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
A willow leaf’s silver back looks up at a mountain. Behind iron gates panning for water I want to be a bridge. A mouth filled w/ frost stutters over rusted brambles.
‘There’s a chink in the iron gate.’
Below a sheet of stratus a gorilla preaches miracles.
above the words
of a cloth drum
waxing moon
Michael O’Brien
“Please, don’t do it. You are not used to…“, she said. In my twenties I demonstrated my love driven by the exoticism and of course, by stupidity.
end of fasting
in the cicadas’ cry
the tea’s aroma
Andrea Cecon
It was over quickly. A little too quickly. Like lightning without thunder, a cake without icing, a novel with the last page torn out: a little too… unsatisfying. How arduous the work was as first, and how dedicated you were to the requisite time to prepare. How you dropped to your knees as if in prayer, hands clasped and breath held, ready to take on the world. Yet, somehow, you failed. The question remains: who is at fault? But this equation has no solution; the variable remains unknown. Now, sitting outside, alone in your chair, watching the smoke curl upward, you wonder again how you wound up here. And with a cleansing cough, a graphic expulsion of air—and every feeling you have ever felt, forcing its way out—you grip yourself steady and reach for your glass, thinking: Yes… somehow, this too shall pass.
waning moon…
another night without
the muse
Elizabeth Alford
She climbs the rickety stairs of this mottled building: half-willing …half-unwilling. The walls smeared with layers of tobacco sputum. Stench of the urinals wafts, like vile green fingers, beckoning her to a dinghy room located at the end of the dark corridor. Retching away in her perfumed handkerchief she clumsily mounts atop the examination table, and a clandestine sonography of the fetus’ gender is conducted.
On this ninth night of Navaratri, the daughter and many others like her, awaken from their tiny caskets, leaving the monochromatic swirl of the sonogram monitor. With kumkum smeared foreheads they enter the alleys of a patriarchal society as Goddess of Shakti: Amba, Durga,Chandika and Kali. Their Trishuls glint silver in the moonlight as they dance, trance-like, to the drum beats around a holy fire.
They surround the demons, who denied them the privilege of human birth. Blowing their conch shells; swirling their long black tresses round and round, these unborn Goddesses behead the culprits. The tips of their sickles dripping red, they return to claim what is rightfully theirs.
forget me nots…
the bruises
on a lost rag doll
Yesha Shah
not typical for your average psychiatric social worker. The man had come in to the ER with some vague medical complaints, hoping to get admitted to the hospital. Unfortunately for him, his problems proved to be too fixable, not up to the powers of modern medicine. This was depressing as he was kind of a feeble old guy. Not really able to defend himself on these mean streets and having nowhere else to go, he had been staying at the rattiest, most drug, crime and vermin-infested homeless shelter in town. You know the one they all talk about, the one the mayor has been threatening to shut down for years but never will because it would mean dumping hundreds of homeless back into the open streets without the political will for a tax hike to pay for new shelters (I mean look how much the new stadium is costing!)
honey in the hive –
we keep pouring even knowing
there’s a hole
Anyway, this old guy – the last thing he said to me as I shook my head in the negative to his pleading to be admitted, was that he thought he had pending charges, out of county. Sir, I said, why not just turn yourself in and go to jail. Then you’d have food, shelter, clothing, TV and healthcare, all at taxpayer expense. He considered for a moment, rolling over in his mind the likelihood of surviving for many more nights on the increasingly cold streets and shelters, and agreed he’d surrender to police. A quick check with the police (one of the calmest 911 calls I have ever made) revealed this to be so and just like that, he had the cuffs clapped on him and a big smile on his face.
the old wolf
settles down with the thrown bone
–moonset
Eric A. Lohman
the other bunny 