Paris by David Beckman

light   cathedral towers straining west   gardens where trees wear scarves and people plant themselves deep  
putting out roots and leaves that
fall   come fall   Streets matrix at corners   buses troll   daring history  
in the metro below rue Monge an old man in tattered sweater


birdwalks
toward me to say   monsieur votre écharpe est sur le sol
then bends to retrieve it for
me   we resist all history here   all
light for fear it has more to say than we and feels it more
and will far past when these words wash away toward
Argenteuil

we can’t get enough of your river   as if finer life were flowing here
and we tourist-lemmings head for it day
and night looking for some truth awash
near Pont Neuf since 1607 when men sharpened quills   dreaming
under scudding clouds that beauty was only here   and
art.

beauty is here and art and forgotten hands that strained to be a part of it    at the tip of ile de la Cite   randy Henri IV established
a pubic bone of land where he dallied long
and named a narrow cobbled triangle opposite   the clitoris of Paris    oh, le mot just    we walk there now thirsty for meaning and a glass of red Bordeaux.

Soul Patch by Subhankar Das

I was at a poetry reading.

My name was announced

and I got up and moved towards the stage.

Then all of a sudden

This short man hair thinning

groped up on stage and started reading.

For a few seconds me and the guy who was conducting

did not know what to do.

Then of course he was stopped

in the middle of his poem

and was asked who he was?

He said he was me.

My god a con selfie I thought.

Still he was allowed to finish his poem

before I took over

and thankfully also collected the cheque

which I almost missed.



Today I get a long distance phone call

congratulating me for a poem

in a commercial magazine

which I never wrote.



Now how am I to prove to my readers

that this is not the big man with long hairs

with a soul patch to go with.



Everyone appreciates the patch

but nobody looks for the soul

as if it did not exist.

The Scorpion Priest by Steve F. Klepetar

dies and is reborn in a city
we once knew.  All his heads

have grown back, his terrible
blue eyes.  Scribes assemble

in the dark; torches are lit; shadows
tease the temple walls.  All night

bats whirl around the ziggurat,
people sing of heat and sand and rain.


Steve Klepetar’s work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Three collections appeared in 2013: Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press).  An e-chapbook, Return of the Bride of Frankenstein, has just been published by Kind of a Hurricane Press.