The Hereafter After my last breath Let the river sing through me But give part of me back to the earth For my ashes yearn for roots Invite the wind and rain As my dusty bones seek a new Zion After my last breath A place with no fairytales or preachers
Ed Brickell
Monsters of Legend Bigfoot lives on skeletons and mud, Moonwalks through the meadow. His heart is a fist of crawling crickets. There is no limit to his awesome evil. His feet aren’t the biggest you ever saw, But they’re goddamned big enough. Middlefoot lives on bacon and eggs, Prefers the shortcut past the meadow. His heart is the common array of valves, His bark and bite just a joke someone told. His feet are not a topic worthy of discussion, So small and normal. Littlefoot lives inside of Bigfoot, Glides free through every meadow. His heart is boundless and filled with love. No violence salts his sweet dreams. His feet are not a burden to him anymore, Bigfoot does their walking, and that’s fine.
Shiva Neupane
What is life? I don't know what is life Who designed it for what purpose. I am esoterically flabbergasted for not being able to understand it. If we were to die what is the significance of being alive. I wondered about this tantric saga because it created the maze of curiosity. when the elixir of imagination gives me a philosophical emancipation. I will celebrate the reason for why I am here.
Howie Good
Rocks None of us even knew God had been dying this whole time until we got the news He was dead. A flash mob forced an old Jew to climb a tree and chirp like a bird. I was inside, tinkering with a machine I’d built for testing the concept that rocks communicate with each other. Despite a series of less than successful field trials, I wasn’t ready to say yet whether it was the machine or the concept that was flawed. I removed the outer casing, replaced the circuit board. A choir on the classical music station was singing something John Milton wrote when he was going blind. A Short Musical Interlude The piano was already burning on the white sand beach when the virtuoso sat down to play. On the boardwalk, couples of all classes and ages began to twirl to the music. Even the undercover angels watching from a discreet distance tapped their feet. Just then an olive drab van accessorized like a mobile gas chamber screeched into the parking lot. As if that were some sort of signal, the universe suddenly disclosed itself – one stray black shoe lying at a precipitous angle at the edge of a mass grave.
Sushant Thapa
Cloth of Choice Some days are spent in imagination Some melt the pride. Powerful and ticking seconds do not wait. There is a feeling of waking up late And performing the improper choir of time. Metaphorically, rising is a gift. The world has a makeup Its wounds are scars of passing hours. We open our arms and embrace We stand the test of passing minutes Till we become a tested blowing air Gone directionless. Finding the way is a meaning Clinging to the last cliff of difficulty. Let’s learn to breathe for one more mortal life, Let's forgive for one more accepting while. Tempests teach a lesson to the sea The torch bearer knows the night. Direction is not a void unless Determination is a cloth of choice.
J.J. Campbell
brutal days ahead there will be brutal days ahead the bodies will stack up and the streets will smell like a different slice of hell each passing day war is not for the timid or the weak or the rich war is for the ones out of options out of time out of place in a society that left them behind decades ago we're all going to die someday some get to have their names in lights others are for a dog to piss on
John D. Robinson
NIGHT GENTLE Stood in the doorway, framed in dim lighting, the night, gentle with Lester Young blowing like a stoned hummingbird, she stood, crying, quietly, not in sadness, she stood in the doorway and I wished that I was a painter or composer, she looked up, at me, her face wet with our kind of love, slowly, I moved forward, kissed her tears and darkness fell asleep. SUNSET Like she was injured, she lay draped over the stark sprawling concrete landscapes and the debris of love, strewn like abandoned planets or the memory of slaves, she lay exhausted, spent, her breath darkening the skies. JOANNA, A POEM FOR YOU It wasn’t the ravages of time or the drugs and alcohol or the harshness of homelessness and loneliness or the absence of affection or the violence of crazed strangers that killed her, no, it was life that took her.
Abdulrazaq Salihu
NAMING MYSELF AN X-GENE AFTER THE X-MEN WERE WIPED OUT.
At the mention of the apocalypse,I name myself an x-gene
Like a boy evaluating this machine era.
My body is flames and my memories are reinstalled in a chip
Like the waves of the waters carrying my mother’s face,
And this time I’m not bothered of how much men fear death,
This is only me adapting and learning the fire-dance
One Step On Coal One Breath,one way towards shore.
You carry all the bullets with your mouth
And spit holes into all the wrong places,
Every body believed my body was a wrong place
The X-men believed so much in the x-gene
And I have told God of how well I know my body and all the halos enshrouded in its bosom.
Smudging my fingers and counting the names of the homes on fire;
Clay, electromagnetic fields & flesh & blood are wired in here
And leaves are colliding in bottles of adopted embryos.
The last time I heard of the apocalypse
I covered my eyes with light and drove into the horizon with highMusicPluggedInMyEars
And I couldn’t recite psalms,
A woman kept saying waalfajri and today I’m so certain the next ayah is Walayalin Aashrin
So certain that this is god swearing ten days to my new age.
I fly into an uncolored television
And my mother tells me a body is nai,
And death is fi, and she tells me nothing of reincarnation
And I’m barricading my nostrils to breathe
To feel the sensation of a body on fire and how it adapts to a constellation of forgotten x-gene.
PSYCHOSIS AND PSYCHE.
In reality,
What; is; a; body?
Forehead; toes
Foreign regalias crocheting a pure day
12ft tall; beards;are;bushes; foresting a saint;
Sporting-waves;bleaching-skin
New voice;bass
New reality;night
High school boys;dropping;out;of;school
Become;high; boys
Psyche;clock ticking towards a dead man
Psychosis; DID troubling a living man,psychopath
Psyche and psychosis;in reality,is a man writing a complex poem
Through the night and body of his 12 year old.
Howie Good
The Texture of Experience The heat has been rising all day to an incinerating pitch. At the designated hour, I arrive at the address on foot, exhausted and dusty. It’s an old, dingy residential hotel on a sunbaked street in a rundown neighborhood prowled by starving dogs, their every rib sharply outlined. When I look up, squinting against the glaring sky, what appears to be an angel with a sword in its outstretched arm is hovering above the roof. Nothing like this happens here, a man who has materialized beside me says. I start to reply, but can’t. There are things that have no name even in the most poetic language.
Donna Dallas
The Nowhere Girl I see the road narrow and forged with the dead – all the dead that tried before to cross this very overgrown dusty path sweep the dust right and left critters scurry bones scrape along pebbles eerie sound of crunch and squish oh hell it’s long hell is long isn’t it? no way to tell there’s no scriptures to follow no engraved instructions nothing for miles not a fucking period to end any forgotten sentence it’s like a great emptiness swells before me in some organic burst and I don’t know the road Y’all think I came before and am now an experienced craftsman at roading but no I’m bleeding through this teetering on a fork all twisted with gnarled branches it behooves me to stop and take a piss before going it again Eeny meeny miny…. or just take the path that looks treacherous and wrecked? if it’s a mess I’m all for it got nothing else to do and nowhere else to go