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

Here's My Advice by Christina Osborn

Here’s my advice: don’t reach for the stars.  Bear with me, I know that apathy is scary and we all feel wasted and wanting sometimes but take your eyes off the skies and look instead at the ground.  It sounds insane but if you focus your brain on the heaven that is the present you will never lose sight of the road that is the right road for you and all of your endeavors.  Here’s my advice:  find out what you want.  If it’s playing or working or staying at home or painting or making a scene or dressing up in black and green or masturbating or eating or drinking or navel gazing, it’s what you want.   if it’s what you want, no one has a right to taunt you or tell you you’re making a mistake or losing your way.  Your way is your own, and no one’s path is the same.  Here’s my advice: play the best hand you possibly can.  We’re all set up with a few good licks, and in a short time you’ll learn the tricks you’ve had since before thought or time or walking the line.  If you’ve got great legs or a beautiful mind or a flair with a pair of scissors or a passion for lizards, by God, run with it.  Run through your life holding that thing hard to you, like it’s the last day of existence and all the resistance has fallen into the dust.  Here’s my advice: Lose something every now and then, it’s good to clean house and clean head and maybe in a corner of the garage or a box or a bag you’ll find a thing you haven’t seen for a while that brings you back your smile and reminds you of childhood dreams and how possible it all seemed.  Here’s my advice: know yourself well.  Put yourself through hell if you have to in order to learn what kind of person is walking around in your shoes.  Ask those questions that people don’t want to hear the answers to.  Here’s my advice:  stop making nice, and start living life.  Universal popularity is a pure insanity and the more famous you are, the further you fall from that particular star, the more people who know your name, the less likely you are to win the game without stomping on a few fingers and toes but it’s okay, because everyone knows it’s cold and lonely in space, and to reach that star, you get frozen or burned or scarred for life.  So here’s my advice: don’t reach for the stars, reach for the phone or a pile of clothes or a pen or a knife or a guitar or a fight or a place to call home.  Reach for yourself and hold onto what you find.

Wait 'Til I Forget by Christina Osborn

Wait until I forget

The sound of the wind in the fruit trees

Before you take me home

I want them to loom in my memory while I’m out on my own

I’ll remember that they’re better than the others I encounter

In my travels

Better by the year and eventually those others will disappear

And I’ll return to you, my orchard, only to find

You’ve stayed the same

Wait until I forget

The warmth of long summer rains

Before you take me walking

I want to be surprised when I feel the sun and the sky starts opening

It’ll be better than before because it’s raining on me

Then and there

And eventually I’ll disappear

Returning to the dust I was only to find

The rain still rains the same

Wait until I forget

The name of our hero

Before you read that book to me

I want to think disaster is still a possibility

And it’ll be deeper than the last time

Because I’ll feel like I’ve heard it but can’t remember where

And eventually we’ll disappear

But the words are here and always will be

And despite the wears of world and change we find

The story still reads the same.

The Hitchhiker by Christina Osborn

My brother told me once you take DMT you can taste it and smell it in everything. I'm not sure what that means, because I've never taken DMT, the drug that your brain supposedly produces just before death, expanding the horizons of your consciousness until the whole world is swallowed in the singularity that is your life. It is supposed to make you look in and in and in until you are looking back at yourself and it's just the two of you facing each other through whatever perfect metaphor your brain has constructed for the occasion and you believe it and identify with it because the one you are seeing looks, talks, feels and acts just like you. And you can feel her emotions as you watch her, your perspective fluttering between first person and third person, watching yourself watching yourself watching you. I believe there is a sliver of something caught inside each one of us golden strangers hitchhiking through the valley of shadows, a tiny slice of the fruit of life riding along in the hollow between the lungs and above the stomach, that spot that sends out a beam of light when it's too dark to see the streetlights.  That pulse is beating with my footsteps, seeing with my vision, hijacking my nervous system from time to time so it can get where it's going. And I don't mind, because it doesn't ride for free. For the smell of sage it trades an insight about the interconnectedness of every concept I've ever learned in school or on the streets. For the warmth of my lover's arm around me as he drifts off to sleep it trades a heart swelling so tight it might burst through my sternum and swallow both of us, happily drowning in our handiwork. For the play of sunshine on the river it trades a song, sung small in the awful elegance of a slot canyon, small but echoing off the rippling walls until my voice is sixty feet taller than i am, ringing up to the endless blue in an attempt to pay back that hitcher for lodging itself in my life. For the taste of a quesadilla layered in jalapeno cheese and cucumbers and peppers, slathered in guacamole we just made together, half naked in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables and trying to find something we disagree on, for the taste of these things my hitchhiker trades the spaces in between pleasure and pain, the distance between the depths and the heights, the weight between joy and sorrow. For my five senses the hitchhiker trades one sense as deep and sprawling as the night sky inverted, opening in instead of out, each point of light composed of trillions of other points of light, galaxies within galaxies. And when two galaxies collide, stars explode, gravity collapses in on itself and a singularity is formed, spaghetifying time and taste and truth and skin cells until the stars are not just touching, now they occupy the same physical space and time together because those words no longer mean anything rational. When you held me in the kitchen and i started to cry it was because i realized at that precise moment in time I may as well have been holding myself. That moment will never come again, not in that way, but I will savor it in everything I put my lips to because my taste buds are still singing a wordless love song to that little golden hitchhiker, who doesn't ride for free. and you know, I don't know about DMT being an ultimate ingredient in everything, not unless it has a much more common name, a name often used recklessly, vaguely, dishonestly, a name used as a weapon, as a cage, as a slave, as a curse and also as a caress on our weary muscles and a soothing hand to ravaged skin. The name of this ingredient is love and I smell it everywhere, I see it in the grasses and the cattle and the sedimentary sandstone and the waves of the rock. I see it in smile lines and glittering glassy eyes and the do in balls of the trees we planted and in your sister's skin and in the kitchen sink and under the open sky. I feel it running in my blood when you look at me, I feel it in my bones holding my back straight, and I hear it in my hitchhiker's song.  We trade love for love and sense for sense and we may not ride for free but the price is too sweet not to pay.