The house is empty. It looks plagiarised. Can you mail it some poems, words, with the right stake of grammar? Maybe some love poems because it has suffered enough of oppressed poetry on politics, wars, homelessness, economy, all that bloodlessness captured in words.
rhapsody
she hums his favourite
duet
Poornima Laxmeshwar
In September of 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland. One week later they captured the city of Lodz. Twenty year old Irena fled her hometown for Warsaw. She had intended to cross the border to Russia, but was too late; the border had been closed. She stayed with friends in Warsaw but food was scarce and she missed her family. Irena decided to go back home.
Because she was Jewish she was forbidden to ride the train. But Irena didn’t look Jewish and she could speak German. So she removed the yellow star from her sleeve and climbed aboard the train departing for Lodz.
The train pulled into the station after the eleven o’clock curfew. As she hurried home, Irena could see a German Officer a few blocks away. So she crossed the street and spoke to him – in perfect German. She told him that she was returning from Warsaw and the train was late; that she was tired and couldn’t wait to get home. She pointed to her apartment building. There was a Nazi flag hanging from the window.
The officer looked at her and said, “Poor girl, run fast, run fast.”
Never one to push her luck, Irena ran, thankful that her landlord was German.
dark night shooting stars one by one
Susan Beth Furst
The world is an act of monomania. We are drawn towards definitions, standard synonyms like without them the whole entirety of a thing will be plainly lost and never found. In this act we forget that we discover the best when we don’t bind, don’t compel, when we just refuse to label.
theoretical
the strung words that never
made sense
Poornima Laxmeshwar
we all have been so busy on the committee doing all the the the things that they talked to us about and I think it will help the teachers with things like this because they’re all about town and not really paying attention to the oh what’s the word you know to to all of those things that everyone says should happen because it’s not that that that we don’t want them to come with us but they need to be able to get offices like the ones on campus which were really just perfect and they had huge feasts with all us kids there on the farm and it was great great fun to go through the the coat closet and put on their big oversized coats and see the hairdryer there and so was the typewriter
winter sky
a crow
without a murder
Jennifer Hambrick
the delicate arch was on fire at midnight
a few stars had swum like earthworms
through hardened concrete & though 1000 starlings
will fail to coalesce into something beyond
that same old fear of dying young & faintly remembered
the whole scene grew unbearably refined
until the moment Miss Utah sharted audibly
her tiara bore striking resemblance to that dismal time when
you & I were on opposite sides of the möbius stripmall
smoking lucky strikes because it was something we all felt was desired of us
as if self-immolation was all we could ask of any architect
for whom the neon glow of the world’s largest McDonald’s
eclipses the quarter moon without any fear of intimacy
fingertips tracing her invisible history Blaschko’s lines
Clayton Beach
White. Crisp, spotless, hauntingly white. The walls, doors, windows, curtains, bed linen, furnishings. White too are the shards of moonlight falling on the designer stone-grey floor. His pockmarked face twitches time and again. The palsy afflicted right side. Tucked inside his feather and down duvet he is sleepless tonight. Like most other nights. He watches the well-starved form of his new wife rise and fall in rhythmic breathing. Tip-toeing to the study, he pulls out a plain white sheet of paper and scribbles on it with a thick-nib black marker pen. The dank air gets filled with the pungency of ink solvent. Names, all of them; his bi-polar ex-wife, his neurotic mother, his helpless father and the younger brother whose sanity he cannot digest. Shredding the paper, he dumps the pieces into the dustbin. This might help when the sheep fail, so his shrink had said.
blood moon
tracing a lifetime
in inkblots
Yesha Shah
I destroyed my poems today. (The crackling of the iPad sounded funny in the shredder.)
jazz bar
on the back of a napkin
I blow my nose
Dave Read
