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 May 2017 Chris Vans
Shanath
There was a storm today,
A tree older than me,
Taller than the walls of brick
                                          Broke.
Why can't I stop thinking about it?
I went to watch the sky later,
There was blood in the horizon.
 May 2017 Chris Vans
Timmy Shanti
Hunkering down in that small world of yours,
Knowing not what purpose it serves,
Not being able to tell your left from your right,
You still choose to stand up and fight.
I salute you, I do, my brave soul!
Take it, own it, reestablish control.
It’s your life, your dreams - yours to live.
It’s your love, your light - yours to give.
Your sorrow, your tears to shed.
Your own fate, your own path to tread.
6 May 2017
The birches are mad with green points
the wood’s edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething—No, no, no.
The birches are opening their leaves one
by one.  Their delicate leaves unfold cold
and separate, one by one.  Slender tassels
hang swaying from the delicate branch tips—
Oh, I cannot say it.  There is no word.
Black is split at once into flowers.  In
every bog and ditch, flares of
small fire, white flowers!—Agh,
the birches are mad, mad with their green.
The world is gone, torn into shreds
with this blessing.  What have I left undone
that I should have undertaken?

O my brother, you redfaced, living man
ignorant, stupid whose feet are upon
this same dirt that I touch—and eat.
We are alone in this terror, alone,
face to face on this road, you and I,
wrapped by this flame!
Let the polished plows stay idle,
their gloss already on the black soil.
But that face of yours—!
Answer me.  I will clutch you. I
will hug you, grip you.  I will poke my face
into your face and force you to see me.
Take me in your arms, tell me the commonest
thing that is in your mind to say,
say anything.  I will understand you—!
It is the madness of the birch leaves opening
cold, one by one.

My rooms will receive me.  But my rooms
are no longer sweet spaces where comfort
is ready to wait on me with its crumbs.
A darkness has brushed them.  The mass
of yellow tulips in the bowl is shrunken.
Every familiar object is changed and dwarfed.
I am shaken, broken against a might
that splits comfort, blows apart
my careful partitions, crushes my house
and leaves me—with shrinking heart
and startled, empty eyes—peering out
into a cold world.

In the spring I would be drunk!  In the spring
I would be drunk and lie forgetting all things.
Your face!  Give me your face, Yang Kue Fei!
your hands, your lips to drink!
Give me your wrists to drink—
I drag you, I am drowned in you, you
overwhelm me!  Drink!
Save me!  The shad bush is in the edge
of the clearing.  The yards in a fury
of lilac blossoms are driving me mad with terror.
Drink and lie forgetting the world.

And coldly the birch leaves are opening one by one.
Coldly I observe them and wait for the end.
And it ends.
 May 2017 Chris Vans
Emily Jennie
A river flows through the backyard
Panic attacks under whiskey breath
Legs numb and gasping for air
Drowning in the driver's seat.
 May 2017 Chris Vans
angel
you make me so confused.
you yell at me to ask you whatever's bothering me
and i have to say "nothing"
and we both know it isn't "nothing"
because it's everything,
but how are you supposed to tell them "everything" is confusing?
i don't even know what to ask him.
and he tells me to spit it out
and i just swallow it
because is the conflict worth it?
he's like a mule
and i'm a mouse
and he can crush me with his hooves
and he always misunderstands me
so i leave for days
and come back when i'm dying,
in hopes that he'll bring me back to health
and he does
and he tells me he misses me
and then he disappears
and i'm too small for him to notice me until i'm being crushed.
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