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Who’s that, can’t you see it’s only A matter of time, and seeds everywhere, A red ochre on rough white rocks, If she distrusts his smile, look, her sky bites When handling trees, or limbs —But words have nothing to do with it, Words, her stale bread, her damaged goods, yes, They can’t bite a
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Mom’s salad smells like hands enslaved by black earth Bones are hidden deep in the garden Mom’s salad smells of nothing and the sun doesn’t rise Rains in the sky have learned patience Silence has been reinvented in the kitchen And the threshold is overgrown with moss-cemetery Mykyta Ryzhykh is an author from Ukraine, now
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Nose-ringed neo-Medusa reclines on a cloud of cord-corpses. The hairy wires and wiry hairs are disconnected from the sockets that she gathers under soft eyelids. Her fringe repels their magnetic pull, and she is waiting for more wires, more and more wires, to come and be petrified. Sam Waldron is a writer and teacher in
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Oily window, whistling steel, pages ditto on the knit-knot twill, a sip of tea between two countries, and forty years of this free will ─ flaked camellia with a pour of milk, that phone call peeled you, earth’s end dwelt, in one language I drink, swallow in another, exerted this love, from cover to cover.
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for GPG– an Angel of the Arts Born into the valley of the blue moon nestled between twin orbs that illumined the gloaming of December’s sky— Shangri-La was there, the crook of mother’s arm breath singing against her breast, cradled ears attuned to first paradise you carried her song through years of days, diapasons of
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He stood by the bus shelter outside Tesco Metro as if he were standing on a red carpet. Tesco Metro was next door to Poundland so this bit of the street was always busy. He smiled if he caught anyone’s eye, an appealing smile if slightly naïve. His thick, slickly-oiled, slightly greying hair gleamed in
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(1) We would like to go into town, today being Sunday, a worthy day among the others to do so, and we only go into town when Uncle Henry takes his medication. There is a problem. Uncle Henry won’t take his medication again. We have tried. After we returned from service this morning, Cousin Emmanuel greeted
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If you catch my tears, you will find them heavy, like the water in basins you carried from the village well at dawn, your shadow stretching across the red earth. You were young then, the air cold against your hands, your arms taut from lifting. You carried water not for yourself, but for others—always for others. You may say I have been cruel, that I
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a flutter in the hollow of the chest neither bird nor butterfly but something softer something less sure of its wings the words you want to say rest at the edge of your tongue with waves that tickle and rise but never crest silence’s still a language of its own the only one you can
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rapture precedes rupture proceeds to definition by division lover / beloved to the ma the ma tics of loss Bob Carlton (@bobcarlton3.bsky.social) lives and works in Leander, TX.
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The Penelope Review 