Last Year’s December

by Paul Vincent Andrews

If my hot mouth
could pray sounds
in the chilled
Autumn morning

Let them lay
brave honest
truths, in lies
planted in dry
summer earth

During other’s harvest
I will plant our other life
in the Indian summer

Where a year we ago
we met, and waited
for a new Winter

Symphony In a Garden Apartment

by Paul Vincent Andrews

her ghost white clavicles
hover over unused thighs

it’s grown quiet now
and you can hear
the neighbors above

screaming, vehement, unbridled

you’re now mad at the first floor screamers
who an hour ago you drowned out
with your own mad midnight music

if an elf lived between
floors, for a transitory enchanted moment
would an angelic harmony
exist in the vacuum between storms

you quickly realize
this is bullshit
and the tenors upstairs
and sopranos down
may at best
create a raga
of cacophony

now you’re mad
at them

how dare they
intrude on this quiet
moment

you consider
telling her the story
again

the shrill mousetrap
sounds may shut
them up

you stop thinking
look up

at the praying mantis
in front of you

her green eyes
praying, she chokes
softly on her breath

you look up

you can’t tell the story again
and head upstairs

someone needs
to say something
to the neighbors

BC Woman

by Paul Vincent Andrews

When she first arrived upon the scene

before the loquaciousness of the crowd
before raspy metal machine music
before the bone yards of fallen empires
before Gods
before I

her feet must have felt strange
planted in the hot arid sand

her eyes compelled to focus
on distant green lights of ancient
phosphorescent plankton
dancing on the rim
of a purple sea

did those green lights spell hope

Or, did she look upon this stage
as the worm devours it’s love the rose

the scrubland behind her
harboring megafauna
with bored opaque eyes

looking down with machinations
of the potential of the rock
next to her

as she skipped
the smaller disc shaped
stones in the sea

the first numbers
rippling

I imagine she turned
and looked back

hard eyes squinted
hungry, and fixated
upon the small furtive
creatures dancing
beside still pools