TODAY THE SKY BLED RED

by Kyle Hina

Today the morning sky bled
red with memories that I can
only imagine from a far, all
caught up in the air beneath
the hazy sun. Wisps of a thing 
infinitesimally small in size but
of infinite magnitude, summoned to
one last sail across heaven’s sea.

Somewhere in there, I’m sure,
is the country blue farmhouse 
that grandpa built, with the tan
guitar in the corner that turned 
him into Johnny and grandma 
into June when he played it. 

There are the skinny emerald
pines that dotted the trail of
a friend’s first date.  And the 
silver and rust car that caught
her sobs when she found 
that love isn’t always evergreen.  

There is the ivory wedding gown, 
all bejeweled and moth-balled, 
that hung in the closet, still 
awaiting its turn to renew a
couple's love. And the matching 
aqua tie that the husband was 
too scared to wear, for fear it 
might find that brown tea stain 
to match all of the others.

A teal blanket that went home
with the baby and the yellow
cleats he wore when he kicked
his last goal. Violet flowers, 
magenta scrapbooks. A faded 
purple skateboard and greyscale
photo of the family reunion, 1989.

On and on, memories too 

numerous to count rise in a 
prism’s worth of colors, but 
carry too much despair to 
form a rainbow. Instead they 
coalesce into a crimson blanket 
that covers the city like a car 
too old to ever be used again. 

In another world, white men 
in black suits point fingers and
shout names, maneuvering for
attention like children at a funeral.  
But my eyes are on the horizon,
where tonight the sky bleeds red.  

Kyle Hina is a husband, father, software engineer, and musician living in Zanesville, Ohio with his wife, two sons and dog. He has one published short fiction work on 101words.org .

TO EMILY DICKINSON, ON THE DEATH OF SINÉAD O’CONNOR

by Anne Myles

I’m thinking of you, centaur sister,

and of this other, lost now—

stripped words beating meters

against God’s battlements

Young I discovered both of you,

needing the keen of it—

hymns of love ingathered

only in separation

Two queens I can’t approach,

though I too felt the rising

to stitch the rage with beauty,

to feel my throat open

in despised prophecy–

flames of our temperament leaping

in stony rooms of limitation,

clawed by what we cannot name—

Both of you dead in your fifties

while I scan a new horizon—

still looking for that vanishing green

pasture to lie down in

Anne Myles is the author of Late Epistle, winner of Sappho's Prize in Poetry (Headmistress Press, 2023) and What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). She is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa and lives in Greensboro, NC.

SALMAN: ELECTION

by Indran Amirthanayagam

“[Salman Rushdie’s wounds] were profound, but he’s [also] lost the sight of one eye... He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So, it was a brutal attack….The world is going through a very troubled period. I think nationalism is on the rise, a sort of fundamentalist right is on the rise… From Italy to… throughout Europe, Latin America and the US, where… half the country seems to think that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. And they admire this man who is not only completely incompetent and a liar and a crook, but just a farce. It’s ridiculous.” —Andrew Wylie (Rushdie’s agent) in an interview with El País, October 22, 2022

 

Salman has lost

an eye, an arm

paralyzed, but

 

nobody has

stolen his mind;

he thinks freely,

 

sees, and turns

to see the rest of

what a man can,

 

gazing on the

horizon into

future time

 

on the cusp of

another election

where intolerance

 

rages at the gates

and in Congress,

and he directs

 

his other hand

to write.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

DST

by  Gerard Sarnat

Image © Sheri Zimmerlin. You are welcome to copy for non-profit use.

4:57, first dusk since Daylight Savings Time lapsed,
we live on

the shore of the Pacific’s rim.
Fibrillating bloody yolk broken,

orangetemple shapeshift greenflash goldenbrownmuffin
done, I’m so happy

sharing this moment with a grandson
who says there are forty billion

habitable earths and at least one
has volcanos that spout chocolate.

Elliot gestures as a red-hot flotilla
of crockodilios

punctuated by wellfleets of pointillist ember prey
makes its way

across the horizon
only to disappears into a cloudbank

never to come out.  At the storm's
critical juncture, the boy wonders,

Why thunder has jagged zigzags
or is it the other thing -- and why?

Rose-colored polarized lenses
are the closest I get to worship.


Gerard Sarnat splits time between his San Francisco Bay Area forest home and Southern California's beaches. He is a seeker and Jewbu, married forty years/father of three/grandfather, physician to the disenfranchised, past CEO and Stanford professor, and virginal poet at the tender age of sixty-two. Gerry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Aha!Poetry, AscentAspirations, Atavar, AutumnLeaves, BathysphericReview, Bird&Moon, BlackZinnias, BlueJewYorker, ChicagoPoetry, CRITJournal, Defenestration, Etude, EZAAPP, Flutter, FurnaceReview, HissQuarterly, Jack, Juked, LanguageandCulture, LoudPoet, MyFavoriteBullet, NewWorksReview, Nthposition, OrigamiCondom, PensonFire, PoetsAgainstWar, Rambler, RiverWalkJournal, SlowTrains, SoMa, Spindle, StonetableReview, SubtleTea, SugarMule, ThePotomac, ThievesJargon, UndergroundVoices, UnlikelyStories, and WildernessHouseReview among others. Just Like the Jones', about his experience caring for Jonestown survivors, was solicited by JonestownAnnual Report and will appear later this year. He is currently working on an epic prose poem, The Homeless Chronicles. The California Institute of Arts and Letters' Pessoa Press will publish his first book. Gerry is a member of Poets and Writers, qualifying in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry.

EXILED LIGHT

by B.Z. Niditch

Asylum-seekers back to where they started: A boat carrying asylum-seekers, believed to be from Sri Lanka, is intercepted off Christmas Island in June this year. Picture: Daniel Wilkins. Source: The Australian

Exiled light
held out
another dawn
a lamp
to another horizon
more certain
and human
than I believe
exists
returning
into a black sun
of memories,
lit up in love
with peace
for the visionary,
your tossed boat
between rough shores
of two continents
trembling for shelter,
to land in
a resting place


B.Z. Niditch, poet, playwright, fiction writer, and aphorist, is published widely throughout the U.S. and abroad. He is also the founder and artistic director of The Original Theatre, in Boston, which has presented original, experimental plays on contemporary social and political themes since 1990.