Hartford, CT; June 2009

Before I went on the road trip, I was told that Hartford is "something of a hole," but the area around the state house is all open green space with monuments. In the foreground, the Corning Fountain. The spire in back is the Civil War Memorial Arch.

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

entrenched

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

exposed

sheets of glass
encase my ankles
and they cut
ever.so.deeply
I am a
meek child,
burn holed,
cigarette tongued,
decaying rot
am I beautiful enough for you?
inside the worm hole
of your pudgy little heart

I find I can be
myself
by tearing at
myself
by skinning
myself
before your closed eyelids
I,
myself--
am naked
a bitter
cold
fluid flood
muscles writhe underneath blood.and.vein.and.white fatty tissue am I stripped enough for you?

---

words: April Michelle Bratten, North Dakota (Up the Staircase)
("exposed" first appeared in Kill Poet)

what bodies are for

What are bodies for, then?
he asked. They give a chance to talk and touch. They let us see and taste, feel, move and make. Make shelter, make gardens. Make music.

No matter how it looks, young or old, dressed
in stockings or a saree, healthy or diseased, smooth or wrinkled, beautiful or plain.

Life is a series of heartbeats, and each one is an opportunity, an invitation to connect with one another. You’ll see it plainly when
that other heart has stopped.

That’s true, she answered, but there is more.
A body comes from another one, don’t forget.
A breast is for nurturing, too.
Bodies are not just for sharing,
a body is a portal too, for bringing life.

And life is not merely a sequence of partners or heartbeats, nor just a line of days like beads on a string.
It is a cycle: we arise from life's source, but then we become
its source. A circle of beginning and becoming and begetting.

His string of beads bent into her circle, then,
and her circle formed a bead on a longer string.
Each heartbeat was
an opportunity becoming,
begetting an invitation to
what bodies are for.

----

words & image: Steve Wing, Florida (about & more)

Words

No guilt letting go of a language
when you don't know the calligraphy.
Memory dances amidst splendor and passion
with visual images, attainable or illusory.

What language did we speak? The details
are now conflicting and continue to be
non-compatible with other partnerships.
The language of inexhaustible lust.

The language spoke to and through us. One
leg of yours and my thigh overlapping
on a mattress formed one word, much
like a Korean character done in flesh-

coloured ink on a soft canvas meant for
instant display. We have enough graphic
words, unfading, to fill a dictionary.

----

words: Tammy Ho, Hong Kong (homepage)
image: Dorothee Lang, Germany (virtual notes)

("Words" first appeared in Orbis Quarterly International Literary Journal)