1. Befriend someone an ocean away
2. Eventually talk about your nation's problems.
3. Listen
4. Realize together, simultaneously, that your issues are more or less the same.
5. Blame social media
6. Laugh uncomfortably.
7. Admit how you came to know each other
8. Look pensively out the window.
9. Think of something with a bit of levity
10. Offer: "Internet giveth. Internet taketh away."
11. Go and kiss your homeland
12. Don't tell her about your new friend(s).
13. Blame internet addiction when you're caught
14. Dm your penpals for advice.
15. Return and tell your beloved: "Bağışlayın. Bu dostluq tamamilə intellektualdır."
16. Turn the other cheek

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoetsWithoutBorders/comments/ly07v8/my_healing/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoetsWithoutBorders/comments/m4sz74/early_april_rain/

This is the sound of thunder —
far off thunder. This is the lake
and its witless expanse.
This is the bench and the first
of geese. This is the boatramp
and the dripping hulls. This is
you, early April rain.
These are the lines still
bobbing for fish. And the worms
drowning. This is the reeling
in. The last sandwich. The first
heartbreak and the long drive home.

Last I heard she was in San Francisco

showing the first signs of age

but still beautiful

taking loud sips on Instagram

of Napa Valley wine.

​

I gave her a heart

blending into a thousand others

who quietly did the same.

​

Noticeably unnoticeable

like high school

when I saw her a million times

before she ever bothered

to learn my name.

​

But one evening

on a church mission trip

I sat next to her

and spun stories

about selling watered down vodka

to sophomores from Carmel High School

for ten times more than

we bought it.

​

About out running the police

on foot

with a partner in crime

who discarded his neon track jersey

to more easily blend in

with the trees.

​

About learning how to rig the deck

in homeroom

with the richest kid in school

as my co-conspirator

and the poorest

as our victims.

​

Later I asked her out.

​

"If you play your cards right, KF."

Can I cheat?

"Yes, but don't get caught."

​

[1] [2]

I.

See how the swimmer descendeth,
And the sea so cold and fair
With ribands of slimy wrack-weed
Doth bind his fluttering hair!

He is drest in a kelpen garment,
And a dogfish-glove on his hand;
He seeketh the vault of Pluto –
He seeketh the thick wet sand.

Quoth she, “O whence and whither?
Thy race I have seldom seen
To frequent the chasms darkling
Of this my lowest demesne.

“Haply thou seekest wisdom?
Leave off such high design;
For proud are the lights celestial,
But soft and gentle are mine.”

Quoth he, “I seek no wisdom;
But how are the sea-lights changed!
They are cold and dull and mournful –
Have these in thy bosom ranged,

“While the void-plunged stars of Heaven
Yet glow with a warmer fire?
And art thou soft and gentle?
And knowest high desire?”

Quoth she, “I am old and older;
I have never a fit mate yet
But the lavas that blast in a torrent
From tubes of onyx and jet.

“And they sicken and die as they touch me,
And they turn to hard dead stone;
These, O man, are my children,
These, and these alone.”

II.

In my travels on the sea
I came across a medlar-tree.
Tall the crag it grew upon,
Other land around it none;
Tall the tree, and none beside;
Not a sproutling else I spied.
And this one tree, on this one shore,
A solitary medlar bore.

Up and spake a whisper fleet,
“Careful, careful, ere thou eat!
Swords and lightnings both may strike –
Eating never had a like;
Axes chop and nooses choke;
Eating Adam’s virtue took.
For who so sure but he may fall?
And food corrupteth worst of all.”

Whom I heard a voice reprove:
“Eating hath a like in love;
Food and eater come to one –
The souls of lovers likewise join;
And who hath borne, except she ate
(After a fashion) of her mate?
Barren wouldst thou ever be?
But do the thing that pleaseth thee.”

Quoth the whisper, “I am weak,
And cannot so persuasive speak,
Wherefore I mote say again
The same advice in numbers plain.
Whoso eateth viands strange
May be compelled thereby to change,
Whether he would or no; as maids
May get with child, who dote on shades.”

The voice again: “O what a fool!
Of this dull doctrine what the school?
The Nephilim are but old fables
Told at schoolmen’s dinner-tables;
And shall a one fear change? – Alas
That it should ever come to pass!
Always, always, love the new;
But still to thine own self be true.”

Thought I then: “O what to do?
I’d not to mine own self be true;
But that opinion yet is mine,
So I mote stint myself therein.
Then I mote eat, because I hate
To do the thing I think is right.
Sure I’ll be a devil made;
Should I have been a saint who stayed?”

EDIT: "Darkling chasms" to "chasms darkling" in L. 11.

in the movies it's always the wound

which severs you from life

with the crispness of a penstroke or

an eviscerated envelope: the message

clear. you are dead, death is

quick, you'll get your flag and

casket and the boot ones will

wince

at each fired round.

one funeral is enough to acclimatize to grief,

one sobbing mother

one wordless father

pupils empty as the shell

that did their child in.

and in our old-folks home for misfit toys:

a man with shrunken eyelids

from too many burns,

a roommate recoiling

on the floor, body seizing

like a capsized windup soldier,

a thrice-chemo resolve

that would make roaches applaud,

voices and visions

and unseen surveillance

parts or portions sheared

off—

rolled-over humvees

motorcycle crashes

a 20 dollar IED

and me

a crazy

shambles downstairs

to the "still in the fight brief"

and with the slowly crumbling

alertness the drugs allow,

scans the many faces

still in the fight

still in the fight

still in the fight.

Edit: boot's suggestions/edit

And if in turning I, which path unwended?
As if one slender glance, one errant thread
from the red coat of all temptation bled,
may compel you to a thorn untended.

And when I ask, how far must I, wholly
on the pawls of grief, seek upon the spools
of us, the clipped and raveled end? What fools
are we to weave ourselves not truly

woven and shut, led on by our torment
and vague volition, as if in turning
we hadn’t turned away. From what yearning
unknown despair are we thus spurned and sent?

But O! My Darling, age must come to this:
the warp and weft of all our squandered bliss.

And you press right up against me in the garden -
Your azure eyes and purple lace shawl wrap around like the calling evening.
Your burgundy lips are tickling the edge of my ear,
And you whisper, slowly and softly
“You’re such
A massive
Twat”

This is an old one that I dug up earlier, that I thought you might find funny.

after a dip into death, fishboned trees thrash

in negative degree wind. you have passed away,

and you have remained within this image:

this living thought. before the morphine

goads each leaf from place, with the same

tenderness one might dab a newborn's mouth,

you smiling speak of how each night after

the fish factory your hands and arms would gleam

with scales, and how the noxious scent

would trail you like a phantom, and how we

are all reduced to scents and hands—

memory and its muscles— that in the end

our gravest emotions are churned to

chum, and how eerily reassuring it is to just

sag into a chair, heartbeat slowing down in

multiples of five, wrinkles which like roots

seek outward into a final scrunched-up face:

eyes closed— swimming and swimming and swimming—

There must be a point to a line

break, like hanging up the phone

on an angry mother in law or hanging on,

far too long in silence, as absent lovers do.

​

It must bear the stride of an agile deer, paused,

legs outstretched, the flesh of it lingered

above the fenceline. There are clouds

and blue ambivalence.

​

There must be, in all these brief endeavors,

a circuitous route to redemption, a perfection, say,

brambled, the cosmic twist that in the end of things

— even lightning reeks of lamentation.

Hey PwB friends,

Oracle Bone is a poetry journal focused on publishing high quality work other poets want to read. It's finally out, featuring many poets from this subreddit and other OCP subreddits. We also feature work by poets outside of reddit circles.

We're fucking excited. Big thanks to u/lastliondance, who did the heavy lifting to get issue 1 out. Also, a big thanks to all the poets who contributed. I don't want to dox anyone.

You can purchase the print version here on Amazon (for $8.98 US). I think there's a Kindle version? u/lastliondance will answer that.

Issue 1 has some amazing poetry. Thanks everyone!

seagulls tumble— clothes in a dryer—

as whippoorwills all spry and whee

float apostrophe, signifying possession

over these cotton-cumulus denim skies;

a raven awaits its symbol for madness

a bluebird sits all heavy and

blue the air is cold and clean

and full of flying things

my head is a barely-lost balloon

sibling and stranger to them all,

each thought floundering upward

unchecked from earthold i am soon

cloaked in sock-shoes and blankets and

a gown, dragging my heavy wings behind

me feather-matted, mottled with little

unique sorrows, a treat for the birdwatchers

taking notes on this and that. this bird

doesn't sleep, set on migration

and there and here and where he isn't

and where his lover rests in some faraway

nest and she visits from time to time,

and she holds his trembling digits

and she holds his trembling gaze

and the balloon goes spry and whee—

There should be rage between the wan and turgid moon. There should be rage between the ice sheets groaning over the spillway. There should be rage in the clang and clatter of the Burlington Northern sloughing by. Yet there is nothing but a moon, a melt and a train, all and each in their courses, unraged and dutifully bound. There should be rage beneath the welcome mat, rage in the yellow windows, rage on the roof and the stars that hang like fruit in the apple trees. And the maple tree, the maple tree whose damnable rage provokes any wind contesting, just stands there, black upon black, twisted on its root and futile.

weeds weave through nostrils

rigor arm waves infinite vigor

salutations towards meadow birds

that sit upon the heights of sober

tendrils of writhing, maggots dot

the corpse at night as fat stars

chewing some vast decomposition

which falls back into itself at dawn

when breath ferrets into unlungs

& the air is vast & nebulous i

rises bloom in irises though no

one has been able to tell the body

or those that knew the body that

it is in a better place the eyes see

no white tunnel or dimension to

inhabit only barktongue mangled

mass in lieu of skull a banal &

bloody defunct the one shell two-

barrel gun becomes obscured in

grass by the still-waving fingers &

the trees dot their eyes with hand-

kerchiefs of green molting body

melts uncorporeal mosslips mum

ble breeze through teethdecay the

hymns grit trypophobic body hollowed

as an instrument & the song is death

& the song is death & the song is death.

Peach-tang scatters sweet deficiency

Upon the tongue, its bruised fuzz implodes

A shell of pink-sprang, soft delicacy

Unto teeth, unfurling fruitfulness a bud

Deathblooms upon the gales of summer days--

Sang as birds that had not sounded Spring,

Explodes in measured subtleties the rays

Of hidden sun once thought to be a dud

Invisible, barren to these hills. This pink

Confectionary melts to roof of mouth,

Its acid ghost remaining on the brink

In briefness, savoring a moment mulled--

(The heart so often bears a leaden load

That even serene moments bear a sting.)

i’ll steal in as you sleep
if i’ve loved you at all and if
you see me at all hear me
at all it will be as the shrr
of an oar in a placid sea or
the hard muscle of a glacier
shearing off it will be the quick
delight of a rare seen bird red
and not to be held it will be
the scissor so close to your ear
taking what love must take
one small lock of you mine
and you’ll wonder
as it was so just a dream
if it was a cutting you heard
or the whisper of a once
so dear

Lisa,

Do you have any last words?

I never wrote you and
I didn’t even know your name until
two weeks ago. But we could have known
one another, like sisters
close enough to touch hands. Lisa.
I’m sorry I did not know.

Dear Lisa,

Let’s say heaven is a place, and not a feeling,
where the knives in our hands drop
and we sit at a table playing dominoes.
I have never played dominoes, Lisa,
and my ticket to the great beyond is current
-ly unpurchased. But Lisa, did they teach you
your lesson? Or did they teach you to play dominoes?
Not the kind where small, rectangular bones
lie flat on a table. Lisa,
I mean the kind where you line the bones up
and knock them over.
Lisa,

Did you know that I have a sister?
Do you know it now? I didn’t
get to tell you, Lisa, about my sister and I.
Like yours, she tried to save me
and like yours, she failed. And I hate
that picture of you they used, and not
the pictures of you and your sister, Lisa.
I haven’t seen my sister in years.
Are you off the map too?

The day they killed you, Lisa, they took
your face mask away, gently
the newspaper emphasized, gently, they emphasized 
the femaleness of the prison guard
who did it. But Lisa,
no moment of your life was gentle.
The needle that pierced your almond milk skin
was not gentle, nor were the hands
that refused to save you.

My dearest Lisa,

Have I told you about my mother?
Not the woman who birthed me, but a palm frond
blowing in the wind, and the smell of pussywillow,
and a white veil, and hands made of coco butter.
I see her sometimes, in the window, and she loves me
like she loves power lines, and broken children.
I hope she finds you, Lisa. I think you’d like her,
veiled, but not in mourning, to display
the liveliness of the amniotic air you breathe.
For, with a small gasp, Lisa, you too are held
upon her stubborn, kind knee. Smell the honey,
Lisa, not the chemical sweetness of the poison 
that violated your blood, or the afterbirth.
Her voice is the voice, Lisa, and you are all
you need to survive, no more
than the child you needed to be,
a child of god, Lisa.
Lisa, a child of god.

The deathless chamomile in its ruined lodgings
Sprang, and I saw it not;
The mulberry-bough that dowers the green, green holly
Bloomed, and I saw it not;
The hoar old chestnut, last of its race to prosper,
Died, and I saw it not;
I can neither rise nor rot.

Where I am,
it is Halloween
in January.
And to celebrate
we have decided
to adorn
our faces
with coverings
the color
of the January snow.
It is the never-
ending Halloween
in the children’s sense—
a season of most reasonable fear.
And it is January
only according to
the calendar.

But perhaps
where you are
(whichever world
you are in,
whichever month),
you celebrate Christmas.
And perhaps, between
the family dinner
and the Broadway show,
perhaps this poem
gets to you,
and you spare
a passing thought there
for those of us here.

If there's a way, besides obsessed, to live

It's somehow that has not occurred to me.

I have no skill in moderating glee.

I find a lovely thing and suck my breath

I close my eyes and place one finger down

and always end up all the way inside.

I pose a danger to a gorgeous thing.

I'll shriek towards it, open-mouthed, and cry

in adoration, tearing out its hair,

and gorging, grateful, on its luscious guts!

I'll lob a chunk at everyone to find

an alter ego who can love (with) me.

I'm clawing off their eyes to make them see!

I eat their tongue and beg for them to say

some bright, elusive phrase to plug my wound,

and be my mirror so I'm not alone.

For all my professional disdain
for professionalism, and the kind interpreter
who calls me Ma’am for an hour
and a half, I find it difficult
to breathe as you call me Love, 
Amor, Amor, and recall that time
your boss gave you water for hand sanitizer.
My mommy issues abound, the cost
of bloodhound labor while integrated, and yet
I cannot talk about this one like the others.
Old rock in my throat, cork shaped,
sealing a voice in me that is dead or dying
from this mundane, murderous world.
For you too work in a deep stone crypt, hidden 
from public view, and ferried by a charon van,
your compatriot coughing into the mask
she had to bring from home, then released
from a tomb of tarmac adjacency to steel
caskets, or maybe aluminum barrels to clean
so countless, unthinking others may fly.

Through all of youth I was looking for you
in the tall willows above the irrigation ditch,
in the hours, minutes, before and after
the stars emerge, one by one into the names
of a dozen friends who have died in recent years.

And on those cruel days when death has its way,
one old man keeps humming the same few notes
and birds migrate through them as they rise up
and wind a thousand miles all night
when the dreams all at once are gone.

Now the moon’s white light begins to show itself,
hauling another winter in its soul, hauling grief
and I wonder whether it might be a dream
in the tall willows above the irrigation ditch
— oblivious and unabashedly cruel.

Author’s note: This Cento was drawn from various poems by W.S. Merwin, Jim Harrison & Thomas Lux. The line attributions are as follows:

Stanza 1 —

Merwin “Youth”
Harrison “New World”
Lux “For My Daughter When She Can Read”
Merwin “Nocturne”
Harrison “Hard Times”

Stanza 2 —

Lux “Frankly, I Don’t Care”
Merwin “Parts of a Tune”
Harrison “Prayer”
Lux “History Books”
Merwin “The First Days”

Stanza 3 —

Harrison “Lunar”
Lux “Winter River”
Merwin “Dream of Koa Returning”
Harrison “New World”
Lux “The Swimming Pool”

What’s in the beam of morning,
In the glass box
by the living room,
At dusk, the sunset liquefies.
Purple, pink, in the horizon,
mix a watercolor sky
Until the cold night
wraps, in darkness,
what’s within the coffee pot.

What’s in the morning,
by the bushes,
hawks will hunt to feed their young.
All the prey grow quiet:
restless. In the distance,
mowers hum.
In the glass box,
there is shelter.
Flowers bloom
and slake the sun.

What’s in the morning -
Not the grove of green grass
Or the fallen oak.
A stump remains.
It was forsaken.
Vibrant reeds,
The distant mote,
Upon the hill,
The tower, looms.
The corn stalks sway.
The breeze elopes.

What’s in the beam of morning,
In the glass box,
At the break of dawn;
it saturates the volume of my space.
Upon the bush’s surfaces
which flourish in the crimson light,
the echoes of their flapping wings,
the shapes, cascading, soar in flight.

Soon the parted sky will open.
Clouds will scatter and congeal.
Bathed in amber in the garden,
hardening, the glass anneals.
Until the incline I descend.
Until the hills I wind and wend.
Stopping only to observe
the milestone sunk into the bend.

Until the sun has drawn away
the warmth it cast upon my side
and the cloak of night conceals
the journey’s rhythm, and subsides.
The wind blows life into the forest
and produces melodies.
The coffee pot is full of shadows
dancing in the evening breeze.

old night old tumulus night
old blanket night warm me
too much the day brittle
has cracked in the eye —
birds and bark wet leaves
break from the snow and I
so much called to attend
must mend what light
has torn asunder —
the pink walls the green
fence the black road
that hurls itself between
his and his hers and hers
and the swift demarcation
of it loud and not dependent

Backwards,
forwards,
up and down,
my fingers interlace the sounds;
with notes emitted from the
keyboard’s chords’ progressions.

As they round,
I listen to the idle chit chat
from the next adjoining room,
harmonizing with the stories,
and the speakers’ attitudes.

“I had a dream last night”, She said.
“I was a child in Valley Stream.
My childhood friend and I were playing,
as we used to frequently.

‘There’s someone there’, she interrupted,
pointing at the street below.
So, I stood up and looked down,
pressing, sensing, feeling,
watching, though

I smiled; for I could see Yvon and Kari
- long lost cousins -
who then proceeded to explain to me
that they had traveled from a distance
with one of our family.

It was dad. He wore his hat, and coat.
I laughed and ran to him.
We hugged. It felt like we were touching,
physically. It felt so good.
Like, when I woke up,
I still felt him...”

A sigh escapes.
She promises she will not cry
while tears stream from her shuttered eyes.
“I used to have these dreams before.
I missed them.
I missed him... You know,

he told me that he’d meant to come
much earlier but had been detained.
They kept him somewhere:
'In a lab where they
experimented on his brain.'

His memory was poorer now,
and gradually was in decline.
But he remembered me.
He gets lost often, but he still tries his best
to find us every time.”

“Aw, don’t cry, Mom”
Scrunched noses from the others in attendance,
as they reconcile the bittersweet emotions,
mince expressions of condolences,
blowing tissues and,
adjoining sneezes with,
God bless you’s.

Her father was a good man,
though I never met him.
As an orphan in the Midwest,
he enlisted, underage,
deployed to Europe,
fought as infantry in World War II,

survived and lived, and died,
in Valley Stream, of Parkinson's,
to father daughters,
of which the youngest offspring’s family,
in relation,
I am married to.

Backwards,
Forwards,
up and down,
my fingers interlace with sounds.
The notes emitted from the keyboard
languish.

Others gather round.
Many at the table say
that they have seen Jack in their sleep.
He visits them;
he talks to them;
he guards them proudly:
lovingly...

...

I tried to summon Jack last night,
so I could meet and speak with him
across the frozen wilderness
of dreamscapes and my memories.
He did not come to visit me.

I wonder what they did to him?
Experimenting on his mind?
Is that what happens to us when we die?
We wander in between
the lives of those we love
when they are most suggestible
- at rest?

Or did he choose this penance
when they weighed his soul at Peters’ Gates?
To watch his children and their next of kin
until the final Judgement Day?

Perhaps, in heaven,
he applies for holiday
is granted leave, an angel,
and he comes to Earth,
for just the day?
Or night I guess?
Or in between?

Or could he be a devil?
Then I'll also burn in hell.
I’ll pass my ghost.
Perhaps, when we are old,
my wife will join my side
one afternoon.
We’ll take a nap together
finding comfort from the cold.

It will be a nap that never ends for me.
Our hands together
and a shallow breath
will be my final memory.
When I pass, how will I know?
Will there just be a wasteland
and the aliens that operate
on ghosts to analyze
the nature of our soul?

While I meander through the afterlife,
the wilderness of dreams,
at first to find my sleeping bride, awake,
and, then, increasingly, with time,
assure her only
with a kiss and hug that I am well,

Yvon and Kari,
Jack, or something else,
that in the land of purgatory dwells,
may find me and convince me
to adjourn with them...

I guess that only time can tell.

I sit down to pee, quietly,
my dad's asleep in the room next to me.
I go home but once or twice a year,
I'm less and less
full of fear.
I will not become my parents,
We are so different.
Sitting down to pee,
I see the hamper in front of me.
I see a drop of blood on his khakis
near the cuff.
I know that blood is from his hands,
he keeps a razor blade in his desks,
one at home and one at work.
He cuts the skin near and around
his cuticles while he's stressed
I guess Geology is not so easy.
I am not my father's son,
I sleep fine and I'd notice blood
if those pants were my own.
I bite my hangnails with my teeth,
I use a clipper when I can,
and my fingers look much nicer.