Painless

To be underground
unreachable to family and others
never to be hurt again.

double rainbow

---
image: Brigita Pavsic, Slovenia (soul flowers)

Red Damselfly

The day hints rainbows
in a drizzle mesh.

No matter.
She collects pieces of sky

on her wings
as her family have done

since the book of Genesis.
Silver light

climbs up her dress
like the curl of a rose petal.

She tickles my ear
with whispers

that slip into the skin
of the mere.

She leaves me
with the empty breeze

and a private song.
Sunshine in a capsule.

---
words: Gordon Mason, Scotland/Spain (Catapult to Mars)

The Hearse

beyond the battlefield

she divorced the whispering
lilies as their petals grew
bitter and no longer creased
in her palm.
they, adorned with memorabilia,
are carried out to sea -
shielding her eyes from the sun,
she stepped into the fragile
penumbra and let go of
yesterday

----
words: E. Miller, Oregon

Torn Hibiscus

---
image: Smitha Murthy, India (Life Wordsmith)

Instead of trying to kiss and paw at her

I remember that dismal,
uncertain time in college
(lost in the mists of life's dark,
tangled jungle)
when my wife
(my girlfriend then)
decided she needed to wander,
to date other guys. If instead
of trying to kiss and paw at her,
these short-sighted jackasses
(thank God for that)
would have been chivalrous
and caring, selfless and concerned
about what she thought and felt
and had to say, she might
have connected with something
in one of them, something
she admired and needed
and came to love, something
she has never found in me.
Things might have been
very different than they are today.
Certainly if she had dated another guy
even a handful of times
I wouldn't be here right now.

---
words: Michael Estabrook (more & more)

Alone

ghosts of passing cars, flaky and white in
soundwaves uninvited to a melancholy willing
to remain like all the wrong memories that
litter the floor with half-empty coffee cups,
and silence creeping about with bony fingers
that used to be kind, but remembering is
always off by just enough to guarantee
life will never live twice, and i can never
pretend away the vestiges of years like
suitcases perhaps never meant.

---
words: Bethany Basset (coffee-stained clarity)
image: Dorothee Lang (virtual notes)

girl shot

A girl with a camera,
not a cell phone thing,
a real lens, reel and clicker
well, maybe not the reel
a digital memory you can't peel

That girl aims her camera
out there in the mall
in the thicket or backyard,
check how she poses
like a cue to her view.

---
By: Tasnim Jivaji, Canada
originally posted in December 2006