NEW! Poem by Kyle Booten

Kyle Booten


POOLSCAPE



You've heard about the order of the waves,



established many years ago by boys



and girls disguised as boys.  Wholly artless,



they plied the crests barehanded.



You've heard about their hands, but have not touched



or been touched, else you too would be clean



and constant, governed by the distant sun



or its viceroy umbrellas.  In their shade



you saw many people alive with sugar.



Every person is made of water; so



every person is, or could be, a radio,



a rudimentary song harvester



with no search-dial, bleating random tunes



or static.  I trust you've heard of static,



that place where songs surge and overlap.



Half-graveyard, half-battleground,



it grows more crowded every summer.



Songs have to go somewhere, after all.



They can't seek asylum in the future.



You've heard about the future, or even



leaned against it once, unawares,



mistaking it for a chain-link fence.

NEW! 2 poems by Sara Femenella

Sara Femenella


MARY SHELLEY

The second moon inflated like a lung,
naïve, organic, a quickstep’s heathered
horizon, peals of astral-ardor sung
above the noir, numinous she weathered

that storm, thank you. So arresting and how
it hurt when it hurt. The gathering gale
of father, redshift Tuesday on the prowl.
An off-key, minor diatonic scale,

a daughter’s parlor trick, she lay muttered
bone-cold in a watery tableau, bloom
affliction mulled and wooly, kill shuttered
away in two blue chambers, fears flood and flume

the ruins. The gamine’s keen and boozy urge
limns motherless aesthete, autumnal dirge.




THE STORY OF THE EGG


Born an arctic circle of cautious
physics, it’s a closed system of calcified
brides and orphans, chitinous and whistling
northern lights. It is Oedipal, sanctified,
a black wing slick with membrane.
If a palacial city, handsomely baroque,
dressed in snow, twinkling with carriages
and holiday parties, then it is the waltz,
the stroke of midnight, the glittering
champagne. Love doesn’t have
to be real. It’s the actual abstraction
of call and response, the soloist’s standing ovation,
the flowers at the door. If every biography’s
unsung accolade and greatest mythology
glows amber in a coal dark,
wreathed in ideology, then it is the proverb,
a disciple to Petrarch’s descent, the Laura,
kneeling in a curved prayer.
What gratitude that every confession,
every hunger, every mistake
from this one small thing, and that you can hold it,
organic, opaque, cool and weighty in the palm
of your hand.