Please don’t read beyond the title. This is not a poem, nor is it a haibun, short story, or flash.
It has no beginning, middle or end. No development of any sort. It is here as a no thing, and by reading it you gain nothing. Unless you make it into something.
petals or thorns
a scratch on the surface
of infinity
-Stella Pierides
Sweat drips in my eyes. In rainbows I see the arch of a jump shot but I wait. Patient. I didn’t come to win but to kick the kid’s ass. Faking the shot he expects I drive hard to the basket.
summer solstice
I slam dunk on
an 8 foot rim
– Dave Read
Footnotes: the Fixer is Jimmy Savile, a prolific English paedophile who hosted a programme on TV called “Jim’ll Fix It!” in the 1970’s and 80’s. The Milk Snatcher is Margaret Thatcher who put a halt on free school milk for under 11’s as soon as she gained office. Sir Glitter of Glam is Gary Glitter (a.k.a. Paul Gadd) a pop star from the 1970’s as well as being a prolific paedophile. Mrs Jackson is a reference to Michael Jackson the youngest of the 1970’s US band The Jackson Five and believed by many to have been a prolific paedophile.
-Brendan Slater
I honor the Force who/that sowed the seed which became me. In degrees though often unaware, I have grown
from rumblings a sprout answers to a name
Lashed by winds, bathed by rains, kissed by moonrise, swaddled by fog, cradled by dawns, how can I be less than a song
the knowing sky neither eye nor lips
They say I leave footprints, scents, echoes, a ghost prowling with the fox for a lair, yet no one says my name
for every mute wind a foghorn
If, at all, you pine for me, feel your breast throttle
pulling down the sky a tipped moon
And on folded knees wait
– Alegria Imperial
Days and months are the wayfarers of measured time, living in an unimaginable reality just as the years that slip by. For those who have always known of the self-creating stars which live drifting with the currents of an everyday truth in which ordinary perceptions are denied, or leading a horse by the bridle into old age, overturned, the mind thrust into a channel in which each day is an exploration, the wandering itself the formerly unknowable because then unimaginable home.
spliced genes
an unnamed seed quickens
the groundwork
– Hansha Teki
the “new” e-coli’s look is unforgettable, they say
like bricks stacked one on top of another
we could have learned brick-making from the virus
or the virus could have learned its shape from our walls
a virus exposed to brick walls
shape-shifting to astound its host
then the kidneys fail, and the wall strengthens
those front guards
at recalcitrant disease
their sturdy hope
-Susan Diridoni
We arrived just in time to see the lighthouse go up in flames. The wingless ravens laughed, and the crimson waves gave birth to a toaster that we couldn’t use.
by the time you read this, I will have rolled off the cliff and into the sea.
when they speak of me, they will speak of a hill. they will speak of a river,
thick and slow with its own gravity. they will not understand why the
gentle, levelling slope was not enough. they won’t know that since the
day I was born, I’ve never been able to capture my own moon.
a knock at the door —
these old bones that just won’t
go
– Angie Werren
the other bunny 