Winter poppies hang lowly
as they nod themselves into a gentle, dreamless sleep.
Their scarlet-skirted heads bob against the coming wind and detach
from their brittle necks to sail westward.
A strange nectar seeps from under the fire-bright petals,
impregnating rivers with its perfumes and
swelling the stomachs of rainclouds
until they blot out the sun.
Beneath your eyelids,
stars shiver weakly
in the shadow of their thin blue light.
The pale and sickly flower of amnesia
blooms nightly on these mud-blackened riverbanks,
stirring the brittle silhouettes
from where they are pinned against nightfall.
The water here is thick and s
She who destroys the light by poetoffire, literature
Literature
She who destroys the light
first seed
Darling, you and I both know
in a better world I could be your Lethe
wrap around you, drown you
erode everything
that ever tried to bring your fate down on you.
Still if I picked up the pieces
I'd hear their soft hum
the one shells moan for the sea
for even then there would be places in you
still not free.
second seed
Surely women must have learned by now
never to trust fruit.
A garden is a prison earned
and there is nothing satanic, nothing sacred
about hunger.
Yet when your body curls in on itself
seduced by not-seeds that need only thirst to root
you find your lips wet
and what might be blood or j
having spun
a mountain
on a record
deck, causing
earthquakes
when faultlines
strained to hear
the needle
reading trees,
streams, valleys
and crags,
it has grown
obvious
that Giza's
pyramids
could pass through
the eye
of a needle
but Atlas'
shoulders
could not
Time Travel Do's and Don'ts by DaneBainbridge, literature
Literature
Time Travel Do's and Don'ts
Do's and Don'ts of Time Travel
So, you've finally done it. You've scraped together the millions of dollars, dozens of passports, countless vaccinations and hours and hours of anachronistic language classes. The day is at long last here, and you are ready to take that romantic little vacation through time. Yes, time travel is everything you've been told. You will meet exotic people, doing exotic things in exotic eras. You will get to see the "Good Old Days" when they were better known as "These Wretched Times." But, before you hit the app button on your genius phone, there are a few things you should know:
Time Travel Don'ts
Don't s
Uncoordinated Longitude by Le-Petit-Tatou, literature
Literature
Uncoordinated Longitude
When I picked up the phone she told me that she missed the trains
and the way the rain smelled in the summer.
I scratched a pattern in the table with my thumbnail. I stretched
the phone cord between my fingers and said I was sorry.
She asked what I had to be sorry about and I told her I didn't know.
I twisted the cord into a clover shape while I remembered
her laugh when we picked up the penny off of the tracks, tossing it
back and forth, watching it catch the light and throw it back.
She asks me where I am and I know she does not ask where so much
as why.
If Kronos Drank Milk by ohmistermagazine, literature
Literature
If Kronos Drank Milk
When I was little, Mama always told me that you couldn't swear by God's name, because then He might expect you to do something for him. So she always swore by milk. I felt very enlightened.
"Milk," she'd mutter whenever I forgot to hang up the laundry, "I've raised a useless child." Or, sometimes it was more like, "Milk! Jessie, get outta that tree, girl!" Things like that.
People would always look at us strangely, and not because Mama and I looked so different. We'd be in the store and Mama would be muttering "milk" at the oddest times, and I'd be standing on the other side of the aisle with my hands hiding in the edges of my coat pocke
I will not apologize because I knew you
when your own ghosts turned their backs to your weeping
or because I thought I could love the bird-shaped organ
calling from inside your chest
or because
I clipped its stubborn wings
when I realized I had been wrong.
I am not sorry for it.
But listen, Victor:
I'm sorry I remember a time
when we were beautiful, our bodies
made luminous by the bitter light collected in our lungs
like ash,
the atmosphere shaking violently as it
sank
into our displaced skeletons.
We could not recall
our own skin.
I'm sorry I called out for you
in the dark
when no one else was there to hear,
each shaken syllable making a