Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Henri Frederic Amiel

••• The Mad Gallery •••

“Red Barbed Wire” by featured artist Thomas Riesner

Slip into Thomas’ playfully hypnotic dreamscapes, as well as our other past featured artists, at our Mad Gallery!

••• The Poetry Forum •••

This last week on Mad Swirl’s Poetry Forum… we met a savant for what they want; we bridged the abyss with coffee bliss; we drowned out life’s drone with a sexy saxophone; we hovered above the colors of love; we justified the actions of the ruling faction; we expanded cognition through another’s tradition; we spoke new ways to end old days; we found consolation in a far constellation. Our guidances vary; far stars, fast cars, the crust of fresh scars. Ultimately, “there’s a story in thar…” ~ MH Clay

FOR MY SISTER IN THE WINTER SKY by Clyde Kessler

Oaks have narrowed you
against the winter sky, against
some frozen traffic, painted
where you lock mom’s house cold
beneath Ursa Minor. Its light
is blurring a trillion explosions
per second per universe per
the blind great-grandmother, you
have called her home into your masks.

Some of your friends look closer.
They walk your dying body home.
It is wrapping itself deep inside the songs
of sparrows, the stray ones that jabber why
snow is almost a feather, a stash of feathers
without the creature. You begin watching
everything of winter falling towards you again
as if reincarnated beside us without another life.

September 27, 2025

editors note: Whom shall you recall when Orion climbs the sky? – mh clay

Reinterpret by Steven Minchin

No, don’t be, don’t be given away by endings
Go- start speaking, lose loss, make odds of outcomes- go

Lose your fear of glossolalia

Then come, come now intrepid, come on, come then
Come on, go, give away alt-endings; and end old days

September 26, 2025

editors note: This may be the only way to survive these times. – mh clay

Hannah’s Hanukkah Party by James Croal Jackson

fireplace on full
blast temporary
menorah lit whole
twice we make
a dreidel drinking
game we make
friends to sing
songs unknown
to some of us
religious
tradition of
late-capitalist
music videos
Josie jokes I
laugh often
tonight I high
five hit shins
hold hands
answering
to each other’s
higher power

September 25, 2025

editors note: This is how tolerance grows. – mh clay

Factions by Archie Abaire

Factions lock in perpetual combat,
thralls to their own names.

They call brief truces
when they find a common foe.

The one doctrine they agree on
is that enemies are any who disagree.

The out-of-power faction condemns
the tyranny of the current regime

until they become the new regime,
when they proclaim that

the desires of the deposed
are evils to suppress.

September 24, 2025

editors note: Ain’t it the truth? Eesh! – mh clay

The Color of Love by Susie Gharib

Have you ever wondered about the colour of love?
Is it a crimson red,
or diluted with a contaminated brush?

Is it pitch black,
an obsession that lusts,
a possessive force
submerging whatever is intact?

Is it grey,
like Autumn’s fading twilight,
a lukewarm shade
that lingers before thresholds?

Is it orange,
a volcanic commotion, abrupt,
to kindle a raging fire
in one’s intellect and heart,
unleashing the hard-knotted tongue?

September 23, 2025

editors note: Love is even for the color blind. – mh clay

Saxicide by Doctor Koshy AV

With not much to look forward to
Except the lack of grandchildren
Son’s inability to learn proper toileting
Self harming through head banging
And bouts of aggression
Drugged stupor
Occasional attempts to run away
Daughter’s borderline personality disorder
Lack of systematic psychiatric counselling and meds
Procrastination
Multiple partners
And sagging marriage as well as attempt to control her weight
Three dogs and grudges against father
And the second one saying
We don’t need one more generation
Let us die out
The way out is Bryan Ferry’s sexy saxophonist
Whom when you listen to
The world stops spinning
Crows caw sweetly
The motorcycle engine
Sputters in the choke’s grip
It’s a kind of slitting of the wrists, perhaps
But it’s not blood running out into the bathtub
Only fluorescent music notes that do no go gentle into that good night
Not ragin’ against the dying of the light
Only drawing it out as it should be into an alba
To soothe a wife from her grief
And a son’s harmful weight thrown at her
And not knowing when he is nude it is not supposed to be done madness
Or a daughter’s unsteady mind and feelings
Love is a saxophone breathed into
To produce sounds, not words
That mean softly
Stridently carry on into the darkness
With a sliver of a moon to keep you both company
Night times
And a chitter of a rat
Which will fall into a trap
Kept specifically by the wife to kill it
To equalize life’s pacts, bling and stings

September 23, 2025

editors note: We need a tune to soothe all savage breasts, balance all “blings and stings.” – mh clay

The God of Coffee by Neile Graham

Blinking, raw from nights of no sleep and thinking
too hard about how my chest is cracked open.

It’s a hard, impossible thing. The gravest pain I know
and I want it. To stay just like this. Starry. Bleeding.

I need the gravity of my flesh, my skin scraped
to viscera by human and natural elements, sanded

by rain and wind, chill and heat, calm and storm. Days
and weather. How else to keep breath in the cave of bone?

I think too hard about the geographies, seas and stones
and skies that aren’t and will never be mine.

About the solid floors beneath my feet that time
warped, eroded, then removed inch by inch until gone.

About the rightness and regret of passing
beautiful burdens into other solid, younger hands.

How to give up the making of myself and wondering
how this fissure, the chasm alone can sustain me.

Waking is harder than you’d believe when you don’t sleep.
How can you wake without its opposite? But maybe

the two are not so contrary as I imagine here,
my eyes scraping open to the soft light of gray morning,

the trees bare of leaves, exposing my rumpled head
to the street. A tiger cat rumbles on my lap, a black cat twitches

dreamy growls on my chest, and stirrings in the kitchen
promise that soon a cup will bring boon and blessing,

crowned with a creamy rim of foam and under that
bitter bright spice and beans and beans brewed

in milky kindness to help me live this day’s fresh-born
minutes. Carried in a grip I acutely love. His hands to mine.

Sometimes depth is a place where rain gathers to spill over
the rocks starting something. Every ravine is not an abyss.

September 22, 2025

editors note: Happy Monday! Here’s a java jolt to jump the jagged rifts of day (of life). – mh clay

Wanting by Guest Poet Suki Adams Sporer

I want from hiding.
I want from seeking.
I want from holding on.
I want from letting go.
I want from remembering.
I want from relenting.
I want from comforting.
I want from color,
and the absence of color.

I want from solutions.
I want from answers
to unformed questions.
I want from silence.
I want from fullness,
emptied of want.

I want from connection.
I want from isolation.
I want from love’s
lovelessness.

I want from disease
and its heartbreak.
I want from heartbreak,
and its disease of wanting.

I want from death,
some stretch of unknowable time.
I want drunkenness,
and clarity.
I want hopefulness,
and the want of hope.

I want transistor radios,
Coppertone fumes,
My big sister and me lighting up
Marlboros on a Santa Monica beach
and racing for the first shower.

I want to undo.
I want to relive.
I want again to fuck all the wrong guys.
I want to wince but never regret.
I want to pretend
I want to be different.
I want to forget
to want and
to want no more.

September 21, 2025

editors note: How about you? What do you want (from)? – mh clay

••• Short Stories •••

We typically ask if you need a read but today we know what you need, “You Need A Number” by Guest Writer Martin Howard Samuel!

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

Take a number, but you gotta *give* time.

Here’s a clue to how this queue moves:

In Need by Tyler Malone

Having been out of the country for quite some time, several years in fact, I wasn’t up to speed with many of the current ways of English daily life.

Wishing to buy a single postage stamp, of the one country in the world whose name is not actually on their stamps, in order to pop a letter in the post, I entered a Birmingham Post Office which, other than the good lady behind the counter, was completely deserted and, thinking, ‘Ah, no waiting, just what I like to see’, walked up to the counter and addressed her with a cheerful, “Good morning.”

“What’s your number?” she asked, in somewhat of a surly voice.

In my book, I have always considered myself number one and replied accordingly, “Number one.”

“No,” she informs me, with a sneer, “You need a number.”

Surprised and somewhat at a loss, “How would I possibly know?” I enquired.

“I just told you,” she replied firmly, repeating, “You need a number.”

Puzzled, “Why do I need a number, pray tell?” I asked politely.

“So I know who’s next in the queue,” she snidely replied…

See how this numbers game plays out here.

•••

Put your ear to the wall & hear our call to check out “The Frustrated Housewife“ by Swati Moheet Agrawal!

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

The break calls from inside of the house, sometimes.

Here’s how this bout begins:

Splitsville by Tyler Malone

I wonder what’s breaking on the other side. A plate? A promise? A heart?

We are neighbours, she and I. But she yells at her maid, who arrives late.

At her four children, one, who refuses to eat, the other one wriggling on her hip, and the remaining two hurling Lego bricks at each other.

The pressure cooker whistles.

The wiggly child cries. He is sensitive to jarring noises. He sinks his nails into her arms to self-soothe and regulate. She yelps, “Tender hands, gentle hands, Shivay.”

Shivay lovingly strokes his mother’s arms.

Meanwhile, the man of the house, sprawled on the couch, is happily munching on samosas and golden jalebis straight out of the pot…

SGet the whole round right here!

••• Open Mic •••

Join Mad Swirl this 1st Wednesday of October (aka 10.01.25) 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 Dallas Beat Poet, Musician and our Mad Brother, Carlos Salas! Here’s a bit about Carlos:

Carlos Salas is a multi-discipline artist, former bookstore owner, and co-host of the Poets on X+ reading series held at Mighty Fine Arts Gallery in Oak Cliff, Texas.

He first started reading/reciting poetry at The Dogstar in Fort Worth, Texas and has been published in various chapbooks and anthologies. He has performed at the first annual New Orleans Poetry Festival of 2016, broadcast to Blackwater Poetry Festival in the County of Cork, Ireland, performed at The Latino Cultural Festival in Austin, Texas. Carlos appears as one of the many regulars at Mad Swirl Open Mic, the longest running monthly reading series in Dallas.

Carlos lives with his love and fellow poet Opalina Salas with their cat Jack in Oak Cliff, Texas.

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 watch us on Facebook LIVE))

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

Here’s our the remaining 2025 features:

November: 21 Years of Mad Swirl Open Mic Swirlabration
December: Holidaze Hijinx

•••••••

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…

Makin’ Haste,

Johnny O
Chief Editor

MH Clay
Poetry Editor

Tyler Malone
Short Story Editor

Madelyn Olson
Visual Editor