Hello Again/Mihir Chitre

To P who went up never to come down again;

B whose truth stabbed my conscience;

C who kissed me at a half-lit eight

when the sea was receding into the west;

S whose breasts glittered like headlights

from behind the midnight, her bra,

While the world overtook us from the wrong lane.

To T who asked for a poem I could never find;

M whose eyes lusted for mine

on a temperate evening in Kala Ghoda

as I tattooed my palm on her waist;

D, the November that ended on the twenty-second;

E, who e-shopped through a gimmicky summer

before running herself out of fashion;

D1, the Radha of an imagined Vrindavan;

S1, the toss I called wrong;

Here I stare at you from the pages of what was. 

“Cut your eyes closed, child.”/Zachary Scott Hamilton

Blind man,

leading fingers inward towards

the trap doors

cycling where the windows

fell,

I was cigarette mouth man

in a story

only meant for

a whisper –

Some great roar.

He rotates the position and presses three buttons

all at once.

“I am alone and she is alone, together at last”

“winter mist continues a cycle

through bars.”

Her lung tissue separates

“housing for the blind.” She thinks.

The rivers cross her spine.

She snores into the cot,

still

of better places

along the

cypress

overlooking mountains, oceans of chamomile.

[fissuring]/Changming Yuan

Between two high notes

The song gives a crack

Long enough

To allow me to enter

Like a fish jumping back

Into the night water

Both the fish and I leave no

Trace behind us, and the world

Remains undisturbed as we swim

Deeper and deeper in blue silence

Upon my return, I find the music

Still going on, while the fish has

Disappeared into the unknown

Wait/Mike Andrelczyk

The difference between the water gun you twirled around your index

finger when you were 11 vs. the weight of the black automatic pistol

hanging from your wrist.

The amputated digit of a Tyrolean alpinist vs. 7 gleaming watermelon seeds

a postage stamp vs. immortality

a metropolitan modern art museum vs. Love Gone South for the Winter

the blood dripping from your index finger vs. the Indian Ocean

the weighted air as you first enter

a darkened tunnel and emerge not

1 but 2

selves. The weight of yourself

leaning against yourself

the difference between the weight in your cupped hands

as the water runs away between your fingers and all

that’s left is the weight

of the molecules that make up

what we call nothing.

Porticos/Sean Ulman

Petite steeples (whelk palaces) urchin-velcro to sea-pickle pillars, plumb-jamb to sea attics by teetotum bobbers.

Beneath thrill-pills planted in polyp pillows, beside bedded clamped clams, embedded in shaved sands, lie shelves of dissolved poems (devolved to follicle threads) revolving @ coral platters.   

Corporal mermaidens (corporeal - the real deal! drool-appeal: finned shell-fanned waists, kelp-cyst busts) twist plots.

Buxom-bums, riddle trances n slippery speeches, (“Scratch my barnacled back, or say, slay an eel, and I may give you a flip,”) force stories to read like erased mist.

Other writings resist, retell legends that lend to sleuthed lathed truths. For instance:

There remain rotting spots where one can shuttle (scuttle) back. Swilling strobing krill particles manifests festering, pestering, ephemeral saddles strapped to dimension-diving sea horses.

Sure, there are lapses - snapped’n½ slides, rattled ladders, explosive synapses - but the tunnels are elastic, more or less lasting.

Ah ha! There goes a gunnel fish breeder gunning 4 lands of guns n coins. Gazing at the final whale carcass tacked to a rusty gunwale, grieving, she crumples to oily trash-rumpled sea. A wealthy thief stabs the aquarist’s recycled bag, poisoning butterfish in toxic surf. 

So dimension historians, or folks that go in for histrionics, polarizing mnemonics, politics… Emotional masochists, those condemned to delve into divided scream dreams, you can get there, you can go…

However, after- the task returning to this under-construction glow polis, where utopia’s top topic…?

Distressing. Simpler to catch purple pebbles in lone fungal slot of trillions of nature-homage nests (trillium skinned, tulip-pistil, lichen latch, xylem file…) in the tyro inventor’s gyroscope, on the edge of town, near where the sidewalk begins to slope up.

Taiga-tinged hummocks hammock’d w/ pinecone cocoons n papaya pods, lacquered w/ fledgling un-usurped philosophies, sop condensed phonic syrup.