"I don't
break a sweat. I sit
the whole year with a bird
on my lap."


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Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series

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Issue 10: Out on a Limb

Issue 9: The Missing Body

Issue 8: The Lily

Issue 7: Passages

Issue 6: No More Tears


A quick list to poets featured in this issue:

Robin Behn

Richard Garcia

John Hennessy

Adrian Matejka

Ayukawa Nobuo

Eunice Odio

Kathryn Rantala

Anna Ross

Mathias Svalina

Larissa Szporluk

Kevin Tsai

Larissa Szporluk

Guillotine

Many friendships have been lost here.
It is all sky, all white, ongoing.
Faith won't save us. The date-palm
in the all-consuming sun runs its little
errand in a skirt of shade. Who said
anything about salvation? The sand diviner
lisping in the burning wind, white eyes,
white skin, converts white grains
into explicit figments: the gag at the back
of the throat, begging the throat
not to scream, the head yanked up
by the hair, upheld for the world
to see‹is it possible intelligence
still dwells there? That the grosser lips
still flutter out the rhetoric of health?
That the earth hangs on nothing?
That between us, there never was a thread?


_______________________________________________________________

Memory Palace

A cloud takes a lifetime
to smother the sun. It's finally

a crime, but it's also a glory,
the lining sizzling gold,

the afternoon's image
occulted. Truth is I don't

have an art. One pulls the other
one down. I know

therešs a blue-purple hill.
I know all the girls

disappear. I don't
break a sweat. I sit

the whole year with a bird
on my lap. The firmament

wobbles. Their deep
purple feet. Asleep, it comes

back, fast, but late
there were poisonous leaves

and salt on the path
like an alphabet.


_______________________________________________________________

Dark Eros
                    

She smirks, sets herself up
on a cinder cone. How does
it feel, she asks the old mountain,
to have no choice but to feel?
Succuss of Anotonšs glottis.
Rumbles, plutonic debris.
Feel this, she hisses into his
sphincter, then does something
evil with fruit, oh, the power
to cry! Oh, to be able to cry!
His mouth is under the sea now.
The past is a quasi-fetish.
I was only a child, but my
obsession with you was divine.


_______________________________________________________________

Pecuniary
                    

It took her in its jaws
and ran, her dangling head
bashing the rocks,

the rocks bashing back.
At the top, abrupt silence
like a dropped baton.

What better rush
than an urge served fresh,
the girl's brief story

srolled up tight, a Persian rug,
the blood at rest,
a pervert's inertial toy?

What does a whippet imagine?
What could a trophy
mean to an Arabian?

We love this preposterous
quest. When it nudges her
into the pit, her body clinks,

an exhausted bauble,
rolls down the walls
of the buyer's yawn,

his wholesale gulp,
her edible cunt,
an optimum bargain.

_______________________________________________________________

The Usual Cadaver
                    

We fell to Earth with Lucifer.
We crossed the sun
the whole way down.
You would have thought
that we were cranes,
or crows of unholy dimensions,
or a form of UFO
flashing like a carousel,
warning you against us.
What is left to say?
She is adding something gloomy
to his jewelry water,
a tinge to the blossom rains.
To the oneness of allness,
an especial time, especial place
a juvenile smile
to carve in you and claim.

_______________________________________________________________
 

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