by Robin Ray Ananda, it’s been snowing since you hand-delivered your toasted envelope of admiration, erroneous sentence for inadequate leanings through corporate transfer of isolation laying behind you.Benign guilt in powdery form, hybridizing tulips with marbled sketch books, encourages fogs of sobriety, illusions of masculinity.Upon waking, you’re hard as petrified anger; ambition – baked in a half shell, your spine-cruising Read More
Category: Rumbling Rhymes
You Were Once a Manta Ray
by Mary Thompson You were once a manta ray breaching the surface of the sea like a gymnast leaping high above its glittering splashes. How we twisted and turned and whirled together like a hypnotic melody. Your impact boomed through the ocean. Now I wish I could hunker down for winter sleep like the hedgehog cocooned in thousands of spines. Read More
The Sky Is Also Blue
by Toni G. There’s a young lady in the corner, not so far from the dance floor, lost in the fantasy of what her first dance should be like and with whom. She waits with her head slightly bowed. Insecurity creates beads of sweat on her perfectly scrubbed and powdered skin. She looks down pretending to admire her new gown, Read More
Hate
by Alison McBain I used to say hate to people, objects possessions the dispossessing fragments of creativity changing sediments layers of years one by one pressed down upon one but most things are not bloody two-shoes flickers, horror movies ultimate the end most things are not to be hated most things lead perfect, pleasant tick-tock shelf-lives unseen unmoved unmoving not Read More
At the grave of your death, I smile
by Elisabeth Horan For why not; God’s been joking with us All the while; He whispers placation In our ears, plants lust for the sinner’s Alcoholic slide, leaves dust where a Mother, her child, she should find. My loss, and melancholy, were it not For our friendship, would be funny, Really, I laugh at the nose of death – Pointy Read More
When the moon spills the secret
by Megha Sood My memories,so scarred and yet sublimeare made of the moonthat white orb of truth,shining mighty high Sitting high in the cleavage of the nightwith a shifty-eyed smilepasses the wisdom from night after nightyour heart, it says,has to go through the phasesto become fullwith joy and grief alike my mottled skinsieved by the milky moonlightimbued with the softness Read More
Shoulder Perched Bird
by Rickey Rivers Jr. A bird perched on my shoulder keeps me company.“Is his name chip?” was the joke you made to me.I realized it applies more to you than me.My shoulder perched bird sings, tells me all I did not see. When we last met I did not know it would feel like my last breath.My shoulder aches when Read More
Odd list Odd house Odd me (Book Review)
Today the pachyderms travel to 19th-century Amherst, Massachusetts, in search of a quiet place to enjoy Elisabeth Horan‘s Odd list Odd house Odd me (now available from TwistiT Press). Taking Emily Dickinson for her muse, Horan spins poems that journey inward and across centuries to explore sensuality, nature, love, loss, yearning, and one’s mysterious self. Invoking the Muse You do not Read More
Birds Rejoice
by Toni G. It’s 6:57 Sunday morning and the birds are chirping outside my bedroom window ceaselessly. Silencio por favor, I yell with the worst Spanish accent ever, hoping that words in a language more beautiful than English will sway them to my will. It doesn’t work, and I blame my junior high school Spanish teacher for not molding me Read More
An Old Superstition
by Lannie Stabile When I cross a cemetery, I grip my breath like a rosary. I watch the tombstones blur,the iron fence galloping along. I finger the beads of my lungs until my chest pops. I try desperately to exorcise you. But the heart is weak and wispy. I release the imprisoned mistand breathe your ghost in again, as I Read More