by Tim Taylor

by Joe Vendetta

by Lara Dolphin

by Bruce Boston

Ajax Redux
by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon

I live in a land of icy mirth
and explicit premise.
I'm starving but I don't hunger
for your glittering glory.

You are no better than Troy,
trading gold for flesh,
lives for legends, blood
for beauty, always fighting
the ever war, the last rape.
Even death is not enough
to put an end to it.

You bring soldiers wrapped
in linen and thick red noise,
the tail feathers of black swans.

by Ryan Stone

Knives cut both bread
and throats,
                   savouring
butter's slick slide
no more,

                              no less,
      
than the coppersnake tang
            of life
departing hot.

Honed to slash two
            from one,
to make unwhole
what once was. Whetted

by Sheikha A.

for Kaa (The Jungle Book)

Deep labyrinths, the jungle has shed skin,
vultures like stars light as silver gashes
where grass has evacuated songs of the bees
and an indigo branch shuffles in a bush,
the cries are wild and alive –

she twirls as fire trapped between walls
of rain, grey mists scale high temples,
silver clouds coat thick fur on the night,
her voice is a hiss caught in petals.

by Miles T. Ranter

Even before your birth
you sensed the stars round Earth
would aid you in your migratory flight.

There surely is no dearth
of peril in the night:
tempests, towers, artificial light.

The cat, the fox, the hawk—
at dawn or dusk—invite
adversity. Yet all your instincts lock

together with your flock
on the most unerring arrow
in all the world: the coruscating clock

which sends you on your narrow
way to land in Faroe
or in Australia. Every constellation

by Angela Yuriko Smith

They could hear us...
through the near-vaccuum
between celestial bodies
seeping between milky ways
riding the dust tails of comets.

They could hear us...
trapped on our waterlogged
behemoth—soaked in acid
and ash—a breath between
hope and annihilation.

They could hear us...
tuning their audio array
to pick up our mega hurts
eavesdropping on final
phonic agony.

by Miles T. Ranter

While dangling from a ledge twelve stories high
(not unlike that scene in Vertigo),
you hear a buzzing sound—a dragonfly?

Louder and louder it rises from below—
a flying car. As it hovers just behind you,
you’re snatched and yanked inside. How did it find you?
Before you think a thing, “Hi Fred!” A voice
you haven’t heard in years: your baby bro!
“I’ll drive you home. Mum, dad and Mary Jo
have missed you. Or we’ll get a drink. Your choice.”
“But Bob,” you say, “our parents are in heaven!”

by Miles T. Ranter