BECAUSE
Yuko Otomo
BECAUSE
I. Because
I love to say, “I love flowers because they are beautiful.” It sounds too simple, naïve & almost silly to express my fee...
The Rabbit and the Rat
Jokie X Wilson
The Rabbit and the Rat
The stones are worn
Although not quickly
Insanity led the ocean to fall
And rise again in revenge
But with a peaceful motive at hand
All went well for a short time
Until the human control fell...
The Winnowing
Michael Lindgren
The Winnowing
is nigh. I heard the voices calling
in the night
I sensed the stream of ones &
zeros flickering soundlessly. The
keening word has been given handed
down from on high
How many, out of
how...
Hairline Fractures
Peter Marra
Hairline Fractures
Pale colors
She lay awake afraid to move
Shocked by her own murder lusts
A long silver needle slowly had been
inserted in her mind
the ecstatic corporate scientists were
Injecting multiple obje...
SCANNING FOR MONKS
Marc Olmsted
SCANNING FOR MONKS
Ambitition - my
breaker of worlds =
disappointment's king & chief
ally of wake=up!
Sipping bad coffee
scanning for monks
there's a lot I won't
do now
for your
rottentooth
deals
-...
Any Other Street
Francine Witte
Any Other Street
would be made of asphalt, black pitch
pillowing in the August heat. But this street
is woven with bones and ash and anything else
leftover when a dream dies. It’s the kind
of street you try to av...
Die Harder Inside
Jane Ormerod
Die Harder Inside
A hand. Wheels. Silver nodding, coffee, the inward flight. Trust Los Angeles. Collect and die. The baggage of toe fist and bear co-and-op-and-corp-oration. Frosty riding. (Live to thirty then flee when...
The Wrong Day
Vincent Katz
The Wrong Day
it was so beautiful today, the most perfect of ones lighted on bricks and the last
walkings toward figures one had seen all summer and would see again
and my parents arrived last night after being dela...
Device
Steve Luttrell
Device
She can’t
take her eyes
off her phone.
Clutched in her hand,
a tether to
some unseen source.
I wonder what
she sees in that device?
glowing
like a beacon
in her hand.
She can’t
take her...
COLD DAYS IN FLORIDA
Thaddeus Rutkowski
COLD DAYS IN FLORIDA
When the temperature drops to forty degrees,
people don’t want to walk around.
It is too cold to be outside.
They stay inside and wait
until the days get warmer.
The temperature rarely drop...
Poet Story
Peter Bushyeager
Poet Story
The steel taps on
Mayakovsky’s size 13 boots
scraped the smear off his surface
when he wrote while striding
the Rockaway boardwalk
each metallic rap on the planks
a refugee thought gathered
so he cou...
Hand Job
Ron Kolm
Hand Job
It’s my first day on the job
In a plant making hand trucks.
“You’ll be rubbing acid on new
Welds to seal them,” the foreman
Tells me. “Here’s some rubber
Gloves,” he says, tossing me a pair.
...
NEW YEAR’S EVE IS THE HARDEST
Anton Yakovlev
NEW YEAR’S EVE IS THE HARDEST
By June he was done and done with politics and painting.
He couldn’t care less where he’d dropped his KGB card.
The shame at being blacklisted only sped up his breathing
two or three...
