And the hunger of loving is so acute that it becomes larger and more real than hunger. It turns itself inside out, and -- flayed and tender side outermost -- it whispers: I am not hunger. I am something deeper. I am what reality is made of.
by Dale of mole
That winter the cows would surround us
In the
darkness, feeling like omens
Against our fearful skins, fat tongues
unrolling
To taste us, fermented straw-mist on their breaths
And
ours, them coming through the thick mists
On our hillside, us across
fields returning
To the cottage from drowning our terror.
Sometimes on
no-moon nights the jigsaws
Of their hides appeared so quietly from the dark
There was almost no time to scream and scream
As they bumped and pushed
us from their peace.
Now they are long dead. Still their generations
Do
the same. Their children know us, harry us.
by mikey
At night I reach over to your side of the bed - that cold spot with its frozen memories. The warmth of my hand brings them out of their icy suspension. I can almost feel your nipple growing hard between my fingers. Thawed memories and maybe flawed memories begin to mix in with my body's involuntary muscle twitches and my random mental twitches - until your side of the bed freezes up again.
by Fred Garber of Factory Town
The Lagosians of Isale Eko come here with great fanfare when an old person dies. They order the most expensive casket, hire out a school’s sports field, throw a large party with canopies, live music and colorful outfits. The gift of longevity is celebrated. But if the deceased is a youth, fallen before life’s fruition, they buy a simple box. The rites are performed under grief’s discreet shadow: a small afternoon burial on a weekday, a somber brass band, and everyone in black.
by Teju Cole of modal minority
Evolution scrimped for ages, only
to have ungrateful kids at the end
rather wear halos and pretend they’re
too pure to enter colleges of fittest
survivals on the wrong sides of seas,
where sharks open jaws on smaller fish
chomping tinier ones still. Death will
wait for a giant asteroid then, when
peaceful people who dismantle bombs
can’t stop it. They make love one last time,
happy they won’t have to wake again,
turn on lights, and remember the sun.
by Donald Illich of The Church of Tony Hoagland
There was a seizure – she shook her husband awake.
Now she lies on this bed, won’t open her eyes.
Her husband sits beside her, thinks of the cancer.
Every day there is more of her hair on her pillow.
The roots of it are slipping out of their sockets
as she lets out each breath. There. There.
by Fiona Robyn of a small stone
The thin curtain pushed gently into the room by the breathing of the breeze. Where it lifted, sunlight splashed and stretched across the floor.
He lay on the rumpled bed, lapped by blown light, shifting shadow. He turned his head to look at her. She was busy with day-start, pulling on clothes with brisk efficiency.
"I've got a lump under my arm, in the armpit, could you look at it?"
She fastened something with an audible snap and leant over the bed.
"Don't worry, it doesn't show."
As she turned and left the room the breeze fell, the curtain dropped.
by qB of frizzyLogic
Earrings
Long dangling earrings in the shape of thoughts falling out of her head.
*
Jumping
No doubt about it, the older I get the less jumping I do. Lucky grasshopper is short-lived.
*
Octopus of wings
Lots of flapping,
but no grasp.
by Catherine Ednie of louder
Light hooks the soft edge of things, holds them in the moment. Light lifts the cover off the sky. A sun dog stands straight up in the southeast: a lovely pillar. There is another pillar to the other side of the sun, making a matched set. The wind blowing hard to the east cannot blow away the morning's color.
When the world rages, rage back your love for the world, I tell myself. Out-shout God.
by Tom Montag of The Middlewesterner
by Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine
Straight talking,
that was what
was needed, so
you said. And
you smiled a thin
and final line,
and you turned,
as they say,
on your heel,
on a sixpence,
and you strode,
straight-limbed, along
the coastal path,
direct, unswerving,
to the jetty, walked
its slick rectangle
to where the ferry
rode at anchor.
Just in time:
the straining lines
released, the anchor
hauled, the ferry
drove a silver
track, straight as
a rail, towards
a flat horizon. And,
as I watched
unmoving, you
slipped at last
around the slow
unyielding curve
of the world.
by Dick Jones of Patteran Pages
by Polyxena
The children sing songs of times long gone
and they play games of forgotten wars.
The sea cannot be seen from here.
The colors are broken, made of wood,
the children use them as white weapons
sharpened like pencils, daggers to survive.
Listen to the breeze, far out, elsewhere,
where green boats patiently await the end.
The sea cannot be seen from here.
It exists only in the minds of children,
small drawings of unreal landscapes,
the sky a color not included in this case.
Their small hands draw conclusions in gray,
the paper assumes the depth of clouds.
by Ernesto Priego of Never Neutral
by Lori Witzel of Chatoyance
In spring I heard a new bird across the road. It was red-brown and easy to locate in the young leaves of a maple. I couldn’t figure out what it was, which was pretty thrilling.
Summer has now hidden the bird in leaves and I still haven’t made an I.D. The creek branch has gone dry. A week ago minnows roiled and smothered.
The bird calls. It calls from over my shoulder. In the yard I walk under the ash tree, battered by a nameless din.
by Bill
Where are my other daughters or sons?
I ask as if I, learning of them, of those grains
Waiting for my arms and lips and heart, didn’t turn
My heart from them, and instead rushed here and there,
Even to cold rooms in buildings named (can you believe?)
After saints, to plead for freedom from them. Please!
You can save us! But they are always there,
These ghosts; they have followed me everywhere
Ever since, taking me to mirrors, showing me to myself.
My sweet darling, here into my once red hands
I’m weeping for love of you, and them.
by mikey
by Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine
An old pop song: the lyrics rise up
from the silted depths intact.
Just when we think we
know it, the world pulls away.
No wonder we hold on tight
to these strings of words.
by Fiona Robyn of a small stone
A quiet rustle of leaves reached into his pocket and took out a dollar. It was a simple theft, not soon discovered, if ever. It could feed her and nourish her wooded home. She could plant some flowers. Oh, but she would enchant a black-capped chickadee to carry her to market, and she would find her true love nestled amongst the parsley. It had been foretold. Lost in the glow of that vision, she didn’t notice the wind carrying the dollar away into the forest of barren trees.
by Daniel Ribar
On the bus home, I was listening to Brendel play Beethoven's twenty-seventh sonata. I was lost in the music, eyes closed, fingers racing to and fro across my knees.
When I opened my eyes, I noticed that the sandy-haired six-year-old in the seat opposite mine was also playing air piano. I looked up and gave him the smile of equals. He looked at me expressionlessly, his tiny hands darting expertly over the unseen keys.
Our gazes locked; I continued playing (it was an especially tricky passage).
And, to my delight, so did he.
by Teju Cole of modal minority
Mingling
Mingling. The savvy of words, the sail, the shine. Soulsolid, brainlit, fingerplucked, earbent. And that's before clothes! Talk to me.
*
Warmth of the Body
Something to notice - the warmth of your body imparted to objects you were touching, but no longer touch: your bedclothes, your underwear, your necklace of stones.
*
The Furry Inquisitive Snout
I understand that writing is a furry inquisitive snout, poking itself into small and cluttered places, searching for choice bits of trash, unusual secrets, maybe a fragment of sky blue egg fallen from the nest. A furry inquisitive snout, a naked prehensile tail.
by Catherine Ednie of louder
Think here of orange peel and cloves, boiled
against winter in November kitchens,
or the flutter square of a tea bag, or ellipsis
of deer scat, punctuation of a spooked animal.
Try to think--but a thought, cinder-
block certain, eludes in grief. Ideas
dissipate like twilight. Life is like a gut
punch, thought the breath
you cannot draw. Life like the vertigo
in the afterblur of a camera flash,
magnesium dreams ghost the cornea,
the pupil, crackle the optic nerve,
things long gone now insistent
half-images, always there
when you close your eyes
to wish them back.
I am dreaming climbing slowly up the stairs in the house where I grew up. I stand on the landing. All its doors are closed. I open my bedroom door. The glow of the gasfire, and my hearthrug like a shaggy dog’s coat. On hands and knees I go and bury my face in its tickly softness. In the bed a human form - the top of a child’s head, her sleep-swept hair just visible on the pillow. I know that it is me. And that I mustn’t wake her. I creep, stealthy as a parent on Christmas night, to the door.
by Polly Blackley
On fire
under the rocks,
writhing out of a
sheath of skin
that smothers;
a vacated cocoon,
crumpled, translucent.
A papery mass, stretched
with the battle to contain
and etched in jagged lines
and tears and rips
with the sinewy
leaving.
-
Technorati Profile/ technorati tags: the release of an exoskeleton, shedding, pouring yourself into a tiny garment in a moment of desperate contraction that constricts as you expand, nature, poetry, traceries of our past, dance of sloughing, scratchings on stone, creativity, snakes, the shell that suffocates, an iron lung grown too tight, molting, writing.
by Brenda Clews of Rubies in Crystal
The fog is lifting over the salt marsh behind Petey's. The waitress sets down my carton of fish chowder along with a plastic spoon and two bags of oyster crackers. Blonde hair piled on her head and wearing a bright pink hoodie, she smiles and the lines around her eyes say lived-in and 'welcome.'
She turns to the couple at the next table and they chat about someone they all know. Locals. The summer crowds are long gone. I empty the tiny paper square of pepper onto my chowder, wondering if my parents came here often.
by Leslee of Third House Journal
Lifting my face from
out of my hands
I see that the world
as it was is still there.
But I see too
that my hands
have opened like
two leaves and that
my old sunflower face
is turned towards light.
by Dick Jones of Patteran Pages
by Natalie d'Arbeloff of Blaugustine
They kept an owl on a tether at the temple of Athena at Corinth. I used to go visit him every day after rounding up a dead rat or two. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: people who would never think of giving alms to a beggar would gladly hand over whatever their cats had caught, and the priestess at the temple always gave me something for the rats. "Your breakfast, sire!" I'd murmur with a bow. The owl would open a single eye, dim as a lantern in the blazing afternoon.
by Diogenes
It used to startle her, how cold an uninhabited body is.
But she can't help the wave of tenderness that comes when she passes a warm washcloth over breast and belly. Everyone succumbs to the impulse to whisper a word of comfort as the stream of water pours.
Sand makes it real. These eyes won't open again, not here.
Wrapped in white, the body looks smaller. She's always startled that it isn’t weightless when they lift it and place it in its nest of wood curls, like a precious etrog with a long way to travel before the holiday comes.
by Rachel of Velveteen Rabbi
by qB of Frizzy Logic
The Abbot of the Week peers out gloomily. Centuries away from the end of human belief in gods and devils, a tiny human remnant strung out in chains of carefully salvaged and lovingly maintained technology, a greenly self renewing planet, and what do we get? Fish falling from the sky every Friday. Believers would know what to do with this, but we are researchers, scientists, we don't theorize ahead of the data. After a resigned sigh, he picks up his pail and notepad, recites his ichthyology mnemonics, and heads out to the field with the rest.
by Zhoen of One Word
Here we are in the first shadow, arms elbow-deep in the tub of nighttime. The gray bodies of firecrackers, smoke-snakes, and sparklers litter the sidewalk. The smell of sulfur hangs on the leaves, and just visits the sides of my tongue.
Up above, impossibly high, three clouds, like red flags, flee to the east.
by Dale of Mole
The train mutters
to itself, no-one listens.
Looking out, her eyes are full
of early morning mist.
Every time she passes a cow
she dips her head
in silent acknowledgement.
She belongs with grass.
by Fiona Robyn of a small stone
A dream I had not half an hour ago:
"I like yellow," she said. "It makes me happy. But now it's a purple moment."
I agreed. Purple moment.
Just then a hospital gurney started to roll down the cobbled street. We ran down after it, but it gathered speed and at the bottom it turned over, ejecting a huge man in a red shirt.
by Pica of Feathers of Hope
The garbage truck of dawn calls me to rise and greet the new day; my daughter calls, in counterpoint, that she’s too tired to rise. My wife replies with discord. Outside, there is shouting: The weird old man from down the street paces the truck from home to home on his antique blue American Flyer, haranguing the stolid city workmen. Politics and children make me want to shout, too. I hope I never get that lonely.
by P.
He drove her to see the great egret, leaving her to walk back to work alone, kingfisher rattle in her ears, while he went to see the doctor he never tells her story to. She knows he still loves her too much to let go. Methodically she strips away the skin on her right thumb.
by Susan of A line cast, a hope followed
After flying for hours buoyed by a natural compulsion to follow the light, 400 warblers hit a net of wires holding up a communications tower in Madison, Wisconsin. The sea of night, like an expert fisher, corralled their falling bodies, while above them in the tower below the clouds our disembodied chatter went on without cease.
by Maria Benet of Alembic
One hot night he fled, crashing the front door behind him. It opened at once and the mad, spiky silhouette of his mother, ashamed to come out in her curlers, yelled: “I hope the bogey man gets you!” He ran the length of their road, maybe a mile. He was nine, small and skinny and no athlete. At the corner he stopped, gasping, and sat for a while on the curb-stone wondering where he could go. Nowhere. So he got up and his body walked back, but his mind never went home. He’s been trying ever since to reunite them.
by Jean of This Too
In the beginning and bisimillahi, sing muse and through me tell the tale of the man of the Spear Danes named Gregory Samsa who awoke from the firing squad to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover that all happy families are alike and stately plump Buck Mulligan in his younger and more vulnerable years must be in want of a wife who for a long time went to sleep early at the best of times and worst of times.
by Teju Cole of modal minority
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