Poetry

Darkness

Poetry

By Emily Simpson

Alone, damaged beyond repair.
Empty yet full of darkness,
Full of the essence of oblivion.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
The blackness consumes me completely.
I’m Alice, falling down the rabbit hole
Forever spiraling downward with no end in sight.
What is it to be whole, to be complete?
Is it giving in to the darkness?
Letting it wrap me in its warm embrace,
Comforted by the nothingness.
Or is it the constant struggle?
Constantly picking up the pieces,
Hoping one day to find the final element.
This can’t be all there is to life,
Holding on to the edge of sanity,
Praying to just make it through another day.

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The Nature of Water Cycling on Earth

Poetry

By Kaitlin Schmidt

Passions and grievances condense into wet words and they coagulate;
puddle poems.
Too often unwritten. Sublimation is rare.
The pressure of expectations and the heat of judgment evaporate them –
and as vapor they soar upwards as prayers.
The skies steam up and rain on us again.

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He Gives Me Religion

Poetry

By Kaitlin Schmidt

Heart dances like a shaker

Love as clean as a Quaker

When he returns to me, the 2nd coming.

Frozen in place like the meditating Buddhist

Several stiff kisses from the lips of Judas

The whole farce droned over by Gregorian humming.

The Lutheran in you nails up my 95 flaws
The Pagan in me boils feathers and claws
And like the Vatican we try to keep it all under the fleece.

I check my Mayan calendar for end

Forgive me sir, for I knowingly sinned

and like a Mennonite, I never stop praying for peace.

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Black River

Poetry

By Marike Stucky

In the beginning, little ones,
 Sky Woman dreamt of white blossoms plucked by darkness.
 She was ripe with child and
 was terrified.

The Tree of Life ripped from the threshold
 between water and sky,
 a cavernous void.

She fell.

Delicate fingers clutched at earth, at seedlings
 She tumbled into the abyss, hair streaming behind; black river.

 Creatures of flight
 cradled the poor girl in their great wings
 laid her gently upon the shell of Grandmother Turtle
 black river kissing the mosaic clean.

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Junctures

Poetry

By Jordan Esely-Kohlman

In seconds after
exchanging names in a fashion
so pleasant as to
ease my troubled soul,
airs that once clung heavy to lovers
loosened &
crumbled
asunder into
a new bed from whence new truths might bloom.

I hunger for these parcels of your essence.

Feast on
flesh &
drink in
moments unspoken
when I was sure I was you
simply wrapped in a different way, or
perhaps we were jigsaw pieces
kept snug by junctures of
the most supple nothings.

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Road Watcher

Poetry

By Megan Siebert

She rose early from a sleepless sleep

The high TUH-duh TUH-duh of the road grooves keeps her risen

Perpendicular, the waterless creeks of eastern Colorado

Parallel, the broken deer with the country road highways

Disappearing color of the landscape made more so by continents of ashen snow

Telephone lines follow like foamy limping waves.

The drowsy chins of the leading passengers pull their Ellington-filled heads down

                        Leisurely

She wants to shave the wisps of hair budding above their collars

Driver’s eyes shift mirror road mirror road

Hers revisit the colorless ocean.

 

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Two Victims

Poetry
 By Abigail Bechtel

You pass an invisible wall,

you begin to snicker and sneer

You judge me.

You make me your victim.

You cannot know where I’ve been

or what trials I have gone through

nor my joys.

And I do not know yours.

I cannot judge you back

though it would be so easy,

though I desperately want to.

You make me your victim,

but you were victims first,

although I cannot know to what.

This bonds us.

  

We are akin in this way,

victims to one another,

To prejudice, insecurity, pride

The list is infinite.

But we are victims, you and I.

This doesn’t make you easier to forgive,

nor me easier to like.

This does not cripple us,

Nor empower us.

Neither does this make us the same.

Those who say,

     “We’re all the same”

  are liars.

We are not all the same, you and I,

but we are also not all

              different.

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Ellipses’ Eclipse

Poetry

By Jordan Elsely-Kolhman

The sun shone on Monday morn
in strands of flaxen memory.

Out past the horizon sat a visage,
its magnificence sifted through the atmosphere,
but those minuscule collisions resulted
in splendor unrequited.

The gentle warmth of lips shifting
into smiles a million miles away
lifted midnight mists,
weekend haze cut into
static fragments
by moments of focus.

We play our celestial parts,
bodies revolving in and out of
eclipses, simply wishing for
the bliss of glimpses.

This life is but a struggle
through ellipses into
…
periods of certainty.

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To be Silent

Poetry

By Natasha Orpin

Listen, child!
Do you hear it?
Of course not. There was little hope that you
would ever hear and know – listen.
For you run about all day chasing monsters and
digging in the dirt
with a playmate no one sees.
How does one put
to paper a thing silent in nature? How does
one imagine the imaginary friend to look?
This is the trouble
with the ineffable. Yet
the instrument – language – is
not the problem. Listen, child!
Your playmate has scampered off with the monsters and now
you are left to the inexpressible.
Hush now.
Ms. Dickinson will be along shortly.

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Pristine Apathy

Poetry

By Cody Claassen

Stuck in orbit around this place
It never decays
always mere miles
from the flowing shadow pit
of melancholy and mediocrity

Sheer exudes from its centre
And this one can hold
Even the idea of escape velocity gets sucked
towards the hostile maelstrom
it creates

Now sitting at the edge of space and reason
I watch like a shamed voyeur
at the things left undone
A great unwinding is happening
and I am doing nothing
to stop the pulling of chords

I should want to leave
want to forge a way out
want something more
But I don’t
and that unsettles me
more than the constant pull of apathy

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