The Clasp by Sharon Olds
The Clasp by Sharon Olds She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds, we had been in the apartment two weeks straight, I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his face, again, and when I had her wrist in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a […]
The Borders by Sharon Olds
The Borders by Sharon Olds To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay […]
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds
The Arrivals by Sharon Olds I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack’s caress, dry and soft. I enter […]
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds
Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds How do they do it, the ones who make love without love? Beautiful as dancers, gliding over each other like ice-skaters over the ice, fingers hooked inside each other’s bodies, faces red as steak, wine, wet as the children at birth whose mothers are going to give them away. […]
Primitive by Sharon Olds
Primitive by Sharon Olds I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are savages. You come in with a bag, hold it out to me in silence. I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it and understand the message: I have pleased you […]
One Year by Sharon Olds
One Year by Sharon Olds When I got to his marker, I sat on it, like sitting on the edge of someone’s bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite. I took some tears from my jaw and neck and started to wash a corner of his stone. Then a black and amber ant ran […]
Crab by Sharon Olds
Crab by Sharon Olds When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She’d drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she’d ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She’d stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky […]
A Week Later by Sharon Olds
A Week Later by Sharon Olds A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school. And […]
1954 by Sharon Olds
1954 by Sharon Olds Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to […]
Winter by Shaunna Harper
She does not thaw in summer, her iced skeleton a visceral display of sapphire veins and pulses bolting in shock to the outskirts of her shores, splayed like a victim. She is perpetual frost, crying sharp diamond tears that leave chips across hard flesh like braille, like fallen teeth from a corpse; the sun bores […]
Twilight by Shaunna Harper
A prayer lifts itself from my mouth between tight teeth and soft lips, grows wings, leaves like a moth by the window trying to find the moon, sings, as the moist earth cools below. As always, twilight has come too soon. Lifted by light like a Chinese lantern, I watch the night sink, its star […]
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
The Other Half by Shaunna Harper Your lips are still on my lipstick. Your eyes are still on my eyeshadow brush. You’re still wearing my favourite shirt; go on, keep it, if you must. The bags you unpacked are under your eyes; see that drawing? It’s tattooed on your skin. All those lies I heard […]
Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper
Is that Christmas falling in your hair? I can taste your past lover’s countdown kiss, I can smell the coming year; it smells like this. I drink this season’s red wine serenade; drunken romance is bliss. Your light spots me through falling feathers and snow; the instruments pick themselves up, tangle, reminisce; the songs say […]
River by Shaunna Harper
River by Shaunna Harper You can’t tell a river which way to run. Trees flank his cerulean depths like soldiers, armed with sticks and leaves, ever-reaching, seizing, only to be swept aside. A river has no place to hide. He is never the same when he comes back; a little older, a little darker, carrying […]
Prelude by Shaunna Harper
Prelude by Shaunna Harper Our bed screams red, gutted, split, under weight of wonderings in my head; bruised like a throat, crushed by hungry lips, gaping like a wound, stunning. The walls are indented and cannot be mended, colour of your temper in blotchy black and blue, handprints sink between spine and sinew, hollow concave, […]
Passing by Shaunna Harper
They’ve strung up your face on canvas carved in glass across the city’s overpass. Your eyes are bulging mole-hills. Your hair is sprouting grass. In the backdrop of a cheap shop’s parking lot, a broken sign curls around your head like a halo; when winter comes you will sparkle with snow. Each fractured letter blinks […]
My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper
The beer has drowned itself in the cask; I’m pulling brown air for punters. The fridge is baring its teeth to my throat; its inner cold works wonders. I’m falling out of love with myself and rising into bad karma, slipping in circles into wrong holes, the maelstrom enfolding this drama. The house is talking […]
Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper
We jumped from the night and fell into the moon upside down in fractured dreams. He told me if I could picture it, I could live it. Reality is a broad market. He came with golden eyes, silver lips, quilted with satin like the finest-dressed mannequin. His puppet fingers dealt a card; a blow, hard. […]
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper
La Fleur by Shaunna Harper Shower rain settles on fine hair like dew, dying sunlight a halo aglow casting darkness in me, light over you. The evening is drifting with falling snow, pooling smooth marble into your pores, beautifying your every mistake, making miracles of your flaws. Autumn breathes its rustic applause as leaves once […]
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper
Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper My mind’s eye sweats a tear. Solitary, it runs to the mouth, as though dying for a taste of its own bitter fluid. The emotional effort is a waste. We watch like two friends as the hand scrawls its script, full stop bringing the final act to an end. […]
In Measures by Shaunna Harper
He sleeps in the hammock of a silken, silver scar that curls around my arm like a chain; a creature comfort, a ghostly appendage, finer than a spider’s web and visible only to me. This is where he lives. Where snow half-falls in unreachable diamonds, becoming hardened rain that wants to wound. Where the sun […]
Hidebound by Shaunna Harper
Lust, the most intimate season; short-lived, dissolving as ever into dust. The crest of a wave still rides the perpetual earth of our honeymoon, though the inner life of the stone erodes, suddenly not so sharp, tough like a dried-up heart. The memory loiters like a dangerous desire, but these days I no longer feel […]
For Someone, Somewhere, In Relation by Shaunna Harper
You hold your breath, stagnant, absent in the station, trains grumbling about leaving and about waiting, people passing, chattering about nothing they are actually thinking about; sex, cheap wine, finances, time, romances and of course, the weather. The flurry of snow at the entrance has nowhere to go but down. You observe the drama of […]
Ellipsis by Shaunna Harper
In love, in letters, subversive in meaning, emphasized in casual italics, from my mind to your fingers, from soft bone to paper, the ink lingers like oil smeared between blood and tissue. For you, over and over, from font to font with changing hands that grow in time, proposing my heart in offbeat rhyme, these […]
Chanson D’Amour by Shaunna Harper
The piano plays its parting score as you lift your case like a child and back out of the door. For a greedy second, just one, before we are done, I picture you in the bath. Dressed in my bubbles, skin wet in candlelight, totally emasculated and with childish delight, I never loved you more. […]
Book Leaf by Shaunna Harper
They tread between lines, hanging metaphors like rope, veined toes curled around loops like branches. They reach from depths to skies, scatter each other here and there like soft blessings, seeping like ink into paper. They press between pages like insects, intricate, frail, anorexic outbursts in perpetual shock. They dance off-beat like drunkards, ignorant of […]
Blue Period by Shaunna Harper
A blue period, right where your face should be, nature’s way of rekindling hurt, of rubbing cold dirt where none should be, swathed in false colour, melancholy. Blue spaces, engorged, intermittent oceans, the old faithful morning voice of regret; nature’s way of tipping the scales, those blue melodies where a lover’s warm voice should be, […]
Amoraphobia by Shaunna Harper
Your vowels pull reluctant lips into something shy, vague, like the shadow of a coy smile, linger like light across dark in dying eyes, the fierce final breath hitches in the throat somewhere between tension and laughter, the ecstasy that comes after, fills spaces in my bones that you used to dwell in with your […]
A Eulogy by Shaunna Harper
With smoke in my mouth and a wine glaze shimmering over my eyes like a river in the wind, I wait for this home to grow old. For the windows to stream tears as they imitate the rain, for the fruit in its bowls to turn to Fool’s Gold, for the cats, perhaps, to shed […]
Stir in Stillness by Shruti Talnikar
STIR IN STILLNESS Silent shimmers, silent shine Silent words & silence- mine Silent city, silent rush Silent me, silent blush Silent rains, silent clay Silence digs in-a silent play Today I wanna untie the lace of moroces Wanna bid bie evrey malacy that crosses Today I let my emotions play Today, I don’t wanna fix […]
Statistic by Shivam Pandya
A statistic maketh a man The man becometh a number. The track is long, winding, With numerous hurdles thrown in at will, And running, slaving on it, Are the zombies, toiling with an inked till. A statistic maketh a man The man becometh a number A blasphemy it is, on the track, To have an […]
Projector by Shreekumar Varma
in a hall where curtains crush the last sunrays, they wait in semi-silent stupor– hundreds, facing a white bright screen; kindred, as they share a dream. no-one notices me; the screen sparkles to life and the story begins, spouting from my eye through a magic ray slicing the night– image quickens and becomes life. i […]
Noe more unto my thoughts appeare by Sidney Godolphin
Noe more unto my thoughts appeare by Sidney Godolphin NOE more unto my thoughts appeare, Att least appeare lesse fayre, For crazy tempers justly feare The goodnesse of the ayre; Whilst your pure Image hath a place 5 In my impurer Mynde, Your very shaddow is the glasse Where my defects I finde. Shall I […]
Night At The Marina by Shreekumar Varma
He plucks a flower from her hair finds her soul embedded; “I’d rather have a flat for us, what will your father spare?” The waters crunch into the night soaking up a tremble, She takes his hand upon her cheek “I haven’t had a bite.” The moon is pale upon her smile; stomach gives a […]
Lord when the wise men came from farr by Sidney Godolphin
Lord when the wise men came from farr by Sidney Godolphin LORD when the wise men came from farr Ledd to thy Cradle by A Starr, Then did the shepheards too rejoyce, Instructed by thy Angells voyce, Blest were the wisemen in their skill, 5 And shepheards in their harmelesse will. Wisemen in tracing natures […]
Kumarakom (after the boat tragedy) by Shreekumar Varma
days after the drowning when companion villages raised the memory of their various dead, and boats and blame were re-examined, and officials packed up, exhausted, dredging out certificates and compensations; one evening when the wails had stilled the sky like ghost singers fading out, and the lamp reached the threshold like any other evening, the […]
Hymn by Sidney Godolphin
Hymn by Sidney Godolphin Lord when the wise men came from farr, Led to thy Cradle by a Starr, Then did the shepherds too rejoyce, Instructed by thy Angells voyce: Blest were the wisemen in their skill, And shepherds in their harmlesse will. Wisemen in tracing Natures lawes Ascend unto the highest cause, Shepheards with […]
Cloris, it is not thy disdaine by Sidney Godolphin
Cloris, it is not thy disdaine by Sidney Godolphin CLORIS, it is not thy disdaine Can ever cover with dispaire Or in cold ashes hide that care Which I have fedd with soe long paine, I may perhaps myne eyes refraine 5 And fruiteless wordes noe more impart, But yet still serve, still serve thee […]
The Grammar Lesson by Steve Kowit
The Grammar Lesson by Steve Kowit A noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does. An adjective is what describes the noun. In “The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz” of and with are prepositions. The’s an article, a can’s a noun, a noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does. […]
The Convoy by Stephenie Tucker
All goes dark, first sound, then sight. I look to see my men alright. Deafening silence in concrete rain, Distract me from the searing pain. All time stops and vantage ends, As I look upon my dying friends. Radio in and evac out, No time for tears between the shouts. Between the blood and shrapnel […]