Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown: “Just as this island belongs to the gulls” by Herman de Coninck
Just as this island belongs to the gulls
and the gulls to their cry
and their cry to the wind
and the wind to no one
Jason Baldinger: to hold back the water
you know john hardy
was a desperate little man
Mike Schneider: Incompletely Known | Déjà vu Bob Dylan
The popularity and critical success — a not-easy-to-achieve combo — have to do not only with the singular genius of Dylan, an unknown 19-year-old bohemian who becomes the icon of an era, but also with the historical-cultural milieu in which the movie’s events — real and not — occurred.
Andy Young: Bone Saw Villanelle
In the museum, the Victorian cutting saw shone
with its curved jade handle. He asked me to snap a pic,
stunned by beauty paired with amputation.
Fred Shaw: Shivaree
The busboy’s belly growls
before every dinner shift,
his salted horizon stacked
with slippery plates, toted
two-handed and belt-high
Barbara Hamby: Nose
Suddenly, I feel as if I have no nose, like Gogol’s Kovelev
riding around St. Petersburg looking for his proboscis.
Sydney Lea: Hush
Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Partners
After thirty years, she knows
he will speak with his mouth full.
He knows her stomach will gurgle
in the silence before they sleep.
Michael Simms: Thinking of the Rapture at Castriota Metals and Recycling
frying pans fence posts
whole bags of rusty nails
even shoes hanging by
the metal aglets
at the tips of their laces
Hildegard von Bingen: Vision 7, The Devil
Then I saw a burning light, as large and as high as a mountain, divided at its summit as if into many tongues.
St. John of the Cross: Dark Night of the Soul (English and Spanish)
That light guided me
More surely than the noonday sun
To the place where He was waiting for me
Majid Naficy: Ah, Los Angeles
I am at peace with you.
Waiting without fear
I lean back against the bus post.
And I become lost
In the sounds of your midnight.
Dawn Potter: Home Burial
I pretend I am living in a faraway
city, somewhere in Europe, where doves
coo in the bell towers and a woman in
heels click-clicks over the cobblestones,
walking, walking late into the night.
José A. Alcántara: Eclipse
Some will be thrilled at your steady undoing,
others, bored, wishing the spectacle over,
still others will be distracted by the stars
blazing past you. But yours will be no quick plummet.
