Bad Timing

A line outside the liberty bell, bars you can still smoke in, cyclists covered in tattoos; my five-foot-one sister playing dress-up in her brand-new, oversized Albert Einstein Hospital coat. Everyone gone, to the shore. (Fourth of July weekend.) Gray, cobblestone streets nearly empty, melting before dusk. It’s my last day here. A crowd gathering for the presidential motorcade Jolts me out of sleep. Kids laughing on the sidewalk below, the day disappearing. Love’s Read more [...]

Pieces Of Minute-Hands

time runs

fluid stop-motion

over carpet –

 

around in music syncopation,

notes hanging from the ceiling

like mobiles

 

and your hands keep reaching

for the moon, but clouds swarm

and silver is only a flimsy figment

in the dark

—Sarah Lucille Marchant

 

The Mortuary School

Frankie bites a peach, axks what’s gonna be on the test. Here sit our vessels, dressed up in sound, shrouded in the rattle of bone & the tap of Celeste’s pencil as she copies questions onto the surface of the desk: How can we cut the carotid artery, and how will the heart, that is no longer beating, respond? In which chamber will the attack be the end of us, and which will just make us very lucky, an avoider of the salt shaker, fierce embracer Read more [...]

Walter William Safar

LONELY NIGHTS Against the old oak I cling my cheek to hear a lost voice inside; The voice of a lost friend, the voice of my lost father and mother, the voice of lost love. And in this lonely night the voices inside the old oak are quiet and inaudible, as if dying along with my spirit. The night has turned its beautiful lonely face to the sky, and I, I call out my own name in this lonely night. which became perfectly strange to me – with some desperate hope that I shall hear the echo Read more [...]

Halflings

We used to be small, with many a great care taking cover from comrades, waiting to give chase Seeking the monsters of our youth attics, closets, beds, basements - better we find them, than they us Rain's worms and snow's angels, the business of those quarters Feared only were the fatherly scold the playground rebuke and the motherly palm in a time when the doubts of giants trickled down to our crowns like raindrops upon ants   Now we roam as giants much Read more [...]

O Capricious Heart

O capricious heart

Make me the miracle

That in choir of love’s opus knells deeply

Sharp as piercing awe

Like eyes perched in windows of a face

Gleaming with the hymn of sharing candles

Kindled in a liturgical flicker of the other

—Remi’el Ki

 

Changming Yuan

Winterscape: Crow vs Snow Like billions of dark butterflies Beating their wings Against nightmares, rather Like myriads of Spirited coal-flakes Spread from the sky Of another world A heavy black snow Falls, falling, fallen Down towards the horizon Of my mind, where a little crow White as a lost patch Of autumn fog Is trying hard to flap, flying From bough to bough Zeugmatic America: A Parallel Poem Every time you stage a play or an election in your own Read more [...]

studying bare walls

His shrinking humiliation blistered in the sun. You raise your nose at him but I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you digging trough the dumpsters, hissing at spectators as they laugh at your misfortune. Lean in close and listen to the clicking of the kitchen clock. Maddening, isn’t it? All of your mental calculations are letting you down, aren’t they? These are nights of love and laughter followed by days of unapologetic loneliness. You stare at the dirty wine glasses filling Read more [...]