Commuter Tanka

Tarik Dobbs

     I am told the cows

               accept new cows on the spot.

                                                What iteration

               of events will we live through

at sunrise on Highway Ten?

Color of the flowers

has already faded away

while in idle thoughts

my life passes vainly by,

as I watch the long rains fall.

- Ono no Komachi

passa o espaço da palavra com sua selva sem margem

- mário chamie

I am not my body. Get me out of here.

- Tommy Pico

Hope

is a charred skeleton

of a house visible from a road that snakes

through the valley of memory

where fig trees burst from the ground like throaty laughter.

- Tommy Pico

If language is a structure born

of the desire to communicate, can I really be blamed when Money says

anxiety is only real when the face breaks and I’m chipping like paint?

- Tommy Pico

left alone to spiral into the abyss of maladaptive delusion

- madisen kuhn

The ageless lust of an elusive closeness.

- Madisen Kuhn

Love consists in this, 

that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

- Roland Barthes

And I can’t pretend to know the watermelon lollipop 

Without the tongue that exists only to melt it away

- Madisen Kuhn

Maybe the chaos will always be there but 

I’ll find a way to break it down into mulch and grow 

Pears and herbs and gardenias from what’s left of me

It takes a while to accept that the shadows matter

- Madisen Kuhn

Where does it come from

The longing 

The need to be loved by the things that we love

I hear a song or read a poem and I’m on my knees

- Madisen Kuhn

I told you I’m always afraid to die 

Except when I’m reading Mary Oliver

- Madisen Kuhn

Haven’t I lived long

enough to know that the sand falls at the whim of my own hand? I’ve been

saving it up, but for what, I still don’t know.

- Madisen Kuhn