Ron Kolm | Sigmund, Surprised by Joy

Sigmund, Surprised by Joy

Sigmund,
A thoughtful child,
Transcribes his dreams
On his bedroom wall
Using a yellow crayon.

When he plays
With his die-cast cars
Pushing them across the rug
He can’t help but hear
The music of the spheres.

Sigmund asks his mother:
“Can we stay up late tonight
And watch the stars come out?”

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Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and the author of several books including Swimming in the Shallow End (2020), A Change in the Weather (2017), and Night Shift (2016). His writings also appear in And Then, Feuerstuhl, Local Knowledge, The Opiate, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A collection of his papers (some 35 cartons of correspondence, notebooks, objects, chapbooks, signed first editions and runs of literary magazines) was purchased by New York University and is now part of the Fales Library’s permanent archives.

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko | Childhood

Childhood

Your first drawing is of the sun

You color it round   yellow   bright

like the bouncing ball your father gives you

when you are just three   What delight

you take in both losing and reclaiming it together

as you run far through the leaves with the sky and the wind

Now he thinks you will remember

what it feels like . . . to hold a world in your hands

Your mother’s world is of a different light   She will hold you

in the spell of  her song which will assume different shapes   At first

you will want to carry it with you wherever you go   One day  it will

take you to deep places that move you as she fades quietly

like the melody or the more subtle color you use to paint a dream

 

Your dream is your portal to the world

Drawn through the rainbow of your imagination

it is being colored continually by your perceptions

You will spend most of your childhood in its sphere

Here   you polish the moon and shine the stars

and trace your name on fragile glass   You wonder

where the blue begins and worry about where it ends

 

Most of the time you spend waiting 

waiting for your father to one day return

waiting for your mother to come tuck you in

waiting for loneliness to leave you alone

The terror of the dark   The terror of your song

catching in your throat like a kite in the branches of trees

 

Later   of course   there is the terror of stumbling through

entire sentences

of being lost among strangers so tall

you cannot see their faces   and

of the hand that once firmly held yours . . . slipping away

Much later   of course   there is the terror

of losing most of your crayons

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A former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, Antonia Alexandra Klimenko is widely published. Her work appears, among other publications, in XXI Century World Literature (she represents France) and Maintenant: Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art, archived at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She is Writer/Poet in Residence for SpokenWord Paris. Her collected poems On the Way to Invisible is forthcoming, Spring of 2021.

Geer Austin | Beige Black Green

Beige Black Green

Sometimes I think about the beach,

how the sand with its soothing

bland color and soft texture

flows up from blue and warm water.

Nighttime lets light into black.

I had a black dream.

Black film without any white.

The memory of childhood summers

is green — meadows and lawns

and those endless rows of privet

clipped flat like an empty tabletop.


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Geer Austin’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Poet Lore, Manhattanville Review, Big Bridge, Plenitude, BlazeVOX, Boog City, and others. His short story, “Stuart Livingston Hill,” is a recent episode of the podcast A Story Most Queer. He has served as a judge in the PEN America Prison Writing Awards and the Bisexual Book Awards. He is the author of Cloverleaf, a poetry chapbook (Poets Wear Prada). He lives in New York City.