title: Perfume
photo by Shaimaa Abdelkarim
poem: Days in
some days
i mostly wonder
when joy knocks
would it smell like
a lily and jasmine musk perhaps
i often ponder
if joy is what today brings
let it come
Photo by Laurent Perren on Unsplash
poem: Bratislava 2016/ Sydney 2020
Where I’d like to be: a place with clean white sheets.
A hotel room, I’ve always loved them. View from the
window – not the ocean or anything, just trees
on a hill with some brutalist buildings and a pink and
orange sunset at rest behind. Luxurious.
The following is a brand new poem written for The Meadow, my bdsm themed poetry collection about my time in the world of bdsm as a young woman. I wrote this piece as well as the Reader’s Guide I published below to enhance your pleasure and understanding of the text. Order your own Meadow at apeppublications.com.
Underneath
Before you call yourself a womanchild,
you fly to New York City, college girl
costumed to be defiled, pigtailed, beguiled
before a bedtime story, too. A whirl-
wind trip in which he will present to you
Red, topsy-turvy, Riding Hood one night, Continue reading “Womannotated – Underneath”
Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash
poem: The Crossroads
The Cailleach’s breath rattles through the barren branches of the standing talls,
as midnight’s moon casts a cold glance upon all below.
Bearing gifts of coin and confections, tipple and tapers, I come to the crossroads
to petition and pray, as the witching hour draws near and the veil thin.
Photo by Naomi August on Unsplash
story: The Dog
Their clothes are ironed on them in the shape of death. Soggy bread of a sky looking over, he gargles time release capsules. Not enough pills milled for the morning after. The frosted flakes expired; he flops between her shrubbery, bulge withering beneath a dress. “It’s no longer in style to be a bad lay,” she says. He vows to return her to the urn, drops her off for cognitive behaviorals instead. “Listen to a woman once and you become her therapy dog,” his mother always said, teeth gnawing through his skull like fly eggs, speaking through a bisection of his face in swarms. “We’re all Satan’s puppet, a populace atop the hoof.” He hears her talk to the shrink through walls so thin he wishes they were her clothes. He tends to end up overacting in the bear costume she makes him wear. They’ve been brining bite marks on each other. In utter silence their chalky mouths resemble apple seeds, if worms took the core. “What eats the worms after they eat us?” Entwined guts, reshuffling microbiomes a couple viruses at a time, they’re not worth the ekphrastic flesh of their penny masks.
poem: The Hunt
we flicker from pixel to pixel
the dream of this inverted world
our bodies dissolved into digits
the horizon flattens and winks out
into an oblate blank plane, stretched
thin between plates of strange glass
we are reborn with ease here
free to reconstruct, to glut ourselves
on electric subjectives
Photo by Christian Fregnan on Unsplash
poem: Take me to a Place
Take me to a place
where you feel no pain
where no one cries
where no troubles exist
Show me the path
that I need to follow
to find this land
where everything works
Can anyone hear me cry?
Because right now
I am so very lost
so very tired and broken
Photo by Patryk Grądys on Unsplash
poem: time travel is cruel & kind
you’re me. i’m not
one but so many.
you do not walk.
empty and rootless i drift. i’m
you. as everyone digs out caste histories and thump their chests and thighs you drift and i turn at right angles. time’s not linear but parallel. adrift i turn left right left you turn at left angles.
cyclone of light or what, i say
Photo by Wendy Scofield on Unsplash
poem: Building Blocks
Sometimes I just want to buy something
fuck like it’s the last hurrah
build an ant farm
although I don’t like ants
I want to do a thing – some kind of thing
(I started this when I was walking)
and then climbed into myself Continue reading “Three Poems by Donna Dallas”
Photo by Inja Pavlić on Unsplash
poem: Noise of life
The last autumn leaf now falling
And drifting towards alien lands,
Barren boughs of the maple tree
Shivering in the wind’s cold clasp,
Besotted moths still chasing flames,
Days seeking nights pursuing days, Continue reading “Three Poems by Mugu Ganesan”
Photo by Mark de Jong on Unsplash
poem: The Painter
How do I answer
the call of canvas
when I have no hands
to spin light into paint
to sift sun and shadow
like yolk from its egg Continue reading “New Poem by Lucy Whitehead”
Photo by Makenna Entrikin on Unsplash
poem: Driving
The moan of late-night cars cruising the highway—
ghostly, but not ghosts. Call them cries at 3 a.m.,
memories bursting forth from the brain,
gasps in bed, a shout to the darkness.
Or call them inadequacies, pains,
breaths too quick, perpetual reveries:
that time you, sick, quit your job and fled
to anywhere, multiple places, seeing multiple
sights and multiple people, all who smiled
and looked around, seemingly happy,
but inside were bursting Continue reading “Two Poems by Jon Bishop”
Photo by Alekzan Powell on Unsplash
poem: DEAR LANDLORD
after Bob and Boots
Please don’t put a price on my apartment.
It’s yours more than mine, though. You can’t
help but exploit that.
So I’ll help you along.
I know your histories of arson. Your predilection
for insurance claims. I’m no dummy—
I know hiphop was born from the sepulcher
of a burning Bronx. But let me do
the burning. Let me clear the place out and gut it.
It’s drafty as fuck in here, in there. Continue reading “Three Poems By Joe Rathgeber”
Photo by Jonathan Pendleton on Unsplash
poem: out of the woods
I’ve been standing here so long the leaves have begun to pile up around my feet. In the distance I can hear sirens. Here comes the rain. The sun shines next. How did they know where to go? Maybe they didn’t, those sirens, maybe they were lost, I think they were lost, wailing like that. Maybe that’s what always happens with sirens, they can’t find where they are supposed to go and they wail in fear and sorrow. Nobody gets helped, the fire burns down the house, the ill do not get taken to the hospital but either recover or die all on their own. The suspects get clean away, they go into the basement and start counting their take. Someone has to deal with the corpse though. They have a designated corpse handler, I suspect. They laugh at all those wailing sirens. They get into fights over how to divide up the drugs and money, but there’s nobody to call. Some of them kill each other, which is probably a good thing, or at least some people would think so. Not their mothers though. Well, not most of their mothers. The mean mothers are glad. The mean mothers are the ones who made sure the instructions were wrong and the maps broken so the sirens could never get where they meant to go in the first place. So those particular mothers sigh, smile at each other, brush their hands together, go back into their several kitchens, make a gin and tonic (light on the tonic, dear) and relax. What is that? Oh! the birds have started finding my hair and I think there are leaves budding out and that’s a good thing, it will help hide me. Even though the sirens can’t find me, I am still afraid my mother will. I may stay here. Why not? I am hidden real well now, and the squirrels have started bringing me nuts. Look. A bird places a morsel in my mouth. I know I will not starve. One day I will leave the woods, but not today.
Continue reading “Two Poems by Kyla Houbolt”
Photo by Cam Fattahi on Unsplash
short story: Point Nemo
He’s been on two journeys in his lifetime. Firstly, Antarctica. With his son, Mark. Arriving by air, setting out (despite all the warnings), saying to the seventeen year old boy, We must take our first reading from the coastline. Mark saying, How can we do that? It’s covered in a billion tonnes of ice.
That doesn’t matter. Continue reading “Short Story by Stephen Orr”
Burning House Press are excited to welcome upfromsumdirt as our APRIL 2020 guest editor! As of today upfromsumdirt will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of APRIL.
Submissions are open from today – 1st APRIL and will remain open until 24TH APRIL.
upfromsumdirt‘s theme for the month is as follows
ESCAPISM
Continue reading “APRIL 2020 Guest Editor Is upfromsumdirt!!! THEME: ESCAPISM”“escapism” captures the meaning of something liberating, physically, in spirit, in heavy thought or deep imagination, or in the heart.
a personal desire or something unbeknownst that calls to you. practical or farcical.
a journey, personal or communal, with a definitive destination, real or imagined.
SEX & DEATH IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS EDITION MARCH 2020 GUEST EDITED/CURATED BY JOAN POPE
Continue reading “SEX & DEATH IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS EDITION MARCH 2020 GUEST EDITED/CURATED BY JOAN POPE”
The part of me that speaks, the part that obeys
Two chambers evolved from the annulled flashes of the Fall of Man
The soul divided
Swallowed by Hades and released from Pandora’s box,
A bicameral chasm in whose stream I am in want of understanding,
in whose dream life and death reflect the infinite.
In the song of sex desire implodes, decimated by numbers representing
Eros in his transmutation:
The number 2, Himeros and his sirens poised above lovers exquisitely
born from the rhythm of an infallible truth
and 7, a point of light revealing impressions of the Thanatos apparition:
The Temporal Spirit
The Other
The Conflicted Duad
The days flow like Mayan vibration without the grace of pleasure
or the wisdom of prophecy.
The essence of my thought feasts on the demeanor of death
My lineage traipsing a fold in transmission, and without pause,
actualizing conception.
Riddled by the vileness of cadenced blood, Karma takes to the air
but never speaks of the wind or whispers
to the scattered hallowed lands.
Its ascension, an appropriation of desire unraveling in the object desire:
A temple of opium flesh that has returned from a past life less spent
coloring the veils of the daughters of a lost Horus elemental.
They come by night from the thighs of spirit;
from the line of dream melded to the shadowless woman’s breast;
from occult spells draped across deflowered contracted continents. Continue reading “The Song of Sex, by Arthur David Spota”
New era rising
New species forming
Death on the streets
Life underground
Mass quarantine
Virus spreading
Misinformation as plague
Plague as tragedy
Tragedy as farce another farce another farce but this is real
This is real the people say
Hyperreal
Global warfare
Lock up your opinions
Redefine your ego but pretend it’s not there
It’s the Dark Age of Aquarius Continue reading “The Dark Age of Aquarius, by Rachel Haywire”
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