It was a bad day:
By the end of it
He had become convinced
That the landscape of the city
Had been usurped Continue reading “In Anticipation Of The Singularity by Mark Beechill”
Fying from New York to Athens,
I am seated next to a man named Frank.
35,000 feet in the air,
high above sea level,
far from swelling waves – Continue reading “Meeting Frank by Loretta Oleck”
Fushimi Inari
We walked into the dark-
-er and darker red gates and long long steps
a key between my teeth
shiny shiny boots plastic
cup of warm white wine Continue reading “Two Poems by John Boursnell”
Crying on the threshold, waiting to step into light, waiting to step into a history of pain. I am at the doorway now. The process of healing hollows me out, a tree preparing to become a waka. Sailing back in time into an ocean of grief and love, back to where I began, back to where we first landed. Continue reading “whatitoka (doorway) by Kathleen McLeod”
We wandered the streets
Pointing out our childhood
Every detail that remains
A teenaged memory Continue reading “This Place is Ours by Hazel Warren”
And once we’ve reached the bridge, we stop.
I have seen the native fellaheen* cross on bikes and motorbikes,
phones in their back pockets,
blasting music that hits like sudden hail in the country stillness,
bites,
and echoes away. Continue reading “Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley by Aiya Sakr”
Finders of hidden places,
young children, explorers, climbers,
crawl under fence wires, dig, cut,
trespass on private property, Continue reading “Make A Way If There Isn’t One by Heather Saunders Estes”
It burst out of you like a swarm of bees,
And you didn’t recognize the scream.
Moonlight drizzled across your forehead
Like milk and honey seeping from the comb. Continue reading “Creation by Erynn Pontius”
Foreclosure
Her alligator appetites had long devoured
the marshes, owned the bayous
in the rooms of our house
by the time she was widowed at sixty.
Our live-in-the-moment mother
trained us to feed on each other, Continue reading “Two Poems by Janet Reed”
i. dirge the sea
shall we put an end to the sea?
re channel its eerie cries
calabash its black bawls,
––– elsewhere … Continue reading “Sahara by Petero Kalulé”
In my dream vision
(which is like Dürer’s except with less water)
There is the same feeling of columns.
The sky staggers on the hill –
The shape of a stomach
Is gestated in the clouds. Continue reading “Dream Vision by Lucie Richter-Mahr”
Do the flyswatters know
that inside the belly of unheard voices
every hummingbird started off as
a bug? That a drop of our blood could drink
sunshine & become white sand beckoning the seas
& the oceans that eat up our feet to the knees
& make us dissolve in that forgotteness? Continue reading “Arrival As A Form Of Departure: the lamentation of an immigrant by Bola Opaleke”
Why Would I Fantasise?
I am not a philosopher.
You came to me in a dream.
Already, I digress.
Subject + verb + object (direct).
You and your syntax.
You are a verb that requires many objects.
I . Want. To. Break. That. Continue reading “Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Four Poems by Sam Lou Talbot”
A mural of a massive wave
painted on a concrete wall
can’t provoke a disaster,
can it? Fenced off so no one
can smut it with graffiti,
this careful reproduction
Continue reading “Under A Wave Off Kanagawa by William Doreski”
15:20 backlit wisps and railroad tracks in the sky. flashes of starlings’ wingtips. I look at the river too long, and now see it every time I blink. Continue reading “Writing A Winter Sunset by Oliver Cable”
some nights i, molested by some
morbid desire, stand before my mirror
and examine myself: my chest, my breasts,
two halves divorced, barren land between.
We arrived in a thunderstorm: lightning fingers shot down, pinning horizon
to dark highway. Then the low rumble. Taut Dakota midnight. For weeks
you’d made me promise to avoid photos, insisting I see firsthand the slopes
of ancient clay rising from the prairie. Rain fought the roof of our rental; Continue reading “Badlands by Betsy Housten”
Once young
The land meant everything
Patches of green and brown
Wild things and half wild critters
Cross our path
As we made our way along
Collecting small mysteries Continue reading “Wonderment by Tara Lynn Hawk”
You claim to make a new life
Then proceeded to backtrack
As you stay deep inside your edwardian
cottage of decay and old newspapers Continue reading “Chainsaw Demolition Waltz by Tara Lynn Hawk”
Punctuality
This
This is
This isn’t
This isn’t a
This isn’t a nice
This isn’t a nice, cool
This isn’t a nice, cool dream
This isn’t a cool dream
This isn’t a dream
of a sunny day in
a Cimmerian
night
This may
This may be
This may be even
This may be even worse
This may be even worse than
This may be even worse than a nightmare
This may not be worse than
This may be the worst
This is the worst
ever
the worst ever monster
the worst ever monstrous
the worst ever monstrous, cool
the worst ever monster, nice, cool
dream, which turned into a
nightmare, since we
didn’t wake up
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 