In Anton Newcombe’s studio in Berlin, there was a typewriter. On this typewriter was a faded, dusty note that read, Everyone should be shipwrecked once in their life.
These words had an unsettling effect on me. Whether I understood it at the time or not, my ship was already on the rocks.
Continue reading “Essaouira Diary by Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon”
ii.
There’s no Hippocratic Oath for vets;
in this world a man is what morals make him. I’m indentured to a thug
with a pocket full of mobile phones,
two weeks into a handshake pact of pills and powders.
I’ve been paid to wait, collude
in the plaza haze, my feet
kicking alleys of August wind.
Perched on a stool in Calle Melo’s limestone glower,
watching ocean and sea blur in the Strait.
I’m doling tablets to door knocks,
cutting chorizo with a necktie knife; listing
on a nightly lullaby of horse tranquillisers.
I breathe in the dry air, breath out
a stem of opioid desire
and settle at the bar,
petals in my mouth.
This is my last night swallowing broken Spanish,
feet on the solstice line
a half step ahead of winter shade.
The ferries from Morocco
are on endless loop, red hulls
split sky and sea.
Continue reading “Last of the Barbary Lions and other poems; a haibun sequence by Rico Craig”
In Casablanca you will expect buildings to be white, based solely on the city’s name, which translates to ‘white house’. But there will hardly be a truly white building in sight. How odd is it to call a city a house? Once you spend a little time in Casablanca, it will make perfect sense. Continue reading “In Casablanca by Ganzeer”
Marrakesh, Old Town
Everyone seemed to have rotten, black, and missing front teeth. They were friendly and kept smiling and that’s how I saw they mostly had rotten, black and missing front teeth.
I couldn’t see a lot of the women’s teeth, only their eyes, and often not even. There were many women dressed from head to ankle, in long black fabrics, with layer upon layer covering skin, hands, hair, and some that covered the eyes, and with only a marginally thinner veil, so that everything was hidden, nothing to determine soul, being, nor Continue reading “Nothing Dries Sooner Than A Tear* by Joanna Pickering”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 