Author: jshb32

The Final Piece in This Collection

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is an epitaph of the end of him: Always plugged in to something and nothing. Unplugged from the world’s color wheel; a hostile model. His vile diluent seeps into oils, turning all a tepid sepia. Screaming into a rabbit hole, he’s cardboard, two-dimensional. Absent and there, fattened with empty. Sitting like a noble royal, yet under the façade just a rotting portrait in the corner. Dust and pixel gathering, admiring inorganic shapes of violence. Now the world, disposed of this depraved subject, will paint strokes, write, speak of better muses.

painted clown
on velvet
flaccid balloon in hand

E. L. Blizzard

The Final Piece in This Collection

Missing

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Oh he is cute enough he is, the way he stands over me like that. He knows the thing is shiny so I can’t see him. You know, that thing in the sky?

There’s stuff missing out of here, right here, all the time, and I’ve told them about it, you know, them out there, the ones in charge. They know.

He’s no business comin’ in here. The cheek of him, twice my age, he should know better a man like that, he doesn’t need it, just takes things. Where’s me newspaper? Jaysus! I was reading that.

And he’s forever using my toilet. Where’s his? Where’s his bloody toilet? I told him to go and piss in his own pot, the fucker.

bathroom mirror
that white-haired man,
– staring back at me

Sean O’Connor

Missing

NIGHT JOURNEY

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Among the poppies we wandered far
till twilight hazed us all in dreams.
We reached the brambles at morning’s gleam
and stopped at forest’s edge to try the fruit—
The taste of sorrow, the tear of thorns—
And now that silver time has cast me all in tears
I long to know, who was that golden soul
I sojourned with?  Why came we here?
And did we set it all to right?  If not, am I to blame,
or was it fate, man’s wretched plight?

strange apparitions
forged from fog . . .
ruminations

Anna Cates

NIGHT JOURNEY

Evoking Sandcastle Cities

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fooling seclusion
making play
in flood-soaked dirt

Wee people stare at the rickety bridge rising over a patchy rivulet. Steam from shared tea ring-arounds their chatty mouths. Sipping from acorn caps, they all agree the tea is good. “I like the zing of it,” one chimes in. Ever gossiping, they spy the first iris bloom and clap with delight for what’s ahead. A feckless fisherman aims a pole over water, his leafy jacket stuck round stick-thin arms. “Not even a bite,” he snorts over his shoulder. Yesterday’s torrential rain left a plastic car abandoned in rutted earth. After a long night, the owner finally gives up trying to extract it and treks a path to the nearest help. On her way, she stops for a coup d’oeil of a sundog. “Don’t see that every day,” she murmurs to no one.

blue-feathered bandits
screeching
for nuts

E. L. Blizzard

Evoking Sandcastle Cities

in progress

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her body a ripple adrift with feathers as fingertip to fingertip they interlace now pull apart encircle until he spins away as she abandoned swirls herself in mists becomes eclipse of clay that spins upon a wheel of time

rimmed with snow
a rill
of birdsong

Diana Webb

in progress

(N.t.)

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The soldier is the same age as my son. His camouflage from some other conflict. He says they were indoors the day before at the Capitol. They hadn’t dressed for tents at the fairgrounds in January. It was kind of cold. He says after he got it he felt like Superman. He has to ask me to unclench my fist three times.

the virus
I don’t feel the needle
either

Chris Gordon

(N.t.)