Recitation/Sanjeev Sethi

Omnivorus paths sown by stealth chiseled my core

yet neurons bend the guilt knob belying my essence.

Whose imprimatur needs to endorse my being?

It took half a century of lived life to cipher this. Actualized

it seems manageable. What of the gazillion mopes this milquetoast

grappled with before matutinal thews spangled?

One is as valid as consciousness allows us. How does one keep

it skookum? By unclogging pores with the steam of sophrosyne.

When energies meld escalators move to a new address.

Magnetic/Heath Brougher

A seed is put into Earth.

A Zoologist sprouts in the garden.

The pangs of swine reverberate eternally.

Shedding leaves and bones for the Cemetery Crowd.

The digging for the xylophone went on for days

just to find that tone of finality to contradict the aforementioned eternity.

Each beer drank itself from empty without pitchfork or quarrel

to scrape the yeast from its tin can as to prevent Thrush.

The whole shelf of the sacrilegious has been bent crooked.

The nuclear blast throws atomic thorns into the omnipresent gales

that rip and unleaf the trees, etc.

tenebraed* to interval/Heller Levinson

to outposts quivering from consanguinity

considering feed-back loops sideways

extremities accumulate uninteresting interest

balance wheel as bludgeon

where

in wherewithal

is

capacious

verifiability = larceny

the target is without distance

*"tenebraed to interval" first appeared in tenebraed (Black Widow Press, 2017)

Whood Athunk/Philip Byron Oakes

Parsing oohs and aahs for triage in the afterglow implying

a slow simmer's fall from grace, in the burn baby burn days

of one's youth. Measuring time by the remnant. A freefall to

ashes, marking the moment of discovery, setting the chill

free to find its footing in the wasted won over by the breeze.

Bruising the space to breathe. Keeping the seat warm for a

synopsis of the years. Parting the ocean from a drop to drink.

An air of having weathered what's worn to suit a pretense,

brooding over the grave of the way it's supposed to be,

echoed in embers scrawling aphorisms in the midnight haunts

of high spirits. What can't be bought at an auction of the

intangibles. The pregnant pauses with bright, healthy children.

The tang's last appearance under the lights. The chances

cluttered with possibilities too numerous to seize upon. If in

photogenesis only, culled from the madding, barely foreseen

as the crests of the wave of all but humanity to the rescue.

Glutting the cavity in lieu of a heart, steered to transplant a

belief into the canon of quirks and privilege unbridled.

Feeding into a timbre that makes the song go round the

reasons it's come to be. In the broken's way of saying all is

well. Clarity's litmus flowering in the fog, as the veterans

of something unspoken yet all but said see. Momentum

towards the random finding nowhere first and home at

last. The thin air where people go to breathe.

Sedentary Fathoms section twenty-one/Felino A. Soriano

                        Nearing nearness and

                                        the philosophy

                                    of

                              warmth,

   this evening is

 an exam into

       hours and how their

     function moves and

  behaves in landscaped

          configurations, building across

                                          what

                                   bridges

                       become in

              the distant

      articulation of whole

                                         or fractioned

         soliloquies