#howanxious

all these years erased, memories faded to blots of ink&dust (rewritten and smudged

in/by a whirlwind of a mind)

nothing is real (nor unreal) in an unchanged sun’s beckoning light, that falls cold on the fullness (red pulp &orange rind) of my ripe skin.

this air is not the air that carries voices &smells across the plateau of another time.

years that were gone/erased —

i never left, never became a…

i treat white words and black smiles as one when the moon looks like a lamp, a river of despondent virtues &potential sins,

i look like a mirror, an image of an image, drinking from the same chalice as a millennium of systemic subversion, my stigma is attached to my body, and i carry it around like a baby in a cradle, like a queer impulse of my hope, like open eyes that do not shut in the dark,…

Man in a Train, Thinking by Jack B Yeats

after Munna — a stranger/friend from the train

the train that never arrives may have already arrived —

he stutters and rushes his way through many words, obliging the falling dusk with his innocence and resolve, light as a feather, sturdy as the city sky of many colours, all dreams cupped carefully in some determined sighs.

he had ventured for his truth, a…

Brain matter – Painting by Cerazivka

layered blood-thick, brown-washed, on the walls of my restive seclusion —

the elemental, egregious thoughts fight against the other for more screen-time —

tea dregs & shunted ideas pass through grey matter, spilling out cranial fluids of creative flow —

acid, sweat, water — the dust of dread, the diligence of death —

how the ritual of words is mired in the…

Art by Jaime Howard

i have got a morning that doesn’t come too often —

the wakefulness of eyes looks becoming on my face, the arcs of hyacinth on my care- worn cheeks, the fissures of words at the corner of my lips, tricks of a thick smile, teeth like scissors that cut through the nights of des- pair, all look becoming on my ninety- days of seclusion, i do not dream a dream,

but i have got a…

Lunar Eclipse by Scott Kahn

seeded cherries are your lips, blood is our wine — we drink from the mouth of a night’s vestigial appendage, when the sky speaks of ecstatic pains & pining sighs of a merlot- moon.

cinnamon rings are my eyes, russet are our limbs — we feed on the saplings of our fingers, the perspiring sacrilege of our arduous dreams & deep lines of a copper- eclipse.

. © Anmol Arora

D…

Joe Scotland, “lost souls” (2017)

in this hemisphere of time where years are lost in discoveries of beauty, and days spent in the reverie of those youthful dreams —

i map out the latitudes&longitudes (of longing) on my body, to find the passage of my thirst, lining experiences&exigencies on the shore of all that was, and all that could have been,

now lost.

where do i begin, if i do not know where…