All rights to the works included in this magazine remain with their respective authors. All rights to this issue’s cover art (“Visual Poem No.40,” 2015-2017) remain with the artist Roland Buckingham-Hsiao. Zoomoozophone Review is an online literary magazine dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry. It is edited by Matt Margo. http://issuu.com/zoomoozophone_review http://facebook.com/zoomoozophonereview zoomoozophone@gmail.com
Our fifteenth issue features haiku and similar forms only and is dedicated to the memory of John Cage, author of haiku and supporter of the zoomoozophone.
Michael Dylan Welch Untitled
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Evan Guilford-Blake Untitled
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Rosalie Gardner Untitled Untitled Untitled
8 9 10
Devon Balwit It’s Not Like in the Movies
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Lisa Stice Untitled
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Bryan Marshall Untitled
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Sergio A. Ortiz Untitled Untitled
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Yuan Changming Autumnscape Confucian Gentility (4 Haiku)
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Clara B. Jones Haibun for Jay-Z
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Sheila E. Murphy Timbre at the Nest Modernity Stone Silhouette
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billy bob beamer POME-why Leaks chANGE and shaping POMEburroughs
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Sean Burn and gobscure Untitled Untitled Untitled
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CL Bledsoe Body Blackjack Series
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Nathan Spoon Moon 2: Handouts
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Alex Russell I Will Never Understand People Who Complain about Ants at a Picnic
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Kyle Flak I USED TO DRINK A LOT OF COFFEE / AND NOW I STILL DO BE YOUR OWN BOSS MOONGLOW
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Ann Christine Tabaka Untitled
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Thomas O’Connell Untitled
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Chaya From the Chagrin Valley Times Police Blotter, December 30, 2010 (1) From the Chagrin Valley Times Police Blotter, December 30, 2010 (2)
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Contributors
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first day of the year— I eat an apple with my left hand
Wednesday morning, Rumbling at seven a.m.: Garbagemen at work.
Dreamt we were married If you ask me what I dreamt I’ll say I killed you
Doing some Googling How to get hair dye off wall How to boil an egg
Lots of people ask For my anthem on Tinder It’s Stayin’ Alive
I. Asses in the air, we would look ridiculous if we cared. We don’t. II. What about the dog, poking in his long nose just when we don’t need it? III. So close to coming when a text from my sick son forces me to go. IV. This is age: poems are a bigger turn-on than flesh—typing, white hot. V. Delightful to fuck condom free no more fear of pregnancy. No eggs. VI. Polyamory— man, dog, me, a cushy bed— all taking comfort.
the terrier digs a cool spot for napping finding wild instincts
From the river, a wet dog shakes its storm.
a river runs through my life thirst hounds me
minimalist light unfold me on paper ... go fetch the wind
The Party/ between the gaps of inspired winds all leaves fall to report to their roots
The Moon/ a shining rainbow trout, cast high and far onto the bank of my dream
The Fence/ Like a grandpa’s teeth Cannot bite the softest days Passing by daily
Orchid/ Deep in the valley Alone on an obscure spot You bloom none the less
Lotus/ From foul decayed silt You shoot clean against the sun Never pollutable
Chrysanthemum/ Hanging on and on Even when wishes wither You keep flowering
Plum/ Your brave bold blood dropped As though to melt all world’s snow Before spring gathers
They know they don’t fit—are not the right type, like Obama at a Trump rally or a chicken in a wolf pack or a rose with no bee. They know that Hal Messel left London for Manchester to live in a castle belonging to Kenya. They are a scientist studying the cash flow of colored boys who have nothing in common— wearing ribbons in their hair and never using paper money. Their best friend is Jamal whose Pell Grant buys Hilfigers® while they can’t find a bathroom in the mall. They protest credit card fraud using Bitcoin® since virtual currency is programmed for loss—not for hacking the central bank. Jamal gave them a book titled, Transmisogyny, and they gave him a bottle of Pinot Noir and a sign that read Safe Space stamped with an Olive Garden® logo and a photo of Ché. They asked Jamal to hum a Kanye song, but he said industrial rock is sure to be the next big sound after rap, and the love child of Jay-Z and Batgirl® will create a Super-race. They have a quick mind. You are flirting with danger. Negroes have pink hair.
Sagacity recedes. Dim winter floats against the yard, and symmetry frees hard elements to meet the bard on wheels clanking toward fire as though a little warmth would dry his plans and let him work. Only matter holds in memory. His motion forming stares into the rocks once placed now nudged away into another plane. How evident the mood of rain. Thin branches tracing darkness let the day wane. Softer thought and skin, the lowered expectations. Centrifugal unforced stamina, as if only trees, then weeds
I hold this pencil that you held. I hold all I have left, this thought you polished as your best. I hold the little holder of the graphite that is you. How you thought and what you found and how you gave it back. I take the only part I have of you. I hold it back. One sentence or two, majestic or medicinal, a thought
Do not away. Evening’s too simple to retrieve. The innocence about me seeds reformulating you and how the little waves go smarting past. We live the sea light and the diamonds that retract how many heaven waves we had. It is a stark day. Now the anonyms come back. Lore points, shivaree dÊtente and aftermath, a presumptive you
POME-why3 words hacked from John Bennett alongtheway, fr. his Select Poems, might matter
Leaks chANGE and shaping
DUSTI SINe THoTH LI o FEEf cough splant snore engris
POMEburroughs pillcep win wind ow caplace sot the secant est sleep soda co vers
1. My body, an avalanche, falling, falling, with the head desperate to stay afloat. 2. My heart is faded paper, damp but drying in the sun. Will anyone read its words? 3. These feet, dumb, trudging ever on, likewise, my soul, oh, it tries to lift itself and move. 4. The crack of bats connecting with baseballs? No, just my knees complaining as I stand up. 5. Eyes, they say, are windows, but to what? The soul isn’t in our brains—or hearts—but our backs.
That person is wearing a mask on top of their head. * LED like the new york times traveling * pieces of beauty. You have now an epoch Your duty
I’m writing outside. There’s lots of bugs, but it’s fine. This is where they live.
fireflies here and there-my last night as a security guard
really feeling the song “born to run� i play my air guitar a little louder
summer leaving i remember the first swim of the season
the smell of baked bread and strong laundry soap clung to her like perfume
In the barber shop Reading yesterday’s paper The smell of pomade
THEFT: A Cleveland man is being sought in connection with the theft of about $200 worth of tenderloin. It was actually a woman, who is also being sought, who left Heinen’s without paying for the meat, but she got into a car registered to the man. The man is currently on parole for sex offenses. A sex offender Stole expensive meat from store Were the cuts tasty?
BREAKING AND ENTERING: Someone broke into an unoccupied home on Country Lane and stole various studio equipment that had been stored in the garage. Among the items taken were amplifiers, speakers and mixers.
Loud amplifiers Were stolen from empty home Did anyone hear?
Alex Russell is a heartwarming disappointment and impulse-bought a website to try and pressure himself into submitting more, under the threat of being the type of asshole who has a website but never does anything to warrant having one. A testament to this failure lives at www.alexrussell.info. Ann Christine Tabaka was born and lives in Delaware. She is a published poet, an artist, a chemist, and a personal trainer. She loves gardening, cooking, and the ocean. Chris lives with her husband and two cats. Her poems have been published in numerous national and international poetry journals, reviews, and anthologies. Chris has been selected as the resident haiku poet for Stanzaic Stylings. billy bob beamer continues his experimental music, writing, small drawings, installations, and digital asemia/visual poetry. Last October, 2016, his exhibition “Word Dust, Untitled” was presented at Humanities Gallery, Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, VA. Some graphite drawings can be viewed at The Nevica Project Gallery in Chicago (thenevicaproject.com). Bryan Marshall was born in Edinburgh in 1975, grew up in the Scottish Borders, and has gradually migrated south, to where he currently resides in the capital of Wales. On the way he has accumulated various degrees (including a PhD in music) and has been a barman, a jobbing musician, a sommelier, a wine merchant, a high school teacher, a pub landlord, a waiter in a Michelin-starred restaurant, and is finally a barman again. He also writes. Mainly poetry, but also short fiction, and he has a short novel in a drawer awaiting further attention. He has had poetry, flash fiction, and short stories published in print and online, and performs at numerous spoken word events, to audiences ranging from around 12 to in excess of 100. A number of performances are available to view online. Every week he runs Cardiff Bay Writing Group, where like-minded people meet to read, discuss, and write poetry and short prose. Chaya is the pseudonym of an academic administrator and former English professor who, in her next life, hopes to be a singer-songwriter in Nashville. CL Bledsoe is the assistant editor for The Dead Mule and author of sixteen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the flash collection Ray’s Sea World. Recent poems appear in The Arkansas Review, Contrary, and Barrelhouse. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs at NotAnotherTVDad.com. Clara B. Jones practices poetry in Silver Spring, MD (USA). As a woman of color, she writes about identity, culture, and society and conducts research on experimental poetry, as well as radical publishing. She is author of three chapbooks, and her poetry, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in various venues.
Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She is a poetry editor for Minute Magazine and has five chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press), Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press), In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books), and The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry). Her individual poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, The Stillwater Review, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, Emrys Journal, and more. Visit Evan Guilford-Blake’s Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B009CC554I. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evan.guilfordblake. Twitter: @EJBplaywright. prisong is the next gobscure / Sean Burn collaboration. A wall of words collided to make new meanings form a backdrop in a library in east London for their performance in mid-November. Welsh poppies will be involved. Kyle Flak’s newest book is called I AM SORRY FOR EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE (Gold Wake Press). He likes sandwiches and ducks. Lisa Stice is a poet/mother/military spouse who received a BA in English literature from Mesa State College (now Colorado Mesa University) and an MFA in creative writing and literary arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage. While it is difficult to say where home is, she currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, daughter, and dog. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of a poetry collection, Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016). You can find out more about her and her publications at lisastice.wordpress.com and facebook.com/LisaSticePoet. Michael Dylan Welch has served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, where he continues to curate two poetry reading series. He has published thousands of his poems in hundreds of journals and anthologies in at least 20 languages. His latest books include Jumble Box: Haiku and Senryu from National Haiku Writing Month, Seven Suns / Seven Moons (with Tanya McDonald), Becoming a Haiku Poet, and Fire in the Treetops: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Haiku North America. Michael’s poems and translations have been chiseled into stone in New Zealand, read for the Empress of Japan in Tokyo, performed at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, printed on balloons and bookmarks, and featured on the backs of 150,000,000 U.S. postage stamps. Michael is a cofounder of the Haiku North America conference (1991) and the American Haiku Archives at the California State Library (1996), and founder of the Tanka Society of America (2000) and National Haiku Writing Month (2010; www.nahaiwrimo.com). His personal website, devoted mostly to poetry, is www.graceguts.com. Nathan Spoon is the author of Doomsday Bunker (Éditions du Cygne, X-Peri Series, 2017) and My Name is Gretchen Merryweather (hardPressed poetry, 2017). His publications include Oxford Poetry, Mantis, Hotel Amerika, Reflections (Yale Divinity School), Spacecraftproject, From the Lighthouse, NPR’s KCRW.com, Zócalo Public Square, and the anthology What Have You Lost? (HarperCollins). He is Associate Editor of X-Peri and a 2017 faculty member for seminars at the University of Pennsylvania and the ALSCW Conference.
Roland Buckingham-Hsiao is an artist and researcher based in the UK and Taiwan. His work investigates the boundaries of language – text/image, text/body, and text/object relations – often via East-West cultural exchange. His creative practice is interdisciplinary but revolves around photography, calligraphy, and poetry. He studied Art at universities in Canterbury, Belfast, and London, UK and Mandarin and Chinese calligraphy at university in Taichung, Taiwan. He has exhibited artworks at many museums and galleries around the world, including Tate Britain in London, UK, and is currently engaged in practice-based doctoral research at the University of Sunderland, UK. His website is https://buckinghamhsiao.wordpress.com. Rosalie Gardner is a human poet and playwright, based in York, England. Her writing has appeared in SPAM, hot dog mag, Reality Beach, and “on the radio.” Sergio A. Ortiz is a poet, a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Loch Raven Review, Drunk Monkeys, Algebra of Owls, Free State Review, and The Paragon Journal. Sheila E. Murphy’s Wikipedia page can be accessed here. Her life continues to include writing, art, and business. She blogs here. Murphy has lived in Phoenix, Arizona throughout her adult life and originally hails from South Bend, Indiana. Thomas O’Connell is a librarian who has decided to only live in towns named after Monkee songs. His poetry and short fiction has appeared in Elm Leaves Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Hobart (online), and Blink-Ink, as well as other print and online journals. Yuan Changming, nine-time Pushcart nominee and author of seven chapbooks, published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver; credits include Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review, and 1,349 others worldwide.