medical sans-serif;”>Just Friends
illness sans-serif;”>An absent-minded kiss
doctor sans-serif;”>in the pale blue haze
of the morning after.
Shrugging off sleep,
Nestled into the half-doze
of wakefulness.
Barely conscious,
the bliss of this brief moment
didn’t register
til several hours later.
And for an instant,
I was in trouble.
But then I remembered:
I could fuck anyone I wanted.
AH
imithe
gan a hanam,
agus a croí,
gan a gaire,
‘sí ina luí.
tá sí uaimse,
imithe.
ró-óg le himeacht,
mo chara is fearr.
Michelle Smith
IN FOCUS
She rests on one knee and the mud soaks through her jeans. Later the cold will make her miserable, but now she does not pay attention to it. Her arms are bent at sharp angles, fingers toying around her third eye. She holds her breath, adjusts the focus and keeps still. Above her head birds sing and some mimic the sound of the shutter snapping. She pushes the trigger, feels the inner workings of the camera in her hands. A sound escapes, like a flutter of a pigeon’s wing. She exhales for the photograph is taken.
Gets up, brushes the dirt off and walks on, applying her mind to unknown arts, changing the laws of nature.
Amadeusz Kepinski
NIGHT RIVER
As the river flows
So do my thoughts,
Flowing through the city,
My ideas curling round the buildings.
It’s a long way I guess
From one fragment of imagination to another,
Forming the basis for a new communication never heard before;
It’s moving quietly now in the still water,
Maybe it’s from another time,
Flowing through my mind as the river goes.
And you, standing there in the cold dawn,
Reaching for some complex theory
That combines quantum mechanics with general relativity,
As if the morning were a combination of elements
Thrown together in God’s experiment.
The last fish will swim into its coffin,
Another civilisation in decline,
Its language pared down to a grunt;
We let ourselves slip off the precipice,
Forever falling into the memory of a star,
Black at its heart and silent as the universe before us.
Michael Donohue
Postcards
I have heard
about postcards.
Postcards that fly
and that fall
across the sky
like storms can’t stop them
and storms don’t stop them.
I have heard that,
and always I’ve asked after them
and been told
you have to wait,
and wait,
and wait,
until one lands on your desk.
And I don’t believe that…
that kind of, untold thing.
I’ve known a different kind,
the kind that sit on my desk
waiting for writing,
waiting for sending.
NJ
Spicy Gum
there’s something calming about it,
kind of like my second girlfriend
my first real one,
who I used to kiss
after school only,
who used to kiss me
only after school,
it’s kind of like that.
she used to chew spicy gum
and take it out of her pale pink mouth,
just before I said hello.
and it was all cold then
between eyes and chins,
and that was nice.
it’s kind of like that,
so I take another sip
D.M
