It’s dark out It’s cold out Any moment now the sun might come out But i can still hear the sound of people moving The sound of people struggling The sound of people trying their best to live in this harsh society I thought i wasn’t getting much sleep these days These people don’t sleep at all I lay in my bed My body devoured I lay there staring up to the ceiling I think to myself It must be freezing cold outside How can those people have the motivation to go out at this time I feel a chill down my spine Somethings not right but i don’t know what I think eating a snack would solve the problem I stand up and go look for some food I sit down with all the food i scavenged A tuna can, some leftover chicken and some ramen Todays hunt was successful i thought I will make it my mission to finish this as fast as i can I dig in quickly I eat ’til there is nothing left except the last chicken leg After this i can finally go to bed with a full stomach I pick it up And I.. Beep beep beep… wake up
Injury to insult
The only time i insult someone is when I get insulted, that’s why you should Add injury to an insult You have to stand up for yourself When you insult them Make sure to injure them as well And don’t just minorly injure them Permanently damage them So they don’t have to come to school So that they don’t have to all this nasty homework I wish I don’t have to come to school anyways I’m not sure about you But personally i was taught to never take any disrespect from anyone Me personally, i would have to add injury to insult
School
I wish that it ended. She keeps talking and talking. I’m not listening, who is? Nobody listening there, all sleeping. School is such a waste.
I wish that time stopped. I never thought it was fun. Schools should host more parties. We stayed there until 9. It ended in a flash.
I wish that he didn’t. Throwing that beautiful ramen away. I’m inside the school starving. While he wastes that ramen. My poor beautiful delicious ramen.
Andrew Ban is a student attending an international school in South Korea. He loves writing in his free time, and his other hobbies include cross-country and bike riding. He has recently published in Inlandia: A Literary Journal, Dunes Review, The Elevation Review, Rigorous and Mortal Magazine.
Eyes reflecting the flickering of the lanterns waiting for the ringing of the doorbell and the tapping of heels. The white tail swirls, catching in the branches, while snowflakes dance outside, flying in the wind. raindrops drumming a lonely tune on the splintered wood.
Enchantment
Frosty December evenings were filled with whispers of Santa’s sleigh, cutting through the midnight sky as I looked out the window, eight years old, convinced I could see the shimmer of Santa’s sleigh streaking across the stars, hearing the jingle of the bells outside our window. Red stockings were hung with glitter, presents wrapped in green. “Children see magic because they look for it.” I looked for magic in the half-eaten cookies and a thank you note from Santa written in loopy script, hope for a jolly man in a red suit to arrive and for red-nosed reindeers to whisk me away.
With every year the sparkling lights become a decoration; I no longer force myself awake, straining to hear the sound of sleigh bells on the roof. Instead the spark remains in the laughter of the children, gifts being unwrapped, and the sound of Christmas carols lightly whispering childhood enchantment. Magic is never gone; it is hidden beneath red carpets on silent, starry Christmas lights, waiting to be found again.
Midnight Sky
cutting through the dimming stars as we looked out to the open, searching for hope in the cold air and dark sky and the sound of cheerful tunes lightly whispering for innocence Dreams are never gone; they are hidden beneath the grass on silent, starry summer days
Lanterns flicker over the Han River market, casting pools of beer across the dancing stalls.
Fresh-baked hotteok and grilled mackerel accompany the vendor’s yells.
Karen Lee is a high school from South Korea and currently attending school in Virginia. She has an unquenchable passion for both writing and drawing. In preparation for her future academic endeavours, she is diligently compiling her writing portfolio and has recently received an acceptance to Iowa Young Writer’s Studio, a distinguished programme that identifies and nurtures emerging writing talent.
Earlier, my village lane, Accompanied by the gentle breeze, Was the haven, For the tired traders and tillers To resume their chores.
Earlier, the lush green field, Bordered by dahlia blooms, Was the seat For the crying, lone lads To attain stamina, smile for play.
The shades of sal-trees, Dancing with the chirping mynas, Provided shelter For the overburdened parents To barter their traumas for new errands.
But now the lane, The green field and the sal-trees Brood for sheltering The honest statesmen, administrators To adopt corruption and dishonesty.
Bimal Kishore Shrivastwa, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at Degree Campus Tribhuvan University, Biratnagar, Nepal. An anthology of his poems is published from Litlight Publication, Pakistan. Other poems from Mr. Shrivastwa are published from the UK, USA, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Besides teaching, Mr. Shrivastwa loves indulging in anything creative.
Rejoice or dislike, detest or love the way this world works, You can think whatever your internal soul says. No matter even if the absolute reality is denied by everyone, It will remain the same and doesn’t need fabricated support.
Agree or disagree, whatever you want to do, Here, the arena is highly rooted in fabricated relative reality. Fabricated reality supports fabricated epistemology, And fabricated epistemology brings delusive humanity.
Fabrication dilutes the reality of changing absolute reality, For what it strengthens its inner monarch— To create an even more practical yet delusive understanding of the world.
Many dark souls are likely to be hidden within this fabricated world, This world— where the golden sun emits the black rays. But the world with absolute reality that we merely have time to dive in, is unbound in our fabricated relative reality.
And this world, with fabricated realities, May be shielded by the computer assimilation. Or a dream of somebody else’s, from where we can never come out, Because we might not actually exist.
Rajendra Ojha (Nayan) is a Nepalese poet, philosopher, social researcher, social worker, and EU-certified trainer. He also served as a citizen diplomat for three months under the ‘Ministry of Population and Environment’ in 2018 in Switzerland for the diplomatic program of the Minamata Convention, which was held in Geneva, Switzerland. Poems and philosophical writings of Rajendra Ojha have been published in various national as well as international literary journals from Nepal, the U.S.A., India, China, Russia, Spain, Myanmar, England, Greece, and Pakistan in both Nepalese and English. He has also published two anthologies, ‘Through the World’ (a collection of experimental poems) and ‘Words of Tiger’ (a collection of philosophical and psychological poems), in 2011 and 2019, respectively. Mr. Rajendra Ojha has been honoured by two major prestigious awards named ‘Asia’s Outstanding Internship Solution Provider Award 2020/21’ and ‘Dadasaheb Phalke Television Award 2023’ respectively for his work as a ‘Social Researcher’ as well as a ‘Social Worker’ (activities related to social responsibility), respectively in 2021 and 2023.
Away from my family, my home, my community, I live under the spell of this ethereal, hazel-eyed woman, swayed by her deific exquisiteness, in a small, abandoned cottage near the woods. Her identity is unknown. But mine altered from a fierce hunter to a roamer, striving with vapourish dreams.
One day I pursue her into the woods with my loyal horse, unnoticed. She stops by a river. I climb up a nearby tree to get a better glimpse of her. As she bathes in the cool river water, I witness her supernatural abilities—alternating as a part woman and a doe. The body of a female with hooves instead of feet. A fruit from the branch, where I positioned myself, drops on the ground. She startles, looks up. On perceiving me, she transforms rapidly into a deer, her eyes glaring with a just-before-storm atmospheric look, and within seconds, starts running.
I chase her on horseback, in tune with her speed, under the cerulean sky—among orangish-yellow flare, spectral, with white ribbons scattered here and there. Her reddish-brown body is now a fleece of pearls, her hooves glowing like lightning, setting the path ablaze on the green mantle of grass moving along the rhythm of her body, while the trees are stationed afar as forest guards. Her tail rises, sticks up like a white flag; her glittering, palmate antlers carry the sun along, as she leads me across emerald, tranquil glades and meadows. Her stance taut, chest swollen with pride, steps electrical.
With a divine grace, she heralds the incoming of a newborn. Storming the agrostis pastures beneath her feet like a restless ocean under the clasp of turbulent waves, she continues darting speedily, while a fawn emerges from her posterior and feebly lands onto the blooming yellow gorse and bracken. Being unusually strong, the baby with a spotted coat almost instantly stands up and follows his mother who promptly licks him clear of the birth fluid. On giving birth to a new life, I notice the gentleness back in her body, her eyes oozing warmth of the mother earth and care of the Nature for the young one.
The earth dressed in jade welcomes the regeneration in a lively spirit—leaves rustling, flowers bowing, branches prancing, while the wind spins a cool gossamer cloak about us. Noticing me at a short distance, the doe and the fawn turn their faces upward, and as if alerted by some inconspicuous signal, they prepare themselves for the run. I imagine her for the last time as a maiden, now newly blossomed into a mother, her eyes like the luminous dawn cascading into unvoiced emotions. Jaded with inexplicable arousals within me, my viperish self brawls for release.
“Who are you? What do they call you?” The fawn asks me, his beautiful brown eyes expectant with kindness and inquisitiveness.
“I’m the earth, the water, the forest, and…” I pause, look above and continue, “the dark,” as the purplish-grey, translucent screen laminates the sky.
Sreelekha Chatterjee’s short stories have been published in various magazines and journals like Flash Fiction North, Friday Flash Fiction, Borderless, The Green Shoe Sanctuary, Usawa Literary Review, The Wise Owl, Storizen, Five Minutes, 101 Words, BUBBLE, The Chakkar, The Hooghly Review, Bulb Culture Collective, Prachya Review, Creative Flight, Literary Cocktail Magazine, and in numerous print and online anthologies such as Fate (Bitterleaf Books, UK), Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul series (Westland Ltd, India), Wisdom of Our Mothers (Familia Books, USA), and several others. She lives in New Delhi, India. Facebook/X/Instagram
The brain itself is not a muscle If you never bothered Its ok to not be ok It’s a selfie obsession
Think Fast
You only get one try Three nights as the sun shines The birds have left the trees The light bores onto me Ain’t no magic tool to fix it To call it quits or destiny
Immersed Over
Smells bloom when the bright, sunny sunflowers shine hot people happy tourists in a photo day view narrowly wafted in that floral breeze with Bees around the Crowd a providing towering shading visitors from the sun’s fragrance tree skyscrapers’ collecting a swarm of breathtaking looks The nectar of an album immersed over
Pei-Chen Ng is a student of poetry based in California. She continues to hone her craft through workshops and community writing groups. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys painting and swimming, finding solace and inspiration in these creative and physical activities.
In the beginning, man coined poetry respecting a heavenly father: an artistic God. Spurred by vanity; in His once upon a time, was His happy ever after… Emerging from countless chrysalides of His own potentiality, He awakens, immaculately conceived from a motherlode of myth. Top filled, to a blindingly bright brim, with youthful vigour. Like a frolicking March calf, fey amongst the buttercups, eschewing boredom at the solid foundation of His consciousness. There, awaiting imagination, He pants impatiently, exuding jealous desire, while deep in His fiery bowels, time chugged, & monadic humours giggled: primed, as bashful as a quixotic firing squad in love… His heart, a vast pumping powerplant oozing light, space, & free association, EXPLODED! Spinning surreality, flung outward, unto a notionally unbounded infinity. Behold! A stream of seminal consciousness; the shape of things to come… In these first moments before true knowledge of Good & Evil, claws or defect, preceding the un-tabulated fall of original incompetence- God stands, insanely beautiful, as tactless as a scintillating orgasm. Blood erecting His crumpled form, the translucent membranes, of His quadrifid ears, stiffening into divine configurations. Holy lugs flap a whispering atmosphere & in response a terrible wind arises, billowing thru the humid fundamentals of a prehistoric age typified by inertia. Beating clouds of mathematics from His trouser cuffs; so aroused is He, that sunlight, resembling thick-cut marmalade plasma, shines out of His bottom. God raises His head, His teeth chatter, His toes curl, His magic tail frisks- thus, attentive to an unravelling knot of whims, & fancies, He speaks! Clearing His throat of polystyrene, & bubble wrap… Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmm, He says. Let there be such a thing as a Heap! And a Drawback! Let there be Fragrances, Mirabelles & Destinations! Herbs & Hubs! Inflorescences & Osculations! Gardens, Fountains, Coronas, Shrews, Indignations, Hippopotami, Magnoliales, Ginkgoales, & Chlamydomonases! AND LET THERE BE ME! Incapable of abnegation, or unselfishness, with a hop, skip, & a jump, He ascended into a primordial haze of soft purple skies, flying for joy, around His gibbous moon, He handcrafted from smelly green cheese- artisanal haughtiness was God’s natural element, alack, insufferable conceit fostered the inception of His sticky end. As performative aeronautics created He then: the Barrel Roll, & the G-Turn. The Scissors, the Split S, & the Immelmann Manoeuvre, the Jink, the Aileron Roll, & the Victory Loop. Then God U-turned, downwards, from the superfluity of possibility. With hysterical passion, He invented the Out of Control Nosedive. He saw the base of His consciousness, beckoning His steep descent. He adjudged that it was bonkers, but good, & chiefly risk-free. He witnessed antelopes’ gracile scatter over the spilling pampas, the misty mountains’ crumpled satin spines, the wildly spread canvas of everything; tantalised, He viewed, the widening darkness of His own sly shadow, materialising to fill- the horizons cup, within which He formulated infidelities, trust issues et seq., money lenders, mercenaries, monarchic territory, subjects, compound interest; environmental catastrophe, pruch & plunder. Doubt rooted in gripping niches, cheek by jowl with disaster, as toxic propagandas spewed from jagged clefts. At this point He devised wrath, transference, coercion, & metastasizing violence. He produced tumbrils freighted with condemned souls bearing second thoughts, stressors, disillusionments, despairs, fear cum trembling onanism; furthermore, the horrified imagination of posterity also seemed like a reasonable idea. Irony, art, metaphysics, & state sponsored religiosities occurred to Him too, just in time to be deferred, yet in vain, as He hardly hit the final line of His poem. (This one)
Evan Hayexists in Britain & rather than follow spurious leaders – over the years he’s intermittently found it therapeutic to write out various thoughts, feelings & ideas as short stories to be examined, considered, & interpreted by clinical practitioners who may be able to offer him professional psychological assistance.
You can find more of Evan’s work here on Ink Pantry.
Sent from my iPhone whilst dieting, a cosmetic enterprise divulged herewith to vindicate this effete 9-point-font
Sent from my iPhone relieving myself in a client’s water closet, clad head-to-toe in hardwearing mustard coloured corduroy, while finetuning pianofortes along the Cotswold Way; pitched perfectly- thus, forgo superfluous middots my dear confrère
Sent from my iPhone amidst a senior moment, so with all due respect Missy- overlook any spelling mistakes & spare me from grammatical criticisms
Sent from my iPhone iTyped with iThumbs: correspondingly, I’m implying one’s recipients sanction brevity, & furthermore, absolve my random spelling gaffes, or irregular punctuation
Sent from my iPhone as one melancholic constituent of an illiberal, self-inflicted Kafkaesque Concentration Camp, wherein fellow inmates doth foster conformity, stasis, & drudgery: this lame text transposes apathetic listlessness
Sent from my iPhone whilst flogging schtrops inside a NW-London eruv: it’s not just some unwarranted clever Dick legal trick, conceived to avoid rabbinical rules
Sent from my iPhone: metabolically struggling to project winning performances that will increase quarterly sales volumes by 20% in accordance with an inflexible corporate strategy; hence, excuse one’s justified anxieties, spelling mistakes etc.
Sent from my iPhone binge drinking Dr Pepper (without any valid prescription or exemption from tooth decay), what’s the worst that can happen?
Sent from my iPhone scunnered by 5-decades-of-wage-slavery: forgive self-pity
Sent from my iPhone having been curtly advised to place personal feelings aside whilst learning for a fact, that I’m not receiving bonuses I’d quite reasonably imagined I deserved; now, apparently, I need to envision our trading team’s big objectives first & foremost- so prithee, friend, tolerate these narcissistic tears
Sent from my iPhone- currently enduring trouble & strife, shackled & chained to my missus, as she tirelessly seeks ever more inventively onerous opportunities to break hard rock’s together- shoot me!
Sent from my iPhone whilst navigating from wife to girlfriend (via a stopover with concubines), onto one’s transgender lover: have a heart cock, do excuse brevity &/or insinuated STDs
Sent from my iPhone undefended as I have my undershirt lifted in the infamous Cock Ring Nightclub; excuse double-Dutch spelling (gasp my arse, how exciting)!
Sent from my iPhone while I’m being digitally probed-cum-prodded royally by Prince Hisahito of Akishino (this imperial boy’s a rough little bugger); pardon me for inscrutable Japanese sexting
Sent from my iPhone perched painfully upon a spinning fickle-finger-of-fate; so rhetorically, excuse me all over the place why don’t you?
Sent from my iPhone inspired by Bruno Manser: get naked FFS, camouflage your face, start blow-piping lumberjacks (excusebrevity, bad spelling, & punctuation)
Sent from my iPhone seeking portals to deeper connections with the essential sphere, & sentience of our planet; feel my extenuating material shortcomings, seen?
Sent from my iPhone during black mass at an agrestic coven- until next time: merry-meet, merry-part, & merry-meet again fellow pagan xx
Sent from my iPhone endeavouring to neutralise negativity by way of palliative creative catharses e.g., ‘meaning’ in the form of poesy, etchings, a jolly song or jig.
Sent from my iPhone riding a crested warthog, bareback thru dense spires of foxgloves: if this fugly pig’s day isn’t enriched, excuse one’s casual animal cruelty
Sent from my iPhone running naked across our neighbourhood common, closely pursued by energetic police community support officers (ignore typos, & brevity)
Sent from my iPhone while wanking excuse typos, brevity, & spilt spunk stains
Sent from my iPhone as I’m dishonourably discharged from my internship with a local coastal Edelweiss Pirates Group, excusebrevity, spelling, &/or punctuation
Sent from my iPhone at home alone, listening to Carmina Burana on full blast; my leggy wife Carla’s literally gone berserk, incinerated one’s candid apologia, before running off, & leaving me: does this condone typos punctuation or disorientation?
Sent from my iPhone reflecting belatedly on my wastrelsy & unforgivably bestial behaviour, increasingly concerned that an attendant, unmitigated public shame, shall long outlive my private trials & tribulations
Sent from my iPhone immersed in fever dreams, presently nailed inside a coffin buried beneath a chalk cavern near West Wycombe alongside supple sources of terror of unknown character, & extent, with only 9% of phone battery remaining, plus perhaps another hour’s oxygen (I know I don’t have to explain myself to you, but I feel rather inclined to do so)- if I ever do dig myself out, I’ll respond fully tomorrow: but for now- thanks for keeping me au-courant with your debauches. Please excuse absurd typos, farce, tragedy et al
Evan Hayexists in Britain & rather than follow spurious leaders – over the years he’s intermittently found it therapeutic to write out various thoughts, feelings & ideas as short stories to be examined, considered, & interpreted by clinical practitioners who may be able to offer him professional psychological assistance.
You can find more of Evan’s work here on Ink Pantry.
A Tuesday like the last, sauntering not jogging after peddle-bikes with hope dangling from a green stick. Forever it stretches in the distance, far from my grasp, yet always flickering, refusing to merge with the night.
A cycle repeated, the same street never forged in memory. Despair pooling and festering like weeds, fungus, and disease. Feet blistered with miles forgotten. The blinding glimmers and aspirations that leave a view forever unpainted, wasting in thick blue light.
But all wells run dry and all memories retire. Look here, look now, travel the coast with your gaze. Breathe the yellow and amber scorching the waning sky. All is reset by the morning.
How do I mourn the living?
It’s not your body or flesh that has decayed, It’s my ability to stand next to you. It’s the conversations weighted in your favour, a son who carries his father.
But how do you mourn a heart that beats twenty miles away? Do I throw dried petals to the earth, clinging only to the good? Do I walk across the sand where my footprints once lived within yours and drown in the tainted memories?
Whatever it takes, I have to mourn you, not because you can’t change, but because you won’t. I have to grieve while you live, accepting that one day the guilt will fill every ounce of my being, when I have to mourn you for real.
Benjamin Parker is a poet based in North Wales with works published in publications such as ‘The Uncoiled’, ‘Free Verse Revolution’, and ‘Nawr Mag’. Benjamin graduated with First-Class Honours in English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University and is now studying an MA in English Literature.
Let the light pass by you first time around. Take nothing in. There may be windows of which you are not aware, with marks on them you do not want
to hear about. Climb into a car late at night & let it take you where you do not want to go. Give nothing away. Not yet. Let the light come round
on a later sweep & then step out into it. Tell all that is relevant to this second position. There is a certain liberation to it, but you still retain your secrets.
The implicit burden of discourse
Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. Be warned that those who profess such a doctrine are themselves practising the deceit they con-
demn so much. Contradiction usually only exists between two statements, occasionally within the one. Here there is clearly one with no contradictions. How to
banish resemblance? Any higher pipe lacks coordinates despite a certain attention to forms & cere- monies; & even about this ambi- guity, I am ambiguous. Give to a
woman the knowledge of the forms & its implicit burden. The polished surface will then throw back the arrow. Thus the spirit of politeness exists in some form in all countries.
Sources: This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette (1860) by Florence Hartley
Profiler
Claimed he could categorize a person through a random selection of their words. Put some together for him. Was assessed as being an unmarried male between the ages of twenty & thirty-nine, white, of average intelligence & with a childhood spent masturbating whilst I tortured small animals. I fit the profile of a serial killer. Am left wondering which is the more inexact science, poetry or profiling, & extremely glad I didn’t show him one of my really dark pieces.
Mark Young was born in Aotearoa New Zealand but now lives in a small town on traditional Juru land in North Queensland, Australia. He has been publishing poetry for sixty-five years, & is the author of over seventy books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, memoir, & art history. His most recent books are Melancholy, a James Tate Poetry Prize winner, published by SurVision Books (Ireland) in March 2024; the May 2024 free downloadable pdf to your scattered bodies go from Scud Editions (Minnesota, USA); & One Hundred Titles From Tom Beckett, with paintings by Thomas Fink, published by Otoliths (Australia) in June, 2024. His TheMagritte Poems will be coming out from Sandy Press (California) in late 2024.
You can find more of Mark’s work here on Ink Pantry.
