Joyful Journey

By Sasha Clark  22nd August 2023

The rock feels an impulse
The nature of the rock is to go slow
An impulse can last decades
 

The rock begins to lean down the mountain
 

Slowly

Bit by bit the rock slides down
Rain helps the rock on its journey

The rock feels joy in its progress
It doesn't worry the decades away
It is happy just to be

A young boy plucks the rock from the ground
to show his father the wonderful agate
he just found

Finally the journey is complete
The joy of the rock is shared

The Short burn of our together
By Bobby Parrott

Our bones are made of compressed grasshoppers
who, though their mouths work side-to-side
instead of up and down, have forgotten how to

coax electric eels out of their inflatable wading
pool jail cells. Hence a redundancy. To electrocute
the unscrupulous, a toy camera beyond broken

lets a kite string snag and splay branch-tips
of stop and ego, where we climb a rickety ladder
into the yew just to sharpen our hearts

on splinters of forget. So why is it that now
as you speak, your eyes contradict your mouth
as its moon-monopoly turns intentions

wormward? And what's with your shoulders? Must
they tilt words, flip wrenches into the sentences
left blinking in this verbal combustion? And please

don't simmer our love to less than never. Smallness
grows us to enclose a forested cosmos, where love
is less unreal than dismember, and even the shortest

strings blind vibrations. But to slip that diamond
spear into my bark is to purr over your sliver
of tinder, fashion our music to a world more singular.

Biographies of Poets

Gregory Arena is a poet from Italy whose poems and short stories are published in prestigious journals.

Nigama RV, is an Indian poet who has authored four books. Writing verses is her passion. Her poems are regularly featured in English Dailies. 

Sasha Clark was raised in the suburbs in Baltimore, Maryland. About 11 1/2 years ago she moved with her husband to Southern New Mexico. She began writing self-healing posts on Facebook shortly after covid started. Then a friend introduced her to a Haiku group so now she writes at least one Haiku daily. She also makes gemstone necklaces, mostly turquoise. And is learning Tai Chi including sword form. Her day job is a reference investigator for a background investigation company which does screening mostly for hospitals. 

Jennifer Gurney lives in Colorado where she teaches, paints, writes and hikes. She is a newly published poet, at age 59, with over 160 poems in print thus far. Jennifer has also published commentary about poetry. During the pandemic she joined the online poetry community of The Daily Haiku.

Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Phantom Kangaroo, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Collidescope, Neologism, and elsewhere. He sometimes gets the impression his poems are writing him as he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.