Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. […]
Primitive by Sharon Olds
Primitive by Sharon Olds I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are savages. You come in with a bag, hold it out to me in silence. I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it and understand the message: I have pleased you […]
One Year by Sharon Olds
One Year by Sharon Olds When I got to his marker, I sat on it, like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite. I took some tears from my jaw and neck and started to wash a corner of his stone. Then a black and amber ant ran […]
Crab by Sharon Olds
Crab by Sharon Olds When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She’d drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she’d ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She’d stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky […]
A Week Later by Sharon Olds
A Week Later by Sharon Olds A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school. And […]
1954 by Sharon Olds
1954 by Sharon Olds Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to […]
Winter by Shaunna Harper
She does not thaw in summer, her iced skeleton a visceral display of sapphire veins and pulses bolting in shock to the outskirts of her shores, splayed like a victim. She is perpetual frost, crying sharp diamond tears that leave chips across hard flesh like braille, like fallen teeth from a corpse; the sun bores […]
Twilight by Shaunna Harper
A prayer lifts itself from my mouth between tight teeth and soft lips, grows wings, leaves like a moth by the window trying to find the moon, sings, as the moist earth cools below. As always, twilight has come too soon. Lifted by light like a Chinese lantern, I watch the night sink, its star […]
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper Your lips are still on my lipstick. Your eyes are still on my eyeshadow brush. You’re still wearing my favourite shirt; go on, keep it, if you must. The bags you unpacked are under your eyes; see that drawing? It’s tattooed on your skin. All those lies I heard […]
Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper
Is that Christmas falling in your hair? I can taste your past lover’s countdown kiss, I can smell the coming year; it smells like this. I drink this season’s red wine serenade; drunken romance is bliss. Your light spots me through falling feathers and snow; the instruments pick themselves up, tangle, reminisce; the songs say […]
River by Shaunna Harper
River by Shaunna Harper You can’t tell a river which way to run. Trees flank his cerulean depths like soldiers, armed with sticks and leaves, ever-reaching, seizing, only to be swept aside. A river has no place to hide. He is never the same when he comes back; a little older, a little darker, carrying […]
Prelude by Shaunna Harper
Prelude by Shaunna Harper Our bed screams red, gutted, split, under weight of wonderings in my head; bruised like a throat, crushed by hungry lips, gaping like a wound, stunning. The walls are indented and cannot be mended, colour of your temper in blotchy black and blue, handprints sink between spine and sinew, hollow concave, […]
Passing by Shaunna Harper
They’ve strung up your face on canvas carved in glass across the city’s overpass. Your eyes are bulging mole-hills. Your hair is sprouting grass. In the backdrop of a cheap shop’s parking lot, a broken sign curls around your head like a halo; when winter comes you will sparkle with snow. Each fractured letter blinks […]
My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper
The beer has drowned itself in the cask; I’m pulling brown air for punters. The fridge is baring its teeth to my throat; its inner cold works wonders. I’m falling out of love with myself and rising into bad karma, slipping in circles into wrong holes, the maelstrom enfolding this drama. The house is talking […]
Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper
We jumped from the night and fell into the moon upside down in fractured dreams. He told me if I could picture it, I could live it. Reality is a broad market. He came with golden eyes, silver lips, quilted with satin like the finest-dressed mannequin. His puppet fingers dealt a card; a blow, hard. […]
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper Shower rain settles on fine hair like dew, dying sunlight a halo aglow casting darkness in me, light over you. The evening is drifting with falling snow, pooling smooth marble into your pores, beautifying your every mistake, making miracles of your flaws. Autumn breathes its rustic applause as leaves once […]
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper My mind’s eye sweats a tear. Solitary, it runs to the mouth, as though dying for a taste of its own bitter fluid. The emotional effort is a waste. We watch like two friends as the hand scrawls its script, full stop bringing the final act to an end. […]
In Measures by Shaunna Harper
He sleeps in the hammock of a silken, silver scar that curls around my arm like a chain; a creature comfort, a ghostly appendage, finer than a spider’s web and visible only to me. This is where he lives. Where snow half-falls in unreachable diamonds, becoming hardened rain that wants to wound. Where the sun […]
Hidebound by Shaunna Harper
Lust, the most intimate season; short-lived, dissolving as ever into dust. The crest of a wave still rides the perpetual earth of our honeymoon, though the inner life of the stone erodes, suddenly not so sharp, tough like a dried-up heart. The memory loiters like a dangerous desire, but these days I no longer feel […]
For Someone, Somewhere, In Relation by Shaunna Harper
You hold your breath, stagnant, absent in the station, trains grumbling about leaving and about waiting, people passing, chattering about nothing they are actually thinking about; sex, cheap wine, finances, time, romances and of course, the weather. The flurry of snow at the entrance has nowhere to go but down. You observe the drama of […]
Ellipsis by Shaunna Harper
In love, in letters, subversive in meaning, emphasized in casual italics, from my mind to your fingers, from soft bone to paper, the ink lingers like oil smeared between blood and tissue. For you, over and over, from font to font with changing hands that grow in time, proposing my heart in offbeat rhyme, these […]
Chanson D’Amour by Shaunna Harper
The piano plays its parting score as you lift your case like a child and back out of the door. For a greedy second, just one, before we are done, I picture you in the bath. Dressed in my bubbles, skin wet in candlelight, totally emasculated and with childish delight, I never loved you more. […]
Book Leaf by Shaunna Harper
They tread between lines, hanging metaphors like rope, veined toes curled around loops like branches. They reach from depths to skies, scatter each other here and there like soft blessings, seeping like ink into paper. They press between pages like insects, intricate, frail, anorexic outbursts in perpetual shock. They dance off-beat like drunkards, ignorant of […]
Blue Period by Shaunna Harper
A blue period, right where your face should be, nature’s way of rekindling hurt, of rubbing cold dirt where none should be, swathed in false colour, melancholy. Blue spaces, engorged, intermittent oceans, the old faithful morning voice of regret; nature’s way of tipping the scales, those blue melodies where a lover’s warm voice should be, […]
Amoraphobia by Shaunna Harper
Your vowels pull reluctant lips into something shy, vague, like the shadow of a coy smile, linger like light across dark in dying eyes, the fierce final breath hitches in the throat somewhere between tension and laughter, the ecstasy that comes after, fills spaces in my bones that you used to dwell in with your […]
A Eulogy by Shaunna Harper
With smoke in my mouth and a wine glaze shimmering over my eyes like a river in the wind, I wait for this home to grow old. For the windows to stream tears as they imitate the rain, for the fruit in its bowls to turn to Fool’s Gold, for the cats, perhaps, to shed […]
The Grammar Lesson by Steve Kowit
The Grammar Lesson by Steve Kowit A noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does. An adjective is what describes the noun. In “The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz” of and with are prepositions. The’s an article, a can’s a noun, a noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does. […]
The Convoy by Stephenie Tucker
All goes dark, first sound, then sight. I look to see my men alright. Deafening silence in concrete rain, Distract me from the searing pain. All time stops and vantage ends, As I look upon my dying friends. Radio in and evac out, No time for tears between the shouts. Between the blood and shrapnel […]
Some Clouds by Steve Kowit
Some Clouds by Steve Kowit Now that I’ve unplugged the phone, no one can reach me– At least for this one afternoon they will have to get by without my advice or opinion. Now nobody else is going to call & ask in a tentative voice if I haven’t yet heard that she’s dead, that […]
Resolute by Stephenie Tucker
The men were dead, their lives, long gone. And yet, their cause still lingered on. The banners wavered in the breeze, through borderlands of ship less seas. And now Apollo shall rise once more, to ferry souls to whitened shores. Now red shall rise the yellow sun, and end at last what we have done. […]
Purple Heart Liz (My Girl At Woodstock) by Steve Sant
Purple Heart Liz (My Girl At Woodstock) by Steve Sant It was all record playing Jigging and swaying Some experiment too Although not ever I All fumbling and shy I left all the tripping to you Oh I had my wild times Fuelled by beers and wines And I once smoked a funny cigarette Though […]
Numb by Stephenie Tucker
The door kicked in the dust relayed, The area secure and stayed. No longer taking time for peace, Within myself, it’s out of reach. No more time spent to say goodbyes, No more tears left for me to cry. I do my job and stay detached, Don’t even care if I come back. They call […]
Notice by Steve Kowit
Notice by Steve Kowit This evening, the sturdy Levi’s I wore every day for over a year & which seemed to the end in perfect condition, suddenly tore. How or why I don’t know, but there it was: a big rip at the crotch. A month ago my friend Nick walked off a racquetball court, […]
Must Work by Steve Downes
Must write must write must work must work minimum wage or better can’t be too physical got a bad back can’t be too stressful bend under pressure can’t be too sexual haven’t got the legs Must write must write must work must work minimum wage or better can’t work for corporate I’m an anarchist can’t […]
Lifetime Of Death by Steve Sant
Lifetime Of Death by Steve Sant A Lifetime Of Death The broken feeling you learn it young You must for it’s certainty true No hysterical fits just stiff upper lips We are British and that’s what we do So when I was but five and my grandfather died And old aunts wept silent tears I […]
In The Chapel Of Rest by Steve Sant
In The Chapel Of Rest by Steve Sant Forever I have seen her Yet never did we speak Well only in some dreams I had On five, six nights a week Then yesterday by chance As she got upon my train The only seat free, was next to me And so my chance it came […]
A Warrior’s Truth by Stephenie Tucker
The dying gasps of night are blackest before the dawn, The final surge of courage calls us to battle on. Enemies approaching from the hillside to the west, Trenches lined with casualties pulling at my chest. Flares as bright as day blinding vision tones of white, Bullets biting dirt rings too familiar sounds of spite. […]
A Soldier’s Song by Stephenie Tucker
Seventeen and full of rage, He fell in love with the careless gauge, of lipsticks red and flawless age, and monsters kept within the cage. Wonder lust and broken down, nothing world, can’t stop me now. bullets spent through hell spit fire, souls to burn on sandy pyres. New world turned and spat him out, […]
YOU ARE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY by Steve Troyanovich
YOU ARE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY For Elizabeth twinkling tree lights always remind me of the christmas in your eyes… i wish i could carry your laughter cupped in my hands forever hold the sanctuary of your smile… then every day would be christmas and i would be warm wrapped in the unending gift of your embracing […]
tomorrow is already past… by Steve Troyanovich
tomorrow is already past… Je ne t’ai pas trouvee tombe au meme amour Ou tu dors allongee derivante en quels cieux — Jean-Philippe Salabreuil dark is the sleep. darker still the dream. woodsmoke ghosts roam over remembrances of shuttered childhood hills… James Wright looms against the countryside banished to the cold brooding fields of trembling […]