Contributor: S.D. Puppini

- -
I waited in the park for hours
While you guzzled wine
While you cried
Over other men
Older men
Outlaws from your outlaw past.

I waited in the park for hours
Waited for you to call
For you to say:
Hey
Come home
I miss you
I want you
The way I used to want you
Once again.


- - -

Contributor: Donal Mahoney

- -
For a year this image has haunted me.
Over and over I hear on the gramophone
Cohen put in my ear
“Feature this:
On a crowded elevator
a strange woman in a baseball cap
unbuttons your fly.”
That image is on the ceiling every night
as I sit shiva in the lobby
of this small hotel,
a hookah, like a tired cobra,
coiled at my feet,
a shamrock in my buttonhole
dead from the last parade.
Night after night,
I think about this strange woman
as each hour I watch
the doors of the elevator
part and give birth.
I observe each new guest carefully,
hoping the woman in the baseball cap
will tire of the rain and ride up
in the elevator and register.
I want her to sit in the lobby
and talk with us.
We who are guests here forever
have eons to hear
what she has to say.
We have paid our rent in advance.
We can afford to sit here and see.


- - -
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Contributor: Lyla Sommersby

- -
I was aflame
the whole day,
the whole week.
I was aflame
I burned
inside
because I thought
you didn't love me
because I thought
I was about to lose you
forever.

I was aflame
I was a wick
on a candle
I didn't even know was burning
until it was too late
until the nub
was all that was left
of me.

I was aflame
until you touched me
until you held me
through the rain of my falling tears
and told me
what a fool you'd been
what you'd meant when you'd said
you could see
yourself
leaving me.


- - -
I am a student in Miami, Florida. Painting is my other love. My first book, Sketches of Someone, is available through Thunderune Publishing.

Contributor: Phyllis J. Buckley

- -
Look to the sky
wonder if
up there
an eye
is looking back
looking into our sky.

Look to the sky
wonder if
anyone
around any
of those stars
wonders about our star
about us
about whether or not
we even exist.


- - -

Contributor: Ben Riddle

- -
For Antonio Martin

Somewhere in America
a mother grieves for a son
gunned down in cold blood.
he was just a boy and
they killed him.

She's crying by the television
as old, white men lie about her boy;
she sobs as they demonise him
condemn him
try to justify
his murder.

He has presents wrapped and waiting
underneath her Christmas tree;
he was so excited to see
what she had made him.
He'll never know
what the future
had in store.

After a little while she stops;
and listens to the silence.
It's all she can hear
anymore.


- - -
A twenty year old aspiring poet and athlete from Perth, Western Australia; Ben Riddle studies Political Science and English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia. You can find more of his work at riddlesocialcommentary.tumblr.com

Contributor: Donal Mahoney

- -
The woman, 81, is sightless.
She receives a blind
pension check from Missouri
and has for 60 years.
Her first check was for $51.
She received that every month!
Now, 60 years later, she gets $718.
And she gets that every month!
Some see the ogre of inflation rising.

Amid the cacophony
surrounding the death of
Michael Brown, the governor
has announced that this January
blind pension checks will be cut
$33 a month, saving the state $730,000.

In quieter times, the governor
might have found
the savings elsewhere.
He might wisely look again
because advocates for the blind
are livid to the max.

Normally the blind are quiet,
just trying to get along but
one can almost see them
with their German Shepherds
and their tapping canes
descending on the state capitol,
scattering the Governor,
Congress and the lobbyists.
Missouri is a sorry state.


- - -
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Contributor: KBounds

- -
In relationships are where my fear tries to flourish
Little dark corners of inadequacies
the sun rises
to light up my flaws

I don’t (and can’t) always feel beautiful
but
I should feel worthy
worthy of love (insert shoulda-coulda-woulda here)
and my love is
a big-open-warm-enveloping
“I’m so happy to see you – my heart smiles to be near you” Love.

I feel a deep need (Desire to be realsies here because I can/do/will live without)
inside of me to share this Love
with just a wondrous abandon, a child-like delight,
without
fear of a landmine disguised as a gesture-word-touch-Nope: “I changed my mind”

If “it” is …Real Love… you CAN’T change your mind - not arbitrarily
Isn’t Real Love beyond the self-will?
Wouldn’t the heart have to Be closed and the mind Decides to change
or do they just Reveal their Truth?

More likely the latter (or so I hope though I don’t understand, I just don’t understand)
and
while perhaps the intent to love
that Desire-hope-Dream was there
heart and mind must agree – or –
disappointment will follow. It has been mine.

I don’t want to say
I don’t know how
I find it “easy” to say I trust God – but do I trust in me?
My gut, so spot on in my surrounding life
in Love?

I want to trust, I think so, Almost Know So but doubt
falls from my head toward my heart
covering my path with little breadcrumbs
and
I keep looking back over my shoulder
Can I find my way back
If I do see a landmine? Before I place my foot down?

And
Can I really move forward
If I keep looking back?


Just how long do I stand on this corner?


- - -
I write to share what my head says and to know I'm not alone.

Contributor: Catherine O'Brian

- -
Hers were pale blue eyes impaled by sunlight,
squeezed almost shut behind dark glasses
on merciless blue skied and cloudless days.
She saw this as an oversight of natural selection,
while coping with a compensatory inner vision
peopled by imagined forms embodying her fears.

Gray objects floating in the moonlight
were discerned by her as mere shadows
of the daylight visions of the healthy ones,
those sensible creatures of the light,
surefooted and without self doubt,
free to play at the limits of their imagination and then
return to the solidity of reality unscathed.


- - -
Catherine O’Brian is a scientist and a poet who works at a nonprofit in Chicago. Her poems have been published in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, Ann Arbor Review, and elsewhere.

Contributor: Amit Parmessur

- -
Dearest lotus-eyed deity from Mathura,
tonight, the intense fascination I feel for You
is oozing serenely into the icy cold fingers
I am about to use to open a fresh window,
onto the cleansed river of eternal happiness.

The new love I have for You is turning
my dust-ridden soul into fragrant sandalwood.
I feel like a carpenter poised to transform
this cruel world into a baby-swing, adorned
with beautiful pearls, jewels, gems and gold.

Tranquility waltzing in my heart, You move
my melancholic feet above obstacles and make
me stop, stare and reason my disjointed shadow
reflected onto the bejewelled pillar of my mind.
I feel now priceless, pristine and One.

O Murlimanohar! Tonight,
the intense fascination I feel for You
is oozing, serenely, into the mellifluous sounds
working wonders on my heart a thousand times,
with Your flawless flute enthralling each pious ear.

You make me dream of sleeping inside
a hollow Banyan leaf, of shining like a hundred
bright moons, of dancing on serpent Kaliya’s hood,
of drawing and painting ravishing rainbows.

The bitterness of the entire world cannot defeat
the sweetness of Your butter if one believes in You,
O Yashoda’s red-lipped infant from Mathura.


- - -
Biography: Born in 1983, Amit Parmessur has appeared in several literary magazines, including Transcendence, Ann Arbor Review, Salt, Black-Listed Magazine, Kalkion and Red Fez. He was nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Web. Hailing from Mauritius he also writes in Creole.

Contributor: Georgette G. Winters

- -
The man who grows strange breeds
of alien corn, extraterrestrial melons
descended from a single star
on a beam of light
one night.

Lured in
by the neo-hippie scene
by dubstep and trance-hop
he stayed for the bud and the dope
he stayed and built a house in the woods

where he grows strange breeds
of alien corn
and extraterrestrial melons.


- - -
Resident of Vallejo, California.