Second Thoughts I see the bug on the floor. First impulse is to step on it, Crush the vile creature. Then, second thoughts of Rebirth and reincarnation. Could this actually be the New life form of a friend? A relative? My mother? Or, on the other hand, Maybe it’s the asshole bully From my youth, or, ahem, Mrs Robinson, my second Grade teacher who gave Me Hell every school day. I think she dented the back Of my head with multiple Backhands with the ruler. Could be that crazy neighbor Who stole and ate my dog, Worms and all, last summer. “Damn you!” I cried as I Heavy-boot smashed the Wretched living entity. “Damn you all to Hell!” But wait…could this be My old drinking buddy From Minneapolis? “Brother Bain is that you? Sorry, Jerry. Damn, your Guts are all over the place.”
Ross Vassilev
Bulgarians are a bunch of idiots assholes and faggots and you can call me a homophobe if you want to I’ve been called worse my childhood lasted less than the life of a yellow daffodil when the cold suddenly returned so do anything you want it’s already been done fuck you.
John Knoll
RAW HIGHWAY for Ravi I’ve been walking inexact dimensions, expanding towards odiferous sunsets, bedazzled by the contours of skin and sin driving my bones towards shadowed balconies since time was invented. This morning you asked me if I believe in God? Me, an old mammal daddy, spouting whale song and bullshit between bites of egg and gulps of black coffee. Yes Rav, I believe the divine intelligences are just like you and me. They have no idea what they’re doing and they too are consumed with joy and terror. We are cursed prophets inhabited by maps of Vietnam.. The word sighs an ancient shadow, breathes the flesh and bone of first love. Fish tracks on our breath. The scent of roses drained blue by time. My love rocks you in the luminous arms of the sea. Be bedazzled son, wear rainbows in your hair. We dance to the eternal rhythms of life-death-mystery-love-terror. Heirs to dolphin joy.
Fatihah Quadri
In a circle
At times, I try to cling to acuity But there comes motions through thoughts, Beating the love of adagio out of me, and a calamari, For the obscure things are yet to be enmeshed. Life is a dead metaphor; not ready for a cathartic canvas. I am always seeing birds perching incessantly, On bits of dried grass to make their tattered nests. Everyone writes about grief, Grief too is a cliché that haven’t halt salivating, Like a mucus on the tongues of mothers, As well as children, lovers, birds, counties; everything. Everyone has a blue sky above their heads. Termites never stopped their pinching on sand, Purposely to make a magnificent hill for themselves. Human races helter-skelter after more than you can list, Glasses, bricks and lands to project a house. Isn’t life overused? Everyday, the moon reinstates itself with the sun, To extract another scene to be called a day. Animals reproduces to oblige hungry stomachs, Time fades as that old, slack and wrinkled fabric. Grandma dies, father comes home drunk, Mother cries, We re-paint the same grief everyday. Shedding tears for pains that has catapulted our lives, Hmm… the circular geometry it seizes us to stretch. We bade good-byes, singing dirges too often And had become a body for the dirges too.
John Grey
SICKNESS Sickness is my secret place, like this virus that keeps me indoors, away from all others. Sure there could be complications but none of the heart, the head. The chills inure me. The headache hones my self-awareness. And my stomach may roil but interruptions don’t. No point denying sickness. Another virtue when some unseemly microbe wants temporary use of my body. I’m flat out on the couch. My brow sweats. Three blankets flow like tide up to my throat. But I’m not worried. No bills are in the room with me. The phone’s not ringing with someone who has great need of me. At least, I won’t be answering it if it does. I’m taking pills. I’m downing medicine. I’m becoming more and more myself with a cough and sniffle underlining the fact. And I’m drowsy (my personal favorite.) Nothing can touch me that isn’t inside of me. Illness is more of a cubbyhole than writing. Sure, in a day or two this will all pass. No more aches. No more mucus. I’ll be back out into the world. The word is “cured.” The end of a medical condition. Or a method of preserving dead meat. THE OLD SCHOOL What did they find when they dug up the floorboards of the old high school but promiscuity, adultery, and even a pregnancy or two. In the old store-room, besides filthy couches and broken chairs, there were twenty bullies, a hundred wimps, and even two suicides. Mice sure but also sadism. And stagnant air to preserve the lot of them. From the gym, men haul battered equipment. Did interstate abortions and drinking sprees really stumble off that wretched pommel horse? And look at that greasy mat. You could write your name with one finger in all those alcoholics. I'm a little in awe. Heaped in a pile below my junior year are blackboards, dusters, wife-beaters, drug abuse and incest. A globe drops from a high place explodes into splinters of Europe, Africa, racism and dread. They're going to tear the whole place down and there's not much to salvage. The old library bookshelf might have some use but the soap opera? The brand spanking new high school opens in September. And it is September. So let the spanking begin!
Ian Mullins
Self-Inflicted I love the scrape, the scar, the damp rush of blood the moment before the skin breaks; when my body and its disease hold each other like two people fucking in the dark, pissing in each other's mouths to feel how much we can dirty ourselves but still come clean: revel in not knowing why it all makes sense under the sheets the way it never does in daylight, when I pick the stale scabs of evidence from the pillow in a worthless shame I decry as discretion; pad the red wounds dry to scab another night scraping myself down to my favorite size. Don’t apologize; never explain. My body is the only one who never turns me down, but I do it to be bloody, I do it to be alive: to spite the worthless shit that says no every day in the mirror. Take a look at him; he hasn’t a drop of shame to spare. That’s why I take him undercover; to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget.
Yahuza Abdulkadir
Sketches Of Grief my mother yelled at me for not ferrying a pain to trace my grief on her body, I was waiting in the wings for the night to darken the skies, revering her thoughts and then sketching different names of grief on her body. I wrote every line of torture on her skin, chanting the elegies of my father into her eardrums. I strive to fetch hope from the memories written on our wall, but my eyes shift into a room of burnt onions, and my tongue fled in search of voices submerged into my father's throat. every morning, I gulp down depression from a cupful of tears, set down and goggle my heart bleed gloomy verses to the world. yesterday, I trudge on the highway and discerned someone, saying; you either shed your emotions in the air & become a poet or else you die a coward. someday, you would hear the story of a boy who moulded his emotions into a poem, & throw his heart into a flower pot. Dark Days when dark days creeps, we saw a strand of hair on our skin, dashing away. we watched our bodies become tissue papers, our cracking lips giving up to its doom, as we felt the slight change of beats in our hearts. when the moon embraces the darkness, stuck stars glitter no more, as the songs of peace echo not, and birds with broken wings find not their way home.
Wisdom Adediji
Metamorphosis The day I turned into you, you saw me first. You were there, breathing petals like lilies, plucking stars from my heart, to the earth on your palms. I whisper to the wind to whistle songs to you, & you —a bright shard from the sun— eats up the darkness on my tongue. I pray the hook in my throat unfurls Into lyrics of old starlings hymning your name. I search your name in the sky of my heart, & all I harvest is memories of you as an angel, & I am incomprehensible for dishing void from my voice. Demons are fallen angels, & oh! what do we call fallen demons? But you are the clean waters, shattering darkness from my bones. & I moult from dirt to your kisses wrapping my tongue with your molars, making my breath as quiet as a sepulchre.
Ian Copestick
That Famous Black Dog Sadly, I have to admit that depression is getting the better of me. Everything is really hard work. Just getting up, and dressed tires me out more than an 8 hour shift at work used to. I've lost interest in nearly everything. I used to love playing guitar. I was never very good, but it was something I enjoyed. I haven't picked it up for over a year. The amount of poems I've had published in the last year, I used to have that many published each month. I need help, I know that. I've known it for a long time, but now I've reached enough of a low point to accept it. Tomorrow morning, I'll be phoning the doctor's surgery. Hopefully, I'll get the help that I've finally acknowledged that I need.
Laszlo Aranyi
Homunculus Cooking a scrawny, hairy newborn... - What the fuck are you doing, cummer? "We'll boil the nine devils out of him." Nine precocious, duck-legged gnomes, born by God-tempting practices of witchcraft. This brat is not even mummified. (parchment-coated, peeling, scaly-skinned) he is a disgrace to the crib. His shrewd, bow-legged hounds chase and hunt the stray deers' akasha image. Nine paces from the river, nine moons sit above the motionless water. Usurer, the sevenfold crouching creator rules the real and the imagined world. He deals zinc-clad cards while fertile scribbles guard the nine crystal-structured Villains. (Translated by Gabor Gyukics)