Sweat drips in my eyes. In rainbows I see the arch of a jump shot but I wait. Patient. I didn’t come to win but to kick the kid’s ass. Faking the shot he expects I drive hard to the basket.
summer solstice
I slam dunk on
an 8 foot rim
– Dave Read
Author: jshb32
Work – in – progress
Hyphens, indents, comma-
towed words,
creased, crossed,
questioned
till the blanks
are tossed for a recycle
mackerel cloud finding lines for a poem
– Akila G.
Acacia
A window full of sky full of clouds. Workers disembowel the street and the city’s intestines of concrete, metal and plastic are laid bare. A friend says: “Oh, that’s an acacia tree” and points.
exactly
the same
age
me
and
my shadow
– Johannes S. H. Bjerg
Samsara
over and above myself myself
– Shloka Shankar
Source:‘Person-to-Person’ by Tennessee Williams
Reincarnation
It’s called relief, this silence that I have just torn into, gnawing the bones of darkness. The charcoal clouds above gather and split open just as a silver spoon clinks into the empty cup.
After your burial, they say you will come back as a crow, just like your father and your father’s father – hungry and impatient, cawing away the day. But I know you better, so instead of the crumbling parapet of our house, I search for you in the swell of the ocean.
funeral march the staccato a dead heart beats
– Paresh Tiwari
The Fixer
Footnotes: the Fixer is Jimmy Savile, a prolific English paedophile who hosted a programme on TV called “Jim’ll Fix It!” in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Milk Snatcher is Margaret Thatcher who put a halt on free school milk for under 11’s as soon as she gained office. Sir Glitter of Glam is Gary Glitter (a.k.a. Paul Gadd) a pop star from the 1970’s as well as being a prolific paedophile. Mrs Jackson is a reference to Michael Jackson the youngest of the 1970’s US band The Jackson Five and believed by many to have been a prolific paedophile.
-Brendan Slater
iddle
I honor the Force who/that sowed the seed which became me. In degrees though often unaware, I have grown
from rumblings a sprout answers to a name
Lashed by winds, bathed by rains, kissed by moonrise, swaddled by fog, cradled by dawns, how can I be less than a song
the knowing sky neither eye nor lips
They say I leave footprints, scents, echoes, a ghost prowling with the fox for a lair, yet no one says my name
for every mute wind a foghorn
If, at all, you pine for me, feel your breast throttle
pulling down the sky a tipped moon
And on folded knees wait
– Alegria Imperial
Make it New
Days and months are the wayfarers of measured time, living in an unimaginable reality just as the years that slip by. For those who have always known of the self-creating stars which live drifting with the currents of an everyday truth in which ordinary perceptions are denied, or leading a horse by the bridle into old age, overturned, the mind thrust into a channel in which each day is an exploration, the wandering itself the formerly unknowable because then unimaginable home.
spliced genes
an unnamed seed quickens
the groundwork
– Hansha Teki
- Adapted from Oku no Hosomichi by Matsuo Basho and The Carpathians by Janet Frame
Ratios
Zumba : the silent weighing scale.
Sales target : the palm-closed number of profit / loss.
Luncheon : cholesterol smiles.
Grocery : crumpled bills in the handbag.
Tea : a snoozing blood sugar.
starlit sky wishing for a shooting star
– Akila G.
drummin rein spiders and elephants
the other bunny 