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BURNING HOUSE PRESS

Not For Profit/For Prophecy

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mourning

There Might Have Been Horses by Rebecca Loudon

Oh sad potato wrapped in plastic like Laura Palmer I might have been Caroline Calloway I might have swallowed a yellow sundress a lemon yellow orchid a story to tell by a bonfire at night in a forest in Montana

my tell is a magnetic lie
my tell is a rotting animal
my tell is a broken knuckle
my tell is a tent pitched at Flathead Lake

where I traveled backward into wilderness where fire and blackberries devoured my girl soul where soil and conifers met at the trout mouth edge and blue water and black deep did not restore my sister but we rose her anyway we opened her stone and chanted up her finished flesh and worshiped her little dress her lilac crown her apples her plush rabbit

I played my violin in the forest
I thought music could fix my disease
I thought music could raise the dead

when my face doesn’t unlock my phone I panic I have become Caroline Calloway my life mere electricity I have disappeared into caves among the stalactite’s green glisten the ocean never closer than my memory of Montana there might have been horses there might have been giant hares there might have been my father building a fire raising my sister from the ashes look he said look at her perfection Continue reading “There Might Have Been Horses by Rebecca Loudon”

Conflation — A Poem by Jack Bedell

Conflation

1.

Yesterday at the riverfront, the water
            rose so high a man washed
his socks from the rubble placed along the bank
            to guard the walking path. His socks
were filthy from slogging through the Quarter
            during the morning’s flood. As hot
as it was, those socks must have felt
            divine on his feet, like a river of cool breeze
carrying him to his next shady spot. He did not
            rush the washing. He had no need
to leave any of the river behind.

Continue reading “Conflation — A Poem by Jack Bedell”

ajinde – A poem by Adedayo Agaru

Continue reading “ajinde – A poem by Adedayo Agaru”

A poem by Dov Nelkin

Nothing exists but the stories we tell,
True or False, Stories have limits
as do facts
duration isn’t a fact
It’s given only to stories

Continue reading “A poem by Dov Nelkin”

Two poems by Bill Abbott

Continue reading “Two poems by Bill Abbott”

The Mourning Series by Temar France

(Mourning i 2013, Temar France)
Continue reading “The Mourning Series by Temar France”

Two poems by Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Sometimes we run restless




We live present.
 
سلاما على من تطرقوا الموت وعادوا أطيافاً
 
We know it.
 
                   and in the rush,       we lament
 
fugitively                    against your
                                                 edgings
 
*
 
Today I saw ghost-ling trees
 
and they spoke so vividly through the fog
 
on roots    
            and groundings
 
The archons come
                     to                 claim  
 
but the roots are too stubborn that only water can go through
 
to ground
                                                                        our  re/turn 
 
to visions of living    far from us that      
 
                         claim our anger (we rejoice in anger)
 
and the feel-s of it rush too much
 
             like lavender or
 
          cardamom pods deep soaked in water…

*
 
                         We live present.
 
سلاما على من تطرقوا الموت وعادوا أطيافاً
 
We know it.
 
                   and in the rush,       we lament
 
fugitively                    against your
                                                    edgings
 
 
 
 
Continue reading “Two poems by Shaimaa Abdelkarim”

A poem by Jen Katshunga

Continue reading “A poem by Jen Katshunga”

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”

Disjecta – Caesura – Membra, from ‘& The Little Light That Escaped (Vedute)’, by Alexander Booth

Disjecta

A face glimpsed as if framed through a space between the lattice-work of a bench, a day-drinking bar on a shade-lined street of turn-of-the-century buildings, Mediterranean maybe, looking for what, lower lip pinned to upper, unsure, a question: a face glimpsed as if framed through a space between the lattice-work of a bench upon which one word was seen: nostalgie.

But back at the beginning: the station was blue. His face a ruin. Rain.

Someone had disappeared. Continue reading “Disjecta – Caesura – Membra, from ‘& The Little Light That Escaped (Vedute)’, by Alexander Booth”

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