The Woman and the Serpent I prize the taste of this rare fruit above the sting of carnal knowledge: the tang of these teeth as they pierce, then sink like lodestone in the deep, I learned to breathe underwater for the sake of our joining. I wonder, do serpents take...

The Giftie On the front step are three fruit: an acorn, an apple, a sloe. The autumn sun gutters in the grey sky. I take the apple, but throw the sloe and the acorn to the hedge. As I eat the apple I look into the sun. Dark filaments, like cancers, pass through its...

The Genius The genius is busy. She’s staring at a ragged alder leaf backlit by the setting sun. She sees its complex simplicity, fractals repeated in varying scale. The word scale invokes fish and symphonies. She hears salmon muscling upstream and tastes the cayenne...

Green Thaumaturge In the forest, a divulged tire Has filled with fuchsia-colored snakes. They appear radioactive, or maybe fed With the blood of Redondo evenings. Nearby a hunter traps a hare In a small cage. He’s perplexed To find its made of glass, or maybe ice...

Rai Parveen Mahal, Orchha  Priya Sarukkai Chabria Emperor Akbar summoned Rai Parveen, beloved of Raja Indrajit, from Orccha to Delhi. Her poetry and beauty captivated the Mughal court. She said to him: Emperor, only a crow or a dog or a beggar eats leftovers. Why...

Bug Season Bharat Iyer Simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious; more specifically, paranoia is drawn towards and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemologies. — Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick I This was the year bug ripped through the...