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“Lovingly, Peaches” by Michaela Rae Luckey
My mother named me Posie, but my nickname is Peaches. When we were young, my mom would read me and my older brother bedtime stories every night until we fell asleep.
One night, I asked, “Why do people call me Peaches?”
She put down our book and said, “When God put you in my tummy, I had this craving for white peaches–craving means something you’re really hungry for.”
My brother and I nodded.
“I ate those peaches all the time even though I’d never really liked them before. When you were born,
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“Spring Shadow” by Mahlon Banda
above: Winter Sunlight (ca 1939) by Glenn Stuart Pearce
*Where oh where is my sparrow?
Who bounced on the naked tree,
Flirting with the nascent sun,
That refuses to show its golden flames.
The sun is not yet prepared to engrave
The solid oaken silhouette,
She refuses to burn it into cement, stone, or passerby.
I must squint to keep sight of you,
My red-bellied black spider of a bird,
Alighting and lighting —
You flick a pointy wing, -
Global Voices Interviews *Hungary* Kinga Tóth & Timea Balogh in conversation with LIT’s JP Apruzzese
The Hungarian version of this interview is forthcoming in Aprokrif in early 2021.
In Kinga Tóth’s world everything is alive and moving and coalescing at each moment. Separation and disconnection are notions she considers unnatural in the natural world. In her work, the multimedia artist and poet captures what most of us neglect to see – not so much the interconnectedness of everything – which suggests the possibility of disconnection – but rather the relentless and organic becoming of everything into one living body that contains all animate and inanimate life.
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Four Poems by John Deming
Rhapsody in Rat
Rats know when you’re watching them.
Yeah, so I’m smoking on the fire escape
overlooking the alley, and rats
fleck in and out, as they do,
and I look with pure fury
at a rat maybe fifty yards off,
its furry back, thick tail
and burning oven of pursuit,
and it is not even facing me
but freezes then sprints
through a brick wall. The rat
ran through a brick wall.
Rats can feel you looking at them. -
film room 208, avenue of the poet rilke by Christian Formoso (translated from the Chilean Spanish by Sydney Tammarine and Terry Hermsen) Photography by Michael Angelo Yáñez
film room 208, avenue of the poet rilke
1
fade to black and two cut-off images: a woman in front of a window—the gesture of gathering her hair from her face—and a smudged name like graffiti scrawled on the bridge at ronda. someone who looks like you across from the woman. a blink. the end of the gesture and the movement already washed-out and no longer there.
2
you refuse to speak, thinking of the tree on a small hill. you want to see it in the scene and so it appears.
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Two Poems by M. Vasalis and Arno Bohlmeijer (translated from the Dutch by Arno Bohlmeijer) Artwork by Ton van Rijsbergen
Death
Death pointed out little interesting things:
here’s a nail – said Death – and here’s is a rope.
I look him in the eye, a child. He is my master
because I trust and admire him,
Death.He showed me everything: drink, pills,
pistols, gas tap, steep roofs,
a bath tub, a razor, a white sheet,
“casually”– in case I’d fancy it, one day,
death.And before he left, he gave me a little portrait…
“I don’t know if you forgot it yet,
