#finalpoems / [?]

Life Journey

There were times when I’m also tired
of this journey we call life.

You see, I’ve done all that needs
to be done, welcomed many moons,

climbed many mountains, nurtured
children from my aging womb,

welcomed grandchildren, cherished
loyal dogs, battled cancer, taught,

many to write, cared for a volatile mother.
I’ve paid my dues. I paid them all.

I am ready to wave goodbye to memories
and bow to gratitude—

offer a love, profound now, and take in
the passion which has sustained us.

And so it is. Please let me
go now…please.

Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a poet, memoirist, blogger, teacher, and award-winning author of ten books and 1000 articles/poems. She blogs for Psychology Today, Wisdom Daily, Thrive Global and many others. She frequently speaks and facilitates workshops on writing for healing transformation. For more information, visit: dianaraab.com. 

#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.