You and me and brightness
You and me and pink and
Purple widening circles.
The pale skin on your neck,
That red cowlick like Tin Tin’s,
Your eyes, wide and blue.
Someone sings in a high,
Clear voice. We come close
To kissing, but don’t.
Catherine Simpson is a cellist who lives in Santa Barbara. She has been previously published in the Big River Poetry Review, Right Hand Pointing, Spectrum, Step Away Magazine, and Into the Teeth of the Wind.
Breaking before our eyes into a sound,
as whoosh and swish of the ocean tide.
In constant as rhythmic strokes
branches crack and are thrown into the stream.
I stood among the trees and watched,
immobile in the cooling shade,
the leaf surfaced, face up beneath the bridge.
Woooh, the wind howled,
Cut limbs falling, the crack they make,
each dropping from its trunk as though for once
the last branch of winter made us trim.
Lost for violence of mid-air branches,
soft current dragged on as wind chimes
blew at the stretch of the dam.
Wading water into land, downward
as the deep blue sea, at times where
the light reflected a bend.
Slowed the surface calm waters,
evergreen trees lined the banks of river,
as natural forces contained the seed of life.
The windows are blown out.
Abandonment offers silence,
our yard grown wildly immeasurable
in green, red, yellows, and browns.
Long recollection of a story roars out.
Sagging doors creak, left ajar, stuck in hinges,
we meet halfway.
Closing the door to those that left for good,
ways of going away, leaving our forsaken home.
We used to have our meals and slept upstairs,
the wooden floor makes hisses at us.
Spiral staircase leads us nowhere now,
quiet whispers we murmured before bed,
shhh – everything is truly silent.
Samantha Seto is a writer. She has been published in various anthologies including Ceremony, Soul Fountain, Blue Hour, Carcinogenic Poetry, and Black Magnolias Journal.
you are
the spring in my limp
the depth of my shallow breaths
the shattered melancholy
of my being broken
memories
from before I knew you
sweet smoke
my dad loved to hide behind
dark eyes of an early crush
summertime grass warm
against my bare feet
first real kiss
black-veiled mourner
standing alone
beneath gray rain
clenching teeth and fist
dropping muddy earth
into my grave
smearing what’s left
across your face
hiding your crying
downcast eyes
enduring the disappointment
in all that I am not
Danny Earl Simmons is an Oregonian and a proud graduate of Corvallis High School. He is a friend of the Linn-Benton Community College Poetry Club and an active member of Albany Civic Theater. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals such as Naugatuck River Review, Avatar Review, Burningword, Pirene’s Fountain, and Verse Wisconsin.
You were there from birth,
passed down from father to son,
waltzing through my veins. My muse.
We embraced, perfectly on pitch,
a song, and then I found
another
and I left you.
I see you
tattooed on my wrists. Thick
black lines, a G
and an F.
My former muse, permanent
over my veins,
under my skin,
a perpetual reminder.
I stare at you, remembering.
Wanting still
to create with you. After all,
you are in still in my blood,
but you’ve left my heart.
Empty capillaries flail
like strings waiting to be plucked,
longing to resonate,
but I’ve forgotten the tune.
Justin W. Price is the managing editor at efiction Horror and for The Bridge online newspaper. His first book of poetry, Digging to China, is available for Amazon Kindle. He has been published in the Hellroaring Review, The Bellwether Review, The Rusty Nail, the Crisis Chronicles, eFiction Humor and eFiction Magazine. He maintains a blog (http://pdxjpricefirstblog.blogspot.com) and is an active writer on Hub Pages (http://pdxkaraokeguy.hubpages.com)
At the Southern Museum of Archaeology, I find
Homo heidelbergensis, the last common ancestor
of man and Neanderthals.
A skull with a sloping forehead, pronounced brow ridges
and no jawbone, a skull that, coupled with a heart,
once contained techniques of ecstasy,
esoteric knowledge of joy, gained,
perhaps, near a gentle soughing stream or
at dawn, sunset, night under the stars or
after a successful hunt or
at his joining with his woman or
at the birth of his children or
at the death of an enemy—
I am much more simple, now.
Tonight, the android Gypsy woman in the glass booth
will awkwardly lay out my cards and discern my future through plastic eyes
and with a resolute smile egest a slip of printed paper
telling me generic-happy-specifics.
I really cannot ever make myself believe
a common augury. Chinese fortune cookies
do not change my life though I have tried.
Benny, a homeless street prophet at 5 Points, tells me
every time he sees me “You are bound for greater things.”
Elijah, my fundamental Christian neighbor, constantly warns me about
a hell that “invades the land of the living and takes prisoners.”
The cards will yield no ready clues.
They must be interpreted by an adept,
a possessor of occult knowledge
concerning past and future.
Heidelbergensis is the first species of the Homo genus
to bury its dead.
I am a middle way Catholic.
I like historical criticism too much, or
I want to like it. In the Church galaxy, hell is a “mystery”
beyond my ability to understand, to understand
the rightness of it, the justness of it
and how God can yet be love.
I believe in geologic time, carbon dating, archaeology.
Homo heidelbergensis could probably ferment a beverage.
He knew about certain mood-altering roots and herbs and flowers.
Did his people suffer from addiction? They had no package stores, no bars,
no coffee shops, no rave clubs.
In Nazi Germany, alcoholics and addicts
were deemed to be “life unworthy of life.”
They were sterilized during America’s early 20th Century eugenics purge.
Now the health insurance companies and hospitals say
it is a disease, a heritable disease
expressing itself on the level of genes.
Chemical dependency is a malady, an unfortunate state
which comes upon us. Like diabetes.
Recovery nets billions of dollars per year in America.
The illegal drug business nets 350 billion dollars per year,
worldwide. And so on. (Alestair Crowley called himself “the Beast 666.”
He died a heroin addict. Did he also require heroin in the afterlife?
Did he need to detox there?)
The next right thing.
I would readily see the lesser secrets.
I would readily see the greater secrets.
I still need help to do this,
to look for the defining arcana
in a random array of circumstances. And
I will learn to interpret the circumstances.
by Bryan Merck
Bryan Merck has published in America, Blast Furnace, Camel Saloon, Conclave, Emerge Literary Journal, Hiram Poetry Review, Literary Juice, The Rusty Nail, Stoneboat and others. He is a past winner of the Southern Literary Festival Poetry Prize and the Barkesdale-Maynard Poetry Prize. He lives in Moultrie, Georgia with his wife Janice.
