PURE FRANCIS

Black-Paper

by Lars Grant

Lars Grant wears a WWKD? bracelet.

Toe Chains

by LB Sedlacek

Ladybugs set free
to roam
over
Georgia
chowing on aphids
saving trees
set free by
the government
no one
thinking about
them migrating
north
wintering in,
flying into
houses so thick
they make a
crunchy
carpet
and they
don’t lay
their dead
to rest
with dog tags:
no indention
for the
teeth
no reason
to kick
metal into
their heads
for later identification
because
when a
ladybug dies
another one
takes
its place.

 

LB Sedlacek would rather be on Route 66.

mode 3

by bruno neiva

 

bruno neiva is a Portuguese writer, poet, and artist.

 

The library on the Palliative Care ward mostly contains People magazines

by Catherine Owen

Seeing you dead reminded me of a hobby
I once had. It all started when Lennon was shot
and his glasses flew off his face and landed in the road
like a fragile owl and this was the beginning of mortality

for me. I would spend hours staring at the inside of album
covers, starting with the Beatles Best Of, its wrongly immortal
portraits of the boys in black & white, too pure for blood,
ending with the Crue's sordid lady boys in leather & studs,

a pentagram rising behind them, the dark sun of all I now
knew. Maybe it wasn't a hobby, more like an obsession,
a meditation, as if my watching the innards of record covers
would protect these tenuous gods, or, in the case of John,

reverse his wounds, remove him to some other street
in New York where he could cross, with Yoko, unharmed.
But that was years ago, albums are gone with their giant,
occult artwork, their shrines and you decided,

before we pulled the plug, to donate your fathomable blue
eyes to science.

 

Catherine Owen, very likely, is a crow in human form.

On Nights

by David Russomano

It rains on nights when the leaves have gone,
coating every branch in black,
drenched. The cold light from street lamps
caught in the boughs turns to spiders’ webs—
silver fragmented lines extend
out in shaky patterns like cracks
in a mirror met by a fist.

From the center of a mirror
struck by a fist, silver fractures
extend out in shaky patterns,
shimmering like spiders’ webs of
drenched black boughs back-lit by simple
street lamps on a rainy night when
the leaves have taken something with them.


David Russomano hopes that you'll make amazing little musical beasts and share them at seaquence.org.