First Snowflake two ways

Evan Gordon

1.

First snowflake, light and soft From white skies above you waft Bound for grasses, streams, and peaks Nosey tips and rosey cheeks

When you’re dancing in the air, Riding breezes cool but fair Do you ever think or care of how you came to be up there?

First snowflake, I do wonder why you’re you, not rain with thunder How you drift with silent grace, How you kiss a child’s face Tell me of the altitude, From the heights, the world you viewed Surely, what a thrill; you flew! Does your mother cloud miss you? See, we’ve waited patiently and receive you happily First snowflake, come by day so that kids and dogs might play

2.

Snowflake, snowflake, glinting bright in the blue and lonely light

Which flat cloud of smoke gray cold loosed you from its frigid hold? Have you come to beat us down? Cloak the lamp and choke the town? Slash and stab ‘til all are blind, Won’t you cease ‘til we’ve resigned? Will you have the world like fireclosing in with hard desire, clamping down on blooded veins and making stone of olden rains? Slow the spider, still the snake every little life, you take.

Winter’s dog, your ice teeth gnash sniff out embers, snuff to ash

Each thing you consume in silence, waning mercy, moonless violence

Tonight you sate your hunger here To dawn, you leave a bitter clear. Snowflake, snowflake, glinting bright in the blue and lonely light Which vengeful god did bestow

Rose

Evan Gordon

rose in my hand, skinny the very last one. carried close to my chest, bouncing in step i never bought a rose for anyone rose on my pillow, crimson moved left, nudged up an anxious little flame, symbol and wish, the same oh, that it may flicker on rose in your hand, skinny the very first one these petals, your cheeks, this stem, your waist you are my flower still waiting to bloom rose in a mug, sideways on the window sill some neglect of care, or chilly night air browned its glory red dull rose in the trash, suffocating. the only one those leaves, your tight arms those thorns, your silence you are my flower dying, not dead you are my flower dying not dead

Spring Flower

Nichelle Murray

Love Unwilling

Evan Gordon

It does not rush like a wild river with mossy rocks and fish of many colors, but is damned early and many times after, home to few creatures. Nor does it flow like blood from a steady heart, but spurts palpitating and dims to cold, freezes and shatters like icicles clinging to the roof overhang. It is not the petals of summer lilies or even the burnt glory of autumn leaves. It is the brittle twig of the naked wintering tree, its remotest reach upon which even the smallest of sparrows dare not perch. It was but faintly curious in its youth and already narrowed and ashamed. It never sent off flares in the warm night to scamper and twirl in trials of innocence.

Wallet

Evan Gordon

The wallet is rich earth-brown. Its surface is weathered, scuffed, softened -leather caressed by sunshine, slathered in grease, groped by pockets, crushed under groceries, stabbed with icy cold, slapped by asphalt, soaked in muddy puddles, corroded from time, flung, forgotten, and found. On the wallet are impressed lines and patterns -the language of its own history, a character description. And yes, it begins to reveal wisdom and patience, with its innards wrinkled, black but greying with little lines running like a foreign midnight riverland with its brown thread tight, holding years, with its single zipper graceful, never catching. The wallet, full or empty, is worth more than it could ever contain.

Ode to Daddy

M’Niyah Lynn

I know of the past and the pain you’ve brought The trauma you’ve caused and the unhappiness you taught, You would always make threats and curse up a storm, The beer you drank and lies you made something like a norm,

So now it’s been 3 years and I still don’t understand, How I’ve still learned to love you and miss the touch of your hand,

Sometimes I ache to hear your melodic voice, To go back to when seeing you was even a choice,

But our future was taken in the blink of an eye, And 3 years later I still suppress the tears in my eyes

Because you’ll always be my dad that I love infinitely, Even though you were unexpectedly taken on March 14th

Mind Matter

Shelly Frish

The War Farah Javed

Horses bare their teeth, The clatter of their barding—unmistakable, Yes — a knell for the innocent. The King’s men sent to war, To settle his bidding then, pawns blindly moved into unknown spaces, Left indiscernible from the land they pillaged.

Brothers against brothers, Women nothing more than collateral. Skin colors, names, genders, race, Erased from the charred remains. Such a noble war indeed.

The knight clad in metal ready to fight, Sacrificing his body, even more his senses. Senses, the strength and the weakness of man.

Sense of caution, sense of pride. Sense of sight, the same one that can blind. For that soldier killing the enemy is a hero, For the dying enemy, the story’s true villain prevails.

Time and time again,

The sword and the shield pinned against each other. One meant to fight and one to defend, until they don’t.

No matter of lances, swords or guns

A fatal blow from each does come.

No matter the comfort of a shield, Men lay barren, stripped of pride; Defenseless bodies in a blood soaked field.

The sword and the shield, Clashes of metal forging sparks of hate. For the soldier hidden in camouflage, His shield is his arm, protecting from shrapnel, Sense of sight shrinking from a dome of debris.

His sword is not a weapon, no it’s flight. No weapon could save him, Unless he has the sense of when to act.

These hunger-stricken soldiers aware of silence, That silence sweeping villages, cities, countries, Replacing screams of delight with shrieks of terror.

The battlefield isn’t just before them.

A losing fight wages from within.

‘When should I run?’

‘Why am I doing this?’

‘When is the fighting done?’

‘Why am I doing this?’

The sword and the shield, The dynamic duo outlasting every war. The knight dies, an emblem of swords on his heart. The soldier dies, once delivered on his shield, Now a Purple Heart, the shield delivering their legacy.

Does war mean nothing more than two losing sides? Differing opinions and anger turning to violence, Fought by those who never sat at the table, Never argued.

Fleeing leads to capture and piles grow, The richest king and the poorest peasant, Both reduced to skeletons littering the earth. Only one true victor in every war.

1723

I can’t lie to you, for the tongue divides

Arianne Gonzalez

And wounds mortal souls of their sincerity. Purest intents muddle and overcast Doubt forever enshrouds and makes turncoats Of us all, with gnarled teeth and broken claws. Miseries profit over fortunes so cunning, We would happily drink the cup of thieves And we will dance with fools, lest we be not so already. Yet here I sit, vowing the impossible Till rosebuds shall never bloom in the darling June That words will never purr so easily, And honey shall never drip from my lips, The fairiest poems shall always bring truth And our prose will ever be with our youth.

I search for beauty like it’s my sole right

Arianne Gonzalez

he waits for me on the horizon line he gives me glinting promises of a life so sweet and divine I’ve driven off into more sunsets and chased sunrises than I could count she winks at me from the water’s edge she beckons me towards the surf so pristine and so gentle and into cliff-side pools I rush into, I do not dare refuse this welcome refuge they lock eyes under star-lit skies they say that love is beautiful in compromise so pure and so refined and into a life of romance I create, I seize days as they come like lightning

I search for beauty like it’s my sole right and I ache until I capture it in verse yet words still fail to catch joy, love, truth the way I’ve offered my hands to the moon and in search of something real the glittered gold did seem quite a thrill pyrite fantasies all too quickly starve so I dove straight into the edge, my soul will belong with what is worth.

Traveler

Alexandra Adelina Nita

we curl around ourselves in the valley of the bodies of giants (my back against a vast— hand? foot? eye? devoid of form, edges blurry, golden patina unmistakeable) the arch of you your wide eyes, mouth collapsed into a half-snarl, shakes and I would say “come closer” I would say take— my bones my gender the way sunlight falls on my face in the morning but you retreat, your face turned away for the benefit of distant cliffs and the birds that fly from them is it the softness that your hands so inevitably find mirrored in mine that is unbearable? you have never asked me why I am here if I can leave

I never tell you how when we touch I unwind pieces of myself and weave them in your hair, over and around you there are shards of another person, place, self buried crystalline behind your eyes and if—when—you leave you will take me too forgive me this transgression it is so small it is the only cruel thing I have ever done to you

Brood X

Alexandra Adelina Nita

Did Lazarus stumble

Out of dreamless sleep?

Unglazed eyes watering

Under the burn of a foreign sun

That grew strange hands

Twisting around to unpeel his shroud

Layer by layer till

Only questions remained.

So different from the nymphs

Whose pale jellied legs

Scrabbled at the soft earth

To dive under, relentlessly eager

They knew that bio-snarled gnarls would drip-feed

Their root users sugared proteins

For six thousand days

Before warmth compelled them

To burst out of grave dirt

And into new skin.

The rattling song of trillions

Shakes the night

They rise to die again

Every breath—victory.

The mirror test

Alexandra Adelina Nita

there’s nothing like the tenderness of nudging the warm bundle on your lap, whose sleekness settled into the roundness of a divine repose the certainty of the sun’s claimant to show him his own image, so carefully taken and so impossible for him to understand, now innocently wide-eyed, now with predatory gleam, slipping forever through the depths and shallows of a different make-of-mind. how do you always know to stay close enough to love?

if there is a Something I hope we’re that to them