Art and shiny things…
Let us take the river
path near Fall Hill.
There we will negotiate
an outcrop with its silvered
initials & other bits of graffiti,
all the way to the broken edge
that overlooks the bend,
& hold hands until
we can no longer tell
where the river ends.
-Jon Pineda, via Poets.org
Will we breathe
like ballet
dancers, learn
to bleed song—
toes pointed?
Will you still
learn this dance?
This is me
trying to
lengthen my-
self. To stand
on the thin
ends of my
swollen toes
and fool my-
self into
Marlin M. Jenkins, Puritan Magazine
Under the yonder, I searched for my name in a blue
book. The pages were doors without knobs or keyholes, yet,
because blue comforts the eyes, the tome opened up to me.
Suddenly I had a taste for blue; it depicted the impossible.
For both Greeks & Romans there was no blue in the rainbow,
but here, by sunlight, the most audacious sapphire. And so
I forsook the allure of verdigris, cochineal, & mulberry
& walked to the river where, having polluted the water, the dyers
waited for it to clear. Rather than tinctures, a miraculous
draft of fishes came up with their buckets. But this was
not the end, nor the beginning, of my faraway look away.
-L.S. Klatt, Blackbird
Let’s be tourists. Let’s eat banana fritters wrapped in old homework, crouch
on red plastic stools under the banyan spiky with joss sticks. Let’s walk
to our lake, have a cà phê đá and count turtles. Our spoons’ll scrape and clink the condensed
milk chorus of men forever on lunch breaks. Let’s forget colonialism and believe
the compliments. Let’s not argue too much when they overcharge us.
During the underwater afternoon hours let’s speed
read more at Linebreak
-Kelly Morse
(illustration by sososimps)
EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE OKAY
I’m going to write one of those novels you can’t
put down. The kind where you don’t know what’s
going to happen, and you want to know what’s
going to happen, so you sneak the book into the
bathroom to get a few pages in while your wife
thinks you’re brushing your teeth or showering,
or you take it to work and hope your workstation
walls are high enough to keep the book secret.
David Ebenbach, Stirring
The bird who turned white from trying to love a cloud
so hard she almost misted him into dust
How one day the bird flew to the cloud and said,
“Finally, after years of waiting,
I can’t tell if I love you because you are a cloud
or if I love you because you are made of water
Kallie Falandays, Nightblock
In our snow globe of good-byes we leave
cities burning, arguments still on fire.
We do not touch but force ourselves
into pockets and gloves.
Winter stumbles on: questions
without answers.
Glass bridge of exits, cracked runway lights
flared blue and gold.
We travel through forlorn gates
the size of breadbaskets
do not stop for sweets or tea.
Susan Rich, Sweet Lit
The stage is blank now. Ribbons swirling, smoke
illuminated from beneath by red
lamps focused on the emptiness, oak boards
laid down into a pattern which affords
a place to leap and land: the colored thread
of narrative in dance has disappeared.
Those arms, like crane wings catching air, once sheared
the curtained wind as if to fly, their lines
as straight as quills, or intricate cleft braids
whose interwoven motion still cascades
like water falling through the wreathed designs
we only dreamed could be performed.
W.F. Lantry
Mordechai Ronen returns to Auschwitz
(after a photograph in The Times, 27 Jan, 2015)
Frei is not in the picture.
Even Arbeit, above him,
loses meaning when edged
with snow, or his memory.
Instead, the words
The Past is Present
circle his neck,
and the outstretched hand
that asks a question
could also be holding up
-Marjorie Lotfi Gill
Coffee and Irony 