May’s Poetry Issues is out, including “Platamon” by Alexandra Mouratidou.

Along with The Hague and Malmö, I am pleased to announce that a small number of copies of the current and previous issues are distributed to a selected audience for the first time in Berlin, thanks to the publishing professional and co-founder of Litdocs and the Literary Field Kaleidoscope, Dr. Sandra van Lente, and in Liverpool, thanks to the curator and visual artist Jenny Porter, some of whose work you can admire here.

And if you can’t get your hands on a copy, you can still enjoy the content of Poetry Issues #3 right here:

The end of our affairs

We’d like to fold them up in a neat

bedsheet-in-drawer manner

but they’re a roomful

of hopelessly knotted yarn.

So we set them on fire in the yard.

We resume our conversations

with ashes-on-mantel earnesty

then stuff them in shoe boxes

at the back of the garage.

So we get to keep the advantage.

In cardboard urns we align the has-beens

the would-be husbands we never miss

but then we judge it inefficient

as it all comes down to mass.

So we finally throw them in the trash.

Unfastened

I asked him to tell me once again

about the death of stars.

He went up and down the room

and I stayed focused on his arms

that broke into a dance against

the stubbornness of time,

tracing harmony and flow

back to when

each loose moment had the stamp

of the movement of the sun.

Platamon

by Alexandra Mouratidou

The evening leans

the sea shies behind a fan:

geranium red.

A Child’s Solace

A memory of

forever invincible

young parents laughing.

Mirror Image

It took me years of staring

at a flat map

before I saw

the night’s stereogram

as firefly lights descended their strings

one by one

and surfaced to the unlit soul

of the one staring.

Interrogation Triolet

The empty pages forced me to confess

to all the murders that I didn’t do.

The pen is now resting on my chest.

The empty pages forced me to confess

insisting that we made some progress

before the late-night shift was due.

The empty pages forced me to confess

to all the murders that I didn’t do.