There’s a bug on the window. It’s very small. So small, in fact, I can’t see if it’s inside or out. With a kleenex, I squeeze hard into where the bug should be. But it remains. On the other side. Like nothing had happened at all.
lunar eclipse
I leave another
message
Dave Read
wings once spread across an open ocean
now you’re all at sea
a slick-wrecked mariner
floundering in filthy lacquer
coated like a toffee apple
pitched onto a foreign shore
tarred and feathered by crude causality
frightful and forlorn
down to earth
the unhappy medium
David J Kelly
You would follow the sound of my voice.
Hey, how was your day?
You are in a field of swaying grass.
Just the usual, nothing new or exciting. How was yours?
The colour of fresh green caresses your skin.
Pretty much the same. Listen. I know this might be a wrong time but I have been meaning to ask this . . . Is there someone else in your life?
Bathed in the soft sunlight, you open your eyes and there is a lake in front of you.
Please. Say something. Just say that it’s a figment of my imagination. That we have been married far too long and this mundanity is . . . I don’t know. Just natural!
Look at that stone by its embankment. You are that stone.
It’s not. I didn’t know how to say it. But I can’t lie anymore. I met her on a flight.
Can you feel yourself basking in the warmth of the sun.
And she makes me want things and do stuff I never had or did before. Never even believed I could have.
Now you would enter the lake with me. Feel the water enveloping you.
Somehow she makes me feel excited about life itself.
And there is nothing in the world other than the coolness of water all around you. No sound, except the deep silence.
She is everything you and I could never be.
Let yourself sink deep.
Are you there?
Deeper
Can you hear me?
Deeper
Deeper
spring cleaning –
dusting the cobwebs
from my shadow
Paresh Tiwari
Helen Buckingham
(‘colonoscopy’, The Asahi Haikuist Network, 20th February 2015; ‘results limbo’, Sonic Boom 3, August 2015)
It was never something I was able to discuss; it felt like too harsh a criticism, or a professional assassination of character. I was convinced you had a terror of empty spaces and now, everything I remember seems to support this notion. You were constantly filling your immediate surroundings with new sounds, scents, colours, textures and ideas. I wouldn’t have called it vivaciousness, even then. It was more like a constant weaving of spells to keep the vacuum of space at bay. When I learned about quasars, I was struck by the parallels of their bright lives and dark hearts. I wonder what horrors death must have held for you? If you could ever bear to contemplate it.
Now you’re gone, I trust the rest will be peaceful.
fearing nothing …
the irony of that
empty boast
David J. Kelly
Michael O’Brien
He stopped the car to check a sat nav malfunction. He heard a pulsating sound. Through the trees he saw a strange, rotating, multi-coloured light. “A UFO!” he exclaimed.
Recalling accounts of radiation burns from such things, he grabbed the aluminium foil from the camping box, and wrapped himself in it. Then, he crept quietly into the woods, with only the occasional metallic rustle.
There, in a clearing, he saw a group of them, standing around the object, which hovered several feet from the ground. They looked at him with their huge eyes. He stopped in front of the UFO in amazement. It dangled from a tree branch, twirling, a bright coloured triangular object, about 18 cm high. Near the base, an inscription: “LED triangle mood light.”
hazy moon
my optician sends
a reminder
Martha Magenta
heels clack down the nave—
just one more Hollywood whore
with a heart of gold.
Bob Haynes
Angelee Deodhar
He has hair all over his face and hands. Red and yellow. Three eyes and teeth sharp as kitchen knives.
Really? And aren’t you scared of this . . . Bog . . . Boglomo?
Bogloomu, Dad! His name is Bogloomu. Boglomo would be such a stupid name for a monster.
Yeah. Right. So aren’t you scared of him? To me he does seem like a scary fella.
Naah, he is my friend. Besides he loves milk. And bananas too. And I always have some to share.
Well at least now we know why we seem to be running out of both.
Little Bear . . .
letting go
the stringed balloon
Paresh Tiwari
the other bunny 