Jessica Beyer - Bhavya Kaushik - Sumana Roy

Meaghan Russell - Jon Sands - Robert Vaughan

Sweta Srivastava Vikram - Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Richard Marx Weinraub

AZAAD POETRY

♥   ♠   ♦   ♣ 

Jessica Beyer
Raw Sushi

The salt and aldehyde smell of her clung to my skin.

Lips the cold maraschino color cherries cannot be
drew flotsam.

Toes the fizzing language of Atlantis.


She stuck grass-colored bitter nails in my mouth.

I liked to watch birds until I met her.


She held maki between teeth before chewing –
mouth open, sesame seeds against enamel.

Hair squealed like squid.

Her seal leather feet rooted for sand crabs.

The one time she sweat it tasted like cold milk.

Tongue, temple, varnish.


Liked sea grass stuck on her body,
liked me to peel it off,
liked to boil it.

She talks about birch trees the way some people talk about childhood.

Paint strewn on sand.


We clawed nine nights in the white shuttered dust house
slowly turning its eroding face from the ocean.

The day we met, her legs were scale-painted,
I thought they were stockings until she washed.


She smolders toward the brut god.

Even in albums of her as a child,
she did not speak in pastels.

Wore a hard hat and seven inch alligator heels to the $4 movie theater
the night she left grapefruit in my bed.

Cherry red reminds me of stride piano.

Bhavya Kaushik

The Amethyst Moonlight...

Through my window pane I can clearly see,
The amethyst moonlight steadily following me.
Propagating its essence in the entire space,
Walking towards me in a perfectly splendid grace.

Breaking me free from the abandoned monotony,
Enlightening every part of my rotten anatomy.
Creating hallucinations, confusing my reality,
In these violet delusions I owe you all of my sanity.

The amethyst moonlight, you are my only company,
In this silent night, you are like my personal symphony.
You are the drug, the only medicine working on me,
You are everywhere around or within, wherever I see.

Sumana Roy
Touch

Touch was a poem you taught me
to read. “Aaa” – you tore the sound
out of my throat. You traced it out
for me to repeat. You became carbon
paper. Strokes-scratches-scribbles. I’m
the desert, you said. Touch. Become
my dune. I was sand, shy at first. Play
ground fear. I wanted to hide. I got
into your eyes. Sand. You rubbed
me into your lids. We hurt, we bruised,
we grew sore-pink. My hazelnut screams
filled your mouth. “Eee”. And teeth came
on skin. Touch.

Touch was a seven storeyed building
I climbed that pollen-yellow afternoon. You
lay on your back. I was Vinci. I drew you.
One wasn’t enough. I needed more. Bookshelves
of fingers. I piled you on you. Vitruvian
Man of my touches. Chimney smoke
sneaked into the room. A neighbourhood
of shadows leaned against our bed. You
stood with your back to me. Empty,
like an owl at noon. You left your eyes
on the bed. You touched the bluegreen
shadows on the floor with your toe. I
grew jealous. I called you to me. I
became a fisherwoman. I threw
my net out to you. Touch
was suicide. But you jumped in. What
gravity. Pleasure was a canal
you ploughed a stream into. Soles brushed
soles, luscious veins squeezed to bulbs
of moist delight, sweat hummed in folds. You
peeled my scars away. Cruelty.

Touch was a season that year. Curtains
of stains hung like Cezanne on your back.
The wind stabbed like your thumb
at my chin. Touch was a parrot song. Your
feather breath on my neck. Powdered
light on your hair. Touch was a rope
we pulled too hard. It snapped in the air.
We went looking for ends but got only glue.
We lost touch. Touch was a morning-wet road.
You wanted to cross. You held my sleeve,
I stroked your clouds.

Touch was striped rain on my back. You
let my skin soak till you found a song. Touch
was a paper lantern you hung
from a tree. There’s fire in roots,
you whispered, scribbling your wet
name around my navel. I burned.

Touch was ripe grain you fed the birds.
My belly the beak-pecked earth. Touch
was a hand rubbing turmeric on satin
aubergine skin. My earlobe pressed
like oilseeds between your fingertips.
Touch was the railway track-spine
with too many stops. You got down
while the red flag fluttered in the wind.
You took long to return. I waited,
licked stamps, posted letters to myself.
You massacred with touches
in other places. Touch. Touch
became a blind mirror.

To touch you, to touch you again,
I became an untouchable.

Meaghan Russell
The demon clears her throat

Guildenstern lives in a home
off South Broadway awaiting
autopsy for true diagnosis. 

Eternal Recurrence chain-smokes
on her break while the crickets
are ratcheting hubmoon in place. 
Spin-fixed thing.  She calls
everyone Angel, complains of
chapped hands. 

Rose talks rorschachs to her
through the porch door and spits
racial slurs at the coat rack
that gum up the screen like
stuck moon, like wax cooling,
wax spread in a weighing pan.

.

Memento Mori: A Love Story

Gloriana and Vindice, pestilence
of leaves falling from the honey
moon, exit cafe 116 (where she,
ever coy with the mirror over his
shoulder, bowed back from their
table to touch the waiter’s arm—she,
in that subtle lisp her Vindice
suspects, spoke in the waiter’s ear—she,
chaste as an olive, pressed the waiter’s
eyes over the linen, over the uncorked
oil glistening in the open air—she,
hoping not to alarm fellow
patrons, gestured discreet as
anise over wormwood to her white
cotton napkin dabbed blood red and the
love-bitten lip lying in her soufflé).

Jon Sands
My Friend

My Friend Lost His Fucking Cell Phone!
is going to be the title of my next movie. John Cusack
will star: phoneless, frantic, and adorable –

with monologues that stretch like giant rubber bands.
White men in their twenties will say, You know
I really identify with that. This IS what sadness feels like.

I don’t make movies. I am a white man in my twenties.
My friend did lose his fucking cell phone.
He feels contactless, naked, deserted.

He is literally wearing no clothes in the middle
of the Atlanta Airport. He’s embarrassed
and seated next to his loneliness.

It feels like other travelers can see his loneliness
more than they can see him. He didn’t actually
lose his fucking cell phone. He left it

in the backseat of an Acura in North Carolina.
They found it. They’re mailing it.
But not until tomorrow. He could read emails from it.

He stuffed each person he loves into it.
He knows they’re not actually inside,
but that’s where he keeps them. It feels like everyone

is flying away from Atlanta except him and his loneliness.
He screamed fuck! so loud the whole gate looked at him
and away from him at the same time.

Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m embarrassed.
I left my cell phone in North Carolina
and have forgotten how to feel loved without it.

I can’t believe something that doesn’t matter
matters this much. It’s never about what it’s about. But why
did I imagine breaking the door off the bathroom stall

with my suitcase? Why am I about to cry in a city
where I don’t know anyone? Why aren’t my hands enough?
How did my body change this much since morning?

 
What I Know

Don’t push me, ‘cause I’m close to the edge.
– Grandmaster Flash

Feels like dawn, but it’s three-forty-five on my watch.
Priority was to have an extra-fly watch.

Nobody’s got more hours than yesterday's got –
see my body become less alive on my watch.

My granddad paid rent first day each month in this house.
Came home from Europe. Said, Those men died on my watch.

Read news. Coffee black. Silence zipped like a raincoat.
My dad next to his brother never tried to cry, Watch!

Held my brother tight when I left Boston last month.
Said, I love you, dude. But kept an eye on my watch.

Said, I understand no one makes it out alive.
I swore on lost time, but I lied on my watch.

I drank my loving cup. I don’t return phone calls,
but make certain my shoes match my tie and my watch.

Throw game as if I’m the one kid not getting old.
Think my ankles won’t break when they ride the sky, watch.

This unnamed siren song. Bullet I can’t dance through.
Bags’ll droop under my eyes like they’re tied to my watch.

It comes naked as your own skin. Just love. Just love.
You just have the people you’ve loved when you die, watch.

Robert Vaughan

Adversity

The children line up
two by two
outside the door
hand in hand
some in threes
some even more

The adult zippers
jackets, fastens caps,
seatbelts toddlers as
the embargo prepares
its Christopher Street
trek, past Stonewall Inn

Reproaches after four steps
while the stroller pushers
think here we go again
and the children have
already learned to ignore
those voices of authority

from the street
from the neighbor
from the babysitter
ignore, defy, oppose,
and challenge

But mostly ignore
as they scream
uproariously
giggling in the
face
of adversity

Sweta Srivastava Vikram

Horoscopic Tales

Her destiny was obvious,
the charts had spoken. The breaking
of eggs – yolk flowing out
leaving the widowed white behind.
They say men disappeared
like vapor from her life.

A loving heart doesn’t question
the bubbles of pouring dreams, she’d said.
But the pundit says tragedy will fill holes
in your words before your sixth anniversary,
her mother had cried, shedding cups of fears.
No diagram of heavens can take him away,
she spoke with poise, deafening the rain.

Five years, five days, five minutes later he died,
at least the faith inside of him, when she whispered
tales of life and death: last call.
Her thoughts, hopping toads, galloped.
With the force of a lonely wave hungry
for its next victim, she struck him thrice.
Sad verses were written in blood that night. 

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

extended pome for Aleks

Aleks named each particular dish
of delicacies with pride
as she placed them on the table.
meals from old cities,
people we'd never see.
we were eating history,
her story and culture. we drank
her Serbian slivovitz sadness.

in the kitchen her mother's ghost
kept roasting red peppers,
scraping burnt-black skin to show
the fresh scarlet flesh,
anointing them in oil,
laying foundations for
another country, another dish
feeding future new babies.

waiting, with crucifix

you oppress me, like the pressure
on my breast, mammogram-squashed.

you make me feel queasy, like the sight
of that small shadow on the screen.

we are second-hand angels-in-waiting
together in a small bright ante-room,

top halves still gowned in white.
one woman I've seen before. we nod

cautiously. no-one knows anything yet.
you hang in your corner, head down,

arms outstretched. there's a faint blue haze
around you, as if air there is thicker.

you seem to take it seriously, this game of death,
throwing your own salty bones.
 

Richard Marx Weinraub

Mary

I put the scarlet polish on my toes
as if it were a badge of courage. I’m
a whore and want to be completely owned
by you. My letter is the “W”
because I double you—your welfare and
your welter squared as I, God, beg of you
to force me to your feet. Please take my tears
and talents as a tithe and leave me weak.
Please lock me in your cage of iron will
extracted from the muddy lode of love,
and I’ll make it immaculate to be
the virgin whore you share with multitudes—
the fish you give those suffering in pain—
the loaves of flesh and blood—your scarlet toes

The Cup of Ganymede

The way things were twelve billion years ago
obsesses me this lonely, moonless night.
The Virgin that I love has gone below
replaced by an albescent catamite.
Aquarius, the water carrier,
which some associate with Ganymede,
looms large as life—and even scarier
is maybe he can satisfy my need.
His Water Jar could slake my cosmic thirst;
his Helix Nebula could be my ear
although his drum already has been burst
by Him or what created the whole sphere.
For Zeus took Ganymede and filled his cup.
In my mind’s eye, I look at what breaks up.