Poetry

#finalpoems / [?]

Green June, late
Morning, bright
Light

Make your coffee, make
Your eggs, meet
Me out back

Water the plants,
Move some things around,
Pick some arugula

When was the last time I washed my hair?
When was the last time you said you loved me
And meant it?

Soap up each other’s backs in the shower
Tell me that all of your firsts
Have been with me

Just love me,
Or at least lie to me
Just a little longer

Arielle McManus is learning as she goes and writing one liners from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. Her work has been published on Literary North, and more of her work can be found on her site, ariellemcmanus.com.

#finalpoems / [?]

Dreaming in the Teahouse of Infinite Light

i. Taking tea in silence

Who dreams the dreamer

dreaming of you
in the garden?

Who dreams the ouroboros
warming in the sun

watcher of the changing skies
falling into cloud and
shadow?

…

Click here to read entire poem [PDF]

Ryu Ando lives and works in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in a number of speculative fiction and poetry journals including Strange Horizons and many more. His most recent collection of poetry, [零] A Phantom Zero, is available through the Operating System Press. He can be found online here: ryuando.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter @ryu_ando_98. This poem was composed while sheltering in place in L.A., thinking about family and friends in Saitama, Japan.

#finalpoems / [?]

Mobius Trip

I flinch then I drift into reverie…
wing-swept and flake-wept to swooping footpaths
past a curved door’s stoop, rapt in a gashed globe
that’s descending, ascending, clutched embrace,
alarmed commuter, reconstituted
deserter, survivor of unveiling.
What can I do but hover then plunge,
lunge then stall? When you’re small, mote-sloughed, speck hid
like a splinter, dislodged, squad-shirked, slivered,
every current re-collects, returns you.

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods outside Saugatuck, Michigan. His most recent of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

#finalpoems / [?]

Let Smiles Bloom

Dawn and dusk teach a lesson
tough times last not, carry on;
lighting a lamp noble act
tracking culprit needs more tact.
As fools mock, devils dance
men fall like leaves in trance
Death knows not faith or colour
Corona cares not men in power.
Stay at home, join not mob
nurses, doctors doing great job
weary souls need claps to cheer
unruly cattle need cane to steer.
Self-restraint need of the hour
hygiene matters most my dear,
positive mind helps and heals
let smiles bloom, drive away gloom!

Sony Dalia is an academic, poet. translator and critic. 3 Published anthologies of poems in English Delightful Dawn, Graceful Green, and Hopping on Hope. One more work is in pipeline. Extensively published in print and online journals museindia.com, boloji.com, poemhunter.com apart from print journals like Chandrabhaga, Sarasa among many othersLives in Hyderabad,India.

#finalpoems / [?]

Dear Human

all I ever wanted was everything
repeated

milk and
honey over the face of the ocean

and behind each gill
hyacinths

it’s hard

to get it
even once

the calm arrangement oblivion
offers
the body

a star
in the mouth

every fountain dissolved by zinc
and copper

when all I ever dreamed
was déja vu
and the future buried

alive in the fifth stomach of my
past

like an ancient fortune cookie

unfolding dimension
lifting a hand into the air again

holding it
in my hands again

fanning it out and out and out

Dear Human

I am leaving the light on for you

a string could be drawn between our windows

of course a pane of glass
can be a shield

but every night it is a portal

my mortality lies prostrate inside its frame inside
my body waiting

if love is patient if love is
a kind of mourning

my wingspan is feather-by-feather
a pigeon pacing its sill

passing shadows over
your last trace

a book you left glows
within its glossy cover

poems at the foot of my bed about a lover’s feet

my fingers almost entirely reach

dear flux dear decay dear
vibrations buried between vibrations buried

between space

Bryce Lillmars received his MFA from UC Irvine’s Programs in Writing where he served as Art Editor for Faultline. Most recent ‘Dear Human’ poems have appeared in Conduit and are forthcoming from Green Mountains Review, American Literary Review and Southern Humanities Review. He’s at work on his first collection and lives in Los Angeles collecting succulents on his sills.

#finalpoems / [?]

The Unspoken Not-yet

What can be said at all can be said clearly;
and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

What can you say?
You can say:
nothing.

No cacophony of choristers, no
operatic arias adjusting
to affliction, to the tender anguish

of the somatic suggestion that
your warranty might soon expire.
You say what you can say

in a body;
there is nothing
that can be said

outside of this.
There is nothing but this body—nothing
but this slow slaughtering of self.

As if you ever aspired to stay
earthbound. You’d prefer
rootless asphyxiation.

No. More like:
the sudden silent breathlessness
of isolation—just before you are

marooned; shipwrecked; a hull, shattered.
Not altogether capsized, nor drowning;
and then, this, quickly now, the quiet

promise of the unspoken
not-yet, of becoming everlastingly
unchained. You say nothing

except what you can say.
Nothing else can be said
outside of this:

body erased;
soul
flown.

Jennifer Stitt is a poet as well as a historian of modern American thought, culture, and politics. She earned a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her writing has appeared in Aeon, Aura Literary Arts Magazine, Big Think, Chronically Lit, Essay Daily, On Being, Quartz, Quiet Storm Literary Arts Magazine, Public Seminar, and other places. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is currently working on a book about the history of solitude.

#finalpoems / [?]

Blinded

Right before the end,
Just up to the point of annihilation,
Hovering over the off-switch for this world of ours,
Heading for a no-repeat shutdown,
I had one small hope;
To be a part of something
Greater than my fear.
To be linked to a phenomena
More firmly rooted than my own internal mush,
My stellar I-am-not-doing-this-right regime.

That desire was realized
By the flashing white light
Of acceptance
Blinding all other concerns
With pure unclouded luminosity.

Robert W. Monk is a writer and poet originally from London, England currently residing in Sydney, Australia. His work has been featured on the poetry webzine Ink Sweat & Tears. He is also the vocalist and lyricist with electronic music projects Echo Rescue, and Points of Convergence. He blogs at https://robertwmonk.wordpress.com/

#finalpoems / [?]

And pity sits beside me,
tongue lolling long, jerking with every breath,
And I think that if I were ever to be alone
it would be better than this
and that the skies in that place
redolent of shivering constellations and laundry soap
would bend their backs just a little
to whisper
there can be joy, even here.

Gretchen Adams is a writer of speculative and historical fiction. Her work has appeared in Canvas Literary Journal and Lunch Ticket. She lives in an increasingly damp apartment in Portland, Oregon.

#finalpoems / [?]

Do not just play a role,
accepting that this world
is normal. Do not fall into
the trap. Run the Gamut
of experience. Then run it
again. You never know what
You missed the first time.

Do not live as a Queen among
the lay people, live as though all
are worthy of love. This life is too
Short to pretend to be anything
but divine.

Live and let live. Do not
Hold onto old grudges
This world doesn’t need more of that.

Find something positive
And live each day for that.

Zoe Eudene Grace is a poet from the Treaty 7 territory on Turtle Island. She spends most of her time watching the collapse of the empire from her twitter account: @beingandzoe. Previously she has been published in In Media Res and Wax Poetry and Art under a dead name. Most of her free time is spent watching sports, wrestling, and re-reading old fantasy novels.

#finalpoems / [?]

Templo Mayor

I centered myself, pressed lips to salty sandstone, pivoted towards
Thousands watching then strutted higher:
I inhaled as you carved my heart
And threw the shell of my body down 30 steps to meet Coyolxauhqui,
Who, despite being displaced herself, cushioned the fraction remaining of my soul, soothed my
cuts, and shared her ground. My blood transfused to strengthen Tlaloc, igniting red rain swells
Flooding plain grasses like combed hair of a doll.
Swollen valleys cradled your bed laden lovers, submerging their passion like
The pinching of a flame with bare fingers. Waters creeped to your chin, pushed it East, where I
rose and watched as you
floated.

Stephanie Garon received dual science degrees from Cornell University, then attended Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her environmental art has been exhibited internationally in London, Colombia, and South Korea, as well as across the United States. Her writing, a critical aspect of her artistic process, has been published in international literary journals and performed adjacent to her artwork. When she’s not in her studio, she’s jumping across river beds to comb through pine needles.

#finalpoems / [?]

GARDEN PATH REVISITED

Gold on green
Sunlight kisses sway
Freshness, affinity
Absorb into my bones, yet
Layered in the undergrowth
A waiting

Time
You perplexing burden
Heavy hypnotising snake
Unfathomable
Unfolding and unleashing
Years upon seasons
Generations
This torrent vanishing all
I know

Caught in the current

We are
I am

But not lost

Born in the U.K., Ann van Wijgerden has spent most of her life in the Netherlands and the Philippines. She has had nonfiction, poetry and fiction published in a number of literary journals. Ann works with an NGO providing education for children living in Manila’s slum areas. www.youngfocus.org

#finalpoems / [?]

and the night recedes

you only feel ‘woman’
when he dyke-s you from his truck window
when she deems you worth your skin enough
to steal it
when they crown you “glorious burden”
you only feel ‘woman’
in the cacophony of poisonous masculinity
of Nair-hair and petite feet
& wow have you lost weight?
you only feel ‘woman’
when you don’t want to
and when you do want
you feel nothing else because to want
means the same as to        .        woman

you feel ‘woman’ that night
walking to your car far from campus
& an open facing yell screams—something
obscured from you        .          & you’re glad for the unknown

you feel ‘woman’        .          at dusk
driving 55 down an empty road
your favorite song bass-ing
with the moon watching your back
and through the speeding you never felt safer
you feel, well not woman but something close and better
when you wake to the orange sun on their face
and their sleepy hand     .       reaching for yours

you only feel you when you stand:          .      a false woman

unearthed from the stone-ash
of a self you never claimed—
on all those nights you’d rather forget
growing from a fire of noiseless hate
as the forest of street lights flicker—
you sing soft the night-edge
‘til the moment’s fading silence pulses
and the night recedes around you to the new dawn

of She

Lauren Miles (she/her/they/them) is a queer poet, playwright, and comic artist from Dayton, OH. You can follow them on Twitter (@andro_meyda2527) and Insta (lilypheonix1252) if you want to see more of her work or just to see retweets of tiny octopi or photos of overcast clouds and their sunshine partner.

#finalpoems / [?]

My Dress Hangs Here

Para Frida

Of course it does – at 6am the men
bring my innards from a low truck
with battered rims; they carry them on
their backs into the rear of the restaurante –

they are the parts of animals, i can make out
intestines and other salichicha type shapes
they will be cooked to perfection – later
not resembling anything como mi muerte feo

such a pretty dress – I wear to my
quinceniera – I wear it to meet the gringos
San Franciso – porque no? me quieren asi
me desean asi – y ademas mi Señor le guste

the part of me which is not hanging here
not divided – but was divided, as the house
and the sisters and the mujer, su marida

I wonder if he would like me to be Russian…
I wonder what happened to the indigenes en Cholula
I wonder if I had a day to myself – what would I
do with it – If I could walk, say to market, la iglesia

en mi vestida – como nativa – que hermosa –
I would watch the men bring the parts of bodies
into the back door of the restaurant. Pieces of
ears for pozole – i might even come in

have a seat –
and eat myself for breakfast

Elisabeth Horan is an imperfect creature from Vermont advocating for animals, children and those suffering alone and in pain – especially those ostracized by disability and mental illness. She is Editor in Chief at Animal Heart Press, and Co-Editor at Ice Floe Press. She has several chaps and collections out at Bone & Ink Press, Fly on the Wall Press, Twist It Press, Rhythm and Bones Press, Cephalo Press, and Animal Heart Press. Her newest collections: Just to the Right of the Stove, with Hedgehog Poetry Press, and Alcoholic Betty, with Fly on the Wall Poetry Press are forthcoming in 2020. She is a poetry mentor to many up and coming brilliant poets, and proud momma to Peter and Thomas. She recently earned her MA from SNHU, and her MFA from Lindenwood University. She is a 2018 Pushcart Nominee and a 2018 and 2019 Best of Net Nominee. Follow her @ehoranpoet & ehoranpoet.com

#finalpoems / [?]

Someday

the point is never to wait to say what’s true
whilst knowing and honoring the pace of things
     .       (which is never my pace of things)
never knowing what time we have,
     .       what’s true

i’d like to tell you how i’ve felt sans risking what we’ve had,
which will happen, always happens
     .       once you know

you promote truth but
don’t know mine or
what’s coming or
that you’re it    .  that
i’m chronically in love
and

i see more than ever why this can’t    .  and shouldn’t    .  be and
     .       that we are impeccable as is   .  but

it’s just you have this spectacular brain
which prohibits consideration of    .   my love for you
     .       which is prohibited      .       which

creates a chronic, crazed kinship with the forbidden

  .       you don’t see

you’re my ideal world but not of it    .  you’ve made quite sure of that

so,    .   but

i still find i’m right in the end
whilst heart throbs with wrongness

     .       do you fear me like the others

     .       now you see

secrets have been, always
the only way my
life keeps going
holding all these secrets
i can never say
hoping to someday, maybe,
   .       say them
dreaming of what’d happen if you knew
maybe everything would be different
  .       maybe nothing
maybe you’ve always known anyway and i’m just here
.       having wondered away life
.       praying you’ll find me soon

Paige Frisone is a body-based writing coach, writer and poet stationed in Boulder, Colorado. Originally from Chicago, her writing pursuits began at Butler University, finishing school at Naropa University with an integrated contemplative psychology focus. Her work has been featured in Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, Rogue Agent and elsewhere. Learn more about her psychosomatic inquiries at: www.paigefrisone.com.

#finalpoems / [?]

For The Ones Yet to Die

death is nothing

you only move to a parallel dimension

and become less obvious

so in my departure

call me by my name

remember me for who I am

be not remorseful for I dwell

somewhere waiting for you

life is just the place to wait for something

              .           and

death is the place to stay for nothing

so cherish these brief moments you call living

because – you become nothing when the wait is over

remember

life comes with its own curse

to be born is to die eventually

life itself is the act of waiting

then

you come to the reality that there is

no such thing as immortality

we are born(e) to die

so remain with your shadow even in death

he would become your soul and live forever.

mortality is in immortality

Semilore Kilaso is a Nigerian writer who loves to collect photographs of humans, architecture, wildlife and landscape. She believes intelligence is relative and every individual should be responsible for the consequences of their actions. When she’s not reading books, she’s reading lines from architectural drawings. Some of her works appear in international magazines; culturalweekly and litvalley and in the anthology “A Country of Broken Boys.”

#finalpoems / [?]

– Out of the Sinkhole –

Like an August Floridian thunderstorm,
I can see the clouds turn darker
than the circles beneath my eyes;
I can hear the clouds collide louder
than the ringing in my ears;
I can feel the wind begin to flap
my sweat stained clothes;
and yet, when raindrops the size of my dilated pupils
fall with fury as boomers quake the ground beneath my feet,
I’m always caught
unprepared.

I even do what I’ve been taught:
I tense every muscle, clench my teeth, squeeze my eyes shut,
let the warmth of the rain flow down my soul.
But my eyes don’t relax like I’ve been told they would,
my teeth don’t release like I’ve been told they would,
my muscles don’t melt like I’ve been told they would.
Instead, the soil saturates and the supporting pressure
sinks and sends me sliding beneath the surface.
Water floods the sinkhole, lightning strikes surround,
water moccasins and gators swim smiling around me,
and I–
I am the weakest motherfucker dying.

And that’s what I’ve learned about depression:
I go to counseling, I deep breath, I exercise, I love,
I write, I read, I visualize, I practice, I give, I thank,
I take 40 mgs in the morning, I take 50 mgs at night.
But I’ve also banged my head against a freezer door
until black spots dotted my vision. I’ve raced my car
to 100 m.p.h. on a lonely road at 3 in the morning
with the intent of ramming that shit into the giant trunk
of an Oregon White Oak. I’ve told a coach I need to quit my
scholarship because this depression makes me a bad
teammate. I’ve left my poetry slam team the night before
competition for the same reason. I’ve taken so many Ativan
at once I slurred through a set list, stumbled off stage and startled
awake with no recollection of driving to an ex-girlfriend’s
place. I’ve stayed in bed for the majority of a three-year cycle
and let myself disappear from all the spaces I claim to love
with a note ready that says I don’t understand it, but it’s all my fault.
See, that August Floridian thunderstorm is always in the forecast,
and I’ll always be unprepared,
and I’ll always slide into another sinkhole.

But I’ve also learned about depression:
When I’m the weakest motherfucker dying,
the lightning will miss me, the rain’s fury will subside,
the wind will slow, the clouds will separate,
the water moccasins and gators will not give a fuck
about biting me because they’re just trying to survive too;
and when somehow I crawl out of the sinkhole,
I will be the strongest motherfucker alive.

And I’ll see all the other strongest motherfuckers alive
somehow crawling out of their sinkholes too. And we
will understand that those who didn’t make it out
of their sinkholes are strongest motherfuckers too.
And we will look at that forecast, and we will be caught
unprepared
together.

And we will slide into our sinkholes,
and we will do whatever we can to be
the strongest motherfuckers alive
after every
Storm.

Ty.Brack is a poet, Hip hop artist, teacher, and youth organizer from Tigard, OR. His poetry has been published in Northwest Passage and will be featured in WritersResist and Eve Poetry Magazine, and his music is available on all major digital streaming platforms. Additionally, he can be seen competing and performing in poetry slams in Portland. Believing that poetry and the spoken word is vital for social and emotional growth, Ty.Brack also organizes youth poetry jams in his community, providing young poets the opportunity to perform, workshop, and network.