It is sad, when small things die.
Silently known only to you, small delicate things, the light of the morning not yet seeing it as
it slowly fades away
fully ripe it falls out of mind like a fat berry into a hungry river
the death of an idea is such a surrender, not to defeat but in a slow fading of its finer parts and
words
until the fading impression is all that’s left
the silent and delicate nature of small things leaves our lazy eyes to rove on as curious lamps
to more happy matters
to have breathless curiosity is to miss the subtleties when they fade.
Category: Uncategorized
SUMMER Poem: Once The Lid Came Off, by Reebie Flowers
The long standing… Of imaging. Dreams, fantasies. That once dead….the notion of limping…
Into what’s done, over … what’s said.
Conceptualize. Bred activity that revitalizes. How one chose to occupy multiple spaces. Just
through solitude and not doubling down … upon mental races.
Frowning on, the abnormal vocational changes.. which doesn’t speak on the most compelling
emotion , that allows one true power to reign in.
Authenticity is the essence of purity and originality. Once the lid comes off, the world doesn’t
have to be ready…
Because, everyone is equipped with a frequent electricity, which pulsates… ready to free the
inner child, being… soul.
Flee from what doesn’t integrate. Things aren’t personal, those viewpoints … only takes.
Know the difference …between life’s tests… or God’s contests, before it’s too late.
ROMANCE Poem: Nocturne: For An Evening Rainfall In June, by Thomas Koron
t was in a small town in the Midwest,
Where the following story once took place,
Between a woman and a man.
Each night, she held a cross close to her chest—
Praying just as hard as one can.
Every day, he kissed the sides of her face—
To be married soon was their plan.
One morning, he went away on a quest,
A family member was very ill—
It had now been several days.
In the living room, she now tried to rest,
As the sky became a gray haze.
From inside the house, the thunderstorm still
Made her worry in many ways.
She walked through the dark house to go outside,
As small insects swirled around her oil lamp—
The floor felt warm beneath her feet.
She opened up the front door, and then sighed—
The summer air was dense and sweet.
The humidity made her skin feel damp,
While she stood in the summer heat.
The rain began with a heavy downpour,
And over the garden she spread a sheet—
Her budding roses were covered.
She wished he was home like never before—
Her heart would then feel recovered.
Without her, his life never felt complete—
A true love he had discovered.
As he rode through the woods upon his horse,
He stopped off for a moment for a drink,
And saw the creek had overflown.
On his journey back, he still felt remorse
For having left her all alone.
While riding down a path, he tried to think
Of any ways he could atone.
Now, her long wait had finally ended,
As she saw him emerging from the trees—
Keeping his promise to be wed.
From the saddle, he quickly descended,
Repeating all he had once said.
He leaned down and brushed the dirt off his knees,
Then removed the hat from his head.
Upon his return from another town,
They embraced—no longer broken-hearted—
As crickets chirped a nighttime tune.
The heavy rainfall had helped to cool down
That warm summer evening in June,
And the cloud cover in the sky parted
To reveal the strawberry moon.
FABLE Poem: Summer, by Haley Wooning
1.
night after night, sunken ships dream of a thousand, pale hands
reaching up from the bottom of seaweed like insects gorging on
bodies bled into god’s great scalp
is this a train of too-many-images? I myself get lost in them, despite
my clamoring – for sleeping, for waking – my mind remains a lost chamber
and what falls apart in me
falls moondark like motes over thick patches of snow –
will never be found there – it scatters even further and I must confide now that
I never lost faith in the world, and the rivers that lived here never shut over me never
dragged me below never – drowned me but somehow
hunger stopped – when? loneliness started grafting its
long webs across the human gut where life is home and now nothing
Grows in its place, I hope it is not
my fault, isn’t it?
2.
invisible as the hard work of being alone – preparation
for home or for work, for bills, for humiliation or failure – preparation for
whatever is to come next, even dreams, those endless
wandering corridors and strange hallways where no one is there to open
a door or heed a call, eventually
the body tires trying to make sense of it, of lining up all these various tasks
while putting derangement into neat order
and the world wheels on, unfolding in a dazzlement of countless tales,
a history of spellwork, dragons and crickets and hags and bees – do you remember
your childhood? the fact of fireflies? the looming trainsounds that
fell off the horizon? all of this disappears,
bones bare in the soil, here and there, something chewed on and spat back out –
one must prepare for the final exhaustion, the moment when the spirit is
too tired to stir again, and shuts its sweet eyes forever
3.
swept and abstract as
the misty wings of dragons
the spirit, exhausted by
necessity- hidden in the
wardrobe shut against the world –
in the mind’s blank fog, not even
spring registers, but I remember
dreams, the emptiness of waking
in the middle of a longing soon to be
forgotten come the sun’s
bleak recognition – that old, tired question
pulled apart into pieces behind the chariot:
why am I thus and not otherwise?
4.
thundering fawnhood, stinking river-mulch
I arrive at the river where you loved me,
I count the empty spaces between my fingers where
on the mossbed my
hands stay open in the long wait
for rain to fall, for dusk to harken each
moment into each moment
sometimes when I am like this, I shut my eyes and wish
at the sky’s bottom another ocean where the birds swim – places
where humiliation does not exist, I go there – I touch the sea’s end where my imagination
tangles like feet in seaweed
like a gnat lost amongst the fallen kingdoms of spiderwebs, like
something not me, how long will it last?
woods my imagination grows home into
life far away, further than the green outside
the heart’s
sputtering
windmill – then decay
5.
green distance, blackbird soaked
the cemetery’s steeple scrapes the sky down to a fog’s pallor
in centuries away, my pulse thickens the woodland hum
and I am neither fearful nor lonely, what the seawaves shape
into the cliffsides is as familiar as my own hands, I am like those
that lived and died below this great tree that hugs the
hillside carved so deep with graves and their etched stones – my loves
and I, we walk the narrow stepways before the sun sets blue dark
at the water – their bare feet leave proof as deep as the world
we dance on the heads of giants –
HAIKU Poem: the speed of slow, by Rose Achino
After noticing a monarch and a canada goose on the same day.
a bird migrates long
distances. generations
move slowly ahead.
LGBTQ+ Poem: Dosage Loop, by Siobhan Dale
Pleasure lopped, I
Stuttered the axis
Of a line. If I can
Tell you where I
Am what shame of
Yours will find me?
I tend you line of
Ivory loops and
Wean myself on
You – my beauty
Butcher. Threshing
Stash of sweet denial.
What happens if
Deny becomes our
Healer?
When I denied the
Ivory floor I lost
Your hands, swoll
And blood-burst
With accumulating
Color. Orange light.
You lay work to my
Hands and said.
Three bags of
Salt will scorch
The earth.
What will be left
After I confess you
Stole into my folds
A patchwork of
Pleasure light?
Your orange set
Decors my mason
Jars. I fear the blade
Is safe but not the
Butcher.
We began the lop
Goodwell. Brought
Our glue guns to the
Funeral and forgot
The words I am who
I’ve felt inside me.
Your two finger-gun
Hot and heaving detox.
The orange set of light
Reminds me too. I am
Who I have entered.
And you, the butcher
Always begged my
Blades.
All blades beg hurt
Lopped off. All hurt
Lops off sunlight and
A swollen thirst. I asked
Your salt bag to please
Bear with me. A body
Swells one mason jar
With blood. The rest
Is debt in detox. I asked
You hold me through
That dose. Please
Caress the skin of me.
Find me one day as your
Form.
Our form folds
On an axis. Our
Axis folds our
Shame.
Axis our overdose
I suture the narcotic.
If you keep my blades
Embedded we’ll be
Fine. I found you salting
Lines and said please
Seal the earth around
You. I have bodies we
Might rewound inside
Closed doors. The shame
Doored. Not lopped.
The stitch still seals itself
Together. I didn’t want
Butcher as the regardless
Of what blades you left
I still repeat your name.
I still repeat the orange
Gun in wait, the recharge
At the funeral. The salt
Gull bags and axis wanting.
I am still wanting.
The want sicked itself
A pleasure. If I can find
Her I’ll beg the pleasure
Off. Lopped off three
Hallucinations, still
Played survival verse.
Please wane yourself
The dose and bladed
Words.
All we are is
Words in dose.
Every day my dose.
Every dose lops blood
behind a mouth and
finds me. Please
come find me. I am
your body in overdose
of bleeds.
ENVIRONMENTAL Poem: History’s Future, by Zachary Garripoli
Centuries ago,
when they dismantled Jupiter through Pluto
to construct a sphere around the inner worlds,
no one thought about the consequence
of emptying the sky.
But whales, and certain plankton
necessary for sustaining life,
recoiled in horror.
When those species disappeared,
it was attributed to:
a chemical imbalance in the sea,
El Nino,
and a lengthening of days
in which the clock’s hands slowed.
Centuries ago they extruded a tube
between the Moon and Mars.
In less-than-an-hour you could be breathing
recirculated Martian air,
which smelled a bit like smog at first,
but you got used to it.
They made progress.
They did away with war,
about the time they did away with thinking
for yourself, as well as speaking out,
and dreaming.
The future held the world in awe,
and then contempt. If it was the beginning
or the end, no one dared to say.
Centuries ago things began to change
so fast, they couldn’t stop
to write it down.
They made it easy to forget
the lessons history would never teach.
ROMANCE Poem: Springlight Leisure, by Nirvana Samsara
Let’s bloom together on a spring day,
where silence speaks what words won’t say.
Let your smile bloom in soft array,
beneath the shade, a mellow sunray.
All the words we forget to speak,
soft as cherry petals on your cheek—
where laughter lingers and time slips away,
let pearls fall free when you laugh that way.
Spend time with me on the meadow’s bend,
where Heidi and Peter let childhood mend.
Let sunlight kiss your dream-lit gaze,
lost in a soft and honeyed haze.
I will pick you flowers, one by one,
and yell to the mountains, “You are my only one!”
Listen—my voice in echoes replies,
when rain starts pouring from my eyes.
ENVIRONMENTAL Poem: Not Dead, by Sandi Timbus
Dead trees make home
to singing birds.
Dead trees hold swings
to laughing children.
Dead trees make shadow
to the tired.
Dead trees feed
Woodpeckers.
Dead trees are not dead.
Fake bail still catches fish.
The mind is still tricked to wonder away
GRIEF Poem: Cenotaph, by Melanie Bryant
Needing you still, I come when I can,
this time to the labyrinth
to share this circular path.
There’s no one on the trail today
as I make my way
a shroud of fog settles in.
These trees were strangers
stark with winter their bare limbs
bearing a striking silhouette; pilgrims bent in prayer.
But now I know them well—
a weeping cherry, a slouching yew;
three graceful cedars standing tall.
Weather has erased the names from their plaques, but there remains:
In memory of; In memory of; In loving memory of
a beloved husband; now six years gone.
Listen. The cedars whisper vespers
as I make my way around the outer edge;
the bricks are slick with moss and sound beneath my feet.
When I pass again, a rotting bench where no one sits and
through the trees, a flicker of neon yellow; hulking husks—
empty school buses, lined and waiting in a vacant lot.
I tell you; it’s still as a graveyard—
the enduring quiet of this liminal place.
Alpha and Omega.
At the still point, I pause to rest;
everything slows, quiets even more, but
nothing stops; nothing ebbs my ache for you.
Still needing you, I come when I can;
again and again, back to this labyrinth.
Look. I am the yearning woman circling this path.