Brahmagupta   the zero you never had to carry




firefly  
     maybe there's
          a chance




quietly turning pages    the ending to a story, I already know




widower groundhog    drowsy on the sun-warped deck




in a room alone   waiting for his luck to change 




a Paul Muni moment    I STEAL her dark chocolate




 history therein     the ones who wouldn't behave




the tricky slow-pitch of old age




soft Veronicas at her open bedroom window



no longer sci-fi
scholars annotating obstruse texts
on a dying planet




using sodium-vapor lights for my big imaginary scene 




I'm the monkey bars of nonlinearity, 
shot in the back
with a hand-held camera  




blowing sea water out of both nostrils
my Madras shorts
hemorrhaging




scent of crushed sage off the shoulders of a stranger




pioneering milk thistle enriching the soil she doesn't speak

***
ant learns to be small

***
the flower says goodbye in humility
but no one knows the language of flowers
even autumn remains indifferent

***
the wind 
scratches the petals

the weather body 
plunges into silence

***
I can't wait for winter
it's starting to snow and I'm in a stupor
I still can't forget you

***
bodies in graves
leaves underfoot
crunch

***
we sold our asses on the dark web every night
because nightingales no longer
accompany us with baby lullabies

money stolen from one's own
body is like coal from mines
need broke people in half
people broke the need in half

crowds of bawlers who forbade me to fuck in the ass
with homosexual boys and swallow their sperm
cannot imagine how many lovers' sperm
they lick from their wives' lips
love has broken us all
we all broke love

***
The dead do not choose who to come to in dreams
Shaggy blood cannot freeze on the rusty body of snow

Night of the concrete taste
Breaking silence

The bird sings a song
The song ruins the bird

***
cemetery puddle
I'm drowning in the grass like an embryo in a mother's belly

rain falls on the cemetery again
you are falling into the cemetery again

***
metal spikes of your kiss
the tattered leaves of my madness
I went crazy for the love of your winter
your snowy red palms make me sad
the distances between the letters of your name bring despair
the darkness in the night pupils is not capable of choice
love or die
suffer or be humus
unfinished concentration camps skulls are silent
the failed noses of love sniffle in the language of flowers
I'm looking for black rope for a bouquet of flowers
flowers strangled by the throat are not able to live without a cemetery

***
The sky ends with the grass dying
The dying sun turns to cold glass
Whose blood will flow from the wounds of the earth at the last moment?

Angels will come down at the most difficult moment
The walls are red like a throat will open up before them
Triangles of fear will explode and will warm cold fingers in vain

***
Wet hands like branches dangling in the cold wind
Aching hands like corpses dangling in the cold wind
Dead hands dangle in the cold wind

The raven screams at the pink moon and the moon turns red
Foliage lying on the ground asks for a drink
The walls of the night shrink to the size of a grave

Flowers grow
Flowers grow in the cemetery

***
The game of life is very strange
The game of life is very funny

People are real gods
Humans are gods of death

No one has risen again
Silence draws a hungry icon

                COMFORT

    By Linda Springhorn Gunther

I sat cross-legged on the carpet and watched my mother in the mirror as she brushed my hair with the antique silver hairbrush Nana had gifted her.

“Comfort is a fleeting phenomenon,” she said.

“Oww. Mommy, you’re hurting me.”

“Just need to get this last tangle out.” She tapped my shoulder. “Sit still, Linda,” she said and went back to yanking on the end of my hair with the hairbrush. “Look. I got it!” She held up a tiny snippet of balled-up hair, placed it on the side table, and continued brushing.

“What’s a phenomenon, anyway?” I asked.

“It’s a…a… condition,” she said. “Like a situation that is observed yet perhaps not fully understood. You’re eight years old. You should know that word. Having a wide breadth of vocabulary will give you an edge in everything you do.”

She sat on the sofa behind me in her powder-blue turtleneck and navy-blue pleated skirt. She wore some kind of turtleneck every day, either short or long sleeved, no matter what the weather or season, hiding her neck where she had a thin vertical scar that went from just under her chin down to her collarbone. Her eyes were like two dazzling gems, an exquisite blue-green mix with tiny flecks of brown. Her eyelashes were long even without a hint of mascara. Her short, dark, curly hair parted in the middle and finished at the chin of her perfectly-shaped oval face accentuated by high cheekbones and the dot of a black beauty mark to the right of her upper lip. I remember thinking she was beautiful as I watched her in the mirror yet tried to get the thought out of my mind. She annoyed me with her strange behaviors much more often than impressed me with her beauty.

We were both brain-gifted. I was in a special progress class at school based on IQ and other tests, and had been selected to skip a grade. She’d often remind me of that particular similarity between us. My mother could talk to anyone on any subject for hours, spouting her broad knowledge of science, literature, history, geography, theater, politics, even quantum physics and the concept of parallel universes.

At first, the person would smile, their eyes wide in amazement at the depth of my mother’s detailed grasp of the topic at hand. She’d converse non-stop, go on and on with strangers on the bus, on the street, in the supermarket, at restaurants, at my school with teachers, until they had to make an excuse to leave the scene, somehow get away from her. She seemed to be unaware of their need to retreat. Was that why my father left us? I was well aware of my mother’s flaws. Her serious flaws. 

She stared at me in the mirror, her head tilted to one side, hairbrush in hand. “You are a beautiful girl,” she said. “I think you’re going to be a star! Linda Springhorn, Tony Award winner!” she declared and spread her arms out in the air.

Watching her in the mirror, I thought she might drop the hairbrush.

“Thanks,” I said. “Can I go now? I’m gonna meet Patty and play cards.”

“No. You’re not doing anything with that Patty.”

Geesh, why did I mention her name?

I rolled my eyes, pulled away, and got up from the rug.

“That girl is unkempt, nasty.” My mother’s face contorted like she smelled a dirty diaper or something worse. She tapped my arm firmly. “Sit! I’m not finished brushing you.”

“Patty is my best friend,” I said as I complied but sat further away from her reach.

“Her sister is even worse,” she went on, and then she tugged my sweatshirt for me to move back closer to her. “The bad language both of those girls use. Shameful! I hear them out there on the street. Very bad influence on you.”

“But…”

“Absolutely not. I don’t want you playing with her or her sister.”

I curled up the corner of my lip as if to say I hate you. It was my usual put-down without saying a word. I knew she despised me doing that.

“There. Done,” she said, and fixed the pink hair tie around my long brown ponytail, giving it one last swoop of the brush.

I started to get up. “Okay, then I’m gonna play handball with Mitchell instead.” I’d just sneak around the corner to play cards on Patty’s stoop outside her building.

“Better choice,” she said. “Just do me a favor Linda-girl, before you go.”

 I picked up my jacket from the easy chair.

“What?”

“When you cross the threshold at the front door, come back three times without stepping on the cracks.”

“Mommy! No. Not that again.”

“Do it,” she said. “I don’t want you to have any bad luck out there on the street. Tomorrow’s your big audition with Richard Rogers. You need to be in tip-top condition.”

I pressed my lips together. I had planned to pretend to be sick that night so I could skip the unwanted callback audition the next day, the audition Mommy wished she was doing instead of me. I felt like her puppet. I didn’t want to be an actress, something she had urged me to do with ballet, tap-dancing and singing lessons each week since before I turned five. Lessons she went into debt to give me. Lessons I didn’t ever want.

“Remember that movie we saw yesterday,” she said, changing the subject. She knelt down on one knee to button up my wool jacket. “That hilarious man dressed up like a woman wearing a mink stole. Tony Curtis! He’s so funny.”

“Yeah, I remember,” I replied. “Kind of stupid.”

“Stupid? He’s an Academy Award winner. And he was my best friend. We danced, acted together in the Navy, and then did summer stock together in the Catskills.” Her eyes got misty. “I knew him as Bernie Schwartz. Now, the famous Tony Curtis. Of course, I had a stage name too – Gloria Parker. We both adopted stage names at the same time.” She smiled.

I shrugged. “Okay Mommy, can I go now?”

I had heard the Tony Curtis story at least ten times before. Ignoring my question, she giggled and fell back on the sofa, sinking into the cushions like a little girl sharing her boy crush, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders raised, her eyes up at the ceiling. She went off into a zone beyond our tiny living room. I almost laughed but caught myself and, instead, curled my upper lip in disgust.

She straightened and pointed her finger at me.  “You keep doing that lip curl thing, young lady, and your face will get stuck like that forever.”

“Can I please go?” I asked.

She stood from the sofa. “Remember, three times back over that threshold. No stepping on the cracks. I’ll be watching you down the hallway.”

I turned to go and moved like a robot, my head fixed straight ahead, my body mechanical, arms stiff at my sides. I would only obey because I was captive to a delusional mother, and I had no choice.

“And find your brother out there,” she added as I neared the front door. “Both of you back in here by four. We’ll rehearse your ‘I Feel Pretty’ and Ronnie’s audition song one more time before Nana gets home for dinner.” 

“Right,” I mumbled under my breath. “Can’t wait.”

I turned the knob to open the front door.

“I’m watching,” her shrill voice threatened. 

I lifted my right foot, careful not to step on the grouted crack between our wood floor entry and the black-and-white checkered-tiled floor in the hallway just outside our apartment, the closest apartment to the main entrance of our five-story brick building. Then I lifted my left foot over the threshold and placed it next to my right foot, and then I turned back to face my mother who stood in the living room with her arms folded at her chest. I stepped back inside toward her, again careful not to tromp on the grout cracks despite the temptation. 

“No cracks,” I said, my index finger pointing down at my feet.  My mother nodded. I turned to cross back into the outer hallway a second time and looked back at her. The sun shot through the narrow entryway, its beam reaching to where my mother stood. Her face looked worn, wrinkled, her body thin, frail. She no longer looked anywhere near beautiful.

“Good,” she said and came down the hallway toward me, her black stack heels clicking on the wood floor. “Now do it again. A third time.”

Maybe I should call the social worker, I thought. I had the phone number for the red-haired woman who wore thick black eyeglasses and carried a black leather briefcase. Dina Weintraub from Social Services. She had given me the light blue business card which I hid under the mattress. She came by once a month to check on my single-parent mother, and sometimes she lingered, waiting for Nana to get home from work so she could spend a few minutes privately chatting with her in the kitchen.

One time I put my ear to the kitchen door to listen. The woman said in a hushed voice, “How is she? Showing signs of compulsive behavior or any delusions?”

I didn’t stick around to hear Nana’s answer back. All these years later, I still can’t decide what scared me most. I was afraid my mother would come up behind me. Or that Nana would swing open the kitchen door and catch me eavesdropping. Or maybe I just didn’t want to hear the answer to the question. So, I turned away.

The “crossing the crack avoidance” routine at the front door was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to my mother’s bizarre behaviors. Each night, she’d demand that my brother and I go back and forth several times across the threshold of the bedroom before getting into bed. Sometimes it was ten times. Sometimes it was twenty.

There was one night when I heard her talking loudly on the phone. I tiptoed into the bedroom and picked up the other line to listen. There was nobody on the phone except her having a conversation with a dial tone, which turned into a loud beep. She ignored the annoying sound and just kept on talking without a pause. Her topic was something about the horrid New York City education system. She was shouting into the phone as if performing a dramatic scene.

Now returning home, I crossed the front door threshold three times as my mother had commanded. I stood alone on the other side of our apartment door, on the black-and-white checkered hallway floor, and I stared back at our shut front door for a few moments. I was ten years old but felt tired, angry, and sad. 

I’ll talk to Nana when she gets home from work, I thought, after dinner when Mommy takes her bath.

Nana would listen, understand my frustration, my hopelessness. Maybe she would get Mommy to change her mind about dragging me to that callback audition tomorrow. 

I just need a little comfort, I told myself, as I walked around the corner to find Patty. Embarrassed and ashamed, I couldn’t say anything to my best friend. It was my secret. My mother.

***Excerpt from memoir titled A BRONX GIRL (Growing up in the 1960’s in the Bronx) by Linda Springhorn Gunther available on Amazon:

           Direct Link to Amazon:

         AUTHOR BIO:

Linda S. Gunther is the author of six published romantic suspense novels including: Ten Steps From The Hotel Inglaterra, Endangered Witness, Lost In The Wake, Finding Sandy Stonemeyer, Dream Beach, and Death Is A Great Disguiser. In 2023, Linda’s memoir titled A Bronx Girl was published and is available on Amazon. Over the past 18 months, more than 60 of Linda’s short stories, memoir pieces and essays have been published in a variety of literary journals across the world. Please visit Linda’s website for her WRITE-BYTES blog for developing writers at www.lindasgunther.com

Live Unhated

Bottle of salty ocean

Take seventeen years worth of pirate slang

Add a dash of 826 Valencia

Read the first ten pages of Moby Dick

Purified to the max

In a deep rinse of kraken blood

And scurvy

Stunning all the onlookers for miles around 

Nearly blinded

McDonald’s thought you were hated enough

To make the Happy Meal Toy lineup

On your little windup Spanish Galleon

Adrift in 100% Apple juice

Poked until chipped

Mystery lying just beneath the surface

A solid blue mannequin instead of bones

A sculpt, not a skull

Leather beaten

Tanned

Pulled

To fit the consumer-based mold

Doesn’t matter if it hurts

Pebbles sell if you’re a smooth enough talker

Keeping track of the time and singing along to the same whistle in your hollow

Noggin

So wide and empty a tornado goes 

Silent in between your ears

No I’m not calling you stupid not by any means

I just want to know why you’re so gullible as to believe

That I was there for you

I’m not your goddamn scratching post

Let me wither in room temperature

Connect the dots to make a wish

But you’ve got a bit worse than a bald spot at this point

And the handkerchief is starting to chafe

Consciousness sliding round like a badly made

Cruise liner dining room

Free mimosas at ten

If you can stomach being around your friends for more than an hour

But I said too much

Please leave

Next?

Next to me was no one

Then you were

But I never asked to be the subject of your pity

I don’t even like it when I’m the subject of your still life.

It’s only because when I hold my breath

I look as if I’m ready

To be born amongst the sea

And forgive you politely 

Saying

“I was never much of a poet anyway”

Any further questions?

No?

Etta and Ann

Your eyes are red from the traffic lights and our lack of sleep. I look over at you. Admire the way the light catches perfectly on the tops of your cheeks. A line runs from your hairline to the tip of your chin. And I look over at you and see your lashes growing into the heat. Freckles added to your iris, I don’t like symmetry, I prefer perfection. I prefer you. There’s an optical illusion I often make you into. We blend your graphite cheekbones, and a part of me always wanted to look like you.

“Would you hold me if you had to?” We ask.
“I’d kill you if I had to.”
“Hold me.” We touch necks in the back seat. I lean further and press my lips into the corner of your mouth.

“Did you ever get that baby removed?”
“I’d rather die of an infection.” You lift my legs over yours and I wrap my arms around your
torso, pulling you down with me. Your head is on my chest, my hand over your hair. Tracing the patterns of your 1920’s slicked curls. There is a tear drawn onto our cheek. And dollops of mascara in the corners of our eyes are what keeps us pretty.

“Etta baby, tell me. Where are we now? When we get home, will we love like this? Or will we
drown again? Etta baby, tell me, are we rotting? Or becoming one?” You repeat it back to me.
“Ann, who in our fat hearts cares?”
“Etta baby, I’m just wondering if I kiss you now, or I save it for our bed.” We shift our body, ‘til our lips are nose away. I shape our mouths to your liking. We met in the womb, on the page, in the janitorial closet. I’ve never known myself, never wanted us more. Close your wrists around mine baby, tell me you’ve never loathed yourself more, we can lose the weight of one another.

We can starve each other and still have the height to melt into one. We wonder if we exchange our beauty like whores, or if our love belongs in the back seat.
“Would you kill me if you had to?” We ask.
“I’d hold you if I had to.”
“Etta baby, hold me tonight. Etta baby, we die tonight. And in the morning, I’ll redraw you.”

Janina Aza Karpinska is an award-winning Poet from the south coast of England. She achieved an M.A. in Creative Writing & Personal Development (with Merit), at Sussex University. Her work has appeared in Bath House Journal; Isacoustic; Three Drops Poetry; Willawaw Journal;Ekphrastic Reviewamong others. She makes writing a daily practice, drawing on many influences and employing a variety of styles, particularly interested in the self-imposed constraints employed by experimental writing group OULIPO.

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