Joseph Salvatore Aversano

‘It’s just a bowl’

‘You’ve left a stain’

‘No  no. It’s part of the glaze’

‘I told you. Go and wash it up again’

convex
within concave
a crack in her lifeline

Diana Webb

the nun processes along the cloister

asleep in her bed she dreams of who it will be

in the refectory she sips through silence

blare of radio one between toast and tea

daybreak
from every angle
a view of the sea

Diana Webb

(for Frank Williams)

A little brown pot that could fit in the palm of a woman’s hand. Too small a container for tea, for safety pins, for buttons lost for missing coins or even for a cactus. It holds it’s own small void.

a glaze
of memories
deep with time

Diana Webb

what are you doing?
nothing
people pay good money to learn to do that
do what?
do nothing
nothing?
like a pebble in the stream
ah like that
yes like that
me?
yes you
um, you drown?
drown?
the pebble
let’s take it from the top again, the nothing
ok
at the feet of the stone Buddha
who?
you
ah ok. nothing?
nothing. let the stone become nothing
the pebble?
the Buddha

from under

the blue cup
the root cause

for January rain

Samar Ghose

pickled light flickers on the doormat
my grandmother soured in dust

no one comes to see her leg
lost to infomercials

a web of blue roots animates
her hand with figures she draws in waves

the window opens to barking far off
are you there? she asks

her voice a rigor of words filling her eyes
the dog leaps off a hollow log

my womb, careful she giggles as I flip her like a pillow
the treacle dusk liquefies on the saucer a dying shore

I dip my finger in the sugar wand wafting in and out
here taste spit from the bottomed-out sea

she puckers her lips then gulps
the hiss of foam drowning

Alegria Imperial