Megha Sood | Crimson Robe

Crimson Robe

 

 

Love is like the crimson robe

flowing in the middle of the desert

unfettered

bathed by the silken moonlight

 

even the shifty-eyed moon is scarred but not love

it floats upon those treacherous dunes

teaches them a lesson or two

about beauty and its frailty

 

those shifting dunes in tandem with the winds

caught up in the illusion of permanence

as they keep up their dance

love pirouettes like a swirling dervish

to the notes of the aubade

sung by the parched lips of her scar-faced lover

watching for the last glance from his love

 

a fleeting touch of the crimson robe

floating and gliding endlessly

in the middle of the night

doused in the love of the silken moon

 

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Megha Sood, award-winning poet, editor, and blogger, lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. She is Assistant Poetry Editor for the UK-based feminist zine MookyChick and co-editor of The Kali Project (Indie Blue Publishing, 2021), an anthology of art and poetry by women of Indian heritage. Megha’s publication credits include Adelaide Literary Award Poetry Anthology 2019 (Adelaine Books, 2020), Fallow Ground (Inwood Press, 2020), and She Speaks (Sierra Club Books, 2020), as well as Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic, a digital initiative of Stanford University. She has recently published two collections of her own work: My Body is Not an Apology, her debut poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press (2021), and My Body Lives Like a Threat, a full-length collection from FlowerSong Press (2022). She blogs at Megha’s World on WordPress and tweets as @meghasood16.

Sarah Sarai | Three Children Are Laughing

Three Children Are Laughing

They fall and float up.
Heaven is deep space, the moon.
They were not issued boots.
They don’t care. They are angels.
They wear taffetas, twinsets,
garlands of sorrow strung on ivory,
eat five grams of Cheerios
every ten years if that is what they
need to count tulips ochers
of the dust we once thought
was all there was to life.


Originally published in Peacock Journal.

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Sarah Sarai’s poems appear in Barrow Street, Prelude, POOL, E-ratio, Zocalo Public Square, Boston Review, and many other journals. Her second full-length collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven, was published by Kelsay Books. She is an independent editor in New York, where she volunteers teaching manners to pigeons.

George Held | Yellow and Honey Moon

Yellow

Yellow crocus
bursts from snow cover
melting my heart

Yellow daffodils
bending in the April breeze —
sure signs of spring

Full moon in June
year’s lowest on the horizon —
honey-yellow moon


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Honey Moon

 

At ten the White Pine tops are backlighted

by a yellow glow that stops me in mid-

stride. Soon the etched disc of the Honey Moon

follows its aureole over the trees,

and I’m tempted to rhyme “moon” with “June,” but

such custom betrays the unaccustomed

glory of this nocturnal sight. One night

a year, this lowest of all the full moons

on the horizon gilds the east. I might

have been at the movies, or cloud cover

could have obscured this cool phenomenon.

From now on, for however many moons

I’ll be around, I’ll free my calendar

to let me keep this moonstruck rendezvous.

Previously published, in slightly different form, in Phased (Poets Wear Prada, 2008, 2010)

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George Held has published four children’s books with Filsinger & Company, Ltd. and over a dozen poetry titles with various small presses. His most recent book, Second Sight: Poems, was released by Poets Wear Prada in 2019. A collection of stories titled Lucky Boy is due out in 2020. Believing that smaller is better in poetry, he writes a lot of haiku. He wears his trousers rolled in Sag Harbor, NY.