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Saudades de Rio by Eva Rosenn

Does it haunt your dreams, or become like a pebble in your shoe?
The dark glossy leaves of the jeniparana,
The bright pink flowers of the bougainvillea,
The explosion of sugar of the banana ouro hacked from the tree?

Remember hiding in hammocks pretending to nap,
Chasing sandcrabs and stepping in pitch,
Visiting your sister’s pet monkey at the animal hospital—
An extended veranda filled with macaws screaming?

My pearl-crusted tutu for Carnival, the drumbeat of the sambas,
The pelting of the rain against the windshield with no wipers,
The salt of the ocean and the syrup of grape Fanta?

Explain choking on Cornflakes and powdered milk
Or taking the bus to the favela to pick out a live chicken
To our kids with American grocery stores.

Continue reading “Saudades de Rio by Eva Rosenn” →

Pacific Coast Highway by Yanina Spizzirri

How many times have I driven the same stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway? It’s hard to say, but enough times to have incorporated its curves into mine. I look at the palm of my left hand and I wander while I follow the life line, tracing it lightly with my right index finger. Up and down, down and up. There I go, edging the Pacific Ocean, winding and unwinding along the PCH under impossibly blue skies.

Continue reading “Pacific Coast Highway by Yanina Spizzirri” →

The Watersteps by BR Williams

The Watersteps are ruins now, but you can still see what is left of them by walking through the dank forest on the edge of town, over the train lines and then down to the crease where two wave-like hills meet. The steps sit half-swallowed inside a wide clay gorge. A little further up the gorge, there’s a stream at least half as wide as the gorge itself. It drops down an accidental waterfall caused by the collapse of the Watersteps. A sheet of tarpaulin wafts, hit by the unravelling crystal carpet of water. For the most part, the stream disappears amongst the rubble and soft ground at the foot of the waterfall. Only further down does a meagre version of it reform, bypassing the steps entirely.

The Watersteps have haunted my imagination for a long time. The first poem I ever wrote was about the steps. I hated it, re-wrote it, destroyed it and started again. I have been repeating each step ever since.
Continue reading “The Watersteps by BR Williams” →

Three poems by Mark Goodwin

February 29th 1933

The saddest thing for the English to bear, is not what they have lost, but instead
what they know has not yet been found, but is nevertheless enduring in the shadows.
– Derrick Adderage

The house has slid here
to this wide street-middle; it floats
like a dark ship on smooth wet tarmac; it splits
the road that seems to flow slowly

either side of it.

The houses lining the street shrink
as this one house inflates
with where it came from.

And him. Continue reading “Three poems by Mark Goodwin” →

Exile, intensive care by Christina Tudor-Sideri

I am not from here. I am from somewhere in between push and pull. I am a thrust not yet experienced by what people usually call ‘home’. I am exiled. I am exile. I reside not in my consciousness, but in the lingering smell of last night’s cigarettes and rain drops. In the burning of pages. In the hunger for belonging, which I feed with matches, flames, and the ashes of what were once my journals, my essays on the flesh of the world, my notebooks, my manuscripts, my resolutions, my shopping lists, my thoughts on the nightstand. Exile. Soft, felt in my hands. Felt in yours. Grasping its shape, fingering its texture, sensing its temperature. Exile, mingled with memorabilia and all the angers of the world. I live with it as one lives with a strong sense of physical presence, something to cling to until I get better. Something to keep me going. Being a gesture, becoming an extension of its flesh. That’s what exile is to me. A grave. Luscious. Infinite. Sarcophagus of blessed souls. I am pulling you into the depths of it. Exile, exceptional euphemism. Continue reading “Exile, intensive care by Christina Tudor-Sideri” →

Stave in the Autobiography of Sidney Ashe Fletcher by James Gifford

The road was cunning under the tires, slipping and pulling as I turned onto the forest service road beside Stave Lake. I was crunching over the gravel with plumes of dust filling the air behind me. It smelt more like desiccated mud than grit or ash. It was hot for May, and I had no idea where the road would lead. I was between two guides: the GPS and a nineteenth century memoir exhumed from the archives. Both were illuminating the screen of my phone, and I was alternating between the two when I would pause.

            1890 – As I learned more of the country and surroundings I realized what wonderful fishing and shooting was to be had in the different lakes and streams not far distant from the City. The Pitt River, the Lillooet River, the Stave and Harrison Rivers, and the lakes from which they came, although well known to the timber cruiser and trapper, had not yet been explored by the great majority of the young men of the City. Continue reading “Stave in the Autobiography of Sidney Ashe Fletcher by James Gifford” →

Three poems by Mingji Liu

Rewinds

Peel open and peek:

inside the flapping, lolling mouth
of our mother’s photo album.

laminated with a sticky-wash skin
in grainy, colour-locked glamours.

encircled as we are, backlit and gypsy-like,
upon the retina of her old kodak.

Leaf through and look:

at our mother’s postgrad bungalow,
and the cats she found and raised alone.

and here, in burnout red, our ex-brothers,
with their lucid, low alley guitars.

and these polaroids of nameless children,
in some backyard mummery we long forgot.

Browse, then burrow:

deep into this picture house novel,

framed by weddings. birthdays. sleepovers.
reunions. divorces. second-hand toyotas.
painted kitchens. political borders. the first dog we ever got.

Then her final photo. Book ends.
Snap shut.
The film roll clicks.
And our lives rewind again.

Continue reading “Three poems by Mingji Liu” →

// to the mirage makers guerrilla visionaries corpse whisperers apparition summoners //

p l e a s e  s h a r e  w i d e l y

 

\\thankyou\\

Continue reading “// to the mirage makers guerrilla visionaries corpse whisperers apparition summoners //” →

Reunion by V.C. McCabe

The sickly stomach heat
of inescapable guilt
pushes me through the door,

brick in belly, heart on sleeve,
succulent hors d’oeuvres for
ravenous vultures waiting

to cannibalise with freshly
sharpened fangs and claws. Continue reading “Reunion by V.C. McCabe” →

Softness as a cosmology by Rishi Dastidar

1. There is nothing soft in the universes.

2. There wasn’t at the start, certainly, unless you count the unexpected wobble that got us going to be some sort of expression of care from a creator we will never see nor hear from ever again.

3. All the energy unleashed becoming skids of hot gas becoming swirls of hot rock having what we will later describe as celestial pub fights, no there is no softness there. Continue reading “Softness as a cosmology by Rishi Dastidar” →

The Green, Green Grass of Ceredigion by Laurence Mitchell

The final nine miles into Aberystwyth were a soothing amble through dappled green light – the disused railway track partially shaded by the overhanging branches of limes and oaks, the gravelly river close enough to be an audible murmur through the trees. Continue reading “The Green, Green Grass of Ceredigion by Laurence Mitchell” →

By the Water’s Edge by Susanna Crossman

Henceforth, every line and every color of Picasso will exude the spirit of this rough land; will have the savor of dried figs or of cracked olives, the vigor of the olive shoot, the light of an almond tree in flower, the perfume of a sprig of lavender. And in St Petersburg and New York, in Barcelona, in Paris, in Berlin… they will collect and admire beautiful fragments of this enamored gaze.  —Angel Querol, son of the mayor of Horta Sant Joan
Continue reading “By the Water’s Edge by Susanna Crossman” →

Familiar Road by Daniel Fraser

Icy evening, drunk but not too drunk,
a blur of lights round Hollingworth, where blue
unhappy boats skim the winter lake.
Your breath gleams up the window of your
unkempt Volvo estate, the dark red hulk,
snug vessel which covered our childhood miles,
expanses doled out in weekend tropes:
car-boot sales, bacon-sausage-egg,
scalds of tea in Styrofoam and
fish fried in brown batter. Continue reading “Familiar Road by Daniel Fraser” →

Fifty Years Later by Kate Wooddell

Whiteness.
Walls gleaming stark with
fresh paint against dusty old tiger murals
while white hairs stroll the halls.  Artificially
whitened
smiles, untanned
skin, some hospital pallid, all
sans melanin.  The most distinguishing characteristic
we share. The pallor
of our segregated shame. Continue reading “Fifty Years Later by Kate Wooddell” →

The farm will have us always by Richard Winters

Winters.Mother.c

Mother

The air at 4:30 is cool and lightless, the Moon is waning gibbous, low in the south in Capricornus, and in the southwest, Jupiter is descending in Ophiuchus. And Mother came to see the tiger lilies yesterday, they are blooming beside the pond, marking the farm’s July. Continue reading “The farm will have us always by Richard Winters” →

One plus one is two point three by Caroline Stockford

 

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Continue reading “One plus one is two point three by Caroline Stockford” →

Grief is a private island by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton

Grief is a private island. You can only wave to people from it. Even people who have lived on that island, who may understand where you are, can only wave back. And yet the island is invisible so unless someone knows you are on it, they talk to you as if life is normal, and sometimes you don’t have the energy to explain or try to that you can’t understand a damn word they are saying because of all the water and wind between you and them.

A very few can whisper from some place different and make you feel temporarily less lonely because they have had a similar enough experience and an ability to empathize in a certain way, but in the end, it’s you and your island. And there’s no shorting the loneliness and sheer pain of grief.

Continue reading “Grief is a private island by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton” →

Three poems by Wanda Deglane

August
August is second-degree burns / from hands grazing against metal / it is waking from sweat-dripping nightmares / and no more room for intimacy / August is a silent scarring / a tension you can taste / stinking rotten in the air / it is a dozen new bruises / peppering my limbs every morning / how my mother wished she could see / a little more color in me / so I show her my arms / my legs / my neck / I beg her, make him leave / please / I won’t come home unless he’s gone / her smile is thin but gorilla glued / she says, I’m just so tired of fighting / can’t we pretend a little more instead? / I board myself up forty miles east / I eat this fake-happy like smoke-staining fruit / soft hair after downpour / and dreams of scissor-stabs tucked neat between my ribs / my brother no longer speaking to me / and forgetting to wake up tomorrow / it’s rush hour in hell / a car swerves to miss me / driver screaming, watch where you’re going / are you trying to die? / I look back at him, doe-like / his honks still blaring in my ears / I have nothing to say.

Continue reading “Three poems by Wanda Deglane” →

Strangers in Strange Spaces by Mercy Ananeh-Frempong

I am a sample of millions, billions. I am this sample soaking in these vivid visions and complexities of minds lost at sea. These eyes gaze long and absent mindedly at nothing, and for moments on end, realize that everything is familiar and alien at once. These eyes, tormented by meaninglessness, seek that which they know not. What the hell are we doing here? Who are all these beings floating through these spaces? Once upon a hazy memory, home was a shape-shifting mask bent out of proportion. Once upon a memory blooming, home was the love of life, the love of this life. Continue reading “Strangers in Strange Spaces by Mercy Ananeh-Frempong” →

Spanish Moss by Eric Edwards

Despite the distance we crash into each other repeatedly.

We spend a lot of our time typing messages. Talking over poor quality internet calls, across time zones that leave me exhausted, both of us wanting. A yearning that brings us closer but at a cost. Long nights of feeling alone while being together.

We hit and smash and spin out of control; never enough days and nights to find the balance that is there, tantalizingly out of reach, never out of sight. The wheels run straight for a while, but veer. We make it to the swamp. Though not the cemetery or the convent. Not this time. What we want is to run away into the woods. Continue reading “Spanish Moss by Eric Edwards” →

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