By: John Grey RESPECTS AS PAID By a grave, day pulls close the curtains.The air creaks, plays foul notes,like a violin unstrung.Grass is damp and unloved.Trees droop like mourners.Broken-winged angels, cold mausoleumnothing here speaks well of life. Expecting death at…
By: Pat Spencer Generally, I find public transportation to be hours of isolation, interrupted by a neighborly comment or two. So, when I boarded a repurposed school bus for the bone-jarring ride from Johannesburg to Zimbabwe, the last thing I…
By Tyler Marable For Joseph Harmon there was not a more exhilarating experience than lying with a young woman—especially one who wasn’t his wife. Lexi laid sleep by his side. Her pink hair ran down her bare shoulders and…
By Pramod Rastogi Eternal Echoes of Time Money may buy much,But never the moments it cannot reclaim.Time moves in one direction only,Bearing me on its unbroken tide,A passage both merciless and profound. O passing breeze, why should I grieveFor missing…
By Munavvar Tlewbaeva It was autumn. A Friday. The cold crept slowly into my bones as the sun began to set. I had just finished my English course and was heading from the city back to my village — back…
By: Geoffrey Heptonstall THE PASSING OF WORDS That I might take from the treefresh metaphors, fully grown,savoured in the reading seasonwhere life is filtered through fading light. The wild garden lacks the handsfor harvesting its ripening bounty.Beneath the leaves the…
By: Debbie Tunstall ADHD? And other conquests. Like a catI’m neither here, nor there. At best I aman all nighter beast. And if you look you may see me studying you, Each curve of your brow I decipher to what…
By: Don Tassone He’d lived in his house for 20 years and planted every tree in his yard. His favorite was an American cherry. He had planted it as a sapling. Now it was big, strong and stately. It…
By: Lilly White See the beaconing concrete walls,The bricks stacked upon each other,Enclosing our lives reduces us to bills,buying,and the politics we inherit. We see them go up,we see them go down. See them go down as the crimson flames…
By Ken Poyner AN EDUCATION Each year we debate what should be the proper age for school children to be taken on a first field trip to see captive pianos in the next town. All of our pianos have been…