Blue Fifth Review...

The Spring Supplement 2006 Issue for BFR is now online -- cover art by Michal Macku.



The issue features E. Ethelbert Miller, Peter Pereira, Jeff Encke, Gerhardt Thompson, Hiroshi Watanabe, Robert Klein Engler, Edison Jennings, Johnson Cheu, and more.


From the issue, here's a poem by J.P. Dancing Bear and an audio file of his reading the poem:



Gacela of Crow Magic

You do not deserve the focus of the crow’s magic—
it cackle-caws a spell, it gutters darkened words.
You do not keepsake the token of the crow—
the leathery hump of a picked-over kill.

A frightened person might run like a shadow
into the sun-stained streets searching for safety.
A fearful person might throw his body
into the tall wavering grass of a field.

Still the crow perches on his telephone wire
and knows that you are only a future meal to him.
Still the crow casts his black sorcery, pointing
his beak at the plump prize within your chest.

Now you try reading some lines from Poe
but the black letters wing off the page.
Now you try staring into the brackish eye,
into the dark sea soul of the grinning crow.

* * *


...from the Winter 2006 Issue -- the world from the female perspective -- a poem and audio file from Marge Piercy. Piercy writes in her comments that the poem should be "dedicated to George Bush and all his colleagues who want to take away women’s right to control our own bodies".



Your proper place

Get back in the box. It’s
a nice box, pink, cozy.
Lined with quilted satin.
It smells of carnations, lavender.

It’s a box with a view:
tidy white streets lined
with trim white houses housing
nice white people.

There’s a church on every
block with a phallic steeple
where God the Father is
worshipped and sin exposed.

Everything you need to know
is contained in a little book
about Dick and Jane and Spot.
Spot chases a bitch and goes

straight to hell. So does she
with other wicked females.
You’re safe: just so long
as you stay in your box.