Afternoon of July 18, 2025

 

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