Poetry

#finalpoems / [?]

The End Of the World Did Not Happen…

With children diving under desks
and clouds that looked like angry
balloon animals. From family members
eager to turn your outsides into their
insides. By a souped-up Commodore 128
computer that decided you could be
a delectable source of electricity. Through
a flood of the earth or emotions
triggering mutant powers. During an angry
volcano surprise party under Los
Angeles, angry gods, or angry paratroopers
descending on cornfields with machine
guns. Because of a failing sun or genius chimps
leapfrogging the evolutionary ladder.
Due to asteroids or ozone leaving the planet
with bald spots, tiny dictators in alligator
boots, or time-traveling paradoxes of crushed
monarchs and nations under altered beliefs.
But fear and ignorance could set the table,
a conversation or two, a desire to please,
ash covering the cars of coughing cities,
a step at a time, a castle at a time, a prayer
of blood sky and bowed heads. It could shift
with a moon-sized parable where the one
can save the many. It could be you. You could be
the one.

Martin Ott’s most recent book is a dystopian sci-fi novel Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016. He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies.

#finalpoems / [?]

In the Wasteland

The end.
Without you,
I will wander the wasteland
as a nobody
to get me behind me,
and I will fail.

I will ride faster and faster.
I will waste, raid the oceans
for more mermaid meat,
scour the towns for
someone who looks like you
to split in two
again and again.
I will leave a wake of loss,
slay the lady of the lake,
smother hearts with my boredom,
my acid god, my amphetamine jihad.
I will drown more youth in rivers of booze,
suck and fuck dynasties into oblivion.
I will poison the well,
serve shit at the table.
I will string the pearls of grief
I stole back from swooning others,
polished,
and they will shine bright enough
to blind Venus for good through midnight
into my mourning.

It’s all to say:
I don’t know myself without you.
And still, every morning,
every year,
5:01 am,
the gem you left in my chest
wakes me again
and again and again,
again and again,
with the feeling you are about
to call my name.

When he is not polluting fresh minds as a teacher-for-hire, Matt Carney writes prose, poetry and music, and trips graciously but liberally through San Francisco, never forgetting to wear his shit-together-glasses as he watches the sunset. His heroes are David Bowie, Ellen Ripley, and Chun Li.

#finalpoems / [?]

in my last moments i’ll be singing a Weezer song 

almost always there’s a song

morning       so  i was a teenager

again   listening to Weezer

a sanctuary   so

cozy   so  now i

go out (avoid roommates)

lost the garage

where i felt safe

to sing

melanie farley lives in Philadelphia, PA. Her chapbook things we have in writing POEMS (for Z) was published with dancing girl press in 2016, and you can find her work elsewhere, if you do some sleuthing. She almost always wakes up with a song in her head.

#finalpoems / [?]

Two Hearts

For so many years you were my oxygen
My breath
My conversational mate
You made me laugh

My heart inside your heart
My hand inside your hand

Before we knew each other we were lost
Two halves wandering
Steps searching
Traveling toward a place to call home

You found me
My arms were wreaths
My intentions were circles
Our laughter was a room filled with jewels

You spoiled me by listening to me
I spoiled you by laughing at your jokes

I hope I gave you enough
I did my best and that was all I had

You were/are/will be
My everything

Nothing will change
Nothing
When the world comes to an end

Eliza Mimski lives and writes in San Francisco, California. Her work has appeared in Sparkle and Blink, the Lascaux Review, Poets Responding to the News, Fiction365, amid other places.

#finalpoems / [?]

One Bird

There is no way out of the labyrinth, meandering trap.
Language is a circle that goes nowhere, though it entertains the mind;
Scripture calls it God.

The world is not the thing: Table, chair, word, person.
Time only happens in thought, what is seen is not seen,
Space and content.

All of history is a sham, this human construct of box:
Pull the zip tab, see it rip and go up in flame, a puff of smoke.
What’s left is nameless.

Coffee is perking, the furnace kicks on, sunlight creeps through the blinds
Daylight turns to night, breath rises, falls, a pulse beats in the heart,
One truth.

Cardinal red against a cursive scroll of tree branch,
A bird thinks it sees another, but there is only ever one bird,
Singing beneath

A blistered empty sky.

Kelly Thompson’s work has been published in The Rattling Wall, Entropy, Oh Comely, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, and other literary journals. Her essay “Hand Me Down Stories” was recently nominated for a Pushcart by Proximity. She is also curator for “Voices of Addiction” at The Rumpus. She is a psychotherapist and has a small private practice. She also works on assignment with soldiers recently returned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado in the sunshine of the spirit. You can follow her on Twitter @stareenite

#finalpoems / [?]

Arcana 16

We were in a large cathedral
important to those such as us: lovers
of history, lovers of odd
structures of the mind, hippy-types,
wayward. Some took pictures,
others moved toward a green field,
their faces dark from much sunlight,
bodies tight with exercise.

I was watching in a hall. I heard
a shouting outside and when I looked again
the clouds had become aggressive,
moving toward us, a tornadic wind
circling meaningfully
as if to entrance us with its dance.
Some cried out, take cover.
Most could not. The sky darkened.

Lightning began dropping all around.
I was instantly aware I too was in trouble.
The cathedral was coming down, battered
by storm wind and lethal lightning,
flaming from its spires, it’ll
soon collapse. I left with my skin intact,
thinking every lightning bolt

that fell would certainly scour me.
That the picture was similar to the tarot
card was not wasted on me,
that the divination represents a collapse
of environment, a renegotiation
of possibilities, a surrender
of what at one time was all one knew.

I awoke then, feeling strange.
I pictured Rimbaud and a cow on a hill,
thinking of the cow the
separate wisdom of moving slow through
fields one creates with one’s step,
nearer the will, nearer the embrace, the
top of one’s head alit with Christmas tinsel,
and Rimbaud a voice drawn in chalk.

It was a dream, I thought, looking out my window.
The sun shook the trees of its silver dollars.
I wish you could have seen the disarmament
of the trees in noon time as Rimbaud
was drawn upon my voice with a light blue chalk.
It is recovered, I thought,
it is recovered.

Elias Siqueiros is a poet from El Paso TX.  He is the author of the poetry collection The Heart Of An Animal. Work has appeared in publications such as Word Riot, Stirring, Former People, Milk, and elsewhere.

#finalpoems / [?]

determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI), xxvi-xxvii, 117, 119, 124-25, 127, 195, 248n24

Jared Wells is a writer and sound artist based in Auckland, New Zealand.

#finalpoems / [?]

What entitles me to talk about the end of the world?

Humans have had gunpowder and steel for years. Rocks and clubs for longer. Teeth and fists for longer. We’ve been ending worlds for centuries.

I bet trench warfare happened on sunny days. Men pulled pins with their teeth while boys bit into birthday cakes.

Why is my end of the world significant? More than every car accident and earthquake combined? My death won’t be as bright as the fire by the bay in 1906.

We only have a few draws left before the filter. But what’s to say the ember is out? Maybe it’ll be hot enough to light a new one.

#finalpoems / [?]

I write to you in confidence
That you will understand
This poem acts as recompense
For that which I demand.

I beg you do not come to me,
Although it is the end.
I know you’ll ask how this could be,
To leave your sweetest friend.

For only it seems natural,
That we should face the close,
With fingers clasped, so near in all,
To whisper softest prose.

But should you try to comfort me,
My pain will only grow.
Your presence speeds up time, you see,
So sooner I would go.

I’d rather miss your last embrace,
And have more time to think
Of love for you which I did taste
From Heaven’s finest drink.

As now I sit in solitude,
My death it surely comes,
But since I am away from you,
Its march more slowly drums.

Our distance grants more hours, you see,
To cherish what we have,
So deeper in my soul you’ll be
When it decides to pass.

#finalpoems / [?]

It is the end

I want to believe
that I would expose it all
Tell the truth finally
Tell you everything I’ve ever kept hidden
The feelings that were too ugly to reveal

Because if it is the end
my reasons for hiding myself no longer matter

But it is the end
and it no longer matters

I will shield you from the dark truth
once more

Might as well

It is the end

*

it won’t end with fire. or ice. it will just end.
one day we’ll lie down together, and look at each other, and laugh. cry. talk about our day.
think about our eyes and the colors they change to. think about each other, and our past, and our future.
what has been and what will be.
who will be.
where we will be.
and one day, at the end of the day, we wont know it, but it will be the last time.

*

i don’t know if i want to know what awaits
is it gardens and oceans and flowers and sand and rivers of milk and honey
is it the arched gate i always pictured up in the clouds
or is it the alternative
beneath us
am i sinking into the quicksand more and more each day

who knows

its probably neither
there’s probably nothing in either direction
we’ll go
and then we’ll disappear
forever

the thought is hard to wrap my head around we are so caught up
in thinking we are so significant
we have to have souls
that will last forever
that will stay somewhere in this strange world
haunting our futures
and our pasts

*

The world ended over and over for you

When you didn’t get that toy you wanted from the store
When you had that nightmare
When you scraped your knee
When you fainted
When he didn’t like you back
When they moved far away
When it broke

And yet when you woke in the morning you felt better
The world restarted
Everything felt new
And everything was ok

What makes you think this time will be different?

#finalpoems / [?]

When I Say Yellow

It has been a fortnight
Since cold ran me down,
Mercury heightened up,
And jaundice.

I had so many plans
To study long nights,
Adorn my balcony with festive lights,
All of them…. Bedridden.

O Mirror, dear fellow,
Eyes are yellow,
My leather tanned yellow,
Is it a whim of Halloween
That removed all my mellow?

In me, all yellow.
Outside, all yellow.

What I eat, yellow.
My dreams, yellow.

That sweet-lime poured in a glass,
Ripe lemons cut my lips like knives,
Sugarcane: the sweetener in an injection
And grams.. The only solid intake.

Fantasies crave in me now;
Pizza smeared with Parmesan,
A crackling dish of fries,
No. O, no. They will rust my liver,
As if it hasn’t by now!

No more do I care of
This mettlesome heart,
Steadily I am falling apart.

A last wish before I sleep,
The next morning light,
Be white,
If not bright.

Edil Christian is a writer currently based in India.He is engrossed in literature and art craft forms. His work has appeared in the Yellow Chair Review. He enjoys the vivacity in smallest of things like a LED bulb or a doormat. You can find more of his poetry on twitter @edil_christian

#finalpoems / [?]

I have tried to live life sitting up
though it’s always tempting to lie down
resting on the part of my spine that juts out
I think about the possibility of someone holding onto my heart.

Life isn’t a game,
We try and explain.
But we are chasing the things we want.
We are making the moves
To differentiate ourselves
(or at least myself)
we look in the mirror for some reason to care
and to justify what we want
and why what we want is right.

Why exploding the soapy bubble was the right thing
Why stinging the girl in the headband set her free
Why holding onto the one person who was so consistently inconsistent to you
was so beautiful.
But so prolonged.
Was it worth holding on?

Allowing myself to become lesser in the eyes of the community.
Letting my chest soak in the thick spaghetti of the world outside my home.
The dusty screen and the toasty bed become antiquated
like an old familiar teacher.
I never got to prove them wrong.
But what would that do?
Prove them right about someone else?

Now I’m looking in the mirror
Did I want the right things?
Did I do those things right?
What have I done right?
It’s the recurring story of our lives.
There’s just no time.