Category: Poetry

Only thinking deadly

Mark A. McCutcheon

tonight becomes you
black as wine in the bottle
I don’t know what to say
I was thinking
I was a thinking knife set
do you remember little daughter
who broke both your hands for forming
your fingers into the fluttering
silhouette of a dove
I didn’t want to object because
I didn’t want to die of what anxiety

won’t somebody look in the drawer
where the darkest file grows
out of time surgery’s tight stitches
there’s only so much you can do
to kill a spider you can’t see
but the sated grey tick pulled
from the puppy’s neck
makes a satisfying black sacrificial stain
when crushed under your heel
we needed many interviews
to bring you up to speed

you told me to stop thinking deadly
you know I only think deadly
time doesn’t make things dirty
I have nothing to disguise you with
your tongue chunk and your bald spot
and your bag stab
only the large sarcasm database
who do you know with the go-to horns
that’s what they say in the business
we rob from the church
let’s go measure the churches

Mark A. McCutcheon

I’m Sorry, I’m New at This

Clare Chai

I have a few apples in my soul
That I forgot to eat the other day
Let’s make apple tarts with them
But maybe let’s eat them next time, when you’re not dead
Oh it’s not a temporary thing? Sorry
You led me down the only stone-paved street in the city
Trying to show me some history
When it was wet and I was pulling my luggage
Sorry don’t care much for your old haunts and ghoulish chatter
We’ve been walking thirteen minutes and I still can’t see the sign
Where does it say Ghost Town?
Oh it’s something you feel instead
You’re not being sarcastic are you
Then maybe shopping malls at dawn or bars in the early morn would be ideal
Yes I miss those places
How did you know?
By the way, that feast was great, the other day
When’s the next one, it’s Halloween isn’t it
What, they pretend to be us and then they eat all the treats for themselves?
Selfish brats.

[Clare Chai]

In the Dungeon of Duntulm Castle
(A Cyhydedd Hir)

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

Wailing winds of Skye
Cut the heart with cry
For bread, crust of rye,
In tortured dreams.

Lads who would betray
Their laird plead and pray:
Fettered limbs decay
As time unseams.

Demon hunger hones
Ligaments and bones
Buried under stones
That crushed their schemes.

Seaside cliffs are steep,
Dungeon tunnels deep.
Madness reives their sleep
But not their screams.

~Ruins of Duntulm Castle, Isle of Skye, Scotland

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

A blinding

Jane Dougherty

I lock the door; the wind blows black this night
through teeth locked in a rictus. Bitter glow
of broken moonlight bathes the restless trees.

Against the birds tossed dark and angry from
the north sky, clacking bone curse in their beaks,
I lock the door. The wind blows black this night.

Key rattles in the lock, by unseen hand
is turned. I have no will to move, and plead
through teeth locked in a rictus. Bitter glow

from bird-black eyes, the taloned fingers snatch
and blind; the smell of blood, the stench
of broken moonlight bathes the restless trees.

Jane Dougherty

After Ireland’s 1916 Rising, in England

Lavinia Kumar

The grey stone prison was all was known
of Dartmoor’s wild barren bogs,
the mists where DeValera spent time
deciphering political fog.

He’d come in over Hairy Hands Bridge—
hoped for help from faeries,
but saw a man sink down with his horse,
and decided to be leery.

Indeed, faeries did come over with him
to that dank moor in south Devon,
where it was so hard to understand
just one word out of seven.

Faeries won’t leave Irish men alone,
even gone to foreign lands.
They guide, decode, trick and support—
deal out a suitable hand.

Those faeries let the prisoner know
his fortune would keep on,
that escape would not be needed now,
to sit back, stop the moaning—

a sound he’d hear come from coffins
carried on the moor at night.
The black horses spawned at a dark pool
where hounds howled at a light.

[Lavinia Kumar]

Mirages

Mário Santos

There is no far, nor distance. There is only the light that goes out
in the darkness of your eyes.
Suddenly we stopped in a kind of desert. We should feel the
same sensation as the vegetables that fall asleep in the garden, in
a contemplative universe, with no other characteristics, just
contemplation. Here we are: standing in a dream, right in the
midst of a dream, in the free and imminently spiritual ecstasy
of those who fly over the plains, while we build roots progressively
deeper under the lethargy of our feet.

Mário Santos

a curse of opera (and love)

Rochelle L. Harris Cox

beside each other in plush darkness, straining,
becalmed, they yearn for storm. he craves

herosong and maidenswoon, the ghostly ship
crossing the stage; she covets his bearded profile,
hair in a viking tangle, through fear liquid as wine

and gulped from the glass. i cried for the dead
men singing, he says later, eyes shadowed by sails

that tatter and flap like crows’ wings across axe-
split pine. she will not listen to the bellows
of warning bass and waning tenor, wanting

only tears or words that do not fall for her.
they long to taste that place where lips meet,

the soft crease that catches saliva, dries it taut
and white so all kisses sting of dark-sung
curses. maybe tonight they will turn to each

other: for dutchmen must sail until love anchors,
until maidens pledge by shedding skin on stone.

Rochelle L. Harris Cox

Night Insect Roll Call

Cynthia Gallaher

sweat bees chase, buzz
me across a bluff
on the Cumberland Plateau
back to the sandstone
reprieve of Rivendell.

I may not be in middle earth,
more at the south paw end of it,
where I see four silent fruit bats
weave like shuttlecocks
on wefted reconnaissance

for mosquitoes on the warp,
those little vampires!
which otherwise
may have knit
swollen anklets for me.

I am too familiar with
such uneven exchanges:
blood letting for liquid itch,
and none too soon, from my
second-floor retreat,

night deepens,
as does the rustle and wave
of a mass rally of integrated insects,
which rattle and whisk the outdoors
like curtains of falling sand,

hold billboard-size stainless panels
they wobble all at once in the dark,
stamp tiny feet in a relentless march
along wooded aisles of aluminum foil,
usher a village of rain sticks shaken, not stirred,

and rend percussion with hundreds of dried gourds
and their thousands of desiccated seeds.
window screens protect me from
their overwhelming thirst
from stalking my flesh after midnight.

but as I fall asleep, am at one with
their multi-voiced symphony
and invite their asymmetrical rhythms
to inspire a dream.

[Cynthia Gallaher]

Gaga

Anca Vlasopolos

in gentle Surrey Exeter
lands where I have a tongue

still

among birds plying melodies
I have not learned
flowers leaves for me
nameless
stretching to this sun

I am left
half-voiced
can call
like infants or other foreigners
without whole roundness
name sweetie on the tongue
only
from wonder
and delight

[Anca Vlasopolos]

You Are a Raven

Heather Sager

I hike the mountain looking for you
and your warm advice.
I search the cabin, the horse farm and field
but you’re not there.

By the unceasing, hoary day,
I insist you live.
The sea eagle skirts the piney hill
and I inherit your daylight pain.

Birds flotilla the field and sky.
Now I know you are not dead—
only transformed.
Cursed by life’s disloyalties
you approach as a jet-black raven,
make your precise landing
on the crooked, gray branch
of a bishop’s-head pine.

Your dust-dark eye probes me.
I stand amid the sun-stroke yellow field
and boast, “Let judgement visit me,
let sharp fangs tear my breast,
let fall my tears!”

My wily eye transforms
to that of a carnal raven; I am changed.
Cleanse my sins, Mother of all—
I ask as I confess to the lunging sky—
transform me twice
so the true hawk in me
may yet fly.

Heather Sager