A single tiny cloudin an otherwise vacant sky, the inkling of a moon –and then the birds arrive, swerving, climbing, swooping,flocking into sunset. As the gold coin dropsinto the slot of night, bird wings briefly singe,cast in a bronze tinge. Kim M. Russell, 14th April 2021 Image by Chris Sabor on Unsplash My response to […]
My name means gold
At least, that’s what a Korean guy told me, who I met in Amsterdam, when I went to buy Matcha and jasmine tea,joss sticks and a brass frog […]
Traces of an Elephant’s Tears (Empathy)
I feel the tears, although there is only a trace now. Just like the baby elephant, alone in the zoo, abandoned with only a memory of the mother it will never forget. And what about the mother’s tears? The tears of the herd? It is not absurd that my maternal instinct rears in despair at […]
14th April 2021 (I may be two days late but I got there finally)
Roused by the brightening of dawn’s light,after the phantoms of the night, a thought stirs in a waking mind,free from the plague of humankind. Like birds, we have been set free to fly,small flocks of shadows in the sky, still masked, but no longer in isolation,with a muffled sigh of liberation. Kim M. Russell, 13th […]
Evening Class
The card on the noticeboard offered an introduction to crystal healing and dream interpretation. Aisling wrote the address in her notebook and returned to the house she shared with three students. She wouldn’t tell them. They would only laugh at her in the same way as they did at her herbal teas and potions. That […]
Consuming the Planet
Like Earth, so much is round:apple, orange, peach,each with its core, pip, stone,gathered from branch and ground.Sun, moon and planets,all are circular and in orbit.The life of an animal is a cycle:birth, growth, reproduction, death,gnawing flesh and bone with teeth.And poets take their knivesand forks and table etiquette,and consume the planet,regurgitating it back onto the […]
There’s a lot you don’t know about gnats
So wicked are these summer larvae,with their sun-blessed insect wings,swarming the cemetery, suckingblood like vampires of the day. But you are not to know or carethat they travelled here through time,tiny chrononauts buzzing in your eara warning from a future clime. Kim M. Russell, 12th April 2021 Free image found on 123RF My response […]
Fan Mail
Letter to Klimt (from a devoted fan) Dear Gustav,This is my final letter to you.So unconventional,so talented, and allyou send me are postcards.I explored your imagery,learned your language,but I can never comprehendthe erotic depths of your mind,where Eumenides watch a condemnedman’s punishment in a sea monster’s embrace. Postcard from Klimt (unsigned) I write not in […]
Snow Globe Episode 5
“I love my snow globe,” he said, a smile on his face and a blush on each cheek. “I’ll put it on my bedside cabinet so I can see it before I go to sleep and when I wake up. The other boys in my dorm will all want one.” “Don’t let anyone break it, […]
I stick these pages together with blue
The blue-tack tucked in the side of the drawerreminds me of days when I listened to your voice non-stop. My younger self wrote your lyricswith a blue ink italic calligraphy pen on index cards; I even copied artwork from album sleeves,shaded in with rainbow-coloured pencils. Leaves unfurled and fell with your smoky timbre.I played melancholy […]
