Smile!

Time Changes Everything

Time changes everything,

and it also stays the same -

in crystalline perfection.

But grand hands hold the

infinite crystal,

between massive, imaginary,

and endlessly delicate, illusory

fingers …

slowly turning the crystal

playfully,

examining the view from

different combinations of the

clusters and varieties of

facets … turning, turning, turning

… with continued interest in

the variety of views.

This crystal was birthed from

nothing, in illusory time, so

despite the inevitable return to

the empty state, the

evolution, the progress,

that continues, aids

the observer, turning

the stone.

And when energy settles

and boredom sets in,

shifts occur,

changing every facet …

like endless math,

and play,

and joy …

an amusing experience,

like a ride … or a show

on a screen, with the

observer riding the waves,

each like a new soundtrack,

a new book …

on and on

Variety, coexistent with

unity … possibly due to

the variety of dimensions

coexisting but appearing

separate due to varieties

in conscious perception …

Isn’t it grand.

—Lucy Lenoir

Untitled

Right now,

sitting by the Bay,

the

 tide whispers my contentment.

Noodle hunts for smells in the grasses

and the succulents that

grow above the breakwater.

Stones, like Buddhas, piled up

to meet the oncoming tide.

I swear, one vertical stone

looks like Bodhidharma!

And here I am—

sun on my face,

the sea-salt wind coming

off the Bay,

indulging myself in a delicious

cup of coffee,

writing these words.

How did I end up

approaching 75 years

living in

this floating world?

—Bruce Linton

“Bird”

“I’ll slit your throat while you sleep, son”

So prophesized the whiskey-clouded beast.

So spun the wheels 

in the attic of the 5-year-old boy.

Eyes shuttered shut, he wraps moth-feasted sheets 

tight around his sweaty neck, the sweetest noose.

He doesn’t know what else to do.

He isolates in the space that follows the stumbling tread on creaky stairs.

Sincere efforts work to counteract this doom.

A Chicago winter in December, 1949

flutters her snowflaked tresses through the walls, blankets the boy in numb.

While in New York, in 1945, Charlie Parker’s fingers raced along a saxophone,

such that now, in 1949,

a Be-Bop blanket of sound bounces from a radio, flies through the air.

This, too,

armors the shivering boy,

such that when the beast (finally) dies,

the boy becomes a man, thawed from the freeze, ready for flight.

—Emily Romano

Bare Into the World

The things I think I know  

are old and tired, mostly.  

Sneakers battered by long days,  

soles splitting, collapsing sides.

The once-white long since  

draggled through the filth  

of urban concrete and  

wetly muddened fields.  

Still, I grapple them on.  

I make them my feet.  

They shape the ways I wobble  

in the world. Lurch. Leave my  

staggered indentations, prints  

declaring, “I have touched this place.”  

Yet, like the shapes they press  

into my paths, they are askew.

How long has it been since I  

squished my arches into the  

spring of moss, tickle of fronds,  

earth ionized by rain?  

Since I went bare into the world?  

Sending my inner heart to  

my soles and closing  

eyes, connecting,  

as with roots,  

to a single  

moment of evanescence  

and arising, decomposition  

and the revelations of tiny birds?

—Geneve Gil