Dilemmas

My earplugs irritate my ears.
What’s worse, I wonder,
three-fourths asleep,
the screaming on the street below
or the whispering on the road
to my brain?

Doug Sylver’s writing can be found in Drifting Sands, The Sun Magazine, The New York Times and Fixator Press, among other publications. He is a recently retired public high school teacher in Seattle.

 

Behind and in Front of the Fence

Three forty-two, cells, stirring

Five twenty and cells, slinking through the slits

Cells on cells, seven ten and seeping so,

The slits and the squares, feeling at the close and opening.

Cupping at the curves and the caveats, kissing indentations, incisions burrowed in the
soles,

Cells on cells, body double. Coursing through the sheaf, the layers on the layers on the
layers,

Humming bristle in a trickle chorus

Over cells and cells and peeling peat, the petrichor

Eight fifty-six and still never still, heather still abrasive and bending to another bend

Brushed upon and brushing back, daypack, stickleback, sticking to that raw moan, sticking to cells on cells, humid, hollow, nine and eleven, twelve, one, two, three forty-
two

Flo Fitzpatrick is an amateur writer from the North of England, whose work has been published in Bending Genres Journal and Hot Pot Magazine.

A line from Youssou N’Dour

My nose runs, eventually syn-
chronizes with the nearby Alle-
gheny River & the cable cars of
memory — the funicular railway

in Wellington, the Perugia People
Mover. I am enamored of carriages
that pass in the day, especially
those that pause at the same station,

pointing in different directions be-
cause it means the observation time
will be longer. My eyes run across
the passengers in the carriage beside

me, hoping to see aspects of myself
among them since it is often said we
recognize ourselves in others. & if I
do, I slide down the window & say to

them “Please accept these biscuits as a
small token of recognition, along with
a metal bookmark & a TOAD attack,
fresh from the Cambridge Dictionary.”

Mark Young’s most recent books are Alkaline Pageantry, published by Serious Publications in
September, 2024; & The Magritte Poems which came out from Sandy Press in October.

New Year’s Eve

If velleities have their way, I will  
conquer a country. Citizenship is
only for devotees of liberty and letters.
 
Prerequisites: Be yourself.
You’re beautiful with your ivories.
You’re beautiful without them.
 
We rubberneck only the rictus.
If dentures matter to you,
you will manage them.

Pablum? Reification?
Let me be.
I’m lit up.

Sanjeev Sethi has authored eight books of poetry, his latest being Legato Without a Lisp (CLASSIX, an imprintof Hawakal, New Delhi, September 2024). His poetry has been published in over thirty-five countries andhas appeared in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He lives in Mumbai, India.
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