by JP Davies

by DavidKM

your bare flesh

this is not a love poem
you are blue and still

humanity slinks away
we feel shame
in your transcendent glow

271st Weekly Poetry Contest

by Bruce Boston

Attenuated images come back
in the short hours of night
drifting in and out of sleep,

fragments of conversation
torn from a transformed past,
forsaken visions revisited.

In cafes of decanted history
the clientele and fare
change by the minute.

In the switchback turns
of yesterday’s streets
the light flickers

with broken images
from a projector
cranked by hand.

The wave of the present
intrudes on the past
like a master thief

by Ciarán Parkes

Where are you heading to, Lascaux horse,
rust and bonfire coloured, running
across the eggshell coloured postcard?
Never mind if your legs appear too thin

to bear your weight, they were never meant to.
You were born like this, caught between the earth
and sky, under someone's moving
fingers clutching clay and charcoal, lit

by uncertain fire light, so you seem
to move in and out of shadows, one
of Plato's ideal creatures, not needing
anything more than this to be alive

by Bruce Boston

by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon

He plays with phantoms,
imagining a sensate response
as his fingers touch the gesso.

Tracing forms as yet unborn
he cannot sleep, his mind intent
on the caress of his brush as it

layers the paint in bas-relief.
Drawn more deeply than most
into the resonance of textures

he surfaces intoxicated with
burnt sienna and rose obsidian.
Pale areolas appear, erect,

by Miles T. Ranter

The red giant Betelgeuse is the dimmest seen in years, prompting some speculation that the star is about to explode. —National Geographic

The stars of Orion are not the same
   as they were a few months ago,
for his right hand has dimmed so much
   you scarcely see its glow.
Yes, Betelgeuse, the supergiant
   lighting up the sky,
has lost its luster, barely noticed
   by the naked eye.

by Bluehalcyon

From broken bits
leftover from a careless destruction,
I am reformed...

Kaleidoscope faced,
fragmented and tormented -
No pulsing Van Gogh, or twisting Dali,
but Picasso shards forced together.

Set in mortar, soul slushed
forsaken Psyche fused pieces,
compartmentalized and pixellated,
an existence threaded through a whisper.

Who can translate
the sound of these colors?

270th Weekly Poetry Contest

by Miles T. Ranter

The cars, which dripped their grease across the fields
of tar, have left, thick bands of altostratus
above the western ridge and coming at us
the only traffic now, whose gray conceals
the foundering sun. Past sycamores and pines
we tread along the empty roads and walks,
lamps recently switched on by unseen clocks.
My hound runs free as a fox and no one minds.

by Lara Dolphin

On a quiet Shanksville farm, I finish
bucking hay then set a frail of peaches
in the dooryard.
There is no relief, no getting over this heat,
so I settle down and stare into the sky
past the clouds through which
you could not see your way.
I fold my hands and speak to God.
Your souls could not be hijacked.
They go on forever like a summer’s
garden growing wild in a place
where autumn cannot reach.

published by The Bangalore Review

by Lee Nash

'—as if one’s life, instead of giving movement to the body, were imprisoned undiminished within it, and beating and fluttering impotently to get out, at all the doors and windows.'
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from one of her letters to Robert Browning.