zine
moon
HOME  ABOUT  FICTION  POETRY  ART  SUBMIT  NEWS  MORBID  ZINES  ODDITIES  BEWARE  CONTACT  WITCHES  GHOSTS  JOHN.KACHUBA  BOOKS  FILMS   HELLBOUND  STAFF
Mark Powers

The September Chosen Poet is Mark Powers

Please feel free to email Mark at: markveano@gmail.com

mark

I’M HERE

The imposing coiled moon—
Hung fanged and viral tongued,
With bristling silvered
Monsoon-toothed,
Oracles of the misbegotten sages,
Who “knows it all” through self-annihilation...

The blackness torqued around her,
She pleaded vituperatively,
Into the speaker of her smart phone—
As she walked on sidewalks
Of rancid ignominy—

She spoke with a brother who
Misunderstood all that she had said,
Yet who was right in her ear,
And stiff bent neck,
The hollow voice of Brother Andy,
Ran muted with his intonations
Of, “Intonations of Spectacular Suicide,”                                         

As she hung on, forever,                                            
Until he decided to extinguish his bleak drones,
And so, off to the hospital he freely,
In global desperation, fled.

THE PROPHESY

The darkness,
Is my bosom friend,
It eats up the meaty, maggot angels
On my chest,
Opens the long atonal voice,
Of the dread night—
Of the masquerading demons in
The dark rains;
It opens me in bold ear-angles—
That the pulchritudinous earth …
Ain’t doin’ all too well.

THE SOMNOLENCE OF EVE

The callow wisp of threadbare night
Trailing,
Off the towering
Robin’s-egg, ovoid, reveling, toward China, eve–
Sinking ‘glassy-daguerreotype,’ static beaut., to fastening dark…
On terra firma below:
Voluptuous, this, in synesthetic dream, a humped herd of Longhorn cattle,
Plodding in soft, undulating-twilit, backed-
Sweat of spanned, leather-splotches of orange,
Spread far out of dusted grit of soil,
Over the land’s arid, unhinged depths.

Their hoofing-loo mouths—
The dysentery of settling wasps
Twirling, flagrant hot gesticulating mouths;
A synesthetic symmetry of bilingual breaths
As the Babel herd shuffles along—

Then…above, a canonized, pinpricked-white symmetry,
The aware, occupying, needle-eye of eve
Confessing, perched, for-all-intents, deaf, white and extremely keen—
It’s true colossal symmetry, dead.

Still, in the host of mitigating dark,
And fully awake
In its jesting, guidance above scabrous terra domain—
Overwhelming the nocuous fortress of delivery, sprawled,
Of eventide magic land.

It, a child mote of falling, angelic, Martian dust,
From the blue dwindling, easy-high canopy…
Like a disquieted dress monger,
Selling her last of many old, out of touch
Sedated, line of cloths…

A serious, benign, many-men-shuffling in justice’s backroom, the star
A fractal link of rounded tiniest symmetry,
Touched the shoulders of taciturn men,
Pinpointed, near the gifted nocturnal, and bright and hale,
Into the brimming light.

Rivaling the greedy, topsoil of the ways of men,
Appointed with the ultra-onerous of judge
Upon the distal top-soil in the hideous
Fortress of a languishing under (warding off love) journeys,
Of continuous knee-busting steel-pole strides.

And many kickass pomp and steady feet
Scattering the roustabout sacred-dust,
Star, twinkling the just and unjust;

Below, in ego-festered, killer menace of ratcheted men,
In terrible acres of mercurial storm,
Enmeshed in loud bursts of
Pitch, hail, and synesthetic air—
The Hindenburg buffoons.

Mark Powers, 66, has been formerly trained in the art and craft of literature since he was 22, when he took his first class in fiction writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus. The class, taught by author James Park Sloan (National Book Award nominee for his novel The Last Cold War Cowboy), so inspired him to want to become a fiction writer that he enrolled as an English major the following fall quarter at this university, and thereby received his B.A. in English there.

He’s worked in various labor, and clerical (for example, at Encyclopaedia Britannica and Putman Publishing Co.) jobs; and writing positions: for a trade magazine, at Putman, and for two local  newspapers, where at one paper he interviewed master crime writer, Eugene Izzi, who so strongly liked this feature story, that he urged Mark to finish a short story. Mark then submitted it to horror author, Mort Castle (currently three time Bram Stoker Award winner), to critique, which led Mr. Castle to become his mentor.

Mark thrived under Mort Castle's tutelage, having poetry accepted in journals such as the Oyez Review, Space and Time, and the Riverside Quarterly; and, in anthologies such as the Dan River Anthology, and the First Northwoods Anthology. Also, Mr. Powers had poetry in the comic books, Vampire Girls and Dream Angel. He’s also had poetry published in the illustrated, Death Asylum. Mark Powers had fiction published in the Oyez Review, The Dream International Quarterly, Fantastic Horror, The Southern Literary Messenger; and in the anthology, Masques V, where he cosigned with authors, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson; and in the anthology, All American Horror of the 21st Century: The First Decade 2000-2010.