by Lorri Centineo

You wrote, “The world is full of paper.”
And purple ink.  O Kasmiri,
Did Shakespeare pull your magic to midsummer nights?
Fae Saffron, you are deepest violet with mind
Long as golden stigmas, spicy – tongued —
Your soul knotted through with words
And twisting through the hearts of exiles.
However would one write of you, write to you?
Like the beggar woman reaching, open – handed
Between the folds of time to touch your distant land,
Thought pure, adorned with fading henna scratched?
What riches meted out of milk and honey fade?
What now do your pointed minarets etch skyward,
Of that land and this land or a muezzin’s forgotten calls to
His God and Your God and Our God and your mother’s
Trail blazed for you through nascent stars’
Milky brightness?
What wisdoms do you spill eternal in the heavens
As its tapestry entwines your name?
And so mine is a silly writ to you —
Breathing aroma of rarest mountain flowers,
And begging from the universe mere alms of verse.
In grease I smear on glass between poesy and truth,
To fall through cracks like stardust on sacred papyrus.
Would that I could write to you.
But there is no more paper.

by Susie Meserve

I think of you like ball – peen hammers, tapping
a hall of mirrors.
Like the foghorn on a clear day.

(Is death abrupt, like wind seizing a house?
In that box — so close I thought to leap up in my skirt and hat
and pull off the lid — it didn’t seem so.
She just rolled off without a hitch.)

I have murdered you, darling.
Now I shake snow off the bulbs,
say prayers for the earthquakes,
for the oboes and flutes and jazz trombones,
for the prayers, for the pray – ers,
for your ghosts.  They are all around the house.
Trust you to have more than one.

by Jon Wilkins

Just like you, she came here overflowing
with a need to feel superior, an age – old

rage holds her heart — gentle but joyless,
resentful, like holding the hair of the girl

hurling in the dorm toilet.  Still beautiful —
still never going to fuck you.  One day she

may see you again, and generations later
erupt like a pimple on a weedy chlapec,

slapstick now, from far away, but the boy
is a killer, has no nation, no hesitation

by Jon Wilkins

Just like you, she came here with a bag full
of chalk and yellow tape.  Her fear of snakes

sneaks up on her now and again, coiling her
on herself like the long braids of the peculiar

pelacur girls she used to watch with a braid
of envy, fear, and desire.  She is a tidal wave,

a tiny wafer, lingering on the tongue
of a Priest, full of unsprung anticipation,

an incipience and a retrospect and the twisted cable
connecting them, impossibly long and longing