A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

Frank Capra

••• The Mad Gallery •••

“illustration 3” by featured artist Eric Suhem

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 flowed river to blood to flesh from mud; we stood sloppy at book copy; we shelter found while making sounds; we mourned relief from pain of grief; we stumbled through stingers as pendulum swingers; we suffered the stab of an attention grab; we lovely made to cruelty fade. And we’ll likely do it again.  ~ MH Clay

Purpled dusk by Timothy Pilgrim

Look, my old ears hear, violent shadows
on the hillside, and, there, reflected,
blood-red sun across the pond. I dive
from bench, drop knife, cutthroat trout
I’ve been gutting, pull her down, say
let’s lie this way til cruelty fades.

May 17, 2025

editors note: The sweet, soft way to cruelty fade. – mh clay

Grievance. by James Rodehaver

There is a rock in my shoe,
small and sharp as regret,
or maybe a lie by omission.
I lean against the table,
dump both shoes out—nothing.
Still, it presses into my heel
like an argument I can’t win.

She is crying in the kitchen,
her hands folded like wings,
her face a soaked roadmap to nowhere,
but I am bent over my shoe,
shaking it again, harder.
The mystery of this is louder
than her voice saying,
“I can’t do this anymore!”

I lace the shoe back up,
the phantom rock still there,
or not there,
and walk out the door
to feel it all the way down the street.

May 16, 2025

editors note: When you can’t walk in another’s shoes. (We welcome Bear back to our crazy conclave of Contributing Poets! Check out more of his madness on his newly reactivated page.) – mh clay

Pendula by David P. Kozinski

When read around in circles history goes
a little something like this: tree rings inscribe
one set of cycles like little spheres caught
and bouncing in harp strings
while toadstools bring news from the underground,
dry seasons and silent spells.

There can be invention
and land-grab (green-lighted and leather-bound):
every muscle flexes and relaxes
in three generations. Then dry-rot and gold leaf,
the sunset dissolve; new alphabets and engines
pop up – whack-a-mole – elsewhere.

Pure hands would push you out of the tower
for speaking less than this. Fresh words
strung by color to brighten a chill era
just won’t stick to clucking tongues
and that leaves jolly Jack
a very sour puss

so let your outlandish, long hair
secure you to something more than trending.
A load-bearing stud
or a round table’s stout leg
might peg you to a spot
and keep your wheels cycling,
and with that, preserve the loom.

We’ve each been swinging
on a pendulum – cough
cough – that never arcs back to familiar loci: the blade
stage-whispers, croons and cuts the heads
of chrysanthemums and caryatids,
shaves laird, soldier and clergyman
with gusto, back and forth

before it dulls; leaves us
poling in shallows, looking back
at land we left so lightly,
all the moments we cannot carry.

May 15, 2025

editors note: Not swingers, swung, till all’s undone. – mh clay

Loss by Lisa Moak

In my garden of loss
I plant my grief
Beside trees
And flowers.

A stony angel
Guards my pain
As I reflect
On each one.

My dog, my dad,
A favored friend,
So many losses
I can’t keep up.

I planted sage
to purge my suffering
But grief remains
And blooms anew.

More loss is coming
Who or what is next?
Life is fragile
And easily shattered.

I can’t stop
the slow march
Of sorrow
Only steps behind.

I only control
My anguish
And count losses
Until I too- end.

May 14, 2025

editors note: So we count, until we are counted. – mh clay

On the Outs by Dan Raphael

at this moment
in every populated time zone
some people are surprised to be able to wake

upstairs without stairs
a glow of hive lights
a dent in the room
window so close to the street leaking out

as time slides
rooms becoming hallways
window in the lawn
sunlight freckled by a mist of shed skin

in this arc of concentric structures
more rotation than we can realize
as pool balls will eventually find a pocket
as thinking of an aroma may cause me to create it

it was cold enough, then the wind started
& no window would let me in
I became as thin as possible but got treated like a sail
an unfitted bedsheet for a centuries-old mattress

we make these sounds in case
some being that can hear them returns

can’t stop to rest, can’t keep my eyes off the street
my cape’s waiting at the stop sign
my door just texted me

May 13, 2025

editors note: Knock, knock! Who’s there? – mh clay

The Oblivion Cantos by Kinnon Batra by Brian Duran-Fuentes

The following is not a book review.
It is instead a wish to review a book known to exist,
albeit, with the grain of salt we take in assuming we can know anything.
Kinnon Batra is a British painter.
She depicts fictional sea creatures. Watercolors on canvas.
But before her work gained prominence online,
she published her first and only book: The Oblivion Cantos,
on Stygian Rim Press, in 2009.
The book is out of print. The publisher is long defunct.
There are no copies available on Amazon or AbeBooks.
It is only listed in a Polish webstore that sells jazz
called Drohobycz Market Records,
but my every attempt at buying the book results in
misplaced packages, black holes at customs checkpoints,
undecipherable response emails listing train departure times,
and deliveries to namesake individuals in research facilities
and communities yet untouched by access to the internet.
The book is composed of 99 poems named “Lacuna.”
These cantos are unnumbered, but only one is called “Andromeda.”
The book has no front or back cover. It is bound with a copper spiral
so that it is impossible to tell which page is the first or last.
The title page, publisher information, copyright date,
are all printed separately inside a small envelope labeled “Diegesis.”
My partner owns a copy, entirely by mistake.
She doesn’t care for poetry, but we share the same name.
All attempts at digitizing the book have failed
since the spiral gets in the way of scanners
and its glare outshines the typesetting in phone apps.
My only glimpses into the book are blurry pictures
and detached descriptions by my sleepless lover.
Our encounters are rare and short on time,
usually inside cargo ships by the marina,
and as much as I ask, the book always gets left behind
next to her pillow or the kitchen windowsill.
Whenever I try to visit, she is never home.

May 12, 2025

editors note: Bibliography devolves into biography. – mh clay

Wet by Randall Rogers

Branches
trees
riparian
means
for capillaries
veins
trees and bees
internalizing means
to live fully
clothed
in flesh.

May 11, 2025

editors note: How to stand in the same river twice. – mh clay

••• Short Stories •••

If the title “Bleep-Itty-Bloo, Or, the Wrong Q-Tip” has piqued your curiosity then this wonky tale by Contributing Writer & Poet Jeff Grimshaw is sure to deliver!

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

What’s left when all the lights go out? How deep does your imagination dig into yourself when all that’s left of everything is just you?

Here’s a bleep of this itty to get you bloo’n:

“Oblivion’s Bend” by Tyler Malone

Eventually, I noticed that the streets weren’t the same after dark. I’d go down Pollard Lane at 1 AM, and there was an angle, a kink, that wasn’t there at 2 PM. What was that? I expected to reach 13th Street after a couple of blocks, but I didn’t. I would keep walking, soon I’d hit a cross street I recognized, and I’d find my way home. Something was off.

Probably me. How could there be streets in my own neighborhood that I didn’t recognize? I mean I’ve been here forever.

And then one morning it occurred to me: the streets didn’t get wonky at night until I died.

I wasn’t dead very long. I touched a live wire that shouldn’t have been, the EMTs got my heart beating pretty quick, I was a little woozy for a week or so, end of story. (Aside from the bills, which took a while to pay off, cough cough).

My brief death had no long-term effects, except for this sense of everything being askew late at night, occasionally. Most likely a few brain cells without oxygen for a little too long. A tiny bit of brain damage. Almost entertaining…

Ain’t no “almost” about it! Get fully entertained right here!

••• Fundraiser •••

Thanks to ALL who have already donated to our fundraiser! We’re 37% closer to our goal! For those who still might wanna lend a hand, it’s not too late. EVERY dollar donated will go towards growing our collective creative outlet… and you can say you helped!

•••••••

The whole Mad Swirl of everything to come keeps on keepin’ on… NOW! Every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade, every EVERY there is! Wanna join in the mad conversations going on in our Mad Swirl world? Then come by whenever the mood strikes! We’ll be here…

Hunchin’ It Up,

Johnny O
Chief Editor

MH Clay
Poetry Editor

Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor

Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor