...he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality.

 Something in us touches

suffering

                  touching

us

like the constellations

of kinetic quiet

that bound us beyond us

Felix Hemme

and you just noticed two days ago

that your face has fallen,

but you don’t believe it,

so every time you look in the glass

it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. 

Dan McCaw 

my inner skin was skinned mouth to bowels,

my soul —deadword, die to find it.

For self-pity there must remain a self.

Steven Ketchum

amid(...) of my insomnia

there gleams a scalpel blade

so clean with meaning

so shaped and sharpened to interstellar blue

that drawing it —in season due —

across my own throat

there comes not blood but an ancient answering

starlight.

    Dazed, they cling to the outer darkness

    like pale reminders of ourselves.

Marefumi Komura








'drunk'



Bozena Dusseau Labedz






Michael Borremans







title - Henry Miller
1,3,4 extracts from a poem of Christian Wiman
2 extract from a poem of Ruth Stone
5 line - Jennifer O'grady