Winter 2007

New Mirage Quarterly Winter 2007 Mirage Group Isles of Myst Review Catalog Spring - Summer 2008 Chapbooks

Morning

So many stories
you want to impose
on the fruit bowl's
polished apple face,
the window that cries
alive with geese.

Todd Heldt

* * * * * * * * *

I have been thinking

I know now
I am looking for proofs
that this is real
that I have existed

There is no substance in my being
there is no core in the atoms I am built of
I am the search of electrons

Sigrid Astrup

Sigrid Astrupwas in born in 1979, in a fjord in northern Norway, and grew up on Tromsø island (with mother Marianne Astrup).
Her father is Jostein Haraldsen. He is an author / painter and lives in the Philipines.
She lives and works as a writer, and installation / video artist, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

* * * * * * * * *

ANGUISH

Dan Tabor

Within the gray cells of my torpid brain

Fair prisoners cry, again and yet again

Imploring for release

Against the bars they lean, their wiptful eyes upon the stars

Imprisoned thoughts...such fragile, lovely things

They smile intriguinngly and tease for wings

Oh, Impotance

To know my lips unchain

Sweet songs that struggle to escape in vain

My stubborn pen stabs through the heart of me

And not to write is agony

* * * * * * * * *

Mirage

Layers of false illusion lie,

Plale clouds twist and wildly fly.

Under us, red walls glow,

Tears, cold knives, flow.

Choice now, now will return.

Hope and love shall return

Jerome Brooke

Dance of the Torches

Far, far away, the flames do play,

Leaping in the far distance

Across the way, candles wildly turn,

Doing their reckless dance.

Stars glitter, then fall, in the sky;

Hopeless realm of night.

Falling, falling to our green realm,

Into our fading sight.

Memories, mere dreams, rise in the dark,

Blind eye of the mind.

Dreams of death, memories of fleeting love,

All, all of a single kind.

Jerome Brooke

Jerome Brooke was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1949.

He lives in Thailand. He is a retired attorney. He has

written a number of collections of poetry, including Our

Lady of Silk, Dark Sea of Sulu, and Mirage : Dance of the

Sun.

* * * * * *

under the god

under the god tonight

is nothing semantics decays

to day today and memory too

is sufficiency me, under

the god is memory and moments

where parts of us

resurrected themselves

tonight under the god

recapitulated pastels

art pain on the palette

under the god a pixel

is now is not noisy life

for tonight. a pain in the

memory me dis-

remembered abject ob-

ject under the god

tonight red is write

red right under the

god tonight

David McLean

David McLean was born in Wales in 1960. He has lived Sweden since 1987.

* * * * * *

Jesus Walks

Jesus lives

in a tent

not a temple

coated with blue

velvet sugar

He dances in freedom

of His salvation

with the night and all

days bearing down with sun.

He has billions of ears

hanging from His head

dangling by seashores

listening to incoming prayers.

Sometimes busy hours drive Him

near crazy with buzzing sounds.

He walks near desert bushes

and hears wind tunnels

pushed by pine stinging nettles.

Here in His sacred voice

a whisper and

Pentecostal mind-

confused by hints of

Catholicism and prayers to Mary-

He heals himself in sacred

ponds tossing holy water

over himself--

touching nothing but

humanity He recoils

and finishes his desert

walk somewhat alone.

Michael Lee Johnson

-2007-

    Michael Lee Johnson lives in Itasca, IL.  After spending 10 
years in Edmonton, Canada during the Vietnam War era.
He is a freelance writer, and poet. 
 
 
 
 
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