Ajay Devaloka

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A Picnic of Poetry Poetry by @merlinflower @PoetBex @NoraNadj @OC_plus_ @jonmedeiros @MatGost Queen Amarachi @donmexlar @JeshBaker @AnkitaSharma_26 @lozzawriting @luntz_david Curated by Syreeta Muir / @phantomsspleen #MythicPicnicTweetStory === I was extremely delighted and surprised when @MythicPicnic asked if I would like to curate a mini collection for them. I’m just so proud of this. Thank you to everyone who submitted for trusting me with your beautiful work. Here are 12 poets, all alive and wild and precious. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Syreeta === A keen crossroad, tucked away a grapeseed rolled off my mouth. away from a tempted jar to a muddy pot. the pregnant pot sighed A hurt - nursed and nursed- inhibited the dense convincing of someone’s plea. . Fry two diverse roads divorced crushed by sneaky trucks and single cars ~The judge leaned to one~ labelled and trapped bad, one of the roads wandered off. the other road finished strong with giggles. . Strange the mist glazed morning, snapped up the reminder of the night with a click of dawn another summer. a deep kiss and the subsequent singing of an unruly mosquito woke me up . Merlin flower is an independent artist and writer. = = = Smoot (i) The dry stone wall has a chink in its armour. Small doorway, purposefully cut at rabbit height. It is a farmer’s gift, for hedgehog pilgrimage and mustelid traffic. Square of blue sunlight and field beyond. (ii) In a world of boundaries, there is an opening. The wall is windowed, floor to chest, creating a hare highway, portal to farmland beyond. Across the field, its mirror image winks. A series of gaps connect and light the way home. (iii) A solitary sheep inspects the hole in the wall. She knows it will not allow passage of her heathery bulk. Instead, she chews at its mossy garlands. This is faerie road, wanderer shrine, dandelion church. Everywhere is threshold. . Xylaria Polymorpha The forest floor is a graveyard. Beneath a bridge of tree root, an epitaph of moss trails leaves. Something is reaching back. Grey, peeling stromata, curved as claws, rise like the dead. The fruiting body is cupped hands, gathering a little rainwater. Fungal nails are crooked, yellow, meeting like weird sisters, Macbeth’s bane. These fingers flourish in rotted bark and stump, living death, charred and cracked like the ghost of fires. A mushroom dryad, Ariel, crawling from damp trunks, spreading limbs and breathing the earthy air in. . Star-nosed moles have 25,000 receptors in their miniscule noses. They are soothsayers, sensing earthquakes, eruptions and landslides. Semiaquatic, anemone-led, they slurp larvae, leeches. Tiny archaeologists, Cassandra-eyed, digging coal-coloured tunnels. In the darkness, noses nudge, blooming like supernovae. . Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press. = = = Women confessing things to each other with that ah look on their faces, women who are tired, women who have seen it all, who have seen nothing, the world is women, reclining, bathing, biting into apples, pouring milk out of jugs, wearing earrings, posing, pouting, dancing, kicking their legs up in the air, putting their hair up, letting their hair down, lying on rumpled sheets dressed, undressed, eyes wide open, half asleep, who told you, who told you we wanted to be painted this way? . Rites of Passage That marble staircase you ran down down down to unknown clubs and mice and mismatched music while he held you Just couldn’t stop the heels the dance floor the heels your heart until he turned into a pumpkin The first mega disappointment The first no- no Then the next and the next and the next . Nora Nadjarian is a poet and fiction writer from Cyprus. She has won prizes or been commended in international competitions including Live Canon and Mslexia. Her work was published in The Interpreter’s House, Magma, Perverse and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Iktsuarpok was published by Broken Sleep Books. brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/n… = = = Song For Q Alone in the room at night, mid-chat, I laugh with my phone, staring at the screen. I laugh long enough, my face becomes that emoji I sent you which had tears creeping out on its chuckling cheek. The room, though sick and jealous of my hysteria, echoes its music. See, even your virtual presence turns my life around. I cannot remember the last time these walls saw my teeth. So when you say you want us to talk everyday, I could not agree more. For this talk affords me this thing I cannot name. . Pastoral Haiku 1 Talking tombstone speaks silence: no more tomorrow. 2 At the clean creek, two trees with twined branches are in the sky. 3 Camels hooves dig the desert— dust resurrects. . Abdullah O. Jimoh(He/him) is a linguist and poet. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Tab Journal, Stanchion, Radon Journal, Broken Antler Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, A Long House, Mudroom, Tint Journal, Gyroscope review, Efiko Magazine and elsewhere. = = = Maybe a Ghost “Ho, Billy, get one potcho on da porch.” Kyzen laughs. Laugh fills his brain. “Dats funny yea? Maybe he’s one porch-oh. Ha!” Billy looks piss off already. Laughterʻs not on his mind. “Dats not a fucking porch, guy, dats the lanai.” “Fine den, get one podagee on da lanai.” Like a newscaster now. “He staring, sitting, just…laidat.” Pause fills the room. Pause, the moment says. “And?” Billy more piss off now. “Whatchyou mean? And what?” “And. Wat! Wat you like me do?” Billy spits when heʻs loud. Kyzen stares, shrugs. Looks down. He shrugs, looks up. “Well, whoʻs dat potcho on the punee? You told him come?” “Ask him wat he like?” Billy responds and doesn’t answer the question. “Eh, what you like, guy? You Milton’s cuzin?…He just lookin at me, like dis, like ded eyes kine, maybe he ded, maybe he one ghost.” Maybe a ghost fills the room, like sludge under the sand at the beach after the rain. Maybe a ghost fills them both. “Ask him if he like eat?” “Eh, you like food? You hungry?! Come in, Mai mai e ‘ai.” Kyzen gestures, fingers together like a kiss. Lips together too. “I tink he not hungry, he just looking at me. Looking tru me, like one frickin ghost.” “Everybody hungry, guy, everybody needs something fo eat. Maybe dey jus dont know what they need, But everybody need something right?” Need fills the room, a pause, the opposite of something in your stomach, a ghost or a pit or the sludge under the sand at the beach after the rain And the podagee on the punee turns his head to the sea, to the moon. He is hungry. He is a ghost or he is the sea or he is just one podagee, waiting, sitting. “Oh, da potcho on the couch, he laughing now, shaking his bones in one bag.” See these bones? Feed them when they not hungry, even if Billy stay piss off. Think about the bones under your skin too. . Jonathon Medeiros is a public school teacher on Kauaʻi. = = = He’s there again, close-by tonight – All hunkered on his haunches, In fuzzy dark – the man who looks like me. The echo of an animal, a mirror shattered at his feet, All glimmering with threat and broken knives. He makes such hungry slobber-sounds – All lip-smack wet and loathsome – He eats and eats those jagged razor shards. The crunch and crack of glass on tooth Makes innards knot and toe-bones curl. The man who looks like me just moans, And slobbers, drooling red. He grins that gum-shred, blood-tooth grin, Laps fingers with a lacerated tongue. He gurgles, split-apart insides, My past reflected in his eyes. . The fallout is electric, felt in thirty rooms or more – That leather belt-lashed skin and judder-bone. He writes the lines of weakness, etching sigils on our skulls, And we become cold corpses – silent, watching from a heap. The friends who shouted warnings – saw the concentrated damage – Those devastating years of fears in floods. While we were breathing hoodoo flames, tight racing with his heavy hands, That terrible disturbance ended homes. He fractured all the clouds and beat the thumping of the system. 'You’d better best-behave or else the punishment runs raw 'And ripples out through angry playhouse scenes.' We slam those doors for sudden reasons. Finger spirals store the hurt, The throbbing moves inside, becomes metastasizing sick. Those knot-fists echo, stinging, leaving memories in tatters, Still crying, curled on vinyl tiles today. . Until you break the glass just to get free. Echoes of echoes in every direction. Contain the present and the past. What he never said though, was our futures 'Squint to glimpse the point where you begin. 'Back and back and back – 'So if you stand between two mirrors, you can see, in theory, all the way –' That’s what he said, that ham-hand bully-bore. ‘Cause of the speed of light. 'When you look at your reflected eye, it’s really in the past,' . Mathew Gostelow (he/him) haunts a misty, leafy suburb of Birmingham, UK. Some days he wakes early and scribbles strange words. @MatGost on Twitter and BlueSky. = = = I LOVE MY AFRO PUFFS I love my afro puffs, round and curvy like the derriere of an Igbo woman, Sprinkled with streaks of mahogany, coloured like honey, A heritage intertwined like cornrows, held by strings of threads, My mother’s DNA sprouting from within me, Adorning my head like a crown, full as the Amazonian forests, Growing thick and strong like the lion’s mane, Under running waters, it shrinks like a tortoise into its shell, Only to bloom like morning glory when the sun comes up, It curls on my fingers and I let it bounce back like a warrior, Each strand, a testament to my unwavering confidence to be proud of myself, My hair is ‘locked’ down; I am not in ‘dread’ of what people will say, ‘Fulani’ braids with wooden beads, ‘Bantu’ knots tied down to my roots, It reaches out to the blue skies, unafraid and healthy. . MELANIN MONROE In the beginning, the potter moulded me from sun baked clay, He called me brown skin girl, trapped the sun in my eyes, And they turned rouge, the colour of the Sahara dawn, Ebony pixie dust was sprinkled on my skin, And when the rain fell on it, it smelled like petrichor, The scent of fresh leaves and cocoa butter, Black currant flowed in my veins, seeped through my skin and coloured me nightshade, I became the dark bombshell, Melanin Monroe, the S.I unit of radiance, I toppled beauty standards that say the lighter the better, I say, the darker the berry, the sweeter its juice, Beauty in the eyes of all, the beholders and not colonizers, I am black Aphrodite, Ashanti, Ugegbe, the Southern belle, This ‘hour glass’ figure of mine will stand the test of ‘time’, Like the pyramids of Giza, I am the ninth wonder of the world, The jigida jiggles round my waist announcing my arrival, Stepping into my year of becoming, I am coming into myself, And accepting the black, strong woman I see. . Queen Amarachi is a Nigerian writer who writes about the African experience and mental health. = = = Snake Desire creeps like a snake in service of grass I admit everything Unbutton one button Your beauty affects me Seeing your face changes everything The light on your neck illuminating the outline of your chin My jaw unhinges I have to leave the house . Homeownership Kills The Revolutionary, They Say A thunderstorm Rolls and splits, Whelms and, then, overwhelms I’m scared It usually turns out okay Think of making love as the rain Sprays in old Tudor windows with cranks On my too-high bed Drops on your back, the wind Picking up; I rented in that place; Once you own a home This kind of thing goes; Instead it’s a branch crushing the roof, Insurance Downed lines Whether to buy a Generac; Devil whispers That every man must take care of himself Not every man must be penetrated, soothed By ozone, buffeted instead of ordering A sampler platter of false promise . Dallas Dermatologist Naked from the waist up Not naked The freeway sound wafts to the 8th Floor office Mozart I’m smug I've left my phone Inside my breast pocket on his door hook; Writing this poem in my head: The window blinds cut bands of cloudy sky; Ahead is the approach for aircraft landing at Love Field Each flight descends through the blinds, hanging for a moment Between each slat; as the angle and descent recede Toward the runway the plane Hangs longer within the space between Slats and the mechanical motion Of the plane's fall becomes so clear Is the pilot even doing anything to earn our respect? What is dignity? Dallas’s nondestroyed towers Are so unlike Palestine Today I’m grateful For a swarm of birds, for the cheerful livery of Southwest Killing children is wrong The dermatologist comes in as I was writing that I went and got my phone after all And wondered if the mole on my chest will be normal . Pierre Minar was born in Beirut and grew up in New Jersey. His chapbook is called Transmissions From My Yearning Chair, from Bottlecap Press. He lives in Dallas with his son. = = = Sue's Side Over by sue she tends your wounds heck she even bothers that you have wounds on this side you’ll have your wounds catalogued and noted that they can be weaponised poked and prodded when you’re at your lowest over by sue you can be free of the weight and numbers of what it costs to feed and house you over by sue you can be assured your minor contributions to daily life are seen you can be sure even you are seen over by sue you matter even when you have no coin to add to the the pot over by sue your little works to tend a garden are smiled upon on this side, you're just weight a burden to be borne a voiceless one with too much bourgeois another mouth to feed and we all know how much it costs to just get by these days over by sue you might have a chance on this side every chance will be taken against your failed little being over by sue you might just be free . Jesh Baker is an apprentice baker and latecomer to writing as a mid-life crisis. When he's not writing, he works as a communications practitioner. = = = 1 Sorcery I find you strange in ways I can’t describe No fitting words can shape what I feel- You are a breathless moment but a long sigh A hard memory but a delicate dream Far away but buried deep within Not around yet never far A free bird I remain chained to A cold night still you warm my heart A short chapter yet my whole script You have no roots but, in me, you stay I see you when I close my eyes I speak to you when I am quiet Only the devil knows what sorcery you do! 2 The Buck Stops Here High on agony, drunk on pain I drink the scorching sunlight And puke a rainbow out I chew up a morose moon And spit out glittering stars I absorb the dark night And ooze a bright dawn The buck stops here The pain ends with me 3 Courage Sometimes, I imagine us in that field Favorite of Rumi and Nietzsche Located beyond good and evil On the other side of all right and wrongdoings In a parallel universe, in that field, sometime We stand face to face; I stare at you With cold eyes that neither feel nor express And tell you that I don’t love you That maybe you were mistaken for I never did That my heart doesn’t beat for you That my dreams can’t include you I can also throw shards of truth at you And roll my eyes when you bleed Yes, love, I too can do that, but It will take a whole lifetime and A parallel universe for me To be you . Ankita Sharma resides in Faridabad, India. She has authored five titles. Her words and artworks have been published in various books, anthologies and literary magazines. She lives for dogs, coffee, art, and books. = = = If If I was going to write you something today it would be gentle like you are. Words would shimmer invisible, salting grain by grain at your feet. But sweetly. They smell of candyfloss, the fairground, summertime, alive, like May. But I have little poem rich soil to spill today. I have no grain. This little I do have, I've put over for you. If that's all, I get today. I'm happy. I'm happy. Slick- slush- stupid Janus and her terrible darkness, drops one single gold coin, from a full purse. One chink of light, for me. I'll take it. If I wrote you something, it would come from the seed lodged in my throat. The one I really don't want to spit out. I'd look to the milk bath sun and gasp, open mouthed. Green shoots, a flower, the colour of the butter, on warm scones, these, I would curl out of my throat for you. . Funicular Parnplatz peaks tower Over the fir lined, chocolate box landscape. Christmas cake folds blend with the horizon. You're up there, miles away. Flakes spill from my eyes, as I climb against Ice-sharp, tooth-bit winds which spar with me, I parry to the edge. Woolen mittens against smooth skin would do me. If I could only reach, the fog-milled tip. . Cat's Kitten A giant black cat skirts the harbour. We lacewings, fragile, as the thinnest icelayer on half frozen ink, watch the cool ebb, and listen to the gentle kitten, licking the pontoon. And we wait, gently fingering the frosting, until our fingertips are twigs. We dare each other, to stick our tongues to the railings, and giggle. Because we do. The cat sits on haunches, in no rush to chase gentle creatures, that listen to his offspring lapping. He likes the night, Glitter-laughing joy. . Laura Cooney is a writer, editor and spoken word artist from Edinburgh and is lucky to be published both online and in print. When she's not writing she'll be with her daughters, as close to the sea as possible. There will be ice-cream! = = = I Liked Driving I liked driving. Mostly, I liked it on the highway with some Stones' song rattling the doors and windows. So when I pulled off near Route 1 below the “He Has Risen” billboard, and took out my driver’s license, social security card, and all the bits of coded magnetic plastic in my wallet, and set them alight on the hood of my car, I guess I surprised myself. Maybe it had been a long time coming. Not that I thought I was looking for something new, or wanted to join a band of Sinti, with their painted wagons, or take up with Lapps and Berbers, or any other groups that roam about- in order to escape from my sedentary existence- nor was I thinking of going alone into the desert to live off locusts and wild honey, or of wandering into the wilderness, like Saint Jerome, to spend my days removing thorns from the paws of lions and cultivating birds’ nests in my armpits, or even simply of just dropping out, to reckon the stars, watch moonlight tremble in spiders’ webs, or dance madly in the rain, like Lear, cursing gods and tempting fate, no matter how strong the urge to escape the world of 9-5 work hours, “no money down” offers, strip malls, and everything else made in China, because I knew, before incinerating those tokens of my identity and purchasing power, I was going to the city streets, to grow a beard and sport rags, to depend on the guilt or patronizing generosity of others, as there comes a moment for each of us when the private self of secrets, memories, and doubts must be extinguished and the unknown faced directly, so, you can know whether can stand it or whether you will break. *Originally appeared in “WordRiot” in 2013. WordRiot no longer exists. . David Luntz has work forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, X-R-A-Y Lit, Bull, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david = = = 🖋️

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