It was in mid March — only a little over three months before now — that we began accepting submissions for the fourth issue of Bold + Italic. The entry of genres picked up wonderful pace initially and during the time that numbers were gradually surpassing each previous number, we added to our positivity by nominating some poems for Best Indian Poetry 2019, those being:
We moved further, wrote to each of our nominees and congratulated them. And all this time, on the other side of the road, numerous submissions kept appearing each day, made it to our door: some came in and had to leave even though we wanted them to stay; some stayed a little longer, took tea; some, some more tea; and there were others that never left and happily added up as family. — One is those was Monica Lewis’ humorous THE MOST GOLDEN TICKET, alongside David Appelbaum’s the bicycle man.
All of this did keep us quite busy — and the very added up family now appears as our Issue 04, with artwork by Jeremy Nathan Marks and Anne Casey as our featured poet this time.
It is a wonderful issue — has been compiled to be one — and while we plan to send a set of poems and fiction we published as nominations for Best of the Net this year, please take some time to go through it. It won’t be a time ‘wasted’!
Also, before we leave, we’re still open to creative nonfiction submissions and those of art; however, for the fifth issue, we are also soliciting some of our favourite writers for their wonderful works.
To begin with, Issue 04 has taken us to newer places — we received more poetry and fiction this time, and only to select a surprisingly lesser amount of those. Moving, then, away from them, this has been the first issue in which we’ve picked up more than just one image to feature.
The artist this time being from London, Ontario. Jeremy Nathan Marks.
While introducing this work, wonderfully titled ‘Equinox’, the artist says:
“I live in a place where a frontier of farms and hungry developers has removed old trees from the skyline, leaving a vast and often violent horizon in front of me. London is the thunderstorm capital of Canada, it also sits in a pocket where tornadoes and lake effect snowstorms are known to wreak havoc. The often treeless plains make for vulnerable coyotes, deer, small mammals and birds. Often, when the sky is not afoot with storms, it hangs over us all in a metallic grey that can persist well into the spring and ring like shots from a long gun.
“Since I come from elsewhere, I have had to learn not only how to engage with this sky but also how to accept it. This piece is a form of compromise: I am treating the great dome as my subject but like the dove in the Noah story, I have brought a branch along to remind me of the land.”
Jeremy Nathan Marks
Jeremy Nathan Marks is a London, Ontario-based writer and amateur photographer. Recent poetry, micro fiction, and photography appear/will appear in Writers Resist, Poets Reading The News, Cajun Mutt, KYSO Flash, Derelict Magazine, As It Ought To Be, The Local Train, Poetry Pacific, Rat’s Ass Review, Front Porch Review, and The Conclusion, among others. His short story, “Detroit 2099” will be published in Stories of the Nature of Cities Anthology 2099 in early summer.
Child, the backyard lawn is cluttered with leaves now, the rain glued them to the green ground. And the tractor is out of gas, and the ferns have started to turn brown
bending their heads towards the earth. That’s what happens when they ask me. The years passed by: my honey hair is laced with long, silver strands, and the same question
finds its way to scratch another notch deep in my belly even when I thought its reach dead. Standing in the field, or running by the lake, legs strong, heart pumping,
I hear the whispers: Thisiswhatthewaitingdo. And yesterday, as I watered the crimson mums near the birdbath, slashing a cut on my ankle with the hose,
the wrenching returns, and then harder, when building a cairn. Days grow short. Sobbing. Drowning in the hottest bath. What you dared to become.
What you never knew. We want the bark to peel and the crocus to bloom. We long to see your face, your eyes, your smile — we long for every inch of you in our arms.
But in my heart, breaking, when I feel a glimpse of you lurking beneath my bones, sense you climbing a tree or picking a flower, and I’m numbed by a hope too profound
to name, I crawl into that dream of your crib, wipe my tears with your soft knit blanket. I am childless. I hold you.
Stephanie L. Wilcox
Stephanie L. Wilcox was born in upstate New York and holds a B.A. in English with a minor in Communications from Westfield State College. She is a professional fundraising consultant and copywriter and has traveled the globe to explore and work with non-profit organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, the Philippines and China. She is a member of the Berkshire Women’s Writers Festival and Voices of Poetry. With her husband and three cats she resides in Western Massachusetts where she tends to gardens, enjoys hiking in the woods, practices yoga and gets lost in moon-gazing and writing poetry.
Take exit 56, past the first of many celery fields, past the looming mega church, the best burgers, Red Wings shoes, and Scooter’s topless bar. Stop at the boat launch and rest your feet in the mud.
The last summer I was there, crystal skulls were in vogue, and I found myself dwelling on their impossible construction and supposed healing properties. Debunked now, but as real to me then as the body, which collapsed across the darkness against my own, silently
building inertia like a comet through space.
I sought in the
supernatural an escape from the mundane—though looking back, my mind paints each detail in beautiful disarray, so that nothing could be called commonplace,
not the alleyway of ever-changing lilies, or the shallow sulfurous marsh, whose avenues were as limitless as its depths.
Yes, even then, under those stars, alone or nearly alone, I understood that our memories began before our birth, and that there were already ways to travel faster than the speed of light.
Duke Trott
Duke Trott’s writing has appeared in journals such as American Athenaeum, The Hawai’i Review, Occulum, Bad Pony, and 101 Fiction. He is a writing instructor at Henry Ford College. When he’s not writing or working, he’s usually cooking something with beans, or walking his chocolate lab, Hudson.
Celeste’s room faced onto one of the shafts where small slivers of daylight fell into the wards and treatment rooms. The only light to enter her room appeared like an angel on the wall opposite her bed in the late morning, and as the days grew shorter with the end of summer the time of its arrival crept closer to noon. She grew weary of waiting for the angel of death to well up inside her head. The doctors didn’t have the means to treat her in the north. Her family didn’t have the means to come with her, so they cried and put Celeste on the bus to Toronto. She was going to die alone. When she arrived, she sat in the edge of her bed and wept. She was still ambulatory. The sisters permitted her to go for walks but with one proviso: if she suffered a headache or any faintness, she had to return immediately to her room. She stood in the lobby off Bond Street in front of the marble Archangel. He was leaning on a staff held in one hand and pointing to heaven with the index finger of the other. “You’d better come up with a pretty good reason for taking my life,” she said to the empty-eyed Michael. One night, unable to take any more waiting, Celeste walked out into the pouring rain on Victoria Street and at Shuter saw a gathering of people lined up, clutching their coat collars and shuffling into Massey Hall.
Curious, she walked up to the box office window and asked what the show was. The girl behind the round, slatted metal speaker pointed to a poster of Charlie Parker. “SRO only, I’m afraid.” Celeste wasn’t sure what SRO was, but a show was a show and worth the hours she’d be away from her room. Before Celeste went south to die, her mother and her priest had warned her of the dangers of the big city. Dying in sin, the priest said, would only compound her mortal suffering by bringing the torment of the afterlife. The infractions that would take her straight to hell were boys, chewing gum, and jazz music. She climbed the flights of stairs to the top floor and stood at the brass rail at the back of the auditorium’s gods. She thought for a moment why they called the upper balcony “the gods,” and decided it was both profane and the suggestion that the higher seats were closer to Mount Olympus. Her hair had gotten soaked during the walk from the hospital to the hall. It dripped down the back of her neck, and she wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her cardigan. “If I die and am damned,” she mused, “I will do it in style coming from the theatre.” The houselights dimmed. The stage gradually grew bright which reminded Celeste of the way dawn rises over Lake Nipissing. The audience applauded. Parker walked onto the stage followed by the other members of his quartet. He paused for a moment in front of a microphone, acknowledged the audience, and said even though there was a hurricane outside, there’d be a bigger storm inside, and with that his quartet began to play.
The steady rhythm of the drums, the emphatic chords of the piano, and the man on stage with his saxophone – the music reached out and grabbed her so hard she thought her head was going to explode. At first, she thought she should try to get back to the hospital so she wouldn’t die in sin in Massey Hall, listening to Charlie Parker. But she stood still. She felt the notes lifting her, as if she was riding each one on a current of wind. She felt as if she had wings. Celeste stared at the dusty-looking gold saxophone Parker was playing. Even from a distance she could follow the movement of his fingers, his cheeks billowing and his lips curling around the mouth piece as if every note was a response to the world’s terrible silence. Where was the devil in this, she wondered? This was music. The music was alive. She was alive. The drummer hunched over this snares and cymbals, picking up a beat and carrying it rapidly until with a final exaltation his sticks came down on the cymbal and the audience applauded. For the first time in her life, Celeste felt music could be more than just a melody. It was a conversation. Her heart and soul and spine all wanted to join in. She felt a fluttering on the back of her neck, as if touched by soft feathers. Then she fainted.
The sisters stood over her in their black habits and wimples, their bodices tied up in white aprons. One of them asked whatever was she thinking when she went to hear the Devil’s music. Celeste looked at them, their eyes stern and unblinking. She told them she had gone to hell and met Jesus. The sisters put their hands over their mouths and scattered. One nun, an older woman without an apron, returned to set matters straight with Celeste. “No one ever met Jesus in hell. Jesus was in heaven. He never, ever, went to hell,” the nun told her scoldingly. “Though, maybe once,” the nun recalled. “Yes, he had been there, but just once, and he didn’t hear jazz when he was there. Jesus died to save the wicked from sin, to save sinners from themselves, and to put a stop to the purveyors of sin who seduced young women with their saxophones. He kicked open the doors of hell on the day he was dead and he’d brought out the righteous.” “Oh, but sister,” Celeste said, “it wasn’t hell. It was heaven. Pure bliss.” The old nun shook her head, stood up, smoothed her habit and began to walk away. She turned to Celeste. “I will pray for you, my child, but I think you are beyond salvation.” Celeste slept. As she fell asleep, she prayed the Lord would deliver her from a brief, unfulfilled life of pain and send her back to where she was certain she saw heaven in the grace note of a song Parker called “Ornithology.”
Just before she closed her eyes, an orderly came into her room to empty her garbage pail. He looked young. He said he was a student. When she asked what ornithology was, he told her it was the study of birds. That was how people who climbed the stairway to the gods had spoken of Parker. He was the Bird. She had glimpsed the wings of a bird, perhaps an angel, and its wings had brushed the back her neck. When she woke the rain had passed over the city and even the light shaft in the middle of the hospital was glistening. The nuns who came and went in her room were talking about the storm. It had been named Hazel. Celeste had never realized storms had names. It was not merely any rain, but a hurricane, as Parker had said, and the storm had blown parts of Toronto off the map. A prayer took shape in her mind. God comes in the wind. God comes in the rage of hard rain. God knows what to do with water. He sorts the high water from the low water, the bass from the sax. God blows hard and makes the doors leave their hinges. God is the music that pulls at the trees, tears at the roof, broadens the rivers. God saw her lying on the floor in the darkness long before those beside her bent down and motioned to the ushers for help. The doctor appeared at the foot of her bed. While she was unconscious she had been rushed into the x-ray room. Someone had looked inside her head. Someone had read her thoughts.
Someone might have glimpsed the threshold of heaven as she was walking toward it in her darkness. He held a chart in his hands. He shook his head. He said he didn’t know what happened but that she should be thankful she had experienced a miracle. The tumour, a large growth that appeared the day before as a dark hole in her mind and soul was gone. She had been cured. She could go. He warned her to stay out of jazz halls, but as he turned to leave he stopped and asked if Bird was every bit as good as they say he is? “He gives music wings,” she said. All the way home to North Bay on the bus through Gravenhurst and Powassan her mind kept returning to the moment when she felt a fluttering on the back of her neck. What had it been? When she spoke to a man on the bus who had come all the way from North Bay to see Parker, he told her that Bird’s favorite haunt in New York was a place called Birdland. If she got a job and saved enough money, she would go to New York. She got a job in the local department store and began to save her money, but instead of going to New York, she married the young man she had met on the bus. In the apartment over a hairdresser’s shop, they would play Parker’s records and dance together until they were exhausted. One night, her husband lifted her up and they both came down together on the floor. Only Celeste stood up.
“What was Parker like?” her son Ron asked as he sat with his mother on the final night of her life. “Well dressed,” said Celeste. “What colour was his suit?” “Dark grey, like the other three in his band. They wore black ties. Their shoes were polished to mirrors. They looked better than any North Bay banker.” Celeste had intestinal cancer, nothing to do with the head. She found the thought amusing. She asked Ron to play a cassette tape she had brought with her to the hospital for her final days before the flickering consciousness of morphine set in to send her off mercifully. “Had the crowd at Massey Hall talked over Parker the night she was there?” “No,” she said, “no one was talking. Smoke was thick in the balcony because in those days you could smoke in the loges of a theatre, but the cigarettes only added an extra dimension of holiness to the moment. The air was purified as if by a censer.” Was she overcome by the smoke? “No,” she said again. “Did you feel you were cheating on God by being there?” “No. I was not cheating on God, and no, I will never renounce jazz either.” He asked what had entered her mind just before she passed out. “Have you ever been startled by a bird? Have you ever been sitting in someone’s house and their budgie gets out of his cage and you don’t realize he’s flying around until he lights on the back of your neck? Put it on,” she said, and together they listened to the Best of Charlie Parker.
“Maybe, miracles do second chances,” she whispered. As the music began to play, Ron realized this was probably the last time his mother would hear Parker. He felt an urgency to ask her questions, a reverse catechism to satisfy his curiosity. And as he began to ask more questions, she mouthed a “Shhh. Listen,” as her last words. In the background of most of the tracks on the cassette, Ron could hear the sound of people talking over Parker in the Birdland lounge as if he was a sidebar to their evening out in New York. The great Charlie Parker was playing, and people were talking. They didn’t know any better. His fingers ran to the very top of the stops, and he hit and held a high note that seemed to last forever. The night she saw him in Toronto, Celeste could not stop staring. She hadn’t stared that long at anything since she was a girl. There was an icon of the Virgin she had to kneel before to do penance in detention after school. Celeste thought the Mother of God was very beautiful, and the longer she stared at her the more the Virgin seemed to move and try to say something. The next day Celeste told one of the nuns that the image seemed to move and wanted to speak to her and the sister looked horrified and struck Celeste’s fingers ten times on each hand with a metal-edged ruler. But she knew she had seen a God who lay hidden behind the fears in this world when the light struck that one tiny spot on Parker’s sax that he had not dusted down to repel the glare off its brass. In that flash, she saw a star as if it glowed through a storm, through the rage and sadness in God’s heart, a star that burst into an explosion of light, just for an instant, brighter than anything in the sky.
Celeste knew, at that moment, the divine lives here and now, alive among all the creatures of the world that feel the magic of a heart’s rhythm. And as Parker hit that high note, when his saxophone spoke, it was not a scream or a cry of pain, but a note as clear and perfect as the answer to a prayer.
Bruce Meyer
Bruce Meyer is author of several books of short fiction and poetry. In September, Guernica Editions will publish his next collection of poetry, McLuhan’s Canary, and in 2020 will publish a volume of essays on his work and a collection of flash fiction, Down in the Ground. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.
they say we are born, a finite fistful of eggs, and what about the shells?
i am all shell, tender and crooked, cracks tracing the lifelines lived in the palm
of your hand, and fingers splayed, branching
little dirt roads going neither here, nor there.
green-skinned, i grow both wishing i were pink,
you take, but i am seedless.
perhaps if planted underwater the pit would take root, to bloom, and we could kiss, again,
like seventeen, like endless.
THE MOST GOLDEN TICKET:
(OR WHEN WONKA FINALLY GAVE IT TO VERUCA, AT LAST, AND SO, NOW TO MY OWN)
lick an orange, it tastes like an orange. the strawberries taste like strawberries! the snozzberries taste like snozzberries! whoever heard of a snozzberry? we. the poem should end there because for one, you should, by now, know a damn snozzberry, tastes like a snozzberry an orange, duh, but still, you wanted still, two everlasting gobstoppers? there is the death of love. your already full and gorgeous gut yet gorging, even if hearts had pits you’d not spew a single one out.
Monica Lewis
Monica Lewis lives in Brooklyn, New York and holds an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Both her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, The JFR, and AAWW’s The Margins, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, FIVE:ONE, The Boiler Journal, PUBLIC POOL, Yes, Poetry, and Flapperhouse, among others. She is a VONAoVoices alumna, and a 2017 and 2018 ‘Best of the Net’ poetry nominee. Her full collection of poetry will be published in 2019 by Unknown Press.
pumps the universe made of strings plucked like an Irish harp
not certain of a voice: om he splices two streets together for a high C
mi
dark matter fills his lungs
black hole-gullet
errancy is in his delivery pouch
mine?
light contracts red torus to green
his is this event the next epoch twitters
the same note
flat
David Appelbaum
David Appelbaum has worked in the university and in publishing, and is an author who specializes in the work of writing. His most recent books include notes on water: an aqueous phenomenology (Monkfish, 2018).
You could tell her she didn’t really want to be there From the first day she started to read the news Just by the tone of her voice as well as the way She looked straight at the camera
And then there was the way she never put any emotion in her voice right from the start of the broadcast right up to any kind of advertisement break and when the lights faded down at the end.
And when the uprising invaded London hanging hundreds before moving onto Watford the lack of emotion or anger in her voice had people running underground in panic.
Drakelow, which hadn’t been in use since the 1940’s was overfilled in hours as was Victoria Arches in Manchester and the one in Kenton in Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Her voice however carried on across the TV emotionless saying the army had it under control until after a while nobody believed her.
(NB. Erica is a robot news anchor in Japan)
Andy N
Andy N is the author of three full length poetry publications, the most recent being The Birth of Autumn.
He is also the creator of Spoken Label, an ongoing podcast series which interviews writers / artists and also with his partner Amanda Steel coruns Reading in Bed, a book review podcast series as well as doing ambient music under the name of Ocean in a Bottle.
A Book Review of Miriam Darlington’s ‘Owl Sense’, by Jayant Kashyap
Any reader begins Owl Sense, I’m sure, just the same way as they begin any other essay — however good or bad that might be, — but then this 350-page encyclopaedia of a book is what becomes more interesting owing to its range of characters. All good ones. To begin with, it is a wonderfully researched essay on the presence of owls and their interactions with all that is around them, but it is not limited only to that point; it is also the story of the author about breaking all the rocks that bar her route, her story of being a good mother to her son, and daughter.
2018, Hardcover edition
Owl Sense is the kind of package that many books can only aspire to be — a part research paper and part observational fiction, the combination makes it a tell-tale owl encyclopaedic — vastly ranging in itself from travel writing to writing for environmental awareness and other sorts. Miriam Darlington has written a book of simultaneously parallel stories — one of her first child Benji’s getting along with an initially unknown disease, and the other of the different members of the owl family. It is a story borne out of several different countries. All of which in search of owls, from getting to know about their way of living to possibly helping them wherever need be.
“I found that in the end any encounter between a mild owl and a human must always be tentative, aware of the assumptions we might wrongly make.”
Apparently, Darlington’s very faithful documentation is an excavation of the ‘almost-nature’ of owls; of the fact that we think we know well this extended family of ‘cute’ and ferocious, mostly nocturnal birds of prey, which, however, only turn out to be “our wrong-headed assumptions”, and which are often challenged by these agile creatures.
Evidently, the book is also as much about ‘how’ we see the owls — as omens and symbols and, sometimes, nothing — as about ‘what’ owls are.
“As we cutify and commodify the natural world they risk becoming ornaments: a static picture on a screen, a shining cup, egg cosy or tote bag [which it shouldn’t be].”
Miriam Darlington is a devastatingly curious researcher; and those who have read her Otter Country know this already, while those who haven’t have enough opportunities yet. One of which could be observing the little breezes of behaviour, which more so add to the nature of the book; the little stories that in some way characterise the owls and the people involved with them at times, like the one of Athene noctua (a Little Owl) and its rescue by Miss Florence Nightingale.
On the other hand, ironically, however, our author here also puts how Nightingale’s presence both weakened and strengthened the owl; how in her absence it also never survived.
With bytes of information, Darlington marks throughout the book how human intrusion has hurt owls (and many organisms alike) in numerous ways, most of the times fatally; how her own ignorant intrusion of once she is so ashamed of. How “[t]he bird is feathered perfection; grace and beauty with talons” and yet (or perhaps because of the very reason) never one to be put up as an exhibit.
“When we get it right, and work with nature rather than against it, we can achieve the most extraordinary things.”
So, as a normal book, talking about the unstable number of owls in present day as a result of what we did to them years (and centuries) ago and have continued doing yet in numerous other ways, Owl Sense doesn’t just stand up to my expectations, it rather elegantly exceeds them. There are qualities about it that continuously amaze me; Darlington as an advocate does the best bit possible on her behalf, and in perfect humour — what we need to do now is learn and act thus based on our bit.
Miriam Darlington is a poet and author of Owl Sense and Otter Country. Reviewers have hailed her as a successor to GavinMaxwell and HenryWilliamson, and as a central part of the new nature writing movement. She has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and a particular interest in the tensions, overlaps and relationships between science, poetry, nature writing and the changing ecology of human-animal relations.
Jayant Kashyap is an artist, reviewer and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and among other publications, his poems appear on The Poetry Society’s (UK) website. He is also the co-founding editor of Bold + Italic, and a food blogger. His debut chapbook, Survival, is almost out in print.
And well if you contract an insoluble solution Reverberating chords come nagging And all again is well.
In the dialect of proposition there lies another word, In the tumult of tradition another voice, Another sound misheard and apprehended Like a screeching fiddle through a misshapen bag of Chamomile tea.
Well and we pick apart the liquor, Purple wrappers strewn across the old apartment; In another room the needle on the phonograph sings Another E. The chaos is written through sublation, Which he has smoked on another terrace, In another time, where time erased is not unbalanced, All unwell.
With a separate briefcase he announces a departure, Through the cracking of the silhouettes, Cackling sovereignty, and another pin on his lapel. We have counted up the hours that he cannot spend Without a slumber, without reminder of another outlet (That it could be different); in a pinch of spectralist viola You set the scene in two or three summations; Carry on the compositions. Telling you or me (Through drizzles shielded over by a mackintosh pullover) That it cannot rain another decade, That is, another decade through the golden years of mirth.
Well in an antiquated peacoat we have strutted down an ersatz Oxford street, reminding you and me of all the convolutions That a modern Helen has to offer. A symphony has been reduced To just a string quartet and rogue soprano. The train to Prague sets off at dusk and you remember the Vltava. He had never crossed the river, and I know how much you’d like to see Another ship carry off its passengers to the Semite and his hound.
A cup of tea is all that it has taken to rend the notes asunder. The printer beckons to another time within the future, And he cannot know how well I have been planted in the past. His sophomoric giggle on a bicycle in Heldenplatz. You take my hand, awaiting; the two spoons of yoghurt Would have been too milky for your taste. He sits before a Raphael, bequeathing sighs of you and me Sipping our mimosas and mint teas. In the Albertina subway graphics dull out a century’s collection, And the marble horseman bites his lip.
In a farther bedroom you have outlined my demise; Over beds of tortellini by the old cathedral he has commented On the use of rocketships out in the sky. The universe is an oblong smear of milk and you have claimed it Bigger. As we traipse through cabarets and shopping malls in trousers That are much too short, you see another possibility, A horizon that is much too rouge in shape and distance. In a plane the children are still screaming. I have screamed another bluff in tandem with all of his proceedings. He carries home another loaf of cash to eat, and we sit through a Ponderous rendition of Pierrot Lunaire. You have seen it always. News rings out from Boston, And it is all the same.
We have known more days together than comprise a meagre Sixteen months. He smokes another waft of dollar bills. In a new concerto there is all to find that has been present in tonality. London Bridge has never quite existed; so we cross the Tower, To our dusky reverential future. I wonder if I shall ever say a word Of you and me and all of our adventures that have landed us Through old attacks. The three-headed beast must now await our stay. Well how can we remain if earth is always movement, and forgetting, Change, and then tomorrow. The umbrella would be better, But I cannot convince you of the happenstance that would shut out all the rain. We say that rain shall always come another day, but what if this—
This is the sunshine that cannot penetrate the winds. His eyes were always waiting for a sibilant conclusion, Looking towards the end. And you have rested but a child, Twenty years without it all, and smiling to a mirror. We have seen a world through a shard of glass—and he Must be an intrusion. He downs another shot of vodka, Counts to four in five numeric units, Wipes his forehead on a puce Canali tie. The marimba is still singing upon our return. In a room in Boston rings the tune of the Arabian queen. In Russia the procession has been always different.
Tonight we gaze at corneas glazed over with the beams of seas, And the waves drift off so peacefully. In a novel she has always found her way. He has wrested all the words and abstract sieges from her grasp; I have arrested all the moments where it was just talk of you and me. One day I met you with a banker’s parapluie. Where has it gone, and why has it all vanished? I do not dare presume to ask such questions, Yet he has always harboured the audacity to speak. Sleep well, darling. He has never called me darling, But to you I shall always be chérie.
Liza Libes
Liza Libes is a poet and a novelist studying English Literature at Columbia University. A native of Chicago, she loves everything that New York City has to offer, especially its bookstores and quirky coffeeshops. In her spare time you will find her reading T.S. Eliot or John Keats for inspiration.
Bold + Italic 