Thine image, more sublime, more pink, more clear...

Christopher Pratt


Elisabeth Jonkers

 Torn from the bosom of my soul's repose, 

 And self-devoted to surrounding woes, 

 Oft o'er my solitary thoughts I brood - 

 (For passing crowds to me are solitude) 

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress

bids me wear them, warm them, until evening

when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them

round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room...

"...the natural, delicate, blue garland which binds the luminous, 
shadowed brows of water-nymphs; while the iris, its swards 
sweeping every way in regal profusion, stretched out over 
agrimony and water-growing king-cups the lilied sceptres, 
tattered glories of yellow and purple, of the kingdom of the lake."










Janet Hill


Alex Kanevsky




Michael Borremans


Kim Cogan








Adara Sánchez Anguiano


Dario Moschetta

  ...watch the soft blush seep through her skin 

 Like an indolent sigh... 

Tsuguharu Foujita



'The Wrong Man'





Deepa Vekaria  












title - Baudelaire
1. excerpt from a poem of Warren Hastings
2. excerpt from a poem of Carol Ann Duffy
3. Marcel Proust
4. line - Carol Ann Duffy

Looking into the dark spaces...

Łukasz Stokłosa






Joshua Brent Montgomery

She kept its bones in a glass case

next to the recliner in the living room,

and sometimes thought she heard

him mewing, like a faint background music;

but if she stopped to listen, it disappeared.

 Szymon Kobylarz

“Certain things, they should stay the way they are. 
You ought to be able to stick them in 
one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” 

Maybe the door ahead

divides

the facts

from natural affection. How

can I know. I meet

too many

in every mirror.

Carol O’Malia 






 Kees van Dongen 


Ilya Zomb




Paco Ferrando 






Kelley Somer



O my grief, hold my hand, come this way.


Sterling Hundley

John White Alexander



 “Books. Cats. Life is Good.”  


Miklos Mihalovits 








1. John Philip Johnson
2. J.D.Salinger
3. Rosmarie Waldrop
4. Baudelaire
5. Edward Gorey 

%%

The Empty Glass

by Louise Glück

I asked for much; I received much.

I asked for much; I received little, I received

next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.

A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.

O wrong, wrong—it was my nature. I was

hard-hearted, remote. I was

selfish, rigid to the point of tyranny.

But I was always that person, even in early childhood.

Small, dark-haired, dreaded by the other children.

I never changed. Inside the glass, the abstract

tide of fortune turned

from high to low overnight.

Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,

to celestial force? To be safe,

I prayed. I tried to be a better person.

Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror

and matured into moral narcissism

might have become in fact

actual human growth. Maybe

this is what my friends meant, taking my hand,

telling me they understood

the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,

implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick

to give so much for so little.

Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)—

a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.

I was not pathetic! I was writ large,

like a queen or a saint.

Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse

to persuade or seduce—

What are we without this?

Whirling in the dark universe,

alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

What do we have really?

Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,

tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring

attempts to build character.

What do we have to appease the great forces?

And I think in the end this was the question

that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,

the Greek ships at the ready, the sea

invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future

lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking

it could be controlled. He should have said

I have nothing, I am at your mercy.

Beneath the Skin of Sleep

Stefan Zsaitsits





'the realisation of bathroom boy'



Emmet Kierans



 'ocean feeling'

Zbigniew Rogalski







François Malingrey






Gigi Mills


Nicolai Crestianinov




zhang xiaogang

How can we wear our smiles

With our mouths wide shut

'Cause you stopped us from singing

I can't shake this feeling I've got

My dirty hands

Have I been in the wars?

We've all been changed from what we were

Our broken hearts left smashed on the floor

I hear a crown 

of hair so dark it swallows suns 

and still I feel as if I've swallowed silk 

or fallen in black milk  

Aleks Bartosik


  
  A stranger staring

 down from the rim.

The skin of sleep is thin.

It cannot hold.

Noel Mckenna

title - Myre Sklarew

1.and 2. - Editors

3. - Rowland S. Howard
4. -  Myre Sklarew