Responding to bubble threat.
Vehicle loaded.
Strapped beneath plates.
Moving out.
Location verification required.
East on… static zzzzzzzz
Repeat. Command. Repeat. zzzzzzzzz
East on… static zzz
Cavalry to command: Continue reading “Divine Intervention – Elancharan Gunasekaran”
Churchgoers scan
my microchip;
they ask
if I’m lost,
if I’m a sheep astray.
They point towards your temple—
the one I’m running from.
I tread away Continue reading “Lost Sheep – Jeremy Mifsud”
imperfect, a perfect image for me.
humbled by its mistakes.
my god is a mistake.
a wrong answer,
differently abled.
its winters often in spring.
its summers sometime in autumn. Continue reading “my god is – Paul Brookes”
Needles are helpful
In identifying can#$@
As well evilicious
Thoughts I have
Like my husband
Doesn’t love me
He won’t have my baby
Like God is temporary
When I need him Continue reading “One More Lamb, No! This Is The Way It Starts, and Baptism Gone Awry – Elisabeth Horan”
Sister sings contrition, ripe to believe
in prophet palms, fey fingers. Submission
to a Patriarch plunge— yield and receive.
White out winter, naked lips and eyes. Leave
past sorrows traded for superstition.
Sister sings contrition, ripe to believe. Continue reading “The Baptism – Juliette van der Molen”
Again, the man in the window
wakes from a dream of June bugs:
fragile with heat, they’d thrown
their bodies into trees and split
like skulls. The man said he was
hungry. The sisters still arrive
some evenings with their Bibles
and a roll of toilet paper. Continue reading “Purgatorio, East Peoria – Todd Smith”
If I try to sing from the silence thoughts of G-d come out sometimes
but I have never
worshipped and meant it.
Nobody has dared ask me to.
I’ve sung higher powers, let strangers
lick the metallic holy off the air around me,
it is sanctifying to make
a space for the devout to cry into,
but I have never
meant. Once down the pub Continue reading “Fearsong – Anna Kahn”
A woman out jogging in a park at dawn saw a smoke drift rising from a patch of blackened earth. Lying on the ground in the middle of it was what looked to be a mannequin with its legs half bent and arms raised in a peculiar, pugilistic pose.
There was a shopping trolley at the scene, adding another layer of curiosity to what must have seemed a strange tableau. The smell of fuel hung heavy in the air and, it being too early in the day for barbecues, the woman’s first thought was that somebody had been burning garbage. Continue reading “An Honourable Death – Victoria Briggs”
God walks through us on lonely nights — Nome Patrick
before i name myself an island in bed,
far from shore, i carve my life inside a poem.
a letter in a bottle is how i commune with God,
walk him round the ruins of my heart,
have him wear this skin that has contained screams.
most times, i am a roadsign cars ignore, Continue reading ““You Are The One God Forgot” by Michael Akuchie, and “Of Perception” by Casimir Wojciech”
In the shop of chimes and mysteries we chose the waving cat.
Maneki Neko—perfect, white plastic,
trimmed with gold and red, one paw raised to the sky.
On our kitchen windowsill, it sat—ushering
good luck in, bad luck out. So we believed.
It ticked like a clock as it waved, only,
it never made it right through a whole night—
slowing to a halt a few hours after sunset. Continue reading “Wishing to Believe by F. E. Clark”
asake, pray for me.
i am your father’s grandfather,
you do not know me,
but you are the lines on my palms.
pray for me! pray for me!
those on earth pray for those in heaven
so those in heaven could set their passage.
pray for me, asake;
pray for my peace! Continue reading “Irapada(redemption) – Aremu Adams Adebisi”
During your Palm Springs summer,
your off-white apartment walls curved
around you like an elegant shell
pulled together tight by the bit of meat inside.
Eventually any distraction seemed a blessing.
Sometimes you appeared able to conjure
up some sound or other outside,
but never the one you wanted. Continue reading “The Ocean’s Only Word, Getting Light, and Near Disaster – Lee Potts”
Burning House Press are excited to welcome BOLA OPALEKE as our JANUARY 2019 guest editor! As of today Bola will take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the full month of January.
Submissions for Bola are open from today – 1st January and will remain open until 24th January. Continue reading “January 2019 Guest Editor Is BOLA OPALEKE!!! Theme/s: FAITH // FAITHLESSNESS // DIVINITY”
Reading Liber Exuvia by Elytron Frass is to enter the murmuring memoirs of an astral traveller. Is to encounter the self as it is – not as fixed point or outpost in temporal time but self as vaporous, porous and atemporal – self as ghost haunting the flesh, spectre sojourning the house of mist. Self as fracture, fact amassed and massacred, exploding and imploding in all directions, past present future for infinity. Everywhere and everyone and everywhen. Continue reading “Liber Exuvia – Elytron Frass – gnOme books”
On desktop browsing the below hyperlinks are functional (if you are on a mobile device you can amble over to [here] for functional hyperlinks).
As the room done deep.
Told to, by, and, so, that it cold is a truth.
throne stretches mark, maid, bare muscle
Editor’s Note: New Library of Revised Classics Series
Get ready for the future: It is murder, Leonard Cohen sang in 1992. Nearly two decades into the twenty-first century and it is clear that his warning is an understatement. What refuge for the thinking person in the face of the End Times? The classics of the Western canon, of course. But who has the time to plunge the depths of literature in the Instagram era? The aim of the current project is to create a digestible, collectible library to inspire and comfort the spirit, stimulate and disorient the imagination.
Each volume in this tastefully appointed series is the product of judicious, computer-aided pruning, social media/graffiti-friendly quote selection, and apocalyptically-toned imagery. The inaugural Condensed and Illustrated for the End Times offerings will include classic works by Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius, Dante Alighieri, Teresa d’Avila, John Bunyan, and Voltaire. Available individually and by subscription, Spring 2019. Continue reading “The Soul of a Man: A Meditation by Joseph Schreiber”
The poetry of the desert is sparse. To locate a poem in the desert you cannot just look, you must smell, touch, hear and taste your surroundings. Never attempt to write about the desert, the result will be too much like writing. These notes form clues as to finding poems in the desert. Whilst the notes may be extensive the poems themselves live a tenuous existence & are barely clinging to life.
Seek out the poems. Continue reading “Notes for poems to be found in the desert by Tony Messenger”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
Gov’t Queries by Katherine DeCoste
During the purplest midnight the time comes to repurpose and scavenge the deepest recesses of the pancreas, sugar-processor and liquefier, mushy and shapeless, which is the least necessary of every twinkling lump of flesh under the round belly. This is major surgery.
A procedure is in order, to be followed precisely.
First, wetness settles: stretch in it, breathe it and swell up, an oversalted fish. Water is made up of many parts and layers: the sunlight, the twilight, and the midnight. The operation must be completed in the dim part where dust particles are zooplankton and speak with urgency to each visitor. Dust spins through air, little animals through water. Dust is silent, but the ocean buzzes and they wiggle their weak legs, incapable of standing.
Second, the endemic, veined skin is stickily plastered onto the inner red eyelids. Bodies are simple, paper-maiche collections of wallpaper. Outside, floral patterns. Inside, the abdominal organs all run together—root around until you find the one you’re removing. It’s easiest with closed eyes.
Third, the sea grows weary of pressing and pressure fades but darkness doesn’t.
Fourthly, the patient will grow distressed as you sever their energy-delivery-system. Explain it like this: I had the bends once and an angel appeared. She glowed brightly in the midnight zone. Said, “we’ve carbonated your bloodstream and these are not simple growing pains. There are impassable meters between you and the heavenly sphere spinning.” Around my finger she tied a white ribbon glowing green in her eerie radioactivity—it read, “eat me.”
Finally they will need to be sustained somehow—choke down sugared green Jell-O and butterscotch pudding cups. Only foods that wobble and can only be partially-chewed are acceptable. The fluorescent lights never fully go off in the hall. Force jittery insulin into their veins.
Katherine DeCoste is a writer and undergraduate English student in Edmonton, Alberta. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sybil Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Structural Damage, and others. She likes to write about anxiety, dissociation, and decay. You can find her @katydecoste on Twitter and Instagram.
About the banner image: The operating room orderly, a 1-W, Voluntary Service worker, wheels a patient from the elevator to the operating room. VS workers in the Mennonite Hospital at La Junta, Colo., contribute much through their sacrificial service.
Share this: