kingsoftrain

thru May 3rd, Lulu is offering 10% off all print books with coupon code of LULU10

poetry collections, mine, self-published, are here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/acolyteroad

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ALSO, if you’d like to support {isacoustic*}, I have a private publication of 60 poems that I am calling {mood piece for baby blur}, available to anyone making a 5.00 donation or more to {isacoustic*} via PayPal:

https://www.paypal.me/BartonSmock
or it can be sent to (bartsmock@gmail.com)

be sure to provide a physical address, to include your name, for the send.

You can check out {isacoustic*}, here:

site: https://isacoustic.com/
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Isacoustic-192435501303710/
twitter: https://twitter.com/isacousticVOL
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isacousticvol/

Date Palms
poems, Sophia Naz
City Press, June 2017

Pointillism
Poems, Sophia Naz
Copper Coin, 2017

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In the poems of Sophia Naz, the creatures have dress codes and the angels hang eyesight’s laundry. Naz sees double, says double. Has two words for every language. As disappearance might draw the crowds away from abandonment, this poet misses more than home and raises the message bottle, broken, to all that is vocal and vexed.

While the collection Date Palms polls the ghost vote on the slow-burn of miracle, Pointillism summons woman as the only darkness left to approve night’s parole. Both collections take seriously their toying, and nurture wordplay from glow to revelation. These verses speak not only of, but also to, those who wear silence as a badge to call it mouth. And so deepen the beauty all anger should have.

By such roadside flares, readers may make a…

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poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

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it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely

Set to Music a Wildfire
poems by Ruth Awad
SIR Press, 2017

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“Will you die for an idea?” – Ruth Awad, from Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion

When so much praise is reserved for the universal, for a thing that touches all things, here is Ruth Awad’s Set to Music a Wildfire– a work that feels pressed into the page. A work that picks up the pieces, not after, but during. A work that pauses in order to continue. A rewriting of the detail’s bible. I love this book for its spiritual reportage:

There was the broken teapot and two women, their clothes
torn open, and an infant. (Sabra and Shatila Massacre / Refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, 1982)

For the way its observant foresight lets image stand:

Tripoli rooftop.
…The sea lipped its insoluble gossip
to the shoreline.

The sky was…

Rishitha Shetty lives in Bangalore, India. Her work has appeared in The wild word, Califragile, Muse India, Spark Magazine, The Quail Bell Magazine, The Indian Review, and The Literary Yard. She is a member of Bangalore Writers Workshop.

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Riversong

A dip in the Netravati,
to wash sins that
escape soap.
It is said that when a
wounded tiger wet
his bloody paw in her banks,
she blushed red
like the ripe cashew-apple.

From here, naked feet took with them
the sweet sting of a forgotten myth
and she took their sins.

Her limbs twisted out of creeks in
swollen streets,
she cut an artery
bled into boulders,
and a writer wrote
of her fury
in his book of songs.

But remember, I have crackled in your mouths like a twig,
even as my sisters wept at their burning skin.
I promise you…