Art is for everybody.

Keith Haring

••• The Mad Gallery •••

“illustration 1” by featured artist Eric Suhem

Mad Swirl is super-stoked to welcome returning featured artist Eric Suhem back to the Mad Swirl Mad Gallery with his latest trippy and electric illustrations. Suhem’s work bursts with color while weaving in bold black-and-white contrasts and it almost feels like stepping into a living breathing kaleidoscope: patterns swirl, shapes pulse, and every detail pulls you in deeper. Each piece is like an acid trip, vibrantly chaotic, strikingly balanced, wild and hypnotic — if you know us at all, you would understand why we simply can’t get enough. ~ Madelyn Olson

Check-out Eric’s living & breathing kaleidoscopic canvas madness, as well as our other resident artists, visit our Mad Gallery!

••• The Poetry Forum •••

This last week on Mad Swirl’s Poetry Forum… we gave up first to who lived worst; we know probed a snow globe; we took a fall for sticker recall; we got in the groove to self improve; we thought how to weather growing old together; we duds arranged for a quick change; we lagged behind, not killing time. Still, we strive to take what waits for no one. ~ MH Clay

It’s Summer, and I Still Can’t Tell Time by Nolcha Fox

Summer is a stack of plates
with hands that count the minutes
backward faster than I see.
The plates are targets for my gun,
filled with bullet holes.
Hard as I try, I can’t kill time.
Instead, I watch it circle,
circle, circle, leaving me behind.

May 3, 2025

editors note: Stuck in Summer’s time out. – mh clay

CUT-OUT TAMMY SWISHES CHEMISE by Christopher Barnes

Unhooking paper folds, backbone gristles. Onus instincts
boilersuit, level-headed cap, matchlock at hip. Eyes vacant,
she deducts finalized minute of legionnaire’s breath.
Portugal’s Popular Forces esteem the quick change.

May 2, 2025

editors note: Paper doll intrigue with a foreign flare. – mh clay

Advantages that Inhere in Marriage by KJ Hannah Greenberg

It remains advantageous, aeras past canopies, possessing one cuddle partner.
The same, there’s a comfort in familiar farts together with accepted wheezes.

Few challenge the essential character of spouses’ accustomed toilet lid height,
Missing toothpaste caps, or else their dishes strewn forever in kitchen sinks.

As well, it seems that relationships built from ylem nearly always allow space
For atavistic caparisoning habits involving T-shirts, maybe, likewise jeans.

A coffee served bedside, a sock darned, a pile of leaves raked just for jumping,
Similarly-related ephemera evolve into vast corpora of delight.

Among white-haired couples, fractious moments receive no excessive attention.
Rather, it’s small kindnesses that manage being illuminated.

Unfortunately, shared tumescence becomes finite, gets drawn off by senescence
—the dead can’t canoodle.

Corroboration, eventually, becomes the stuff of scrapbooks or electronic letters,
Saved birthday cards.

A pairing’s numen eventually dissipates like dandelion fluff, like July raindrops,
Like life.

May 1, 2025

editors note: This poem is included in KJ Hannah’s latest collection, Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks. “All poems and some art have detailed citations since the book’s an illustrated omnibus of my first 16 published poetry collections.” We can get our copies here. – mh clay

Alley-Oop by Sanjeev Sethi

When the music in me summons
a throbbing idea to mull
in the alembic of
unsettled issues,
a stanza pops up.

Blandishments from other briefs
possess no chorus.
A glisk corrals
and grows into a sheet anchor;
a bottom I seek mollification from.

Expertise in andragogy is formed
in actuality. Sharpening
the skill set of one’s crew
without curating the self is all wet.
Personal mentoring is a precondition.

April 30, 2025

editors note: Ignore inward awareness? Arrest outward advancement. – mh clay

Flat Out by Anthony Ward

Flat out on the kitchen floor
I can’t move
Instead I’m moved by the smell of the stew
Boiling away on the stove
The odour of which stunts me to childhood
Where an old faded sticker on the white wooden cupboard
Acts as a memory suspended in the memory of my mind
Almost fifty years have gone bye
Fifty years of wear and tear

I’m like an old car
That’s gradually seizing up
Corroding into my surroundings
From showroom to no room
No longer got the moves
Only the moves I’ve got to make
Creaking like a rusted hinge
More mangled machine than man
My teeth more metal than enamel

Thinking back to when I was younger
When the road was all laid out ahead of me
And I could just roll along with it
Never imagining what it would be like to be old
As I imagine now what it would be like to be young.

April 29, 2025

editors note: Something to stew on. – mh clay

Separate Particles by Rita Moe

“What is it made of, the white stuff?”
I asked and shook the globe again.

My mother, washing dishes
Or scrubbing the floor, said, “Soap flakes.”

I studied the particles as they settled.
They stayed separate. Did not dissolve or bubble.

It was another way of realizing
My parents weren’t always right.

Or had some other agenda. Like when I asked my dad
About the Federal Reserve Bank, he said,

“It’s another way the government
Controls the little people.”

It made me sad.
They had things all figured out. But to me

The world seemed full of possibilities. Like looking up
“Federal Reserve” in the encyclopedia and learning

The country was divided into twelve districts
Like the apostles or eggs.

With the globe, I decided
Knowing the answers entailed too much—

The hammer, the puddle on the floor.
I settled instead for a list of untested hypotheses:

Styrofoam, chips of mothballs,
The white cliffs of Dover.

April 28, 2025

editors note: Before the omniscient internet, this was how you could “f*ck around and find out.” – mh clay

Swapping Scar-Stories With Cindy-Louise by Paul Tristram

“Fuck both William Saroyan
and Knut Hamsun…
I never tasted actual ‘Steak’
until I was an adult
… and then, the first time,
it was a forkful
off someone else’s plate
… because I was staring
whilst I waited for her sister.
I’m the youngest of seven…
hand-me-downs and scraps
… I lost my right front tooth
fighting with one of my
brothers over a loaf of bread
off a doorstep whilst
the whole family were out
stealing from the milkman…
which is also where I tasted
orange juice and yogurt first.”

April 27, 2025

editors note: Hard luck, hard learned from a hard life. – mh clay

••• Short Stories •••

Sometimes you just need to break outta that scrolling social cage and free yourself with a read like “Social Creatures“ by Contributing Writer & Poet Marie Higgins!

Here’s what Short Story Editor Tyler Malone has to say about our featured read:

This come and go, it’s cold–but not cold blooded.

Here’s a bit of what you’re setting loose:

“Social Climber” by Tyler Malone

There she was again standing in front of the cage. She took a deep breath before she opened it. No matter how many times she cleaned the inside, Nancy was forever afraid of being scratched or worse. She knew to wear her long-sleeved lab coat, the one she kept over the chair near the cage door. She slipped it over her clothing before she went about the cleanings, feeling like a zookeeper. It was thick, so even if Spike lashed out, it did little more than make her jump, as long as he scratched at the sleeve or body of her coat.

She also knew to work at a slow pace because his spats mostly happened when she worked fast, unsettling him. She feared him most when he was on the lower part of the largest limb and she needed to reach in to retrieve the tub. It put her in a more vulnerable position. He did whisk her hair away from her shoulder with his claw once when she was in this position. If he was on the cage floor, it wasn’t unusual for him to scratch her hands. She told Jeremy that if Spike ever scratched her face, that would be the end of it, but she didn’t even get rid of Spike when Spike did worse than that…

Slide on over right here to get the rest of this reptilian read on!

••• Open Mic •••

Join Mad Swirl this 1st Wednesday of May (aka 05.07.25) when we’ll be doin’ the open mic voodoo that we do at Barbara’s Pavillion!

We will get things started with some musical grooves brought to you by Swirve (Chris & Tamitha Curiel, Gerard Bendiks) then hosts Johnny O & MH Clay will set the stage for some open mic madness!

This month we are featuring local mad one, Brett “BA” Ardoin! Here’s a bit about BA:

“BA” is a co-creative performance improvisationalist. Levitating images, thoughts and linguistic constructs into unexpected synchronistic combinations. A Cross Pollinator of Poetry, Collage Art and Three Chords of Mad Swirl Hootenanny Fuel. “B.A.” is the “Washboardist” for Oblong Cassidy and his SpaceHorse.

Come to participate…

(preRSVP at our Facebook event page or send a message to openmic@madswirl.com)

Come to appreciate…

(join us LIVE at Barbara’s Pavillion- located at 323 Centre St, Dallas -OR- tune in to our Facebook LIVE feed starting at 8pm)

Come one. Come all. Come to be a part of this collective creative love child we affectionately call… Mad Swirl!

Here’s a sneak-peek at our the remaining 2025 features: