Demolition | Mary Bone
Underneath bark and wooden planks,
termites gnaw and chew
destroying homes,
making burrows.
Tunnels appear
as they make
their own homes.
modern poets
I Disappear… | Jim Bellamy
i disappear into the nape of my head
wide birds hiss after ashen gates- kids
peer under worm-wearied ghost gibs
o as we suck a burned nut then lost light
drops us under golden graves- & night
scatters female power?
berried saints stopped here.
More at https://jimbellamy.simplesite.com.
If You Knew | Mikayla Wyndham
If you knew where I’ve been
I bet you would turn away,
Avert your eyes, move
Imperceptibly farther away,
So unpleasant is my story.
I’d like to share it with you
But I know you can’t handle it,
Just like most things. I guess
I’ll just continue pretending
That we’re a couple and
Dream of a time when I have
Someone in my life who
Actually cares.
Oceana (Redux) | Kenneth Vincent Walker
Dare I enter the ocean
Of your tranquil eyes
Submerging its depths
Like a delirious diver?
Upon holding my breath
An intense passion arises
As I bask in sheer beauty
Soaked in all its surprises.
I’m entranced by your kiss
Loitering about in my mind.
My heart fiercely beating a
Pitter-patter out of time
In an ocean of ecstasy.
A Brighter Burn | Jenny Middleton
That night the light was slow
A faint glimmer before a brighter burn.
The singed green shade twisting
in the faint breeze mouthed
through half open windows.
I’d got up, too hot to sleep,
too tired really, for those ends
of things that tangle a mind’s
late thoughts
when a moth traced the vagueness
at the corners of the room.
Its confusion crashing at the walls,
the brightness its beacon,
and then its silhouette inside the stretched
satin shade seemed muffled
and drawn large as those paper puppets
in shadow theatres of old preconfiguring
its own demise and fizzed throes
of death as staged and restaged tragedies.
Then the stench of absence and heat
was all; a universe swallowed whole.
Shutting the light off, I stumble to the stairs
that fall into the dark, wheeling.
Nested | Christine Emmert
Without wings
I sit, high in the palm of the tree,
looking down on earth beneath
where others walk.
I would fly away as snow drops
but the white chastity of winter
spreads around the landscape
until it is lost.
And what have I found here?
A perch above that which is taken.