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

“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

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.

I read something interesting at the bookstore today. Someone had written on the restroom wall: “if you think your poem sounds boring or dumb, just throw in a rhyme… bum.” I’m sure he or she was sitting on that one a long time.

adding my two cents
to the take-a-penny
leave-a-penny tray

Elizabeth Alford

Yesterday I removed -1000 emails from my computer. In a sense I exterminated them like the vermin they are, infesting every aspect of my life. Where do deleted messages go? Are they like space debris destined to forever encircle our fragile earth? And what of those trillions of social media and app communiques as inane as ‘having a great time, wish you were here’?

In this age of instant texting what meaning do these messages carry? George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Carl Sagan have all had their say, now it is Stephen Hawking and Nostradamus.

Humanoids with huge thumbs are programming humans – so yes, Your honour, I plead guilty to cybercide, systematically deleting 1000 people from my cyberspace … message by mess… age…

black umbrellas gone
just one drips rain …
into the open grave

Angelee Deodhar

A comma. I don’t pause very often. I pause too often. An ear. I gave up listening a long time ago. A cloud trail. Is there an end? A cloud-tail. Fast disappearing like my sense of self.

I remind myself that nothing is constant. Except maybe for this. A score of nows.

in a funk my muse and i

Shloka Shankar

An ant crawls across the face of a mirror. But the mirror is not a mirror, it’s the sky: an even monotone gray, flat and dull as my hair in the morning. And the ant is really an airplane, so distant I can make out neither the shape of its wings nor the roar of its engines. It moves in such a straight line that it can’t be an ant; ants are notorious stumblers. Sometimes after my morning smoke, I stumble into the bathroom and stare at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror, wondering why I’m still here.

confrontation
face-to-face with
another day

Elizabeth Alford