Category: Poetry

Snigdha Koirala has previously been published in The Inkwell and Unknown Magazine. Born in Nepal and raised in Canada, she is currently living in Scotland, where she is pursuing an English Literature degree at the University of Edinburgh. 

 

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R

 

Arms bending, there was dirt
stuck to the inside of your elbow.

My thumb itched to trace
its spirals over you,
to fold your blond paper skin
into the damp pocket of my coat,
and hear your knees click flat against the
bridge of your nose.

But your limbs–untied–
swinging around skinny metal bars,
and your blues under chiffon lashes
s p r a w l i n g
through the place,
looking for something,
through and around me,
like in that theatre,
your air filling up
all the spaces I could feel–
I lost and lose control,
dizzy,
heavy,
foggy breath–
I imagine–
along the lines of your hands,
over the crooks of your bones,
your veins–

I imagine–
settling above that piece of dirt,
coaxing it into the calm,
blowing it away–

I imagine

seeing you bare.

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Snigdha can be reached via email, koiralasnigdha@gmail.com.

 

John Lysaght is a writer of fiction and poetry from Long Island, New York. John began his formal writing while attending the University of Scranton, graduating with a BA in English and Latin in 1968. Mr. Lysaght has had a rich work history as a teacher, counselor for at risk youth, therapist, social worker and probation officer. His work has appeared in Esprit, Poets’ West, Avocet, The Greenwich Village Literary Review, Nomad’s Choir, Calliope’s Corner, and October Hill.

 

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First Snow

Autumnal caravan
Palette of browns
Draped with fleece, with flannel
Of spiced cider and maple syrup
Haystack and harvest,
Turns and fades
Into memory.

Aloft,
Vanilla pregnant puffs
Birth virgin downy hexagonals
Dressed in white lace–
Angel-crafted from above.
Alabaster-jeweled
Geometric masterpieces
Flutter as they parachute
Downward to join their brethren,
Snow man antecessors
Decorating the landscape face below.

Solitary galosh imprints
Mark where I’ve been
And question where next to go.
With upturned face
And supplicant palms
I catch in an instant
Transmutant wonders
Returning to origin
Replicating the continuum
Of renewal.

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John can be reached via email.

Yael Veitz is a New York-based poet and editor of Clio: The Journal of the Brooklyn College Historical Society. Both her historical interests and her poetry reflect a geographically diverse background, an insatiable wanderlust, and, occasionally, her love for her cats.

 

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Hebron

 

City of earth, of sleeping souls
Holding our shared ancestors as if in a cradle, under the mountain steps.
Do not inter the living.
Do not crush your inhabitants under broken cobblestones, blanketing them with thin,
White dust as they sleep.

You bury. It is your calling. You deaden their hearts, let them cast stones at each other
At the bus stop.
The flimsy fence between them, strewn with garbage, becomes another monument
To the dead.

You are all gravestones. You are cracked walls, broken pavement, warning signs and
Scarlet declarations gashed into centuries-old walls.
I slog up your steps,
Sneak into both halves of your great tomb, and feel the great sleep coming over me.
Eyelids heavy with weeping,
I almost curl up on the carpet at the mothers’ feet.

If the city has ears, they must be here, in the women who carried me.
So I murmur to them.
They incline their heads to me–Sarah, Rivkah–toss their soft braids over my shoulder,
Their ears a great desert expanse,
Their wombs puckered, leathern.

I try to tell them.
I try to tell them about the stones, the swastikas;
About the thick glass between our two halves, and the bullets that put it there;
About the girl who slashed her wrists to ribbons, wound those around her throat.

I try to tell them–Sarah, Rivkah–
Beg them to shake the earth,
To level the trenches,
To forget old jealousies.

But my words come out in squeaks–only one word, many times:
Just please, and please, and please–

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Yael can be found via Facebook.

Cinzia DuBois is an Edinburgh-based poet whose writing is intrinsically influenced by philosophy and classicism. She performed some of her poetry for the first time at A New World!?, an event co-hosted by The Ogilvie and Interrobang?!, in April of this year; though new to the poetry scene, she hopes she will have the opportunity to publish and perform her work in the future.

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Caustics

 

Where did you find her?
For a moment I felt rare. Diamond in the rough.
Enchanting,
A golden tree root protruding from the earth,
Bodying a phloem of sapphire drunk on liquid silver
Melted by rhythm.
Somehow I was noticed
In the depths of this dark harpsichord echo chamber
Where minds met lines
met tongues
met hearts.
All feet were paddling together in a concrete pool,
Observing lost lines of poetry
Floating upon the surface of regis rugs.
Until this moment I had been drugged by my invisibility.
Addicted
To the security of being
nobody.
Vacant-body.
Just another space-taking body.
Where did she find me?
Ambling apathy at the base of a pearl coastline,
Shifting broken glass beneath her feet, their polychromic splinters scratching at her skin.
I owe my survival of these decades
To the art of submersion.
Refined drowning. Close enough to the surface to still be present
So no one notices how deep you are.
Close enough
To catch drowning sailors,
guide them back to shore,
but never let them take you.

I have found more certainty in catching caustics
Than sincere sentences.
There are no falsities in the kisses which seal envelopes of light.
Diamonds of fluorescent turquoise tattoo themselves upon my sunken skin;
I am made mystic.
My thighs, wrapped in a faux sailor’s silk,
Feel uncomfortably thick. Painfully closed.

No man would risk his life drowning for this.

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Cinzia can be contacted via @Cinzia_DuBois on Twitter and C. A. DuBois on YouTube.