City Tableau #15 - Felino Soriano

The systematic lake rippled towards dying grass,
an attempt to rectify the connection of once holding hands.
Above the quasi sentimental scene between
color wheel representation, oil brown, thick oak
branches hang in a language of obscurity.
Wind shifts its silence into vernacular of discontent,
shaking the branches into intelligible voices of
releasing myriad of birds.
Asymmetrical variations of
avifauna assume varied positional chance,
just as the wind untangles the fingers of the apologetic
lake and dying grass, whose meeting symbolizes
regret and disillusioned disappearance.


Felino Soriano, California, USA

Autonostalgia by Ray Succre

At perch in buckets by the hour,
and on filmy cola rims,
I snapped a shutter, daylight caught
atop the water in a boat,

and there between my eye and next,
and there in the nightcrawler-mulch
on my sleeves, and farthest into this
wind-stripped memory, nothing
so large as my father’s presence.

Nostalgia has its life in hundreds
of flashes, so strangely reduced
as to admire pebbles,
and though in warm memory
my father dictates, I, myself,
in them barely seem to infer a soul.

Most of the memorable me
will only be found in other heads.


Ray Succre, Oregon, USA

Relics by Cortney Bledsoe

I have no memory of your voice. I can't rewind
and play it back like some tape recording in the spinning cogs

of my thoughts. I have no records, no paint
splattered on the walls of the cave

hollowed between our lives.

That cry I uttered when I was pulled from you,
splayed before the world is also, I assume, forgotten.

So we are even.

The echoes have been long going,
but are now terminally forgotten, and I can mourn

the colors of all the days we missed by keeping eyes
solely on each other's throats, but they've passed.

Mother, outside, today, there was a purple fire
like Mars riding down to trample us all. The world burned,

and was renewed in light.
I just wanted to tell you.


Cortney Bledsoe, USA. Editor of Ghoti Magazine

Waiting by Rethabile Masilo

Our bowls clanking
like ghost vessels,
we stand against sun and wind,
and death that loops over
to take our vision;
when all else has deserted us
in the blankness of the hour
the horizon, our last scene,
comes at us
from where no sun
will ever rise.


Rethabile Masilo, France

Echoes from Tomorrow by Sue Turner

Tagged by a developer’s ax,
moving like a celeritous tune,
black cedars slide from hillsides
beneath a graphite tinted sky.
Nothing slows the stride of time
and none can stop the wind.


Sue Turner, ID, USA

Running Baby Sea Turtles into the Surf - Bob Bradshaw

I'm down on my knees watching.
She is like a child digging
on a beach, flipping sand
into my face. Weeks later,
under a sky warped
by the shrieks of sea birds,
her baby turtles scramble
toward the surf.


Off shore
the sharks have gathered,
to gorge on them
as if they were floating dishes.
But before that happens
the sea birds are relentless,
plucking the baby turtles up.
I drop a turtle as I run it towards the water
and before I can snatch
it up, a frigate flies off
with it.
I'm like an armored truck's guard
trying to pick up
the scattered cash,
the truck turned over,
and the neighbors
swooping
in.



Bob Bradshaw

Blue – Oil on Canvas by Ashok Niyogi

a molten yellow moon
throws jagged crescent light
on eyelids stretched thin blue
over infinite observed sadness
snakes writhe in total delight

with my third incandescent eye
I contemplate a blue ocean
of immortal nectar
in which is submerged
this beautiful blue world

coiled white underbelly
of the final serpent
is a bed for the ultimate
blue god whose navel sprouts
blue lotus with a thousand petals

on which I squat
four headed and beget
the will to populate
all directions of the blue wind

our world has risen from the deep
on the tusks of the infinite blue boar
in an eternal blue sky
time germinates in blue flame
the god into whom I was to devolve

even after
I go about collecting accumulated sin
I covet
and get

poison distilled from blue ocean
and this is my offering to his divine throat
that turns blue
what remains is nectar
to nourish blue lotus
on which his blue feet will rest

this truth
is best……………………


Ashok Niyogi, California, USA

While the Seashells Listen, I Think I Love You by Michael Lee Johnson

Lost love letters
lost to the rolling blue sea
of early morning seashells
of late evening driftwood
whenever waves roll high upon sand dunes
or bring forth new sand at low tides recession,

whenever the sea rolls...
I think I love you.

Your memories echo in the seashells-
your love splashes back at me
on the rolling whitecaps
all day long
while at sea
and disappear each night
as the white foam washes
back out to sea.

Or just at home, on a shelf,
one seashell echoes-
I love you
a thousand echoes roll
I love you.

I'm a long way from the sea now,
will you listen for me­-
while they wash in
and wash back out again?

The seashells roll.


Michael Lee Johnson, Chicago, USA

The Living Sea by Christine Bruness

Constant movement
kinetic strength
its force
does not discriminate--
it just is…
providing
a bounty
of nourishment
asking
for nothing
in return…
the least
we can do
is
keep it clean.

Christine Bruness, New Jersey, USA

haiku by Christine Bruness

foggy summer dawn
smell of coffee drifts
across the beach camp



Christine Bruness, New Jersey, USA

Lost in a Distant Harbor by Michael Lee Johnson

Love,
once beside me

now

lost in a
distant harbor

calls out into the night
crawls back into the fog.



Michael Lee Johnson, Chicago, USA

Ocean by Anthony Liccione

her arms
an open ocean,
waves me in
lets me go;
swallowing
my blues
of forty knots
below-
how we men
like to throw
them back
to the water
these woman
that stir the
simmering pot,
before it cools–

you dare not
ask for
a compass,
if ever lost
at sea,
she will be
a storm of tears.
but you recoil
and hold
the boat steady
stay in the center
of her arms,
where fish
keep searching
for hooks,
lured with love.



Anthony Liccione, Texas, USA

The Sea by Melanie Bishop

Mist rises from the ocean's depth.
The sea, green gray, dark and deep.
Each wave rushes towards me, then
like a forlorn lover recedes again.

Sprites, sirens of the night call to me
as they dance upon the white foam.
Glittering in the darkness.
And I watch the enigmatic moonlight
change the tiny beings' colors, sliver gold.
As they like dancers in the dead of night,
leap from wave to wave.

Crystalline laughter echoes softly. Almost
lost in the surf's sound. My feet, naked, buried
deep within the sand that pervades my flesh with
dampness.
And I wait.
Wait for the tide to once more slip slowly
back into the murky sea.
I wait and dawn breaks to warm my cold still body


Melanie Bishop, New York, USA

Mabota by Rethabile Masilo

One day the Mnandi sea
broke the southern crag,
and washed it, washed it
with soapy suds and
I saw brought down, by a jazz
ensemble, the walls of Jericho.
On that day, I went down
to the beach and listened,
half hoping for words to
appear, some pure clue to give
sense to our predicament,
a sign to be acknowledged,
cherished, held most dear.
On the contrary,
among spaces and old worlds
you can watch them keep
their outdoors from coming in.
If they spoke at all
we’d know why the child died—
it would be revealed to us—
if they as much as cracked
such code of silence.


Rethabile Masilo, France