Akshaya Pawaskar | Red Blush

John William Waterhouse (1849-1917), The Awakening of Adonis, Oil on canvas c1900, Private art collection

Red Blush

 

 

The redness spreads over the sky like a blush

calming the frantic nerves of morning into

the warm eventide.

Is it the sailor in my soul, delighting over

this change in light?

Is it love tinting my glasses, warping my vision?

Is it the throbbing pain, attesting I am alive?

Is it the globe with vermilion on its forehead?

Is it the bleeding firmament?

Or is it fear or courage, victory or war?

How we interpret this play of colours,

this many-hued life.

How we weave stories of Adonis and Aphrodite

around roses.

How, then, the art on my wall never is red —

vibrant and arresting.

Perhaps, it was never a colour

meant for the shy,

though in their blush,

a hint of it they cannot deny.

 

 

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Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India, and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling, among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020, placed third in the Poetry Matters Project contest that same year, and placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her debut poetry chapbook, The Falling In and the Falling Out, was published by Alien Buddha in January of 2021. Follow her on Instagram; her IG handle is @akshaya_pawaskar.

Howard Pflanzer | Orange Sky

ORANGE SKY

 

In the west the sky glows orange

Light scattered by the pollution

Right before the sun goes down beyond the shore

Is this a harbinger of a happier time ahead

Or just a precursor of another black night

 

Let’s wait for tomorrow

And see how the day progresses

Will the sky at dusk glow a brighter orange

Streaked with crimson

Or will the disappearing light plunge us directly into the darkness

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Howard Pflanzer is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer. Dead Birds or Avian Blues was published by Fly By Night Press in 2011. Recent publications include FIVE Poetry, And Then, Downtown Brooklyn, Home Planet News, Pratik, Poems:LES Festival of the Arts Dedicated to the Lower East Side (TNC 2016, 2017), Of Burgers and Barrooms (Main Street Rag 2017), and WORD:An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes (2017). His hybrid performance piece, Walt Whitman Opera, adapted from Whitman’s poetry with music by Constance Cooper, was presented at the undergroundzero festival in New York in July 2014.

Austin Alexis | Replay & Seeing Twilight

Replay

I slide down the memory of you
hoping the ride will never end.
Yet I sense one day
I’ll be too old to recall
your jokes, your jaw’s attractive shape,
my fascination with your insights.

At least for now, you live
in an orange haze of twilight
at the front of my mind
where I keep what I cherish,
though I know all of that is fading,
slowing, dissolving into night

Seeing Twilight

The air is polished pink,
then orange, then scarlet
at the shore
as dusk ages into evening.
“You’re missing the sunset”
a person says to a sleeping friend
who wakes, sits upright
on a lumpy beach sheet
to spot the orange ball
knelling into the sea,
yielding to Time and Nature,
since it is part of both.


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Austin Alexis is the author of Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, Madgett Poetry Award, 2014) and two previously published chapbooks from Poets Wear Prada. Recent flash fiction, poetry, reviews, and plays have appeared in Home Planet News Online, Unstamatic, The Avocet, Point of View, and Long Island Sounds (an anthology). He has work forthcoming in Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing. He served recently as a panelist for the Bronx Council on the Arts. He lives in Manhattan.