Forest Scene, by Narcisse Diaz de la Peña

Chapter 1: Hellocinations

In her woman's world, a virtual wombniverse; her vultcherish watchers wild in their flickering half-dreams of fleshy lust and crimson joy. A creature of sharp eyes, sharp soul, tender heart, marooned blood and amber eyes in each uncertain twilight. A seed ungrown, unbeautiful, in sullen soils and under an uncaring sun. Glowing luxen threads missing warmth, as they tremble aghast in cold light and deaf, dumb darkness

Chapter 2: Axylem

Rickety roofs trembled tritely on those rainy days as the men within bickered blithely. You were different then, diffident and remorse fueled. Your forest burns, greens outside disappearing into greens within. Ganesha's tri-leaved twigs afern in your garden of uncaring love, death, and rebirth. Your mind, moving to bare needs and prescient primality, like the grove throne you grovel in; and I know you will live in this wooden axylem forever, pleated in the rings of this unrhymed phloem.

Chapter 3: Freudian Trip

Apropos I propose with haut pourpose, in a jumble of half-words and naked sin. Bleeding Fay's blessed face seeping from a red heart read rong - pale fire glinting; throned there in their Lilith lilies, then in through their glaucous flaring petals. The arrow of my time points to you, my arrow sublime points through - touching naked skin with sceptres of waked sin - as tepid diamond dimples erupt, floating in a fluentsea.

Chapter 4: : Nounsense / Pagalpankti

Music of a sullen, druggish darkness. Harken heavy hearths trembling into menmeant turns of rippling riverrun pools. We watch once sibilant twice tragic thrice treacherous fours of natures' far heaved flights of fansix; say one won feighted asinine lives too tense ill livin' to evolve.

January 30, 2025




Further considerations

[poetry]

Themes & Variations: Vanitas and Grisaille

By Chris McCreary

Paste the blueprint onto any cylinder // & it becomes a continuum, a battle plan // wrapped in flypaper’s ad infinitum.

[fiction]

Nuptial Gift

By Samantha Hernandez

One morning, Jane woke up entirely herself.

[article]

With Someone You Care About

By Lola Bosa

My boyfriend likes to undress me in a nonsexual way, or at least that’s how it feels.

[poetry]

Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning (Psalm 30:5)

By Ron L. Dowell

The charlatan bilked them // Out of what they’d said was sacred. // The lion's teeth specialize in cutting meat.