And I want to wake up with the rain
Falling on a tin roof
While I'm safe there in your arms
So all I ask is for you
To come away with me in the night
Come away with me.

-N.J.

New Poem!

You know of these times, of how

a fall lurks behind every corner.
too many puddles on streets
bitten strawberry hearts drip,
playgrounds with four-year-old
branches of outstretched hands
praying to be held. what to do after
the laying down of lilies, after the
sacrifice of stars and bullets to the
altar of woman’s naked brown back,
which another lifetime was apartment
window beacon saving you night
after night. yes, this fear is grander
than all of us. today although some
trains might not explode into each
other’s clanging metal arms, every
ride is prologue then death of the
human story no matter how long we
delay these wet cratered hearts still
needing a flame to drift towards
from their pathetic red puddles.
no, the city’s maple trees have not
been asking after you, though each
sacrificed leaf war hero has a dynamite
strapped to her back taunting to be
turned over to soldiers hunting for
footprints behind each breath
and bend of the highway’s wind.
all signs point to: I don’t matter.
how then, this teasing in the air?
how then, index finger of your left
hand, the plucking of my pearl
necklace. lips chanting: you.

-Sonia Mukherji

"we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

-Eliot, Middlemarch

Venus de Milo
In her half-baked shell
Understood the nature
Of love very well
She said, a good love is delicious
You can’t get enough too soon
It makes you so crazy
You want to swallow the moon. . .

Take these stars from my crown
Let the years fall down
Lay me out in firelight
Let my skin feel the night
Fasten me to your side
And say it’ll be soon
You make me so crazy, baby
Could swallow the moon

-Jupiter, Jewel

open your eyes

and then there are times when life splashes cold water on your face during a winter slumber and perhaps your most indulgent, comfortable dream and demands:

that's the best you can do? did you take me so dull and predictable already? wake. there are fables to live and stories to give. heartaches and heartmakes. crooked trees and brick streets.

i beg of you,

open,
open your eyes.

Wednesday Poem!

You Can't Have It All

by Barbara Ras


But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.