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
