|
|
I saw a man win the lottery and I thought Now I will never win. His luck was mine: the drink he bought me is my one hundred and thirty nine million dollars. My fortune was to help this man, fawn-trembling with windfall and birth pangs of new wealth, uncollapse in a street. Moonbat, he said from the ground, fingers in my hair, call all your friends, we will drink all night, I am a millionaire. I can’t, I said, I have no friends. We will buy you some right now he said, but then I stepped back gasping, philanthropy
» Continue reading Why I Do Not Call Anyone Ever by Julia Whicker…
To generate reaction, let us make trees grow inside a hot refrigerator.
Some trees may go witty, selling their complexions for pennies to survive.
The surviving trees will give birth to doves which will lay green eggs into snowy nests, crooning.
The dead trees will reincarnate in charcoal, and burn every anus of retrogression to dark ashes.
The non-surviving-non-dying trees will build a cult where saboteurs like them worship faceless gods.
About the author:
Jekwu Anyaegbuna is an alumnus of the Farafina Trust International Creative Writers’ Programme, facilitated by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Nigeria. He graduated from the University
» Continue reading Reaction by Jekwu Anyaegbuna…
My daughter says she is cold, but I do not have a daughter. Yesterday at the traffic light a homeless man stumbled through cars, tried to sell flowers. Sometimes from a cracked window you can hear a saxophone, but not see the player. All passing faces look familiar from a certain angle— you might see a child who reminds you of you. The city is saddest at night, and that is when fires happen.
About the author:
Anne Butler is a Virginia-born, Los Angeles-based poet and actor/singer. Several of her poems will appear this summer in Illuminations, Spillway Magazine, and
» Continue reading What Smog Covers by Anne Butler…
You filled the room like carbon monoxide. I cough like a chess board, hesitate letting go of my drink before I finish my next move.
With each step, red felt rolls out behind you; everything becomes a kneel bar.
I’m playing hang man with your name on this napkin.
No one will write
a poem on hibiscus.
Only vulgar words
rhyme with it as such.
A demure red hibiscus is
born as a pink bubble
on a green cup.
Like an exaggerated rose or
Indifferent prose.
If you look into the hundred yellow eyes
it blushes deep inside.
It is an eccentric botanist’s pride.
There is now way to work
with it in love or life.
It is just hibiscus-
no rhyme, no reason
No fuss.
About the author:
Deepa Kylasam Iyer is a Writer, Researcher, Playwright and a Published Poet. She has published in
» Continue reading Hibiscus by Deepa Iyer…
Listen to a reading of “Man’s Life” by Francesco Grisanzio.
Ermine, Honey,
tufts of ermine.
Every one over the falls,
onto the banks. I can afford
Ace bandages. I demand
these weasels mummify me.
Your shawl and gloves
clinging to my thigh.
Don’t tell the guys
I’m trying on your coat.
Let my legacy be a queen
sheet set of chest hair,
these hands.
About the author:
Francesco Grisanzio is currently working on his MFA in poetry at The New School. He earned his BA in English from UMass Amherst. His work has appeared in Fawlt, Why I Am Not
» Continue reading Man’s Life by Francesco Grisanzio…
Listen to a reading of “The Way, To (1)” by Jake Syersak.
On seeing a parasol skimming the obsidian against a bank of water, in September of 2004, I wrote,
of umbrellas & pianos, boats & birds—eyes that hear, unwound are ears. Ergo,
the umbrella is a swan, was a, or.
I understand what I saw—was’d—sawed a sailboat from a piano aslant, or this “boat from afar is.” Ergo,
this image of piano was a “isthmus my lips is” in the spiral of explaining my memory to you: wind scoring woodgrain on an otherwise still pond wings the
» Continue reading The Way, To (1) by Jake Syersak…
Death by hazy associations? Death by the dimness of quotidium? (Is this an autopsy or are you just
happy to see me?) Death by making up words like “quotidium.”
Hurry! it’s a foot race
to make up as many words as you can as fast as you can to describe what we think we see in all our closest associates.
The hard part about being a human is you have to move around and say things.
About the author:
Phillip R. Polefrone’s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from: The Smoking Poet; A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; Counterexample Poetics;
» Continue reading This is the hard part: by Phillip Polefrone…
it is in the things whispered against napes of necks under a twelve-step backsliding moon the thing bloomed beautiful over the lie and the shy lips of one saying I am unnamed without you
About the author:
Carleen Tibbetts received her M.A. from CSU Northridge and lives in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in BluePrint Review, Redheaded Stepchild Magazine, Zocalo Public Square, Ancora Imparo, and other journals.
I’m going to faint by madness intercepted pump my neuroses full of unabridged diction. Rush goes the weasel wearing a tinfoil tri-corner hat where the Woolworth’s in Greensboro used to be my full mimosa tea is a pitcher of bargained hurt.
If a Friday brings a sprig of Whitman lilac to you, keep it. But remembering his political about-face song of myself tickles bellies in a David Duke flash-mob
as you wait on the would-be rocker exchanging what’s left of you with tin Christmas trees on the boulevard. Puddles of tangerines, of nervous sleep, of 12 finches the amnesiac &
» Continue reading How Bout Them Apples by Nikki Wallschlaeger…
|
