Barnaby Smith (New South Wales, Australia): "Docklands"

On a first visit to Dublin
the East Wall Road drags you
along with the winter sun. Man
at the traffic lights with his
family: he was at the film last
night, the film whose spirit
we are quietly clinging to. His
daughter’s hair, made up of angles,
adjusts as she sways with her
father’s cigarette smoke. She and I
are getting to know the puddles,
both improvisers in terrain. She and
I are taking it seriously.

© Barnaby Smith 2017

first published in fourWtwenty-eight

Cleveland Wall (Bethlehem, Pa, USA): "Midge"

Because what’s the fun of being Barbie
without the plain friend? You can take her
shopping, make her look pretty but not
as pretty as you— never as pretty
as you— and that’s the beauty of it!
Barbie’s wholesome freckled friend
does not resemble a gnat in that
she serves a vital purpose in the game:
the beta foil that makes the alpha
shine the brighter. She may content
herself with the occasional dig about
intellect or bleach, whether or not
she’s any smarter or less prone
to artifice. What of it? A silvery laugh,
a toss of the long hair and the whiff
of rancor is gone, leaving just
the faintest smudge on the windscreen
of a fast pink convertible.

© Cleveland Wall 2021

originally published in Monday Journal Issue #2

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, USA): "Apparition Poem #2044"

What if, really & truly,
the God that made us
was beneath us? What if
we emerged from ooze,
call it primordial, that was
itself a matrix for an eternity
of half-made garbage, & one
millennium, the entire universe
just slipped out— an accident?
There we were, all of us, at 1.0,
those elite-brained imposing
spatial-temporal dimensions
on time, space. Pygmies, also,
pushed down towards tiny
existences, hating 1.0 very much,
as an enemy like taxes, always there—

© Adam Fieled 2025

In Memory: Larry Sawyer (Chicago!) 1970-2025

As if there was a man who wore the
mask of a man and that man
noticed behind the mask that there
were shadows covering the earth
like semesters. The man realized he
had a lot to learn. So he studied the
tongues of the shadows as they
spoke a language he'd never heard.
At night they sang the most
intricately embroidered songs.

Perhaps there was a refrigerator in the
sky that he rode to forget himself,
this man who exhaled librarians.
Day and night he read the
silence, cutting his throat with
syllogisms. Butterflies burst forth from his
calamari as he ate it. He noted these
details lazily and continued with his
reverent stroking of the sun.