Shinjini Bhattacharjee

Heteroglossia

Night, explain the distance between yes and yes. Thunderclap unhinged, I squint at the sight of branches fractured on the window. Through it, I see the wind peeling inside itself, pulling graveyards of blur out of every invisible branch. They taste of trembling skin, and of questions slipped in without the marks. Lie like a closure, or like hems that empty the thickness of discard. On the top of the hill, the girls always sneeze inside the folds of red silk. It belongs to a woman who hides inside a bear skull, whose earlobes are made of still water, pushing out diamonds. Every week, she teaches the town folk how to disassemble themselves inside their homes. How the left eye must always be placed on the headboard, or how the cheek must be smeared on the floor like a freshly evacuated bouquet. I do not like her, yet she manages to turn the knob on the neck of my shadow to get inside it. Somewhere, the birds stop lending their skins to the sky.

How to build a boat from bedroom towels

In this one, you lived like an elbow wholly untouched. How many hourglasses does one need to break to stretch a desert? The rumors are true: That night wilted around the edges of our fingers and the salted fog. You carried it in your white basket, eager to feed the baby kittens. How many times will we let the leaves blur our whispers, or let the sky break inside the words whenever I say something slippery. The background should have been a totem, but it was mostly brown, with purple abject. That night, there was no land, and yet we stuffed our erosions with apples, goldfish and cotton so that the walls could age faster. You cooked eggs for dinner, yellow like an oak steeling itself against a river. It would have smelled as beautiful as a painting, only if I was not too weary in it. Only if you had not starved their moon crusts in the palm of your hands. A definition makes use of both the object and the dust beneath its flinch. “I love you,” for instance. Or solitude drawn too fiercely on the window. When the light shines on it, it’s so bright, it is frightening.

SHINJINI BHATTACHARJEE is a writer and the Editor-in-Chief of Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have been published, or are forthcoming in Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Cimarron Review, Gone Lawn, Crack the Spine, Small Po[r]tions, elimae, Red Paint Hills Poetry, Literary Orphans and elsewhere.

Gloria Heffernan

I concentrate on the cigarettes you flicked
out the window
when you refused the dish I handed you
in lieu of an ashtray.
You seemed to think I would prefer
the blast of cold night air
to the possibility of simply washing the dish,
just as you thought I would prefer
the truth to lovely illusion.

I imagine the cigarette butts landing on a stack of
discarded newspapers
in the alleyway six stories below,
the glowing orange tips
boring holes through yesterday’s news,
and smoldering for hours before bursting
into a blaze that seems more bearable
than the resentment I see smoldering
at the corners of your eyes.

“Next time,” I promise,
“I’ll have a real ashtray waiting for you,
the kind with little round indentations
to cradle the cigarettes securely
while the smoke curls up like
a cobra emerging from a snake charmer’s basket.”
You nod appreciatively
and we catch each other in the lie,
knowing there won’t be a next time,
and it’s high time you quit smoking anyway.

GLORIA HEFFERNAN is a proud native of Jersey City, New Jersey. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Icarus, Pleiades, Radiance Magazine, The Comstock Review, Stone Canoe, The Healing Muse, Parody, Grey Sparrow Journal and the New York Times Metropolitan Diary. She has also had articles and essays published in numerous magazines and journals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Eugene O’Neill Review, Dramatist’s Guild Quarterly, and The Syracuse Post-Standard. She holds a Master’s Degree in English from New York University and teaches critical writing at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

Sheri Vandermolen

Pollock’s geometry
splashes off its canvases,
onto the open-minded walls
of my otherwise quiet gallery —
creation perpetuating its relevance,
with dilating drops of India ink,
to fill once-blank spaces.

SHERI VANDERMOLEN has served, for fifteen years, as editor in chief of Time Being Books, based in St. Louis, Missouri. Her projects have included overseeing compilation of The Complete Poems of Louis Daniel Brodsky and managing four collected-works editions. She has also facilitated the publication of dozens of individual poetry and short-fiction volumes. She graduated summa cum laude in 1990 and relocated to India in 2008. Her verse has been published in various international literary journals and anthologies, including Contemporary Literary Review India, Earthen Lamp Journal, Muse India, Papercuts, Taj Mahal Review, Veils, Halos and Shackles, and Verse-Virtual.