Andrey Gritsman

EMPTY HOUSE BY HUDSON House abandoned,even traces of souls evaporated.No one will die there anymore.Nobody prepares the bed.I am just a passerby,incidental traveler.And I am calm, my returnsecured. For some reasonmy soul’s in the empty house.It calls come backto the dark corners, to dust.This is my regular stroll,passing the house,passing myselfon the road unknown. Translated…

Nidhi Agrawal

The three poems are located below the introductory paragraphs, but we recommend reading the introduction to fully appreciate these works. Introduction In India Lord Shiva is known as the Father God and Goddess Durga is referred to as the Mother Goddess from the age of the Indus Valley Civilization of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa (The civilization…

George Freek

I PONDER THE FUTURE (After Su Tung Po’s ‘Autumn’) The summer’s lilies are gone.They’ll never come back.The autumn chrysanthemumsare also fading.They’re turning black.What beauty is there in winter?I hear a cardinal whistlehis lonely cry.‘Look at me’, he seems to say,raising his despondent head.Perhaps he just missed a grub.He’ll also soon be dead.I know rivers still…

Maximilian Martini

The Clock Maker Will’s hands, pale and patchy, don’t shake. They open the dial face of a seven-foot, two-inch Grandfather Clock and reach inside to find the key and wind the arbor until the spring for the clock is half tight. They do the same for the spring that strikes the chimes and then they…

Jory Pomeranz

Seasons of Suicide “When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his…

AJ Strosahl

DRAGGING THE SEA BEHIND HIM There is a whale in the Royale parking lot. Shoppers cluster around it like a flock descending onto a wire: keeping a respectful distance, squawking. There are actual birds too, arranged in a loose cyclone that pulses and shifts above. It is not overwhelmingly big, the whale; the length of…

Mary Mandeville

ASSIGNED SHAME AT BIRTH I stand before my full-length bathroom mirror before donning the day’s needed costume. Doesn’t matter if I’ll put on workout tights, jog bra and t-shirt for walking dogs or taking a local hike, or whether I dress in floral tights, a skirt, sweater and sensible but cute shoes for seeing clients,…

Elizabeth Jane Kert

A BIRTHDAY DUET I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop since September 2014 when my 21-year-old son went AWOL from residential treatment in North Carolina. Max had unraveled about a year earlier as a college freshman in Olympia — a result of copious amounts of alcohol, various recreational drugs, mania, and complete…

Richard Thomas

Asking For Forgiveness We stand at the edge of the ancient forest, yellow blurry eyes weeping with sickness, as a cool breeze pushes through the leaves, the light flickering in the cabin, as the day starts to slip away. We are more than we were last month, double what was birthed last year, and none…