night of colors & night of sound blues & blue notes sweat slinging with sex-mad zeal off Roy’s Takamine strings a festive bar’s passion room & you with spirit blunted obsessing about balloons your method to forget the fight that finished a friendship while I forgave the music for its happiness …
- You are a bodega of feeling Open twenty-four hours Cash-only, of course With an ATM just outside, And a small neon window sign That says "OPEN," A sign that hasn't been turned off In years and years - Cravings are metered here, Thirsts small and medium Put off until sun-up, Put off long enough …
Friday, prayer time in Bangalore: the call crackles on the heat, and my thali's squeezed out like little piles of unwashed toes. Bells are ringing in my tail-bone—seven sharings in Shravanabelagola. Seven in Belur. and seven on the train overnight from Gorakhpur. No sleep in the berth, this time. The bells are still at it, …
Her fingers ghost over her rocky mountain lips as she tastes the rust of the run off. She smears the stains on the back of her hand and stares at the toenail poking its way through her battered sock, like the beaks of birds that used to fall down her parents’ chimney and get trapped …
I’m waiting like I’m supposed to. I always listen. He should be ready soon to take me home. My mom drops me off at school. It’s a 20-minute drive. The arrangement is that a family friend, who happens to be a teacher at my school, gives me a ride home since my parents work late. …
Digging and dragging my nails into a Chalkboard until they break, and then some more, Until the tip of my bone makes contact And screams like a siren pounding with rage, Until it bursts the drum of a stray dog’s ear. Silverware screeching on a dinner plate; The sparring of knife and fork within the …
Credo I believe in fate of the shoreline— cattails shattering into seed, turtles tucked into burrows, their three-chambered heart. Let the loons lift. Let the past recede which owes nothing to memory. Nostalgia is a ghost lounging around— mucking things up. I believe ephemerals: a love story, a knave of feathers, a choir of reeds. …
Never before in my life have I ever felt as inferior as the day I was told I had picked a good job for myself. Now, I thought that this comment had come out of a pure perception of my personality, as it came from my aunt. No. This was something quite different. “You know …
Continue reading “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” By Heather Bekkers
She was one of five Bossier Parish daughters. But what was her name? Her husband was Willie Fitz, we know that as surely as biscuits rise and grits gruel. Keep those biscuits warm—she’ll sop them later on, with mayhaw muck. We’re waiting in the woods, piney dark smeared on moonless palms. Wipe black and yellow …
There are no heroes, only gritty survivors with take-no-prisoner attitudes: stranded, abandoned, unraveled & revealed. A sharp salvo of pity-seeking pleas hits deaf ears, then dissipates into an unforgiving atmosphere, silent radar restored to street corner tranquility. Help is a matter of interpretation under pressure, the little pains that annoy and undermine, a collective signal …
Continue reading “Invisible with liberty & justice” By Gary Glauber
Burnt Pine 