NEAR RHYME FEB 27 2014 secrets issue
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20 16 3
4
CLAIRE DONALDSON
ADEFISAYO ADEYEYE
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KAZU WABE LEENA DANAWALA
22
BOB SCHOFIELD
SCOTT MULLEN
TATE DORVINEN ANNA POSEY
KATHERINE OSBORNE GRACE MILLARD
9
ASHLEY WILKINSON
ETHAN KASTNER
10
12 18 21
ANDREW CARTER
CAMILL A FRANKL-SLA TER
14 15
ALEX TABLON
5 7
6 11 19 8 17 MOLLY SILVERSTEIN
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CLAIRE DONALDSON
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ALEX TABLON
we bury the bird under the big tree in the backyard so god would not see what little hands could do to little necks and feathers and bones and beaks mom calls us in from inside the house we line up at the bottom of her nose to hide ourselves from her eyes her eyes for dinner we have chicken and you spill puke onto your plate when mom asks you say you want to be a vegan
AND IT WILL STAY THERE FOREVER UNTIL THE WORLD ENDS
KATHERINE OSBORNE
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ASHLEY WILKINSON
tender leaves
the bow of your foot out the door
frame flitting and heat
seeded in that hollow of my
belly I swear I never but still the Y
punctuating
below cuffed knuckles the rose on the back of your hand turning or mine cake candles
while I
unassuming
am your birthday and the day is going
dark already the color of grapefruit almost as tart
your neck
I rot under lackluster pressures dead
petals skirting the vase I can’t stop saying that tree just above
your small wrist
I blank on the name a
park full of those things the low branches waisting the trunk
why didn’t you ever call back that day I
won’t get into it but finger beds shredded clumped
dried bits
and heat I crouched down in the hallway
a moment thinking perhaps but you didn’t
I swear.
TENDER LEAVES
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MOLLY SILVERSTEIN
they keep certain doors locked until we can get small enough to fold through them. I’ve been small enough for years. I just keep folding. my great grandpa sliced off his thumb collapsing a folding table. uncle Frank found the thumb in the yard and threw it over the fence before he realized whose appendage it had been. there are entire parts of us that are dispensable and anything becomes itself if you cut it off cleanly enough. I want to keep the great poets bottled inside me with holes for breathing. yesterday I pictured putting the whole day in my mouth the subway the people on it computers envelopes desks. someday something will drag us back and that’s what’s haunting me.
FOLDING TABLE
ETHAN KASTNER
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BOB SCHOFIELD
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ADEFISAYO ADEYEYE
1. 2. 3.
Giant snail shells lie emptied on the beach. We crawl inside of them. At night we can hear the sounds of digging things. An empty planet. The vultures picking the unborn turtles from the top of the volcanic sand. Birds diving off the human coast to cower cold in the snow. You ask me where the bees went. We eat slices of moonflesh from the top of the ocean. Octagonals melt against our teeth. Bees make geometry out of living. Ants make calculus out of chaos. We are diving into the sea to catch the smooth backed anxieties grouped near the surface. Thousands of ants underneath us. Building tunnels. The bees slough off fur lined coats. Debone like fallen trees. You ask how many atoms in a molecule. How many atoms in a blue whale. We grow ripples from the seeds of dead trees. We grow insects from people tanks. Every ripple is a wave. We are the bacteria children swimming the ponds inside the mouth of whales. The design is flawed. The weather handheld. The wind screaming while our matrixed fingerprints hold it together. A colony collapse. We watch injured turtles crawl out from dormant volcanoes. We pick the bees out of the cooling sand. Jawless things dig graves inside us. You ask me how reasonable is a genocide.
TEETH
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TATE DORVINEN
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SCOTT MULLEN
The distance between these two/ Trees, lies in the secrets confided In tender bark. /Ripe for the Peel, maybe these wounds have /Not fully healed before we/ Ripped the bandaid. /The skies /Fade pink like cheeks /During late December dreams. / And And their history is/ Evident in the leaves,/ Late spring come to see/ That we are no longer Who we set out to be./ The wind rustles these/ Bones like limbs through Time;/ it’s bend till break./ Uncover me from this shell/ I am no longer bound. Birds chirping./ Good Morning.
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ETHAN KASTNER
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CAMILLA FRANKL-SLATER
February, 2014 — French authorities put three tons worth of elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns through a grinder. Three tons — GUARDIAN — officials said the powder would be encased in a composite material to make it impossible to retrieve, and used in construction.
nicipal paths to the point where underworld demons could be heard cackling below and arguing about the number of jokers in the devil’s pinochle deck.
The unlawful slabs were laid outside of workers’ housing, where salt had eroded the mu-
Judging this unacceptable, the French Minister of the Interior called for a new sidewalk to be
Sidewalk so thin, that several ghosts of evil dictators were said to have escapde. Genghis Khan was among them. Sources indicate that Imagine: Trace elements of ivory in pavement the Ghost of Genghis Khan was last seen at a lead the first-ever arrest of ten meters of Burger King menu board asking What’s a Hap“criminal sidewalk” in Pessac. py Meal.
ANDREW CARTER
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laid immediately and ordered special, “voodoo safe” cement mix be used. Ivory, a material with well-known and scientifically verified magic and anti-magic properties, kept the ghosts in and the noise of the demons to a manageable din; but upon the discovery of an entire piano key in the sidewalk by a deranged, retired, schooner captain who was “just trying to play Auld Lang Syne” in tears, pounding his claws on the sidewalk and kissing the earth, the authorities had to act.
Now, with the magic ivory seals gone there is hell on earth today and everyday after. So remember, each exhalation is precious, each inhalation puts you at hazard of becoming host to a monster’s soul, and every breath still counts on the air here at Sleepy Puppy Silent Radio.
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LEENA DANAWALA
i drew a red ‘x’ on my thigh with paint. my palette’s run dry, i mix the colors on my skin, to try to bring some light to dull dust. i’ve memorized the way the hues move in your eyes in the artificial light, the way they dim in the winter nights, sadness a shadow over your awful glow. there’s paleness in the whites of your eyes, the tightness around the edges of your lashes. i can see white, white in the clench, unclench of your fists. me, i taste blue in the chap of my lips, lonely blue, forget-me-nots wilting blue, lonely supermarket shopping, midnight coffee, can’t sleep until 4am dark blue.
COLOR STUDY
ANNA POSEY
KAZU WABE
Your mouth is ripe purple fruit blood-scented like wet iron filled with secrets between the teeth I keep trying to find, the seeds of your truth, the you alone at 3 am riding the subway laughing to yourself with your pen scratching pages of a notebook I imagine you keep in hidden drawers. Your soul is an endless ocean filled with everything weird and black and glowing in the bottom, while I am a sightless gull diving at the surface in perpetual hope of catching some small thing of you in my beak.
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GRACE MILLARD
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