boomerang or pop-gun, grief makes its choice. your father hides his blurry hand might god invent scissors. there is a model of your city and some leftover glue.
Simon Henry Stein is a writer and composer whose work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Always Crashing, Electric Lit, and XRAY.
~~
Five Fragments from Pale Calendar
1.
the rules unravel
some old vermillion or burnt curtain
I was a light-tongued fortuneteller who would not
bleed as planned
by the throat
by the throat
now is the time for all young men
2.
are there still trees there, and meaning
not subject to spin
this is not the right concrete, and not stolen
come home, all is forgiven, in the hills
too few enemies to gather a light
3.
I always was awake is what you
could have presented as an explanation
or a gift
condensed to a hot white point
nothing is parallel or straight
any other embrace or salutation
all the forever
now all of the nights have names
some of them are named after…
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as you do not struggle to recall the titles of those empty sermons we composed while biking uphill after our sister’s head, I tell you that a baby eats like jesus in a haunted house and that dad was right the lawnmower dies because it knows where in the yard his mom was deep enough to bury doll and I deny that hibernation is real
(is more a ghost started by two wise men dressed as animals
it gave me nightmares, from mating call to church bell, that air conditioner in our third floor window. thematically, the poor are closer to death. my people don’t move. god is where you left him. god where I put.
Visar is a writer and artist with poems previously published at ghost city press, agbowo, Kalahari review and elsewhere. Twitter: rabiutemidayo.
~*~
It’s not your first day at sea
It’s not your first day at sea
struggling to grasp them by the head
Laughing louder than the sea
Wading out wet with guilt
Reeling in the fishes
Through and through the black waters,
Dripping down till only silt —
The unholy ledger
~*~
Azure
Before the rooster this morning
Grandmother was already barefoot on her farm
Watering plots of cassava
She wears white underclothes stopping right on her knees,
It is evening already
to permit all the heavy lifting.
When she is in the bushes she would
Do along with songs
In the voices I’ve grown
to associate with the blue sky,
hovering as clouds do
Over sunny afternoons —
A sureness of rain
To join her I…
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you have to count them quickly
the bite-marks on my son’s arm
–
either you touch a goldfish
or become
a dentist
–
does it matter whose dream
my mouth is
–
make art and make it empty. god has run out of room.
Marisa Crane is a lesbian fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pigeon Pages, Pidgeonholes, Drunk Monkeys, Riggwelter Press, Okay Donkey, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and elsewhere. She currently lives in San Diego with her fiancée. You can read more of her work at http://www.marisacrane.org. She tweets @marisabcrane.
~*~
Power
Wailing. Searing nerve endings. A home isn’t a home
without bodies that punish themselves. They remain silent
until the day they don’t. No one hands out earmuffs
at birth. We learn by crying. We learn by finding
what we needn’t ever find. Sometimes the medicine man
is the one that lives inside your brain. Branded like a farm animal,
I can’t forget the terror of powerlessness. What is the shape
of power? Is it anything like the form an island takes?
Isolation. Shame, misnamed. I want to lounge
in the language of self-love. Steeped in saltwater
choreography…
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