Public Republic

Kenneth Pobo Photo: Flowery *L*u*z*a* The sun sneaks through Matt’s back yard, appears in his dining room window. Naked and reading the paper, he sips his morning coffee,

Publishing House Fakel Express invites you to the premiere of the poetry book Въздухът Около Пеперудата / The Air Around The Butterfly by Katerina Stoykova 4 December (Friday) at 6:00PM, Rakursi Art Galley, Han Krum Street 4a (behind the City Library), Sofia, Bulgaria

Kenneth Pobo Photo: Darwin Bell Tartuffe’s selling dentures at the mall copped from a dental clinic, winks from the confessional. At the I-95 Welcome Center he hands out maps with bags of blow. On the mayor’s lap. He’s running a resale shop but it’s really a front for a kidnappers. He’s roiling in bad chemistry, […]

Robert Baker Photo: John-Morgan (one brown eye one blue) Sheer curtains blow shroud-white, with a warning wave of hiss, into the tiny room. The window is thrown open to the pre-dawn wind off the Sierras and the wolves are howling a hungry celebration of reunion. I am awake but very physically tired from crossing the […]

Drew Logan Photo: Vince Alongi If it rained they met under the bridge in secret If the Sun shone they met in the park in public Everyday they solved the world’s problems No one took notes

Peter Kraevski Снимка: kwanz Wondrous territory Alogical and cruel dictatorship Its limits are the horizon And utopias are its reality In the morning you get going And at noon undetectably you are beyond return Translation: Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Therése Halscheid Photo: gromgull I have just finished sweeping a place in the glade where a bed is now made of star moss and blossoms. I have ordered a moon to come softly, its white through the trees, birds for the sky, a waterfall lovely to listen to. Come, step out of the dream of […]

By Donal Mahoney Photo: aloshbennett Two men tall, one from here and one from there,

Chantal Bizzini Photo: I’ll Never Grow Up Flowers explode, stars, sea serpents, Medusas, rise up, flower to purge their being, disperse their form, their color, to be, after the elation, no more than stem of smoke refallen in the violet-blue water of the bay. Goodfellows, monsters, flakes of gold, one after another, surge, disappear… children […]

Changming Yuan Photo: Mira Dimova Orchid: Deep in the valley Alone on an obscure spot You bloom none the less Lotus: From foul decayed silt You shoot clean against the sun Never pollutable Mum: Hanging on and on Even when wishes wither You keep flowering Plum: Your brave bold blood dropped As though to melt […]

Therése Halscheid Photo: bortescristian The moon shows me a place beyond this darkness below an area of low ground where you stand among flowers, you in the natural silence of your being in the quiet hours your strong hands own. You with a hoe working that same plot of earth watering the magnolia I never […]

Roumen Leonidov From The End of Mythology Photo: DerrickT it’s cozy, safe and warm. So they say. Something like a sanatorium for fanatic manikins. But I don’t buy this. Both my eyes have seen this mantle trailing on its own. No wonder it’s the choicest tablecloth for stains. I can hear them humming underneath: “The […]

Chantal Bizzini Photo: fauxto_digit To Eric Dolphy Streaks, colors split into blaring gold, mystic rays, pouring from blue-grey clouds, decompose in rose strips, stretched thick chalk of reverbating sea, wild mauve and deep purple, new fusion of tender shades then more somber congealed by sun’s fall disappearing back there, at the edge of the inhabited […]

Robert Baker Photo: jenny downing In a quiet conversation over drinks with my very most new friend, some woman wafting by Patchouli explodes the Trojan horse that I keep up my nose. She asks if I’m OK, my maybe new friend does, “A far away look. My, my how rude.” She smiles. I smile back […]

By Therese Halscheid Photo: Kamen Ferdinandov father’s view Do not force me to want these shadowy doctors and faint strangers or look anymore at their leaning over, not when I can open my eyes inward not while I watch, in sleep, the forgotten films, hours of old reels of my life replaying.

Milena Valkanova Photo: akshay moon Mom, there are times when your hand in mine feels like throbbing of a thousand lives together. We are the unsundered chain of blood meandering within the riverbeds where our great grandmothers threw their daughters like bread on the water. Now is a time to let your mother walk on […]

Roumen Leonidov Photo: madmolecule awful pleasure thinking is. Even if a person thinks whether it’s worth thinking. It’s awful when one reclines in repose and doesn’t want and cannot think about one’s brains. It’s awful that homo sapiens doesn’t think. And there comes the homunculus and there comes the homunculus stalin-hitler and with what an […]

Drew Logan Hard Bread Hard Time Hard Luck Now and then Soft Woman Soft Mouth Soft Work Photo: Kamen Ferdinandov Arís is Arís Arán crua Am crua Ádh crua Anois agus aris Bean mhín Béal mín Beatha mhín

Milena Valkanova Photo: Temari 09 You are burning And I am stern We reside On the edge of expectations While you are fending off The tide Of neurotic insecurity I would caress The endeavors And little deaths But you’d rather hide Behind The oblong idea Of constantly renewed cells Of painful understanding

Simon Perchik Photo: Hamed Saber Still, the Earth with so much hair is just not strong enough, the sun takes all the light it wants and every morning you watch the struggle, it ends with the sun fattened feeding her brood in the dark