Africa

by A.V. Koshy

You were the first born, Africa

among the continents

God created you, as the best Woman Mother of the lot

Adam and Eve and the garden of paradise,

the tree of life and the tree of knowledge

of good and evil

and all the birds and animals

the dinosaurs and behemoth and the unicorn

and the dragon and the wild ox were all found first in you

gold and bdellium and onyx and cedar

and diamonds and precious ore

Your people, tall and ebon and beautiful

the fathers and mothers of the whole human race

Africa my Love, no one knows of your contours

how daily I wish for your white sand interiors

and golden green curves

and birds of brilliant plumage

and forests and rivers and miles and miles of deserts

your children spread to Asia and

South America

Australia New Zealand

North America and Europe

The future may belong to the children

but no one has breasts like you

And when you stand up, the whole world will tremble

At your stride

for yours is the future

You the first born daughter of Mother

Earth

for there is none like you

and your people

will use the countless riches of your body

wisely

and well

for the healing of the nations

Africa

I salute you

and look forward to that day

When the mighty shall tremble and lay their riches before you

for protection and help

and be found to be very small

O Africa

always misunderstood

but not by the ones who have been there

in you and seen your promise galore

You are old as the earth

and young as a baby

and in times to come

will astound the wise-men

who always called you a second class citizen

of the cosmos

but they do not know

the people of Africa

and the stars are both gods

and wait for the shaking to rise up and dance

and finally be given by the Same God who made them,

their just dues

and then they shall rule

and of their kingdom and dominion shall there be no end

for all their slavery and misrepresentation and mental suffering leads to eternity's and infinity's reign.

DOLORES

by Bryan Murphy

He knows she is there.

The air is heavy with the aroma of coastal flowers and the Pacific humidity he associates with Dolores. The guitar awakes to Hamish's touch as he tunes it. The audience looks bigger than those he is used to.

Hamish felt very lucky when the leader told the band they would be playing the Jazz Festival at Zuntema, just along the coast from Playa Chisme, where he had met Dolores. He was sure she would come, for the rare treat of live jazz, if not for him. She had captivated Hamish by her easy sociability, by her height, which matched his, by her being at home in her own skin even amongst the lost souls of Playa Chisme.

Hamish, though, failed to prise Dolores away from the surfer. Four long months have passed since then: plenty of time for Dolores to have grown out of him, or tired of him.

The act before the Oaxaca Jazz Ensemble is playing. Its music barely creeps into Hamish’s awareness. He thinks of the music the Ensemble is to play, and suffuses it into his mind with the essence and the allure of Dolores.

Now it is they who are playing. Hamish produces his allotted notes. He would love to follow the tenor sax beside him into the heights and beyond them, but his instructions are to stick to the score and not try to show off his technical skills. Those skills had brought him invitations first to jam with the Ensemble and then to join them, an honour for a musician barely out of his teens that recognised his Oaxaqueno status despite frozen-north birth and features. Hamish is happy to do what they tell him.

At the end of their second number, he catches sight of Dolores. Has she changed? Her hair has bleached to a lighter brown. She is as self-composed as ever, at ease in town clothes. She slips out of his vision amongst the families replenishing plates and glasses.

Into their third number; his playing takes on an urgency. He is playing for Dolores, of course, calling to her, urging her into his orbit. By the fourth number, he is not showcasing his technique, he is his technique. Dolores is forgotten. The drummer starts to play off him, echoing Hamish’s chords in new riffs. Expectant looks are exchanged amongst the band, though Hamish is oblivious to them. They urge each other on with flickers of improvisation. The tenor sax dives deeper into the music and leads it in a new direction. Hamish follows him and then is following no-one, rearranging the tropes of the genre to outline new possibilities and then explore them. This is no longer technique but raw feeling.

The music stops rather than ends. Applause takes its place. The band stare at each other, exhausted, elated, astonished.

Hamish is back in his own head. He remembers Dolores. Now is the time to find her. He sets his instrument down at the edge of the stage and takes the steps that lead off it. High-fives and back-slaps mark his passage through the crowd. He has never experienced a reception like it. But where is Dolores?

The next band is tuning up when he spots her. She is not alone. Hamish recognises four of the group from the Playa Chisme summer. The surfer is not amongst them. Tomas waves him over. Greetings are effusive, congratulations sincere. But it is an age before he can get Dolores to one side, out of earshot of the others. He asks her to come to Playa Chisme with him, alone, now. She can’t. He insists. She won’t. He cannot believe her reluctance. He entreats her.

“Look, Hamish, you’re a nice guy but you’re just not my type.”

Hamish’s world stops turning. His blood has frozen in his veins. His liver has turned to lead. His head hurts.

The figure of Julio comes into Hamish’s peripheral vision. Now he is going to get hell for his disobedience. Julio nods at Dolores.

“Hamish,” he says, “we have to talk”.

But the band leader is beaming.

“Let’s get some beer and fix you some solo time for the gig in Puerto Desaparecido.”

Hamish is back in a turning world. He is starting to feel good.

I NO LONGER KNOW THE QUESTION

by Michael H. Brownstein

One by one the cliff erodes,
ice bores deeper,
words stop making sense:
abyss, crucify, alliteration—

passion comes in through fog.
Who claims we must remember?
Skin always knows pain.
fingertips happiness, feet satisfaction.

payback burns

by Linda M. Crate

I stained you in pomegranate, let
my bitterness sink into your bones —
then I fled from you into the shadows;
you thought when you broke me I’d lay there
and wilt like my sisters: the lilies, but
I allowed you to suck out all of my rage so
freedom would ring like wedding bells, and
so I could finally breathe again;
my spirit was grateful to be void of your
hate which you projected on me —
it was so loud that my ears bled from
the dulcet tones; you dripped your lies
into my tea, so I used them to sour your
apples and you never thought twice about it;
you never thought that I wouldn’t break
like the limbs of a tree, you greatly underestimated
me when you told your honeyed lies here.

Prague and Tongue

by Karina van Berkum

Like Tongue, the word
Prague is spelled
for its swollen center

and placement,
which snakes before
it stalls.

This winter I hid inside
both for a while
while the leadfaced

neighbors worked fast
on their own
obsessions. Alone,

I learned to be in love
with neither town
nor appendage

whose shining, wasted
forms ache against
one another:

Prague from Tongue
in a moment of silent
lunacy, say,

and Tongue sitting wet
in a gray station,
dying to go.

Recipe

by Melina Papadopoul​os

Sometimes, I want to ask you
if my name still tastes like something.
it's taken every last drop
of summer's sunlight stamina
for me to finally feel like a picnic.
I've just begun to dot my I's
with watermelon seeds.
I could be an ant farm if my blood cells
give out and decide that oxygen is too heavy
to carry to another breath I'll take for granted.
I don't have a Mount Zion in me.
I can't make internal pilgrimages worth it.
perhaps one day, my brain
will decide that it was trivial to carry
a name outside of childhood where you could
have called me that kid or something
and I would have been just as lost in my own skin,
even if someone replaced my heart with a compass
and my feet with a map that knows the way
without my reading so deeply into its travel lines.

So refresh my memory.
Put a familiar taste on my tongue,
a foreign one even.
Is my name still something
that you don't even chew before swallowing?
Don't worry, I don't want to melt in your mouth.
I am afraid of melting because
it could be the only death that doesn't come equipped
with an afterlife.

Is it too much of a hassle to still call me sweet?

I that know cavities are a burden.
I know that dental drills scold before forgiving.
Eventually, you hear your mother's voice
in that spinning snarl. Eventually,
you remember that your mouth is wide open
and that you're wide awake.
you begin
to think of names that you can't assign to nouns,
just adjectives and so I'll just come right out
and say it,

is my name still beautiful?
Could it be the real name
of a real wildflower?
If not, that's okay, I want
to be a scientific name.
I want to flavor soup
in Latin and, if I must,
with my death-cap tendencies,
I want to put out a dinner party
Linnaeus style.

But sometimes, I want to do more
than ask you. I want to tell you
to close your eyes and open your mouth,
and I want to place this name of mine
on the taste bud with the best memory
I think you'd forget me
if I let you keep your eyes open.

Sweet Love

by Nazra Emamdee

What will you try to save me from
If I screech vibrating silence
And pierce through aching muscles amidst the night?
Can you put those dark green straws
Through which run revenge and pleasure,
With kisses and sweat back to meditation?
Will you put me down when I fly, screwing,
With the devil’s wings towards forgetful karma?
If I say that I love every piece of you,
Will you love my dead nail
Under which lies a pretty history of blood crystals?
Will you love it through a coated sham or naked
If it promises to uproot itself off my skin
And neglect me?
What will you love me for
If tears of an unknown manufacturer,
Like final products are spilled on your sweet lullaby?
Will you force me to sleep amidst quenching dreams
Which squeeze the life out of my garden?
If I grow cancer in my heart,
Will you love the living me or the leaving me?
If I hammer twice my ring finger,
Will you put that ring through
And feed me with strawberries
Or saw the flesh and bones off me?

The Universe

by Bobbie Troy

the universe
an intangible thing
that seems to grow larger
as i become smaller
and less confident
and so confused
about the relationship
of macrocosm to microcosm
and microcosm to macrocosm
that the only decision
i can make
is what to have for dinner

Button Up

by Laura Close

A year from now, maybe I will
button up. I will take a vow of silence

before the weather turns bitter.
               I will ask the vicar.

October is sometimes cold enough
to ask for a row of buttons or for

old overcoats to recreate recycled
notions from old coats’ buttons;

as for the fine fabric itself I cannot
recycle it; I don’t know how; I seek out

electric sheep and a row of quiet dreams.

Centerfold

by Alan S. Kleiman


But I’m usually more shy
I don’t centerfold regularly
I don’t centerfold happily
I centerfolded only a time or two my whole life
And I wasn’t thrilled centerfolding at all.

Shyness doesn’t mean you are shy
it doesn’t mean you want to die
or hide from each face
like a butterfly.

It doesn’t mean you are timid
looking
or speak with a quiet sound
or laugh only when laughed at
or sing when the voice is laryngitis hoarse
when even a cry won’t sound.

Shy’s when inside you’re scared
and say truth to yourself
never
When you must be shy
because pain bars the doors.

Even a fire in the stables
won’t let the horse escape.
Burn before leaving
Put water in a dish left outside the stall
and think it will hold back the flames.

Only water will lash the storms
of rage, the visions of self
crashing the rocky shore
Hard.

The dish won’t burn,
like the burning bush, truth
won’t escape. Flames

won’t lick the dew off grass or upper lip.
Stand tall
Remember
Duty has no meaning in a colored light
Shifting sands mean everything.

Freedom

by Kim Wilson

I wanted to be left feeling invisible because to remember would be unfeeling; compassionately socializing with the enemy shouldn't deliberately weigh on my feelings. Why would my sanity truly depend on your survival; that can't be. Why can't the feelings of being down have its window shut; spilling to the ground. The explanation of when I rage; has been shut up so long that I've forgotten the rules and pleasures to openness; if there's really still a place for me. The only thing that's changed is that the applause is only quieter. The bright lights of 'insane'; frightening nights is what my soul knows to be forgotten amongst the sane. I try not to weep or willow but out-casted is, as out-casted does. Don't cry for me because I hide part the way; let's get it straight. My forgetting my whole self because I have been born again and again and again and...; I ain't mad, I go on. How do you unscramble a rattled mind that's struggling to be born again with the hope I have left; I've lived in the flesh, now die in the Word. God has plans for me, as soon as I figure at what they are.

Paper cuts

by Susan S. Keiser

A sharp eye hones
and paints the outlines
of a world invisible to ours,
cutting at the certainty
of paranoid dimension,
stark gingerbread
scissor-made and snipped
from adjunct dreams.

Idle generations carved
of iterative black and white
drift from fingertips
into a filmy paper land,
people spilling into cities
and the countryside;
men and women, hopes
sliced from dreamlands or
pale, illucid memory,
drifting on a tissue breeze
toward genesis, imperceptible
in its minute savageries,
controversy biting at
a deft and bleeding hand.

Reptilian Mind

by Wayne Lee

In my reptilian mind, I still crawl
on my underbelly
through the primordial ooze
inexorably toward evolution.

I am not yet ready to stand, to sire
live young, to bleed, to oppose
forefinger and thumb.

Everything is either food
or not food.

I miss my tail.

This Shirt Belonged to My Father

by James Babbs

this shirt belonged to
my father
every time I wear it
I think of him
pouch of Red Man
chewing tobacco
tucked inside his
left front pocket and
I remember
the way it burned
my tongue when
he let me try some
how I immediately
spat it out
while he sat back
and laughed
watching him
working on
something in the garage
his sleeves rolled up as
he reaches for
the ball-peen hammer
pounding the piece of
metal he has
clamped in the vise
the sound of it
still
ringing in my ears