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Soothes
             the 
                 LOVE of Experience 

                    Lifts from the start 

Continuity is Always Beginning 

              I See Something Good 
         & there was good 
 Nothing Wasted  My LOVE 

      ♡  Well along I see  ♡

Continuity always Beginning 

 Soothed my presence LOVE 
       Gifts await the Star
             in the sky
                    ☆
 
                                                                  ...

 
by  John Edward Culp 
       April 24, 2023

Flying

I remember flying

Learned it early

Somewhere between

Peter Pan and Superman

Sitting out on a windowsill

Overlooking Adsit Court

Legs dangling and then

I was off flying

The whole world in front

Of me, waiting for me

Up with the geese

And the gulls, as if there

Were no limits

No expiration date

On my flight

Soaring, zooming

Hovering, floating

I could be there or anywhere

I had the mind to be

Now I just remember flying.

It got away from me.



                Free Fall

Sometimes running feels like falling.

perhaps like free falling

your feet barely touching down

as distance appears and disappears

under you

 

They told you that life was a marathon

and not a sprint

but they sprinted away while you sat

there tying your shoes

 

And now you are running alone

almost weightless

 

This is running, falling, free falling

without a parachute to snap open

to catch you when the ground leaps up

to show you – you’ve reached the end.



     Getting Away


Time to walk away

Turn your back

A full 180 this time.

Pick up your pace.

 

There’s no rear-view

Mirror this time.

 

There are memories

That will go bump

Go thump in the night

 

But right now you’re

Moving away

 

Physically at first

Mentally sometime later.

 

But now you’re moving

Putting distance and time

Between you

 

And all those things –

the list seems too long

to go over ever again.

 

Those things you knew

You had to leave behind.

 

And now you’re

Alone out here

Without them.

J. K. Durick is a retired writing teacher and online writing tutor. His recent poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Black Coffee Review, Literary Yard, Sparks of Calliope, Synchronized Chaos, Madswirl, Journal of Expressive Writing, Lightwood, and Highland Park Poetry.

Gen X

Maybe we weren’t resourceful. Maybe we were just confused.
Maybe we lost our way. Maybe we lost our shoes
in a pond with a surface like a screen without words or songs
from the future disconnected walking barefoot down the long
screen to the future which doesn’t have a phone
or a bookstore or a workplace and is leaking like snow cone
purple across the tile. We follow cracks from lock to key
through the back screen door. To be safe you touch the tree
growing upwards towards the moon and on up towards the light
pollution that blurs what’s happened. Together with what might.

UFO Museum: Roswell, NM


Breaking in was nothing,

For one of my talents,

Ditto for lifting the device I needed

From its glass case without tripping the alarm;

Installing and testing it was a matter of moments.

I was ready to go;

I'd miss Darlene, she'd been good to me:

A loving wife, willing participant

In what must have seemed, at times,

Bizarre activities, but she'd get over it,

And I couldn't give her the children

She so desperately needed,


I needed to get back to my other family,

My other wife

Raising a horde of sprouts on her own,

And I was so tired of the lies:

An only child of fictitious parents

Killed in a “car” crash,

Born and raised in “the Midwest,”

A retired airline pilot.

My only real fear,

That my wife had remarried,

And her husband had, of course, eaten our young,

So I'm on my way back to Aldebaran,

And I really hope that if I have to kill and eat

Her and her lover,

He's not one of my brothers.

Lost “again” in translation.

I am adrift again. In this country
The lilting accent of a brook

wrapped around my mahogany skin.
My idioms tumble down like unruly roots.

Dormant in the taciturn stillness
of phantom dreams.



A meditation upon love

People walk through a haboob to get past it. “Humongous”, my child’s
sibilant whisper hangs in the air for someone to retrieve it and carry
in their pocket. The hawkers screech like birds trapped in walls. I put
my fingers in my dead ears.


Once I had dipped my feet in gelid marble, my blush filled the sky with
tones of lilac. The sealed silence of the tomb had echoed so loud. Mouth
Agape, knees trembling, I listened.


I share a birthday with an empress. I had walked the gardens,
blue Polyester sticking to me like a second skin, henna marking
me till my elbows. Demure bride. Now vultures circle over my head
in anticipation of carrion.


There are red letter boxes outside disrupting the pristine alabaster.
It is a post office, they say. I look away, I was never here. One by
one, the sepia toned photographs disappear from the family album
with a broken spine.


A woman with a beehive on her head, saree draped artlessly over
a sleeveless blouse. A young man pretending to touch the spire,
an optical illusion. Father caught in an awkward moment
with a Yashica camera.


This is no longer a story about love at first sight. A forlorn princess
did not sit on a bench here in 1992.Poets never rhapsodized about its grandeur. We don’t know how it came into being.


The sun is in arrant mode; it burns holes in my heart. Tomorrow,
I’ll return and post a letter. Seeking solace in subterfuge for what
never was.



Glossary

Haboob: A wind that brings sand from the desert native to Sudan.


You will disappear…


You will lose a lover and disappear off the face of the earth,
you will squirm in the therapist’s chair and not tell her where
you were.



It has been eight sessions and two hundred dollars for an hour
the seat is still warm from the person before you. An imprint left
on the beige upholstery is oddly comforting.



We are all drowning and the thought
makes you feel not so alone. You have not cried once.
For a whole week after his passing, you told Seema




about the folded shirt and black trousers, he left them on the bed.
He did not want to die, he had just slipped out into the night
for a breath of fresh air, perhaps he needed to clear his head.



You read books on reincarnation, about the afterlife, you meditate
your hair grows white, you wake up screaming even with the night
light on but you don’t shed tears.



Ordinary days can kill you, you have learned
luminous, filled with the chirping of birds, the
chittering of crickets. You will carry your



anguish into your New York apartment
in lieu of luggage, there are no elevators,
the man beneath is a doctor who sleeps during the day.




You hate him because doctors could not save your love, yet you don’t entertain friends with kids anymore. Children are loud and you are fragile like a handheld grenade.


You become a plant mother instead, you never weep,
you pamper your pots with filtered water. And one day there is an Orange



in a pot by the sill, a tree you had bought on a whim at the grocery store.
You marvel at how perfectly spherical it is, how orange
how it grew out of bereavement, you eat it peel and all.


It is sweet and tart and bitter; it bursts and melts on your tongue
and the salt finally pours from your eyes, it trickles past your lips.



A familiar gnawing to devour everything fills your being as you sob.
Your tears drown the whole building, then Manhattan, all of it
but you swim ashore in your aliveness.



Jahnavi Gogoi is a poet who grew up amidst insurgency in Assam, India and lived to tell the tale. She is a writer of children’s fiction and a mother to an assertive seven-year-old daughter. Her debut book of poetry ‘Things I told myself’ can be found on Amazon. Jahnavi now resides in Canada with her family in the picturesque town of Ajax. Her poetry has been published in Inssaei International journal, Academy of the Heart And Mind, Spillwords, Soul Connection by Guwahati Grand Poetry Festival, Mystic Aura magazine, Indian Periodical. She also has words in G plus, The Beacon webzine and others.