Founder’s Favourites Issue 2-Jan 2018 Adam Levon Brown Alexi Milano Anna Kapungu Blanca Alicia Garza Carl “Papa” Palmer DJ Tyrer Darrell Petska Elizabeth Spencer Spragins Gregg Dotoli Ken Allan Dronsfield Mark J Mitchell Pamela Ahlen Peter Hoheisel Rick Blum
Founder’s Favourites Issue 2-Jan 2018 Inside 3 Rick Blum Riverside Cemetery 4 Ken Allan Dronsfield Dust on the Parlor Mirror 5 Elizabeth Spencer Spragins Latticework Pie | Spice 6 Alexi Milano Theriomorphic What Winter Taught Us 7 Mark J Mitchell Lunar Time 8 Peter Hoheisel Conspiracy of Joy 9 Darrell Petska At Winter’s Solstice 9 DJ Tyrer Haiku 10 Gregg Dotoli Newborn 10 DJ Tyrer Haiku 11 Adam Levon Brown Lilacs of an Ocean Breeze Caress My Hands 12 Carl “Papa” Palmer An Icicle Nonet 13 Pamela Ahlen Haiku 13 Anna Kapungu Bitter December 14 Blanca Alicia Garza Find Me
Ken A. Dronsfield Pg 4
Elizabeth S. Spragins Pg 5
Adam L. Brown Pg 11
Carl “Papa” Palmer Pg 12
Pamela Ahlen Pg 13
Blanca A. Garza Pg 14
A Brief Word from the Founder
I am so excited to showcase more talent in this second issue. The following poems and stories had a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, or visual description that captured my emotions. Something new is coming for the March edition. I will upload one or two favourite pictures to the website. If you submit a story or poem to compliment the image, and I like it as a favourite, you will receive a free copy! Check out the website on Jan 15, 2018 for details. Also, I’ll explain why I like the individual submission. A huge thank you to the new and established contributors for allowing me to publish your work in the premier issue of Founder’s Favourites! My star contributors have submitted poems and stories that range in all subjects and themes. I would appreciate feedback. What is your favourite submission? Monique Berry monique.editor@gmail.com
Riverside Cemetery By Rick Blum
Red-tailed hawk floats overhead, eyes fixed on a chipmunk scampering through barrows of crinkled leaves, oblivious to the talons he will taste shortly. Two teenage, banana bikers careen along mushroomed-pocked pathways, laughing at jokes only they comprehend. Passing cars curse smart-phone addicts vacillating in solitary absorption. All the while a chary, young woman, dried tears encrusting ashen cheeks, places a single, white rose on a grassy patch of earth encasing her passed future, unaware of the incessant cacophony of now beckoning her like a New Year’s toast.
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Rick Blum has been chronicling life’s vagaries through essays and poetry for more than 25 years during stints as a nightclub owner, high-tech manager, market research mogul, and, most recently, old geezer. His writings have appeared in The Literary Hatchet, The Satirist, and The Moon Magazine, among others. He is also a frequent contributor to the Humor Times, and has been published in numerous poetry anthologies. Mr. Blum is a two-time winner of the annual Carlisle Poetry Contest. His poem, Tomfoolery, received honorable mention in The Boston Globe Deflategate poetry challenge.
Dust on the Parlor Mirror By Ken Allan Dronsfield Boxed peanut brittle candy cane smiles cigar smoke rising trays of ribbon candy. Spruce scent wafting mistletoe in doorways nutcrackers guarding gifts around the tree. lights flash or chasing holly on the fireplace toast with hard eggnog enjoying our Christmas. bowl of reddish punch family and friends arrive holiday memories exist in dust on the parlor mirror.
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Ken Allan Dronsfield is a disabled veteran and poet who has been nominated for 2 Best of the Net and 3 Pushcart Prize Awards for Poetry. His poems have been published world-wide in various publications throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. He has been published in The Burningword Journal, Belle Reve Journal, SETU Magazine, Blue Heron, The Literary Hatchet, The Stray Branch, Now/Then Manchester Magazine UK, Bewildering Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review, EMBOSS Magazine, and many more. Ken loves thunderstorms, walking in the woods at night, and spending time with his cats Willa, Hemi and Turbo.
Latticework Pie
By Elizabeth Spencer Spragins granny smith apples nestle deep within their crust a perfect circle as I hold the knotted hands that held my heart in childhood ~Winston-Salem, North Carolina
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Spice
By Elizabeth Spencer Spragins a cinnamon stick in each cup of hot cider my memory stirs when aromas of apples whet the hungers of my heart ~Boston, Massachusetts c istetiana—stock.adobe.com
Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a poet, writer, and editor who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade before returning to her home state of Virginia. Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, Indonesia, and the United States. Shades and Shadows, a collection of her bardic poetry, is scheduled for publication by Quarterday Press in winter 2017. Updates are available on her website: www.authorsden.com/ elizabethspragins.
Theriomorphic By Alexi Milano
What Winter Taught Us By Alexi Milano
Night just fell and it’s even darker now. Our voices transform into whispers, perched on the edge of our balcony. Six crows, black and steady squawk over the call of thunder, roaring miles away. This moment with you hovers under their elegance, within their inquisitive beaded eyes. Let’s become crows together, dive into midnight air and soar through a sky full of stars. I’ll follow as you lead us into the ink-stained horizon. My head cocked to one side, while I observe you with one faithful eye.
Our home celebrates shades of crimson and green making webs on walls with shiny tentacles. You reach for the coquito, goblets full of white clouds that light flames in our throats so we’ll chat for hours with no real ideas, just words that deliver proud, roaring laughs. I could be saying something witty about God, or life but the horizon’s blinked, and your favorite tints of purple and pink swim across the sky; they’ll one day make us look back, and beg for it again.
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Alexi Milano is a writer and artist born in New York, raised in south Florida. She enjoys teaching her students how to push boundaries with their own pieces of writing where she lives in Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in Red Fez, In Between Hangovers, Poppy Road, and Black Poppy Review. She is co-editor at Varnish Journal.
Lunar Time
By Mark J Mitchell The moon is almost ready: Movable feasts mesh and lock together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The moon is not quite ready: She must stretch and wax and dust off all those secret names she left hidden in the dark. When the moon is perfectly ready she will wash the world in white. She will be mistress of the sky and she will accept our presents.
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Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors(Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage Press and two more novels are forthcoming: A Book of Lost Songs (Wild Child Publishing) and The Magic War (Loose Leaves). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.
Conspiracy of Joy By Peter Hoheisel
Your laughter haunts, harries me, shakes my soul like a woman who snaps an old work shirt to dry in a March wind. A brace to manhood, yet, like a deep, blue-black wave cresting to open air and sun, laughing air, singing sun, you thresh my serious soul. Your laughter is springtime, our serious conspiracy of joy, our yes to children and work & the morning star is a tiny splash of silver against the ending night.
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Peter Hoheisel has published poems in national publications, such as The Nation, and many regional ones, a few of which are the Langdon Review, Grasslands Review, Nebo, and Iconoclast. As well as teaching Creative Writing, Literature and Composition, at Lon Morris College in Jacksonville, Texas, he was also chair of the department of Religion and Philosophy at that institution. Before he moved to Texas, he was awarded numerous grants to teach poetry in many schools through the Michigan Council for the Arts and in Tyler, Texas, under a grant from the Texas Commission for the Arts.
At Winter's Solstice By Darrell Petska These icy cares be damned: out with some jam from our raspberry patch where sunlight peeked past terraced leaves and bee and beetle plied their trades removed from breaking news, prowling eyes from outer space and Google street cams pirating my privacy as I gainfully basked beneath gently arching canes— What fine therapy for icy days an hour's sunny reprieve would be, where time runs long and hands to heart's content pick, or not, before returning to day's flak and fire— But jam it must be for a taste of that sun. I'll spoon it down like medicine and hope for the best on Groundhog Day.
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Darrell Petska's writing has appeared in Red Paint Hill, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Chiron Review, Perspectives Magazine, Star 82 Review, Bird's Thumb and elsewhere (see conservancies.wordpress.com). Darrell worked for many years as communications editor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, leaving finally to focus on his own writing and his family. He lives in Middleton, Wisconsin.
Watching passers-by Sitting in The Corner House Briefly relaxing DJ Tyrer
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DJ Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing, was placed second in the 2015 Data Dump Award for Genre Poetry, and has been published in The Rhysling Anthology 2016, issues of Cyaegha, Carillon, Frostfire Worlds, Illumen, The Pen, Sirens Call, Tigershark and California Quarterly, and online at Three Drops from a Cauldron, Bindweed, Poetry Pacific, Scarlet Leaf Review and The Muse, as well as releasing several chapbooks, including the critically acclaimed Our Story. DJ Tyrer's website is at http://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk and The Atlantean Publishing website is at http://atlanteanpublishing.blogspot.co.uk/
Newborn
By Gregg Dotoli pure blessed and of bliss wishes don’t yet exist
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Gregg lives in New York City area and has studied English at Seton Hall University. He works as a white hat hacker, but his first love is the arts. His poems have been published in Quail Bell Magazine, The Four Quarters Magazine, Calvary Cross, Dead Snakes, Halcyon Magazine, Allegro Magazine, the Mad Swirl, Voices Project, Writing Raw and Down in the Dirt.
Sitting here, a view Pier stretching far away Ships, grey Thames water
DJ Tyrer
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Lilacs of an Ocean Breeze Caress my Hands By Adam Levon Brown
Lilacs of grace saturate Toadstool soil as Persian thunderclouds dominate the blue-bell sky Peonies of rainbow silo-hilled spider web fillings massage the outlets of a once forgotten dawn Lakes of sapphire assuage the senses in rivulets of silver-awakened emotions which shimmer in perfected hazes of noon Olfactory euphoria calls from the decadent smell of petunias which latch onto self-love and bloom with the ease of a cocoon set in silence Ivy hangs from lattices of joy as mighty birch stand tall in times of grief and settle hurricanes underneath stones of gray
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Adam Levon Brown is a poet residing in Eugene, Oregon. He enjoys the outdoors and playing with cats. He has been published in numerous places including Yellow Chair Review and Tuck Magazine. You can contact him on his blog at AdamLevonBrown.com
An Icicle Nonet By Carl “Papa” Palmer Icicles always fat at their tops tapering down toward the ground, time frozen in melted drops from eaves around the town. They drip in the day, refreeze at night, melt away, out of sight
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Carl "Papa" Palmer of Old Mill Road in Ridgeway, VA now lives in University Place, WA. He is retired military, retired FAA and now just plain retired without wristwatch, cell phone or alarm clock. Carl, Hospice volunteer and president of The Tacoma Writers Club is a Pushcart Prize and Micro Award nominee. MOTTO: Long Weekends Forever
Pamela Ahlen is currently program coordinator for Bookstock Literary Festival in Woodstock, Vermont. She organizes literary events for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth) and has compiled and edited the Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth. Pamela is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press).
nature's undone rattle of beech, sigh of birch deep woods offering Pamela Ahlen c Skeeze—Pixabay.com
Bitter December By Anna Kapungu
The mystic lands of heartbreaks Where tears fill the oceans Bitterness told in the weeping for self Power to the setting sun The beating heart in his saddle He rode into Yellow stone Where the cold sapped love from her blood Nothing she desired more Than the love of him Nothing else she could have died for Than his breath taking brilliance He took her breath away She transformed to the Beauty of Snow Icy cold sparkled without the light Their love was different and complicated Lived in the land of chance and hope
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Anna Kapungu is a poet and children’s book writer who has published a poetry collection entitled ’Water falling between words’ with Austin Macauley. Her second book to be published by Pegasus will be entitled ‘Feet on unstable waters’. She is a Canadian citizen currently residing in United Kingdom. Anna is a graduate of South bank University London with a BA (Hons) Degree in Hotel Management and a Diploma in Public Relations, Marketing and Sales Management from Commercial Careers College. Publishing credits include Pegasus, Carrillion, Onepersonstrash, Magazine, Adelaide Literary, Aadun Journal, Austin Macauley ,United Press UK ,Eber and Wein Publishers USA, Forward poetry UK, The Sentinel Journal Magazine and The Eustere Journal.
Find Me
By Blanca Alicia Garza If one day you look for me and you can't find me anymore, look into the poems that I wrote to you, you'll find me there.
Close your eyes and feel me— as I left a piece of my soul in every letter, in every word. Look for me in a Dandelion in a rainy day in a pristine white rose in a cloudy sky in our beautiful full moon in a thunderstorm in our favorite song in a crimson red dress Find me in your dreams Feel me in your coldest night I will look for you in a lonely night in the core of my soul in a golden star in our favorite song in the sound of the rain in every tear I shed, one by one until there is no more— no more you, no more I, no more us. I will go quietly without interrupting your silence. If one day you remember me and you can not find me, do not look for me anymore this time I left to never return. Perhaps our love will fade like the words in my old book of poems. I will always treasure our loving memories in the shattered petals of a pristine white rose.
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Blanca Alicia Garza is a Poet from Las Vegas, Nevada. She is a nature and animal lover, and enjoys spending time writing. Her poems are published in the Poetry Anthologies, "Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze", and "Dandelions in a Vase of Roses" now available at Amazon.com. Blanca's work can be found in The Poet Community, Whispers, The Winamop Journal, Indiana Voice Journal, Tuck Magazine, Raven's Cage Ezine, Scarlet Leaf Review as well as Birdsong Anthology 2016, Vol 1. Blanca was recently nominated for The Best of the Net 2017.
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