kingsoftrain

Aytan Laleh is a twenty-one-year-old writer based in Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Eunoia Review and is forthcoming with Riggwelter Press and Picaroon Poetry. She writes under a pseudonym and tweets at @AytanLaleh.

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Child of Four

There is the sound of her laughter,
Purer than an image of oxblood,
She jumps from ship to ship, embarking on a
Journey to no-man’s-land.
She has a biscuit in her hand
Which drops, to make her squeal,
The grains stuck to her lips with epoxy,
Her lips the colour of rose-pink blush,
Her eyes emblems of dark times ahead,

But this child of four does not need to worry.
She is the sun that laboriously stays in place,
Her labour a work of easiness,
Never to set, rise or make a move,
She is the vapour not formed,
The lioness without a womb,
She is paint, red and yellow,

Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review, and her poems have appeared in Spillwords, Vita Brevis, The Stray Branch, The Machinery India, Lunaris Review, Slink Chunk Press, Streetcake Mag, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry northern shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. You can find her work and additional links at RenwickBerchild.com.

~*~

Learn A Dead Language

Learn a dead language
and you will know how to speak
speak with ghosts, that’s what you said to me
the morning brindled, the low sun an owl’s eye
saw your hand snowy and lean
point to the sky, with foodstuffs dribbled your chin
the river was still running behind the silent house
it did not run for me, it did not run for you
the blankets…

Stuart Buck is a poet and author living in north Wales. His debut collection of poetry, Casually Discussing the Infinite, peaked at 89 on Amazon’s World Poetry chart and his second book I Am Very Far will be released on Selcouth Station Press in 2019. When he is not writing or reading poetry, he likes to cook, juggle and listen to music. He suffers terribly from tsundoku – the art of buying copious amounts of books that he will never read.

~~~~~

the fawn

something soft fell to the earth that night

still warm from descent, chalk on slate

the sleep abandoned heard the faint hum –

damp leather crack as it hit the island

pulsing, the colour of ripe corn and battery yolks

the smell of june drop fruit and charcoal

from its bowels crawled a single white fawn

all teeter and stumble, dripped with mucus

from the…

Heidi Turner is a writer and musician from Maui, Hawaii. She holds a Master’s in English from Azusa Pacific University and has been published in Gravel as well as Abstract Magazine, Cirque, and Linden Avenue Literary Journal, among others. You can follow her work at http://www.hidturner.com.

//

FORGETTING

Just last week, contentment
invaded, clutching a gift
wrapped in red ribbon,
a tiny box filled
with shattered stone tablets:
a list erased
by the finger of God.

lax

the asphalt river of the world

snakes

through the fog toward the glass
and a new growth is growing –
“terminal, probably, that tumor”

and the tiny tv squawks anyway
interrupted
resuming after every inconvenience
as though I know the story well enough
to break it

we are slithering

toward the end of the line
and back behind me, a child cries
and I envy it through my soundproof
earphones and third…

An editor for the federal government, Jonathan Witte has a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Maryland. He lives in Silver Spring, MD, with his wife and three children. This is the first time he has submitted his poetry for publication.

*

Solo Voyage

Evening docks
like a desolate ship,
indigo and monolithic,

its umbral sails
swelling above
the distant hips of
a titanic continent.

Sleep tastes like a mossy anchor;
it lurches, shifts, and slips into gear—
the sound of stars grinding on stars.

I sail across an ocean of teeth.

I acquiesce. I drown

in the velvet
whirlpool of
your absence.

*

Origami

What am I supposed to tell
the children when they bring
their deformed beasts to me?

I teach them the word menagerie as
they clear the project table and sweep
up cuttings from the kitchen floor.

We gather without you for another