Poems by Daniela Voicu

1.

Let's dream of a better Planet...
where people never cry
where there is no hate,
where night turns to day,
full of butterflies and
fireflies and good fairies.

Let's dream of a normal, green Planet
to wake up from this bad dream
called war
sadness
and hate...
to be better.

Let's start with
We
first.
Let's reap what we sow...
Let's begin
Let's count good things
good deeds
then let's judge
others!

Let's dream of a Planet
where it exists
People!
There exists?

And it's not Mars
is this Planet Earth
this is where we are firmly rooted.

Creepers grown
inverse to the
heaven.


2.

I'm so down
so I can walk on the Earth...
with all dreams
well-rooted-lianas
in the wing-traces that I can no longer
fly...

and I gave so much sky...

I am the poet stuck to the temple
of the dreams of the Earth,

the poet who loves
every sunrise
from every eye of clear water...

I memorize the alphabet of solitude
rolling words
opposite your smile
and the flight of the last white rooster
what never concerns
back
but it always comes back to the place
solitary...


3.

There are departing birds
and birds that come back
so are people
like birds
migrate by destiny
some return clandestinely
others remain anchored
in other dimensions
steal from these
seasons


4.

my tree has tobacco mornings
hung in some
which are only an attempt to be
and the rest of us
from cover creators
we became the cover ourselves
scrawled by time without imagination

this tree
it is read not between the lines

it's the only tree in a range that grows blood instead of poppies
from all kinds of veins of the whole world
without any suicide


5.

I love you
and winter still sparkles with
locked dreams in a crystal globe.

Make a wish
towards the west,
when birds chased by wind and mist
all will come together
on my skin...
forgotten by time in a corner of heaven
on Earth.

And the Sun slowly kisses itself...
children on the forehead...
immortal.

And repeat in thought:

Let's not forget
Let's forget
Let's not forget
All.

We will be the children
of this
immortal Sun,
in the same
crystal globe...

on the same
Earth...

Poem by Sushant Thapa

SCRIPTING

The shallow ruins
Of an empire
Needs more
Creative happiness
Than a wildfire of misery.
In creative happiness
We all dwell
Because we are still alive.
It is a sheer happiness
In what we do.
Release of misery
Is an unyielding loyalty
That makes contagious bread
Of ill will.
Although we may be brimming
With life,
We cannot remain unblinded
With misery.
We would still want to be alive
If someone is to read us
In the days to come.
Once a voice is written
It speaks louder than the meanings.
The empire of tomorrow
Runs in the veins today
And we are alive to script by design.

Poems by Kushal Poddar

THE PRACTICAL PRANK STORE

The sunbeams enter
through the duple doors
of the old corner store
and forge a rhombus.

An alley cat sheds
its silk of sleep at the centre
of what reminds me -
the 'geometry of chance'.

The keeper says nothing.
The cat doesn't rub
a customer the wrong way.

The keepers die. The store
stays open, grim, grotty.
I swear I see the cat, the same

since my knickers and gumball days,
ignoring both the dead and alive,
dare not ask others if they too see it.


VERMICOMPOST

Two magpies flare up
their fifteen minutes of flame;
this duet raps on for its own sake,
no information is exchanged.

The squirrels chumble their micro food
in the cleavages of grass.
One man syncs his sinking flesh
with a bench and his unemployment.

The park lights up;
early afternoon burns around;
an one-winged crow crosses the field.
its curiosity meets a gray cat.
I have lived one lifetime here; now, I leave

Poems by Ian Ganassi

FROM THE ROOF

It was a story about
Two contrary motions: like rubbing
Your belly and patting your head,

Or being relevant and irrelevant
At the same time.

Then there were various
Two-steps.

He learned one of them
And did it whenever he faced
A dance floor, no matter
What time the music was in.

But when you’re young,

As long as you keep your wits about you,

A kept man.

A long time ago. Once upon a long time ago.

Scrambled eggs and ketchup.

And as for words,
Just don’t use too many of them
Or you’ll run out.

The view from
The 20th floor is “awesome,”
But it gives me vertigo.

And I already had vertigo.

BELATED EPITAPH 

He heard what I was saying but could not admire it.

They do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it.

Either way, the remains of the day

Are directing traffic in the shipping lanes.

They are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

Take a shower, you’re seriously stinking.

Don’t look now but the boat is sinking.

A blind man groping in the dark for meaning.

There’s only one key, and he knows it well—

He plays it on his flugelhorn from the bottom of the well.

Either you’re busy being born or busy dying.

But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

“Real men don’t grow flowers.”

“My brand of intoxication is superior to yours.”

But not for ours.

With such friends, who needs headstones?

The worst of it is that they’re long dead.

Poems by Timothy Pilgrim

UNHERDED GEESE

Trumpet solo on the edge
of evening sky, candles unlit —
an enduring trait. Not quite like
not catching yourself on fire,
just to be safe. Forget flight
away from South, nooses black,
the rest, white. A safe pond,
by gaggle, by dawn. The hope,
survive night, maybe vote.
Put out of mind they shoot
at darkness until blindness comes.
Bullet after bullet claps
when you say it’s all done
with mirrors. Speed on,
honk when passing,
no tweeting allowed.


HINDSIGHT

An unnecessary comma near the end
of her fiery text creates temporary doubt,
much like an m left out of comma itself
would render me unconscious for months.
Causes rethinking the wisdom to reach out,
mention our sensual encounter last night —
passionate tryst after heated discussion
about eroticism in Rossetti’s Goblin Market.
Clearly prompted her to tap back with fury,
disclaim any romp with flibbertigibbet (me)
who dares to recount reputed nakedness
after nonexistent melt and drip. In hindsight,
understandable, a vicious digital flaming
intended to preempt early pre-supposition.


AUTUMN FALL, YAWN

Boring, Grand Canyon, deep,
ribbon-river below sheared
by sharp cliffs. Wearisome — desert,
parched, stretched out, flat,
red sky lured black. Mundane,
my eyes, swollen, throat cracked.
So pedestrian, the crawl to edge, the lean-out,
the drool, the regret. Very trite,
October light vanishing, gray dusk
swallowed too. Not to mention,
tedious, sleep coming at midnight,
fall reflected by the rising moon.


SURGERY DAZE

Nurse wheels me, gurneyed,
long hall — count back,
let go, dream. I drift to thrift store,
float near saws, buy a wit machine
for a song. Starts, runs, pumps out
slogans, puns, Google ads.
Bumper stickers — stupid, glib,
patriotic puke gagging me.
I aim spout down drain,
watch my blood lead the way.
Last gem to go, Americans —
tolerant, selfless, free.
I awake bandaged, mouth, dry,
tasting of phrase, hint of cliche —
brain, what’s left, half-decayed.

Poems by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

THE GENTLE EXECUTIONER

Without knowing my future,
there is this and that,
a gentle executioner
set to emerge from the shadow.

Living will be a thing of the past.
My footsteps have been measured.

Whether I go north or south, east and west,
a gentle executioner lies in wait.
The clock is ticking.
Luminous skies grow dim.
The bells are ringing.
The alley cat is down to two lives.
The gentle executioner never sleeps.


SHORT A DOLLAR

Break up with the life
that will not let you sing.
This is the time to
live life like you want to.

Others live in comfort.
I’m short a dollar.
Yesterday, I was short
a dollar and last week

too. This poet does
not expect riches.
I have many
poems. Crazy ones and

serious ones. Moon
and sun poems. Who can
forget the star poems?
I stand in my eyes and

watch heaven blurry.
I keep the light low to
imitate dark skies.
I’m short a dollar.

Poems by Veronica Javregui

THROUGH THE HEART

Everything must enter through
The heart one way or another
Our mind a labyrinth in and out
Everything must exit through
The heart as well
Living. a process of a two way river
Once at times we think they are the same
Sometimes the entrance and exit dance
So we must stay with things longer
Everything must enter through
Everything must exit out
The heart the river
Running through


THE DARKNESS HOLDING MY BACK

Suddenly everything lifted
I was tied to the bed for a week
The darkness holding my back
Everything lifted I myself could not
See or touch the ground
We must live if not once always
In these realms of possibility
Maybe edges will never meet
But to touch one is to touch a million
To release my soul to you bare it
Bare my mind not being scared or
Giving you the a chance to doubt
I show you everything and you SEE


WE TRAVEL THE SAME PATHS

Now I see we all live the
Same street various times over
Once nearly dead once happy
Never wanting the day to end
Once with a love once alone speeding
Catching a breeze as an only friend
We travel the same paths trample
Those emotions with bare feet with
Boots we try not to look down
Not to remember those memories
When we were young only emotion
How has everyone grown a coat
Yet my eyes never stopped their ways
They grow more impassioned more fire
More knowing of every way they went

Poems by Owen Bullock

 RAIDERS

ram raiders
501s
cat containment
its gentle invasion
(of the bed)

           winter dew glistening in the grass

lanterns and leaves

           deep winter
           not all trees
           are bare

            hour before dusk
            the tattooist
            takes in his sign

            as bright
            as you can bear
            red of winter leaves

“Your creativity will expand into as big a space as you give it.” – Patti Miller

rich with
leafflurry
our walk to the café & cake
the shirt, scarf & papier mȃché pig I bought at Vinnies
(a Rescue Pig
with a money box slot
the plug taken out
liberated from the world of corporate finance
it will spend the rest of its days in meditation
contemplating Derrida’s idea of the absent centre)
new shoes
lasagne dinner
hot chocolate supper
the chess challenge
poems in Vallum: Bridges
grief

It’ll all be beautiful – and it was!


*

             20,000-year-old shelter
             the smoke paths
             through the rocks

             up mountain
             the man in front
             talking about taxes

             the hand slides
             down the stick
             these short steps

             tors
             orchids and forbs –
             we look out

             granite boulders
             some with rows of
             teeth

             the elusive lyrebird
             we find
             its sound

             down mountain the scent of cassinias

             downhill
             passing the places
             where we stopped

             return
             finding the map
             lost on the way


WORTH

          worth getting dizzy for
          I stoop to sniff
          the first narcissus

“Nobody on earth can prevent me from doing one particular thing: celebrating my lofty dreams.” Shri Chinmoy

today’s graffiti:
he didn’t do anything wrong

           gym –
           his muscles as he looks
           in the mirror

I accuse her of fears
also mine

blaming her for a complicated world
instead of accepting it’s complicated

“captured, distorted, breath & rain” – Valerie Kirk

         a bird flapping
         through this urban
         sky

maybe I’m some use
someone from Ukraine looks up
my bibliography on PTSD

           sun
           through the trees
           through trees
           

Poem by Adam Fieled

EQUATIONS #25

When I converse with N on the phone, in about my thirteenth year, our heads open up together, and we create an imaginative landscape out of nothing at all. Events around us, our classmates, notorious or boring or uproarious events of the days get used as fodder, parties, dances, and we hoist the whole rig up and sail it into the sky. We dance ourselves around our desire for each other: are we friends, or could we be more? When we broadcast together, other will sit and listen, spellbound. But to the left and to the right, even at thirteen, is the impulse to share our bodies as well as our souls and brains. N is conservative this way. She maintains a deep need to keep physicality light in and around her— she doesn’t play sports, can’t swim, is an excellent dancer but not a dab hand as a walker of city blocks, either. All her thoughts are of transcendentalizing past her own body, which is arrayed around her like marsh to wade through. The problem is a hold she wants to maintain over my emotions. We act, often, like newlyweds, but because she will not submit to me physically in any way, my emotions, unconsciously set at a skeptical angle, cannot cleave to her finally, like a ship docking in at a port. Sexual devotion often starts, I learn later, with the body, the physical mechanism. Our bodies are the primordial fact of who, and what we are. So, we talk on the phone for hours, imaginative leap follows imaginative leap, but imaginative leaps are not a basis for a man’s devotion. Not that I’m aware of this at thirteen. All I know is that our brains are doing something intense together, and I like the feeling, but my soul craves a reality somewhere between us that cuts deeper, from sharper, starker angles, into a sense of achievement, conquest, victory, a permanent sense of marking and being marked. Later, it is Trish who brings all these algorithms together. She knows only too well what I am, and what I want. We imaginatively leap all over the cosmos together, hand in hand or separately, but the climax, the final imposition of the most profound shared imagination into the most profound imaginative leap, is back into our bodies and, when we are good together, out again, out into a re-entry of the cosmos, as a finality.

Poems by Sanjeev Sethi

AXIOM

Once I recognized your Heiligenschein
from a distance.
Now we are face to face,
and I ask myself: who is this?
Beyond the embellishments
is the experience:
One can’t persist on exaggerated portions.

Verities make lazy returns.
Ferhoodling with the formations
is a flawed recital.
Fluted notes help.
There are advantages to importation
but it’s for the short run.
Only what is stored in us plays its part.


MIRE

In the hamster cage, how does one spawn a sentence
and some more: the dodge of duties summon one’s
stillness? When entry to a lettered at-home is seen as
arrival: one is eye to eye with flintiness of another kind.

In this sketch, the idea of a flat back is faint. Sharing
the privates or rum punch with a sandbagger is rueful:
Low-rent experiences are allotted to most of us. Is
thought in thoughtlessness: deliberate or destined?


CERAUNOPHILIA 

After a row, we are like the waitstaff of the nearby eatery
who look everywhere but at those who depend upon them
to take their order. When solutions can’t repair the rusticles
of our relationship, we let them soak in the sediments of
ceaseless effervescence.

Now and then, you issue your presence, but like a fledgling
idea, I surrender it to my sustenance account. A pervicacious
impulse pushes me away from you: is this how love scripts
its return? If relationships were as effortless as unsubscribing
from a newsletter.

Poems by Joshua Martin

STUDDED HOLE IN THE WALL

twisted ciphers undulate
chopped potato deer hooves

released ponder shirt tail
wonderful asparagus rifle
stunted wet miscreant
homeless unto lozenges

throat clenches photographs
wafting haystack crashing
timed beauty altar
crab witness guarantee
lumber fleeing camaraderie
relish microphone theatricality
slogging forward avenue spittle

chortled loyal partygoers
punch drunk dribbling

laudable paradox pier
not yet hot raw & seldom
wrinkled nose proverb
candlewax infinity cross

waterspout lookalike vinegar
train pulls into burnt landscape

already superimposed skillset
aimless bombastic magician
slamming mallet childhood
a canyon risen between greed

fallen paragraph bubble crown
oceanside mistletoe wraith

misery loves happenstance


AQUAMARINE SUBLIMINAL ILLUSTRATIONS 

dust the thorough magnetic trousers
busying blossom champagne crusts
stunned like kangaroos
left in wooded bookbinding hut

clarity of a mountain mangled
over Soviet montage flippers
wearied insatiable ticking
release pole-vaulted fingernails
unsteadily mopping galactic avocados

wimpy a whispering carousel
the lawn ornament coughing
to reward mischief sneaking
resourceful yet backlogged

blue then shorn
must have figured handpicking
sorting hot air balloon snot
once soaked in microwave brunch
regretfully administering moles

achievement hands bask
dripping panorama
wandering yippee lunch wraths
stone-faced until chapped
fusing lips into clouds

Poems by Stephen Bett

INFRA LASTING

If it’s infrathin it’s gotta be well short
of “infrasimilar”

As gurl to grrl…

Same diff, or not really?
(an A’muricanISM)

Go teach your grandmother
to suck electric prunes (dear)
(masquerading in the fridge?)

This crew at sea —
[We’re] not ready to face the light
[We] had too much to dream
Last night

Think dream, sailor
If thinkin’ could be dreamin’
(more than a thin diff)
wch aint for real, that
boat sailed

Well, I told you once an’ I told you twice…

InfraTHIN’s “the very lastness of things
… [a] frail and final minimum before
reality disappears”

(Bang, homesteader)

This could be the last time…
Oh, no Oh, no-o-o

So darlin’, save the last dance
… us mincing ones

It’ll put your duplicitous reel
on edge


Notes: The Electric Prunes, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)”; Rolling Stones, “The Last Time”; The Drifters, “Save the Last Dance for Me”; Re: “the very lastness”— see Paul Matisse footnote to “Inhabiting the Sound Gaps”; Re: “the real” as duplicitous—see Robin Blaser’s essay on Spicer, “The Practise of Outside”; David Dowker introduces us to his (?) term “infrasimilar” in his poem “The Information Paradox” (Dissonance Engine)


M LETTERED READY FOR USE

Last night
Thinkin bout las’ night…

It was reel it back in

It was She-e-e-e-e-e-ry, Sherry bay-yay-bEE

It was mincing up airy-fairy & fiery
— Oh no, oh no, you’re gonna b-u-u-rn! —
right down to the lastest glittery ember

It was rolling round the roses Rosie
mein frau dug infraRED out of sight

It was won’t you come out tonight
pyre higher & higher on a magiK
red-hot-wire carpet flier

It was Sher-err-erry airheads flambée
bloodstains track the hall of miЯRors
(It were nowhere Rreal womyn’d done gone)

It was Sailor Grrl cresting adrift
our on·lie the lone·lie muse, feisty
M lettered ready for USE

Notes: The Traveling Wilburys, “Last Night”; Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons; Arthur Brown, “Burn”

Poems by Stacy Black

BY CHANCE OR NATURE’S CHANGING COURSE UNTRIMM’D

You ride an ordinary wave of pain.
You live. Others
are annihilated

by aliens, by love, by the government.
You read your fortune in an alley
in a dried splatter of gunk:

You’ll be going away on a long trip!
You pack your life into a cardboard box
going soft at the corners,

tape it all up and take it into the attic
where there are no days or nights.
You live. You marry

the first mannequin you meet.
Your life together lasts a long time, waiting
for the mail to come.


OBLIVION

Experts predict California to burn again this year
because California is beautiful that is its destiny
or so I’m told
by everybody, the movies and ancient scrolls

I have spent my life unearthing from beneath your sleeping form
like an angel beached on the shores of this world.
I live in a city with a medium-high amount of murder
and violent crime,

far away from the sea.
You can talk about love if you want.
Or New York, I guess.


POSTERITY

You were there, slipping
through time and space
and wiping the white dust

of antiquity from your phone
as Rome burned and doctors
began bleeding George Washington.

You tried telling him about
his great white obelisk,
and how there’d come a time

when no one in America
would carry cash. Later,
Rimbaud flipped you the bird.

Poems by Jeffrey Side

THE SAMENESS OF DAYS

You hold the peasants at bay.
You have your work cut out.

You should make enough, as
the winter is coming.

Your slivery tongue will get me down.
Same as it was yesterday.

I have diligently numbered the days
since I came west.

It was the only thing left to do,
while heading upriver.

Captain of my soul, now I know.
Good measuring has informed us.

The plains of the world were
where the gold of happiness was.


THERE WAS A FEELING OF SYMPATHY BETWEEN US

Winter again
drunk
to shed

ramble makes
deeds
sail well wash

action dies matted
of a
fist lens paint

swear foam
bursts the
goat

midnight dog
backs
up shaking years
radiation source
fingers
defence city loners

death crosses
mark network
down

trench statues
commingling with the
dead

hotel gate presidents
reserve shells
and trench statues


YOU KNOW ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Her coat spreads
power around
elegance of
compromise.

Second ridge
ghosters
take the city
and are grateful.

The no seen cars
speed town
borders vanish
fast control.

The weather
was the
first accident.


THERE ARE THOSE WHO REBEL AGAINST THE LIGHT

I’m alone and it’s spring.
If only you’d let me lie on you.

You’ve no dispensations or compensations.
You must let yourself go, that’s the only rule.

Who’s that woman over there?
I haven’t seen her before.
She’s up from the coast with her aunt.
She’s here for her health.

I found her in the morning when she was at her best.
I found it hard to walk away.
The hardness stayed with me all day.

I’ve got people on the streets.
You’re not wanted anymore.

There are reasons for me to suspect I’m mortal.
Raise me from the stranger’s grave.

Poem by Adam Fieled

EQUATIONS #26

Audrey, as a tangent to N, took the idea, not of broadcasting gossip but of sharing and disseminating literature, as a fait accompli move to establish romance, drama, suspense, and rich entanglement in her life. Prisoner of a rich background, and with a preacher for a father, she latched onto me as a purveyor of sweets for her, from my books to my looks to a sense of deference she wanted me to sometimes have as a way of demonstrating respect for her roots. The one determinative moment— we stood, with a crowd of poets, outside a bar in Andersonville, Chicago, as a night of festivities ended, and I was either going to pick her up somehow or not— ended in, for me, a practical response of denial. Her apartment was in an obscure neighborhood in Chicago, I was staying in the distant ‘burb Palatine, and was due in Rockford the next afternoon. For Audrey, as she was later candid about, I was resisting something compelling in the universe which required that we spend the night together. She was heartbroken, with her Indiana-bred sense of being cornfed (blonde, voluptuous, clear complexion), and with the conviction she had that anything she wanted could always be hers. Rich equations suffer greatly from senses of entitlement, emanating from the rich, and dousing all that they touch with a glaze of non-recognition, of obliviousness. This was Audrey’s contradiction— give her a text, available to be read at her leisure, incapable of vocalizing need or difference of any kind, and she could rise to the occasion brilliantly. Texts had a way of ejaculating into her brain and heart tissue, in a lovemaking routine (with the right text at the right time) extremely pleasurable for her. As I stood with her outside Moody’s Pub, a flesh and blood entity— needy, morose, possibly surprising or disobedient the wrong way— turned her interest tempered with diffidence. This decided the night for us. Had we been ensconced together for several days, as I had been with Wendy, things might have been different. But when two possible lovers are too transient to each other, the magic spells don’t work, incantations fall flat, and it is learned again that for equations to take on flesh in the world, there is no substitute for real, raw time.

Poem by JoyAnne O’Donnell

SPRING RETURNS

Spring awakens the spring sky of hope
A new year of greater joy
Flowers start to carry a journey to hope
For better days
Lilacs I saw just popped out in my
Mothers beautiful garden
I enjoy them
Especially the scent
Makes me feel better
The color I love
Reminds me of love
When flowers help you
Sometimes when you’re sick
They come make your day
Feel warm in a way
I thank them on the phone
Grace comes when you pray
For a good day.

Poems by Jeffrey Side

I NEED YOUR HYGIENE

You believe what
you will. He
got no one
else to lie.
He had plans

I never knew,
while listening to
my sacrifice. The
dust has you
tight, and you

don’t question it
when it commands
you in the
night. I’m waiting
for some of

your time, and
losing what I
can’t find. You
took me over
your walls but

only had your
breathing to sell.
After Milton, he
became more treacherous,
and needed you

for reasons you
didn’t need him.
Now he’s got
a chicken farm
in Puerto Rico,

where he blows
a horn all
day. You have
your hygiene which
you carry well.


ROMAN SKY

Do you remember that walk?
That walk you called separation?
That walk you called independence?
That walk you called “being stronger”?

Did you really believe any of it?

Did you declare how you were
free and how
you had no machine to
control your day?

Did you try to prove
a point
while weeping into
your hands
in the desert?

And did you find someone to
make the sky like
Rome for you?

CUTTING UP THAT CROP

Nobody knows
what a nice
day it
is except me.

I came back
to see you
while
you were away.

You have
spoken well,
if that’s what you feel.

We’ll make no
more arrangements.
We carry on regardless,
anyway.

I didn’t learn
my lesson,
and you
didn’t learn the truth


SOMETIMES THINGS ARE HARD TO PUT DOWN

Be careful where you chew,
as they’re looking
for someone else
who never lets it sleep.

Turning gears and sticks,
she doesn’t know which
way to go.

Now I measure all my
leather, making sure it fits.

When I get the envelopes,
I’ll look out for the slits.

She is on the lawn,
looking up at the birds.

She can never be here,
if you are always there.

I measure her up with
my head,
and I give her rifle,
and I give her bait.

Poems by Pete McNabb

THE CHOIR

Beyond the lip of day and deeper than
The womb of night –
There is a world
Perforated by innumerable and tiny lights.

He touched the babe of new religion back to life,

Growing like its store of time-lapse videos.
For Thou is Active
Or Thou is in Active, but Thou
Is never absent,
Unlike forever before.

Unanswerable prayer
Too easily met with plurality,

The choir responds with new apocrypha,
And no true section can be found to hold
A pitch or range that will be understood
By anyone who is Actively listening.


FORTUNE TELLER

In my allotment, in my time, my friend
I was inborn

With chance to tell
The meaning of your life.

But as a magpie, I couldn’t
Resist the glittering boughs

Of other, secretless, trees.
I could not stay to say.

And still, I knew.
Better yet, I forgot.

Bereft of all your hope, I made you
A feral mare to run through fields.

And you grudge me for
What is mine to know?

I still accept the chance
To lose.

You should’ve seen the treasure
In the trees to which I flew.

why was the secret of your life
entrusted to no other

the answer is unquestionable


SOLSTICE

The wick not burnt but cut
At both ends in Minneapolis,
Where day-sky and night-sky
Communicate color instead of sun –
Black, white, black –
Like a bride stalked
By Maidenhood, Widowhood:
A comedy
Beginning and ending in one line.

Poems by Dana Ravyn

I MOVED HERE SO AUDRE LORDE
WOULD BE MY NEIGHBOR

I built my home
in a taciturn chestnut tree
so close to the end of earth
that its mahogany eyeballs
sometimes roll over
the edge, toppling to extinction.

It is held up by stanchions
that get their strength
from the grace of weakness,
like the pneumatized bones
of chickadee wings.

At dawn, I wake to green
sounds that erase dreams.
I watch chestnuts plummet
to their death, their spiny
anger skin splits, revealing
glimmering spheres of adulation.


SUPPLICATION

when i burned your photo
it was not in effigy.
there was no more room
for your image
in my heart,
occupied now with
navigating white-knuckle
rapids of rivers
flowing backward.
Only the ashes fit.
they float
like orphan eyelashes
into retreating crevices
of memory.
as i held the glossy
corner to the flame,
a supplication to time:
erode this anguish
as slowly, as deliberately
as egyptian granite.
deep, to reveal
veins of gold.


CROWS

call me back from reverie,
entreaties echoing from
dangling drops of rain
to reach me.

if I awaken, I can dream
of black barbs of feathers,
follow each to a bony quill,
then deeper yet,

into inky thews. Entwined in
sinew, my heart canters as
wings thrash into cawing
freedom of oblivion.


WHAT REMAINS

The ocean returned
to claim the sleeping
in plain day,

foretold to me
in dreams of
prescient dragon flies.

Bargello veins pulsed
in cellophane wings,
droning in and out of

shafts of light,
framed by private
nebulas of dust.

There are still remnants
of magic free from
weighted words,

and cell towers poke
from a new sea, a landing place
for blue dragon flies.

Poems by Norman Jope

MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE MOON

after Paul Bowles

‘Where the music leads, I follow‘
although it does not lead. It circles and swirls
until this evening is elsewhere.
I descend stone steps at the call to prayer
beneath a sapphire sky.
Seeking adventure and auspicious fate,
I court the whore in her tent, who pretends
that she’s a princess and a constellation.
There are murmurings from the other tents
but, even now, I know where my wallet is
and my name remains on my passport.
What value resides in experience
when, in time, the mind goes blank,
its novas and starships vanished from view?
‘Amass it nonetheless’ say the sages,
‘because you’re helping God to be’.
I add to the archive with this woman,
showing her my wallet as I leave...
then kicking at her friends as I scale the stile
on my way to a rumpled, unmade bed.


AT THIS MOMENT, TO THE NORTH

I bow to the black beast in my skull,
the blank beast that is aftermath,
a death that erases then erases itself.

At the Pole, there is tangible dark.
I think myself north to deep-iced waters
and flickering sky-wide lights.

Death stalks me in its silver fur.
Plunging into its eternal night
I leave language behind, red marks in snow.

Here, the lights wheel slowly.
I stare at trapped Polaris,
at the distance that it carries,

snowdrop-white.
I think myself to a nakedness
that is harder to sustain than death itself.


THE CAPITULATION OF THE LOCUSTS

There are miniscule gaps in the air
where the insects used to be,
prefiguring larger voids.
We await our own extinction -
the future is veiled
and horizons frown.

I rest my head in a recess
of a polished rock
and describe these tribulations,
the slave of a voice
that speaks of earth swept clean,
of penal fire and judgement.

Nothing will remain
but the signs of that judgement
in primary colours -
the panoply of earthly things
decanted into void,
a failed experiment.

Nothing remains for now
but to shop myself to death -
the future is over
and all legacies in vain,
my art mere noise
amongst the other noises.

The silence of the insects
that do not exist
is what is heard now
in the sterile fields.
Apocalypse
need not be grand.

A TIGHTROPE LAID ON THE GROUND

These days, I walk a tightrope

laid on the ground from breath to breath.

Sometimes, my heart seems to shake with the effort

of proceeding from moment to moment,

from day to day, from year to year,

from life to whatever comes next.

I see myself falling to the ground,

the tightrope to one side or the other,

thrown from myself in a moment -

a solid shadow cast on linoleum

beside the photocopier, startling

the smartphone-cradling students

into turning away from Instagram

to read the last rites from an app

they’ve installed on the chance that, someday,

they’ll witness the demise

of an old man like me.

Born in the year 2000,

they know neither Reagan nor Thatcher

or a world without Putin.

It’s their turn now and I must pass on the torch,

however charred or lukewarm.

So may their endings be as calm

as I heave from breath to breath

on the newly polished floor,

finally seeing my face

as the face of a stranger

after all this time.