A. Aamir

God is a piece of choclate

M. Rose

Logic dictates atheism

Faith is equated with fairies and zodiac

Parlor tricks sold to those sitting in pews

Every Sunday, every Sunday

 

Heaven is rotting in dirt,

buried below a tree that grows from a ribcage.

Living is only a side effect of dying

with an Icarus complex.

 

when baptized as a baby,

my head couldn’t hold itself up;

the church claimed another soul

to send dancing to the Morning Star

 

can you see the lord’s face

without loving someone?

there are proverbs that would beg

to differ.

 

the line between myth and miracle

lives in the crawlspace

of arteries and armies

constructed in heresy’s blood trail.

belief is not comprised of white-out;

sins are not a word document

not rough drafts for rewriting:

morality is abstract and true.

 

grantaire’s lack of cross

is mine to bear in due time.

not a believer, a anti-leader

of nihilism and despair

 

the sole spiritual experience

was switzerland’s gift.

perhaps it is a lack of oxygen but I think

god is a piece of chocolate

 

a life’s working theory

in midnight realizations and caffeine

a story to be continued

or not

A Visit to the Past

M. Amaya

So she looks out at the world

Although she does not see

She perceives all as good

But darling, how big of a fool can you be?

Open your eyes, observe what you should

Those you think who help you will hurt you

Keep your walls up, that is the key

Listen to all but tell none

Not a soul, to no one you should speak

For they will take and take

They'll suck out your insides and won't let you be

Man down, I'm down,

I took too long to warn me 

A. Aamir

Falling Leaves

 

A. Titova

 

O. Sysak

N. Lidyard

A. Aamir

Jug

M. Chauhan

T. Burroughs

Am/Be

M. Doebel

Sometimes I wonder what my hands would be like had I not grown up so close to water. The discrepancies between air and water temperature are shocking, what is 50 degrees terrestrially would threaten my skin with blooming ridges, trembling and trying to cave in, slip beneath each other in the water. 

Sometimes, I forget that some things have an eternity, envy and anger tugging at my arms as I stop feeling sorry for the currents that are hindered by a dam in the Rappahannock when I remember that the water will be back here in a thousand years after ghosting through a few tear ducts and over the skin of a rusting bridge. And this all makes my heart an anarchist, insisting in an infinite web of should-feels and nipping new identities in the bud just because I don’t have time for them to develop. It makes me feel a little better to believe in reincarnation for a moment and imagine my eventual body, maybe so lucky as to be as insignificant and pretty as a water-skater crushed beneath the bodies of lovers in a river bed, but then I remember that I wouldn’t remember the feeling of denim sliding off my legs or the need for brambles breaking in my confidence as a miserably self-aware winter ends. 

I’d like to know something so simple and secret as how differently the piles of rocks in the creek tumbled 500 years ago because I looked at them as December wriggled against the filmy balm of August and noticed that they were all in different stages of assimilation. They all adopt the stream eventually, taking on its little mistakes as tattoos in their slate, one slip in the landscape making something more permanent than the ravine could have imagined in its childhood. 

If we got there early enough in the morning, there was a ferry that would rescue me from the South and take our car across the state line to a different territory and I was always the only one who thought the autumn trees looked less dead on those new roads than they did on the ones we had to call our own. I imagined there was a bold yellow line striping the bottom of the river as we crossed over, marking black from white and I even searched for differences in plant species overwhelming each side, making up legends for the making of each one: the loose ropes constricting the trees in a drowsy, half-reverie were overlapping halos disguised cleverly and simply by nothing but a color. The gravel on the ground looked raw at the dock and the hot apple cider tasted like cotton after I scorched the ravaged pink on the inside of my mouth, already brinking on blood from a habit that had me tearing at all the loose skin with my teeth, trying to make the home of my words more smooth. (They needed all the help they could get.)

               It was all yelloworangered and

                         chipping paint and

                                     one incidence of the sky not affecting mood and

                          words I didn’t yet know but

               that were part of my own language, I didn’t know, in someplace foreign,

     so close. 

You can’t fall in love with too many things at once, or people will stop listening to you. I didn’t see the truth in notions such as those the first and last time my father took my sister and I fishing. The parts of my eyes that were always obscured by eyelids still burned quietly with the fiery fingertips of the temptress of sleep, dripping back beneath the skin beneath my eyes, making it sag downward in a paradoxical resistance. Gravel crunched beneath tire in the parking lot, the sound that had come to mean “this is a second home” and the “BAIT 10¢” sign hung from rigid chicken wire and the little structure where a man with an impressive white beard and a face softened by the intake of stories was colored less by white paint than it was by morning dew. The canoes all slumbered in a row, in a place that left them unaffected by the moon and made them warm with the sun. And my fault is in the pauses, and so it was that day, I would have perched on top of the furthermost boat and watched the rest of them disappear with the sweet scent of sunscreen and searching glances, if I could have. But my father’s hand balanced the pull of the river and the tug of my instincts and we rowed unsteadily around a bend and into a hollow in the heart of the forest, a peninsula of water where the gold light was best for spotting clouds of gnats and seeing our wake by way of rearranged soil taught to rise to the surface and love the water better. 

These little streams and stretching lakes and Mason-Dixon rivers did to me what they did to the rocks, my hands have subtle valleys where ripples ran up to nuzzle my palms over and over and over, I think the ravines in their infancy would have liked the idea of my identity being in water’s permanency. 

 L. Nieves

Blood Pressure

A. Jian

some days i only read science journals
to remind myself how both god and science
overestimate our durability
to remind myself to not do the same

here is what i learned:

they say a human heart
can beat for thirty minutes
outside the body
(indefinitely inside)

i laid in bed with my friend
and used the cracks in the ceiling
to map out the worlds missing inside us
with our fingers on the dark’s pulse point

she told me she was terrified
of hearing her heartbeat as she slipped into sleep
despite the reassurance she was still sentient
because she could sense her own machinery

that night i dreamt of my dead grandfather
prying open my ribs and cradling my heart
reading the veins like roadmaps to Some Place
before he placed it in his own empty chest

so assure me:

when i die they will hand my heart to someone
and i hope they have an easier time searching it
and learn how to listen to the silence around the
thump thump thump

Jive Danced Away

C. Baker

            Though his pace was not hurried, the trees clawed at him, arthritic fingers grasping at his clothes and face. Beams of silver spanned the heavens of the inky river of the night sky, dotted with pebbles of platinum light, beating against the canopy of the ancient trees.

Out of his twenty-two years on this Earth, it was the coldest winter in recent memory. There had been no snow, just a dread cold settling over the land; perhaps to stay. The water of farm troughs had frozen over during the night broken again each morning. Winter caps were donned in the early morning, fire wood stacked near the door to avoid a lengthy trip in the cold.

This very cold bit at him now, cut his cheeks, frosted his eyes, made visible his breath. It was foolish, he realized now, for me to make pilgrimage out of the farm today. But he had sworn four years previously to visit her grave every year on her birthday, the third of January.

Sometime later (it was hard to tell time in this particular forest), he came to the clearing. Moonlight shone brightly on the thick grass, thick enough to use as a bed. They had come here often before the accident, stargazing and telling stories. The clearing was not particularly large or small, and he got the feeling that it changed size at a whim. There was constant blurred motion at the edges of his peripheral vision; the tree line seeming to retreat or advance at any given moment.

            The grave stood in the middle.

            It was not rich or decorated frivolously: farming was not a job for the frivolous. It was made of plain stone, tinged with age after the course of hot summers and cold winters. The light of the moon made the stone shine like opal containing a star. It seemed to burn from within.

            He walked towards it, the grass offering slight resistance to his steps. He reached out his hand to touch the stone, tracing his finger over the engraving:

                        The sun of my life;

The moon that guides the hero by night;

Take your respite;

That you are freed from your blight;

My dearest Jive.

It came back to him as it did every year: the hot summer weighing down the world under an oppressive blanket, a miasma of heat shimmering over the dirt road as his pickup bounced over the ruts and tracks laid down by years of commute; her face, dotted with perspiration, seemed to glow with a cool radiance. They were talking, but he didn’t remember about what; maybe about which movie to watch at the cinema.

That’s when the car hit them.

He hadn’t been looking at the road; her beautiful oval face distracted him, cool blue eyes promising the relaxation of a day by the lake, lips more plump and red than an Apple of Eden.

Steel bent and screamed.

The windshield spiderwebbed.

            Glass flew across the cabin, rending flesh.

            Her scream cut through the air, goosebumps in the heat of June.

            The paramedics told him later, after he woke in a hospital bed surrounded by concerned family, that she had died nearly instantly after the impact. The passenger side door had crumpled, and the engine block of the other car had carried enough momentum to liquify her ribs, and fracture his right arm. The other driver had threatened to press charges, but dropped them after learning that his betrothed had been killed.

                        He didn’t talk to anyone for a while.

            The ceremony was plain; money was tight. It went without saying that it would be closed-casket. The coffin was plain oak, the tombstone of a generic type. His was the only family that attended; her family never present in her life, given up for adoption at birth. It was a brief funeral, given in the glade, clouds masking the unrelenting sun.

            His eyes were moist as the casket was lowered into the ground. The sky above opened, rain falling like a thousand tears, mixing with his own, a wet kiss on the cheek. He became solely devoted to his work on the farm; college was never expected of him, and his parents needed his help more often in their slowly advancing age. But, on the third of January, he made pilgrimage to his shrine, her resting place.

            He hadn’t realized he was crying.

His fists were clenched tight on the head of the tombstone, knuckles white with exertion. The tears froze as they traced their solemn way down his exposed face. God, how he missed her. He prayed every night for her, hoped that she knew that he missed her.

“What’s with the tears, my boy?”

The voice froze him to his core. His eyes flew wide, to see a cowled figure advancing towards him from the edges of the forest, directly behind the tombstone.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

It was raspy, the man’s voice; like dead leaves underfoot in fall.

“W-who are you? Why are you here?” He cursed himself for his voice cracking. The old man continued to advance, relying on a gnarled walking stick.

“Don’t you know yet, Jason? You’ve been quietly calling out into the night for me, hoping for me to make my appearance, begging for an audience with me. In the darkest of the night, you toss and turn, call out ancient names best left unspoken, and beg for her to live again. To live, with you.”

The old man pulled his cowl back, revealing a drawn out nose, and exaggerated mouth. His eyes were alive; dark and twinkling with sinister energy. Clouds began to obscure the moon’s silver light.

Jason took a step back, wary. The glade dimmed as clouds formed overhead.

The old man stepped closer, past the tombstone now.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” He huffed at this, crystalline breath dissipating in the air. He searched for some recognition, or understanding in Jason’s eyes. He found none.

“I’m the Devil. I’m disappointed. All the begging from you and I would’ve thought that you’d be expecting me.”

Jason shook his head, muttering under his breath.

“Now listen here: I can give you what’s-her-name-” the Devil turned and looked at the grave “-Jive, if you give me something else in return. Nothing important-” he glanced at his fingernails “-just your soul.”

Jason stopped.

“You… You could give me her back? You can do that for me?” He spoke softly, afraid that even voicing the idea could make it real, afraid of having hope.

“Uh-huh. Just need a verbal agreement that you’ll give me your soul and you can see her again.” The old man looked up from his nails, and held Jason’s eyes.

Jason shivered and looked away.

“If you can give me her back, then that means that…”

“That she didn’t go to Heaven? Oh no, she did, but the ol’ geezer in the sky doesn’t like to admit to me having the power to do just about anything that I please. You see, we made a bet a long time ago over an apple… Long story short, I bet that humanity was intrinsically evil. He bet the opposite. I won, and every now and then I get to snatch one of his precious from his ‘Glorious Kingdom.’”

                        The clouds swirled overhead, like an inky broth, obscuring the moon.

            “I agree. Bring her back to me.”

                        The old man smiled.

            All of reality screamed. The clouds vaporized as the heavens opened above him in all its glory, the light of the divine shining down, stronger than the sun and as pure as creation. His eyes burned with its magnificence.

            The ground in front of him exploded, dirt flying like a filthy rain; the Devil laughed maniacally, clothes burning away, taking the form of a satyr wreathed in flame. The casket set to rest four years ago slowly rose out of the soil and into the air, the oak burning away until he saw his Jive. Her skin was rotten and decayed, but bathed in the brilliance of the heavens it seemed beautiful. The satyr motioned with his walking-stick-turned-staff, and the flesh was new. A second more and she was wearing her white wedding gown.

            The satyr gestured for him to look skywards, as he made a pulling motion. Simultaneously, Jason felt his soul wretched out of him and saw the soul of his beloved descend into the corpse. Every nerve ending burned, every cell screamed, every fabric of his being wept as his soul was pulled out of him. He collapsed to his knees before his reanimated love.

            “Jason.”

                        Her voice was angelic, her face radiating beauty.

                        He looked at her, his scorched vision blurred with tears of joy.

            “Jive.”

                        She gasped.

            “What have you done!?” Panic tinged her voice.

            The devil cackled manically behind them.

            Her cream-colored skin began to slough off, turning a waxy yellow. She reached out with her hands, wiping away dirt and tears as she decayed before him.

            “I love you Jason. Don’t you ever forget that.”

            She screamed as her soul was ripped from her body: the same ice-cold scream from a hot day in June.

                        The silence was deafening but for the wheezing of an old man.

            “I never said how long you could see her, my boy.”

                        He could hear the smirk in the his voice.

            Jason closed his wet eyes, centuries old now. His body ached, his head throbbed, his eyes stung. He lay down on the now-dead grass where they had shared their first kiss, their dreams and hopes, and where he had proposed the idea of marriage. He just wanted to sleep.

            As his senses were fading to pitch darkness, Jason felt himself being picked up, and heard the heavy breathing of an old man exerting himself, as he was carried off to something far worse than oblivion.

Untitled

C. Gong

i don’t usually write poetry.

my thoughts express more readily in

short

telegraphic

text,

like twitter. there’s no poetry on twitter.

see,

those fingers can flitter across keys, and enable

immediate

thought-to-text translation.

use no ink and quill to decipher your mind’s musings.

expend no time --

here in the 21st century, we use

emojis

to communicate those pesky,

complicated

emotions.

seriously

do you know how many times

i had to backspace

to get rid of the autocorrect on the

i?

who do you think you are

trying to capitalize me

as if i had some sort of ego

or self-

worth?

Terror-Stricken Water

M. Amaya

You were once my rapture

Now all I feel is disdain

I thought I was yours to capture

Tell me, how often does it rain?

The chain reaction has caused me to feel it everyday

My tissue of hope has deteriorated

Look at what you have initiated

The strength I once had before I broke

I have retrieved

Now tell me, how often does it rain?

This ultimatum will cause you to not only soak

Water is too thin, no no you will too bleed

For you turned my love to execration

Look what you’ve done, this was your creation