Public Republic

Stanislava Stanoeva Photo: leipaf.geo time dispelled like lightning Heels hurt from walking I asked someone for the second shirt And I felt cold in the scalding hot noontide I was barefoot and I learnt To turn objects into primal matter In the lands of the sinful one, bread sprouted And I’m still learning to walk […]

Chuck Clenney Photo: carbonnyc Sunday Morning, I find myself Reading old love letters Reminiscing of how my hands Remember how your body felt.

Drew Logan Photo: kevindooley Batman and Robin sitting on the curb out of any wine since last night waiting for the liquor store to open Batman and Robin sitting on the curb out of any love since they were born waiting for the liquor store to open Batman and Robin sitting on the curb out […]

Tanya Kolyovska Photo: twoblueday The cypresses, ah, the cypresses – slender shadows of radiant souls. Translated from Bulgarian by Valentin Krustev

Drew Logan Photo: ktylerconk Sitting in Juice Church waiting a return to sanity or donut whichever comes first Someone passes me the box of donuts I become a donut hole in the middle

Gerald Yelle Photo: aussiegall China were a far better partner than this Ferlinghetti of the brain, better than Discipline’s twin sister party favors, Maintenance and Flonase. They take, on the one hand, the flexing of a wrist to mean the same weak nod for as long as the moon captures daylight in its halo.

Suzanne Nielsen Photo: candlescents Lester Wilcox spoke of his love of firearms shortly before he took his last breath. His sister stood above him removing the PVC pipe that silenced the event, as she was jumpy around loud noises. “Sleep in heavenly peace,” she whispered, then listened to her heart beat contentedly in her own […]

David Cazden Photo: opticalreflex Like dragonflies on a pond, two girls alight beside me in the college diner–Sali wears an August tan, a hair thin choker streaming around her neck, while the other, red headed, freckled with leaf shadow, stares into her book. Outside, box elders are flinging their doors

Cheryl Snell Photo: pixle I’m trimming my sister’s hair when Mother makes for the scissors. I’m the one, she begins. Her words sputter to a halt as I close the gaping blades. She stands, dwarfed in the kitchen she once ruled, and I see her as she was, bending low over the children’s curls, her […]

Bozhana Apostolova Снимка: crystalina Lord, what a huge void domain between stamens and constellations – shining chasms of scents, dimmed galactic abysmal spaces. And amidst them, without end resounds the deafening calm, uninhabited by eyes, by bees, wings and handpalms… There is no place for vacuum under the sky anymore… The world will simply collapse […]

Simon Perchik Photo: Clearly Ambiguous And forgetting too comes easier bending the Earth the way the old learn to see in the dark –I lose count to begin again, finger by empty finger touching my lips, expecting more silence though the baby has no room to make an arch, to feel the wind under one […]

Donal Mahoney Photo: lepiaf.geo Through the window I see the sun fire up for the last time today. There are jays in the trees near the meadow, crows in the grass I cut with a scythe early this morning.

Aksinia Mihailova Photo: NatureFreak07 My left hand over a piece of paper; if you erased my thumb and my little finger and replaced them with verse, my hand mutilated and bony seen from the above would resemble a step of a bird chained to the piece of paper with tiny inky bracelets. Like that exotic […]

David Cazden Photo: yoppy Behind us, flashes of car windshields off the streets, students awaiting plates of food. We float conversation while the sky encircles us without a cloud.

George Fillingham Photo: ansik “Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes And slept.”          Wallace Stevens After Steven’s firecat Had bristled in the way Of the clattering bucks As they swerved To the left, and to the right, He slept. And as he slept, he dreamed.

David Cazden Photo: luigi morante Sali reads Turgenev, sits next to a girl with loose pants and a looped wallet chain. They talk in airy tones beside the diner window where the sky is dense

Bozhana Apostolova Photo: Per Ola Wiberg Get up early. Carry on your shoulders the concern about the seed yesterday sown. Everyday there is something unfinished to be done: a cut conversation, an unfinished poem. Everyday there is something that has yet to be born or conceived. Go along the hard road of water and bread— […]

Simon Perchik Photo: lepiaf.geo As if from some hourglass this beach slipped past last night, the wind returning empty, its sand laying motionless among the hours, one more joyous than another, one more caring one flying between these gulls and even you are lonely

Kenneth Pobo Photo: j-pocztarski In 745 Li Po peppers a poem about loneliness with a mountain and, inevitably, a moon. Today in Middletown, I’m lonely. A mall a half mile away, that’s a mountain too. Some regrets are mountains. Some can never be climbed.

Chuck Clenney Photo: procsilas Salvador Dali Slept with Wooden spoon In Hand. When he Fell asleep The spoon Hit the ground Subconsciously startled To head To the easel Without the artist. Automatic painting.