When armed with an arsenal
Of ideas bigger than bombs
And words that are piercing as arrows
Quivering
With swelling anticipation
Like the tide, it crests
When faced with a blank white page
You wait for the explosion
The crash of the ocean wave
It destroys the castles you have built
But you call it
Creation.
Featuring: Ivor Irwin, Zoe Etkin, FM Stringer, Ryan Mattern, Alexander N. Tan Jr., M.D., Lowell Jaeger , Jon Stocks, Kevin McCoy, Kathy Carr, Ian Campbell, Gregory Wm. Gunn, D. Trunick, Patrick Battle, Remi’el Ki, Gabriel “G” Garcia, Craig McCarthy, Emily Faison, Sarah Lucille Marchant, Marija Stajic, Kyle C Lucas, Elisa Abatsis, Rich Ives, Zhanna Vaynberg, Sara Shah, George Fleck, Walter William Safar, Changming Yuan, Cliff Weber
For over ten years, Burning Word has chosen the path of political neutrality, which we feel best focuses on the art. Today we see a threat to the art, the artist, and to our ability to publish the work. We've censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the Internet--a bill that could pass any minute. To see the uncensored text, and to help stop Internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/15524/uncensor
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Burning Word is a quarterly literary publication focussing on emerging writers of poetry and short fiction.
ISSN 2161-8992 (print)
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Emily– this poem is fantastic. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attempted to encapsulate the spine-tingling feeling of a blank page and how often I have failed. The second stanza is really fucking great, I can’t say enough about it. One thing though– capitalizing every line, at least for me, softens the crash of each ocean wave in its conformity. It only distracts me from the beauty of your words. As does the lack of punctuation. But like I said– lovely stuff.