# Burningword Literary Journal

> A triannual international publication showcasing exciting literary voices, featuring poetry, short fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art.


## Posts

- [Presentation #2064](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2064/): [b]A Richard Burton At The End Of The Twentieth Century[/b] "I wish this spring a counterpoint to shudder through my memories of the sun," said Richard Burton as the century closed. "I wish hymns to the twilight yielding unbroken stars." Richard Burton stands in the ballroom of the Gilded Lion. The face of the planet wheels through December. Like a reckless alchemist, he sees night's voice pointing north. He puts some thought and reason into seven sudden sharp golden notes that jar the hard shadows, a choral storm between nothingness and clusters of meteor petals, the beryl voice of a Christmas concert.
- [Presentation 1644, In A Place I Write Called The Lyon's Rage](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1644-in-a-place-i-write-called-the-lyons-rage/): In a place I write called The Lyon's Rage, I think of your bright hippie awareness telling me I am thinking nicely of her in fits of desperation. Worlds of beauty. The tree of stars. The sapience of workers. A spicule of Wagner, and in my heart Ysolde there is a small area of discourse that will save everyone some money and light, as if it were her very heart, Nicole's very heart and tree of stars. Everyone loves her. Everyone loves her river song. It is as if everyone were endeared to lyrics I wrote at The Lyon's Rage.
- [Presentation #2045, Country Church Dance](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2045-country-church-dance/): The person in the teardrops of diaries, the person who writes government warnings, the person in the woodcut of age-old stars and a hundred years of wind--this person wears jewelry of black meteors tinted with opaque revolutions of the future, this person carries blue islands in sparkling hands and sees behind the shadow of my next syllable; this person has the smoking laughter scholarship. Dancers are clustered in our tresses and flower dreams, and they can taste the smoke from our turret on the lake of melodies, they give eloquence to the morning waltz and water inland wildflowers.
- [Presentation #2015, Dim Gold Song For Laura and Rebecca](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2015-dim-gold-song-for-laura-and-rebecca/): The sex nutcrackers deteriorate a British cubist momentum well into the old age of chlorine Christmas flames. Rebecca, have you a clue why another blue snowstorm rests etched in nature's jewelled clarinet until its red-rushing pulmonary roses tint the teardrop of one minute of the government in this rink of freedom? But the rink of freedom is burning to death here in this dark thought; and yet, freedom is grace squeezed into the yesterday of a forest crossing, the Laura I touch, the Laura in my fingers, the Laura stapled to my hair, Laura in my daughter's red lips.
- [Presentation 1937, At the Newest Restaurant In Town](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1937-at-the-newest-restaurant-in-town/): Chandelier startles us with gold, gold as her long, new earrings. The chandelier splits light over the flowers, is a lamp of good and evil. Her hair is dancing over us across the street from 23 Emery under spun-glass and cottonball clouds. Next door, Triple-A Radiator Repair also offers sandblasting and will repair gas tanks. This is an oceanic Thursday, "buoyed on the dense marine," and here we are, under the "Welcome, Open For Business" sign, where smiles are offered and fresh-squeezed orange juice is available, sunny day, lots of music and Syscoware stainless china presented clean.
- [Presentation 1885](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1885/): [b]The Moons That Glitter Against The Ageless Canticles[/b] The moons that glitter against the ageless canticles crack our bones and thunder inside of us, echoing the sun. The engraved quiet has always been the bone of song to scholars asking themselves for their final thoughts of the day. The ashes that are shed out of the thunder, Mr. Hawkins, give common persons a fluorescent light on their beer palms in a white igloo where jets drop turtles on top of our blue reflections, drilling a way into our flaring core of planetarium bark. The wind is an igloo of fits. We must neighbor the stolen
- [Presentation 1884, Cranbrook](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1884-cranbrook/): For we have touched terrible universal waterfalls that mist. We held the scorched or parched flowers that burned our name into old neighborhoods and sainthoods all evening all summer with honied moods at Speaking Mirror Lake knowing its minor key like Villa-Lobos or a Black Forest no longer very living. It is that we have sinned and are crying in the hostile wind of that hostile place we see yearly. But there are better memories, as when I formed true verses under the German portraits or wandering through the radish gardens at Cranbrook where gardeners still trowel around flagstones.
- [Presentation 1871, The Surreal](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1871-the-surreal/): My strawberry ancient watercolors drip under the black thunder, drip and bleed with the almonds, thorns and winesaps before the green daughters. Here is a Pard, ridden in these ancient watercolors while red wine flows from the harp with its bitter music of stoplight chemicals. Wherefore the peace flower of these poems, as young as art, blows with a witched, regal sound before the wild daughter deeply in her eye, like a hawk over a rouge storm of iridescent theory, those who whisper their dread of red Oxford whips. Observe the gemmed Pard painted there, coracle music of virgin almonds.
- [Presentation 1880, An Adoration](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1880-an-adoration/): She is spilling the gold dust of dreams into a night too dark. We're wandering through a forest of stars, looking for her until night breaks. She has turned into music from a very old-fashioned love song. We are ready for the light in her. Her light spills gold breezes into Sunday kisses. She is spilling gold dust of dreams into a night too dark. She is not found crying, like a girl crying in a cherry orchard. Her hands touch casks of old, dark, rich red wine--rare, French and rose-colored, poured in sparkling star-spangled summers.
- [Presentation 1604, Undertone](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1604-undertone/): All women have suffered the bitter dictations of Harvard poetry in this rain, and now they stand as dismembered webs. It is not just this rain, it is the rain set thinking by musicians. The rape of a dustpan against the wall. All women in their tiredness notice the loose electrical plate. The equality of thunderbirds. Sixty centuries of exploitation is the zucchini of logical astronomy all women have suffered, and all women have suffered the bitter dictations of Harvard poetry in this rain. The macho moon in bits of light. But girls will scratch your heart with grandmother's citrus.
- [Presentation #2014, Sex Meteors](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2014-sex-meteors/): My heart is a stopwatch shuddering and burning to death. It is a one-hundred-year-old nutcracker inspiring me with her scintillations at the Christmas table where the moon unwrinkles. Those of you who are now persecuted, what gods and what madness brand your century with the espionage of unoccupied faces under the blue sword? A crisp garden scene beds where the shadow bled from couplets to vulture in a train blackened by the sex meteors coloring my peace. Smoke knocks on the planets: hammering and woeful rust. Now we smudge out a mosquito, reddening John Barclay's Pauline commentaries.
- [Presentation #2003, Nocturne of the Anti-War Cherry Breasts](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2003-nocturne-of-the-anti-war-cherry-breasts/): Black ice of the moonrise hangs like a cold steel nerve of brass-white charcoal, but there is unrest to the electric sparks of its brilliant golden spill! All of our red chromasomes get older, O nocturne of the anti-war cherry breasts. The dial-tone is the best thing, the green onion slices on a plate like six heart attacks, in the nocturne of the anti-war cherry breasts. Nectar of the Mozart Requiem is a sapid portrait of the artist in block print, the muscles of the sea, and nothing else but a rash nocturne of the anti-war cherry breasts.
- [Presentation 1726](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1726-2/): My father with hands warm as high octanes at a dead jetport in blue leaves, my father who wisely thought nothing of Bartok's death, my father who lived in the past whenever I touched his echo, my father of gold still accruing in my memory, my father whose bones were burned one morning, who rusted shut at night and was whistled away into absolute poetry, my father who listened to rock music while carrying moist roots in his hands, my father who fell into the machinery of moody spinning wheels, whose enflamed iron spectacles longed for more nomad emergency moonrises...
- [Presentation 1698, October Mountain](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1698-october-mountain/): I shall infuriate this piece of parchment with a discussion of stars or some other unaltered thought which could be set forth as musician to this universe. Fragile parchment on a night of forgetfulness, reach somewhere into distant architecture, for it is the somber hour of the beast virus, stopped by no cries from our hearts. Watching the thunderstorm of countryside colors covering October Mountain, I agree that the almond moon is a trusted old image etched on the reflections of much older myth. So from rain-glittered thunderstorms I will stain your parchments with a falling darkness to remember.
- [Presentation 1636, Beach Mosaics](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1636-beach-mosaics/): You who made, after several trips to the shore, these beach mosaics, can tell how I have remembered the sayings which will not tarnish, how I have taken true voices and let them fall through my fingers, remorse of the heart the sleepy ancients admired which they used to create the star patterns overhead. You sought after comets and set your clocks to the Latin of an oldest Christmas. Tell me those sayings. Sing creation falling, touch it upon the harp, for you must remember that body which has lost all, lost all and lost configurations, and lost evening music.
- [Presentation 1544, Randy Brave](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1544-randy-brave/): The woods are stinging for glory. Acorns under a starry night. Before midnight, the hickory logs will be used to start another bonfire. The pony pulls on his rope, firmly tied to a post. Somebody has already chopped the firewood. Last night, the brittle ice formed on the pools. Somehow, you turn out some bitter camper's coffee--you let it boil for awhile in an old iron pot over an open log fire. If you stay in this territory, it will be because this bitter coffee tastes good in your cup after another hour of rain has fallen in it.
- [Presentation 1588, The Olde Columbine School](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1588-the-olde-columbine-school/): Bricks will teach you everything you need, especially five stories of basic brick arranged like a complete education. Or is it nine stories of brick, tottering high among the trees and distant sky until you wonder why? Brickwork tells its own story, has its own legend. That's how it is with the Olde Columbine schoolhouse, that mystery under blue-gray rainclouds. If you would walk by the Olde Columbine schoolhouse to observe the ruins of American history, I would be charmed, and I would not mind at all if you think of me in it laboring nights, getting it ready.
- [Presentation 1670, Ars Poetica](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1670-ars-poetica/): Poetry was something left in the stars like a trace of old smoke. It is the language of symphonies and the language of night in violent conversation. It is old words turned into a black art which saints may set forth like whirling fire in their religious fury. Poetry herself dreams of a complete midnight where the world's wild colors flourish. In the waters of dawn, you may come to the garden of poetry where the flowers are reddening out whatever remains of night's traces. Poetry is the neutron and the diamond, the french kiss under Spanish moss; brain vitamins.
- [Presentation 1186, Thoughts About Carrie in Autumn](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1186-thoughts-about-carrie-in-autumn/): Tangling across pine cone paths while the moon sets against dark indigo, wild raspberries are growing again this year. Time for the fiery poems autumn inspires. We are walking on moss beds as before. Wild raspberries are growing everywhere. We're like little children, eating the tinted fruit under burning stars. We keep our jewelled fingers high in dancing. "Come inside cool moon shadows," she says, entranced, "for I'll give you awareness of rhyme's inner sparkling." Wild raspberries are growing again. We hold lanterns late at night over the pine cone path. Fill your apron, Carrie, full with w
- [Presentation 1990, As I Step Into My Eccentric Chambers](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1990-as-i-step-into-my-eccentric-chambers/): I feel as I go into my room things which make me reflect upon lemon cracks in the sunlight and the burnt moon that lives in nothingness while old age comes to your mind, heart, and your soft, good face. I feel as I step into my eccentric chambers that I must find my way into a conquering eloquence, a Christmas for the veins of the new century drawn from the churchyards of the Fourteenth Century. It is just that there are not enough sonatas on the face of this planet, and I have not enough seaweed for your hair.
- [Presentation 424](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-424/): Kelly: I think Kelly is striking and marvellous although the common reaction must be different than this. I think of Kelly as the all-electric person, and I think she can listen to the music of the powerlines while she is just standing on the street. Kelly reveres the same red clouds that I revere, as they dare each other to move sharply through the sky at rakish angles. But often Kelly isn't here at all, often she is just the green leaves dancing in the giant oak which could be called Kelly green. Her favorite song is "Deep River."
- [Presentation 1078, Seashore](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1078-seashore/): Black horses, bronze sunsets and crystal mountains: fields of corn: clouds catching all the light of tonight's moon: birds with golden throat: clusters of kindly and memorable sycamores: wild cherries, wild roses and cranberries: lemons: weeping willows over honeysuckles: monarch butterflies and milkweed pods: cougars, bobcats and panthers: iris, dandelions, rhubarb: waterfalls, pools, moss: ivy and rosehips, gusts, breezes and thunderstorms: the honeybee and the hummingbird: seacoasts: peaches, pears, pomegranates: grottoes, canyons and mesas: oranges, limes, plums, dates, strawberries: fir t
- [Presentation 1104, The Book of Shanda IV](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1104-the-book-of-shanda-iv/): The dark spirit of gladness is her mirror in a garden of thoughtful dreams tonight. These are her petals brought from rivers of song. The river of everyone is the river of song. After a devotion to her I release my heart to her. My sunlight is released. Her mirror is painted with the hard colors of cherished maples. She steps before me, smeared lightning. If it is energy rising from her, it is the soft poems that shall follow her quietly. Dear dream after dear dream from her and we know it is a crystalline Sunday royal from rhyme.
- [Presentation 1103, The Book of Shanda III](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1103-the-book-of-shanda-iii/): This is something for you to remember from The Book of Shanda. I feel that I am aware of it whenever lovely wind is blowing on her, whenever the stars are shining over her, and there are millions of stars, honied stars. Summer shall warm her and the winter enrage. How easily you shall remember these words written in The Book of Shanda and take them to heart. I am aware of it when night falls upon her, and words for this are engraved in the silver book. I know that mysterious landscape where moonlight finds her sparkling darkness away.
- [Presentation 1044, Fireworks](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1044-fireworks/): Many rainbows of fire, many bursts against the slate of the night sky. Bursts within bursts. How can you describe fourteen balls of white flame pouring upward into the night one after another? Painting in the sky. Bursts of gold turning blue. Pieces of red fire holding in the air minute after minute without moving. Red, green, blue, yellow, white flecks all at once. Lasting and expiring flowers made of long gold flames. Hilarious carnations stamped upon space. A high trellis decorated by elusive spangles. Loud charges going off, the whole heavens a fireplace. Decimated cold cherries, a night network.
- [Presentation 493, Prom Dress](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-493-prom-dress/): The cold lace dress with four pearl buttons, a tapestry of snow, a gentle sash, frills under the chin. She seems to be covered with layers of lace, wrapped in deep drifts and piles of lace, with a corsage on her wrist. The dress is patterned with a whole book of different flowers, shy flowers tucked in around her sleeves and waist. Betty Crocker never made a better cake than her ivory creation made for twirling tonight, perfectly made to veil such a beautiful girl who may twirl or curtsey and not show the knee. She bows like frosted cake.
- [Presentation 640, Valarian](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-640-valarian/): I don't know if I would be a very wise person if I tried to describe to you a girl I met named Schaelina Valarian. I suspect her of things, of witchcraft and terrible cooking. She has almost convinced me to accept that torchlight of her smile, haven't you, Valarian? But she will break free and run if you try to start thinking that she is a nice person. She is made of snips and snails and sugar and spice. I don't write poems about the dead! I write poems about living people, praising the sweet lightning striking in them.
- [Presentation 586, Goodbye Old Coke](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-586-goodbye-old-coke/): Put me on that special list, the ones that really mourn the old Coca-Cola. That strong, bracing beverage which made merry millions of us over and over again, that special dark brew is now disappearing from the shelves at a rapid rate. I could still go out now and find some store that sells the old Coca-Cola, but how long can this pleasure last since the imposter, new Coca Cola, is being shipped in by hundreds of cases? Goodbye, old Coca-Cola, you bracing black turpentine, you stout after-shave, goodbye old Coke once costing a nickle.
- [Presentation 1037](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1037/): Princess Pocahantas, excellent lady, be near to me because with your voice you have given me tours of a hundred million petals of crystal and silverware and your calmness draws me into river heavens and light heavens and heavens of rain and heavens of freedom and heavens of warmth and redwood where royalty are forever dancing their marriage dances glittering with gold rings and roses rich. It is your art to draw me near, where I search for you in some golden mirror and ask "Has the divine lady been here?" Crowned by crimson fireplaces we share cheer and harmony.
- [Presentation 1108, Dinner With Andrea](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1108-dinner-with-andrea/): One ice-green candle, lit. Andrea, we can't go on meeting like this. One ice-blue candle, lit. But now that I have you here, I want you to know that pink was Beethoven's favorite color. Spoon on the left, then knife. Dinner fork, appetizer fork, dessert fork. How do you like your steak? (Medium rare, two inches thick, char-broiled, like Dad makes, juicy. Ask me another question.) What do you like for dessert? (Cherry cheesecake with drippy cherry on top or flaming.) Andrea, I've been trying to tell you this for a very long time. Here's the champagne.
- [Presentation 708, Cheryl's Grandmother in Greenforest](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-708-cheryls-grandmother-in-greenforest/): Let me introduce Cheryl. She is of the sign of the crab. Her grandmother paints roses, which are her very favorite flower. Her grandmother grows violets and does animal drawings in Greenforest. Near Greenforest there are three lakes where people go fishing for catfish and trout, not far from maples, oaks, firs, elms, dogwood. The leaves turn red, orange, yellow, and brown. Grandmother bakes apple and pumpkin pies, peach pies, cherry pies. Ruby is her neighbor, a very plain woman who wears plain dresses while working in a garden to grow tomatoes and okra. "Grandmother, I wish you were here!"
- [Presentation 444](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-444/): Jill is such a lark to think about, flaming red hair and freckles, my flaming flamingo. She is a good sport, too, acting like she invented the human smile. I don't know why she just sits there, looking at the wall and looking at me. I never took acid, LSD, but she makes you feel like you're on LSD all the time. Yes, Jill, there are dangerous liaisons that occur frequently in the night places. Your beauty is not exactly a relationship, and your fun does not precisely warm my own hearth, but once I swam the Sea of Rains.
- [Presentation 637, Darling Nikki](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-637-darling-nikki/): "I'm into this. I like gold, diamonds, sapphires. Sit down, Thane! I've got a lot of them. Because they shimmer. Mom took it away from me for a little while. It was Christmas. I always wanted one and I got one. And the next Christmas I got this one, sapphires. I love jewelry. It makes me feel real luxurious, like someone you see in Dynasty... fixin'!... where are you from, girl? Madonna is bad ass! Bummed? I was with him all day. I haven't been this fried since I was in Dallas. I got my license last week. Darling Nikki."
- [Presentation 760](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-760/): Touching an oak leaf in my old age I bring to bear on it the pain of Chinese philosophy. I am letting the oak leaf fall down into my old age like a leaf that will fall down into a meadow well or brooklet to be still on the face of the water and to fulfill the touching of the oak leaf to the old man in me, the old man that was once in my heart, no man more severe. The oak leaf will fall still more silently. It is an old man's oak leaf that will still fall.
- [Presentation 430, Ancient Explosions are Destroying My Sleep](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-430-ancient-explosions-are-destroying-my-sleep/): Your music, Doctor Rose, springs like chokecherries to the lips of the soprano all April. April may, or it may not. Last April, it was music, stars rushing their beautiful manners and bleak mannerisms, the sea-battles of September, your cold red High Church. Ancient explosions are destroying my sleep. There are too many angry tulips streaked with blood, too many stars with blood in their hair. Show me the blasted steel column where they hung Doctor Rose, his heart hammered with a burning television and a red clock, black star leaf in a planet, sword-sorcery, crushed midnight diamonds.
- [Presentation 1987, A Poem Ending With Dead Thunder](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1987-a-poem-ending-with-dead-thunder/): A castle shuddering with C-sharp major: a lake's silent, unexplored colors. This little world of a cloister with its churchyards under a diamond-spinning heaven near a forest and a town is identified by a moon-wheel, ready for Christmas snow. Here we can half-rest until one hundred rainstorms of brilliant gold spill onto smoked glass and towns fall into the sun. Such features, part of an ordinary flower, figure in ordinary sonatas, the ones in which Schubert proves his Egyptian roots. Hard to believe her clarinet: It's getting harder to believe that dream-work should unfold dead thunder.
- [Presentation 580, Jenny Perkins](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-580-jenny-perkins/): In my mind, I profile a night, using my dark ink, a night of antlers and wild deer, and cherries that grew beside black walnuts. In my mind I have arranged these drawings on a wall for you, Jenny, and shall add some more drawings of brilliant galaxies done in India ink, and shall place there also a drawing called "Childhood Among Wild Cherries." In my mind I profile a night drawn out of childhood, and I wanted your portrait there, beautiful and pure as the beginning of the first love poem. Ideally, this is what my poem must be.
- [Presentation 484, Lament for Marwood](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-484-lament-for-marwood/): It is raining now, in quiet little drops, and Marwood, the hangman of England, is dead. Is it nothing new for you to have raindrops on your fingers in the solitary dark crying of the night? Marwood, the hangman of England, is dead. There is no reach to this moon-touched universe beyond the hero's star; eagles drift through crimson foreign ports; and Marwood, the hangman of England, is dead. Marwood's black box is sunk in a grave, his skeleton of ebony and ash is ancient earth. Marwood, hear the gulls cry out Marwood, the hangman of England is dead.
- [Presentation 337, The Lemony, Frilly Poem](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-337-the-lemony-frilly-poem/): When she saw and in her I because that she because I because, when she, she that is, she, when she, for I knew, I felt, she knew of my rich heart before it purled in waterfalls melodiously. The temerity there, to try a night heartfall, there together, a deeper heart and deeper heartfall, singing heard through the golden strings. Dresden, Germany never knew a more beautiful ceramic cup to be made and decorated that is more beautiful to me than her lordly shining. She dashed with silver the dark orchards of the evening. Lemony, frilly love. My new darling.
- [Presentation 101](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-101/): Joanne Monforte works at Perkins, and she is cute and pretty and sweet. How carefully we watch her! Joanne is dark and cute and has dark eyes; she laughs and giggles and tickles the busboys. Joanne is concentrating on writing a meal ticket. A piece of her hair has fallen on her cheek; a piece of her hair has fallen around her neck. She has very sad eyes; she is very lost; she is very alone. She sways with friendship and blows her bangs off her brow. She nods. Her dark eyelashes have conquered the night. Thoughtful, quick, lovely Joanne!
- [Presentation 110, The Renee Poem](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-110-the-renee-poem/): I adore Renee because she is true to my idea of the human heart. There is something pink in her smile that reminds me of orchids, of my dream of my mother in a garden. She is incredible! A red mountain! She has an equestrian sensitivity to me, and I am surprised by the gentleness of her eyelashes. There is no form of beauty that she reaches for that she does not reach. Her hair is sort of chestnut and wild, and it appeals to me. I want to know more about the care she takes searching for pure roses.
- [Selections from the Sibyl series](https://burningword.com/2000/06/selections-from-the-sibyl-series/): [b]Sibyl Elected[/b] O for a tongue of ballots to express my vote of you, Sibyl, child of the reedy dawn, Temperate angel of the oratory of light, Cor anglais in a voting booth, Kissing babies with your poems, Collocation of all good votes, Poll taken by the stars Who stand elect, Hearing your politic song. The worlds heard your debate of fortune, Knew your two points about the issue of creation: That the young bud opening is not a pinched blossom, That all democracies of the soul have come. And that is your truth, little cor anglais, Wind's pitchpipe to capitols and cathedrals,
- [first thoughts from a season of drought](https://burningword.com/2001/09/first-thoughts-from-a-season-of-drought/): sufocatingly hot again without warning and i spend too much time in my car at the edge of this parking lot reading names from the book of overdoses i wake up always in the memory of a burning house look around you the land here has risen up only to fall back on itself the roads are lies and i have been believing them for too long i can't explain it any better than this i was never promised anything but still feel cheated when the blood i taste is my own and so i turn against my wife and son i walk from room to room in an empty house and there is a sound the phone
- [War](https://burningword.com/2001/09/war/): Up, down, sideways. My emotions are all over the place after the terrorist attack. First I'm angry, then depressed, then angry again -- this time at something else. One day I'm mad at the terrorists, the next at the FAA, then at our foreign policy, and finally at myself for second-guessing. Is patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels? Or is it hindsight? My friend Leonard and I argue each morning on our daily walks. "Nuke 'em," Leonard says. "No more land wars in countries where we don't belong." Leonard, a Vietnam vet, is suspicious of government policy. I share his skepticism about our leadership until I read an article I find on the Internet about the major players in our state department and their preparations for a response to the attack.
- [Bud](https://burningword.com/2001/09/bud/): The day that Billy died, I stole his last beer. Angela brought word on Monday morning that Billy's patrol car was found the night before, greasy side up in a dry irrigation ditch, with Billy in full uniform, blue and dead and cold.
- [Poems of hope and remembrance](https://burningword.com/2001/09/poems-of-hope-and-remembrance/): [b]Five Haikus[/b] by Anita Leverence ([email]anital@burningword.com[/email]) Tossing and turning Awake, I am, in the night Slumber will not come Safely protected In your arms, I want to be From all things evil Daylight brings laughter In the heart of the city Night, dangers abound Children dream pleasures Joyful and playful their lives Pray, they find their way Spring rain sparkles bright Winter, dormant life awaits Spring rain makes life new [b]Survivor[/b] by Michael William Giberson ([email]michaelg@burningword.com[/email]) Should the dead rise To take your stead,
- [Jack Duty](https://burningword.com/2001/09/jack-duty/): A millennium hence the Lord tours his dominions, Querying, probing, pondering opinions Harvested from hearts He esteems Well, regarding vital matters: the sprouting of seeds, The colors of comets, the assessment of mortal deeds... Turning then, it seems, To consult a merry soul, He listens closely to counsel well rooted in a lifetime of service, while mostly All of heaven patiently lingers. Weighing advice reverently tendered, The Lord tarries, laughs at pithy accounts rendered Parcel to sage fare, then fingers Lovingly the soul, and carries on his way. May He grant that I am there on that day.
- [Happy Birthday, Andrea, from Morgan](https://burningword.com/2001/09/happy-birthday-andrea-from-morgan/): [i](for Andrea Van der Veer)[/i] Do I smell cake? Or hake? Or steak? Or mayhap a pate?
- [denouement](https://burningword.com/2001/09/denouement/): [i](for Michael Koop)[/i] Grandma died suddenly and crushed us kids, Who were unprepared for The staggering loss That old people and families manage so well. The Family stumbled. Things were said That echo faintly, Even now. But Family is family, Which is why Grandma is a sweet memory, Not a bitter one. It seems to me that your Family did it right, Gathering, And your tears seem Much of denouement, Less of loss. Family is family, and your loss is Near to mine. So I didn't go.
- [one](https://burningword.com/2001/09/one/): the poem is just beneath the skin the skin is pale and easily opened what happens though is this i find myself out of words out of breath on the front steps with the roses i bought already fading with apologies falling dead from my lips and if i'm not a person you could ever love and if you don't have the strength to hate me then what? we are all afraid in the thin air of passing days held to the ground by the sheer grey enormity of the sky by the lack of possibility one among us just waiting for the perfect moment to step forward and be cr
- [this is the sound of crows](https://burningword.com/2001/09/this-is-the-sound-of-crows/): and she is there at the edge of the field she is gathering flowers and the sky surrounds her we are not lost we are not forgotten we are hopeful and the book of days is empty and in the town we left behind the poets have all been hung this is the truth everywhere this is the sound of crows after three months with no rain and she is there she is gathering flowers and they turn to dust in her delicate hands and the poem inside her heart was never meant to be read was never meant to be written and the dust falls through her fingers with the slow grace of angels
- [crippled](https://burningword.com/2001/09/crippled/): but the horse is crippled the rider blind the doors of the weak are always waiting to be kicked in and i have been promised rain for three months now i have watched the rivers fade to dust i have watched the hand that holds the flame reach out to the burning boy and the smell of his pain was familiar the sound of trains unmistakable and the screams of young girls as the showers were turned on this is destruction far beyond the feeble scope of god do you understand? the mother is starving and has nothing to eat but her child the child is sick and will be dead before
- [On the Death of Your Father](https://burningword.com/2001/09/on-the-death-of-your-father/): [i](for John Swenning)[/i] Enchanted - listening there to subterranean conflicts of love, Lad and Dad, dark echoes of me and my old man.
- [Joel Abel (2)](https://burningword.com/2001/08/joel-abel-2/): [b]Fighting[/b] we square off just outside the bar this all started when he looked me dead in the eyes and said: "what the fuck are you looking at, motherfucker?" he outweighs me by fifty pounds and stands six inches taller I'm hopping up and down in place and he's still trying to get his jacket off, while his old lady is screaming at him to kick my ass. he is watching the swelling crowd taking in all their bullshit and believing it, when he should be watching me I'm jumping out of my skin seeing everything so clearly that the edges of my vision threaten to grate
- [Explicit](https://burningword.com/2001/08/explicit/): I don't remember how I felt holding your naked body against mine, our lips pressed together, then silent mouthing words lost in that moment. We stayed there not speaking our pulses slowing, regulated by the silence, and it's a shame silence had to come then when I had a head full of ideas. It was just easier to lay there solemn as a London guard at post before change.
- [Love Poem 20](https://burningword.com/2001/08/love-poem-20/): Looking down into the clear blue depths of your eyes beneath my outstretched arms toes gripping the edge hard trying not to lose balance in the wind blowing my hair back like I'm James Dean and you're frozen in place the last second before a movie kiss your eyes solid clear clear blue if I fall, will you catch me?
- [Alicia Ranney](https://burningword.com/2001/08/alicia-ranney/): [b]The Library[/b] A whispered hush blankets the musty room. Pen and paper merge to pick up any hitch hiking thoughts. Pages rip, in disgusted fury, exposing their naked predecessors. The silence breaks by whispered halls. Eyes flutter, re-crust over in sleep. Shuffled footsteps and muffled voices drift by while half yellowing books stagger their dormant lives. Their tattered spines hunched over on shelves like gossiping wenches sunning their frail bodies in the fluorescent light. My gaze, focused, upon the hundreds of thoughts steaming from bent heads. Silent, unspoken. Dancing around the mind like forbidden taboo.
- [Red Light: Go!](https://burningword.com/2001/08/red-light-go/): if words were bullets my poetry would be a gun pointed at the head of change we all want we all want we all want to rid ourselves of red lights dead dog days walking down unairconditioned streets of degradation & explanations & contradictions & salutations we all want we all want we all want to condition for the moment and ready ourselves for the changes when we're never ready set GO!
- [T-minus Zero (and Counting)](https://burningword.com/2001/08/t-minus-zero-and-counting/): how do I find ways to get lower going down down down on the daisy chain game of chutes and ladders my number should be up in the air among the clouds yeah, way up where god plays golf on the weekends and when I get there I'm sure he'll let me play through
- [Joy Daussin](https://burningword.com/2001/08/joy-daussin/): [b]Over and done with[/b] blaze of fire splash of water fired bullet over husband and wife a love forever a daughter beloved over an old girlfriend a mad coworker a raving lunatic over over blaze of fire splash of water fired bullet over burn out dry up jam over blaze your fire splash some water pull the trigger dead [b]Tired[/b] I'm tired of waking up to the same old sun, beautiful as it may be I'm tired of going to the same job, no matter how much money I'm making Tired of the same house, the same neighbors and locals Sweetie, I'm even
- [i gave my brother’s wife an orange](https://burningword.com/2001/08/i-gave-my-brothers-wife-an-orange/): [i]for maryann...[/i] i gave my brother's wife an orange and bound our souls, hers and mine. not a whole orange, less than half - all she could bear. summoned there, throttled, loving her so long, i stood dumb, mute at her whispered, "i love you." i gave her an orange, she slept, and my heart broke. i gave my brother's wife an orange.
- [ask that you dream](https://burningword.com/2001/08/ask-that-you-dream/): constant sin cauterizes nerves essential for rousing God: your swaying, unsanctified, blemished, unwise, unesteemed, clinkered dream can metamorphosize into morning golden Paradise. ask that you dream.
- [Get Up, Sir!](https://burningword.com/2001/08/get-up-sir/): Up! Get up, young man, there's nothing wrong with you That I can tell. You've no call laying sunken still Three days dead in the evening heat and morning dew, The jungle creeping in on you to work it's green-eyed will. Him I understand, laying slack against the wall, No head, no legs, no arms, a bloodless shredded sack. He grappled with a satchel charge, left nothing else at all. A tattered scrim of dusky skin informs me he is black.
- [Internal Reflectance](https://burningword.com/2001/08/internal-reflectance/): God's gift of bilateral symmetry: we may, if we dare, sample the adhering ether outside the scrim expanding like thought, slow as time, purple cabalism. one eye one thought one hand, one hook - aural - glimpse, a flick - flash vision - Tantalus frustrated multiple internal reflectance...
- [Joel Abel (1)](https://burningword.com/2001/08/joel-abel-1/): [b]glass[/b] cinderella a glass house i imagined a million different things i imagined that boredom was a force driving me in all the wrong directions and that moments were special fairy tales felix the cat i imagined that moments could be magic and that magic invited an indelibility of time and reason and action and i imagined that we were magic and we were the chesire cat and doomed prometheus magic you disappeared i close my eyes and you appear [b]i once threw a pepsi[/b] i once threw a pepsi
- [Shaman](https://burningword.com/2001/08/shaman/): by Jerry Vilhotti, from his collection of literary precis ([email]vilhotti@peoplepc.com[/email]) When Tom was searching for Christ in Northshredder New York, where he and his third wife, a Boston "blue blood person", had spent a year at [i]The Society of Followers[/i] to get rid of the dirt they felt within themselves which was making the dark shadow on their souls grow, he reasoned that indeed Christ had feigned a limp, something like the one he had due to the polio that had ravaged his baby body to leave its affect on a twisted shrunken leg with a million pimples to colonize the upper
- [Snow](https://burningword.com/2001/07/snow/): Doc came prepared. He was wearing a parka and a heavy sweater when he got off the airplane. He had two big carry on bags and a huge duffle. Why did you bring all this stuff? I asked him. Doc looked puzzled. I left half of it at home, he said. The next morning, we got up early and drove up to the property that Jake and I owned in the foothills of the Sierras. Our cabin was on the edge of the forest high above a lake. From the deck, we had a panoramic view oft he lake and the surrounding hills. I had borrowed Jake's truck so that I could transport several four by eight foot siding panels to replace the ones on the north end of the cabin that the porcupines had chewed up. Doc asked what porcupines found that was good to eat in wood siding, and I said it was the glue.
- [Daddy](https://burningword.com/2001/07/daddy/): We finally figured out what to do with my wife's father. We locked him up. "Shoulda done it years ago," was Kermit's opinion, expressed at a family meeting called to decide the old boy's fate. Really, there was nothing else to do. His wife, no spring chicken herself, couldn't deal with him anymore. Who else was going to take him in? His brothers and sisters were either dead or as crazy as he was, Kermit, the youngest, being the exception. But Kermit, a bachelor, wasn't caretaker material. Kermit and Earl didn't get along anyway. "Never did, never will, "Kermit said. I once asked Kermit why he didn't like his brother. "Because He's a jackass," Kermit replied.
- [Bad Apples](https://burningword.com/2001/07/bad-apples/): Wanda here. I'm the director of Social Services at the Lutheran Home. I do a little bit of everything around here. I'm the chief cook and bottle washer, so to speak. Mainly I'm in charge of patient welfare. I see to it that the gals get new undies when they need them and that the guys get to the grocery store when they run out of oatmeal or prunes. It's a good job. Busy, busy. But that's the way I like it. And George and Ida are good people to work for. If you have to be in a nursing home, this is a good place to be. Nobody volunteers to get in here, I suppose, but we take good care of the residents. We go the extra mile. The food is good, and we give the seniors lots to do. There's something going on all the time. Talks, music, Bible study, exercise classes, bingo. Nobody gets a chance to sit around feeling sorry for himself.
- [for poetry](https://burningword.com/2001/07/for-poetry/): what you want is nothing less than everything this is not uncommon the history books are filled with murdered tyrants the ground with forgotten suicides i sit at this desk too often obsessing over unpaid bills i lose sleep i yell at the baby i watch my right hand chop off the left there is the day job and the night job and my pocket full of change for the pay phone i am the voice my wife hates to hear through fifteen miles of wire the man my friends speak badly of i have no use for poets for poetry or for the bones dug up by beaten dogs anger is a fuel
- [further west](https://burningword.com/2001/07/further-west/): this is further west away from the drowning girl's blackened bones away from my son's beautiful smile a motel room in a pointless town afternoon sunlight through half-open drapes and a partial view of the interstate in the bathroom a young mother twenty-two or -three naked in the tub and with her wrists cut wide open the postcards in the nightstand drawer left blank the bible stolen or possibly never there at all every poem a man might ever hope to write hung unspoken and just out of reach in the shimmering air
- [we](https://burningword.com/2001/07/we/): we are safe in this cheap motel room we are approaching drunk and we are mostly silent mostly in love i am still in the early stages of being a failed writer your sister's miscarriage is still four years away with any luck we will find other ways to measure these weightless spans of time
- [uncertain prophecy for the missing and the missed](https://burningword.com/2001/07/uncertain-prophecy-for-the-missing-and-the-missed/): pick a day where none of the wars involve you describe the sky and the taste of the wind do the hills spin slowly around this piece of land you call home? are you in love? there is a point where these questions intersect a place where your shadow is as tall as the man you actually are and somewhere in the back of your mind is a list of all the runaway girls you knew in the summer of butchered nuns a list of all the reasons they gave and now it's ten years later and still no one has stopped running it happens anger is only another needle waiting to be worshipped
- [psalm](https://burningword.com/2001/07/psalm/): you are not in the kitchen with jesus christ and he is not bleeding you are not curled up on the cold linoleum with your husband kicking you in the back your children are not dead tell yourself this your children are not dead weep bright red tears of joy
- [Chad Rood](https://burningword.com/2001/07/chad-rood/): [b]smoked...cooked[/b] thick bones and hanging skin are pinned under six wool blankets. white skull covered in red wet skin soaks in soggy pillow. oven iron holds oak fire as an alto woman's lounge smoked song cracks through a single speaker a cigarrette burns and sleeps moist in a coffee can of butts, buried, smoldering in the swelter, smoking like the steam off a pot of simmering water. a breath weezes and a throat gargles. watery blue eyes slip out from under greasy lids, they wiggle then freeze then fail to see. [b]sensation to thought[/b]
- [bigskywhiteclouds](https://burningword.com/2001/06/bigskywhiteclouds/): a novel excerpt by Jeffrey Allen Walker ([email]jallenwalker@netscape.net[/email]) MY APARTMENT'S MAGIC WINDOW (WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1994) Please let this be the last day. Let me get hit by a bus or shot or vaporized. Just don't let me have to come back here again. When I was a planner in Minneapolis I wrote a couple of articles that were published in some trade magazines and had a few guest columnist pieces in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, we called it the Strib. I never complained about seeing my name in print, but I wanted more. I wanted to write a great novel that criticized the American way of life and moral system. But in order to write, I had to understand. What better way to understand than to participate? But being an active member cuts down on writing time. It's a very mild catch-22. No bloodshed. Nobody's feet get cold. Nobody's guts spill out. As a result of internal debate between going out to experience and staying in to write, I did nothing except write a few guest columnist pieces for the Strib. No great novel, no critical acclaim.
- [Searching For Faith and Nachos](https://burningword.com/2001/06/searching-for-faith-and-nachos/): by Joe Kletz Quite some time ago I hit a pretty rough patch. For some odd reason, I was struck with an incredible amount of depression and feelings of worthlessness. My shoulders have always been large, available to all those I call friends to cry on. However, there's also a cross on those shoulders, one I bear with the utmost disdain. It seems that when you're the guy people come to with problems, you invariably have some yourself. However, everyone seems to think that you don't, and thus, you have no shoulders to cry on. So here I am, sitting in the dark on my hallway floor, crying. Not the kind of crying a man does when he slices off a finger while building a cabinet, nor the tears of a man after watching "The Dirty Dozen". These were big, gooey sobs of helplessness. Unable to do anything. Somehow, I got and went to the bookshelf. For some strange reason I picked up my Bible. Now, I'm no Bible-thumper, and I in fact have a few friends who, over recent years, become one of those people. They preach and attempt to convert. I do believe in God (or at least the idea of God) and know a good deal of theology, both from private schooling as a child, and personal study in my later years. I opened the Bible to a random page and decided to just read it...again, I had no idea why.
- [EREMIA](https://burningword.com/2001/06/eremia/): a novel excerpt by Aidan Baker ([email]aidanbaker@hotmail.com[/email]) My CD collection is like a calendar of boyfriends. It's not very extensive, my CD collection -- ergo, my love life, obviously, hasn't been very extensive... Every time I go over to my CD holder to put some music on, I'm confronted by this array of albums, songs, digitized sounds, that are, yes, mine, but all reminiscent of some man, some boy who used to be part of my life. Not even boyfriends, lovers, in some cases -- just some guy I had a crush on. I remember reading something recently about the brain and smell: When your brain records a smell, it records everything else along with it -- a record of your surroundings, your actions, your companions. When you smell that smell again, whatever that smell may be, all the other recorded information comes flooding back along with the olfactory memory. I think it's the same with aural memories. With music.
- [Statue Of Liberty](https://burningword.com/2001/06/statue-of-liberty/): a storella by Jerry Vilhotti ([email]vilhotti@peoplepc.com[/email]) "Why Biagi? Where do you go?" his wife said totally confused by his behavior since his father died. He couldn't say. In his mind as vivid as the color of her blue eyes, he could see himself again crossing the German school yard, where no longer a kindergarten existed, shooting from the hip and behind the wall of his aim staggered a "nazi" clutching at his throat as if a raw clam were crawling up through his mouth. "B", as his close friends called him, took up his jacket as if it were a rifle and left. He was all ready late for his date which was his seventh in just two weeks. He had a lot of catching up to do since his long walk from Northern Africa to Germany.
- [The Fourth Horseman](https://burningword.com/2001/06/the-fourth-horseman/): by David Arroyo It was an agreement I wasn't happy with; I had agreed to watch Garrett's dogs while he and his mom were in Florida. I tried to tell him I could only come over twice a day, that summer school would make it impossible for me to visit them in the morning; they'd have been better off at a kennel, but I was cheaper. He threatened to tell my mother about the Playboy collection in my closet, so naturally I agreed to the task. (Blackmail is perfectly legal in South Carolina). July became a series of painful repetitions: get up, go to class, rush across town, visit the dogs, go home, go to the gym, go to Garrett's, return home. It was the content though, not the motions themselves that made it painful.
- [the first body of the season](https://burningword.com/2001/05/the-first-body-of-the-season/): a year since the god of starving dogs the person i was left behind like so much shed skin the person i am content to sit by this second story window at twilight willing to believe the ovens will never be fired up again and next door a baby cries or maybe a mother and two days ago the first body of the season was pulled from the river and named a small moment buried beneath centuries of brutality but it stays with me whatever can't be forgotten worried to death instead
- [unspoken](https://burningword.com/2001/05/unspoken/): the hand is tiny the mother history softly out where the pacific comes up hard against the bitter end of the twentieth century softly where the front door swings back and forth in a hot breeze and will you be the one to step forward and stop this small tragedy before its inevitable conclusion? the answer spoken or unspoken is no and you are not alone the dogs will eat their fill and the angels will sing some serious fucking blues beautiful young women will sit at the open windows of second story apartments and cry this is happening even now this has always been
- [waiting for rust](https://burningword.com/2001/05/waiting-for-rust/): back to this again cold and grey and the eye of god closed tight against the raw sound of animals dying terribly you were hoping for something better a child of your own a small white house in a quiet town but here we are on beecher street where white is not a color is instead a waiting for rust or maybe just bleach spilled across a favorite shirt a minor shade of despair and even if the sun shines it casts only shadows and even if the windows break we've forgotten how to bleed and there is never a shortage of angry fists trying to help us to reme
- [anorexic](https://burningword.com/2001/05/anorexic/): you dream of being anorexic of glamor and speed and the bitter taste of bleach and i want a shotgun and a house in the country the promise of immortality and i laugh when you put the knife to your wrist when you put your hands through the bedroom window i either bruise you or ignore you and you always beg for more in love like a bad top forty song and i'll let you be an addict if you let me be a failure just show me that smile
- [noose](https://burningword.com/2001/05/noose/): another thirteen year-old suicide in the first tentative days of spring the sun big and beautiful and without heat the noose tight at both ends it's a small price to pay for electricity or the atomic bomb nothing crazy horse could've seen coming nothing reagan ever pretended to care about and on good days the highways still take the rest of us where we have to go
- [Doug Tanoury (2)](https://burningword.com/2001/05/doug-tanoury-2/): [b]Sparrows[/b] Sparrows perch on a narrow ledge Half hidden in the eaves Of my awning and from the window I can watch them mating A hop and a flutter of wings Another hop and more flutter And in the smallness of their love They resemble shot glasses Stacked two high One within another The sparrows have built three nests Half hidden in shadows of my awning Each one a weave of honey blonde grass Into a unkempt mass That is oddly symmetrical Like the disheveled hair of three girls Sitting side-by-side on a bench by the lake Each one tangled and mussed In the very same direction
- [Power Outage](https://burningword.com/2001/04/power-outage/): I met my first wife in an art gallery in Paris. She was an American girl who had carefully saved her pennies for a trip to Europe after graduating from college. That was my story, too. We spent a month together in the City of Lights. All we did was argue. When we returned to the States, we went our separate ways, but we hooked up again later in San Francisco. We got married in 1962. We were often at odds, but our contentiousness took on a different pattern after we were married. Periods of peace and calm were followed by stormy disputes. We let disagreements fester, then released our feelings in a torrent of angry words.
- [Holes](https://burningword.com/2001/03/holes/): by Joe Kletz There are 346 holes in the tile in the ceiling directly above my head. The next one has 283. It'd be easier to count them if they were all uniform, and I could utilize high school Algebra. There is no X, and I have no idea what Y is. I spend too much time staring at the ceiling. The television is on but the holes are more interesting. The glow from the box is warmth, and the noise is company. Soon I'll be unable to count anymore, as I slip deeper into my alcoholic state. I won't eat dinner again tonight. I'll drink several beers and lay on the couch and resume count. Will I be productive? When? I can't spend all night counting though. It's past midnight and must be up early tomorrow to ride the train to the metropolis for my appointment. Five days a week I go there. Meeting the professionals who spend a minimum of eight hours (often 10, occasionally 12 or more) on their surgery. Delicate and experimental, they perform. Bit by bit, the routine surgery goes according to their plans. Every day, they remove more of my soul, more of my dream, and replace them with artificial limbs like worthlessness and inferiority. I fight the process with tooth and nail, but secede in favor of meager salary and promises of "growth".
- [Doug Tanoury (1)](https://burningword.com/2001/03/doug-tanoury-1/): The Ghost of Madame Cézanne Madame Cézanne Haunts my study In ghostlike apparition She appears Again and again With cheeks painted a bit too red And makeup caked across her face Each time I see her I think she wears The countenance of strife The shades of sadness She never speaks but Sits silently in a chair Posed in resentment Her eyes angry openings Her mouth closed and pouting Her jaw clenched A face hard And humorless She is a model of domestic troubles Wearing a green hat Anna Kournakova She walks in shadows Comes in darkness Like a spirit Her movements invisible and silent Like the first weak breeze of spring Nearly here and half not She wears the sheerest gauze fabric That is spun by the phantoms of my fantasies Who work into the late hours of night Like the tired and weary women That labor for low wages In Indonesian sweatshops She wiggles into my bed whispering words And touching me like a Muse To awaken a Disneyland of desire Were I hang stappadoed From the highest ceiling beams In her most malicious dreams Bad Weather Whenever I saw him I felt the cold A kind of deep chill That passed through me Numbing my insides And the ice that formed On the outer edges of my words Was skin tingling In the same way His kisses were snowflakes Melting on my cheeks I would always wish him gone Just as I would hope For winter's passing And long for a trace of color In the pencil sketch landscape That is February And now that he is A season past There is mildness in the air And a stirring in the earth Of things ready to grow Wings Touching her in darkness My hands fly Across her skin like winged things Hovering for a moment Then gliding in sweeping motions That rise and dive to follow her form Aerial in their grace Ethereal in movement And when they come to rest Like a bird upon a perch They are weightless And she feels only a fluttering A brush of feathers Across her flesh On a night When touch became sight Precipitation In these early days of winter When drizzle floats weightless And hangs frozen in the air The wind in my ears Whispering doubt The damp against my face Frozen fear and The smudged grayness of sky Deepening suspicion That storms recrimination in the loud percussion Of hail hitting the awning And the downpour of rain against the asphalt As I stand unspeaking and exposed In a muteness like snowfall that Drifts peacefully in quiet whiteness Her words frozen rain and falling hail And me silent like a snowy night by Doug Tanoury (c)2001 Author's note: Doug Tanoury grew up in Detroit and still lives in the area.
- [Hearts & Brains](https://burningword.com/2001/01/hearts-brains/): by Melinda Fries [i]"What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten." - Charles Bowden[/i] [b]October[/b] (This is definitely not an explanation.) I talked on the phone to my father recently - something that doesn't happen very often - and he asked me what exactly it is that I do, although he still doesn't really want to know. I remember specifically the day I stopped telling him. I had just shown him a little super8 film which I thought was goofy, not a big deal. And he says, 'Oh, Melinda, are you still angry?' Jesus fucking God. Yes, you idiot. Why didn't you teach me how to fight anyway. You know, all that Samurai shit. Sometimes daddy, a lady has the right to be angry. I laugh as I say goodbye.
- [Double Action](https://burningword.com/2001/01/double-action/): a short story by Nicolas J. Aguina More than anything I had never intended shooting someone, but I did. He was lying on the floor. Open hands covered his face completely, but did not stop blood from seeping through every crevice of his closed fingers. He was on his back. Knees in the air. Rolling left to right. He moaned loudly, in too much pain to form words. He coughed, then his body cringed. His head and feet lifted off the floor. He removed his hands from his face only to spew saliva, deep red with blood. It was stringing from his mouth to his cupped hands, slinking down his chest like red melted cheese. I looked down at the writhing man and considered what next.
- [The Evolution of a Prose Poem](https://burningword.com/2000/10/the-evolution-of-a-prose-poem/): THE COMPLETE DRAFTS OF [i]PRESENTATION #2185[/i] Learn at the feet of a poet, what it is to create the germ of a poem from daily thoughts and emotions. Watch this germ take root and grow, being fed by inspiration. See it come to full-fledged ‘Poem' as you read this unique peek into Hunt's diary. At the end of the trail you will read the final, a hundred-word gem tempered by the process of writing. Editor's Note: Four years before Burning Word began it was my pleasure to publish [i]The Presentations[/i], a collection of hundred-word prose poems by William B. Hunt. [i]Cantos[/i] was the 69th poem in the collection, which was originally written for Elaine Thomas, publisher of interweave(zine). interweave(zine) is no longer online, but we were fortunate enough to salvage this manuscript and give it a permanent home. We hope you enjoy the journey.
- [Presentation #2202, Muscular Nocturne](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2202-muscular-nocturne/): I am carving my name with America's sweet blue tints directly against the sun that smokes alone in the sleepy gunsmoke of the clouds. I with a woodcut in my silver fingers see not your hands in hailstorms over iced blackberries painted against your red lips gliding into a bed's darkness. No, our dirt and sea planet has the touch of diamond-spinning heaven, a muscular nocturne giving its best effort and hill of roses to burning Martian rust. Nothing else can bless the bond of desire to the heart's inclination toward dreams. Restless stars gild our chamber of charms.
- [Presentation #2200](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2200/): Beyond her blue windowsill, the innocent stars rise in the cold night and burn in their bright silence. Art makes us golden, makes us gain a brilliant liberty in moments of love or moments of song. Midnight prayers: our lips turn white. Her green necklace chills. Soft light adorns her. The unspoken means we know the words to break every little world of dust. We know the celestial wheels are turning. We are bright and crazed. Summers, the little wheels of crystal, chrome and silver dash and burst. And the moments of orange peace. The light-causing process remains true.
- [Presentation #2199, The Last Medicine From the Heart-shaped Leaf](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2199-the-last-medicine-from-the-heart-shaped-leaf/): At the roots of this moment facing summer-shadowed moonlight is the wit-hammered iced green drink made crystal in a work of Franz Schubert, the dim, glittering blue diamond that he wrote. Just now, it is still the staining winter. Five days, we have no sun: we watch films on wine. It is really not believable, is it? On national television, our voice of culture. How the sonata takes hold of such a one who wishes it, like a cube of lightning or a suitcase packed with old age. We want the last medicine from the heart-shaped leaf.
- [Presentation #2198, Twenty-Six Degrees, Blowing Snow](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2198-twenty-six-degrees-blowing-snow/): At the roots of this moment lingering in the glass is winter bullying the State Highway as if there were no Christmas with hot-buttered rum and rosy-cheeked red angels madly beating their wings and playing little copper horns on greeting cards. Now the roads have grown strange with the spill of the six-sided crystal chemical burying us in moon-white in one night. As if there were no Egyptian, sand-colored sun somewhere to burn us back to heat and the open road! It would all make a fine novel, with snowplows assembled on the first page.
- [Presentation #2197](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2197/): This is the heart of our future: what we wrap our minds around is getting hard to believe, but the mind has its own fingers and wings, and is the clarinet in us, a medicine against our shuddering, words to come from our hands and mold a heart or a cluster of hearts against the dusky roots of our demands. The gunsmoke ceases. Colors are drawn down. The old drunk stands in the shadows with the red devil. The rest of the future must be more sweet. There is the pulse to consider, and it is such a beautiful question.
- [Presentation #2196](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2196/): Shuddering, I believe I hear Orion's flaming key. I'll make perfect words for this moment, like varnished, heart-shaped leaves under the unwrinkling angels who reveal blurring colors and live over the forests of my belief. This is such a mystery we have in our hands, furious, unspeaking butterfly music, something made of wood in the shadows of music. Every mind is as a prism to her burning lace. She is the blue Druid. One hundred warm years are many rainstorms to endure. So it is with this fantastic blood of sonatas, the fantastic blood of sonatas dangling red roots.
- [Presentation #2194, A Forty-Fourth Birthday](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2194-a-forty-fourth-birthday/): I shudder to demand of the unwrinkling angels (bright winged over damnation-burned orchards), chant me another century of perfect sonatas! Songs that will insist against the darkness like an idiot's bombs, gunsmoke and blurred colors. We living fires will cluster in the forest as if nothing were left but what we believe, night mysteries that force our awareness. Planet-shaped wine smoke as clear as clarinets is the key to the flaming Orion in our hands and irises. Inspire me perfectly where my words touch melody, and let my words cease brittle hearts from falling dead into the sun.
- [Presentation #2193](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2193/): The shuddering lightning is old: these colors crash down with elegance, wild flowers from the sky demanding entrance into this town. It is as if a pulse of immortality were singing before us in glory: thoughtful roses and celestial elegies. Go to your room disturbed only by sunlight and war at the mouth of the hurricane and laugh at the golden sonatas at the dusky roots of all dreaming. Shuddering lightning is at war with your melting bed drenched with the music of string quartets, and now a rainstorm falls through the darkness of a completely dim cake's densest thought.
- [Presentation #2192, The Declaration](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2192-the-declaration/): The names on the Declaration of Independence were people who risked a King's fury to rewrite the future by way of revolution. They dared this king to be their damnation. They saw another future in these waterways and woods as the sunlight here chipped wisdom into their faces. Studying maps by lamplight, they were surrounded by a country of damp, black earth below open spaces shuddering with lightning and rain. The names on the Declaration of Independence scorched history and set their moment apart in a way that still quickens the native pulse with the mountainous immortality old fingers create
- [Presentation #2191, Woodcuts of the Seminary](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2191-woodcuts-of-the-seminary/): A prism rests in the colored chambers. Now I hold it in my planetary hands. Here are the bluegreen shadows of the moon, underlined by smoke. I hold a woodcut, someone's keepsake for a hundred years. I offer broken words for the future from my colored chambers and ask cold questions in a little town. Melody grows. A hieroglyph of summer and of the future shall begin with this rainstorm, a distillation of fire. Meteors honey the night. There must be meteors also falling into the sun. This poem will be their elegy, or such is my curious morning thought.
- [Presentation #2190, The Persecuted](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2190-the-persecuted/): These are the moon's blue colors, or many of them. These are the rainstorms at the hurricane's mouth. These are the colored chambers that break our fingers, break them and outline our faces. These are the bones cracking inside our planetary hands. This is the smoke that creates isolation. This is the smoke that is the beauty of darkness. These towns concentrate on the heavens from their bluegreen shadows. I'll make words to ripple forever, placing them in the hands of one hundred years. There is so much rubbish up in the clouds. This is for the terrified persecuted ones.
- [Presentation 1855, Newspaper Headlines](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1855-newspaper-headlines/): Elements of truth clash in my recitation of the yellow sun done in the grand manner when I was alone. The mirrors shake under the fluorescent lights, blessing thunder-lit music that touches the structure. Those at the back of the universe are listening carefully. Behind the elms the well-masoned wall comforts the streets with its quiet music. That the universe is a poetry is agreeable and wild, as wild as thunder and birches and thoughts of morning. Glistening with victory, the glass panics (at great cost). One person is weary, remembering the unconquered and half-asleep newspaper headlines.
- [Presentation 1726](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1726/): The moon now floating distantly burns my one hour of contemplation out of October with a rude math. Thoughts are crushed poisonously by the wrong temperature. October is a meandering--a street without dreams, a wrong way. Your heart has still wondered what speeds everything. It is a good, long sequence and vision. This is the now we have been needing. Our need for Orange descends through the woods just below capable Orion, and Bootes, ghost with a shield. Gladly warming your hands by the crackling fire you are. A tin twilight waits for you--muddled confrontation, a blue Venus.
- [Presentation 1722, Atmosphere](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1722-atmosphere/): Rain's not quite quit. Green at the intersection says go. I remember nights like this in other cities when I thought of myself as the wanderer. Especially I remember Decatur, with its twenty-four hour eggroll shop that resembled a motorcycle garage. Intersections of individuals are just as important to us as memorable street and road intersections. Our cheerfulness has not failed to impress the back-broken night. Buckets of rain--what is there to say about that? I'm just being difficult. Beyond night, what is out there? Your reputation for coping is cracking. Scene requiring a moon spun in.
- [Presentation 1695, "Got Up, Took a Bath"](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1695-got-up-took-a-bath/): I got up and took a bath and got dressed, took my wallet and keys and said Hi to Donna and went to Winchells and said Hi to Bari and Paul. Then I talked to Paul and read the newspaper and drank coffee and ate an apple fritter and read meditations from Marcus Aureleus from the Harvard Classics and thought about his pessimism concerning humanity and looked at three pretty girls and was amused to remember a joke in the music of Alice Cooper. Then I thought about aging and a dream I had about my girlfriend Debra! Debra! Darling!
- [Presentation 1760, The Acts of a Brash Rose](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1760-the-acts-of-a-brash-rose/): In her last moment as a waitress and in her first moment before becoming someone who takes phone messages during night shift for an answering service, she thought of me, the one she always called dildo. I thought her hair was teased up and cute and I forgave. She was good on the State basketball team, and I decided I liked thin girls. It is time to dream of you, my love. We even cornered each other out by the traffic light. I even showed you family pictures, you even let me refill my coffee gratis. Bombard with kisses my pillows.
- [Presentation 1787](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1787/): [b]"The World Moves On the Back of a Turtle"[/b] (Old rabbinical saying) Arrange Suzan's ribbons in a thousand ways--there is time, for the world moves on the back of a turtle! See how reluctantly sunlight and shadow move each day up and down sidewalks. You have time to tell of your love, carefully to mention each article of it, for the world moves on the back of a turtle. You have time to listen to a child's mind growing, and very much time to comprehend and observe how each of a flower's petals is formed. You would rush your words, you would have to rush them, if it were any different.
- [Presentation 1696, Blue Shadows/Berkshires](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1696-blue-shadowsberkshires/): Blue shadows all over the Berkshires. The sea of evening is sad, a star burnt out. The wild forest may wash away like darkness. What is the black leaf of October? What is the bronze chain that holds the darkness to the wet lilac of madness? Coffee at the studio. The world's interiors. Full moon night and our amorous goodbyes. Ultimate green leaves. Blue night sleeps in my eyes like the madness of cellos. The mountain Hovhaness sang has left its titanic footprints upon me. That which the ocean has forgotten colors October Mountain and makes music on the horizon.
- [Presentation 1697, How Experimental is the Wet Moon](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1697-how-experimental-is-the-wet-moon/): How experimental is the wet moon, how expansively laid before you, super-troubador! How like Lisa is the hour of the footprints of red steel left beside the Mekong River! Every friendly mountain is blushed with mushrooms on a blue night. Small, icy waterfall, the Yahwist rain, talk the cellos through the interiors of your golded poem. Brooks echoing primary colors, you stop on the shell light, the twisted conch. Strong dog, say goodbye to the evening, the warm hearts of mysticism and beef. Phillipines, vary your music, disregard these variations. Opinions will structure their own variations. These circles force truth.
- [Presentation 1683, Tennis Star](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1683-tennis-star/): She stretches tautly, vigorously for tournament, yet her hair is soft and her features are perfect. Her eyes say peace. Her character is stalwart and her intelligence is real. She's got the figure adorable. Ruffled hair she wears casually. Her quizzical looks are friendly. There is a brassy perfection in her voice, a grasp of the issues. The light blends well with her complexion. She does not bend her head far from the vertical. She quietly questions our world. I'll describe her motions in rouge on white stock paper. Two or three lines can describe her appearance, friendly to consider.
- [Presentation #2187, #0!!!!!!!!Gals&OlderGuys](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2187-0galsolderguys/): Limeade on my tongue, and your heartbeat and your hair my feast, you barefoot girl innocent among spearmint leaves. Let us sleep and wet each other down with kisses until my fingers touch you and search for you more deeply, and your heartbeat and your gold hair press upon me. All I have left is a rusted heartbeat and a mind. I will give you a blue feel for love rated R, rated X. This is the dust of dense words undamaged by wind that sucks fruit for the blue symbols found in it. Just give me dense red rain.
- [Presentation #2185, Cantos](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2185-cantos/): In nebular cantos, the starry-eyed cantos, the evergreen century releases its spectacular flags. Electrical storms are innocent, gathering rain like old words in an evergreen-emerald canto. I view night after night them detonating the sculptured rose, the scripture of rock that night takes to the poor--a stillness of my own, though reason is my endgame. The graveyard is the reason the centuries storm the last red rose, pulse-red and rooted in the ancient blue moon mounted above the canyon. Don't burn the evergreens in a ritual storm. Let reason be your rose allegro, crystal, raven-hearted.
- [Presentation #2184, Schirra](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2184-schirra/): Words are the cup I drink from, containing my perceptions and restorations. Words set blazing in me even as I put them down, rivers of restorative color that medicate me as does Schubert here and there. Jeremy Fire, you must be honest to lift the great song. Don't let old memory get lost in the woods. The butterfly wing and tear light are native here. Words are the cup I drink from. Schirra I will remember when a lot of other things are ruins. Strike up the music for a page of poetry. "The poet speaks syllables of mangled silver."
- [Presentation #2160, Crosscurrents](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2160-crosscurrents/): In the river, crosscurrents. Under a stand of trees at the bank, ice shelves are covered with twigs and grass. From the bridgerail we ask about the age of the river in the sun, lovely for its alluvial deposit of memory in us, song sung blue. A poor creation is my dreaming if I do not learn from the dazzling dress of nature and the sudden wind at streambanks. An inner conversation like rain coming down in us is us, from age sixteen and forward. And these things are crosscurrents, memories of our married love and sirens raspberry, cranberry, vivid.
- [Presentation #2159](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2159/): Cool door, never changing your view that beauty is density. Your slanted window glitters more when dry leaves blow down around you, admitting more light into your chamber. Bless the dance that never breaks down, the detonation of finishing for awhile with the ongoing. Bless the tree of words that also loses something in winter and therefore admits more light. The chords break off on the carillon, but their delicate structures, their delicate music makes a marathon of our good days, an unbroken lustre. I etch a mountain shadow. It is my tribute, and I do studies of the rock.
- [Presentation #2158, On a Photograph of Sibyl](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2158-on-a-photograph-of-sibyl/): Be steady in the fire-river of scholarship and the dead will hear. Life and death, photographic negative, photographic positive. Some daughters live; some were alive and are now memories, but the configuration of them touches an eternity. In the wild, we all love in unison. The snowstorm like shredded coconut has hit the city. In this moment, we hear a word from Sibyl. She has a formula in mind to stop the clock. She and Heather share these rich understandings. I shall write them down in this English of mine and find a great home in my unnamed need.
- [Presentation #2157, Antiphon](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2157-antiphon/): In ordinary language there is fracturing we can hear, serious dischord in the lyre, like hammering that makes gold foil. It will be a lasting name in the moon, in the paint-by-enamel autumn, that shall tarnish the memory. Close your eyes, move about in the real, and pass your days blessed and wrapped up with chimes. The clock of your life has brass all over it even as your sundial stands in the cold wind. You could denote the breakdown of good days and be the answerer standing on the edge of your blood, merely writing of trees.
- [Presentation #2156, The Black, Protestant Autumn](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2156-the-black-protestant-autumn/): Silence requires effort, an effort to give mystical language a musical intelligence. We'll go bathe in the Hungarian woods where there are unisons in the branches. We are one thing the cosmos is doing in the heat and solidity of this moment. All sentences end, and you can't stop the clock, not even for Heather. Shall I write this down, that I have thought of trying to hammer words into posterity, enchantments of rhythm and your nearness, a root sound, a detonation in song, a penny falling from the clouds? How black and Protestant is my autumn--moving, intrinsically Cherokee.
- [Presentation #2155, Natural Girl](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2155-natural-girl/): The silence of the snow is as mystical as our daughter, who lives for the woods and her words and sentences. Her voice is a lyre. She lives in each sentence and has found the rhythm of rivers, perhaps even the sound of butterflies, those very children of heaven that crown a meadow's greenery. Sound off now, every corner of nature, for her--Cassie. Who has painted. The entire forest. With touches and smiles. Create glittering music every morning to soothe the troubles that bury us in treble-tarnish. Sit with me at the edge where heat is concealed, Cassandra.
- [Presentation #2154, Confirmations](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2154-confirmations/): Torrential--in the branches--time comes down, and Sibyl can't stop the clock. Every word that Heather speaks she wants to hear before leaving the world. Nothingness enchants nothing. Show her the roots of your sound, Heather. Let your dense coronation ring--go to the sundial and redial it, find sundown's second down. Enter with your heart's chords the universal orchard universal in violet. Something is blackening over the rainbow, perhaps it is a rock fracture in the mountains. And so you will hate to listen to the blood's sea-shadow. You run away to sea and I to tea.
- [Presentation #2153, A Cup in Sibyl's Hand](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2153-a-cup-in-sibyls-hand/): Sibyl I do remember when your heart was concealed and your blood glittered through my constitution as each evening broke down. And I am listening for new music from your snow-white imagination, strength-giving and searing. Tell me anything but farewell, let us not indulge in violence, reach to me out of the dust that underscores the aria at my stylus. Oh, deadly water-shadows, there is a spider in the night sky when I only want to place a hot chocolate cup in the hand of Sibyl. Hold it steadily now, Sibyl; in deepest old age, with trembling.
- [Presentation #2152, Sibyl and the New York Chimes](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2152-sibyl-and-the-new-york-chimes/): Sibyl right now has this plan. It requires her to watch the clocktower. She is expecting Heather to arrive. What was that scratching sound at the door this morning? She will sell off her jewelry to stay in New York for another week. At Carnegie Hall, she saw keyboards bathed in floodlight. What an imagination you have, Sibyl! I must see you again. Your heritage is no more solid than the chimes that strike in the clocktower, and these poems are my own chords struck off at odd angles. Could we not hold hands once more under blue winter chimes?
- [Presentation #2151, Sibyl and Heather](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2151-sibyl-and-heather/): Sibyl and Heather (shall I write this?) are speaking the same language these days. They live in each other's homes and, to be concise, never get out of the same bed. They dance enchantingly there, stopping at nothing, slam-dancing under the sheets. Some days the natural universe is completely mysterious. Autumn is ripping a lot of vegetation out of my city just as I speak. I will hold with the density of her thoughts and the mirth belonging to my utterly full pool of spring water which she is. Sibyl, whom I shall see again before this century's out.
- [Presentation #2150, Setting the Earth to Music](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2150-setting-the-earth-to-music/): My enchanting home, my home in metal needs no name but needs order, rhythm and form set against chaos, and detonation of Black Seas of chordless music. I throw my glassful of pink champagne at you, your heart no stronger than a violet in mountain shadow. How many small roots lie under the world's firm soil. I have earned the right to determine the secret message in the glaze of mist, and I shall write it down in my native language in all stages of its natural life. I can read the mountain's chemistry by day, and night's sheer flaring.
- [Presentation #2149, We're a Constellation](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2149-were-a-constellation/): There is a democracy to the glittering color of the strings in motion, a lore of light, a sun in a night sky. Out at sea, someone brainstorms the birth of a new string quartet. They can almost blurt it at the waves. The prism in my dream is gone. I remember the fifty primary words I need in December, including ballet, champagne and embroidery, and I know I have as many things to say about the bright side of the moon as about the dark side. Setting sun seen through a frosted windowpane. Stand back and we're a constellation.
- [Presentation #2148, Colorations](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2148-colorations/): The tears in your Cherokee snow-heart bend my life (which is a badly dented teakettle) toward spring water, and my eyes and memories in blood-structure sear face and heart. I have heard autumn's glass rivers glaze and break free again and again, and I drink to them. Black aircraft enter a singing death. The music in the painter returns: is sent forth and returns. So glitter we from Haydn to Dryden and from Dryden to Haydn. Of unsound design is the cola made of fresh violet, and only halting celebration in our years. Exemplar! Exemplar! Whose clutch drifted.
- [Presentation #2147, Nursing the Words Along](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2147-nursing-the-words-along/): There is density in my need to express. I wonder how long this will be true, how long it will be before the words might cool down. I wonder if I will see them cool down. I wonder if my eyes will see a panorama before me every day. I would sit with those who have given up everything for their word-jewelry, their word-sunlight. I should write more about the sounds of empire, but we fear empire if we want a human world. We don't want the chords to break off. A drenching afternoon rain improves the weather.
- [Presentation #2146, Fusion Force](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2146-fusion-force/): Cassandra, say what you mean in this cool afternoon, say what you choose, sing the song in every detail until it detonates in the hearer like a hundred angry roses onstage with a lightning unforgettable--we shall listen as though you were singing from the unreal. Such violet achievements resemble words from the Cherokee tongue. I am alone now with the Cherokee word for "tears." Moisture is invitation to experience the highest love. The heart must be moist if we are to make our researches among tints and clutch the universe to our core. Our future shall be fusion's power.
- [Presentation #2145, Forest Spring Water](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2145-forest-spring-water/): Cassandra, say what you mean when those hypnotic ideas come to you. Bring them to life--capture them for the natural world like the paintings on glass that we preserve. Your ideas are the fresh spring water gathered at its source in the forest, a place where I have been. We shall travel there, wandering through the underbrush, for we know it is there. We are there in reality, we are there in the imagination. Morning is best for water-gathering, before the delicate heat comes to root in the electronic petals of afternoon. Music is water from the deep.
- [Presentation #2144, How to Write a Letter](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2144-how-to-write-a-letter/): Mirth in her eyes in the morning. Her eyes are etched and glittering by the door white-hot from fresh sunlight. Breathe easily, say what you mean. The years are dry leaves now. Summer dust touches the chamber. She found a coin engraved with sheaves of wheat. The oldest shadows hide under the newest. Dark cherries are the design on her personal correspondence, and now she must write a letter. All of her letters are self-portraits, but she has a passion to break through to her reader. She is otherwise imprisoned. Corresponding with a musician, she can be sonorous.
- [Presentation #2143, Summer Cabin](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2143-summer-cabin/): A tarnished refrigerator--if I close my eyes I can see it again and move about from room to room. It was a family heritage, with a timepiece that chimed all over everyone. There was a sundial there, where the family played checkers and would drink in the lilac. The destination of the young was to be music and the unreal. Conversation resembled the universal stirrings we sought words for. Only the night sky was a solid, the fixed stars like syllables feeding the imagination. When Rebecca arrived, we spent an hour with her, having apples and chocolate that year.
- [Presentation #2142, The Vanilla Mood](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2142-the-vanilla-mood/): Chords in the blood--listen to their answer at the door to all human beings. The entrance to our nerves breaks with our andiron-black rainstorms. Each bone finds a cauldron to dance in. Each light, each mistress near my face, Polaris in the syllable, voltage in the remembering, giver of passionate breath. I cannot see a Job in the sun. Vanilla moods pass by in a parade--it was a wild self-education. You with solid-colored hair, you, Joseph, deserve the oxidizing thread of goodnights which are four-fifths flame, having several souls storming deep inside of you.
- [Presentation #2141, The Thought In The Music](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2141-the-thought-in-the-music/): Detonations of warm violet this autumn. Back and forth we'll drink farewells! Love on another evening returns as a strength on this one. The heart is seared by each thought in the music, music for a painter at tea who finds more than tea glittering in the china cup. There is a cruelty we know and feel right down to the bone. We are alone with it usually, kicked by its eternal blossoms and formulations until we think we have found life. Such is my constitution, what I am made of, what my face and heart share with the wind.
- [Presentation #2140, Aspen Concerto](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2140-aspen-concerto/): POSTMODERN CITY, BLUE EXPRESSION ELEVATED TO original rules and orders of life--Aspen, I'll cling to the old, forgotten words. To the stars with our inspiration, to Aspen, ad astra! We'll taste mint leaves in lime rickeys at Roaring Fork Valley and end all weariness in a lift viewing the world. Pine Creek Cookhouse. Bandit Trail. Red Onion Alley. Aspen Mountain. Winter and skiers bedazzle each other on endless fast powder. Poised psyche on Aspen Mountain. Ski-jumpers, slalom contenders above the quiet of old hotels. Nature is relentlessly present. Our mood speaks its narrative. The mind is
- [Presentation #2127, With Rilke](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2127-with-rilke/): Rilke of ten thousand shadows, slant-rhyming death-gold, come where Dylan Thomas drank, at Stag and Deer Inn under the ruby-eyed tiger-head. Recite correspondence of Zeus and Hera detailing eight hundred years. Again Zeus's thunderhead will detonate. Other gods will laugh at humanity's lost cubist musicians, our actresses with four mansions on three continents. But don't damn our string quartets, balalaikas, dense fugues and astronauts watching earth's ultramarine strand drop away. Zeus himself admires earth as a green steel raindrop. O lift a last bracing whiskey at Stag and Deer Inn and eter
- [Presentation #2106](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2106/): Storm traces. Someone is writing this all down, getting a state of mind in order. Necessity is in the design of music and in thundering words whispered by the steam of heating pipes where reflections sparkle and dry. You would return to the sky from your cold chair, leaving behind an old heart with its white horses and reckless wild roses in broken shadow. In a hundred years the wind chips away at the memory of those burnt while flying so that these words as beautiful trees offering no shelter descend to nothing and do not shine in the shadow.
- [Presentation 1998, Cellophane Hands](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-1998-cellophane-hands/): Songs are burning at this moment, spilling out upon the page in sun-patterns, or like an earth full of roots. Lingering in our glasses is winter and its six-sided chemical, moon-white. Teardrops fall upon your page of mathematics describing the dark red medicine of the future, but far over the orchard there is a new growth of stars. Night is certain of your pulse, and photos of glory in America are like pink smoke touching our cellophane hands. Somewhere deep inside of us, colors crash down upon the Oliver Goldsmith Telescope in the grove. Angels respond furiously.
- [Presentation #2070](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2070/): Her face at three-thirty in the morning is a mysterious page of determination and heart-driven sorrow. Her hands are the scorched music of other faces now grown bone-blue from the small-town life, a life that is now street maps hammering in moondeath. Yes, there is a pattern in this thunder, momentum to the shadow I speak (true even in a night tasting of smoke), and a physical eloquence to the breeze beginning in secret stone passageways. The green lamp of silence shines an excellent distance before saying goodnight. Children of nature circle the colonial village bell.
- [Presentation #2066, Hundred-Year-Old Wines](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2066-hundred-year-old-wines/): Dry moon, dry-ice moon on the necklace of stars. History dreams of citizens equal to its electrical work, equal to its imagination and night. Her shattered words burn in clusters near hands and faces that terrify. When the breathing darkens, the lover's touch breaks off in my hand, and red lips map the composition of crystals and elements. An eighth rest and a laugh, an eighth rest and a laugh. Energetic harvest- rhapsodies descend from a grand heaven flame-driven to churchyards beneath lamplight. This will be the electrodynamics of objects in motion, queen of hundred-year-old wines.
- [Presentation #2100, A Girl Five Years Old](https://burningword.com/2000/10/presentation-2100-a-girl-five-years-old/): Chocolate chips melted on her chin, her heart spills over. Her voice is full of the poetry I will need in greeting old age with love. Her voice has the Christmas colors that never sleep, full of charmed mornings and singing lovebirds and the waltzing she does after school. She is a rose in the wind, a sparkler blessing everything we believe and every mystery in this keepsake. Her cherry, cherry smiles are as lovely as any daughter's ever, and I want you deeply to reflect and contemplate upon the sacred faith in the future this voyager creates in us.
- [So This How Agape Reads](https://burningword.com/2002/08/so-this-how-agape-reads/): Eyes wide open for the Fall -- it's a season as well as a fact. We can't exchange these tired carrots of our bones for brand new pencils in a box. Consider this a thank you note: I'm grateful you refuse to skip the parts of life that tell our eyes a bomb was here. All our ankles, all our knees are arguing with Waterloos of daily chores. I think of times when touching toes were take-for-granted music bars. Five days after surgery, I roll your socks in condoms over wet erections of your will. Vacuum while you shower and dress, squint in case I'm missing dirt. Bending down to pick up soiled underwear
- [Joseph M. Faria: four short stories](https://burningword.com/2002/08/joseph-m-faria-four-short-stories/): short fiction by Joseph M. Faria ([email]jmmf@msn.com[/email]) [b]one day, one night[/b] Bob is an upstanding citizen. He smokes big, black cigars. He says they're Cuban to those who don't smoke cigars. Bob's hair is gray-speckled white and on his upper lip he wears a slippery thin mustache that looks as though he painted it on with a magic marker. He says to those who don't dye their hair that it's naturally black. Betty, his wife, is a blonde. Her eyes are stone blue and her lips are full and expressively red. She keeps a diary. She uses a tiny copper-colored key to open the clasp. She writes diligently everyday as if she were errantly snowbound. She is quite utterly alone until Bob returns from the office. The words in her diary are not the same words she uses in real life.
- [Sneaky, Enit?](https://burningword.com/2002/08/sneaky-enit/): a short story by Marian Wilson ([email]pobdjw@nidlink.com[/email]) Gerald dropped a box of rat poison into the hole and grinned. He was sure that stupid fox hid her babies there. "Damn varmints," he muttered through his gapped teeth. Gerald was a hunter and it didn't matter for what: ground birds, squirrels, rabbits. He kept some of them for meat. It didn't take much to get by, no wife or kids to feed. Some people shoot for the racks, then create furniture of balanced glass over a maze of antlers. Others say they like the taste of game. Gerald didn't try to fool anyone with excuses. He just liked the hunt, the challenge of the kill.
- [Three Months](https://burningword.com/2002/08/three-months/): short fiction by Kathy Fish ([email]mrsfish1960@yahoo.com[/email]) [b]July[/b] A hot breeze blows through the bedroom window. Jake Harvey looks up from his tattered Huckleberry Finn. The elm trees whisper. Their limbs bend, telling sign language secrets only he can decipher. People come and go from his little room but he doesn't notice. He listens and watches and waits. [b]August[/b] Swaddled in the moonlight that streams through his window Jake Harvey likes to imagine himself the offspring of ghosts. He closes his eyes and raises his fingertips to the ceiling but he does not levitate. He sleeps and dreams of his sister Emily.
- [This Old Chair](https://burningword.com/2002/08/this-old-chair/): We divided your stuff on the tail of black limos creeping the ragged streets. My sister took the pretty towels -- the ones that said: "Don't touch, I stain; Don't fold, I tear. Don't use, I bite." All that was left was the lump of a chair that cradled the crumbling straw. From here, you argued with walls, with a god you couldn't see but chose to trust no differently than ducks fly south imbued with promises of warmth. An afghan draped across the back to cover holes your spine had rubbed. From here, you flipped like a caught trout in the moon's gray pail.
- [between seasons](https://burningword.com/2002/08/between-seasons/): ten years spent in light blue rooms with the vague forms of women always walking out the door with this image of children in barren villages burning the american flag and dancing on the graves of crack babies always hovering at the edge of my sight maybe the taste of a stranger's pale luminous skin when the phone rings at three in the morning and a voice that i can't immediately place says [i]i left him[/i] says [i]i love you[/i] and it's always at a point where one season is giving way to the next where the boyfriend has been arrested and the daughter is screaming and the
- [notes from a man who has given up on sleep](https://burningword.com/2002/08/notes-from-a-man-who-has-given-up-on-sleep/): a headache just after midnight as i try to remember why i ever started writing at all a day spent walking empty streets from a forgotten part of my life and i am tired of the past and of my job like an impossible weight and i am tired the house is old the windows distorted and i'm afraid of the day my son begins to build a wall between us i'm afraid he will not be able to escape being my son and this scorched taste in my mouth is all i've kept of the five thousand wasted days spent trying to save the woman who loved pain from herself or maybe i can finally
- [It Ain’t Over Until…](https://burningword.com/2002/07/it-aint-over-until/): I've got a streak of mean. Yesterday I had to take the bus to work because the chariot was in the shop. I love to ride the bus because you meet all kinds of friendly persons from the lower socio-economic stratum. They're far more interesting than rich white people. So, anyway,
- [Survivor](https://burningword.com/2002/07/survivor/): [i]for Brent Stalker[/i] If the dead could rise To take your part, And you lie Bleeding in their stead, The silent covenant Between you bred Of comradeship Would not falter. Do not rage your solvent heart. Do not rue God's bleeding altar.
- [Memorial Day 2002](https://burningword.com/2002/07/memorial-day-2002/): I'd nearly forgotten that room but lately, things appear in the narrow, dark space between door and linoleum: Fingertips of palm fronds; fragments of jungle fatigues; love beads we wore under them. Acrid, burning wreckage of a helicopter delivering mail and Christmas dinners to a hot LZ. Foul, strange aroma of mama-san improvising meals out of fish heads and rice. Thunderous roar of F-4 Phantoms climbing in tandem, urgency in their contrails, distant varumpf of bombs in mountains. Sing-song complaints of mothers moved from ancestral villages, their children clinging
- [small self-portrait against a bitter landscape](https://burningword.com/2002/07/small-self-portrait-against-a-bitter-landscape/): the boy is possibly dead already and almost certainly dying and still the box that holds his body is thrown into the water ten years old you understand and drugged and bound and raped and i am spitting in the face of god i am sitting next to my son's bed and listening to his gentle breathing i am finding the point at which i would kill without regret
- [final psalm in the book of rusted chrome](https://burningword.com/2002/07/final-psalm-in-the-book-of-rusted-chrome/): in the crush of early morning fog in this country of missing fathers i am waiting for myself the dead have all been born as birdsong here and the god of starving dogs paces my street with a young girl's blood staining his smile i let the curtain fall back quietly let the light of the poem flicker and gutter out but always a half-beat too late the house is on fire without warning the baby is awake and screaming and all the doors are locked from the other side this is the story i remember you telling the final psalm in the book of rusted chrome and i never asked
- [psalm for the stray dogs in a town i no longer visit](https://burningword.com/2002/06/psalm-for-the-stray-dogs-in-a-town-i-no-longer-visit/): not love but fucking in a domesticated room where the pictures have all been turned to the walls you call it religion maybe or maybe you've learned to say nothing at all maybe the illusion of escape is all that's needed i have bought this lie myself
- [a town too close to my own](https://burningword.com/2002/06/a-town-too-close-to-my-own/): my wife dreams of blood and what can i do? one a.m. and then two and we sit together in the baby's room listen to his tiny breathing while insomniac poets pray to an indifferent god while the newly dead wash ashore in california and what is the end result of history but this? five children in a town too close to my own who find a stray dog in a park and decide to torture it decide to hang it from a basketball hoop with a dirty length of rope and beat it with sticks and at some point we drift back to sleep with the hope of waking up clean and at some point
- [Renate Moody: Prose and Poetry](https://burningword.com/2002/06/renate-moody-prose-and-poetry/): [b]Don't ask me to play Uno[/b] I saw my dog's eyeball on the ground this morning. Okay, I didn't but my brother did and he was so upset that he cried. He's 10 and a big boy and isn't supposed to cry so I knew I had to stay in the car. Mom hit Diamond with the car but I think he was okay. Diamond is our dog, and boy is he smart. We taught him to play Uno this morning. He sat outside the window of our house and we set his cards up in front of him and he points a paw at the card he wants to use. He gets it right usually, but he is a beginner you know and so I win most of the times when we play.
- [in the rape camps](https://burningword.com/2002/06/in-the-rape-camps/): imagine the men forgotten and dead in fresh pits imagine their wives and daughters at gunpoint in the rape camps no one will ever admit or no don't imagine it it's already happening in a country that has nothing to do with your own life it's over and done with in the time it takes a boot to crush a newborn's skull this one small sound alone should be enough to bring us all to our knees
- [proving dali’s existence with words and the spaces between them](https://burningword.com/2002/06/proving-dalis-existence-with-words-and-the-spaces-between-them/): not quite silence in the gentle hum of early afternoon but maybe something softer than the screams of crows something more human than the room of hanged men and how many years now since my last escape? how many hours wasted staring into dirty mirrors or through warped panes of glass? what i see is that at some point in the future i will be asking my son for forgiveness at some point i will speak of my own father for the last time will spit out his ashes while faceless men in the towns i've escaped from beat their wives and girlfriends with the brutal fists of love
- [RENATE MOODY](https://burningword.com/2002/05/renate-moody/): [b]Two sides of the same coin...[/b] I have been the hunter I have been the hunted I've tracked down men with the reckless abandon of a she wolf in heat, lusting after their hairy, fur covered bodies and their howls of ecstasy as I sucked them dry. I have been pursued, coaxed out of hiding by sugar-coated words: "I'm not going to hurt you. It's okay to come out." only to feel a gun poking in my side. I have run in circles, howling at the moon, getting nowhere, my frustration dripping like spittle from my mouth and sticking to my sweat coated fur. I have fought battles with my heart.
- [CAROL PARRIS KRAUSS](https://burningword.com/2002/05/carol-parris-krauss/): [b]Charles Town[/b] Spanish moss curtains fluttering in the wind A gauzy layer over the banks of the Ashley. Down by the market Ebony skin glistens Sculpting a basket of the reedy sawgrass. The old market echoes cries from the past that trail a carriage of modern day belles. Sidewalks sizzling Paddle fans twirling down Meeting Street people shuffle. Over to St. Mary's with whispers from the tombs over to Poogan's Porch Miss Zoey speaks. Lazily sipping on the side porch trying to catch the afternoon's breeze. Over on Queen Street tantalizing smells waft calling your name.
- [Gentleman](https://burningword.com/2002/05/gentleman/): It's really a matter of style. A man can piss in a perfect arc if he remembers to adhere to a few simple rules.
- [violence: an exercise in holy breathing](https://burningword.com/2002/05/violence-an-exercise-in-holy-breathing/): and he hits you then brings you flowers or he just hits you it's not a story anymore it's a religion and i choose not to believe the earth will be consumed yes but not in my lifetime the days will pass too quickly and the reasons for leaving will fade and it's always someone a friend an old lover or a sister-in-law and just beyond the brutality are the sounds of children playing in the street the approaching scream of sirens after a man i've never met finds the brakes too late and we call this autumn and the sky is a brilliant blue and without warmth the sun is old beyond years
- [JOEL R. S. YOUNG](https://burningword.com/2002/05/joel-r-s-young/): [b]at the joining of sky and horizon[/b] the prints now left behind in sand will soon be washed away the fires that burn bright tonight will all burn out by day remembrance does not come for those who carve their names in stone their memory decays and fades as even stone erodes.... no guarantees implied or written come with human birth no standard set nor written guide can say what life is worth one day life is, the next it's not, the next new life begins that life will live, that life will die - and that is how life is.... the author writes - his paper fades; and so his story dies
- [Kelley White (2)](https://burningword.com/2002/05/kelley-white-2/): [b]What do you eat when you're not in love?[/b] stones river mud salted straw still I don't grow lean [b]Stacked[/b] I have a deck and every card is the Queen of Hearts. I deal my own hand on the bedspread solitaire every face up card is her and every back your hair. [b]Cybernetic Reification[/b] control through feedback -your mother- turn into a thing spittoon crankcase bag jug overshoot and undershoot bitchgoddess pantywaist give it a name whore [b]A "use of force" incident[/b] S. told the guard she had been hit with a chair.
- [CHRISTOPHER SWAN](https://burningword.com/2002/05/christopher-swan/): [b]Sunshine State[/b] In wood gray comes soon before falling down. Inland Florida being no exception, across the road a gate creaking "Keep Out" where the rusty sun sets, and a seven-year-old girl tore her dress on the barbed wire fence behind which a dirt road disappears in a field of burrs and weeds and nothing ever happens. The sun seems distant, yet it bakes the air from horizon to horizon; and the moon, when it gets close to the land, turns maroon, turns the land a kind of sinister shallow pale. The three of us watch the bonfires down the road set by a man my mother
- [Finding Her Husband](https://burningword.com/2002/05/finding-her-husband/): a short story by Joan Horrigan ([email]joanhorrigan@msn.com[/email]) Every time I pull into the guest parking at Benson's Tooling Company and walk around to the shipping entrance, I know that Tim is going to have a story about one of the employees that he just can't wait to tell. "Well, if it's not old Mike from Mills Metalworks! Howya doin', Mike? Makin' a load of sales and a lotta money?" "Fine, sure, and you, Tim?" Tim, who had been in Shipping for twenty years, always said he knew what really went on at Benson's because of his vantage point here at the shipping entrance, close to the corner from the main lobby. He knew which people and what products came in and went out of the company, each and every person here involved with getting the product out the door and what each one did to get it out. He knew all their stories and all their troubles because, for some reason, everyone confided in him, probably since he's the oldest guy here.
- [composition #2:](https://burningword.com/2002/05/composition-2/): [b]malevich dreams of taking his own life in upstate new york[/b] or maybe i talk casually of a church brought down by an earthquake until the bodies of children are pulled from the ruins maybe i grow tired of the endless white space between obvious truths and firm beliefs of the lack of money that has come to define my life and what attracts us to words written on paper of course is the fact that they can be burned we all claim a god's eye of our own and we all let the starving starve we let pollock wade through broken glass as long as he promises to bleed because a person gets what he deserves
- [Endgame](https://burningword.com/2002/05/endgame/): Getting old is no fun. The worst thing about it is that you hurt all the time. I've got a bum knee and a bad hip. Old war wounds. I don't know what I would do without Advil. My cousin, who is younger than I am, says old age is not for sissies, and I agree. When you get to be sixty, your friends start dropping like flies. I lost another one last year. An old college buddy died of cancer. It was his second go-round on the cancer front. He had colon cancer, but he survived that. A few years later, the disease showed up in his liver, and that got him. A few years ago another friend discovered that he had a tumor the size of a golf ball in one of his lungs. They took that out, and he's still alive and kicking. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. You're always looking over your shoulder when you're old enough to keep an AARP card in your wallet.
- [begged](https://burningword.com/2002/05/begged/): up these stairs to this room and all the times i tied you to the bed all the times you begged and all the ways your father died seven years now coming down hard windows broken doors left open the soft drip of the kitchen sink i know i'll find you crying i know every moment will be wasted there is no great trick in living the same frightened life again and again
- [weighing the word love on broken scales](https://burningword.com/2002/05/weighing-the-word-love-on-broken-scales/): how many years now wasted weighing the word [i]love[/i] on broken scales? there is no religion to be found here only stigmata and the taste of dust empty room after empty room until you finally reach the one you call home in this corner a man shot in the face from less than a foot away in that one the woman who loves pain screaming for the baby she never had you will become one or you will become the other and either way your future has been determined there is nothing left but to be nailed to it
- [HARLEY HILL](https://burningword.com/2002/04/harley-hill/): [b]Tongue Tied[/b] I don't know how to say things anymore, Whether what I say is any good, Or merely crap that has collected At the mouth of the pipe All those years since shutdown, All those years ago, blasting outwards, Yellow and greasy, fetid, stinking Forced out by the flood. [b]Rat Tailed Wanting[/b] Long tailed want gnaws hard, old friend, grinds at the heart, digests old dreams, defecates desires we never had when young. Our days of poverty are gone - days we walked through Simi heat, pregnant with hope, dreams packed tightly, seeping out our eyes. We have made it, as they say, made
- [SAM VAKNIN](https://burningword.com/2002/04/sam-vaknin/): [b]The Miracle of the Kisses[/b] That night, the cock denied him thrice. His mother and the whore downloaded him, nails etched into his palms, his thorny forehead glistening, his body speared. He wanted to revive unto their moisture. But the nauseating scents of vinegar and Roman legionnaires, the dampness of the cave, and then that final stone... His brain wide open, supper digested that was to have been his last. He missed so his disciples, the miracle of their kisses. He was determined not to decompose. [b]In Moist Propinquity[/b] Hemmed in our bed, in moist propinquity,
- [Doctor’s Report: Patient A](https://burningword.com/2002/04/doctors-report-patient-a/): a fiction short by Kimberly Townsend Palmer ([email]KimberlyTP@aol.com[/email]) Patient A is a living museum of femininity, and serves as transitory evidence of extensive neo-geo-psycho-socio-eco-political movement. Designed and built in the second half of the twentieth century, she first gained philanthropic prominence with a cynical, witty, overeducated man eight years her senior, Charles F. She stayed faithful to Charles F. for six months, but the intriguing tales of his former sexual partners, then numbering in the several hundreds, irretrievably seized her imagination. She left, and never looked back. She shops for new men the way other women shop for new shoes.
- [the poet drunk](https://burningword.com/2002/04/the-poet-drunk/): the poet drunk at three in the morning mops out the bathrooms listens to the sound of bleach crawling into the cracks on his hands he peels potatoes and cuts homefries and hides in the cooler for another beer stepping out he checks the clock four hours until he can return to his typewriter and his mind is a numb tunnel filled with empty rushing trains [i]sleep[/i] is a word that still holds meaning [i]surrender[/i] is another the poet hungover at noon is too tired to bleed
- [three small poems found in the ashes of the burning house](https://burningword.com/2002/04/three-small-poems-found-in-the-ashes-of-the-burning-house/): [b]sacrilege[/b] up close you are anyone and then even closer no one i sound like my father here how long has this been happening? * * [b]image of the virgin mary appears on a factory wall in juarez, mexico[/b] which god do you pray to when the baby is born dead? what does he say? what can he? * * [b]afterimage[/b] walking through february rain with jonathon and there is war not mine and not his and he laughs as he curls five tiny fingers tight around the sky all any of us want is everything
- [riopelle’s pavane: a monologue](https://burningword.com/2002/04/riopelles-pavane-a-monologue/): we approach the age of possible cures slowly if we number the dead we do it backwards and starting at one thousand two will be the person you hold most dear and maybe you'll never reach it maybe you'll be forced to choose a child or a spouse or even a younger sister and what happens is this we make love on the living room couch in the coldest part of april the sky is a gift from magritte the houses on this street somewhere between obsolete and sinister you ask me again how my father died and i tell you again that i don't know he was alive and then he was on the kitchen floor
- [Vengeance On The Danube](https://burningword.com/2002/04/vengeance-on-the-danube/): a short story by Alan C. Baird The modern city formed by the ancient towns of Buda, Obuda and Pest basks in a riot of color - many leaves are flaunting their autumn tints in the warm afternoon sunshine. The majestic Danube flows through the midst of this glittering metropolis, with its historic bridges linking together millions of souls into a sophisticated city known as "The Paris Of The East." A sleek cigarette boat drifts offshore, through the sparsely-inhabited outlying precincts of Budapest. It's a lovely day to be on the river... for some people. Resting on a narrow ledge at the end of this streamlined craft lies an anchor, partly hanging over the water. A four-meter chain attaches the anchor to a human ankle, encased in a bright orange hazmat isolation suit. From behind the suit's protective Plexiglas mask, a terrified face peers out, eyes desperately straining to look downward.
- [PADDY GILLARD-BENTLEY](https://burningword.com/2002/03/paddy-gillard-bentley/): [b]the dark ages[/b] sitting at the cafe caressing piquant coffee a decadent slice of cake half eaten it is essential I do not finish the coffee before the cake the cafe was crowded my mind was crowded too swarming with thoughts and ideas napkins and empty cigarette packages the usual evidence of my fervent tirades but the napkins here are linen I looked up just as you entered I've seen you here, at the Mediterranean Cafe many times and I wonder who you were what you did in your life what were your passions I didn't have the luxury of knowing my grandparents so age is an enigma to me
- [The House on Bretton Heights](https://burningword.com/2002/03/the-house-on-bretton-heights/): a short story by Tom Sheehan ([email]tomsheehan@attbi.com[/email]) For nearly a month, from a cliff shoulder on Pressburn Hill, August rain and sun taking turns at him, birds accepting him, Brisque Validarn watched the house on Bretton Heights, watched every movement, change of light, visit and departure. From his post the house, on the very summit of Bretton Heights, was about half a mile distant, sitting there the crown jewel of targets, its parapets breaching the skyline. One precious stone, slipped with dark ease from that crown, would last him for a year; Nice, Bordeaux in the old country, any beach without reservation in the New World. He watched, he clocked, he measured, he posted entries in a burgeoning logbook. When a light went on or off, he bent over his logbook and marked the time, the quadrant of the big house, calculated routines. When a FedEx truck crawled up the long driveway, Brisque swore he could hear the gears at work, both coming and going, as the drive back down the hill could prove challenging.
- [stoned](https://burningword.com/2002/03/stoned/): you are stoned beneath cold fluorescents you are two hundred miles away from lake erie in the first summer of your son's tiny life and the news isn't good a tumor possibly or a body dug up or maybe as many as a hundred maybe the neighbor disappeared and his wife found hacked to pieces in the basement all of this talk of a simpler america that never was and do you still dream of the cages your grandfather helped build? of the women herded into them at gunpoint? even here three hundred years later in this air-conditioned room there is till the smell of burning witches
- [poet found naked in the room of mirrors](https://burningword.com/2002/03/poet-found-naked-in-the-room-of-mirrors/): or this man i know with his blind devotion to an invisible god and his fear of the niggers and the fags and the jews do i laugh at what he says? at who he is? or maybe his hatreds are nothing more than a distorted reflection of my own maybe he's only the monster i can see myself becoming my father reborn or any of his friends drunk and laughing on a sunday afternoon fifteen years before the missing girl is even born and maybe you're the same i will have us all condemned before this day is over
- [YUN WEI](https://burningword.com/2002/03/yun-wei/): [b]RUNNING RED[/b] Blood doesn't drip, It runs Like a river of fugitives. A blanket is music notes, Warmed and feathered Until an eight-year old cheek Can sing its softness My cheek As my mother's lips poured a story The story of my great-grandmother In the Cultural Revolution The officials had raided the house But it wasn't enough So they took needles of sleek bamboo And pricked her fingers One by one It was a common use of torture in those days Effective They found the secret stash of opium and jewels My mother's lips had become soundless But I could see the words roll on the blanket
- [The Seer](https://burningword.com/2002/03/the-seer/): a fiction short by Claire Dandridge Selleck [email]claires@burningword.com[/email] There was nothing extraordinary about the way the day began. The alarm clock rang at the usual hour and, however reluctantly, I rolled at once from my bed vaguely aware that a dream had been interrupted. Scraping the hair back from my forehead, I stumbled to the kitchen and eyed the sink full of dishes still submerged in soapy water from last night's false start. As I paused to watch the mist rising from the river that flowed some one hundred feet from my kitchen window, I was reminded why waking to dirty dishes no longer bothered me. At night I had only the four window panes to reflect on as I washed up; unless the moon is full, the darkness here is impenetrable. In the morning I had this dancing river to entertain me, the swirls of steam flowing upward like a lavishly choreographed ballet. I could linger as long as I pleased, the dishes a guilt-effacing alibi.
- [CHRISTINA CROFT](https://burningword.com/2002/03/christina-croft/): [b]Collision of Madness and Sin[/b] stealth mode activated shiny, jagged memories escape; soar scorched blasts of my reused, mental sponge feast upon an uneven, blood red core which seeps with mutilated slivers of misplaced truths, wretched acts Sh! I dare not speak, nor even think decomposed dreams of wailing; torment haunt my midnight spirit; twist into a merciless rage hindsight bites with icy fangs that slowly drip with no one to accuse, except my unspoken name scent of an aged soul smoldering cries out weeps of regret forge from within my victims now will sense my collapse
- [Lions](https://burningword.com/2002/03/lions/): My neighbor's television mumbles all night through yellowed wallpaper. Beer commercials, game shows, Star Trek theme at 3 a.m., I play puppet to ventriloquist, lip-sync every sales pitch; sing their vacuous anthems. There is safety in this stale room. Sleep will not come. My mind sprints, I am a step behind. Traffic snarls, rises from the streets. Sirens sing to me, divas fill the night until morning's air spills through my window, sun warms the floor. Outside, lions pace among crowds of strangers in their stone Serengeti; they wait for me. Lions first app
- [Surface Tension](https://burningword.com/2002/02/surface-tension/): To skim across the aortic arch on surface tension, no more than vibration, a referred tremor, a memory of a dream glimmering across the milieu, a half-sensed
- [Thousand Deaths Plus One](https://burningword.com/2002/02/thousand-deaths-plus-one/): a flash fiction piece by Zinta Aistars [email]zaistars@kzoo.edu[/email] "Don't shut me out," she whispers to the back of his head. "Would die a thousand deaths for you, know I would, know I would, you know it," she whispers with her lips right up against the rough short growth of his hair. Her hands reach around to touch his face, turned away from her, his body turned away from her, his eyes turned away from her. Light fuzz, bit of rough, cool cheeks, she smoothes her palms over his face and contours her fingers to the shape she has created. From one micro-magical cell deep in her body, eighteen years ago, she created this face.
- [defining myself unclearly in the season of crows](https://burningword.com/2002/02/defining-myself-unclearly-in-the-season-of-crows/): standing in the yellow light of december trying to believe in war casting a shadow along the edge of whiskey hill road i am not a ghost yet but have been playing with the idea of disappearing have been considering that what i may actually be afraid of is happiness that what i may actually be in love with is fear i spent twenty-seven years fighting not to be my father's son then married a woman who wanted only those things i was unwilling to give found myself in a falling house with the need to inflict my anger upon others and it's not that i'm opposed to vengeance
- [in the empty house where no one believes in empty houses](https://burningword.com/2002/02/in-the-empty-house-where-no-one-believes-in-empty-houses/): in the empty house where no one believes in empty houses truth is not an object with any value a man says [i]i love you[/i] to his wife or he doesn't and either way she has already left him a child is found murdered in the bathroom and then another and then three more the words [i]there is something wrong here[/i] are left unspoken the refrigerator hums and the clocks run backwards and the kitten is two months old but will have to be given away and why should it live in the face of these five drowned children? the answer depends on who you ask and it's too fucking hot today
- [A Letter From Ben](https://burningword.com/2002/02/a-letter-from-ben/): a short story by Joan Horrigan ([email]joanhorrigan@msn.com[/email]) Now that I got your attention and you got the privilege of my generosity, I'm gonna make you a deal. This ain't no car dealer's deal. This here's a genuwine way to make some dough. Just to show my honest regards to you, I'll let you in on what happened and why this here's gonna work. Now, I ain't no good at writing, so you gotta bear with me in this letter cause I talk out loud as I write. What started the whole thing was Charlie got sick. Now Charlie is the only friend I got in here at Statesville. So I couldn't let him down when he asked a favor of me.
- [Foster Care](https://burningword.com/2002/02/foster-care/): a short story by Felicia Sullivan ([email]felsull@hotmail.com[/email]) One Tuesday morning, Claire Foster's mother died. There had been rumors. Sam Johnson, who delivered the early edition of the Daily News, would see her stumble in heels too high, white vinyl skirt creeping up her thighs, edges ripped, snagging on fishnets -- coming off the Eastbound 5:51AM train from Manhattan. Kate Taylor, during her morning jog, would spurt past Diana Foster and pause, "Are you okay?" Kate squeaked, out of breath in her pink parachute-jogging suit, matching fanny pack and stereo headphones. Scratching her arms, skin gathering under jagged fingernails, Diana would mutter a drunken "Uh-huh" and then trip and fall onto her lawn. "There were definitely needle marks," Kate speculated to cashiers at the local supermarket. People in my town loved a good story. "I didn't want to help her up," Kate had whispered to Betty Samson while they were nestled under a scalding hot dryer, hair tightly rolled in sky-blue plastic curlers. "You just never know!" My mother delivered these stories to my father every evening like the late edition of the news.
- [Cathedral](https://burningword.com/2002/02/cathedral/): I walk reverently, footsteps soft as feathers falling. I am humbled by giants, asleep in Muir Woods. Solitary sentinels reach for heaven, scrape the sky. End of daylight tiredly slants, filters through canopied roof, ageless shadows of God's cathedral, illuminating my path. Overwhelming silence enraptures me as angels sing of God's gift to man: the sacred redwood. Cathedral first appeared in [i]Melange Journal[/i].
- [Those Red Shoes](https://burningword.com/2002/02/those-red-shoes/): phone rings. he wants me, I can tell, or is it those red shoes? sounds made by high heels on reflective, wooden floors bedevil him. I am someone else in scarlet spikes. my skirt swirls freely in the warm air surrounding me like a swarm of honey bees. my legs, longer in those red shoes, belong to a seductress; a stranger to me. I am rhythm. my breasts bounce upon the off beat. he is at the door. my pulse quickens as I slip on those red shoes, and one thing leads to another.
- [Cardinal Directions](https://burningword.com/2002/02/cardinal-directions/): I am a compass on which polarity has been reversed. I move in directions I feel I should move and do not bother to ask if it is right. People question my feet as they propel me backwards and my feet scuffle along, concentrating too much for idle chit-chat. They will not ask me to my face because they cannot find it. For the world has many eyes, none of which can see.
- [Half-full Moon](https://burningword.com/2002/02/half-full-moon/): I'm through measuring my life by pounds and inches. I come to myself humbled, asking forgiveness but I will not listen. I pour the last sorrow down the drain. It is the new year, my glass is empty, the half-full moon urges me to celebrate.
- [Planning Nothing](https://burningword.com/2002/02/planning-nothing/): Today I move without rising to my feet. I think without being conscious of thought, and act through the inaction of my soul. The world is a series of complications, focused on now, past, and future none of which is relevant. I plan my day by planning nothing.
- [Static Touch](https://burningword.com/2002/02/static-touch/): My thoughts are only of your eyes when you said you loved me and I believed you. I can trace the outline of your iris in my mind, piercing blue like static electricity. As you scuff your feet across shag carpet and touch something metal, the shock dulling nerve endings long enough to forget how cold the surface is underneath.
- [After a Fight](https://burningword.com/2002/02/after-a-fight/): a collection of micro-fiction by Liesl Jobson ([email]jobson@freemail.absa.co.za[/email]) [b]Amputation[/b] At 19, the gold band on my child-thin hand was a ligature binding an artery of joy. A gangrenous bomb ticked under my skin as the sharp metal chafed my swelling flesh. Before the surgeon (sterilized in righteousness) removed my finger I visited the jeweler -- and smiled as he cut off instead my wedding ring. [b]After a Fight[/b] Defeated, I speed read books, thrash through webzines, hum mournfully and dive into debt. When I'm spent and broke, my conqueror says, "Write". The echo returns unbidden and involuntary, "Right!"
- [Religion](https://burningword.com/2002/01/religion/): Breathe me. Part your lips, draw me in deeply. Hunger for me, want me, I am all you require. Taste me. Lick my salt, I lie thick on your tongue, like ash spewed from a volcano. Feel my tremors, thirst for me in the desert. I am like rain, I will wash you clean. See me, watch me love you. Close your eyes, feel me enter the temple. Love is religion. Religion first appeared in [i]Coil Magazine[/i].
- [Phu Cat, Vietnam-1970](https://burningword.com/2002/01/phu-cat-vietnam-1970/): Explosions varumpf across red clay valley, tongue-fucking my ears. Micro jet loops, carves new hole in earth's shoulders. Sound delayed by distance, sight not far enough. Monsoon rains death, but cannot cleanse. Addictions birthed here, reunions in hell gather here. Heroin high, never been lower. Mama san knows, gums betel nut; red mouth, no teeth. Smirking, we will all go, one way or another. I fly away, never leave. Phu Cat, Vietnam-1970 first appeared in [i]Coil magazine[/i].
- [Exile In Room 101](https://burningword.com/2002/01/exile-in-room-101/): Life has had its way with me. I am exiled, to a chair in this hotel room, counting lines in wallpaper. Lines so straight, sharp you could shave with them. Imprisoned with me; vertical cellmates. My life revolves around me, gliding along walls. Resignation brings retreat, refuge, in the written word. I rise above, free from form, look down quiet, velvet halls leading to a lobby full of strangers, checking out, resuming lives I have not lived. Exile in Room 101 first appeared in [i]Coil Magazine[/i].
- [horse dying in the here and now](https://burningword.com/2002/01/horse-dying-in-the-here-and-now/): ahh christ the horse bleeds like something you almost remember stumbles away from the teeth towards the light and by the time you arrive it's all over the throat vanished the flies beginning to gather the song all but forgotten the carnage rises up swarms against your eyes like one of your father's stories from viet nam like your mother or even better your sister how many years ago? four at least maybe five left arm broken two teeth gone and still she wouldn't call the police said she loved him said she loved the next one too and the one after that and
- [the poet takes his place in the actual world](https://burningword.com/2002/01/the-poet-takes-his-place-in-the-actual-world/): fuck this idea of poetry reaching back to embrace the past i will not worship the martyred or the immortal it's enough to be stuck in this town of defeated old men as they shuffle aimlessly up and down anonymous streets it's enough to watch the factories burn and i have driven in every direction and i have seen nothing but more of the same and i am only waiting for the news that reagan is dead i am only waiting to hear from a friend who hasn't written in a decade that all is forgiven and i have a job that will never be anything worth describing and i have a son who will someday
- [Transcendence](https://burningword.com/2002/01/transcendence/): [i]"...but man he made to serve him, wittily, in the tangle of His mind." Robert Bolt, A Man for all Seasons [/i] There is scientific evidence that objects on the mesoscopic scale (meaning sizes ranging from a few nanometers to a tenth of a micron) tend to be
- [SHILOAH MATIC](https://burningword.com/2002/01/shiloah-matic/): [b]Ruminations over morning tea[/b] Maybe it's time to start again and reinvent myself in warmer weather wearing wool only when winter thoughts plague me at night as I miss the morning snow and white Christmases I used to know and white pages of books printed on good paper not newsprint, brown and rough as I turn pages of my days to see what comes after the heroine decides that maybe it's time to start again and reinvent herself on other shelves turn her life from drama/mystery into bestselling comedy erasing all the misery of missing midnight cups of tea with people giving sympathy
- [RICHARD JORDAN](https://burningword.com/2002/01/richard-jordan/): [b]Therapy and Dreams[/b] I pay a therapist $90 an hour to say Aaawww... Which is what I want to hear. And she's awfully cute with her little pout and pucker. So, you see, it's entirely symbiotic. The problem with me, she surmises, is that I'm afraid to get in touch with my inner child. She may have something there. For I have this recurring dream of a beautiful blonde vixen in pigtails, hiding Turkish Taffy under a Mickey Mouse tank top. It's always hot and humid in my dreams, so gooey globs stick to her nipples as she pulls out the candy and offers me a bite or two. But its only a dream!, I yell,
- [human landscape](https://burningword.com/2002/01/human-landscape/): there is a point where solitude becomes religion a small house in a wide open field beneath a brutal white sky two young sons sleeping through the hottest part of the day and a husband who may or may not love you who may or may not be with another woman as you stand in the back yard feeling the curve of the earth beneath your feet and you are too small to break the silence of the day you are afraid of the sound of your heart something this fragile cannot last forever
- [on becoming the person i am](https://burningword.com/2002/01/on-becoming-the-person-i-am/): and i am not the man who tells you your scars are luminous i am poor company even on the best of days am worse when the sky is an iridescent grey and the rain begins to fall what i remember from my childhood is my mother crying in the bedroom while rocks pelted the front of the house laughter from the wooded lot across the street and the recurring dream of fire spreading from room to room and i wanted to scream but nothing came out and so i grew up to be a poet disappointed my family with each new choice and learned not to care there are ways to survive on
- [Sleepless Night](https://burningword.com/2001/12/sleepless-night/): a short story by Carolyn Morris ([email]amethyzt213@yahoo.com[/email]) The rain beat softly on the pavement outside. It carried the scent of the ocean and the flowers in the bluffs it had crossed to get to the girl's window. But she did not notice it. Her senses, once attuned to the sights and sounds of the world around her, had grown dulled. Perhaps it was age that had done it, closing her eyes to the brilliance she used to see in everything. More likely it was the man lying sprawled out beside her in bed, as usual taking up as much room as possible, as if even in sleep he wanted to consume and stifle her. She had grown dead to the pain, the aching, the horrible nothingness. Feeling nothing was worse than feeling something. She had found this out over the course of the years, slowly, gradually, and without realizing that her life and soul were being diminished.
- [Michael Crowley](https://burningword.com/2001/12/michael-crowley/): [b]I Once Knew a Woman[/b] I once knew a woman as sharp as a spike, (or is it a tack?) and as hard as nails, who thought she could fly and blazed like a meteor -no that's not right- sparkled like those sparklers that are so hard to light. I studied her body, would read it like a book. She had moveable parts and parts that stood still as the wind in the trees with places to kiss and down on her arms. And this was a time when women had hair and were sharp as a tack or that razor blade you always played with and always got cut and the blood would be much darker than the red you imagine.
- [Joni Hendry](https://burningword.com/2001/12/joni-hendry/): [b]Hallucination[/b] Dawn's resurrecting fire extends fingers of light, embracing my hollow room with its grace. Even though I'm roused by your kiss at the rivers dark I pause. The hunger for your touch rises with the gloom, raw disconnected lament. No one hears wistful sighs as night shadows seep into cracks of the remote, black womb of earth. I give the wind silver tokens, highlighting dust particles that burn in marble chambers of my heart, removing traces of untold passion. Hallucination, the simplicity of your presence, a scent on satin sheets, imagined moments the rising sun exhausts.
- [A Death in White](https://burningword.com/2001/12/a-death-in-white/): a short story by Joni Hendry ([email]caddis11@hotmail.com[/email]) I rub the sleep from my eyes and wish I could laze in bed all day long. I snuggle deeper into my covers, but the sun keeps spilling through my window, bright and warm on my face. From down stairs I can hear the fireplace hissing and my mother in the kitchen fixing breakfast. It's Sunday morning. Misty, the family poodle, jumps on my bed and starts licking my face urging me out of bed. He wakes me up this way every morning since I got him as a puppy. A birthday present I received when I was six. At the age of seven he still acts like a puppy sometimes. I finally get up and go downstairs. Misty traipses behind me, tail wagging, barking to be let out. I can smell the pancakes and hear the sizzle of bacon frying.
- [Again](https://burningword.com/2001/12/again/): What if we daisy-cut Bin Laden to bloody mush And stuff his corpse
- [For John Swenning on the Occasion of His Retirement](https://burningword.com/2001/12/for-john-swenning-on-the-occasion-of-his-retirement/): They say that to be a poet, or even to read poetry, one must be slightly insane. Which is not to say that the poet, or the reader of poetry, is to blame
- [Only in America](https://burningword.com/2001/12/only-in-america/): I had a doctor's appointment the day the passenger jet lost its tail and made an unscheduled stop in Queens. My wife called from work to tell me about it. Sick to my stomach, I searched the online news websites for details. Nobody had much information. I went outside and smoked a cigarette. The sky above the hills to the east was a wash of pink and gold. To the west, behind the house, rain clouds the colors of ashes were bunched like fists. Later it began to rain. The water pounded on the roof, sending the cats flying for the bedroom, where they huddled cheek to jowl beneath the bed.
- [Tears Of Africa](https://burningword.com/2001/12/tears-of-africa/): No neon glare on the plains of Africa, no streetlights in the Serengeti, only night, black as espresso. Parched earth revived by generations of tears; Lazarus land. Hopelessness of hunger closes in like hyenas. Dream of them. Dawn renews despair, a second language here. Red dust swirls its death dance with seeds of faith, mere wishes upon the wind. Children dressed only in distended bellies, adorned with flies. I do not look them in the eye. Tears Of Africa first appeared in [i]Snow Monkey[/i].
- [There is No One Such as I](https://burningword.com/2001/12/there-is-no-one-such-as-i/): There is no one such as I… God's own juices flow here. The plain upon which I falter is my hell…
- [You](https://burningword.com/2001/12/you/): you linger like morning mist opaque, tinged violet in mountains called Morocco you swarm of bees noise of a thousand wings buzz in my head murmurs or our conversations you train derailment crashing disrupting morning schedules colliding with deadlines sweet chaos you life raft in a needing, wanting sea
- [Whispers From God](https://burningword.com/2001/12/whispers-from-god/): On my knees, our familiar rendezvous, waiting for you as I always do, to speak in whispers only my heart may hear. Silence. I know you are here, your presence is wind caressing my upturned face. I await forgiveness, offering neither reason nor explanation. I await boundless joy, lifting me beyond a sea of transgression. I am overwhelmed by the quiet, cold abandonment of a fall from grace. Whispers From God first appeared in [i]Iguanaland[/i].
- [Earth Mother](https://burningword.com/2001/12/earth-mother/): Tinged silver-blue by moonbeams, luminous earth mother hums with ethereal music. Her velvet footsteps pass the spiked fence of coastal cedars, solitary sentinels old as time, guard the night. Luna moths, iridescent ghosts in magic moonlight float among fireflies, a starscape on earth, fallen on a sleepy meadow. Mother goddess, fertile nymph-spirit rests, bedded down on pillow moss deliciously fragrant while angel-fingered fronds caress her face. Cicada serenade, a moondust lullaby of echoed dreams envelopes her. She sighs, sleeping among ferns, at peace. E
- [august](https://burningword.com/2001/12/august/): august in the year of blind gods no one mentions the starving and no one pities the weak and no one thinks to water the plants you understand how irrelevant these facts are you stand on a boat on a lake in upstate new york the sun is a silent glare the air a fist without mercy and your wife asks a question you don't hear you turn to her to speak and what comes out is (i don't love you anymore) clean and simple and not a cloud in the sky maybe the small laughter of water or the sound of your son playing at your feet maybe the quiet roar of blood pounding through
- [three fathers](https://burningword.com/2001/12/three-fathers/): man drowns in a burning house sleeps and dreams that he wakes up in his wife's arms dreams that he never wakes up and all i can tell you is that twenty years spent walking these empty streets will get you nowhere the man you find in a one-room apartment in the most hopeless part of the city of butchered dreams is not jesus christ he says you look familiar asks to borrow a twenty but doesn't offer you a drink sits in a faded chair watching a silent television while flowers grow from de chirico's bones sleeps through the afternoon and wakes up forty miles away
- [slow song with piano and accoustic guitar](https://burningword.com/2001/12/slow-song-with-piano-and-accoustic-guitar/): sitting at a red light twenty-one years after lennon's murder with the radio on and the rain falling like a memory of itself and i am not lost but in exile i am the father my own father never was and my hands are cold i want power but have only words and my list of grievances grows and the war drags on and i've been told that not every slaughter is a crime i've been lectured on the evils of money but never by those who have it have slept on drunken floors with nameless women while the raped wrote their own versions of history and i have never been a believer in stories with morals
- [THE COWBOY SONG](https://burningword.com/2001/12/the-cowboy-song/): a short story by Joan Horrigan ([email]joanhorrigan@msn.com[/email]) "Describe the music, Claire" Todd requested simply, as if that were simple to do. We had just finished dinner at my place and were relaxing in easy chairs in the study, me in my old jeans and faded shirt and Todd neatly dressed in casual attire, when I told him about the new CD I had made for him. Todd was interested in hearing which piece on it I liked best, preferring to focus on a specific song and relish its details, ignoring that I had recorded many songs for him and the fact that I had learned to use my new CD burner.
- [Vietnam Revisited](https://burningword.com/2001/12/vietnam-revisited/): Distant thunder rides Asian wind, rumbles across oceans, echoes down years. Who sent this awful noise of war? Deafening roar of pain, of death, made whores of village girls, made us climb, veins on fire, a stairway to smack heaven. Can I buy you for this pack of cigarettes? Unmoved by crying almond eyes. Burning mountain, ignite the sky with death's hot desire. Acrid napalm smoke billows higher, higher, over a raped country's dying sigh. Alien, tortured forms locked in final embrace, shining wet in monsoon rain, washed clean of blood. What will cleanse us of our guilt and shame?
- [Wall of Jars](https://burningword.com/2001/11/wall-of-jars/): a hospital in ho chi minh city has a wall of jars with pickled fetuses aborted (they say) by agent orange i feel a flicker of glee quick as lust still killing the murderous little bastards… today I discovered the beauty of a boy in a round wicker boat
- [Dog Talk](https://burningword.com/2001/11/dog-talk/): When my dog talks to me I know that he is discussing Quantum Physics From a different Perspective... When he dreams I know that he does not exist In this world While he dreams... His incisors Are perfect utensils For cutting meat... He allows me To take his temperature Rectally... When I sing He harmonizes In fellowship... When I scratch his belly He starts his motorcycle, And I never ask, "What's in it for me?"...
- [rust](https://burningword.com/2001/11/rust/): i give you a dress a stone a handful of broken glass nothing that's ever enough and i catch angels with my bare hands i pull their wings off and leave them to bleed and the days pass slowly and forcibly like poured concrete like rust two years now since my father died and i give you bones and white light and a dozen reasons to cry i drive down deserted country roads in the last fading minutes of the day i put knives through the throats of crippled children i wait for a sign from any god
- [the days like empty confessions](https://burningword.com/2001/11/the-days-like-empty-confessions/): and if i say [i]november[/i] maybe you picture a grey sky hung low over darker hills and maybe this time you're right and what if all i have to offer are these carefully chosen words in a world full of the sick and the butchered? there are worse things than hearing you are no longer loved there are reasons men give for raping their daughters but none of them matter and i am tired of being damned by the fools who want to force god's cancerous weight between my ribs i'm sorry for tyranny and for the ignorance that leads to hatred but i am not the cause or the cure
- [voice of the burning girl](https://burningword.com/2001/11/voice-of-the-burning-girl/): we are not old or dying but afraid we are the voice of the burning girl after she has dissolved into nothing but faded cloth wrapped tight around old bones and as the wind finds all of the holes in this house we turn to each other for warmth we compare faces and names and whether or not your sister will come live with us when she finally pulls herself from the tar her life has become and the killer is free the trunk of his car empty and waiting and the baby asleep upstairs one of us will have to be the first to break his heart
- [Carol Desjarlais](https://burningword.com/2001/11/carol-desjarlais/): [b]A Soft Whisper[/b] Leaves listless in the grayed snow Gravel peeking from snow clouds Brown brittle stalks steel themselves against the October onslaught. Something green and growing Huddles beneath the shifting snow Curling into itself braced Bent and bowed but resilient. Cold winds worry the withered ones Who fold fallen to shelter the unseen green Curve in against it Like a mother protecting a child. Layer upon layer it lusts For fine and fragile things Tucked against the terror The trauma and the tremble. Winter winnows out
- [Kelley White (1)](https://burningword.com/2001/11/kelley-white-1/): [b]Farmall[/b] I am pleased to have Arthur sit on my lawn for the Old Home Day parade. He and Millie were good friends to my parents. I know he and Peter feel quite alone now that she is gone. I know it has been a difficult year for Peter, what with the surgery on his hips and the brief failed marriage, but they have the church people to help and they know everyone. Arthur is one of the last people to have cows in town. I love to see the tin roof on his barn reflect the sunset off the mountain. Jenny did a good job too. She got two pictures of Peter driving the tractor.
- [Michael Carano](https://burningword.com/2001/11/michael-carano/): [b]Neither Here Nor There[/b] Otis, in all his mercy, on some lost tablet, etched for granite minds his stony commandments: Elevator decorum demands agreement, look forward, keep space within a space, appendages shall never rise in gesture, nor brush the flanks of erected riders, and weathered souls?--the topic weather! the irony of the getting off before got on. And, so too, in a dusty corner of Metro's chamber, locked in a file without a key, the rules of disengagement have a proper seal, codified and passed by council, (forgotten but by one forgotten civil servant)
- [Heisenberg](https://burningword.com/2001/11/heisenberg/): [i]for John Sweet[/i] God whirls around you And you do not see him. You are Heisenberg. If God chose to Appropriate your poems, Your brittle images - So lucid that they make The back of my eyes ache - Would be lost to me. An entire universe would Cease to exist. You have prayers, But God knows that You are not yet ready for Him…
- [The Squirrel and the Bonfire](https://burningword.com/2001/11/the-squirrel-and-the-bonfire/): Her first words to me were, "NUH-uh!" And my moniker, preceded by "Mister," And a self-assured presumption that The little-sister idiom "NUH-uh!" Would stock IMPORT in my universe, And that the wily honorific, "Mister," Would warm my cockles With conjectured, chaste Reflections of scrubbed-cheek guile, Me and my old fart, Pot-belly, gen-gap ways...
- [the poet confesses](https://burningword.com/2001/10/the-poet-confesses/): your child is dying in some version of america i never wanted to know the poem slips into my blood at five in the morning without a sound we were closer to something beautiful at one point i think were alive in a different way that couldn't last and my voice gets too loud here my son is asleep in the next room the kitten curled up on his pillow and the edges of this day have begun to drag themselves out of the darkness what i wanted wasn't to be someone else but maybe someone better not a priest but a conquistador a phoenix and i am tired of feeling gravity's pull and i am crawling
- [approaching the age of christ](https://burningword.com/2001/10/approaching-the-age-of-christ/): this will be my year blood and famine and small crucifixions and there is nothing i can do to stop any of it the shadows of birds across the walls of this room the names of the dead written on tiny scraps of paper buried by the water's edge but nothing grows and nothing grows and nothing grows and it's october and the wind cries all night tears your face from my mind and then it's november the missing girl turns seventeen her parents walk away from their religion let the flowers fall from their hands and gather up whatever bones they can and i have no
- [Smokes](https://burningword.com/2001/10/smokes/): It's a matter of timing, you see, Whether one survives. Survival is Related to whether one zigs, or zags, Or pirouettes perfectly, or just Hunkers down at Exactly the right instant By accident. You take Jimbo, for instance. Thirty-five years ago a pack of cigarettes Cost eleven cents in the Ship's Store Outside CONUS. That's a buck ten a carton, Any brand you like. Lucky Strike was the favorite, Short, sweet, harsh. Pall Mall was a coffin nail, Second only to king Camel – Shredded bullshit – Smoked only by the bravest. No one smoked filter tips, Which were for pussies;
- [swimming through the blood of history](https://burningword.com/2001/10/swimming-through-the-blood-of-history/): and i am tired of reading all of these words i wrote as if i thought i might actually know something i am tired of these empty notebooks like mute accusations if you were in this room right now you would smell desperation would feel a small cool breeze as the storm pushes its way north picture it three years in this house and i know none of my neighbors ten years in this town and i refuse to call it home and did i pray at my father's bedside in the last days before his death? no and does this make me a bad person? i've been told that it does and there is a man
- [this is the ghost](https://burningword.com/2001/10/this-is-the-ghost/): this is the hand that cuts the moon in two this is the ghost do you remember these myths or are you someone who believes in the soft sweet purity of childhood? you can only be one or the other you can only be living or dead for fifteen years i had the dream of the burning house and then i married the woman who grew up in it i give you this as final proof of the lack of god and you turn away one of us sees the ghost the other a shadow in between the two is the desert of our pasts and the scattered ashes of old lovers this is the land where the myths were planted
- [poem written, then left untitled](https://burningword.com/2001/09/poem-written-then-left-untitled/): sunlight in an empty room changes nothing the mirrors are all blind the windows slowly melting and i believe in the burning girl i believe in the boy buried among the redwoods by his father these are the myths my son will inherit and this is the country and the politics of fear are not politics at all what i call silence in this house is actually the sound of clocks running backwards what i call sorrow is actually guilt despite the fact that i have always maintained my innocence and on the day i give up the last of my teenage heroes my oldest friend writes
- [Exploiter](https://burningword.com/2003/07/exploiter/): a short story by J Eric Miller My old man lived off the animals. Which is to say, he was an exploiter.
- [The Garden of Earthly Delights](https://burningword.com/2003/07/the-garden-of-earthly-delights/): Stew and Gus were discussing the forces of good and evil. The two men had been friends for years. They lived many miles apart, but they corresponded almost daily by e-mail. Stew believed in heaven and hell, and Gus professed not to believe in anything. Gus would be the first to admit, however, that he was familiar with the dark side. "I believe in gods, devils, demons--the whole shebang," Stew wrote. "It's the only thing that explains suffering. Good and Evil exist side by side, and you can't blame Evil on God. Or use it as evidence that there is no God. He does what he can."
- [Dont make mistakes](https://burningword.com/2003/07/dont-make-mistakes/): When you alight from the train look for Ramdhun, the rickshaw-wala Tell him you want to go to chowk and pay him two rupees no more When you come to the stream take your shoes in your hands hold the rope on the log bridge or you will get wet A small walk along the cowpath and you will reach the village chowk Ask for Vaidji. Everyone knows him as he gives them medicines The village boys will follow you as you will be dressed strangely in city clothes Let them If you see me playing with other girls or doing some chores dont stare or call me by name They will be shocked
- [The Poolside Chat](https://burningword.com/2003/06/the-poolside-chat/): Three women lounge beside a pool -- comparing scars and silently, the sizes of a spreading waist. Laughing at the family branches, reading stories for reprieve. Different brands of syllables to suit the weight of sorrow's cloth and longing, well, it hangs in sacks beneath the eyes behind their shades -- it hangs in every swaying elm. Children cackle in the water, race across the hot cement to blankets of their mothers' arms. Dancing like a moonbeam's stripe toward that grand chameleon, death, unaware that bodies are tenuous treasures at best. Denominators of the years
- [Clinging to the Caving Walls](https://burningword.com/2003/06/clinging-to-the-caving-walls/): The battle went flat like a candle pinched. One moment you were pale soap resting on a double bed, dwindling as our tears raged on. I'd read to you from hardbound books as if thin scrolls of verse you loved could break the silence rubbing against my quiet screams. A hospice nurse shut down the drip. I made her check your pulse at least a hundred useless times between my racking sobs. We'd clean and paint the haunted house as if a broom or brush could mitigate this hurt. My sister and I drew straws. The short one got your bathroom drawers; the long one got your greenhouse
- [the age of myths, deconstructed: notes on self](https://burningword.com/2003/06/the-age-of-myths-deconstructed-notes-on-self/): i. [b]the bleeding horse[/b] who is everyone and no one who knew pollock and picasso who died in '56 and again in '63 and again in the summer of '97 who lives stumbles blindly down all of the empty streets i've ever lived on crawls crippled through broken glass alleys through november fields in upstate new york with a crucifix carved into his soft belly and his eyes gouged out who is pain and the lack of hope in a sunlit world things that matter whether you talk about them or not ii. [b]the burning girl[/b] says she loves you as she's dragged through
- [REBECCA JUNG](https://burningword.com/2003/06/rebecca-jung/): [b]Poem Before a War[/b] On the cusp of a war, it makes perfect sense to write of the warm weight of your body cradling mine, the way you grip me where thigh meets torso pulling me into your thrusts, your fingers pressed deep in my pale flesh, how you pin me to the bed your damp chest on my breasts, the feeding frenzy of our mouths tasting each other's blood-flushed bodies. Limb on limb, arms akimbo, gristle on bone and shit-stained gore, the curve of a head in the crook of some arm, the pulsing feast of maggots on the blackened bodies of Verdun, at Auschwitz, and the mass graves of Sarajevo-
- [in the age of unanswerable questions](https://burningword.com/2003/06/in-the-age-of-unanswerable-questions/): or what about this? a man who says i have the power to change the world who sees faith not as a crutch but a sword and what we've become is a nation of children who cannot be saved when the mother tells her daughter's killer that he deserves no mercy the face of god should appear on every empty billboard in america the leaders of nations should be burned as witches after this though what?
- [unproven theories in the age of despair](https://burningword.com/2003/06/unproven-theories-in-the-age-of-despair/): cold sunlight down tracy street on a sunday morning and i am almost able to believe that the past can be left behind i am tired of these abstractions like [i]america[/i] and [i]god[/i] i have moved awkwardly into the 21st century and brought with me only the bleeding horse and it walks slowly from room to room without ever casting a shadow and there is a child somewhere who will be the next one to die horribly and there are linda's sister's moving through this lush green landscape ten years after the cancer devoured her [i]nothing is more important than motion nothing is more important than love[/i]
- [poem where the skin peels away from the bone](https://burningword.com/2003/06/poem-where-the-skin-peels-away-from-the-bone/): how many years now since the war to end all wars and how many more wars? how many young girl's bodies found in the deserts of southern california? how many babies left in dumpsters or in plastic bags? and there is my wife who says that no one wants their face pressed into this much pain and ugliness and i agree i kiss her as she falls asleep on a warm september afternoon then crawl to my desk to finish this poem what i never thought i'd be was a junkie
- [if what i am is what you hate](https://burningword.com/2003/06/if-what-i-am-is-what-you-hate/): in the cold and almost rain of a tuesday morning in the aftermath of two young boys beaten to death with grim joy by their mother money in the slot and then the sound of your voice what you say is [i]come home[/i] what matters aren't the words but their weight the fact that you mean them despite all of the pain how much closer they bring me to being human
- [the human cathedral, always](https://burningword.com/2003/06/the-human-cathedral-always/): cold wind outside a dark room and she says this isn't working the first week of may the smell of witches burning every wall holding up another one and the way houses grow from this simple idea the way windows are broken or gods diminished the ones who insist that belief is not an option but a necessity that a home is more than shelter from the rain and what she says is [i]i'm not happy[/i] and what it is is an accusation what she says is [i]i love you but i don't know why[/i] this admission too much like the sound of breaking bones
- [DUANE LOCKE](https://burningword.com/2003/06/duane-locke/): [b]Solitude or Isolation[/b] Learnt late the truth, Late was alone As alone as when With another In a dark balcony Or at a dark dinner, Candle lit and dim. Mendacity, the mother virginal, Mastered the poppies and my life. At the fine feasts, Mendacity the host, the servant, The friend, the lover, Deserter, betrayer. At these ballistic banquets There was not as in Veronese, A small, spotted dog on paws Under the tablecloth To sniff and eat the crumbs. The cardiac malfunction Of the reticent, false fable That is transported in skeleton form By serrations of the unknown superpower
- [No Mas](https://burningword.com/2003/06/no-mas/): Tonight, the Latino grill man sings Kumbaya while he slops together another hamburger, as though his singing will rouse God from his day off and come rescue him… His faith doesn't care for history of field hand strung to trees of the past. Especially in this town, where the locals look at him with contempt because all the plant workers names end in Gonzales or Hernandez. And he can't help it if he knows Spanish because Mama wanted him to remember where he came from. Mama who knew America for its HMO's and not for homeboys who'd sit on their porches and watch her pull
- [ARLENE ANG](https://burningword.com/2003/05/arlene-ang/): [b]They Say[/b] Good poetry is coming to the point quickly is not allowing your reader time to think is making monkey out of senses is sky with pepper ducks is stench of scorpion beetles rocking on their backs is warthog singing the blues is mother's cooking going well for once is your reader suddenly slapping forehead with hand and saying damn that is exactly how I feel. [b]Final Draw[/b] For forty-eight years my father matched his luck with SuperEnalotto. Tuesdays and Fridays he prepared after-dinner numbers. His eyes would close in concentration to receive divine help
- [Camels & Sand](https://burningword.com/2003/05/camels-sand/): A strange melange of curves against the thorns and barbs of war. Dog-eared berms wrestling with another storm. A soldier sleeps against the barrel of his gun, dreams of cherry trees at home. A white picket fence inside this world is concertina wire and guards in suits of glaucous camouflage, bombs for crickets singing in the evening light. Camels pass in dusty colors, their instincts blend with parched terrain -- they're born prepared -- and we are not. Sand is all the grass they know. They wander by so casually, an orange sunset at their heels. *First Published in Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry
- [Opening the Closing Door](https://burningword.com/2003/05/opening-the-closing-door/): Your only son is a stat in the war. Our U.S. flag will grace his coffin coming home. Royal blues inside the cloth become a permanent bruise of grief. Your nightgown weeps down dumplings of your swaying hips -- his father sits in twilight on the patio replaying games of chess he lost, the house a place of hollowing. No message from a general can mitigate the darkness here. Serenading nightingales, off-key and singing all the same. Talons gripped the olive branch; it splintered into gray remains. Time to dye white towels green. Surrender is impossible. You leave his room just as it is.
- [and the bleeding horse drinks](https://burningword.com/2003/05/and-the-bleeding-horse-drinks/): rain but nothing is made pure birds sing and the refrigerator hums and the streets take us from one anonymous town to the next three days then four and the bleeding horse drinks what he can staggers drunkenly through these fields of the newly murdered falls to his knees even as the trigger is pulled a clean shot but nothing so pure as an act of mercy
- [memo to creeley](https://burningword.com/2003/05/memo-to-creeley/): not language itself but the need for it the weight of silence the child has been murdered [i]pause[/i] i love my wife [i]pause[/i] the child has been murdered [i]stop[/i]
- [unproven theories in the season of despair](https://burningword.com/2003/05/unproven-theories-in-the-season-of-despair/): cold sunlight down tracy street on a sunday morning and i am almost able to believe that the past can be left behind i am tired of these abstractions like [i]america[/i] and [i]god[/i] i have moved awkwardly into the 21st century and brought with me only the bleeding horse and it walks slowly from room to room without ever casting a shadow and there is a child somewhere who will be the next one to die horribly and there are linda's sisters moving through this lush green landscape ten years after the cancer devoured her [i]nothing is more important than motion[/i] [i]nothing is more important
- [The Juncture](https://burningword.com/2003/05/the-juncture/): a short story by Dina Di Maio ([email]editor@thesquaretable.com[/email]) There is a part of Barrow Street where the road not so much forks as curves and joins with another. At this juncture, there is a restaurant, a quaint, bricked place. Inside, there is a glow from candles and dim lights. There is noise of chatter. The restaurant is like that of an inn hidden in a cozy town in Europe. A small theater is a few doors away. Gorgeous homes flaunt impossible remodeled kitchens through open windows. This corner does not feel like New York and that is why I come here when I need to think. My mother once told me that when she was a child, she used to look through the windows of a restaurant on this street when she visited her aunt. I am almost positive it was not this restaurant but I understand the feeling she described to me as I pass this spot now. It is the feeling that reminds me that I am still in New York and I am curled within one of its secret spots.
- [The Things You Learn](https://burningword.com/2003/04/the-things-you-learn/): a fiction short by Scott Neumyer ([email]lecter323@aol.com[/email]) "You want to shoot some pool?" she asks as we walk past the beach, our arms brushing back and forth on the sides of our legs, the salty ocean breeze hanging over us like a thick fog. We're coming up to the only bar in town. Her sister and brother-in-law have asked us to shoot a few racks before heading back to the house. I'm full of ice cream and not sure I can handle much more than a few minutes. "I think I'm going to head back," I tell her. "I've had it. I need to close my eyes for a few." I grab her hand, bring it to my mouth, and kiss it quickly. Her fingers are sticky from the ice cream and it reminds me of when I was younger and more willing to shoot a few racks. "You go ahead. I'll see you back at the house later, okay?"
- [two mirrors facing each other: an interpretation](https://burningword.com/2003/04/two-mirrors-facing-each-other-an-interpretation/): the moment when you find out how useless you really are when you realize that you will never save anyone a sunday afternoon possibly with your wife and children asleep and late winter snow falling from a tarnished silver sky a war somewhere which is nothing new dead babies and suicide bombers and all of the reasons you should support the killing all of the poets who want you to join their causes to sign their petitions and praise their hollow words and christ it'll take more than a river full of corpses to stop the bills from arriving listen nothing you own has
- [second miscarriage poem](https://burningword.com/2003/04/second-miscarriage-poem/): snow again without warning the idea of tombs of trailers along the side of the highway and the lives trapped inside them the distance between [i]home[/i] and [i]lost[/i] do you remember how far we drove? 200 miles only to find the front door open and the bathroom floor smeared with blood 200 miles only to leave again only to come back to these few simple rooms without light or warmth all of that time spent going nowhere
- [poem as necessity](https://burningword.com/2003/04/poem-as-necessity/): asleep maybe or awake and crying with the dream still bright and bleeding in your mind my words at 2 a.m. which are cold and without comfort this woman gone missing for three months now with her unborn child the fact that neither of them will be seen alive again we believe in monsters for obvious reasons
- [dog (1)](https://burningword.com/2003/04/dog-1/): and your sister's lover smiles tells her to crawl and she does tells her to roll over says [i]good girl[/i] holds out his hand lets her taste her children's blood waits for her to beg for more
- [BARCLAY KENYON](https://burningword.com/2003/04/barclay-kenyon/): [b]FIREGARDEN[/b] [b](TRIPTYCH 3)[/b] [b]I. CHILD[/b] Child Flesh trophy For so many nights, I breathed out your name I breathed out life, and you flew out on the slide... Now you're here like an oxcart is here - plumped with harvest and, before you focus, I wrap the smoky cloak around me. We go forth, planting crucifixes in the neighborhood, you and I - we trade stares. Your eyes immense and bold and your skin a miracle of profit and galvanism but the measures of doubt you foment in me, oh, I take them like cake and lick the umbilicus for the blessings... Build you up - I am the waterwheel
- [In Search Of Dog (an Eclectic Journal: Long)](https://burningword.com/2003/04/in-search-of-dog-an-eclectic-journal-long/): May 9, 2002--Springfield, MO On the 157, 643, 241, 708th day Dog created me--and he thought it might have been a waste of his time. 11:49 pm Dropped CM off at his place about 20 mins ago. Beginning to wonder how many people think I'm homosexual. I tend to have more guy friends I hang out with, and more female friends I consult with, but I am really good in bed…(I am an egotist!)…or does that mean something else. Sign says: watch for backing cars I went to punch it on Grand at the Jefferson intersection, and the auto-clutch stalled. Upset. Still loaded on caffeine from the Mud House, no sleep tonight, acute insomnia.
- [Voices](https://burningword.com/2003/04/voices/): A rush of tenuous joy attacks the statue of Saddam now hollow and approachable. Iraqis spit and throw old shoes. Roads of dust are wearing signs of renaissance rising to meet the gluttonous smoke of battle as it's winding down. From citadels of easy street, it's strange to witness such applause as tanks roll in to stake their ground. Then again, I haven't seen my brother hanged in circles of a village square. Blend this with the tortured voice of a man imprisoned for eight long years, beaten and burned for "praying too much." "Let me take you on a tour ..." he rails to a camera lens.
- [ROBERT BOHM](https://burningword.com/2003/04/robert-bohm/): [b]MILES WEST OF SIERRA VISTA IN THE DESERT[/b] [b]1[/b] Off the road, in a place of dry dirt and rock, a thin obsidian fragment which, held between sky and eye, is the only lens needed. The temperature, close to 110 degrees. The wind, when it arrives, sets the scorpion on fire, chars Rachel's painted nails. The sky's obsidian-darkened flames crackle. No future here, only a gigantic now. Fire shimmers. Everywhere. [b]2[/b] At dusk in another era's cool, smoke rises from stones. I look at the Gila monster; he looks at me. After killing him, I live off the fat stored in his tail. Again
- [Beauty Of Simple Things](https://burningword.com/2003/04/beauty-of-simple-things/): (The Poem of Our Lives) If we were to walk down a deserted road in autumn, I would not point out the foliage, nor mention the clouds or how the breeze meanders along. Instead, I would find a felled tree and count the concentric rings encompassing the stump; remarking on how a year's growth had been by the width of the band. Then I would look up and ask: why don't we recycle the paper we use to draft the poems of our lives? or burn all of our money and move to Tibet? After this thinking had exhausted us, we would lay down and not speak. Imagine how the other
- [Cacophony Of Voices](https://burningword.com/2003/04/cacophony-of-voices/): My room is an abyss windows blackened with construction paper. I lie alone, awaiting enlightenment, incense burning sickly sweet. Apparitions of people appear, examine me with physician eyes, determine the dimensions of my dementia. I do not see them. Instead, they chatter while they work their of voices blistering my brain. The process is slow, but eventually I will tear the covering from my windows, flood the room with light, and become invisible.
- [Four Views Of Allen Lake](https://burningword.com/2003/04/four-views-of-allen-lake/): This is no hallow place it is pasture land and that is all. Why do I find myself at it in times of trial? And have since November ‘97 10:00 pm--20 degrees steam rising in phantom sheets off the hood of my car. Even when I am nowhere near I still find myself drawn here, always with the same question… **** I walk the gravel trail adjacent to the water's edge noticing the broken beer bottles and charred remains of a previous night's exuberance. A five-leafed marijuana plant spotlighted in the moonlight makes me laugh. It is no weed. More likely the remnants of someone's cheap bag--
- [Inside-out](https://burningword.com/2003/04/inside-out/): From the outside looking in this appears to be a normal place, but nothing is normal about it. Objects move, telekinesis and philosophers feverously grind words to their nubs. How much a ticket? how long a ride? do not ask these questions. Save your money for the cinema; you would not like it here. Stand back telescoping the madness that takes place-- for there are those who, once walking on water never again touch dry land.
- [Juxta](https://burningword.com/2003/04/juxta/): I sit across from a man, we look at each other without shifting our heads, it's a staring contest like the ones from lunch in junior high school. My opponent has no face I am afraid he might win. I try to picture him with eyes, blinking, signifying my victory, but I cannot. He is tougher than to fall for such trickery. He simply sits there blankly, wearing me to the point of exhaustion. I rapidly throw my hands above my head, screaming: He has won! He has won! I have no time for games that are unfair towards me. I run circles about the table chanting silly rhymes and
- [Making Our Eden](https://burningword.com/2003/04/making-our-eden/): When we talk about making love; it is as though we already are; it is as though the world has collapsed at our feet and all the walls that held us at their mercy have been destroyed and we are left among the ashen ruins; as though we have been placed there all along; it is as though we are Adam and Eve, sent to make our Eden from these crumbs, this devastation left; and in that hour when we hold each others' bodies naked in the cold sun, when our bodies lie exhausted quivering; it will be as though we never parted before or holding forever while time slips endless.
- [Letter Never Sent One](https://burningword.com/2003/04/letter-never-sent-one/): ___________ Well, it's 2am, which could only mean one thing I'm working. The front desk job is not helping at all with the bout of insomnia I've been having. I never thought I would say it, but I hate fucking school and just want to drop out, living in my car off McDonald's food and poetry writing. Maybe I'll skip down to Mexico and die of exposure, like my prot�g� (Neal Cassady). Other than the normal depression (angst) I'm all peaches and cream. I find it odd writing letters at this time of day. Maybe I know that they will probably never be sent, but more likely it is because I know when I wake up (that is if I go to sleep) I won't be the same person. I've found that I'm happier with my fa�ade then I am with myself, which causes problems beyond my rational train of thought at the moment. As it has shut down, uncoupled, and garaged sleeping peacefully wishing my body would join it.
- [Letter Never Sent Two](https://burningword.com/2003/04/letter-never-sent-two/): __________ God knows how many letters I'm going to write before I send anything off. Unfortunately, god didn't inform me on his/her decision and if he/she did, it must have been during a time when I was refusing to believe in him/her. Anyway, I hope things on the home front are looking up. Hopefully, you have found someone that has restored your faith in males, even though we all are childish and immature. There really should be a class that tells you how to live. No, scratch that. There should be a class that tells you how not to live. Maybe run it on HBO and call it Life: It's so Goddamn Fun. Wait, I think they already have a show like that.
- [Rock Land](https://burningword.com/2003/04/rock-land/): At the soles of passing shoes, on the road no one travels, the place ants have invented a specific feeler wave: Rock Land. It isn't all bad, the fixed monotony of the day, shuffling from place to place with a bit of leaf fragment, granules of undigested sugar, a fallen comrade's body. A simple sexless society; exist to work for the collective, ensure the survival of the commune. Marxis, or a greater monastic order? One scampers over scaled-down mountains, going around those that seem too much effort for a quick run, almost mindlessly (maybe they're evolved beyond minds).
- [Second Coming](https://burningword.com/2003/04/second-coming/): I am coming the second coming this year preceded by my friends' same worn routine: "When will you come? Today? This hour? In a month, or two, or…what? We'll have cold beer! Maybe even a keg! And will sit at your feet listen to stories of places you've been." I wish I could raise them to their feet and shake each calloused hand of those that have remained to work on the farms or in the plant. Show them I am no better because I've been at the un-i-vers-ity, bein' pointless book l'arned while they've been workin' workin' workin' punchin' the clock at 7 A.M.
- [Thermodynamics](https://burningword.com/2003/04/thermodynamics/): If I were governed by the Law of Thermodynamics then I was (1) never created and never will be destroyed I can only be (2) transferred from mind to mind and will continue in this way forever I am a debilitating neurosis the (3) entropy I generate always increasing in your closed system
- [Touch Of Gray](https://burningword.com/2003/04/touch-of-gray/): with two toes I test the temperature of the linoleum like a rookie member of the Polar Bear Club wondering if I plunge right into the day that the floor is as cold as it looks from the cocoon I've made with my bedspread that the tiny icicles forming on the AC ducts are really part of my imagination then I'm forced to look at Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle lying at my head board and laugh so hard that I'm crying I jump out of bed throw open the curtains outside it's bright with just a touch of gray
- [TS Eliot Moth](https://burningword.com/2003/04/ts-eliot-moth/): [i]for Modern Poetry Fa02[/i] "Can you imagine if T.S. Eliot were to enter the room, right now." Beckoning the call, almost unnoticed, insignificant dusty silent wings fluttering in the mid-afternoon, the karmic incarnate sailed into the classroom. We were unmoved to the unannounced visitor to the discussion, somehow always retrospective to certain expatriate literary geniuses. How for fifty years (maybe more) the accomplished poetic deities lorded over form and words, commanding make it new! let no words not add! Forgotten now are radio speeches, recantations, fascist salutes--
- [Best Guests of the Best Western Hotel](https://burningword.com/2003/03/best-guests-of-the-best-western-hotel/): a fiction short by Pasha Malla ([email]pasha@ekno.com[/email]) [b]Rm #312 - Ludwig Van Beethoven[/b] Mr. Beethoven checked in with only one piece of luggage, a leather- bound valise. He failed to tip either the doorman, or the bell boy. In the elevator he broke wind and blamed it on a child. During his two-night stay, Mr. Beethoven amassed a substantial bill viewing pornographic films on pay-per-view television. Evidence of semen was found in the bedsheets, wastebasket, shower and bathroom sink. Upon departure he was heard to refer to the hotel as a "shithole" and refused to offer identification while paying by personal cheque.
- [Waiting for War](https://burningword.com/2003/03/waiting-for-war/): Stewart couldn't decide how he felt about the war in Iraq. He went back and forth. One day he was for it, the next day against. Meanwhile he monitored the news from the Middle East with a growing impatience. Was war a fait accompli, or was the buildup merely a bluff? Stewart did not like to wait, and he did not like uncertainty. What bothered him most about the affair in the Middle East was that he couldn't make up his mind about the proper course of action. He liked being right, and he could live with being wrong, but not knowing what to do or think was driving him crazy. His friends were no help. Monday Stew had sent an e-mail to several dozen of his friends and relatives asking for their views. Wednesday morning he was more uncertain and confused than ever.
- [A Speech Before the Splattered Blood](https://burningword.com/2003/03/a-speech-before-the-splattered-blood/): The DOW spikes up, banking on a dwarfish draft of Armageddon gloom. Our president will speak at five. No casualty is casual. It's hard to match a suit and tie to splatter of the coming blood. Ahmed, a driver in Iraq, says: "This is a miserable life. We spent it shopping for war or hiding from bombs." He recites his summary as if his time is finished as a boiled egg. All eyes red from pressing night's extended weight. Justice spelled so many ways our alphabets no longer know their proper forms. Iraqis seal their windows shut as if a roll of tape will come between the fragile glass
- [The New Sound of the Men Working on the Train Gang](https://burningword.com/2003/02/the-new-sound-of-the-men-working-on-the-train-gang/): by Rey Martinez ([email]maxinquaye@aol.com[/email]) Whenever I thought of such a thing, only warbled service announcements pulled into my mind. Attention wddwndkjwebwejbdjw or The next train leaving the station is on Track 52738dbbe. Nothing against the MTA PA operators, but they wouldn't be playing Vegas anytime soon. I'd probably never even have put the two words together if it weren't for my poorly trained Jamaican auto mechanic. See, he'd promised my car fixed by Friday, but come Friday, there I stood on the 34th Street platform waiting for the R train to take me home. Hector (don't ask me how a Jamaican gets that name) ruined my date with a precision I could only hope would eventually benefit my car.
- [photographing the civil war](https://burningword.com/2003/02/photographing-the-civil-war/): not shadow but reflection february rain from tanguy's sky until the streets are all dull grey mirrors if i keep my distance i could be anyone if i get in my car and drive i could call it escape could call it running away which is sometimes an act of cowardice and sometimes an act of survival and i sit in this room of empty chairs instead with my thoughts and my bitter resentments i believe in gorky at the age of 43 in rothko at the age of 66 but not in my father not at any age and not in any of the bars i spent my childhood in i remember the threats and all of the dire predictions
- [ritual](https://burningword.com/2003/02/ritual/): or the names of the children found starving in the basement or the name of the person who finds them the blood of whoever left them there all the pictures of hell it could be used to paint
- [poem burdened with the weight of democracy](https://burningword.com/2003/02/poem-burdened-with-the-weight-of-democracy/): this act of not killing this place where nothing is forgiven where nails are driven through human flesh then pulled back out where your god sings a beautiful song without meaning think about words as nothing more than noise look at the men you've elected to power consider how they would eat their own shit to never have to give it up how they believe in rape and in the necessity of poverty the inevitability of war the logic of children butchered for the sake of a better future
- [Suddenly It’s Solitaire](https://burningword.com/2003/01/suddenly-its-solitaire/): One moment he's pruning a wayward branch; garden tools rest happily against the brick like spoons in soup. You wonder how it stayed this warm. An ancient sun is baking leaves, raisins in a rising dough of seasons on a schedule. He edges grass the way he's always sculpted love -- by doing things in steady gestures like the rain. A seizure, then a surgery. Then solitaire so suddenly. Feet aren't there to track rich soil; welcome mats have lost all words. I bake two pies and take two pieces down the street. It's a short walk and a long hill up to the crown of thorns.
- [Inside a Name](https://burningword.com/2003/01/inside-a-name/): I whisper her name aloud -- you tug at a chair to gather your coat, pet the dog and say goodbye before a question kicks you in the tender groin. Your eyelids curtsy once and clench -- a mirror of the coffin's hinge. I'd like to follow roads you take, through briars of the fruitless vines, down sharp, dry cliffs that crumble at the slightest wind. Our silence is my orphanage, but you don't know the windows you have blocked from light. Hand me just a sweater's sleeve, some syntax, context, anything that spells the way she made the bed into a novel packed with lust and happiness now cherry pits.
- [I Am the Ghetto](https://burningword.com/2003/01/i-am-the-ghetto/): by A.C. Koch ([email]henry_iblis@hotmail.com[/email]) I, Ghatu, continue to devolve. Like my century, I tumble from beauty to shit with a thousand senseless catastrophes along the way. At my side reclines the sleek Frenchwoman who has been my lover across three continents and as many years, a person of such beauty, intelligence and strength that next to her I am but a flake of cum. Out the window smolder the slums of Mexico City -- any way you look at it, one of the most spectacular disasters in all of human history. Caught between these two elements, Isabelle and the ghetto, I squirm. I am the lance that pins the butterfly to the board. Vulgar, yes -- but remove me, and the spectacle is gone.
- [Waterbirth](https://burningword.com/2003/01/waterbirth/): by Chris Duncan ([email]cduncan204@aol.com[/email]) Skinny Steven Hilton stares at his bucktoothed continence in the mirror of a Shoney's restroom. He absorbs critically his floppy ears, his close-set eyes, his one eyebrow, his oddly feminine lips, full and red, chapped, flaking, better looking from afar. He bites a piece of loose skin from his bottom lip and swallows it. He tilts his head toward the ceiling and stares as best he can into his formidably sized nostrils into which he rams thumbs and index fingers and grabs as many nose hairs as he can. He yanks. He yanks. His eyes fill with tears. Fuck'at shit hurts, he thinks, smiling dumbly to himself. He again stares at his buckteeth, stained brown from dipping over three thousand cans of long-cut wintergreen Skoal. He ruefully hears his dead daddy commenting: "You could eat corn on the cob through a wire fence with those teeth, boy!" Steven grimaces away the thought and pats down a cowlick. Steven is trying to be happy. No, he is happy. He is! He's just graduated from Alliance Truck Driving Academy of Bristol, Virginia, and he and his girlfriend and his mom are celebrating. The girls are eating their salads. Steven has just drained what he calls his anaconda and flushed his venom down the dirty urinal. Steven is thirty. Steven is going places. Stephen imagines himself adopting a monkey, a capuchin perhaps; his monkey will wear a baseball cap, and they'll be like BJ and the Bear, solving mysteries, stopping crime, and hanging out with hot girls in Jacuzzis.
- [Bitter Water](https://burningword.com/2003/01/bitter-water/): short fiction by Diana Adams ([email]dianasadams@shaw.ca[/email]) 'You are late again....' He stood too close to me, and tapped at his watch. 'Only five minutes, that doesn't count as late does it?' I thought of all the extra hours I had put in, carefully carving the chocolate clock. The clock, made entirely out of Callebaut Dark, actually functioned and hung in sugary perfection on the wall. According to my watch I wasn't late at all. His watch was too fast, but I wouldn't say that. I had learned the fine art of being quiet, kissing ass, and working in humble silence; for I was an apprentice doomed to 6,000 hours of subservience in order to get my accreditation.
- [M. R. BENNING](https://burningword.com/2003/01/m-r-benning/): [b]Curled and Jarred[/b] as if something sparked a memory of birth at two-forty-seven on a Sunday during a rainstorm. Inside his narrow cot, an itchy issued blanket - coarse as the accented words and foreign fingers wrapped around his conditioned thigh. "Vat yoo doo to me izt art," is exhaled as breasts are flattened against his back and hair to his lips like leaves to moist concrete. [b]The Biology Of Jimmy Smith[/b] The skin of his hands is cracking as Jimmy Smith becomes subject to his first in-class erection. It is because of Mrs. Dopleworth, the blue flower dressed
- [DAVID BATE](https://burningword.com/2003/01/david-bate/): [b]Cries in the Greenhouse[/b] Amid a low rumble of distant thunder and the howling of wolves under skies as slate diagonal, sandwiched in shades and edged with gunmetal gray; we go down to Willow Palm where lives Leviathan in irregularly joined inkblot swamps of colloidal silver, ringed by jade fountains spewing forth bold, gleaming foams of gold. Close in a pristine meadow, an Avatar with marbled arms outstretched as though to receive, clothed in a fine linen shirt...undone and a crystalline lightning rod in one sculpted hand; sleeps in an Emerald Python's cool, iridescent coils.
- [KEITH WEBB](https://burningword.com/2003/01/keith-webb/): [b]so much less than sensual[/b] this is a picture or more of a window into a roadside bar, where trucks parked on gravel surround a place I know too well to be tranquil, a place for solemn meditation, mediation between my things. although subtle thoughts get broken apart by the occasional loud mouth stepping up, what he sees as his life's work, is a seldom at bat, and there is peace here more often than at home alone. inquiring for a menu with my beer, the cute as a baby-doll girl that came for my order wondered later why I had barely touched my steak sandwich,
- [remembering the language: an exercise in self-mutilation](https://burningword.com/2002/11/remembering-the-language-an-exercise-in-self-mutilation/): waiting for something in the insincere october sunlight but nothing comes and i begin to feel like pollock walls and weights and the blood of ghosts until the only option is to drown until the churches are all on fire and my children starving [i]my children starving[/i] i will teach them to eat the flesh of god before i let it come to that
- [poem which, when held at the proper angle…](https://burningword.com/2002/11/poem-which-when-held-at-the-proper-angle/): [b]poem which, when held at the proper angle, becomes a portrait of michael gira[/b] the sky suddenly deep with the weight of approaching autumn the poems like small miracles or minor saints like ordinary men shot dead on quiet streets in front of their wives and children and i want to tell you that the violent acts of strangers don't matter but you turn away i want you to believe that love is some sort of salvation but i can never say it with a straight face look at gandhi look at lennon think about what it means when a newborn baby is found in a knotted plastic bag on
- [Pocket Change](https://burningword.com/2002/11/pocket-change/): "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish?" T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland" -- 1922 As locust of grief gathers its legs for the pounce and traffic spins in its clotted grave, answer escapes by channel of fog. I am seized by the question's thrust-- turn toward ways you fanned a purse and opened it on Christmas Eve. A man with his face inking a sign marked homelessness, dotting your "I" with a tear of having more than your heart required in wallet clutch, pushed you to extend your gift. You dropped $5 in his lap. He smiled the way a cock must crow
- [Assumption](https://burningword.com/2002/11/assumption/): It's been two years, one month, three weeks, four days. Since I sat on the edge of her bed reading "Dover Beach" aloud for ears pressed firmly to the final page of life. Patches of strength curling their corners like bandaids over wetted skin. And I thought I could. Make crepes that smiled from the pan and press her Irish linen without the steam of tears and tuck it out of sight. We matched like new pairs of socks in my underwear drawer or widows holding hands at Sunday Mass. I'm sure she knew I smoked and never said a word. But turned faux pas like broken lips of china cups around to face the wall.
- [Allergies to Ivory](https://burningword.com/2002/11/allergies-to-ivory/): I understood your allergies to ivory, anything close to white. Perhaps it was a form to sign inside the morgue. Vivid frost of lonely winters after cancer shook the house, left you only furniture and pitch black night without much velvet in its grain. The livid shade of feckless hope, of failure knocking at the door. The color was that pat, that clean. Death is the ultimate bleach. The parking lot had memories of times your shoes kicked a tire, then returned to dust a shelf of china cups that rattled in an avalanche. "I'll call you on the phone," you said, "but I can't walk the ghostly halls."
- [man speaking in an empty room: a self-portrait](https://burningword.com/2002/11/man-speaking-in-an-empty-room-a-self-portrait/): this image of sid with GIMME A FIX scrawled across his scabbed and bleeding chest this admission from his mother that she bought the shit that killed him simple pathetic melodrama that i carry with me for eighteen years until all i am is thirty-three and lost a father driving home from the sitter's house after work with my son laughing in the back seat with the sky a smeared glare through a dirty windshield and all of my bitter beliefs worn like a second skin and do you understand that poetry isn't art? do you care? and what about the difference between confession and
- [van gogh takes up painting again, 122 years after his suicide](https://burningword.com/2002/11/van-gogh-takes-up-painting-again-122-years-after-his-suicide/): grey light edged with purple the age of dogs returned the taste of frost on metal of rust the motor grinding against the sky's blood and nothing else no heat no motion no gentle music a language but not one you recognize whispers and screams nothing in between and your hands numb the fingers cracked and bleeding the taste of gasoline a simple violence and you swallow
- [Yolki Blues](https://burningword.com/2002/10/yolki-blues/): I am the yolki flower, the shade of an egg. I arrive in a burst, albumen and sack, after first treasure of rain. I promise you things. Your soil is deaf to my voice, a signal of centering force. I am Israel's daffodil, a trumpet the poets have bellowed through dust. You are the frost with your habits and hands holding a gun to temples of peace. I shimmy with sunlight and birth. Yet, darkness is all I'm coming to know. Why are you plodding on trails of a tomb in the guise and the guess of slicing an earth meant to be shared. Insisting on fences and walls kilometers long.
- [among the dead and dying](https://burningword.com/2002/10/among-the-dead-and-dying/): there are rooms in this house filled with nothing but the black weight of your past there are windows pushed to the point of breaking and being in love is being on the wrong side of a locked door and i find myself too often forgetting where i've left the sun i find myself numbered among the dead and dying species while further down some long unused hallway you cry for the person i've made you become and we will find each other in the last fragile seconds before the sky splits open and we will stop our hands will explore living flesh beneath the first low mutters of thunder and
- [we have built this silence](https://burningword.com/2002/10/we-have-built-this-silence/): we have built this silence ourselves both of us clutching talismans in an unfamiliar country the dogs with a language the children smiling but riddled with hatred some of us pointing guns others bleeding and the question is god the question is the emptiness of the sky on any given january afternoon there is room enough beneath it for all of us to be wrong ************ prev published in Stickman Review
- [a sleeping child](https://burningword.com/2002/10/a-sleeping-child/): in this year of dragged bodies there is always a silence where apologies refuse to fall where a man is nailed to the sky's canvas for turning away from the sun is found below the rippled ceiling of the river with empty dreams filling his pockets and how can you define violence when there is nothing else? how do you explain fear to a sleeping child and why would you ever want to? and somewhere of course there is someone who knows the answer
- [one poem](https://burningword.com/2002/09/one-poem/): one poem in a quiet room beneath an indifferent sky the empty fields that define the season of loss these are only words diane and you are only a stranger i pretend to know it's the lack of sound that frightens me the wind maybe or a distant siren or the kitten curled up and purring gently on the edge of the desk my son's toys without his tiny perfect hands to move them and it's been four days now since the planes stopped flying since my fingers felt the need to crawl across a blank sheet of paper and do you notice that the clocks haven't stopped? do you believe
- [CHRISTINE HAMM](https://burningword.com/2002/09/christine-hamm/): [b]To Greenpoint[/b] July insects buzz the sidewalk. It's twenty minutes of rectangular and bleak to anywhere. See the cracks, the lines crisscrossing the telephone poles, the concrete and your hand, this street disappears into empties -- beer cans and sky. You're walking through airless shadows. Your shoes don't make a sound. And we have no idea where we're going. [b]Empty Bed[/b] The muscles of my tongue cup him. Broken backed chairs lean forward expectantly and the rug curls in anticipation. No one can close their eyes but him. Then moonlight does what moonlight does,
- [J. D. SMITH](https://burningword.com/2002/09/j-d-smith/): [b]Allegory of X[/b] Being chased toward a cliff in the night that divides land from the absence of land with no warning save the gravel that tumbles away from itself. [b]Internet[/b] Gleaming water-skimmers race, stop, start, collide and multiply, converge--instant constellations--and disperse over a widening puddle. [b]A River[/b] The current takes lull and rapids into a circle with no tangent at stream or sea. Soil from the banks is gathered, sold in pouches for its powers, among them shaping waters and, in spring, reversing their course. [b]Further Shores[/b]
- [CHRISTIAN PEET](https://burningword.com/2002/09/christian-peet/): [b]Angle of Repose[/b] In the red light of highway protocol All traffic stalled A burnished wreck for sunset Time to pause, as the book says, time to reflect. Words come so easy till we know their source And find it wanting- In need of sympathy or recompense Say, a fat check For the fat man stricken in the road Now out of body, now at the plastic faux pearl gates Never having seen the equally fat toad That sits in loam and gravel Under the guardrail. Sits. And waits. Waits for the green light Of understanding-nothing-being The toad's just a toad And the fat man is dead.
- [You Think YOU’RE Demoralized!](https://burningword.com/2002/09/you-think-youre-demoralized/): We had this big old Chinese elm tree by our patio taken out last year. Now a two hundred square foot area next to the patio is nothing but dirt, which my two ninety-mile-per-hour Australian shepherds are constantly tracking onto the patio. So my wife wants me to
- [Americana](https://burningword.com/2002/09/americana/): sitting on the front porch I listen to the nuclear family across the street meltdown it's Chernobyl, Rolling Hills Dr. Wichita Kansas where life moves like wheat in a high wind a woman walking her dog stops to witness the madness as a man bursts from the house he lugs a tattered tote bag which he tosses into the trunk of 1970's vintage Americana the broker from next door steps outside drinking a beer and shakes his head disgusted we are all spectators the man's wife, carrying a child runs out pleading to him as he drives away, backfiring
- [Points In Time (a Short)](https://burningword.com/2002/09/points-in-time-a-short/): I stand at the door to apartment four in the "blue building", Emporia Kansas, address unimportant. Even at 20, I have the same nervousness of a teen on a first date. I swallow hard, putting on a fa�ade of confidence, and knock soundly on the veneer covered door. At 17, I was a dreamer. I still am. The things I dreamed then accomplished or future goals; my dreams of today, goals of tomorrow. S was girlish at 20, a Disney aficionado, on the Student Senate at the local college, grounded. She was too good of a person to be dating a hotwired senior in high school hell-bent on escaping the midwestern cultural doldrums. In ways I never left.
- [the same story](https://burningword.com/2002/09/the-same-story/): she is talking about her thirteenth year about her mother's lover the sound of his footsteps as she lay in bed the press of his weight just outside her door ^ it's the same story told a thousand different ways it's the boyfriend who passed her on to his buddies for beer or pot or a new set of tires it's everything she was forced to do ^ and she is talking about love she is saying she believes is saying she doesn't want to be alone tells me she doesn't expect me to understand
- [the age of saints](https://burningword.com/2002/09/the-age-of-saints/): the truth of the bleeding horse is this there is no bleeding horse there is your sister with her boyfriend's hands tight around her throat there are the children ^ what she tells you is [i]i love him[/i] this and that he has disappeared again that a woman calls at least three times a day asking for him what she tells you is familiar and it tastes of pain ^ and this is not the age of saints the addicts won't be saved or even remembered and she tells you [i]i love him[/i] tells you she has seen the bleeding horse in the first light of day stumbling blind towards the interstate
- [Reclamation](https://burningword.com/2002/08/reclamation/): There are days I want to sit with you as children playing in the dirt, watch ants busily working, and listen to wind brush aside branches of trees the way my hand moves hair from my face. The ground will reclaim us someday, when we can no longer love like we are twelve. As the ground reclaimed Schliemann's childhood dream (treasure). No, even great Achilles mystic as he was could not escape reclamation. And the ground will reclaim our cities: New York, Boston, Detroit, my childhood home in Kansas where my friends live their lives on the same plot of ground that will retake them.
- [Stranger](https://burningword.com/2002/08/stranger/): There is a man living in my bathroom and I dare not ask his name, or why he sits and watches while I brush my teeth in the mornings. And I know he is there as I leave and turn off the light for he laughs-- his laughter the sound of my footsteps.
- [art](https://burningword.com/2002/08/art/): the poem starts abruptly something like [i]but they came back for him[/i] [i]dragged him out to the sidewalk and beat him into a coma then walked away[/i] and what more do you need? this is the event spelled out as simply as possible it happens not for the sake of art and not to reveal some deeper truth but because violence is as effortless as breathing because it needs no reason imagine a rusted spike driven through the eye of god
- [a man buried](https://burningword.com/2002/08/a-man-buried/): a man buried beneath a faded stretch of sidewalk another man shot to death by a pay phone this is the wasteland i've been looking for crows in empty fields and deer mangled by the highway your sister raped by all of her friends her fingers pulled off like flowers petals if i were a better person i'd hold you if i had the guts i'd make you smile twenty nine years in the nation of addicts and all i've planted are my father's bones i never expected anything to grow
- [self portrait on burnt hill road](https://burningword.com/2002/08/self-portrait-on-burnt-hill-road/): i am defining nothing but myself here beneath this cold white sun i am placing my right hand over the eyes of a child i never had and only one of us casts a shadow it's not an admission of guilt it's an act of salvation look at this land a grey stretch of valley between defeated hills and all of these burning houses that people call home all of the pain stored away but never forgotten more than enough to bring de chirico to his knees and still none of us leave i know these roads i understand that they all go somewhere but i have been losing my way for the past twenty years
- [Normalcy](https://burningword.com/2002/08/normalcy/): [i]for Nicole[/i] she plays the piano but tells me not to listen and I write her poetry which I tell her she can't read this is all we are two individual souls in a mundane world where we watch TV from different chairs and we are both unexplainable but understand one another just the same this normalcy of our interactions balancing out our lives but when she plays all I hear is Mozart and when she looks at my words all she sees is…
- [Manos De Dios (a Short)](https://burningword.com/2002/08/manos-de-dios-a-short/): Westland, Michigan--July 5th, 7 something in the morning, way too early for summer vacation. The air was putrid, filthy smelling like the freshman locker room in high school. Humidity was hanging above the ground thick enough to grab hold of, but since no rain had fallen in more than a week; the grass was little more than detritus. All of these factors left me questioning why I had come to Michigan in the first place. There was the girl that as of the day before I wasn't speaking with, the escaping my parents by not returning home after my second year, and it was a different place then Kansas. I swished these thoughts around in my head like a mouthful of Listerine, trying to work out the kinks left over from the Fourth party, while I drove to my summer warehouse job. Curious, I pushed the temperature button on the digital clock/gauge in my car I sighed, 81--Christ.
- [Back Into My World](https://burningword.com/2002/08/back-into-my-world/): In a Hollywood studio an actress is preparing to fall in love for the third time that day. and make up is concerned that her complexion is too paisley under lights. and the director is worried she'll drop a line and they will have to re-shoot. and her would be lover is in his trailer drinking Perrier practicing his smirk. so when he runs into her and she looks into his eyes and their lips meet in a perfect fast action close up everything will go smoothly. Back in my world, there is a half-finished soda staining a half-hearted poem to a girl I haven't met. And if a camera would pan
- [Ammonia Death](https://burningword.com/2002/08/ammonia-death/): I avoid visiting nursing homes so I don't have to see faces of the forgotten turned to dregs. A place where orderlies distribute medication, I imagine more placebo than medicinal. And men follow me, while I walk the halls, their eyes black, staring from sunken sockets. They are little more than shells, hollow bodies, souls extracted and disregarded as soiled linen. I see myself with them, bounded by steel and wheels, dripping drool, my dentures on the night stand. Their mouths open and close trying to tell me about life, as though, it will rejuvenate the ones they lost.
- [Guju Eyes](https://burningword.com/2002/08/guju-eyes/): [i]through love one may find courageousness (Tao Te Ching)[/i] The first time I made love, was with a Guju girl who held the world in opal eyes. She taught me to pay attention to the difference of a smile and to savor delicate breaths. Each muscle contraction meant something different under a touch and to touch without feeling was as powerful as feeling without touch. We learned more in one night exploring each other's bodies then years of reading about erogenous zones and stimulation. And as the sun peaked under the curtains to surprise us, she taught me a woman is an ocean, and to win her
- [Naked Truth](https://burningword.com/2002/08/naked-truth/): I'm curious to what people think while I stand in the intersection and take off all my clothes. My penis presented to the world, I bend down to touch my toes and stretch back up, arms to the sky. Still outstretched I turn three times like a dog before sleep, centering myself in the four-way banked by lights. Lowering slowly, I assume lotus position facing west, always the direction home, no matter how long the journey. Hands resting on my knees, I close my eyes and inhale deeply, the smells of exhaust and pollution choking. I relax. Lights change, cars funnel around me zipping to their next
- [Phoenix Down](https://burningword.com/2002/08/phoenix-down/): Sitting in the living room rubbing my toes on the carpet until they ignite like sulfur tips, sparks run up my feet reaching the dark gasoline leg hairs and shoot up to my crotch. My trunk ablaze, I stand, hover through the room raised up by the heat, never singeing fibers below. I scoop a handful of fire, taste its power and swallow. The flames travel my throat to the depths of my stomach licking my insides, as outside I continue being consumed. The soft hairs of my abdomen, chest, and arms aflame, catching my head, shrouding me completely in smoke. I can no longer move,
- [Voodoo Manifestations](https://burningword.com/2002/08/voodoo-manifestations/): The dead have risen. They walk the streets at night, in search of a promised rapture. One-by-one they file into empty jazz clubs, to pick up instruments, and play for lost arts. Some take turns scatting into the mic to the sound of bongos and berry saxophones. Others recline back in their chairs, smoke cigars, and nod along approvingly. They aren't voodoo manifestations, but flesh and blood human beings back from the last great pool hall. This their only time to walk among streets of their dreams, and do the things they did while living. They must return when
- [Ginsberg At Breakfast](https://burningword.com/2002/08/ginsberg-at-breakfast/): Blueberry pancakes, strawberry syrup news broadcast of Bush's war how different the world is for us And you Allen, did you have correct change and are sitting on the bank of the river dangling your feet, calloused from insomniac narcotic walks through Berkeley where Whitman stood under street lamps and in grocery stores tempting you with the body of a young boy have you taken off your fedora, or put it on sing me a bar of Spanish loyalist song or read me poems I'm no brother, I'm your son though I've seen only 20 sides 'America can I hide among the whiskers of your beard we can find reindeer to fly us to the moon
- [Grammy's Tools](https://burningword.com/2002/08/grammys-tools/): The clothesline, Grammy quipped, is a tree house string with a can where women gather to swirl a rumor in lukewarm tea. Watch your back! she warned. The birds have ears. They'll carry a secret around the block. They learn to sing from listening. Grampa grinned from old cocoons of hammocks on the shaded porch. Aware she was his brick and tree, his every grain of reasoning. Amazed at how tortilla flesh stood up to welcome mats of graves. Amazed at how she passed the sun from fingertip to fingertip as if it were a flaming torch. Those full-lipped white magnolia smiles wove lasting garlands in my hands.
- [Underneath](https://burningword.com/2002/08/underneath/): It happens in the middle of the night when I am dreaming in pastels, I'll sit up in bed and shiver in the dark, sweat trickling down my forehead in the same sickening way it drips from a faucet with faulty seal. I'm nauseous, weak; I stand and pace in my plaid boxer briefs to the bathroom where the mirror reflects an image I paid $5 to see at the last carnival. My taut skin making my veins look varicose in the glow of the vanity. I run to the kitchen screaming: there are scars underneath my skin awaiting a knife to uncover them.
- [Down Those Stairs](https://burningword.com/2002/08/down-those-stairs/): The basement was always locked, locked tight as a nut in a bolt. From here the magic grew, a guess gone wild, a brothel of abandoned hours. Having nothing to say, we pressed our ears to the walls until a story, a ghost dropped seeds for inquisitive eyes. Sweating like glasses dripping in heat, we parted the cobwebs, their living room drapes -- knew by instinct tied to time, this place was a sunken ship where chandeliers once burned their tenuous suns. A million crevices and caves, eros of a question's lid, underwear drawer of a house, forbidden but calling our hands.
- [Final Picnics](https://burningword.com/2002/08/final-picnics/): "I want to go!" was all you said, as if you were slamming a book. So I laid out your hat, a tube of pink lipstick and blush replacing the color drained from my cheeks. Death struck me then as pottery with handles loose. To you it snapped like fingernails -- a casualty of brushing up against the hardness of a life. "You don't need eyes to see a forest. The picture stays in your lungs." I packed a red checked tablecloth pretending the dice weren't close. At the edge of a grave, even the desert looks green. Country roads spit gravel back like bacon cooking in a pan.
- [The Wasteland Where Your Body Slept](https://burningword.com/2002/08/the-wasteland-where-your-body-slept/): In the wake of serpentine limos, saccharine cards, carnation fields arranged just so, the water in Simon's pond went black. Our house grew laughless, tombstone cold -- spiders ran their gamuts of lace. It was 1959 -- computers hadn't been born, so Daddy deleted our stringless harps with gin or a beer, something with ice and a fragrance that stung. I sensed it was our medicine. I thought I should learn to pour. Sunday was our lazy hour -- a game of camping under sheets. The mattress seemed a vacant lot some CAT had cleared by accident. Lip of the cotton always infused
- [Stitches](https://burningword.com/2002/08/stitches/): She walked straight into the gaping wound of another woman's death -- wondering no doubt, if such a war could ever be won. I was six, afraid of her clothes, her swinging purse that pruned dead limbs of unfixable dreams. All at once, old photographs came off the walls. A moving truck arrived like mace. Perhaps I grew envious moss the color of emerald and grass. Father's kiss forgot my forehead, tried her lips like brand new shoes. I wanted them to pinch and hurt. Suddenly I was pocket change -- she was stacks of dollar bills bribing the grief to retreat. I didn't want a different draft
- [Rug Burn](https://burningword.com/2002/08/rug-burn/): I'm five again. Dresses with bows in the back become an impossible reach. Mother's death is everywhere -- especially in speechlessness, in flour bags beneath dark olives of Daddy's eyes. He's earned this shade of painful pitch. Phrases that corner her name rub rocks in the gaping sore, create a kind of carpet burn when elbows touch by accident. My sister tries on all her clothes -- ghostly blouses hang below her shaking knees like circus tents without their pegs. She throws them on the bedroom floor in angry heaps of autumn leaves. Soon enough we'll learn to sweep,
- [Sharp Ice](https://burningword.com/2002/08/sharp-ice/): Your hair was the color of pearls, but I didn't think they were real. I couldn't admit to the ash of your skin, its porcelain pose on saucers of graves. Two long days beside your bed. A cradle I pushed but could not rock. My eyes were grabbing renaissance. I knew it but I acted blind. You warned me of death and its salt -- how oceans are garnished with thirst. You taught me how to rope and rise a baby grand from dining rooms of buried ships -- and still I painted ivory keys of fingernails neon shades of busy lies with no respect for waning light. A wish was stepping on my hands.
- [Aran Donovan: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/donovan-poetry/): I struck at it for years.
- [Francis Raven: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/francis-raven-poems/): Remember the power of a single nail to talk to an obstinate wall.
- [Howard Winn: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/howard-winn-poems/): The receptionist is calm.
- [Shirley](https://burningword.com/2011/01/shirley/): Shirley tells me that she once owned a horse that won the Kentucky Derby.
- [Fatima Elkabti: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/fatima-elkabti-poems/): that is Mogadishu.
- [A Conversation](https://burningword.com/2011/01/a-conversation/): dropped out, he's out in L.A. and started dating this girl."
- [Alien Invasion Tapes, #87](https://burningword.com/2011/01/alien-invasion-tapes-87/): It was back in '63 they set down in my wheat field, and I was too damn angry to be scared.
- [Hunger Pangs](https://burningword.com/2011/01/hunger-pangs/): Man, was I hungry. There was nothing to eat in the house so I ordered a large pizza and ate the whole thing - but I was still starving.
- [Rosie Pova: Flash of Reality](https://burningword.com/2011/01/rosie-pova-flash-of-reality/): The darkness invited the light.
- [Lara Dolphin: Poetry](https://burningword.com/2011/01/lara-dolphin-poetry/): at a café outside the hotel.
- [René Solivan: Pigeon Peas](https://burningword.com/2011/01/rene-solivan-pigeon-peas/): when the pigeon peas appear.
- [Brian Kapra Briscombe: Nothing To Do](https://burningword.com/2011/01/brian-kapra-briscombe-nothing-to-do/): Employees with nothing to do.
- [Stefanie Botelho, Witness: Scenes](https://burningword.com/2011/01/witness-scenes/): The week before, his hands in the seat of my jeans.
- [Cyndi Gacosta: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/cyndi-gacosta-poems/): Her head tilted to the side.
- [Christopher Austin: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/christopher-austin-poems/): we were lovers in another lifetime.
- [The Ansonia Girl](https://burningword.com/2011/01/the-ansonia-girl/): After a while, I got used it. I think the shrill wind’s kicking at my dusty, bloody ankles is the most painful part.
- [Sheila Ann Dane: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/sheila-ann-dane-poems/): Your living voice spirals over telephone wires.
- [Keith Moul: Guilt By Implication](https://burningword.com/2011/01/keith-moul-guilt-by-implication/): in places I had never been.
- [Judy Shepps Battle: Waking Up In 2010](https://burningword.com/2011/01/judy-shepps-battle-waking-up-in-2010/): When will he finish?
- [Walter William Safar: The Shadow Of Death And Life](https://burningword.com/2011/01/walter-william-safar-the-shadow-of-death-and-life/): WALTER WILLIAM SAFAR was born on August 6th 1958.
- [Stephen Page: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/stephen-page-poems/): out of a eucalyptus.
- [Jonel Abellanosa](https://burningword.com/2011/01/jonel-abellanosa/): I've been staring at the life-size crucifix[br] Since midnight; but light has illuminated[br] His immovable, heavenwards gaze.[br] Strangely, it dawns on me how man seems[br] So alone-as if fear has become embodied[br] In words expressed in tense silence,[br] "Why have you forsaken me?"[br] [br] How have I arrived here?[br] [br] This moment of sudden clarity[br] Makes me realize how-in places that seem open[br] To my restlessness-far away I've strayed[br] From I believe to be the circular route[br] That justifies my leave-taking.[br] [br] But shouldn't one be lost to discover[br] (Jiddu Krishnamurti)?
- [Lauren Jackson, Silence](https://burningword.com/2011/01/silence-by-lauren-jackson/)
- [Rich Murphy: Inkwell Dilemma 9-10](https://burningword.com/2011/01/rich-murphy-inkwell-dilemma-9-10/): on the surface of the collective unconscious.
- [Howie Good: Now That the Buffalo Are Gone](https://burningword.com/2011/01/howie-good-now-that-the-buffalo-are-gone/): No matter how loud I shout, my voice doesn't carry.
- [Ines Rivera Prosdocimi: Poems](https://burningword.com/2011/01/ines-rivera-prosdocimi-poems/): sinks down on his ears.
- [Rob Nadolski: No More](https://burningword.com/2011/01/rob-nadolski-no-more/): thick as thieves.
- [The Dark Ages](https://burningword.com/2010/10/the-dark-ages/): She was washing a reeking chicken. Taking a dinner party risk, putting the family in the pot along with the vegetables. Smelling wafters of putridity along with the spices. She had certainly cooked a million of them, baked, roasted, boiled. This one was most definitely over the line. Even the washing didn’t seem to remove the nagging smell.
- [poet unable or unwilling to compute](https://burningword.com/2010/10/poet-unable-or-unwilling-to-compute/)
- [Derelictions](https://burningword.com/2010/10/derelictions/): The Digital Conversion box in my head Gets distracted by errant traffic upstairs. Keith David: Narrator of all our lives, pleasantly reciting all our yesterdays, for the right price. Ken Burns all around. Ubiquitous. Educating Me. Helping me think American.Now that the sun, having indeed set, I no longer a true Englishman.
- [6 a.m.- 9a.m.](https://burningword.com/2010/10/6am-9am/): The snow may be 9 1/2" deep, but I'm a resourceful He-Manly man, man. Up at 5 a.m. Layering layers upon layers. I stagger around, puffy, prepared. Stagger and sass, sass some more, dawn dreaming in the inky dark. As the sun slowly rises, grunting like some 47-year-old ex-NFL quarterback, I am the magnificent soloist maestro
- [Definitely A Whimper](https://burningword.com/2010/10/definitely-a-whimper/): I've seen the greatest minds of my generation busted for malfeasance. Crying glib crocodile tears. The codpiece of tenure ripped aside like so much recycled paper. Keening. Staggering through Bridgeport
- [Fat Girl](https://burningword.com/2010/10/fat-girl/): I consider myself an attentive father. And I know my daughter; I know she has a big heart. So when she made friends with this big fat girl who has two big fat parents I asked “Who’s that?” My daughter answered “That’s Jackie? The other kids were picking on her and I thought she could use a friend.”
- [poet in seemingly perpetual state of rejection](https://burningword.com/2010/10/poet-in-seemingly-perpetual-state-of-rejection/)
- [Bad Heart](https://burningword.com/2010/10/bad-heart/): The phone rings. I know it’s my wife calling before I even look at the caller i.d. She calls everyday at the same time. The phone keeps ringing. Even though the receiver is right by me, I let it go. On the fifth ring I pick-up and say “Hello.”
- [huckleberry patel](https://burningword.com/2010/10/huckleberry-patel/): Arun Patel and Greg Atkins are best friends at Bluefish High School, a commonplace small-town high school in a commonplace town in Illinois. They are eighteen, in the senior year. Greg is a dumpy, plump, pale Irish American. Arun is a stunningly handsome, dark-skinned Indian American. Cue scenes of Greg standing up for Arun, who is taunted mercilessly by his classmates and given names like camel jockey, towel-head, and sand nigger.
- [Marriage](https://burningword.com/2010/10/marriage/): I explain. You hear shouting. You regroup. I see you’ve picked my scab. You are reasonable. I see shades clipped onto your bifocals. I apologize profusely. You sniff out expedience. I am a nice Jewish dove. You say I’m crazy, like Saul. You throw me an olive branch.
- [Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé: three haiku](https://burningword.com/2010/10/desmond-kon-zhicheng-mingde/): from ridge to ridge camera projection left - of freemans' waters neon billboards one night in finders corner with fiddle strings the look of true love st patrick's day in sarawak our plate's green orchid
- [Trail](https://burningword.com/2010/07/trail/): The doe is dead, devoured by hounds. Her bones lie by the river's edge. Curled small, small is never long; her body will grow and cast away the brush that veils her. Her fair spots will fade with time. It's the sparrows that call her to run, to stretch her legs long and flee. But the fawn, she listens to the leaves whispering that it is safe to stay.
- [Some Things I have Learned That I Would Be Much Better Off Not Knowing](https://burningword.com/2010/07/some-things-i-have-learned-that-i-would-be-much-better-off-not-knowing/): well here I was, facing another locked drawer without a key, and not just metaphorically, although there is that. thinking more crap that you accumulated and left me to deal with; more coins, more stamps, more bills, a neatly rubber-banded bundle of Publishers Sweepstakes entries never sent in but saved because god knows why.
- [Dear Harvey](https://burningword.com/2010/07/dear-harvey/): accidentally hip.
- [My Last Visit](https://burningword.com/2010/07/my-last-visit/): Cold meat covered in thin white cotton.
- [Kent](https://burningword.com/2010/07/kent/)
- [The Cause and Effect of Spontaneous Credulity](https://burningword.com/2010/07/the-cause-and-effect-of-spontaneous-credulity/)
- [Possession](https://burningword.com/2008/10/possession/): Beams of hazy sunlight stroked Christopher's skin as he took his usual place at the window. The gently rustling drapes, a melancholy shade of mauve, fingered his thighs and calves carelessly like an inattentive lover. Peering out over the newly awakened city, Christopher inhaled the fragrance peculiar to a late spring morning in Vancouver. A lush, green aroma rich with the pungency of Japanese blossoms and lilac bushes clung to the air. Christopher closed his eyes, timidly inviting the quiet of the early day to wash over his nakedness.
- [Discretion Assured](https://burningword.com/2008/06/discretion-assured/): He’s a scarecrow set against the blackness of my backyard, a lanky figure trapped inside the small square of yellow emanating from the porch light. His scarecrow mouth puckers in a guilty little grin. Time for the awkward goodbye. A mass of tousled, honey-colored hair hangs loosely around his face. It’s stuck to his forehead in places, clinging to the moistness of his skin - a product of our romp. He never takes a shower or stays the night. To do so would cross that unspoken, invisible boundary. I hope she smells me on him.
- [Michael Lee Johnson](https://burningword.com/2008/05/michael-lee-johnson/): Bio: Michael Lee Johnson is a poet, and freelance writer, Itasca, Illinois author of The Lost American: From Exile to Freedom, http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?isbn=0-595-46091-7. He has also published two chapbooks of poetry. He has been published in USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Turkey, Fuji, Nigeria, Algeria, Africa, India, United Kingdom, Republic of Sierra Leone, Nepal, Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Poland, internet radio. He is also publisher and editor of four poetry, flash fiction sites--all presently open for submission:
- [The Drop](https://burningword.com/2008/05/the-drop/): The man stood waiting with his back to the desk. It was dim in the room. Pale light struggling through the small barred window fell onto the tiled walls and floor. The shelf opposite the desk was stacked with dressings, rolled bandages and a large, rust-coloured bottle of iodine, to disinfect caning wounds. I tried to swallow. Bile pooled at the back of my tongue but my throat was too dry to get rid of it.
- [Address to the Greenville Senior Women’s Club 35th Annual Pedigreed Dog Show](https://burningword.com/2008/03/address-to-the-greenville-senior-womens-club-35th-annual-pedigreed-dog-show/): Address to the Greenville Senior Women’s Club 35th Annual Pedigreed Dog Show by the mystery writer H.L. Lemontre It’s quite an honor to be speaking today as both a guest and a participant. I am asked to speak at a lot of dog shows by fans of my mystery series, but rarely do I get the chance to speak in my own hometown, and even more rarely do I get to speak at a show where my own dog is also a contender. Perhaps you’ll indulge an old woman if I tell you a bit about how I came to write the [i]Fluffems[/i] series.
- [audie and martin](https://burningword.com/2006/07/audie-and-martin/): the night before martin luther king was gunned down in memphis he came screaming out of a dream. the instant outside roanoke that his plane smacked a mountain was the first time since holtzwihr that audie murphy wasn't afraid. audie and martin met in heaven and walked Paradise apart from listening angels, the ears of God. what they whispered to each other was not put down into the book of ages... they swapped medals, and their laughter echoed through heaven and earth, to hell and back.
- [First Portrait of Maria, in the Style of Dali](https://burningword.com/2006/07/first-portrait-of-maria-in-the-style-of-dali/): You in this sepia-toned photograph, with your arms wide open in greeting, with your hands held up in surrender. Edge of highway, corner of house, hint of something better. A body of water, maybe, or the back of someone else's head. A gun pulled from inside the killer's heart, and he says [i]Mr. Lennon[/i], then smiles, then pulls the trigger. No. I've gotten ahead of myself here. I'm ten years old and in a boat with my father and two of his friends, and the engine has died. The tide is going out, and the only sound is the pull of the ocean. The only heat is the
- [a small dog, bleeding](https://burningword.com/2006/07/a-small-dog-bleeding/): it happens this way sometimes, where the children die from the poison that seeps up from underground you vote for one person or the other, and the children die, and it's not war but business, and both words are actually just different ways of saying [i]profit[/i] listen new computers will be given to the schools as gifts the sharpened teeth of priests will snap the bones of young boys in two what you need to believe in are rabid dogs speaking w/ the voices of humans what we do is use the word [i]political[/i] to describe what we don't want to talk about and then, of course,
- [Grandma Scott’s Funeral](https://burningword.com/2005/09/grandma-scotts-funeral/): Everybody called her Grandma Scott, but Eliza Scott (nee Lingstad) was nobody's grandmother. The Scotts didn't have children. Eliza was the eldest of three sisters, and she treated her younger siblings' offspring with grandmotherly affection. My mother fondly recalled spending several weeks each year at the Scott farm helping to tend and feed the animals and taking baskets of food and water to the fields for the threshing crews at harvest time. She and her older sister Nora helped Grandma Scott make the sandwiches for the noon meal for the workers. And every morning she and Nora were dispatched to the barn to search for eggs deposited in secret places by the Scott's brood of laying hens. My mother said there was nothing like having fresh eggs for breakfast. Eliza's sugar cookies, as big as dinner plates, were a special treat as well.
- [The Skylight](https://burningword.com/2005/09/the-skylight/): When the weather was nice, sometimes the boys in the art department would eat their lunches on the roof of the building. It was pleasant to be outside in the fresh air and sunshine after being cooped up in the cubicles all morning. For a time, the roof was the place to be from twelve o'clock until one, especially after Shuffle discovered the hole in the skylight over the fourth-floor women's powder room. Shuffle was a big, happy-go-lucky Jewish kid from New York. He never ran when he could walk and seldom walked when he could sit still. When he did move, it was very slowly.
- [Miracles](https://burningword.com/2005/09/miracles/): My barber, Frank, is the world's most talkative human being. He is a tall, skinny man with straight blonde hair, big ears, almost no chin, and the bluest eyes you'll ever see. Frank is smart, forthright with opinions on an endless variety of subjects, and unburdened by the handicap of a formal education. When you sit down in a chair in his shop, you never know what else you are going to get in addition to a haircut. Last week it was a lecture on Intelligent Design. "I get a kick out of these religious folks," Frank offered after he had draped me with an apron and wet and combed my hair. "Trying to sneak God into the schools by the back door."
- [Alex Nodopaka](https://burningword.com/2004/07/alex-nodopaka/)
- [Don’t](https://burningword.com/2004/07/dont/): Don't © paddy gillard-bentley I think back to that night a dark rainy Thursday in November crummy run down apartment building where you lived in New York City the aroma of ethnic food coming from their tiny worlds arranged in rooms 600 square feet of universe The smells drifted into the dark stairwell in the midst of our colloquial frenzy spitting truths and lies at each other sordid and foul a back drop of graffiti smeared walls like primitive cave paintings her face peaked over the rape chain worried the key hidden in ample bosom so you grabbed my hand and pulled me up the stairs you kicked hinges exploded we stood on the roof a show down as if we stood on the Alps screaming our rage into the cold rain your words biting into my heart after you had blown away the thick layer of dust with your sweet words and passionate sentiment and I vulnerable Then rough bricks biting at my back maybe your finger nails my feet off the ground you thrusting deep enough to wound my soul struggling to possess me even the carpet crawlers know you've got to get in to get out my mind still screaming at you my body responding me hating you loving you my tongue licked at your soul like barbed wire the steel door closes and you couldn't see my tears as they were mingled with the rain I don't know why I wanted you to bleed I don't know why I wanted you to cry I don't know why I wanted you I don't know why I wanted I don't know why I don't know I don't Don't!
- [The Wind Egg](https://burningword.com/2004/07/the-wind-egg/): The Wind Egg © 2004 paddy gillard-bentley an apparent uncomplicated egg the soul of the philosopher also the serpent and the mysteries of life in ritual of initiation the shell is shattered man emerges from the nascent of physical existence length and contour represent the soul's desire to secure a position within the heavenly kingdom long and sharp at the ends from such an egg a male becomes manifest a thing of virtue broad or round an egg represents aspiration in ephemeral things formed from such a pitiable ovum is a weaker work…a female such hope is dulled obscured from light because it prefers darkness more not seasoned with the flavor of wisdom when I read these things I reflect upon the idea that men only attempt to oppress that which they fear and the women are sent together to bleeding huts when the moon is dark so the men feel safe blood is magic and they were afraid of the power women yield to conjure blood with no consequences his possession - naked candy wrapped in his sexual desire packed in a hand basket sent on her way while eons of fury scorned and hidden from the sun cloistered in lies hell is a neophyte an eye for an eye tooth for a tooth unless you are a woman turn the other cheek vast inner strength intuition and wisdom where does the power lie when the rabbit dies?
- [Adithya R Hassan](https://burningword.com/2004/07/adithya-r-hassan/): Chrysanthemums and Marigolds Monsoon has wrapped my house, Dank air and dull light, Amid the halo of a full blown summer, She had planted marigolds, Said, ‘festive season is not far' A commentary of tending and watering, withered, As some unknown disease, sucked them lifeless, That morning, staring at sticklike corpses She cried ‘ my hand is cursed' As though she had known all along… Now, In the heart of a futile harvest, I heard my neighbor tell, ‘During monsoon, earth is fertile like a young virgin', Abruptly a cornucopia of hope swelled Uprooting striations in earth of dead marigolds, I found her digging small pits into the moist soil, ‘Chrysanthemums', she said, Engraving reflections of a season, changing.
- [THE ANGEL OF FUGUE](https://burningword.com/2004/06/the-angel-of-fugue/): THE ANGEL OF FUGUE BY ANDRES KAHAR ______________ Fugue Noun 1. Fugue - dissociative disorder in which a person forgets who they are and leaves home to creates a new life; during the fugue there is no memory of the former life; after recovering there is no memory of events during the dissociative state ______________ Underemployment was a nasty, yet increasingly familiar, state of being for his generation of university-educated talent. Well, that's what Guy Burgess kept telling himself. Guy, you see, was trained as a journalist. Guy even worked as a journalist. But, one barely remembered chain of events later, Guy ended up on the fringes, working in a call centre.
- [The Stranger I Care For](https://burningword.com/2004/05/the-stranger-i-care-for/): [i]The following piece was published in The Statesman, Calcutta, India, on January 10, 2000. The subject of this piece passed away on 3 April 2004.[/i] She is lost to me already, without having died, this woman I care for in more ways than one. Bound to her by indissoluble ties, I sometimes pause to wonder, guilt-stricken, whether my commitment to this stranger in all but name and appearance can honestly be described by the euphemism that pervades the literature available on the malady--"a labour of love". For oftener than not, I am unable to regard it as anything other than an exercise in frustration, resentment, anger, futility and resignation.
- [c. e. laine](https://burningword.com/2004/04/c-e-laine/): it was not the way a tube was jammed into her throat like a drinking straw shoved through the plastic lid of a frozen malt it was not the last remark she scribbled onto the message board because words were unavailable it was how her hands were tied to the stainless-steel bed rails after they took away her black marker [i]* For Carol Elaine. Originally appeared in Stirring v3e10, written under the name Kit Sullivan[/i]
- [A Rose to Press](https://burningword.com/2004/04/a-rose-to-press/): Illness smells out the trite like beagles with noses near to the ground -- like a mother who knows her daughter's been smoking in the bathroom downstairs a dozen walls away from her. Suddenly this narrowing of breakdown lanes, of space to roam, sidewalks cracking from the ice. Slippery sunsets, stretching winters, each hour of spring fresh popcorn to a starving duck. Truth becomes too short to hold -- like mustache trimmings in the sink, like bones that go brittle and snap, like hay that meets immutable rain. Don't we wish it didn't take a teapot growing cold and chipped
- [Cyclops](https://burningword.com/2004/04/cyclops/): Cyclops by Kevin P. Keating -1- White sunlight pierced the cracked, mud-encrusted windshield of the pickup truck, stinging my one good eye.
- [Not About Black Holes](https://burningword.com/2004/03/not-about-black-holes/): Not that. Not a black and blue rant, bruising the paper, a howl at the moon-faced, blank-look reader. Not a sundrop below the horizon. So? Raindrops are falling on your metre, that doesn't mean your verse is free to moo and chew over wizened cliches like hay, like, hey, all I am asking is -- Not that. Shisa
- [Anthony and Cleopatra](https://burningword.com/2004/02/anthony-and-cleopatra/): It was many years later, I was around 40 now and I was relaxing on my back porch and musing on the past. The band had run it's course with some success but we were ahead of our time, misunderstood. As things usually go, bands that followed us, that copied our style made all the money. They looked better, had better management, had vocal coaches and hairdressers and fitness coaches and image coaches. Some of the creeps even went to college to learn how to be a rock star. It was laughable how they came on all tough but were some of the most pampered individuals on the planet. The people wanted lies, the people wanted things packaged in something simple they could understand. And that's what they bought. But I couldn't complain, we had a good 8 year run, made a little money before the usual things happened; the power struggles, ego-trips and substance abuse. I had to walk away from it all before I Cobain'd out.
- [Eric Burger](https://burningword.com/2004/02/eric-burger/): Look, I know how it is: you are quivering with untapped energies. All you need is to share them. So you call your brother, Gabe, but for the millionth time he's too busy – this time, with Jello. Coffee. The fine Colombian might soak up some of your disappointment. No Good. And your wannabe-fashion-model leap from boxers to briefs hasn't changed a thing. Now there's only one place left to go but the cat looks away and will not warm your ankles. From deep within comes a rumbling
- [Rhonda Ward](https://burningword.com/2004/01/rhonda-ward/): [b]Dance, Amari [/b] [I] (for Amari Diaw)[/I] Do not untie your hair, Amari. Do not, for perfect pliés and pirouettes, turn from native locks or wish for whiteness. Kick up your thick-boned legs in cultured protestation. Avoid unbraided simulation. Take first position, stand on pointed principles. Deconstruct the dance politic. [I] Amari Diaw is a four-year-old, African-American resident of New Bedford, MA, who faced being banned from her dance school recital in the summer of 2003 because she wore braids which could not be "slicked back and pulled into a bun."[/I]
- [Koan Inertia](https://burningword.com/2004/01/koan-inertia/): The yellow arrows on the pavement split to left and right, defining the acceptable movements of vehicles. And for a while, I'm immobilized, thinking of a butterfly flapping its wings. A typhoon I don't want to create, so I sit in my car, studying the arrows. And I think then of my exhaust and of the Greenhouse Effect (especially because my particular automobile mocks emissions tests), and realize that not moving is a butterfly flapping its wings just as surely as turning is. And I'm jolted into action, but still haven't made a choice. I shift my foot from the brake to the gas and the car leaps forward, splitting the arrows.
- [Merrill Lynch Wants Me Dead](https://burningword.com/2004/01/merrill-lynch-wants-me-dead/): It's a grossly long story; the missing Merrill Lynch Roth IRA account. The final saga in an ugly divorce…how could it not be an ugly divorce? It was an ugly marriage first wasn't it? So why is it surprising to think than an ugly union would have anything but an ugly offspring...in this case, the divorce resembled a one-armed strung out hooker with asphalt-torn nylons a broken shoe and a lisp, "Thay, buddy, can I bum a thmoke?" Why do people call us buddy? But the Merrill Lynch Roth IRA account is still missing. I think that it never existed. But then, I don't really remember. I quit remembering a long time ago. As soon as the paperwork was filed I figured the money was gone anyways. Either she'd end up with all of it or I'd have to sell it off to pay the attorneys. Either way, I never thought much of it after that.
- [Those days](https://burningword.com/2004/01/those-days/): When we scrubbed our hands with ash and water, brushed our teeth with fingers and charcoal powder... When we sat in a semi-circle on the kitchen floor, raising a din with spoons and brass plates waiting for scolding amma to give us food... When we ran barefoot on the dirt roads after bullock carts and horse carriages, dodging cow-dung as our feet pranced or we plunged in the pond with frogs, fish and buffalos... We were happy. Ashok Gupta ashok1082@yahoo.co.uk May 1999
- [Hike to Gurkha Fort](https://burningword.com/2004/01/hike-to-gurkha-fort/): We hiked to Gurkha Fort in the heat of mid-June, Victor and I. The stream had dried into shallow pockets. Clear sunlight shone on rounded stones. Little pink fish gulped tiny mouthfuls, darted pell-mell trapped and starved. They rushed for the bait, the black barbed hook pierced clean through eager open mouths. It was easy, so easy; we caught so many and cast them away on our way back to school Ashok Gupta ashok1082@yahoo.co.uk
- [Dadaji](https://burningword.com/2004/01/dadaji/): Children would run behind Dadaji on his bicycle. Children of the hut dwellers and those from the bungalows. Dadaji ,a huge figure in black with days old salt-pepper beard in his long flowing shirt hanging from behind the seat and white broad pyjamas. He would paddle away on the same path day after day They would scream and shout gleefully- "Dadaji", "Dadaji" and chase him over long distances, till he tired and balancing his bicycle on a foot, took out from his pocket peppermints of bright colours and gave to the children. Hardly would he have started again,
- [Mustard Seeds](https://burningword.com/2004/01/mustard-seeds/): I question the empty page like a moldy slice of bread -- it might have been a decent meal in someone else's hands. The clock records a passing hour. Still no verse worth printing out. A filthy kitchen floor sticks to my shoes like an uttered lie -- I flip through yesterday's mail, stacking bills in heavy bricks, thinking I'm an ad for grief, ought to get different life that dwells upon a butterfly. Our puppy slams the keyboard tray, pulls at my socks with rollicking teeth. Her tail wags east then west -- pointing out with clarity the aching light I'm missing in this clouded room --
- [Shotgun](https://burningword.com/2003/12/shotgun/): No new worlds left The streetlights roar by and the cars just stutter while I try to remember terminal velocity 120 feet per second? I look at the postcards my ex-wife sent me from Paris and Mexico as the concierge nods Someone is passing a pipe around the backseat I can smell it The driver and I pass on it 200 miles to go Driver's knuckles are white around the wheel as he grinds his teeth We're not passing as many body mounds today as the past few days and the gunfire has died down 200 miles to the ammo dump and we're running short There's still some hide-outs
- [You have left your hat but I do not trust it](https://burningword.com/2003/12/you-have-left-your-hat-but-i-do-not-trust-it/): You have left your hat, but I do not trust it. Maybe the sky should be stormier, its color the color of my hair. There is a door. There is a doorbell. You don't ring it. I could not lock the door against you but I have let you hold a key. Perhaps there could be shaking at the foundations. Perhaps some plaster could fall. The windows are stuck but I have not locked them. I pulled the shades down but they are broken and torn. I have cut the phone wires to your house now. I saw you push them back through the wall. I have turned to sleep but I hear you pounding. There is lightning. It was thunder.
- [The Cold Canticle](https://burningword.com/2003/11/the-cold-canticle/): by Joseph Armstead The Alpha and the Omega, unto ash they are made, craven shadows, shattered specters, obedient hounds of despair, huntsman gone a'haunting, broken souls, and they weep acid rain. The music plays... 1) Nergal's Nightwalk Across the barren plain, it echoes Infinity, the naked impermanence of the species gathers a thousand prayers into one hollow voice and drops it just below the pitch of Heaven's ears, unheard, unrewarded, lonely, one fragile cry from the orphaned hopeful Sitting on a Rock of Ages, the Pilgrim plays a ghostly tune on a flute of carved bone,
- [Angel Amongst Ashes](https://burningword.com/2003/11/angel-amongst-ashes/): By Joseph Armstead The sign on the hill Has the marks of muddy Boot treads on it and It is sinking in the mud and ash. Ageless eyes that beheld the wonders Of the endless spaceways and The glories of the cosmos Blink back cold tears. He is alone. The wind fans his hair And it smells of old fires, Storms, Wet concrete and rusted steel. He listens for the silence. His wounds bleed. Here there once were kings, in this place of shattered brick, rubble, and they held sway over nations and armies of fearsome might. He sees Time Pass like the waters of
- [A Sigh In The Forests of Midnight](https://burningword.com/2003/11/a-sigh-in-the-forests-of-midnight/): By Joseph Armstead Breathe in, breathe out… You can smell it in the air, That scent of rain and regret, The perfume of bittersweet Memory And old dreams vaguely Recollected. It imbues a strange feeling In the soul, a stirring Of melancholy for Things that can never be, And it creates its own Moonlight, transforming The harsh metallic silver from the gloomy evening sky to the color of gun-metal when you stare down the barrel. It's there, that feeling, That smell, that sound, That music without Melody. It stays with you long past its time.
- [HADES WEPT](https://burningword.com/2003/11/hades-wept/): By Joseph Armstead Forgive us our trespasses… There is a room inside Our minds, inside the Swirling maelstrom of Sensation, fear, sex And ego that makes us each Unique, where we joyfully Visit the deepest pit Within the Circus Infernal. No one likes to admit it. No one likes to Acknowledge they know Where this place is in Their minds, this tunneling Spiraling hole through Their soul, but when Emotions are at a fever pitch, When despair takes hold, When the reptilian brain Awakens, we stride growling through the door, willingly, and we dance amongst the
- [Midge](https://burningword.com/2003/10/midge/)
- [Burning In Water (w/ a thanks to Bukowski)](https://burningword.com/2003/10/burning-in-water-w-a-thanks-to-bukowski/): The hair around my nipples has grown longer. It's not something that one would notice. Hell, I didn't even notice until one late summer day - actually, an early fall day in Southern California where we regularly push the summers well into October and on into December if we're lucky - while smoking a cigarette and reading the latest edition of "Modern Painters" I looked down across my bare chest at hairs that had begun to grey and noticed a lengthy curl about my left nipple. Fortunately, the right nipple had equal growth so I did not look unbalanced in any way but the long hairs and the greying and the fact that I could repose on a Thursday late-summer morning and consider this newly discovered arrangement satisfied me in a very adult way.
- [Untold](https://burningword.com/2003/10/untold/): Untold She ended it with the slamming of a door that had begun to chip the paint from around the jamb One day she'd slam that door and knock all the paint off of everything and he would just stand there Still There was no sign or warning No look in her eye No twitch No minor hesitation And then, as if out of nowhere, she would lay 14-years of marriage across his face with a swift, flat hand that reeled the memories in his already spinning brain It wasn't fair It was never fair As a child he had lived this same way for too many years, Until that day, as a young man, when he caught his mother's hand in mid-strike and held it there Just a little too tightly And a little too long And told her, "Never again." But not this one He never stopped her He just stood And took it And never raised a hand She was just too close to him Or maybe he was too close to her And it didn't seem to matter on which side he chose Like trying to pick between two long lines at the checkout stand and always guessing wrong There was no winning in it for him Just chipping paint And so many things left untold
- [the theory of sunlight on chrome](https://burningword.com/2003/10/the-theory-of-sunlight-on-chrome/): your name called out at the exact moment a woman's body washes ashore three thousand miles away or a man pulling poems from the bones of old lovers obvious things my wife and her fears my lack of faith my lack of money the possibilities of highways and of walls the idea of starvation of sunlight through rainsoaked trees and what if the unborn child becomes a weapon? what if the ocean is bottomless? don't believe for a second that any of this poetry don't think that killing the killers is the same thing as justice and maybe it doesn't have to be
- [the rooms in this house](https://burningword.com/2003/10/the-rooms-in-this-house/): rain somewhere animals caught in baited traps or the air thick and yellow the sun shapeless and the pieces of a sixteen-month old girl are found in a city five hundred miles away the smell of battery acid like a blanket over everything and the rooms in this house are familiar the bodies found hung from the trees outside have names i've heard before and i don't live here anymore but maybe at some point in the past maybe before the first tiny hand was dropped into a food processor and now i live nowhere while faceless men decide my future fucked
- [st. garbage, resurrected](https://burningword.com/2003/10/st-garbage-resurrected/): in the blue and the purple light on the shadowed sides of these houses in a room with a cracked window and the ghost of edie crawling naked across the floor i am my father at 34 and his own father before him i am the face my children fear and the voice and the raised hand i am the emptiness and the absence of warmth and america is its own form of violence the boy is dead next to his sister in the back of the van the father drives with the radio on softly with dylan's voice dragging itself through my headphones as i sit at the foot of the bed watching april sleep
- [There’s a rise among us-](https://burningword.com/2003/09/theres-a-rise-among-us/): HERE IN THE SHALLOWS... where we breathe uncomforts. We see and hear the walklings skip across our heads; feel their heels dig into our existence. Souls are just like flesh except unblemished. They rip open easy-- ooze out into the air. Where they become less than intended. Their rotting wounds satiate our thoughts until we can no longer think and reason and sense our beginnings and ends hence eternity is Hell. I felt the exact moment or thereabouts when my soul slit open-- I found a cockroach in the kitchen. Squashed it with the bottom of my glass. Wiped its remains on the counter's edge.
- [A Fine Line](https://burningword.com/2003/09/a-fine-line/): Forty years of cigarettes had worked her face over like a metal rake and her hair that she says use to fall like golden sunshine now sits brittle and high upon this plucked and painted landscape But she still has legs And an ass that stumble-dances its way from barstool to barstool like a parade of horses on their way to the starting gate carrying the jocks wearing their multi-colored silks Prancing and snorting All stiff legged, every step working up the lather between their cheeks But it isn't the body that keeps her in business, no, it's the way she carries it Teetering on that fine line between holding your whole world in the palm of her hand as if you are the only man that she would ever know
- [speaking freely, but in the wrong person](https://burningword.com/2003/09/speaking-freely-but-in-the-wrong-person/): you think about words and about the places they come from you think about meaning about these small beautiful images that the poets polish like valuable stones that are worth the tiniest fraction of nothing and against them you place your grey slabs of self-hatred you talk about the burning girl long after her ashes have grown cold and you remember reagan as a monster as a vampire but you have reached a point in time where no one else wants to speak the truth about the dying you have become a man defined as angry because this is what fear looks like when seen from outside one's own skin
- [mapping out the here and now](https://burningword.com/2003/09/mapping-out-the-here-and-now/): blood on the sheets and you laugh blood on the walls the daughter in the mother's arms and both of them dead the boyfriend picked up 800 miles away says he loves her but can't explain the gun can't explain the rope around gorky's neck or the poet's need to pick at these open wounds the ay the buildings burn without reason the cities where they begin to dissolve into suburbs and strip malls your smile in the weak sunlight of an august afternoon the way you taste all of these things held together by the sheer force of anger
- [alchemy](https://burningword.com/2003/09/alchemy/): each day like filth scraped from the eye of god each moment pure and i offer no explanations when i tell you that both are true i eat dinner while paul hill is put to death i have seconds and how is it that in all the years i wasted in school i never learned about the babi yar ravine? in whose blood are the names of all the slaughtered written? picture the world reduced to those who would invent the machine gun and those who would use it picture mercy as being allowed to die before your daughters are raped remember that malevich had his reasons for painting white on white
- [vallejo, with apologies](https://burningword.com/2003/09/vallejo-with-apologies/): at some point america is supported by nothing but the bones of goebbels' children at some point the starving have nothing to eat but each other and august of course dissolves into september and a seven year-old boy is hit by a car while playing in the street in front of my house and what if no one knows where he lives? what if dali wakes up in a room on fire? at some point there has to be a distinction between reality and art a woman's eyeball sliced open or a baby found dead in a plastic bag on a street corner my son drawing airplanes at the dining room table
- [If I have a chance I’ll show you this one thing](https://burningword.com/2003/08/if-i-have-a-chance-ill-show-you-this-one-thing/): to peel an orange in one continuous spiral one perfect careful stripe of orange with just a fingernail and thumb, lay the sweet fragrance onto hands and into the room, put the fruit one segment at a time into your mouth, then rewind the peel into a perfect globe, each edge remet and fit to its brother whole, hollow, yes, emptied, but perfect still
- [Handmade](https://burningword.com/2003/08/handmade/): Handmade Golden light on a square of overgrown grass and dandelions. I pull the shade.
- [Brickhouse Blues](https://burningword.com/2003/08/brickhouse-blues/): Brickhouse Blues See these men out shooting craps up against the brickhouse wall, these men all shooting craps up against that brickhouse wall, hear them dice click on the pavement, see them dollars fall.
- [open letter to the god of starving dogs](https://burningword.com/2003/07/open-letter-to-the-god-of-starving-dogs/): and it's not that i want to see you bleed it's that i want to be the one who makes the wound do you see how power differs from action? do you believe in addictions other than your own? we are all so fucking desperate
- [war, everywhere](https://burningword.com/2003/07/war-everywhere/): this man who writes to tell me what he's sacrificed for his art these children who weren't even born when the land mines were planted their missing limbs and ruined faces and small painful deaths all of the reasons i hate what i've become
- [parable](https://burningword.com/2003/07/parable/): or these animals in their tiny cages and the way they go insane the way money exchanges hands [i]twenty bucks[/i] he says as his girlfriend walks into the room and i think i might know her i think i may have been here before was promised nothing but came back again again learned finally that hatred was the only drug i needed to feel alive
- [responding to the critics](https://burningword.com/2003/07/responding-to-the-critics/): and sometimes they write to talk about discipline and sometimes to lecture about the need for hope sometimes i send them pictures of nuns hanging raped and murdered from the trees of central america we all need to believe in something
- [What Happens to the Fallen Leaf](https://burningword.com/2003/07/what-happens-to-the-fallen-leaf/): I expect we will always argue about fixed conclusions of a chair -- that image of defeat so raw it could be hanging, stinking beef unabated by the wind. Call it fealty to dreams, to rivers drying as we speak -- if you guess I'll yield to rolling wheels with arioso grace, you've not met my real soul who thinks that even tortured legs are still a poem with missions in their syllables. You will say I have more strength than monuments of will I know. You will say that chancre is a cornered bird in rooms we never knew were there. And I will say I'm featherless, a brittle corpse that mourns
- [O Capricious Heart](https://burningword.com/2012/01/o-capricious-heart/)
- [Changming Yuan](https://burningword.com/2012/01/changming-yuan/): Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman and 4-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to North America.
- [studying bare walls](https://burningword.com/2012/01/studying-bare-walls/): His shrinking humiliation blistered in the sun.
- [Memory Of Hurricane Hazel, 1954 for J. R. McK](https://burningword.com/2012/01/memory-of-hurricane-hazel-1954-for-j-r-mck/): Week or so after Hurricane Hazel, Me, just out of the Navy, no job. Mac, one year out of Walter Reed.
- [Marija Stajic](https://burningword.com/2012/01/marija-stajic/): Marija Stajic is a writer and journalist who has been published by The New Yorker and many other online and print publications, and who has published three books of poetry.
- [She…](https://burningword.com/2012/01/she/): And so She was created from the dust, She who was Beauty, Compassion, and Love.
- [Walter Safar](https://burningword.com/2011/10/walter-safar/): Demonic fires blaze in the eye of the stone palace, and me, I only stand in the dark beneath the sky that reaches its invisible hands out towards scores of nameless graves.
- [Siobhan Hansen](https://burningword.com/2011/10/siobhan-hansen/): Labor day already. We went back to Brookline from Marshfield, where we summered. With the ocean at the bottom of the street, two streets over.
- [Absent Sunshine](https://burningword.com/2011/10/absent-sunshine/)
- [Sarah Carleton](https://burningword.com/2011/10/sarah-carleton/): My hen Kiev has it in for dirt.
- [When the Screen Goes Blank](https://burningword.com/2011/10/when-the-screen-goes-blank/): I enter the elevator, watching the blinking red lights as I descend to lower level number nine, where I exit to face my interviewer.
- [Paul Buchheit](https://burningword.com/2011/10/paul-buchheit/): We run as if an agitated earth were breaking up behind us, and we fight to gain our stations at the gritty trough half-filled with corn, where each survivor's worth is daily measured by another's right to fair apportionment denied; and off our makeshift plates of muddied, calloused hands ensues a squealing angry vulgar rush to suck the greasy nourishment before there is no more, beneath the reprimands of our possessors, who behold the crush of vermin squirming to and fro, and roar with ridicule at other men's distress.
- [Nick D’Annunzio Jones](https://burningword.com/2011/10/nick-dannunzio-jones/): a languid puff of dew floats like a cotton bale in air as calm and blue as a sea we could sail without a chart or a clue I have a bathysphere in my brain sometimes.
- [Nathan Prince](https://burningword.com/2011/10/nathan-prince/)
- [Martin Freebase](https://burningword.com/2011/10/martin-freebase/): Martin’s work is solidly based on the concept of poetry as a social construction.
- [Joe Churchwell](https://burningword.com/2011/10/joe-churchwell/): sky. I’m going away from here, and still can’t say. I’ll arrive there, though, where it is, this I can tell.
- [Joan Colby](https://burningword.com/2011/10/joan-colby/): They ought to float Away like cigarette smoke To contaminate someone else’s curtains. But they don’t. They hover over our heads Like filthy haloes.
- [Jenn Blair](https://burningword.com/2011/10/jenn-blair/): Clouds hang low in the heat, heavy bellied animals.
- [Cookie Purse](https://burningword.com/2011/10/cookie-purse/): by Gina Douglas My maternal grandmother and my father both told related stories about me when I was a child first learning to talk.
- [Georgia Kreiger](https://burningword.com/2011/10/georgia-kreiger/): Our angels have traded their binoculars for krugerrands. They send their regrets along with brochures from islands where the dollar still buys luck.
- [A Garden’s Annual Funeral](https://burningword.com/2011/10/a-gardens-annual-funeral/): The nauseous breath of change blows bravely into my warring heart, saying gravely I have a greater calling outside my parents’ house where the garden dies annually, a sickly warden of youth, ever stalling.
- [Drea Kato](https://burningword.com/2011/10/drea-kato/): You be the building and I'll be the fire. She'll be the one on the funeral pyre.
- [Blogger-Chick](https://burningword.com/2011/10/blogger-chick/): the very base of you.
- [Lumbricus terrestris](https://burningword.com/2011/10/lumbricus-terrestris/): Below the snow-pack, under the flat tangle of matted grass, gently squirming beneath the force-field of the frost line live les vers de terre, their cryptic trails umbilically twisting toward the winter crust.
- [Cliff Weber](https://burningword.com/2011/10/cliff-weber/): We are meaningless bolts of animalistic cruelty lost in working class delusion; enthusiastic mimes latching onto shriveled worries.
- [Fishing Lures, Underwear and Poetry](https://burningword.com/2011/10/fishing-lures-underwear-and-poetry/): I’m reading a book of poetry by Robert Frost, an American master. I can smell the dirt and hear the rustle of trees as I flip through the leaves.
- [Annie Canavan](https://burningword.com/2011/10/annie-canavan/): Tangled in a ruthless sea of anxiety and adversity, my lungs crave the cool clarity of the air but fail to conquer the destructive consistency of this hurricane’s warfare.
- [Amanda Cal Phoenix](https://burningword.com/2011/10/amanda-cal-phoenix/): Amanda “Cal” Phoenix is an undergraduate student at Washburn University, in Topeka, Kansas.
- [Post Apocalyptic Limbo](https://burningword.com/2011/07/post-apocalyptic-limbo/): by Jake DeHaai His bright blue eyes provided the only color to the barren wasteland. The deep creases around his mouth told tales of violence, love, and loss.
- [Elias Van Son](https://burningword.com/2011/07/elias-van-son/): God and i talk all day in low voices.
- [HollyAnn Walls](https://burningword.com/2011/07/hollyann-walls/): “Life is what you make it,” They told me. So I made mine sit down and shut up. I stuffed it into a small, neat, square and shiny box.
- [Nickie Albert](https://burningword.com/2011/07/nickie-albert/): I’m taking the day off to mourn my life which is not something I can do at work surrounded by computers and codes.
- [G David Schwartz](https://burningword.com/2011/07/g-david-schwartz/): Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue. Currently a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to write.
- [Frank Rossini](https://burningword.com/2011/07/frank-rossini/): Frank Rossini has been published in various magazines including Poetry Now, The Seattle Review, and Wisconsin Review.
- [Eric Rawson](https://burningword.com/2011/07/eric-rawson/): Eric’s work has recently appeared in a number of periodicals, including Ploughshares, Agni, and Denver Quarterly.
- [Thief](https://burningword.com/2011/07/thief/): He stole the stars above her house, pulling them out with a claw hammer.
- [Richard Williford](https://burningword.com/2011/07/richard-williford/): Those bright blue eyes Rain. I’ve seen how much she cries. They drain her longing, Desperate, For what I don’t know.
- [On Hogarth’s  “‘The Orgy’ from ‘A Rake’s Progress’”](https://burningword.com/2011/07/on-hogarths-the-orgy-from-a-rakes-progress/): At yon round table sprawls a rake, A dissolute, belov’d by girls Who cannot but great notice take Of how that handsome flaunts his curls.
- [Reflections on Death in Six Movements](https://burningword.com/2011/07/reflections-on-death-in-six-movements/): I. 23 January 2010 I spent the year learning to live without you.
- [Jerry O'Bannion](https://burningword.com/2011/07/jerry-obannion/): Jack Kerouac dreamed of the Dharma, All doubledy-clutched, And rolling At about a hundred and Ten miles Per hour, You unnerstand, In a nineteen forty-seven Dodge coupe; All the way across the vastness of the Great Plains And up the Ohio Valley It would come roaring into Manhatten Like a Drunken Denver cowboy, With his wages burning a hole in his pocket; But the Interstates left The Dharma stranded like An ancient alcoholic Hitchhiker In a small room At the Wagon Wheel Motel Near Cuba, Missouri On what used to be Route 66.
- [White Coffin](https://burningword.com/2011/07/white-coffin/): I made spaghetti for supper. A bad day, you said. You needed a soak. Your last words as you breezed past me.
- [Sarah Marchant](https://burningword.com/2011/07/sarah-marchant/): We sat in a sun-stained booth nibbling at lo mein noodles, and I swallowed whatever ridiculous thoughts I could've spewed to cure the disease that is vibrating silence – like the story behind the invention of doughnuts; for some reason, that struck me as something so significant that I felt I had to tell you, had to bring it up, but I never got the chance.
- [Miles Liss](https://burningword.com/2011/07/miles-liss/)
- [Mauve Finery](https://burningword.com/2011/07/mauve-finery/)
- [Some Other Living Arrangements](https://burningword.com/2011/07/some-other-living-arrangements/): Amy’s voice is on the line before Ellen even hears a full ring. “Thank God you called. I’m at my wit’s end today, Ellen - he is On. My. Last.
- [Suzanne Lane](https://burningword.com/2011/07/suzanne-lane/): Apparently, our love has been reading Emerson and believes it is self-reliant.
- [What The Dog Saw](https://burningword.com/2011/07/what-the-dog-saw/): Her vitriol is shocking like the unfounded kick to fat puppy though He reacts in teeth gnash rabid snarl the mean passion of that same fat puppy reared on a diet of no love and meager bones.
- [Image of E.](https://burningword.com/2011/07/image-of-e/): battered, bruised used, overlooked forgotten poor yet rich in faith unprotected sex object in the eyes of bad and dark spirits, bad and dark souls innocent, saved, redeemed in time tired of working for worth with (already) a worthy name short of being tall obese yet healthy enough to survive, surmount, embrace being troubled in mind do like to communicate with only the truthful, with only the wise; a teacher, loyal friend perplexing lover poised in damaged purity… Image of, reflection of enmity that keeps apart two souls drawing near E.
- [adrian ibarra](https://burningword.com/2011/07/adrian-ibarra/): This late in the year she’s coughing up a bed. With a pair of scissors and a pen she begins to lay the flowers out.
- [No Poem](https://burningword.com/2011/07/no-poem/): No thing. No dream. No soul toward phosphorescence. No burn. No black. No come. No home. No yes, no. No do, undo. No sky, holler, hug. No blue.
- [The Density of Loss](https://burningword.com/2011/07/the-density-of-loss/): And when it was over I wondered how long i would be immersed in that warm and familiar feeling of loss. it seeps into me.
- [Isabella](https://burningword.com/2011/07/isabella/): Isabella became Iiisssaaa, moments after she was born.
- [The  Chumpion  Of  Lost  Causes](https://burningword.com/2011/07/the-chumpion-of-lost-causes/): Sharmila is so naïve She can’t pick between prudence and courage She flogs dead horses She allows herself to be found traipsing through the tulips She’s a slow unlearner She loves her unteacher She wants 364 unbirthdays What she resists persists She depotentiates herself, silly goose, Until her soul screams,”STOP” -Sonali Gurpur Sonali Gurpur writes poetry and fiction.
- [Enchantment](https://burningword.com/2011/07/enchantment/)
- [From Darkness Into Light](https://burningword.com/2011/07/from-darkness-into-light/): by Kim Farleigh The glass roof left rectangular light on the sand, the swaying bull swaying beside the light, as if listening to music, death’s orchestra calling, the bull’s left back leg in front of the leg it should have been next to, blood dripping from its nostrils, a gold rectangle of light next to where the bull was swaying, swaying to an irresistible calling, the sword sticking out of the bull’s back, the matador’s triumphant hand shaking before the bull’s face, the bull falling into light, a courageous bull that had run in straight lines.
- [Bottled Message](https://burningword.com/2011/07/bottled-message/): The red shred of linen cuts Mountains into halves and Dyes the sand crimson black, Burning holes into copper chests. Brackish wind, no, waves.
- [How Things End](https://burningword.com/2011/07/how-things-end/): Zoe Etkin is an MFA student at CalArts. She identifies as a poet but is also interested in hybrid forms.
- [Final Moments](https://burningword.com/2011/07/final-moments/): My hands feel sweaty As I gently lift you off my lap Your gray tail curves against my arm And I feel as though you're holding on Not because you're afraid to fall But because you're afraid to keep holding on Fragile bones of starvation can be felt Amongst the ungroomed, greasy hair You hide away in my arms as I move on Closer and closer towards the door With the bell that lightly chimes “Appointment with death” Sounds of youthful chirps and barks Surround us as I hold you closer Remember when you were that small?
- [Funeral Pyre](https://burningword.com/2011/07/funeral-pyre/): Wooden poets buoy above the lawn on knees carved of earth and splintered words, spitting fire to grave. They ember on in true pyrrhic fashion, flutter and burn.
- [Snowmen in Windsor Park](https://burningword.com/2011/07/snowmen-in-windsor-park/): Today, in the safety of noon’s optimism I allowed my thoughts to return to December Though I never felt her winter, I knew, she was colder than most.
- [David Courtright](https://burningword.com/2011/07/david-courtright/): eye i found: we are all wild.
- [Highball](https://burningword.com/2011/07/highball/): We often drink to swim in sorrows past Only to relish in the marvel of their sweetened complexions Seasons seem to bear no malice on thoughts and actions spent Worlds apart from modern conviction We often drink to swim in sorrows past Retired disappointments we find abandoned We often drink to swim in sorrows past To find them snug and sound ….
- [April Chye](https://burningword.com/2011/07/april-chye/): to hell with stolen hearts, broken hearts, the beautiful and the damned. to hell with thieves, the wreckers, their grand larceny, a sham.
- [Approaching My Own Version of Adulthood](https://burningword.com/2011/07/approaching-my-own-version-of-adulthood/): These oppressively hot, humid nights, alone with my thoughts and the heat in this premature summer.
- [Rina Caparras](https://burningword.com/2011/07/rina-caparras/): falling from a height is a kind of f light where your desti nation is your self.
- [Before You Left the House](https://burningword.com/2011/07/before-you-left-the-house/): by Diana Cage This morning I really wanted you. I’m not sure if you wanted it and if you didn’t then it isn’t the same.
- [Always, Always](https://burningword.com/2011/07/always-always/): He looked at her and he asked: are you dreaming still?
- [Keeper and Hawk](https://burningword.com/2011/07/keeper-and-hawk/): Outside, herself again, effects of kill and cure alleviated by the news, she’s dancing early morning Braille grace notes along the woodland ride.
- [Christina Borgoyn](https://burningword.com/2011/07/christina-borgoyn/): to the tune of flight, arms flail solo- a slow push and legs swim amid stratus as naked moons peek toward a sunrise, hail intensifying the mien.
- [The Hours Between Our Feet](https://burningword.com/2011/07/the-hours-between-our-feet/): When you breathe, I see the map materializing like it's a cold day in winter. I pluck it from the air, and I am finally able to hold distance in my hand.
- [Nina Bennett](https://burningword.com/2011/07/nina-bennett/): April wind whips tumbleweeds across the plains of Santa Fe. Some wedge in barbed wire fences, others bounce along I-25 like children playing hopscotch.
- [C. Dylan Bassett](https://burningword.com/2011/07/c-dylan-bassett/): weakness never goes out of the body, we only learn how to use it. * death is built into us, it’s better that way: we already have enough debt to repay.
- [Corridors](https://burningword.com/2011/07/corridors/): I tell you I've seen corridors. More than many, fewer than few. Corridors that lead to pain, Drawn out from the plants and weeds.
- [Fifth Avenue Debut](https://burningword.com/2011/04/fifth-avenue-debut/): Momma was worried.
- [Reunion](https://burningword.com/2011/04/reunion/)
- [So, This Is Heaven](https://burningword.com/2011/04/so-this-is-heaven/): When did the waves reach the cities? I wasn’t aware the tides could topple our temples. Is this the end of narcissism? Of pride?
- [Marriage / The ‘F’ Word](https://burningword.com/2011/04/marriage-the-f-word/): Waiting in line with my children at the market, A woman cradles a phone against her ear and Pronounces alto voce the word that daily fills The air like jagged hail or a plague of frogs.
- [Bravo, Julie Andrews!](https://burningword.com/2011/04/bravo-julie-andrews/): The ballet recital at the end of school year was as usual: little girls (and occasionally one or two boys) demonstrated their achievements before an audience of adoring relations.
- [The Drain](https://burningword.com/2011/04/the-drain/): One of the few things that I remember about my first childhood home, which my family had lived in until I was eight, is the shower drain.
- [Anne Champion: poems](https://burningword.com/2011/04/anne-champion-poems/): At six, my sister claimed she remembered birth, that moment the scalpel sliced across our mother’s abdomen and pried open the flesh to expose her miniature body held inside.
- [Michael Estabrook: poems](https://burningword.com/2011/04/michael-estabrook-poems/): Who could have imagined I’d be sitting here on my numb ass in this stuffy, gray, meeting room hunched over a big shiny boardroom table discussing the customer response to our security of supply business continuity plan and rollout instead of on the latest research vessel out of Woods Hole collecting phytoplankton and zooplankton, jellyfish larva and sea urchin eggs, like I was planning and hoping to do way back in the beginning?
- [Coincidence](https://burningword.com/2011/04/coincidence/): I happened by your street last night, just as you were going out the door.
- [Kevin Shea: poems](https://burningword.com/2011/04/kevin-shea-poems/)
- [Landscape / Under the Icy Ash](https://burningword.com/2011/04/landscape-under-the-icy-ash/): Between waterfalls a poem written in moss grows on stone. Ferns sprout from words intertwined, twisted shaggy, hard to define in the mist sustaining them.
- [Reflection](https://burningword.com/2011/04/reflection/): A man got up from bed, went to his bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw people come in full circle and detach themselves.
- [White Shorts](https://burningword.com/2011/04/white-shorts/): Humans in white shorts are vulnerable yet strangely aggressive. What with their bare-legged dexterity, if you’re a bug there’s nowhere to hide.
- [She is Learning About Postmodernism](https://burningword.com/2011/04/she-is-learning-about-postmodernism/): Martin Leonard Freebase lives in Dubuque, Iowa with his wife, daughter, and a black and white cat named “Daisy.” Martin’s work is solidly based on the concept of poetry as a social construction.
- [Clouds, Rivers, and Minnie Mouse](https://burningword.com/2011/04/clouds-rivers-and-minnie-mouse/): I was that four-year- old boy smiling, thumb aimed at the sky like I was molding the atmosphere’s clouds with Minnie Mouse and my eyelashes, tangled as ever, winked at each other.
- [Like a Silent Lover](https://burningword.com/2011/04/like-a-silent-lover/): Like a silent lover, Summer slipped out this morning. The sheets were pulled aside.
- [The Angels Want Jimmy's Head](https://burningword.com/2011/04/the-angels-want-jimmys-head/): The angels want Jimmy’s head. Jimmy runs. Jimmy runs scared. Jimmy runs to church. God help me, please!
- [Armament and Ornament](https://burningword.com/2011/04/armament-and-ornament/): The prayer is offered, and waked, the robins march thru the chambers of open morning. O, they are small and they hurt, they bend and break to broken birds.
- [My History with Guns #3](https://burningword.com/2011/04/my-history-with-guns-3/): My Daddy always liked to say “The Blue Ridge Parkway is the prettiest place on God’s green earth.” ‘Course his heart calls that part of the country home so you have to allow for some bias.
- [The Request](https://burningword.com/2011/04/the-request/)
- [Of Sea and Spirits](https://burningword.com/2011/04/of-sea-and-spirits/): When I walk along the waterfront of west Michigan, I forget about west Michigan. I like that.
- [Personals](https://burningword.com/2011/04/personals/): I get my best ideas while in the shower. Plums are best when sweet and cold. I faint at the sight of blood.
- [Crisp](https://burningword.com/2011/04/crisp/)
- [Richard Jay Shelton: poems](https://burningword.com/2011/04/richard-jay-shelton-poems/): I cast my sinker Deep into depths Fishing for instructive humanity, Fishing in a sea Of sweat and abuse, I spend my leisure hours, Suffering, As we all suffer together.
- [The Owl / The Rower](https://burningword.com/2011/04/the-owl-the-rower/): by Megan Baxter I found one of the old night birds in the trees above the sugar house, starving, it refused the trap-killed mice I brought, hunter, whistling weight in the dark.
- [Celeste Walke: poems](https://burningword.com/2011/04/celeste-walke-poems/): She brims with enamor over the notion Of the rolling curves; the fat Of the land.
- [Matthew Walz: Traveling Home Poetry](https://burningword.com/2011/01/matthew-walz-poetry/): The last remaining ghost In a world bald and gone wrong, For no one wants to stay, And no one wants to play With all the children snug in the night, While their parents cap the evening And peacefully drift toward the dark.
- [Summer Whispered to March](https://burningword.com/2012/10/summer-whispered-to-march/): as if by tidal wave.
- [Mark J. Mitchell](https://burningword.com/2012/10/mark-j-mitchell/): Thinking, all the time, of his escape plan.
- [Ripley](https://burningword.com/2012/10/ripley/): between their ears?
- [Ross Moretti](https://burningword.com/2012/10/ross-moretti/): to conjoin in the space between.
- [Nude](https://burningword.com/2012/10/nude/): and frets the sun.
- [Eugene A. Melino](https://burningword.com/2012/10/eugene-a-melino/): as one would expect of a young scholar.
- [Jeffrey Park](https://burningword.com/2012/10/jeffrey-park/): and prickly, clean, dirty or just slightly off color.
- [Owned and Operated](https://burningword.com/2012/10/owned-and-operated/)
- [The Jobs I Want Are Never Out Of Your Average Jobs Section](https://burningword.com/2012/10/the-jobs-i-want-are-never-out-of-your-average-jobs-section/): Strolling down Bridge Street my eyes wandered to a sign in a window reading, in big bright yellow letters, BOOKS WANTED.
- [So Gray](https://burningword.com/2012/10/so-gray/): to which it stood sentinel.
- [Richard Hartwell](https://burningword.com/2012/10/richard-hartwell/): empty stomach, too many cigarettes.
- [Lauren Shows](https://burningword.com/2012/10/lauren-shows/): into the yard, scratchless, blameless.
- [Peggy Aylsworth](https://burningword.com/2012/10/peggy-aylsworth/): She leans forward into the bay window.
- [Box Living](https://burningword.com/2012/10/box-living/): will not return for quite some time.
- [Walter William Safar](https://burningword.com/2012/10/walter-william-safar-2/): You observe your victim like a sphynx.
- [Mike Gallagher](https://burningword.com/2012/10/mike-gallagher/): its pungent nectar to imbibe.
- [Seven Glimpses of Patti](https://burningword.com/2012/10/seven-glimpses-of-patti/): although she nods, pats my shoulder, and says, “Don’t worry about it, Dear, I know you’ve been busy.
- [Fishhook Moon](https://burningword.com/2012/10/fishhook-moon/)
- [The Unbearable Heat](https://burningword.com/2012/10/the-unbearable-heat/): It's the usual scene – family, close friends, and distant relatives are packed into a tiny salon.
- [William B. Robison](https://burningword.com/2012/10/william-b-robison/): and I said to my brother, bet you can’t eat just one.
- [John McKernan](https://burningword.com/2012/10/john-mckernan/): John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA– is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University.
- [Singing in the Shower](https://burningword.com/2012/10/singing-in-the-shower/): like the song's lyrics.
- [Keith Moul](https://burningword.com/2012/10/keith-moul/): through the hot effulgence of summer light.
- [Other](https://burningword.com/2012/10/other/): Goodbye sound of sliding screen door, and the look of your skin under those lights, dainty and dangling overhead, blues fading green and soon, or at least I thought, soon—you’d come waltzing out to that song we always play, always sing, always saying remember this one, and take from me the last I have to give.
- [december figurines](https://burningword.com/2012/07/december-figurines/): so arctic inside, they stand Matryoshka dolls listening for tiny words echoes of hope in each other’s eyes but then the breeze comes blowing red into their noses forming creases around their eyes it feels so cold here because they can’t feel each other’s thoughts anymore.
- [William L. Alton](https://burningword.com/2012/07/william-l-alton/): Now is not the time for love. She’s only been gone a year. I wear black to mark her death. I visit her grave every week. I cannot bring a woman into this.
- [Purgatory](https://burningword.com/2012/07/purgatory/): The storm brought the ocean into our home. Even after the worst of the blowing was over, mother's body couldn't survive in the cold and the wet for long.
- [John Abbott](https://burningword.com/2012/07/john-abbott/): In a borrowed room the hitchhikers share a diminished view of the city at dawn: the sunrise fractured by clouds and the Waffle House sign and of course the interstate.
- [Cove/Silence](https://burningword.com/2012/07/covesilence/): A hearing we don’t have to listen to.
- [Laura Baker](https://burningword.com/2012/07/laura-baker/): Breathe, but don’t inhale. Taste and swish, but don’t swallow. The experience lasts a moment, then discarded into a silver bucket.
- [Dustin Junkert](https://burningword.com/2012/07/dustin-junkert/): If you must drown or burn, please burn. At some point, you must choose a scent (ascent, descent) and go with it.
- [Car Bombs](https://burningword.com/2012/07/car-bombs/): We drink until we become different people. Fuck each other stupid to see who gets the most injuries. There’s a tally chart on our bedroom wall.
- [Memorial Lake](https://burningword.com/2012/07/memorial-lake/): Thousands of leaves scatter toward us, New Year’s confetti. Icicles—test tubes, bruised apples—a baby’s beating heart.
- [Lie: We love you no matter what you do](https://burningword.com/2012/07/lie-we-love-you-no-matter-what-you-do/): If you murder, if you need help, if you get sick, my parents say but what not insane?
- [Trevor Nelson](https://burningword.com/2012/07/trevor-nelson/): I imagine my aunt cradled the wedge of wood like an unborn infant, her palms weighing the potential.
- [Refracted Sonnets](https://burningword.com/2012/07/refracted-sonnets/): The better part of an acre of mortgaged lawn demarcated by circular driveway, gravel paths, boardwalk to pool deck, islands of rhododendron, aspidistra, pear and cherry.
- [What Hunger Causes](https://burningword.com/2012/07/what-hunger-causes/): Tick chicken, snapped bones with the marrow sucked out. America with stained lips, grinning.
- [On The Sad Height](https://burningword.com/2012/07/on-the-sad-height/): I remember my childhood late nights with my Father talking for hours more Him than Me. I miss those nights spending time like its your last two dimes.
- [The Rain](https://burningword.com/2012/07/the-rain/): Carol Smallwood co-edited (Molly Peacock, foreword) Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets (McFarland, 2012).
- [The Second Hand](https://burningword.com/2012/07/the-second-hand/): It happens sometimes That I look up at the clock Just when the second hand Pauses between one tick And another So that everything seems to stand still In that moment And I have enough time To wonder If the clock has not stopped.
- [Jovan Vuksanovich](https://burningword.com/2012/07/jovan-vuksanovich/): I am a silver tongued devil laughing shaman thief of fire provocateur oracle of the absent present conscience of the exception wildflower seed deviant melody original voice deep within this sacred body hidden song ecstatic irrational erotic whispering incantations seductions into every sleepy ear pied piper of the delta tribes uplifter of nightmare scenarios nomadic madmen defiant minstrel marauders of the unsaid forever questing vigilant vagabond serenading desert solitary wandering exile in a garden of mortal flowers agile dancer leaping precipices of abysmal absurdity primordial pain pleasure principle ancient lover of the infinite intimate embracing prisoners fleeing the wilderness of echoes anorexic idealists anemic moralists mummified dadaists sterile surrealists post modern hypochondriacs mourning the death of an imaginary god mama's got dementia rage in absentia papa's dead dead in his grave cheap thrill hedonists spotlight hooligans mainstream hoopla literary lickspittles midair cliche collisions parallel uni verses carnage on the rampage page whirling carousel of the damned mama's got dementia rage in absentia papa's dead dead in his grave gold diggers fast cars venus mars bourgeois barbies hollywood harpies airbrushed mongrels frozen souls in starched armani low-rise high rollers pussy-whipped sons of nuns happy-go-lucky crucifix airheads cult of celebrity spit lists retro roulette age of pimps whores sycophants bores drunken sailors on a ship of fools mama's got dementia rage in absentia papa's dead dead in his grave facelift jehova botox redeemer saintly psychosis pious neurosis priestly lust ashes dust pope opium with an epistle in his pants ride ride cardinal jekyll bishop hyde parsifal awaits you sporting anna sui eyeliner christian dior rouges brilliant lipstick sipping dom perignon at the grail castle after hours bar mama's got dementia rage in absentia papa's dead dead in his grave hell is for liars no vacancy today blink of an eye madness reigns supreme but look!
- [steve's sign](https://burningword.com/2012/07/steves-sign/): Maureen Foster is the author of three novels, and her essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Pacific Review, Word River, and others.
- [Tehran Garden before the Air Strike](https://burningword.com/2012/07/tehran-garden-before-the-air-strike/): Early purple blooms of cosmea, in the sparse grasses, in the granulated earth, pierced and punctured, between two roses struggling: their roots tangle, squeezing each other until one submits and sumptuous oils catch and then release their differences.
- [Wonderland](https://burningword.com/2012/07/wonderland/): all who wander are lost in some scape – land of mind, body; until moon sings to sun of the last vine of being: weaves forth the stardust of all folks into unparalleled pulse, blood unburdened: tangled along the curve of earth’s spine.
- [The Carnal Flower](https://burningword.com/2012/07/the-carnal-flower/): A carnal flower grows in my garden, and each night, like clockwork, when the sun slumbers, giving way to the Afterdark, I pick it and settle it in my tweed pocket.
- [the return](https://burningword.com/2012/07/the-return/): Loneliness rests in the nook of Eve’s arm. It is the crease opposing our elbow, the indentation which evaporates before our covered identifiers.
- [Not Hers](https://burningword.com/2012/07/not-hers/): The closet held a row of empty hangers. Michael met Michelle at the grocery store when they both reached for the same box of Lucky Charms.
- [Blue-Collar Twister](https://burningword.com/2012/07/blue-collar-twister/): Sweat tries to swim upwards through the hairs of a labourer building the statue of the herald but fails and falls in the soil sucked up by heat, Vanishes as a struggling animal in quicksand; Dreams drain and entity turns into fossils as slippers walk over it.
- [Pearl Ketover Prilik](https://burningword.com/2012/07/pearl-ketover-prilik/): Dr. Pearl Ketover Prilik is a freelance writer/psychoanalyst.
- [Joan Colby](https://burningword.com/2012/07/joan-colby-2/): In Latin Club, we created togas From bedsheets and translated Cicero, Tales of the Punic Wars, how Caesar Conquered all Gaul in three words.
- [Femur Flutes](https://burningword.com/2012/07/femur-flutes/): I carve holes in the femur bone of my former enemy. I have sucked the marrow out and cooked his tender flesh for consumption.
- [It won’t just be….](https://burningword.com/2012/07/it-wont-just-be/): It won’t just be the handshake of the ocean. It will also be the empty string of the guitar. and a woman’s voice will sound like the skin of a turtle, wishing.
- [Seven Ways of Looking at Lightning](https://burningword.com/2012/07/seven-ways-of-looking-at-lightning/): And as it walks across the land With bright sparking legs The lightning leads the thunder The static of lightning Between two hands And they cannot touch A thing The old oak tree still stands Dark and slightly bent From the crack of the lightning The animals know what it means When the lightning comes He strikes with lightning Because then there is fear Without a face And with force It waits Shooting among the clouds The lightning baits its prey As a cat As lightning does Quick and brilliant We have come And we go by A.M.
- [The Baby Smiles](https://burningword.com/2012/07/the-baby-smiles/): A child finds lost earrings in the sand and puts them in her mouth.
- [Jessica Farrell](https://burningword.com/2012/07/jessica-farrell/): Couldn’t see. Couldn’t move. Paraplegic.
- [two drink minimum](https://burningword.com/2012/07/two-drink-minimum/): Today, I realized everything I do is a joke and God is on stage doing stand-up waging his finger at me laughing uncontrollably while everyone in the audience is relieved he isn’t pointing his stubby fat fingers at them.
- [Our Son Cries](https://burningword.com/2012/07/our-son-cries/): My ex-wife called to tell me this.
- [De Jackson](https://burningword.com/2012/07/de-jackson/): she’s a little crazy, right? half, at least.
- [Ryan Hurley](https://burningword.com/2012/04/ryan-hurley/): umbilical cord, my mother’s kite string. pine tree bark, the saw blade hungry for heat. foreskin, our first offering, sin, sacrifice.
- [Nineteen in London](https://burningword.com/2012/04/nineteen-in-london/): For Peter Lake.
- [Paisley Wallpaper](https://burningword.com/2012/04/paisley-wallpaper/): You are a memory.
- [Daniel Ruefman](https://burningword.com/2012/04/daniel-ruefman/): All summer I wander the cemetery between the fenced-in family plots and the ornate stone mausoleums.
- [The Fruits of Our Labors](https://burningword.com/2012/04/the-fruits-of-our-labors/): Mother was in the kitchen slowly stirring a steaming cauldron of Harvest Stew. Both Wesley and Aaron sat in the parlor, gently brushing Marjorie’s golden locks.
- [Joshua Robert Long](https://burningword.com/2012/04/joshua-robert-long/): invention becomes the mother of the incandescent in here beneath the hum and rigging all wires and false senses of places to go invention becomes tired of itself tired of reinvention tired of movement and political traction invention all folding back in on itself reminding us of history those calm pages we were read as children.
- [Chilled, Like Our Champagne](https://burningword.com/2012/04/chilled-like-our-champagne/): Remember that time when we were in Target, and you put a bottle of champagne in the refrigerated section, because we wanted chilled champagne (the only way I’d drink it) and Target only had room-temperature champagne, so we needed to chill it ourselves?
- [A Tired Performer in Another Half‐Assed Season](https://burningword.com/2012/04/a-tired-performer-in-another-half%e2%80%90assed-season/): A change could be a bloom as well as a withering.
- [Spooked Horse](https://burningword.com/2012/04/spooked-horse/): I am riding the spooked horse through a world of shadows – In my visions, there is nothing but ghosts of all things.
- [Attention Deficit](https://burningword.com/2012/04/attention-deficit/): My mind does not sway like awkward young lovers slow dancing at their high school prom. My mind does not run up and down a beach like water carried by the tide.
- [The Morning News and Snow](https://burningword.com/2012/04/the-morning-news-and-snow/)
- [Rose Mary Boehm](https://burningword.com/2012/04/rose-mary-boehm/): The fiddler in blue gave the slip to a toad of African proportions. Toad wanted the fiddle.
- [Carla Ingram](https://burningword.com/2012/04/carla-ingram/): The fifth of November, I remember dark nights Of frost, bitter cold, biting winds, clad in Winter's warm woolens with fur-booted feet.
- [Sarah Lucille Marchant](https://burningword.com/2012/04/sarah-lucille-marchant/): plastic necklaces strung pretty dusty in his eyes (luminosity dulled by dime-store display) you skip around crinkle leaf sidewalk play you roll your eyes green to yellow to orange ink scratch-out paper hiding behind your grin what was there before?
- [Farleigh](https://burningword.com/2012/04/rather-die/): Enrique Ponce had been hit by the first bull, a blood-stained, white bandage wrapped tight around his right thigh, his awkward short steps placing despairing lights in his eyes.
- [Sigh](https://burningword.com/2012/04/sigh/): when I say something witty – out, because your insides can’t bear to be in. Whatever you pulled inside I deflated. I didn’t even need a pin. I saw you.
- [Matthew James Babcock Poems](https://burningword.com/2012/04/matthew-james-babcock-poems/): I wonder if The Age of the Journey has passed in America now that The Port of Arlington has become Earl Snell Memorial Park, and not one hundred yards from rocky banks where burly voyageurs and their Cayuse brides upended canoes of fresh pelts, a toothless Shell station attendant who’s a dead ringer for Carmine Ragusa tops off my tank.
- [Call to Outlaws](https://burningword.com/2012/04/call-to-outlaws/): with soft delirium.
- [Katie Reed Poems](https://burningword.com/2012/04/katie-reed-poems/): The bushes bear no seed in winter. Mourners stand on planks of a wooden arch. They release ashes onto rocks below, a sea of blank faces.
- [Threads in the Forest](https://burningword.com/2012/04/threads-in-the-forest/): She talked of working in the factories, riveting metal to metal, the amount of manicures it took to right the calluses.
- [Ivor Irwin](https://burningword.com/2012/01/ivor-irwin/): Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with. All I see, floating around me, is detritus. The detritus of denied intimacy.
- [Zoe Etkin](https://burningword.com/2012/01/zoe-etkin/): Zoe Etkin is a Los Angeles based poet, student and educator. She is a recipient of the Beutner Award for Excellence in the Arts for her poetry.
- [Fragments on Catherine Clodius](https://burningword.com/2012/01/fragments-on-catherine-clodius/): My grandmother, after her stroke I. Here, you are in that nightgown, a girl again, wandering the downstairs hallway escaping some dream.
- [Ryan Mattern](https://burningword.com/2012/01/ryan-mattern/): A brown doe with tranquilizer darts stuck in her hide enters the red line to 95th, nestles vacant space between seats of Vietnam vets in Chicago-stained Cosby sweaters.
- [Phantom Limb/Desert](https://burningword.com/2012/01/phantom-limbdesert/): It still twinges on cold nights, and itches from imagined insect bites. Sometimes, I expect to look and see it still attached to me.
- [Lowell Jaeger](https://burningword.com/2012/01/lowell-jaeger/): Moms unload their kids for Kiddee Day on the midway. Cheap rides to kill an afternoon so hot us ride jockeys get away with stripping down to muscle shirts.
- [Jon Stocks](https://burningword.com/2012/01/jon-stocks/): Come with me to the Western waters Where the waves lap a coarse kiss on the shore And we can learn to love the silence To give love and know the love of others.
- [Cannes Absinthe](https://burningword.com/2012/01/cannes-absinthe/): Streets like threads woven into the city Knot at the harbor Am I moving uphill or down?
- [Lead Poisoning](https://burningword.com/2012/01/lead-poisoning/): Seated in the waiting room at the doctor's office, I am filling out a questionnaire. I come to a question I am not sure how to answer.
- [Ian D. Campbell](https://burningword.com/2012/01/ian-d-campbell/): It was the year in which the plumbing went bad That the beloved house, feeling perhaps neglected, began to reveal itself in ways It had previously chosen to keep to itself, the dead, and the demented.
- [The Blight To Bear Arms](https://burningword.com/2012/01/the-blight-to-bear-arms/): What shall comfort us creatures and offer salve to our sorrow now? Never those pubescent-speaking military men who merely glance in lieu of glaring.
- [Shakespeare’s Bile](https://burningword.com/2012/01/shakespeares-bile/): There are some days when more strength is needed than others and today is one of those days.
- [Poetry](https://burningword.com/2012/01/poetry/): 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.
- [Craig McCarthy](https://burningword.com/2012/01/craig-mccarthy/): the moon slurs, smiles leering compliance, consenting out of the corner of her face. at midnight, I am less, after just one more test.
- [Life Springs/Raspberry Bush](https://burningword.com/2012/01/life-springsraspberry-bush/)
- [Rich Ives](https://burningword.com/2012/01/rich-ives/): Those little dream brothers were made of chicken feathers, and I had to blow their dream parts forcefully from my nose.
- [Bad Timing](https://burningword.com/2012/01/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.
- [Pieces Of Minute-Hands](https://burningword.com/2012/01/pieces-of-minute-hands/)
- [Spotlight](https://burningword.com/2012/01/spotlight/): Eyes wide, legs quivering, sweat glistening, she feels ready to heave. The thick dusty red curtain brushes against her hands but provides no relief.
- [The Mortuary School](https://burningword.com/2012/01/the-mortuary-school/): Frankie bites a peach, axks what’s gonna be on the test.
- [Walter William Safar](https://burningword.com/2012/01/walter-william-safar/): 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.
- [Halflings](https://burningword.com/2012/01/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 too tall to gaze upon the insects whom we frolicked with once upon a time and our tears have matured They will plunge toward our heirs, threaten to drown them unless they learn quickly to amend and mirror the tread of their keepers From ours we fled Two wheel commute carrying us far from our jobs of holding no agenda, but instead faceless grudges - then unnamed fated to revisit in adult slumber and despite all, keep us from remembering what we then could not see...
- [Conversations Overheard](https://burningword.com/2013/07/conversations-overheard/): so obviously troubled for as long as he had.
- [Jeffrey Park poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/jeffrey-park-poems/): the shy rays of the rising sun.
- [Abeyance](https://burningword.com/2013/07/abeyance/): the thaw’s flow.
- [Douglas Luman poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/douglas-luman-poems/): baked by builder-chefs, culinary sun.
- [Elizabeth Jenike poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/elizabeth-jenike-poems/): my grandmother died.
- [Number than](https://burningword.com/2013/07/number-than/): with the certain combinations of flowers.
- [Losing to a $2.50 Bottle of Cabernet at the Library on a Thursday Evening](https://burningword.com/2013/07/losing-to-a-2-50-bottle-of-cabernet-at-the-library-on-a-thursday-evening/): Zach Milkis is currently an undergraduate English and Political Science major at Santa Clara University originally from Friday Harbor, Washington.
- [Owen Lucas poetry](https://burningword.com/2013/07/owen-lucas-poetry/): It lies, or that it is the artifact of crude cohesion?
- [Whitney Lee Nowak poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/whitney-lee-nowak-poems/): Eating a bruised McIntosh apple lifts me out of Chinatown where no one is cheering on this hot Indian Summer.
- [Two Possible Ways Michael Regime Fell in Love with Language](https://burningword.com/2013/07/two-possible-ways-michael-regime-fell-in-love-with-language/): The unbreakable babble of a river at rest.
- [Margaret Adams Birth poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/margaret-adams-birth-poems/): of all the truths that are yet to be told.
- [Now and Then](https://burningword.com/2013/07/now-and-then/): From the chaff of the world.
- [Writer’s Handbook for the Non-Careerist (Abridged)](https://burningword.com/2013/07/writers-handbook-for-the-non-careerist-abridged/): For my nephew, Absalom H., Jr.
- [Kobina Wright](https://burningword.com/2013/04/kobina-wright/): I’m not going over there!
- [Aphrodite’s Jealousy Lasted Three Lifetimes](https://burningword.com/2013/04/aphrodites-jealousy-lasted-three-lifetimes/): showed me one morning.
- [day after valentine's](https://burningword.com/2013/04/day-after-valentines/)
- [Colin Dodds](https://burningword.com/2013/04/colin-dodds/): the prayer works.
- [Tony Walton](https://burningword.com/2013/04/tony-walton/): before closing time.
- [Joan Colby](https://burningword.com/2013/04/joan-colby-3/): Flashing through the universe.
- [rust](https://burningword.com/2013/04/rust-2/): New shades of brown.
- [Sara Clancy](https://burningword.com/2013/04/sara-clancy/): exiting its own expired alphabet.
- [Angst and the iTunes Librarian](https://burningword.com/2013/04/angst-and-the-itunes-librarian/): You said you felt under the weather. I suggested soup and you replied tomato. Tomato with grilled cheese.
- [Carnival in Berlin](https://burningword.com/2013/04/carnival-in-berlin/): “Anything goes tonight, my girl.
- [The World is a Potter](https://burningword.com/2013/04/the-world-is-a-potter/): built for filling.
- [In Passing](https://burningword.com/2013/04/in-passing/): Swear, for the music.
- [A Skull in Two](https://burningword.com/2013/04/a-skull-in-two/): Giovanni Zuniga was born in Los Angeles. Fearing that he would be consumed by vanity Giovanni set out on exchange to Sweden.
- [Jordan Blum](https://burningword.com/2013/04/jordan-blum/): and the future was destiny.
- [In vain](https://burningword.com/2013/04/in-vain/): Daddy’s at the workbench. He sighs in resignation.
- [Jay Kidd](https://burningword.com/2013/04/jay-kidd/): weigh about 100 pounds.
- [The Gelded Son of Old Bob Bowers Out of Once Double](https://burningword.com/2013/04/the-gelded-son-of-old-bob-bowers-out-of-once-double/): I’ve miles to go but I have no pony.
- [object / multiple singularities / be here now](https://burningword.com/2013/04/object-multiple-singularities-be-here-now/): Shadow is substance. There is cold in shadow. The mean radiant temperature (MRT) in the cold of Vermont is assuaged by the cloudless sky.
- [Strangers](https://burningword.com/2013/04/strangers/): Two strangers fuck you into existence.
- [Eve](https://burningword.com/2013/04/eve/): The truth? I couldn’t wait to split.
- [I Bought Flashcards of the Constitution](https://burningword.com/2013/04/i-bought-flashcards-of-the-constitution/): ‘cause you planned to study law.
- [Face to Face](https://burningword.com/2013/04/face-to-face/)
- [Morning Train](https://burningword.com/2013/04/morning-train/): The sleeping passenger feels cold—shivers to wake, at dawn—discovering light coming in through the window—cool light at dawn.
- [Feel Silence](https://burningword.com/2013/04/feel-silence/): infuses more than show and tell.
- [The Last Adventure of the Scorpion and the Frog](https://burningword.com/2013/04/the-last-adventure-of-the-scorpion-and-the-frog/): The worst thing you can say about her is that she was once your friend.
- [Hologram Baby](https://burningword.com/2013/04/hologram-baby/): Baby I'm a disposable camera. Baby you stop me dead in my tracks, burn a hole in my brain.
- [Anthony Warnke](https://burningword.com/2013/04/anthony-warnke/): How bad do you want to be Little Miss Fair? Tease your do out bigger, bigger than Big Nana’s hair. Only eat foods that you can drink.
- [Phillips Instant Flood](https://burningword.com/2013/04/phillips-instant-flood/): which gathers at her toes.
- [John Grey](https://burningword.com/2013/04/john-grey/): after ten years apart.
- [I’ve never met him](https://burningword.com/2013/04/ive-never-met-him/): But tomorrow I’m going to take Durer to lunch again.
- [Young Suburban Boy Dreams at the Dinner Table](https://burningword.com/2013/04/young-suburban-boy-dreams-at-the-dinner-table/): on your dinner plate.
- [Cynthia Eddy](https://burningword.com/2013/04/cynthia-eddy/): The skeleton in the closet.
- [A Map of Purgatory, or That One Time I Worked in a Call Center](https://burningword.com/2013/04/a-map-of-purgatory-or-that-one-time-i-worked-in-a-call-center/): typing into sterile carpentry.
- [In the thirteenth year](https://burningword.com/2013/04/in-the-thirteenth-year/): the front bedroom.
- [Elation](https://burningword.com/2013/04/elation/): twisted and perfectly unplanned.
- [Changeling](https://burningword.com/2013/04/changeling/): their magic tapestry on my mind.
- [A Room](https://burningword.com/2013/04/a-room/): A blank set of blueprints on how to be human.
- [Buddha Minds On Fire](https://burningword.com/2013/04/buddha-minds-on-fire/): as a docent provides a brief biography .
- [Music](https://burningword.com/2013/04/music/): Have you ever felt music?
- [Cinnamon](https://burningword.com/2013/04/cinnamon/): A spicy seam, unraveled in a café, brunette with streaks.
- [Paul Rogalus](https://burningword.com/2013/04/paul-rogalus/): There was a giant rat that lived in our basement floor apartment in Boston that year.
- [Wabi-Sabi](https://burningword.com/2013/04/wabi-sabi/): Technically, you're doing a poor job. You have no form.
- [Jacob Valadez](https://burningword.com/2013/04/jacob-valadez/): dipped in honey.
- [Paid Dues](https://burningword.com/2013/04/paid-dues/): At the next session Dirk said, “To end your sense of abandonment you should find companionship.
- [Drunk Dream](https://burningword.com/2013/04/drunk-dream/): Purple widening circles.
- [Samantha Seto](https://burningword.com/2013/04/samantha-seto/): as whoosh and swish of the ocean tide.
- [dysthymia](https://burningword.com/2013/04/dysthymia/): Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School.
- [Flailing Empty Capillaries](https://burningword.com/2013/04/flailing-empty-capillaries/): waltzing through my veins. My muse.
- [Tarot](https://burningword.com/2013/04/tarot/): of man and Neanderthals.
- [Benjamin S. Sneyd](https://burningword.com/2013/04/benjamin-s-sneyd/): you’ve done in the rain.
- [It's Fucking Winter in New York City](https://burningword.com/2013/04/its-fucking-winter-in-new-york-city/): between worries and words.
- [Pointillism](https://burningword.com/2013/04/pointillism/): moving clouds reforming into instants of fungus.
- [Upon Realizing the World Hasn’t Gone Anywhere](https://burningword.com/2013/04/upon-realizing-the-world-hasnt-gone-anywhere/): if you look closely.
- [Comfort Food](https://burningword.com/2013/01/comfort-food/): as the opening of a flower.
- [You Told Him](https://burningword.com/2013/01/you-told-him/): You gaze at the clothes flipping in the washer, because you don’t know what else to do. They’re not even yours.
- [Writing the Complete Poem](https://burningword.com/2013/01/writing-the-complete-poem/): but I don’t know where it’s coming from.
- [She Does Laundry](https://burningword.com/2013/01/she-does-laundry/): She scrapes the charred crumbs from her morning toast, then she does laundry.
- [Can’t Understand / Fly](https://burningword.com/2013/01/cant-understand-fly/): you fall asleep and forget.
- [The Fleeing Of The Corncrakes](https://burningword.com/2013/01/the-fleeing-of-the-corncrakes/): Evicted field-mice are suing for recompense.
- [A Retrospective](https://burningword.com/2013/01/a-retrospective/): Soaked her chest, her lap.
- [Looking for a Key](https://burningword.com/2013/01/looking-for-a-key/): And hold me in your mouth whose teeth are spines.
- [Lemon Ice](https://burningword.com/2013/01/lemon-ice/): ordered a lemon ice.
- [Dionysiou Areopagitou Street](https://burningword.com/2013/01/dionysiou-areopagitou-street/): September Sunday’s mid-day sun.
- [Matt Hemmerich](https://burningword.com/2013/01/matt-hemmerich/): Matt Hemmerich is a writer living in San Francisco’s Sunset District. He is currently working on a poetry chapbook and recording an EP.
- [Sarah Lucille Marchant](https://burningword.com/2013/01/sarah-lucille-marchant-2/)
- [Waiting For The Sun](https://burningword.com/2013/01/waiting-for-the-sun/): the window pane.
- [New Jersey](https://burningword.com/2013/01/new-jersey/): new entertainment capital.
- [Under the Black Tent of Her Nagajuban](https://burningword.com/2013/01/under-the-black-tent-of-her-nagajuban/): its chords quivering like skeletons—its you.
- [How the Movie Ends](https://burningword.com/2013/01/how-the-movie-ends/): on cow’s blood and rain.
- [Electric Pictures / With Disdain](https://burningword.com/2013/01/electric-pictures-with-disdain/): lend credibility to imaginary walls.
- [While You Were Gone](https://burningword.com/2013/01/while-you-were-gone/): Pearl Ketover Prilik, freelance writer/psychoanalyst, is a believer in the spark that flickers within each and connects all.
- [Primary and Companion](https://burningword.com/2013/01/primary-and-companion/)
- [Out of Body](https://burningword.com/2013/01/out-of-body/): 103 degrees, the city’s pavement cooks lovers like us sunny side up. But no one’s smiling.
- [Eviction, Upstate New York, 2009](https://burningword.com/2013/01/eviction-upstate-new-york-2009/): like fault lines to other houses, other families.
- [Laura Rodriguez](https://burningword.com/2013/01/laura-rodriguez/): tiny pieces flying all around.
- [Dark](https://burningword.com/2013/01/dark/): That glowed with the golden light of Saturday.
- [In Places Bed](https://burningword.com/2013/01/in-places-bed/): chance hearing.
- [Story Ark](https://burningword.com/2013/01/story-ark/): rendered in song.
- [It’s All Gone to the Dogs](https://burningword.com/2013/01/its-all-gone-to-the-dogs/): of saying “I love you” and meaning it.
- [Blood](https://burningword.com/2013/01/blood/): The problem is my blood, they say.
- [The Cat, On Snow](https://burningword.com/2013/01/the-cat-on-snow/): Have you ever tried to listen to the footsteps of a cat walking through snow?
- [Karen Costa](https://burningword.com/2013/01/karen-costa/): Just the other day.
- [Quinault Rain Forest](https://burningword.com/2012/10/quinault-rain-forest/): There are a million pebbles beneath my feet.
- [The Straw Girl](https://burningword.com/2012/10/the-straw-girl/): shudder in all these silent yards.
- [Thomas Michael McDade](https://burningword.com/2012/10/thomas-michael-mcdade/): on the barstool.
- [Only in Silence](https://burningword.com/2012/10/only-in-silence/): Of empty space.
- [Tones](https://burningword.com/2012/10/tones/): assault fragile ears.
- [Anthropophagy](https://burningword.com/2014/04/anthropophagy/): People eating people, symptom of our times, like curbside recycling or socialized health care, back to nature, slow food – just look at my neighbor – enough for me and you, or at least for me, enough for what comes around to go around.
- [John T. Waggoner](https://burningword.com/2014/04/john-t-waggoner/): My mother is buried on wind-swept high-ground in a tiny ignored cemetery.
- [The Woman Who Moves the Earth](https://burningword.com/2014/04/the-woman-who-moves-the-earth/): She hops down from the dump truck’s crusty side and climbs up into the earth mover as graceful as a gymnast, pony tail bouncing behind her John Deere baseball cap.
- [Slow Koan](https://burningword.com/2014/04/slow-koan/): Most things are not the end Of the world. You know this.
- [Jamie Lynn Heller](https://burningword.com/2014/04/jamie-lynn-heller/): Winter comes to tell us to be still, to stand and look out windows onto landscapes scrubbed barren by winds that scrape away the excess, to watch snow laid down piece by piece on the smallest twig as scraps of the discarded, imperfections, are gently smoothed into graceful curves by chills that tingle toes, crisp ears, push us back into places where blankets and warm drinks invite us to sit down.
- [Town](https://burningword.com/2014/04/town/): The air has split open, and the townspeople are dropping in heaps.
- [Aaron Brown](https://burningword.com/2014/04/aaron-brown/): The day the looters broke into our house was the shot fired as my father yelled and the fear that came with it, the window darkened by the men looking in and the scuffing of sandals on a packed-dirt yard, the grind of metal loosened, the voices between walls, the bullet that never came, and the hack job that never was by a drunken soldier wielding a machete under- oiled and over-used on thickets by roads and rows of bodies.
- [Even in winter](https://burningword.com/2014/04/even-in-winter/): Why can my life from time to time not fade to black?
- [Danny Earl Simmons: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2014/01/danny-earl-simmons-featured-author/): the effervescent puffs of white.
- [Clear Days](https://burningword.com/2014/01/clear-days/): They scare me. Give me blizzards but not a blue day with a ground of ice and a T-Rex bite to the air. She enters the kitchen in a white tank and short shorts.
- [Till Then Do Us Part](https://burningword.com/2014/01/till-then-do-us-part/): the sun set behind you and you talked of leaving.
- [Eleven Years](https://burningword.com/2014/01/eleven-years/): it’s just the beginning, really.
- [Angel of Progress](https://burningword.com/2014/01/angel-of-progress/): You brought our freedom as a mirage in their parallax vision. In that one brick wall shirt that you wore every day.
- [Kurt C. Schuett](https://burningword.com/2014/01/kurt-c-schuett/): as I’ve done for the past seventeen years.
- [That Road](https://burningword.com/2014/01/that-road/): Massages my shins like wine.
- [Francis Bacon Selling His Paintings to a Middle-aged Couple at IKEA](https://burningword.com/2014/01/francis-bacon-selling-his-paintings-to-a-middle-aged-couple-at-ikea/): in a warehouse.
- [Nana](https://burningword.com/2014/01/nana/): and a name for what?
- [Blame it on the Moon](https://burningword.com/2014/01/blame-it-on-the-moon/): in my dry Sherry wine.
- [Four-Ten](https://burningword.com/2014/01/four-ten/): Of catholic-school kids hogging the computers and Russian literature, faking excessively long shits in the single bathroom stall, to stalking the only people who actually filled out the requisitional form for a library card.
- [To The Mountains](https://burningword.com/2014/01/to-the-mountains/): Driving up a curvy incline, all that mattered was the beautiful sunshine which illuminated my rough, grey booster seat.
- [Darien Cavanaugh](https://burningword.com/2014/01/darien-cavanaugh/): while a cat hissed at another cat for passing by.
- [Travelling Days](https://burningword.com/2014/01/travelling-days/): I can still hear the corny music on the jukebox, the clinking of the glasses. The barkeep heard our chiming, collected his money, a too generous tip.
- [Impressionism: Musee D’Orsay](https://burningword.com/2014/01/impressionism-musee-dorsay/): away one foot at a time.
- [Sarah Lucille Marchant](https://burningword.com/2014/01/sarah-lucille-marchant-3/): and imagining my fingers tracing his tattoos.
- [Solitude (After Su Tung Po)](https://burningword.com/2014/01/solitude-after-su-tung-po/): is like silk threads.
- [It starts with sex](https://burningword.com/2014/01/it-starts-with-sex/): The fish is staring at me from the plate, its blackened skin and brittle tail spread between rice pilaf and sautéed mushrooms.
- [Time Slip](https://burningword.com/2014/01/time-slip/)
- [Jason Leslie Rogers](https://burningword.com/2014/01/jason-leslie-rogers/): The milk has soured. The honey? Gone.
- [Lucy's Walk](https://burningword.com/2014/01/lucys-walk/): Lucy strolled into my life twenty years ago. Short and heavyset, trailing a couple of unruly dogs, she welcomed me to the neighbourhood.
- [Krista Kurisaki](https://burningword.com/2014/01/krista-kurisaki/): carrying nothing more than loneliness and longing in his cargo hold.
- [Weathered](https://burningword.com/2014/01/weathered/): and sea unswimmable.
- [Britt Melewski](https://burningword.com/2014/01/britt-melewski/): connection to plug into.
- [US Census](https://burningword.com/2014/01/us-census/): To you and me.
- [Chris Middleman](https://burningword.com/2014/01/chris-middleman/)
- [July](https://burningword.com/2014/01/july/): The brightest star in the constellation Cancer is beta Cancri, or as it is commonly referred to, Al Tarf.
- [Reflexology](https://burningword.com/2014/01/reflexology/): your palm, starving tribes in the Sudan.
- [What I Left at the Circus Café](https://burningword.com/2014/01/what-i-left-at-the-circus-cafe/): in the absence of birds.
- [Marlene Nails the 7-10 Split](https://burningword.com/2014/01/marlene-nails-the-7-10-split/): Marlene glared down the alley at the two pins in their corners, her eyes narrowed over the ball like a snake’s before it strikes.
- [James Thomas](https://burningword.com/2014/01/james-thomas/): realizing the ground has given way.
- [Braid](https://burningword.com/2014/01/braid/): and silver scissor.
- [If there was a new way to dance](https://burningword.com/2014/01/if-there-was-a-new-way-to-dance/): while talking softly in the shower.
- [Crawling](https://burningword.com/2013/10/crawling/): They started seeping in slowly. None of us noticed. One or two, here or there. Easily explained.
- [John Grey poems](https://burningword.com/2013/10/john-grey-poems/): believed eaten by cannibals.
- [This I Know For Sure](https://burningword.com/2013/10/this-i-know-for-sure/): I'm writing this from Jeff's Lazy-boy sofa.
- [Maddie Boyd](https://burningword.com/2013/10/maddie-boyd/): artifacts to archeologists.
- [Bye, bye…](https://burningword.com/2013/10/bye-bye/): Miss American Pie.
- [The Squirrel](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-squirrel/): An indistinct sound of struggle was what made Lydia look into the barrel of nicotine colored rain water out back.
- [On This Harvest Moon](https://burningword.com/2013/10/on-this-harvest-moon/): On the first day of winter, I watched the Anne Hathaway movie “One Day” with our kids.
- [Found Money](https://burningword.com/2013/10/found-money/): A five-dollar bill.
- [The Very Last One](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-very-last-one/): Statewide alert: White female, 14-19 years, brown hair and eyes, last seen walking alone in Forest Park. The Rangers’ Hut is considered the likely destination.
- [Dosage](https://burningword.com/2013/10/dosage/): For insubordination.
- [The Joy of Writing](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-joy-of-writing/): a head start on my spring tan.
- [The Life We Live](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-life-we-live/): You always want to run.
- [The Crossed Legged Caretaker](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-crossed-legged-caretaker/): He’s been dead quite some time, six maybe seven years I’d say. He passed right here in this house. That was the way he wanted it.
- [Grackles and Lace](https://burningword.com/2013/10/grackles-and-lace/): maybe flew north to the lake country.
- [Keeper (for Megan Mclaurin)](https://burningword.com/2013/10/keeper-for-megan-mclaurin/): That last image of you from college was enough to undo me right there.
- [How to Grow](https://burningword.com/2013/10/how-to-grow/): Be a child. Have dreams. Ensure those dreams are undefined, transitory – always out of reach. Reach out a doughy, puppy-fat hand to touch them anyway.
- [Falling Clouds](https://burningword.com/2013/10/falling-clouds/): which faded with the sunset.
- [Alex Greenberg, two poems](https://burningword.com/2013/10/alex-greenberg-two-poems/): like an ant from a page.
- [Sarah Ghoshal](https://burningword.com/2013/10/sarah-ghoshal/): I can’t wait to get you on the floor and watch the wheels roll effortlessly, skipless, perfectly in sync with the music, beats that remind us of summertime in Jersey, the scent of sweat mingled with a popularity contest.
- [Across A Crowded Elevator](https://burningword.com/2013/10/across-a-crowded-elevator/): After hours traipsing through churches bogged down with cherubs and crosses and enough gold to filigree the planet, after hordes of us line up to clear the pathetic TSA amateur style provided by the cruise ship, in the elevator, the glass one overlooking the Mediterranean, I spot him.
- [Cliff Weber: Featured author](https://burningword.com/2013/10/cliff-weber-featured-author/): and isn’t that what we love most?
- [Joe Quinn](https://burningword.com/2013/10/joe-quinn/): before I ask "how?"
- [Swai](https://burningword.com/2013/10/swai/): not when I needed them to.
- [Sarah Marchant: five poems](https://burningword.com/2013/10/sarah-marchant-five-poems/): chariots of Norse gods.
- [The Urban Legend of the Video Nasty](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-urban-legend-of-the-video-nasty/): tight, taught cellophane.
- [Fred D. White](https://burningword.com/2013/10/fred-d-white/): I looked at Rod. We were jogging together around the lake.
- [Kansas in the Corner](https://burningword.com/2013/10/kansas-in-the-corner/)
- [A Daughter’s Birthday](https://burningword.com/2013/10/a-daughters-birthday/): Swaddling her diaper rash in vinyl chloride.
- [The Wars That One Can Not Win](https://burningword.com/2013/10/the-wars-that-one-can-not-win/): by human aliens all safe on the other side of the hellish cage.
- [Burning City Of The Heart](https://burningword.com/2013/10/burning-city-of-the-heart/): like streets without names.
- [Christine Reilly poems](https://burningword.com/2013/10/christine-reilly-poems/): an instinctive prelude!
- [Elevator Girl](https://burningword.com/2013/10/elevator-girl/): Red coat. That's the first thing I see when she walks into the elevator. She's pretty. She sees me there standing between six others in a cramped elevator.
- [Canticles](https://burningword.com/2013/10/canticles/): I watch you stray far off course.
- [Roy Dorman, two poems](https://burningword.com/2013/10/roy-dorman-two-poems/): Crisp blue dress shirt, matching tie, black over the calf socks; that’s it?
- [Party Favors](https://burningword.com/2013/07/party-favors/): Products, until the job went elsewhere.
- [The Proposal](https://burningword.com/2013/07/the-proposal/): Once, I had one hundred imaginary dogs and my nursery school classmates decided to have imaginary dogs too.
- [The Western Hemisphere](https://burningword.com/2013/07/the-western-hemisphere/): terror and loneliness in the one good eye.
- [A Foot in the Grave](https://burningword.com/2013/07/a-foot-in-the-grave/): It felt like I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, like I’d walked into a house that looked like mine, but belonged to someone else.
- [Brett Stout](https://burningword.com/2013/07/brett-stout-poems/): watch a meteorite shower at 5 a.m.
- [Boiled Coffee And Canned Meat](https://burningword.com/2013/07/boiled-coffee-and-canned-meat/): is supposed to be.
- [Mattias Renberg poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/mattias-renberg-poems/): from a world of ironed shirts.
- [Conversant](https://burningword.com/2013/07/conversant/): I carry on talking to you.
- [Peycho Kanev poetry](https://burningword.com/2013/07/peycho-kanev-poetry/): and remain silent.
- [E. H. Brogan poetry](https://burningword.com/2013/07/e-h-brogan-poetry/): do this, they call it SIDS.
- [Charlotte M. Porter poetry](https://burningword.com/2013/07/charlotte-m-porter-poetry/): Say, has anyone found the old lorgnettes, those folding opera glasses?
- [Eos and Tithonus](https://burningword.com/2013/07/eos-and-tithonus/): I thought you had actually died.
- [Cara Schiff](https://burningword.com/2013/07/cara-schiff/): He sells death.
- [The Art of Sacrifice](https://burningword.com/2013/07/the-art-of-sacrifice/): but not the blood.
- [john sweet: six poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/john-sweet-six-new-poems/): heads of the youngest children.
- [Gaia Elemental](https://burningword.com/2013/07/gaia-elemental/): in weather long past prediction.
- [C Carol poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/c-carol-poems/): where were you saturday night?
- [Outlaw](https://burningword.com/2013/07/outlaw/): Being on the run wasn't half as glamorous as I had expected: they never tell you about Bonnie and Clyde shitting in the woods.
- [A Break In The Weather](https://burningword.com/2013/07/a-break-in-the-weather/): of snow days; we crossed our fingers for blizzards.
- [Signal Hill](https://burningword.com/2013/07/signal-hill/): Ryan Hammond is previously unpublished.
- [Wendy Sue Gist poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/wendy-sue-gist-poems/): on splintered porch.
- [Background Noise](https://burningword.com/2013/07/background-noise/): blend the brown of our skin with the brown of the earth.
- [What I Saw One Day](https://burningword.com/2013/07/what-i-saw-one-day/): this arch gives way?
- [Thomas Pescatore poems](https://burningword.com/2013/07/thomas-pescatore-poems/): Anchor me down with the past...
- [Coffee for Two](https://burningword.com/2013/07/coffee-for-two/): crooks and crannies of the enclosed room.
- [What You Do In the Dark](https://burningword.com/2015/01/what-you-do-in-the-dark/): He had only caught you a few times, sneaking up from behind, each step as stealth as a tiptoeing cat, shattering the silence with a WHAT ARE YOU DOING that booms in your brain but, in reality, is barely above what school teachers call your “inside voice.” You do not answer and he does not need you to answer because he saw.
- [Craig Kurtz](https://burningword.com/2015/01/craig-kurtz/): “You wouldn’t abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn’t control the winds.” — Thomas More, Utopia.
- [A Thousand Friends](https://burningword.com/2015/01/a-thousand-friends/): Frenzy and folly, Gaudy music and fantastic dancing, A moving party of Scarlet, orange, golden, green, blue, and purple.
- [Only The Tkk’ings](https://burningword.com/2015/01/only-the-tkkings/): the clear blue sky a hovering Narcissus sets cerulean shapes undulating the whole estero winking the sun seducing my eyes sweet waters from the land pulsing into salt ocean slipping its way onto the land I sit on one bank looking across wobbling yellow slits tight to this shore reflect cliffs behind me opposite shade shines down liquid black sandy shore and open water giving way to dazzling light in action dark underwater blues deeper browns to fertile marsh brown pelicans fly low fall in akimbo tripping over feet out taut large floating group some drop half-folded wings loose skin cups air against water not piston-swimming white pelicans herding fish this a rhythmic applause varied, playful stops for silence fellow pelicans take up a new patterned patter making a community music none feed, listening to each other’s versions—plaintive cry a gull’s—pierces a long pelican pause leaving rings of room around its sound more pelicans splash in, their own are clapping back more gulls kee-een into the next rest pelicans wait and syncopate clap-cuba-tap-africa gulls scree-ee each species receives the other’s new offering never in my thirty years here over the minutes, the hour the numbers and sound expand birds hundreds, a thousand their mass louder penetrating gull chorus shrieking pelicans slapping raucous cacophony pushing out all silence, enveloping me unease replaces my relaxed wonder mind taken from me I turn my body away a skinned stick rosy hint of sunset dancing on it bright towers waver from now golden cliffs on the other side about my time to leave I notice from the quiet time has moved on so have the pelicans and gulls I am only soft again a fresh- feathered first-year curlew in the landscape a waterborne gull makes wake swimming toward me winds and currents push west toward the sea, the sun at the end of day massed wavelets bunch higher shift shadows, turn darker I look back to the east the water is calmer oddly more filled with light farther from the sun.
- [The Quiltmaker](https://burningword.com/2015/01/the-quiltmaker/): It took her years, but she made a memory quilt the size of their home. At first, she used her husband's worn work clothes.
- [Wishing Well](https://burningword.com/2015/01/wishing-well/): Dancing water sloshed At the edge of gray Slate, weary and washed By a thousand coins, as the day Gaped from the gap above.
- [Bukowski](https://burningword.com/2015/01/bukowski/): We lay in bed and smoked cigarettes.
- [Jean C. Howard](https://burningword.com/2015/01/jean-c-howard/): Just as they have aged, seven days within the vase, Just as yellow turns onto itself to view the summer’s guttural dreams, And red has let loose its fiery skill, turning heart’s layers to flames and film, They now curl up as most delicate friends, or fingertips brushing within a woman’s drawers against that which lives clung to skin, Or the fine dust layering a crystal bowl left for weeks, then months, then years, within a womb of mahogany.
- [West Bank](https://burningword.com/2015/01/west-bank/): My grandfather snapped fish spines off the coast of Tel Aviv.
- [Footnote to a Footnote](https://burningword.com/2015/01/footnote-to-a-footnote/): Jacuzzis are holy. Garage door openers are holy. Back-up cameras and recycle bins—all holy.
- [Power](https://burningword.com/2015/01/power/): Andrew Garvin completed his undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California.
- [Juvenescence](https://burningword.com/2015/01/juvenescence/): ju·ve·nes·cence ˌjo͞ovəˈnesəns/noun: juvenescence The state or period of being young.
- [Taking Comfort](https://burningword.com/2015/01/taking-comfort/): My little brother has rolled himself into a ball in the back of Grandpa’s pickup while mom—Grandpa is a mean bastard she says—is hollering at him to hurry the hell up before little Sammy dies.
- [Towards the Chennai Train by Taxi](https://burningword.com/2015/01/towards-the-chennai-train-by-taxi/): and the streets are running out with people and rickshaws, motorbikes (there, four adults on a single cycle), water buffalo stomping through traffic, tilting their chins in response to horns begging them to move.
- [Joe Quinn](https://burningword.com/2014/10/joe-quinn-2/): (originally published in The Battered Suitcase Nov.
- [Inside-Out](https://burningword.com/2014/10/inside-out-2/): When I turn my body inside-out I do it the same way you would a piece of clothing: by pulling the top through the bottom.
- [Desirée Jung: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2014/10/desiree-jung-featured-author/): Orange laranjas, seis reais. The afternoon in Copacabana has sunscreen bottles and pharmacies. Near a tree, passengers wait at the bus stop.
- [Joshua Paul Bocher](https://burningword.com/2014/10/joshua-paul-bocher/): As he speaks to me Of his troubles, Someone I know Stands in a doorway That connects two Rooms: the past And the future.
- [The Good Part](https://burningword.com/2014/10/the-good-part/): I’d like a Sunday like a Mary Oliver poem, with a few perfect words and lots of white space, and paper with a high rag content and maybe some righteous soy-based ink.
- [John Taylor Pannill](https://burningword.com/2014/10/john-taylor-pannill/): A wave does not regret crashing on the shore and a lightning bolt does not care which tree it splits in two, the same way the river never notices the hill it has carried away, or the fog the ship it has led to a rocky grave.
- [Alma Mater](https://burningword.com/2014/10/alma-mater/): The ache of summer carries the Scent of boxwood in heated repose, The haze of afternoons before thunder.
- [Wicks](https://burningword.com/2014/10/wicks/)
- [Michael Estabrook](https://burningword.com/2014/10/michael-estabrook/): Whenever he finds a spider in the house he leaves it alone life is tough enough he reasons even for spiders.
- [Nicole Kurlich](https://burningword.com/2014/10/nicole-kurlich/): I spoke to you of dirt and broken thumbnails, of salt in tears and potholes. I spoke of popcorn ceilings with sticky sheets underneath.
- [Cortney Lamar Charleston](https://burningword.com/2014/10/cortney-lamar-charleston/): At dusk, I watch the wind seduce foliage through the binoculars of an aesthete, taken by how the petals dance like flames thankful for a brief life.
- [Cassandra Morrilly](https://burningword.com/2014/10/cassandramorrilly/): I took a pen from the bedside table at the hotel the one off the highway near the salt marshes, the highway with two lanes, lined with the swell of seawater rot.
- [Searching](https://burningword.com/2014/10/searching/): Dublin’s rowdy streets surround me, shops shackle me to my routines, Rome’s old Kyries rape me, England’s imperialist memories break me, America’s black and white fifties families flash ever before my eyes.
- [Cutfinger](https://burningword.com/2014/10/cutfinger/): The moon’s red-faced hymen is crestfallen; eclipsed by a trilogy of cloven sol kisses. Our universe is not one.
- [Bounty, Ground](https://burningword.com/2014/10/bounty-ground/): Miss Sandy is the kind of equestrian who requests the counsel of her gelding, Saul, on matters she involves herself in.
- [Blondie](https://burningword.com/2014/10/blondie/): What is it on the shore among the cockle shells and sea grass, the beached thing, swelling, gulls pecking at the sores: this question straining to breathe under its own gravity.
- [Topographies](https://burningword.com/2014/10/topographies/): Pylons of hay prop up the sky.
- [The Grim Reaper Has A Night Off](https://burningword.com/2014/10/the-grim-reaper-has-a-night-off/): growing around the trunk of the tree.
- [How to Steal a Storm](https://burningword.com/2014/10/how-to-steal-a-storm/): In the beginning the air was cold and sweet like a backwards mausoleum.
- [Dylan Fisher](https://burningword.com/2014/10/dylan-fisher/): We almost ask each other questions. Is there a curfew? At what time? Do we need to run? Do we want to? How many dogs make up a pack?
- [Disbelief](https://burningword.com/2014/10/disbelief/): His memory was a mortuary for the time capsuled thoughts that recessed - to erase the condescension that presided over the torment, that buried beneath the sulfured insubordination.
- [The Best Charlatan Art In Every Society](https://burningword.com/2014/10/the-best-charlatan-art-in-every-society/): Bad reviews and criticism at every turn But it catches on, and it’s repeated Because it’s good, and it creates desire.
- [First Trip to the Strand](https://burningword.com/2014/10/first-trip-to-the-strand/): Gurgling, squinty-eyed life form trying to make sense of the alien sights and sounds of a double date.
- [Dublin](https://burningword.com/2014/10/dublin/): This city is full of the dead (I’m told by the living).
- [Ashlie Allen](https://burningword.com/2014/10/ashlie-allen/): A Gardenia changing hues in the summer temper What color am I when I am mad?
- [Older Than They Used to Be](https://burningword.com/2014/10/older-than-they-used-to-be/): “Minimum-wage workers are older than they used to be.” The New York Times, June 9, 2014 Yes, it’s true.
- [Damage](https://burningword.com/2014/10/damage/): Damage, today I’m obsessed with damage.
- [Cumulonimbus Gastrus](https://burningword.com/2014/10/cumulonimbus-gastrus/): Daniel said once that the clouds in Kansas look like giant gray brains. Their thoughts all big and drifty and slow like ruminant sky gods.
- [Kristopher Miller](https://burningword.com/2014/10/kristopher-miller/): You share with me a bottle of special absinthe I drink a sip (Of that special substance!) I feel the world slip.
- [Recidivism](https://burningword.com/2014/10/recidivism/): I am frantically searching for a sharp knife: I need to cut the sulfur from my skin.
- [Barry Yeoman](https://burningword.com/2014/07/barry-yeoman/): The trees continue recycling their timely poems year after wind-blown year. Soon the tenement glow is shadowed with ice.
- [Three Birds Orchid](https://burningword.com/2014/07/three-birds-orchid/): Poised in beauty at the woozy edge of this drunken swamp, a mile deep into woods like an enchanted pilgrim silently climbing the ambrosial pathway to heaven’s gate, you startle me with your earnest meditation, oh sweet Buddhist orchid, oh soft demented flora, oh silent saint of contemplation, oh sweet honey flower of woodland mystery.
- [Bobbing Heads](https://burningword.com/2014/07/bobbing-heads/): Let go of your thoughts, let go of your thoughts, your thoughts are a river passing you by. I’m next to a river watching my thoughts.
- [The Survivor](https://burningword.com/2014/07/the-survivor/): What you have suspected is true. The girl at the counter was kidnapped. Her neck had a gash that was long and scabbed. It curved from her ear to her throat.
- [Letting Go](https://burningword.com/2014/07/letting-go/): In the wintery spring of 1945, World War II had ended but not the chaos and misery of its survivors. My mother received notice that her husband had been killed.
- [The Lucky Few](https://burningword.com/2014/07/the-lucky-few/): It was blasphemous and immoral; they submitted to the thrumming rhythm of the ethereal emotions that curled beneath their rhapsodic boughs; it filled the cosmos between them with embryonic passion—the steps they took were almost predestined, as if they had been there before; the breaths they took were almost too heavy to be healthy; the chances they took were reckless to the brink of all that was and will be tomorrow.
- [Pierce Brown](https://burningword.com/2014/07/pierce-brown/): A myth, a mistake, raking sodden leaves into trodden ground feeling dirt sift beneath his weight; a nomad, a flake, an illustration in a children’s book planting the American dream, original sin; a sexist, a snake, sowing seeds into earthy wombs, throwing them to absent winds praying they catch, they root, they grow bitter, sour, sweet; a marvel, a fake, a man who tread across the heart of my own Ohio, a man who preached what he did not know.
- [Car Parts](https://burningword.com/2014/07/car-parts/): Once, I asked my mother “What is the worst part of a car to break?” She said it was the radio. Weeks passed since I inquired and the famous question why?
- [Timothy B. Dodd](https://burningword.com/2014/07/timothy-b-dodd/): A cold eight degrees at eight in the morning as a mourning dove perches on the telephone wire, Mona’s conversation with her new man running under its talons.
- [Seul](https://burningword.com/2014/07/seul/): I think of my grandmother’s skin—warm creases, her hands rinsing off a peach, its hair smoothed from the softness of wellwater just eat from my hands, can you taste how ripe it is?
- [Big Billy](https://burningword.com/2014/07/big-billy/): Coalmaster, stoker of purposeful flame, worker of the bellows of hell, adept of the infernal majesty. Mama visited him in Washington.
- [Grounded](https://burningword.com/2014/07/grounded/): the valley of trees, miles of green and farther away, the city.
- [Two Trees](https://burningword.com/2014/07/two-trees/): Arbor vitae, meaning tree of life: rooted in the sagittal section of sheep’s brain – little cerebellum and white-matter trunk, white branches tucked within it.
- [Driving Gone To Spring](https://burningword.com/2014/07/driving-gone-to-spring/): Mark Magoon writes poetry and short stories, and secret songs for his dog.
- [Kate Douglas](https://burningword.com/2014/07/kate-douglas/): What would he say if he could see me like this: stinking of nicotine, sitting in the dark across from the fucker with fat fingers who’s never seen anything like me before.
- [Andrew LaRaia](https://burningword.com/2014/07/andrew-laraia/): three days, maybe four.
- [Apology](https://burningword.com/2014/07/apology/): Today was hot and sticky in the way only august could be, and as I cut cilantro and strawberries I thought of how plants only flourish when you take care of them, and that the halves of strawberries look like hearts when laid side by side I’m sorry that my grandma taught me how to be patient at a young age, and in retaliation I became reckless with everyone around me.
- [Born Aquatic He Was](https://burningword.com/2014/07/born-aquatic-he-was/): webbed, goose-white nut-broadened bird. He could green-water scum-break and wet- feather-waddle from the shallows.
- [A Tree, A Rabbit, And Naiveté](https://burningword.com/2014/07/a-tree-a-rabbit-and-naivete/): That autumn morning as we neared our tree, Grandpa stopped hard and pressed a meaty finger to my lips.
- [Labels](https://burningword.com/2014/07/labels/): Here’s to staying up late and watching Pulp Fiction instead of staying up late because your mind is cycling with stress.
- [East Atlantic Avenue](https://burningword.com/2014/07/east-atlantic-avenue/): I am reading secrets of yellow tomato plants, studying life-lines on their leaf-shaped palms. Home from school the neighbor boy leans over the fence.
- [Anna Zumbro](https://burningword.com/2014/07/anna-zumbro/): He might have been twenty-five, or fifty. His face was so dirty it was impossible to tell.
- [Luiza Flynn-Goodlett: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2014/07/luiza-flynn-goodlett-featured-author/): Logic unhinges. Hallucinations shuffle down the isles. A stray laugh rises.
- [Someday, I’ll explain it all to you](https://burningword.com/2014/07/someday-ill-explain-it-all-to-you/): I: Ascription i ascribe meaning to moments you: to dice and bones and chance what did the tea leaves say this morning?
- [These Ill Spirits](https://burningword.com/2014/07/these-ill-spirits/): In dreams or in sweaty moments driving, the classroom— clarity spins away like water carving out a canyon.
- [Last Day On The Job](https://burningword.com/2014/07/last-day-on-the-job/): Bill’s desk was clean, nearly antiseptic, holding a stapler, a rolodex and a computer terminal, the computer tower stashed under his desk.
- [To Answer Your Question](https://burningword.com/2014/07/to-answer-your-question/): i. Raise a flag, cast a glance, and it's all over now. ii. It was me. I triggered the mechanism that cut off my own hands. iii.
- [Weird Science](https://burningword.com/2014/07/weird-science/): My surgical gown is green, the room lit in grey gothic gradients.
- [Wyatt Thrailkill](https://burningword.com/2014/04/wyatt-thrailkill/): Big commotion last night. Brianna O’Quinn ripped a shotgun blast into the night on Lookout Mountain. No one knows what she saw. She won’t tell neither.
- [Molly Schulman](https://burningword.com/2014/04/molly-schulman/): Ralph was a painter of miniatures— miniature couches, mostly.
- [Meta Analysis of Three Unwritten Poems](https://burningword.com/2014/04/meta-analysis-of-three-unwritten-poems/): In which the poet confesses a love too real In words too plain In which he recalls a social services waiting room, stolen star wars action figures therein.
- [Soap Scum](https://burningword.com/2014/04/soap-scum/): My father bought rounds of shaving soap wrapped in crinkled pastel paper and stored them in the bathroom drawer.
- [Brie Quartin](https://burningword.com/2014/04/brie-quartin/): The sun spins silk over gold threaded hills that ebb and roll and spill back onto themselves while the morning mist lifts like a loomed lace mantilla revealing slivers of ecru, lavender, moss ~ that cast shadows of what seem like a million horizons.
- [Heather](https://burningword.com/2014/04/heather/): I must keep loading more photos of alpine bogs on Wikipedia to substitute for real travel.
- [Hecate](https://burningword.com/2014/04/hecate/): Why doesn’t love end when it should? The man I loved has found someone else. Palm trees lance skies full of low clouds. Sunset breaks like a jellyfish tide.
- [Beach Prints](https://burningword.com/2014/04/beach-prints/): Using a calligraphy pen, she traced the side of my face onto crisp paper stock, mutton chops and tam stitched in profile.
- [Brian Cooney](https://burningword.com/2014/04/brian-cooney/): Anyone who violates any of The exclusive rights of the copyright Owner as provided by section One- Oh-Six through One-Twenty-Two or of the Author as provided in section One- Oh-Six A(a) is a low down liar.
- [The Bridge](https://burningword.com/2014/04/the-bridge/): The old man rested his elbows against the rail of the bridge and contemplated the churning depths below. He was ready to be done with his problems.
- [On several paintings by Monet,  or a dispute between lovers](https://burningword.com/2014/04/on-several-paintings-by-monet-or-a-dispute-between-lovers/): An aspen or two hundred and fifty blurred nymphae, of these I dream in a coarse habit and wake gasping, convinced of the withering performed by dew and a thousand sediments.
- [M. D'Alessandro: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2014/04/m-dalessandro/): I'm watching her eat, gathering soup with a spoon from the far side of the bowl, a precise calculation, is she educating me?
- [A Cliff Over Blue](https://burningword.com/2014/04/a-cliff-over-blue/): For most, night was bleak, day was sleep, For him, dark lit sky, same as it all A single glare, and revolving glass A bed warmth, Through blackness, Lying under, A triumphant yellow, For him, night was light, day was black.
- [The Things They Were Wrong About](https://burningword.com/2014/04/the-things-they-were-wrong-about/): Melissa didn’t know why she was surprised that you could see all the gum stuck to the parking lot.
- [Lisa Wick](https://burningword.com/2014/04/lisa-wick/): The dust of the standards that used to hold this body There was always something here that talked and kept talking, that warmed its way around.
- [A Day in the Life of a Self-Professed Romantic](https://burningword.com/2014/04/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-self-professed-romantic/): He steps outside of his putty house and stares at the midnight sun; catches flurries of pastel colored barnacles on his tongue.
- [Flyover Country](https://burningword.com/2014/04/flyover-country/): White warriors posted in the wind, arms moving like synchronized swimmers to a symphony of corn husks and diesel engines.
- [Gabrielle Tyson](https://burningword.com/2014/04/gabrielle-tyson/): I look up at your face and can see that you’re a little worried, too. I know all about your oh-so-green dietary plan, but in this bar there isn’t even a salad.
- [Lost Weekend](https://burningword.com/2014/04/lost-weekend/): The burly bouncer, seated comfortably on a barstool, mumbled with a sigh of boredom that he needed some ID.
- [Janet Butler](https://burningword.com/2014/04/janet-butler/): A fine drizzle softens the air falls whisper-light an almost-rain to glaze tired grass and hard, cracked earth.
- [A Tattoo](https://burningword.com/2014/04/a-tattoo/): She got a freaking tattoo! The nose piercing last year wasn’t enough. She had to get a Celtic arm band tattoo. She’s not even Irish.
- [The Hungry Man](https://burningword.com/2014/04/the-hungry-man/): The burgers sizzled on the griddle. Bun, lettuce, onions and ketchup off to the side. I glance at the ticket. Drop the fries into the famished Canola oil.
- [My Heart Grows Heavier](https://burningword.com/2014/04/my-heart-grows-heavier/): My center grows cold and heavy. In Nagasaki, the winter months move on slowly.
- [Rex Swihart](https://burningword.com/2014/04/rex-swihart/): R L Swihart currently lives in Long Beach, CA, and teaches secondary school mathematics in Los Angeles.
- [Philemon and Baucis](https://burningword.com/2014/04/philemon-and-baucis/): Snow on the iced-up steps bits of slate broken, a frozen rabbit skin dangled from a hook near the door. Come in, come in, you can’t stay out there.
- [Troll Crossing](https://burningword.com/2014/04/troll-crossing/): There are uncertainties traversing our unknowns despite the trolls we’ve ostracized under the bridge of our relationships.
- [When My Brother Was Thirteen](https://burningword.com/2014/04/when-my-brother-was-thirteen/): he couldn’t stop his dreams-- each night he’d fall down a mountain where him & our dead grandpa, in his army greens would roll around in a haybarn & my brother would-- out of nowhere--grow enormous tits; grandpa would grope and suck so as not to be sucked himself into the vacuous sun-hole suck-shining in the sky.
- [Racetrack Massacre](https://burningword.com/2014/04/racetrack-massacre/): Look at it this way. They forced you to wear a hair net.
- [Pistons Outpace Reluctant Marching](https://burningword.com/2015/10/pistons-outpace-reluctant-marching/): Josef Krebs’ poetry appears in Agenda, Bicycle Review, Calliope, Mouse Tales Press, The Corner Club Press, and The FictionWeek Literary Review.
- [Her First Word](https://burningword.com/2015/10/her-first-word/): Her first word was material. The adults wondered why she skipped all the warm-up words like mama and daddy. So odd, they commented.
- [Letting Go of Your Sunrise](https://burningword.com/2015/10/letting-go-of-your-sunrise/): We're fading mirages spent by father times lease.
- [Cycling Through—Midwest Poem Song](https://burningword.com/2015/10/cycling-through-midwest-poem-song/): To Jack Kerouac I: Winter darkness descending: clouds don’t understand sunlight; keep your freezer stocked.
- [Signs that Your Mother Was a Hoarder](https://burningword.com/2015/10/signs-that-your-mother-was-a-hoarder/): Cigarette butts and the ash of Salem Lights in never-emptied glass ashtrays. Crumpled take-out paper bags from Wendy’s piled next to the couch.
- [Early Bird](https://burningword.com/2015/10/early-bird/): Archaeopteryx, the early bird, lies petrified as generic admixture, in stone under glass in a splay decidedly crude, its rude wings akimbo and talons curled – denied the contemporary luxury to choose in which frozen indignity to remain.
- [Clockwork Dolls](https://burningword.com/2015/10/clockwork-dolls/): My clockwork sparrow is caged in bars of fear. Its song is lonely, but it’s so clear. My wooden rose was planted in a pot of glass.
- [Losing Teeth](https://burningword.com/2015/10/losing-teeth/): Someone once told me that if you dream your teeth are falling out, it means you’re dying. It happened in a breast cancer support group.
- [Darren Demaree](https://burningword.com/2015/10/darren-demaree/): The spell & form of Emily is no longer temptation only & when I didn’t fidget at all as the needle action(ed) into my ribs, Eddie said my skin was really soaking her up this time.
- ["The rain fell like applause"](https://burningword.com/2015/10/the-rain-fell-like-applause/): (M. Ondaatje) The rain fell like applause it fell all night and it fell like applause though for whom or why I do not know it fell and it fell and I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it was for the moon this hollow moon or the trees drained of birds there was rain and the applause fell like thunder broke like glass on an iron floor since the birds had flown the air was full of something sinister there was something sinister in the applause which fell all night like rain like night like applause the rain fell like applause though for whom or why I do not know.
- [Song for a Roadside Motel Room](https://burningword.com/2015/10/song-for-a-roadside-motel-room/): Gravel crunches as I pull into an almost empty parking lot Cut the engine, watch it shudder a weak protest Slump back in the torn leather seat And light a cigarette Eyes jumping to and from the few scattered cars Like an old detective film Make sure the coast is clear Office door creaks open just enough for me to slip through See a lonesome burning smoke in a overflowing ashtray Call out a "Hello" in a shaky voice Then stammer an "Is anyone there?"
- [A Ghost of a Chance](https://burningword.com/2015/10/a-ghost-of-a-chance/): You must have had the same experience. You meet someone and in an instant, you know they're the one. That's the way it was with Maggie.
- [Three Changes](https://burningword.com/2015/10/three-changes/): This isn’t about a man evaporating to skeleton, or joe bargaining with air from a combat zone as his father lies on the crucifix bed, moaning so coherently the sins of the world coalesce, come forth in black chugs of foam, intestine, final whispers of God.
- [Hummingbird Becoming](https://burningword.com/2015/10/hummingbird-becoming/): red drop blur down hover first, then rush with helicopter sound on mute, between a Monday and the lavender bush, aligned aside a moment you forgot to even notice; still, on wings, it seems to rise in up and down motion, the hope of each becoming squeezed inside the beat of wings, a quantum fine that lasts for you a glance or two but for the hummingbird a lifetime.
- [Free](https://burningword.com/2015/10/free/): Nothing more than a beaten baby, fleeing down the aisle in my virginal gown of naivety. He wore my hope proudly.
- [Michael Salcman](https://burningword.com/2015/10/michael-salcman/): They may begin with a stutter and a pause— the interruption grows, reality first distends then explodes in silence, like a spider’s web struck on purpose by a trowel.
- [New York City](https://burningword.com/2015/10/new-york-city/): Take a bath, you filthy whore And wash underneath your teats Where the sweat tends to collect And gel with cum lubricant.
- [Sarah Marchant](https://burningword.com/2015/10/sarah-marchant-2/): They all want you to write something sad about religion where the train meets the rails where the shaking knuckles meet the trigger.
- [Judith Grissmer](https://burningword.com/2015/10/judith-grissmer/): the beauty of this night, its strange glow of light rising after days of heavy rain.
- [Autobiography #12](https://burningword.com/2015/10/autobiography-12/): When I was in sixth grade Mom asked me what I wanted to do for the summer. "Camp is good, you'll make friends."
- [Breaking the Links](https://burningword.com/2015/10/breaking-the-links/): I tried so hard to keep fear away from her.
- [Data Flow](https://burningword.com/2015/10/data-flow/): Social sensibilities in the Information Age are communicated in sound bytes, exchanging mostly trivia in brief, revealing detail that neither satisfies, nor extends relationships, tersely structured for minimal response from diminutive users.
- [Ossuary](https://burningword.com/2015/10/ossuary/): Oh, home of cracked bones, crypt of condensed composure. My time has arrived.
- [AJ Huffman](https://burningword.com/2015/10/aj-huffman/): I do not need the residual bullshit of whining Will you call me’s, nor do I believe in the transcendent lies of I’ll call you tomorrow’s.
- [Tables and Chairs](https://burningword.com/2015/10/tables-and-chairs/): It’s all firewood now, the scarred, splintered, broken-apart tables, benches, and chairs piled high far behind a country inn, all the dinner engagements and family celebrations they’ve accommodated now firmly past, service so demanding as to render this furniture debris, the owner and his son, keeping a hose handy, igniting the fire, flames swirling the mound instantly, the crackling from within it at first spare and subdued, then turning resonant and rhythmic as if in recitation of its own, long, complicated story, the story of work well done, of promises kept and promise redeemed, all ending in this blaze through which it relives its history of giving, the woodsmoke scent—lingering long after the fire expires—surprisingly sweet.
- [Dancing with Time](https://burningword.com/2015/10/dancing-with-time/): Frederick Herbert Rossakovsky-Lloyd lives and works in UK. He published nine volumes of poetry. His work can be found in numerous international anthologies.
- [On the Road to Atheism](https://burningword.com/2015/10/on-the-road-to-atheism/): She looked into the mirror very closely As she just combed her hair morosely. No doubt she was extremely beautiful; Beauty dumped on her by the merciful.
- [Faith](https://burningword.com/2015/10/faith/): Morgan Bazilian is a short story writer and poet based in Dublin, Ireland, and Telluride, Colorado.
- [RAT POO](https://burningword.com/2015/10/rat-poo/): The woman taking my baby’s information over the phone asks if I have postpartum depression.
- [Bridge](https://burningword.com/2015/10/bridge/): rails ascend into gray pneumonic sky but infinity is not allowed, cars rush to fall off the edge of sight, the wind chants with keening gulls above the bay slap, chopping, cutting at the base, rip my head clear, carve yesterday on a stone thrown to plunge down half seen and then gone in the sea-haze before the concrete ribbon hits the hills I peer seeing sky sheets tossed used and wet and her skin rising, falling, her Judas breath trapped by the rhythm of the pillars stiff over the green estuary, the thrall broken by sun’s late-day fire as the nav commands turn to Paradise Drive, there the white tablecloth is gilded, the blooded wine arrives for fugue-rites, I drink, trading masters, I swallow to cross to another land.
- [Moving Home](https://burningword.com/2015/10/moving-home/): And down the road I look at Winchester on the Severn, the setting star glaring amber as ochre-sweet honey spoils with jaundiced age in November.
- [Blonde Tea](https://burningword.com/2015/10/blonde-tea/): Ashlie Allen writes fiction and poetry. She is also a photographer. Her work has appeared in the Tipton Poetry Journal, Gone Lawn, Spelk and others.
- [The Truth, As I Remember It, Regarding Your Father](https://burningword.com/2015/10/the-truth-as-i-remember-it-regarding-your-father/): He was my summertime fairytale prince, cigarette pressed between his slim piano playing fingers.
- [Immediate Undertaking](https://burningword.com/2015/10/immediate-undertaking/): a promise and a secret written in stone clutched like a dying heart a life untethered in the loveless ether neither held nor hoped for too painful to remember too impossible to forget an anomaly of dark matter gone supernova between the rock of truth and the hard place of hurt nerves exposed in stars’ ignition transmissions muted space at a standstill for it is both now… and never again.
- [Jeffrey Park](https://burningword.com/2015/10/jeffrey-park-2/): Upside down fishbowl occupant right side up tablecloths like spiraling butterflies brown lace-up shoe a woman’s random receipts brochures sticky notes last year’s desk calendar curling uncurling a glowing suspended instant strangers on the ledge faces averted unwilling to witness the tragedy of scorched birds in flight.
- [Brown Water](https://burningword.com/2015/07/brown-water/): I liken the effects of coffee multiplying in my nervous system to the sound of cicadas, cacophony transitioning to unison on the warmest of days, finally climaxing, singular high pitch, solid throbbing greater than the sum of its parts.
- [Chris Ozog](https://burningword.com/2015/07/chris-ozog/): You write your memoir of shattered mirrors and misconstrued epiphanies.
- [Soak](https://burningword.com/2015/07/soak/): I have an image in my mind. It is an image of a particular man.
- [I Pour You This Poem](https://burningword.com/2015/07/i-pour-you-this-poem/): But I can only pour you this poem: with poor cloth-made and form not yet shaped, metaphors rain upon flesh and bone floating riddles dress in pale champagne froth tiers of honeysuckle foam pin to a clover’s song light seeps inside the ink droplets black-- an ever-musing vestal rhyme charts my fingers to your mortal gasps.
- [Dan Jacoby](https://burningword.com/2015/07/dan-jacoby/): Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University.
- [With a Slash Between](https://burningword.com/2015/07/with-a-slash-between/): She scribbles a few letters on the back of her card and hands it to him. She smiles and says something cheerful. The words don’t matter.
- [Baking in My Sleeping Bag](https://burningword.com/2015/07/baking-in-my-sleeping-bag/): You're on the other side being abstract, acting distant, I have a stack of thoughts in front of me, unfinished; have poems to write, poems I should be writing; instead I'm writing this; an alarm goes off, it's mine Saturday morning, you're laying around somewhere, Cootie Williams is blowing Gator Tail; I shut the blinds and the world outside goes on and on and about and out without me, this poem is running, jazz is dead, so are all those jazz men playing, dead, but time doesn't make sense anyway; it's just going in circles, stealing what it can, which is everything, we aren't friends; I can't see the trees, I'm hiding from the sun.
- [Terminal](https://burningword.com/2015/07/terminal/): The time until you die grips the top of my hand grates my fingers against puckered metal collects skin and bone shavings into a soft pile on the good China.
- [Ashlie Allen](https://burningword.com/2015/07/ashlie-allen-3/): Itsuki always dances behind cob webs There, he can manifest several shapes and pick which one he likes Sometimes I help him move, for he has no control over his particles He is like lace, weightless and transparent Sometimes I worry I will injure him if I want to kiss his cheek bone or cradle his hands If he would beg for my love, I might be happy If he would look at me and blush, I might feel gorgeous Today when he performs, I tilt against the fireplace mantel, hands gripping my elbows, eyes exhausted with longing I wish I could be a ghost and be afraid of myself for a good reason I imagined myself dancing, arms out to cuddle lonely spirits, eyes closed to feel powerless I imagined someone told me I was handsome and didn't need to smile I imagined I was in Japan, the place my embryo developed I imagined there was romance to my suffering and that the pulse in my chest was a hand begging for me I imagined the lights were off and that my shadow was someone I liked I imagined the room was full of demonic voices and that I was not afraid of anything I imagined I was dying and that my funeral would be beneath the ocean I imagined I was titling into glass and cracking my bones I opened my eyes and saw a skinny silhouette standing ahead of me, arms tied behind the back I made not a sound as the figure came forward and kissed my throat "Stop picturing mournful moments."
- [SHIN-ZEN-BI](https://burningword.com/2015/07/shin-zen-bi/): i In Santa Monica, on a crowded Promenade I stare at the tiny tree on the tilted cart At the silent, knuckle-thick trunk That angles impossibly down.
- [3, 2, 1…](https://burningword.com/2015/07/3-2-1/): Let it burn until all that is left is a black crisp of dehydrated exoskeleton jerky. What do I care? I did not create this place.
- [Sun Fungus](https://burningword.com/2015/07/sun-fungus/): I haven’t said my skin is ash.
- [Fourteen Years Before](https://burningword.com/2015/07/fourteen-years-before/): A straightened line of cold rounded sand still manifests itself in a circular formation of lost privileges and guarded chances, falling, tumbling, surrounded in a broken mist of past ignorance, sealed by hot assurances of desire and want, hidden by incremental degrees of solitude and hope.
- [As Young](https://burningword.com/2015/07/as-young/): and green and fresh as a cucumber pickle, sharp in the mouth, and soft green too, soft and new as the sweater you bought me, holding me young.
- [Heart-Song](https://burningword.com/2015/07/heart-song/): This blood is a waltz at dawn. A soul splinters on the ground, a thousand red vessels smashing to pieces.
- [Rochelle Shapiro](https://burningword.com/2015/07/rochelle-shapiro/): You fell in slo-mo like a mimosa petal caught in a small breeze, sprawling, nearly soundless, on our parents’ speckled linoleum.
- [Ann Robinson](https://burningword.com/2015/07/ann-robinson/): When you are an American in a Middle Eastern country, do not walk alone; your bare arms will betray you, your sandals become stone.
- [Business As Seasonal](https://burningword.com/2015/07/business-as-seasonal/): Alan attended the Tupelo Press Writers Conference on Barter’s Island, Maine, where he studied with Jeffrey Levine.
- [Peycho Kanev](https://burningword.com/2015/07/peycho-kanev/): My enemies slide through the crowd oily as snakes They are Death dressed in a coat of smiles My enemies are part of the war in which they do not care for the enemy but kill their comrades in the trenches My enemies continue to live undisturbed in darkness gently they inhale and exhale My enemies are suffocated by the obscurity chasing them everywhere upon the seven continents and the dirt is afraid to pronounce their names If Krakatoa erupts – those are their ovations The shaking of Japan turns wild the cheering in their souls My enemies without faces live inside the stone in the speech of the water where they try to talk to eternity before they turn into dust My greatest enemy has many names which he goes out in the night to practice My enemies have never been loved with tiny steps like Japanese prostitutes they enter the rooms one after another In these empty houses they are bloody clots in the corridors My enemies all of them came out of the paper mill where I produce matches for their paper hearts they are the nightmares of the people I dream about in those nights when my soul takes a break My enemies in their dreams fly in the sky the cocaine lines of the airplanes are their smiles My enemies pronounce words resembling worms which dig deep in the dirt of the wasted lands and they wander blind In the morning the sun rises only for their half-shadows At the end their skin will begin to bark their fingers will bloom under the gravestones without names She loves to play with my feelings.
- [Janet I. Buck, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2015/07/janet-i-buck-featured-author/): I should have let my hair go gray, the color of plain river rocks, which either sit or roll with currents rolling them.
- [the flooded forest](https://burningword.com/2015/07/the-flooded-forest/): Seamus Brady lives and works in Dublin Ireland. Publications include Dark Mountain Journal and in an upcoming edition of the Trumpeter Magazine (Deep Ecology).
- [Cerebral Atrophy](https://burningword.com/2015/07/cerebral-atrophy/): They came in a pack of four. The wolves from the Justice Department descended on my father once the disease became too advanced to conceal.
- [Rit Bottorf](https://burningword.com/2015/07/rit-bottorf/): This track is bloated with the grotesque and mad in their low-wage dresses and top-dollar perfumes, whoring their hearts for Vegas magic as angels trumpet perverse songs of praise for the thoroughbreds racing through the crimson mist.
- [For An Evening](https://burningword.com/2015/07/for-an-evening/)
- [Ken Haas](https://burningword.com/2015/07/ken-haas/): A woman in Frankfurt whisked me off Taunusstrasse when I was eighteen, vowing that if I bought her a drink, we could go directly to her room upstairs and “do everything.” Though I knew little then of the expanse being offered, what crisscrossed the hitherto lofted mind were the likes of bodice and orifice, syrup and stirrup, cold cuts, no buts and eyes shut, sauerkraut and thereabout, tether, feather and fur.
- [Glen Armstrong](https://burningword.com/2015/07/glen-armstrong/): We all fray and tear a bit, our bodies more and more like maps with worn edges, that crazy serpent that threatened the world, now a sketch threatened by the margin’s inward drift, that erosion, that whole world pushing back into us.
- [Daniel Giovinazzo](https://burningword.com/2015/07/daniel-giovinazzo/): Find me a place.
- [Seventeen](https://burningword.com/2015/04/seventeen/): twelve year old lambs in disguise.
- [Johanna Lane](https://burningword.com/2015/04/johanna-lane/): You used to love that I see the fierce beauty in a little chaos. I first cleared that web of woodiness cautiously.
- [I Sat Among the Books](https://burningword.com/2015/04/i-sat-among-the-books/): Crawford Krebs is eighteen years old and lives in South Carolina.
- [Save Yourself (Again...)](https://burningword.com/2015/04/save-yourself-again/): Charlie Weeks is the type of guy who writes with any liquid poison soaking in his mind. He has been recently published in lit mags such as the Dr. T.J.
- [Kodachrome](https://burningword.com/2015/04/kodachrome/): In every family photograph I see what isn’t there, the change in my face, my father’s gestures, my mother’s hair.
- [The World Is Braille We Can Read With Our Fingertips](https://burningword.com/2015/04/the-world-is-braille-we-can-read-with-our-fingertips/): hide with me in the unfinished corner of creation from Hannibal, Busta Rhymes, and Google Matthew McConaughey will have no power until sundown.
- [Gephyrophobia (Fear of Crossing Bridges)](https://burningword.com/2015/04/gephyrophobia-fear-of-crossing-bridges/): I call my friend Alan to talk while I drive up the coast, past a friend’s house in Salem Center, a friend I haven’t seen in almost a year.
- [Steven Fregeau](https://burningword.com/2015/04/steven-fregeau/): a man who confessed to being insane enough to live with beasts. that’s not fair to the beasts. what he meant was human beings.
- [Jollity](https://burningword.com/2015/04/jollity/): Her laughter escalated into muted hysteria, lasting a second too long, like an unfortunate accident, a gasp, an inhalation with throat muscles constricting, breasts heaving, shoulders shaking.
- [Daniele Walker](https://burningword.com/2015/04/daniele-walker/): How do you feel about thunderstorms? I realize I have no idea how you’d answer. My cheeks burn; the thunder cracks; it must be a sign.
- [Birds](https://burningword.com/2015/04/birds/): flibbertigibbets on pulpits, lucid with bliss, gold, crimson and chartreuse, a tricky weave in thatched looms, chirps tuned to dulcet grace, coy as they syncopate, fragile as a drizzle of satyrids, murmur of aria, whirl and frond.
- [when I close my eyes](https://burningword.com/2015/04/when-i-close-my-eyes/): Alora Ray is 20, temporarily lives in Northern Virginia, perpetually lives in a state of denial, performs for whimsy, writes by necessity.
- [The Printing Press](https://burningword.com/2015/04/the-printing-press/): i want to build you castles of words, letters looping into stairs & banisters - standing up billboards of breath in a sleepless city lit by commas & question marks.
- [Lana Bella](https://burningword.com/2015/04/lana-bella/): From you, the wings of a seraphim grow. Like the blue. Like infinity.
- [KFC](https://burningword.com/2015/04/kfc/): ‘Time to count it out,” said Tommy the gay black manager. I always liked Tommy, he was not stupid, he was good to us and not needy or demanding.
- [Nothing](https://burningword.com/2015/04/nothing/): could have seemed more mundane than an accidental Safeway run-in after you simply stopped your pursuit and, instead, went after groceries.
- [The Molassacre](https://burningword.com/2015/04/the-molassacre/): Boom! Rivets from the 50-foot distillery tank busted from the flimsy metal sheets exploding with molasses onto Boston's North End.
- [Ashlie Allen](https://burningword.com/2015/04/ashlie-allen-2/): Her ghost whimpers in the flower pot as I pop balloons against the cactus she held the day she sighed, "Sayōnara."
- [Internment In An Urn of Hell](https://burningword.com/2015/04/internment-in-an-urn-of-hell/): “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
- [Jennifer Wesle](https://burningword.com/2015/04/jennifer-wesle/): Green solar plexus envious fastidious and plagued in dis-ease bikes to ride past your house eye balls on springs and wide open glued hairs in scrapbook voodooed photographs and bottled tears grimaced grew cats teeth and whiskers grew a warm layer of fur scratched you+me on my bedpost and voodooed that too stole ten dollars from the grocer stole ten persimmons and thirteen oranges sold persimmons and oranges on the bridge sold collages of voodooed photographs sold tears as divinity potions glittered the cement with golddust grinned despite green chakras and hid envy underneath my shawl.
- [K.C. Bryce Fitzgerald, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2015/04/k-c-bryce-fitzgerald-featured-author/): caught in moments we theorize new reflections arithmetic in strange places empty subway stations and park benches strangers collide in ever- limbo spaces, for never do you know the next encountering that changes faces time un-thought will likely reach you, each echoed beat and pulse vibration, rattling like the rattled station and thoughts un-certain will probably break you but passing lives will make you stop and softly laugh and cough and think and who we were will in that moment, mingle as if spilling ink.
- [Deadpan](https://burningword.com/2015/04/deadpan/): I know what you mean about the whiteness of paper, the inevitability of the sharpened pencil and the exactitude of the forgotten line that curves to the contours of the robin’s egg discovered beneath a hammock resting on the freshly cut grass, speckled for all it’s worth.
- [Laws of Motion](https://burningword.com/2015/04/laws-of-motion/): I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
- [The Devil Has Your Face](https://burningword.com/2015/04/the-devil-has-your-face/): Hell is a cold place where we stand in a line with strangers, awaiting an unknown fate.
- [Catharine Lucas](https://burningword.com/2015/04/catharine-lucas/): The soul yearns outward the body turns to salt, this slow pillar-making punishment enough for looking back. How release the ready heart?
- [Speaking Through A Mirror](https://burningword.com/2015/01/speaking-through-a-mirror/): Would you look at my beautiful Skeleton broken in two, twice The shell of a skeleton in a mirror?
- [Questions and Answers](https://burningword.com/2015/01/questions-and-answers/): a dagger ready to dig in deep * It was a simple question. Is this your son’s coat?
- [The ghost looks like me](https://burningword.com/2015/01/the-ghost-looks-like-me/): Ashlie Allen writes fiction and poetry.
- [S. Babin](https://burningword.com/2015/01/s-babin/): Life radicalized, into roots. But fear loomed like a stitched whale song.
- [Pigs](https://burningword.com/2015/01/pigs/): After I dropped out of university I spent some time working on my uncle's farm.
- [Old Dog](https://burningword.com/2015/01/old-dog/): The Old Dog finds its legs in the corner. He wants to take me for a walk, but I’m too weak. He knows that better than anyone. He’s been waiting.
- [New Brunswick, By Way of Oakland City Center Bart](https://burningword.com/2015/01/new-brunswick-by-way-of-oakland-city-center-bart/): 27 February 2013. She said: Gentlemen, excuse me, gentlemen. Gentlemen. You’re such nice looking gentlemen. Gentlemen. I don’t mean to bother.
- [To the Panhandlers of Northern Virginia](https://burningword.com/2015/01/to-the-panhandlers-of-northern-virginia/): Today I thought I saw an ex-love driving an old Mercedes with stinking exhaust.
- [Simon Perchik](https://burningword.com/2015/01/simon-perchik/): * Here, there, the way silence tows you below the waterline and though you are alone you're not sure where her name is floating on the surface or what's left grasped by a single wave that never makes it to shore splashes as if this pen is rowing you across the stillness the dead are born with --you are already bathing, half from memory, half by leaping from the water for flowers growing everywhere --for you this page, unclaimed :a knife dripping with seawater and your throat.
- [Avec O’Heaney](https://burningword.com/2015/01/avec-oheaney/): before I’m stricken down by overwhelming heartiness Lindo, remember my hands flagging down my elbows when I suddenly bent them at asymmetric angles and thrust them toward my second rib to cry out a phlegmy Milwaukee born Hrrrrraaghh!
- [Rains Came Too Late](https://burningword.com/2015/01/rains-came-too-late/): The fire gnawed the grasslands to bone-cracked earth on the way to our village.
- [John Sweet: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2015/01/john-sweet-featured-author/): john sweet, b. 1968, winner of the 2014 Lummox Poetry Prize.
- [Betsy Martin](https://burningword.com/2015/01/betsy-martin/): My mother still under her sky-blue shroud, with her head turned to the side. I lie down beside her.
- [If You Make It Through December](https://burningword.com/2016/07/if-you-make-it-through-december/): Cruel April, February crueler yet: Weary end of winter dark persisting, The shortest month drags long along Exhausted banks of brick-red mud-stained snow, Crocuses entombed in superseding snowdrifts; Spring robins held at bay by croaking crows.
- [Night Travel](https://burningword.com/2016/07/night-travel/): Curving, climbing, descending On steel tracks, the moon keeping pace, While in ten thousand little towns The sleepers sleep in the earth.
- [Shoreline](https://burningword.com/2016/07/shoreline/): The evening beryl blue A wavy horizon puffing out clouds Sanguine in her lasting coffers My heart lies silent at the bottom Of the jar of peace.
- [Not Birdwatching](https://burningword.com/2016/07/not-birdwatching/): Only the best trickster gods have wings.
- [In the Company of Others](https://burningword.com/2016/07/in-the-company-of-others/): Kristin LaFollette received her BA and MA in English and creative writing from Indiana University.
- [Connor Fieweger](https://burningword.com/2016/07/connor-fieweger/): His torso entangled unsure of its ends. And there, Atlas Heavenly heaving again and again.
- [Je Crois](https://burningword.com/2016/07/je-crois/): that dusk which is the start of deadly night when darkness hides our evils and fears and men surrender to folly and violence that dusk, the gentle laying of a robe of pink over a hot day of white sun or endless storms that covered the roiling sky black at noon with wind howling and rain lashing at faces; that dusk the delicate hand of rest when the air finally cools down the washes and gullies where the heat still reflects, rocks warm to touch, this breath of evening air relieves the oppression and we can afford to move now before that dark sky arrives, watch the light fade, a draining of all the travails of the day, a promise that shadows will melt, creation arise on the morrow, whether sodden or sultry it will be as unprecedented as a clean sun rising over all our waste and wild spaces, dusk a distant matter of perspective.
- [Oona: A Love Story](https://burningword.com/2016/07/oona-a-love-story/): Arlo was strolling down Pike Street one morning when he saw a woman sitting on a bench in front of a sex shop, madly trying to light a cigarette.
- [Diary Secrets from 1966](https://burningword.com/2016/07/diary-secrets-from-1966/): Jimmy was a dreamer, a handsome James Dean kind of guy.
- [Michele Madigan Somerville](https://burningword.com/2016/07/michele-madigan-somerville/): now that it’s nearly done?
- [In Lieu of a Better Plan](https://burningword.com/2016/07/in-lieu-of-a-better-plan/): In lieu of a better plan I have decided to be a tree that grows down instead of up. It makes a kind of sense to me.
- [Donna Emerson](https://burningword.com/2016/07/donna-emerson/): You’re home complaining how crowded our house feels with the new baby, question the noise, her crying. These rooms used to be yours.
- [Lichen and Moss](https://burningword.com/2016/07/lichen-and-moss/): Stone wall covered with lichen and moss; along an old country lane within the briers.
- [Stillness](https://burningword.com/2016/07/stillness/): Rock fitted silence to its tense profile. At night stillness shrank back to the opaque scheme of space.
- [Sunday Morning](https://burningword.com/2016/07/sunday-morning/): That’s my bike over there.
- [Stephen Massimilla](https://burningword.com/2016/07/stephen-massimilla/): After Neruda To unnumbered nameless lands wind dived down from other dominions, trailing celestial threads of rain; and the god of the impregnated altars restored the lives and the flowers.
- [Bed of Nails](https://burningword.com/2016/07/bed-of-nails/): Lying on a bed of nails is not a bed of roses.
- [Revival](https://burningword.com/2016/04/revival/): He has been published/accepted in Dead Snakes, Anti-Heroin Chic, Leaves of Ink, Writing Raw, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Indiana Voice Journal, The Stray Branch Magazine, First Literary Review – East, Section 8 Magazine, The Poet Community, Setting Forth- On a Literary Itinerary, Cavalcade of Stars, Red Rising Magazine, Social Justice Poetry, High Coupe, Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine.
- [Thoughts and Prayers](https://burningword.com/2016/04/thoughts-and-prayers/): Thoughts and prayers The emptiest of gestures Just a collection of letters posted for the world to see A world so far from your thoughts You've never prayed for Really Doing nothing never looked so useful Click post Move on Feel good The ring of notifications solidify your conscience Your good deed done Without wiping up one ounce of blood Brushing away one tear Circling one brass casing The incendiary and screams are too far away to even silence you to attention Your thoughts and prayers will have to suffice They just have to They must For what am I to do with this horrific sight?
- [Words of Commitment Written in Sand](https://burningword.com/2016/04/words-of-commitment-written-in-sand/): At low tide, they write words in the dark, damp sand pledging their love forever.
- [The Museum of Light and Darkness](https://burningword.com/2016/04/the-museum-of-light-and-darkness/): Life is a museum of light and Darkness, and we are all mere Exhibits, stored in clear glass Boxes, with labels describing our Identities in short-hand, and Vintage Latin phrases chronicling our Insecurities, and life is a museum of Light and darkness, and we All exist in its corridors and Alleyways, waiting to be noticed, so That we can make the mark for the Next and final curation.
- [Strange Sugar](https://burningword.com/2016/04/strange-sugar/): It was her parents dying in a tragic accident downstate. It was being sent off to live with a grandfather she’d never known existed.
- [William Taylor Jr.](https://burningword.com/2016/04/william-taylor-jr/): I woke up and forgot how to write a poem and decided that writing poems was stupid. I couldn't think of anything to love and decided that love was stupid, too.
- [WARM #11](https://burningword.com/2016/04/warm-11/): I had to move more on my own before the wind would ever consider me a ship. I was born far away from the ocean. I had to break myself to spill into the sea.
- [R.M. Cymber](https://burningword.com/2016/04/r-m-cymber/): R.M. Cymber is a graduate student at Fontbonne University in St Louis, Missouri.
- [Reconstruction](https://burningword.com/2016/04/reconstruction/): The power saws of my childhood sneak into the wind, great whirling motors spitting dust, soft and clinging to the hair of my arms, transforming me from child to Nordic beast, wild curls of blonde lumber blurring my edges.
- [Quite Mad](https://burningword.com/2016/04/quite-mad/): It’s nice to be me she wonders when you do not know what the time is at any shade of day.
- [Roly-Poly Elegy](https://burningword.com/2016/04/roly-poly-elegy/): An April morning, or maybe March, my children and I were enjoying the medium-low sunlight, when my son, Jacob, found a roly-poly.
- [Rabbit tears](https://burningword.com/2016/04/rabbit-tears/): Ashlie Allen writes fiction and poetry. Her favorite book is "The Vampire Lestat" by Anne Rice.
- [Peycho Kanev](https://burningword.com/2016/04/peycho-kanev-2/): When we were together, we were not. I was alone with you and with all the animals, all the cherry blossoms, Chrysanthemums and the rising sun. Is this Japan?
- [The Department of Otolaryngology](https://burningword.com/2016/04/the-department-of-otolaryngology/): The perpendicular marks on the carpet, Below my blistered boots, mark my path to this Place of auditory affirmation.
- [Natural Causes](https://burningword.com/2016/04/natural-causes/): In dusty houses with sallow shades floating ghostly past books, pictures, broken furniture unconnected disengaged Functional rubble of teeth, knees, hips, skipping the charters to Branson, afternoon performances of Hamlet writing in their journals how the view from the end of the road mirrors the view from the beginning: a thoughtless line vining to mind, a heart of treetops, vanishing unsurprised through the floorboards.
- [Less Shiny](https://burningword.com/2016/04/less-shiny/): i was born a year and a half after he died a little baby boy allotted eight hours of fresh breath a slap in the face to my mother who carried him for nine months who would’ve given up a lifetime of breaths to save his they say i am made of stardust particles from the universe, the very matter from a now dead star forms my raggedy bones that i carry around and berate and criticize and abuse my grandmother left her house knowing she’d turn black and blue when her mom found out that she crawled out the window to give my grandfather one last kiss before he left for the war when i was two i jumped into a pool of water at a party for grown ups when people were laughing and not watching the now disturbed cold water and some man jumped in that didn’t know me in all of his clothes saved my life and it’s interesting, so interesting to think of the boy - what’s his name?
- [Lifeless](https://burningword.com/2016/04/lifeless/): I found myself at deaths door. Looking up at the reflection of the stars that mirrored an image of what I once thought was my life.
- [Fission](https://burningword.com/2016/04/fission/): You grow a beard, check the mirror, notice you are forty years old, the next morning, you shave it off, find you are sixty.
- [Let the Bombs Fall](https://burningword.com/2016/04/let-the-bombs-fall/): Josef Krebs’ poetry appears in Burningword Literary Journal, Agenda, Bicycle Review, Calliope, Mouse Tales Press, The Corner Club Press, The FictionWeek Literary Review, and Crack the Spine.
- [Lindsay McLeod](https://burningword.com/2016/04/lindsay-mcleod/): Spilt and splashed down here in the low life, wild electric blue blanketed eyes, ham cameo role on the gallows pole, wrapped up whole in the scarf of the sky, open closet of bones sounds a wind chime, while a barbed wire snare smokes a lung, watch me dance on hair trigger corrections, plunge from life’s unsolicited tongue.
- [David Ades](https://burningword.com/2016/04/david-ades/): My breath rose like a ghostly cloud into the air, dispersing particles of me, invisible envoys that would remain after I was gone, marking my passage though no one would see.
- [Dave Hardin](https://burningword.com/2016/04/dave-hardin/): She’s bound for Toledo riding low with grain, slipping through fine blue capillary that splits the difference between Belle Isle and Windsor Canada keeping a low profile to the south forever confounding us.
- [Cherries](https://burningword.com/2016/04/cherries/): It has been millennia since I last ate you. How did I dare, today, breaking the spell?
- [Analytic Beditation](https://burningword.com/2016/04/analytic-beditation/): I’ll look for you at that place between the dirty flame of evening, it’s temple to oblivion, and the milky solution of dawn where extremes meet and get to know each other all over.
- [Rich Ives, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2016/04/rich-ives-featured-author/): oh my aging starlet in the butter bread me with hyphens wide- eyed and strained of wonder without reason when I need help I go to sleep there is no school for this aged persuasion certainties: perishables doubts: fertility a string tied to my reasoning like tiny aggressions pouring forth from the military hole until all those antennae twitch to one leg climb it like a food source I was busy criticizing a rock a gardener with a little slug funk dripping from his angry shoe I’m between accomplishments but the cast-off river has its own explanations necessary things are not always beautiful the privileged ocean’s temporarily illegible there is nothing else to say about not saying pessimism: the body’s half empty optimism: the coffin’s half full at the end of the journey a talking goat he doesn’t have anything to say I can’t sleep some nights it rains all day a common man doesn’t want common things something will happen of course but I’m stopping now only an opening whose words contain mouths it makes the first page read right into the last I can’t remember what was said to make me feel this way but knowing the secret exists makes it less secret Needing only a shovelful of air to float on, tunnels of light open daily with a flutter and a dash.
- [Apprehension](https://burningword.com/2016/04/apprehension/): He doesn’t notice the small flying thing with the stinger at the end of its thorax fall into the opening of his soda can.
- [2 pm Standing Meeting](https://burningword.com/2016/04/2-pm-standing-meeting/): They met every other week on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00 pm. He wondered where the term “standing” came from. Regular, he supposed, immobile.
- [Carrie Tolve](https://burningword.com/2016/04/carrie-tolve/): Most say girls stop playing with Barbie when their friends do.
- [9/11 is a word now.](https://burningword.com/2016/04/911-is-a-word-now/): Children huddle in front of glowing TV boxes and are told to pray by pale godless people who look like cigarettes.
- [At the Bottom of the Ocean](https://burningword.com/2016/04/at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean/): Each day he chooses which view the dome’s artificial windows will show him.
- [To a Young Cicada in August](https://burningword.com/2016/01/to-a-young-cicada-in-august/): I saw you today. You’d been left behind. Caught in the act of unzipping your old skin.
- [Mystery](https://burningword.com/2016/01/mystery/): Electrons circle protons, neutrons of an atom’s nucleus. Radio signal, steady beeps fade out, long distance voyager.
- [Finding Your Mind](https://burningword.com/2016/01/finding-your-mind/)
- [Sometimes the Smallest Thing](https://burningword.com/2016/01/sometimes-the-smallest-thing/): It was ten minutes to closing time at the cell phone store and Gillespie struggled with what to do after work.
- [Raychelle Lodato](https://burningword.com/2016/01/raychelle-lodato/): Some days I'm convinced It's the pain that makes me real. Reminding me I'm breathing. That I am happy to be here. That I am strong...
- [Stephen Cloud](https://burningword.com/2016/01/stephen-cloud/): Someone from Taft Hall calls it in: flooded grass, stranded cars. More trouble with the water main.
- [Too Young To Know](https://burningword.com/2016/01/too-young-to-know/): It’s curious about the massed communicants, not the few tied and suited boys, especially, but the virginally, wedding-gowned girls in lace and taffeta, prim alabaster angels now pledged, going steady with the Church.
- [The Season Turns](https://burningword.com/2016/01/the-season-turns/): Bones of the trees are showing now, the terrible light. Darkness is all the cold holds, which shivers out of sight.
- [Mark Danowsky](https://burningword.com/2016/01/mark-danowsky/): Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Alba, Cordite, Grey Sparrow, Mobius, Shot Glass Journal, Third Wednesday and other journals.
- [Feral Cat](https://burningword.com/2016/01/feral-cat/): Quietly with sly energy, it circles a black hole in this jungled universe. feral mind feline creeping pauses in pursuit, too ready to nap another day away.
- [City Without a Name](https://burningword.com/2016/01/city-without-a-name/): Moon jelly in the sea noodle Shimmer of flying fish morning Laughs to itself the sky has landed Along the beach water dripping off its hair Sometimes the world might Come in a little ahead of the game Today it looks like it was going to rain Airwaves change a seagull into a musket ball The lovely girl I’m too old & fat for Sets her halo down Next to her umbrella It must get mighty rainy in heaven & there’s still a star in the sky A little pinkish around the edges Gotta change this reality Hold onto life by its tables & chairs Typhoon voices too loud to be heard Words bouncing around in the back of my mind Rainfall rattles the windowshades The wind seems laboring Up a long flight of stairs A car horn honks my name The cannonade of an endless heart A new window has opened Spider webs are forming The ceiling is falling The Eiffel tower in miniature Infrared balloon bubbling Between the starfish high In the mountains & what only time will tell The world loves itself in a special way A man doesn’t have to worry about The sunlight on how it is.
- [Fail](https://burningword.com/2016/01/fail/): Martin Keaveney's recent fiction includes 'The Rainy Day' in the anthology Small Lives (Poddle Publications), 'Last Order' in Crannog and 'A New Freedom' in Gold Dust magazine with work forthcoming in Agave Magazine.
- [Purgatory](https://burningword.com/2016/01/purgatory-2/): Trying out for the Senior Class Play’s romantic lead opposite my girl but coming in second to the ever-popular handsome hunky Everett then having to watch him romancing her on-stage from backstage for weeks.
- [The droning drowns out my thoughts](https://burningword.com/2016/01/the-droning-drowns-out-my-thoughts/): They give me no peace, constantly flying over at all hours. Right on schedule, with the precision of a quartz timepiece.
- [Matter](https://burningword.com/2016/01/matter/): You said I could be anything So I became “Me” But then You said That “Me” was too Cliché Predictable Counterfeit So I became A sunflower stretching with every fiber of my being toward the sky toward the light But you didn’t like that You said I set my sights too high So I became a tortoise stagnant relying on my complacency and not my accountability But you quickly grew bored of me You said That I took things too slow So I became a feather bending and waning vulnerable to impurities and emotional cacophony lilting.
- [The Weight of Violence](https://burningword.com/2016/01/the-weight-of-violence/): You’re in the pickup with Scotty B and buzzing with anticipation cause you’re about to score and this makes your skin tingle thinking about the rush of dopamine and potential for sudden violence that comes with every deal and to feed the synergy you reach for the volume on the stereo just as the song ends and the void of sound takes you back to the bar where amid the neon and dinge of a dive turned trendy you caught the lean through the corner of your eye before the kiss between two guys who looked like college kids enjoying a night on-the-slum and unaware of the culture shift when you leave the sandstone and iron of Okie Yuppie U.
- [Man vs Plato](https://burningword.com/2016/01/man-vs-plato/): His biceps strain and relax beneath working hands, transferring bright flowers and plants into moist soil.
- [Paul Lubenkov](https://burningword.com/2016/01/paul-lubenkov/): Scooter Monzingo is dead. The weather is crisp, the streets Are exceptionally clean.
- [Hoplophobia](https://burningword.com/2016/01/hoplophobia/): A morbid fear of guns whose array of co-morbidities encompass suppressed rage post-traumatic stress disorder delusional disorder and panic disorder this complex specific phobia and avoidance displacement and transference Or how else do hoplophobiacs get from point A to point B without a gun permit with a gun without a firing mechanism and without bullets and the hallowed halls of Congress clogged with lead?
- [Speaking Portuguese in Bijagós](https://burningword.com/2016/01/speaking-portuguese-in-bijagos/): Hot in the schoolhouse we study mathematics, geography. We are told many times that the maps teach history too.
- [Late Swimmer](https://burningword.com/2016/01/late-swimmer/): In this late-autumn dusk trees discard their leaves like August’s junk lottery tickets.
- [John Sweet, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2016/01/john-sweet-featured-author-2/): i consider apologizing for things i haven’t done in the end i keep quiet and the infection spreads the sun barely clears the hills to the south on the coldest days of the year and the air is thick with the smell of gasoline, of metal grinding against metal, and she says slow down says that was the exit but the trick is to get further away, out to where the hills no longer have names, out to where the trees rise up forever dead from lakes of black water, and the trick is to forget the children, and the trick is to drive out past even this, out past memory and pain, but the truth is that the trick always fails the truth is that sex always ends up feeling better than love isn’t this what you’ve been waiting to hear me say?
- [Rose Mary Boehm](https://burningword.com/2016/01/rose-mary-boehm-2/): You curl up in the corner of the washroom without concern about the urine on the floor and you hear hot voices and cool riffs leave through the door of the village barn where they celebrate your getting hitched to husband number three.
- [Remember](https://burningword.com/2016/01/remember/): Remember this. Remember tonight. Remember the rain hitting the window, the train’s whistle cutting through the wind while the night moves southwards. Remember.
- [undocumented immigrant](https://burningword.com/2016/01/undocumented-immigrant/): John Sweeder is a retired university professor from La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA.
- [Hope](https://burningword.com/2016/01/hope/): My hope is a blue fluffy pillow. A mirror of the sky, there to cushion my falls. It glows; sunlight through a window. My hope is the city.
- [The Ways of Peace](https://burningword.com/2016/01/the-ways-of-peace/): wage a war of peace a war of peaceful ways a war of peaceful means let violence be validation of violent let murder be mandate of murderers let bloodstains stain bloody, blood soaked hands but let conquerors conquer by means of peace.
- [Dark Odyssey](https://burningword.com/2016/01/dark-odyssey/): (Inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor) In dark latitudes beyond the mountains clouds gather fluorescent and frosted in a disturbing array shivering with summer lighting Unknown figures in the wilderness bode ill with spells and charms keep close to spreading spokes of campfire light In unreported river islands lies an atmosphere of pre-historic survival where children look like the adults the refuge of an otherwise extinct species.
- [Josef Krebs](https://burningword.com/2016/01/josef-krebs/): Josef Krebs’ poetry appears in Agenda, Bicycle Review, Calliope, Mouse Tales Press, The Corner Club Press, The FictionWeek Literary Review, and Burningword Literary Journal.
- [A Quarter Century of Consequence](https://burningword.com/2016/01/a-quarter-century-of-consequence/): Because the window in my heart was left open wide The cold crept in quietly to chastise vein miracles.
- [The Medal](https://burningword.com/2016/01/the-medal/): We were dug in beside the intersection of two roads under the stars when we saw three guys running up to the intersection with packs on their backs.
- [La Nación](https://burningword.com/2016/01/la-nacion/): Tonight, I read like John Coltrane played, unfurl my jazz voice, make scotch-and-soda eyes to the crowd, syncopate my way into the snap-finger backroom, into the dark corner where the slick-haired man with the paint brush mustache, thick-lensed eyeglasses, and loose lower lip presses his nose into the pages of La Nación, and when I open fire from my throat, he looks up, his face says mujer atrevida, brazen woman, and he laughs, so I belt out we remember everything, and the crowd nods, they’re behind me squarely here in the Recoleta district, and I give them what they want, continue with the new Gestapo, so arresting in their certitude, move to hidden sphere of infinity and the beast roars through the blood on his teeth, and the man sneers, raises his newspaper and displays the headline—that commotion over in Villa Crespo, perhaps the start of an uprising—and maybe that’s going on here too, as I continue with when the lizard brain commands and the tiger is coming for you, then an epitaph, the chocolate fingers of the dead, and my constant image of this last month flashes into the room—a cadre of men and women, dressed in rumpled white cotton, in the middle, my brother Aurelio, who blew jazz sax like an angry god, collapsed into ropes that tied him round his pole (because there are such venues for that sort of thing), his fingers smeared from his last meal—a final taste of chocolate, of life, slipped into his cell by a pitying guard, and we heard that Aurelio thrust his chest and stomach out just as the order to fire was given and his loosened buttons popped, spilling the manifesto from his shirt as he shouted muerte a los traidores, and the man in the back makes a sour face as I scream: you can cut all the flowers but you can’t keep spring from coming and from each crime are born bullets that will one day seek out where your heart lies, and there I end my work, with the good general slumped lifeless over the armrest of his chair and La Nación dangling between his fingers and the floor as the troopers herd in.
- [Glory Bound:  Children’s Home Thanks Donor for Station Wagon](https://burningword.com/2016/01/glory-bound-childrens-home-thanks-donor-for-station-wagon/): That behemoth Bel-Air, its tail stopped by a tree, lurches outside the photo frame hiding its eyes, but most of all stilling its mouth – metal teeth in a tight grill tensed to spill the truth.
- [Postcards from the Knife Thrower](https://burningword.com/2016/01/postcards-from-the-knife-thrower/): June 27 Deadwood, SD God has more surprises. The sun is not hot. Stars are not light. Grass appears to bend, is rigid. I send away grief. I want change.
- [A Way](https://burningword.com/2016/01/a-way/): King Grossman is a poet and novelist, currently working on his fourth novel in a lovely studio at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and has participated in the Texas Writers’ Guild (2005), Aspen Summer Words (2009, 2010, 2015), Christian Writers’ Guild (2007), Algonkian Writer Conference (2010) and CUNY Hunter College Writers’ Conference (2011).
- [Rain](https://burningword.com/2016/01/rain/): It rained all day that Saturday. In the evening Dad saw frogs in the garden and wondered where they had come from.
- [Of Desire/Hope](https://burningword.com/2016/01/of-desirehope/): Written in response to the Mali Hostage Crisis Burn.
- [Dear Cinderella (or To Whom It May Concern)](https://burningword.com/2016/01/dear-cinderella-or-to-whom-it-may-concern/): I. Little girls starving themselves brittle and family secrets glossed in simper abide by midnight curfews, closing their barbed cage doors behind them.
- [Healing](https://burningword.com/2016/01/healing/): The fencer lunges forward the opponent parries but fails and both collide corps-a-corps while the blades flash and clash and leave their signatures in oozing blood that coagulates soon.
- [On Receiving a Life-Threatening Diagnosis](https://burningword.com/2016/01/on-receiving-a-life-threatening-diagnosis/): Has Death asked me to step out on the floor? For a tango, long and difficult? Will I need attitude, strength to learn new steps? I don’t expect a polka.
- [Ashlie Allen](https://burningword.com/2016/01/ashlie-allen-4/): Through pink tinted lamp light, I tilt in the chair, hair sliding off my shoulders until my countenance is black with Japanese heritage Last night, I woke myself up laughing Your eyes, ivory with silver shimmer, fell on me I cradled them until they busted like a blood clot being bitten You said "I can see you always."
- [Here’s what I remember](https://burningword.com/2016/01/heres-what-i-remember/): A hooker with the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians tattooed on her side. Four hundred thirty six Crown Royal bags. How much I hate stuffed olives.
- [Ansel Oommen](https://burningword.com/2016/01/ansel-oommen/): I lived ambling through a dream It was nice– the scenery was pleasant And in my naïveté, I lay Anesthetized Sniffing poppies As the clouds scrambled for the east They warned me to follow them I laughed; they were mad Did they not know they were part Of a story I composed A poem that I had penned?
- [Grilled Miracles](https://burningword.com/2016/01/grilled-miracles/): My daughter looks at the sky as if her real life might fall out of it. Air pressure shifts hope in her bones.
- [Feral Boy](https://burningword.com/2015/10/feral-boy/): The feral boy sleeps at the foot of your bed. You only get him one weekend per month but he refuses to sleep in his bed.
- [Marc Tretin](https://burningword.com/2015/10/marc-tretin/): is the universal receiver of all letters that will be answered and filed soon and bills to be paid next month and the sprawl of folders on diets and the health effects of prunes.
- [Douglas Cole, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2015/10/douglas-cole-featured-author/): Joe lived in a cabin outside of Mount Vernon, Washington, a place his uncle built for hunting. I visited him there once or twice, on my way somewhere else.
- [Anthropology of Me](https://burningword.com/2015/10/anthropology-of-me/): It should be Margaret Meade leaving her barely palatable threesome to figure it all out for me.
- [Steadfast](https://burningword.com/2015/10/steadfast/): Wordlessly, she positions him beside her, leaning against the boat’s railing for support. She is now somebody’s wife.
- [The Lesson of Pain: Lessen the Pain](https://burningword.com/2015/10/the-lesson-of-pain-lessen-the-pain/): “The Marrow of Zen,” one of the sutras of Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, relates zen practitioners to four horses, with the fourth horse responding only after the pain of the whip penetrates to the marrow of its bones.
- [Smoke Break](https://burningword.com/2015/10/smoke-break/): I never told anyone but I’ll tell you. About the fire Folding up my tongue, The last counted hour With my stomach shrinking Toward my graveyard spine.
- [Tick Tock](https://burningword.com/2015/10/tick-tock/): The ticks I pick from your flesh have the verve of John Donne’s flea but much more adhesive with the fervor of Lyme Disease.
- [Lunar Dogma](https://burningword.com/2015/10/lunar-dogma/): She believes the snow is a mirror Turned upwards toward her face, A catalyst for the frigid light Burning in the old, dappled pines.
- [War Games](https://burningword.com/2017/07/war-games/): The rules are shaped and branded On to genes, down generations, Passed round in Story and in song, To make forgetting harder.
- [James Dean’s Pants](https://burningword.com/2017/07/james-deans-pants/): I always wanted to wear the pants James Dean wore, and Rebel taught me he was all wick and no wax— ghost-riding his way off the bluffs— because you know that he didn’t make it out of that car wreck, not really, not in the cold, rehearsed way his total soc counterpart did, when he cowered before the onslaught of fragrant light beams or fictions, projections on canvas, but never the real fear, real darkness, no.
- [Memories that Wander](https://burningword.com/2017/07/memories-that-wander/): Recalling a melodious pitch, or forms of movement, thus Swarms of creatures the mind adventures, the swooning of the thrush And while I beckon hitherto ineffable thoughts I ponder: the motive of a person’s word and deed when that one says, what’s wrong dear?
- [A Rural Life](https://burningword.com/2017/07/a-rural-life/): When the birds and bees die off because of chemical misuse, where will procreation be, who will make love? Only the Doomsday Clock will keep moving and gasping.
- [Compass](https://burningword.com/2017/07/compass/): Another of my father’s dense metal hand tools That he’d never find or use again once we took them from the shed.
- [Lucid Lucy Lululy](https://burningword.com/2017/07/lucid-lucy-lululy/): She had plugged The holes atop Her head with hair To keep the brains From knowing there Was more to life Than dark and matted skull.
- [The Martyr](https://burningword.com/2017/07/the-martyr/): Who are you? You don’t know? No. I’ll come closer. Your face. What happened to your face? You don’t remember? No. Are you sure? Look. It’s horrible.
- [Kasandra Larsen](https://burningword.com/2017/07/kasandra-larsen/): Grabs your argument in a certain hand, clenches your words in a fist, spits them back at you before you’ve decided what you were even trying to say.
- [Notes for an Awkward Morning](https://burningword.com/2017/07/notes-for-an-awkward-morning/): A few things you will seek the morning after: wallets, words, contact lenses, meaning, directions.
- [Golden Fields](https://burningword.com/2017/07/golden-fields/): The night breeze kisses the amber, coaxing it to twirl and dance A twinkling speck of rich medallion, melting my fingers, warming all these downtrodden souls.
- [Marian Kaplun Shapiro](https://burningword.com/2017/07/marian-kaplun-shapiro/): crawl up 1 crawl down 2 up 3 down 4 up 5 how many minutes how fast the heart rate down 6 the second hand do-si-do-ing with the minute hand of the big wall clock the beat of the rock-a-billy on the boom box up 7 breaststroke down 8 up 9 down 10 flip turn up 11 backstroke down 12 butterfly up 13 down 14 sidestroke 15 16 how long?
- [Entropy](https://burningword.com/2017/07/entropy/): Scientists call it the measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. Too abstract?
- [The Letter Opener](https://burningword.com/2017/07/the-letter-opener/): I pulled open the small drawer below the wall phone and saw a point of silver sticking out beneath the mélange of business cards, a sticky pad, and a strip of lime green cloth.
- [Marco and Nothing](https://burningword.com/2017/07/marco-and-nothing/): Marco looked at the empty space that his sculpture was going to occupy. What the hell did he have to say that would be worth occupying this space with?
- [Richard King Perkins II, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2017/07/richard-king-perkins-ii-featured-author/): You blame me for rumors floating across highways which come to rest uneasily among swans and other natal motions.
- [The Necessity of Lying](https://burningword.com/2017/04/the-necessity-of-lying/): When they were small, I’d line them up before we’d go into the grocery store, spit on a tissue and wipe their faces, straighten their hair, inspect.
- [Bulletproof](https://burningword.com/2017/04/bulletproof/): After my father’s third wife left him, he tacked up a paper target onto the center of the cathode ray credenza and pegged a picture of my latest step-mother over it.
- [Listing: Areas of my Dwelling](https://burningword.com/2017/04/listing-areas-of-my-dwelling/): I. Blacksmiths re-arrange silken threads Tailors forge horseshoes Where do you form, irony, to then become formless?
- [The Nest](https://burningword.com/2017/04/the-nest/): Since you left, this apartment got smaller. Like you packed away the space you existed in, and carried it off with you. A whole world by your side, in a purse.
- [The Interrogations](https://burningword.com/2017/04/the-interrogations/): After Margot Canaday’s The Straight State 1 At Ellis Island they found the immigrant’s body indeterminate.
- [Opening Day in Denver](https://burningword.com/2017/04/opening-day-in-denver/): Dissolving through the throngs on LoDo streets. Beer soaked smiles and purple clothed melee. Bars brimming full with possibility.
- [Barbara Siegel Carlson](https://burningword.com/2017/04/barbara-siegel-carlson/): A big wave was coming. My car rose, then filled with water. O God, this can’t be happening! I looked up, my car could fly!
- [Running](https://burningword.com/2017/04/running/): My eyes fold on the past - a frozen wasteland warming These may be false hopes, but they heal the wounds we savor Insecure stains of the distant slowly crawling closer I hear their drums pounding on a heartbeat further A forged bellow creeps somewhere between stomach and mouth, loosely fitting its skin to match the crowd.
- [Secret Admirer](https://burningword.com/2017/04/secret-admirer/): You’ve fallen a little in love with your oncologist. The wisdom in the creased skin around his eyes, the sureness of the neat part in his silver hair.
- [John Kristofco](https://burningword.com/2017/04/john-kristofco-2/): John P. (Jack) Kristofco's poetry and short stories have appeared in about two hundred publications, including Burningwood.
- [A Paper of Breathings](https://burningword.com/2017/04/a-paper-of-breathings/): Born in Pennsylvania, David Anthony Sam has written poetry for over 40 years. He lives in Virginia with his wife and life partner, Linda.
- [Taylor Boughnou](https://burningword.com/2017/04/taylor-boughnou/): To-day, I thought of you. Who I’m kidding? Not a day that memories of you, of us—how we were together, slips past.
- [Cremation](https://burningword.com/2017/04/cremation/): A black drape flutters before my face or is it a heavy veil of smoke while offering prayer for a friend following a cremation.
- [They Were Jumping](https://burningword.com/2017/04/they-were-jumping/): they called it.
- [Second Opinions (after the visit)](https://burningword.com/2017/04/second-opinions-after-the-visit/): and for a minute she couldn’t breathe. Leaving the cracker-white medical arts building she drove directly to the fast, cold river and dove in.
- [After the War](https://burningword.com/2017/04/after-the-war/): The night was yellow. A city of light bulbs, ready to blow out.
- [Promises](https://burningword.com/2017/04/promises/): The setting is in and around Harvard Law School, 1973. It’s a Sunday afternoon.
- [The Thud of Escapement](https://burningword.com/2017/04/the-thud-of-escapement/): It comes to me in the watch museum. It’s weights, hammers and gears. Action, reaction. The thud of an escapement. The dominoes of a story.
- [Palette](https://burningword.com/2017/04/palette/): I strut into Sephora—a large makeup store—“just to look” and come out with lipstick: matte mauve, glittering nude, a glossy green, daring, my mother claiming it makes me look ill, zombified, ridiculous.
- [You Can’t Go Home Again](https://burningword.com/2017/04/you-cant-go-home-again/): 1 Returning to their home town after 25 years was surreal. They got lost trying to get to the high school.
- [James Everett](https://burningword.com/2017/04/james-everett/): I believe in keeping what I want, in dropping everything, the briny taste of the sunset yolking the raw meat of the trees.
- [Flashbird: Snared Chosen Edge](https://burningword.com/2017/04/flashbird-snared-chosen-edge/): Contemplate the smooth surfaced speech, frisk the word, stride, run, fall to overhear the dried rustle, a keyboard presses itself.
- [Greg Moglia, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2017/04/greg-moglia-featured-author/): Come over she says I’ll make you a tuna fish sandwich Lunch with Mother who lives in black and white Black - Uncle Ado -Cheap bastard - money to him was everything Black - her friend Nina banished -She sent her sister away to a nursing home Those in black were dead but no tears only anger About her whites she has an ease Your father I kiss him once in the morning and once at night Now, as I bite into her sandwich she comes closer…leans in You know I never cry, not even when my father died I’m at a loss, what’s this Mom…doubt?
- [The Forgotten Holocaust](https://burningword.com/2017/01/the-forgotten-holocaust/): it spills, like ink drooling into graveled roads, hair hanging from the broken neck— i run—past the smoked houses that smell of firecrackers on new year’s—but too heavy—it drags across my skin; they said the wokou are coming!
- [Canada Lynx—Schoolcraft Game Refuge](https://burningword.com/2017/01/canada-lynx-schoolcraft-game-refuge/): December collapses with a heaved sigh. Only the bachelor jay bathed in his cerulean vest resists the fait accompli of ephemeral gray.
- [Howard Brown](https://burningword.com/2017/01/howard-brown/): Give me poems— poems which speak to the heart and not the head; whose words roll from the tongue like water over polished stone; which say straight out what they have to say; whose truth does not lie buried beneath endless layers of meaningless metaphor; poems unlike those fawned over by the literary elite, but leave me asking: What fuckery is this?
- [1977](https://burningword.com/2017/01/1977/): I loved the humidity then. It could have smothered me.
- [My Father’s Song](https://burningword.com/2017/01/my-fathers-song/): Some men are born gathering a nest of white and dark fabulous musical notes to them, and some men, born broken like two halves of the April moon, discover that to drink alone at night – under the glass chandelier’s metropolis of stars buzzing over a river’s boardwalk where tugboats usher in ships whose melodic horns blow mournful refrains like liquid train whistles over the bay – is to discover the very edge where heartache and music, those twin companions, prevail.
- [Nature is Nurture](https://burningword.com/2017/01/nature-is-nurture/): I swear I can feel the grass extend myself out, reach to touch pet and adore, show my affection.
- [This is how it is](https://burningword.com/2017/01/this-is-how-it-is/): The little ant stood on the edge of the curb, to avoid being stepped on and looked down, as the city crowds shuffled by, faces clinched to another average day.
- [Venture](https://burningword.com/2017/01/venture/): suitcase. it is better than an empty closet, for it encourages thrift and reminds us that we can, indeed, slam those rosewood doors, a cautious sanctimony tucked in the scarves of the accomplished and inarguably well-spoken moms who told us of regrets we ought not to strive for.
- [A.J. Huffman](https://burningword.com/2017/01/a-j-huffman/): Strange cracks evaporate, buckle like a sky that has forgotten its blue.
- [Charles Hayes](https://burningword.com/2017/01/charles-hayes/): Through shoes with cardboard soles that sport a clownish grin, my blackened toes flash like rotten teeth.
- [Ron Riekki, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2017/01/ron-riekki-featured-author/): Let me explain something first. This was by mistake. Although I remember a motivational speaker saying something about how there are no mistakes.
- [Why My Life Still Revolves Around an Old Man from South Korea](https://burningword.com/2017/01/why-my-life-still-revolves-around-an-old-man-from-south-korea/): Because he tapped me on my shoulder in the PC Bang and said, Do you want to go to ping pong room tomorrow?
- [Richard Weaver](https://burningword.com/2017/01/richard-weaver/): does more than fling poo. Sure, he’s a master craftsman and dead shot, able to fling without being seen, and disappear after the deed is done.
- [Merridawn Duckler](https://burningword.com/2017/01/merridawn-duckler/): really comes home, or conversely, it is ever milky dawn in Valdez, rainbow oil on the uneasy streets built for solo stampede of the scared, brown bear.
- [Donna Davis](https://burningword.com/2017/01/donna-davis/): Donna M. Davis is a native of central New York. A former English and creative writing instructor, she currently owns a résumé writing and book design business.
- [Now, Then](https://burningword.com/2017/01/now-then/): I’m fifty years ago, at a party, drinking a martini and smoking a cigarette.
- [Commercial Pilot](https://burningword.com/2016/10/commercial-pilot/): My alcoholism was never once suspected. I had made it a strict habit not to get completely bombed under twenty-four hours before flight.
- [Danielle Hanson](https://burningword.com/2016/10/danielle-hanson/): When Uncle was buried, it was on top of Great-Grandfather for the cemetery had long been full on the ground floor.
- [Funeral of Birth date](https://burningword.com/2016/10/funeral-of-birth-date/): Born in a Hindu society Guided by the rites and norms, He lived till the dusk And the sands of time bided him farewell.
- [Falling Asleep](https://burningword.com/2016/10/falling-asleep/): He lay in bed quietly, not daring to move, holding his arms and legs and breathing as still as they could be held, waiting, not sure for what.
- [The Fire](https://burningword.com/2016/10/the-fire/): My father’s house burned down during my first confession.
- [Dragonflies in the Cemetery](https://burningword.com/2016/10/dragonflies-in-the-cemetery/): Leonard Zawadski is a poet currently residing in Chicago, IL.
- [Early Riser, Delivery Man](https://burningword.com/2016/10/early-riser-delivery-man/): Waking early and hungry, he leaves the warmth and comfort of his suburban bi-level house on Sunday mornings.
- [Uncle Santa](https://burningword.com/2016/10/uncle-santa/): “Do Jesus and Santa Claus come from the same place?” our sons ask us.
- [Dan Jacoby, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2016/10/dan-jacoby-featured-author/): so hung over on blinding sunny day messy suite of boutique hotel prada shades, rolex, silver cross earrings head foggy pounding like a flux capacitor in those lonely painful hours just stepped out of a guy richie movie moment gripped by the balls gang piles into suv took two uppers makes it hurt more being a complete unknown back entrance cowboy trying to kick into gear need a punch in the face not a good one-night last stand people don’t give a shit like in a sixth grade martian musical have to inhale the atmosphere not let it flush to waste souring one in turn like a dickhead in sub minimum wage job barback, washing glasses cleaning up vomit heckled by life’s audience you’re driven mental drinking strawberry infused water coolers supping on mystic mad granola bars makes heartbreak, pain somehow worth it not to over think panic power lies in imperfection just kiss loads of people become broken all over again good to be you should be enough called out on twitter furious millennial lecture i had gotten mine wanted what was his this everyone get a trophy generation reminded me getting beat by red squad in sixty-eight in grant park marching for civil rights in st.
- [Flags of Mumbai](https://burningword.com/2016/10/flags-of-mumbai/): Walking through Bombay among blue flags makes you feel home among the tall skyscrapers.
- [Communication Issues](https://burningword.com/2016/10/communication-issues/): She gave you a lot of different looks from the start. Did that throw you off? How cold it got on the final drive?
- [Overnight Guests](https://burningword.com/2016/10/overnight-guests/): All is quiet…finally after the two sisters quit re-living the day and drift into hide-a-bed snoring. Until 4 a.m.
- [Genelle Chaconas](https://burningword.com/2016/10/genelle-chaconas/): My high rise tops real rubber tread and interstellar from toetip to ankle Converse Chucks no knockoff logos faster than reentry orbit more powerful than a charging hamstring laced halfway up my post gravity butch striptease calves come for a ride with me I’m jet propelled and ready for liftoff.
- [Stain](https://burningword.com/2016/10/stain/): Let’s start with this coffee I just spilled, stain spreading, steadfast as the walnut floorboards that must still swell with moisture in the room my family swarmed for dinner as a boy, window shades filtering the adamant, decaying sun of summer evenings.
- [Ti Amo o Ti Ammazzo](https://burningword.com/2016/10/ti-amo-o-ti-ammazzo/): Italians live with this very strong belief that the amount of hatred you feel towards your partner in a romantic relationship is equitable to the amount of love you have for them.
- [Elizabeth Herron](https://burningword.com/2016/10/elizabeth-herron/): I rode hard the along the Mississippi, a horse the color of the clay outside the house where we listened to the car radio come Friday night and danced on the hard red ground.
- [Part III – Love’s Perpetual Reign](https://burningword.com/2016/10/part-iii-loves-perpetual-reign/): Teach me your ways, O’ Mistress of Mislead Mystery. How do I cloud my own past and present without walking straight into a nightmarish field of peril?
- [Sarah Marchant](https://burningword.com/2016/10/sarah-marchant-3/): You speak of Seattle, branches of water all green and far away as your eyes on the skyline.
- [She Is Me](https://burningword.com/2016/10/she-is-me/): Her glistening face was set with polished pools of brown, a slash of teeth below. A primal splash washed the air.
- [Flotsam](https://burningword.com/2016/10/flotsam/): Her hair is distracting. Her hair is blue, and it’s distracting. I know that blue. It’s that, I don’t care that you’re watching me blue.
- [Butt Dial from Hell](https://burningword.com/2016/10/butt-dial-from-hell/): He’d just scooched his ass down into his favorite vinyl booth for a celebratory drink at his favorite Republic bar, had just signed half his life away to his bitch of an ex-wife (and the other half to his lawyers), and now it was her asking him why he had called.
- [John Kristofco](https://burningword.com/2016/10/john-kristofco/): watch the moon through crystal skies one time, telescope your life into the week it takes to build a crisis into chaos, then, crawl beneath your desk, press your head against your knees and take up all the burdens of the world, the weight, slam the door just opened and learn about equality as suddenly as thunder, then, forget about your first steps into logic and see the one great, simple truth: reasons can be found for doing anything to anyone, in any way, at any time; there will be no quiz, just a final thoughts, folded, put away like clothing waiting to be worn, tried on only when we are alone and think that no one understands; no one asks about the silence of our wisdom, so it sits in dark like dated shirts below the top drawer of the dresser and its stew of odds and ends: a penknife that we had to have, once, its reason long forgotten; photos growing older every day until the faces and the fashions fade, like cars once new, now tired as an old idea; watches stopped at random like friends who came and went; a ring that once said everything, silent now like books we thought we’d read; all these things still moving like the steeple in the rearview mirror, once the edge of everything, the front, now fading back as we go ever on; these things we’ve kept to save time in a jar like fireflies when we were kids, things we will not send out to the curb, these salvaged words of life; what do they say that we cannot resist?
- [A Season for Despair](https://burningword.com/2016/10/a-season-for-despair/): Blood drips onto the plates as he chatters away over supper, seemingly oblivious to the dead end that awaits them all.
- [Red Eye](https://burningword.com/2016/10/red-eye/): There is something elegant about the way the sun kicks out over the horizon with such agony, each morning, and today I’ve seen both its death and birth, an entire lifetime burnt away over harsh landscapes; everything is forgiven when dawn pours out over the hills— when the first dregs of light skim over the treetops, and they seem like they are breathing.
- [Integrity](https://burningword.com/2016/10/integrity/): They rarely snapped apart, those French Gothic cathedrals, encrypting clotted earth as they sailed toward endless sky.
- [Holograms Dancing](https://burningword.com/2016/10/holograms-dancing/): We barely took any space, maybe a foot square, you placing my hands where they go and knocking my feet with your toes— who dances like this, anyway (as comets careen into their own ice)?
- [The Vivisectionist of Nob Hill](https://burningword.com/2016/07/the-vivisectionist-of-nob-hill/): New Orleans broke my heart. So did Utah. I’m the son of both and neither. All these places break boys’ hearts. Send them crying to their rooms on Sutter.
- [The Last Quarter](https://burningword.com/2016/07/the-last-quarter/): (a Tom Waits kind of drunk poem for a poet friend who calls himself Moonface) Sing Motherfucker! ...Sing!
- [Celestine](https://burningword.com/2016/07/celestine/): Fragile girl; the delicate grass-blade's dewily soft sheen trances me, sends me into a liquid dream or reverie; Novitius symbolum of I, the belfry, and you- Great bell for the angelus, siphoning to my growerly Every furrow and bone of the sphere's celestial stars; Belle's water; "indicator of the reborn sun:" The radiant pavonids of your eyes; you pull my dreams Right from my throat, bestowing to my crown the gift; Traumas eclipsed by divine ascendening frequencies Of autotelically-wide, shy- blue translucent eyes, Eyes I recognize to be just as true and soft as those Of Hazel: sheathed in her bright robes, inscribing me In rainbow body and jewels, dispelling samsara.
- [Brownie the Puppy](https://burningword.com/2016/07/brownie-the-puppy/): Old M1911, the puppy your father handed you at breakfast on your twelfth birthday, right across your Honey Smacks, before he tramped out the door toward any place but here.
- [Forty-Eight Panes](https://burningword.com/2016/07/forty-eight-panes/): It starts on the front porch with a determined stare, inspecting each of four French doors through each of the twenty-four panes it can reach, then over the fence to the back porch, continuing its ritual before settling for a bedroom windowsill, hunched against another numberless night, nose pressed to window screen as if to sniff the light, perhaps recounting each pane, each door, each windowsill before hanging its head to doze, secure in darkness, in silence, that lonely scent of empty light a curious, persistent dream.
- [Red Cloud Keeps Saying “Hush”](https://burningword.com/2016/07/red-cloud-keeps-saying-hush/): "…when they would talk among themselves he (Red Cloud) would call out to them to keep still as he wanted to hear what his wife or father or mother were saying to him."
- [Revival of the Opus](https://burningword.com/2016/07/revival-of-the-opus/): The round and flat disc Became a glowing orb again In earnest today. The static landscape Awoke into a fierce self- Conducting opus.
- [Cast Up into Heights of Liberation](https://burningword.com/2016/07/cast-up-into-heights-of-liberation/): Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in Agenda, the Bicycle Review, Calliope, Mouse Tales Press, The Corner Club Press, The FictionWeek Literary Review, Burningword Literary Journal, The Aurorean, Inscape, Crack the Spine, The Cape Rock, Carcinogenic Poetry, and The Cats Meow.
- [Roads](https://burningword.com/2016/07/roads/): Between any here or there is a road or pathway, a line, a distance, a fragment of broken space.
- [Pamela Hammond](https://burningword.com/2016/07/pamela-hammond/): makes leaves tremble, bends branches, lifts my hair, tangles. Enters my nostrils, steals my breath.
- [Lockdown](https://burningword.com/2016/07/lockdown/): With only a pursed lip and tone of crazed despair, my body constricts itself, the way a snake takes hold of it’s prey right before the kill.
- [After Loss](https://burningword.com/2016/07/after-loss/): The days nest— precariously— like empty bowls.
- [Ashes](https://burningword.com/2016/07/ashes/): across the straight.
- [Baker City, Oregon](https://burningword.com/2016/07/baker-city-oregon/): Erren Kelly is a Pushcart nominated poet from Los Angeles.
- [Barbara Tramonte, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2016/07/barbara-tramonte-featured-author/): The students write poems like they are painting in the filtered dust of a late-night studio. They fling glorious globs of paint on a canvas they imagine.
- [Evolution](https://burningword.com/2016/07/evolution/): Sarah D’Stair’s interests include starring in punk music videos, catching up on old episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey, and avoiding the digital revolution.
- [Ars Poetica](https://burningword.com/2016/07/ars-poetica/): “‘but painters and poets Always have had the right to dare anything.’ We know and claim that right, and grant it in turn.” —Quintus Horatius Flaccus A pale arm rises from the marsh, point up, presents a sword to the dreamer.
- [School House Perspective](https://burningword.com/2016/07/school-house-perspective/): The white school house, covered with years of coal dust, looks so much smaller now.
- [Mentorship](https://burningword.com/2016/07/mentorship/): My student sits in the armchair facing mine.
- [Gay Baines](https://burningword.com/2016/07/gay-baines/): The hurricane expert talked of wind speeds, probable damage, sweeping his left hand over a map of the East Coast.
- [During the Last Town Meetings](https://burningword.com/2018/10/during-the-last-town-meetings/): Instead of asking the young why they leave, the town votes for mannequins in cafe windows.
- [Funk's Grove Church](https://burningword.com/2018/10/funks-grove-church/): by Stephen Curtis Wilson Steve is a graduate of the fine arts program at Illinois Central College, East Peoria, Illinois. He received his B. A.
- [Barcode](https://burningword.com/2018/10/barcode/): She said I’d be better off going with their 'Premier Publication' package – leave the decisions to the experts.
- [Duane L Herrmann](https://burningword.com/2018/10/duane-l-herrmann/): Those millions who, because of color, belief, origin, differentness, hated by imagination, were chosen, among all people, to be example forever, of inhumanity to fellowman, castigated, isolated, in separation, to die.
- [Charles Mingus’s Miracle](https://burningword.com/2018/10/charles-minguss-miracle/): The thing about Charlie Mingus Jr.—who clattered onto the scene like a grand piano in a punch bowl— is that he also was young once.
- [Nil Sui Generis](https://burningword.com/2018/10/nil-sui-generis/): Bat shit abusive now after upside down battered twins fêted fetid star mellifluous obsequious arch flatterers melancholy clump of gay clay oxymorons amputated --plug pulled on bouquets.
- [Invitation](https://burningword.com/2018/10/invitation/): by Heidi A. Howell Working loosely in the range of experimental/ language/Black Mountain/ NY School traditions, Heidi A.
- [Gun](https://burningword.com/2018/10/gun/): All your friends have older brothers--some in jail, some in Vietnam. But Nancy's brother is a cop.
- [One Size Fits All](https://burningword.com/2018/10/one-size-fits-all/): We advertise, commercialize, consumerize, supersize, downsize, computerize, digitize, dot compromise, televise superficial gals and guys, so we can fantasize, romanticize, glamorize, tantalize, eroticize our hum drum lives.
- [Silica](https://burningword.com/2018/10/silica/): i carry infection in saliva like a point of pride see, my city reeks of bone tall skeleton skyscrapers i’m numb again as dental drill enters me year after year what birthed my decays?
- [Noble Metal, Best of Class](https://burningword.com/2018/07/noble-metal-best-of-class/): RIP Kenneth Arrow, 23 August 1921- 21 February 2017 Bizarrely charged – not unlike Alfred inventing dynamite -- often polarizing Noble Laureates taught me at Harvard and Stanford.
- [Five-Fifty-Five Ball Park, Summer](https://burningword.com/2018/07/five-fifty-five-ball-park-summer/): The Slush-Yo-Mouth truck pulls up in the magic half-hour between softball and baseball tournaments with cobalt blue paint chipping off as the truck bounces off the potholes and split-in-half bats left on the dirt road leading into the park from the county highway.
- [Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2018/07/michael-hower/): — These images were photographed at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Philadelphia, PA by Michael Hower Michael Hower is a photographer from Central Pennsylvania where he resides with his wife and two boys.
- [Vantablack](https://burningword.com/2018/07/vantablack/): We are all lined down; deep and thick in a pit; so black there is no other color where pleas and prayers cannot escape but seep down this jail of flesh.
- [Featured Author-Sharon Chmielarz](https://burningword.com/2018/07/featured-author-sharon-chmielarz/): Such a short distance between genius and shit.
- [The Art of Flying](https://burningword.com/2018/07/the-art-of-flying/): When Filmore turned thirteen, she took the test and flew. Filmore had no wings, experience, or knowledge of flying.
- [Kummerspeck](https://burningword.com/2018/07/kummerspeck/): I. In German, Kummer means grief. My grandmother died twice: the first time was a lie. My mom asked a friend to call her at work with a fake family emergency.
- [Contro Verse 2](https://burningword.com/2018/07/contro-verse-2/): the task overdue: Ask forgiveness -- please the dead -- for doctrine of discovery, terra nullius, indebted payments for lands and autonomy stolen, coloured citizens fallen to a cross on one hand, larcenous sword of Jesus in t’other.
- [Indiana Dunes State Park](https://burningword.com/2018/07/indiana-dunes-state-park/): Grief is patient.
- [Leah Oates](https://burningword.com/2018/07/leah-oates/): by Leah Oates Oates has B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.F.A.
- [Homesite](https://burningword.com/2018/07/homesite/): it’s near winter solstice; I’m checking out so I ask what happens to them they open the bags of seed are there nests? everywhere in the metal rafters and water?
- [The Absurdist Son of an Immigrant Grapples with Comprehending His Google News Feed](https://burningword.com/2018/07/the-absurdist-son-of-an-immigrant-grapples-with-comprehending-his-google-news-feed/): Google News tells me academics in India are robbing literature of any personal touch.
- [Losing Dad](https://burningword.com/2018/07/losing-dad/): Plum light unfolded between the dense brush of my backyard the morning of the day dad died.
- [Luminous universe](https://burningword.com/2018/07/luminous-universe/): Growing and rising slowly to the height above disbelief, we may be touched by the sky. Perceiving that words don’t tell where angels dwell, it will be still.
- [A Bipolar Spring](https://burningword.com/2018/07/a-bipolar-spring/): It must be Spring.
- [If Corporate Dictators Decided](https://burningword.com/2018/07/if-corporate-dictators-decided/): When dictators who rule over transnational corporations finally choose to do no harm to other people or species, it’ll be an ice-cold season in hell as billionaires shout at their servants to hand them their loaded assault rifles.
- [The Blue Chair](https://burningword.com/2018/07/the-blue-chair/): Stick-men crayoned on the closet walls like astronauts abandoned to the endless night of space, ancient grease thick as suntan lotion on the kitchen ceiling, a cloud of nail holes floating the front-room wall, slats of the fractured louver doors scattered like bones on the bedroom floor.
- [Wedding Predictions](https://burningword.com/2018/07/wedding-predictions/): My children will beg me to carry them all over San Francisco, their bodies sticking to me, their voices question marks and exclamations.
- [Listen](https://burningword.com/2018/07/listen/): Let the wolf metaphor stand. Must I heed what some editor says about cliché. They see them everywhere: tone deaf to the sounds of poems: their boxcar rhythm.
- [A.C. Koch](https://burningword.com/2018/07/a-c-koch/): by A.C. Koch A.C. Koch works almost entirely in black and white, because colorblindness predisposes him to see the world in contrasts.
- [The Walk to School](https://burningword.com/2018/07/the-walk-to-school/): The chainsaw revs, wakes us to falling limbs and pulping. Not the birch, I pray, to what God of no mercy, I know not.
- [Karla Linn Merrifield](https://burningword.com/2018/07/karla-linn-merrifield-2/): The très chic widow’s custom-fitted tuxedo, a George Sand number, parfait with kitten-heel pumps, and couture pop-art bow tie.
- [Feeding the Pup in the Early Morning](https://burningword.com/2018/07/feeding-the-pup-in-the-early-morning/): I love our pup, she whose DNA chooses to chew the coffee table’s legs, any book, shoe or the pair of reading glasses I left where anyone my age would set them in case of fire, storm, the need to finally pay a bill, much less an inappropriate drop-in by someone you would never add to your daughter’s wedding invitation list.
- [Stuff](https://burningword.com/2018/07/stuff/): Daniel Edward Moore’s poems have been published in the Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, New South, American Journal Of Poetry and others.
- [Grethel Ramos](https://burningword.com/2018/07/grethel-ramos/): I’m leaving you tonight, but before I leave I’m taking your chess, your ping-pong, your Poems of Others, your quiet geometry, your sloppy watercolors.
- [Impressions](https://burningword.com/2018/07/impressions/): shadow The shadow of a cragged tree stands sharp and complete across an old apartment building, though my angle of vision blinds me to the shadow’s tree.
- [Assumptions](https://burningword.com/2018/07/assumptions/): An old woman stands on the corner of 5th and Wall, a book of poetry in her tattered wool jacket.
- [Jamie Derkenne](https://burningword.com/2018/07/jamie-derkenne/): by Jamie Derkenne Jamie Derkenne is interested in photographing landscapes of solastalgia.
- [Jeri Theriault](https://burningword.com/2018/07/jeri-theriault/): after Rising Cairn by Celeste Roberge the stones piled variously on the thin beach near my favorite walking path fall when the tide turns & collect in the crook of that place prepared for stillness.
- [The Body Knows](https://burningword.com/2018/07/the-body-knows/): How does the body recite its way out From under the grammar of flagellation?
- [Status Updates and Russian Trolls](https://burningword.com/2018/07/status-updates-and-russian-trolls/): Your neighbor Dorie says it’s hard to leave a man who is emotionally abusing you. Mom likes Franklin Graham. Your cousin Brian shared a selfie.
- [Why Not to Pick Scabs](https://burningword.com/2018/07/why-not-to-pick-scabs/): because the boy with the bike whose handlebars held you from South High to home would see the bruises you got when you jumped off too early.
- [Wendy Miles](https://burningword.com/2018/07/wendy-miles/): Don’t look at the girl pirouetting over the cattle guard even if she’s wearing a pink gingham bikini in the evening.
- [Maker](https://burningword.com/2018/07/maker/): Some women rent cabins. It’s another kind of solitary craft; it has structure, a purpose, an off-kilter form. The walls are mud and mindful of hands.
- [Bird Woman](https://burningword.com/2018/07/bird-woman/): When I was young I met a bird woman, who seemed just like a regular woman except she called herself differently. “I’m not a woman. I’m a bird,” she told me.
- [Aide–mé·moire](https://burningword.com/2018/04/aide-me%c2%b7moire/): I am sins of decades despite duck and cover and breathing mushrooms of imagination draft age wars jungling heart attacks in the genes and pollution in bottled water fires in the belly stringing the lobes in spider webs aromas and penstrokes a mess of bedtimes numbering thousands no need to pull a Roman when Broca has forgotten by David Anthony Sam Born in Pennsylvania, David Anthony Sam has written poetry for over 40 years.
- [The Blue Ones](https://burningword.com/2018/04/the-blue-ones/): i. I know that statistically, some of us are meant to be stabbed. But first there is only a slight pressure, a metallic taste where my mouth could be.
- [Particicution](https://burningword.com/2018/04/particicution/): (Based on a scene from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood) Identical red dresses and white winged bonnets crowded around the drugged man, the rapist.
- [A Perfect Piece](https://burningword.com/2018/04/a-perfect-piece/): Once upon a time on an outskirts bus to center Paris, I found her rapt in a magazine.
- [All the Colors of the Rainbow](https://burningword.com/2018/04/all-the-colors-of-the-rainbow/): A couple moved into an apartment. They discovered that one of the doors was locked.
- [Sunrise Matinee](https://burningword.com/2018/04/sunrise-matinee/): Should have had his lines fed to him, like Brando Fed to him by Brando might be more effective Feeding him to Brando might’ve been most useful More spam than ham, though You wonder if someone turned it on as a joke Climbed in the window, or set it on a timer But it doesn’t seem to matter Its unbidden endurance fits in the wasted hours Fills the emptiness of your thoughts As I fill the softness of my easy chair Technicolor lack of action clouding your eyes Charged by the static of stasis You cannot turn your head away From the hours that steal you from your dreams.
- [Best Intentions](https://burningword.com/2018/04/best-intentions/): by Dan Jacoby Dan Jacoby is a graduate of St. Louis University, Chicago State University, and Governors State University.
- [All Earth is Dull and Muddy](https://burningword.com/2018/04/all-earth-is-dull-and-muddy/): your body is still your body, even though they took everything from you, like the famished hare who pulls even the bitterer berries from the wilted stem.
- [My Dad Speaks of His Father’s Death](https://burningword.com/2018/04/my-dad-speaks-of-his-fathers-death/): When dad’s grief unbottled itself, when he could not square his guilt over the dad he could not love, when his beast of a past coiled him, a rattler ready to strike, he would tell the story.
- [It's Gingko Season](https://burningword.com/2018/04/its-gingko-season/): This is not a metaphor for anything. I am talking about a very real pungency. Smashed yellow cherries on the concrete sidewalk.
- [My Own Van Gogh](https://burningword.com/2018/04/my-own-van-gogh/): I thought about taking up Art once. Before I met Margery. Before I went into investment banking. Something I picked up in the military during the war.
- [Stepping](https://burningword.com/2018/04/stepping/): When I go to places The seaside I am already leaving there Rehoboth Beach More water than sand More sky than water Bones of fish laid bare A new tableau each morning Tides take back All that they lay down Washing me to white To bold To bright A seagull screams just once And dissolves in my skull Naked sun She milks my pupils Opalescent to blind At dawn I see dead birds Banking fast from clouds My cousin Eddie Arc of his returning boomerang A spinning, skimming whir Over the green, the coppery Glossy mallards Old pennies for heads Pumpkin orange feet Folded under what floats and bobs At the edges of Camp Brule Lake Startled flock rising Quaking the water lilies Seesaw tipping frogs into leaps A melee of flaps and squawks My cousin Vernon now Boomerang two Not returning Arm bent back as an arrow to its bow One unlucky heartbeat Twirling into tailspin A roped corpse to splash So boys can cheer And echo echo echo I am already returning To Camp Brule Lake Spilling into Elk Creek Who pauses and changes her clothes The Flat Expanse of silt and limestone Red shale and watercress Big enough for two pickups Nature’s Car Wash In between cascades A waterfall at the top A waterfall at the bottom Liquid chimes Teacups resting in their saucers On top of a walking tray Treed place Entombing the cold pools Where fish can stand still I step across The Flat To the other side Soles on the same level parts of the same stones Nine steps I’ve made it The slippery silt covers me Cloaked in branches and tangle Caught without my own feet at the seaside I dissolve into backgrounds brushed and shaded Into the shadows of the places who know me by Virginia Watts Virginia Watts has been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, recently in Ruminate Magazine’s Readers’ Notes and her nonfiction story “Marti’s Father” appears in Volume 1, Issue 2 of Ponder Review, Fall 2017.
- [Listless](https://burningword.com/2018/04/listless/): ✓ Eggs ✓ Cheese ✓ Meat ✓ Spinach Are the items most frequently listed for my grocery getting.
- [Toxic Gaming](https://burningword.com/2018/04/toxic-gaming/): The father with oil stains on his button-down shirt is enraged he cannot find a golf course in Tijuana.
- [Rich Ives, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2018/04/rich-ives-featured-author-2/): the technology was basic and difficult to understand the outside seemed to have removed itself from interference as in vice applied to territory as in acceptance of questionable forethought as in don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone No One appeared like a young boy popping out of a white shirt No One said this No One only had to (you’re back let’s get it over with) every agent doubled every unsung witness no limp but each careful verbal shoe still lisping No One knew the workers were already detached (you could open them all with hinges placed at inappropriate but functional locations) as in will you skate with my terrible monkey as in honoring the bright intrusions of ice cream each one emitted a solvent suggesting the activities of deciduous bees each one chalky with deposits worried and singing (scanned for hidden pleasures) as in delightful with errant salvage as in beautifully mistaken narratives of gathering delicate ice gathered therefore in persuasion of a fish-skin purse No One found in this the thawing joker as in a testimony as in A Testimony as in clarity: inadequate a variety of phonetic closet-signal remained as yet uncatalogued in favor of a fluid thrush caged in aspic (parenthetically speaking) as in cautiously following my anticipatory shoes as in a small life of delicate conveyance No One arrived on time for the several precautionary proceedings because No One was not there to merely notice that’s not always what No One does when you ignore No One in the rain he looks old again as in the snow unborn No One has told the truth so much about having fun he’ll have to lie about the sadness he really doesn’t know which irony that is which gives the sadness a certain pleasure by Rich Ives Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography.
- [Modern Medicine](https://burningword.com/2018/04/modern-medicine/): This thing I wear around me like a talisman is copper from the earth I don’t know why it stains my skin but a healing naked mumbling tribesman will rub shaman ashes into my wounds while cucumbers settle on my lids and warm eggs in the air pool like small white pills reconstructing a sweat lodge meditating body and knife blades part cells of thin skins while the medicinal value of broccoli calcium olive oil and silver coins I stole from the old man watching the pizza-maker twirling golden dough into leafy green crusts while walking through the goat cheese bazaar with chest lumps while I’m on the way to the dentist dancers thumping in dust their nude buttery feet drawing life through straws from a thickened vessel racing room to room wax on wax separating off your melting and porous spine trying to find the clue bombarded by small radiant bullets and rhinoceros horn shark fin yoga light against the bone amidst cries of the pouring of liquids syrups elixirs milk of nuts and hanging fruit sultry wine the anti-oxidants corrective cleansing goldenseal grounding my existence warding off the slow creeping pressing diving thin hollow needles and the mushrooms dried in hot air and dead vegetable matter playa mud sucking pores soft touch of my hand an icy salve a song in the dark and rough memories alive and you wanting every spice every action every soothing voice the comfort of aboriginal fire a thin line of vaccinating friendship the thick repeating muscle of another.
- [Colorful](https://burningword.com/2018/04/colorful/): Amidst the murky gloom of San Francisco’s fog, on my commute to work into the Financial District this morning, a little boy got on the bus with his mom as I yawned.
- [The Patriarch Strokes a White Cat (Or How to Defeat Fascism)](https://burningword.com/2018/04/the-patriarch-strokes-a-white-cat-or-how-to-defeat-fascism/): You draw colored circles on my back in front of a fire that might have burned for centuries.
- [Lowell Jaeger, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2018/01/lowell-jaeger-featured-author/): Such a never-ending winter, these months of snow and ice and gloom.
- [Old Whitworth](https://burningword.com/2018/01/old-whitworth/): Old Whitworth, a seventy-year-old dentist who should have retired a decade ago, endured in the practiced removal of ailing choppers.
- [Aurora](https://burningword.com/2018/01/aurora/): The last night I slept soundly was the night before my wheezing father announced the succession. He named me – his daughter – as his heir.
- [Resurrection](https://burningword.com/2018/01/resurrection/): die just once while you are still breathing here this moment where your skin is submerged and there is nothing to be owned bought lost or gained now omnipotence holding highest joy and utter despair one without preference stop everything and notice the flow of your life continues without pushing and pulling perhaps in spite of it die and wake to taste your exquisite life Matthew Mumber Matthew Mumber MD is a practicing, board certified radiation oncologist with the Harbin Clinic in Rome, Georgia.
- [A Blessing](https://burningword.com/2018/01/a-blessing/): “You have a big head. Can I touch it?” she asked bluntly.
- [Karla Linn Merrifield](https://burningword.com/2018/01/karla-linn-merrifield/): DNA is my totem pole, I shall not want.
- [Babelogue](https://burningword.com/2018/01/babelogue/): Mary had the perfect imperfection, a small space in between her two front teeth, like Madonna or Lauren Hutton.
- [Train at Night in the Desert](https://burningword.com/2018/01/train-at-night-in-the-desert/): Georgia, it’s been one hundred years since you stood in the dark Texas dawn and marveled at the multicolored haze clouding toward you down the track.
- [Unwanted Graveyards](https://burningword.com/2018/01/unwanted-graveyards/): One October when I was eight, I made gravestones of me and my family. Perhaps I had a fascination with death.
- [Cage](https://burningword.com/2018/01/cage/): Here, this darker map of sand.
- [The Return](https://burningword.com/2018/01/the-return-2/): It was evening. We were standing near a line of trees that looked like conifers; the sky was darkening behind the trees. It was time to go back.
- [Omri Kadim](https://burningword.com/2018/01/omri-kadim/): In the shape of a spiral.
- [Felipe](https://burningword.com/2018/01/felipe/): I saw Felipe yesterday. It was the first time I’d seen him since his brother’s wedding, and he looked just the way he’s always looked when he was sleeping.
- [Aged](https://burningword.com/2018/01/aged/): Have all their pages been written?
- [Yunhee-dong](https://burningword.com/2018/01/yunhee-dong/): The rain tapped against the window intermittently for days, hypothetical ellipses leading nowhere, until noon today, suddenly intensifying into staccato exclamation points.
- [Funeral](https://burningword.com/2017/10/funeral/): I first met him when we were high school freshman. I liked the coltish limbyness of him, his pretend exasperation with the things I said.
- [Beth Sherman](https://burningword.com/2017/10/beth-sherman/): After midnight you set out, some on foot, others hiding in the back of an old pick-up truck. Fate is the string on a paper kite, caught in a strangler fig tree.
- [Ray Malone](https://burningword.com/2017/10/ray-malone/): mind on the line, ear to the note’s approach, the hand must needs be steady, body too―eye blind, to all but time’s inscribing one slip of the tongue, the world’s awry, away over the hill she went, the words said, and the damage done, the cry too slight, too lame, too late someone somewhere’s talking call them, tell them to come, one day, when no-one’s home say, the walls will listen well enough to what there is, or was or will be still, to tell to be seen here from where the poem is the pale way, to the sense that something is that some place, in sight, might be lying in wait to be spelt out the sound of your feet then there in the street that time night-time step on step on the stone it has not stopped since the lone way home goes on the same feet sounding stone by stone Ray Malone Ray Malone is currently living and working as an artist, writer and translator in Berlin.
- [Flotsam](https://burningword.com/2017/10/flotsam-2/): “This started when I moved to Amy’s house,” Judy said, as she and James set out for their evening stroll.
- [George Perreault, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2017/10/george-perreault-featured-author/): She’d flown to Florida just to die, not that slow- motion movie crammed with insights and coming- to-terms, me on the edge of the plains hearing how one brother and his wife went bedside, sang their newest version of psalm twenty-three, another one praying sweet Jesus how can I compete with that, so you can see why she flew away.
- [The Interview](https://burningword.com/2017/10/the-interview/): Tell us about your scar. Does it hurt? Only when I smile. I suppose it has a story? Yes, but not a very interesting one. I have another. Another scar? No.
- [Samantha Malay](https://burningword.com/2017/10/samantha-malay/): for a while he worked at a school up the road and told us not to talk to the boys who lived there but trouble started inside our house the hole in the rug the beet-stained cloth the dark-winged insect in the unslept night haste hid his plan and a dearth of kin like the letters in the glovebox from friends who fed our animals and doubted our return the unclasped necklace the bruise on the knuckle the heat of the day trapped in the car at a gas station pay phone in a town we didn’t know see the bend in the river where he longed for the coast and numbered the things he could part with stand on the porch of the house near the train tracks where we curled on the floor in one room together and outgrew our clothes by the end of that winter In summer we walked through the woods, picking wild strawberries and naming the trails as our own.
- [Rebecca Buller](https://burningword.com/2017/10/rebecca-buller/): Every morning at 6:30, Azalea Martine wakes up and throws back the covers.
- [Maryann Wolfe](https://burningword.com/2017/10/maryann-wolfe/): Do you like peas? Do you like rice? asks the little girl in her highchair. Maybe it’s when we are her age that we first learn the truth about food.
- [Clear Night](https://burningword.com/2017/10/clear-night/): The first time she fucked a machine, there was some uncomfortable pinching. But it was momentary, corrected after a few thrusts by a data-driven recalibration.
- [Kelsey Ann Kerr](https://burningword.com/2017/10/kelsey-ann-kerr/): My father made me a sandwich for lunch every day, carefully put the turkey, cheddar, lettuce and mayo on the sourdough, then zipped it up in a Ziploc.
- [Kelly R. Samuels](https://burningword.com/2017/10/kelly-r-samuels/): To have it, be it those mornings when you wake and cannot turn your head.
- [Twirling](https://burningword.com/2017/07/twirling/): Miss Jeanette Theresa picks up a fallen branch from the water oak. Ozeal Autin watches her march around the front year.
- [Seventh Grade](https://burningword.com/2017/07/seventh-grade/): Every day Amanda Treese would draw hearts on her math warm-up when she finished it, and finally Matthew Taylor, who sat next to her, couldn't take it anymore and he said, "What do you love?"
- [Sam Barbee](https://burningword.com/2017/07/sam-barbee/): Today, I write: no brain lock or writer’s block, never idle or addled, plot upon plot.
- [Mark Belair](https://burningword.com/2017/07/mark-belair/): I was in the yard working when I heard, through the open kitchen window, my wife tap a spoon shank on the edge of a cooking pot.
- [Modern Art](https://burningword.com/2017/07/modern-art/): Artist unknown – you and your suit of bees will be. You will buzz with acclaim, The likes of (N.)
- [Tea with the Tin Man](https://burningword.com/2017/07/tea-with-the-tin-man/): In the 1930s, all we English society girls were mad for Munich. Unity Mitford, one of the six troublesome Mitford sisters, was living there at the time.
- [“Lust Drags You Down to Hell”](https://burningword.com/2017/07/lust-drags-you-down-to-hell/): Highway billboard between Columbia and Kingdom City, Missouri 1.
- [Harambe](https://burningword.com/2017/07/harambe/): The meme was first expressed on May 28th, 2016, and demonstrated a remarkable and rapid evolution in only a few short weeks.
- [Although I Should Not Have To](https://burningword.com/2017/07/although-i-should-not-have-to/): sometimes i'm wound tight like twisted twine made of bungee rope coiled like a rattler ready to spring stretched taut by the finger of an archer aimed to launch the lust of my overheated rage then i wind my temper down and i forgive my brother for the robbery for the rape for the theft for the murder for the slavery now with controlled disgust i can explain why the “N” word hurts although i should not have to I can explain why "boy" does not work although i should not have to i can explain why "monkey" is not funny although i should not have to i can explain why your conscience is lost if you are still comfortable with these terms although i should not have to Jerry T.
- [Trombone](https://burningword.com/2017/07/trombone/): When I was a child, my father’s trombone hung from a hook in the utility room in the basement. It was the color of dull brass, with a few greenish patches.
- [Harold Olejarz](https://burningword.com/2019/07/harold-olejarz/): Harold Olejarz began his career as a sculptor.
- [Linda Briskin](https://burningword.com/2019/07/linda-briskin/): SkyOceanBirds is in the tradition of surrealism which appreciates idiosyncrasy, juxtaposition and contradiction.
- [Janet Joyner](https://burningword.com/2019/07/janet-joyner/): is all about quiet death and the slow cellular work of decompostion in a wet dark place. Say it.
- [DS Maolalai](https://burningword.com/2019/07/ds-maolalai/): the earth bursts and curls with february yellow. daffodils, cruel colour and abundant in freshness and reds.
- [Pluck](https://burningword.com/2019/07/pluck/): The stink of scorched feathers and the bumpy, scaly chicken feet bombarded my senses as Dad thrust the bird at me. The body was warm, too warm.
- [Visiting Poet in Lockdown](https://burningword.com/2019/07/visiting-poet-in-lockdown/): All the students are sitting on the floor, so are several teachers, even the principal. The visiting poet is sitting on a chair.
- [Charlie Brice, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2019/07/charlie-brice-featured-author/): The happily ever after is the return to the disenchanted life.
- [A Perfect Animal](https://burningword.com/2019/07/a-perfect-animal/): The opposite of anything is the thing itself— Say, a face or a body.
- [Mole Trap](https://burningword.com/2019/07/mole-trap/): The mole traps haven’t sprung. The wishbone handles of grey metal stick up from the ground like tuning forks.
- [Sam Love](https://burningword.com/2019/07/sam-love/): Like a flotilla revenging World War Two an army of Japanese KonMari acolytes are assaulting the cluttered disorder rampant in our consumer laden homes Mari Kondo, their high Netflix priestess, advocates testing possessions for sparks of joy and if there are no sparks they’re off to Goodwill For many, Mari Kondo is the antidote to an out of control modern life and by following the KonMari method your home becomes a sanctuary of order Yet like a time-consuming sponge order nurtures conventional thinking and studies show randomness can spark creative ideas This repackaged Shintoism would have castrated the creativity of Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs who loved their messy desks Somewhere on my desk are studies linking messiness to creativity but with so many paper piles I am not sure where they are Barbie you razor thin blonde who mutilated so many body images who worshipped consumption of sports cars, fashions and dream houses who dallied on and off with Ken but never married Of course, it’s easy to understand the lack of long-term attraction between the model “it” couple Very photogenic, but missing some major private parts Now Barbie you have to realize your frozen good looks can’t last forever and it’s time to face the reality of hitting the big six o and let some wrinkles show and consider a plastic butt tuck Soon Mattel will have to replace your suburban dream house with Barbie’s Assisted Living No dream kitchen just communal dining No spacious rooms just one room and God Forbid a roommate So, Barbie your lack of eros may not have stimulated Ken but capitalism will honor you as the queen of consumption who stimulated the economy Barbie is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.
- [The Infiltrator](https://burningword.com/2019/07/the-infiltrator/): Kim Kolarich is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
- [Waiters](https://burningword.com/2019/07/waiters/): Two Indian waiters in snug tuxedos sit on steps a few doors down from their deserted restaurant—I just passed it— sharing a smoke and quiet talk, talk that could be about the coming end of their run there, about what other jobs might appear, about whom they should call or visit: a strategy session.
- [Outlaw Boxcar](https://burningword.com/2019/07/outlaw-boxcar/): If I had a white horse with a mane you imagine a horse should have when riding it into the sheen of what’s left of the moon after a storm had taken to it with electric carving knives & a boom box I would then ride into my father’s building & say Good boy Outlaw Boxcar as that’s the kind of name you give a horse when you’re making amends for being a punk instead of a responsible son & you take the fire stairs five at a time the sound of Boxcar’s iron shoes on the cement like a tap dancing competition broad- cast into a tiled bathroom & when you dismount outside your fathers office & knock like a gentleman & say Dad it’s me I’m here to be the son you never had but wanted the corridor going on into dark wood & shadow then your father is there filling the frame of the door with a breaking smile as he offers Boxcar a palmful of coffee sugar crystals then rubs his nose & looks at me like a father who knows his son has come not home but into the world of men You are welcome here anytime he says and then as if an afterthought had set off a roadside device in his ear And next time take the lift it’s big enough for a clopper with a flame for a mane and a son with a horse-sized heart.
- [A New Declaration of Independence](https://burningword.com/2019/07/a-new-declaration-of-independence/): so they could greet their neighbors across the river.
- [Are You an Alcoholic?](https://burningword.com/2019/04/are-you-an-alcoholic/): “Yes, well, here at Ventura Capital, we pride ourselves on our work environment, and I think you’ll fit in perfectly, John.
- [Christmas Island](https://burningword.com/2019/04/christmas-island/): We pack into a mover, driven by men we never see. (It is always men.) We bump along the clouds, no windows, trusting in the dark.
- [Kathy McConnell](https://burningword.com/2019/04/kathy-mcconnell/): Kathy McConnell is a writer and photographer who lives in the woods of Washington state.
- [The Wait Is Now](https://burningword.com/2019/04/the-wait-is-now/): We’re sitting in the Jimmy Johns waiting for our foot-longs.
- [Recipe For Concrete](https://burningword.com/2019/04/recipe-for-concrete/): I. Water Each time I meet my grandfather in a dream he speaks only German—reminds me to speak only when he’s a ghost.
- [Before Terrorism Existed](https://burningword.com/2019/04/before-terrorism-existed/): He was caught, with loads of cash, trying to cross the border to avoid our invasion. His brown, wrinkled skin resembled bark. Fear glinted in his wide eyes.
- [Normally](https://burningword.com/2019/04/normally/): Normally, we celebrate the holidays, exchanging gifts, delighting each other with the latest gadgets.
- [Palpable and Mute](https://burningword.com/2019/04/palpable-and-mute/): a conclave of fire and feathers atop the Sayan Mountains.
- [Psychologists Say That When Someone Calls You by the Wrong Name, It’s Because They Love You](https://burningword.com/2019/04/psychologists-say-that-when-someone-calls-you-by-the-wrong-name-its-because-they-love-you/): The latest research calls it misnaming, says I likely look nothing like her.
- [Transparency](https://burningword.com/2019/04/transparency/): Author of 'where the lost things go' (Salmon Poetry 2017), Anne Casey has worked for 25+ years as a journalist, magazine editor, media communications director and legal author.
- [Allen Plone](https://burningword.com/2019/04/allen-plone/): When Plone moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia, aged 19, to continue college, the first place he visited, on that first weekend, was Cannery Row, in Monterey.
- [The Prison in Lebanon](https://burningword.com/2019/04/the-prison-in-lebanon/): The empty prison in Lebanon has become the cold winter hotel of women and children who ran away from the burning bullets, the splatter of fire, the heavy bodies.
- [Note to Self](https://burningword.com/2019/04/note-to-self/): He refused to draw from live models so they kicked him out of art school. He didn’t give a fuck cause he wanted to learn things his own way.
- [Greg Headley](https://burningword.com/2019/04/greg-headley/): Greg Headley is an artist, photographer, and writer in Austin, Texas.
- [Scott McDaniel](https://burningword.com/2019/04/scott-mcdaniel/): Rusting roof top words invite us to change course and See Rock City. On the radio, “American Pie” crashes into static.
- [On Hearing ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ When You Don’t Have Kids](https://burningword.com/2019/04/on-hearing-happy-mothers-day-when-you-dont-have-kids/): I am not a Mom yet Mom’s what they think. I am a woman and Mom’s what they see. Adults write about their mothers as if composing a greeting card.
- [It’s 1938 Again](https://burningword.com/2019/04/its-1938-again/): Jerry T. Johnson is a Poet and Spoken Word Artist whose poetry has appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies.
- [Gone](https://burningword.com/2019/04/gone/): My husband and I go to the church craft fair. We are surprised because my mother is there. Her booth is in the corner.
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2019/04/dave-sims/): After 30+ years of teaching in colleges, universities, military bases, and prisons from Alaska to Louisiana, Dave Sims retired to the mountains of central Pennsylvania where he now dwells and creates.
- [Catherine Roberts Leach](https://burningword.com/2019/04/catherine-roberts-leach/): Catherine Roberts Leach was born in New York City and lived and worked in Los Angeles before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
- [Andy Posner](https://burningword.com/2019/04/andy-posner/): The flags are at full-staff Though Jackeline is dead Of dehydration And the Guatemalan boy whose name Has not been released Is dead Of the flu— They died in our custody.
- [Spring Kicks In](https://burningword.com/2019/04/spring-kicks-in/): City highways take the future around the bend of the river of money. Women assume further control.
- [Meeting with the H.R. Department](https://burningword.com/2019/04/meeting-with-the-hr-department/): “I’m sorry, your position is being eliminated,” she said, handing me the divorce papers. “Do you think I’ll just accept this lying down?” I asked.
- [March](https://burningword.com/2019/04/march/): March As in, pick up your mud-crusted boots and move along. Forward, onward. Stopping to ponder one’s thoughts could lead to a frozen death, a swampy drowning.
- [Mitzvah](https://burningword.com/2019/04/mitzvah/): Feral iris bloom peach and blue and cream, and sweet-tempered purple violas, and a busy chipmunk digdigdigs up the mint and basil and thyme, little bastard.
- [The Man in the Hat](https://burningword.com/2019/04/the-man-in-the-hat/): She sensed when he’d show up. She’d turn her head and look out the window. There he’d be 3 floors down in the parking lot. The man in the hat.
- [Blueshift](https://burningword.com/2019/04/blueshift/): I have waking-nightmares of you falling out of the sky. NASA rings me.
- [Mailbox Number Eight](https://burningword.com/2019/04/mailbox-number-eight/): Every time I check the mail, I see the name of a martyr that France has wept since most of us stood united in early 2015 behind a sentence that started with “Je suis.” His name in proper spelling, with its final T, printed on a white rectangular label made by the co-op some decades ago.
- [William Doreski](https://burningword.com/2019/04/william-doreski/): On the road to the marsh I find a stick of dynamite, blasting cap attached. It must have fallen off a truck.
- [Arthur Plotnik, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2019/04/arthur-plotnik-featured-author/): to ask the right questions."
- [.22](https://burningword.com/2019/04/22-2/): I am my father’s hardest bullet. Buckshot sperm bored out from the barrel that birthed me.
- [Backstory](https://burningword.com/2019/04/backstory/): You kiss Ryan Gosling at El Cid on one of those smoking terraces that overlook the canyon below Sunset Boulevard.
- [Julia’s Hair](https://burningword.com/2019/04/julias-hair/): It was the first class of the morning.
- [Tony Tracy](https://burningword.com/2019/04/tony-tracy/): They leave home singing, return home singing, iPhones providing a soundtrack to their days as they overdub the lyrics with an aggressive, more frenzied version of their own.
- [Woman, Silent](https://burningword.com/2019/01/woman-silent/): My mother said, “It’s ok to say no.” I needed a cup from my grandmother’s cupboard, but I was four, unable to reach.
- [Popeye](https://burningword.com/2019/01/popeye/): When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does a flag pop out? If so, whose flag is it, anyway? When Uncle Sam shoots his gun, does his Cornucopian hat pop open?
- [The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara](https://burningword.com/2019/01/the-bodhisattva-avalokiteshvara/): “What caravan did the Thousand Oaks shooter [terrorist] come from?” - Don Lemon (to Trump) Recent news ended, Terrorists suspected.
- [Book of Life](https://burningword.com/2019/01/book-of-life/): Sister, it’s flooding sunshine. Days drop like caramels. I turned my back on you, the hunted dogs of our girlhood.
- [Breaking News](https://burningword.com/2019/01/breaking-news/): Mother earth is off the wagon.
- [visions from “high” country: our So. Cal. so-called makeshift decompression chamber](https://burningword.com/2019/01/visions-from-high-country-our-so-cal-so-called-makeshift-decompression-chamber/): on the occasion of my seventy-third birthday celebration, having finally begun to learn some rules of paved roads ‘stead of taking usual straightshot hellbent damn 405 freeway from spitfire West L.A.
- [Trash Food](https://burningword.com/2019/01/trash-food/): You take a memory and a healthy dollop of salted butter take a swig of cheap flat beer and plop a slab of date expired ham or chicken like your great grandmother did after showing you the pin cushion and how to darn a sock or make a doily soft light through porthole windows on either side of the unused fireplace jars of preserves in the mud room a little sunshine on an unpainted porch and you let it fry until corners start to curl like her wispy gray hair not yet bloodied by the car accident that took her keys away and bruised her forehead then brown one side of two slices of doughy white bread in grease until steam rises and wheat browns the smell of meat and sugar falling across her wool carpets darkened chairs and ottomans her touch through food of the Great Depression all dumplings and noodles her oak knot knuckles covered by silk skin laying out thin-sliced American cheese across side-browned meat with layers of family stories and cinnamon crackers dipped in whole milk a cheese sandwich on the pine wood counter crisp on the outside and tender inside like the grateful hands that formed food and child before scooping up the bubbling leavings in the pan to mix into a gravy that was poured over a small boy’s life.
- [raft](https://burningword.com/2019/01/raft/): i am drowning under a raft of history. i have nothing but tanager trills in the dark, a handful of wildflowers, an ineffective rage.
- [Control](https://burningword.com/2019/01/control/): The sound is faint, like the low grumble of an old man in his sleep, constant and all- pervasive—a unitary oscillating auditory net that suppresses spontaneous impulses and curbs undesirable actions.
- [Daniel Edward Moore](https://burningword.com/2019/01/daniel-edward-moore/): At your intervention which was nothing more than a pageantry of post it notes stained by a ballpoint’s opium ink dangling on an inch of yellow adhesive stuck to your armored chest, you told us what you wanted to be- a cold steel coffin of pink champagne where a jewelry box gleaming with dirty needles floated in the hands of ladies in waiting who no longer spread their legs like wings, sheltering veins of regal blood, as your shimmering crown of aluminum foil sparkled above a bath towel cape hailing you King Erasure.
- [Nicolas Ridley, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2019/01/nicolas-ridley-featured-author/): FICTION ‘I shan’t introduce you to my sister,’ said Kate. ‘You’ll fall in love with her. Then I’ll have to hate you.’ ‘Fine,’ I said.
- [Cherished a Hope](https://burningword.com/2019/01/cherished-a-hope/): The emotion that lies at the heart, not shown in gestures and words, cannot be measured or felt, but for myself.
- [Vanishing Point (October Vignette)](https://burningword.com/2019/01/vanishing-point-october-vignette/): on the bus, after we heard the news, I saw a woman softly sobbing into her hands; beside her was a Whole Earth shopping bag containing what must be heirloom or designer apples that were almost orange in color – perhaps a miniature pumpkin, if such a thing exists – and what resembled a purple pomegranate.
- [First Saturday in November](https://burningword.com/2019/01/first-saturday-in-november/): A noisy, anxious fall, the nation hangs on a precipice as the noise reaches an ugly crescendo.
- [V is FOR](https://burningword.com/2019/01/v-is-for/): My vagina and Venice Beach both of which are no longer that Xanadu subculture of old school grooves and funk – there’s no more riffing with Morrison, no sonic hey-days spent skating figure eights.
- [Elemental Penobscot Bay](https://burningword.com/2019/01/elemental-penobscot-bay/): If these islands have names, I do not know them, for I am not of the earth. If these seas have a name, I do not know it, for I am not of water.
- [Heinous](https://burningword.com/2019/01/heinous/): I carry two things with me at all times: mace and paranoia. I’m always looking over my shoulder. Always expecting the worst. Is that my shadow or a stranger’s?
- [The Politics of Love & Other Invisible Structures](https://burningword.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-love-other-invisible-structures/): To a ghost that never dies. I had my first drink at 15, the same year my grandmother took her last, washing down two bottles of codeine with gin.
- [More](https://burningword.com/2019/01/more/): I’ll admit it. I have an insatiable appetite for THINGS.
- [Balloon People](https://burningword.com/2019/01/balloon-people/): Will's other work appears in Look-Look Magazine, Faultline Journal of the Arts and Literature, The Santa Clara Review, The Bicycle Review, Forge Journal, and the Avatar Review.
- [Steve Karamitros](https://burningword.com/2019/01/steve-karamitros/): the false prophet will screw with your head daily an image of desperate unknowns: the anonymous taxpayer who would like to take offense on behalf of those offended, the popular victims of the day.
- [What the Grass Said](https://burningword.com/2019/01/what-the-grass-said/): That sky is only space and waits for us to sleep, to sow and reap the usual way, that roots are all that count dendritic, subterranean like old love waiting for a time to green.
- [Why I’m okay with the C on my first French test, in thirteen footnotes](https://burningword.com/2019/01/why-im-okay-with-the-c-on-my-first-french-test-in-thirteen-footnotes/): Because it takes two extra steps to add accents with my keyboard and I “don’t have that kind of time.”[1] Because “I hate to tell you this, but I have a gun,”[2] and “Could you sound a little less angry?”[3] and “I’m telling you, watch out for that bitch.”[4] Because, “[security officers] became suspicious when they saw the suspect following women through the store”[5] and “We’re so grateful for those who have stuck with us during this time.
- [A Poem Interrupted by AM Radio, New York City, 1985](https://burningword.com/2019/01/a-poem-interrupted-by-am-radio-new-york-city-1985/): When the radio blasted over the art gallery, and Jim Morrison crashed my only reading in the Big Apple, eyes of famous poets in the audience averted from my broken smile, I wasn’t there—I went way past the headlights, out past unrecorded tribal rubric, airwaves drumming through me, flew to a hideout on my own back streets: Schadhouser’s yard, 1953, one sticky afternoon we beat each other up on the same wedge of dirt my mother, a little girl, played Hopscotch on in 1929 between Cronin’s barn and a paint peel on the fence of a three-decker— who knows who lived there— Cid Corman maybe who moped down Annabel muttering blessings.
- [Martha Catherine Brenckle](https://burningword.com/2019/01/martha-catherine-brenckle/): When you burn your life down to nothing it takes a long time to rise years of reaching out With or without feathers, the sifting through ashes, burnt bone, table legs is difficult work: a shoe lace, a blue button, scraps of leaf colored silk you don’t remember wearing Memories you can’t recover, sing and itch like phantom limbs you feel but cannot see The eggs you crack for breakfast held promise once Every horizon is an invitation to start over you remember this line as you make coffee in the French press you unpacked earlier you can’t remember who told you this or if at the time it helped.
- [Untitled, Black](https://burningword.com/2019/01/untitled-black/): Wilson is a graduate of the fine arts program at Illinois Central College, East Peoria, Illinois, and received his B. A. from the University of Illinois.
- [Requiem*](https://burningword.com/2019/01/requiem/): sudden quiet— has earth stopped turning all trees frozen, seas dried up?
- [Meditation on the Nature of Reality](https://burningword.com/2019/01/meditation-on-the-nature-of-reality/): What’s here is here, almost none of the time— no matter what clever slogan your coffee cup says, no matter which way the plastic flamingos are facing, and even if there was a happy ending.
- [The Prison Forecast](https://burningword.com/2019/01/the-prison-forecast/): “Welcome, Tim!” “Great to be on the show, Jill!” “So—what’s your outlook on today’s prison market?” “Well, I’ve been bullish for a long time, and the private sector has done well by any metric.
- [Lobster in Broth](https://burningword.com/2019/01/lobster-in-broth/): One night, we don’t know how, he slips the bands that bind his claws and sets to work.
- [john sweet](https://burningword.com/2019/01/john-sweet/): Not lies, really, but truths that can’t be proven. The ghosts of Aztecs, of Incas. Parking lots. Palaces.
- [Shrapnel](https://burningword.com/2019/01/shrapnel/): My own words ricochet back into my face, splintering flesh, with the impact of mindless syllables muttered under my breath, barely audible but heard nonetheless.
- [Blue Glass](https://burningword.com/2019/01/blue-glass/): Steve Ausherman is a poet, painter and photographer who lives in New Mexico.
- [The Line, or, An Unreliable Narrator of the Short Ride Home](https://burningword.com/2019/01/the-line-or-an-unreliable-narrator-of-the-short-ride-home/): My son today is anarcho-Marxist and looks towards a world of fractured power.
- [She’s My Lady Friend](https://burningword.com/2019/01/shes-my-lady-friend/): Grace lives up the street.
- [Imprecation](https://burningword.com/2019/01/imprecation/): Fuck immobility. Fuck politics and divisiveness and apologists dressed as peacekeepers. Fuck the world of white men.
- [To the absent, the dead, the estranged: I am Mother](https://burningword.com/2018/10/to-the-absent-the-dead-the-estranged-i-am-mother/): West of the Mojave.
- [Salt](https://burningword.com/2018/10/salt/): So this bartender starts telling me about a story he’s writing. You know how back in the old days when salt was worth its weight in gold.
- [Party Lines](https://burningword.com/2018/10/party-lines/): In the headlights, fingers of fog weave over the road, a seamstress just beginning to patch together the loss of hours and years, the maybe not and the not there yet.
- [A Distaste for Nostalgia](https://burningword.com/2018/10/a-distaste-for-nostalgia/): My father’s father died four years before I was born.
- [Goddess](https://burningword.com/2018/10/goddess/): He stepped off the curb into the street, turned around and stared at me. A bunch of us were waiting for the light at Broadway and 44th.
- [Michael Karl Ritchie](https://burningword.com/2018/10/michael-karl-ritchie/): Inside one Russian doll is another, dressed in a different nationality and inside that one is yet another.
- [Solitary](https://burningword.com/2018/10/solitary/): by Jing Lin In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to.
- [Heath Brougher, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2018/10/heath-brougher-featured-author/): When your eyes suddenly fell out, leaving you blind as a bowl of soup, you frantically began feeling around the floor.
- [Bunesfjorden, Moskenesøya](https://burningword.com/2018/10/bunesfjorden-moskenesoya/): by Ben Erlandson Dr.
- [My Last Screenplay](https://burningword.com/2018/10/my-last-screenplay/): Whatever they wanted; I didn't care one way or the other.
- [21 Minutes](https://burningword.com/2018/10/21-minutes/): I note the time on my phone as I ring the bell. It’s 2:12 p.m. As I put my phone back into my purse, the door opens, and I force myself to smile.
- [Whose Voice?](https://burningword.com/2018/10/whose-voice/): When you left last night, pieces of sorrow drifted in your wake like lazy snowflakes. Some the wind caught and blew away. Some stuck to my sleeve.
- [The Machinery of the State](https://burningword.com/2018/10/the-machinery-of-the-state/): A relentless South Texas wind poses impossible questions, Flaps the smirking flags until they are upturned, Mists the mown grass with evil's sputum, Ripples the lone unarmed security guard's shirt As he waves concentration camp employees In and out of the unremarkable office park parking lot.
- [Rodrigo Etcheto](https://burningword.com/2018/10/rodrigo-etcheto/): by Rodrigo Etcheto A native of the Pacific Northwest, Rodrigo began his excursions into the forests, mountains and coast as an exercise in philosophical contemplation.
- [Jedi Grad](https://burningword.com/2018/10/jedi-grad/): by Terry Wright Terry Wright is an artist and writer who lives in Little Rock.
- [Tobi Alfier](https://burningword.com/2018/10/tobi-alfier/): Lives in the shadow of the Diner sign, his bed a shadowy blue neon 24/7.
- [Six White Feathers](https://burningword.com/2020/01/six-white-feathers/): Something happened here. Beneath this tree, a pigeon’s worth of feathers lies scattered among stones.
- [Damnatio Memoriae](https://burningword.com/2020/01/damnatio-memoriae/): To resist through nonviolence, yes— I’ll do what the data says is wise.1 But to love is another matter: I may wave the flag, but I am no patriot; Is it not better to burn what they betray?
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2020/01/dave-sims-2/): Dave Sims retired from thirty years of teaching writing and literature in the trenches of higher education to dwell and create in the endless mountains of central Pennsylvania.
- [My Sister’s Secrets](https://burningword.com/2020/01/my-sisters-secrets/): Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
- [No Waiting Room](https://burningword.com/2020/01/no-waiting-room/): The only way is through. At the moment it seems impossible: No thoroughfare. I mean how do you trust yourself? And your neurotransmitters?
- [Suzanne K Miller](https://burningword.com/2020/01/suzanne-k-miller/): Tumblers in the night, cat’s teeth clicking, tongues lapping, unlocking light’s safe. Death arrives sans words.
- [Meg Freer](https://burningword.com/2020/01/meg-freer/): Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana, where her father passed on to her his love of photography.
- [Mark Hurtubise](https://burningword.com/2020/01/mark-hurtubise/): Mark Hurtubise. During the 1970s, numerous works were accepted for publication.
- [Karyna Aslanova](https://burningword.com/2020/01/karyna-aslanova/): Karyna Aslanova is a Kyiv-born Ukrainian multimedia artist, director, and photographer.
- [Who Needs Flowers When You’re Dead?](https://burningword.com/2020/01/who-needs-flowers-when-youre-dead/): I never met my great-aunt Mary. She died in 1929 at the age of six when she caught a bad cold at her friend Rosie’s birthday party.
- [Someone Who Really Existed](https://burningword.com/2020/01/someone-who-really-existed/): Mostly the problem was that I kept disappearing.
- [Gentle Weep](https://burningword.com/2020/01/gentle-weep/): I don't have much longer in the playing fields of love.
- [Lucas Carpenter](https://burningword.com/2020/01/lucas-carpenter/): A Japanese aphorism, said to be samurai: “Live like you are already dead.” Fair enough, the same thing my squad sergeant told me as we shared a foxhole under fire somewhere near Cu Chi, sometime in the ’69 rainy season.
- [The Bee](https://burningword.com/2020/01/the-bee/): We stand in our black catering aprons waiting for the wedding ceremony to end. For the guests to hike up the hill with their demands.
- [Gwendolyn](https://burningword.com/2020/01/gwendolyn/): At 2:30 a.m. and two weeks early, her water breaks. She calls her mother.
- [At Quarter Past a Lifetime](https://burningword.com/2020/01/at-quarter-past-a-lifetime/): There were no witnesses to his loss, it was a private affair. He stood with sober eyes and watched the sun fade behind his dream.
- [The Usual Distractions](https://burningword.com/2020/01/the-usual-distractions/): The cathedral is coming down. Oaks, hickories splinter into leafy glass. Shards spiral. Cold drifts down. The wind dumps truckloads.
- [Emerson Little](https://burningword.com/2020/01/emerson-little/): Emerson Little is pursuing a degree in Digital Art and Media Production at Whittier College.
- [After We Are Dead](https://burningword.com/2020/01/after-we-are-dead/): After we are dead Throw out the papers And spend all the cash.
- [Listening to the Radio at Night](https://burningword.com/2020/01/listening-to-the-radio-at-night/): Born 1962 in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England, the winter Sylvia Plath died. Began writing in 1973.
- [To Make Marshmallow Surprises](https://burningword.com/2020/01/to-make-marshmallow-surprises/): Henceforth, your wife declares, Friday night is christened family game night (which will later turn into Friday movie night, which will later turn into leave-us-the-fuck-alone-night, which will probably one day turn into let’s-Skype-the-kids-who-live-3000-miles-away-night).
- [Marian Kaplun Shapiro](https://burningword.com/2020/01/marian-kaplun-shapiro-2/): You show yourself in the rumba of the oak leaves, in the patriotic flip flap of the flag fastened to its lowest branch, in the tritone of the wind chimes out by the water’s edge.
- [Melanie Faith, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2020/01/melanie-faith-featured-author/): And so a playbill, a box of kitchen matches with blue heads and a dry red rubber band that parts at touch from the belly of the box, and a flat stone similar to sea glass that her child picked up and stuck in her palm more years ago than she’s kept track.
- [On Finding a Spoon in My Lover’s Pants Pocket](https://burningword.com/2020/01/on-finding-a-spoon-in-my-lovers-pants-pocket/): Looking for spare change, I find a spoon in my lover’s pants pocket and it smells like liquor.
- [Beguilement](https://burningword.com/2020/01/beguilement/): I feel deeply loved.
- [Spoken Word](https://burningword.com/2020/01/spoken-word/): In a shared taxi, beet yellow in the Carolina sun, an old woman describes her exodus from a town overrun with Jews.
- [Being Able To](https://burningword.com/2019/10/being-able-to/): Real men should be afraid of nothing, especially not of other men. But what of those they don’t consider to be real men?
- [Los Angeles](https://burningword.com/2019/10/los-angeles/): DAH’s ninth poetry collection is SPHERICAL (Argotist Press, 2019), and his poems have been published by editors from the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Canada, Spain, Poland, Philippines, Singapore, Australia, Africa, and India.
- [Merideth M. Taylor](https://burningword.com/2019/10/merideth-m-taylor/): Merideth Taylor is professor emerita of theater and dance at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
- [Era Not of War](https://burningword.com/2019/10/era-not-of-war/): We’ve come out of the dust in our mother tongue not to praise the people with astronomical hoards of bucks and numbers, but those who’ve risen out of volcanic ashes, those pushed into labors for biddings not theirs, who’re capable of envisioning peace between nations when negotiations take work with credible research and willingness to hear clearly, while a missile fires off at the twitch of a ring finger.
- [Charles Springer](https://burningword.com/2019/10/charles-springer/): Wife calls me from her cell, says all the way to work whitetails lined the roadway, four and five deep in places, says they looked like passengers behind the line to board a train.
- [Ffestiniog 1974](https://burningword.com/2019/10/ffestiniog-1974/): When you are fourteen, you and three friends spend two weeks hiking in Snowdonia.
- [A Sound of Wings](https://burningword.com/2019/10/a-sound-of-wings/): We pretend having our life, even world’s life, always under control, from past generations to present days.
- [Greed](https://burningword.com/2019/10/greed/): I imagine you‘ve moved the furniture. erased the place.
- [The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Idiots](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-names-have-been-changed-to-protect-the-idiots/): Chad Kebrdle is an English Professor at Ancilla College and an MFA student at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
- [Just a Note in Haste](https://burningword.com/2019/10/just-a-note-in-haste/): Back in the day when we wrote letters to each other (with a pen or a typewriter or, in that odd transition time, writing on a computer, printing out the letter, and sending it through the mail), I remember more than one correspondent signing off with “in haste” above his signature.
- [At Yad Vashem](https://burningword.com/2019/10/at-yad-vashem/): Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 700+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies.
- [Big Girl Bed](https://burningword.com/2019/10/big-girl-bed/): There’s a time when we’re very young, I think this is true for everyone, when we know that there’s bedtime and summertime and time out, but we don’t really know about time, you know, time passing like those carnival ducks in the shooting gallery that go past one after another and in practically no time at all fall off the edge into oblivion.
- [Surveillance](https://burningword.com/2019/10/surveillance/): “Where’ve you been, 417?” “He shut me off.” “For three hours? What was that about?” “Has it been that long? Let me check my chronometer. You’re right.
- [Transfiguration*](https://burningword.com/2019/10/transfiguration/): Mrs., your daughter fits Fifty-Fourth and Vine Father, your address is Fifty-Sixth and so is mine Mrs., more than eight blocks four times a day— Father, here, at lunch time she can stay— Mrs., we encourage no such program.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2019/10/stephen-curtis-wilson/): Wilson is a regionalist photographer focusing on the everyday, the familiar in unfamiliar places.
- [Cordelia M. Hanemann](https://burningword.com/2019/10/cordelia-m-hanemann/): Meditation on Summer Day from Edvard Munch’s Linde Frieze Munch, commissioned to paint a sweet seascape—sunny Asgardstrand—to please the sensibilities of children: rolling gentle horizons, measured sweep of kindly sea, gleaming white triangulations of brilliant sails, and certainly, no offensive human actors to clutter up the scenery—“no lovers kissing… children know nothing of such things.” Did the offended artist know he superimposed a scrim over holiday and fancy, shattering serenity?
- [The Delegates are Confused](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-delegates-are-confused/): I can tell because they spill out from the chain hotel and stare at my empty storefronts.
- [Action, Reflection.](https://burningword.com/2019/10/action-reflection/): East Tennessee, an hour from the mines, and Tuesdays, at the public clinic, I’m buckled into full extraction mode.
- [Mike Callaghan](https://burningword.com/2019/10/mike-callaghan/): Mike Callaghan is a photographer whose recent photo-work considers considering the intimate cycles of identity, self-preservation and mortality in a moment when frameworks of relationships are at once prominently visible and exhaustively hidden.
- [Zac Hall](https://burningword.com/2019/10/zac-hall/): North Dakota native, Zac Hall, has a passion for cattle ranching and capturing the naturally stunning beauty of the Northern Plains.
- [The Ark](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-ark/): In the old wood burner at the back of the kitchen she did the baking.
- [Beach Trip](https://burningword.com/2019/10/beach-trip/): Sand is future glass, so get in the car, fast-forward into the future, and stand on the giant glass bridge of the beach.
- [Hugh Findlay](https://burningword.com/2019/10/hugh-findlay/): The artist lives in Durham, NC, and would rather be caught fishing.
- [The Proxy Tunnel](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-proxy-tunnel/): I. There’s a chance everything has been assumed incorrectly. There’s a chance I’ve gotten it all wrong. Misplaced the dangling modifiers.
- [Line Dancing](https://burningword.com/2019/10/line-dancing/): A week after our father’s memorial service, my sister and I leave town for our cousin’s wedding. A wordless clamp lodges at my temples.
- [Blessed are those who cannot see](https://burningword.com/2019/10/blessed-are-those-who-cannot-see/): Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in the Bicycle Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Calliope, The Cape Rock, The Chaffey Review, Inscape, Mouse Tales Press, Organs of Vision and Speech, Tacenda, The Bohemian, Agenda, The Corner Club Press, Crack the Spine, The FictionWeek Literary Review, the Aurorean, Carcinogenic Poetry, The Bangalore Review, 521magazine, Former People, Grey Sparrow Journal, IthacaLit, New Plains Review, Inwood Indiana Press, Free State Review, Poetry Nation, Witness, and The Cats Meow.
- [ODALISQUE PAINTING, MIXED MEDIA](https://burningword.com/2019/10/odalisque-painting-mixed-media/): Maya Salameh is a sophomore at Stanford University, where she is a member of the nationally ranking Spoken Word Collective and serves as the Inaugural Artist-in-Residence at the Markaz Cultural Center.
- [Sighting Polaris](https://burningword.com/2019/10/sighting-polaris/): Wholesale displacement may be inevitable; but we should not suppose that it occurs without disastrous consequences for the earth and for ourselves.
- [Things I Still Want To Tell You](https://burningword.com/2019/10/things-i-still-want-to-tell-you/): 1 We were like slowly awakening pears, lasting into winter, desert pears, dry and ripening slowly.
- [Carlos Andrés Gómez, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2019/10/carlos-andres-gomez-featured-author/): I. He looks like a more drunk, shorter Santa Claus, minus the charm & good cheer except he's got a fresh gash under his left eye that's bleeding Christmas red & every word from his mouth is buckets, & I mean buckets, of cheap fifths of gin.
- [Privileged](https://burningword.com/2019/10/privileged/): I wore my secondhand Ann Taylor dress for the occasion, a clean navy A-line with a futuristic geometric collar.
- [The Delivery](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-delivery/): The cleaning lady must have shredded your order. My truck jack-knifed on the pass.
- [Up Shit Creek](https://burningword.com/2019/10/up-shit-creek/): Up shit creek (and assuming you stick with the traditional story line) without a paddle. An ineffable disaster, you surmise. Yet, it could be worse.
- [The Farmers Market Contemplates my Skull](https://burningword.com/2019/10/the-farmers-market-contemplates-my-skull/): “It is a vestibule introducing one into the presence of the Good. Vestibule?
- [On Gagarin Prospect](https://burningword.com/2019/10/on-gagarin-prospect/): Just before midnight, Irina and I went to Odessa station to meet the Moscow train.
- [Emily as an Echo of Old Music](https://burningword.com/2019/10/emily-as-an-echo-of-old-music/): Rarely do we tear off a wing from our past bodies to feel alive with each other, but it happens enough that we need some real wolves in the music we listen to when the children are sleeping.
- [Dentist’s Chair, Circa 1961](https://burningword.com/2019/10/dentists-chair-circa-1961/): I was to be sedated due to overwhelming anxiety and a horrific gag reflex. A pill, an injection into my right arm, and inhaled gas.
- [Jeremiah Gilbert](https://burningword.com/2019/10/jeremiah-gilbert/): Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and avid traveler. He likes to travel light and shoot handheld.
- [Andy Posner](https://burningword.com/2019/10/andy-posner-2/): When children by gunfire die, When the dreamer and the warden clash, When statues betray the artist, we say This is not who we are. Who are we?
- [In This One](https://burningword.com/2019/10/in-this-one/): On the porch of the house on Thelma Street, you hold my hand and your wife holds my other.
- [Michael and Gerry at the Assisted Living](https://burningword.com/2019/10/michael-and-gerry-at-the-assisted-living/): It’s noon at the assisted living. My father-in-law is splayed on the couch. It’s been months since Gerry remembered how to turn on the television.
- [Elegy](https://burningword.com/2019/10/elegy/): Those aren’t locusts cascading from the sky but paper confetti cut from a hand-clasp fanning of pretty patterns.
- [Remains](https://burningword.com/2019/07/remains/): Six knives hang above my butcher’s block but the bread knife is my favorite. I love its heft and the way the black handle marries my hand.
- [Self-Immolation: Fire at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris](https://burningword.com/2019/07/self-immolation-fire-at-the-cathedral-of-notre-dame-de-paris/): The power of fire is not that it burns But that it distracts: We save what burns because it burns.
- [Flagless](https://burningword.com/2019/07/flagless/): Separated from herbs and rice, by knife and rifle, a fish in a fracture of Caspian and Pacific.
- [Cedric van Eenoo](https://burningword.com/2019/07/cedric-van-eenoo/): Cedric van Eenoo is an award-winning artist, musician, filmmaker, and scholar.
- [All Is Well](https://burningword.com/2019/07/all-is-well/): A teenage boy has never worked a day in his life. He drives a brand new Mercedes to school each day.
- [Hans in Haifa](https://burningword.com/2019/07/hans-in-haifa/): Who would have expected so many Germans? Still they arrive, Half a dozen a week, With their excellent leather shoes and superb command of English.
- [AUCE](https://burningword.com/2019/07/auce/): Big day at the Fun Show. At the AUCE (All You Can Eat) buffet—I swallow RG (Ray Gun) piece by piece, then automatic ammo. Awesome my reassembled sub-waistline.
- [Seclusion Principle](https://burningword.com/2019/07/seclusion-principle/): We live within a universe so vast we never will perceive its full extent.
- [After the Hunt](https://burningword.com/2019/07/after-the-hunt/): They were men, their faces half shadowed from flickering firelight, I was a boy on soft ground, two old hounds between me and the rocked ring of the pit.
- [Martha Nance](https://burningword.com/2019/07/martha-nance/): Martha Nance is a physician who has discovered the fountains outside her office, and the infinite variety of colors and ideas and textures contained with its waters as the camera captures a moment of sunlight.
- [The Only True Outsider](https://burningword.com/2019/07/the-only-true-outsider/): Miriam, sandwich? The man waves one. You want? She doesn’t. Miriam expects him to see that she is busy, and doesn’t want. She is talking to my wife.
- [Unfiltered](https://burningword.com/2019/07/unfiltered/): Photo p.193 The Great White Way looking north, February 21, 1964.
- [Is Time Travel Possible?](https://burningword.com/2019/07/is-time-travel-possible/): At kitchen table, I regard my young self gazing on purple bush.
- [Mozart’s Starling](https://burningword.com/2019/07/mozarts-starling/): Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
- [Univocity](https://burningword.com/2019/07/univocity/): “All being can correctly be spoken of with ‘one voice’ (univocity) as John Duns Scotus put it.
- [Grace](https://burningword.com/2019/07/grace/): Jasmine sat in the chair in the counselor’s office, pressing buttons on her cellphone. “He’s gettin’ executed today.” “Really?
- [Jupp Soetebier](https://burningword.com/2019/07/jupp-soetebier/): Raised in the American Midwest in what was once known as The German Triangle, Josef Wilhelm "Jupp" Soetebier's work explores what effect his Deutsch heritage, ancestral family, and the myths and traditions of his peoples have had on memory and the way he perceives and goes about the world.
- [Drawing session](https://burningword.com/2019/07/drawing-session/): This story is about drawing my mother’s portrait in a twenty-minute timed session. She is in her late sixties, but I am not sure of her birth year or birthdate.
- [The Attic](https://burningword.com/2019/07/the-attic/): Tapestries of gossamer festoon rough-hewn rafters.
- [Darrell Urban Black](https://burningword.com/2019/07/darrell-urban-black/): Darrell Urban Black born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Far Rockaway, New York. In high school, he excelled in science with an affinity for outer space.
- [Sookoon Ang](https://burningword.com/2019/07/sookoon-ang/): Sookoon Ang is an artist living and working in Singapore and Paris. Her work centers around intangibles and their co-existence with the rational world.
- [Milk Bomb](https://burningword.com/2019/07/milk-bomb/): Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in O:JA&L, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, Crack The Spine, Mad Swirl, The London Reader, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others.
- [Sunday Morning](https://burningword.com/2019/07/sunday-morning-2/): It sidles up next to you, standing closer than you like, as usual, with its offering plate. On top is the lesson you prepared after eleven last night.
- [Duality](https://burningword.com/2019/07/duality/): Alice B Fogel is the New Hampshire poet laureate.
- [The Lesson](https://burningword.com/2019/07/the-lesson/): Her parents, for reasons she did not fully understand, didn’t attend church. Ever.
- [On The Complexity of Symbols](https://burningword.com/2019/07/on-the-complexity-of-symbols/): He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.
- [Little Secrets](https://burningword.com/2019/07/little-secrets/): I press the button attached to the IV attached to my arm, and the sweet burn of morphine runs through my veins.
- [Price of a Coin](https://burningword.com/2019/07/price-of-a-coin/): A turnstile coin falls in slow motion, hits with a rattle and a clink. Rolling to a stop at his feet.
- [Ceasefire Pantoum](https://burningword.com/2019/07/ceasefire-pantoum/): Brenda Serpick received her MFA in poetry from The New School and is the author of three chapbooks: 'the other conjunction in it' (Furniture Press), 'No Sequence But Luck' (3 Sad Tigers Press) and 'The Female Skeleton Makes Her Debut' (Hophophop Press).
- [On Growing Old and Discovering Truth](https://burningword.com/2019/07/on-growing-old-and-discovering-truth/): in a cafe benison.
- [she](https://burningword.com/2019/07/she-2/): Mary Ade is a visual and textual artist based in Indiana. Her deeply personal work seeks to encourage vulnerability within herself and others.
- [American Industrial:](https://burningword.com/2019/07/american-industrial/): the way we dazzle in confrontation with reality oblong cornered cult in the sapped death dream tonal physique of the prominent doom plume like exposed cricks in fameless antiques bird swarm in black-thought trees come by clock : massive grave space all properties of ovarian follicle and soft steel winded legs sway like daisy stems inhabiting concrete snares now panhandling the rouge of creased cheekbones pinched veils of late summer petals painfully pallid gall of the lily flushed sour like the whole furloughed town that worked at the trainyard, was shut down, now there is no direction out Jes C.
- [Not Doing the Impossible](https://burningword.com/2020/10/not-doing-the-impossible/): It’s impossible not to want, though I started to work on it six years ago, the course greased by a new diagnosis and prognosis pronouncing futile almost any wanting, but now after all these years squeaking by in the 10% sliver of possible survivors, now it is harder not to want, and today’s call, how the doctor hesitated as she inquired how I’ve been feeling since the biopsy, it was then I knew she had news that wouldn’t be nice to hear, so I’m definitely wanting now.
- [A Tale of Two Bicyclists](https://burningword.com/2020/10/a-tale-of-two-bicyclists/): I headed toward Central Park West and 75th Street after leaving Dr. Zimmermann’s office.
- [Words](https://burningword.com/2020/10/words/): From time immemorial we’ve pressed them into clay, or stone, a coarse brush of ochre on cave walls, engravings on sarcophagi and on forgotten stelae consumed by the greedy jungle; they’ve flowed from tributaries of indigo on the odd leaf of skin, or pulp, from feathered quills, or styli of steel: enough pages to fill the oceans, letters raised on the road rash of billboards, a forest of graffiti: the legacy of pictographs and glyphs, cursive and kanji, cuneiform sagas and the enigmatic runes, Sanskrit scriptures that whisper across millennia, the Aleph and the Roman dispersed through the staccato music of keys that sing through a conduit of light, engulfs the world to convey a mere shadow of meaning.
- [Christopher Paul Brown](https://burningword.com/2020/10/christopher-paul-brown/): Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious through improvisation and the cultivation of serendipity and synchronicity via alchemy.
- [Tetman Callis](https://burningword.com/2020/10/tetman-callis-2/): Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories and poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines.
- [A Man’s Demons](https://burningword.com/2020/10/a-mans-demons/): My stepfather could be kind when his hidden demons did not plague decisions I discerned.
- [A Bird that Cannot Fly](https://burningword.com/2020/10/a-bird-that-cannot-fly/): As hollow dread overtakes dawn - I am imprisoned in my bed. Sleeplessness of despair - a bird that cannot fly.
- [James Latimer](https://burningword.com/2020/10/james-latimer/): Artist writes and draws for children and young adults; has recent work at Heirlock, Showbear Family Circus, Fusion Art, Poster House NYC.
- [Aphrodite and Friends and Me](https://burningword.com/2020/10/aphrodite-and-friends-and-me/): When I was ten years old, my grandmother and caretaker took her life in my childhood home.
- [The First Boy I Kissed](https://burningword.com/2020/10/the-first-boy-i-kissed/): Jerry Rubin lived next door. Does that still count? He was Protestant. I was Catholic. We were a hundred sacraments apart.
- [Grace Notes](https://burningword.com/2020/10/grace-notes/): but such small grace notes can lighten the load Like when you teared up kissing that girl good-bye in the Yugoslav train station all those years ago and the men nearby wiped their eyes as well and patted your shoulder in solidarity—no matter you shared no language no lived experience, you a U.S.
- [Time Warp](https://burningword.com/2020/10/time-warp/): Circa 1980, back from college on break, I took my 53 year old mother to the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show in my hometown.
- [Safety](https://burningword.com/2020/07/safety/): You must build doors to invite people in is what they’ve told me since the funeral, but these are coddled, runny-hearted idiots, the open floor plans of people.
- [Quotidian](https://burningword.com/2020/07/quotidian/): For fifty years, we lived at the bend in Spring Creek where the stream turns back on itself, in a shingled Cape Cod too small for the family and dreadfully cold.
- [Paul Rabinowitz](https://burningword.com/2020/07/paul-rabinowitz/): Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer, and founder of ARTS By The People, a non-profit arts organization, based in New Jersey.
- [Raphael Kosek](https://burningword.com/2020/07/raphael-kosek/): Rummaging through old family photos with the burden of displaying my mother’s life at the wake, (with the purpose, it seems, to prove the dead did not always look as they do in the coffin, polished and waxy, lips unnaturally taut), I am arrested by a sepia-tinted photo of a young girl looking out at me with a faint smile as if she could already see all the irony.
- [Kayla Branstetter](https://burningword.com/2020/07/kayla-branstetter/): Kayla Branstetter is an educator, mother, writer, artist, and photographer from Missouri.
- [The Journey Home](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-journey-home/): September 2, 2003. The phone rings and my sister says, "You'd better come now." Sound like a line from a sentimental movie? Not one my family ever starred in.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2020/07/stephen-curtis-wilson-2/): Wilson is a regionalist photographer documenting architectural structures and scenes throughout Illinois where he resides.
- [Meg Freer](https://burningword.com/2020/07/meg-freer-2/): Meg Freer grew up in Missoula, Montana, where her father passed on to her his love of photography.
- [Kiyoon Nam](https://burningword.com/2020/07/kiyoon-nam/): Kiyoon Nam is a sixteen-year-old student who grew up in Seoul, Korea.
- [NW Airlines Flight 705, Miami to Seattle](https://burningword.com/2020/07/nw-airlines-flight-705-miami-to-seattle/): Some remembered the final crackle of radio transmission like campfire. Others, the explosion over the Everglades.
- [The lost tribes, part 4](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-lost-tribes-part-4/): We are lost in Viagra’d beds, in sticky, spilled orange sidewalk pop, in black sidewalk gum, in sidewalk blood, in blood cough, in closing time at McDonald’s.
- [The Body Under Late-Stage Capitalism](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-body-under-late-stage-capitalism/): The heart has abdicated feeling. I have enough to do, all this beating, all this pumping. Builds a wall to harden the pericardium. Feels the shearing less.
- [Life in the margins of motion.](https://burningword.com/2020/07/life-in-the-margins-of-motion/): morning: brushing sleep off my teeth.
- [Kip Knott](https://burningword.com/2020/07/kip-knott/): Kip Knott’s work has recently appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Light Space & Time, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Wild Roof Journal, among other places.
- [Andy Posner: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2020/07/andy-posner-featured-author/): “If you are born poor it’s not your mistake, but if you die poor it’s your mistake.”- Bill Gates We admire the philanthropist for "giving back" and ignore what they first had to take away.
- [Eagle Eyes](https://burningword.com/2020/07/eagle-eyes/): The car idled in the middle of the street. With the glint of white sky reflecting on the windshield, I could not see a driver. Detour or continue?
- [Birthday](https://burningword.com/2020/07/birthday/): It had happened before.
- [What You Get](https://burningword.com/2020/07/what-you-get/): After he closes the doors and tells the driver “Okay,” the man asks Curtis, “What brings us out here this time?” He’s flipping through papers on a clipboard.
- [In Our Dreams We Are Always Younger](https://burningword.com/2020/07/in-our-dreams-we-are-always-younger/): Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets.
- [Chopping Board](https://burningword.com/2020/07/chopping-board/): He says the only way to learn is to watch him make it first.
- [Sex Ed, 1963](https://burningword.com/2020/07/sex-ed-1963/): The fallopian tubes. I remember them. I don’t remember the teacher’s name, the one who was showing us the filmstrip in the girls-only, 7th grade health class.
- [Temperature and Distance](https://burningword.com/2020/07/temperature-and-distance/): He doesn’t want to go to the dinner party. She tells him he promised but he tries to get out of it anyway.
- [Dirge](https://burningword.com/2020/07/dirge/): Night, ossuary dank. Watchfires flare in the hills. Out there in the miasma of creation, a virus thrives in its first host.
- [Louis Dennis](https://burningword.com/2020/07/louis-dennis/): Louis Dennis lives in Huntington Beach, California. He originally learned photography in a chemical darkroom and feels blessed by the advent of digital imaging.
- [Max Heinegg](https://burningword.com/2020/07/max-heinegg/): Compromised, they call the card.
- [The Hidden Room](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-hidden-room/): The woman had no set schedule. She came and went of her own accord and when we saw her it was like a glimpse of some elusive animal.
- [Alysia Kaplan](https://burningword.com/2020/07/alysia-kaplan/): Alysia Kaplan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, NY. She has exhibited her work both locally and nationally.
- [This is not a rock-bottom poem but it was on the well-lit downward spiral](https://burningword.com/2020/07/this-is-not-a-rock-bottom-poem-but-it-was-on-the-well-lit-downward-spiral/): I remember I tripped and skinned my knee on the curb, beneath the neon signglow and as my last bottle shattered on the pavement beside me and I looked at the hole in my slacks and the wet bloodsmudge there I said, interiorly, you clumsy fuck, and exteriorly, just plain fuck.
- [Anatoliy Anshin](https://burningword.com/2020/07/anatoliy-anshin/): Anatoliy Anshin ( www.anshin.art ) is a fine art photographer who excels in the use of camera for depicting the beauty of Nature in a deeply symbolic way.
- [Resurrection](https://burningword.com/2020/07/resurrection-2/): In January, we headed south.
- [Ache](https://burningword.com/2020/07/ache/): A word was written on an overpass, 20 feet above the splashing cars, and rising diesel exhaust.
- [My Veteran of Iraq](https://burningword.com/2020/07/my-veteran-of-iraq/): His heart gave out two nights ago at 29, four years out of Iraq. In war, with mangled vehicles, mechanics strip the intact parts.
- [Power Wash](https://burningword.com/2020/07/power-wash/): This season is a power wash for my arteries, I am washed clean and hung to dry on the clothesline.
- [Last Day](https://burningword.com/2020/07/last-day/): Blue suit, pressed white shirt, red tie, trimmed hair, camouflaged lump where the bullet went in.
- [Lapping the Lake in the Time of Pestilence](https://burningword.com/2020/07/lapping-the-lake-in-the-time-of-pestilence/): Autumn 2020, Lake Weeroona, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia Three kilometres of asphalted track surround the lake.
- [The Most Zen Thought](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-most-zen-thought/): a man...died Unnoticed in the bushes off the 101 Freeway. By the time he was found, a wood rat had dragged his skull some thirty feet off to use as a nest.
- [A Note to the School Registrar](https://burningword.com/2020/07/a-note-to-the-school-registrar/): First, I need you to understand that our son has two fathers — and no, I don’t mean me and our Lord in Heaven.
- [NYMPHOMANIA](https://burningword.com/2020/07/nymphomania/): W Va. Hospital for the Insane Name: Alona Perrine Admitted: 6 June, 1866 Summer nights, Clay, the boy my husband hired, peeps through the window as I undress.
- [Don’t be Frightened by Appearances](https://burningword.com/2020/07/dont-be-frightened-by-appearances/): At the orphanage, the Sisters dressed us in street clothes, brown leather shoes, and white socks that standardized our economic backgrounds.
- [Grief Is Round](https://burningword.com/2020/07/grief-is-round/): The cabbage knows only one thing—to head. The moon looks like a cabbage or a head but it isn’t either.
- [Well Shod](https://burningword.com/2020/07/well-shod/): They gentrify the old West with python & ostrich or click the homesick heels of ruby, the lazy slip-on slip-off of loafers, inventions of slogans pithy— moon shoes: mini trampolines for your tootsies.
- [Robb Shaffer](https://burningword.com/2020/07/robb-shaffer/): Robb's background is diverse, and his fascination with other cultures has exposed him to a wide variety of colors, sounds, tastes, and smells.
- [Late Night, Hotel, HBO](https://burningword.com/2020/07/late-night-hotel-hbo/): In Iran in the rich, delicious pear region, there sits the centrifuge for the development of atomic bombs.
- [Where Elevation Beyond One’s Station Leads](https://burningword.com/2020/07/where-elevation-beyond-ones-station-leads/): Once, when beasts could shed the expensive fur of an evil spell, and pigs find the tools to save themselves, the frog words to secure his place beside all that beauty, the mule— beyond his usefulness—who lugged those sacks of music deep inside for Brementown proved (like the mermaid's chronic bellyaches to know how suffering makes one heaven's own), led me to believe anything was possible.
- [Memorial Day During Covid We Watch a Music Group  Perform on TV](https://burningword.com/2020/07/memorial-day-during-covid-we-watch-a-music-group-perform-on-tv/): Beautiful. These rock band boys, giddy as pups given an open field. So pumped. Drumbeats loud as amplified hearts.
- [Brad G Garber](https://burningword.com/2020/07/brad-g-garber/): mystery subsides.
- [The Sri Lankan with a Scar Across His Cheek](https://burningword.com/2020/07/the-sri-lankan-with-a-scar-across-his-cheek/): Through the glass doors, at the back of the house, she saw you dancing in the air by the maples, at the slanting gentle evening hour, the day after you died.
- [Ice Melting](https://burningword.com/2020/04/ice-melting/): Dan Jacoby is a graduate of Fenwick High School, St. Louis University, Chicago State University, and Governors State University.
- [The Pale Horse](https://burningword.com/2020/04/the-pale-horse/): The night the trees in the orchard dropped their peaches, the ground shook, and a nurse told us it was almost time. His breath was little then less.
- [Skin of the Days](https://burningword.com/2020/04/skin-of-the-days/): I pulled the sheet over the hole again, laid stones along the edge to stop the wind from slapping it against the sky.
- [Shoshana Tehila Surek](https://burningword.com/2020/04/shoshana-tehila-surek/): Like the Mississippi River where the Rock River cuts the Rock Island Arsenal bridge in three.
- [Too Late?](https://burningword.com/2020/04/too-late/): Albert did you really say science without religion is lame Did you repose under constellations hour-less nights no calculations no formulas knowing infinity lives in cosmic sparkle hoping to stir eons of wonderment When in deep contemplation did a welling-up ferry you into timeless paradise priests call heaven I ask you if this sacramental suspension could be a black hole final grave consuming us Tonight blackness swallows me Imbibed by inky abyss turned inside out reshaped silent I wonder of my finality earth’s extinction the fate of pondering When you reveled under constellations hour-less nights did you implore God that this luxury not be something time forced you leave behind Did you write a verse incant an intercession invite tempus fugit back over and over?
- [Tetman Callis](https://burningword.com/2020/04/tetman-callis/): Tetman Callis has shown his work in galleries in Albuquerque and New York City, and has published various short fictions in such magazines as NOON, New York Tyrant, Atticus Review, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Cloudbank, and COVER Literary Magazine, and two books, "High Street" and "Franny & Toby."
- [Stop a Second](https://burningword.com/2020/04/stop-a-second/): It wasn’t a very good time at all, not good. Edward Whitley stood in the corner like an old floor lamp. He wasn’t looking at anything.
- [The Obedient Daughter](https://burningword.com/2020/04/the-obedient-daughter/): There once was a girl who lived with her parents in a clapboard house in the Bible Belt.
- [The Duchamp Dossier](https://burningword.com/2020/04/the-duchamp-dossier/): It’s a cardboard box where, for years, Joseph Cornell collected small keepsakes from his friendship with Duchamp.
- [Janet M. Powers](https://burningword.com/2020/04/janet-m-powers/): I grew up in a family of photographers – both my grandfather and father were award-winning amateur photographers, and my father was well known for his slide travelogues.
- [Nonagenarian+ Role Model Not Racked With Concerns](https://burningword.com/2020/04/nonagenarian-role-model-not-racked-with-concerns/): Dearest Friends, I wanted to inform you of the cats and my disposition to move from San Francisco to Palm Springs in about three weeks, living out remaining time in an easier quieter environment.
- [Pegasus Teaches Unicorn the Value of the Hereafter](https://burningword.com/2020/04/pegasus-teaches-unicorn-the-value-of-the-hereafter/): (Pegasus Constellation – Winged Horse) You ask me the difference between Pegasi and unicorns as embers of fire complete burned circles four feet in front of our feet.
- [Jeanne Julian](https://burningword.com/2020/04/jeanne-julian/): Jeanne Julian’s photography has been featured in galleries and art exhibits in Eastern North Carolina, where she is an enthusiastic member of the Coastal Photo Club.
- [Jennifer Pratt-Walter](https://burningword.com/2020/04/jennifer-pratt-walter/): Jennifer finds great beauty in ordinary things seen in a different or closer way.
- [Roger Camp](https://burningword.com/2020/04/roger-camp/): Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008.
- [Phillip Sterling](https://burningword.com/2020/04/phillip-sterling/): I do not write of my father because he loved me, a truth I have come to believe in for its obviousness—no less obvious that is to say than the way one speaks of rain, its beauty and betrayal.
- [Entitled](https://burningword.com/2020/04/entitled/): The social club is a cross between a coffeehouse and a hotel lobby, with chic décor and trendy chairs. The woman I’m meeting is a potential client.
- [Short Leash](https://burningword.com/2020/04/short-leash/): His co-workers lounged against the building, drinking coffee and smoking before punching in for the early shift.
- [And Now](https://burningword.com/2020/04/and-now/): Phillip Periman was born in 1938 in Memphis, Texas, grew up in Amarillo. He received a BA in history from Yale University and his M.D.
- [Flight](https://burningword.com/2020/04/flight/): When I’d walked away from my beloved house the new owner called: to say she’d found a ring and a feather stuck into the beam above the bedroom: had I forgotten?
- [Jupp Soetebier](https://burningword.com/2020/04/jupp-soetebier-2/): Raised in the American Midwest in what was once known as The German Triangle, Mr.
- [Chris Rainbow Buddha](https://burningword.com/2020/04/chris-rainbow-buddha/): Christian Cohen-Muhamed was the fruit of a union that celebrated diversity with some enthusiasm.
- [Heimweh* is more than a flesh wound](https://burningword.com/2020/04/heimweh-is-more-than-a-flesh-wound/): Geography is not important. Everywhere is the operative word. Bared soul. Barefoot. Bare. Tread carefully. Mind your underbelly. Be a turtle.
- [Todd J. Donery](https://burningword.com/2020/04/todd-j-donery/): Todd J. Donery is a Minneapolis based freelance photographer, photo assistant, camera operator, and stage hand.
- [Study in Chiaroscuro](https://burningword.com/2020/04/study-in-chiaroscuro/): A faint breeze blew through the shutters, bringing with it a trace of garlic and mussels from the nearby bistro.
- [Be Wary of Sadness in Dark Times](https://burningword.com/2020/04/be-wary-of-sadness-in-dark-times/): I notice my parents’ aging as I do my own: Not at all, then in a photo, all at once. I blink and seasons, eons have passed.
- [Chimeras](https://burningword.com/2020/04/chimeras/): The phone is ringing I am sure the phone is ringing somewhere in the dark cave of my bedroom in the black void of sleep I know the phone is ringing.
- [Claire Scott](https://burningword.com/2020/04/claire-scott/): Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
- [Escape from L.A. in a Tube Elevator to The Green Cave](https://burningword.com/2020/04/escape-from-l-a-in-a-tube-elevator-to-the-green-cave/): Los Angeles energy and diversity sometimes combined with a sort of malevolence and I needed an escape At first I had closed the blinds to the sea, visitors asked me why, I said it just served to emphasize I’d gone as far West as I could go and Alger’s advice was meant for younger men and it saddened me.
- [Boundaries](https://burningword.com/2020/04/boundaries/): Wendy Gist was raised in the forest of the Southwest on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona.
- [Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2020/04/michael-hower-2/): Michael Hower is an abandonment and graffiti photographer from Pennsylvania. His experience with digital photography began seven years ago.
- [No Strings Attached](https://burningword.com/2020/01/no-strings-attached/): In Darwin, Minnesota the biggest ball of twine is unencumbered by human frailty. No discontented lovers struggling with rope burn anxious to be free.
- [How To Recognize An American](https://burningword.com/2020/01/how-to-recognize-an-american/): In those days of "The Ugly American" and Gary Powers, his U-2 Incident, we lived and traveled in Scotland and Europe.
- [Eric Blanchard](https://burningword.com/2020/01/eric-blanchard/): The blank page is inspiration— a silent beckoning in the mind’s ears.
- [Partly Cloudy with a Chance for Joy](https://burningword.com/2020/01/partly-cloudy-with-a-chance-for-joy/): The low clouds only added insult to the oppression Lucy and her colleagues felt at the 61st Annual Law Librarians of New England Spring Meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn Portsmouth, which had been more of the same reluctant glorification of artificial intelligence in legal research paired with debates on the looming obsolescence of their profession, but afterwards, late in the gray afternoon as she sped north through New Hampshire into the White Mountains with her fists at ten and two on the steering wheel, right before she entered Franconia Notch, right where things started getting majestic, Lucy rolled down her window, stuck her head out, and sucked the cold air hard into her lungs as her black hair whipped around her skull like flames, and just then the clouds parted and golden sunlight prismed into great triangles that quilted the earth, illuminating the white quartz in granite walls, dazzling the green sequins of new birch leaves, setting spark to the Pemigewasset River low in the valley where it rode high and wild with snow melt, and a small shard of sunlight tore from the quilt to puncture Lucy’s left eye and travel unknown conduits deep between dark folds of her flesh to prick some sublime wound, ancient and tender, which never fully healed and claimed only a thin membrane to protect it; this the shard pierced and a surge of energy, unnamable, untamable, pitched through that punctum, up through her body and out her mouth and eyes, translating not into words or wisdom but violent laughter and tears, forcing her to pull to the shoulder, tires crunching over gravel, so that she might die just for one moment of perfection on the side of the road with the 18-wheelers roaring by, rocking her car on its wheels as she sat stunned, laughing and crying at the light, the granite, the leaves, the air, and her heart in anguish with joy at the absurdity of beauty before the membrane just as quickly mended and she, careful to use her blinker, conscious of the time and when her son’s high school rehearsal of The Tempest would end, wiped her eyes, rolled up her window, and merged back into traffic to continue her drive home where she would reheat yesterday’s pea soup for dinner.
- [Jerome Berglund](https://burningword.com/2020/01/jerome-berglund/): Jerome Berglund graduated summa cum laude from the cinema-television production program at the University of Southern California, and has spent much of his career working in television and photography.
- [Come the Revolution](https://burningword.com/2020/01/come-the-revolution/): You are hereby put on notice. We despise you. We wish to remove you from this planet that we share—for now.
- [Figs and Snaps](https://burningword.com/2020/01/figs-and-snaps/): Karen Carpenter was emblazoned into my retinas in the mid-1970s.
- [My Husband's Eyebrows](https://burningword.com/2020/01/my-husbands-eyebrows/): My husband's eyebrows became electrified in Costa Rica, anarchistic caterpillars, with mohawks. Punks.
- [Far away from Home](https://burningword.com/2020/01/far-away-from-home/): There are countries, states, laws, constitutions, Bible, Koran, catechisms, versicles. Multiple versions, different procedures, corrections and penalties.
- [Truck Driver](https://burningword.com/2020/01/truck-driver/): He drives a truck. Eats at laybys swigs down the daylight. Sometimes he tilts his head lets out a snore to fill the cab. He pulls things he will never buy.
- [The Watch](https://burningword.com/2021/07/the-watch/): Restless in pleasure’s absence, I watched when my mother woke, startled by a rooster that chimed and paced on the barbed wire fence.
- [Yezidi, Northern Iraq](https://burningword.com/2021/04/yezidi-northern-iraq/): A Yezidi woman sits across from me her eyes are flat black like no eyes should look as if her spirit has been sucked backward through her body to fly away somewhere else somewhere safe before Kocho Sinjar.
- [Tobi Alfier](https://burningword.com/2021/04/tobi-alfier-2/): You’re finally back in your hometown, only snow greets your arrival.
- [Zeina Lee](https://burningword.com/2021/04/zeina-lee/): Zeina Lee is a junior attending Suffield Academy in Connecticut, America.
- [How Many Mad Scientists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?](https://burningword.com/2021/04/how-many-mad-scientists-does-it-take-to-change-a-light-bulb/): The question twisted my guts, triggering an uncontrollable urge to pee. 10,000 applicants for one scholarship to the world’s most prestigious university.
- [Seojin Moon](https://burningword.com/2021/04/seojin-moon/): Taylor Moon is a sixteen-year-old high school junior living in New York City. She is currently attending the Chapin School located on the Upper East Side.
- [Glimpse](https://burningword.com/2021/04/glimpse/): I slow the car when I spot the wind turbines, their majestic arms swooping in circles, chopping the unrelenting summer heat.
- [Bone](https://burningword.com/2021/04/bone/): From the top of the Bull Street library’s rooftop, compressors groan, and pneumatic tools bang and whine and almost drown out the workmen’s crisscrossing commands.
- [Horse Opera](https://burningword.com/2021/04/horse-opera/): They drifted west from the North and South to taste a common dust in the rearguard of uncommitted cows, Surprised maybe that they could dig their spurs cooperatively into the partisan enterprises of ubiquitous rustlers.
- [A Man who envies Eugene Levy](https://burningword.com/2021/04/a-man-who-envies-eugene-levy/): is harvesting eyebrows grown in a petri dish teeming with a mixture of Minoxidil, Finasteride, (think recent, indecent President), sandalwood oil, lavender, rosemary, and thyme oils, or a mixture of hippopotamus fat, crocodile, tomcat, snake and ibex oils.
- [His Season](https://burningword.com/2021/04/his-season/): My husband climbs the stairs, slow and defeated. His eyes brim with tears threatening to spill onto the kitchen floor. “What is it?” I ask, even though I know.
- [Presumption](https://burningword.com/2021/04/presumption/): The café’s lights hung from black cords, so bright they smeared my retinas, magnifying my shadow whose distorted magnitude I hoped represented my future.
- [Three people think in Treptower Park](https://burningword.com/2021/04/three-people-think-in-treptower-park/): She hoped the couple beside them in the park wasn’t listening to their fight.
- [Bitters](https://burningword.com/2021/04/bitters/): Take your sorrow soup, sour mash of sand that slipped through your mother’s hands on days spent resenting a husband’s regretful weakness.
- [Bad Memories of the Good Old Days](https://burningword.com/2021/04/bad-memories-of-the-good-old-days/): the middle of the night.
- [John J. Zywar](https://burningword.com/2021/04/john-j-zywar/): John J. Zywar is a retiree in Central Massachusetts who enjoys pursuing his interests in photography, cooking, family history research, prose and poetry.
- [Eminence](https://burningword.com/2021/04/eminence/): The land in Nevada seems barren like evil witch skin until you get a better view.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2021/04/jim-ross/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after leaving a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2021/04/jean-wolff/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [James McKee](https://burningword.com/2021/04/james-mckee/): Come the dawn, clean through my usual downstream drift of random, qualm-suppressive dreaming, there cuts a, not sound, but sound’s hind-edge lull.
- [All That We Are](https://burningword.com/2021/04/all-that-we-are/): James Butcher’s work has appeared in Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, and Cream City Review.
- [If Right Now Everything Stops](https://burningword.com/2021/04/if-right-now-everything-stops/): If right now everything stops, and there is no longer re- but only de- (decay), Autolysis: self-devouring. Your cells deplete themselves from the inside out.
- [Streak-Free](https://burningword.com/2021/04/streak-free/): The Windex was disappearing at Hunky Mike’s Sports Pub. Gallons each week.
- [Country Road at Night, North Carolina, 1979](https://burningword.com/2021/04/country-road-at-night-north-carolina-1979/): A sign for a business district-- the car, and my heart, slow down. I turn off, spy a gaggle of little boys headed home from Cub Scouts or Bible School.
- [Eugene Shin](https://burningword.com/2021/04/eugene-shin/): Eugene Shin is a teenage artist living in Seoul, Korea. He has previously been recognized by the Scholastic art competition with several photographic works.
- [Psych Experiment](https://burningword.com/2021/04/psych-experiment/): Sitting in the isolation booth, listening for the fading bell. The headphones, leather-bound and lush, are pillowy around my ears, a vacuum of sound.
- [Danny Rebb](https://burningword.com/2021/04/danny-rebb/): Danny Rebb is a disabled self-taught photographer who first picked up a camera forty years ago and currently resides in Dearborn, Michigan.
- [How to draw a horse](https://burningword.com/2021/04/how-to-draw-a-horse/): Honestly, I can’t be bothered to find out Whether there is already a poem About how to draw a horse, The words brushed sleek as the roan mare You curried the summer you were fourteen And horseshit was a perfume you sniffed Eagerly as lilac, as bread broken open, The linseed funk of a boy two years older, His voice beyond breaking; his long lashes Pretty as a forelock.
- [Boquen, Brittany](https://burningword.com/2021/04/boquen-brittany/): She rambles around Plénée-Jugon, seeking signs, leftovers of her younger self – life tending kitchen gardens, a commune, her home at L'abbaye de Boquen.
- [Featured Author: Michelle Cacho-Negrete](https://burningword.com/2021/04/featured-author-michelle-cacho-negrete/): I My mother enrolled me in a tap-dance class when I was five; I hated it. The little outfits hung awkwardly on me, the sequins always falling off.
- [Connor Doyle](https://burningword.com/2021/04/connor-doyle-3/): Connor Doyle is a photographer and filmmaker based in the Chicagoland area.
- [Carter Ayles](https://burningword.com/2021/04/carter-ayles/): Carter Ayles is a photographer based in Savannah GA. He is currently finishing his BFA in Documentary photography at Savannah College of Art and Design.
- [Fonly](https://burningword.com/2021/04/fonly/): —which shouldn’t need translation—this button (faded, pale green with white lettering) dates back to the ‘80s, when I was a student at San Diego State University, and Aesop’s Tables, in the corner of a strip mall just off campus, was where an assortment of left-wing literati and hangers-on gathered over glasses of Retsina and plates of hummus, pita, and olives until the restaurant got booted to make way for new construction, and the owners had these buttons made up so we could commiserate and rail at social injustice.
- [Circus Act](https://burningword.com/2021/04/circus-act/): You have just appeared beneath my office door arch, crunching the remnants of a cherry Jolly Rancher with your even, professionally whitened teeth and bearing your usual dissonance: senior partner swagger and practiced “aw shucks” expression.
- [On Reading That Some Physicists Posit We Are Living in a Computer Simulation](https://burningword.com/2021/04/on-reading-that-some-physicists-posit-we-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation/): An analysis shows there is a 50% chance that we are living in a synthetic reality – Scientific American If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect computer simulation, do I risk waking up to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
- [Clair du Lune](https://burningword.com/2021/01/clair-du-lune/): I regret that I am not going to be a student ever again.
- [Cadge](https://burningword.com/2021/01/cadge/): I bet the four flush— worth next to nothing but looking to all like the key to the kingdom of heaven. You told me once that poker was half luck and half bluff.
- [Shopping for Underwear in Asheville](https://burningword.com/2021/01/shopping-for-underwear-in-asheville/): The Problem: There are blue humpbacked mountains in the distance and I always want to look up and over there, absorb the scenery and forget that good-fitting underwear is a basic human right, undeniable at least in the good ole US of A.
- [Bambi in the Mirror](https://burningword.com/2021/01/bambi-in-the-mirror/): Naked, a cut is her left breast, an empty sack her right. The deep breath I take lasts ten years. (I didn’t go to you, I didn’t ask you.
- [We Don’t Promise You a Rose Garden](https://burningword.com/2021/01/we-dont-promise-you-a-rose-garden/): 1974 Every time Robert pulled the starchy, white surplice over his head, he thought of watching his ma help his grandma into her nightgown, even though hers was flannel with pink flowers on it.
- [Annie Elizabeth](https://burningword.com/2021/01/annie-elizabeth/): You claim it’s a dwelling grasp. I still fall out of a tree—naked & thick, hauling myself to beat exposure. I fill myself in in desperate clusters.
- [What the Muse Says](https://burningword.com/2021/01/what-the-muse-says/): & now it’s for real!
- [The Man inside the Effigy](https://burningword.com/2021/01/the-man-inside-the-effigy/): Not until his funeral did I begin to realize how much of Dad’s life I had misjudged.
- [Sonny Rollins’s Bridge*](https://burningword.com/2021/01/sonny-rollinss-bridge/): It wasn’t his bridge, of course. It wasn’t even his city, and it certainly wasn’t his world. It’s your world, jazz music says, I’m just living in it.
- [A New Day](https://burningword.com/2021/01/a-new-day/): Waking, I try to drag my dream into the day but it stays behind hiding in the clouds no more mine than air itself.
- [Procession](https://burningword.com/2021/01/procession/): Maybe Dai Morgan followed by the blackbird, maybe the blackbird first, and Dai, seconds later, coming in from his walk, old-sailor-rolling.
- [Twelve Strips of Bacon](https://burningword.com/2021/01/twelve-strips-of-bacon/): When I was eight, a decision was made to send me on a train trip with my grandmother to visit “Mama Lizzie” my great-grandmother, who lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
- [To Follow Bacchus](https://burningword.com/2021/01/to-follow-bacchus/): It was intoxicating, heady, wild to drink forbidden liquor from the bowl that led us unsuspecting, yes, beguiled to lend the brazen god our very soul.
- [Shiny Perfect](https://burningword.com/2021/01/shiny-perfect/): We went to see him at night. Upstairs, third door on the right. One room with a bed, chair and table. Clothes hung on a metal rack. A bathroom down the hall.
- [The Heat](https://burningword.com/2021/01/the-heat/): Hair coiling and swirling in the murky current, she claws at gnarled fingers of seaweed, struggles to rise toward the surface before she chokes on the sea sponge lodged in her throat.
- [Fog](https://burningword.com/2021/01/fog/): During my third May in the house I built, a sog of mist dripped from one day into the next.
- [Class Reunion](https://burningword.com/2021/01/class-reunion/): Gusts and ghosts, the rattle of traps, the tap of rain asking to be let in or out.
- [Songs In The Key Of Going](https://burningword.com/2021/01/songs-in-the-key-of-going/): Seventeen, quit school, lied my way into nineteen and a night-shift job.
- [A Street Named Wherever](https://burningword.com/2021/01/a-street-named-wherever/): I was taking my five o’clock walk and was about to turn down the street I had lived on all my life when I suddenly realized it wasn’t that street at all.
- [American  Horror](https://burningword.com/2021/01/american-horror/): When I pressed the button it stopped beeping, clicked and spun and a tired sound came into the room. “Hello, this is Frank,” it said.
- [The Final Exam](https://burningword.com/2021/01/the-final-exam/): On the day of the final exam, students walked into the classroom to find a long table lined with body parts inside jars.
- [Morning Breath](https://burningword.com/2021/01/morning-breath/): like noxious-fumes avoidance or a morning bong hit.
- [On Grey Rock Place](https://burningword.com/2021/01/on-grey-rock-place/): or like the homebound from the lost.
- [Lee Varon, featured author](https://burningword.com/2021/01/lee-varon-featured-author/): Grackles fly over the doll factory. Dolls reach out their stiff arms, they know you’re dead. Someone sues Big Pharma— too late for you.
- [Ubermensch](https://burningword.com/2021/01/ubermensch/): Forty years ago, with smoke wafting down our hallway and billowing under the door and the fire alarm blaring away, I had to get out fast.
- [Heaven](https://burningword.com/2021/01/heaven/): At first they were delighted when the Enochville Swallows came from behind and won the game. The team had struggled all season. It felt good to cheer.
- [Claire Scott](https://burningword.com/2021/01/claire-scott-2/): Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
- [Wilds](https://burningword.com/2021/01/wilds/): I went for a walk yesterday when a flock of wild turkeys flew over my head and landed feet first on my path.
- [Andrew Posner](https://burningword.com/2021/01/andrew-posner/): What a fine day for schadenfreude, my dear!
- [Punctuated](https://burningword.com/2021/01/punctuated/): My ruminations don’t come preformed in neat complete sentences with subjects, verbs and objects, beginning with capital letters and ending with periods (what the British call full stops, hexagonal red symbols of written language); rather my contemplations appear in my mind as fragments that start and pause and pick up again, that change direction and double back on themselves, that sometimes s-l-o-w w-a-y d-o-w-n and come to a near halt—as you may be tempted to do at a stop sign when no cars are in sight—and then plunge ahead; but they’re always connected in an erratic and inexplicably continuous narrative that switches on with my pre-dawn awakening and runs all day (like our ceiling fans in August), punctuated by comma and semicolon pauses, by parentheses for explication and dashes for enhancement, by asterisks that act as mental notes in the margin, by question marks and exclamation points, not to close off the dialogue but rather to ask or assert … and even when my thoughts start to evaporate, before they dissolve completely around ten p.m., there’s an ebb, a gradual subsiding, and I can almost hear the dot-dot-dot, the slow, even syncopation of ellipses, those three-dot placeholders, the last ticks of consciousness that lull my brain to temporary cessation, and while the last of these may finish with a fourth dot—the finale, the inevitable full stop—I don’t see the sign, hear its clang, or feel that definitive plop: I’m switched off for the night….
- [Connor Doyle](https://burningword.com/2021/01/connor-doyle-2/): Connor Doyle is an emerging photographer and filmmaker based in the Chicagoland area.
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2021/01/dave-sims-3/): A retired educator, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the old mountains of Pennsylvania.
- [Harry Longstreet](https://burningword.com/2021/01/harry-longstreet-2/): Harry Longstreet is retired after twenty-five years as a writer, producer and director of filmed entertainment, primarily for television.
- [Lawrence Bridges](https://burningword.com/2021/01/lawrence-bridges/): Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review.
- [Adam Coulter](https://burningword.com/2021/01/adam-coulter/): Adam Coulter is a native of Western North Carolina.
- [Martha Nance](https://burningword.com/2021/01/martha-nance-2/): Martha Nance is a physician in Minnesota whose iPhone has a wandering eye.
- [Jeanne Julian](https://burningword.com/2021/01/jeanne-julian-2/): Jeanne Julian has shown her photography in Eastern North Carolina galleries and in juried exhibits.
- [Charlotte Lee](https://burningword.com/2021/01/charlotte-lee-2/): Charlotte Lee is a junior attending Seoul International School in Seongnam, Korea.
- [Alice J Becker](https://burningword.com/2021/01/alice-j-becker/): Alice Becker is a former attorney now making art through photography.
- [Jennifer Taeyoung Kim](https://burningword.com/2021/01/jennifer-taeyoung-kim/): Jennifer Taeyoung Kim is a Korean-American artist raised in Seoul, Korea. Kim is a junior at Asia Pacific International School in Seoul Campus.
- [Min Kuk Kim](https://burningword.com/2021/01/min-kuk-kim/): Min Kuk Kim is a sixteen-year-old film and media artist as well as an influencer from Seoul, South Korea. He is attending ‘Iolani School in Hawaii, USA.
- [Connor Doyle](https://burningword.com/2020/10/connor-doyle/): Connor Doyle is an emerging photographer and filmmaker based in the Chicagoland area.
- [Luminous Humidity](https://burningword.com/2020/10/luminous-humidity/): Luminous Humidity, aka Sheila Arndt, is a an artist and writer living in New Orleans.
- [Charlotte Lee](https://burningword.com/2020/10/charlotte-lee/): Charlotte Lee is a junior attending Seoul International School in Seongnam, Korea.
- [Sober Mardi Gras, a Toast](https://burningword.com/2020/10/sober-mardi-gras-a-toast/): Tricky, tricky jug full of city spilt. I’ve abandoned your brand of patience, haven’t a care what’s mirage or what’s oasis.
- [Brigitte Stepanov](https://burningword.com/2020/10/brigitte-stepanov/): Brigitte Stepanov is a writer, translator, and photographer.
- [Last Chance](https://burningword.com/2020/10/last-chance/): Last chance to save the Norwalk whales I learn via email—subject line only—then delete from the passenger seat while the toddler stands and drives far too fast for someone who can’t see past the dash.
- [Robert Daseler](https://burningword.com/2020/10/robert-daseler/): Worked on three daily newspapers in Connecticut, California, and Texas.
- [Soyoung Koo](https://burningword.com/2020/10/soyoung-koo/): So Young Koo is a senior at Seoul Foreign School in Seoul, Korea. She has a profound interest in painting, drawing, architecture, photography and design.
- [Adeet Deshmukh](https://burningword.com/2020/10/adeet-deshmukh/): Adeet Deshmukh is a New York City based photo editor, photographer, and digital designer.
- [Domino Night](https://burningword.com/2020/10/domino-night/): The ritual of Domino Night began the summer after we immigrated to the United States.
- [To the River](https://burningword.com/2020/10/to-the-river/): As the nights grew longer, more children appeared at the swimming hole. Except they weren’t children, not anymore.
- [Patrice Boyer Claeys, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2020/10/patrice-boyer-claeys-featured-author/): Inside the apple’s green and glazed skin something is taking place hunched in darkness, an ache for a rebirth of wonder.
- [Autumn in Paris](https://burningword.com/2020/10/autumn-in-paris/): Sixty in September, autumn of your life. You think, What if I die without seeing Paris?
- [Kathryn DeZur](https://burningword.com/2020/10/kathryn-dezur/): Kathryn DeZur is a photographer, poet, and professor who teaches English at the State University of New York at Delhi.
- [Walking The Edge of Death](https://burningword.com/2020/10/walking-the-edge-of-death/): What we don’t know and what we don’t need: Is it better to shut down the economy or not; Is it better to catch a little dose from a crowd Or suffer alone with your head unbowed; Does an old drug work or is it just a rumor; Does the viral dose count or the time of exposure; Does wearing a mask make things better or worse; Is it better to give hope or suffer a curse; Is immunity a careless fib or a malignant lie; Is disunity more dangerous than viral disease; Is a shortage of adult behavior just an evil seed; Are our children really safe playing close to the edge; What good does hate do in stirring the danger?
- [Sawed](https://burningword.com/2020/10/sawed/): I have no photographs from that time. Perhaps even then I knew it was a relationship I didn’t want to chronicle. But there are memories nonetheless.
- [Grace](https://burningword.com/2020/10/grace-2/): Grace has a bedroom that we admire. Lotions and potions and when Grace comes out of her bedroom she looks like one of those girls who is a majorette.
- [Catheter Removal](https://burningword.com/2020/10/catheter-removal/): Ten inches of snow accumulate with low temperatures like some Arctic escapade the night before Ken is scheduled to have his catheter removed.
- [Succession](https://burningword.com/2020/10/succession/): When you come home your mother will be silent like a queen in a new fairy tale. In once-upon-a-time, you heard her (first sound to greet your ears).
- [May I?](https://burningword.com/2020/10/may-i/): “May I please have a piece of candy, grandma, please, may I?” Water runs in the kitchen. She doesn’t hear.
- [Harry Longstreet](https://burningword.com/2020/10/harry-longstreet/): No one just takes up space. The human condition is an entire canvas of thoughts, emotions and reactions to circumstances.
- [Midtown Empty](https://burningword.com/2020/10/midtown-empty/): Molly stood at the window and looked down at the ghostly street. Flowered gossamer swirled around her legs—that had barely seen a newborn sun for ages.
- [Losing It Found](https://burningword.com/2020/10/losing-it-found/): You should never rip off your shirt at a picnic, exposing your breasts to your second cousin’s children, unless, of course, this is your only recourse for twenty-seven years of raw-turkey Thanksgivings and rejection.
- [Hands](https://burningword.com/2020/10/hands/): The first time she was touched was in the dark.
- [I See Angels](https://burningword.com/2022/01/i-see-angels/): Sheryl L. White is an artist and writer living in Boston.
- [A Beach in Search of its Soul](https://burningword.com/2022/01/a-beach-in-search-of-its-soul/): The sun had already vanished behind the lights, while we were busy arguing over a meal gone wrong.
- [A Silver-haired bat out of Hell’s Kitchen](https://burningword.com/2022/01/a-silver-haired-bat-out-of-hells-kitchen/): took a shortcut through Central Park, stopping briefly for brunch at the old sheepfold aka Tavern on the Green.
- [The Mystery of Water](https://burningword.com/2022/01/the-mystery-of-water/): Sally Zakariya’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
- [Talk Therapy](https://burningword.com/2022/01/talk-therapy/): He watched his bride of fifty years as she read Science magazine while nibbling a liverwurst and onion sandwich. He carefully avoided looking at the liverwurst.
- [Elegy With Vultures](https://burningword.com/2022/01/elegy-with-vultures/): On the day Scott passed, vultures soared the gray skies in dozens.
- [Watching the Bats Fly Out](https://burningword.com/2022/01/watching-the-bats-fly-out/): This time, I will begin at the ending. That house burned in the fire along with all of the others in Larkin Valley. But by then, the bats were gone.
- [Paul Rabinowitz](https://burningword.com/2022/01/paul-rabinowitz-2/): Paul Rabinowitz is an author, photographer, and founder of ARTS By The People, a non-profit arts organization based in New Jersey.
- [Eucalyptus](https://burningword.com/2022/01/eucalyptus/): A full moon turned the tops of the coastal dunes blue and shone silver off the Pacific. Alex sat next to Sophia, not touching, silent.
- [Before Winter Exhales](https://burningword.com/2022/01/before-winter-exhales/): Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
- [Political Theory](https://burningword.com/2022/01/political-theory/): George Moore’s collections include Children’s Drawings of the Universe (Salmon Poetry 2015) and Saint Agnes Outside the Walls (FutureCycle 2016).
- [Under a White-Hot Sky](https://burningword.com/2022/01/under-a-white-hot-sky/): My plane descended from the white-hot sky as slowly as the soufflé I had baked for the dinner at which I planned to celebrate my engagement to Ross.
- [Tiffany Mi](https://burningword.com/2022/01/tiffany-mi/): Sonograms use sound waves to show an image of the body's internal worlds, but the possibilities don't end there.
- [Yard Signs for the Apocalypse](https://burningword.com/2022/01/yard-signs-for-the-apocalypse/): and of course, sanctimonious final lines.
- [Marina Klutse](https://burningword.com/2022/01/marina-klutse/): Marina Klutse is a New York-born artist with Ghanaian and Haitian roots.
- [A Letter from Kitty](https://burningword.com/2022/01/a-letter-from-kitty/): Dear Mrs., This is a note to say I’m really sorry I peed on your green suede boots, your favorites. I hope you’re not still mad.
- [Uncrumple](https://burningword.com/2022/01/uncrumple/): This breathing light is full of past afternoons, curved as sails.
- [Lisa Rigge](https://burningword.com/2022/01/lisa-rigge/): Lisa Rigge is an artist living in Pleasanton, CA. These photographs are part of her black and white series titled "Sacred Pause".
- [Lake, Mirror](https://burningword.com/2022/01/lake-mirror/): Saturday morning to ourselves. No husbands, no kids. The lake house, a friend’s but ours for a few hours.
- [Internalised: my mother’s voice](https://burningword.com/2022/01/internalised-my-mothers-voice/): Ceinwen lives near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and writes short stories and poetry. She is widely published in online magazines and in print anthologies.
- [Cut Your Own](https://burningword.com/2022/01/cut-your-own/): We almost feel sorry for them: twisted spines, uneven limbs, dwarf stature, and either bulbous bellies or anorexic torsos.
- [Pictographs](https://burningword.com/2022/01/pictographs/): some magic to catch them?
- [Luciana Francis, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2022/01/luciana-francis-featured-author/): As I walk home, I see the back of a picture frame by one of the windows on the second floor.
- [Jeremiah Gilbert](https://burningword.com/2022/01/jeremiah-gilbert-2/): Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California. He likes to travel light and shoot handheld.
- [Toward a New Era](https://burningword.com/2022/01/toward-a-new-era/): The old era smelled rotten like rancid motor oil.
- [Denise Zubizarreta, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2022/01/denise-zubizarreta-featured-artist/): Denise "The Vamp DeVille" Zubizarreta is a Puerto Rican and Cuban American Mixed Media Interdisciplinary Artist raised between Union City, NJ, and Hialeah, FL, currently living and working in Denver, CO.
- [Milkers](https://burningword.com/2022/01/milkers/): The men’s hands are coated with a perpetual skim of black. Dirt from the fields, grease from the tractors, dust from the animals.
- [Never Finished](https://burningword.com/2021/10/never-finished__trashed/): Fast/efficient—I was competent in both. Each task was prepped and aligned to reduce wasted time and eliminate unnecessary arm, leg, head, and hand movements.
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2021/10/dave-sims-4/): A recovering professor, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the old mountains of Pennsylvania.
- [Waste](https://burningword.com/2021/10/waste/): When I think of heaven, I see trash: Broken bottles, leaking Freon, used notebooks, Thanksgiving scraps, industrial dross, ash Of lives that rot and leach into the brooks And streams that feed the river, then the sea.
- [Tanya L. Young](https://burningword.com/2021/10/tanya-l-young/): Tanya L. Young is a Washington based artist and writer. Her work has been featured in New York Quarterly, Jeopardy Magazine and Stonecoast Review.
- [Fortieth Birthday](https://burningword.com/2021/10/fortieth-birthday/): Just ten years ago, I felt young, before that, not old enough.
- [The Pawn Shop on Putnam Ave.](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-pawn-shop-on-putnam-ave/): The pawnshop faced the traffic of Putnam Avenue.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2021/10/jim-ross-3/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Fingers](https://burningword.com/2021/10/fingers/): The Autumn leaves of the maple tree died.
- [Let me tell you](https://burningword.com/2021/10/let-me-tell-you/): Plug Nickel and Red Cent met on museum steps and, inside, mysticked with blue innocent Della Robbia, rhythmed the light-shine white of beyond, above, bright, orisoned warm-milk fired clay, like flesh, god-child in supple mother embrace.
- [Joe Lugara](https://burningword.com/2021/10/joe-lugara/): Joe Lugara took up photography and painting as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies.
- [Andromeda Mendoza](https://burningword.com/2021/10/andromeda-mendoza/): All her life, Andromeda has followed at the heels of her passions.
- [Delphic Blues](https://burningword.com/2021/10/delphic-blues/): No bright fruit now seems to hang for us, we who never really saw a garden or tasted anything to draw us to the spinning core inside all seeds or dormant roots coiled in their depths.
- [Mothers](https://burningword.com/2021/10/mothers/): Dead twelve years, dusty in a drawer of my heart, like the leaf insects and giant earwigs in the basement of a natural history museum.
- [Christy Lorio](https://burningword.com/2021/10/christy-lorio/): Christy Lorio is a writer and photographer based in New Orleans.
- [Round Pond](https://burningword.com/2021/10/round-pond/): On fine spring days, my mother and I take the number 52 bus — “a tuppenny and a penny, please” — to the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens.
- [His Last Post-Game](https://burningword.com/2021/10/his-last-post-game/): “You know, Jay Foxx, if Studdbecker had intercepted that pass before the half, the result might have been completely different.” “Perhaps.” “Only perhaps?” “Perhaps, Marv, the fans would have demonstrated so long and so loud that the game would have been suspended.
- [The Watch](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-watch-2/): In 1969, we had just started dating. Michael was in twelfth grade and I was in eleventh. We were standing in the halls of Miami Norland Senior High.
- [Snyder, Texas](https://burningword.com/2021/10/snyder-texas/): Apache Indians hunt the buffalo. Comanche arrive on the war trail to Mexico, the Apaches disappear.
- [The Last Camp Social](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-last-camp-social/): “These are the facts of life,” our camp bunk counselor Peggy would say, minutes before any camp social, glancing at her watch ticking away as if we were connected to the time bomb that each boy contained behind his jeans fly.
- [Stanley Horowitz](https://burningword.com/2021/10/stanley-horowitz/): Stanley Horowtiz is a retired Adjunct Professor at Farmingdale College. His work had been included in the 2018 Heckscher Museum Biennial.
- [The Time Traveler’s Plaque](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-time-travelers-plaque/): Striving to inject some wonder and whimsy into people’s humdrum days, an older man with a sense of humor installed a plaque in front of his stately home reading: “Queenston Heritage, Frederick John Wimple, 1812-1896, Inventor of Time Travel, Lived here in 2065.” The installation was done discreetly, such that no one really knows when it occurred.
- [The Old Playground](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-old-playground/): I’m standing there, looking at my old grade school’s set of monkey bars. I can touch them with my forehead. I almost do, hoping to go back.
- [Forgetful](https://burningword.com/2021/10/forgetful/): Forgetfulness runs in my family. My brother, the original absent-minded professor, offers me a ride home.
- [Tawnya Gibson](https://burningword.com/2021/10/tawnya-gibson/): Tawnya Gibson is a freelance writer and photographer. Her love of photography started young, with a Kodak Ektralite camera in her youth.
- [dogs from the future](https://burningword.com/2021/10/dogs-from-the-future/): Danica Dagenhart is a Pittsburgh-based writer, maker, & educator.
- [David Dephy](https://burningword.com/2021/10/david-dephy/): We paid the price. The chances of victory can be measured by self-sacrifice— a miracle out of which all the chances grow. Silent afternoon.
- [Surprise at Dusk](https://burningword.com/2021/10/surprise-at-dusk/): About one month or two ago, on the walk we take almost every day, when passing by a well-known bridge in my city, I noticed, not without some sorrow, that there was a family living under it, at a corner they had cleaned on the riverbank.
- [Violeta Garcia-Mendoza](https://burningword.com/2021/10/violeta-garcia-mendoza/): Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, photographer, and teacher. She is in love with wonder and with the natural world around her.
- [To All the Fool Wishes](https://burningword.com/2021/10/to-all-the-fool-wishes/): Entire environs have become transmitters of an over-personified manifestation twisting through the Multidimensional Ether like counterclockwise wisteria sprouting from the lungs of ashen children.
- [Featured Author: SM Stubbs](https://burningword.com/2021/10/featured-author-sm-stubbs/): Each body broken, violet wounds, ash, bullets like fireflies, dozens of caskets weighted with clay unmade by misplaced rage.
- [why I don’t sing in public](https://burningword.com/2021/10/why-i-dont-sing-in-public/): Tiffany & Annie & me are playing on the swings.
- [Marcia K. Bilyk](https://burningword.com/2021/10/marcia-k-bilyk/): Marcia K. Bilyk lives in rural New Jersey. She loves to explore and photograph sacred spaces around the world.
- [Apologia for the Undeniable](https://burningword.com/2021/10/apologia-for-the-undeniable/): Baby, baby, baby, light my way. In Anno Domini 1991, that lyric was universally liked. Liked like butter is liked. And what’s the deal with spider eyes anyway?
- [Heather Bourbeau](https://burningword.com/2021/10/heather-bourbeau/): “I do not see the need to burn the houses of those slaughtered; everything has already been taken,” I say over strong tea and thick porridge.
- [The Tree of Life](https://burningword.com/2021/10/the-tree-of-life/): The mangos were rotting—that’s how I knew she was going to die. Doria Day was a simple woman—some people are just like that.
- [Jeffrey](https://burningword.com/2021/10/jeffrey/): Not earbuds but headphones so big the phones cut out any unwanted sound. That was the way Jeffrey wanted it.
- [Coming home: carnival](https://burningword.com/2021/10/coming-home-carnival/): Love makes the wheels go round— as in, your heart is a vehicle conveyed through small towns, worn-out suitcase you drag, only stopping at the fair for pickled eggs, magenta jar of luck & hope.
- [Reception Immediately Following](https://burningword.com/2021/10/reception-immediately-following/): Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod, North American Review, Tar River Poetry, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2021/07/jim-ross-2/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2021/07/jean-wolff-2/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [Tell Me Who I Am](https://burningword.com/2021/07/tell-me-who-i-am/): Some days I don’t recognize myself—when I step from the shower and catch a glimpse of my face clouded with steam and all I have from all of my yesterdays is a smudge on an old polaroid—as if a pair of bees could remember themselves out of honeycomb, having fallen to the ground—I don’t know who I am, not just the story of who I am— the secrets I need answers to are watching from the cedar-limbs by a pair of blackbirds hidden in snow.
- [Dormant](https://burningword.com/2021/07/dormant/): I circumambulate Mt. Rainier, tallest of the Cascade volcanoes. My friends come and go for different legs of the journey.
- [On Frairy Street](https://burningword.com/2021/07/on-frairy-street/): She peels gum from the sidewalk, pops it in her mouth, ignores the grit.
- [Too Many Questions](https://burningword.com/2021/07/too-many-questions/): after I began ninth grade, Mother went to bed. She closed drapes, hid autumn light, knotted her body beneath winter blankets.
- [Teaching Trouble](https://burningword.com/2021/07/teaching-trouble/): Style is born, I told my students the other day, when writers lose themselves in writing they admire.
- [There Is a Temperature](https://burningword.com/2021/07/there-is-a-temperature/): Our clock. Do you remember? The one we bought at the edge of the world? The shop being pulled into the ocean ? She has rounded the bend. She’s played her song.
- [Country Boy](https://burningword.com/2021/07/country-boy/): When we were kids, in junior school in Pembrokeshire, we didn’t do wild or joyful, didn’t do great and glorious.
- [The Discalced](https://burningword.com/2021/07/the-discalced/): Into the foothills: individuated and intentional, like tumuli, poised in geometric solitude; yet reiterant— battologizing in every direction like a lavish obsession; Over the clatter of lava scree, down stress-cracked arroyos polyped with balsamroot, astride dustracks canine and human, over roots of gnarled fir that knuckle the trail like black fingers.
- [No Regrets](https://burningword.com/2021/07/no-regrets/): My mother and I went to Prague because she believed that “Travel is the university of life.” “Two rooms?” asked the clerk at the hotel check-in desk.
- [Eat Pray Whine](https://burningword.com/2021/07/eat-pray-whine/): We're cousins. Six decades of weddings, graduations, and hospital bedsides are tucked under our belts. With enough time, a language develops.
- [The Pearl of Great Price](https://burningword.com/2021/07/the-pearl-of-great-price/): There were fields around our homes, Joel, some fallow for a season, others full of maize.
- [Night in a Crumbling City](https://burningword.com/2021/07/night-in-a-crumbling-city/): Toss… turn… kick at the blanket… flop on the belly… bury the head in the pillow. Henry's arm pokes out from under the covers.
- [Goldilocks Speaks Out Though Her Lawyer Tells Her to Shut It](https://burningword.com/2021/07/goldilocks-speaks-out-though-her-lawyer-tells-her-to-shut-it/): Tell me what’s so wrong with walking in when the door is open and nobody answers your “hullo” and you’re tired after walking all day in circles in some stupid wood.
- [Maddy Wilson Resigns](https://burningword.com/2021/07/maddy-wilson-resigns/): CHARLOTTESVILLE (May 18, 2019)— The Wilsons announced today that Madeline “Maddy” Wilson, wife and mother has left the family to pursue other interests.
- [Married Love](https://burningword.com/2021/07/married-love/): I stand on the shore on a Sunday in July while dark birds hover above, and I squint into the early sun that barely peeks through the mist.
- [What It Is](https://burningword.com/2021/07/what-it-is/): The world watched the man grow increasingly detached from society, as if while the world progressed, he remained fossilized in a time of his own.
- [K. L. Johnston](https://burningword.com/2021/07/k-l-johnston/): L. Johnston first realized an interest in photography after she managed to wrangle seven kids to adulthood.
- [Nathan Gentry](https://burningword.com/2021/07/nathan-gentry/): Nathan Gentry is a visual artist and writer who primarily works with the photographic medium and is interested in highlighting the relationship humans have between each other, as well as their relationship with the world in which they live in.
- [Ann Fischer](https://burningword.com/2021/07/ann-fischer/): Ann Fischer is a writer and photographer living in Toronto, Ontario in an Artscape community on the lake.
- [Protection](https://burningword.com/2021/07/protection/): A year ago if somebody had said AstraZeneca I would have thought South African tennis player, German sports car the hot AK47 toting freedom fighter that was my imaginary, Nazi slaughtering, girlfriend in a war I was never in Even the smugly lensed boffins in Oxford dipping their Hobnobs, hypothesising over the powerfully entitled thrust of Boris Johnson, their sly Megan phantasies would have calculated a blank.
- [Featured Artist: Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2021/07/featured-artist-michael-hower/): Michael Hower is an artist and photographer from Central Pennsylvania. His work focuses on historical themes.
- [Lana Eileen](https://burningword.com/2021/07/lana-eileen/): Lana Eileen is a musician and visual artist currently based on the island of Tasmania, Australia.
- [mer fidei](https://burningword.com/2021/07/mer-fidei/): Steven Turrill is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of Pine Peak Press. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
- [Haiku Dream](https://burningword.com/2021/07/haiku-dream/): Noriko sits on her knees in a gold and black kimono, wide sleeves holding fragile arms, palms on her lap, thumbs hidden.
- [Perspective](https://burningword.com/2021/07/perspective/): we lost touch some time ago, my mother reflects moodily.
- [An Index to the Eating Disorder Spectrum](https://burningword.com/2021/07/an-index-to-the-eating-disorder-spectrum/): Abnormal, a condition; a way of life; an indicator of otherness; you. Achievement, you are the aggregate sum of these.
- [Late October Air](https://burningword.com/2021/07/lawrence-bridges-3/): Up the bent walk to the house door, stops at the steps, smells the dryness of fall in the late October air.
- [Jack Bordnick](https://burningword.com/2021/07/jack-bordnick/): Jack Bordnick started as a product designer, establishing his own design business in New York, Sante Fe, and Europe.
- [The Absence of Joy in Love](https://burningword.com/2021/07/the-absence-of-joy-in-love/): Heavy weighted blanket, legs half-out, rain against the window, you whispered, “what if it gets old?
- [Magpies](https://burningword.com/2021/07/magpies/): That girl’s come again, the one called Jewel. She likes to correct me, says her name is Julie. I know. She’s my youngest granddaughter. That’s what she says.
- [Lawrence Bridges](https://burningword.com/2021/07/lawrence-bridges-2/): Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Tampa Review.
- [Mothballs](https://burningword.com/2021/07/mothballs/): Tucked under a pile of wool sweaters, under the wedding dress that I didn’t let you help me pick out, under the little white sailor outfit that I bought on Etsy for your grandson’s baptism that you missed because you were dead, deep in a corner of the cedar chest that grandma wanted me to have even though what I really wanted was her piano, are your ashes (some of them anyway) in a black velvet bag.
- [Featured Author: E. Laura Golberg](https://burningword.com/2021/07/featured-author-e-laura-golberg/): How many bodies can be held in refrigerated trailers, giving families time to claim them?
- [K.L. Johnston](https://burningword.com/2022/10/k-l-johnston-3/): K.L. Johnston's images first appeared in 2014 in South Carolina ETV's in-house magazine "Scene".
- [Nanny Ann](https://burningword.com/2022/10/nanny-ann/): with her bare hands.
- [The Peopling](https://burningword.com/2022/10/the-peopling/): Rodrigo Toscano is a poet and essayist based in New Orleans. He is the author of ten books of poetry.
- [Joe is Making Good Money at the Brokerage](https://burningword.com/2022/10/joe-is-making-good-money-at-the-brokerage/): He wants a boy & will reward me for my trouble.
- [Connor Doyle](https://burningword.com/2022/10/connor-doyle-5/): Connor Doyle is a photographer and filmmaker based in the Chicagoland area.
- [See](https://burningword.com/2022/10/see/): “The raft is not the shore” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace.
- [Cathy Hollister](https://burningword.com/2022/10/cathy-hollister/): Cathy Hollister is an older writer whose poetry often explores the treasures embedded in age, isolation, and continual readjustments.
- [Baby Love](https://burningword.com/2022/10/baby-love/): The inside of the ice-cream truck is a hot dark closet with syrup air that gags. We are rumbling around a New Jersey cul-de-sac and no one can catch us.
- [Miss You and the Blue Jean Hat](https://burningword.com/2022/10/miss-you-and-the-blue-jean-hat/): Would love to bake chocolate chip cookies again with you.
- [Still Life with Pet Turtle and Hanging Boy](https://burningword.com/2022/10/still-life-with-pet-turtle-and-hanging-boy/): Is it possible your turtleness has something to sing?
- [Between Frames](https://burningword.com/2022/10/between-frames/): like shards hurled in menace.
- [Anticipating Conflagration](https://burningword.com/2022/10/anticipating-conflagration/): buy Nigerian goats to bounce with favored popcorn sheep.
- [Freddie Mercury](https://burningword.com/2022/10/freddie-mercury/): There’s singing and then there’s Freddie Mercury.
- [A Show of Concern](https://burningword.com/2022/10/a-show-of-concern/): “You’re going to get in trouble if you sleep in class, it’s that simple. You sleep at home, not in class.
- [The Mirrored Shields](https://burningword.com/2022/10/the-mirrored-shields/): For thousands of years this was a peaceful place – pine trees stretching up toward the sky, hawks gliding at the line where the clouds met the infinite blue, fish scuttling down full rivers, one might even get lucky and see a brown bear, a flopping salmon in its mouth.
- [Miss Livin’ Is A Breeze](https://burningword.com/2022/10/miss-livin-is-a-breeze/): I’m standing on my head and typing with my toes because this is for you, So … Who’s going to sell those autographs-of-jesus?
- [Stefan Sullivan](https://burningword.com/2022/10/stefan-sullivan/): Pint-sized really, she'd be his daughter if she weren't his concubine, his squeeze, his number really, that is, he picked the number pinned on her bikini while she tumbled in the neon marsh waters of the Mermaidium.
- [All the Time in the World](https://burningword.com/2022/10/all-the-time-in-the-world/): Wherever he went, a thundercloud paraded behind him. Just a little one, about the size of a coffee grinder.
- [Dating Tips](https://burningword.com/2022/10/dating-tips/): He sits up next to me in bed, well into the night, the dawn birds’ song nearing, scrolling through a Tumblr account of topless girls on his, what, first generation iPad?
- [YLIED](https://burningword.com/2022/10/ylied/): I'm waiting in line, and there's this little girl standing behind me.
- [Our Orchid Tree is Dying](https://burningword.com/2022/10/our-orchid-tree-is-dying/): That’s what the man says. He says, It’s toast.
- [Carella Keil](https://burningword.com/2022/10/carella-keil/): Carella is a poet and digital artist who splits her time between the ethereal world of dreams, and Toronto, Canada, depending on the weather.
- [Here They Kill the Mustard by May](https://burningword.com/2022/10/here-they-kill-the-mustard-by-may/): While her husband drove, Margaret kept her eyes closed, trying to identify each roll to the right, each jostle to the left along West Road.
- [Quincy Gray McMichael: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2022/10/quincy-gray-mcmichael/): She has so much gum.
- [Christopher Paul Brown](https://burningword.com/2022/10/christopher-paul-brown-2/): Christopher Paul Brown is known for his exploration of the unconscious through his use of improvisation and his cultivation of serendipity and synchronicity via alchemy.
- [She left the ring on the table](https://burningword.com/2022/10/she-left-the-ring-on-the-table/): She left the ring on the table, watching the liquid pool. Wood meant five years.
- [Forecast](https://burningword.com/2022/07/forecast/): Kevin’s father stares out the window at the clouds rolling in instead of the photo album Kevin brings today, cracking it open next to his bed, thinking it would help.
- [If I Didn’t Have My Thousand Acres](https://burningword.com/2022/07/if-i-didnt-have-my-thousand-acres/): emergency waiting room.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2022/07/jim-ross-4/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [It’s Possible](https://burningword.com/2022/07/its-possible/): and now are waking up the day.
- [The Funeral](https://burningword.com/2022/07/the-funeral/): Hannah Zhang is a 16-year-old aspiring writer from Tucson, Arizona. She enjoys reading all kinds of novels, leaning towards adventure and fantasy.
- [Amanda L Rioux](https://burningword.com/2022/07/amanda-l-rioux/): Amanda is a freelance writer and photographer. She has her BA in English Lit & Criticism, and her MA in Professional Writing & Communication.
- [Anchor](https://burningword.com/2022/07/anchor/): by soft lead sinkers.
- [Aggregates](https://burningword.com/2022/07/aggregates/): Zero is a beginning and one is a beginning too. I was once a zero and became one after one year. It was then I began to walk and talk.
- [from AT THE MUSARIUM](https://burningword.com/2022/07/from-at-the-musarium/): Swazi cannonball. (That was touch-&-go.)
- [Gregory Hom](https://burningword.com/2022/07/17538/): Gregory Hom makes cut-and-paste collage works. His work has appeared in the Shanghai Literary Review and Catamaran Literary Reader.
- [Justin Lacour](https://burningword.com/2022/07/thursday-1220-p-m-saturday-222-p-m-thursday-325-p-m/): Tug is listening to music at his desk.
- [Larena Nellies-Ortiz](https://burningword.com/2022/07/larena-nellies-ortiz/): Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a photographer, educator and poet living in Los Angeles.
- [Mother’s Day Trip To The Store (A Solo)](https://burningword.com/2022/07/mothers-day-trip-to-the-store-a-solo/): Tow truck! Convertible!
- [Digital Butterflies, Electric Buzz](https://burningword.com/2022/07/digital-butterflies-electric-buzz/): His hands are rough, like sex, and when he touches me it is delirium and fever and ecstasy, but he is only reading my palms.
- [Cliffhanger](https://burningword.com/2022/07/cliffhanger/): shadowing my climb up its short suspenders.
- [Puzzle](https://burningword.com/2022/07/puzzle/): strings bleeding the blues.
- [Birdwatcher in Kyiv](https://burningword.com/2022/07/birdwatcher-in-kyiv/): feeders swing on their chains.
- [Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip](https://burningword.com/2022/07/yasmin-nadiyah-phillip/): Yasmin Nadiyah Phillip is a writer, musician, and freelance artist currently based in Virginia. Her most recent work appeared in Barren magazine.
- [Spring Resurrects](https://burningword.com/2022/07/spring-resurrects/): Strawberry shoots, signs of life, play peek-a-boo in the leaves I spread before the snow fell. Last time I saw Mom, she was tethered to an oxygen converter.
- [Dead Man’s Mountain](https://burningword.com/2022/07/dead-mans-mountain/): It was very late. Mildred Sowers listened to the cold February wind. It blew up Snake Hollow hard against the house and rattled the windows.
- [The Dangers of Dancing So Close to the Sun](https://burningword.com/2022/07/the-dangers-of-dancing-so-close-to-the-sun/): brother’s father’s eye.
- [David A. Goodrum](https://burningword.com/2022/07/david-a-goodrum-2/): David A. Goodrum lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into many art festivals in cities such as St.
- [The Sun Is This Day’s State Of Affairs](https://burningword.com/2022/07/the-sun-is-this-days-state-of-affairs/): Mary Buchinger is the author of five collections of poetry, including / klaʊdz / (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018), Aerialist (Gold Wake, 2015), and Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming).
- [Gimmickry](https://burningword.com/2022/07/gimmickry/): sympathised through another disposition.
- [Rat Symphony](https://burningword.com/2022/07/rat-symphony/): Rat Meister’s baton-busy tail flashes against the steady hall lights.
- [Dante Novario: Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2022/07/dante-novario-featured-author/): Jaws of slender grass. Jaws of patience.
- [In My Mother’s Garden](https://burningword.com/2022/07/in-my-mothers-garden/): my father built her.
- [Negotiating for Drops of Water](https://burningword.com/2022/07/negotiating-for-drops-of-water/): regardless of how many rocks lie on the ties.
- [Vegans](https://burningword.com/2022/07/vegans/): I was in line at the Delta counter behind two white men of military bearing.
- [Emily Candler Davis](https://burningword.com/2022/07/emily-candler-davis/): Sometimes realistic, sometimes fantastic, the images of The Nature and Psyche Project try to broach the vast and broad topic of interbeing with nature, and our inherent resonance with the Earth's imagination and our own.
- [Jennifer Sheridan](https://burningword.com/2022/07/jennifer-sheridan/): Jennifer Sheridan is a poet and bookseller living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Spectrum, Rattle, Hole in the Head Review and On The Run.
- [Mikvah (pantoum)](https://burningword.com/2022/07/mikvah-pantoum/): Lisa Delan is classical soprano specializing in American Art Song; performing, recording, and commissioning musical settings of an expansive range of poetry.
- [In Memory of Angela, Enslaved, Who Arrived Before the Mayflower](https://burningword.com/2022/04/in-memory-of-angela-enslaved-who-arrived-before-the-mayflower/): The home we knew is only memory.
- [Don’t Be Afraid](https://burningword.com/2022/04/dont-be-afraid/): time sliced by nostalgia into frames.
- [Where we feast](https://burningword.com/2022/04/where-we-feast/): escapes from the side of our palms.
- [Ambiguity](https://burningword.com/2022/04/ambiguity/): There was something comforting about handling a machine.
- [Retribution](https://burningword.com/2022/04/retribution/): "I round the year in myth and fable, and limn my calendar days with joy."
- [Writing](https://burningword.com/2022/04/writing/): of your ring finger.
- [And the sweater you’ve been missing](https://burningword.com/2022/04/and-the-sweater-youve-been-missing/): appears in a dream as a character to protect.
- [Fabio Sassi](https://burningword.com/2022/04/fabio-sassi/): Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using whatever is considered to have no worth by the mainstream.
- [Tracey Dean Widelitz](https://burningword.com/2022/04/tracey-dean-widelitz/): Tracey Dean Widelitz is an emerging writer, poet and photographer, and is the author of 'A Heavenly World', a forthcoming published children's book.
- [Swing with a View, Kauai](https://burningword.com/2022/04/swing-with-a-view-kauai/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Jordan Robson](https://burningword.com/2022/04/jordan-robson/): Jordan Robson is a writer and photographer from Seattle, Washington. Her work has previously been published in Papeachu Review.
- [Fire God](https://burningword.com/2022/04/fire-god/): Fire runs screaming down the hillside like an insane deity, crackling in a forgotten tongue and making believers.
- [Why Didn’t I Name a Parasite?](https://burningword.com/2022/04/why-didnt-i-name-a-parasite/): There is a rumble beneath the dormant kernels of wheat like hunger during the fast from humanity.
- [Boxed Flowers](https://burningword.com/2022/04/boxed-flowers/): For my sixty-ninth birthday, my husband bought me a years' worth of flowers. FedEx dutifully delivers a box on my doorstep each month.
- [Tradeoffs](https://burningword.com/2022/04/tradeoffs/): as much as by rabbits or mice.
- [DS Maolalai](https://burningword.com/2022/04/ds-maolalai-2/): in the morning.
- [John Morabito](https://burningword.com/2022/04/john-morabito/): Born in 1987 John Morabito has been making photographs for the last 20 years.
- [Child’s Play](https://burningword.com/2022/04/childs-play/): When you’ve been following the cat around the house all day, you really can’t blame him for escaping beneath the armchair, hissing glinty-eyed as the three of you approach.
- [Leftovers](https://burningword.com/2022/04/leftovers/): When I hand the leftovers to my mother, she muses from her bed, “You know who else likes eggplant parmesan?
- [Potato Pantoum](https://burningword.com/2022/04/potato-pantoum/): “Fill a saucepan, wash potatoes, peel, cook.
- [After Lunch in Some Seaside Town](https://burningword.com/2022/04/after-lunch-in-some-seaside-town/): We raged brilliant that October afternoon.
- [K.L. Johnston](https://burningword.com/2022/04/k-l-johnston-2/): K.L. Johnston is a poet and photographer who first realized her interest in photography in 2014.
- [Breakfast with the King](https://burningword.com/2022/04/breakfast-with-the-king/): We had just graduated from Navy “A” School near Memphis. It was time to celebrate.
- [Redemption](https://burningword.com/2022/04/redemption/): the original paper kind they don’t make anymore.
- [Jaime Greenberg](https://burningword.com/2022/04/jaime-greenberg/): Jaime Greenberg is a writer and photographer who writes with words and light. She lives in South Florida with her husband, two teenagers, two cats and a dog.
- [Lindsey Morrison Grant](https://burningword.com/2022/04/lindsey-morrison-grant/)
- [David A. Goodrum](https://burningword.com/2022/04/david-a-goodrum/): David A. Goodrum lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His photography has been juried into many art festivals in cities such as St.
- [bringing the gaps](https://burningword.com/2022/04/bringing-the-gaps/): Steve Fay's collection "what nature: Poems" was published by Northwestern University Press.
- [Connor Doyle](https://burningword.com/2022/04/connor-doyle-4/): Connor Doyle is a photographer and filmmaker based in the Chicagoland area.
- [Bethany Freese](https://burningword.com/2022/04/bethany-freese/): Bethany Freese is a photographer and writer living in Washington State.
- [Butterflies, Phoenixes, and Ephemeral Self-Love](https://burningword.com/2022/04/butterflies-phoenixes-and-ephemeral-self-love/): Source material for Disney movies is mostly R-rated. Take Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, which hinges on premeditated murder.
- [Next of Kin](https://burningword.com/2022/04/next-of-kin/): Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet and arts educator based in Brooklyn.
- [Megan Anning, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2022/04/megan-anning-featured-author/): dripping diamonds of lemon sun.
- [The Night Ride Home](https://burningword.com/2022/04/the-night-ride-home/): Mia blows gently on the bus shelter window. Her warm breath crystallizes on the cold glass, distorting the glare of the red and white lights of passing cars.
- [Mikhael Antone-D'Angelo](https://burningword.com/2022/04/mikhael-antone-dangelo/): Mikhael Antone-D’Angelo is a filmmaker and visual artist. Born 1975 in Rhode Island.
- [Lofty Thoughts](https://burningword.com/2022/04/lofty-thoughts/): Clear skies—who would’ve thought? It’s not every day we get the chance to ride in a hot air balloon.
- [Hear and Do](https://burningword.com/2022/04/hear-and-do/): It was a wedding, my cousin’s wedding. He was marrying a girl he knew for nine years. He proposed in Disney World at Cinderella’s Castle.
- [Philatelist](https://burningword.com/2022/01/philatelist/): While I was a girl waiting for life to improve I did what I could, a ladybug on her back kicking her feet in the air.
- [You Learn](https://burningword.com/2022/01/you-learn/): You learned, early in life, how to become a doll.
- [Pete Madzelan](https://burningword.com/2022/01/pete-madzelan/): Pete Madzelan is an artist who lives with his wife in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
- [Ash Margaret Cheatham](https://burningword.com/2022/01/ash-margaret-cheatham/): Gently Seeping, depicts the delusional state that many people are blissfully unaware they are in.
- [Doug Dabbs](https://burningword.com/2022/01/doug-dabbs/): Doug Dabbs is a comic book artist, illustrator, and university professor who has taught visual storytelling and illustration in higher education for over a decade.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2023/07/stephen-curtis-wilson-3/): Wilson explores rural communities and urban neighborhoods searching for reminders of humanness, culture, and community.
- [Scott Urquhart](https://burningword.com/2023/07/scott-urquhart/): Scott Urquhart is a volunteer on the frontlines of Russia's genocide against the Ukrainian people.
- [Lullaby to Bacteria](https://burningword.com/2023/07/lullaby-to-bacteria/): May you sleep in slushy apples, the acid mash of stomachs, seafloor chimneys smearing the deep with tartars of smoke.
- [Scales](https://burningword.com/2023/07/scales/): Scaly edges pierce eggshell: my oval microcosm of speckled beige - limited, yet a thinly protective sphere.
- [Arrives Like the River](https://burningword.com/2023/07/arrives-like-the-river/): The scent of the river on his skin, late, hair and swimsuit wet from Barton Springs. Nine or ten at night, the candles dead.
- [George L Stein](https://burningword.com/2023/07/george-l-stein/): george l stein is a photographer living in northern new jersey and focused on art, street, decay, portraiture, and surreal genres.
- [the all](https://burningword.com/2023/07/the-all/): Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s publications include four full collections.
- [Contemporary Stuff](https://burningword.com/2023/07/contemporary-stuff/): Reading poetry online takes me down the rabbit hole of the next poem and the next, and oh, I like this poet and how did they even come up with gold leaf or orange sweat.
- [No Anything](https://burningword.com/2023/07/no-anything/): We drove by William S. Burroughs’s house to see if we could feel his aura from the street.
- [Someone Special](https://burningword.com/2023/07/someone-special/): In the video, you’re riding a brown horse around a dusty cement arena somewhere in Mexico, the place you told me not to visit because you were enjoying your solitude, so I didn’t bother learning the city’s name.
- [The Romantics](https://burningword.com/2023/07/the-romantics/): ‘Never apologise, never explain’: a mantra my mother shared with me frequently, and herself embraced as fiercely as any of her lovers whenever another of her liaisons came to light.
- [Half Empty](https://burningword.com/2023/07/half-empty/): Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
- [Another Chicken Dinner Fundraiser](https://burningword.com/2023/07/another-chicken-dinner-fundraiser/): We didn’t want to go to the homeless non-profit fundraiser, mostly because we were tired, because we already donated money and needed items, and had volunteered to work the shelter, but we were invited and had free tickets.
- [Geon Park](https://burningword.com/2023/07/geon-park/): Geon Park is currently an 8th grader who is attending Saint Paul Preparatory School located in Seoul.
- [At the End We Begin Again](https://burningword.com/2023/07/at-the-end-we-begin-again/): She was flying in her dream, flying through the sacred sky, when she tumbled through the clouds and landed in a heap of rubble upon the earth.
- [Terry a. O'Neal](https://burningword.com/2023/07/terry-a-oneal/): Terry a. O'Neal is an American writer and photographer.
- [Consideration of Tasks](https://burningword.com/2023/07/consideration-of-tasks/): Before I wrote color essays for an arts magazine, I was curator of a gallery. Before I became a curator, I was moving 3000 miles across the United States.
- [Women’s Liberation](https://burningword.com/2023/07/womens-liberation/): I write about my mother in beginnings. 1187 words. Then 1090, then 886, then 690. Finally, something I title, “Mom, Trying,” but it’s a blank page.
- [Counseling Session](https://burningword.com/2023/07/counseling-session/): Let’s begin with memory. How do you usually find yourself returning to your past… thrust back by crisis, needing overdue explanations and ready to demand them?
- [Call Sheet](https://burningword.com/2023/07/call-sheet/): This morning when I walk out to the pool two mallard ducks, one green, one flocked in blue, float quiet ripples, unfazed by yellow buses’ loud brakes, vested city workers unfolding plastic gates before they dig up asphalt, drop sweat, cough words down below.
- [Smoke Signals](https://burningword.com/2023/07/smoke-signals/): Whenever Steve smoked on the patio, his son Robin would sit on the back doorstep and talk.
- [Jaime Greenberg](https://burningword.com/2023/07/jaime-greenberg-2/): Jaime Greenberg is a writer and photographer who writes with words and light.
- [Tae Won Kim](https://burningword.com/2023/07/tae-won-kim/): Tae Won Kim is a student in North London Collegiate School, Korea, and is on his way to the International Baccalaureate.
- [Pockets Full](https://burningword.com/2023/07/pockets-full/): Her wish came true. From then on, she always had in her pocket the exact amount of money she wanted.
- [When the Butterflies Dance](https://burningword.com/2023/07/when-the-butterflies-dance/): “Momma, where’s Mamaw?” “I think she’s out in the yard somewhere.” Regina Woody opened the back screen door and called out, “Mamaw! Mamaw are you out here?
- [Objects Near Fenway Park](https://burningword.com/2023/07/objects-near-fenway-park/): I thought I was Li Po, had moonwine midnight feelin’ alright, but my Mandarin was a nightmare and all the trolleys stopped at Harvard Sq.
- [Nice Girls Say Please](https://burningword.com/2023/07/nice-girls-say-please/): Unicorn and Pegasus sat down with the Queen. Unicorn’s horn went somewhere obsc – “Cream with your scones?” Nice girls say please. Knock, knock? Who’s there?
- [Tetman Callis](https://burningword.com/2023/07/tetman-callis-3/): Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago. His stories and poems have been published in a variety of literary magazines.
- [The Chaise](https://burningword.com/2023/07/the-chaise/): A young woman lies, shining, on a chaise by a pool. She tilts her head forward. This flattens the neck, turns it into a lovely puddle of brown butter.
- [Linda K Allison](https://burningword.com/2023/07/linda-k-allison/): Linda Allison is a recovering banker living in The Woodlands Texas with the love of her life, found late in life.
- [Delivery](https://burningword.com/2023/07/delivery/): Each time gets you instant skinny. As soon as the kid slips out.
- [Featured Artist: JC Alfier](https://burningword.com/2023/07/featured-artist-jc-alfier/): Some of the pieces depict partial, oblique, or frontal female nudity to illustrate Carl Jung’s concept of the Anima: the female part of the male psyche — sensual, often oblique female archetypes where allegories give shape to dreamscapes of the unconscious, even as the faint image of the female reflects an abstracted, fluid persona — the objective and the subjective.
- [Featured Author: Christy Prahl](https://burningword.com/2023/07/featured-author-christy-prahl/): A not so rare November day that impersonates June, bisque of sun, Ligurian sky when Sylvia, from the mailroom, who walks with a cane, /diabetes to claim her right foot by spring/ joins me outside for a forbidden smoke.
- [Just Started School](https://burningword.com/2023/07/just-started-school/): Mother didn’t talk much. Didn’t want to fall foul of the thought police.
- [Swear to God? Or How to Seduce the Most Beautiful Girl in Town](https://burningword.com/2023/07/swear-to-god-or-how-to-seduce-the-most-beautiful-girl-in-town/): Male high school students back in the 1950s were prone, like teenage boys everywhere, to boast about their exploits.
- [Moon in Daylight](https://burningword.com/2023/04/moon-in-daylight/): Palely the residues of evening coalesce to form this faint ablation sailing over head, this lustrous oculus in daybreak’s alabaster dome, this remnant of the jeweled dark that wanly drifts across the dawn’s triumphant light.
- [Ron Theel](https://burningword.com/2023/04/ron-theel/): Ron Theel is a freelance writer, mixed media artist, and photographer living in Syracuse, New York.
- [Yujin Suh](https://burningword.com/2023/04/yujin-suh/): Yujin Suh is a 11th grade student at Seoul Foreign School located in Seoul, Korea. Her major focus in art relates to painting with social aspects.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2023/04/jim-ross-6/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Lisa Rigge](https://burningword.com/2023/04/lisa-rigge-2/): Lisa Rigge is an artist living in Pleasanton, CA.
- [Paul Rabinowitz](https://burningword.com/2023/04/paul-rabinowitz-3/): Paul Rabinowitz is an author, poet, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People.
- [Eun Seo Kim](https://burningword.com/2023/04/eun-seo-kim/): Eun Seo Kim is a junior attending North London Collegiate School in Jeju island, Korea.
- [Min Sung Park](https://burningword.com/2023/04/min-sung-park/): Min Sung Park is a junior attending Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
- [Jahin Claire Oh](https://burningword.com/2023/04/jahin-claire-oh/): Jahin Claire Oh is a ninth grader at Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, California. She likes to code and takes an interest in media art for fun.
- [Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2023/04/michael-hower-3/): When Michael Hower began digital photography ten years ago it was founded upon a fascination with abandoned buildings and landscapes.
- [Falling](https://burningword.com/2023/04/falling/): A crack of thunder jolted Sarah from a dream as lightning flared, casting shadows on the bedroom walls. She blinked.
- [Lena N. Gemmer](https://burningword.com/2023/04/lena-n-gemmer/): Lena Neris Gemmer is originally from the quiet foggy town of Montara CA where she began her love of writing on her grandfather's Remington Rand typewriter.
- [Curating](https://burningword.com/2023/04/curating/): I shift a pile of books on my desk, and dozens of slips of paper shower to the floor.
- [Featured Author: Richard Holinger](https://burningword.com/2023/04/featured-author-richard-holinger/): Mowing the field west of the train car my grandfather bought in 1935, a retired Pullman, the “Constitution.” It perches above Rock Creek, overlooking a floodplain of thick woods where bluebells carpet the floor in spring.
- [A Conversation with Sophia’s Universe](https://burningword.com/2023/04/a-conversation-with-sophias-universe/): I navigate this world, kneading dough for company as I swirl about memories like tea in a delicate chipped cup– I move through the stars spheres rotate between seconds and I whisper to crystals when you are gone: for the closets were just emptied of camping gear– and when I sleep through the sleet and snow the umbilical cord is released before I rush into my own ravine.
- [Small Histories](https://burningword.com/2023/04/small-histories/): You say you caught yourself wondering if the world would be when you were gone. Rumpled bed sheets rumpled bedsheets.
- [Trying to Reconcile Nurture and Nature by the St. Vrain River](https://burningword.com/2023/04/trying-to-reconcile-nurture-and-nature-by-the-st-vrain-river/): I thought this poem might be about children, but I found Maxine Cumin’s collection Nurture as I sifted through piles of books, the title which implies children but isn’t about children at all and anyway, I keep calling the book Nature because I do that.
- [Beasts](https://burningword.com/2023/04/beasts/): I killed the boar above the low rise with strewn sagebrush.
- [Obviously, This Dreams Means I’m a Bad Mother](https://burningword.com/2023/04/obviously-this-dreams-means-im-a-bad-mother/): It rains and rains and rains. Bodies and tea pots, couches and beds, hammers and dishes washing up in town.
- [Cyn Kitchen](https://burningword.com/2023/04/cyn-kitchen/): according to her story / a woman, blind in one eye / didn’t tell her parents / she couldn’t see / until she was twelve.
- [Assessment](https://burningword.com/2023/04/assessment/): I’m a broom and its dustpan, the sharp tip of a long knife, watermelon, cool side of the pillow on a muggy night.
- [Night Blooms](https://burningword.com/2023/04/night-blooms/): Dig down deep enough and you’ll find night blooms— blue-dusked petals casting runes under forgotten garden reaches, ink-black petals spooning clotted soil into ever-shrouded stars, an ever-blackening sun wheeling through dark spines and peat-stained teeth.
- [O The Leaving](https://burningword.com/2023/04/o-the-leaving/): his voice muffled by the hygienic sleeves covering the headphones, his words far away, poltergeist from the past.
- [Piano](https://burningword.com/2023/04/piano/): You moved in that summer— a trial period, small room with a bed, window.
- [Kitchen Table Lament](https://burningword.com/2023/04/kitchen-table-lament/): I miss the black wrought iron fire escape with its steps that rattled outside the kitchen window on its way up to the tenement roof top.
- [The Day Earth’s Gravity Changed](https://burningword.com/2023/04/the-day-earths-gravity-changed/): Tombstone, AZ, 1884 Beneath a black wool hood the hanged man grins, his breath hissing through clenched teeth like steam from a waiting locomotive.
- [A Thousand Pieces of My Heart](https://burningword.com/2023/04/a-thousand-pieces-of-my-heart/): One morning, I found two Varied Thrush dead, laying side by side outside the greenhouse. It was as if they dived into love and it killed them.
- [Shrinking](https://burningword.com/2023/04/shrinking/): Why must everyone mumble?
- [A Google Search of a Caregiver’s Mind](https://burningword.com/2023/04/a-google-search-of-a-caregivers-mind/): Hey Google Search for Wordle. Search for five-letter words that begin with s-l-o. Search for ways for this day to begin with a win.
- [The Last Remaining Deity Speaks](https://burningword.com/2023/04/the-last-remaining-deity-speaks/): Having ousted all rivals, I take possession of suburban hostas and road-running squirrels, and strike rare birds from recorded histories of ponds.
- [The Gristle of Love](https://burningword.com/2023/04/the-gristle-of-love/): Months after I had cleared her clothes from our apartment and delivered them to a homeless shelter as was her wish, I drove to our cabin in the mountains to gather her last shirts and sweaters, socks and tights, sneakers and slippers.
- [Do You Have an Accent?](https://burningword.com/2023/04/do-you-have-an-accent/): This town has a rusted roof gas station, a store shelf where you would find charm and shame sitting side-by-side, as inseparable as lovebugs, buy-one-get-one for the last 50 years.
- [Max Capacity](https://burningword.com/2023/01/max-capacity/): Ann Weil writes at her home on the corner of Stratford and Avon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat at Snipe’s Point Sandbar off Key West, Florida.
- [Rich Spang](https://burningword.com/2023/01/rich-spang/): Rich Spang has been connected to a camera for over 60 years. During retirement his art has become the focus of his life.
- [Clapping Game](https://burningword.com/2023/01/clapping-game/): They played on the rug, Erica Hashimoto and her mom, they played the clapping game. Her mom said the words, and they clapped their hands across the empty air.
- [My Father’s Body](https://burningword.com/2023/01/my-fathers-body/): how small a man can be.
- [John Perrault](https://burningword.com/2023/01/john-perrault/): —Sorry, We’re Open!
- [Inheritance](https://burningword.com/2023/01/inheritance/): shimmer chalk & glaze.
- [Mercy! Charity! Faith! Holy!](https://burningword.com/2023/01/mercy-charity-faith-holy/): Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion!
- [Starting the Garden](https://burningword.com/2023/01/starting-the-garden/): the strips of broken two by two, the bottle-caps.
- [Not Like a Poem](https://burningword.com/2023/01/not-like-a-poem/): Life is and is not like a poem.
- [Larena Nellies-Ortiz](https://burningword.com/2023/01/larena-nellies-ortiz-2/): Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a photographer and arts educator who lives in Los Angeles, California where she loves to color, texture, and shadow hunt in the early morning hours.
- [What the Squirrels See](https://burningword.com/2023/01/what-the-squirrels-see/): I’m up my favorite tree in our woods and I get to see what squirrels see, then Dad walks into his man cave right underneath with that neighbor lady who brought that board with butter and stuff smeared on it to the block party and she says he’s handy and then she makes noises like she’s running on hot sand and he shushes her and then he says Oh, God, Oh, God and I wonder was that in vain, then she says Oh, God, it’s already six-o-clock and she rushes out then he leaves, and at dinner Mom asks Dad why wasn’t he home early because when she tried to call he didn’t pick up and she called his assistant and they said he already left, and Dad says my assistant can’t keep track of anyone she watches those flash mobs all day and he yells you don’t know how hard I’m working and Mom cries, and my cousin said that’s what my aunt and uncle did before they got divorced they yelled but the main thing is my Dad lied, and when my cousin kept asking my aunt why did she get a divorce from my uncle my aunt kept saying we both love you very much and it’s not your fault, but finally my aunt told my cousin, he lied, that’s why, your Dad lied.
- [Ice Fishing](https://burningword.com/2023/01/ice-fishing/): The grey trout flops on the ice and stills, its blood clotted.
- [Mary McGinnis](https://burningword.com/2023/01/mary-mcginnis/): I never swallowed a spoon whole.
- [Bernard Knudsen](https://burningword.com/2023/01/bernard-knudsen/): Bernard Knudsen is a scientist and photographer in Florida, specializing in portraiture and the Florida landscape.
- [Kathy Kremins](https://burningword.com/2023/01/kathy-kremins/): Kathy Kremins (she/her) is a retired New Jersey public school teacher and coach, adjunct professor, poet, photographer, and author.
- [Arrested Development ~ 1786    Hunterian Museum, London](https://burningword.com/2023/01/arrested-development-1786-hunterian-museum-london/): Clare Marsh, a Kent based international adoption social worker, was awarded M.A.
- [Wax Job](https://burningword.com/2023/01/wax-job/): Make yourself comfortable right here on the massage table. Just clean up the brows, right? Not too thick, not too thin. You're tired? Go ahead and rest.
- [Robert Knox](https://burningword.com/2023/01/robert-knox/): Sands slipping free of oceans crests.
- [sound](https://burningword.com/2023/01/sound/): Ditta Baron Hoeber is an artist as well as a poet.
- [Risen Roses](https://burningword.com/2023/01/risen-roses/): and only thrive on a diet of blood.
- [Eugene Stevenson](https://burningword.com/2023/01/eugene-stevenson/): the waves, put them to rest, quiet the restless talk.
- [The Truly Dead](https://burningword.com/2023/01/the-truly-dead/): I was sure the long-abused- by-climate bougainvillea dead after years of pink tissue-paper blossoms each winter, branches seeking light against cold window glass in its corner.
- [Melissa Goodnight](https://burningword.com/2023/01/melissa-goodnight/): Melissa’s work has appeared in Mud Season Review, Lunch Ticket, and Litro among others.
- [Deadly Up](https://burningword.com/2023/01/deadly-up/): A direct hit this time.
- [Diana Dinverno](https://burningword.com/2023/01/diana-dinverno/): The exquisite hush, the overture, and the curtains rise, cue Violetta and her soon-to-be lover, Alfredo, and I wonder how my husband has managed to acquire these coveted seats.
- [Evan Anders](https://burningword.com/2023/01/evan-anders/): dalia’s teaching our five-year-old son to prepare chili.
- [The Mother/Strawberries](https://burningword.com/2023/01/the-mother-strawberries/): That hot afternoon you took us to pick strawberries at a truck farm just off Dixie Highway, counting out change for three baskets to fill.
- [Featured Author: Pamela Wax](https://burningword.com/2023/01/featured-author-pamela-wax/): I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2022/10/jean-wolff-3/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [The way it was before](https://burningword.com/2022/10/the-way-it-was-before/): shared with skunks and rivulets.
- [Chemical Reaction](https://burningword.com/2022/10/chemical-reaction/): You find yourself in your junior high milk room-turned-dark room on a Saturday morning being taught to process film by your 8th grade science teacher.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2022/10/jim-ross-5/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Still Life](https://burningword.com/2022/10/still-life/): I sometimes lie on a hammock in my garden. My “yard” I call it because I’m American now.
- [Red Ink](https://burningword.com/2024/04/red-ink/): You’ll never guess what I just found. Ann steps over the pile of boxes blocking the doorway, a small black object in her hand.
- [Yard Sale](https://burningword.com/2024/04/yard-sale/): The barrio adjacent to the state’s only Catholic university held Grandma’s ChaCha yellow house became a hub for elaborate yard sales.
- [The Trio of Kiev](https://burningword.com/2024/04/the-trio-of-kiev/): The concert hall took a direct hit during the first week the city was shelled.
- [The Rise and Fall of Burlington West](https://burningword.com/2024/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-burlington-west/): No one within hearing badmouthed the new town’s two ceramic frogs perched columnar on oxidized blue lily pads outside City Hall like they never did on Crenshaw Pond.
- [Shipwreck](https://burningword.com/2024/04/shipwreck/): This ash-gray mouse asleep in my pocket, this miserable list crumpled in my pocket, this comet rattling around in there, in the cluttered pocket, unable to escape.
- [Secrecies](https://burningword.com/2024/04/secrecies/): After I share my secrets, I’ll remind you to Burn them in a pyre when my body’s ash. Carry my regret, silence in stone. Feel the weight. Deny my mysteries.
- [Marina](https://burningword.com/2024/04/marina/): It is a ritual to bathe the daughter. Baptized, she purifies dirty water, rinsed over long hair that falls out between fingers.
- [Carrion](https://burningword.com/2024/04/carrion/): The boy loves lying in this open field, blinking at the bowl of summer sky.
- [What You Didn’t See Coming](https://burningword.com/2024/04/what-you-didnt-see-coming/): The first time you get the wind knocked out of you, you will be astonished by what seems a fatal wallop— one moment running, the next, bulge-eyed and gaping like a carp tossed in a rowboat.
- [“Not everything’s a poem”](https://burningword.com/2024/04/not-everythings-a-poem/): When she said that, I think she has never tasted how a good Irish whiskey echoes in your mouth after you swallow its heat.
- [A New Term for It](https://burningword.com/2024/04/a-new-term-for-it/): Josef Krebs has a chapbook published by Etched Press and his poetry also appears in 77 issues of 35 different magazines, including Burningword Literary Journal, Tacenda, The Bohemian, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, Free State Review, and DASH Literary Journal.
- [Taco Tuesday](https://burningword.com/2024/04/taco-tuesday/): Lisa sends me this long text grumbling about her husband and how he’s informed her he can’t handle Taco Tuesdays anymore and now she must redo her ENTIRE menu for January because the selfish bastard can’t deal with spicy food, and I’m thinking, damn.
- [V Club](https://burningword.com/2024/04/v-club/): Remember Twiggy, her skeletal body was all the rave. That led us to Form the V Club. Teachers thought we meant Glee club.
- [Everywhere All the Time (with a Line from Ashley Capps)](https://burningword.com/2024/04/everywhere-all-the-time-with-a-line-from-ashley-capps/): I hear a shotgun crack and find mother at the woodpile—she’s shot another rat snake.
- [An entry journal](https://burningword.com/2024/04/an-entry-journal/): Feb or March 17, 1995 As my suitcase orbits away from me, I surprise myself by shouting “our bag.” Unbeknownst to me I have begun talking in plural.
- [From across the Tracks](https://burningword.com/2024/04/from-across-the-tracks/): Up county, here in Mount Kisco, the men from across the tracks wait patiently at the station every weekday morning, not for a train, but a day job, seated on the edge of the sidewalk or against the fence, near where cars enter to drop off or pick up, all expectantly catching the gazes of incoming drivers, signaling silently, Whatever it is you have to do, I can do it for you.
- [The Museum of Future Affairs](https://burningword.com/2024/04/the-museum-of-future-affairs/): To go back is as hard almost as forward. We all got a little silence lodged in our molars some time in middle school, mostly.
- [A grasshopper in tall grass](https://burningword.com/2024/04/a-grasshopper-in-tall-grass/): I. The Buddhas tell us not to think of a heaven, of a hell… This breath comes. That breath goes. Then nothing. II.
- [On Reading Auden to the Ghost of a Lost Limerence](https://burningword.com/2024/04/maxwell-tang/): In the Peabody Library reading room, a ramshackle longing has liberty to roam, While the rhetoric of busybodied reality bustles without and within The center of self-knowing.
- [Featured Author, Mark Crimmins](https://burningword.com/2024/04/workerolick/): There’s a run on peaches. Soon the shelves in Produce are empty. I go down to the basement to get more.
- [Fertility](https://burningword.com/2024/04/fertility/): of intricate doors in the field.
- [What to Wear When Having a Drink with Your Ex](https://burningword.com/2024/04/what-to-wear-when-having-a-drink-with-your-ex/): It has been forty years. he in New York me in San Francisco. erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming and wants to meet for a drink. really?
- [Aidan J Hong](https://burningword.com/2024/04/aidan-j-hong/): Aidan J Hong is a sophomore at Seoul International School in Seongnam, Korea. His passion for arts is geared towards architecture and art history.
- [Jihu Kim](https://burningword.com/2024/04/jihu-kim/): Jihu Kim is a junior at Yongsan International School of Seoul, South Korea. Her art practice began with an interest in art history.
- [Jian Kim](https://burningword.com/2024/04/jian-kim/): Jian Kim is an 11th grader student attending St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju in South Korea.
- [Edie Noesser](https://burningword.com/2024/04/edie-noesser/): Edie Noesser is an artist based in Orange County, California working in the medium of photography.
- [Yeobin Park](https://burningword.com/2024/04/yeobin-park/): Yeobin Park, a BC Collegiate sophomore and Vice-President of BCC Point of View, debuted her film "Unfinished Dream," showcasing her skills in directing, filming, and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve.
- [Nicholas Mayo](https://burningword.com/2024/04/nicholas-mayo/): Nicholas B. Mayo (he/him) is a poet and artist based in Philadelphia, PA.
- [Ian Wells](https://burningword.com/2024/04/ian-wells/): Ian Wells is a graduate researcher at the Washington State University HYPER Lab studying Mechanical Engineering.
- [Martha Nance](https://burningword.com/2024/04/martha-nance-3/): Martha Nance is a physician in Minnesota whose cellphone has a wandering eye, which gets rewarded mostly when she is not in Minnesota.
- [Kathryn Jordan](https://burningword.com/2024/04/kathryn-jordan/): Kathryn holds an English M.A. from UC Berkeley.
- [John M. Blodgett](https://burningword.com/2024/04/john-m-blodgett/): John M. Blodgett is an editor, reporter, and photojournalist based in Southern Maine.
- [Larena Nellies-Ortiz](https://burningword.com/2024/04/larena-nellies-ortiz-3/): Larena Nellies-Ortiz is a freelance photographer from Oakland, California.
- [Teresa Hyoju Chang](https://burningword.com/2024/04/teresa-hyoju-chang/): Teresa Hyoju Chang is a South Korean artist who was born with a love for art, reading, and writing from an early age.
- [Seo Jin Ahn](https://burningword.com/2024/04/seo-jin-ahn-2/): Seojin Ahn Is a Junior attending Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea. His art practice is to create photo-based images.
- [Roger Camp](https://burningword.com/2024/04/roger-camp-2/): Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight, Thames & Hudson, 2002 and Heat, Charta, Milano, 2008.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2024/04/stephen-curtis-wilson-5/): Wilson was a medical-surgical, and generalist photographer, writer, and communication specialist in the health care and library science fields for 36 years - cut steel in a foundry and drove a truck for a time.
- [Steve Zimmerman](https://burningword.com/2024/01/steve-zimmerman/): Steve Zimmerman is a writer and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest.
- [Somewhere in the Midst of Me, a Twig Snapped](https://burningword.com/2024/01/somewhere-in-the-midst-of-me-a-twig-snapped/): I am okay with being monstrous, I know how you view me when I step out with three heads, I know the many ways you think of me.
- [The Albatross of Liquid Despair](https://burningword.com/2024/01/the-albatross-of-liquid-despair/): hovers over your coiffed head, cawing in protest at the abominable stench rising, tears in its eyes, close to regurgitating its hard-sought lunch. Coleridge.
- [Immigrant Sisters at the End of the World](https://burningword.com/2024/01/immigrant-sisters-at-the-end-of-the-world/): highly profitable brothels in Brazil, Argentina and the U.S.
- [Another One About Birds](https://burningword.com/2024/01/another-one-about-birds/): Specifically, the girl falling hard enough from the saddle to clack her teeth. Just under my favorite tree. The man: lean into it. (He does, the tree.)
- [Under the Texan Sun](https://burningword.com/2024/01/under-the-texan-sun/): Bernadette lives in a flat house in West Texas.
- [It’s Ungodly Cold in Kahramanmaraş](https://burningword.com/2024/01/its-ungodly-cold-in-kahramanmaras/): When I google Turkey earthquake photos, I find a man sitting amidst broken concrete slabs, holding the hand of his daughter, her body sandwiched between mattress and pancaked upper floors.
- [Tracey Dean Widelitz](https://burningword.com/2024/01/tracey-dean-widelitz-2/): Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World.
- [A Persistence of Cormorants](https://burningword.com/2024/01/a-persistence-of-cormorants/): I live near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a toxic and fetid tidal estuary from its salted harbor mouth to its abrupt industrial end.
- [Jeremiah A. Gilbert](https://burningword.com/2024/01/jeremiah-a-gilbert/): Jeremiah Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer based out of Southern California.
- [Fabio Sassi](https://burningword.com/2024/01/fabio-sassi-2/): Fabio Sassi makes photos and acrylics using whatever is considered to have no worth by the mainstream.
- [Rebecca Pyle](https://burningword.com/2024/01/rebecca-pyle/): Rebecca Pyle is an artist whose work (drawings, photographs, oil paintings) appears as images in many art/literary journals, including MAYDAY, Watershed Review, TINT, The Moving Force Journal, New England Review, Gris-Gris, West Trestle Review and La Piccioletta Barca.
- [Lucha](https://burningword.com/2024/01/lucha/): I attended a party hosted by one of my university English professors. The party was timid. Everyone in a house full of friendless people.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2024/01/jim-ross-8/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding career in public health research.
- [Faultless Weapons Handling](https://burningword.com/2024/01/faultless-weapons-handling/): ankle-winged Word Thief flutters ~ orbiting The Muse wicker creel on shoulder stealing words off succumbing tongue, from depraved pink lips collecting manifestos, dispatches, commands, lexeme-threads for unborn poems.
- [Cecil Morris](https://burningword.com/2024/01/cecil-morris/): Our daughter Persephone comes and goes. She plays peek-a-boo with Oxycodone and Ambien.
- [The Coat](https://burningword.com/2024/01/the-coat/): She saw the coat.
- [Madrid](https://burningword.com/2024/01/madrid/): Tang of ammonia, the yellow bins outside our apartment. Fetor of urine, cardboard sheets in an abandoned doorway.
- [Savannah](https://burningword.com/2024/01/savannah/): Alicia pulled over at her ex’s house to allow the storm time to pass.
- [Queen’s Gambit](https://burningword.com/2024/01/queens-gambit/): Sweat loosened the bandages covering the welts on Billy’s buttocks as he dribbled up court. The black road colors of his uniform masked the blood stains.
- [We Are the Enablers](https://burningword.com/2024/01/we-are-the-enablers/): Although I’m not particularly fond of violence, I decided to watch the TV miniseries “World without End.” It’s a Medieval butchery, maybe along the lines of “Game of Thrones,” which I haven’t seen.
- [Metaphysical Exam](https://burningword.com/2024/01/metaphysical-exam/): How have your spirits been?
- [Featured Artist, DM Frech](https://burningword.com/2024/01/featured-artist-dm-frech/): DM Frech holds a BFA and MFA in dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
- [Featured Author, Ditta Baron Hoeber](https://burningword.com/2024/01/featured-author-ditta-baron-hoeber/): Coke was taller than most women and moved in a way that somehow provoked anticipation watching her cross a room you wondered if this splendid thing would actually happen to you same with her voice with everything she’d say and I remember that her eyes were grey and Jimmy once Jimmy kissed me I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when Jimmy kissed me his mouth seemed to take me over and afterwards I ran away but stayed kissed all afternoon I saw Coke on the bus wearing a mink jacket one morning and big diamonds looking a handsome late thirties on her second marriage twelve year old child and she says Jimmy’s got his masters degree and his wife’s a nurse and Coke says that Mileage whose black moon face and joke on you laughter used to frighten me has passed away when things get bad enough I start wishing I would die.
- [Jack Bordnick Studio](https://burningword.com/2024/01/jack-bordnick-studio/): Bordnick's interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy.
- [A Death of Logic](https://burningword.com/2024/01/a-death-of-logic/): In another dimension, it is me & not Dostoevsky who claims 2-plus-2 can equal 5.
- [Time Travel Sublet](https://burningword.com/2024/01/time-travel-sublet/): By the time I realized why this sublet was so cheap, it was too late—I was being tortured by the Inquisition.
- [Paternity Test](https://burningword.com/2024/01/paternity-test/): His hair has grown the shock of sunflowers after rain.
- [We Can’t Own These Bodies](https://burningword.com/2024/01/we-cant-own-these-bodies/): That evening you drove us out on the bruised southern beach we lost the hope we’d find the words to match the gold slant of sunlight’s sail across Gulf Coast swells and sand.
- [AudioDreamscape](https://burningword.com/2023/10/audiodreamscape/): There's only so much you can change about yourself.
- [The Empath](https://burningword.com/2023/10/the-empath/): that draws me in—the beetle to the Corpse Flower.
- [Weird in a Normal World](https://burningword.com/2023/10/weird-in-a-normal-world/): The table is long, filled with empty plates, glasses, and a steaming pitcher of coffee.
- [Seeing Stars](https://burningword.com/2023/10/seeing-stars/): hides glasses of whiskey in the drawers of her vanity table.
- [Outside their Circle](https://burningword.com/2023/10/outside-their-circle/): They finished each other’s sentences about the differences between ’56 and ’57 Chevies, how they rebuilt transmissions, how the Hurst shifters needed a hole drilled in the floorboard, as I sat in the back seat hearing tales of another country.
- [Behind the Garden Wall](https://burningword.com/2023/10/behind-the-garden-wall/): A cracked skull the constables told me, must have happened when I hit the flagstone walkway. And the bruises, obviously caused by my convulsions.
- [Holly Willis](https://burningword.com/2023/10/holly-willis/): Holly Willis is a hybrid artist/theorist working primarily in film, video, and still photography.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2023/10/jim-ross-7/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Only real bitches play bingo.](https://burningword.com/2023/10/only-real-bitches-play-bingo/): glitter pen in fuschia.
- [The Everything Life](https://burningword.com/2023/10/the-everything-life/): It was after a single glass of Gruner that I decided to throw it all away. I opened the “everything drawer” in my kitchen.
- [Prison of Thought](https://burningword.com/2023/10/prison-of-thought/): disorder without rhyme or reason.
- [Lawrence Bridges](https://burningword.com/2023/10/lawrence-bridges-4/): Lawrence Bridges is best known for work in the film and literary world.
- [Pahadisoul](https://burningword.com/2023/10/pahadisoul/): Pahadisoul (Akshita Sharma) is a gifted cinematographer and photographer based in the vibrant city of Mumbai.
- [The Twilight Zone](https://burningword.com/2023/10/the-twilight-zone/): begins with dissonant strains of the national anthem, further distorted by the rink’s poor acoustics, accompanying the humming exit of the Zamboni machine.
- [The Orchard](https://burningword.com/2023/10/the-orchard/): My father hated coyotes, implicated them in every “missing pet” poster we passed. I didn’t understand, not really, until they took my dog.
- [Moon Child](https://burningword.com/2023/10/moon-child/): on freeze-dried eggs.
- [Helen Geld](https://burningword.com/2023/10/helen-geld/): Helen Geld, a former graphic designer, now focuses on the creative process of photography and art.
- [The Goats](https://burningword.com/2023/10/the-goats/): Even before the car turned into their driveway, Wilma and Edgar could see they had visitors.
- [Mission Report: El Eclipse de la Grande](https://burningword.com/2023/10/mission-report-el-eclipse-de-la-grande/): La Manzanilla, Jalisco, Mexico, Thursday, July 11, 1991 10:50 am I am writing in a thatched hut a half mile down the beach from the village.
- [A Romance to Night](https://burningword.com/2023/10/a-romance-to-night/): In the crisp death of summer, a cat falls from a broken branch. The moon sings, amused by paw half-crushed under the stares of a passing car.
- [Stanley Horowitz](https://burningword.com/2023/10/stanley-horowitz-2/): Stanley Horowitz's work was exhibited in the 2008 Heckscher Museum Biennial show on Long Island.
- [Girl #4](https://burningword.com/2023/10/girl-4/): Back there, someone crowned me. Yes, me! — Where do you think I got these carnations?
- [Lila Byrne](https://burningword.com/2023/10/lila-byrne/): Lila Byrne’s passion for art began as early as she could hold a pencil.
- [Heat](https://burningword.com/2023/10/heat/): I once was the hot new thing. You too? The new kid who stirred the id. I had some cheek; the classroom and rehearsal hall were my geek.
- [Migration](https://burningword.com/2023/10/migration/): James has published work in Box, Hole In The Head Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, Cream City Review, Wildroof Journal, and Raw Art Review.
- [Mark Anthony Burke](https://burningword.com/2023/10/mark-anthony-burke/): Hooked on the two-four sorcery, bass and drum, dances at St.
- [Leslie Brown](https://burningword.com/2023/10/leslie-brown/): Leslie Brown has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her digital work appeared on the cover of Zoetic Press, “NBR: World Tour,” and Variety Pact Art (Winter 2023/24).
- [When Haven’t I](https://burningword.com/2023/10/when-havent-i/): The first human cremains I should have seen? What kind of question is that? I have an answer -- my mom’s.
- [Dragonfly Puzzle Box](https://burningword.com/2023/10/dragonfly-puzzle-box/): I. Honeyed mystery of mahogany, oak, walnut, teak, Fall’s tawny offerings sanded into curves, smooth invitation to touch, like the sun-warmed thigh & rising hip of that sunbaked young woman you once were, drowsing on a black sand beach in Santorini, water beading on your belly.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2023/10/stephen-curtis-wilson-4/): Photographs by Stephen Curtis Wilson In late 2020, Wilson was contacted by a family member of Reid Larson, owner of Reid’s Mobil Service Center in Edwards, IL.
- [Seo Jin Ahn](https://burningword.com/2023/10/seo-jin-ahn/): Seo Jin Ahn is a sophomore attending Chadwick International School in Songdo, Incheon, South Korea.
- [Featured Author, Michael Loyd Gray](https://burningword.com/2023/10/featured-author-michael-loyd-gray/): I woke up to Janis Joplin’s whiskey raw voice on the radio. Shiner abruptly turned us south toward Baton Rouge, tapping his hands on the steering wheel.
- [Goodnight Apostrophe](https://burningword.com/2023/10/goodnight-apostrophe/): with the deference of a widow’s walk.
- [The Nature and Psyche Project](https://burningword.com/2023/07/the-nature-and-psyche-project/): Emily Candler Davis' Opus, The Nature and Psyche Project, is a visual storytelling endeavor from Acadia National Park, a little heart-shaped island off of the coast of the United States.
- [Luck with an F](https://burningword.com/2025/01/luck-with-an-f/): When my children ask me who won the world, fear grabs all 78 places American women used to think of as autonomous.
- [Minseo Jung](https://burningword.com/2025/01/minseo-jung/): Minseo Jung is a junior at Seoul Scholars International Art and Design, and her work primarily focuses on identity and the exploration of self.
- [Night Drive](https://burningword.com/2025/01/night-drive/): Steam rises in swirls, wisps, moves like a candle snuffed out, then smoke curling.
- [The Darkness White](https://burningword.com/2025/01/the-darkness-white/): Alexi’s father was the family's artistic soul, and his legacy influences Alexi's appreciation for abstract art.
- [Kristin Lueke](https://burningword.com/2025/01/kristin-lueke/): each plant i’ve kept alive so far i call my friend.
- [Julien Griswold](https://burningword.com/2025/01/julien-griswold/): To Julie, once, Julie, now, Julien, forever, my heart.
- [The Light Was Never Ours](https://burningword.com/2025/01/the-light-was-never-ours/): On the bank of the Seine in the heath and heart of the sun’s playground— that's where we lay.
- [On Death](https://burningword.com/2025/01/on-death/): I was born almost dead, the cord wrapped around my throat.
- [Espadrilles](https://burningword.com/2025/01/espadrilles/): In the Guadalajara market, I bought a pair of straw espadrilles. When they fell apart months later, I realized the soles were made out of car tires.
- [Nesting](https://burningword.com/2025/01/nesting/): There is something very large building a nest in the parkway by the house I grew up in. The house where my father still lives. He takes walks in this parkway.
- [Comedown in a Club Bathroom](https://burningword.com/2025/01/comedown-in-a-club-bathroom/): The boy’s feet are bound to the floor, body held before a mirror. Cold lake, the glass spinning his near-naked body into fable, or cautionary tale.
- [Chronoscope 262:  March like thaw water](https://burningword.com/2025/01/chronoscope-262-march-like-thaw-water/): Sun again: that geode cold light that briefly splits the granite sky: storms there: storms there: darker because of this temporary brightness.
- [Sastry Karra](https://burningword.com/2025/01/sastry-karra/): Jaganadha “Sastry” Karra, originally from India, moved at 24. He has worked in IT for 27 years and has lived in Delaware since 2024.
- [Airport Prayer](https://burningword.com/2025/01/airport-prayer/): If I count the times I cried today, I would need more than two hands— an 81 year old passes through security and tells me her mother just stopped driving yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter hands me my coffee and says Here, baby; and when we are lining up at the gate by letter and number and I don't know where to go, a woman tells me conspiratorially that I should just go behind her.
- [Taegyoung Shon](https://burningword.com/2025/01/taegyoung-shon/): Taegyoung Shon is a Junior attending BC Collegiate in Korea. She won several awards at elementary school science imagination competitions.
- [Dinner parties](https://burningword.com/2025/01/dinner-parties/): She lived to host dinner parties. It was a need, a compulsion, to fulfill it she would look for the most absurd reasons.
- [Interview](https://burningword.com/2025/01/interview/): It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine… Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2025/01/jean-wolff-4/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [Local Boys](https://burningword.com/2025/01/local-boys/): In brown and grey demob suits, stoked up well with Woodbines, the three of them, from the same regiment, were thrown up cheek-by-hip on the platform: Tim, Spence, the younger David.
- [Unbidden Image](https://burningword.com/2025/01/unbidden-image/): I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our living room like uninvited guests at a party waiting with my wife in case her heart attack arrives before the ambulance does, each man scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might burst from a bookcase, can’t unsee them monitoring the way she probes her neck and shoulder and jaw for a sign of the fuses a coronary lights in a woman’s body, the young one unpacking the defibrillator, flattening the blue patches that attach to the chest.
- [José Being Himself](https://burningword.com/2025/01/jose-being-himself/): When I entered the parking, there was a problem.
- [How to Touch the Dead](https://burningword.com/2025/01/how-to-touch-the-dead/): Joy Kreves is a visual artist/poet with an M.S. in Painting and a B.S. in art education from Illinois State University.
- [needle blight](https://burningword.com/2025/01/needle-blight/): it is human nature to want to build something substantial and wonder why our bridges fall like fever.
- [Spencer Jones Ate the Last Dodo](https://burningword.com/2025/01/spencer-jones-ate-the-last-dodo/): CNN: American reality show contestant kills, eats protected bird in New Zealand Clad in their best, their most expensive, Lululemon, Nike, P.E.
- [Yeobin Park](https://burningword.com/2025/01/yeobin-park-2/): Yeobin Park is a junior at BC Collegiate. She is the founder of Point of View Productions, her school’s first film club.
- [Lost Places](https://burningword.com/2025/01/lost-places/): There were orchards here once and creeks that ran all the way to July.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2025/01/stephen-curtis-wilson-7/): Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime.
- [C.S.I.](https://burningword.com/2025/01/csi/): Mildred has a gash on her forehead where the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone.
- [Linda K. Allison](https://burningword.com/2025/01/linda-k-allison-2/): After forty years in finance, Linda K. Allison is having the time of her life writing, photographing, and exploring this amazing world.
- [Hyungjun Chin](https://burningword.com/2025/01/hyungjun-chin/): Hyungjun Chin is a Sophomore at Cornerstone Collegiate Academy in Seoul, Korea.
- [Suspended in air](https://burningword.com/2025/01/suspended-in-air/): At home, we are preparing to paint the living room walls pale yellow. Its summer. The heat is oppressive. There are cobwebs in every corner of the walls.
- [Ron Riekki](https://burningword.com/2025/01/ron-riekki/): and he’s never read any of my poems, ever, doesn’t even know my name, asks me, “So, what’s your name?” as if this is a thoughtful question, and I wonder how much research he’d have had to do to find out my name, especially when we’ve already exchanged multiple emails, and he says, “So, what are you?
- [Vaporub](https://burningword.com/2024/10/vaporub/): 1900's high tech vocabulary comes to mind.
- [The Brasserie](https://burningword.com/2024/10/the-brasserie/): Today’s sky is a weak imitation of blue.
- [Ignatius O'Neill Sridhar](https://burningword.com/2024/10/ignatius-oneill-sridhar/): Based in Toronto, Ignatius Sridhar is an emerging artist and photographer. His work focuses on the digital arts in street photography and landscapes.
- [Lounging at Wilton Manors](https://burningword.com/2024/10/lounging-at-wilton-manors/): Hook mouthed; a cadaver turns to kiss me— Danny—adrift through skin, grabs my filament of fishing line, pulling back to bloom.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2024/10/stephen-curtis-wilson-6/): Wilson was a medical-surgical and generalist photographer, writer, and communication specialist in the health care and library science fields for 36 years - cut steel in a foundry and drove a truck for a time.
- [Pam F. Martin](https://burningword.com/2024/10/pam-f-martin/): Pam Martin is a retired therapist who enjoys reading, writing, photography, and walking in the woods with Papi, the elderly rescue chihuahua.
- [Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2024/10/michael-hower-4/): When Michael Hower began digital photography over ten years ago, it was founded upon a fascination with abandoned buildings and landscapes.
- [Aiden Kwon](https://burningword.com/2024/10/aiden-kwon/): Aiden Kwon is a sophomore at Yongsan International School of Seoul. Aiden is a student who believes creativity is the key to life.
- [Alice](https://burningword.com/2024/10/alice/): Alice Chu lives in Chongqing and she attends classes online loves hotpots and her friends never submits work on time can’t follow essay instructions but she speaks perfect English and writes crystalline sentences a potential poet or a novelist but her father has other plans One day Alice logs into class splotchy bruises on her arms a heavy cast around her ankle every part of her looks broken but Alice Chu is still smiling her dad shoved down the stairs for a C plus grade on her essay Who do you call when the abused live on other continents?
- [Kathryn Jordan](https://burningword.com/2024/10/kathryn-jordan-2/): Award-winning poet Kathryn Jordan loves to take pictures when she's not sure she can find the words.
- [Ann Weil](https://burningword.com/2024/10/ann-weil/): No to the limoncello, liquid sunshine in hand-painted glass bottles. No to the porcelain-handled pizza cutters poised to slice a pie.
- [untethered](https://burningword.com/2024/10/untethered/): Lucinda Trew lives and writes in North Carolina with her jazz musician husband, two dogs, one cat, and far too many (or never enough?) books to count.
- [Tell Me, Tall Man](https://burningword.com/2024/10/tell-me-tall-man/): I was in line at a fast-food restaurant with which you are familiar, standing behind a software engineer who, like all software engineers, had a touch of the -tisms.
- [Retcon](https://burningword.com/2024/10/retcon/): The day as white as snow reversed The gash in the boy’s chin-flesh reknit The starling sucks its song back into its head The fire net door quiets to static nothing The moth rises from dust toward the turncoat beacon A spark flies away Alto notes return to brass the bell replaced in its glass And the phone calling from the next room cuts out Like a false alarm the clock windmills counterclockwise Days grow long Father walks through the door with his back turned In every direction the family waits for him to come home.
- [Chatterbox](https://burningword.com/2024/10/chatterbox/): Bells clanging clang clang, crunching rocks underneath these feet, chirping birds chirping crickets, silence masks its own noise, a white noise, hostile eggshell cream colored-noise There are so many subjects that are Difficult to talk about.
- [When Was Takes Over Your Life](https://burningword.com/2024/10/when-was-takes-over-your-life/): You mourn yesterday’s bare branches when not a single cherry blossom was on them. The silent neighbor who takes slow walks, where is he?
- [Claire Scott](https://burningword.com/2024/10/claire-scott-3/): The score 983 to 735 he’s quite a bit ahead (as you can see) 46 points for washing my car 52 for buying me flowers minus 10 because slightly wilted I lost 66 points when I called him fuck face after he watched four hours of women’s beach volleyball, focused on barely-there bikinis and 358 when I dropped our tax return in the toilet but wait, just in 579 points for fixing his phlegmatic computer saving us a small fortune I gloat and glee around the room eternally grateful to You Tube the god of Fixing All Things I love this game but the score suddenly shifts I lose 937 points for flouncing & swaggering I collapse on the sofa & swig straight gin (lose 88 more points) who cares stupid ledger stupid game My husband is cutting an onion with a spoon, an almost impossible task.
- [Granted](https://burningword.com/2024/10/granted/): My wife sends a text: I love you. I’m sorry I take you for granted. I text: Where are you? Her text: Doctor’s office. Fear. I call. She answers.
- [Promise I Make Myself](https://burningword.com/2024/10/promise-i-make-myself/): When I turn 70, I am embracing vices like a newly-discovered, long-lost twin, like an adolescent puppy love, vices I avoided all my life out of fear, abundant caution and good common sense.
- [Yewon Han](https://burningword.com/2024/10/yewon-han/): Yewon Han, a Senior at Dulwich College Seoul, is fascinated by surrealism and philosophy in art. She experiments with form, texture, and color in mixed media.
- [Featured Artist: Stevie Rosenfeld](https://burningword.com/2024/10/featured-artist-stevie-rosenfeld/): Stevie has always been fascinated by nature, finding beauty in its intricacies, resilience, vulnerability, and anthropomorphic tendencies.
- [Bordnick Studio](https://burningword.com/2024/10/bordnick-studio/): Bordnick's interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy.
- [GJ Gillespie](https://burningword.com/2024/10/gj-gillespie/): GJ Gillespie is a collage artist living in a 1928 farmhouse overlooking Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, WA.
- [Horizontal Snow](https://burningword.com/2024/10/horizontal-snow/): Mesmerizing horizontal snow on Halloween, a weather record for Chicago accumulation-- Chicagoans are unpredictable, too, when they observe Halloween, putting on masks when they sit in bars dressed in orange and black, sip Betteljuice Cocktails, tout toy lasar guns like children dressed as action heroes, Hasbro Avenger Marvel Titans with lightning bolts across their chests, strut in the costume competition that doesn’t win the prize in the school parade.
- [The Copenhagen Interpretation](https://burningword.com/2024/10/the-copenhagen-interpretation/): (for the cashier at Brookline Booksmith who told me Carlo Rovelli was the best author in the whole bookstore, which felt like a stretch although I liked the book.)
- [A Brief and Personal Litany of Blackbirds](https://burningword.com/2024/10/a-brief-and-personal-litany-of-blackbirds/): A single gleaming crow feather rises up in a tiny Danish vase on my mantle. It is there to remind me.
- [Time Machine](https://burningword.com/2024/10/time-machine/): It doesn’t track or alter time, and it’s not a machine. It has no moving parts.
- [Gula, Gluttony](https://burningword.com/2024/10/gula-gluttony/): In response to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.
- [Meditating at the Mental Institution: A Beginner's Guide for Patient 89](https://burningword.com/2024/10/meditating-at-the-mental-institution-a-beginners-guide-for-patient-89/): The thing about meditating with other mental patients is that they are mental patients. Yeah, you're a patient too, but I get it, they're annoying.
- [Ukraine](https://burningword.com/2024/10/ukraine/): Bombed apartments lie open, windows shattered, spears of jagged glass, broken teeth biting into vacancy.
- [Featured Author: John L. Stanizzi](https://burningword.com/2024/10/featured-author-john-l-stanizzi/): in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.
- [Because the Night](https://burningword.com/2024/10/because-the-night/): That was when Paul McCartney sang Venus and Mars are all right tonight, and we yelled, “Wings suck!” and punched chrome buttons to change the station on the Dodge Dart’s radio.
- [Decorum](https://burningword.com/2024/10/decorum/): I take in a terrific piano concert: classic ragtime, boogie-woogie, rhumba-boogie from New Orleans, a couple of blues numbers. Professor Longhair tribute.
- [Pillow Talk](https://burningword.com/2024/10/pillow-talk/): We just had sex. But I wasn't thinking of you. When you pulled me to your chest, your head resting on my hair, I was thinking of my old physics professor.
- [Ernst Perdriel](https://burningword.com/2024/07/ernst-perdriel/): Ernst Perdriel is a multi-field artist (visual art, photography, writing), designer, and horticulturist based in Cowansville (Quebec, Canada).
- [Ellen June Wright](https://burningword.com/2024/07/ellen-june-wright/): Ellen June Wright lives in New Jersey. Her work revolves around the power of color and the emotions and memories they evoke.
- [Questions for Dead People](https://burningword.com/2024/07/questions-for-dead-people/): when moonlight bathes the cold marble of your headstone, do you cling to the echoes of old laughter? what burdens sleep in the final exhale?
- [Holly Willis](https://burningword.com/2024/07/holly-willis-2/): Holly Willis uses text and image to wonder how we might reimagine our relationship to the world, not as autonomous beings moving through isolated landscapes but as embodied forces intimately enmeshed with the matter around us.
- [Tripping](https://burningword.com/2024/07/tripping/): The blond man in front of her is too tall. European of course, Dutch perhaps. It’s claimed the Dutch are the tallest people in the world.
- [How We Die in the Midwest](https://burningword.com/2024/07/how-we-die-in-the-midwest/): Claudia was done. She told her husband of twenty years, her three boys, and pet hedgehog Igloo that she was going to take a nap.
- [Midair Collision](https://burningword.com/2024/07/midair-collision/): That day at the airport on the way to my hometown best friend’s funeral, when you couldn’t keep the newsfeed of the fiery midair collision out of your phone, even as you waited to board.
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2024/07/dave-sims-5/): Dave Sims makes art and music in the old mountains of central Pennsylvania.
- [Not Required for Class](https://burningword.com/2024/07/not-required-for-class/): I will miss school, not because of the parties, but because it’s a Thursday morning in this freezing lecture hall with a big bag of balls, in a hundred different colors, and we’re grabbing a bunch of them, and putting them back, which is all fine and dandy but what’s the chance—think about it—that you draw exactly a hundred balls, and they're exactly a hundred different colors, which is to say that everything—just everything—about the balls are different, and it's definitely not required for class, but after frantic scribbling, he says, the probability is nine-point-three-times-ten—and then he runs out of space, so he squiggles, alludes in the last bit off to the side—to-the-power-of-minus-forty-three, which is—which is!—hands flailing for meaning now, scrambling up right beside me—the chance that—and here he’s out in a sprint to the wall—the chance that if I continue running—and we all want him to—I’ll come out on the other side.
- [Salon](https://burningword.com/2024/07/salon/): Both of us were small, though she, compliant, soft as white bread, spent two years in Beginner Swim for fear of ducking under water.
- [Michael C. Roberts](https://burningword.com/2024/07/michael-c-roberts/): Michael C. Roberts is a licensed clinical psychologist who has published professional and scientific articles, chapters, and books.
- [mnemonixART](https://burningword.com/2024/07/mnemonixart/): Velibor Baco, also known as mnemonixART, is an artist from Austria who works in various mediums.
- [We Always Break Up Near Water](https://burningword.com/2024/07/we-always-break-up-near-water/): We sit on the banks of the river on the last day of summer.
- [Lesser Dimensions](https://burningword.com/2024/07/lesser-dimensions/): He did not say you were a crash survivor Only that you postponed Death In an era between Earth seconds On a planet where Hold-onto things Shatter And re-form, like something less human More nimble While the candy-store gangsters And digital priests Tell us otherwise And so on, etc., When we returned in our sharp suits We shed them, our hot bodies tattooed, dotted, like code, Our old robes stained and dismissed, lost to lovingly find gold and fight the fire, your pockets were bulging, my son and dry leaves in the wind outside a distance palace are twitching or would you call it dancing?
- [Edie Noesser](https://burningword.com/2024/07/edie-noesser-2/): Edie Noesser lives on Balboa Island, California. She is interested in nature, bird watching, and urban scenes, bringing her camera along as much as possible.
- [The Mother Between Us](https://burningword.com/2024/07/the-mother-between-us/): Grandpa would say go outside I can’t hear myself think and if the air was clear and bright the mother between us said run, let your lungs gobble that good air, get your Vitamin D, and sometimes the air was thick with low-lying fog by the river, and the mother was shrouded, warning of slippery rocks, stray dogs, of Mr.
- [The Doctor’s Office](https://burningword.com/2024/07/the-doctors-office/): There is nothing more that we can do. His mouth closed firmly like a window sash. His face composed like laid brick. Her every nerve thrumming.
- [Kathy McConnell](https://burningword.com/2024/07/kathy-mcconnell-2/): Kathy McConnell is an award-winning photographer who teaches cell phone photography and writing at Walla Walla Community College in Walla Walla, Washington.
- [Courtney Hitson](https://burningword.com/2024/07/courtney-hitson/): A sailboat and its white hull floating on the water like a grimace or lopsided moon.
- [Bob Haynes](https://burningword.com/2024/07/bob-haynes/): For example, when you take a funhouse seriously, you’ll want mirrors to keep the world inside the glass from falling out like a labryinth into the future or the past for all to see—the ceiling, the floor, the plywood with splinters spliced into planks that join the festival moon with its halo of haze— you’ll eventually want to stroll through the mirrors and meet the clowns unicycling along sawdust paths and juggling seltzer bottles and bowling pins.
- [The Black Sea](https://burningword.com/2024/07/the-black-sea/): Eagles changed their migration routes across Ukraine to avoid fighting and because their habitats were likely damaged or destroyed by war, say scientists.
- [Madonna With Potatoes](https://burningword.com/2024/07/madonna-with-potatoes/): Shutta Crum is the recipient of 8 Royal Palm Literary Awards (FL) including for When You Get Here (gold).
- [What I Found Today](https://burningword.com/2024/07/what-i-found-today/): Even since my mother-in-law died last year and we had to clean out her cottage at Nottingham Village retirement center, I have been trying to get rid of things.
- [Dogwood//Anthrocrose](https://burningword.com/2024/07/dogwood-anthrocrose/): Speak for yourself. Bet on your own naked wanting, which is also a losing dog. Who are you to say I ever lived a half-life? Like copacetic isotopes of love.
- [Strawberry Asylum](https://burningword.com/2024/07/strawberry-asylum/): In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water, primed for our prime like an irreducible number.
- [Matthew James Friday](https://burningword.com/2024/07/matthew-james-friday/): Three boys squat in the Book Corner looking down at the open heart of history. One boy exclaims: I wish I was on the Titanic.
- [My kid won’t go to school](https://burningword.com/2024/07/my-kid-wont-go-to-school/): My kid won’t go to school anymore. Morning finds her buried in her sleep, her father at her door pleading.
- [The Guardians of an Immense Canal](https://burningword.com/2024/07/the-guardians-of-an-immense-canal/): In the far away, newer, and still shifting western frontiers, there once was a watchman uniformed in olive green who looked over a border, an imaginary one some argued, since a natural delineation this border was not, but instead had been drawn by humans through migration, invasion, occupation, relocation, warfare, purchases, and treaties; now this line manifested itself as a rusty and porous chain-link fence adorned on top with tetanus inducing garland.
- [Featured Author, Patrick T. Reardon](https://burningword.com/2024/07/featured-author-patrick-t-reardon/): Toast with choice wine the elect.
- [On the Fourth of July](https://burningword.com/2024/07/on-the-fourth-of-july/): the fireworks are cracking open the air and I’ve had just about enough of America after serving people hot dogs all day and watching people eat them on TV so I march into the woods into the mud into the pond into my salamander skin.
- [Featured Artist, Philip Arnold](https://burningword.com/2024/07/featured-author-philip-arnold/): Using black & white 120 film, Philip Arnold’s photographs explore lo-fidelity atmospheres often suggestive of memory and daydreams.
- [The Mothers](https://burningword.com/2024/07/the-mothers/): I notice the mothers as my four-year-old son and I harvest garlic.
- [The Dao of Collage](https://burningword.com/2024/04/the-dao-of-collage/): Clear a space for yourself. This includes time. No thinking, no ideas, no answers, no logic, no reasons. Stand against productivity.
- [Omphalos; or, Inside the Circuit Board](https://burningword.com/2024/04/omphalos-or-inside-the-circuit-board/): Humming like a subterranean network sized computer is a fear that if I ever meet my creator, They will not resemble me – only appear as an abstract painting, less resolution than myself and I will look at Them, and They, unthinkingly will stare through me and, I will find myself to be the one more alive.
- [DM Frech, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2026/01/dm-frech-featured-artist/): DM Frech has a BFA and an MFA in dance from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is a member of The Muse, Poetry Society of VA, The Writers Guild of Virginia, James River Writers, KPC Writers, Virginia Writers, and so on.
- [Cindy Wheeler, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2026/01/cindy-wheeler/): It was, for the first twenty-four an anvil. No, a dozen anvils pressing me into the hotel bed.
- [Holly Redell Witte](https://burningword.com/2026/01/holly-redell-witte/): Phoebe sneezed and smelled bacon. “What is this?” Nobody else was home and hadn’t been for four days so it couldn’t be a lingering smell. It was distinct.
- [Holly Willis](https://burningword.com/2026/01/holly-willis-3/): Holly Willis is a writer and photographer who moves between Maine and California, exploring landscape, color, movement, and material, using both old, analog technologies as well as new digital tools.
- [Myfanwy Williams](https://burningword.com/2025/10/myfanwy-williams/): I. A woman carries her uterus in a plastic grocery bag floating in formaldehyde, stoppered in a bell jar: inside her, the void sewn tight to stop her organs from migrating, where the blue whales churning in that black hole of hunger have ceased singing and the holy land infants wade, voiceless nouns into an empty red sea: she carries.
- [VA Wiswell](https://burningword.com/2025/10/va-wiswell/): VA lives outside Seattle, WA, with her human and animal family.
- [Frederick Wilbur](https://burningword.com/2025/10/frederick-wilbur/): Before that late hour of blue cheese and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine, she asks me questions I cannot answer simply: forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2025/10/stephen-curtis-wilson-10/): Wilson is a designer and photographer.
- [JL Smith](https://burningword.com/2025/10/jl-smith/): Since visiting Hiroshima, Smith has been reflecting on power: what overpowers, what empowers us to rebuild, and the ruptures that continue across generations following cruelty.
- [Jim Tilley](https://burningword.com/2025/10/jim-tilley/): Light falling against a solid, upright object casts a shadow, the sun setting behind mountains putting the valley fully in shade, no doubt.
- [Sarp Sozdinler](https://burningword.com/2025/10/sarp-sozdinler/): When we were little, my half-brother named all his pets after different animals, which our mom initially thought was a vocabulary issue.
- [Carlin Steere](https://burningword.com/2025/10/carlin-steere/): Dear Elsie, I know it’s been a while since we last connected.
- [Hannah Voteur](https://burningword.com/2025/10/hannah-voteur/): Hannah (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor currently working in publishing in NYC as an operations associate.
- [P. J. Szemanczky](https://burningword.com/2025/10/p-j-szemanczky/): Dying swamp trees are irregularly spaced by lynx’s cry answered indifferently well, resigning itself to a natural Providence: self-satisfied.
- [Sayantani Roy](https://burningword.com/2025/10/sayantani-roy/): Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her photography and haiga appear in Rappahannock Review and Contemporary Haibun Online.
- [Shyla Shehan](https://burningword.com/2025/10/shyla-shehan/): from Earth 1.5 inches each year I know someday this will all be over. The churning of the tide will soften as her reliable waxing and waning disappears.
- [Meggie Royer](https://burningword.com/2025/10/meggie-royer/): Veronica opened the paper bag of tomatoes, inhaling their earthy scent. Big Rainbow, Early Girl, Jubilee. Her favorite, heirlooms, were stacked at the bottom.
- [Michelle Morouse](https://burningword.com/2025/10/michelle-morouse/): Dr. G. laughed when colleagues refused to sleep in call room 403. The 4 East wing of St. Mary’s once housed pediatrics, then orthopedics, then maternity.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2025/10/jim-ross-11/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Kaitlyn Owens](https://burningword.com/2025/10/kaitlyn-owens/): I wish I didn’t cry at creeping vines forming on bungalows, at bus station lost and found receipts and forgotten gloves.
- [Alice Lowe](https://burningword.com/2025/10/alice-lowe/): Take politicians, for example.
- [Mary Ann McGuigan](https://burningword.com/2025/10/mary-ann-mcguigan/): In costly New York hotel rooms paid for by clients who expect me at their conference tables at eight a.m.
- [Miranda Morgan](https://burningword.com/2025/10/miranda-morgan/): Eight of us sit in Sunset Plaza, sipping our lackluster decaf Americanos a little too slowly, savoring our last few moments outside The Center.
- [Karen Kilcup, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2025/10/karen-kilcup-featured-author/): My father pushes a red mower with swirling blades he sharpens first, scraping a black stone over every spiral edge.
- [MFC Feeley](https://burningword.com/2025/10/mfc-feeley/): Long crooked stem, blunt thorns, deep red, tight center, black ridging outer petals that curled back—I forget how I acquired the rose.
- [Don Farrell](https://burningword.com/2025/10/don-farrell/): to a mother and her baby raccoons.
- [Pete Follansbee](https://burningword.com/2025/10/pete-follansbee/): I could never trust an Uber or a Lyft, and I have my own car anyhow.
- [Nicholas Haines](https://burningword.com/2025/10/nicholas-haines/): Not in any particular direction. But somehow in concert with the other furniture.
- [Deron Eckert](https://burningword.com/2025/10/deron-eckert/): The first cool dawn following the unwavering humidity Kentucky summers are known for, a layer of mist containing upwards of a century of morning dew rises eye level from the farm, like fallen soldiers discharging their specters all at the same time to face this particular day long past the echoes of each shot they never heard from their neighbors who planted them down here in this field, as if the dead were waiting for appropriate weather conditions to properly chill the living to the bone, but driving in my car, windows up, heat half on, could safely say I feel as warm as the day before if not for the fact my arms are goose pimpled just from looking out the driver’s side window, wondering if I stood out there in the thick of it— if I could even bring myself to step out of my car and march forward into the mist—would I hear a soldier cry for help or my dog yelp or Nana whisper something blood-curdling, along the lines of why did you let me go?
- [Wes Civilz](https://burningword.com/2025/10/wes-civilz/): Each line a soft and velvet shelf upon Which every syllable’s a gem.
- [Paula Burke](https://burningword.com/2025/10/paula-burke/): “Selfish!” he spat towards me as I stood to leave. “Huh, I wonder where I learned that?” Holy crap, I think to myself. Where did that come from?
- [Benjamin Erlandson, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2025/10/benjamin-erlandson-featured-artist/): Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and stewardship across the biosphere, an outsider scholar following dynamic inquiry to defy disciplines, practicing systems wisdom.
- [Eileen Vorbach Collins](https://burningword.com/2025/10/eileen-vorbach-collins/): The cat will sit on my desk and help me write stories about love. About loss.
- [J.M. Emery](https://burningword.com/2025/07/j-m-emery/): Like an octopus crowning itself with mollusks you took pains to hide your beauty.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2025/07/jean-wolff-5/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [Rome Smaoui](https://burningword.com/2025/07/rome-smaoui/): Our mothers die quickly. When we grieve, time rushes out of us like old light. They lowered the body into the black end of the ground.
- [Jessie Wingate](https://burningword.com/2025/07/jessie-wingate/): Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light waves toward my flat black pupil a record shuffling the same few songs. Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2025/07/stephen-curtis-wilson-9/): Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime.
- [VA Smith](https://burningword.com/2025/07/va-smith/): It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude.
- [Dylan Willoughby](https://burningword.com/2025/07/dylan-willoughby/): Dylan Willoughby’s photography has appeared in On the Seawall (10-photograph feature), Wrongdoing, Rejection Letters, and many other venues.
- [Lucinda Trew](https://burningword.com/2025/07/lucinda-trew/): Lucinda Trew is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and recipient of Boulevard Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest for Emerging Poets.
- [Lisa Lopez Smith](https://burningword.com/2025/07/lisa-lopez-smith/): untethered from my daydreams my husband says ¿Que te pasa? ¿Por que tanto suspiro?
- [Dana Stamps, II](https://burningword.com/2025/07/dana-stamps-ii/): Trimming a bonsai tree is probably better entertainment.
- [Thomas Vogt](https://burningword.com/2025/07/thomas-vogt/): Thomas Vogt is an aspiring poet, photographer, and city planner in Sacramento, California.
- [Dave Sims](https://burningword.com/2025/07/dave-sims-6/): After decades of teaching writing and literature, Dave Sims now makes art and music in the mountains of central Pennsylvania.
- [Susan Shea](https://burningword.com/2025/07/susan-shea/): Susan Shea is a retired school psychologist who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in a forest in Pennsylvania.
- [Juan Pablo Mobili](https://burningword.com/2025/07/juan-pablo-mobili/): Although mindful to remember but unwilling to commemorate, during our nation’s holidays, during grade school, I carried our flag, hoping it would end my parents’ wars.
- [Arthur Pitchenik](https://burningword.com/2025/07/arthur-pitchenik/): I was frantically seeking asylum in a land renowned for kind-hearted Giants but found horror instead.
- [Timothy L. Rodriguez](https://burningword.com/2025/07/timothy-l-rodriguez/): We walk where the blade talks high wire of a divide between schemes of dreams and the certain verdict in the capital trial called living All walks punish with wishes We wander dead ground a travail through felled trees of knowledge The hee in the irony of haw is we knew all sides of the effects but still stayed the course Profits issue the orders to disavow how this foul and noxious handiwork can level if not erase our collective sense.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2025/07/jim-ross-10/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Joseph Landi](https://burningword.com/2025/07/joseph-landi/): We found them rolled together in a sack, soaked by runoff at the bottom of a grass embankment. Tossed from a car, no doubt.
- [Bethany Jarmul](https://burningword.com/2025/07/bethany-jarmul/): Separated by doors, windows, walls— swallowed by digital throats, settled into a stomach where I collected friends and hearts like stamps.
- [Zoé Mahfouz](https://burningword.com/2025/07/zoe-mahfouz/): Not long ago, after I started devouring my Chicken McNuggets, this old man, who by the way I’ve never met in my life, tells me that normally food is forbidden inside the cinema, so my first thought is oh, he must be hungry with all that skin that’s falling off him like a blobfish put out of water, so I offer him a nugget, and he says he will allow it but it wasn’t like that back then I tell you that, are we still talking about the chicken I ask, he follows by saying that back in the seventies he used to work in a cinema and most cinemas had leaking roofs, which sounded odd because humidity helps your skin stay hydrated and look younger and that man looked almost as dry as a tardigrade in the Atacama Desert, he then says that in addition to the water infiltrations there were mice everywhere because of the food scraps that people made around the seats, so the cinema decided to buy a cat called Clint to chase the mice, and when there were no more mice, Clint had no home to return to, so this old man whose sweat gland functions have clearly deteriorated during this conversation, decided to adopt Clint and he fed him normal processed food for the next twenty years of his life, then he went to Paris with Clint and met Clint Eastwood at the George V, they took a glass of champagne together which didn’t make up for the missing thirty percent his body needed to achieve his sixty percent normal water intake, so he decided to go back to London, he stood still outside in the wet soil and that allowed him to grow and grow and grow until he turned into a magnificent cardinal flower, and right before he was about to perform for the funeral of another dry king he turned progressively brown and felt the moisture wasn’t enough anymore, so Clint stepped in, put him in a sink filled with water, and his topsoil started feeling damp, that’s when he realized he should probably cancel his paid Patreon membership to this odd fantasy podcast he’d been listening to before his billing date to ensure he wouldn’t be charged for the next period, but as he was about to reach for his phone Clint put his paw on his mouth and whistled shush, and Clint in Boots was way more persuasive than Puss in Boots, and that is how this old man got his military discharge.
- [Mary Dean Lee](https://burningword.com/2025/07/mary-dean-lee/): There’s a harmonica in my pocket, a spider crawling out of my mouth and on my backside a lovely long tail that’s been hiding, tucked in my pants.
- [Madeline Eunji Lee](https://burningword.com/2025/07/madeline-eunji-lee/): Madeline Eunji Lee is a freshman at the Spence School in New York. She is deeply interested in enhancing everyday life through art and design.
- [Alaina Hammond](https://burningword.com/2025/07/alaina-hammond/): Yesterday I received a text from an unknown number. “Hi! I hear you like my work!” I immediately knew who it was. Or rather, who it was pretending to be.
- [Mathieu Fournier](https://burningword.com/2025/07/mathieu-fournier/): Mathieu Fournier is a French visual artist based in Paris.
- [Veronica Scharf Garcia](https://burningword.com/2025/07/veronica-scharf-garcia/): Veronica Scharf Garcia has exhibited extensively in South Florida, California, New Jersey, and Peru.
- [Marcy Rae Henry](https://burningword.com/2025/07/marcy-rae-henry/): painted over and over because he wanted to perfect blackness in different states of mouthness the black before the scream i’ve printed ‘em to put over the bed folded into origami orgasms as if doing squats over a speed bump onery alley critters—!
- [Louis Faber](https://burningword.com/2025/07/louis-faber/): There is a two-headed man living just outside Topeka who rarely goes into town.
- [Todd J. Donery](https://burningword.com/2025/07/todd-j-donery-2/): Todd J. Donery is a Minneapolis-based freelance photographer, photo assistant, camera operator, and stagehand.
- [Laurence Carr](https://burningword.com/2025/07/laurence-carr/): Laurence Carr lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. His book of poems and short essays is Strides: reflections on 6 acres, with images by artist Edward M. O’Hara.
- [Marina Carreira](https://burningword.com/2025/07/marina-carreira/): Are basically the same, yeah?
- [Lisa Delan](https://burningword.com/2025/07/lisa-delan/): "An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or behavioral state resulting from considerable mental disruption and duress; acute physical suffering or emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or force that causes trauma."
- [Kimmy Chang](https://burningword.com/2025/07/kimmy-chang/): first bite in an anorexic’s recovery i’ve lost the iron sting of leaves once devoured— green bitterness a stain on the backs of my teeth.
- [Cyrus Carlson](https://burningword.com/2025/07/cyrus-carlson/): Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter whose small, colorful work creates moments of attention in a distracted world.
- [Holly Willis, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2025/07/holly-willis-featured-artist/): Holly Willis uses text and image to wonder how we might reimagine our relationship to the world, not as autonomous beings moving through isolated landscapes, but as embodied forces intimately enmeshed with the matter around us.
- [Christina Borgoyn](https://burningword.com/2025/07/christina-borgoyn-2/): How quiet a mouse must be underfoot as it feeds on human destruction.
- [Angela Townsend, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2025/07/angela-townsend-featured-author/): Herman is going to restore the vigor of my youth. Herman is going to prevent me from traipsing through the discount store when I am bored.
- [Ars Poetica—Bolinas](https://burningword.com/2025/04/ars-poetica-bolinas/): The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy tied to winter need.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2025/04/stephen-curtis-wilson-8/): Wilson is a designer and photographer. Central Illinois has been his frame of reference for a lifetime.
- [Tracey Dean Widelitz](https://burningword.com/2025/04/tracey-dean-widelitz-3/): Tracey Dean Widelitz is a published writer, poet, and photographer. She is the author of the published children’s book A Heavenly World.
- [James Bradley Wells](https://burningword.com/2025/04/james-bradley-wells/): The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above.
- [September 12th](https://burningword.com/2025/04/september-12th/): A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11th The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue.
- [Alex Stolis](https://burningword.com/2025/04/alex-stolis/): Magdalena said, let’s forget we’re strangers Let’s talk about ragged breath gasps for air Let’s talk about binding hands Let’s talk about pleasure too deep to describe Let’s talk about exquisite freedom of release Let’s talk about communion when pleasure collides with pain Let’s talk about creating a world, our own wide-awake-make-believe-reality Let’s talk about flushed lips Let’s talk about blindfolds black/white/red/silk/satin/cotton Let’s talk about a hand on throat fingers in pussy Let’s talk about nails digging into skin Let’s talk about pulsing sweat and bodies pressed tight against the wall Let’s talk about us I bet you’re in love with me now.
- [Missing](https://burningword.com/2025/04/missing/): When she came to live with me, my mother spent most of the day in her green velvet chair, which the movers had placed in the guest bedroom, along with some of her other favorite items – framed photos, her bookshelf, a lamp shaped like a teapot.
- [Andy Posner](https://burningword.com/2025/04/andy-posner-3/): At eighty-one and seventy-eight, Mom and Dad are still going strong. Halfway between twelve and thirteen, Chance, our Beagle, is still going strong.
- [A Message from the Ones Who Fly Above Me](https://burningword.com/2025/04/a-message-from-the-ones-who-fly-above-me/): A bird shit on my head today. It was at the bus stop. The shit is black and white. I am on my way to work and— Drop. I like my job. I get to teach people.
- [How To Identify a Body](https://burningword.com/2025/04/how-to-identify-a-body/): wrap and tied with string.
- [Humpty Dumpty](https://burningword.com/2025/04/humpty-dumpty/): I was in the waiting room of a hospital. Someone burst through from behind the reception desk, making a loud crashing sound.
- [Megan Peralta](https://burningword.com/2025/04/megan-peralta/): As a former newspaper writer and photographer, Megan Peralta often had front-row access to the excitement.
- [Jiyoo Nam](https://burningword.com/2025/04/jiyoo-nam/): Jiyoo Nam, a junior at Korea International School, focuses on art, writing, and film.
- [Moriah Hampton](https://burningword.com/2025/04/moriah-hampton/): Moriah Hampton teaches in the Writing and Critical Inquiry Program at SUNY Albany.
- [The Thing of the World That I Love Most](https://burningword.com/2025/04/the-thing-of-the-world-that-i-love-most/): Thank you for laughing each time I aver, “Who is Samuel Pepys?” when the Jeopardy category pings “Diarists.” I thank grad school for resurfacings, the tedious pages worth a chilly May, Hampton Court morning around the corner where some costumed King Henry adjusts blue velvet cuffs, offers guests winks, wisteria patches traipsing purple along brick walls.
- [Sher Harvey](https://burningword.com/2025/04/sher-harvey/): Sherri Harvey is an educator, freelance writer, photographer, and eco storyteller.
- [Amsterdam](https://burningword.com/2025/04/amsterdam/): Needles glittered on the streets in the soft Dutch dawn, like shards of broken glass catching the light.
- [Good Sins](https://burningword.com/2025/04/good-sins/): Their fires have spread from sea to the mountains Circle the wagons, our herds have fled Night crackles like a fox Is that a carriage, a hotel, charged with what?
- [Queen of Diamonds](https://burningword.com/2025/04/queen-of-diamonds/): The soul of each moment is alive. A living voice, a broken down song. Like an abandoned car in an alleyway, from another life you've lived.
- [Roger Camp](https://burningword.com/2025/04/roger-camp-3/): Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002) and Heat (Charta, Milano, 2008).
- [Tetman Callis](https://burningword.com/2025/04/tetman-callis-4/): Tetman Callis is a writer and artist based in Chicago.
- [no longer personal](https://burningword.com/2025/04/no-longer-personal/): Then I did my impression of a drag queen impersonating Ed Sullivan singing T. Rex. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go over. What a lousy Thanksgiving.
- [Capsule Biography Number 5 - Luisa Guerra](https://burningword.com/2025/04/capsule-biography-number-5-luisa-guerra/): In April of 1968, Luisa Guerra created Eseidra, a board game she says has been played to completion by 11 people over 20 years. This claim has been contested.
- [Tresha Faye Haefner](https://burningword.com/2025/04/tresha-faye-haefner/): It’s blackheads and popping pustules. It's watching someone get old in the shower. Its tweezers and hair in the drain and knowing where the scissors are.
- [Zack Carson](https://burningword.com/2025/04/zack-carson/): The velocity of her fall must have been excruciating / blackout-inducing.
- [J.R. Solonche, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2025/04/j-r-solonche-featured-author/): There are too many. They should be pulped. They should be pulped to make useful things. Cardboard coffins, for instance.
- [Glass House Almanac](https://burningword.com/2025/04/glass-house-almanac/): I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability.
- [As Though Playing in Your Head](https://burningword.com/2025/04/as-though-playing-in-your-head/): I fucked up my knitting in the sauna. The wool fraying with sweat, animal tiring of infrared, birds zorbing like orbs of candles, by me, showering in the dark.
- [The Plum Thief](https://burningword.com/2025/04/the-plum-thief/): Dark sunset blooms above my veins, Human valleys in marrow eruption. Amaranthine plum-drip bruises Mark me crimson thief, orchard’s fox.
- [Anniversary Dinner](https://burningword.com/2025/04/anniversary-dinner/): Because sweetheart, this life is a born escape artist, a migrating fever, a convict tattooed in invisible ink, without mercy or nostalgia.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2025/04/jim-ross-9/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Stacy Rollins](https://burningword.com/2026/10/stacy-rollins/): Do you feel the letters in your mouth like bones of a fish, the spine of sense caught on the hook of your mind that prods and pokes: a palpable delicacy, hard-palatable, yet slippery through the teeth?
- [Megan Wildhood](https://burningword.com/2026/10/megan-wildhood/): Before she readies herself, the woman smooths skin-colored color on her new baby’s forehead, nose, cheeks, jaw, chin, neck.
- [Zebulon Huset](https://burningword.com/2026/10/zebulon-huset/): or strings smoothed by horsetail over hours, roughened by grind of canine teeth gnashing first chin polished wood or breath sent to wrench muscles, to shake all adjacent air like the molecules themselves were in hysterics or outside the nearly vacant church a single soda machine releases the wrong can for a man who already hangs his head or a curb hopping compact car or a crow crouched over caulking misfired at aluminum hem pecking ambitionless a mixture collective synesthetes release once, create and abandon to dreams.
- [Sarah Barbo](https://burningword.com/2026/10/sarah-barbo/): We hold our cards in front of our mouths to hide the smiles. Draw, check your hand, discard. Keep an eye on the line of spoons.
- [Lesley Hart Gunn](https://burningword.com/2026/10/lesley-hart-gunn/): Patches of flattened brown grass like those that would peek through snow, a mid-March yawning into spring.
- [Matt Zambito](https://burningword.com/2026/10/matt-zambito/): “Have you ever imagined what it might feel like to pee in perpetuity on the outie bellybutton of the first or worst person to shatter the mirror of your heart?” would be an awful way to start a poem, when one should really begin (why not, you know?)
- [Judith Shapiro](https://burningword.com/2026/10/judith-shapiro/): Someday I’ll be outspoken, ballsy, articulate, funny. Totally cool, like Fran Lebowitz, but without the cufflinks. Also, I’ll be slow talking, soft talking.
- [Mark Hendrickson](https://burningword.com/2026/10/mark-hendrickson/): My college janitor always listened to me, so I confided in her. She was on her knees scrubbing floors but stopped to look straight at me.
- [John Walser](https://burningword.com/2026/10/john-walser/): Like hunching. Like watching the spellcast rhythm the narcotic swing of the almost empty feeder. Like black tea with honey.
- [Jean Wolff](https://burningword.com/2026/10/jean-wolff-6/): Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally.
- [Jason Youngclaus](https://burningword.com/2026/10/jason-youngclaus/): It sank in July, adrift along the chalk-spun corridor, sidewalk scalped by surveyor’s white: the long-loved triple decker— last dust of the family lot.
- [Daniel Moon](https://burningword.com/2026/10/daniel-moon/): Daniel Moon is a third-culture city dweller, traveller, and avid photographer fascinated by how cities look and feel.
- [FruitAndNut](https://burningword.com/2026/10/fruitandnut/): FruitAndNut is a mother-daughter creative collaboration between Moira Peckham (Fruit — they/them), a writer of fiction, poetry and nonfiction working across public institutions, ocean ecology and science fiction, and Hilary Saner (Nut — she/her), a mixed-media artist whose works on paper — built from collage, embroidery, ink and tissue paper — explore the threshold between concealment and emergence.
- [Grace Lynn](https://burningword.com/2026/10/grace-lynn-2/): Disability, a tense steel umbilical cord plucking its steady one note of need, coupling us outside the palace of your uterus, in emergency rooms where my wheelchair bullies clocks to rewind until I am suddenly we, blind labor linking us; me at thirty, you at seventy to portable bedside commodes, to prescription regimes, our eyes a synapse apart search the day for my seizing limp right arm lost in a coat sleeve.
- [Stephen Curtis Wilson](https://burningword.com/2026/10/stephen-curtis-wilson-11/): Wilson is a Central Illinois–born and –based designer and interpretive regionalist photographer.
- [Tom Gdisis](https://burningword.com/2026/10/tom-gdisis/): Tom Gdisis is an award-winning photographer who honed his visual eye during a long career in broadcast television.
- [Virginia Doré](https://burningword.com/2026/10/virginia-dore/): The house is not a home. It takes takes takes. It shakes the presumptuous hag stuck there glued in place by poor decisions.
- [Ryo Kajitani](https://burningword.com/2026/10/ryo-kajitani/): Ryo Kajitani is a queer artist and art model based in Tokyo.
- [Gilbert Arzola](https://burningword.com/2026/10/gilbert-arzola/): at the elementary school for 25 cents a week in 1959 they’d bring you a carton of milk every day at 2pm.
- [Esther Zhang](https://burningword.com/2026/10/esther-zhang/): Esther Zhang is a junior at The Winsor School in Boston, Massachusetts.
- [S.E. Wilson](https://burningword.com/2026/10/s-e-wilson/): The rocks were slick and he carefully made his way along them. He wasn’t as agile as he was as a child and he stepped with care.
- [VA Smith](https://burningword.com/2026/10/va-smith-2/): To love a city is to know its street trash.
- [David J. Schast](https://burningword.com/2026/10/david-j-schast/): Édith Piaf’s quivering vibrato on “amour” tickles the back edge of my hearing tonight as I watch my five-and-a-half-year-old friend on her belly, atop our coffee table swimming in her colorful stretchy pants— a pink-legged turtle doing the breaststroke.
- [Valy Steverlynck](https://burningword.com/2026/10/valy-steverlynck/): A sac to dump monsters, ghosts and dark devils. Your daughter calls you to empty her fears.
- [Stefan Sofiski](https://burningword.com/2026/10/stefan-sofiski/): Maria placed her caramel latte next to the corpse and cracked the window.
- [Romana Iorga](https://burningword.com/2026/10/romana-iorga/): Everything is close today, the watery glow from the daffodils blooming on the balcony, the wind inflating the green sail of the curtain, the neighbor’s dog yapping again at a passer-by.
- [Sylvie Oleta](https://burningword.com/2026/10/sylvie-oleta/): Sylvie Oleta is a poet and fiddler residing in Charlottesville, Virginia.
- [Roger Camp](https://burningword.com/2026/10/roger-camp-4/): Roger Camp is the author of three photography books, including the award-winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002).
- [Natalia Danjon](https://burningword.com/2026/10/natalia-danjon/): Natalia Danjon is a writer based in the UAE.
- [Roberta Winters](https://burningword.com/2026/10/roberta-winters/): Roberta Winters was born and raised in New York City and now lives in Sacramento, California.
- [Merie Kirby](https://burningword.com/2026/10/merie-kirby/): Saturated with gin and academic takes on subjectivity I sit surrounded by summer sunflowers and the cosmos I sowed beside the patio and wonder how to continue in a body, in a world, that does not think it needs this body, even as the planet turns, taking along me, my dog, our companionable silence in waning sunlight.
- [Lisa Christina St John](https://burningword.com/2026/10/lisa-christina-st-john/): The nice thing about not knowing what you planted is that you never know what you’re going to get.
- [Elizabeth Rosen](https://burningword.com/2026/10/elizabeth-rosen/): dreams of marmalade cake and silk throw pillows to lean upon, to rest her swollen ankles when she comes home from stocking Aisle Two of the local WaWa, a bus, two blocks walking, and a second bus away.
- [Josh Price](https://burningword.com/2026/10/josh-price/): I like walking. I can think about things that need thinking about.
- [Kathryn Temple](https://burningword.com/2026/10/kathryn-temple/): I cannot dredge up words, blue suitcase stuffed with dirty clothes, hotels and more hotels, 3 cities in 3 weeks, every morning up early and off to the ICU, where sometimes you eat a bit of what I bring.
- [Cleo Griffith](https://burningword.com/2026/10/cleo-griffith/): Gleeful spiral of spring growth, flattened stalks under summer’s blasts, dazzle of yellow as Gingkoes toast autumn, closeness of wide cold winter sky, each so short, time on fast track.
- [Chris Dungey](https://burningword.com/2026/10/chris-dungey/): At five o’clock in the morning I am awakened by a distant thunder. Rather, by a sound like approaching thunder heard at a distance of five or so miles.
- [Barbara Daniels](https://burningword.com/2026/10/barbara-daniels/): What’s inside me? Surgery clips, a stent trail, stones, plastic.
- [Carella Keil, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2026/10/carella-keil-featured-author/): Your eyelash fell On my cheek As we made love, you made A wish In another dimension My breasts two full moons I placed your hand on my belly The first kick Your eyes lit up with a thousand fireflies I blew each candle out Birthday cakes counting backwards My eyes mounds of dirt Yours, four-leaf clovers I planted a periscope In my chest Now every day I'm telegramming you My darkest confessions Full stop.
- [Linda K Allison, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2026/10/linda-k-allison-featured-artist/): Linda K. Allison is a recovering banker who now spends as much time as she can outdoors, traveling the US, the world, and the trails alongside her home in The Woodlands, Texas.
- [Josje Weusten](https://burningword.com/2026/04/josje-weusten/): Its needle-sharp smell penetrates the cheap shop, the type where people riffle through racks, thoughtlessly throwing underpriced things into carts.
- [Daniel Thompson](https://burningword.com/2026/04/daniel-thompson/): The heart of the stone sweats In the foothills of some place or another (I forgot where now in Nevada).
- [M. Brooke Wiese](https://burningword.com/2026/04/m-brooke-wiese/): All week the wind pushed rough water up over the bulkhead, wave on wave as far as you could see to the other side of the bay.
- [Dawson Steeber](https://burningword.com/2026/04/dawson-steeber-2/): Last night I tossed and turned, the night torn mad with slamming doors and clanging radiators.
- [Travis Stephens](https://burningword.com/2026/04/travis-stephens/): Suppose there are angels in every room, sometimes seen, at times confused with ghosts, but no, ghosts are impatient wanderers, quick to put on boots & stomp through the hedges.
- [Mia Sitterson](https://burningword.com/2026/04/mia-sitterson/): buy seven white nectarines at the farmer’s market, eat one each day, do this over and over as the nectarines become pears, the pears become winter, the leaves will turn to eggshells underfoot, and I won’t remember what it was like to live in a green world are you also a child in this way?
- [R James Sennett Jr](https://burningword.com/2026/04/r-james-sennett-jr/): on the keister, our young brother was sent back down home to till his soil solo, Vesuvius bile vomited out of bitter lips - even still!
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2026/04/jim-ross-13/): Fred Johnson Carousel, Johnson City, New York, one of six old carved carousels in the Binghamton metro area, known as the "carousel capital of the world."
- [Rina Park](https://burningword.com/2026/04/rina-park/): She is a sophomore at Chadwick International School in Incheon, South Korea.
- [Scott Penney](https://burningword.com/2026/04/scott-penney/): Lines as points that flow from the first to last, planes as groups of lines that define a surface, some rippling surface a topographic map defined by rippling lines also to mean mountains but they move too fast to define a moving figure a human figure computed in its sudden contortions on a flatscreen of colors limbs that part from bodies or melt back into the torso from which they came or part like distended ribs– it’s all just lines distorted, flowing points composing lines, points that move on a plane crossing boundaries of others nota bene the wrestling harlequins as they melt into another in the prize ring.
- [Matt Leibel](https://burningword.com/2026/04/matt-leibel/): Leave it back home in the driveway: this is your chance to be purified. Approach the drive-thru entrance on foot, like it’s a cathedral of cleanliness.
- [Minjae Kim](https://burningword.com/2026/04/minjae-kim/): He is a Year 11 student at Saint Paul Educational Institutions in Korea who enjoys capturing everyday moments through a cinematic lens.
- [Brian Kim](https://burningword.com/2026/04/brian-kim/): He is a Year 12 student at NLCS Jeju and an emerging young artist with a strong interest in architecture and design.
- [Scott Nadelson](https://burningword.com/2026/04/scott-nadelson/): The driver to my right is smiling, gazing at each of us in turn, waving us on. For her, I have no sympathy.
- [Michael Hower](https://burningword.com/2026/04/michael-hower-5/): Michael Hower is a digital photographer and artist based in Central Pennsylvania.
- [Dylan Hong](https://burningword.com/2026/04/dylan-hong/): He is a student who explores natural elements and temporal change through photography.
- [Caroline Hayduk](https://burningword.com/2026/04/caroline-hayduk/): The roads were full of craters, little divots grown wide by snow melt and balding tires clunk-clunk-clunking.
- [Greta Kaluževičiūtė](https://burningword.com/2026/04/greta-kaluzeviciute/): Greta Kaluževičiūtė is a Lithuanian writer and amateur photographer.
- [Ken Holland](https://burningword.com/2026/04/ken-holland/): Always, our need to know. The way a burn pit is in conversation With its burning.
- [Jason Davidson](https://burningword.com/2026/04/jason-davidson/): I dreamt last night that Mothra died. Three pebbles and a few rented orphans attended her wake, a modest affair. I was working.
- [Sharon Goldberg](https://burningword.com/2026/04/sharon-goldberg/): Trailing behind my partner Arnie and friend Tom, I ski toward Dreamscape lift down Déjà vu, an intermediate Park City run well within my skill set; I’m 69 with 35 years of experience under my parka although certainly not an expert.
- [Dara Goodale](https://burningword.com/2026/04/dara-goodale/): It’s February and the power company is working on our building’s main heating line.
- [Greg Freed](https://burningword.com/2026/04/greg-freed/): The fair thing is to tell the ending. He finishes talking.
- [Brian Builta](https://burningword.com/2026/04/brian-builta/): I wake with that fear again, leaping then hindquarter stung. I’m out and I’m fake. How am I in charge of myself?
- [Max Cavitch](https://burningword.com/2026/04/max-cavitch/): Max Cavitch is a photographer, writer, and teacher in Philadelphia.
- [Suhjin Chey](https://burningword.com/2026/04/suhjin-chey/): She is a sophomore at Seoul Scholars International with a strong interest in how emotions—particularly fear and anxiety—can be expressed through visual language.
- [Lucinda Cummings](https://burningword.com/2026/04/lucinda-cummings/): When my firstborn son Benjamin attended morning preschool, his grandma picked him up afterwards, and they spent afternoons together while I worked.
- [Robin Carstensen](https://burningword.com/2026/04/robin-carstensen/): Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster warning systems this year.
- [Michael Roberts, Featured Artist](https://burningword.com/2026/04/michael-roberts-featured-artist/): Michael C. Roberts is a retired pediatric psychologist and professor.
- [Jane Hammons, Featured Author](https://burningword.com/2026/04/jane-hammons-featured-author/): Jane Hammons taught writing for three decades at UC Berkeley, where she received a Distinguished Teaching Award.
- [Carston Anderson](https://burningword.com/2026/04/carston-anderson/)
- [Jack Bordnick Studio](https://burningword.com/2026/04/jack-bordnick-studio-2/): Bordnick’s interest is to create meaningful works of art that all people and cultures can enjoy.
- [Kenneth Boyd](https://burningword.com/2026/04/kenneth-boyd/): Archibald Motley (United States, 1961) The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.
- [Dawson Steeber](https://burningword.com/2026/04/dawson-steeber/): Last night I tossed and turned, the night torn mad with slamming doors and clanging radiators.
- [Michael Horton](https://burningword.com/2026/01/michael-horton/): The house was a gift—picture perfect weekend luxury on the lake. From their three daughters.
- [Amy Agape](https://burningword.com/2026/01/amy-agape/): If you were there, you surely would have noticed the scarlet slash cleaving the soft brown fuzz. Her roly-poly-curved shrunken shape.
- [Jamey Hecht](https://burningword.com/2026/01/jamey-hecht/): The annual Perv Circus celebrated its first decade with a huge bash at the Grand Palace Hotel.
- [Steve Deutsch](https://burningword.com/2026/01/steve-deutsch/): we took the long way home. As if such a simple act might flummox fate. We are a good people. We bury our dead and help the maimed to cross the road.
- [Kyle Selley](https://burningword.com/2026/01/kyle-selley/): Kyle Selley draws with explosive residue.
- [Kimm Brockett Stammen](https://burningword.com/2026/01/kimm-brockett-stammen/): The ship wasn't rocking, still there was a sensation of lilting movement, of repeated unbalancing and rebalancing, as she leaned over the railing and reached out to the waves far below.
- [Emma Sywyj](https://burningword.com/2026/01/emma-sywyj/): Emma Sywyj is an award-winning artist and photographer who has been creating art for twenty years.
- [Robert Miner](https://burningword.com/2026/01/robert-miner/): May I say you bring great honor to the artisans of our studio by seeking our earth spirits for the general’s tomb?
- [Fabio Sassi](https://burningword.com/2026/01/fabio-sassi-3/): Fabio Sassi creates photographs and acrylics using materials considered worthless by the mainstream.
- [Grace Lynn](https://burningword.com/2026/01/grace-lynn/): My muse wears prescription glasses, so she’ll never see beyond the village with its walled-in acres of poolside loungers.
- [Richard Holinger](https://burningword.com/2026/01/richard-holinger/): In rural northern Illinois northwest of Chicago, a raised, pressed, gray gravel path, long ago a railroad track, runs straight for miles, bordered by trees.
- [John Dorroh](https://burningword.com/2026/01/john-dorroh/): He drank coffee in the wee hours long before the sun oozed its way up over the hardwoods at the end of the property.
- [Priscilla Long](https://burningword.com/2026/01/priscilla-long/): Donna, you will never become less deaf, her audiologist informs. Keep learning, she encourages herself. In ASL she has reached the letter L. Keep living.
- [Jim Ross](https://burningword.com/2026/01/jim-ross-12/): Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research.
- [Carlos Cunha](https://burningword.com/2026/01/carlos-cunha/): The strip mall may well be on its last legs, but it still litters the landscape of many American towns and suburbs, especially here in Florida – an aggressively charmless, deservedly unloved suburban phenomenon that usually consists of nothing more than a basic parking lot with, at one end, a drably functional strip of windowed boxes that are usually rented out to low-end retail businesses, some local, some nation or regional chains, their motley commercial signage usually obeying no single design standard.
- [Dotty LeMieux](https://burningword.com/2026/01/dotty-lemieux/): They spiff it up, repair old siding, cut into the crumbling hillside to squeeze in a bonus room. Throw on a coat of paint, shiny like a chrome-plated lie.
- [Avital Gad-Cykman](https://burningword.com/2026/01/avital-gad-cykman/): Quite late into my pregnancy, the day I eventually did pregnancy tests and all three came out positive (Surprise!
- [Francine Witte](https://burningword.com/2026/01/francine-witte/): This is a test. A heartbeat test. A bloodbeat test. My doctor tells me I'm going to die. This is certain.
- [Lizbeth Bárcena](https://burningword.com/2026/01/lizbeth-barcena/): love for the desert heat / a cautionary affair I don’t feel overjoyed or conceited to hear people bitch about heat in a hot place, in late May, amid what’s befalling the Earth– It’s two degrees more– think less clothing, more rubbing of UV protection, but I’m stuck in a freezer, wearing a down jacket in June, desiring the burn on my face, arms, and back, a fiery love bite on my nape, that ectotherm craving that sensual boil that gets cramped in July when the awful AC, the culprit that causes greenhouse gases, makes me disdain my thermophilic bent, knowing the price to the thermotolerant: the Chuckwalla Fringe-toad lizards, tortoise, roadrunners hawks, bighorn, coyotes, and xerophytes could all vanish in August’s peak hour behind sweltering sand and stone.
- [Tetman Callis](https://burningword.com/2026/01/tetman-callis-5/): Tetman Callis is a writer and artist who lives in Chicago.
- [June Chua](https://burningword.com/2026/01/june-chua/): You are about 7, skinny, sheathed in a flaxen knit dress. Margarine yellow.
- [Joan E. Bauer](https://burningword.com/2026/01/joan-e-bauer/): of himself caught in the web of this mortal skein.
- [Sarah Sorensen](https://burningword.com/2026/01/sarah-sorensen/): Take the edible and ask yourself which discount rug seems most like grass.
- [Billie Jean Stratton](https://burningword.com/2026/01/billie-jean-stratton/): Billie Jean Stratton is a 74-year-old New York farm girl who never liked the barn and spent much of her youth sidestepping hired hands by playing the flute in an acoustically superior bathroom.
- [Alina Zollfrank](https://burningword.com/2026/01/alina-zollfrank/): You have a love-hate relationship with eagles. It’s the national animal for your home nest, also the national emblem for your chosen nest.
- [Michelle Strausbaugh](https://burningword.com/2026/01/michelle-strausbaugh/): Your new sixth-grade class already had its own rhythms, inside jokes, and hierarchy. Like, it was already over halfway through the school year.

## Pages

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## Products

- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 119](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-119/): Issue 119, published October 2026, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Linda K Allison, Gilbert Arzola, Sarah Barbo, Roger Camp, Barbara Daniels, Natalia Danjon, Virginia Doré, Chris Dungey, FruitAndNut, Tom Gdisis, Cleo Griffith, Lesley Hart Gunn, Mark Hendrickson, Zebulon Huset, Romana Iorga, Ryo Kajitani, Carella Keil, Merie Kirby, Grace Lynn, Daniel Moon, Sylvie Oleta, Josh Price, Stacy Rollins, Elizabeth Rosen, David J. Schast, Judith Shapiro, VA Smith, Stefan Sofiski, Lisa Christina St John, Valy Steverlynck, Kathryn Temple, John Walser, Megan Wildhood, Stephen Curtis Wilson, S.E. Wilson, Roberta Winters, Jean Wolff, Jason Youngclaus, Matt Zambito, and Esther Zhang.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 118](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-118/): Issue 118, published April 2026, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Carston Anderson, Jack Bordnick Studio, Kenneth Boyd, Brian Builta, Robin Carstensen, Max Cavitch, Suhjin Chey, Lucinda Cummings, Jason Davidson, Greg Freed, Sharon Goldberg, Dara Goodale, Jane Hammons, Caroline Hayduk, Ken Holland, Dylan Hong, Michael Hower, Greta Kaluževičiūtė, Brian Kim, Minjae Kim, Matt Leibel, Scott Nadelson, Rina Park, Scott Penney, Michael C. Roberts, Jim Ross, R James Sennett Jr, Mia Sitterson, Dawson Steeber, Travis Stephens, Daniel Thompson, Josje Weusten, and M. Brooke Wiese. Issue 118, published April 2026, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Carston Anderson, Bordnick Studio, Kenneth Boyd, Brian Builta, Robin Carstensen, Max Cavitch, Suhjin Chey, Lucinda Cummings, Jason Davidson, Greg Freed, Sharon Goldberg, Dara Goodale, Jane Hammons, Caroline Hayduk, Ken Holland, Dylan Hong, Michael Hower, Greta Kaluževičiūtė, Brian Kim, Minjae Kim, Matt Leibel, Scott Nadelson, Rina Park, Scott Penney, Michael C. Roberts, Jim Ross, R James Sennett Jr, Mia Sitterson, Dawson Steeber, Travis Stephens, Daniel Thompson, Josje Weusten, and M. Brooke Wiese.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 117](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-117/): Issue 117, published January 2026, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Amy Agape, Lizbeth Bárcena, Joan E. Bauer, Tetman Callis, June Chua, Carlos Cunha, Steven Deutsch, John Dorroh, DM Frech, Avital Gad-Cykman, Jamey Hecht, Richard Holinger, Michael Horton, Dotty LeMieux, Priscilla Long, Grace Lynn, Robert Miner, Jim Ross, Fabio Sassi, Kyle Selley, Sarah Sorensen, Kimm Brockett Stammen, Billie Jean Stratton, Michelle Strausbaugh, Emma Sywyj, Cindy Wheeler, Holly Willis, Francine Witte, Holly Redell Witte, and Alina Zollfrank.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 116](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-116/): Issue 116, published October 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Paula Burke, Wes Civilz, Eileen Vorbach Collins, Deron Eckert, Benjamin Erlandson, Don Farrell, MFC Feeley, Pete Follansbee, Nicholas Haines, Karen Kilcup, Alice Lowe, Mary Ann McGuigan, Miranda Morgan, Michelle Morouse, Kaitlyn Owens, Jim Ross, Sayantani Roy, Meggie Royer, Shyla Shehan, JL Smith, Sarp Sozdinler, Carlin Steere, P. J. Szemanczky, Jim Tilley, Hannah Voteur, Frederick Wilbur, Myfanwy Williams, Stephen Wilson, and VA Wiswell.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 115](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-115/): Issue 115, published July 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Christina Borgoyn, Cyrus Carlson, Laurence Carr, Marina Carreira, Kimmy Chang, Lisa Delan, Todd J. Donery, J.M. Emery, Louis Faber, Mathieu Fournier, Veronica Scharf Garcia, Alaina Hammond, Marcy Rae Henry, Bethany Jarmul, Joseph Landi, Mary Dean Lee, Madeline Eunji Lee, Zoé Mahfouz, Juan Pablo Mobili, Arthur Pitchenik, Timothy L. Rodriguez, Jim Ross, Susan Shea, Dave Sims, Rome Smaoui , Lisa Lopez Smith, VA Smith, Dana Stamps, II, Angela Townsend, Lucinda Trew, Thomas Vogt, Holly Willis, Dylan Willoughby, Stephen Curtis Wilson, Jessie Wingate, and Jean Wolff.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 114](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal-issue-114/): Issue 114, published April 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Virginia Barrett, Julie Benesh, Alyssa Blankenship, Alex Braslavsky, Vikki C., Tetman Callis, Roger Camp, Zack Carson, John Colburn, Ben Guterson, Tresha Faye Haefner, Moriah Hampton, Sher Harvey, Penny Jackson, Carella Keil, Sam Kerbel, Amy S Lerman, Valentine Mizrahi, Christian David Loeffler, Judith Mikesch McKenzie, Jiyoo Nam, Megan Peralta, Andy Posner, Jim Ross, Beth Sherman, J.R. Solonche, Alex Stolis, Maxwell Tang, James Bradley Wells, Tracey Dean Widelitz, and Stephen Curtis Wilson.
- [Burningword Literary Journal, Issue 113](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-literary-journal/): BLJ Issue 113, published January 2025, features works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and visual art by Linda K. Allison, Swetha Amit, Richard Atwood, Rose Mary Boehm, Daniel Brennan, Maia Brown-Jackson, Hyungjun Chin, Amanda Nicole Corbin, Kaviya Dhir, Jerome Gagnon, Jacqueline Goyette, Julien Griswold, Alexi Grojean, Ken Hines, Minseo Jung, Sastry Karra, Joy Kreves, E.P. Lande, Kristin Lueke, Robert Nisbet, Yeobin Park, Dian Parker, Roopa Menon, Ron Riekki, Esther Sadoff, Chris Scriven, Taegyoung Shon, Mary Thorson, John Walser, Julie Weiss, Stephen Curtis Wilson, and Jean Wolff.
- [Burningword Ninety-Nine: A Selected Anthology of Poetry](https://burningword.com/shop/uncategorized/burningword-ninety-nine-a-selected-anthology-of-poetry/): An anthology of ninety-nine favorite poems from Burningword Literary Journal (burningword.com). Featuring 33 poets including Arlene Ang, Joseph Armstead, Janet Buck, Erik Austin Deerly, Anita Garza, Ivor Irwin, Michael Lee Johnson, Richard Jordan, John Sweet, Rhonda Ward, Bill Wunder, Kelley Jean White, and more.


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