Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with over 1,900 poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press); ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy; (Cawing Crow Press) and ‘Like As If” (Pski’s Porch), Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

Art/image by Mear One -- https://mearone.com/

The Volume Of Man, Reading by Bruce McRae

Sherese Francis is a Queens, NY-based, Afro-Caribbean-American (Barbados and Dominica) poet, editor, interdisciplinary artist, workshop facilitator, and literary curator of the mobile library project, J. Expressions. She has published work in various publications including Furious Flower, Obsidian Lit, Rootwork Journal, Spoken Black Girl, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, she has published three chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant) and Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature), and Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press).

Art/image by Mear One -- https://mearone.com/

The Hunger Of Myth, Reading by Sherese Francis

Mooning About by Ivars Balkits

SIX DAYS IT TOOK TO RAISE IRON & CONCRETE FROM THE FIRST MIND
ON THE SEVENTH DAY TIME REFUSED BEING ALONG WITH THE RAIN
RUNNING THROUGH THE VALLEY ALL HIGH & NAKED
I LEARNED TO PAINT AFTER THE FIRST CRACK IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL
NOT LONG BEFORE FLIGHT WAS MY FIRST ASPIRATION BUT GOD HADN’T SAID THE WORD YET
PLEASE PASS THE SUPPER HOUR I AM GOING BACK HOME TO LORD OVER PRESENT OR PAST CHAOS THEORIES OF THE BASIS OF NAVELS
POET FINDS LINT IN HIS POCKET SMOKES A CLOVE SLEEPS THROUGH HIS TONGUE STENCIL’D INTO PREVIOUSLY UNBORN PARALLEL UNIVERSES
IF YOU SEE ME WITH MY HANDS BEHIND MY BACK ON REDWOOD ST. AGAIN ASK THE GHOSTS IN THE PIGEON COUP FROM 1969 ON IF THEY ARE COPS
THERE WILL BE NO TRANSITIONS OR ERAS
THERE WILL BE NO RECLUSIVE TENDENCIES IN THE COUNTRY OF SWINE
SAVE YR QUARTER FROM HOARDERS OF ART RUN AMUCK UP THEMSELVES
WITH DREAMS OF CONVENIENT FINANCIAL GAIN
WHEN YOU SEE THE NIGHT OWL’S SWORDED BEAK THAT’S JUST MOTHER NATURE SIZING YOU UP
CHANGE YR SECRETS BEHIND YR OWN CELL WALLS
DO NOT THINK OF MONEY
IF YOU EVER ASKED FOR ELSEWHERE YOU’VE COME FROM & IT ALWAYS TURNS BACK FROM YR ENEMIES
IF YOU NEVER LEARNED WHAT IT IS & WHAT IT ISN’T I CAN’T BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU
PLEASE TELL ALL THOSE SINKING SHIPS OF GEOLOGY, OCEANOGRAPHY & WHIP ITS
ONLY IF LOOSE LIPS LOSE THEIR GRIP ON REALITY BEFORE YOU DO
EVERYDAY I AM BORN BEHIND THE TIMES
EVERYDAY I CATCH UP BY CRUSHING THE OPPOSITION WITH BRUTE STRENGTH & FIERCE DETERMINATION
NEVER TAKE A POET’S WORD FOR IT UNLESS YOU GIVE UP SOMETHING OF YOURS FIRST
NEVER TAKE MONEY FROM SOMEBODY ASKING YOU QUESTIONS

Daniel Cyran reads THE END OF ART by D.C. Wojciech

"Either the State will be destroyed and a new life will begin...or else the State must crush the individual and local life, it must become the master of all the domains of human activity, must bring with it wars and internal struggles for the possession of power, surface-revolutions which only change one tyrant for another, and inevitably, at the end of this evolution—death!"

- Peter Kropotkin in 1896

It is an eventful year,
We live in a nation flourishing 
On the blood of millions murdered
And millions more being murdered
Everywhere else in the world.

I sit reading the incorruptible words
Of those who chose defiance
To the highest evil;
What they foretold is almost incomparable
To the nightmare lying before us.

The Revolution has not won.
But it exists everywhere.
The trigger-like mentalities
That lead the counter-attack
Bear down with unequaled force
On the rising tide of revolt.

The people walk as if in a movie-dream
And work in the terrifying order
Of a chaos their bodies reject,
But their fear compels them to accept.
The bureaucrats and idle rich
Continue their reign of permanent war
On the sweat and blood of the poor.

Across the seas a monstrous child
Erupts over all Europe:
The final expression of centuries
Of accumulated barbarism.

The politicians spill their lies
Over our heads; the lies of murderers,
Rogues and fools whose hearts have ceased
To seek the light of Love.
The measure of their strength
Is the docility of those they rule.

Whatever happens, one thing is certain:
The end of a world it has taken
Hundreds of years to create,
But mere seconds to destroy.

Daniel Cyran reads Philip Lamantia's 'A Simple Answer to the Enemy'

When the future became present
you were all adopted. To tread its wilderness.
Threading twilight with your lover who is olived
plucked from orchards of their childhood
a chord on the harp
growing into its jaws.


By the time the phone rings in the silent trash
of living day-to-day, we didn't have
to do anything. Day broke its back
for us. An orchestra
in the desert where each musician plays
a bow apart, a red ribbon
of fiddles, stories waiting in line
stranded.


The phone rings because it is oppressed. In our house
making room for more silence
stalks me in my nightgown
from the basin into years
kneading dirt into order.


Echoes pour from the sink flooding
like the tropics. The younger of our brothers.
A cathedral tortures its bells
then forgets them, And by 2020 everyone
will have given up
on everyone else.


The custodian scrubs away
in a school of thought, kaleidoscopes—
men with canes who fracture light so much
as when I was starved for it.


Insects sharpening their death drives. Both whom
have only attempted life, twice
were alliances with men.
Tendons blowing the boat apart
under skin. Whose life expectancy sits rusting
in bullet holes collecting fog
and ringing!


To completely sever
oneself from what is making
noise with logic, even if
logic. Coins clogging
a wishing well in a ghosted town.
The hand reaching toward sound is thin in the cloth
of one's breath. A graveyard is a bed
full of children arguing with their parents.


If one still breathes? Their spirit will
use its cage, our attention,
the same boat
leaning too far into the wind.

Was it a drunkard in the stairwell
who used today's newspaper 
as a table to hold his lottery tickets?
He scratched away and I told myself


   I'm done. I'd like to go
to the beach now.


Even
before you, the shore has been
against us.

Daniel Cyran reads an excerpt from Dot Devota's 'The Eternal Wall'

Paul Gorman & The Hypnotist Collectors - Staring Down My Madness

To A Jubilant Conscience, stephanie roberts

At the fulcrum of worlds.

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