Disruptions

Carmen Rabil-Eichman

Let me disrupt you,
whip my bellicose bead upon,
secure you in a Jacque Louis David
vexing vision. I carefully place pearls of
clarity, hindsight rhinestones
hammered against equivocal edges, unbalanced
Neoclassic beauty, our deep hues inhaling
stark shadows desecrating diaphanous dimensions,
cut-chipped diagonals gouged, a heavenly attempt
to direct lackluster moments, dictate Romantic shifts,
force us to die-cast dynamic motions
that rival Napoleon commanding winds and fate
while crossing the St. Bernard. Our passion-storms of antiquity
raise his stallion, his arm compels us to follow, our historic
battles hurling straight into hell.

Microbism

Peter Magliocco

Now I wonder how the stars
regard us majestically
during the long midnights
of summer, when we contemplate
the enormity of space.

Do astral sentient beings stare
back through their own telescopes?
Those living in stellar architecture
vacuum stardust from the cold
landscapes of desolate silence,

perhaps like ghosts waiting
to manifest themselves someday.
Draining energy from our future
digital instruments, waiting
for our knowledge to equal

their own erudite sciences.
Those ancestral gods will awake
from a long, cosmic hibernation
to scan the heavens at last.
Will their bulbous eyes be peeled

through squamous orifices,
writing new testaments in
words of alien language
describing the last remnants
of earth's inhospitable barrenness?

A geography toppled by some
civilization nearly extinct,
except for the lingering microbes
of human origin, now hiding in
terrestrial oceans of dust.

MY ISLAND

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

I was never clever,
never inspired envy.
I found my own island,
closed up my feeble mind.

I learned how to float one
morning with my face up
to the sun. Shadows all
around me. My island

was sinking. My island
was without fish. There were
wild birds in the sky. They
started to talk to me.

I longed to fly like them.
I wanted to fly to
the sun. I wanted to
catch fire, be the sun’s food.