Lost Skies by Sierra Donahue

Thinking of the colors. And rain. Banana bread. Demons. And your face.

If I was going crazy, would I know it?

Sneak up like lightening through soft purple clouds trying to hide the expanse of sky so you don’t trip falling up.

Yesterday, the sky was blue and deep. The day before, it was a red thing, hung low and close. Bloody bed sheets god forgot to bleach. I had to crouch, walking out the door.

I await the sky tonight. I pray it isn’t purple and that it finds you safe.

If she was lost, would you tell her?

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Don’t Call Me Crazy

Said did I mind if he smoked.
Said he was headed for Glenwood Springs.
Said he didn’t know how to use a cellphone.
Said it was his first day outside of prison after seventeen years, nine days. Said he was forty years old.
Said his sister was raped and he killed the five guys that did it.
Said his daughter was turning eighteen in December. Said he was still her hero.
Said his nickname was “Crazy Peckerwood”. Said they don’t call him crazy anymore, said names and behaviours precede one another.
Said goodbye from the payphone stand across the terminal.

My Nicaragua by Sierra Donahue

It’s like all at once and yet so slow.

Creeping, it races to drown and embrace. Stealing sight and sound as you sacrifice your heart.

My friend laughs in the distance as he is pulled under. Again and again. Always he rises to smile at the sun and wave to me just when I begin to worry from my safety, here, where the depths can only tease.

I return his salute. Envy commands me to dive deeper, farther. But my feet are growing roots in the sand.

Such is love, faith, and the blue tides of San Juan Del Sur.

Writing to Pretend to Forget by Sierra Donahue

In hundreds of hundred word pictures she fell. Inevitably – How did she not know?

Outside, the world delighted in hot splendor. A commotion dressed for anyone to taste,

summer’s modesty abandoned.

Starry night intoxications leave scars for autumn. Burns where her hands remember his.

Perhaps words will purge what tears cannot, she prays and hopes and writes while wishing

away her heart. Turning days like pages she remembers to forget. Heartbreak can lead to laughter

too, if she remembers not to cry. If she remembers those eyes are no longer hers to hold.

How restless I grew, waiting for winter.

Death of Arachnida by Sierra Donahue

She spins, dancing with the grace of twilight song. Starlight crests her dark and painted back.

The queen of night ascends –

And is at once cut down.

No more to seduce her wandering prey. No more to beckon hither with shimmering promises

wrought from shivering limbs.

But, oh! She spun so sweetly, a mystery none could tell. A mystery none could live to hear

without the taste of blood –

Their own.

She held secrets close and dark beneath that shell that was her skin –

That was her heart.

The tales she wove, renowned in strength,

Writhing wild with the wind.

Chameleon

recidivist philanderer, convenient unforgetter of fraudulent schemas from highschool playbooks

awestruck prepubescent, demiurge of daydreamt universes through dusty passenger windows

barren mute, gaze deflected in transit, sheathing his uncomfortable affliction

bourgeois aggregator of secondhand intellect, little black rolodex of opinions

vengeful unwinger of dragonflies, silvertongued forger of whys and wherefores

serial altruist, infrequent imposer of narcissistic generosity upon the undesiring

nostalgic reactionary, tattooed in tribal silhouettes, acquiescer to privileged simplicities

vagrant troubadour, moonlit bard, decreasingly tragic aficionado of mind alteration

insatiable scientist, hunter of patterned quarry, unwitting patronizer of chaos

lowly stenographer of this unholy warfare between a thousand selves

Twentysomething and a Half

Work hard. Also, relax.

Listen to your parents sometimes. Because sometimes they are right. And sometimes they are wrong.

What matters matters.

Life is like sports. Always pass the ball, unless you have an open shot, in which case, shoot the ball.

Think about what you’re doing.

Have some sex. Not so much that you have a baby, but have some sex.

Write a blog but not a shitty one.

Make some money. It’s okay to be a little broke, but seriously, make some money.

Friends = new friends + old friends – bad friends.

Be as popular and smart as possible.

7 Under 7

The young disruptors, innovators, gadgeteers, and thought leaders on our annual listing of the 7 Under 7 are impatient to change the world.

In categories ranging from government to entertainment to astrology, our panel of expert judges chose from the field of 700 million humans under age 7 to bring to you the world’s brightest stars. In sum, these ambitious youngsters, ranging in age from 3 to 6, represent the creative and intellectual best of their generation. Individually, they are engaging, surprising and incredibly hardworking.

Meet Mitch, Tom, Branon, Jessica, Jamie, Erin, and Sudipta! Our future is in their hands.

One kind

There are all kinds of love. Nervous love. Puppy love. Sibling love. Comfort love.  There’s also Nikki love.

It’s a love that knows every bit of your selfish insanity yet still loves you.  It’s a love that must do everything imaginable to help. Because you are amazing. This love aches and uplifts and cherishes. It doesn’t question or begrudge, or reason. It doesn’t make sense. When you’re loved this way you actually feel loved – you feel it hush your skin, and seep deep under your bones.

When I experience this kind of love I’m inspired to love others with it. 

One of Those

My grandma once told me speed bumps were what happens when lousy drunks fall asleep in the street and freeze up forever.

Call it that, call it a preternatural recognition between kindred sponges; either way I don’t regret waking him up.

“Alright down there?”

“Oh, yeah… Just inspecting the uh, sidewalk integrity.”

“This your place?”

“I’d ah, say it’s more theirs than it is mine.”

Dorothy Parker of his generation against the lamplit picket fence, one of those friendships.

Three endless blocks of beers and roadtrips and best man at each other’s weddings.

Rashid, I wish I’d seen you again.

This Happened to Alex Last Thursday (by Susha)

A groggy morning, the kind that makes decision-making hard. Toast or cereal? Pants or shoes.

On the bus, Alex waited for someone else to pull the stop line. As the beast lurched forward, Alex and a fellow rider groped for stability, their hands landing on the same stretch of pole. A brief morning romance.

Off the bus, the removed hum of traffic on freeways above offered a respite from the bus’ intimate roar.

Then a dump truck flipped over the freeway and killed Alex. Overhead, thousands of morning commuters sighed impatiently because the commute had just gotten 40 minutes longer.

Location Scouting for an Apocalypse

A furious West Portal traffic junction channels its fleeting multitudes, their trajectories uncountable to a cursory observer.

Lifeblood streams from an unbound pentagram where convergent tramlines vivisect a suburban arterial.

Another boulevard pours westward across the ensuing mayhem, downhill from an irony of baseless opulence named for a medieval ascetic.

Chaos in equilibrium.

And pause.

Thirteen endless seconds. Mass-produced corpuscles hover before an inexplicable lattice of red lights, an apparent serenity ill at ease with the industrial throb that persists.

Green. Circulation resumes.

***

Far overhead, Nemesis nods solemnly and departs, her baleful reconnaissance unknown to the mortal interchange transpiring below.

Sunday, November 3

yellowjackets are sucking
sap off the pines
in City Park

did you want to bike
or go lie and
read or…?

cyclones of photosynthetic
litter, the largest cottonwood
leaves fall first, yellow to
brown on down

six feet of double helix
spun into every nucleus,
cistrons assemble polypeptide
chains fold into proteins
that literally build us

wink, nod to the
other room and grin

pay these things no mind
they will align
give them no names
they go on all the same

the cold front
fans through the debris
like screens of static,
see clouds strained
through the Front Range

Fulgurite

obsolete shanks of stained glass
align in her kaleidoscope of reasons
to spell words once wagered on
and long since forgotten

moonshine silhouettes of lucky numbers
on a drycleaned lottery ticket,
daring to be redeemed for more than a story
but here it is:

[fools waltz upon monsoon sands unaccompanied,
to the fulminant tide let them offer their loves:
these transient whispers they leave phosphorescent
relinquish no cinder, no wake in the frost]

november subsides,
battleworn vagrants in pairs
comb lacerated shorelines,
weary of thunderous solitude

trophies of petrified lightning to share
for the ones who withstood
in charmed resilience

Civic Centrifuge

What unknowable rhythms compel the dervish? What sacred fugues imperceptible? What hellwind choruses are wrought upon those whirling talons, stoke the smouldering flare that he cradles between sawn-off glovetips, some semaphore to his celestial brethren?

What fleeting tyrannies of human sense can one impose on this son of Chaos, this otherworldly conductor of downtown crescendo? Eyes under the leprous bandanna? Nose behind the double band-aid, bifurcated tongue behind maniacal shards of a grin? Some antediluvian childhood when bedroom mirrors once framed these esoteric contortions?

And yet he spins, these questions unanswered, scuppered already upon the tempests of our own creation.