Peter Newton

It’s July and you’re dreaming the coastline. You’re on a road beside a ticking bed of reeds. A car approaches. A dot hits the windscreen. Flies through haze. Crash-lands in a verge. You run. Your heart is exploding. Your eyes seek a victim. You find it. Pick it up. A female reedling. Still warm as the landscape. Beady eyes shut. Scratchy claws all clenched. You clasp her frailty, as if pity would save her, but a jet of her blood from a hidden vent sprays. It fills your palm. Squirts lines on your forearm. Splashes your T-shirt. Salts your lips. Stings your eyes. It bursts into vapour. An atmospheric blackout. Clouds the summer. Blocks the sun. Slaps your face.

behind the pines
a bleeding sunset . . .
the future howls

David Alcock

Last night. On my back in water. Near the beach that we went to years ago. Before dawn and the purple autumn curdles. Pines rupture gloom like the points of a saw. Warmth dissolves and a memory re-opens. Fingertips flinch from an unstitched wound. Rags of flesh. Soft drumming of heartbeat. I try to scream but I can’t even moan. My brain hooked. I’m pulled to a jetty. I see someone else. Painted nails on her bump. Creak of wire. Slowing clicks of a fishing reel. Someone laughs. Moonlight coils on your club.

between your lips all shadow and starlight
eyes flicker
like fires on a reef

David Alcock

I suppose I knew. Some bugs eat paint. Having put the finishing touches on a watercolor. I fell asleep.

The chanting continued. In the temples. And the same stars passed over Gautama. Passed over me.

Morning awakened. The grass green town. Still. Chanting.

I rose. The painting on a table. Riddled with spaces. Where eyes and flowers once shone.

Robert Witmer

Diana Webb

wrinkled paunch speckled with eruptions of ermine the emperor is naked see how he fondles a child
forces himself onto nearby aide while the cameraman pans awkwardly away aims his lens toward the adoring crowds disembodied voices gush from the speaker about how magisterial and dignified he appears what a storybook marriage has with the missus how great it is to finally at long last have someone with empathy and civility back in power hashtags are suggested memes hastily produced on the spot in real time oh look now he’s invading Venezuela perfectly charming give us hell

butterfly
on a solar panel
coral lawn ornament

Jerome Berglund

Here comes the moon moo moo moo moo
Here comes the moon and I say
It’s so bright
sleeping beauty, It’s been a long cold growing splinter
sleeping beauty, it feels a century since it’s been here
Here comes the moon
Here comes the moon, and I say
It’s so bright

Moon-moon-moon-moon here it comes
Moon-moon-moon-moon here it comes
Moon-moon-moon-moon here it comes
Moon-moon-moon-moon here it comes
Moon-moon-moon-moon here it comes
sleeping beauty I feel that inkstone slowly melting
sleeping beauty it feels a hundred years since it’s been clear

Here comes the moon moo-moo- moo-moo
Here comes the moon and I say
It’s so bright

Here comes the moon moo-moo-moo-moo
Here comes the moon
It’s so bright

It’s so bright

hoofprints
bovines skim the surface
who’ll make the leap

Diana Webb

Just before fireflies light up a dark night, a swarm of dragonflies buzzes in your brain. You ponder how, a couple of your own, dissuaded you from being what you could be. You pull aside the curtain of time to see yourself not doing what you should’ve done then for the fear of being left out. Then you see them, the ones who followed the same path after leading you astray. You gasp for fresh air, realizing that it is what is within yourself alone that is to be trusted. That same night your favourite contestant on a reality TV show makes the same mistake and gets eliminated. For you, she is still a winner.

glabellar lines an epiphany

Tazeen Fatma

How bittersweet all these punctuations,
as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it.

The inch of time’s protracted to a foot.
I think without you I might just spin off

to every period ever printed.
I’d like to write, in a continuous swoon.

I blinked. And you were gone.

Richard Matta