... a gesture in the empty air ...

  And (their) silence matched the silence under snow.

 Massimo Lagrotteria 






Pascal Laloy




Phil Hale






Malcolm Liepke


I woke with this marble head in my hands;

it exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down.

It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream

so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.

'A Space in All the Noise' ,by Jason Shawn Alexander

Alexandra Levasseur

And a soul

if it is to know itself

must look

into its own soul:

the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.

Clare Elsaesser

2. line - Andrew Solomon
3. and 6.  extracts from a poem of George Seferis 
5. by - Andrea Gibson

...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

Tempt not the silence, for the fates are deep

Returning to the room:

I notice how

all your word-

plays, calculated ploys

of the body, the witticisms

of touch, are now

attempts to keep me

at a certain distance

and (at length) avoid

admitting I am here

I watch you

watching my face

indifferently

Francine Van Hove

Amylin Loglisci

" If it has given, it did so in order to take. "
(life) 











Stephen Wright






Michael Klein

The secret is,

Even the empty bed is a burden to them,

A pretense.

They are more themselves keeping

The company of a blank wall,

The company of time and eternity

Kailin Zhao






Alison Van Pelt

 my limbs, also, have left me. 

 Who has dismembered us?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

Christine Wu 





title - George Sylvester Viereck 
1 -  excerpt from a poem of Margaret Atwood  
2 line - Schopenhauer
3 - excerpt from a poem of Charles Simic
4 - from a poem of  S. Plath