Director, Andromeda Simulations International, Bahamas: a global education company providing online and in-person workshops in business finance.
Series Editor, Sampson Low's 'Potcake Chapbooks'. Formal verse about traveling, family, love, etc...
Melissa Balmain’s third poetry collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is available from Paul Dry Books (and from all the usual retail empires). Balmain is the editor-in-chief of Light, America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010.
Der Arme Poet (best-known painting by Carl Spitzweg, 1839)
If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme, (with thought and frowns, it can’t be very hard), I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
O, gradus ad parnassum. One quick climb. I’ll be crème de la crème and avant-garde, if only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.
Top hat, cravat and walking stick meantime are ready—attributes to reap regard. I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
No more damp attic life; no fleas or grime. My poem will be perfection—a petard! If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme.
My peers will shout, “Alors, a paradigm! Such lofty wit, a wise camelopard.“ I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
I bite my quill: crime, slime, Mülheim, enzyme. The world will bow, salute and call me bard. If only I can hatch a heartfelt rhyme, I’ll take my rightful place with the sublime.
*****
Janice D.Soderling writes: “This poem is ekphrastic, generated from a preceding work of art. “About the mysterious motor that generates, I can say little. But no composer, artist, poet, sculptor works ex nihilo. Earliest man, woman, looked at their handprint, their footprint, and a thought rose, an urge to express what they felt – a primitive fear of death perhaps – and off they went to the caves to imprint their hand, or to carve a footprint on the rockface by the sea. A shout-out that Kilroy was here. “We hear music in the babbling brook, in the sighing wind, in the raindrop falling from leaf to leaf and plopping into the puddle below. There is poetry in the emotive sounds we make and hear: tinkling laughter, cooing seduction, growling rage, keening sorrow, barking grief. Of such, language is made; of language Shakespeare made Sonnet 73. “All art is imitation, from birdsong to a symphony orchestra, from the walking stride to the metrical verse. All art is a denial of death. Even the comic art.“
Janice D. Soderling is an American–Swedish writer who lives in a small Swedish village. Over the years, she has published hundreds of poems, flash and fiction, most recently at Mezzo Cammin, Eclectica, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Tipton Poetry Journal. Collections issued in 2025 are The Women Come and Go, Talking (poems) and Our Lives Were Supposed to Be Different (short stories).
‘The Poor Poet’ was originally published in American Arts Quarterly, and republished in the current Well Met, where links at the bottom will take you to other poets in the issue.
Pic credit: Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet (via Wikipedia)
I have never in my lives Met a girl named Arabella – Captain Blood, the lucky fella, Took them all to be his wives.
I have never been reborn As a pirate quartermaster – Long John Silver, lucky bastard, Shouldered me aside with scorn.
I had never – strange but true – Had a chance to rape and pillage; Takes a crew to burn a village, Takes much gold to get that crew.
So for now let’s all enjoy Cold and wet northeastern snow, How and why – we’ll never know… Yahrr, my mates, and chips ahoy.
*****
Vadim Kagan writes: “We were visiting BVI, and I had this wonderful morning ritual – walking along the beach to the coffee shop, and then dragging a beack chair to the water so that my feet were in the surf… and coming up with a poem or two watching the sun rise and the clouds change colors. Since childhood I’ve been a huge fan of Rafael Sabatini’s “Captain Blood” novels, so the first two lines just happened, and then the rest kinda followed. I think back home the forecast called for snow that day, so the contrast was again already there for me to make use of.”
Vadim Kagan writes poetry and prose in English and Russian. Vadim’s poems, bringing together traditions of Russian and English metered verse, have been put to music and performed by local and international artists. His poems have been published in The Lyric, Founders Favorites, The Road Not Taken, the Lost Love chapbook and recently in the Maryland Bards Poetry Review 2025. Vadim lives in Bethesda, MD, where he runs an AI company providing advanced technology capabilities to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.
You swore at me and hurled your ring into the pond then drove off back to London “for some bloody fun” with friends whose Chelsea coven held you in its bond. I was next in, scored twelve and hit the winning run.
The beers were long and cool, the Captain shook my hand. Dusk shaded in, a final liquid blackbird sang. A coughing tractor crawled a strip of fading land. An owl flew low across the pitch, a church bell rang.
Two muddy urchins with a shrimp-net dredged the pond their hopeful piping rippling in the cooling air while you choked on exhaust at Guildford or beyond along your golden road to Knightsbridge and Sloane Square.
Another world and just two perfect hours away your eyes had been bright green. Or brown. Or were they blue? I still recall the details of that Summer day so much more clearly than I now remember you.
*****
Martin Parker writes: “The only point I might add is my hope that if the muddy urchins’ dredging efforts were rewarded they were not too disappointed to learn that the ring’s diamond might not have been a real one! The intervening sixty-five-plus years have, mercifully, erased the fact that I may have been nothing but a cheapskate!”
‘Man of the Match’ was first published in Snakeskin.
Martin Parker is a writer of mainly light and humorous verse much of which has appeared in national publications including The Spectator, The Oldie and The Literary Review. In 2008 Martin founded the quarterly light verse webzine, Lighten Up Online at www.lightenup-online.co.uk, now edited by Jerome Betts. His website at www.martinparker-verse.co.uk gives details and excerpts from his two “hopefully humorous and only occasionally wrily depressing books”.
All systems are failing shadows flicker around the darkened room
There is no captain to report to, I am he.
Lost among the leaves.
*****
Poet, author, editor, publisher and digital creator Anthony Watkins passed away this week after a long illness. I knew him only through his creation of Better Than Starbucks, the wonderfully broad tent poetry-fiction-and-interviews magazine that came out monthly and provided for writers of all styles. It was a generous and inclusive publication, well reflective of its creator.
The poem above is one of the last messages posted by Anthony Watkins on his Facebook page, as everything was winding down.
At night we dream to clean our memory, discard trash from our cache. Reincarnating after death would be the same; the past, scraped by death’s emery, unknown in the new game, cleansed of our memories, but with a stash of added skills… and karma’s unpaid bills.
*****
No, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in anything, or in nothing; I’m an absolute agnostic. “I think therefore I am” is as far as you can go with any certainty – even “who or what I am” is ultimately unknown.
‘Clearing the Cache’ was published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb (if you exist, of course…)
Dear Mother come softly across your grey veil and onto the path in the dark where the snail is crossing obliquely and nightjars sing sweetly and put down your toilet bag quietly, discreetly on the rim of the cemetery fountain. Now wash your hair free of this mud and these worms, and squash those white maggots that gleam in your ears, then smile as you used to. We’ll have no more tears.
*****
Andrew Sclater writes: “I think everyone who loses a parent probably wants to resurrect them somehow. But memory is a false friend. We can’t see them clearly enough: we know, with vagueness, what they were like, but not who they were. We’d like to go back but we can’t, though this poems attempts to. Then, the realisation that we stand alone, orphaned, comes slowly, painfully and (awkward as it is) angrily as we grieve. This poem was delivered almost complete to me. It simply flowed out of the first line in a rare and rather magical way. I still like it more than almost everything I’ve written, placing my discomfort so tidily into its formal box.”
‘Dear Mother’ first appeared in Poetry Review.
Andrew Sclater is a Scottish poet currently living in Paris. He has published poems in Ambit, Best Scottish Poems, The Dark Horse, Magma, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, Shearsman and elsewhere. He co-founded Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. He has been an editor of Charles Darwin’s correspondence and his Dinner at the Blaws-Baxters’ was published in 2016 by HappenStance Press. His newest pamphlet Quite Joyful is from Mariscat Press.
The more she strained her mother wit To put the jigsaw into place, The more the pieces wouldn’t fit.
Too bad the cat had felt the need To leap into the midst of things— The puzzle would have been complete.
Somehow she had misplaced the lid, Which had a picture stamped on it Of what she searched for in her head.
The work lay spread in front of her; The shapes appeared and disappeared, Each morphing into metaphor.
Sometimes they’d stay where they belonged— But then, to her weak eyes, it seemed She’d put them all together wrong.
She kept on shuffling scattered bits; Meanwhile a lifetime passed beneath Her aged, trembling fingertips.
*****
Lee Evans writes: “This particular poem arose from the year-long habit my wife and I have of doing jigsaw puzzles. (Big surprise!) In such circumstances one gets to thinking a lot about putting the pieces of one’s life together, especially those of us who are in our mid seventies. I may have stolen the title from a Paul Simon song, but that has nothing to do with it. Several people I have known have suffered from dementia late in life, but the poem is more about trying to grasp fluid realities than dementia, and attempting this in the frailty of one’s declining years. But that’s not all there is to the poem…”
‘Late in the Evening’ was first published in Snakeskin.
Lee Evans was born in Annapolis, Maryland and worked for the Maryland State Archives. Having retired to Bath, Maine, he worked for the local YMCA and retired from there. He has self-published 13 books of poetry, which can be found on Amazon and Lulu.com. He occasionally puts poems on a blog, The Road and Where It Goes (Formal purists should be forewarned that he has written a fair amount of free verse!)
To be loved by you is like floating on my back, falling asleep in the sea’s slack. Sometimes. Sometimes it is more unnerving, leaping with a wave for bodysurfing, being swept facedown up the beach, hair and ears full of sand. That too is love, and grand. Sometimes, again, I hope for more that’s out of reach – (and you do too – don’t glower!) and sometimes we get gifts hard to believe, dolphins swimming with us half an hour till mutually we and they just turn away, they to sea and we to shore, and then they come back suddenly once more and leap, so close, and leap, and leap again… and leave.
All those are in “loved by” – the calm; the turbulent rift, the sparkling fizz, the sudden unexpected gift. What can I say? I couldn’t, wouldn’t, choose to deny how sweet it is.
*****
Thirty-five years with Eliza and still going strong. Who knew.
‘How Sweet It Is’ was published in the current Snakeskin.
We hadn’t pictured paradise with vultures circling overhead. Edenic lushness has a price we hadn’t pictured. Paradise seems changeless, but its clock’s precise. “It’s feeding time,” the watchers said. We hadn’t pictured paradise with vultures, circling overhead.
*****
Susan McLean writes: “This triolet was inspired partly by the Latin phrase “Et in Arcadia ego” (which means “I too [am or was] in Arcadia”), partly by the famous Nicolas Poussin painting in which that phrase appears on a tombstone surrounded by gawking Arcadian shepherds, and partly by a family trip to Florida at Christmas, to celebrate my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. Arcadia, a region in Greece, was made famous by Vergil in his Eclogues as an idyllic rural land mainly populated by shepherds. “Arcadia” thus came to be associated with a relaxed bucolic paradise. Yet the Latin phrase reminds us that no earthly location is immune to death.
“In contemporary America, one of the locations associated with tropical warmth and pleasant leisure is Florida, where many Americans from more northerly locales go to vacation or retire. While my family was staying at a rented home near Sarasota Bay, on the highway we often passed signs for Arcadia, Florida, which was not far away. The weather and the natural beauty of Sarasota came up to our expectations, but we did not foresee that every time we went outside we would see vultures circling overhead. Given our parents’ ages, the vultures were a poignant reminder of mortality.
“A triolet is one of the shorter French repeating forms. One of the challenges it presents is how to vary the repeated lines so that they do not become boring, usually done by adding slight changes to the punctuation of those lines. This poem originally appeared in Able Muse and later in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”
Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa. https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean
Form in Formless Times 