My mom told me to buy vessels for what I already own when the itch for novelty strikes. I did one better. I closed the loop of longing, enshrined the weightless dying!
Continue reading “Extreme Abstractions: Home Edition, by Bree Jo’ann”
My Ariadne can see the future.
(My Ariadne. This is my version of the story.)
She spins her red thread, and it twists into shapes before her eyes, hearts and nooses. It tells her that Theseus turns out to be an asshole.
Seven young men and seven maidens arrive on the island, and Theseus outshines them all. His eyes are the sky blue of someone who believes he cannot fail, who believes he has no darkness within him. Those eyes make Ariadne dream of flight.
Theseus wonders how such a creature as the minotaur, half-beast, half-man, could be allowed to exist. Ariadne doesn’t tell him the last of the halves: the monster is her half-brother. In the evening she dreams of blue eyes, but her hands twist and turn the red thread. At midnight she dreams of mazes like arteries and veins, running red and blue.
Ariadne gives Theseus a coiled ball of thread the size of a heart. She tells him the thread will guide him out of the labyrinth.
![suescavo[again][tosurgerise]1a](https://burninghousepressblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/suescavoagaintosurgerise1a.jpg)
Exodus II
I climbed up
to shout you from the rooftop.
Fingernails and scrabbling feet
searching for a place to stand
immersed in the visions flowing from
your daydreams and nightmares.
But before I could speak,
the desert heat baked your words
leaving them flat and tasteless.
Bread with no meaning to make it rise.
Alone, watched only
by the blind eye of the sun
I told myself, “Climb down.” Continue reading “Exodus II by Paul Bluestein”
Labyrinth Song
Not everyone enters
their maze on a mission.
Some of us wake one day
curled inside a darkness
that stretches in all directions
for countless miles caught
in a lacework cage reaching
beyond years.
…………………Ever winding
we wander half blind
through rotting corridors
searching for signs of life
stumbling over pits that beckon
beneath wearied feet
in the yawning velvet dark
wrestling
with dead ends that glint
with knives and chains
slamming shut doors
that open silently
into nothingness
…………………chasing golden
voices not our own over
floors that sharpen suddenly
into spikes through
mirrored courtyards where
we glimpse our aging faces
catch sad minotaurs
behind our eyes.
We become adept
at surviving stripped
of all but our existence
at times weaving
the gleaming edges of pain
into armour and amulets
fortifying our bones Continue reading “Labyrinth Song by Lucy Whitehead”
Hocus Pocus
This [bread] is no other than
Jesus’ flesh
This [horse’s open mouth] is
Vaisvanara
This [word] has
A magic power
This [fish head] brings
Courage & posterity
This [fluid] cures
All diseases
This [sequence of syllables] drives away
All evils & devils
This [ritual] ensures
Good weather & good harvest
This [hat/hood] guarantees
Purity, loyalty
This [flag] leads right
To paradise
This [man] is Continue reading “2 Poems by Yuan Changming”
RECONCILIATION
I broke you
out of solitary—
I did it because
I could
because it was
a dream.
Tara Skurtu @TaraSkurtu is a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems appear in magazines such as Salmagundi, The Kenyon Review, Plume, Poetry Wales, and Poetry Review. She is the author of The Amoeba Game. Tara teaches creative writing in Bucharest.
Banner Image “Dream #4” by Robert Frede Kenter. Tweets at @frede_kenter
Dispatch From an Altered State
this place is a contagion: I can’t
read here: only
despair: no time remains for new words: only old
obscenities: only enemies
are recognizable: their animus flares: their crabbed
hands pluck at my dis-ease: I lie
under heavy blankets, red raw railing—
Continue reading “Three poems by Jude Marr”
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