Ann Cassandra Murray

Sep 2021

B Young

Michelle

What a Bass-Head,
the only one to ever fill me with dread.
She asks, "Hey baby, did you forget to take your meds?"

I just needed 3 xanax bars to remember not to forget about her, the girl drinking from the sweet wobbly nectar of the Bass Gods, I'd drop everything to visit her in Oregon.

She once flew to Durango, to road-trip home east, with me the beast. In my jalopy hooptie of a 1992 Corolla, falling apart, ripping at the seams. Across this country we flowed over rivers and streams and poured unhindered by time or space. Through the great sand dunes of Colorado we played our own tunes, the stalagmites and horrid cave crickets of Mammoth Cave Kentucky, It got fucky at a seedy motel in Kansas, another in West Virginia. We make it to Fredericksburg, Viriginia, in the span of less than a week we have roared and soared through half the continent. We spend a night with our settled friends, married now, Shaun and Rachel, lovebirds. Until, home to Philly in one straight shot, through DC **** DC and up through Delaware, we are finally home. A journey complete. Sunsets, mountains, forests, lakes, dunes, beaches, deserts, plains, prairie, and perc 30s. All now a part of our memories,
how sweet they be.

#poem #poetry #travel

Feb 2015

Ezra Pound

In A Station Of The Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Feb 2015

B Young

fixing the bottons

It’s funny how beautiful people look

While you’re walking out the door

Shuttering

Shaking

Lower your eyes to the floor

How do you feel when someone you love

Doesn’t come around anymore

Dec 2014

Sarina

endemic

There are loves that can create a new universe, there are
loves that would fill outer space
where stars are just drops of mango juice
and every person you wish wrote poems about you, does.

A macrocosm so vast that
tragedy is only powder and cold coffee does not break
my heart anymore, sadness does not fit in

an oven but float, phantom-esque, in black air
no longer pollution
that slowly asphyxiates, hardly discernible in our palms of
tangible love. You will not have to tell anyone that you
love me because the whole world is our bedroom.

I felt I was dangerous the first time
you tried to **** me, like I would be too tight
and shatter every last porcelain bone under your skin.

Like my body was a vacuum ******* you in
unable to escape, inland something other than a stranger.
Instead, we became the cosmos
pouring fruit-juice-stars on the unlucky and the unloved.

Sep 2014

Gigi Tiji

Breath

A plant begins to wither
its leaves fall to the ground
and it drops its seeds

To some this may look
in its entirety, like death
but to others it is birth

A seed's shell cracks
its insides come out
and everything changes

To some this may look
like complete destruction
but to others it is growth

Breathe in
Breathe out

Life is a coalescence of
the Surround into the Self

It is a turning outside in

Breathe out
Breathe in

Death is a dissolution of
the Self into the Surround

it is a turning inside out

happiness surrounds the
cries of the newborn

Breathe in

cries surround the
happiness of the dead

Breathe out

#life #death #existence #spirituality #existentialism

May 2014

Sylvia Plath

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

May 2014

Gigi Tiji

a lady lights a cigarette

a lady lights a cigarette
glowing red cherry
lips, puffing without
regret
a cigarette, burning
smoking, grey breathing
choking and
tap tap the
falling ashes

it is over with
a definitive flick —
a lady lights a cigarette
she can see her spirit
dancing in the smoke

#cigarette

— The End —