Denial in Cycles
girl born altered doomed a beast
the moon dies and
i’m not bleeding like i’m supposed to
Continue reading “Denial in Cycles by Mika Hrejsa”
Reflections on Jacob’s Ladder (1957) – Helen Frankenthaler
Continue reading “Jacob’s Ladder by Katherine Beaman”
One Day Mother
When cramps come,
With knotted stomach sickness
And hours curled
I remember one week of knowing you,
The children you named,
Those who’d have,
My eyes
And your hair.
Continue reading “One Day Mother by Eden Howard”
Artificial
is how things should be.
The bloodied disturb our equilibrium.
.
Continue reading “Artificial by Paul Brookes”
The People v. Sid Vicious
Continue reading “The People v. Sid Vicious by Lee Wright”In 1978, punk rock vocalist Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen to death. A copy of Vicious’ confession to New York police, titled; Voluntary Disclosure Sheet Supplement: People v. Ritchie aka Vicious, describes in detail the events as Vicious recalled them. Almost every line in this poem was taken directly from Vicious’ confession, with very little deviation. The poem, like the confession, is a lie, that is also the truth.
The Periodic Table
reared my brother to normalise the words:
‘I am bleeding from my uterus’
(he’ll thank me one day)
I’ll complain every time I bleed-
my potential
scares men with small minds.
Continue reading “The Periodic Table by Isabelle Kenyon”
Cinderella upon Remembering Bruno
Her hands
down by her sides
Also her drink of choice
and how she speaks to
the bartender
Her subtle, slow
I’ve got all day
burn
Continue reading “Judith Taylor: Cinderella upon Remembering Bruno”
Over the Threshold
We laugh like newlyweds
as you carry me over the threshold
into a house rife with the spirits
of former tenants-
a lonely caretaker, a childless couple,
a single mother-
their DNA peeling off the walls
like chipped paint.
Proper Entry and Exit
After Listening to “Canvas”
One must know what it is to be in and out. How to properly enter and exit. “Properly,” not in the sense of the bourgeoisie or uppity, but in the sense in which Robert Farris Thompson wrote about. Writing as he did about the ways we be.
There are ways of being in and out.
But how to enter and where to be once inside and how to decide when to no longer remain—what makes those decisions, those moments?
Can we ever reach the inside without entering?
And can we reach the outside without exiting?
Composition: Mixed Media
I paint to learn what my eyes barely see,
things hidden to me: cast shadows, a latch,
my mother’s ghost floating behind the drapes.
I study the image I shot, its hues and patterns:
copper door, stained windows, the stone of walls
and sun faded stone, the blur of a doorway’s curve.
Continue reading “Susan E. Gunter: Composition: Mixed Media”
I was thinking about Brutalism, cattle and passage tombs. Form, currency and death.
Walking the fields of North Cork and the headlands of Galway, casting cow-sheds as signs.
Homes for people, now homes for animals. Cycled forward by occupation, migration and forecasts. Radio broadcasts. Concrete and local stone piled into walls, supporting cold tin rooves. Corrugated steel. Cheap and functional, galvanised wave forms. Tin, iron and zinc combined and beaten thin. Weather resistant not weather proof.
Does it haunt your dreams, or become like a pebble in your shoe?
The dark glossy leaves of the jeniparana,
The bright pink flowers of the bougainvillea,
The explosion of sugar of the banana ouro hacked from the tree?
Remember hiding in hammocks pretending to nap,
Chasing sandcrabs and stepping in pitch,
Visiting your sister’s pet monkey at the animal hospital—
An extended veranda filled with macaws screaming?
My pearl-crusted tutu for Carnival, the drumbeat of the sambas,
The pelting of the rain against the windshield with no wipers,
The salt of the ocean and the syrup of grape Fanta?
Explain choking on Cornflakes and powdered milk
Or taking the bus to the favela to pick out a live chicken
To our kids with American grocery stores.
February 29th 1933
The saddest thing for the English to bear, is not what they have lost, but instead
what they know has not yet been found, but is nevertheless enduring in the shadows.
– Derrick Adderage
The house has slid here
to this wide street-middle; it floats
like a dark ship on smooth wet tarmac; it splits
the road that seems to flow slowly
either side of it.
The houses lining the street shrink
as this one house inflates
with where it came from.
The sickly stomach heat
of inescapable guilt
pushes me through the door,
brick in belly, heart on sleeve,
succulent hors d’oeuvres for
ravenous vultures waiting
to cannibalise with freshly
sharpened fangs and claws. Continue reading “Reunion by V.C. McCabe”
1. There is nothing soft in the universes.
2. There wasn’t at the start, certainly, unless you count the unexpected wobble that got us going to be some sort of expression of care from a creator we will never see nor hear from ever again.
3. All the energy unleashed becoming skids of hot gas becoming swirls of hot rock having what we will later describe as celestial pub fights, no there is no softness there. Continue reading “Softness as a cosmology by Rishi Dastidar”
Whiteness.
Walls gleaming stark with
fresh paint against dusty old tiger murals
while white hairs stroll the halls. Artificially
whitened
smiles, untanned
skin, some hospital pallid, all
sans melanin. The most distinguishing characteristic
we share. The pallor
of our segregated shame. Continue reading “Fifty Years Later by Kate Wooddell”
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”
Isn’t every fruit soft, if you wait? In small bodies the time is softly passing. Peach had a twilight air. It wore a yellow curling-up sticker that read ‘gog de magog’ in black print (something from The Bible I think) with a picture of a purple desert tree and ‘the fruit of paradise’ in tiny print across the top and ‘paradiesisches obst’ along the bottom. Continue reading “Peach On The Beach by Kate Feld”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 