drunk kissing blurry faces under neon lights
i'm sorry that your party had to end with a fight
but that creep was overstepping everywhere tonight

after sharing reservations about people getting high
your friend won't stop asking for my marly lights
these cigs for aesthetics are going to ruin our lives

debrief time: your parents argue, divorce is in sight
romance is everywhere, you're convinced that i'm blind
hey, out of curiosity, have you ever wished on a satellite?

Love, like petals of a blooming flower,
Roses of rubies, lilies of pearl.
A skin as though of jasmine
that August evening…was it August?

I created you in a hazy vision
when my mind was drunk with sleep -
Are you a dreamer too?

It is just like
August was here
   and lost.
My chances of redeeming
All but
            gone.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com


                                     August is a Yellow Flame


                          “That August was like a yellow flame”

                    Anna Ahkmatova, 1917 / Anno Domini MCMXXI /
                                       III. The Voice of Memory


This August is indeed like a yellow flame
Death writhes among brown-burnt withering leaves
The grass is as sere as Macbeth’s acrid soul
And garden hoses drip in futility

The sun-bleached visage of Ozymandias
Might frown upon this blighted desert wrack
For not unlike the Ancient Mariner’s ghostly crew
The usages of summer drop and decay

But look!

But look above the last barren clouds in the west -
A tiny sliver of the promising moon

comet Swift-Tuttle
Perseid meteor show
shooting star wishes






Mark Toney ©️ 2023

Time should have been enough
Time and space and ignoring you
But I can't.

Ignoring you is like holding my breath
A challenge, possible until it inevitably isn't.
I can't.

Your hair is longer but your eyes are the same.
Your smile is quieter but you stand taller now,
laugh louder.

I wrote you a letter, and I want to send it.
I want to stamp it and send it away from me and to you
But I can't.

I can't let myself go, that small secret.
I can't.

My throat is heavy with August’s sorrows
I sit by the shore and wait for the weakest waves
to drown my little feet — I  stagger over them like a clumsy giant.
But it’s seaborne sadness wraps, a constant, unrelenting embrace
like a mother’s grief,
a gentle creature’s death,
a rabid dog feasting on a poor, meatless bone.
I am alive — so cruelly alive for it all
as it falls

down my throat, down my chest like a child’s pained whisper.
My body is heavy with August’s weight as I retire to my filthy bed
and hold myself.

Cold are the nights in their quiet,
lackadaisical, taunting hours.

Come now, September. Come, kindly, if you please;
sweep me away into a million, invisible dust particles
suspended

under clueless, flickering lights.

I name all of my lovers after months now
and all roads lead to August and
the Roman cities we’ve burned —
how she walked on crumbling streets as I held the matches —
this poem is a page for burning at its tip:
a lone match, scalding — a firelit kiss
but the flames have always been a hypnotic sight
like a woman perched in your sunlit bed —
her hair, red as flames licking my neck,
red as love that bleeds on itself;
it leaves a stain on pretty things.

Now her skin has silk sheets burning away
like banners in a Roman cathedral,
her half-breath kisses, dying — now embers,
tainting my dress black where her lips had staked a claim.
Now her touch is wildfire crawling on my skin
and I am a wounded doe — waiting. waiting.
waiting.


The only world I know burns to the ground
before my very eyes
and we are no phoenixes, darling; all we do is burn.

i watch you and all i see are deviant rays
hiding
the sorrow in flowers, while the night
is falling, and
falling,
on the ****** moon, like
honey
glued in the lines of the palms,
Masters of the Zenit, flowing like sand from the fists,
on the other side of the dawn