Category: Poetry

Fever

Judy DeCroce

a humming sound impatient
like a shell held to the ear

waves of heat brim
a constant reminder
of a storm within

an ocean’s roar and shrink
and the tide waiting

I know its persistence
burning as its beach

Judy DeCroce

what’s left

Linda M. Crate

you told me once
i didn’t have a temper,
do you feel it now?
in the flames of my immortal
wings?
or perhaps in the fires of my dragons?
i know you must feel the heat
of my rage
i haven’t quite disguised it
does it disquiet you?
or do you think you will quiet me
with sweet honeyed words
full of insincerity?
silver tongued devil,
i know the fangs of your
death and darkness,
but i do not despair because
you have not yet met my monsters;
i will destroy your darkness
with all of my light
and the heat of the fangs of my monsters
will destroy what’s left.

Linda M. Crate

The Quintessence of Fire

Stephen Mead

Enter flame, its elusive petals.
They become real & you could drink them,
be lit with their hues.
Such nimbuses pulse, drawing air in,
luminescence wrapping round,
a vampirism kiln
sucking, swallowing, reeling
back out…

Such hunger
gives off a sulfurous aura.
Cobalt gas yawns, an unpredictable
breathing thing.
It lives as turbulence, truth.
Its blazing is nature, opposing
neutrality, glamour, rituals.

See it grazing, moving across lawns?
Bursting to eddy, the conflagration
seems sacred. To focus on its bowels
means discovering Pompeii, the burnt
ends, the ashes…

Falling, every tip drops
a climax, a kiss.
Next they head seaward,
having cleared the landscape.

Here regeneration’s bleed, wavelengths
of burners, their innermost eyes.

The evolution is fascinating, an enigma
to behold. Imagine it
separated from gaseousness,
thrown into cold space——

Fire, a sphere, that coin
twirling, twirling,
this side of it, a black hole,
this other…your door.

Stephen Mead

Fire

Kevin A. Risner

at the age of four / my house was a lightning rod / the roof bulged toward the purple sky / a magnet to saturated clouds / with eyes closed it sat alone / a lunar landscape / windows held wildfire as I walked closer / eyes focused on the upper floors / where I slept / the flames were brooms sweeping in the churning rhythm of a washing machine agitator

at the age of seven / I saw a scene at the start of a film / a man unlocked the front door / briefcase in hand / full of work to finish that night / turned the knob and opened the door / the collected energy of the fire within blew the door off its hinges / engulfed him completely / and that was his sole role / I think if that would happen to me / stand at the threshold / reach for the door handle / open it the tiniest crack / wait for the heat to come / I’d believe the wind would save me

at the age of thirty / I wake up in a sweat / July seems so far away / from the reality I want / nightmare anviled my brain / we want to have so much more time handed out to us / every minute / every day / but we open doors and become consumed by everything in the next room

Kevin A. Risner

Manufactured Seasons

Prithiva Sharma

I’ve slept in your heat,
You’ve woken up in my ice,
And our sleep cycles have been reduced to seasons
Where spring never comes;
It’s either the scorching sun or an icestorm

I wonder why they name cyclones after just one person—
It is never just one somebody who erases a community
It is always an entire community which ensnares that which it fears,
Which it rejects

Our identity is like that (or as you say, our iden-titty is like that)—
It is a community full of wilderness that needs to be civilized,
It is a religion full of Satans that needs to be christened
It is a house full of both of us with our weird couch (named Dorian),
And our discolored walls, and us

One day we will wake up together, in different sides of the same bed,
Our feet curled around each other because we
Want to not have cold feet at least at night—
We will walk out of the house at the same time, with our hands intertwined
And no one will look at us, except for the barista at Starbucks
Who will tell us that we’re the cutest couple she has seen this morning,
And so she will give us a discount of 2 bucks

One day, we will, but today?
Today we wake up together, in different sides of the same bed,
Our feel curled around each other because
We want to not have cold feet (even though it is the middle of summer,
And the air conditioner barely works)
And we walk out of the same house as two different people at two different times
So no one would know that at night, we are the same body
Heating up even in the hum of the air conditioner

And when I say I love autumn, you’ll change the bedsheets to a rotting red and
Mustard yellow; when you say you miss the cool, I’ll finally get that
Air conditioner repaired
And in the middle of a Sunday work marathon when we both
Exclaim how we long for spring,
We will go and buy enough flowers to weave a quilt with.

Because if seasons don’t come to us, we’ll bring them.

Because if man can make love, then we can make seasons too.

Prithiva Sharma

I’ll Forget You

Julianna May

I’ll forget you in a day or two;
the way your hand cupped
my neck’s nape, drew me close
like strings of a knapsack
pulling together.

I’ll easily forget your freckles,
constellations covering the space
of your cheeks.

Each brush of your hand
on my shoulder, knee,
burned the wooded maze
around my heart.

I won’t dwell on the ways our tongues
danced a tango quickly
to the beat of my heart.

I will forget you in a day or two
despite the fire dancing
through my body.

Julianna May

August, 1980

Zoe Philippou

The only Summer my red-haired
mother was tan, not freckled,
not pained and peeling,
but goddess golden tan,
we moved the porch swing
back and forth too slowly
to part the air.
The hottest day gone too far.
Brittle grey planks
popped and creaked,
tongue in grove,
with the small shifts
of weight that carried us
teaspoons of distance,
forward and back,
nowhere at all.
Inhale and exhale.

She was breaking
the last of the pole runner
beans into wet newspaper
spread across her lap,
trying to save them.
Sandals kicked aside
the wooden kind she always wore,
like a Dutch girl, finger
over the cold water
crack in the world.
Feet resting heavy like badly chosen
skipping stones, cracked and scattered,
a dry creek bed that skinned
your knees and shins
if she curled up in bed with you
to say goodnight.
So she didn’t.
Kept them tight to the floor,
hushed you at a slant.

I laid my cheek against her arm
felt the slip of sweat and beach oils,
salt and coconut
though we had never
been to the sea,
closed my eyes on rattling thirsty
crows, saw shadow suns
behind my blind eyelids
and counted, lips shaping
the numbers, the tense and snap
of her shoulder under gilded skin.
Until she shrugged me off.
dirty cheeked and whiny
as a mosquito.

I knocked her glass
on purpose as I jumped
to go, spilling sweet tea and ice
over her stone toes.

Jody Burke-Kaiser

Naked

(for the women of Salem)
Jennifer Gauthier

Naked lately—
flayed over fire
innards exposed indisposed
to tell my secrets
to those who wait.

Called to testify amplify verify the very part
that hides itself away inside.
Bartholomew knew the fate that
I can’t escape
To skin the truth off the lies to try
To skim the oil from the water
As it slews in circles across the surface.

Roiling, my brain buzzes with bitter words
Biting back the worst when they threaten to slip through the slit
That gapes in my face.

Naked later—
Stuffed with stones sinking
Into the dank underbelly of the stream
screaming through the current wetly
with a witch’s wail.

Jennifer Gauthier

a spark to set the world on fire

Jessica Minyard

you are outside in the dark, alone
you can hear the music, feel the bass
rattle through your chest

there are a few stars, winking
like lazy eyes

she’s in there, you know, but
she said she doesn’t want to see
you

you imagine the booze flows freely, hot
and sticky down throats, spilling
on dresses, lowering inhibitions, until

she forgets you

you catch a flash
of yellow hair, the sweet arch
of a slender shoulder, and sigh

the sloping walk down to the beach is short

you take off your shoes

the white sand is still sun-warm, but
cool when you dig in your toes

there is a crack, then another
pungent odor of sulfur wafts down

fireworks burst and shimmer
against the black sky
Streaking and shattering and exploding like tiny stars

red
blue
green
purple
pink
silver
gold

like her hair

the colors ripple across the waves
and disappear

you cuff the legs of your jeans and
step into the water, chill stuttering
your breath

but

you’ll have the fireworks to keep
you company

Jessica Minyard

First Love

Merril D. Smith

This universe is secret smiles—
a boy,
a girl,

blushing stammers of
will you?
are we?

It is slow eternity,
delicious magic,
a look,
a kiss,
that time of joy, embraced,
and gone—

remembered
in the heat of a June night.

Merril D. Smith