Baxter Boeh-Sobon
Following Lord Dunsany
Begin with a legend or familiar tale
That we learned as young children to let us regale.
Or if all tales are used and you're quite sure of this
Then create a scenario that would not end in bliss.
The next step is simple. Build sorrow and fear
So character's emotions from the pages you'll hear.
Convince your reader that all will end in woe
But that, my friend, is as far as you'll go.
The last stage is tricky for it must come out just right
Your story must be dark but your ending must shed light.
And not in a way that tells us all is well
But more in the style of, "Oh, what the Hell."
For if you want to capture the essence of Lord Dunsany
Then my friend, you must learn, to write sarcastically.
Celtic Twilight
It was a cold night when William woke in a fright. He was dreaming of tomorrow. Of his destiny. Of his death. In this Celtic Twilight.
Tomorrow he was to go into battle and defend his homeland and family against the invaders. William and his rag tag army were to face the imperial army of Dunning. He had never been defeated and it instilled fear in William's marrow.
His dream ended with a stab wound to his heart. A piercing cold that emptied his body of blood to quench the thirsty earth. He had fallen and Dunning stood over him, delivering the final blow.
In the morning the battle commenced. The air was filled with arrows and screams and barbaric battle cries. A clash of matching uniforms and plaid kilts. William fought bravely, yet ever keeping an eye out for Dunning. And then he saw him. Backing away in terror of his death, he tripped over a dead body and fell back, watching his fate approach him.
Dunning came atop him and William gasped. A piercing. A cry. Dunning had been shot by an arrow. He fell to the ground! And William cursed that Celtic Twilight and fought on.
Amy Martin
Inspired by “After the Fire”
When what had been so long about to happen finally happened, when men traveled in large vessels many miles from home, they sought to find riches and wonders they could claim as their own. They spoke of different peoples that their destination was known to have had; they mentioned India. And then they saw great expanses of land, open and endless.
“Some people has been here,” one traveler said, “on all this land.” “It is the people of India,” said one. “Something different than them,” said another.
And then they found that the place was not India, but a new world.
Kevin Labarbera
MOTIONLESS
The air was thick and hardly anything could be seen without the adjustment of one’s eyes. Though wind was roaring, the stretch of coastal sand stayed perfectly in tact. Its only disruption was the crashing down of black water, chewing away at its right arm. Still, the miles of sand did not budge. I wondered what ominous powers hovered over the coastline, and to my surprise I received an answer. “The strengths of others are only as powerful as the power they are allowed.”
THE PLACE
The place is filled with memories both good and bad. Actually, the more I think on it, the place was bad. It remained unnoticed for those who refused to take a second glance. And those who did sadly never returned, at least in my mind. The place could not be seen from eye level. Therefore, the body needed to contort and transform into something far from reality. It doesn’t matter what, just do it. I’m not going there so do not ask again. You went to the place? Are you insane or did you just decide you were complacent with the idea of death? I will never go to the place…I do not belong there.
Katherine Anderson
Children’s laughter lingers as their skin turns tan
Season after season Mother Nature grows them like flowers
With water and light, until they stand and reach for the light.
All white and yellow, love all over,
Their hurt like sand, washing away in the salty water
They live transient, and changing
Dreams like memories in diamond eyes
Reflect in the bubbling water
Over stones and crash anew.
Crashing into music of some other day, they dance,
Any day, to choose the track and let it play
Let it play, any day.
The world spins and yet stands still in every moment.
Spins around as she stands, still in every moment
Wrapped in sunshine like blankets on the beach.
Here, you don’t have to move anymore, ever again.
If you don’t want, you can stay
Sitting on this beach, spinning beauty
Through summer’s endless blue sky.
In the patch of night, where all the people lit up
By what they thought was the sun
Was the moon.
So simple in the moonlight, they say.
There was black, and no sound
Echoes of life beyond, echoes of living
Which is really not living, but is drowning.
Drowning, this dark was more than drowning,
This was too much water.
No sound, no light, what you thought was sleep.
Until you woke up, sleeping elsewhere than you had fallen.
When or how or why, is beyond what anyone could guess
Maybe it is luck, but maybe
They were right;
“Life is a thing when you learn, you Grow.”
But you can’t grow if you’re drowned,
So, they breathed you back to life and warned
Don’t go near there again.
Because, “Supplies are endless in the evening;
By the morning they’ll be gone”
Means life is meant to be indulged in moderation
The End of People
Time wavers as he empties his thoughts into a gray void known as sky above the people he inhales and exhales inhales his thoughts into his fluttering chest remembering when these newborns wailed for a beginning now crying at the end and blanketed by the apocalyptic gray sky as Time’s dream and his thoughts End
The Cliff and Mountain
Cliff You are not a Mountain But half a figure of a broken promise But an abrupt end to the countryside But a slurred image of god’s design But a shattered relief of earth’s tension But a towering wall to man’s progress But the monument to a nature’s failure But a deviant smudge on a pristine canvas But yet often a point of view to withstand Rather than a view to behold Rather than a treatise to perseverance Rather than a cities’ border Rather than owe anything to surroundings But the Cliff reminds the Mountain, That the Mountain may fragment into a Cliff But a crumbling Cliff becomes a Mountain |
wandering the shores
maybe a hundred years or more
herding the sinners like sheep onto his boat,
his eyes unwavering from his oars cutting into the grey water
the thick, slow moving river making the motion of his arms become tedious
left to wander the shores
for a hundred years, no token for passage provided
the ferryman comes and goes, gathering passengers each way but avoiding me
using his left hand to wave their dark ghosts onto his boat, feeling their coldness pass by me
I wonder why I am jealous of them, the sinners being accepted into his boat
Is their fate better than mine? To be rowing across the divide between the living and dead, or stuck on the sandy shores not on either side
Their souls do not look so peaceful now that they are gathered; they know their fate, their destination
One last time he returns, now with only one soul with passage paid on shore
Leaving me, the grey soul and the ferryman depart from shore
Waiting my hundred years or more, they never return
Jacob Partlow
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
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
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