Egyptologists through the sand fast as busy beetles, looking for curse rock kings with faces of apple crumble that fall apart like the plots of ham-fisted detective novels on the rack; scratch-and-sniff femme fatales that smell like bubble gum in amber. Perspiration from the sweat houses and bait shop wrigglers on the hook. Infusions of blood libel and spoons of flustered custard, that darning needle way you nose through traffic. Machine gun nests moonlighting as electrical boxes and broken beer bottles in the ramshackle gutter. “The findings, collect the findings!” I hear a surprise party voice demand. Sounds like razor blade soup, so I refuse. Ants have hills they die on, I see it every day. On my way to corner convenience, bellowing out the hits like some shoelace god in a world of knots. And what is left behind is a hoarder’s reminiscence, clutter to a less-seasoned mind. You become a part of it whether you are careful or not, which is reason enough to take your clumsy chances.
From Public Domain
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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Painting by René Holm (Born 1967). From Public Domain
WINTER IN A DARK WOOD
The night is a black tar pit. Creatures of the dark crawl blindly from their holes. Some will die in it, and then blow away like petals from a dead rose. The moon stumbles across the sky, but the moon is also blind. I take little notice of the moon. The stars are distractions from the remains of an ordinary day. They’re as frail As ornaments of paper mache, hanging from a paper tree. They’re unreachable In my search for things I’ll never find. The stars are somewhere, but they’re also deaf and blind.
George Freek’s poetry has recently appeared in The Ottawa Arts Review, Acumen, The Lake, The Whimsical Poet, Triggerfish and Torrid Literature.
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On the grass of a village park, filled with the light of spring, pigeons have gathered, pecking at scattered food.
Three city pigeons and two wild doves— their feathers seem alike, yet different; their bodies and expressions seem different, yet somehow alike.
They do not keep their distance or fly away wary with fear. They mingle like old friends from the same neighbourhood.
Recognising each other’s differences, communicating without discrimination— their quiet gathering is like an open, spacious scroll painting from the East.
City pigeons and wild doves— what kind of relationship might there be between them?
Are they neighbours, like people who left their homeland and met one another in a foreign land?
Or a multicultural family out for a spring picnic, taking a little time away from the routines of life?
Could this be a scene of empathy, where newcomers from the North walk together with others?
Or a place of reconciliation, where winners and losers, after an election, accept the result and come together as one?
Each dressed in its own distinctive plumage, they mingle as though speaking heart to heart— a quiet scene of coexistence.
Whether they know or do not know of the turmoil on the other side of the earth, on this bright and gentle spring day they simply walk together, warmly, in the sunlight.
From Public Domain
Ihlwha Choi is a South Korean poet. He has published multiple poetry collections, such as Until the Time When Our Love will Flourish, The Color of Time, His Song and The Last Rehearsal.
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“Let’s go for a camel ride when we are in Broome!” Alex suggested.
The voyage from Darwin to Broome along the remote Kimberley Coast had felt interminable. Twenty-one days with no other sailing boats in sight until we neared Broome. Even shore visits had been tense, with the prospect of meeting a crocodile or stepping on toxic jellyfish in the shallows. Unlike Alex, I was not a natural sailor, although I assisted where I could. I was adept at operating the winch when he was adjusting the sails, throwing out the fenders before arrival at a dock, and hooking the mooring with the boat hook. However, I was really there because I liked his company, and this overruled my aversion to risky adventure. Alex knew this, and he also knew how much I would love to ride a camel.
Astride a camelBroome Camel SafariPhoto Courtesy: Alan Noble
The camels loped towards us at the meeting point at the far end of the beach. The earlier ride departed soon after we arrived, so we had to wait. We found refuge in the shade of the official camel tour vehicle. I removed my shoes, sat down, and ploughed my bare feet into the sand. Forty minutes later the earlier ride was finished, and the camels lined up again. Alex and I were to share a camel. The lighter person had to hop on the front and the heavier on the back. All of the personnel were young European working holidaymakers, and invariably cheerful, like all of the other working holidaymakers we had met in Western Australia working in hospitality. Their job included caring for the camels. They would arrive at the farm late morning, groom the camels, and walk them for an hour to get to the beach. Apparently one of the camels had been rescued and so we were instructed not to pat her, but others enjoyed being patted. We mounted our female camel, Silky. Her long neck stretched in front of me. She had curly hair on her neck and long eyelashes.
Because our tour was late, we could enjoy it just before sunset. We had wanted to take the sunset tour, but it had been booked out.
“Are you enjoying it?” Alex asked me.
“This is absolutely worth it!” I confirmed, allowing myself to be gently rocked in the saddle in a motion which mimicked the ocean swell.
After the hardships of violent seas, a torn sail, and extreme isolation, I could relax on this gentle creature with Alex sitting behind me, gazing at the changing colours over the horizon. At the end of the tour, the tourists spontaneously erupted in applause. If this had been horses, they would have been startled, but the camels remained calm.
Camels are not native to Australia, having been introduced from the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Subcontinent in the nineteenth century. In fact, the railroad that runs south to north across the Australian continent was named the “Ghan” in honour of the Afghan cameleers that the railway replaced. Camels were released into the wild in the early twentieth century when modern forms of transport were introduced. Their descendants compete with native marsupials for resources, and so they are considered invasive. But it is not their fault that they are invasive.
Camels in 1925 Australia. Photo Courtesy Lance Mugford circa 1925
They are the descendants of camels that were brought here well over a hundred years ago. It so happens that they are well-adapted to the harsh conditions of the Australian outback. Sometimes wild invasive animals are culled because of the havoc they wreak on native fauna and flora. But I have a soft spot for these magnificent desert creatures and hope that they can be treated with dignity and kindness.
Anchored in sunset. Photo Courtesy: Alan Noble
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Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her recent work has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, Continue the Voice, Micking Owl Roost blog, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, and Mind, Brain & Education Think Tank. In 2024, her story Safari was chosen as the Editor’s Choice for the June edition of All Your Stories.
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I don’t recall seeing it the first time. How did it escape being a “weed?” And a dead weed at that. I do remember seeing it in a different light. Different than the posies in the large flowerpot; Different than the ground cover. Different from anything else. The height soon marked it as different. Could it be a grass? Will it wilt and die? Time will tell, time will tell. Days pass, then weeks. Shapes begin to appear and the height continues to impress. It could be corn, corn? It’s in a flowerpot! Another couple of weeks. The top begins to show the characteristics of corn. Silk: corn has silk. A tassel -- corn has a tassel! A small leaf forms on the side and grows. It begins to look like an ear. But where did it come from? Corn grows in large fields. Enormous plantings. Mine is a single, happy plant. Maybe this is where the tiny cobs in Chinese cuisine come from. I refill the bird feeder. There it is: kernels of corn mixed with the other seeds! I go to check on the sprouting pine tree.
Photographs by Ron Pickett
Ron Pickett is a retired naval aviator. His 90-plus articles have appeared in various publications. He has published five books: Perfect Crimes – I Got Away With It, Discovering Roots, Getting Published, 60 Odd Short Stories, and Empaths. Ron has had his poems published in Scarlet Leaf, Borderless Journal, and other periodicals.
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each day she paints a new picture, forgets to add colour because being disagreeable for always is her very best from the first with years piling on top of one another where they keep falling down on fairy tales from another time, she said everybody else is evil because she’s always right, so the rest of us clowns should bow down to her including the children who left before it was legal, now we heard the husband took an oath of celibacy sometime last week to blank out the years lost in obsolete matrimony
Richard D. Houff is an author and former publisher from St. Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in numerous magazines such as Atom Mind, Brooklyn Review, Chiron Review, North American Review, Osiris, and Rattle.
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The monitors hummed low, a thinning choir That strained to keep its vigil through the night. The screens performed dramatics for boozy vinegar, slight Distortions drifting through their failing wire. The ward exhaled a slow, mechanical ire, A breath that scraped the edges of her will; She felt the hours gather, standing still.
She lingered where the curtains met the floor, Unsure if she should cross that final seam. The room became a coldframe of evening, dream Unspooling into fractures evermore. She tried to name the ache she couldn’t store, A shape that shifted when she reached to hold; It slipped like syntax breaking in the cold.
The nurses whispered through their coded rites, Their footsteps patterned like a failing loop. She sensed the weight of every passing troop, A march of hours draining into nights. The ceiling flickered with recursive lights That mapped the drift of endings yet to come; She felt her thoughts grow strangely faint and numb.
She touched the rail, its metal faintly warm, A relic of the body once it bore. The quiet pressed against her like a door She feared would open into some new storm. She tried to brace herself against the form Of grief that rose, unbidden, from the seam Where memory and present tense convene.
The screens displayed ducters for faces, blurred, Their outlines trembling with spillings in the meters. She saw in them eyes for wasters, quiet greeters Of truths too raw for any final word. She felt the weight of what could not be heard— The sense of dead beneath the faces, drawn Like shadows stretched across a failing dawn.
She breathed, and in that breath she heard the past Rewind itself in muted, broken frames. The ward, adept at erasing names, Prepared to overwrite what couldn’t last. She wondered how a life could be recast When all its lines were scattered in the air; She wondered if the self could still repair.
The night advanced, a slow and patient sweep That gathered every silence in its net. She tried to speak, but speech itself had set Into a shape too brittle now to keep. She watched the shadows lengthen, steep by steep, Until they touched the threshold of the bed; She bowed her head to what could not be said.
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied hard and sat entrance exams for Oxford University. Jim has a fine frenzy for poetry and has written in excess of 22,000 poems. Jim adores the art of poetry. He lives for prosody.
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I never hear raindrops slow when they thin and scatter, when the weight of each one lightens, even as they’re still falling. I never hear a jetliner moving toward the horizon, the sound of it blending with sunlight as I see it fade into the haze or hear the footsteps of cardinals scurrying across a concrete walkway— only that I tried as hard as I could, like a silent heart on that forgetful day in yet another year since everything passed on and silence silenced things, forever vacated from my ears, forever rotating in and out of consciousness, rotating thinner across the depths of air where their sounds stay barely witnessed.
PORTENTS
There are moments suddenly interrupted: an apparition appearing as an actor centred on stage and then a spotlight is switched on when the familiar lighting reveals a texture I can feel though cannot hold. But just as suddenly, it leaves. When it happens, it’s the finer aromas that still go missing.
But I see everything soon leaves, and what I recall— even if I’m not conscious of it—is all I have left. Isn’t this the entire story? I am here with random memory switched on and off in this maddening ritual I don’t control. But what I see is how brutal the lighting can be, a ceremonial illumination of a face and hands through every version of my life,
a historic river running over the washed stones of the riverbed, the sand smoothed and flattened without aged footprints, and me again waiting with my hold on it looser than ever. Not a moment leaves without my breathlessness in it, the sounds of what we knew, the only way we can be with each other—as if we share breakfast in an empty house we’ve never occupied.
THE EMPTY HOUSE
I come back to the dream: the darkened house, the empty rooms, with only an angled streetlamp bathing the walls and floors in pale light. The telephone has long gone silent.
I know I’m walking through a dream but it doesn’t reveal more other than to say: you’re on your own regardless of rain or chill in the moist air. I don’t want to disturb what rests here but couldn’t if I wanted to. I only know the proclivities this recurring dream has reinforced, stirring and blending with the others disjointedly. So I list each day, a leaning curse like a once-glorious yacht tilting on a long stretch of beach. The ocean, streaming to shore in thin, wide-waves, pulls the sand from once settled places aligning awkwardly with the proclivities I’ve come to.
I’m toiling to enjoy my remaining time the best way I know in the circle of people I’ve chosen. If only I could forever keep them on the checkerboard of my life, the seemingly-random lateral and retreating moves and reclaim the joy I’d once known—the art of adding colour to a colourless world in the white and pale-gray of another day.
The handwriting of the empty house is the tidemark in the art of another time, where doors don’t reopen— will never reopen. It sits isolated as a place lost when time too is lost along its silenced walls— once the heart of life itself—and will no longer say what I thought they always would. The language now incompatible with the one I’d spoken—but it still startles me when I hear those off-balance words and live the challenges they inflict daily.
SR (Salvatore Richard) Inciardi was born in New York City and attended Brooklyn College and New York University. SR Inciardi’s poetry has appeared in in various online and print magazines including Green Ink Poetry, Harrow House Journal, Front Porch Review, Grey-Sparrow Journal, Borderless Journal, Written Talesamong others. He was a contributor to Green Ink Poetry for their publication on Kennings: Equinox Collections: Autumn released on Amazon in October 2024. SR Inciardi currently has two books of poetry on Amazon that speak to loss and navigating grief.
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The rains have abated Moments light up The shadows of hills Cast a flicker of hope The rains lighten burden And somewhere a light flickers The rains weave dreams In small hamlets or puddles
These rains come in moments When the hills lie sleeping But rains arouse fire in hills
In dry catacombs, a mystery Which is always impermeable
We get up in mornings Recollecting last night’s torrent
In this town of reverberating hills
Echoes which resound of past And a longing of silences
Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong where he was born and brought up. He has been writing and publishing poetry for over forty years.
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The river keeps its oldest songs beneath a skin of silver light. It teaches stones the art of patience and carries every dawn downstream.
Birds arrive before the sun, stitching morning into the trees. Their wings awaken sleeping branches with whispers softer than the breeze.
The reeds bow low to passing currents, as though greeting an old friend home. Clouds pause upon the mirrored surface, watching their pale reflections roam.
A fisherman waits without complaint, trusting time more than his net. The water knows the language of hope better than words have spoken yet.
Children skip smooth stones across the flow, counting each bright leap with delight. The ripples gather every laughter and carry it beyond my sight.
I leave with empty hands, yet somehow return carrying the silence the river lent to me. Its quiet lingers in my heart, a gentle guide through restless days, reminding me that steady waters often reveal life’s deepest ways.
Hassan Ismail Adekunle is a Nigerian poet whose work explores memory, identity, and contemporary African life. His poems have appeared in literary magazines, including the Inverse Journal.
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