Cinderella upon Remembering Bruno
Her hands
down by her sides
Also her drink of choice
and how she speaks to
the bartender
Her subtle, slow
I’ve got all day
burn
Continue reading “Judith Taylor: Cinderella upon Remembering Bruno”
This is not a violin, it is a doorway. I know this, because I read a lot. My notes and references are usually very detailed breadcrumb paths. But, as Brion Gysin said, the mice can get into the larder of language (and I add to his point, memory). And, well… I have no control over legions of mice.
“This is is not a violin, it is a doorway.”
Continue reading “ReVerse Butcher: This is not a violin, it is a doorway”
Over the Threshold
We laugh like newlyweds
as you carry me over the threshold
into a house rife with the spirits
of former tenants-
a lonely caretaker, a childless couple,
a single mother-
their DNA peeling off the walls
like chipped paint.
Tachypsychia. The word we use for defining the neurological condition which alters our perception of time. Time lengthening, time moving slower, time contracting. A blurred vision of time as response to a traumatic event. Time as a collection of unrelated passages. Time as red lines on the temptation to exist. Time as well-captured intentions, the same throughout all journeys. Every inked reflection, a paradise lost. Continue reading “Christina Tudor-Sideri: PASSING THROUGH THE HOME OF THE DYING”
Proper Entry and Exit
After Listening to “Canvas”
One must know what it is to be in and out. How to properly enter and exit. “Properly,” not in the sense of the bourgeoisie or uppity, but in the sense in which Robert Farris Thompson wrote about. Writing as he did about the ways we be.
There are ways of being in and out.
But how to enter and where to be once inside and how to decide when to no longer remain—what makes those decisions, those moments?
Can we ever reach the inside without entering?
And can we reach the outside without exiting?
Composition: Mixed Media
I paint to learn what my eyes barely see,
things hidden to me: cast shadows, a latch,
my mother’s ghost floating behind the drapes.
I study the image I shot, its hues and patterns:
copper door, stained windows, the stone of walls
and sun faded stone, the blur of a doorway’s curve.
Continue reading “Susan E. Gunter: Composition: Mixed Media”
I was thinking about Brutalism, cattle and passage tombs. Form, currency and death.
Walking the fields of North Cork and the headlands of Galway, casting cow-sheds as signs.
Homes for people, now homes for animals. Cycled forward by occupation, migration and forecasts. Radio broadcasts. Concrete and local stone piled into walls, supporting cold tin rooves. Corrugated steel. Cheap and functional, galvanised wave forms. Tin, iron and zinc combined and beaten thin. Weather resistant not weather proof.
My brother’s childhood room and mine connect through paired doors, at three different points. Walk out my room and and ten paces would take you to my brother’s door, next to the AC control, across from the panic button. We also shared a bathroom, each room opening onto the sinks where we would brush our hair, or teeth, or forget to, side by side. With both doors open, you could have seen from pillow to pillow if you tried hard. Continue reading “Dov Nelkin: 6 doors and One Slammed”
Forty-One
When
You wake
From sleep
You wake
From death
You know
Every Hour Hurts in Fall
By now, you have adjusted to time’s addition, waking
without alarm, your body’s sudden jolt of electricity—
your toes and fingers wiggle—eyelids flip open to stare
at the ceiling’s cold. You’re still here. Isn’t that crazy?
You want to get moving before you hold still, before
you find yourself between the flight of day & dream.
EXIT
on being broken / like shards of withered glass / my body
repels every music its soul makes / i close every door i
can’t walk back through / by this i mean i keep memories
in a box of cigar / god tells me i am a chapel Continue reading “Adedayo Agarau: 3 poems”
Growing, Up
The grass lies hungry, waiting
to swallow up water, worms,
seeds.
I scatter them. One by one
they are plunged into the
dampened fingers of fertile
earth,
Room 168, the Hotel S-
The door opens to a married man, a single bed.
You’re not here, but your presence is everywhere. The bed is meticulous, signs you’ve been here are subtle, imagined, your outline dimpling the duvet, just a trace; Continue reading “Ben Gedaliah: Room 168, the Hotel S-“
Portal
Strange goings on today televisions walk in and out the door pills spew from the cat’s mouth
here take your medicine fox at the door yip yips pit bull chews a piece of Wonder Bread the skull
of a boar on the table the boy reaches through a hole in his bathroom floor the door is open the
window is open Continue reading “Rebecca Loudon: Portal”
Isle of Brooders
From a jail in a far off island, boats arrive to
deport the sad. Grieving blood is tasty like the
legend of vanished rivers: an Acheron emptied
out by thirsty souls. Continue reading “Aditya Shankar: 2 poems”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 