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rocky love by archita mittra

12/30/2016

 
igeneous

we were forged in fury, ancient as the blackbirds who remember the world without a moon, we who learnt to play with fire, back when anaximander dreamed the earth a drum suspended in dark space. but we knew better, sizzling and crackling down jagged cliffs to vermillion seas. our love erupted from the cauldrons  of volcanoes, singing through smoke and dust, leaving behind a trail of lava for our children to follow but when they were born, they were black as shadow

sedimentary

we lurk the crevices of underground caves, our lips too burnt  to sing. the world is too much for us, so we learn to disappear within each other, colours mingling like a rainbow drowning in the sky. in a parallel life, blackbirds build nests of skeletal twigs, waters dance to the whims of a silver moon and the jilted  barren mountains yearn for the sky to kiss them wet and green but we who have died long ago, our blood petrified in our veins, our love an ancient fossil, die in silent sleep everyday

metamorphic

sometimes we remember our own demented dreams, where we fall to the abyss like icarus only to fly away with the wings of fire. we’d sing that story every night till our lips  were burnt black with the despair of hope. sometimes i think i know you as someone else, as dust motes glittering goldenly or as leaves of russet, whispering through the heart of a broken town. we are ancient spirits of the air, trapped in crumbling stone, sending our last wish to the blackbirds who’ve claimed the star-stitched sky as home. once we fell to fly, now we fall, fall, fall to remember to fly again
✱✱✱
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Archita Mittra is a wordsmith and visual artist with a love for all things vintage and darkly fantastical. She occasionally practices as a tarot card reader. Find out more on https://thepolyphonicphoenix.wordpress.com/ and ivyonthetrellis.wordpress.com

collages by marcos morales

12/27/2016

 
Marcos Morales is a graphic designer based in Heidelberg, Germany. He has a strong love for digital collage and illustration. He is curious, loves to travel and enjoys collaborating with other creatives. Find more at marcosmorales.com.ar.

space race by christian sammartino 

12/23/2016

 
I still believe I can build a space shuttle
With tinfoil helmets we wore as children
And garbage I glean from street corners.

Please let me craft our mother ship
In your backyard—my home sickness
Is the size of Pluto.

Cold war kids like us can’t wait for wealth,
Trickling down from superpowers.
We have to launch our own salvation.

Our Space Race is between landlords

And every one of our ancestors who never
Could defy the gravity of this town.

We were bound to these tenement space stations
The day our parents signed our birth certificates.

Slumlords will redline us outside
The city limits of their solar systems
If we linger in this neighborhood.

They will terminate our mission to exist
With eviction notices, claiming our rent payments
Aren’t big enough to live on this planet.  

We will be homeless like Pluto,
Exiled because we are too small to brawl
The bullies of the universe out of our path.

Houston, we’ve had a problem since we were born
And mission control’s phone lines are dead.

If NASA could slingshot Apollo 13
Around the moon, two broke kids
Can escape the orbit of the ghetto.

We will blastoff from this neighborhood,
Abandon this paycheck-to-paycheck city,
Discover a new galaxy to call home.  

Our small step away from the man
Is a giant leap toward a homeland.
✱✱✱
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Christian Sammartino is the co-founder and Editor-In-Chief of Rising Phoenix Review. He studies English Literature at West Chester University. His poetry is influenced by life in the Pennsylvania Rustbelt near his hometown of Coatesville. His work has appeared in Words Dance Publishing, Voicemail Poems, Werkloos, and Lehigh Valley Vanguard and is forthcoming in Yellow Chair Review. Sammartino was a Resident Poet for Lehigh Valley Vanguard during the summer of 2015. His first chapbook, Keystones, was released by Rising Phoenix Press in December 2014.

robot by Monica Beaujon 

12/17/2016

 
my kaleidoscopic silhouette
infinitely fades and replicates.

every summer has been spoiled
by excessive fire
and my face is swollen
from all the dying stars i slid
underneath my skin.

i break open my own heart
and stuff it with
glue, glitter, and gunpowder.

now i feel like a purring engine
or a cold robot;
if you look closely, my sweat
is made of little silver bolts.

i am purifying my bones,
electrifying my tongue.
i want to talk like a radio--
full of static and interest.
✱✱✱
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Monica Beaujon is an undergraduate student, majoring in English at the University of Wisconsin. Her poetry has most recently been published in Germ, Five 2 One, and Maudlin House. Other writing of hers has appeared in Thought Catalog.

venus in scorpio by lauren kayes

12/16/2016

 
Caterpillars slurp the soup of their own bodies to grow
           and I can’t imagine we were told
                       that you have to eat your skin and stomach and heart
                                   to become something beautiful.

I want to read you poetry but your thumb bears down on my lip
           to expose sharp-wet bone
                       and I’m starving, so I want to bite clean through
                       until you’re gushing copper and salt on my tongue.

I don’t, but I think about it.
I think about devouring your heart but I won’t even taste myself on your fingers in case I’m not any good.

I think maybe kissing with our eyes closed means we’re paying attention
           or we’re afraid of seeing each other
                       or we just want it warm and dark and quiet while we eat.

You tell me this is bigger than us—this is longing with the lights out
           and you’re trying to take it all in without drowning.

It seems selfish, taking it all, so I don’t.
I let you have it instead
           and wonder if my insides are enough to drown in
                       and I think maybe you want to
                                   because you haven’t been taught how to swallow.

With every stroke we’re unzipped, oil-slick
           soft light spilling out
                       until I don’t know whose breath I’m holding,
                                   until I’m holding nothing at all.
✱✱✱
Lauren Kayes is a queer, disabled writer of fiction and non-fiction. She lives in Los Angeles with her leopard gecko, Isabela, and can be found on Twitter @LaurenRKayes. 

art by alexander c. solomon 

12/14/2016

 
✱✱✱
Picture
Alexander C. Solomon is (not-for-too-much-longer) a Boston based writer, photographer, and singer originally from Omaha, Nebraska. In the summer of 2012, Alexander lived in Baden-bei-Wien Austria, where he studied twentieth-century German poetry, and discovered his desire to write. Photography was always a part of Alexander's life and travels, but only recently did he merge it with his writing. The inspiration for his work is found in travel, meditation, and his dreaming life. He's coined his works “Illuminations” after the medieval art of illuminating manuscripts, for which an artist would take meaningful text and paint or “illuminate” the words with symbols and scenes. After seven years of writing, this collection is the first time Alexander's work has been published – which is a pretty big deal – so thank you to Sea Foam Mag! Check out more of his work HERE and find him on Instagram HERE.

2 poems by by louis packard

12/8/2016

 

​BE EXTREMELY WARY AFTER MEETING W GHOST DOGS PAST SUNDOWN:

sitting still on the comically broken bus bench
staring past the rear of the express ashland bus as it stops for me
lowered + waiting  5 seconds before leaving me alone again
thanks!
i wasn't sure if it would take me to the right place
even tho it definitely would
no, wait
actually the reason i didn't move from the bench was because i thought it was currently the funniest thing to do
especially w a dead phone
everything is funnier w a dead phone
but it got too funny tho
someone across the street literally died from laughing so hard
so i had to skateboard away from the crime scene west

[2 jetskis have fun on the hudson river
but they are not will smith + eva mendes
+ they are not u + i
u tommy wright
u creep at nite
i want to hold my breath until i feel lightheaded + then kiss u
i hold my breath until i feel lightheaded + miss u
what if i moved there + we dated?
i could win the mega millions
but feel too scared to buy a lottery ticket]

take the damen bus south home + eat fresh
insanity is getting the same sandwich from subway every single time
+ for no apparent reason expecting it to taste like 8th grade
insanity is
i'm sry i have to go back home to the state i live in
i'm working on making less selfish actions
i'm working on making less actions

EAR INFECTION CANCER LEG:

every time i come home 2 my parent's house i eat some of my dead dog's tramadols
+ eventually they will all be gone
+ my parents might ask
"why did u eat all the dead dog's painkillers?"
+ i might say
"it looks like u answered ur own question"

​
✱✱✱
louis lives in milwaukee + is currently gone off the mead + watching daisy of love, he tweets @monster_ultra + has a website w his boiz http://www.banglocaldads.com/ 

blue candle burn, burn down by carrie redway

12/6/2016

 
Blue like Iceland's opaque lagoons
or blood vessels under pale flesh
the candle vomits blue wax
burns down
I watched the wax pool and drain
pool and spill
for twenty minutes

about the same amount of time
I sat listening to hymns
watching for your coffin lid to wiggle
creak open an inch
enough space for an arthritic finger to show
ice blue, crowned with
a coral-painted talon

Some animals lay next to their dead
and we laid over ours through
wood, varnish, metal hinges. Six-feet of soil
I remember lying awake at night
hearing you breathe next to me and then stop
I prayed to Jesus, the beetle,
and you exhaled. Yet the coffin remained shut.

I will find a coral fingernail
in the soil we buried you under and
I will wear it in a locket around my neck
our secret
a message that you are now some place
where coral nails are not needed.
Nor fingers the color of blue lagoons, for that matter.
✱✱✱
Picture
Carrie Redway is a writer and mixed media artist in Seattle, WA. She is inspired by myth, folklore and ritual. Her poems have appeared in Really System, Sick Lit Magazine and Picaroon Poetry. She tweets @carrie_redway.
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