Sarah Sarai | Low Life, Malibu

Low Life, Malibu

 

Buoyant and so damn blasé about it,

the ducks are all You looking at me?

I can float, sucker.

 

While those puffed-up fighter pilot

gulls straight up sneer, Haw! Haw!

fools, we’re slumming it.

 

Unhinged as their jaws, they swoop in

on darting fish close to the surface,

then circle our scraps for dessert.

 

You and me, slouched on wet sand, we

feel the day’s chill as a flesh-crawling

parasite. We consider following

 

the sun as she shimmies down,

searching new and newer horizons,

and each time, we invite her to join us,

 

up the highway, in a cracked red-

leather booth shaped like a crescent moon.

She might want to but never shows.

 

We’re not big on duty, but we get it.

We have us one responsible sun.

The I’m-all-that flighty couldn’t care less.

 

 

Previously published in Pine Hills Review, August 2, 2023.

 

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Sarah Sarai is the author of several poetry collections including That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books, 2019); Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016); and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX Books, 2009). Her poems are widely anthologized, most notably in Gerald LaFemina’s Composing Poetry, a Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2016); Like a Fat Gold Watch: Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath edited by Christine Hamm (Fat Gold Watch Press, Brooklyn, 2018) and Say It Loud: Poems About James Brown edited by Michael Oatman and Mary Weems (Whirlwind Press, 2011). A native New Yorker, born in Long Island, she grew up in Los Angeles, returning to attend Sarah Lawrence where she earned her MFA. She currently lives in the big city and works as an independent editor.

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.

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.