Morning | Ananya S. Guha
Pages brown
leafing through
torn pages, book of poems
a muse awakens to morning.
poems about poetry
The Ethereal Poem Eternal | Michael Kagan
As the ancient tribe of wandering poets
Pushing and prodding
Crisis and passion drawn
From the central library of time
In ink and blood explaining
As only poems are able
The organic airborne substance
Defining the human condition
In the period when they penned
Digging deeper and deeper
Where meanings converging
Melt all over the lines
Perception teases
Tickling curious minds
In every way hunting seeking
Until you have a hundred answers
And every answer is right
And every answer is wrong
But the unfulfilled poem stands
Like an inoperable iron monolith
Unflappable in it’s position
And we write about anything
Floating in from anyplace
From everywhere
Things we didn’t know we didn’t know
Things we didn’t know we knew
Hopes the poem will fit the puzzle
And teach us how to trust
Plagiarism | Chris Byrne
Was it just a word?
Or was it sneaking in
And stealing my soul
Whilst I slept,
Hearing me playing my
Favourite song that inspired
Me, a tune that helped
As I wrote those deep and dark
Inspiring sonnets, trying not to
Plagiarise the lyric, that hidden
Meaning within a song,
My thoughts coming to life
All because of a song,
Something it awoke in me
As I typed and typed
Erased and erased
As my brain thought
It’s too like the song,
The never ending
Thoughts of a poet
Are always just like the song.
Opening | Clara Burghelea
A mother wound
lives under the skin.
Raw at first,
throbbing less in time.
It dwells into other losses
of the tongue
that grew mute, unraveled,
the morning sounds
of night-shift cracking bones,
damp cloth on feverish foreheads,
eggplant salad, complicit smiles.
A language of lacks, body as implement.
Slowly, one poem bears the next,
descending the page like a string tie.
At the end of the day, I weigh
the unsaid, the misspelt, the in-betweens.
The poem cracks. On the page,
the learned foreign letters
give pain a loud, bearable voice.
The wound tingles, the words breathe.
One dying leaves room for poetry.
Many other deaths follow.
Pretending to Be Profound | JD DeHart
By the light that streams
in, you can see through
the discourse, held up to
the light like a small animal
within that envelope of syntax
and highbrow terminology, the
digestive system of the creature
can be deduced
a flurry of sound and thunder
with no lightning heat or music.
Discarding the Poem | Ananya S. Guha
A poem flexes words
I sit taut, still among the words
of others, and wonder why in the last instance my poem was politely
rejected by an editor who writes poetry like me, but wants also to
discard the words of others. So in righteousness I decide not to write, or read, but simply chalk out ways of obviating the poem.
A Poet's Curse | Chris Byrne
A poet’s curse
Is writing about love,
Sensing the darkness it expresses,
The beauty it reveals; understanding
It’s a complicated feeling,
Misunderstood, difficult, full of
Words, thoughts, and misconceptions.
Most never see, nor value
Its true nature, yet we recognize
Its inner beauty within the
Gloom, always craving it
Never seeing it.