Mia Leonin, 'Refugee (Baghdad 2003)'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Refugee (Baghdad 2003)

A child’s legs twitch, wired with the day’s last synaptic flickers.
Her body kicks and rolls into the C of sleep’s inevitable curve.

Beneath a newly named Pluto she sleeps—no longer a planet,
now simply a sphere, a smear on the galaxy’s conscience.

A mother kneels into the lamp light of the day’s last ablutions.
How will her missing hand groom the head?

She rubs her cracked heels with coarse salt and wheat chaff.
How will the linens trample themselves clean?

Daughter, your mother’s prayer teeth would sharpen
and shred your opaque sack of sleep.

She would chew you into her cow-belly vault, break you
into one of the earth’s invisible compounds with her rumen

if she could live to see what you will survive.

By Mia Leonin

'Prof of Profs' by Geoffrey Brock

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Prof of Profs

I was a math major—fond of all things rational.
It was the first day of my first poetry class.
The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass,
told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”

could own it, since poetry we memorize sings
inside us always. By way of illustration
he began reciting Shelley with real passion,
but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” —
because, with that last plosive, his top denture
popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.

He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture,
a promise so splendid it made me give up math:
“More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.”

~Geoffrey Brock

The Solipsist, by Troy Jollimore

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The Solipsist

Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.

That primordial tide—
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash—
is on the inside.

Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole

universe. You recline
on the pillow: the cosmos
grows dim. The soft ghost
in the squishy machine,

which the world is, retires.
Someday it will expire.
Then all will go silent
and dark. For the moment,

however, the black-
ness is just temporary.
The planet you carry
will shortly swing back

from the far nether regions.
And life will continue—
but only within you.
Which raises a question

that comes up again and again,
as to why
God would make ear and eye
to face outward, not in?

~by Troy Jollimore