Bones, break, unravel, limbs, suffer little children,
The path spread out before us is a path that’s been beaten
Down a million, billion, trillion times, by feet unrecorded
Yet we walk, and so the path breaks more.
No one knows where it’s leading. Yet we walk.
Graves fill around the path, but we are used to the smell.
Some look straight ahead, and some have twisted
Their heads looking back. A few, take slow steps,
Look around, and seem to smile more often
Than the rest. But we all fall, no one reaches the end.
I imagine there is a great God who is waiting there all alone.
Hoping, praying to find some friends. I doubt we’ll reach them though.
It’s a design fault, after all. We are not whom to blame.
But I wonder, walking, to myself, who does a God pray to?

---

Sameen Shakya is a poet and writer based in Kathmandu, Nepal. His poems have been published in the following magazines: Havik, The Pittsburgher, WINK: Writers In The Know, Teach Writer, and W-Poesis.

Kalopsia

Walking downtown,
The man with the hatchet
Saying hello by chasing me again

Getting my exercise for the day
Bloody puddles on the sidewalk,
Just wine for the birds

The vomit is fertilizer for the flowers
As I stand on glass,
Recycling the sand is so thoughtful

Narrowly, I miss the burning car
A warm fire for the homeless,
The people here are so considerate

As I walk by the boarded-up windows
Covered in graffiti
A mosaic of the streets

Smoke floods the air
Burning cardboard fills me with nostalgia
As I joyfully cough up my lungs

A bullet just missed my shoulder
The neighbors playing cowboys and robbers again
This is my home and these are my friends.

---

Never Where You Look

Little things like socks seem to vanish
When you need them the most
Commencing the tedious search
Through piles of crisp laundry
My feet are bored without their fluffy friends
As I turn my bedroom into a crime scene
Destroying my nightstand and metallic bin
Empty golden chocolate wrappers litter the floor
Leaving the room to continue the rampage
As my toes grow colder,
The same routine occurs in the kitchen
Kitchen roll forming stripes on the floor
After an hour of this escapade
I am beginning to lose my patience
As I pull on my chestnut locks
I decided to check the kitchen once again
I found the two red cotton gems hiding in the drawer
Beneath the old bills and receipts
That I forgot to throw out
No matter where you look
Things always show up somewhere else.

---

K.G. Munro is an author and poet. Here are a few of her writing credits: Oddball Magazine, Poetry Potion, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, Muddy River Review, Cosmofunnel, and Splendeur Magazine.

To Asphyxiate All Carcinogens in One Bloodless Clump

We’ll never be constantly present. According to science, to claim existence is to oscillate continually between bizarre and merely hypothetical. Hence the fracture of our dreams, the transparency of these makeshift selves. I am anti-theoretical, unthinkable down to the most unstitched repressions of my neuro-linguistic pathways. Near-microcosmic fighter-jets reinforce the heads of hundreds of baby electric eels comprising the goggles I wear to disguise this blinding migraine. Pleasing myself was never my aim, but wow. Things being what they seem, I can change the caption under this frame at any time. Like suppressing the merciful jerk-twitch of the nuclear button-pushing finger, we explore this weirdness like a metronome, right out of its lyrical loop of causality. I am the screen onto which you project your blood-pumping wonder, and I’ll be here long after the projector switches off and the audience goes home. Thinking things about thinking things rethinks our very thinking until the robotic nurse again vacuums up the plastic army men, future jet-pilots weightless and tumbling through the machine’s tubing. Automatic bodies dispute their purposes as our clock-faces click over to never. Embodiment means never having to say we’re monstrous. We may never know where we came from, or why we’re leaving.

---

Voice-Mail for the Dead (unrhymed anapestic tetrameter)

This enjambment of death’s big eraser grows thicker,
a planet-sized soccer ball plugs up my throat—
I remember your voice, how you wanted to see me
and calling you up doesn’t jive with the fact

that you’re dead, and I know you can’t possibly be there,
though you’re still on my contact list here on my cell
so I speed-dial your number, your body now broken
your vertebral column in shards from the crash.

Denial’s a lesion, your face floats before me
I hold the device to my ear and recall
how you’d always pick up after two or three rings
with your fluty “Halloo,” and I’d smile and begin

but now it’s been six, and then seven long warbles
When I hear your recording start in, and I blush,
the prickles and stings that dart over my body
convince me it’s you that I’m about to address.

“Remember that time when I told you it’s over?”
I stammer, pretending you’re there on the line.
You don’t interrupt me; for once I can say it,
your voicemail recording each stumble, each fret.

When I get to the part where I ask you to call me,
you’re shaking your head and the room follows suit.
I can’t say goodbye ’cause the beep says it’s over,
and I wonder how Verizon will get this to you.

---

Psalm of Internal Combustion
in the Age of Deforestation

The silver dollar spins on a marble floor
and ignites my horizon kaleidoscopic.
The materialist mental apparatus of humans
plows through time, murders baby rabbits

huddled together in fields of trembling.
How we graze the lonely stars, glass
spires snapped off from someone else’s
idea of light. Our entitled selves trigger

the end’s bible-thumping frenzy, choking
in Prozac-encrypted obedience, withholding
healthcare for the elderly. “I’ll be back,”

says the simulation blanking out our screens
as savior. And I think, yea, though I climb
through intimations of mortality, I will fuel
no chainsaws– for our siblings the trees

forgive us, the sawmill and slaughterhouse
quarantine this suicide on our parquet floors
and dinner tables. Our guests and our pets,
they distract us, cry against us in the mute voice

of our descent, grocery store meat aisle another
horror dishing out the fear. My Alfa Romeo
runneth over; surely, malice and hunger shall
swallow us, all the clocks on our walls

and I shall kill in the contaminated biosphere
of the radioactive mouth, mangle bloody
the Oh Beautiful from the crags, to the power
and the glory of bald eagles, forever.

---

Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet’s epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.