Poetry

Clarity

I wake up and the colors
are turning circles
on their axis.
And around my head.
The women, lush and
beautiful, are murdering
me quick and painlessly.
It’s like a knock on wood,
sunlight seconding that emotion.
Morning sometimes coming through
through beer bottles.
It’s not L.A., but it’s New York.
It’s somehow both of them.
Plus Atlanta a little.
And all of you.
Wrapped around my soul
and my soul wrapping
around tight. It’s a thrill,
though no one saw me. No one will
ever know. Except you, if you’ll
listen. It might not have even happened.
But yesterday I walked up Broadway.
Unchanging, not rearranging as I walked.
But with a feeling that felt like everything.

~Jonas Kyle-Sidell

–inverted memories–

compass
appealing invitation
golden breathes
gaming unconsciously
to the midnight sun

—

celluloid dreams
gazing through my veins
bleeding me out

~Blanca Lista

Santa Lucia-

my eyes
in a jar
so that I’ll remember

spinning those secret threads
dripping down inside

the ghosts of memory
of things yet to see

do I flatter myself–
that your crumbling plaster body can hear me?

eyes plucked from your own head

starring down at me

wearily asking:
what do you seek?

redemption? lust? an answer to your two-penny question?

what would you like from my sleeping skeleton?

i haunt myself with the words as you ogle me
unworthy and forgotten saint
crazy with her own knowing

whorls of transparent smoke hover underneath my eyelids
as I light your candle and whisper your prayer

I cast my crime and thank you…

young woman yet old fare

—almost mistaken for a goddess

~KL Pereira

diatribe

precisely in the order about
face would you I continue
dictate terms of the early surrender

and now the stillness becomes
all at once the one and only thing
I can have stomach for

anyway the same holds true
for whatever you can say that
holds true for you in your turn
what you can have stomach for

~Christopher Mulrooney