Digital Immortality
Somewhere on Google Earth,
my uncle is still alive
and watering the flowers
under the front window.
~Gabriel
Bates
a mixture of emptiness and overeating
~Mykyta
Ryzhykh
poetry does not exist
~Mykyta
Ryzhykh
Your thoughtless words
Broke my heart
Just a little
~Sarah
Mahina Calvello
Concrete and honey
In a black sky
What’s left?
~Sarah
Mahina Calvello
lonely mouth...
in the dark kitchen
eating pickles from the jar
~Patrick
Sweeney
pill bug on the lime-green ceiling
...I'm
rooting for the success of his journey
~Patrick Sweeney
hamster
you get the wheel to yourself
yet go nowhere
~Roberta
Beach Jacobson
Starting
Over
There's a storm raging
outside this morning.
So with nothing
better to do,
I watch a little brown spider
desperately try
to rebuild its web.
You and me both,
buddy.
~Gabriel Bates
my turn to be the old man hurting on the bench at the zoo
~Patrick
Sweeney
waiting
for someone to pass out kazoos at a Washington press
conference
~Patrick Sweeney
Alexandria was a data center too
~dan
smith
some small difficulty verifying I'm human
~Patrick
Sweeney
not my genre
not my president
~Roberta
Beach Jacobson
Loses map
which way to follow to meet the dawn?
Loses
map the North Star.
~Partha Sarkar
attacks
are more
common at night -
my hypothermia
~Maria
Cristina Pulvirenti
Segmentation
the segmentation
of a butterfly’s wings
are scales
overlapping
like shingles on a rooftop
soaring colors
so fragile
iridescent dust
on
careless fingers
~Lauren Scharhag
Supernova
Everything on the surface is dead—
our hair, skin, and nails,
like stars whose light
we
can still see.
~Lauren Scharhag
trapped
in backyard bucket of doom
not just bugs
~Roberta
Beach Jacobson
Southside
In my neighborhood, I pass the school where kids are still
being sold the lie of upward mobility. Somehow, this place
always feels abandoned, even as the yellow buses line up
and the football players dash out onto the field for practice.
The loose-gravel shoulders of the road, potholes,
mud-washed sidewalks, rattle of highway traffic overhead,
drifts of trash, beer cans glinting like fool’s gold.
Somehow, it feels like civilization has moved on,
and we’re all ghosts here. At my feet, wild asters
persist,
their retiring indigo faces that require so very little.
~Lauren Scharhag
Snapdragon
In this, the age of eviction, I pass by
so many abandoned houses, it starts to feel
like the inhabited ones are full of ghosts,
and these vacancies are some sort of testament.
On River Street, another house, Shaker-style,
but otherwise indistinguishable from every other
paint-peeling, broken-windowed ex-domicile.
But on this one’s unkempt lawn, there still blooms
a
single red snapdragon.
~Lauren Scharhag
alien discovery
a rare Earth
what's left of it
~dan
smith
Addiction
It's already
got its claws in me.
There's nothing
I can do about it.
Because there's no
running from it
when it runs
in your family.
~Gabriel
Bates
A Few Questions
How do you
make the air
leave the room
as soon as
you enter it?
And how do you
bring it back
when you hold me
close?
~Gabriel
Bates
they say
universe whispers to us
through
songs
~Tejendra Sherchan
