It’s been a wonderful year but I’m just not up for the challenge of being the editor anymore.  I’ve enjoyed reading all of the submissions and am now looking forward to finally having the chance to send out my own submissions to other poetry journals.

Poetry Breakfast is a wordpress blog.  If you are well versed in using wordpress and would like to take over Poetry Breakfast, feel free to email me at poetrybreakfast@yahoo.com.  I believe wordpress will let me turn over the administration of the blog to another wordpress user.  Our loyal readers and blog followers would certainly love it if someone could keep Poetry Breakfast alive.

Thank you to everyone who has submitted their work and to all those who have welcomed the many poets we published this past year.

For those who have poetry submissions pending, you’ll be hearing from me in the next day or two.  I haven’t read any submissions since at least a week before Hurricane Sandy came through here, so there is quite a backlog of submissions.  Obviously, your poems will not be accepted for publication here since we are now closed.  That certainly doesn’t mean your work was rejected.  Hopefully, everyone will find a place to publish their work in one of the many, many other poetry journals out there.

Thank you again for all the poetry submissions and for reading the poems of the many wonderful poets we’ve had the opportunity to publish here.

Sincerely, Isabel Sylvan, Editor

In our indeterminate future
I imagine stepping onto a barren landscape
Looking over at symmetrical mountains
Towering above immense craters-
As if set in stone.

Yet this world is not concrete.
It’s a living thing,
It grows and breathes-
Is constantly moving,
Prone to different temperaments
While it wails with despair.

Its grey complexion obscuring
A vibrant colourful persona
Exulting from the darkness,
That’s sheer lunacy to ignore.

Anthony tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including Enhance, Drunk Monkeys, Speech Therapy, Turbulence, Underground, Ginger Piglet, Torrid Literature Journal and The Rusty Nail, amongst others.

About the sky
About the vastness of the undiscovered
portions of my mind

About the solid ground
About the tears spilt,
Splitting the earth, rendering unsolid
stability unquakable

Until its secrets spray uncatchable
Until it is grasped gray with colors
dripping between clenched fingers

Open, open up, oh hand
Send back those hues unto the clouds
Where they’ll reign unrained a mystery.
and i will say with certainty

Someday i’ll write a poem.

Diane Boisvert poetry has appeared in Taj Mahal Rview, Camroc Press Review, Monkey Kettle, Feathertale. Indigp Rising, Madswirl, Flask and Pen, Psychopoetica and is forthcoming in the Raleigh Review

About the things we burned.
The leaves we gathered
so many brittle memories
raked into poem piles
we lit
and oh how they caught
and burned
signal fires on hilltops
dispatches from the front lines
tactical maneuvers
casualty reports
little pyres
clean down to ash
that turns a grey mud
in the season’s first cold rain.
Some things are meant to be burned.
Some deserve
the necessary fires that purge
and release
the magic of pencils and diamonds.
With the scent of strawberry and smoke in your hair
I could love you still more.

Ray Sharp writes about the place he knows best, the Western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His poems have appeared in dozens of on-line and print journals. Ray’s chapbook, Nothing Abides, was published in 2011 and his first full-length collection, Memories of When We Were Birds, will be available before the end of 2012. Ray blogs at raysharp.wordpress.com

I heard about her, all my life.
Just a devil, bane of my father’s existence,
judgement personified. (He’d married a Jew. So I am a Jew.)
Not the Nice One. The Other Grandmother.
Nana. Nana. Nana.

She died when I was two.
I remember the wake: my older cousins running around, chasing
a tin flying saucer toy. It whirred along the floor, lights flashing,
making such a noise.
They chased it, pushed each other at it. Ignored me,
scared out of my wits. Never saw the like.

The adult men would disappear into a room, come out louder.
I remember very well. They smelled funny.

My father’s face: gleeful.

My mother in all her classy glory,
keeping herself to herself, not saying one damn word.
The Catholic witch was no more.
Ding Dong.

But this photograph, just got it. It’s Nana and me.
I am maybe 8, maybe 9 months. She’s holding me.
I look happy. I’m glad to be there.
She doesn’t seem to think I’m a Jew.
She seems to think I’m a baby girl.
The arms encircling me look just like mine do now: long and lean.

My cousin described her ways, wrote it all down:
One thing I’ve noticed is, when I sit and pay bills,
I do it like Nana.

Ann Haynes is a mom, writer, part time bartender, and office worker. She often wants to say what’s what while on the job

While my family, myself, and my home survived the storm, many neighbors were not so fortunate. We live along the Raritan Bay which sits between NJ and Staten Island. Like all coastal areas of NJ we were hit hard. Many of the homes down the street were washed away and most of Union Beach, a small working class town, has had more than half of its town destroyed.

Needless to say, Poetry Breakfast is not a top priority for me right now.

I know there have been many pleas in the media and even a benefit concert to raise money for the Red Cross. Yes they are a wonderful organization, however, they are not here. I’ve heard they are in NYC and in Southern Jersey. But I haven’t found a sole around here that’s seen them.

A vast majority of our needs are being served by a little local non-profit called RAINE (Reaching Anyone In Need Everyday). On Sunday alone, they served over 20,000 meals, handed out clothes, helped residents clean up their damaged homes, provided diapers and toiletries, and so much more. They have been doing this every day 10 am to 7pm since the day after the storm hit and will continue working daily to help our neighbors in Hazlet, Union Beach, Matawan, Keansburg, Keyport, and other Bayshore areas.

100′s of people have volunteered to help RAINE with their relief efforts. ALL the volunteers are local. Many have been without power for a week. You’ve seen the destruction that Sandy caused. What you have not seen is how amazing the people in Central New Jersey are. On the news, you see people pleading for help from the government and Red Cross. Around here, there are no pleas. People are taking care of each other. The best way I can put it is this: The wave of volunteers and donations from our own community is stronger than the 15 ft tidal surge waves that demolished half of our neighboring town.

If you want to be inspired, or just find a place to donate where you know that the next day, your donation will actually be put in the hands of someone who’s lost everything from the storm, please check out RAINE on facebook at www.facebook.com/groups/raine/ You can visit their main website at http://rainefoundation.com/ . They are accepting financial donations through their main website. And like I said, basically the next day, your donation will be in the hands of someone who needs it right now.

If you’re local to the Bayshore NJ Area, I am posting where help is available and where donations and volunteers are needed at www.facebook.com/BayshoreNjReliefCenters

For those of you who have submitted poems for consideration in Poetry Breakfast, I don’t know when I will be getting back to reading them. It may be a week before I get back to that, or it could be a few weeks. If you don’t want to wait and wish to send your submissions elsewhere, I completely understand. Just please email me to let me know that you’ve sent them somewhere else. If you’ve already received an acceptance for your poem, it WILL still be posted on its scheduled day. Those are already scheduled and in the system.

And yes…I am asking you to donate to RAINE. And to spread the word about them to your friends. Also, I’m asking you to look at their facebook page just so you can see the amazing generosity and resilience of people here at the Bayshore. With all the destruction around us you would think it would break your heart, but with the hundreds of people volunteering thru RAINE and the tens of thousands they are helping, it lifts your heart to a level you could never imagine. If you can’t give, just go to their facebook page and let them lift your spirits too.

That stunning body design. She
text him into every line of
her palm; exceed all available
space. He’s built stronger
than the stench of urine in
any New York City Housing
Project elevator. Much tougher
to get through than, Times Square.

She savors his kiss good bye; with
her neck hair’s raised. Goose bumps
instantly appear; like Braille on both
arms: vibrate one missed call displays
how (her) body is (his) touch screen.

Kenny Fame is a African-American poet who was born in Paterson, New Jersey; but he currently calls the village of Harlem in NYC his home. He was a recent graduate of Cave Canem’s 2011 & 2012 Poetry Conversations Workshop classes. He was the winner of “The Tenth National Black Writers Conference Award for Poetry.” He has been a featured “Poet of the Week” on the Poetry Super Highway during the week of January 2-8, 2012. His work has appeared in numerous journal both nationally & internationally: Steel Toe Review # 7& 10, River Lit #5, The Fine Line, Emerge Literary Journal # 1, Rufous Salon (Sweden), Milk Sugar, Prompt Literary Magazine, De La Mancha, Anastomoo, ken*again, Assisi Journal, African-American Review, Gloom Cupboard,Black Magnolias Literary Journal # 6.2 & The New Verse News on December 18th 2011

Telephone rings and I am
seven and sleeping in my own bed
and across the way is my little brother.
He wakes up before I do and the clock
blinks red the phone bounces.
My seven-year-old legs part the sheets
and carry me to the phone and there I hear
things I don’t understand and something
about an alarm when I hear my father’s feet bounding
across his wooden floor.
Down the stairs he comes and takes the
phone from my hands and holds it to his ear. His eyes are
red and he grumbles words that I do not understand. I look
across the kitchen at the microwave light green and see
a time I’ve only seen during day. My father is no longer
holding the phone and instead has his arm around
my waist and hoists me over his shoulder and
carries me up the stairs and tucks me into my bed and
my little brother pretends that he is asleep. I hear,
some minutes later, the car start and I sit at the window
and watch my dad pull out of the driveway to do
what I thought was the greatest job in the world.

Hailing from Long Island, New York, Matt Dantes is a burgeoning poet, storyteller, pianist, visual artist, occasional bartender, and student at Adelphi University.

These finely aged novels,
Stored like bottles in a cellar,
Become all the more portent with maturity.
You want to drink their contents,
Be intoxicated by their words,
Until they have you speaking so fluently
The language pours from your mouth,
While those staid sober
Will stress you’re slurring incoherently-
That they’re far too precious to be drunk.

Anthony tends to fidget with his thoughts in the hope of laying them to rest. He has managed to lay them in a number of literary magazines including Enhance, Drunk Monkeys, Speech Therapy, Turbulence, Underground, Ginger Piglet, Torrid Literature Journal and The Rusty Nail, amongst others.

A Friday morning, Grade Six, and all
anyone could hear was the conspiratorial talk of the girls’ sleepover
planned for that night.
I kept waiting for the tap on my shoulder,
the invite whispered in my ear.
Stayed close to the girl’s cabal
at recesses and long after school until it finally sunk in.
My face in the pillow that night, the fear I would drown
in my tears.
There were a thousand little deaths,
strung out until morning.
How can such moments not define us?
Not ruin us
for anything good
that might ever come after.

A Glasgow-born Canadian, Tricia McCallum is the author of a sequence of poems, essays and photos entitled “Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered.” (2011). Her poems “Thirst” and “There’s Always the Guy” were chosen by readers at goodreads.com as the winners of the poetry competition in December, 2011, and in May, 2012. Two of her poems, “Following Seas” and “The Gift of Donovan,” appeared in the first issue of the quarterly poetry e-zine called IMPpress. Tricia’s poem “The Island Dog” will be included in “Estuary,” an international poetry and visual arts album to be printed in England in December.

Tricia invites you to read more of her work at www.triciamccallum.com