As Blue Fades by Robert Okaji

 

Chris Munnik

As Blue Fades

Which defines you best, a creaking lid or the light-turned flower?

The coffee’s steam or smoke wafting from your hand.

Your bowls color my shelves; I touch them daily.

Sound fills their bodies with memory.

The lighter’s click invokes your name.

And the stepping stones to nowhere, your current address.

If the moon could breathe would its breath flavor our nights?

I picture a separate one above your clouded island.

The dissipating blue in filtered light.

Above the coral. Above the space your ashes should share.

Where the boats rise and fall, like chests, like the waning years.

Like a tide carrying me towards yesterday’s reef.

Or the black-tailed gull spinning in the updraft.

Originally published in Underfoot, and included in Okaji's first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises (3: A Taos Press, 2025)

© Robert Okaji Enjoy other posts by Robert Okaji HERE.

Robert Okaji

Two years ago, Robert Okaji was diagnosed with late-stage metastatic lung cancer, which he found annoying. But thanks to modern science, he's still living in Indianapolis with his wife, poet Stephanie L. Harper, stepson, cat, and dog. Recent publications include Our Loveliest Bruises (3: A Taos Press, 2025) and His Windblown Self (Broadstone Books, 2025).

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Distinctions by Loralee Clark

 

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Distinctions

 

Paging through an old dictionary

Mina learns coven meant “to gather,

to witness”, though now it connotes

a group of witches’ gathering.

 

She studies her hands: hangnails, dry cracked skin. She looks in the mirror:

freckles and wild, strawed hair,

cowlicks on the left side.

Is she a witch?  

 

She collects crabapple, maple, oak 

and cherry leaves into her journal.

She gathers yellowed and browned

leaves into piles, dredges them

through the mud, attaches them

back to trees on their trunks.

 

Is she a witch for witnessing

the trees?  For wanting to make them whole again, refusing them letting 

their leaves loose when the sun sinks low on the horizon?

 

Mina may be; she is also 

a dendrophile 

but she won’t learn that word 

for several more years.

© Loralee Clark

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Loralee Clark

Loralee Clark resides in Virginia; her website is sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark.  She has a book forthcoming this year, Solemnity Rites, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Periwinkle Pelican, White Stag Journal, Chewers by Masticadores, Nude Bruce Review, Lucky Leaves, Everscribe, The Rockford Review, and Soul Poetry, Prose and Art Magazine.

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Naming Rights by Angela Townsend

 

Image | Khabbab Abdelmaqsoud

Naming Rights

We all still expect to hear our names called.

Few say this, even undercover. Fewer still say “here I am!” after the age of leg hair. But this is a dream that can’t be taken, not even by one’s own reasonable hands. 

We have names, like indoor cats and botanical discoveries. We have names, like visible nebulae and cartoon characters. We have names, and this is a remarkable thing. 

We are not a mass of meteors known only by our belt. Proud astronomers have picked us out individually, and we can be spoken on the starfield. 

We can be called, and we will turn our heads before we give them permission. We can be written to, written up, written about. We have faces made of sound, totems made of letters. You can engrave us on your palm or wear us around your neck. 

We are not I Am, but we are more than we were. We are pronounceable. We all still believe we will be called by name.

I look up and see a loose bookshelf, curious why it leapt forth like a hip bone. Living alone, I seldom speak my own name, but I hear it. Does the very furniture rattle at the sound?

I look down and see my feet, long like skis and silly in their pawprint socks. Do they know what it means to carry a name across state lines, to follow the calling?

I look at dull documents and see incendiary material, the placid pyrotechnics of an old name turned new. Did each strike of the keyboard recall, muscle memory undaunted that I am no longer a maiden?

My name feels like a silver dollar in my hand. I never loved it before. I will never spend it again. I will take it for pancakes and write it birthday cards in longhand. 

I am infatuated with it today, shifting its weight in my lap like a warm weaned baby, powdered with the scent of ancestors. I stroke its vowels. I bubble bathe its consonants.

But my name makes me proud in the key of humility. To know you have a name, to know you still expect to hear it, is to suddenly hear every other name as a whole note of love. 

The cousin trying to enlist you in his plan to market all-natural nose hair extensions has a name.

The cashier who ruined her day and assaulted your soft loaves has a name.

The assistant escaping all responsibility has a name.

We have already been called, loved into letters, and considered with care. We are being called, day by day, and what’s asked and what’s given are prone to sloppy kisses and arm-wrestling matches. 

Grace has the stronger grip. We forget.

But then we glimpse lilac letters on the window, on the bookshelf, between the sleeping cats, between our own eyebrows. We hear rumors of our own name.

We can’t cease to remember. 

We can’t reason our way out of the most unreasonable expectation.

We have a call yet to come.

We will hear our name clearly for the first time. We will hear the arms behind the voice. We will hear the reason for each letter. We will rise.

Already and not yet, the letters sizzle. They are sparkler-scribbled in the sky, the promise of lasting light. They are the other world invading, the love that singles out crocuses and gerbils and cashiers and poets and every grieving gleaming being in earth’s late hour.

I want to call my neighbor with the courage of the named.

I want to linger over letters like sacred writ.

I want to be a signal flare of another world, where every name is a prayer, and every word is yes and amen.

The named are the loved. The call has come, is coming, and will come again.

© Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend

Angela Townsend writes for a cat sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and seven-time Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and West Trade Review, among others.

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life with dissociative identity disorder by Carol Anne Johnson

 

Pexels

 

Life with dissociative identity disorder

In the tapestry of self, threads unravel, 

stitched and sewn in fragmented whispers, 

echoes of laughter, shadows of sorrow, 

each patch a pulse, a heartbeat in the chaos.

 

Some days I rise, a sunrise painting the walls, 

a vibrant brushstroke of hope, 

new eyes to see the world, 

the warmth of sunlight caught in shifting smiles, 

while others linger in dusk, 

soft murmurs of silence, drifting through twilight.

 

I am many, a gallery of faces, 

each portrait a story, 

guardians of dreams and fears, 

some wrapped in Armor, bold and bright, 

others small as secrets, hiding in the folds of time. 

We dance through corridors of memory, 

a waltz of “Who am I today?” 

an echoing question in the chambers of the mind.

 

There are days when the world feels like sand, 

slipping through fingers, 

others when it blooms, 

sudden bursts of colour, life blooming despite winter, 

each identity a flower, roots entangled, 

each petal a longing to be whole.

 

I navigate through sunlit streets, 

and shadowed alleys of thought, 

each step a delicate negotiation, 

between fragments of courage and whispers of doubt. 

The mirror reflects all and none, 

a kaleidoscope of existence, 

where time is not linear, 

but a spiral, looping back, forward, 

twisting threads into patterns of resilience.

 

Some call it disorder; I know it as a mosaic, 

intricate and imperfect, 

beauty in brokenness, 

where the pieces tell a story, 

not of absence, but of presence— 

the myriad ways to survive, to feel, to thrive, 

to love in fractured tones that sometimes sing, 

sometimes sigh.

 

In the quiet of the night, 

I weave the strands together, 

an embrace of selves, a collective heartbeat, 

an understanding beyond words, 

that in this vast tapestry, 

I am not lost, but endlessly found. 

In the symphony of voices, 

I learn to listen, 

to the sweet, chaotic melody of being, 

inviting each note to take its rightful place, 

in the song of my, 

our, 

life.

© Carol Anne Johnson

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Carol Anne Johnson is in her mid-40s. She is blind and was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and complex PTSD. She is also a survivor of child abuse. She enjoys writing poetry and reading, walking, and volunteering. You can follow her on her blog, http://therapybits.com/.

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