Starlight
The stars did not shine today
For no one looked their way
The people failed to notice the heavens
With their eyes glued to the ground
No one bothered with Orion’s belt
Or the curve of the Big Dipper
The deathly tail of scorpius
Nor the distant roar of Leo
The people will be in darkness soon
As the sun reels in the remaining light
A black canvas punctuated by a waning moon
Slowly disappearing onto itself
The forgotten guide of the North Star
Left the people lost below
A little girl awakens alone
Frightened from a forgotten dream
Looks out the window for hope
But there are no stars to wish on tonight
My future
The future is a long hallway,
Filled with open doors
Will I choose the path of honesty
Or follow the route of deceit
Will I open the door to hope
Or walk into the room of despair
Head towards the light of righteousness
Or accept the darkness of greed
These significant uncertainties
Turn my life into a series of coin flips
A deadly game of heads or tails
A hopeless spiral of uncontrollable fate
My future is bright they tell me
That things will get better as time goes on
The future has so much to look forward to
But I don’t know what I’m looking at
Mandep Chahal
Life was doing swell.
It was playing the game just fine-
winning some, losing some.
But they decided its quality could be improved.
Because what couldn’t they fix at this point?
So they brought in their tools
-vowels, consonants, punctuation aplenty.
And they set to work on life, fixed it up
and made it proper.
But it didn’t seem to be enough.
So in came the heavy duty weapons:
slurs, exclamation points, the dirty things people keep hidden in their hearts,
words screamed too fast and hard to even hear.
And little by little, as they dutifully worked,
they chipped off the sheen
that Life had always had.
And little by little, as they dutifully screamed,
Life got up, dull and broken,
and walked out of them all.
They didn’t even notice.
Mandeep Chahal
There once was a young woman who lived in a town with a fair amount of others.
She was a writer. Being as young and as beautiful as she was, she shocked them all when she did not produce stories about the eternity of youthful love and the pleasantness of picnics under the sun and the feeling of going to sleep knowing someone wishes they were with you at that very moment. Instead she wrote poems and stories and essays and novels on loveless love and the endless and magnificent scope of human cruelty. She shocked them again by going into too much detail about the stuff that’s usually kept hidden in the darkest corner of a heart. There were volumes about betrayal and white lies discovered under her name. She caused lovers to second-guess each other and families to have silent dinners, still together but with nothing to say to each other. And just when she was starting to catch the attention of those important people who’ve got some semblance of power, she happened to drown in a beautiful, roaring river. The passerby saw the glint of the sun on the jewelry of her eyes and notified the local authorities. The body was quickly removed from the river so as to not frighten the honeymooners and moved to a much more appropriate place. The thoughts of her quickly faded and the truths she had brought up subsided even faster. But like they always say, the sun still rose in the morning and the animals kept living and the world kept turning around and around. And everything continued. Just as she had written it.
Sadhna Samantarai
It’s the ink that bleeds from multi-colored skins
Tracing the ghosts of ideas, a phantom script screaming in anticipation
It’s the entanglement of the web made from settled souls,
Organized into seats orbiting the sun of disagreement on an eternal trail to illumination.
It’s the coffee house across from that bakery summoning growling stomachs
As all gather in warmth to awaken their mind body soul, as if those things are separate.
It’s the mishmash of words that show that they aren’t separate.
It’s the blend of colors that sing hallelujah together, fashioning mirages of the mind
Using nothing but black on white.
It’s the ball skating smoothly on a paper with scribbles that make sense
To all and none at once, but will always hold dear to the holder.
It’s the ball that beats beats on the dingy bubble gummed concrete
To keep the blocks from growing up into dingy cells.
It’s the word ball that jumps from a pen to a sport, a writer to a player.
It’s the smooth transition between the lack of differences
And the worlds of differences between a writer and a player.
It’s the stories of a writer.
It’s the stories of a player.
It’s the colors of their lives,
It’s the moments shared with wives.
It’s the love of the endless, cherished skies,
It’s the hate of any question beginning with “Why.”
It’s the innocence of a child’s untainted mind,
It’s the beauty of digging in the moment only to find
Nothing.
And everything.
It’s infuriatingly necessary,
It’s obnoxiously omnipresent,
It’s understandably overlooked,
But it exists, like a memory
Planted in the soil of every soul
Itching to give birth to
Poetry.
His eyes drank her in
from the cushions of her thighs to the delicate sharpness of her cheeks
until he was absolute in his intoxication for her.
His stunning acquaintance.
His passionate lover.
His fiancé.
His captive.
And what more could one expect
when a beautiful man meets a beautiful woman?
As if it mattered that her swanlike neck peeked at him
from under the noose he had lovingly tied into fragile bow.
As if it mattered that should her wrists wish to stray
from the silver bangles he had charmingly added to ornament
the fine rivers snaking up her arms,
she could turn his life upside down.
As if it mattered that at some point,
she was hanging upside down and in pain from the blood
pounding pounding at pounding at her pounding at her temples,
because he had forgotten to turn her right side up at some point,
because he was so amazed at how soft her damn hair still managed to look.
And how could it matter when none of this mattered to her?
What did she care of the callous manner
in which he locked her to a two foot night stand?
What did she care of the dark malice behind his beady steady eyes?
What did she care of her awareness of his stubborn heart,
bent on bringing a wickedness that had never been heard of before
in this world?
What did she care of the checkered dark bruises tattooing her arms and legs?
They were nothing more than love marks
under the scrutiny of her rose-colored glasses.
What did she care?
She was his,
she had been his
since the moment he had gagged and stuffed her
petite body into that smelly old sack.
But it was going to end soon, no worries.
He would carry on as planned,
wreak a havoc that
tore the world apart by its very seams,
start a World War III,
bring to this earth an early apocalypse
that would make babies cry quiet tears of pity
and old ladies scream tantrums of “it’s not fairs.”
The universe would be on its knees from
the aftershock of a chaos that leaves no space
for descriptive words, only the dark ink stain
on a white page that opens up to envelop a shadowy world in its
endless black hole.
And they would live together happily in love afterwards
as the world burns into flames around them.
After all, he did propose to her.
It was a chilly night, so the young girl Katrina wrapped herself tighter in her red scarf. Of course the train was going to be delayed for another two hours: someone up there was trying to get her. The rain had just started to trickle down from some hole in the sky, so she being of the wiser bunch sat on the damp bench under the flickering light of a lamp and the leaky roof of a worn down deserted train station, perfect for some spooky horror movie setting. The murky air wasn’t totally alone for her to consume though: a man stood reading a newspaper behind the lamp post, and an old lady sat directly across from her, a mere ten feet away. She was a wrinkly old prune of a thing, like she had spent an eternity in a bath tub until her skin had decided to melt into layers upon layers of folded raisin skin. And though her skin was spotched, her hair was sparse, and her arms were sagging, her eyes still had a sparkling mischief in them, as if she was prepared to pounce, armed with nothing but the mad gleam of a concocted plan sprouting in her brain.
Already somewhat unnerved from the scene she was caught in herself, Katrina continuously looked away and back into the glowing pair of eyes that never seemed to waver from her face. It was unsettling, the way they glowed pale in the night sky, almost as if there was no soul behind them whatsoever. After about thirty minutes though, another dark stranger entered the scene, as quiet and mysterious as the old woman herself, dressed in that typical suspicious looking dark overcoat and shades that all criminal masterminds wear. He seated himself right next to Katrina.
This was becoming too much for the young girl whose parents already institutionalized her for paranoia: she knew the dark stranger and the old woman who sat down were plotting something. They kept eyeing each other, as if for a signal: to bag and tag Katrina of course, what else? They were deciding whether to boil or dissect her, kill or torture her, hold her for ransom or murder her. But the lone train station left little room for an escape plan. There was nowhere to run to for miles. All she could do was keep seated and pretend she didn’t know exactly what it was that they wanted to do with her.
After a few more minutes of excruciatingly awkward pain of anticipation, a train heading for Dallas City, the opposite direction Katrina was headed for, came roaring in, screeching and halting to a stop directly in front of them, like a senile woman in a psychiatric ward.
The door remained open for a few minutes, but right before it began to close, the dark stranger grabbed Katrina and dragged her through the train’s shutting doors. Katrina began screaming and dragging her heels in the ground, but it was too late: the train station was already disappearing into the distance. The man reading his newspaper behind the lamp post howled at the injustice in the distance, but it was drowned out by the train’s screams.
Katrina kicked and shrieked in protest, as the dark stranger tried to calm her down. After all, he said, he had just saved her life from the man with the newspaper, the one who had a moment ago stuck a knife in a poor old woman’s back, and was thirsty for more.
Akshaya
Response to Diane Wakowski
Death
Death came to me.
She came in a dream.
Whispered
“I’m here now. I’m here to take you with me.’
I went
Gladly,
Happy that I was leaving.
I thought I needed
That solitude
To teach me:
The meaning of life;
Right from wrong;
How to grow up.
But it was just a dream.
Nothing more than a faded Wonderland
That can’t save me.
I woke up, troubles on my mind.
I knew what I had to do now,
How to embrace Death
I guess in a way I found the answers I was looking for.
I wasn’t trying to escape, but rather stall her sure approach,
Because the moment she arrived
Things would be different.
I’d have to let her consume me
Change:
She comes with Death.
In fact they say Change is Death, a manifestation if you will.
I don’t know
What I want.
What’s safer?
What’s easier?
Death or Change?
It’s a difficult choice.
But for now
Death
She draws near.
--
Akshaya
Evan Loker has two Dunsany poems
Indian Valley Grove Fargone
I ambled, limp and tired, down the road
beyond the settlement of plasma, capital and plastic
where shop keepers trade dreams for the main-line station
where cliffs fell like leaves
from an autumn bough and stood suspended
in pink, as the sun begins to slip away
I saw my companion, tended hands I had abandoned
cupping swollen cheeks and sullen eyes
whom I remember from summer
in these hills
these oakey getaways
housed the friend who called himself "elf"
the cruel surf, expanding waves, destructing
hundreds of years,
energies, spirits that crown
fringes of life with equanimity
the new concrete-plastic mecca
looms, enshrouds outdated oak foothills
our eyes meet
together, in solidarity,
together in the indistinct movement
apart from fear
New Rust, Curtains
Actors in the alleys jest
to hide their fears
mountain dust blows west
to dry a river of tears
the smoke of the chimney drowns
bright-eyed new lovers
romance does not see such towns
which sleeps in soldered covers
to hope-- in hope-- is naivety
but to create, to imagine
may preserve earthly majesty
kept afloat by lines of mystery
between mortal chasms
that make threats to disappear
Patchworks of soil, of history and pain
with an acidic poison, oblivion's stain
hides ribbons of life below the Stockton pier
The jesters sweat to forget
true lovers, though in all regret
concocted genocides
from within the mind
