Volume 8, Issue 3

it was the spring of hope - nicole e. turiano, zz baggins 

--“No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny

without leaving some mark on it forever.” 

Francois Mauriac--

--"The way to love anything

is to realize that it might be lost."

G.K. Chesterton--

A Skills Feat Krafty Kuts

846 Victims to Date

Shadows

Becoming shapeless
makes them admired poison
Reaching theory through cracks and calculations,
Upon request
It's manipulative query slopes a greater need
for walking lines
Too narrow for proportionate profiles

Every man has thought of honing in it's mystery
Every woman learns to want it's sleek and redesigns herself in it's company
Of secrets
as the mirrors we keep hidden
By silent
And forward
Our gazes and of course
our steps

Is it a comfortable coincidence that they trail behind, mostly?
Os is it that our impression of light
is false
As if something more deceiving likens to be embedded in it's beauty
Being admired like such extensions of self
It should make sense to us only
Because they are often dependent
on days passing in them

And perhaps like the rest of us
Wish they didn't have to be
Unnoticed and forgiving
In a wake that sustains life
Like portraits of what we wish we were instead of our truths

Fading into the cracks on sidewalks and borrowing significance through windows that cast us in
Tombs of hours that Might as well have never been
Mortal as bodies they stem from

Nicole E. Turiano




ocean

because i have this mad desire to see
the lay of the land as a whole i will
always swim farther than anyone expects
and having swam so far from shore
there is nothing i can do now but float

this is what an ocean will teach you
in the end
how to float only

minutes become hours/then days
and weeks/months/years/a
litany of furtive longing
giving oneself up to the seduction
of water equates to an act of love

an act of love equates to life

J.A. Spahr-Summers

dying is a necessary act for living - zz baggins

River

Like a river you dispose of your love
through a valley of wandering tributaries
Within shallow cleavage of flowing gape
your tantric prose
Are random bevels of your past, and its wisdom bones

Petrifications
looming fragments
Lay like oracles of your historical intentions
Disguised in motion and memorable rapture
A hypnotic dance, weaves to pattern everything you embody
Only to leave it all behind

Secrets unearthed among shadows and scars
left for wisdom to kiss in
Your spools of inspiration,
white wept under the graves of unknowing,
and diluted divisions

Unwarranted droughts, deliberate passages of frozen limb,
Uncertain buckles of flood and tide
Have left mystery like a stage for your ghostly depiction
Your romance a pivotal caption in time, encircling
it's relevance
In the murmur of night, half strung in its hum
A hymn of existence precludes

This monumental lust

Like a throne for you to gage
where erosion of your heart will contain in pools
By gentle banks
Prisms of light to infuse your fertile moss stumps,
Faceted funnels of lucid spirals, and languid coffins
Leaving striations of beauty and color
like fingerprints against what is left to assume

At the mercy of your touch
Weathered by your ambiguity
Taunted by unpredictable moves

A passion distilled in the encryption, of your corrosive will
Far depth in a bed of wading
Floating passively - reflections of dark and stars
Upon mirrors of your soul pieces
Adrift your fate

Meandering on to further endless
As where I've come to miss you
Consumed by what I find,
Remains a river
such as your love
Disposed in a valley, of wandering tributaries

Nicole E. Turiano



tree
for nicole

we could also say
a tree is just a tree
or
a poem is like a tree
never equating them to life
or what allows us to dream
or to the breath they bring us
or the flesh of themselves offered
in slivers to our want of rhythm

cut the fucker down/some
people actually say things like this/then
they do it/lets not
lets dig deep for water
or draw it from the delta
lets encourage the thing to grow
lets hand it over to life

J.A. Spahr-Summers

at any given moment heres whats inside my head - zz baggins

November

November is my mother's mirror
It's aged like she thinks herself boned
fragile
As cliffs receded from years of heavy rain
she has never forgotten
collecting their flesh rocks in each of every two of her pockets

She stands on their weak edges imagining depth
That is space between fallen and reborn
Her fingers to her lips
Because she wants to know what nothing feels like
Thinks its what makes forgotten ok to have ever been let go
She says November makes unknowing impossible
to be unwanted

she is plagued-says all us women must be
She can't be a man, can't not feel like a man, can't not piss without her skin at the mercy of cold, like a
man
Making her vulnerable, sick
Making her bleed
though she never wanted to have what her mother once did
So she rather desires not to
desire having
Wants not what wanting makes her rich with ache

She thinks she could jump to be without her loathing
If only she's been born
With a dick
Men don't have mirrors-they have nothing in their pockets,
Only, their dicks
Like kings, can only fuck with
And when they piss-they do wherever they feel like it
Kings never bleed, is what she tells us

November is cracked at it's frame
Through it's thick desperate layers
of time held hostage
By reflection and dreams
that have escaped her
in of her Fitted cage
she wears not like a mother
But Like a King,
dresses the rain in November

Nicole E. Turiano




white v neck t shirt and jeans

you asked me once what i wanted you to wear
when i photographed you/not saying/perhaps
something more obvious/what exactly/
white v neck t shirt and jeans/i know this to
be true because this is what i still find inside me
this river raging this river searching asking for
passage to the universe i know to be inside you

J.A. Spahr-Summers

while beautiful for all to see your true beauty lies hidden within - zz baggins

In-Stereo[ANT]isms (Classified)

Let us be more now than the pale coal
from regret is a perimeter of spherical fire
we channel our humility spread through aerosol cans
and wonder who
stoked it high by steeples compared to
open timbers lynching ashen pyramids

We immortalized prevailing smoke
Not just dreaming trails and hums
Slain opus mounds of word spread moss
like madness in the veins of Sycamore, and Creeper kings
burnt against fallen fences, September strophes

Let Monarchs lower trembled in tin cans echoed clamor
From our own hands, we drink rust and claim our ant castles holy
though we carried our queen to the apex
hungry shadows feeding upon

And where suffering adorns the apples poison stem we
wave its tiny green flag surrendered before giants
who lie to us the truth

Nicole E. Turiano



the truth
for nicole

is where i want to be and
this is where i hope to be
strap me down if necessary
make me look in the mirror
make me take a good look
i think that we are worth it

J.A. Spahr-Summers


Read This

the earth is like a child that knows poems - nicole e. turiano, zz baggins