kingsoftrain

~
poetry and god share the same quick death.

I’m on what you’re on;
the eighth day of the world.

~
it’s all in your head. the newborn we had on a mountaintop. the word it knew from memory. its hand that stuck to everything but the dog our dog ate. the cold our dog died from. the tent we called aquarium. that we filled with diapers. that was never full.

~
existence is the wrong inquiry.

I was destroyed by an angel

for having
taste buds.

/ a pinkness

went on
without me.

~
if touch is all it can manage

the hand is poor.

I am the new face
of baby
doorstep.

when lightning
has emptiness
to burn

feed
the fasting
doll.

~
I am old and nothing brings me joy.

I did
good things
but I
was asked.

drunk
outside
of a dog
shelter
I am likely

Set to Music a Wildfire
poems by Ruth Awad
SIR Press, 2017

~

“Will you die for an idea?” – Ruth Awad, from Let me be a lamb in a world that wants my lion

When so much praise is reserved for the universal, for a thing that touches all things, here is Ruth Awad’s Set to Music a Wildfire– a work that feels pressed into the page. A work that picks up the pieces, not after, but during. A work that pauses in order to continue. A rewriting of the detail’s bible. I love this book for its spiritual reportage:

There was the broken teapot and two women, their clothes
torn open, and an infant. (Sabra and Shatila Massacre / Refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon, 1982)

For the way its observant foresight lets image stand:

Tripoli rooftop.
…The sea lipped its insoluble gossip
to the shoreline.

The sky was…

Rishitha Shetty lives in Bangalore, India. Her work has appeared in The wild word, Califragile, Muse India, Spark Magazine, The Quail Bell Magazine, The Indian Review, and The Literary Yard. She is a member of Bangalore Writers Workshop.

~~~

Riversong

A dip in the Netravati,
to wash sins that
escape soap.
It is said that when a
wounded tiger wet
his bloody paw in her banks,
she blushed red
like the ripe cashew-apple.

From here, naked feet took with them
the sweet sting of a forgotten myth
and she took their sins.

Her limbs twisted out of creeks in
swollen streets,
she cut an artery
bled into boulders,
and a writer wrote
of her fury
in his book of songs.

But remember, I have crackled in your mouths like a twig,
even as my sisters wept at their burning skin.
I promise you…

Darren C. Demaree is a writer whose poems have appeared, or are scheduled to appear, in numerous magazines/journals, including Diode, Meridian, New Letters,Diagram, and The Colorado Review.

He is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently ‘A Fire Without Light’ (2017, Nixes Mate Books). His eighth collection ‘Two Towns Over’ was selected as the winner of the Louise Bogan Award by Trio House Press, and is scheduled to be released in March of 2018.

Darren is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology and Ovenbird Poetry. He lives with his wife and children in Columbus, Ohio.

~

EMILY AS WE, SPARINGLY

There is a patch of cells
in the back of my mind
that knows the actual
truth of Emily, all of it,
the names, the transfer
into bottles, the names
& the yellow, all that
yellow we code-named
“bird-watching”…

Kelli Allen has served as Poetry Editor for The Lindenwood Review and she directs River Styx’s Hungry Young Poets Series. Allen teaches in the MFA program at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally

Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books (2012) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest collection, Imagine Not Drowning, was released by C&R Press in January 2017.

http://www.kelli-allen.com

~

Galloping toward the harbor, crown in our pocket

When roots are horses, nothing seeds to fruition.
It is this way with us, too. We pass tasting booths
in Madrid and on the way down, pocket notes
meant for after curtains blunt wide. We leave applesauce

Agnieszka Mauch hails from Poland. She dabbles in writing, nature photography, and linguistics.

~

FURTHER DISRUPTIONS

Snow’s vibrating
my body is the age of wounds

I once made a girl fall and it was initiation

I should abhor myself
for even daring

I was gradable
I should have one level of me now, I think
I swim like Anne
I can’t
move my arms enough to create a
notion of the sea

it’s the acid that makes us speak up
makes us float

one day
silence will correct me
not exclude me

~

IT’S ALWAYS THE SMALL THINGS

The shadow house is open

all rooms butchered
to the gore
of emptiness

A moon in the pond of the living room
is grinning
it has a face like thistles,
teeth like sightings at 3 am

it feeds me this setup
each time
I am torn apart like some door
to a…

Leanne Drapeau is a high school Language Arts teacher in Hartford, Connecticut. She works with students each year to revise and perfect a social justice oriented curriculum that uses literature to teach both reading and writing skills through the lens of critical literacy. Her poetry has been published in Triggerfish Critical Review and The Good Men Project. She is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee.

~

loneliness is a powerful thing, kafka

The pillow has done violence to my face
like a cloud crossing the moon.

Kafka follows me through all
the corridors of my memory

through all the blue rooms
of his blue book.

His ears catch the sunlight
and shine orange, bloodlit

veins like eyelids –
the inside –

like swallowing
a flashlight.

His ears are lanterns
and his eyes are caves
his tongue is a candle

when there are rocks he goes
before me

and when there…

Jon Coneis a writer who lives in Iowa City. His published works include LEAST (Greying Ghost), THE PLESYRE BARGE (Greying Ghost), SITTING  GETTING  UP  SITTING  AGAIN (Standing Guard in a Cornfield Press), FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH TWO DOGS BLEEDING (Phrygian Press), as well he has appeared in several anthologies and numerous journals both online and in print. His collection COLD HOUSE will be published in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the fall of 2017.

~

YOU ARE NOT LATE, IT IS ONLY THE PRELUDE THAT PLAYS

This subtle theater where affection exists on light breeze, this hill that bends us to the river edged by dogwood where songs once heard are windows open onto long silence. They were lovely: in their off-key purity they put beauty on hold. How you took their diligent notes. What you have will surprise you by marking the measure of what is lost, as the beams…