Posts from — April 2008

by Brad Rose

A still cunning coaxes your unwitting prey
toward the scent of nectar and swelling fruit,
where the charm of easy beauty
has beaten a path to your lethal appetite.

Crabbed tight and tensile in clenched deceit,
your venom, perfumed, sweet with waiting.
In the gentle petal, pink thoughts of ambush bloom,
where you’re perfectly poised for gorgeous victory.

How many of your eyes will glimpse your kill,
as it expects merely a honeyed cling,
while your meal is lured, blind and unaware,
to an inexorable devouring?

by Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa

On this stable earth, afresh every morning,
You peeked at our fore-fathers trekking
Side by side on the barbed seal of being.

You saw Noah’s Flood, the wars of the world;
Saw blood flowed to a flood; man scorched to desert mould;
Earth parted, sea bellowed and roared

Eating up life; thunder applauded fierce wind turns
In crowded places; and the cascade woes of nature
not in ill-will but in seeing that ill was done.

Still you remain unblind, unspeaking, unbleeding;
Feed earth green fingerlings, same as in the beginning.
In your infernal shine is the sternness of will.

by Diane Payne

People ducking beneath wet umbrellas,
avoiding the woman’s hand reaching

out  from the window ledge. “Spare
change?” she asks to no one in particular.

“Spare rain?” a man laughs running to his car,
giving the woman one last look before crawling

into the driver’s seat, while the woman remains
crouched, filling her hand with spare rain.

by Persis M. Karim

Which comes first?
The slow decline
of the body,
the sag of tissue
and skin
or the dull memory
that eats away
at sureness
just below
the bone?

by Iolanda Scripca

San Diego

The freeway was empty that time of morning.We jumped in the car with an anticipated giddiness and headed towards Dana Point, California, at about 45 minutes distance from our house. The sun was playing hide-n-seek along the Pacific ocean either blinding us shortly and rhythmically from behind the vacation homes or elongating our shadows into abstract but childish caricatures. Santa Ana winds changed their minds midway; probably exhausted of so much destruction and fires fed by them few weeks ago in the San Diego area.

We boarded the modern Catalina Express, one of the speedboats available in the Southern California harbors such as: Dana Point, Long Beach, San Pedro, Newport Beach and Marina del Rey and said “Good bye” to the so familiar coast which, now, was becoming smaller, faster and faster, in the deafening mixture of sirens, engines, cumulus clouds and the immense blue color of the Pacific in winter. I felt I was in the artistic world of Wyland, in which herds of white horses crash as waves against the rocky Californian coast, in which the beauty of this spherical planet was not only divided into two worlds but also combined into a beautiful poem of Earth and underwater life.  [Read more →]

by Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa

Like life
Vice begets vice.
Watch with prudency
You do not get it.
It could just be the penicillin
From the pharmacist.

by Oritsegbemi Emmanuel Jakpa

Hope

Hope is a caged bird
that sings –

but goes and never comes
when it is freed.

And so too is
                    sorrow.

by Adrielle Perkins

A single strand of spider’s silk,
Stretched, silver in the sun;
Is sticking to what’s left of summer,
Now that fall’s begun.