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.
‘All habits are tinged with sadness, / for being habits.’ Paul Theroux
During pre-dawn silence, no longer part of noisy families, greeting another day released from night’s hobgoblin dreams, he reads mostly depressing news with derivative sub-headings. He tackles delivered newspapers in the same sequence after removing glossy feature sections like a rich man ignoring a beggar – Epicure, Money – that sometimes slither unwanted to his floor. Ritually, he begins with the front pages’ clamour, then sports from the back, saving word puzzles he completes nonchalantly until last. Serious reading, a cello’s sumptuous notes enhancing his mood sometimes, comes later in the day.
His coffee brewed in a pot the same as he sees in favourite movies, those with brave direction and storylines, he sips from the same mug, its handle missing, stirred the same number of times, rattling lightweight pages, some filled with ads. Loathing advertising since youth, its chief crimes banal repetition and boneheaded appeal, this irony is not lost on him. He could catch radio news afoot to counter chores’ tedium, or when driving, ditto with his phone attending to life’s quiet desperation, yet he reads newsprint days into weeks, months and years uncaring what narrow minds think, of him or anything else.
Wide reading spurs recollection. He lowers a paper or book to his lap reminded of old haunts he falls into again, street by street, fizzing along vaporous memory’s fraught trails where the splendour of scenes like cherry blossom didn’t even exist in the imagination. Only church bells chiming on Sunday mornings offered an approximation of beauty. He hears their idiom, tawdry yet sweet, redundant now, so elegiac, and relatives’ voices, sees his classrooms’ faces. Some names hover just beyond reach, as do smells he wants to breathe once more. Feeling like a character in one of his books he time travels over and again. Those harsh precincts remain fertile for him but they are all changed of course, gentrified now.
He collects what amounts to a muse carnival. Although being overcrowded with gewgaws instead of people, he can’t resist op shops and market stalls, their ridiculous bargains. One favourite site, within a fenced off rubbish tip, is on an island where pre-loved items left by locals and holidaymakers are displayed in a tin shed by volunteers. To the sound of seagulls’ cries you can leave your own unwanteds and/or help yourself to others’. Hats, clothes, board games, wetsuits, a beautiful statuette suffering a broken ankle, Mozart on vinyl, curios and chronicles, even damaged stained glass imbued with classical hues, from the gimcrack to the magical, are free.
Convincing himself he is not addicted, just obsessive, he moves his treasured trash around, but not much. Glancing in certain dusty directions he sees its artful reflection in mirrors. He has found an oil painting, its canvas lumpy, possibly a pentimento, and a watercolour, both by unknowns, and famous books written long ago that he should, and probably won’t, read again. Other relics from cobwebbed lofts and musty chests of drawers remain, as he does, freighted with keeping everything unchanged living alone on the plains of sorrow. Like the band playing on the doomed Titanic this trove comforts, so too, his coffee and memory accompanied newspapers that contend with his awareness of incomprehension’s replication, a kind of hideous virus.
Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, Honest Ulsterman, Offcourse, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
You can find more of Ian’s work here on Ink Pantry.
where is the sky from where are the drops of silence from where are the freckles of the mirror from where are the human silhouettes of the scream from where are the silent indignations of the apple wind from where are the woollen night milky lips of the cemetery from under my iron blanket-eyelid
cycle of return grass sings glass hurts bones crunch ears shrink leaves cry hands pray bush rises and forest opens autumn rain
the birds’ needles go to sleep in the cherry tree and they wake up on the branches of falling leaves
the look opened the night cries so the pupils meet another dead suicide
my hands dream of dying as a hydrangea
sleep can’t sleep quiet don’t keep quiet speak lips are dry drink river is dry eat stomach burst die it’s too late the cemetery is asleep
Mykyta Ryzhykh has been nominated for Pushcart Prize. Published many times in the journals Dzvin, Dnipro, Bukovinian magazine, Polutona, Tipton Poetry Journal, Stone Poetry Journal, Divot journal, dyst journal, Superpresent Magazine, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Alternate Route, Better Than Starbucks, Littoral Press, Book of Matches, TheNewVerse News.
Nuanced woo sleeves the trees absolutely, limbs, trembling arabesques, re-enacting their valedictive wave-shrug to April.
Constellations of light-green stars allay the grey disposition: blazed artifice erasing rafts of winter entropy.
Feathered seraphim inhabit the grove’s ethereal umbrella (abstention from fussy havoc not optional), daft sanctuary for the ephemeral.
Great Blue Heron
Look, I want to love this world as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get to be alive and know it.
—Mary Oliver, ‘October’
Busy inhabiting my world— blazing car, radio blather, coffee buzz that wouldn’t last—
I somehow caught a left-hand glimpse, so quick I didn’t see you flinch, yet so outstanding, you could’ve been
a plastic cousin to the prank flamingos that another morning enthralled my neighbour’s lawn.
Stark still, ankle-deep in that transitory water, only the one side, one-eyed,
wide as disbelief, you looked just like you looked, posed in the Natural History Museum,
1963: for again, all those slender angles, the spear of your bill,
that deathless intensity marking your stick-form way, only now in a mid-May puddle poised
between the intersecting rushes eastbound, 196, southbound, 31. And you, still doing
what you’ve never known you do, still finding your life wherever you find yourself—
while I, still fixated as always on finding myself, as if that were to find a life,
saw again how wildly I am alive— how I always want to know it.
When the Water and Sand Dance
When the water and sand dance, whence (whence?) their music? What is that music? What sense, what composition surfs itself in? Yes, the water—its bazillion droplets, the mini-jetsam line it etches. Yes, the sand—its gazillion granules, the sponging gauze-and-muslin of them. But what but mind imagines there’s music? Perhaps the end of your century also hauled along its ton of sadness as did mine. And perhaps the years have finally worn it down to barely nothing of your day-to-day. The sun and shadows play again their fetching fine effects. The moon and birds and even dying leaves relieve your smallest residue of gloom. But mind—must it remember anyway? And is it therefore grateful, more than happy in that moment, to cue its private music, then tune your needy ear to every measure when the water and the sand dance?
Walking the Beach, We Show Our Ignorance about Stars, Constellations
before mentioning the dead ones mixed in, the snuffed ones, how they’ve guided the race, we figure, since long before the faintest flicker of a first-hand myth; but dead, even then, and now, this side of infinitude, this side, let’s say, of Gilgamesh, how the discerning words of the long gone still illumine our forever primitive way.
Gazpacho for the Soul
How much better it is to carry wood to the fire than to moan about your life.
—Jane Kenyon
How much better even to muster a quick sample of what is better:
*
Finding the old apples scattered out back for the deer vanished while you slept.
*
Leaving the lit tree up well past New Year—a new who-cares tradition.
*
Not only seeing but hearing your granddaughter’s Instagram giggling.
*
Road-tripping to Chicago, those skyscrapers arising over the Ryan.
*
Doing burger Thursday at the What Not, stressed-out Will for your server.
*
Reading at 3 A. M. with your reassuring spouse, who can’t sleep either.
*
Cycling the back roads south of the new house, turning west toward the lakeshore.
*
Counting out haiku with your deep-brown-eyed daughter: re-frig-er-a-tor!
*
Switching from notebook to computer, suspecting a poem’s in sight.
*
Beating your fetching wife to the punch: Happy ‘Leventh Anniversary!
*
Having the silly luxury to reckon a best order for all that’s better.
True North
The lone crow on the lone pole where the weathervane used to whirl insinuates my need for misdirection.
He is an arrow of skittish attention, of scant intention: the cock and hop, the flick and caw toward anything
on the wind. Now angling east, now south by southwest, he designates with beak then disagreeing tail feathers,
with a lean-to and a shoulder scrunch, with an attitude from his beady black eye— as if he were ever the one to judge.
And once he’s spun like a pin on a binnacle past all points of some madcap inner compass— once the clouds have bowed to push on
and the grasses have waved their gratefulness— he unfurls the shifty sails of his wings, and the breeze relieves him of his post.
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching university writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, USA. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his work has appeared internationally in a wide variety of anthologies and journals.
You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.
