The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot
In Galilee, fog bound and still, I saw you smile a breath before the first bird sang
and though tone-deaf to the grace notes, I suspected some brief divinity
amongst the rough clothes, rougher language and poisonous farts of our companions.
“Love”, you said, “is transformative, it makes new shapes of us all”.
“It grinds us to salt”, my terse reply.
On the road to Jerusalem we made new testaments, burned away our articles of faith,
the novelty of it all coughed in to an oven heated air like magic
the colour of dark, arterial blood,
but when I demanded absolute proof, you pointed to the wonder
of a swallows’ coil-pot nest and with a flourish of your hand declared
“Behold”!
It brought laughter from the others though not from me
my skin too thin for that kind of fun.
On the night before the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,
in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,
I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold to touch,
I believe I heard her mournful sigh;
“nothing is new, nothing is new, I have seen it all before.”
Mick Corrigan has been published in a range of periodicals, anthologies, magazines and on-line journals His first collection, Deep Fried Unicorn was released in to the wild in 2014 by Rebel Poetry Ireland. His poem Snowbound has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 2017/2018 by San Pedro Review/Blue Horse Press USA. He plans to do dangerous things with his hair before it’s too late.
Where Erasers and Wastebaskets And I Am Kept
This surly poorly reimbursed gigolo works for two offices.
One desk overlooks the Pacific Ocean, the other virginal forest.
The former is pure Lucite. Uncluttered. It is all about open water.
The latter’s socked in by zealous woods plus sentimental photo fog.
On federal holidays, overlords unfetter my chains, force me to go outdoors.
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, has been nominated for Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards, and authored four collections: Mount Analogue selected Sarnat’s sequence, Kaddish for the Country, for pamphlet distribution on Inauguration Day 2017 as part of the Washington DC and nationwide Women’s Marches. Harvard/Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built/staffed clinics for the marginalized, been a CEO and Stanford Med professor.
A cloud disappears
It’s 9 in the evening
in Barcelona, a Monday,
and I’m leaning
on the stone wall
of the balcony
in my bathrobe,
vaping,
and the convent bell’s
tolling the hour.
The grass is so
implausibly green
it has to be fake
but the olive tree is real
and above me
in the late evening sun
there’s a cloud that looks
like Cyprus, backlit.
The bell tolls
and I look away
and now it looks like a president
with a wispy quiff of a comb-over;
the bell tolls
and I look away again
and now it’s just
a thumb and index finger;
the bell tolls for the last time,
and now it’s altogether gone,
just the pale blue left,
and the moon
and a mayfly,
and somewhere in the distance
a passing moped,
scooting off
to wherever the party’s happening.
Adrian Salmon is an international fundraising consultant by day, classically trained singer by night, and poet whenever he should probably be doing one of the other two things. He lives in Bingley, West Yorkshire.