neighbourhood

i have walked these streets so long
reality filtered into pixels. 
sometimes i wish the world were a carousel,
lagging behind the changes
trying to hold onto its unblemished beauty
we want to preserve its soul
to watch old streets transform into new dreams
we want to be a part of this city

Garden

this is undignified,
this sprawl, this teetering stack,
these beautiful flowers are creased,
the windows are blocked,
the laundry is clean, i swear. i am clean, i swear.
just tired, just waiting.
i am a pile of me’s and it’s getting mixed up
and a little wrinkly
and if this goes on much longer
none of the me’s will pair with the good jeans
and then who will clean the garden?

and frankly i’ve been nauseous all summer.
maybe it was a premonition, some light foreshadowing,
i was dry heaving my way to now,
a threat building, like morning sickness,
only i’m giving birth to a real monster of a crisis,
one i certainly did not want.

it’s much easier to use my laundry as a metaphor,
because i cannot pick up my selves and fold them into a poem.
but i should put the pile away and dry them outside,
shouldn’t i?

Our Car is Totalled

There are no rental cars available.
The closest hotel is a 30 minute drive from
This exit.

                              i want to go home.
if we take this exit, we’ll be home in
like 20 minutes. is that okay?
                              my head presses against
        the forest green pillow.

We get out of the car.
Shorts.
I have shorts on.
     mom, i’m cold.

She hands me sweatpants.
Blood drips down her nose.

     she looks fine. why does mom have blood all over her nose?

We don’t know where the tissues went.
There’s no other car like ours.
What happened?

you need someone to call the police?
                                                            yes.
i don’t know who’s talking.
                              mom, what happened?
i ran over a deer.
                             is it okay?
no, it’s dead. it
died.

Nobody sounds normal.
Mom sounds weird.
The deer is dead.
That’s the saddest part.

Sigrid Kim is a student attending a high school in Virginia, where she actively engages in writing, drawing, and caring for her two beloved dogs, Oliver and Cooper. In preparation for her future academic endeavours, she is currently assembling her portfolio and has recently secured admission to Juniper’s Young Writers Camp and Sewanee.

Clumsy

Love, we stumble and shout,
Though we act like rivals, 
We trip over joy, giggle,
In the end, we realize, 
Aren’t we a joyful mess?

We Yell

love, we yell and hoot, 
jumbled up, all about now, 
who knew we’d bond everyday?

debate on top, no claim, 
a title, yet we win,  
all of it, no fight?

wild, loud fights, we laugh 
we find a way, laugh, 
so, who needed peace anyway?

though we act like foe, 
family feed me well, too,
ain’t love but a fête?

in the end, we know, 
with love and tangled path, 
ain’t we a happy muddle? 

love, we yell and hoot,
though we act like foes,
we find a way, laugh,
in the end, we know,
ain’t we a happy muddle?

Heartbreak Anniversary

Balloons once vibrant now sag in despair—
Are we mere whispers in desolate air,
Deflated joys linger; 
Guess the revelry was a mirage in the night,
They promised—now absent from sight.
Look around—solitude’s grip is tight.
Lifeless echoes of mirth that never was real,
Like spectres of a friendship, no warmth to feel.
Me, alone, with the deflated balloons forlorn appeal.

JK Kim is an ambitious student at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, VA. His interests lie in creative writing, particularly in short stories and poetry. During his free time, he enjoys playing golf and pursuing photography as a means of expression and inspiration.

The Tank

The mint-painted walls peel
And flower with Expo marker
Like fish, we flood the hallways
Schools of puny power
The tank runs out of oxygen,
And we float up for gasps of air
But gills are meant for water

Second Chances

I’ve gotten, I know,
Another thousand chances.
But on most days I breathe better,
I’m still holding on for life.
Sometimes God should give us more time.

Salad Without Dressing

Only you and I nibble on the salad.
Our sweat drips onto the napkin.
It leaves a salty trail.
The vegetables look so vibrant on the platter,
It paints over your pain.

Olivia Park is a high school student who loves storytelling. She enjoys writing poetry, short stories, and essays that explore themes of identity and the human experience. Olivia has been recognized in school literary magazines and local competitions. When not writing, she finds inspiration in art, music, and nature.

Defining Algorithms

The autumn colour warmth
needs to be reprogrammed.
The approaching winter equinox dictates
recipes for hearty soup connection.
Grey chill skies demand a closeness
absent in the other seasons.
Soon depth of winter will encapsulate
and the coding must be secure.

Prehistoric Allure

I am going back to the caves.
The cool dolomite calls me.
Autumn is a good time to go.
There’s a freshness in the breeze
and it is too early for the bears.
I need the Native American paintings
especially the one of the man and woman
cooking over the stone-ringed fire.
Last year while hiking, we found them.
I know you remember.
Love was strong then
and promises held so much hope.

No One To Hold Tonight

Most of the time
after a hard harvest,
it simmers
and spills over
like some
neglected Marina sauce
with dried red splotches
staining aluminum
until the need
for the through scrubbing
clean up.

But tonight
like a scalding broth
falling from the stove,
without logic or intent,
it just spews.
And the residue
is everywhere.

R. Gerry Fabian is an published poet from Doylestown, PA. He has published five books of poetry: Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts, Wildflower Women, Pilfered Circadian Rhythm as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound. In addition, he has published five novels: Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, Seventh Sense, Ghost Girl and Just Out Of Reach.

You can find more of Gerry’s work here on Ink Pantry.

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The Shared Apartment

My house-mate’s wallet was full of cash when he threw it at the sliding
sash, busting a hole, fragmenting everything with the glass.

Colder and colder draughts of Wednesday morning
ricocheted in a strumming bass thudding in with the glass.

The false gold halos of coins winked and plashed at our feet burying
into the shag-pile carpet’s tufts, permeating the room, needling it with glass.

We pulled blunt edged pounds, two and ten pence pieces out
from beneath the sofa and attempted vacuuming the glass.

He didn’t say anything much after that and I moved on a few months later.
The window between us becoming a crevasse shattering with glass.

The cellophane we stretched over the break frayed into thin and thinner
slivers like my memory of what we had sliding into a vanishing glass.

That apartment was in roughly in the middle of town, now cars
rush where we once slept in the room still cracking with glass.

Vote

Can one mark matter? Can one X
be a kiss and affirmation
crossing lips or a voting box?
Can one mark matter? Can one X
change thoughts, score the path people fix
do lives hinge on one decision?
Can one mark matter? Can one X
be a kiss and affirmation?

Fear is a Common Denominator

Stumbling through 5.30 AM
and clasping a Tupperware container –
instead of sleeping – I am saving a mouse

from my cats. It hunches, shivering
amongst looming furniture
fright’s seeds germinating
beneath its fur
scrabbling against the carpet.

I can’t tell it the domed plastic box
isn’t a steel trap where air will expire
spent breaths as blood filled chokes
or that the day will
not vomit scratched-up pain

I can only show it open
alley-ways mazing behind the street
and let it run from me
back to dank undergrowth.

Jenny is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. Her poetry is published in several printed anthologies, magazines and online poetry sites. Jenny lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats. You can read more of her poems at her website. 

You can find more of Jenny’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Chemistry, Controlled Chaos And Connection

I can feel you still ‘smiling’
when I (briefly) look away
… and you caught
my faint ‘stammer’
inside your delicate mouth
whilst I was explaining
the way my ‘insides’
dislodge and fall…
the very moment you awake
… and we conspire
over re-introductional kisses
… to neither dim ‘Trouble’
nor hide from its
… cRoOkEd pathway…
through the topsy-turvy Day.

He Killed Everything In His Garden
~ the short story which accidentally turned into a poem ~

Fingertips (slightly) bouncing
off piano keys a-tremble
at the edge of my nerves
… and the morning blackbirds
look the way double bass
strings sound with arco…
melting away heavy rainfall.

Sorry, I got distracted again
… here’s your chance
to do your jigsaw thingy
and fit an ‘imagery embrace’
snuggled right up
into my meandering thoughts.
What I like about you best
is that when I show you
my ‘nice side’
… you instantly reciprocate,
rather than… ‘Menu-Browse’.

“… Is the ‘Finger-walking’ cryptic?”
Pausing to answer
deflates MOMENTUM
… work it out yourself or stay
confused… my involvement stops.
“You’re mistaking ‘Garrotting’
for ‘Disembowelling’… is it
Lucy? Cool, send her my love.
It’s sort of like ‘Lexical-Gustatory
Synaesthesia’… I can taste
the smell of old lady beggar hands
which have been re-counting
pennies whilst clumsily drinking
Styrofoam cupped tea… whenever
she says the word ‘Cuddle’…
any other female and it
tastes like cherries, or cake dough.
No-no, I absolutely insist
… you take ‘All of this/that’…
I’m quite content with the Doorway.”


Top-heavy Indian Summer

I’m busy,
psychically
pebble-skimming
the late afternoon
… rippling
pockets of peace
and quiet
with my curiosity
and sideways view.
I’m not, exactly,
intruding,
more observing
with outside-the-box
perception.
Dipping my
inquisitive toe
into the rhythmic
pond water
which dwells
in-between
what’s yet to be said
… in answer…
to what has already
been spoken.


To The Root

The excavation was a lengthy operation,
to say the least.
The emotional support beams buckled daily.
Each cavern grew smaller in size…
as the throbbing pulse drew her down deeper.
There was a waterfall of thought, halfway in,
where a dim glow, I shan’t call it a light,
radiated melancholia,
and a strange, eerie, out-of-tune melody
strangled itself, over and over again,
to the background drumming heartbeat.
The shelf of regret, just below,
was unstable to both foot and hand holds,
and the moths of vertigo face-fluttered
in demented, blinding, fury.
At the very bottom,
she found the essence of herself, at last…
rocking back-and-fore,
upon the floor of a hut
made of the bones of memory.
Cradling a snake to her breast,
which emanated a beacon of false hope,
whilst at the very same time,
devouring twice the prize it was deceptively giving.

Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, flash fiction and short stories published in hundreds of publications all around the world. He yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet. 

His novel “Crazy Like Emotion”, short story collection “Kicking Back Drunk ‘Round The Candletree Graves” and poetry collection “The Dark Side Of British Poetry” are all available from Close To The Bone Publishing.

the moon rises
a dog barks
a car drives over a broken tree branch

the branch cracks under the weight of the car

the moon rises
a dog barks

snap
snap

elastic broke

almost blinded him

when he looked out the window
all he saw was himself looking back

he cried a lifetime

then he laughed

words
i have no choice

they created me

eat
shower
work
supper
bed

no sex tonight

Grant Guy is a Canadian theatremaker, poet and visual poet and arts programmer. His theatre and performance have appeared in Canada, the United States and in Europe. He has published in hardcopy and online. He has visual poetry in the United States, Argentina and Brazil and in Europe. He is the recipient of many grants and awards.

The core of the self is a magnet
which pulls in the physical world
and the stuff of human nature,
good and bad.
Once trauma is caught there, it is hard to dislodge,
the power of the magnet being strong

In this space occupied by “I”
is sunlight, water, air and earth,
also a little child who remains worried and fearful,
petrochemical sludge,
viruses and bacteria,
a need to love and to be cherished
and a desire to avoid pain

In this space is pollen, sunlight dispersed in a different form,
and seed, infant plants,
who blow over high desert and grassland
past cows and squirrels
and fish finning in ponds.
In this space is intelligence
and strategies designed to enable survival
but which may actually sabotage survival
In this space are tools, ever more powerful,
with which we strive to dominate our world
In this space is art, and sensitivity

In this space is air,
sometimes still, or moving steadily or gusting,
or appearing as wind, at times fierce,
which carries spirit from the far corners of the past
into the space of the distant future
Our small parcels of light
meld with the brilliance that streams from our star
and our drops of water join the ocean

We may clothe those winds with fantasies of reincarnation
in which we are kings or queens or famous scoundrels
However hard we work to clear our minds,
sometimes we backslide
into bizarre, irrational ancient mythologies
because their fantastic fictions,
tailored to the human psyche,
ease pain and
give hope

But these fantasies
take us out of the here and now,
which is the only place one can be
Even the immortal soul is transient

Deadly pathogens and fatal hostilities
are fed by the greed, anger and delusion
which reside in all human hearts
We are like the Tasmanian Devil
When we feel threatened,
In this universe which, some claim, is made of love
we viciously bite each others’ faces

Like orange lava,
pollutants well up
to run uncontrollably downmountain
toward cities and towns
which fill with ash and sulfurous smoke

Meanwhile, the need to love and be loved
embraces all persons’ identical craving
and pain shatters against the jagged afflictions of others

Mitch Grabois has been married for almost fifty years to a woman half Sicilian, half Midwest American farmer. They have three granddaughters. They live in the high desert adjoining the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They often miss the ocean. Mitch practices Zen Buddhism, which is not a religion, but a science of mind (according to the Dalai Lama). He has books available on Amazon.

You can find more of Mitch’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Rites of Passage

Encountering grief is a rite of passage,
like love and yet unlike it,
for grief is a long time coming,
a tiger dancing in the dry grass,
our bullets are pills and sometimes we run out of them,
sometimes we play dead, hoping the tiger will go away,
sometimes we are tired of losing so much, we have nothing to
tempt or trade with grief, nothing to scare him away,
and grief takes no prisoners, has no calm, no qualms.
In our grief we speak of the dead so often now,
we wake them, we envy them, we sing them lullabies.

After the rain, there will be rainbows

Illness is like damping of wood
but once it dries, irrational hope will flicker,
with the confidence of candles
against raging stormy winds.
But damp birds don’t fly well.
So we sit and hope,
for hope is a waking dream.
We shiver to warm our bodies
and ask, for we can only ask, our bouncing heart
to settle, to brace for impact,
as we mould ourselves again, again begin
twig by twig, after the rain, when the nests are destroyed,
gone like the dead, gone like the wind.
We bring healing, twig by twig, for new nests and new hopes.

After the rain, there will be rainbows.

The watchers in the rye

No cow turns to see us pass,
or that distant running train,
we, holding hands, so that,
should we fall, we fall together.
We pass by where there was a yellow wood,
where now, a yellow building slants, stands.
We, white as snow, as death, as bones,
as birds’ eggs in nests who do not know
that the mother bird is dead, far away.
Dead like a plant in cosmic darkness.
We like statues, the scarecrows of the elegant house gardens,
eternally grave in all tricks of lights, watching
the all too familiar glint of the moon on broken glass,
on shallow eyes of broken people, the sick and sickening,
who once played hide and seek with us, sat with us in schools,
who we met at birthday parties and broke lunch boxes with,
who are taller than us now and their ears can’t hear us,

who we almost touch like the wind, and then refrain.

Dr. Vaishnavi Pusapati is a physician and poet, previously published in nearly 50 international literary journals and magazines such as Prole, InkPantry, Palisades Review, Dreich, among others).

Opposites

What
goes
together

but
opposites

like
bread
and
butter
pickles
and
olives.

Sweet Times

Snow
sifting
through
the
clouds

cooking
up
sweet
times

like
a
delicious
dessert.

What Beauty

What beauty is snow
anyway
but for children making
snow angels
snowmen and having
snowball fights,
while
adults stay warm by
the fireplace
drink hot chocolate or
have a glass of wine.

Danny P. Barbare resides in the Southeastern USA. He works as a janitor at a local school and writes poetry in the evening.