Today,in thegard e n

Leyla Yilmaz

the apple colored leaves have found their ways to brown soil, and grass strands look up at me in contempt, for their sunny green color now matches the mud of the earth.

The plums have grown rotten on rugged branches. Sweet flesh drips into mother earth as raindrops insisting to melt into entropy. Sugar housed in its purple bounds having lost its patience to find its new home.

I watch the purple skin blending into the earthy brown, cursing me for letting them fall. But your skin is next to mine. Love, if they had eyes and tongue, if they knew you, they would rather fall than ask me to leave your side.

I draw the curve of your eyelashes in memory, one by one. I decide I will water the garden later. I will make it up to the earth. Leaving the work of today for an impossible later –later, next day, next year, next life–whenever time grows weary of being spent on you.

When I’m not erased within your lines, I note myself a poem I must write about your eyes. There is this stench and there is a muse who requires such a careful study that it leaves the artist paralyzed, apprehended by the mere idea of missing how your eyes catch the sun in glorious emerald, or the raise of your eyebrows when you look at me.

Today, there is a garden, falling, rotting, angry and there is me with the heat of your presence–only seeing what is mine to see & kissing the pink berries off your cheeks and hungry mouth.

Gentlemen’s Choice

Peyton Harrill

Mixed media, collage

Feeli

They say there are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1. As far as decimals go, they will never reach 1. It’s comforting to know that there are endless possibilities. It’s even more agonizing to know I’ll never be close to reaching you.

I feel sympathy for pi. Never ending. Commonly known but never truly known. So many have tried to figure it out. No one has.

3.14 barely scratches the surface. Labeled irrational. Just because no one is capable of deciphering who you are.

0 holds the secrets of the universe. An invisible password. A silent key. By itself it’s nothing. Absolutely no value. But with anything else, any insignificant number, It’ll be the one to take you to the stars. You never truly see placeholders. Until they combine with something else and make it disappear.