BJÖRN IN VENICE

by Julia Griffin

Björn Andrésen, Swedish actor who starred in Death in Venice, dies aged 70: Actor who also starred in Midsommar and became a musician was nicknamed ‘the most beautiful boy in the world’–a title he struggled with all his life. —The Guardian, October 27, 2025

"He is very frail, he is sickly," Aschenbach thought. "In all probability he will not grow old." And he refused to reckon with the feeling of gratification or reassurance which accompanied this notion. — Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)

The man wanted him dead. That was the truth

Beyond the mere unspeakable, the shame,

The furtive stalking, the pretence at youth:

To have him die, this moonbeam boy whose name

He never knew, whose voice he never heard:

Blue eyelids closed, flesh drained to marble, cold

Child’s spirit thinned to air. The man incurred,

Thereby, his own death, endlessly retold; 

The boy survived, to manhood, middle age,

Seventy years. He did his best to grow:

He bristled out, became a white-haired sage,

Outlived the man, but not the mythic glow

That doomed them both. Behold the boy, love’s prey,

Who died, at last, but never got away.

Julia Griffin has published in several online poetry  magazines; lives with a socially-engaged basset hound, a regular on local demonstrations.

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WORD IN THE DICTIONARY

by Arlene Weiner

“Tariff,” Donald Trump has said many times, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” —The Guardian

Tariff?
More beautiful than cerulean? 
Than mother? Than home?
 
Something Arabian
about tariff: a perfume. 
Something elaborate: a fringe. 
 
Certainly more beautiful
than beautiful, bee-yoo-tiffle.
Related to giraffe? To sheriff?
 
A herd of tariffs, say, gathers
high-hanging fruit. A tariff
with a posse protects. 
 
And yes, Arabian: Wikipedia: 
The English term tariff
derives from the French: tarif…
 
a descendant of the Italian: tariffa,
from Medieval Latin: tariffe…  
from the Ottoman Turkish…
 
borrowed from the Persian…
The Persian term derives from Arabic:
 تعريف, ta rif.
 
To riff on tariff: What if 
the English, the French, the Italians, 
the Turks, the Persians
 
had taxed foreign tongues,
policed the borders of language,
put up walls?
We’d have no tariff, no beautiful tariff.

Arlene Weiner lives in Pittsburgh. She has been a copy editor, a den mother, a Shakespeare scholar, and a member of a group developing computer-based instruction. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Ragged Sky Press has published three collections of her poetry: Escape Velocity, City Bird, and More. She also writes plays.

I AM PUERTO RICO

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

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I am not an island

surrounded by big water

but shimmering shores

lapped by the tears of my people

I am not a dirty barrio
but a street strung

with a clothesline filled
with aprons and smocks

I am not mud caked

but the color of rich clay

and sparkling amber gemstones

I am not a gray swirl of storm
but a lovely ocean breeze

I am a centipede with countless legs
moving together to make repairs

I am the evening breeze
whistling come home

I am the chartreuse fern
bowing to our emerald palms

I am the indigo sky

fluttering like a dancing petticoat

I am the contented sigh

in our silver-edged moonrise

I am the sweetness

of our plump, clementine sun

I am joyful as I play
hide and seek behind
our rolling, laughing hills

I am strong like the backs of our beetles
I am flying with rainbow wings

I am as quick as our waterfalls
I am as spirited as the acid green coqui

I am Puerto Rico



Kathleen A. Lawrence has had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, Scryptic, Silver Birch Press, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word Magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, Silver Blade Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others. Recently two of her poems were nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). In 2016 she won third place for “Even Happy Ghosts are Scary Ghosts When You’re Seven” in the SFPA poetry contest. She was a Poet of the Week at Poetry Super Highway in January 2017.

DAKOTA

by Jay Sizemore

Image source: Daily Mail, September 3, 2016

How beautiful must the world be
to make me stop and notice
I am a narcissist?
I’m so far away from the plains,
the rolling weeds and sagebrush,
dirt-dry plateaus cracked like ancient faces.
I’m so far away from open fields
stretched equidistant to every inch
of the empty and aubergine horizon;
the sky seems endless as a child’s imagination,
white puffy clouds like floating castles
turning purple and gray along the dust bowl rim,
with rain shaft ropes tethering those
mountainous zeppelins to the Earth.

How beautiful must the world be
to make me care about the future
my children will live to see?
Some hold onto hope like eagle feathers
in their hands, have seen the stars
through a portal of smoke
cloaked in a buffalo’s hide.
They have stood for centuries
at the edge of a graveyard,
watching the white man dig more holes.

How beautiful must the world be
to make me want to live here
inside its nebular womb?
With every breath, the timeline of existence
shrinks backward one step.
In my heart, I could wear a headdress,
I could smell the burnt leaves
wafting like spirits around my skull,
like voices turned to ashes
swirling and sticking to my tongue.
I could sing songs around the fire
in a language I never learned.

How beautiful must the world be
that I shut off these engines of dinosaur teeth,
that I throw my hardhat to the ground
and climb down from my mechanical cage,
that I brush the crushed grit from my jeans
and embrace the joyful tears
streaming down my face
with so many arms around me,
welcoming me home like a long lost son,
turning to stand in line
against something as intangible as time?

How beautiful must the world be
that I admit I’ve always been wrong
about everything I’ve ever believed?
This world must be beautiful,
with its birds, its light-flickered murmurations,
its ponds with surfaces kissed
by hungry fish mouths catching flies.
It’s a beauty that never asks to be observed,
and that is just what makes it
so irreplaceable.

Jay Sizemore was born blue, raised by wolves, and learned to write by translating howls. He doesn't regret his wisdom teeth. He thanks you for your concern. His work can be found here or there, mostly there.

WHAT YOU BELIEVE INTO

by Jim Gustafson



“What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful?” --Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde upon being told that his theory of the “inflationary universe” (The Big Bang) has been confirmed.  March 17, 2014


What if we believe
into this just because
it is beautiful?

Is that enough, or was
there more for us
to hope for.

Not many can place their life
in just one thing. Perhaps
science is poetry, after all.

One day, will our words
be measured at the earth’s pole?
Will come to the door

and say, what you have
believed into
has been proven true?


Jim Gustafson’s most recent book, Driving Home, was published by Aldrich Press in 2013 and is a 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominee. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Tampa, teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Fort Myers, Florida, where he reads, writes, and pulls weeds.