| IMPETUOSITY
by Vince Corvaia When I turned six I tore the wrapping paper off my birthday present to find a wooden stick. "It was a kite," my friend told me. No, I didn't grow up to be impetuous in love. Every September I attend the kite festival in Long Beach, Washington, where the blue sky fills with red and green paper and I celebrate the wooden stick I took into the yard and turned into a sword. |
Misheberach / Healing Prayer by Marlene Burns |
|
TWENTIETH DEMON
by Sophia Pandeya You held me like the mangroves hold the twin worlds of earth and water in fluxed yet rooted equilibrium Lightly yet tight lipped at each arrival and leaving each blue veined swell of alluvium, turquoise ancient as a dirge blossomed at your knee Flotsam and rumor came surging on the bended backs of trees the metal husks of lipsticks, hummed from old and sequined mouths of curses silken as a prayer In your hands, humble grains mimicked the hiss and sift sift of bodies borne on the reed planes a Hieros gamos made in air You picked each flaw precisely, pebbles felled with a nail-flick flew from your oracular lentils, the ones chosen for nuptial divination tossed high six times the fabled legume hexagrams read the selfsame axiom In a split second of brash petulance I fell from the realm of the gods who at their leisure chose to torment me with twenty demons, nineteen of which I defeated in a fever between sleep and death but the twentieth demon still lodges silent as a poisoned well within me |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
home | Table of Contents | archive