Unseen Fire by Robert Ennis

Merely a gate;

I've become an

infiltrator.

Not quite floating

until the right

moment arrives.

Not my doing:

but plans of a

mind far greater.

I must ignite

souls like flame with

supernal light.

I Prefer Girls by Sky Flower

I will not claim I'm straight

Nor will I claim I'm bi

Pansexual is rarely used

Asexual takes too much time to explain

I am not gay

But it seems that way because I simply prefer girls

Not to say I couldn't be with a man…

I've been with a few, more than I can count on one hand

I guess

Sexuality is such a mess

But they just expect you to tie yourself to a label

I feel like I'm lying if I claim any as mine

My sexuality is evolving all the time

It's fluid

Like a river that runs down my cheeks asking "is this me, is this me?"

A question that gives my not so accepting distant family a hope

That I will go back to men and stick with them but I won't

Because I simply prefer girls

I don't need to go into my libido

Or my sexual past

Abuse I've had

Relationships that made me mad and still effect me now

I do not need to tell you how I cam to this place

I just am who I am

And if you ask me again, I'll repeat what I said

No, I don't need a scale

And I'm not just confused

I simply Prefer girls

Playing School by Darren Edwards

Let’s talk about education.

Let’s talk about the power of knowledge

and the desire to learn.

Let’s talk about the hundreds of thousands

of schools Oprah didn’t buy

new computers for,

or the millions of African kids

whose school house didn’t just get

a new roof because they don’t have

a school house to put it on

and how we pat ourselves on the back,

fluff our pillows and drift to sleep

thinking happily about the lesser half of these

equations.

Let’s talk about desire.

and the returning student

whose fifty plus years

have taught her more than her twenty-eight-year-old teacher

could write in a hundred books

and how she still shows up to class

because of a belief that even this young arrogant shit can show

her something new.

Let’s talk about how she shows up to class

despite sickness and shakes

despite struggles with bi-polar disorder

despite memory loss

caused by the electro shock therapy

Harvard doctors put her through  

in the sixties.

Let’s talk about the day

she suffered vision loss

and shook in a way that only those

who’ve had their concept of reality

spun on a top can understand,

the rush to the emergency room,

and how she cried as her son guided her to the car,

because all she wanted

was to learn.

And what about the single mother

reading “Good Night Moon” to her daughter

dreaming that the inner-city school

the girl will attend could get more funding

or the upper class high school quarterback

whose pockets should be filled with vending machine

change, but are filled with the pills

he needs to keep up with the pressure

of expectations and ideals thrown on him

by parents and teachers and a society that only

cherishes the individual in success or distress.

Can we talk about these things?

Or, do they slide past our fingers,

touching only briefly,

only in passing

on our way to the video store

to rent “Empire Records”

or “The Breakfast Club”

because it’s been a long week

and I need to fall into

pop culture like the oversized cushions

on my living room couch

because the walls of my skull are still

reverberating,

still vibrating,

still trembling with the image of this

woman being helped out of my class

the class where twenty kids in their twenties

listen to one kid up front pretend

his thumb can

pins the worlds knowledge

to an overhead transparency. 

No Name by Ryan Rutkoskie

Am I Afraid of Silence?

Honestly

I couldn't be.

Already I've spent so much time wrapped wonderously up in your words and unmentionable time typing wildly to riciprocate but

what do I say to a sigh so lovely it sais everything?

I want words to circle and shape the suns magnitude

but sometimes when your breath trembles in it's own

iambic pentameter all the poetry

just wants to shrink down and listen in wonder

sometimes

it's like I'm tethered to the shattering beauty of that heartbeat

tapdancing 

on the nape of your neck

so words can't be everything all the time

but for right now

I just want them to rise up

and celebrate the silence with

and help us to unravel all that meaning

wound into 

it's every

moment

What Could Have Been a Child by Christina Osborn

Red rivulet like ribbon winds through muggy water
Slowly, giving bulk back to the body of the daughter
In an oily tub of green and silver visions of the flood
And a rich and rosy residue, thick rubber-wriggling blood

And Look! by Christina Osborn

Shorter and shorter runs the connection
Faster and faster wraps the perfection
And then stop
Cut around the holes and you find a series of
Tunnels under wax paper stretched over styrofoam
Climb in and down to the blackness out of which
We each and collectively arose
And stop
Rest there in the limbo between emptiness and
All your things
Given by others and your nature and
The sting of dreams
Now drop
Your hands are built for grasping even when your
Eyes forget to look
And so the sin of asking punished only
If you believe the book
So feel
The grip that rips your hands
Will dig beneath the flaps and drink the blood
Forget the things you thought you knew
Switch off the engine, throw up the hood
And look!

U. S. Dollar, The Tied Down Damsel by Ryan Rutkoskie

America's back bone writhing

hotly burned by our worthless struggle in the bound places

our sense of progress stifled

then

stagnant

we simply stiffen with fear

when the tracks begin ringing at us

physics claim the train

can move now

only toward us

as a disaster hauled by stubborn steam

our position

is fixed

roped down with a pemanence

the world has reserved only for Washington ideologues

it's that persistance we admired

the desired die hard partisonship grip

defined and hard-wired by party line whip

that

for which they've all been hired

and as train cars crack on our nerves set fire

and our little helpless hearts retire

the tracks

sing us to sleep like a righteous choir