By Benjamin Jackson Sweat-scented sheets which once wrapped legs and limbs, limbered by love and lust and expansive, demonstrative selves now sit clean and sterile, cast aside on a lonely shelf like trophies commemorating a sport no longer played. You folded them crisply with your distant hands, just before you…
By Bradley Hamlin Rachmaninoff and I feel her brown eyes like oblivion and bliss listening to “Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini” at 3 a.m. tired but I slept when I held her in her house last night and those eyes were closed to drunken winters and I wonder how…
Growing Wild Imagination By Christy Bailes Imagination grows wild over my life, like the grape less vines I found, wrapping red circles around wood branches, so tightly pulled, I couldn’t cut through the tendrils without the stem folding, as the firewood pile, anchored so heavy to earth, didn’t move, oblivious…
By Jenny Andrews Cool rain-filled wind, skips along leaves strewn paths. White roses swirl in the afternoon breeze, rose scent saturates this mid-October day. Red rose petals scatter among the brown and yellow leaves decay. Cool rain and that revived memory of that man I once loved in a season…
We recently asked writers to submit their holiday-themed haiku to The Penmen Review in celebration of today, December 22, which is National Haiku Day. Here are some of the best submissions: Auntie, In the Guest Room, With a Hamper Looking for places To hide that dreaded fruitcake: An annual…
Sounds heard on a Sunday summer night By Sheikha A. were not coming from the very far beyond shushering hiss of the sea, footsteps heard in sloshes and splatters growing heavier by each advance of the heel. I won’t talk or pine about the moon so white, glaring eye of…
By Krista Johnson Lost in purchased imagery of foreign sights and sounds expressing voicing past thoughts silently suppressed. A flow of words across the eye of people, places, and emotions. A transformation transition moving picture of the mind. Hands anchor and trade with fingers at the ready to flip turn…
By James Seals I laugh at the irony as the country music group Little Big Town sings about the boondocks: a phrase that Oxford English Dictionary tells us derives from the Tagalog word bundok which means mountain. Little Big Town sings that they feel no shame they’re proud of where…
Thickly Settled By Christy Bailes Sadness blows west with air so dry I taste bitter dust mixed with tumbleweed and golden brush. What I lost has reversed direction, as if it were the last moment before death. Kneeling to tree roots in rich, summer earth, I inhale New England one…
A poem based on The Pale King by David Foster Wallace By Cynthia McGarvie An alfalfa breeze. Socks’ burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire incised in the sun all day until hardened, worms incised in the lead. A horse smells the worms incised in the wing, silent with…