The Unusual Coronation: 9/11 Tribute

by A. Mameghani

There down the road she skips,
Chrysanthemum Mary Rose.
A girl of only the grade of four
With bouncing curls of the sun’s rays,
Innocent and sweet, the princess is,
She finds her way home, alone.

Through her eyes, her colorful friends dance, aflutter.
With them she speaks of her day,
Nearing the house she calls her home.
Before entering, she bids her colorful friends adieu,
And cherishes the soft rhythm
Of their floating departure.

Inside, the great grandfather clock tolls,
Still an irritated grumble.
Now, it is three,
And the king and queen are absent.

The princess does not mind.
Her heart lies in freedom,
For it will only last until their return.
With her studies complete,
She takes to the green room,
Where the sun’s warm light remains.

She adds the finishing touches
On another completed piece
As the sun’s light begins to dim
With an ever subtle fall.
Another illustration
To fill her book
With the wonderful colors of her friends.

Inside, the great grandfather clock tolls,
Still an irritated grumble.
Now, it is five,
And the king and queen are absent.
The princess does not mind.
Her heart lies in freedom,
For it will only last until their return.
With her illustration completed,
She takes to her room,
Where her imagination refuses
To be restricted by reality.

She explores the faraway lands
With her friends that dwell in the shelves.
Land after land, she passes through,
Observing the lives of the residents,
Wishing that someday
She will be able to adventure alongside them.

Inside the great grandfather clock tolls,
Still an irritated grumble.
Now, it is nine,
And the king and queen are absent.

The princess grows perturbed.
Never has darkness fallen,
But the house remains near vacancy.
With her adventuring completed,
She takes to the living room,
Dark as can be,
Silent as death.

The monotonous noise
Of television cartoons
Calms the nerves of silence.
All friends have retired for the night.
There she sat, alone,
A phone by her side,
Waiting for a sign.

Inside, the great grandfather clock tolls,
Still an irritated grumble.
Now, it is eleven,
And a new queen has been crowned.

A. Walkup

D. Wood

Midnight Drag

by A. Jian

Primarily, your fingers work as stalactites,
Reaching across the span of worlds in search of a flicker of warmth
Embedded in the pregnant silences in the early morning
Something to prove existentialism is not applicable to your surroundings.

These frayed nerve endings can still wrap around the music
though your pale skin shivers and shakes at the sound
of another broken window, glass panes mirroring your own
Each starting car passes through your bones like pinpoints on a map you hate.

Your lips feint hesitation as they spell out enticements
They break off each syllable like matches of your midnight cigarettes.
The smoke curls around my tongue as chickadee whispers whip across dusk
It’s not yet time for the syncopation of these moves to be let loose.

You breathe in rhythm with the twitches in the grass and I can’t help to wonder
Darling, your ebony sins make your skin look more surgical than ever.
Pinprick pupils on the brink of elixirs and passions reunited in the plaster
We can’t seem to crash these cars at the same time and place.

Do the pills and liquid lyricism you suck up like a drowning artist
make you feel the solutes and solutions in the blood in your veins?
Your skin must pull through your flesh each night if you hear
those hypnotic heresies in the thrumming, drumming crimson.

K. Armstrong

Stillbirth

by M. Doebel

The clutter of this half-town is

clustered like it’s living, maybe dying.

It is enough to swell the nausea,

this sunlight on the paint of cars,

beams the color of

“it’s always raining on Sunday”

except when it’s not.

It is 2 o’ clock and the warping

is waiting to launch an offensive.

Somewhere, something happens,

but the work and the lull and the thrums

are too moderate to make the event viable

to behold.

The unease is syllogistic,

an undefined fraction of a lifetime

has been spent knowing

that if I can make it ‘til dark

I will have survived a Cold War between

numbness and nervousness

(they collide and create a positive: nonsense).

This is a time when mortality is not frightening,

when even a close-range shot would have me convinced

that the barely-sensation

shooting up legs from steps, in,

out,

never around the same house

would drone on endlessly anyway.

I am implying yes or no questions in the sign language

of distressed hands through hair and over browbones

and every little thing chimes in with

“yeah, I don’t know, maybe, not probably,

could be, we were always bluffing about simplicity”.

I am only seeing this city

because it happens to reside between here and there

and it’s rubbing the last of the thrill of the journey off of me

(your enthrallment was silly anyway,

I tell myself,

I insist,

I yell,

I weep, dryly).

The magic things are no longer sentimental to me,

I cannot for the life of me remember the rawness of awe

that tumbles from the same images over and again,

someone should have taught me what would be poisonous

(because it is still not clear to me what is reverse-stitching my comfort blankets).

Some people wake early just to watch the sunrise,

but to me it looks increasingly like a stillbirth.

    A. Titova