It’s all in a name –

Those Dishpan Hands

Anosmia

I ask my husband to describe my new perfume
(because I have no sense of smell)
and he reports it stinks of princesses.
He has told me that earthworms reek raw meat red
and the blossom clustering the prunus
is sweet, scented the way cold petals feel.
Incense is twilight and Christmas stirred together.
The sea’s like white salt tastes but often
mixed with a lugubrious undertow of dirt.
The cat’s like a clean coat, a certain crispness,
and snow’s bouquet is nothing but it makes
a faint increase in every other fragrance.
When I was sickest, he said that my flesh smelt
like tree-roots washed by rain but, nowadays,
it’s pale and yielding like buttercream.

Kitty Coles

Siúil A Rún

see a symbol hiding

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

Words

Language games, playing with language. Using the dictionary is fun. Words play leapfrog with each other. Letters disappear. And, unexpectedly, poems appear…

Seen

Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.

Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso: Metamorphoses of the Human Form: Graphic Works 1895-1972

Tomorrow’s Soldier

Future armies could be made up of half-human half-machine cyborgs with infrared sight, ultrasonic hearing and super strength, equipped with mind-controlled weapons.

In a US Army report, experts from Devcom – the Combat Capabilities Development Command – outlined a number of possible future technologies that could be used to enhance soldiers on the battlefield by 2050.

These include enhanced limbs for increased strength, an eye that provides infrared and ultraviolet vision, and an audio device that provides ultra- and subsonic hearing.

Ryan Morrison
Cyborg Super Soldiers
Mail online

A Heart That’s Been Broken

A heart that’s been broken
has a tiny hinge
And when it happens a
second or third time
it just
swings open & shut
like a gate.

Maureen Owen

From “R E D”

chapter viii

We never refer to sadness

as something that looks

like secrecy

but it does

Chase Berggrun

{“R E D” (27 chapters long) is an erasure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Berggrun took the text of Dracula and erased all the words except the ones that told a very different story that they wanted to tell. No words were added or moved out of original sequence – Lindsay Garbutt, Assistant Editor of Poetry Magazine}