The air for months
an apocalyptic blanket,
jaundiced shimmer from stones and dirt.
How does your
world end? A pandemic
for real next time,
wet bulb temps settling
along your latitude sooner than expected,
a decade from now or three?
Do you require
global holocaust, or is a burnt town, town
by town
enough? How far away is Talent, Oregon
Paradise, California. How near
is here it is. We walk outside breathing
ash, breathing bone, sucking whatever
we can into lungs, thick greasy air
enshawling our shoulders,
robes we’ll be wearing till
the end.
– Claudia Putnam
Author’s Note: “Raiment” is part of a chapbook MS composed at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in 2021.…
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A round-bottomed toy that rights itself when
one attempts to push it over.
– Wikipedia
My dental hygienist
looks and sighs.
My son takes my car
to the car-wash.
Again I dream
I forgot my dog
in a locked garage.
Don’t you too
get swamped by
one guiltwave
after another,
don’t we struggle
to keep the
straight when
the car wants to veer,
don’t we ache…
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bitch, he says.
stupid bitch,
reaching over the counter for my colleague
whilst his girlfriend stands behind him
looking bored.
at least, I assume she’s bored
under those big sunglasses.
they get their refund in the end.
it’s the quickest way to get rid of them.
it’s the only way:
a company
can’t accuse an individual
of inappropriate behaviour.
that would be fascism.
apparently.
I think.
anyway,
no – my shaken teary colleague
CANNOT have a break:
can’t she see how long the queue is now?
– Paul Tanner…
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Ever since I was a child, the grass irritated my ankles. To combat this, I would wear socks when walking in the grass, leaving green stains on white cotton. Here the world looked safe. The sun was hot, striking my skin until it was a dark red. Blueberries crushed against the pads of my fingers. Their juice became stickier as the heat began to rise. I wanted to feel the grass beneath my feet. So I dumped the bucket of berries on the ground and started jumping on them. The berries became little sticky fireworks. My feet sunk deep into the berries. Grass began to grow between my toes, tangling around my ankles. Eventually roots took hold of my toes, and the grass wound up my wrists.…
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With one leg not two, he’s a great little hopper.
He has to be. Our knowledge can only be finite says Popper,
a philosopher of whom this little black bopper
has possibly not heard, not even a whisper,
but Karl has a point, a legitimate view:
the bird can’t imagine hopping on two.
From the path to the compost, the rail to the bin,
he’s perfected the art of hopping on one
a hop left then right, like a one-legged trooper
adroitly avoiding coming a cropper,
backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards:
thirteen ways of hopping for a blackbird.
When fate deals you a bad hand or rather a bad leg or rather a non-existent leg it may seem improper
but as mentioned our knowledge can only be finite says Popper:
so when fate deals you an unfair cop,
what can you do but live in hop?…
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– Paloma Sierra
Author’s Note: Life often exposes us to violent storms, but like the seed of the mangrove tree, we can find a home wherever we drift.…
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I don’t know flowers
so I couldn’t tell you their names
but I passed a cluster of them
on the way to work:
they were light purple long thin buds.
maybe some kind of lavender?
I don’t know
but since the published poets
were always banging on about flowers
I thought, what the hell
let’s see what all the fuss is about
and I bent down
to have a sniff:
I didn’t like them.…
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