The ninth issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
PDF for download 21ST CENTURY FLOW
21st Century Flow – Issue Nine
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21st Century Flow – Issue Eight
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The eighth issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
PDF for download 21ST CENTURY FLOW ISSUE 8
21st Century Flow – Issue Seven
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The seventh issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
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21st Century Flow – Issue Six
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The sixth issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
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21st Century Flow – Issue Five
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The fifth issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
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21st Century Flow – Issue Five
21st Century Flow – Issue Four
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The fourth issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented poets from around the world.
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21st Century Flow – Issue Three
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The third issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented African, American, and European poets.
Can be read in two formats – PDF for download or online flipbook.
https://www.flipsnack.com/21stCenturyFlow/21st-century-flow-issue-3-1.html
21st Century Flow – Issue Two
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The second issue of 21st Century Flow is available now featuring work from talented Asian and American poets and artists.
Can be read in two formats – PDF for download or online flipbook.
21st Century Flow -issue 2 (1)
https://www.flipsnack.com/21stCenturyFlow/21st-century-flow-issue-2-1.html
21st Century Flow – Issue One
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Excited to announce our first issue is ready featuring poetry and art from the United States and Asia.
Issue One of 21st Century flow magazine is available in two formats – PDF for download or online flipbook.
_21st Century Flow – Issue One
https://www.flipsnack.com/21stCenturyFlow/21st-century-flow-issue-one.html
A POEM
A KILLING WITHOUT METAPHOR AND SIMILE
In the alley behind the futsal center
On the ground they activate a do not resuscitate order
Three bags of Doritos strewn where they fell
The genesis of tiddlywinks tossed for bravery behind the futsal center
Out of body experience will end quickly
As data conflicts with what the inner self knows
When she set foot in a totally shaded border
That engages light free happy egress
Oh brains in automatic decline
When she comes my way, it was taken as a dig at freshly preserved memories
I would have no compunction about swatting a bug
Trashed feelings kept in a safe deposit box
I paid for monthly executions and excursions to search for privacy
Privacy, our eternal accomplice
A POEM
PROPS
In Chapter Three of the book How To Be Me
Begins the description of the items needed to maintain the illusion
In lesser detail, step by step begotten avarice
Audience fooled without awareness of effect
Humanity without humans
Gonzo empire of invisible youth
All these auxiliaries they use to appear cooler
Bad deal chimpanzee soul retribution
All these false-faced applications cancel honest essence
Ask around for aspirin guardians
Plaster and gather the expense of conformity
On your person and in a territory marked by you
It matters if the object is portable
Junked opposite(s) for lousy performers
A POEM
FOODBANK
You’ve got me questioning the universe again
An endless sprint that has already passed through the township of dissatisfaction
And is now edging around the dark borders of ambivalence
Twisted soul, dinner roll, take the yellow ticket
Your husband can’t find a job
That had me gasping in shock at inhumane uncaring citizenry
which punctured personhood on a broken flagpole
Crushed dreams, baked beans, there’s a sermon at 7 pm
This week’s groceries are paid for by a grant from the Kiwanis Club
My passionate mistrust of an authority that allows animal self-centeredness to dominate
is the great winning argument for the golden flop of communal lack of community
Canned pears, not in my backyard stares, I recognize the fight we are born into
A POEM
THE COLLABORATOR
If someone brings you sunshine
You are well within your rights to question where the sunshine comes from
Suspicious of good fortune, those are the flowers that appear overnight in your garden
It is not clear and I can’t fully enjoy a horse with a wide open orifice
There’s something I rather you didn’t witness first hand
Hopefully, by the time it is common knowledge, time forgives the selfish loins, the burning stake liaison
My present day self-worth is held in abeyance by experience
I sit quietly
I go to work quietly
I don’t want to draw attention to myself
However, at the first coded sign
The first message devised for people like me
I jump to my feet with terrible energy
A POEM
DEVELOPERS OF A NICENESS BOOSTER
A neighbor didn’t want to “fight the power”
Instead he concentrated on fighting unwanted flowers
When his efforts accomplished nothing, he gave up fighting unwanted flowers
And put in a rock garden
His scorched earth exterior acknowledged weeds as winner
All day diabolical swirling fumes of enhanced reaction to other reactions
Wage their periodic war on the effort to remain calm
But now there’s lot more grateful people
A lot less complaint, a lot more patient ease
What we went through closed the loop, it did not further stretch out our contempt for one another
I took off my pants in the shadow of this big curfew
I am always hungry these days but never gain any weight
I went to the supermarket and it felt like a trip to Paris
My enthusiasm is kindness inoculated
A POEM
MONUMENT TO THE VICTIMS OF A CERTAIN KIND OF TREADMILL
Any description of the problem starts this way
I was always at the right place but at the wrong time
I’d move on from a desert to see a garden bloom there later
What carried me aloft was responsibility, survival, duty which found their own tidal currents and pushed me onwards
There is no honor in those words I wrote above – responsibility, survival, duty
Slick sick spread of pressure’s pollution in the tidal currents that challenged me
I couldn’t care less was the caption they removed
It was replaced with a weakly worded acknowledgement of what society forced on me
All the others whose chests burst and bodies shut down due to the everyday disruption of a life they did not want
Where is their monument with its contained accusations against capitalism?
But in my time I laid low, crept in deceit
Open smile that walled in secret plans
I did not finish your thought
Your directive stuck, held fast by excuses
Thorns embedded in clothes, flesh, conformity
A POEM
THE DRAWING
Tear the sheet in half
Maladjust the permanence of vision
In J’s room with a photo of the false prophet on the wall
Shared with those that need to fill in space with inspiration
The drawing he showed me was of a tired looking pied piper playing a flute leading a toilet with legs down a cobblestone path
Behind them in the sky is a sun-sized wide open bloodshot eye looking over the whole scene
What was on the sides of tragic white sheets of sketch paper
We never talked of this
We talked of betrayal and which key fit the lock
And the walking toilet as a different representation of the siren song of God
A POEM
EGGPLANT WEST
Tortured cylinder, rid of turmoil
Dainty magnified oligarchy is sealed from the harm of reflection
Bowtie flowchart provides the incidental information “dinner is eight”
And new grudges start at nine near the walk-in refrigerator and standing in the screened in porch
Participle for do good denied like a shot at the basket
Big wingspan slaps down the decider of affluence
No one gets their due reward, everyone goes on living with new instruction – stop thinking about the end of all of this
Stop and start golden macabre frenzy of presentation in these last days
These days of knowledge acquired for what is lost but too massive for regret
The pieces that flake off and fall produce only generic sadness, a feeling not targeted at any one specific thing
Like expired milk thick and pungent in the decades old refrigerator
Bad seated collective – No members are in the place they want to be
No members feel like working together
No members have any sense of future goals
Being near to others provides a small measure of comfort in these last days
A POEM
MALCOLM MALLARD
I wish we all could live on the banks of a lake
Green water always available for an after school or after work dip
I wish we could live on the banks of Malcolm Mallard’s lake
His father was actually named Mallard Mallard
He always seemed annoyed with us kids when we visited
As if he bore a great grudge against all life for his bizarre naming
The girl who loved Malcolm Mallard was fat and unattractive
And he did not love her back
And took great pains to let everyone in our social circle know there was no relationship between them
She later became a government employee and collects causes to write petitions about
Writing petitions for her like a more successful teenaged version would have collected colored hairclips
She and we all think about
The blue turtleneck of Malcom Mallard
And how he used to pull up it up over his head until just a shock of blonde hair showed
Then run around with arms and hands outstretched making uuuuhhh noises like a mental defective
A POEM
THE INFLUENCER
I pulled strings and some strings pulled me
Into the place of product placement still life
The angry benediction of the dopamine scowl
Dopamine fingers – how they twitch like dying beetles
For the softened lights, the drawn down activity of manipulated mammalian maturity
Living on a dare is a distant memory
In a catacomb of external social society that leads to an empty mausoleum
Endorsement deals for putrid larks whose tomfoolery of self is exhibitionism pointed downwards to the middle of the Earth
That was too close for me but for most not close enough
Who knew the world was full of such bad dancers?
And people who look worse the more clothes they take off
That’s the effect of toxic sustenance and losing touch with what is front of you what touches your skin, what is first hand deliverance of living to you
Raj Dronamraju 