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March 2024 (110 editions in total)
58th edition as a webzine
Poems listed in surname alphabetical order
To view Pulsar Poems from earlier years, refer to Home Page, for listings
***
Poem Index - March 2024
Glitch, Nikos Chrysikopoulos.
Above the Wispering Pines, Joanne Holdridge.
More or Less, David Pike.
I Teach Adult Eduction Classes - Brandon Robshaw.
Fools Aftermath, Gordon Scapens.
No Rain, Daniel P. Stokes.
Feigining Sleep, Daniel P. Stokes.
Fissure, Peter Venable.
Claws, Thomas Zimmerman.
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Glitch
in this critical moment
when you expect me to explain
my thoughts are too fluid
to find words to step on
and the words are too jagged
for my few baked thoughts to rest on
the fan of my brain starts and stops
gasps of breath not transmuted into words
the fear extending its half rime on my palate
between honesty and self-preservation
the algorithm of my brain breaks down
into algos and rhythmless silence
Nikos Chrysikopoulos
St. Gallen, Switzerland
*
Above the Whispering Pines
The perfect metaphor can’t be caught
like a bass with the just right colored lure
coaxed like a child with the promise
of ice cream later if she’s good
can’t be kidnapped for ransom
swum after and held up like a prize
for a race quickly won
won't appear when you go out
wearing your rain slicker and hat
umbrella clutched in your right hand
or when you’re searching
between damp cobblestones
magnifying glass out
peering down at your feet
They dance out on the open
plain, where you don’t know
how you could have not seen them
light dazzling, expanse wide open
and you’re on a hill
looking down not a tree
or shrub in sight
but like chasing after the sunset
in a boat planed off
and heading toward
that sinking sun
it’s only when you stop
chasing and head away
from what you seek
that your life
a perfect metaphor
will come and find you
Joanne Holdridge
Devens, MA, USA
*
More or Less
He was beside himself
with rage. When I say
beside himself I mean, close
but farther down the page
than you at first
might have expected.
So, there he is
or was
glowering, incandescent, howling
for all he was worth
which wasn’t a lot,
half man, half something else
100 percent clot,
shouting the odds
making a show of a show,
beside himself
but farther down the page
as I previously explained,
than at first you might know.
David Pike
Camelford, Cornwall
*
I Teach Adult Education Classes
I teach adult education classes
and look the part, with my tweed jacket, beard
and glasses. History of Ideas: art,
literature, science, philosophy.
We meet in shabby run-down parish halls
with pallid flickering fluorescent lights
and walls of peeling beige. In midwinter
night falls by four. Drizzle patters
on the windows. Outside it’s bitter cold;
in here the radiator’s on full blast.
Every head is grey. I’m sixty-two
and I’m the youngest in the room.
In twenty years or so we’ll all be dead.
Meantime, we consume tea and plates of
hobnobs, and we feed our hungry minds
with Plato, Dante, Darwin, Hobbes, and Hume.
Brandon Robshaw
Walthamstow, London
*
Fool’s Aftermath
A swarm of wasps
are questions in my head,
a pavement tries hard
to hold me upright,
a spent night
wonders where I’ve been,
and you are nowhere
to be seen.
That clock with no hands
is telling me lies,
a roundabout
ignores my pleas,
my way home
needs the kiss of life,
and you are nowhere
to be seen.
There are words lying
where you left them,
there’s an excuse
that cannot be excused,
there’s a life running
headlong into a whimper,
and you are nowhere
to be seen.
And if there’s no you
I don’t want to be
who I think I am
in the morning.
Your face
will forever be
the speech I didn’t hear.
Gordon Scapens
Penwortham, Preston
*
No Rain
I check the window.
The ocean slaps the wall below
and clouds are scudding.
But there’s no rain.
Out the door and down the path
my brute and I go marching.
Inside, as I typed, he lay
and brooded. Outside alone,
fields vying for inspection,
he skulked about the yard
and eyed the door.
But now we’re off together
and he’s prancing, bucking, whirling
his approval. I’m infected.
Reflection, speculation are suspended. We’re
freewheeling. He’s on
a trail of smells that must be tested,
I’m stepping in the pawprints of his quest.
This ridge that’s under snuffle
spans the headland. The ocean,
on my left hand, melds with sky.
We’re down the other
towards a fern-fringed lake.
He, voracious at the sight of so much water, laps and slavers.
A gallon later, we shuffle
up a rise to meet the sea
upon the other shore.
His eyes are gunsights.
This water’s not for drinking.
It’s a target. He jounces
belly-high in seaweed,
around a rotting hulk and,
after splashing anything nose-worthy,
scrabbles back. At the ditch
I snag him by the collar
to let a car by, the driver
lifts a finger in salute.
And here’s the quay - a squawk
of gulls, bewailing our intrusion,
as he, unscrupled, smiling
on the seawall leaps and war-whoops,
keeping them in flight.
A glance across the bay affirms
The Bens are watching
and with the self-same gusto we return. House in sight, he rushes up the drive as if he never wished to leave it.
brushes by me indoors, mauls
his bedding, and, uninclined
to write a word about it,
slips to sleep.
Daniel P. Stokes
Dublin, Ireland
*
Feigning Sleep
The mornings you get out of bed before me,
feigning sleep, I watch you dress
to gauge how you behave
when no one’s looking.
And as you waddle round the room
attacking drawers, I focus,
fascinated, on your fork,
your breasts, your buttocks
as if I’d never seen them.
We’ve linked our aims
and fused our flesh
and know we’re better paired.
Still… having to concede that you exist
outside of my conception
and create a universe that overlaps with mine
with perceptions that don’t pertain to me
and dark matter I can never sound
nor work my will on,
leaves me frantic to find out what I can.
But even as I curl here, concealing
my intent to see what you’ll reveal,
I’ve half a notion you’re aware
intuitively of being watched,
instinctively amused by my poor ruse
to find insights in your undulations
and artillery in the manner
you pull on your drawers.
Daniel P. Stokes
*
Fissure
Every autumn grandpa hunted bobwhite
Castle Hayne NC. At dinner,
he always warned “Bite slowly”
but at nine years old, holster
and cap gun strapped to my hip,
chipmunk-cheeked with mashed potatoes and biscuits,
gravy odor filling my nose, I chomped into the spicy meat
in rapture—eyes closed—
bit on a birdshot, chipping
and cracking an incisor down the middle.
My tongue found it, spit it out
on great-grandma’s Royal Albert China plate.
It rolled up the edge and back by a pea.
Gramps shook his head.
I let out a cry a neighbor declared
she heard half a mile away.
Sixty years later
my tongue still probes its worn cleft,
that metallic aftertaste
tainting every buttered biscuit,
birdshot embedded in every bite.
Peter Venable
Winston Salem
NC, USA
*
Claws
Just trimmed your nails this morning. You don’t need
them to remember that we all have claws.
Reminds you of a conference years ago:
a poet told you, “There are claws around us.”
Then, “How long have you been writing?” This
before a curt dismantling of your work.
Your miniatures lay there scratched and chipped.
The poem the poet liked the best was one
about your death. Just sayin.’ Why not sample
it: “Streams nibble behind my knees.” That night,
the poet read a poem you loved. About
kids playing hide-and-seek. At dusk, the parents
cry, “All in! All in!” A fine refrain.
Evading claws. Or entering their clutches.
Thomas Zimmerman
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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