|
BEATING HEART BEATING
by Aaron Kent Give your audience live commentary in traditionally social situations – order complicated coffees and buy your weight in vinyl records. I have never seen Elvis on Sunset Boulevard but I have seen Nikki Sixx try to siphon sunlight into his veins. Soya latte and all. I have a heart, and it screams for a beating heart beating a beating heart. I tried to paint it in bright colours, flecks of Jackson Pollack's entrails. Gave it some life. Told it to go fuck itself in the early hours when my ear drums lose the rhythm section. |
ALL ROADS LEAD TO TIBILISI, GEORGIA by Baxter Jackson |
|
ON THE WHEEL
by P.M.F. Johnson She's a future creature, this gaunt fortune teller in black silk scarf, double-hoop earrings and tennis shoes. She rearranges the deck so nothing can pop up reversed, but she swears an honest reading. Doing the cards for you her interpretation flips to her own concerns, all the world a return to herself. Done once, she jams the deck back together, instantly starts another spread, desperate for . . . what? That her kids might magically change? Her cluttered art in that greasy gallery will start to sell? The hard cards are anything but mute, they reveal coin disappointments, love's lethargy, someone's thumb on the cosmic scale. She crushes out her cigarette with a dissatisfied hiss, starts another reading, intent on rendering back under her control all parts not bliss. |
FOUNTAIN SQUARE, BAKU, AZERBAIJAN by Baxter Jackson |
|
SEVERAL SUPPLE WEASELS
by Timothy Pilgrim weave like your memory, sleek, through trees, find slippery ways to avoid the rain, slink away deep into murky streams. Leave me dazed, confused, ready to believe amygdalae, the almond-shaped mass in each cerebral hemisphere, gray matter steeping the brain. Make me embrace emotion, whether or not I want, like anger, hate, this sly pain. |
|
CLEVELAND HAIKU #171
by Michael Ceraolo A metallic spider web– the fly stuck in the window screen |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
home | Table of Contents | archive