Subterranean Blue Poetry: Current Issue

“sky and shadows
                                    blue
                                                  sunlight
                                                                  trees weaving dreams . . .”

“3:30 Summer Lilliana Kreighoff the best light for photos people of the heart and soul ring never leave photos of black and white gulag the coloured light in Summer windows all one afternoon the angel manifests leaves a burn mark on the wooden floor sleeps, goes to sleep the silence of angels aches when I see you here Ariel the light the same as nothing the light thunder under the mountain open your hand un touche de jaune la rose et les baies du blanche les verts couvert dans dentelle blanche . . . rain, rain from heaven . . . there’s winter in the heaven . . . in the sky . . .”

DREAM EXIT

by Mark J. Mitchell

During the great dawn shortage
he chanced upon her notebook
of Persian poems. The pages
were fragile as leaves
from two autumns ago.

She was in the next room
chatting with a fictional friend.
He could have asked about it.
He never did. He just
dropped that notebook into his long pocket.

PUBLIC INSECURITY

by Mark J. Mitchell

Everyone on the inbound bus
thinks their small secrets are safe but
the thin man, three seats from the back,
he sees them all, he knows them all.

That woman—with the gray, askew
Face— she forgot her lipstick,
but knows it is on the counter,
smiles, sure his wife will find it soon.

And the man in the blue suit and joke
tie—he misplaced his faith—just
last night. He’s sure it will come back,
so he shakes his sure Chronicle.

A mother looks at her short son —
neat in his uniform sweater—bites
back the iron taste in her mouth.
Children should not know their parents.

Watching, he is careful never to take
notes. He won’t draw pictures. That’s
against his rules. It is enough to know
that no one knows the things he knows.

ON A THEME FROM BRECHT

by Mark J. Mitchell

“Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth.”
— Bertolt Brecht
New Ages

And wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth
in soft kisses, quickly lost, like music
from her piano. Windows let notes out
last night (and it was the last night) and you ran
after them with your net. Then starry air
found its way back into your open mouth.
Your tongue brushed her wisdom as it landed
on fact. Her candle out, the smoking wick
a token of wisdom from her mouth’s lair.

ROCKY MOUNTAINING

by Changming Yuan

At the same height of
            Every rocky mountain
            Above all seasonal change
A snowline is widely & cursively cut

            As if to bite a whole patch of
Sky from heaven
With rows of rows of
            Whale-like teeth

CLOSE TO THE HEART: LEARNING THE CHINESE CHARACTERS

by Changming Yuan

: anger influxes when slavery
Rises from above heart

: worry thickens as autumn
Sits high on your heart

: depressed whenever your heart is
Shut behind a door

: meaning is defines as
A sound over the heart

: thought takes place
In in the field of heart

: forgetting happens
When there’s death on heart

: to tolerate is to bear a knife
Right above your heart

THE 12-YEAR-OLD PEDIGREE

by Diarmiud o Maolalin

sitting in the veterinary
waiting room,
waiting with Summer
in her carry case,
clutched
like a lady at a bus stop
holding her purse
and her groceries.

the air:
a sharp smell
of medicine.
a smell
of anxious dogs.

In the fields, in the symphonic plains
and mountaintops,
in the first days of a city,
in the days and months and years
of a city being born
in the nation that you know so well
there is the nestled spirit of your mind,
an egg.

A dragon formed with ink and music,
a dragon of words connected and fearsome,
indestructible.

The moment of city dying,
a landscape forever altered or
a spiritual shift, a cultural death.

A funeral on
a rainy day, flowers dance
for the young tombstones.

He knows all of this
and leaves me chasing ghosts
and poems, it’s like I don’t know him
at all, only his words a warped truth.

Time and day and year and place,
objects and living creatures,
movements all stripped down
to this simple logic
captured so swiftly in the moment
a master of the form.

Night and day as revolutions
on the same place,
chasing moments
and writing them down,
the world constructed not as it is,
but as he exists within it,
chasing dragons,
the beauty of the horizon
and what is just beyond it,
the beauty of the surreal
the sublime,
the imagined.

Life is a beautiful thing.
Death is a beautiful thing.

The world has turned
and left me here,
chasing Basho chasing
dragons through real and unreal worlds,
following the dreams and words
of a man who exists
only in bones and words and memories,
and who used to be a formless, thoughtless
thing not yet born.

He is madness reincarnate
as the dragon is born of madness
and kindly he shows me what I know,
he is always already real and alive
and ready to walk
the mountain path of his legacy.

As the rain forms a bridge
with the night time,
that is when the dragons come out,
that is what he teaches me.

Hands rush through the koi pond
become fish themselves
and the hands themselves become lost.

Beauty becomes dragons.

All the magnificent, noble things in the world.

Here is a house, a garden, a river.

The home of Zen, that
shared place of peace and chaos,
dream of life and death.

Tonight around 3am as all the bars were closing, I was standing next to the sidewalk somewhere between Sir Winston Churchill and DeMaisoneuve, trying to find my friend in that fucking crowded shitshow of people, and you were asking your friend if he had ever had a Soda Cracker before for some reason.... He hadn’t, and you found that shocking!

Then you turned around and asked if I had ever had a Soda Cracker before, and I was like “uhhh yeah, of course!” Then you gave me and my friend some crackers (you had a whole purse full of them, which was hilarious and kind of awesome... I used to love eating those when I was a kid), and asked me if I wanted to hear you sing a song... I blurted out “taylor swift" for no particular reason, and you sang a song.... I have no idea what it actually was, but you sounded pretty decent!

I kept thinking I should ask you for your number, but I couldn’t figure out if that dude hanging out with you was your boyfriend, and he seemed like a super chill dude! But I do remember distinctly that you made a point to tell me your First AND Last name........ Email me your number if you end up reading this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is truly the end of the world.

(N.B.: “Happy Anniversary, Happy Anniversary” – a note from the Editor

“Happy A-N-N-I-V-E-R-S-A-R-Y!” – a note from the other Editor

(“that dude is her husband”) – whispers the cat

(“closed for the season”) – whispers the other cat

“Alas poor Yorick” – says Machiavelli

“Iago says Hello!” – says Machiavelli Jr.)

An original progression of The New Goth with elements of horror and classical images caught inside absurdist theatre, [RE] COLLECTION OF THE [UN] LIKELY by Dani Ferrara, Gabrielle Lessans and Trainwreck Press. The chapbook is in classical form, strikes a vellum chord with a cream cover (the art/photo of a girl portrait in sepia by Enrique Meseguer) and the crisp elegance of white pages with black type. Ferrara and Lessans are poets and teachers. They have founded the Nocturne School of Lucid Writing and teach poetry workshops/ “memory care poetics” to college students and seniors.

This Chapbook recreates the experience of poetry in an exciting original avante garde New Art form. Each page of poetry is titled with “THEOREM:” and a subtitle, an enigmatic introduction to the poem of that page, an in context, out of context reel. The oeuvre is a certain sang-froid, a spiraling of darkness. A very dissociated presentation, a presentation of broken, broken psyche, perhaps broken love affair(s) that haunt. The idea of space and dislocation, the language is truncated, nonsensical with made up words, spaces between letters, the number “0” and words that suggests a certain violence, a fire. The writing is often incomprehensible, drifts and bangs, often as if the voice of the work is drowning, in parts as if a death rattle. The images are of nature, borrowing from a very broken romanticism, a word, “conch”, “beanpod” no description, coached in a backdrop of melee.

From “THEOREM: The Dream Is A Meeting Place”

        she measures her body to a cross

                  piece obsessed
                     by mauve

                                     by
                                      sill

                     sill
                       sallow
                                     dusky
             waters

                                    the silence
                            off encounter

The words, sometimes split words, letters travel across the page like a pictograph, giving spaces, giving breath giving breath stopped short. Often it is nonsensical, the write suggests conflict.

What moves the work into the stratosphere, is that it can be read in different ways, going down and/or across, read and rereading in parts, as if building up into a climax of chanting at the end of the work. Reading quickly through the last poems, the “0”, the “od,” the “g od,” the voice reads and rereads in different ways as if intoning a Black Mass, in some rhythmic art presentation of ritualistic violence. Perhaps with influences of the DaDa movement from W.W.I, the artists so moved by the insanity of the war rejected reason and the Modernist school to focus on irrationality and the nonsensical.

A fantastique experimental event as the Think Machine meets The New Age in crash, [RE] COLLECTION OF THE [UN] LIKELY by Dani Ferrara and Gabrielle Lessans.

Available @ Trainwreck Press.

A New Age tarentella spins into surrealist spaces, as if everyone is on a tour bus with the poet riding around the blue city, and this Chapbook is the poetry of broken thought outtakes, Mudflaps for short dogs by Pearl Pirie and Trainwreck Press. Pearl Pirie is an award winning poet and educator who lives and works in rural Quebec. She is the author of 24 Chapbooks and 4 poetry collections. She won the Lampman Award for the pet radish shrunken (Book*hug, 2015), the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for Thirsts (Snare, 2011), amongst others. Her latest work is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020).

An original offering, in the spirit of “naive” poetry, a certain Dadaist event, in a very intelligent housing. The Chapbook begins with the quote, “A poem is an egg with a horse inside” a thought from a Third Grader and what transverses is like Dr. Suess gone wild. A surreal spin, plays with the light around nonsensical, a truthtelling, dancing with language in original form. Borrowing from the classical with nature images, pictures twist and turn in the warm wind. An internal dialogue that is broken, a very intelligent weave, a presentation of the contrast of the dark housed in fantastical spaces.

From “but love can walk thru solid obstacles”

“I adopted the role of wearer of feathers, which
requires a lot of sweeping up the falling and fallen.

gentlefolk, please return to your tour bus seats . . .
yes, fog does look passingly gelatinous. please sit.

to stay in the same place is more work than to change.
oh, who cut the yellow onions in here? is that rain?”

The Chapbook is divided into different chapters, particularly brilliant is “concretized”. A group of poems with fantastical cadence, playing on similar words that dance in a pictograph. By stringing similiar words like an intelligent white rap but rather than steady rhyme at the end of lines, leaves the Reader hanging and then tucks them in.

From “bathe”

“breathe
brethren
heathen’s
heaven
heaves
eaves’
vestibule
rest a mule . . .”

and the poetry riffs and dances in a breathtaking theatre of poetics.

Flies on the wind of whirly gigs, an exciting original offering in New Age poetry, Mudflaps for short dogs by Pearl Pirie.

Available @ Trainwreck Press.

“In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo . . .”
- from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T.S. Eliot

“windsong Summer sun on bare trees . . .”

windjammer after, a place by water the mad, bad planet Hollywood owning something you can’t own like tv in the clouds dic Ibanez by Christmas hazelnuts and chocolate whistling Dixie werewolves military a green whistle the world was autoclaved wrong who would make us clown girls the sundown award he who owns the night pulls the center of the earth the heat, rumours the heat passion rumours medicant rumours poetry . . . into all one Summer night . . .

“black cat in green field watches . . . the wind says rain . . .”

a blues font cinematique plaster cast bone grif sights and hands wild, of the wild eye chattels of the moon the Saint of the evening succulents supplicants of the moon as if celebrating a place didn’t really exist it is, it is the words around the edges of the moon an old-fashioned house sits in the middle of other houses there are no roads leading to this house it sits in the middle of the round imagine a found-in at the movie theater sit in the velvet and dark all Summer long the broken my broken heart somewhat darker than the cloth cont f!cked universe lick o’ Persia Mary bake of a good day kid McNichol screws lemon totes wives are forever the Lincolnshire the last revolution je t’aime Leopold dar toi sisterhood the silent witness of the room . . .

“light and light white clouds bright sky blue through Summer trees . . .”

walking, walking all the haunted rooms of rien de rien the ceilings of Taipei rot rotting tapestries wallpaper that peels rot dirt the rot furniture cold, cold the winter naked the bodies blue with cold . . .

“streetlamp bright on golden boughs blue grey falls dark and darkening sky . . .”

blues and asundry blueshearts blues holidays don’t die the beautiful blue let the Saints dance and fill your heart with dancing O’ Michelangelo stay safe, heart one (very beautiful Napoleon) (dance Napoleon dance) it is afternoon in Berlin no family, no friends, no country, no claims on the heart somewhere it is blue it is afternoon in Berlin my old Spanish lover the night my heart turns, cries and is alone . . .

“in yellow all the trees clothed . . . quiet . . .”

“dance hall days” sitting in an ice-cold tub of water for an hour the suffering of winter kong and the heat of the sun breaks us into rain sweet ocean song where Michelangelo walks The Lord set the Israelites free out of Egypt my head is an open Bible I have suffered mightily and The Lord in heaven saw me the girl awake women r bone meat Tbilisi 5 o’clock cleave no hell, no glory in German towne ocean songs there are no secrets before The Lord the most magic in a teacup on grif missing people how the war started how the war ended how we were set free I kiss you like rain the reluctant Muse home of the German esquire let the saints dance the Word is the Spirit sin is suffering flush with memory except when . . . it falls into when the lover comes it’s not for everyone like anyone Venus cut meat a huge fire-bomb through the ages to come into a 20 second thought nothing has changed much since 1496 the perfect love someone of roses the veil of St. Mary . . .

“heat shimmer greens the trees quiet into blue evening . . .”

a rose the blues movie the blues of the eternal beauty “click” move the dress a little to the right “click” smile “click” Hollywood is a big towne meat cut begs the Wilde cookie mart and empty like a stone an open window cut walking into a music box you can feel it come up from the street blue and blue looking for the children by the light of the moon . . .

“Summer in the dark day
                 in the wind
                                                watch the treetops
                                                watch the sky

                                 thunder over Eden . . .”

j’attendre le quand même et le quand même la nuit bare vestibule head heat balloons fasting through cobalt rings ceramic bowls the heat “yes, I’ve seen a few hard places” the secrets of things she in the next hospital bed the bag of poison in her hands through the night the breaking morning singing darkness and darkness singing I cannot sleep the world is full of crime, yet I am not a criminal les gens disparu à la ciel no use to be without the stray places lost treasures go he was trying so hard not to sing and yet he was singing penny drops from heaven places I couldn’t find again places found sky the goddess divided battre au chaises de Lincolnshire a little like beat cloth and a side of Summer Blue Fontaine des bleus James des bleus the warm pastry custard and orange longtime a beautiful of poetry somewhere inside the green fugue “she rests her head from weeping” . . .

“green and green sky
                                             darkness evening, darkness night
                                                                                                         the heat broken

                                                                                                              O’ Summer rain and rain . . .”

Rebecca Anne Banks lives in the New Age Renaissance Republique of Poetry. She has been writing and producing artistic content for 40 years and is the author of over 30 books of poetry, guides to the Holy Spirit, a primer on marriage discernment, a family cookbook, a book of children’s stories, a book of World Peace Newsletters, all available at Amazon Stations. She has produced 3 CDs of Folk/Rock music and has 17 CDs of music awaiting production. She won an IARA Award for Top 55 Internet Airplays for Angel Song (2010). She is an Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She is also the Poetry Editor at Subterranean Blue Poetry (www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com), CEO/Artist at Tea at Tympani Lane Records (www.tympanilanerecords.com), the Book Reviewer at The Book Reviewer (www.thebookreviewer.ca)and the Quilt Artist at Kintsugi Art Quilts (www.kintsugiartquilts.com.

S.T. Cartledge lives and works in Australia. He has published four books of poetry Orphanarium, Cherry Blossom Eyes, Beautiful Madness with Eraserhead Press and Pixel Boy in Poetry World with CLASH Books.

Dani Ferrara (poet, educator) lives in Denver. She is a founder of Nocturne School of Lucid Writing giving workshops in creative writing and teaching undergraduate classes. She has earned her MFA from Naropa University. She is widely published and has been featured in Black Sun Lit’s “Vestiges”, ARTEIDOLIA’S swifts & slows and Dream Pop Press, amongst others.

Gabrielle Lessans (poet, ecucator) lives and works in Denver. She is a founder of Nocturne School of Lucid Writing giving workshops in creative writing. She is studying for her MFA at Naropa University. She is a celebrant of New Age aesthetics.

Diarmiud o Maolalin. The poet has been nominated four times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

Mark J. Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. His latest poetry collection is Roshi San Francisco from Norfolk Press; Starting from Tu Fu, was published by Encircle Publications last year. The activist, Joan Juster where he made his living pointing out pretty things. Currently, like everyone else, he is unemployed. A meager online presence can be found at http://www.facebook.com/MarkJMitchellwriter/ Twitter - Mark J Mitchell_Writer http://mark-j-mitchell.square.site/.

Pearl Pirie is an award-winning Canadian poet, educator and publisher. She has published 4 collections of poetry and 24 Chapbooks, her most recent publications are footlights (Radiant, 2020) and Mudflaps for short dogs (Trainwreck Press, 2021). She teaches workshops in poetry through Chalkpaths and Studio Nouveau. www.pearlpirie.com.

Changming Yuan published monographs on translation before leaving his native country. Currently, Yuan edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. www.poetrypacific.blogspot.ca. Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations, eleven chapbooks (most recently LIMERENCE) & publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) & BestNewPoemsOnline, among nearly 1,900 others across 44 countries. Furthermore, Yuan served on the jury for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards (poetry category).