Title
 

Author
 

Your Second Hand Smoke is So Much More Addicting

Cathryn A. Sheeran, USA

Inside The Dawn

individuality, UK

My first words, after our first kiss

Michael J. Donnelly, USA

when a painter and poet meet

Namita Krishnamurthy, India

sum total

Nicolette M. van der Walt, South Africa

Remembering Isabella

Richard Kurtz, aka Kaibab, USA

Phenomena

Tara Wilson, Canada

Your Heart, My Heart

Wanda Lea Brayton, USA

Your Second Hand Smoke is So Much More Addicting

I remember late night drives
how you would flick
hot ashes on my lap
and laugh
as I danced in my seat

you had all the answers...

you loved an audience
anyone who would devour
your words
and I too,
would lick the exaggerated
syllables from my lips

your tongue a marathon
of brilliant failure

oh yes, how I miss that

Inside The Dawn

Inside the dawn there is a place I loathe,
sketched with the shades of possibility,
shall I walk time's lanes with my head held high
or cower below clouds that scoff at fear?

Beauty strolls around wild quicksilver thoughts;
nature in her majestic flowing grace,
but pain lingers on a bold horizon
with its taunts which capture this stuttered heart.

The seasons perhaps will roll their presence
over my body that's been stripped of skin,
and I will turn and face the sky in death,
touch sorrow with the bitter breath of war.

I will mourn my loss for a thousand years
as brand new battles scatter other souls,
for now though footsteps follow cold anguish
as love dances pleasure on hills of old.

There's strength in knowledge of your own demise,
but weakness too attacks the spirit's flames,
with curls of regret I accept life's tones,
ruffle wisdom along the day's warm shades.

My first words, after our first kiss

I would write poetry for you,
as passion kindled anew

it was though I had huddled next to a fire
surrounded by frigid wilderness,
my heartbeat thundered
amongst snow crested trees
as verse not yet written
echoed in my mind.

Now, I cast gifts of words at your feet
for I have little more
and this is a fortune you say.

Day becomes night, night becomes day,
turning to years, feeling your touch, a brushing
of my soul, with loving preservation.

I pray this flame never dies.

when a painter and poet meet

I

mid-September - we're walking, lost
in rumbles of today's street. some men are talking.
some are not.

suddenly, your voice is a room I can walk through,
every syllable, a resonance aching
through my body;

I know
I am already smiling

II

walk slow I say
so that I can rest somewhere in your voice
and read Cummings, or maybe
just watch your hands paint poems into me

a vase of van Gogh's sunflower, a host of starry skies

III

I do not want to stop walking, but somehow we do.
all around us, the noisy crowd of a street.
your fingers within mine, are as obvious as them all.

everything is loud, everything is silent

and our hands, a metaphor to every poem
I haven't written:

just too simple to resolve

sum total

when you pick up speed and fill me
with clouds, suddenly the sky
is mine.

there’s a dark window in your eyes
through which my face disappears:
dove, dove, dove, tame dove,
wild dove blindly cooing
something between

afrikaans and high german. your mouth
opens around me: you’re a white planet
of flesh barking at the stars,
true full moon style.
clearly,

we are not precise. these bodies
carry marks of close shaves
and survival – narrower in places,
wider elsewhere. we are firm-free.

I keep hearing a rumble
of poems in your wrists, imagine
there are feathers growing
from my arms. regularly

we act out death, always till the last
word, the last blurring of language
in your throat and mine. our love
lies scattered in many rooms
but our shoes always point
towards the bed

where our sighing rises,
rises to one height.

Remembering Isabella

It has been almost a year,
these woven signs of feathered heaven,
brush-stroke flying contradiction,
changing path of cheery sky
surging fire,
with journey born,
and scorned-dark thorny spire.

Love falls down in higher calling,
drowning leaves with earth,
discolored,
duller to touch,
and eyes glowing night
billowed hooves, spent,
her resting footprint, silent thunder.

I have held your spirit
embracing meadow's wonderful embarrassment,
shyer sun-fill bursting petal line,
courage pounding sod in search of God,
grieving for the wings of autumn;

last tall grass in golden wands,
giving back sweetly, her flight of green idea,
when legs were strong, and grace was bounty.

We were like an early leaf-fall,
practicing basic need to graze,
in dancing blaze of rushing children,

our soulful mouths,
amazed to windy swallow
and taste of pasture

at seasons end, calling snow,

as enlightened blow,
winter stings to sow.

Phenomena

How night blackened when he swept loose
the strands of hair from my lashes,
how the sun shivered
when his warm breath burned my skin,
how the bones and spine of water
curved and narrowed into
the wetness he wrapped inside of me
and when he sucked and pulled
the plump seed from a quartered orange;
when we merged like malleable globs of rock
my earth shrank and yet compounded,
creatures restrained in our clays
leaped from darkness to slither and gallop
across mountainous moans,
to scurry and flap from our pupils
and shape the wild
planet of us.

Your Heart, My Heart

Opalescent prayers of morning rise
We rise like birds into warm wind, glistening sun

Our feathers lift in flight

Your hands, my hands
pour ink upon delicate parchment, thick with knowing

Trees are born in songs of lace

Your lips, my lips
part, come together, fluid motions of rapture

Autumnal sighs
we fall like leaves into the forest bed, keening

We are born in songs of lace
drifting mist through branches, bare with remembrance

Smooth and ancient stones
we glide, water glides around us

Your eyes, my eyes
dusky rivers are we, seeking ocean’s roar