It Doesn't Matter How Loud

                                                                   by Simon Perchik

*

It doesn't matter how loud

--you are listening to someone

who isn't here, a love song

 

half covered with dust, half

moves closer as sunlight

brushing against her breasts

 

for their pollen though you

don't sing along, are clutching

a motionless flower between your lips

 

--even without the radio

you are breathed upon, the Earth

made whole from just two lips

 

and that first breeze

still circling the sun

--you are embraced! healed

 

the way each evening closes

is never found though in the dark

you can still hear it falling

 

and the echo helps you make sense

how the same kiss opens only one cry

when two mouths are broken.

 

 

 

Bio: Simon Perchik's poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker and elsewhere. 

 

 

Early Morning

 

       by Len Kuntz

 

And in the early morning if there is no friend again

And if the sky is still wearing her blue-black face

Hiding all those stars with the moon behind her skirt

I at least have poems to read

Books and books of them

Each a certain form of sustenance itself

So much so that when I finish

Reading a half-dozen or more

I can scarcely think about breakfast

And those fish outside the window in the lake

And that beaver in the lake too

And the eagle flying high overhead

They all know what I’ve just learned

That sometimes

When we are most alone and scared

There are places to go

Words to seek like medicine

That can fill our hollow spaces

And heal wounds we thought

We’d wear forever

 

Bio: Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and an editor at the online magazine Literary Orphans.  His story collection THE DARK SUNSHINE debuted from Connotation Press in 2014.  You can also find him at lenkuntz.blogspot.com .

 

 

 

A STAGE FOR SORROW AND COMFORT

   by Richard Fein

 

Two women, maybe sisters, are on the corner.

One cries and one wraps her arms around the other.

And around them cars horns blast so ear-splitting loud.

The whole city seems on hold, and so do they,

standing motionless and so desperately clinging.

On that corner, on that ground, comforter and comforted seem frozen

on a sliver of city real estate surrounded by traffic

while city skyscrapers look on.

Two women, maybe sisters, one sobs, the other hugs.

Then they move on, for what else could they do,

but to leave that corner,  that empty stage

where  yet some other human drama will soon be played

before some other audience other than me.

 

Bio :Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as:Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review, Skyline Magazine, Birmingham  Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic,  Canadian Dimension and many others.