I levitate to the thirteenth floor
each time I proclaim how desperately
I covet connection,
and once the capsule jerks to a halt,
and my stomach drops,
the light blooms,
the imperceptible chime rings,
but the door won’t budge
because sincerity is too much,
and the floor was never there.
– Brontë Pearson
Author’s Note: “Triskaidekaphobia” was written for a poetry exercise called The Fish Tank of Rage, where you are given an abstract emotion and a random object and must craft a poem combining the two. “Triskaidekaphobia” was the product of “the elevator of rejection” and plays upon the idea of many buildings lacking a 13th-floor due to superstition. …
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Evans, whose object would have been
to draw the biographer’s attention away
from the business of being photographed,
might have asked Edel to interpret
Eliot’s encomium on James:
that he had “a mind so fine
no idea could penetrate it.”
Edel, distinctly self-conscious,
might have laughed this off
as modernist hagiography,
allowed as how James
had plenty of big ideas:
Innocence, Europe, Art.…
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“My biggest fear…” I could tell him my biggest fear, but he wouldn’t understand it. Only two people in my life have understood it and one of them would never admit to understanding it. We are the 1%. The cosmic joke. The empty. The unexplainable.
We are living contradictions because we are not one person. No, we don’t have split personalities. We are always us. Always complicated, and always multiple things, never just one thing.
We want so badly to be a part of all this, but we will never be a part of this because we cannot commit to being one person. We will not take one path because we do not see the point in walking when the destination is not our decision. The destination is the same no matter the path.…
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Because I’ve felt up the smooth spine of books
with the caress of my finger, and I’ve passed time
under the hold of a good book, I know my mother.
When I was seven, I learned about stone soup
from hungry soldiers in an audiobook, and you
wouldn’t believe how the stomach thinks in hunger.
My mother grew up and lived against a menu of hunger
and her Bible was the mountain peak to a pile of books.
She’s stopped going to church, but she’s said to me, you
have to believe. I was fifteen the first time
a pastor’s preaching made my tears collect like soup
in a falling bowl. I have seen my mother…
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1
I came
With thousand colorful dreams And the world
drunk them all Year after year
it dropped like a rain Drop by drop by drop
And I know tomorrow
even These few black crows Will fly away
From my snowy roof
2
Gliding from the elevator gushing on the street blowing with the taxi
Crossing the highway by the rain bow Saying hello to the old house
And entering my room It’s been years since human flew here
3
You plant your feet in the ground with fingers staring at clouds
you surrender your leaves to the wind and know that death
is not an exotic event
4
Sadness
is better than darkness
I fear the silence of lanterns waiting for sunset
– Maziar Karim…
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And like a sailor, he lifts the blinds. In the distance, no matter how far he is in that VA nursing home, he sees us out here somewhere as we glide. Your elderly father sees you and me, our hearts as one woven kite on the porch swing just as night seems to nudge the sun aside. He knows we are falling in love.
After all, all our footprints in sand and snow and cinder and everywhere we go, we go two by two by love but look at how the world blends so small. He knows. Widowers may have a way of seeing all the power in believing, as somewhere way out there is yet a heavenly mother near her child.
He may remember his younger sky, and her beautiful eyes, and likely can see them still when you laugh and when you cry.…
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It’s one kind of delirium
the state of these bed sheets
state of the union
after the fever breaks amid the folds
honey bees through the window
summoned by the sweet musk
they find moisture
in the crevices
and buzz about the tiny bud beneath the curtain
The linens bare your teeth marks
Cresent indentations like moon shadows
The fever broke
amid the shadows
behind the blinds
and the ecstatic mess
the delicious delirium of bedsheets
became
a home
– Apollo Papafrangou…
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