He told the police sergeant, as he knew he would, that he would leave right away and help however he might. The address he wrote down was familiar to him. It was in the Flats, an old Holyoke neighborhood or section of the city once inhabited by many different ethnic groups, although now almost exclusively Puerto Rican. He shoved the paper with the address in his coat pocket and found his little black bag with the oils and other implements for giving what once was called the last rites of the church, but were now termed the sacrament of the sick, and headed off in the direction of the Flats. Sixty-six Center Street. He’d been there before, he was sure. Only the week before, the adjoining block had burned up. It was another of those…
Bhuwan Thapaliya – Seven Poems from Kathmandu
I’m sick of not seeing you He poured himself a glass of her thoughts two years after she won a scholarship to heaven to pursue her PhD in life after death and sat down beside her antique gramophone with his senses straining in the dark. “I’m sick of not seeing you, I’m seeing only the back of an African Wild Elephant and the wide open jaws of the vultures. Helpless days of confinement, a stultifying inertia and no knowledge of what comes next. “Where are your eyes in the sky, Grand Ma?” he sighed. Where are the bald eagles? Where are the rhododendrons? Where? Where? Where? He stammered and cried. What type of poem am I? “What type of poem am I?” I am as formless as the clouds, and as elegiac as the silence, in the itinerary of the noise. I am not a classic written by the author,…
“To Your Inner Slavery,” Poetry by Selma Haitembu
To Your Inner Slavery You try really hard not to show it I will not relent to evade my notions, Nor my ideas, hence the color of my skin Spoke before I could raise my head To your foot, beneath the very grounds I lay scythed by your scorn I will not relent in shame My mother, I wore as pride Ride me into the dangers of your color Your ignorance and frivolous abuse Your amusement related to mine Rooted from two different aspects I worry not where you are from Your stench has no beginning I worry only what you would do next To know, to finally see my color My mind in this brown skin bag Has gears twisted in complex turns I deserve to be here as well, it will show And below me you will fall soon Your hate of me will beg to exist,…
“Soliloquy in Blue,” A Short Story by Johan Alexander
Did she say something? Did I say something? Her brow illuminates under the streetlights and pulses with the beat of the windshield wipers. She won’t look at me: her eyes flash sequins at the sidewalk. Droplets floating, floating: translucent globes hanging in space. Then they burst apart. She shakes her hair and I can no longer see her eyes. Rain: I yawn through the misty rhythm. My eyes close continuously. Headlights and streetlights mix in the distance and through the murk I wonder when things started to go off course. We had danced together, squeezing particles of music from our sweatshirts. Then we ate at the Greasy Spoon, where she said it. The air between us is a stale sponge unable to soak up all these discarded feelings. Damp inside the car and heavy on my eyelids. I try to blink. The tires below us slime their way through the night. She sits in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. What`s the point? She glances over, a quick reflex of her neck, surprised. I realize I have mumbled my thoughts aloud. Beads of sweat wander across my hairline. I keep my face forward. She turns away. Again. I roll down my window an inch. I open my mouth. A few raindrops land on my tongue. …
Laura Carter – Poems of Sensations and Memories
I pull away from the bruise. There is no bruise. It’s been said that language itself is a bruise, a collection of things to be feared. There is no bruise. I put off the pain. The pain returns. The body burns, as if in a fire, largely having been heated in winter by the obsolete feeling of the no. There is no no. I pull away from the no. The no, not having been part of the story, can’t really comment on anything. There are no people. There are people. Someone lights the proper way forward, as if in modernity, and I pull away from that. Why go? Someone on the other side of the ocean would pen a marinade and drink it down for dinner. I eat. There is no food. I see. There is no sight. I put away the bruise. Then, all…