Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Zombies and Wolves’

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Women I’ve failed or wronged or left behind
approach my thoughts like zombies for the kill;
I’ve literary walled defences – still
given the chance, they’ll eat my brains, my mind.

Through forest, orchard, farmyard in decay,
a shadow of a wolf slips greyly in,
my thoughts of death, grim, wasted, ill, rib-thin,
tracking my weak resolve, hungry to slay.

Mountaintops blown apart, forests clear-cut,
where’s there to hide? Nature doesn’t exist;
her landscapes crushed in patriarchal fist.
This former farmland hides my ruined hut.

Impotent, I still write, thus giving birth
to future wolves and zombies of the earth.

*****

This sonnet was originally published in Candelabrum (a twice-yearly print magazine of formal verse that ran bravely from 1970 to 2010… now sadly defunct, eaten by wolves or zombies or whatever snacks on print poetry magazines), and republished in Bewildering Stories #1039, a decades-old online magazine of primarily speculative fiction.

Photo: “Full ‘Wolf’ Moon – January 22, 2008” by Rick Leche is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Sue Parman, ‘Kaizen: How to Build a Poem’

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Ignore your hand and focus on the pen,
which writes without your knowledge of the whole.
Do not insert the personal. Avoid translation.
The changes made are small and gradual.

Commas herd their letters toward a distant
goal of rhymes and metaphors but do not
specify a conscious “I” or soul,
a bold new vision or a school of thought.

Write like a dancer making small mistakes.
What is wrong to you fulfills your friend’s desire.
Cuttings and shit are what it takes
to grow a garden from a funeral pyre.

A poet will die unless she learns to laugh.
Do not hit DELETE. Save everything as DRAFT.

*****

Sue Parman writes: “When I was four years old, my father asked me, ‘When is a door not a door?’ His answer, ‘when it’s ajar,’ infuriated and then intrigued me. I began to keep a journal in which I wrote down sentences such as, ‘If the Devil is evil, God is odd.’ Puns were my intro-duction to poetry, a form of verbal play that taught me that words, rather than being a lifeline to truth, could be slippery and contain many truths at the same time. One of my favorite poets is Kay Ryan, the queen of poetic puns (see her ‘Bestiary’). As an anthropologist, I consider them a vital contributor to mental health, since they satisfy the needs of large-brained mammals to avoid epilepsy by indulging in surprise.”

Sue Parman is an anthropologist and award-winning essayist, short story writer, poet, and playwright. She is the author of two poetry books, “The Thin Monster House” and “Carnivorous Gaze,” and her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including the above poem in Rattle. She writes in a number of other genres as well, including anthropological travel memoirs and mysteries. Her most recent publications include a short story, “Gannets and Ghouls,” which appeared in the September/October 2024 issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; and a nonfiction essay, “You Can’t Get There from Here,” that was awarded the Travelers’ Tales Grand Prize for Best Travel Story of 2024. After teaching anthropology in California for thirty-five years, she moved to Oregon in search of water, and travels frequently in hopes of getting lost. https://www.sueparman.com

Photo: “PDCA-Cycle-Kaizen” by Tagimaguitar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Shamik Banerjee, ‘Masjid Road’

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Fishmongers’ cleaver knives don’t rest at all;
Their heavy thuds outdo the termless spiels
Of colporteurs dispensing large and small
Versions of holy books. On mud-sunk wheels,
Waxed apples, sapodillas, apricots
Effuse their fragrance, trapping passersby
Who check the rates, then stand submerged in thoughts—
Some fill their punnets, some leave with a sigh.
Outside the mosque, blind footpath dwellers wait
To hear the clinking sound—the sound of true
Relief—while dogs, flopped by the butcher’s gate,
Get jumpy when he throws a hunk or two.
Loudspeakers, placed on high, say “call to prayer”
And all work halts; there’s silence in the air.

*****

Shamik Banerjee writes: “Crammed with saree shops, bakeries, small abattoirs, vegetable vendors, holy book distributors, toy stores, and sundry other things, Masjid Road is one of the very few tireless market places in Guwahati, my hometown. As a frequent visitor to this place of never-ending commotion and bustle, I have always been fascinated by these sellers’ devotion to their work. Though rest is a distant guest here, all activities come to a standstill right when the nearby mosque sends out the call-to-prayer through towering loud speakers.”

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India, where he resides with his parents. His poems have been published by Sparks of Calliope, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, Ink Sweat & Tears, Autumn Sky Daily, Ekstasis, among others. (‘Masjid Road’ was first published by Bellwether Review.) He secured second position in the Southern Shakespeare Company Sonnet Contest, 2024.

Photo: “Indian Shops” by Scalino is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Sonnet: Melissa Balmain, ‘Memo to Self, in Bed’

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Don’t think, while you are holding him, of deadlines,
of monster Visa bills you haven’t paid,
of NPR reports on gangs and breadlines
and kooks with nukes available for trade.

Don’t think of whom you owe a three-course dinner,
of editors you wish you had impressed,
of whether you should be two sizes thinner
and twice as nice to look at when undressed.

Above all, never think of how time’s racing
toward commonplaces you’re afraid to name–
white halls, bleak calls, the foregone mortal ending;

how you or he (which one?) will soon be facing
long nights where solitaire’s the only game.
Don’t think: just wink at him and keep pretending.

*****

From Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Melissa Balmain writes: “Like many formalist poets, I miss the Nemerov Sonnet Award (for which this poem was a finalist). The Nemerov spurred many of us to write more sonnets, and gave us terrific ones to read when the winners and finalists appeared in The Formalist and, later, Measure. Other contests have emerged to fill the post-Nemerov void, including the wonderful Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest, sponsored by Poetry by the Sea. Still, I’d love to see the Nemerov come back somehow–the more good sonnets, the merrier.”

Editor’s comment: In addition to the sonnet’s expected rhymes at the end of each line, Melissa Balmain has thrown in a bonus internal rhyme at the beginning of the last line of each quatrain and tercet. It is quietly done, but adds lightness to a poem that is both light and dark in subject matter.

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 light verse, and has been a member of the University of Rochester’s English Department since 2010.

Photo: “New Bedding!” by Andrew Love is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘The Way It Ended’

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So time went by and they were middle-aged,
which seemed a cruel joke that time had played
on two young lovers. They were newly caged
canary birds – amused, not yet afraid.
A golden anniversary came around
where jokes were made and laughing stories told.
The lovers joined the laugh, although they found
the joke – though not themselves – was growing old.
She started losing and forgetting things.
Where had she left her keys, put down her comb?
Her thoughts were like balloons with broken strings.
Daily he visited the nursing home
to make her smile and keep her in their game.
Death came at last. But old age never came.

*****

Gail White writes: “Time is the strangest of the conditions we live in.  Scientists, essayists, and poets can ring endless changes on this theme.  Time has devastated the lives of the couple in this sonnet, but as Solomon told us long ago, love is as strong as death.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘The Way It Ended’ was first published in 14 by 14 (which has also ended…) and is collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “young couple being photographed at the beach” by phlubdr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: James Lucas, ‘RUOK?’

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My question asking if you are OK
in full knowledge that yes may well mean no—
monosyllables build the barricade
perimeter beyond which we can’t go
into the sanctum where you admit fright,
a precious hell guarded from special op
humanitarian fact-finding flights—
must voice loving concern. And then must stop
to wait on answers truly indirect,
accept teenager-brokered terms of love
are spoken in non-sequiturs and gaps,
a small concession I did not expect
enough to give stalled confidence a shove,
to tell us that you are OK perhaps.

*****

RUOK? was first published in Shot Glass Journal #43 in the International Poets section.

James Lucas’ bio:
“I was born in Sydney in 1965, and educated at the University of New South Wales, where I won the University Medal, and then at Cambridge, where I completed a Ph D in modernist poetry in 1997.
I published two chapbooks in the UK in the 1990s, and my first Australian publication was in Southerly in 1994. Since then my poems have appeared in Communion, Contrappasso, Cordite Poetry Review, Heat, Island, Meanjin, New England Poetry Review, Overland, Quadrant, Salt, Scarp, Southerly, the Henry Kendall Award Anthology, and the 2020 Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology.
My first collection, Rare Bird, was published by Recent Work Press in March 2021, reviewed in ABR in August 2021, and Commended in the 2021 Anne Elder Award.
I read as widely as I can in contemporary and older poetry. For many years I have taught English at Sydney Grammar School.”

Photo: “RUOK” by arievergreen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Denmark is not a Friend’

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To poets, lovely Denmark’s not a friend:
there’s too much commonsense, it’s too prosaic.
These blonds just blindly make life a bland blend;
but life should be a salad, a mosaic.
Long live the Christiania anarchists!
Bare feet, graffiti, dog shit, broken glass!
Runaways, pushers, folk on Wanted lists,
the type you’re careful around when they pass.

Well, maybe I exaggerate… I love
museums, bike lanes, all the walking streets,
orderly lines where people never shove,
the clean green parks, the clean stores full of treats…
And after all, I write in sonnet form:
a lovely, useful, ordinary norm.

*****

I wrote this sonnet last month in Denmark, and it was published in the June Snakeskin, an all-rhyme issue. (I’ve tinkered with the title and one of the lines…) The opposing arguments for personal freedom and social responsibility are hardly new, and I agree with both. Perhaps I need to reread Matthew Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy‘… <downloads> <peers>… hm… no, too much religion.

Photo: Postcard in Snakeskin

Weekend read: Michael Murry, ‘Inconspicuous Conclusions’

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A play’s last scene has often served as trope,
where theater, as metaphoric scheme,
enables authors to compose a dream
of Life as it exhausts its mortal scope.
The actors in our own Life’s play, we “hope”
and “love;” some “challenge fate;” some “sob” and “scream,”
but all personify Forever’s theme:
that with its ending, Life must simply cope.
I cannot speak for others in the cast,
but my bit-part as extra in The Show —
as son and father, husband to the last —
gave me such joy as any man could know.
I’ve lived a lucky life. Of this I’m certain.
So when my last scene ends, ring down the curtain.

*****

Michael Murry writes: “The background concerns the passing away of my 48-year-old son, Stuart Langston Murry, in a freak accident while visiting his mother in northern Taiwan. As part of the grieving process, I turned to reading some of my favorite poets – especially Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Dirge Without Music’ – before composing an elegy for my son’s funeral: ‘A Song for Stuart’ published as a Memoir in Bewildering Stories Issue 1032, followed by a companion sonnet ‘Anticipating Anonymity’ published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1042. So much for the composition’s background. ‘Inconspicuous Conclusions’ was published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1043.

As for the formal sonnet structure of the composition, I chose to use as a model John Donne’s Holy Sonnet (VI) with its opening “This is my play’s last scene” for metaphorical theme. The sonnet’s 14 lines consist of iambic pentameter (5 stress accents and 10 syllables) lines: 12 with masculine endings and 2 lines for the closing couplet’s feminine endings (5 stress accents and 11 syllables): ABBAABBACDCDee.

For relevant biographical information, see my website:  http://themisfortuneteller.com/  with my verse compositions under the “Poetic License” menu tab. Consider me a 76-year-old Vietnam Veteran Against The War – the one that never seems to end – retired and living in Taiwan for the last two decades. I started writing formal verse compositions in 2004 as a sort of DIY bibliotherapy for Delayed Vietnam Reaction. I haven’t stopped yet and see no reason why I should. You and your audience may find my work too polemical for most refined poetic tastes, so if you choose not to quote any of my verses, I will certainly understand. As you please . . .”

Photo: Michael Murry at Advance Tactical Support Base ‘Solid Anchor’, Vietnam, early 1970s.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘The Days Have Come Unhooked’

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The days have come unhooked from passing time,
its little Brio trucks are off their tracks;
the past and future mix to make their rhyme,
with pieces placed at random in fresh stacks.
Clear memories blend their present, future, past.
The days stretch out, and yet the months fly by –
you turn in circles, facing first, not last.
As childhood deepens, old age pools go dry.
Behind its smoke and mirrors, whores and pimps,
its harshly lovely playful attitude,
reality is thinning – you now glimpse
an indescribable infinitude.
The game is won – your enemies are no more,
yet you don’t end it while you max your score.

*****

Published in the Spring 2024 issue of The Road Not Taken.

Photo: “Brio freight train set” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Kelly Scott Franklin, ‘Shell Station, Tennessee’

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It was the ravage of the scene that shocked:
the concrete torn by trees and ragged grass,
red guts of fuel pumps over splintered glass,
the wreckage clawed by climbing vines and mocked
by moth and rust. There in concentric rings
obscene graffiti spelled out every sin.
(The smell of something even worse within.)
It’s like we saw into the death of things.
But what about the ruins I can claim?
What of the loves that I have let decay,
the hand withheld, the times I didn’t say
I’m sorry, didn’t pray for you by name?
We leave shell stations, call them what you will.
Neglect is the unkindest way to kill.

*****

Kelly Scott Franklin writes: “Originally sparked by an ekphrastic prompt over at Rattle Magazine (declined; first published in Ekstasis Magazine), this poem was ALSO inspired by a real abandoned gas station somewhere along the highway through the mountains on the way to Knoxville, TN. But I think it had been cooking in me for a while. I took a trip across the American heartland, from Southern Michigan to Central Kansas, and was absolutely depressed by the neglect and decrepitude. I stopped at a rest stop to use the restroom somewhere along the way. The restroom had a sign that said, “We take pride in the quality of our service. If anything in this restroom is not up to your satisfaction, please contact the management.” I looked around the restroom and there was garbage everywhere. Everywhere. It’s like people have stopped living the basic human things. The poem was also inspired by my troubled relationship with my late mother.”

Kelly Scott Franklin lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. He teaches American Literature and the Great Books at Hillsdale College. His poems and translations have appeared in AbleMuse Review, Literary Matters, Driftwood Literary Magazine, Iowa City Poetry in Public, National Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. His essays and reviews can be found in Commonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, Local Culture, and elsewhere. 
https://www.hillsdale.edu/faculty/kelly-scott-franklin/

“Abandoned Gas Station, 2013” by Genial23 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.