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WELCOME
to

The River Poets
Journal

Based in Lambertville, NJ

A Journal of Poetry/Prose
Art & Photography
Oil Painting - Alan Fetterman

Septombre

                              By Ruth Z. Deming

First she comes
a skipping girl
twirling down
the avenue
kerchief on head
basket in arm
strewing
leaves
acorns
apples
and casting herself
invisible
across the land
won’t scare us
with
things to come:
the shedding of
maple’s majestic leaves
uncrowning of the golden oak
reducing
all
to
baldness.

After
the initial chill, 
the shuddering trauma,
acceptance falls
like welcome rain
as her solemn brethren
October and November
bring forth a new definition
to our world:

We must
find beauty
in spareness:
in the lone bird who calls
and the spinning leaf
dancing down the avenue.

Ocean In A Box - Judith A. Lawrence
"George Street" Oil Painting - Joe Kazmierczyk

Lamentar Del Barrio
By Joe Treceno

Qué tal?  You switch-blade poets
     and domino philosophers
Apocalypse people with gritted teeth
and clenched fists living in the
land of the multilingual and  
the cunnilingual
in the rampant despair of
the tenement hearses
struggling with chemical dependence
and Puerto Rican independence
astride the Hari Krishna chants,
halleluiah cries and
santeria sacrifices

everyone out to save your soul
and no one filling your bowl
the stomach growl stronger than
the hunger for knowledge
Dali melted summers, dias de
conciencia perdido and nights
of death hushed pale
past the Second Avenue push-cart Rambla
with mixed-sized sneakers on sale
and hidden within the granite
canyon walls, the weapons
of self destruction

Picasso never painted the
Guernica of the barrio,
nor Monet the floating
condom lilies of the East River
the Indians must surely have
accepted food stamps for this
part of Manhattan


alongside platanos, pasteles and
salsa caliente of course
a chalk outline circles an
early morning corpse
glasseada son los ojos de
lo sonadores del barrio





(Untitled)
By Roy Smith

He flew at lightspeed
weighed nothing
left watching pyramids grow
now he’s back with his red eyes
clear and serene
looks like a big cat with eight arms and legs
fuzzy and unimaginably cute
might have seen him at the bar
dancing to eighties blasts
maybe the B52’s
doesn’t smoke
but always has a pack
he’s all theory of special relativity
big Dipper and cries of Orion
known billions of sentient beings
across his daily millennia
all dead now soul living stranger
Calligula and Beethoven
his breath smells of unsalted peanuts
and chocolate licorice
he’s just here folks
to tell us about them there meteors
day after
gonna let them out of the zoo
likes Johnny Cash.


Dust Song
By Phil Nerges

In the cloudless glare
Way off to the west
Dust rising in the air
Just a puff of wind, a truck perhaps
Hard to tell from so far away
Like a plume of smoke shimmering in the heat

The sun is cruel in the desert
I think of home, of being alone
On the burning sand,
The little cloud is growing
I wonder who has walked here
And who is coming now

A flash of light in the dust
A reflection from a windshield
That is heading out of nowhere
And I wonder who is coming, whether I should hide
Might be bandits, warriors, soldiers
A ghost for all I know

Could it be you that's coming?
Pulling the tail of a comet
Beneath the desert sun
You said we'd be forever
That's how I hoped it would be
Seems so long ago, before I left to go…

The cloud of dust keeps growing
Moving right this way
I wonder if you're coming now
Wouldn't that be nice?
You said we'd be forever
That's how I hoped it would be

It moves too fast to see inside
When it rumbles by
Just a cloud of dust is all that's left
As it disappears
Heading back to nowhere
Beneath the desert sun.


Don’t Love You Anymore
By Mike Walerstein

It’s been a long-long time a-coming
But it’s longer looking back.
We shared our years and shed our tears together.

And I guess we thought about breaking up
It must have been a thousand times
But we stuck it out and turned it for the better.

(Chorus)        I don’t love you anymore
But don’t love you any less
     Our love turned into friendship
And I’m glad.

I don’t need you anymore,
  But don’t need you any less.                  And I thank you for the happy               years  we’ve had.

I loved you in that special way
Reserved just for the young.
In our springtime it was passion and desire.

And now that fall approaches
I’m still glad that you’re the one
That kept my ship afloat through stormy weather.

(Chorus) I don’t love you anymore
But don’t love you any less
Our love turned into friendship
  And I’m glad.


                      I don’t need you anymore,
  But don’t need you any less.
   And I thank you for the happy
years we had.

Times I longed to kiss your neck
And others just to break it.
And I gave you many sleepiness nights
And I still wonder how you take it.

But through ups and downs,
Tears and frowns
That smile kept shinning through.
All and all I’m glad after all
To be loved by a woman like you.


Excerpt from Words in Search of Music.

Dedicated to the words that live in all of and to the melodies music we have yet to find. Together they make our songs of life, our words in search of music.





Bertrand at the Beach
By Ted Peck

Bemused, disconsolate, buffeted, beaten,
bearing his beach umbrella, folding chair,
his blanket and his Baudelaire
Bertrand limps along the sand
assailed by memories of Beatrice,
who has abandoned him, scorning his love.
He sulks, he scowls, he plots revenge.

Establishing his small domain,
his island of shade in a sea of sun,
he settles his chair, picks up his book
(“Les Fleurs du Mal” in paperback),
adjusts the tinted glasses on his nose,
surveys the scene around him, seeking solace.

Bodies he sees!  In all directions,
female bodies, concupiscent, bold,
oiling their limbs beneath the gaudy sun.
Nearby, a lusty young one sits alert,
resting her chin upon her hand--
returns his stare.  She is, he swears,
the model for the haughty nude
depicted in “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”.
His flesh quickens; in his imagination
he removes her clothes.  Finds her too heavy
for his taste, and looks away.

Turns his attention then upon a group
of sportive nymphs out splashing in the surf--
Renoir’s nude “Bathers”, to the very life!
Such luscious bodies, how could he resist?
Shall he approach them?  Balding, middle-aged,
a most unlikely Romeo, he fears.
His lust subsides.  (Oh Beatrice!)

The air is heavy.  His eyelids sink.  He sleeps.
His mouth falls open.  The sunlight steals
across his toes, and in his dream
miraculously, from the sparkling sea,
Aphrodite rises, gloriously nude.




Second Guessing
By Marcia Angermann

When does it seep in,
slide under the gate of not seeing,
twist a path into unremitting light.
When do the should haves and could haves
begin to ask,
“Why didn’t I?”
With a diagnosis?
When “terminal” becomes forever?
Or is it in the finality of absence
that you can no longer see who you were
in the before,
you can’t accept
not living up to your own divine expectations.
How could death be such a surprise,
when you saw it coming,
that train roaring down the track,
you heard the whistle scream,
and scream,
and scream,
and still you counted the ties on the track.


Sometimes the Wind Covered Them With Sand
             By Gloria Calcina del Vecchio

Up and down the beach were player-pianos
And the rain and snow fell on them, but
The sea never reached them.
Every morning a woman in a rose-printed
Dress turned one on and it performed
In front of the surf until night.

Sometimes in the dark, someone would
Come over the dunes and
Set that piano on fire, replacing it
With a TV set with which people watched
The ocean contained inside a box.

Poetry Selections from the
2007 Artsbridge/River Poets Anthology
" The Eclectic Muse"
Published 12/2007

Poems, Prose, Art/Photography by River Poets and Contributors
All future rights to material published on this web site are retained
by the individual Authors and Artists/Photographers





Music by Sandy Bender
"Thorns and Bramblest"