Nate Maxson
Sun shadow of a Blakean jaguar passing overhead/ sun didn’t set today/ only light from the stripes of the wildfire
Here is your prayer made of smoke and dust/ rising shamanic signal, skywide: approach the throne and whisper, like so, inside the old world’s red lungs
Let this earth disappear/ this ash-land singularity/ burn, big world to the ground
Clare ChaiPoetry Contributor
Clare Chai is a writer who lives and breathes Hong Kong, and hopes to write about it in all its contradicting complexity and also about her personal experiences in the city. She has a day job and is only a poet by night, so please excuse her if her work is sometimes a bit dark (though she loves to let the light in too). She is interested in identity, culture and the ephemeral nature of things.
Poetry Contributor
Larry Blazek was born in Northern Indiana, but moved to the southern part because the climate is more suited to cycling and the land is cheap. He has been publishing the magazine-format collage Opossum Holler Tarot since 1983 and could use some submissions. He has been published in the The Bat Shat, Vox Poetica, Leveler Poetry, Five Fishes, Front and Mountain Focus Art among many others.
Diandra HolmesPoetry Contributor
Diandra Holmes has lived in the Midwest for most of her life. She graduated from Butler University. She lives with her wife and three cats.
Photography Contributor
Olivier Schopfer is a Swiss poet and photographer, born in 1966 in Geneva. He finds inspiration in nature and in his travels around the world. His work regularly appears in anthologies, as well as in numerous online and print journals. He is the author of four
books: In the Mirror: Concrete Haiku (Scars Publications, 2018), So Many Miles: Fifty Senryu (Alien Buddha Press, 2019), Half in Light, Half in the Shade: Haiku and Senryu (Cyberwit, 2019) and Home After a Long Absence: Haiku, Senryu and Tanka (Cyberwit, 2020).
Cover Art – Nevermore
Shannon Elizabeth Gardner is a graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point with a Bachelors in Studio Art and a Minor in Art History. Her interest in horror and the macabre came about while exploring nature and the paranormal. The work explores the natural and organic process of death, evoking empathy for decay. She believes life is beautiful when left to fate and by leaving art to chance, it assists the viewer to witness beauty hidden within imperfections. Her process appreciates nature’s process and discovers the earth’s imperfect beauty. The ethereal mood of her work reaches the extreme and addresses the taboo.
Poetry Contributor
Archana Sridhar is an Indian-American poet and university administrator living in Toronto, Canada. A graduate of Bard College, Harvard Law School and a former Fulbright Scholar, her work has been featured in The Puritan, The /tƐmz/ Review, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere.
Maybe at the end all you see is faces
Poetry Contributor
James is the author of four collections of poetry, Solace Between the Lines (2019), Light (2016), Ancient Rhythms (2014), and The Silent Pond (2012). He has also had over 1,390 poems, four novels, 35 short stories, and seven essays, published in over 180 national and international magazines, journals, books, and anthologies. His poems have been nominated multiple times for Pushcart and Best of Web awards. He earned his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, and his doctorate from BYU. A review of his newest collection of poems, Solace Between the Lines can be found on Cyberwit.com.
Jim Hanson
Ghosts engender all of us
and live in our civilization
—so read a book, watch a movie, recall a line or speech or historical event, look at a great skyscraper or jet airliner
—they are here in the light of day from the shadow of the past.
They were back there studying and experimenting, developing their talent, breaking down old forms and creating new ones, dreaming of the ideal form, celebrating their genius, sparkling with youthful energy, disdaining any limit on themselves, and assuming as do we their life and age to be quintessential. They composed, performed, wrote, painted, acted, designed, engineered, deliberated, legislated—creating civilization, our civilization.
(And we are here as their careless caretakers, redacting and revising their works, defiling the primary with the secondary, reinterpreting their dictums of truth, beauty and goodness with the hermeneutics of postmodernism, misinterpreting the flame of eternity for the flux of modernity, acting as corrosive as the acids of nature, listening to Glenn Gould play Bach and Al Pacino perform Shakespeare – defiling authenticity, our replicability.)
Ghosts also engender each of us
and live in our home
—stay up late, turn out the lights, drink a whiskey, watch an old movie, see live actors long dead, appear in the dark
—I watch a late-night movie with Fred Astaire dancing sweetly with Ginger Rogers, gliding across the black/white screen, brightening the drudgery of the thirties. And not alone—yes, my father and mother are here, from a long time past, in this moment of suspended disbelief. We sit on the couch and talk about the good times when dancing the jitterbug, singing the tunes of Broadway, listening to Jack Benny; also surviving the hard times of bankruptcies and strikes during the depression, the dust storms of the great plains, and rations during the war. My mother recalls working nights at a roadside café for 25¢ an hour, which was the price of a movie ticket, and there she met my father a truck driver. My father talks, too, about Model T cars and Clydesdale trucks, about FDR and Eisenhower. I offer cocktails, but the movie ends, and they rise from the couch. No, please stay, we have so much to talk about. But no use, the more I plead and attempt to hold them, the farther they drift away, phantoms fading in the late night air. Past and present tear apart, silently, leaving no trace of what once was.
Ghosts live in mid of night with me
when then and now occur as one.
At dawn of day they go away
to where I know I too will go.
Pranav Yadav
It’s been a while,
Since I lost my life again like last night,
It’s so ironic that I still type
The words which I never bespoke
To love I’ve never known.
Loneliness sets in,
It’s cold, empty like we’ve all felt
It’s empty but then why is it heavy?
When did nothing get it’s weigh
How did darkness started to feel home
Showers became longer,
Days shorter
And the quiet breaths of sleep
Rumble in my stomach
Barks on the street
Occasionally construction noise
All became my fellow companion
In words I brew,
Doodles I drew,
With the extra strong coffee I gulped.
Not long before it turned black,
Had vodka, the Irish knack.
I wonder what pain did Irish felt
That their breakfast held
This abomination.
But it was magic indeed,
My night filled with smoke
Were lonelier
But I didn’t sleep.
I could now sit to contemplate
Ramble these words as my eyes
Followed the mosquitoes closely.
Where do they disappear in the morning?
And why do they sing
In our ears,
When we don’t like them?
Isn’t it the fate of lovers to sing us to sleep
To kiss our cheek and leave
Us with marks
All over our body.
While they love somebody
And we’re nobody
In this neverland of feelings
With no escape, just killing
Of emotions, spur and urge
To live.