My son thinks he’s seeing lightning bugs
for the first time.
He’s only four and doesn’t remember last July.
“Don’t try to grab them,” I say.
“Hold your hand like this.”
We stand by the cemetery fence.
I show him how to raise his palm up beneath them,
a pink platform floating up through the dark.
“These are big dipper fireflies. They dip. They swoop.”
I draw a “J” in the air.
“So, we catch them from below.”
He lands one, too hard, and laughs.
“Gentle. Don’t grab. Just watch.”
The little beetle turns a half circle and flies off.
“Can I keep one?”
“No. We don’t keep. We only visit.”
Out across the cemetery,
they are shining green and yellow on the graves.
We are growing old.
The Earth.
The nation.
The village of ghosts I call myself.
“Do they sting or bite, Dada?”
“No, sweetheart.”
Not in the way you mean.
Not in the way you mean.
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Days of yearning are over, that great longing, burnt into the arc of the western sky goodbye
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She wore her Heiligenschein well
On the road
Searching
For everything found
Surface only burn
A halo, imagined
Never fully blown
Formed temporarily
Perchance to earn, or to learn
Some truthfull fullness
If allowed to bloom into attachment
She wore fast the halo
Never taking its game
To what it is capable of
Handling, nothing approaching doom
Wanting,
It says everything
Yet only plays at viewing
From the safety of afar
Or safe unchallenging beds
In beds and beds
A rose who never grows
Anything but
More useless
No storm this
But a single cloud
So quickly out of the sky
Scared away by the fire
Fear indeed the mindkiller
Yet kept as reminder
Of almost achieved glow
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With neither
ideational bon bons
nor sacred lightning
for insight
There I'll be
just sitting
in a starless
corner
hoping
the darkness
coughs up
some answers
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had a video call with Kiddo
he sang me happy birthday
ate some praise from my fantastic mother
it was hard to swallow the bitterness of the flat line everywhere between
i chewed hard on thank you before i spit it out
yeah yeah
today alone lasted 41 fukken years
.
on a less philosophical note
why?
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the android bends its programming
into a thousand paper cranes,
repeats the process threefold.
three wishes is the traditional
number of legend,
according to the databases
of myth.
this must be done properly,
the origami perfectly transformed,
the wishes free
of necromancy,
of salacious intent,
and of the multiplication
of power. Nervous, the android
speaks the words, gathering
the cranes, hoping they will
take form:
heart
soul
free will
please–and the cranes twist
free from their binary grasp
and flutter into the sky.
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when i return you've
dispersed with rose incense
fumes left me some
burnished
silence-sleep but i couldn't
trace it thank you so much: your
concluding pearls break away bounce
off into the gamboge mist:
the balcony observes that same
forsaken asphalt that never
speaks about
you
or sahibi river at dawn
ready to conquer your apparition
never does:
so far from
the shore
still intimate
with chandeliers of genevieve
that rattle some honduran poet
now ripely bestowing
cadaver ballads
onto a jejune son:
that you had blown on like
dandelions and the spirit was
still probing singed flesh
and there was more
then but now it's your
reticence
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the reality of it all is
Go ahead,
drink the moon
eat the valley
scrape up every last morsel
of the neon awnings
Keep silent,
on the hours
it takes to read your manuscripts
and correct your acronyms and
stilted pirouettes
Don’t say,
hey thanks
and we all make mistakes
Pull your hair out
pace around dandelion tufts
never able to settle
Conveniently forget,
we’re not in the cottage core
of saving lives
or fighting crime
or infrastructure improvements
Take a breath,
drink some water
eat a Snickers
and then get to the crux
of your urgent benediction.
– yiqi 22 April 2023 12:17 pm
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Crunching rough ibuprofen on your wedding night
It's a dry fire; a headache like kissing Swamp Thing
A big sloppy wet green kiss, reeking of warmth & Louisiana
Transgressions in dreams like bad ideas in a poetry sketchbook
I was never "your man"
I can still smell 127 inconsecutive hydrogen peroxide events
All holding hands like a gang out for blood on a kinder planet
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mother knows best // shay brooks
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my blues are woven through
a white picket fence that holds
an afternoon warmth well
into eventide delphiniums reach
to touch the stars while tiny
blues whisper forget me not
wrapped tightly through the lattice
of the swinging gate
open and closed blossoms
to your wrought iron heart
©️-Aubrie-2023
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I love
having
two shoulders
it's just
so practical
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...
the length of a breath…
where did this moment come from.?
there was no distance…
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I give the bartender
all the cash I have
in my wallet. He
gives me his name but
I’m not here. I’m in
a king sized hotel
bed in NJ. I mouth
the Spanish olive
because I can’t
kiss you, but if I
concentrate and
soften my third
eye, I taste your
exhales.
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hush madness
~
trees rush
through dreams
speed-of-light slideshow
leaves upon leaves
i spin
beneath
arms outstretched
stars glimpse
full-moon in her majesty
hush madness
cinnamon
earth
fire
trees gift me
branches lift me
up
up
up
between
beyond
hush madness
rest
~
azuki lynn
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Parse
Forest parses the farce. Farce parses back.
It’s late, and dark, and achy,
it’s all been overthought.
We’re not getting anywhere.
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