Daniele Walker

April 2015 | back-issues, poetry

Getting to know you

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.

I miss a lover I don’t know

and the thunder is judging me.

Have you ever

tried to write a poem

and the poem won’t write

but its lines keep insisting themselves to you?

I’m being silly.

It’s storming and I’m blushing and

I don’t know you

but I know you don’t write.

The thunder snorts

and the poem about you keeps insisting itself to me.

burning.

when you kissed me,

did your fingertips

feel like lightning?

No,

i guess that was

just me.

Thunder.

Shame on you for making me feel something.

Shame on me for thinking it meant something.

So

how do you feel about thunderstorms

and relationships that won’t go anywhere

poetry

and me?

The thunder is crackling now,

cackling now,

but I don’t think it’s laughing at us.

by Daniele Walker

October sixteenth

The world in which I am living

is not the world in which I woke up

this morning,

because you are not in it.

The world is not the same,

and I didn’t even get to say goodbye

to it

or to you.

This kind of sadness is how I imagine drowning like you did.

And I wonder if it hurt.

And I wonder if you were afraid.

And I wonder

if

you knew

what was coming.

And I wonder if you knew that I loved you.

by Daniele Walker

Daniele DeAngelis Walker is twenty-three years young, but her soul feels much older. An avid lover of colors and words, she graduated from Drew University with specialized honors in creative writing. She works in the publishing industry and lives in New Jersey with the fiancée she never thought she’d have.

Birds

April 2015 | back-issues, poetry

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.

fantasia of mince,

lilt-borne chimes,

troupe

of felicity,

young as breeze,

buoyant with glee,

irresistible

aerial

delectable

playful

flight.

by Chris Crittenden

Chris Crittenden writes from a struggling fishing village, fifty miles from the nearest traffic light. He is pretty well published.

when I close my eyes

April 2015 | back-issues, poetry

when I close my eyes,

my bones quiver like I’m

the girl I was last summer,

waking up eighteen on

the banks of the river,

four inches deep in little boys

that press themselves flush

into the creases of my barefoot callouses

it’s there:

honeysuckle, rationed

single drop by single drop,

nectar touched so gently

by our green mother

that it’s bitter to my tongue,

pressed inside my cheeks,

to bite, to knead,

sewn into silk-hewn soil

that bleeds roots from seeds,

bursting leaves like sunburst skies,

like the amber-glossed eyes

of every horse I led to water

only to never let them drink

by Alora Ray

Alora Ray is 20, temporarily lives in Northern Virginia, perpetually lives in a state of denial, performs for whimsy, writes by necessity.