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St Croix, USVI, Bergen Museum, New Jersey. He has been the subject of numerous articles and catalog essays. He has been awarded artist residencies in the Caribbean and Asia. He is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington DC, USA.

Nancy Kirolos | Fairku/600nm

Fairku/600nm

Difficult to rhyme
Mix of yellow and red shades
Grapefruit soda yum

Carrot tangerine
Bitter British marmalade
Sweet ginger ice tea

Half circle at dawn
Indian mango lassi
Autumn pumpkin pie

Bright shade on dark skin
Orange color or sweet fruit
And Buddhism too

______________________________

Nancy Kirolos is an artist and an award-winning scientist living in the Netherlands. Her preferred media to create art are words, music, watercolors, and photography. She likes to write stories and poems in English and Dutch. Nancy’s goal is to stimulate people emotionally and intellectually through her written work which has been published in several publications in Europe and the US. In 2020, Nancy was longlisted for the Dutch El Hizjra literature prize

Howard Pflanzer | Orange Sky

ORANGE SKY

 

In the west the sky glows orange

Light scattered by the pollution

Right before the sun goes down beyond the shore

Is this a harbinger of a happier time ahead

Or just a precursor of another black night

 

Let’s wait for tomorrow

And see how the day progresses

Will the sky at dusk glow a brighter orange

Streaked with crimson

Or will the disappearing light plunge us directly into the darkness

______________________________

Howard Pflanzer is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. Dead Birds or Avian Blues was published by Fly By Night Press in 2011. Recent publications include FIVE Poetry, And Then, Downtown Brooklyn, Home Planet News, Pratik, Poems:LES Festival of the Arts Dedicated to the Lower East Side (TNC 2016, 2017), Of Burgers and Barrooms (Main Street Rag 2017), and WORD:An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes (2017). His hybrid performance piece, Walt Whitman Opera, adapted from Whitman’s poetry with music by Constance Cooper, was presented at the undergroundzero festival in New York in July 2014.

Akshaya Pawaskar | Indian Summer

Indian Summer

These days
we wait for the moon
to descend upon
us, to fill us up
with its white coolness.
As our heads spin,
as our kurtas drench
with sweat,
cling to our flesh
and muscles,
and even the bones
of civilization creak
under the weight
of a wish to bare
our papery
parched skins.
We move thirstily to
the solace of noise
from our ceiling fans.
The blades slicing
the Indian summer,
cutting the air
into a salve on
our salty bodies
dressed in austere
cotton whites.
As Tropic of Cancer
simmers to a boil
and the mosquitoes
whine into our ears,
sounding like languorous
sullen lovers,
we recline on
the earthen floors
of this peninsula.
As hysteria of
the orange sun
meets with
our torpor,
an old paramour
afraid of touch,
it welts us red
with love that
needs no touching.


______________________________

Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India, and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020, placed third in the Poetry Matters Project contest that same year, and placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018.

Isabelle Lorion | Orange is the Colour of Wisdom

 

Apes in the Orange Grove
Henry Rousseau, 1910
(Private Collection)

Orange Is the Colour of Wisdom

He was driving on a black road through orange fields in the north of Portugal. He had just escaped from the jail of his mind, where he had been confined for months, years perhaps. He remembers the oranges his lover brought him when they met on Sundays. He had crammed those oranges onto the kitchen table. He was playing with them, rolling them under the paws of his black cat or tossing them in the garden for his orange dog to retrieve for rubs. He would juggle his oranges or hurl them against the glass partition separating him from his lover. And then, let them rot until he could collect the dust of their skin to mix with oil for smudging onto his drawings.

Orange is the new black.

He had left town for the South of France, Spain, and now, Portugal. The sun grew softer and softer, its amazing flashes playing on the fruits of the orange trees. Plenty of oranges fell on the grass under the trees and rotted. No one seemed to care. No one came to pick them up. The whole area seemed deserted. Silence thick as a flock of black birds permeated the grounds and skies. He picked some oranges, peeled them, squeezed them.

The juice flew through his throat like the juice of life, like the juice of freedom, the juice of traveling far away from all that rot.

Their juice was sweet and bitter like the new dreams that bounced inside his chest and opened their wings, knocking down his pale and cold heart, down on the knees of hope.

He would keep driving south. Forever south. And the road in front of him opened her arms, opened a new space in the sky. And his chest filled with air and strength. His lungs opened wide to a new vivid breath.

His body blew up like an orange balloon, and he thrived.

South, to the end of Africa! To the Cape of Good Hope, to the old legends of sailors and ancient heroes! There he would embark on a boat with orange sails and head further south to the very south, to the very heart of the South Pole. Slowly on a dreamy trip through the mist of the Milky Way, the whiteness of ice and the darkness of night, the softness of the waters and the harshness of the grounds. Wasn’t Earth a blue orange? He would peel it. The sky was blue. The road was straight and black. It was rolling out its strip as a story full of promises.

He tucked his knees underneath himself and rolled down further than far. There he would forget all his wounds. At last! And be joyful as light, like the skin of an orange peeled by a happy monkey. He would cut his body in sections and prepare an orange cake, slices of which he would offer to the orange orangutan to eat, as a gift of himself to another being. At last, he would be rid of himself, free from the old jails. From what had been the ever-present prisons of his mind and ego. 

The orangutans would swallow him, and they would laugh.

They would tell one another that he tasted like an orange, sweet and bitter. Unfortunately, he would be born again, the same, same but different. 

And reborn, he wears the orange dress in Guantanamo. And the story resumes. He manages to escape. The sky is red and orange as the sunset on Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood’s sign glittering over the hills of fame and shame. He turns in Orange County and starts running toward the night of LA, through the night that gets down on the Western World. The obscurity of his lost desires estrange their reasons and blur their visions.

Orange spots, orange dots, and orange flashes sizzle under his eyelids, blurring his vision, and he loses his reason. He gets lost in the deserted alleys of a giant supermarket, all white and steel. He runs on the moving platform of a wide and empty subway station, ripe oranges rolling between his feet. He stumbles upon a moan of a lonely lane while in the distance the groan of the train vanishes. Strange curtains float in the wind, and the dust of minds falls on the mirror of a floor.

His spirit spreads out toward the uncharted territories of space.

If he turns back again to contemplate the gutters, he will be changed to a salt statue.

He won’t come back!

This time he won’t come back. The black mountain of wisdom stands out in the orange sunset; long files of monks swarm on the little paths, heading for the summit, their orange robes floating in the wind like flags. 

He disappears through the cotton of  clouds.

His body splashes as an orange stain in the ocean of the memory of his words. He won’t come back.

This time, he won’t come back.

______________________________

I was born in the mid-1950s in the suburbs of Paris.
I ran away. I traveled. And I wrote and played music.
I love walking.
I’ve been working with children.
I go to poetry scenes.
I love horses. And all animals.
I am an anarchist.

George Held | October’s & Two Haiku

October’s

color is orange,
for autumn leaves
and pumpkins

and the Hunter’s Moon
and summer-fattened
deer and elusive fox

with no more ground
cover in which to hide
from hunters

in search of a
game animal’s
hide and soul . . .

______________________________

"This adult milkweed leaf beetle is already in costume for Halloween." 
[Photo credit: M. J. Raupp, Bug of the Week (blog), Oct. 13, 2014,
 http://bugoftheweek.com/]

Butterfly milkweed —
on its orange flowers crawl
black-and-orange beetles

         Butterfly milkweed —
         on its orange flowers crawl
         black-and-orange beetles

______________________________

Don’t imitate me —
never simulate half an orange
cut in two

          Don’t imitate me —
          never simulate half an orange
          cut in two

(After Bashō)

Bashō meets two farmers at autumn moon festival, 
print from Yoshitoshi's Hundred Aspects of the Moon,
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi - Ukiyo-e.org, 
Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum,
https://ukiyo-e.org/image/metro/5233-060-092 

______________________________

George Held has published four children’s books with Filsinger & Company, Ltd. and over a dozen poetry titles with various small presses. His most recent book, Second Sight: Poems, was released by Poets Wear Prada in 2019. A collection of stories titled Lucky Boy is due out in 2020. Believing that smaller is better in poetry, he writes a lot of haiku. He wears his trousers rolled in Sag Harbor, NY.

Bruce Whitacre | Christmas Oranges

CHRISTMAS ORANGES

The children were not to watch

as Father unloaded the snowcapped wagon.

Crates and bushels went straight to the cellar

and under an Indian blanket.

Father pocketed the key with a wink.

Jennie had to sit to keep breathing,

her hands trembling as she cracked the walnuts.

 

That evening, candles clipped to the fir were lit.

Their dots of light graced the gingham bows, the popcorn

strings, casting deep shadows in the parlor corners.

Atop the white tablecloth brought from Ohio,

turkey with stuffing, yams, and fruit pies crowded

the table, so everyone ate standing or in the parlor.

Mother fanned herself at the fire, exhausted, while

Nora, the hired girl, hovered, hiding homesick tears.

Family and neighbors joined in rolling up the rugs,

then with fiddles and dancing. Jennie missed the beat.

Stepping to the window, she gazed through the frosted panes.

Stars arched over the prairie. Horses stomped under their blankets.

 

Father called her into the kitchen.

“I want you to see these first, Jennie. Remember?”

His carpenter’s hands, deft and hard, pried a crate open.

Golden spheres burned into view, sweet and strange.

“Oranges!” she cried. Father laughed, “They made the last train.”

She remembered from last year to peel them first

The flesh exploded in her mouth —

Ocean. Green. Warm. Sunshine.

She closed her eyes and swallowed. Not here, in one taste.

 

She carried a bowlful into the parlor.

The music stopped. The dancers paused.

She beamed as everyone surrounded her, each reaching for

an orange, the only ones any of them would eat that year.

The night froze in her memory like crystals on the panes

melting into a tale from time to time, like now,

for me, then freezing again for the next blue hour.

 

 

_____________________________

Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today, and was recently nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues.  He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. An activist and advocate for the arts and social justice, Bruce lives in Forest Hills, Queens.