Skip to main content

Renuka Raghavan

Image
By

(Re)incarnation

Because a colossal arm of hubris
beheaded a body fleshed together with turmeric and clay,

nursed not at his mother’s bosom but with hands and breath,
splenetic Destroyer of Evil,

the pale of his blue skin, fire of his third eye
cowered to a mother’s sorrow.

Lugubrious chants precede

rumors of a dead elephant in the North,
his non-decaying carcass starfished across forgotten rubble.

Legend is (re)born

with his head now appended onto that jaundiced figure.
Several gods pose behind him for scale.

Renuka Raghavan’s previous work has appeared in, Boston Literary Magazine, Jersey Devil Press, Blink-Ink, Star 82 Review, Down in the Dirt Literary Magazine, Chicago Literati, and elsewhere.  She is the author of Out of the Blue, (Big Table Publishing, 2017) a collection of short fiction and poetry. Renuka serves as the fiction book reviewer at Červená Barva Press, a poetry reader for Indolent Press Books, and is a co-founder of the Poetry Sisters Collective. Renuka writes and lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Visit her at www.renukaraghavan(dot)com

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amy Holman

By
My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg  We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer, either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet  in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that. Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline,
4 comments
Read more

Beneath the Chickenshit Mormon Sun by Bruce Embree

By Rusty Barnes
I've posted this before, on a depressing day probably just like this one. This poem makes me feel better. That's all I have to say on that. It turned out worse than I thought The champion defended his title then Eldridge Cleaver came on to talk about his reasons for becoming a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Grandma and I damn near fell out of our chairs Went to town and got crazy drunk Came back home, called you long-distance after cruising and drooling Mainstreet again This is my last wish and love poem It is as follows Want to hold the wake at noon with plenty of acid and rum No friends and relatives Ghost music by Hendrix and the Byrds drowning all sound as you fuck me to dust beneath the chickenshit Mormon sun. Links:  http://www.limberlostpress.com/authors/161embree1.html
4 comments
Read more

Maureen O'Leary

By
Grief (for J’uan) Maybe we turn into clouds of reefer Particulates coating the lungs of the people thinking about us First and secondhand smoke Clinging to the frizzing gray locs of the women mourning us Or maybe we are in the splashes of Hennessey Swirling in the bottoms of Styrofoam cups A bad burn in the throats of our brothers Something to remember us by On the way back up. Maybe we are still here. In the way the candles keep going out In the way they call out to God. If they only looked up they could see our eyes Shining through the branches and glittering through the haze Below the stars. Maureen O'Leary lives in Sacramento, California. Her work appears in Coffin Bell Journal, Bandit Fiction, The Horror Zine, Ariadne Magazine, and Sycamore Review. She is a graduate of Ashland MFA.
Post a Comment
Read more