located
ink imaginary
lost in this distance
awkward lines drawn
across faint eyes echo

Kate Adams

ON THE ART OF DREAMING

If allowed not to leave past the dimming horizon,
then I request a ticket to stay. So I can watch
a new screening of a dream! Why is this yearning
for a relentless rattle of a film projector?

…the daily movie show has given me the power
of humility. Ever since a cold image of a crypt
changed into the sun’s greeting…

In my fist I firmly hold an entrance pass
to inexplicable dramas on celluloid. While
at nights I emerge towards the frontier,
fix my eyes on reality: gray it isn’t

– it radiates enchantingly with mystifying gleams!
Still I always step back and press hard, till I bleed,
an advance ticket to tomorrow’s screening…

Dariusz Pacak

before sleep

the plane
throws nets of rain-mail knitted from quadratic equations
over my roof and thoughts.
solutions dissolve like chalk as they slide
into wet guttersleep. i resist,
just in case a unified theory
of everything
should come to me uninvited
like a gift of engine-noise and water.

the plane fades into ink still loud on the page
but the rain is tenacious;
scratches formulae on the slate.

it is late.
time conspires with space and gravity
to pull me down into a black hole;
the pen now weighs the same as a
small hatchback
and my lashes
drag my blinds down to the
event horizon.

Roddy Williams

BLOOD FLECKED GRASS, WEED,

BOTH FUCKED IN THON FIELD

CC all embarrassed at menstrual staining Ma’s mattress
coaxed me to hatch our escape. A walk to river Bann
along back roads barters the balance of flowering
love. Bloodhounds barked and cock and hen crowed.
Do you remember CC? The sun shone springtime bright.
I remember flowers unknown by name, but crystalline
like semi-precious tears. In walk we clasped each other
like we couldn’t grasp by mind this concept of balance, like youngsters
on a see-saw we’d let go to feel the warm repletion in the rise,
to touch skies that were ourselves, searched and traversed their limits,
and all this beneath the most beauteous sky not imagined,
to clasp each other again, and again in a falling away
in a constant return, to the bounteous form that bridges the void. O!
The tumult of rain that holed us up at Finney’s Oils
was gracious in granting us time to kiss and we thanked it
as it waved goodbye, and in the bright again, and clasped just so,
we reached the river and the bridge where I’d last seen Colleen.
In your attempt to clamber the wrong fence you got your boots
covered in dog shit and we began to worry about going blind.
But we set all worries aside and clambered the right fence
into the angler’s field that used to be somewhere not to call my own.
The singing donkey and the pookah were still there and looked askance
in our advance, I was sure I heard them say “beware, tonight
the moon will fall out of the sky, forever.” CC I’m sorry
I never told you. But it took me time to trust myself again, again.
And anyway, I knew, I couldn’t be sure, as the holograph is grimy.

Robert Herbert