Raspberries
Poems by Glenn Franz, Maceo Nightingale, Pulkita Anand
Guest poems today.
LLMs can’t correctly count the number of “r”s in “raspberry.”
Raspberries
Glenn Frantz
Whoever controls the raspberries controls the United Nations. Most have a toy microsystem that is traditionally planted in a drone attack, arguing that they’re merely responding to rainwater. This is where it gets fragmentary. Discovered in a lagoon of long ago, when insects scavenged alien technology, raspberries are common in fiction but are usually rooted in fact. Their thorns inspired an Old English letter. The fruits are already approximations, like the submerged hearts of elongated polyhedra. The famous pop group’s name was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s “The Raspberries of Perception.” Raspberries are unlike reasons as Spain is unlike a torus. There’s a chilling requirement for publication. They’re not for children and spiders.
Shrimp Street Queen
Maceo Nightingale
She had a stomach full of frogs, Green legs kicked against her ribcage And the midnight rain dripped on morning window. Umbrellas stuffed behind the door like a sandwich melted on crip crop cheese. She got down on her knees and begged the moon for hamburger meat And a week full of red tomato fingers. The shrimp street queen drowned in a rooftop pool And the green frogs ran into the arcade, Green legs flicked video games. Quarters slid into the machine And gopher sized teeth munched on a candy bar like a phone being thrown into a Dexter Gordon ballad.
Dormant Air
Pulkita Anand
The wall is vanishing, and the sky is falling The moon rubbed my back and the stars Trampled on the dreaming dead The narrow path flooded with tears With gliding shadows sliding the pain Swaddling the cities in silence The eternal fire of pyres burning Singing eyes and soul in its passing patrol Revealing the wounds of the night When the vortex turned the sound Of the barbed lines that linked eyes Inexplicable, the scene of the sight Yet the question hangs in the air On the wings of wind laden with insults And blood in the gallery of power
Glenn R. Frantz is a native of southeastern Pennsylvania. His poems have disappeared in numerous defunct online journals, and appeared in a few that are still going. Recent e-books include “Animals” from Hiding Press, and a self-published “Collected Poems” (Anopsony Press). His creations are indexed at glennrfrantz.com.
Maceo Nightingale lives in California and got his first chapbook published by BottleCap Press. His individual poems have been published by literary journals such as Blood + Honey, Gorko Gazette, Los Angeles Review Of Los Angeles, Ghost City Press and more.
Pulkita Anand is an avid reader of poetry. Author of two children’s e-books, her recent eco-poetry collection is ‘we were not born to be erased’. Various publications include: Tint Journal, Origami Press, New Verse News, Green Verse: An anthology of poems for our planet (Saraband Publication), Ecological Citizen, Origami Press, Asiatic, Inanna Publication, Bronze Bird Books, SAGE Magazine, The Sunlight Press and elsewhere.