constantly receiving shipments
of sadness and sorrow.

So we slap on some of those
Happy Happy Joy Joy stickers

and soon as you can say it
those suckers are snapped up

as if all folks need is a little
smiley face to stare back at

from the confines of their
sparse apartments.

spirits lifted
the wake
he wanted

Peter Newton

Protocol dictated a button be pushed.

An impressive male, he was to father generations

of Silverbacks until the small boy

dropped himself like a hand grenade.

The great ape flung him giddily about

like a plaything oblivious to the countdown.

Like a ticket home.

Shakespearean
the play within the play
death by cop

Peter Newton

A rented room. This saggy mattress and assemble-it-yourself bookshelf. Yet, how sweet are those hardwood floors? And the sound of one’s own footfall in the silence.

when home is no longer : home

Kelly Sauvage Angel

Another six hours have passed. The nurse comes back with a new bag to hang up on the IV stand. She reconnects the cannula and a cold liquid invades unsuspecting veins. An alien invasion of personal space. A metallic taste. It doesn’t feel the same as last time.

fear of needles
finding a new bravado
in daydreams

Twenty minutes later. A different nurse. The bag is empty, and things are not what they were the last time, or the time before. That cold liquid felt mercury-like. It’s triggered a transformation, like Neo had, after swallowing the red pill. A perfusion of internal organs has caused irrevocable change. Flesh is now mimetic polyalloy. Will it affect consciousness? Maybe an updated imagination could create any personality it wants. Such power, such possibilities, yet still an overwhelming urge to sleep.

dry veins drifter
looking to hitch a ride
on a new nightmare

David J. Kelly

Winter’s cloak is tattered rags. The white counterpane wore away so quickly. All that’s left are isolated patches of moraine-encrusted glacier. Walking home, late at night, there’s a sense of suspended animation. Somehow this freezing space is freezing time. Still, incontestable imperatives propel the body onwards, comet-like, through cold emptiness, to describe another eccentric orbit.

castaway
watching Noah’s ark
crest the horizon

David J. Kelly

Lying discarded beneath some urban undergrowth, near a mulberry tree, a man is discovered bisecting a dream or an insect — it’s not clear which because the evidence suggests he may have hijacked his own unconscious mind.

rolling stone gathering no moss garden

Tim Murphy