By: James Aitchison (untitled) dipping his pen in mother’s milkthe baby wrote about stormy heavensand a weasel in a pieabout pink remembered hillsfinite and romanticwithout periphrases or inversionsuntil he lost every scrap of sincerityand the pathos of objectsa mystic babythe…
By James Aitchison The country around South Australia’s Flinders Ranges is unforgiving. It is also deceptive. Some years there’s enough grass to support thousands of sheep; in others, the pastures become an arid wasteland. Boom and bust, boom and bust…
By: Black Edward The June cold had settled properly over Glen Norah. It crept through jackets and sat quietly in your bones. Along Kunzekweguta Road, the usual smell of burst sewage floated above the potholes and open drains. Most people…
By: Selena The Message I Never Sent I open your nameand let it stay unspoken.The cursor waits like it knows me,patient with everything I avoid.Every sentence I try to buildcollapses before becoming real.So I leave it unfinished,a silence shaped like…
By: James L Johnson Pedaling non-stop since nine this morninglunch on a rocky shorea shallow rocky section of the Lehigh Riverwhere a mile norththe Aquashicola Creekoffers its tribute to the greater flow. I dip my cloth headband in cold water,…
By: Paul Dickey Near the Creek / Childhood Sweethearts /The Poem that Made No Sense (I am just saying some words, and all of a sudden I amwriting this poem or starting up a new conversationyou know what it is…
By: Zunaira Rehman Identity is not what they call youit is what you answer to when no one is watching,it is not the version of youthat survives other people’s expectations.It is the versionthat exists when approval is no longer required….
By: Philip Graubart The Hamas delegate stepped to the podium. He wore a checkered Palestinian keffiyeh, tight black jeans, a Grateful Dead t-shirt and shiny white New Balance sneakers. He grinned, loving the attention. His fake Arab pronunciation was not…
By: Arvilla Fee This Land I know this land like the back of my handevery knobby knuckle that dips and swayslike hump-backed camels on the high ridge.I know brambly bushes thick with berriesthat stain my lips and fingers peacock-bluein the…
By: Goutam Roy Grant me another life, Oh God, a life beyond this one,where I may meet my beloved again and tell the unfinished tale—a tale of love, a tale of pain, born within a darkened room,where straw became my…