Prose & Poetry
“Relearning the Body” by Carlene Gadapee
These legs have carried me a long way, and must for a while longer.
“The Day of Qingming” by Huina Zheng
Behind her, more translucent spirits float, as weightless as smoke in the breeze.
“A Story about the Sky” by Michael Simms
So the sky lives in me
but the dark?
I don't know where the dark lives.
It comes and goes.
“Easter Parade” by rob mclennan
The internet offers “oculus,” from antiquity. Named from the Latin for “eye,” this circular opening in the center of a dome or in a wall, none of which sounds right. If that is what this is.
“Last Stop on the Journey Back in Time” by John Grey
It wasn’t to hear him speak/on piety and justice
“We Were Talking About Paul Simon” by Joyce Peseroff
my history–yes, I’m still hankering
after songs of money and love,
love and worry.
“Marlboro Man” by Leslie Lisbona
I could have lived without opening the car window if he didn’t smoke, but he did, and not just cigarettes but a pipe as well, and sometimes a cigar. In our tight quarters, he managed to light a cigarette, place his pipe somewhere, and drive a stick shift.
“The World Went Clanking” by George Genovese
The world went clanking like an old tin can,
a cranking babbler on its wind-whirled way,
tossed on immodestly, without restraint,
and little mercy from the tar it spanked;
“Appointment in Samarra” by Julia Wendell
Could have been worse, everyone said. / It wasn’t meant to be…
“Moving Riveted” by Mary Dean Lee
This river is like an ocean, force of the surf and wildness of the wind, but it’s a body of fresh water moving, boundaries on either side.
“It Might Have Been Me” by Gail Hosking
Sometimes you get lucky and walk out of your bombed apartment
“ The Tiara " by Elizabeth Reed
But my eyes tell a different story. They’re squinty, looking off to the side, hiding my thoughts, my eyebrows ever so slightly furrowed as if I’m already questioning this whole pageant.
“Day of the First Turtle” by Ann Leamon
learn
to be better turtles,
to stick their necks out…
“My Lover Sends Me Bulbs I Keep in the Basement” by Mary Dean Lee
I go down to plant a red amaryllis, ripping open the plastic bag of black dirt in the box when I can’t get the knot out…
“Aunt Theresa” by Olena Jennings
Later, the sun poured over our shoulders
as we read our name
on the grave stones.
“That’s the Thing with Anger” by Tom Schabarum
Were it not for the other mothers,/ fathers, families, and grandmother/ that kept it pulsing, my heart would be long dead./ They made it a sea, deep enough to weather storms,/ until a day, when love settled home, opened me up,/ and guided my heart’s tempest until it was repaired./ Remembering everything, my heart, at last, broke./ And now? All we feel is gratitude.
“On the Metro” by Philip Alcabes
…the moody sighing of beech leaves and the persistent grasping of rhizomes of grasses, the roots of pittosporum, as well as the hiss of nitrogen fixation by the underground nodules beneath the clover and, too, the industrious feeding of earthworms and termites…
“Stories We Tell Ourselves, or Narratives We Take for Truths” by Steffi Gauguet
Lately, I have become more aware of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can do or even should do in our short little lives, plagued as we are by nihilistic melancholy and fear of anonymous mediocrity. Stories grown from ideas put into our young, inquisitive, spongy childhood brains by our parents, our teachers, friends, ourselves…all the messages we internalized, that grow into neuronal connections and pathways we keep carving deeper and deeper through repetition until they turn into trenches of thought patterns we can no longer escape.
“Year's End” by Yuliya Musakovska, a poem from THE GOD OF FREEDOM, translated by Yuliya Musakovska and Olena Jennings
How much is left here, o universe, trembling and alive.