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FEILE-FESTA
Spring 2015

Poetry

The Harbor of the World
- O. Arieti
Those Italian Boys
- I. Backalenick
Friendless Featherheads
- G. Beck
Spailpin
- K. Cain
Fashioning
- J. Campbell
King Street Comanche
- B. Foster
Santi
- L. Giulianetti
Poets Out of Service
- M. Johnson
Irish Farmer
- L. Kumar
Communion Portrait
- J. Lagier
Away
- M. Lisella
Connemara 2004
- C. Lloyd
Carrying Grandpa
- M. Lyon
The Saying of Mass
- C. Moore
Taking You home
- J. Mulligan
Departures
- P. Murray
Yiaprakophela
- P. Nicholas
Resurrecting Easter Sunday
- L. Pierro
Dublin Spirts
- F. Polizzi
Nun Ponnu/They Cannot
- N. Provenzano
Kate
- K. Retzlaff
Refuse
- C. Steinhoff
Strawberry Pickers, Cyprus
- J. Tarwood
Melina's Tarverna
- B. Thomas
No News
- R. Tremmel
Signs
- R. Volz
Broadway Bagel
- C. Wald
Taking My 8-Year-Old Daughter to Hear Seamus Heaney
- L. Wiley
My Mother Had a Relationship with Good Bread
- C. Young
Sicilian Traces
- A. Znaidi

FEILE-FESTA
Spring 2015

Prose

Augurina
- J. Amato
Moving Day, 1897
- D. Corrigan
My Madeleine
- F. Dunne
A Review Of Italoamericana: The Literature Of The Great Migration, 1880–1943
- G. Fagiani
The Immigrant's Grandson
- J. Giordano
Review of The Glass Ships
- R. Crupi Holz
A Sunday Afternoon
- R. Iulo
Dark Idyll
- T. Sanfilip
The Choir Book
- G. Sullivan
Review of My Two Italies
- T. Zeppetella

Featured Artist
Richard Holz

BIOGRAPHIES

Contributors



















Michael Lee Johnson




Poets Out of Service

 

Like a full service gas station

or postal service workers,

displaced, racing to Staples retail

for employment against the rule of labor,

poets are out of business nowadays.

Who carries change in their pockets?

Who tosses loose coins in their car ashtray anymore?

iPhones, Smartphones, life is cam ready to shoot, destroy.

No one reads poets anymore. 

No one thumbs through yellow pages anymore.

Who has sex in the back seat of their car anymore, just naked shots online?

Streetwalkers, cosmetic, bleach blonde whores,

plastic altered faces in neon night,

don’t bother to pick pennies or quarters off the street anymore.

The days of nickel bag of candy, pennies lying on the counter top –

for Tar Babies, String licorice, Wax Lips,

Pixie Sticks, Good & Plenty, no more.

Everyone is a stop end player in time.

Monster technology destroys culture fragments, efforts in mindlessness.

Old age is a passive slut, conversations distilled, serrated

measurements by number of slim toothpicks,

matchbooks of many colors vanished.

Time is a broken stopwatch gone by.

Life is a defunct full service gas station.

Poets are out of business.